THE CLARION CALL OF FAILURE IN AFGHANISTAN
Ned Marsh | 04.12.22
The Clarion Call of Failure in Afghanistan
The strategic failure in Afghanistan is a clarion call for the United States Army to challenge its industrial age mental model of landpower. The loss demonstrates the ineffectiveness and lack of utility that large-scale conventional landpower has in low-intensity conflict. While the US Army may desire to leave low-intensity conflict behind, the United States’ state and nonstate adversaries will not stop using the very strategy that has rendered conventional landpower hegemony, as David Kilcullen puts it, irrelevant.
The US Army’s modernization and future vision of landpower is Multi-Domain Operations, conducted as a part of a joint force in the information age. Essentially, the vision focuses on a return to large-scale combat operations nested within great power competition. The fatal flaw to this is the assumption that the adversaries of the United States will fight in a manner suited to the United States’ strengths. They will not. Instead, adversaries will continue to employ asymmetric actions to deny decisive battle by rendering task-organized battle systems, such as carrier strike groups and armored brigade combat teams, inconsequential. They will then fight a deep battle in the gray zone below the threshold of war and exhaust the United States. Napoleon lost in Moscow not because he was decisively beaten, but because the Russians extended the struggle and denied him the opportunity to win. Napoleon’s exhausted forces eventually collapsed under the weight of winter, unable to survive in the barren Russian land while being harassed by the tsar’s forces.
https://mwi.usma.edu/the-clarion-call-of-failure-in-afghanistan/
