Retired 3-star: Americans don't understand that ground troops win wars
Sep. 25, 2014 - 07:30PM |
By Jeff Schogol
Staff Writer
U.S. lawmakers and the wider American public do not understand why it is important to win land wars because the Army has a hard time explaining it, said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno.
“We’re going to see this — interestingly enough — played out, I think, in Syria, where we’re having airstrikes,” Barno told Military Times on Thursday. “The effects of airstrikes and Tomahawk strikes ... are not enduring: They’re transient and as soon as the last bomb falls, the enemy begins to rebuild and readjust. In many, many ways, it’s very difficult to achieve lasting effects and consolidate any kind of success without having some kind of force actually make that permanent. It doesn’t have to be American troops.”
But 13 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a backlash among the American public against ever using ground forces, said Barno, who led U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. As a result, most Americans do not understand that only ground troops can achieve lasting victories.
“The fact that we don’t understand that as a country anymore, in some ways, is potentially going to be problematic for us,” said Barno, who now works for the Center for a New American Security.
One reason the country is so averse to sending boots on the ground to fight the Islamic State is the Army does not do a good job “explaining in plain English that your grandmother would understand what it does and why it’s important,” he said.
That prompted Barno to write an opinion piece for Foreign Policy this week arguing that the Army needs to better explain its purpose and importance to the American public and lawmakers. For example, the Army provides “indispensable capabilities” to the other military services and U.S. allies, including theater-level logistics, ballistic missile defense, theater-wide engineering support and communications, he wrote.
“These often-invisible Army capabilities get little attention and fewer resources, but comprise sizable parts of the Army,” he wrote “Without them, the joint capabilities of the U.S. war-fighting machine would rapidly grind to a halt.”
For years, the Army has assumed that everyone just understood everything that it does, Barno told Military Times. This assumption has turned out to be false.
“Most people can explain and understand what an air force does; most people can talk about what the Navy does; the Marine Corps — better than any service — does a great job of selling of what it does,” Barno said. “The Army is kind of all of the above and none of the above. It has a very difficult time because it does so many things and it’s so egalitarian and is so disconnected — in some ways — to these big high technology, highly visible services.”
To better explain its relevance, the active-duty Army, National Guard and Reserve need to speak with one voice instead of arguing over funding and resources, such as whether the National Guard should have Apache helicopters, Barno argued. He also believes Army officials should spend more time educating Congress about the essential tasks the Army performs that largely go unnoticed outside the military.
“We’re on a continual influx of brand new folks on Capitol Hill, fewer and fewer of whom have served in the military, have any connection to the military, and one of the manifestations of that is there is no consensus for the importance of defense — and in some ways, not even an understanding of the U.S. role in the world and why having an engaged role in the world is important,” he said.
http://www.militarytimes.com/article/20140925/NEWS/309250063/Retired-3-star-Americans-don-t-understand-ground-troops-win-wars
