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BY Andrew Bacevich
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 13, 2017, 4:24 PM
The Trump administration’s dizzying shifts on foreign policy make it difficult to discern any pattern or purpose in U.S. actions. Just in the past 48 hours the President changed his mind regarding NATO’s putative obsolescence and absolved China of engaging in currency manipulation.
These are merely the latest in a long list of reversals, with yesterday’s firm statement of intent overturned today as Trump discovers that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they appeared back when he decided to run for the White House. Who knew it was all going to be so complicated!
All that said, an inkling of a theme may be emerging from a series recent presidential decisions affecting ongoing U.S. military operations. Put simply, Trump appears to be allowing his generals greater latitude in the conduct of those operations. “Decisions” may be the wrong term; what we appear to have here is presidential deference to America’s professional warrior class.
For their part, the generals are using this enhanced freedom of action to escalate. Escalation occurs not on a large scale, but incrementally. Nobody is keen for a replay of Iraq circa 2004-2007. Even so, senior military officers appear to be taken with the idea that the application of a bit more force just might do the trick, bringing stalled wars to a successful conclusion.
As a strategy, this amounts to more of the same — plus.
Evidence of this trend is available everywhere from Iraq and Syria to Somalia and Yemen. Today’s use in Afghanistan of the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the entire Pentagon arsenal offers a further illustration.
Rolled out of the back of an Air Force cargo plane, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast munition, or MOAB, was deposited on a complex of caves said to be occupied by ISIS militants. U.S. commanders insist that they took extreme care to ensure that this “Mother of All Bombs” did not harm friendly forces or noncombatants.
(Elsewhere, meanwhile, other U.S. commanders were apologizing for an airstrike in Syria that accidentally killed 18 of “our” militants — that is, rebels attempting to oust President Bashar Assad. In wartime, even extreme care comes with no guarantees.)
We don’t know how many ISIS fighters the 22,000-lbs. behemoth MOAB killed. Perhaps many, perhaps only a few. We do know that each MOAB costs the American taxpayer a tidy $16 million and that Gen. John Nicholson, commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan, justifies its use as needed to “maintain the momentum of our offensive"”against ISIS.
A test of the MOAB
(FILE PHOTO/AP)
Of course, in one form or another, U.S. forces have been on the offensive in Afghanistan for going on 16 years. One might think that by now the accumulated momentum would have carried U.S. troops all the way back to Fort Bragg or Fort Hood.
Use of the MOAB does signal a distinctive approach to generating momentum. The Pentagon’s preferred M.O. in recent years has emphasized the use of precision weapons; this gargantuan piece of ordnance is the inverse of precise. Its purpose is not to discriminate but to obliterate.
Its introduction to the battlefield therefore signals a departure from previous practice. Yet detonating one MOAB won’t win the Afghanistan War, nor will following up with another two dozen just like it. Nor will the employment of any other miracle weapon, for that matter.
What the MOAB signifies is the bankruptcy of U.S. military policy in the Islamic world. President Trump is clueless, his top advisers are devoid of imagination, and his senior field commanders are brain dead. Only such a crew could possibly fancy that unleashing a bigger bomb will get us out of the hole that we have dug for ourselves in the Greater Middle East.
Trump and his generals are only making the hole that much deeper.
Recommendation: Stop digging.
Bacevich is the author of “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.”
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 13, 2017, 4:24 PM
The Trump administration’s dizzying shifts on foreign policy make it difficult to discern any pattern or purpose in U.S. actions. Just in the past 48 hours the President changed his mind regarding NATO’s putative obsolescence and absolved China of engaging in currency manipulation.
These are merely the latest in a long list of reversals, with yesterday’s firm statement of intent overturned today as Trump discovers that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they appeared back when he decided to run for the White House. Who knew it was all going to be so complicated!
All that said, an inkling of a theme may be emerging from a series recent presidential decisions affecting ongoing U.S. military operations. Put simply, Trump appears to be allowing his generals greater latitude in the conduct of those operations. “Decisions” may be the wrong term; what we appear to have here is presidential deference to America’s professional warrior class.
For their part, the generals are using this enhanced freedom of action to escalate. Escalation occurs not on a large scale, but incrementally. Nobody is keen for a replay of Iraq circa 2004-2007. Even so, senior military officers appear to be taken with the idea that the application of a bit more force just might do the trick, bringing stalled wars to a successful conclusion.
As a strategy, this amounts to more of the same — plus.
Evidence of this trend is available everywhere from Iraq and Syria to Somalia and Yemen. Today’s use in Afghanistan of the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the entire Pentagon arsenal offers a further illustration.
Rolled out of the back of an Air Force cargo plane, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast munition, or MOAB, was deposited on a complex of caves said to be occupied by ISIS militants. U.S. commanders insist that they took extreme care to ensure that this “Mother of All Bombs” did not harm friendly forces or noncombatants.
(Elsewhere, meanwhile, other U.S. commanders were apologizing for an airstrike in Syria that accidentally killed 18 of “our” militants — that is, rebels attempting to oust President Bashar Assad. In wartime, even extreme care comes with no guarantees.)
We don’t know how many ISIS fighters the 22,000-lbs. behemoth MOAB killed. Perhaps many, perhaps only a few. We do know that each MOAB costs the American taxpayer a tidy $16 million and that Gen. John Nicholson, commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan, justifies its use as needed to “maintain the momentum of our offensive"”against ISIS.
A test of the MOAB(FILE PHOTO/AP)
Of course, in one form or another, U.S. forces have been on the offensive in Afghanistan for going on 16 years. One might think that by now the accumulated momentum would have carried U.S. troops all the way back to Fort Bragg or Fort Hood.
Use of the MOAB does signal a distinctive approach to generating momentum. The Pentagon’s preferred M.O. in recent years has emphasized the use of precision weapons; this gargantuan piece of ordnance is the inverse of precise. Its purpose is not to discriminate but to obliterate.
Its introduction to the battlefield therefore signals a departure from previous practice. Yet detonating one MOAB won’t win the Afghanistan War, nor will following up with another two dozen just like it. Nor will the employment of any other miracle weapon, for that matter.
What the MOAB signifies is the bankruptcy of U.S. military policy in the Islamic world. President Trump is clueless, his top advisers are devoid of imagination, and his senior field commanders are brain dead. Only such a crew could possibly fancy that unleashing a bigger bomb will get us out of the hole that we have dug for ourselves in the Greater Middle East.
Trump and his generals are only making the hole that much deeper.
Recommendation: Stop digging.
Bacevich is the author of “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.”