Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 14

defeat our enemies, our military leadership has to stop
pretending like we’re winning the current war against IS;
we’re not. Quite the contrary, our military leaders should
feel morally bound to protest, in a meaningfully way, the
political mindset that routinely embarks the U.S. military on participating in wars—often not even insisting
that they be called wars—with no clear metrics describing a victorious end state, and does so just because it has
a professional military available and it can.
In conjunction, our national commitment to
demanding success must also change if we are to have
victory in the future. To accomplish this, Americans
in general must be made in some way to have a very
personal stake in the duration as well as outcome of
conflicts in which our politicians contemplate taking
us. For example, if the military—including the Reserve
and National Guard—was told to go to war, and that
it would not be coming home until that war was won,
we would organize and fight much differently than we
have done for the past few decades. 
We did exactly this when we habitually used to win
wars. My father was a World War II veteran; when he
deployed to Europe, he wasn’t told he’d be home in four
months or six months—or after his unit’s first year’s
rotation to the European theater was up. He was simply
told by his leaders, go win the war on the European
continent—which he did, serving proudly as a corporal
until the job was done.
Why shouldn’t we do the same today if we are
serious about winning wars? What has changed? Is it
too hard? Do we lack the forces to sustain a lengthy
war? Do we lack the will? Or, rather, do we now have
a system in place that makes it too easy and convenient to send our forces to fight wars in which the U.S.
citizenry and politicians have little personal stake? Has
that system grown so overly bureaucratic that it can’t
get out of its own way? Has winning become too politically incorrect for our nation? The answer to all those
questions, in my view, is yes.
If our military was directed to go fight a war with
the specific understanding that it would be required
to stay until it won the war, we would plan and fight
much differently than we do today. And, more urgent
and specific planning, as reflected in reformed policies
and procedures, in my assessment, would result in wars
that would be far less costly than the perpetual funk of
perfunctory conflict in which we now find ourselves.
12

Such a change in mindset would prevent, for example,
the nonsense we routinely see at large U.S. bases in
war zones where many soldiers become preoccupied
with getting to a Pizza Hut or a Burger King located on
the base instead of eating the rations that are already
provided. Remember, someone has to protect those
convoys of frozen burgers and pizzas along the highways we fight on. Many of those protecting the convoys
filled with totally unnecessary supplies like these were
no doubt blown up by al-Qaida’s improvised explosive
devices or Iran’s explosively formed penetrators.
However, complaining about the suitability of
chain-business pizza in a war zone is not the point.
Rather, war zone pizza parlors and burger barns serve
as a collective metaphor for the inappropriate ease
and comfort that policy makers now too easily promote within the military toward war making that is
reflected in a lack of strategic purpose that should aim
at victory in as short a time as possible. This is not an
elementary argument. Clearly, winning is something
we have not done well, with few exceptions, over the
past half century of conflict an d war. (Those exceptions include Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm
in the early nineties and the defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq,
2009–2011.)
Therefore, we need dramatic reform of our mindset
as reflected in extensive changes to our defense and
interagency structure. Such changes should go well
beyond Goldwater-Nichols to whole-of-government
planning and execution of a war effort, and they should
come as soon as possible. However, at present, there is
an immediate and urgent necessity for organizing for
absolute victory against IS’s very vicious and cancerous
form of radical Islamist extremism before it is too late;
reform (in some cases, radical reform) that enables
organizing and acting decisively against IS is the most
important requirement today.

Organizing for War against the
Islamic State
The kind of war we are currently in with IS is
in many respects not at all new. Globally oriented
terrorism is not a new phenomenon but has existed
in many permutations since even before the nineteenth century. So, we should not be surprised at the
current levels of violence involved directed mainly at
soft targets that are appearing in many quarters of the
March-April 2016  MILITARY REVIEW