In fall 2009, over the course of three months, the Obama administration debated how many additional U.S. troops to deploy as part of an Afghanistan "surge." The military reportedly developed options between 40,000 and 80,000 troops, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, regional combatant commander General David Petraeus, and commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal coalesced around the lower end of the spectrum. Vice President Joseph Biden and Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel sought a smaller and cheaper option of no more than 20,000 troops focused on conducting counterterrorism missions. According to journalist Steve Luxenburg: "In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise." When military officials repeatedly attempted to add forces, much to the president's frustration ("Why do we keep having these meetings?" he asked an aide), he personally wrote a six-page "terms sheet" that limited the size and scope of U.S. forces and operations in Afghanistan.
As many of these examples suggest, civilian officials are often deeply ignorant of the factors that limit military effectiveness like geography, logistical demands, actionable intelligence, or adversarial strategy. Meanwhile, the perspective of many senior uniformed officials was best described by Richard Betts thirty-five years ago: "The military's natural professional impulse is toward worst-case contingency planning for any conceivable disaster." One way to limit worst-case contingencies is to "plus-up" the force package. "War is not a game to be won 6 to 5. You want to win 21 to 0," as another director of operations on the Joint Staff told me in an interview.
In his excellent book, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations, Peter Feaver analyzed the principal-agent problem, which argues that civilian principals have the authority and military agents have the expertise. The belief that military planners provide inflated estimates of the forces required to achieve an objective is an example of what Feaver terms "shirking" -- something that undermines the ability of civilians to make future decisions. This includes generals dissuading the active consideration of certain options or intimidating mid-level civilians under the guise of merely offering their "best military advice."
To bridge the gap between relatively uninformed civilian principals and expert military agents, trust must be built through the back-and-forth bargaining process that develops and hones military options. When senior military officials perceive that their civilian bosses are unfocused, unserious, or unaware of the costs associated with using force, they are less likely to develop creative (and risky) options, resulting in "oversized options" that render any use of force politically impossible. Similarly, when civilian officials sense that the military is reticent or inflexible, or refusing to accept that the White House wants to "do something" -- assuming reasonable risks and costs -- military planning suffers. While there is no "correct" number for the forces required for a campaign or mission, it is only through trust and dialogue that strategy -- the combination of military and non-military means to achieve an outcome -- are generally successful.
The framing of military options remains particularly relevant today as the United States considers what force levels to keep in Afghanistan after 2014 -- assuming permission from Kabul. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, U.S. officials noted that "preliminary military recommendations" include maintaining "6,000 to 15,000 troops for training and counterterrorism missions" in Afghanistan, and that "senior U.S. officials said they expected the president to authorize up to 10,000" -- roughly splitting the difference, just as he did three years ago.
SUBJECTS:
