Page 212 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

714 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

its doctrine, in a recent article in the journal Military Review, argued that the days of large
battles between armies on an open field of battle are over. Instead, Caldwell believes that war
and conflict in the future

“…will be decided by forces operating among the people of the world. Here, the margin of victory
will be measured in far different terms than the wars of our past. The allegiance, trust, and confi-
dence of populations will be the final arbiters of success.” 51

Counterinsurgency expert and a principle author of FM 3-24, John Nagl, believes that the
American Army will lead the way in conflicts fought and waged among the people and will
have the capability in so doing to “change entire societies.” in both Nagl’s and Caldwell’s
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conception, just like Douhet’s and the Revolutionary War School’s, battle between armies
were things of the past. Populations were and are now decisive and were and have become a
surrogate for militaries who have concluded that there are no longer anymore big battles to
fight. Only a short, cursory view of events after the proclamations of Douhet and the Revo-
lutionary War School shows the fallacy of this kind of thinking.
Yet if history does provide guidance it is that the dustbin of it are full of individuals who
thought that they had accurately (and narrowly) conceived of future war. The future of war
is not only counterinsurgencies like Iraq and Afghanistan. One can imagine a range of pos-
sibilities that cover the full spectrum of war and conflict. A movement to gain contact with
Iranian forces inside Iran by an American ground combat brigade is a hypothetical that ap-
pears certainly within the realm of the possible. A range of possibilities exist in Korea from a
collapse of North Korea requiring the South’s occupation with American support to a higher
level of intensity with some fighting as the North collapses, possibly drawing in American
conventional combat forces. These are just two examples of possible future scenarios where
the American Army will need to be able to fight on multiple operational levels.
53
The American Army must break itself out of its self-built counterinsurgency box inspired
and dominated by FM 3-24 and its reliance on the protracted people’s war approach to coun-
terinsurgencies of the early 1960s. If it can step outside of it the Army will see how atrophied
its conventional capabilities have become after 6 years of doing nothing but counterinsur-
gency warfare. It will see how it is trying to fight and win a previous unwinnable counter-
54
insurgency in Vietnam all over again in Iraq. and it will see how dogmatic it has become in
55
51 Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV and Lieutenant Colonel Steven Leonard, “Field Manual Manual
3-07, Stability Operations: Upshifting the Engine of Change,” Military Review (July-August 2008), 6.
52 John A. Nagl, Review by John Nagl of Brian Linn’s “The Echo of Battle,” in RUSI, (April 2008), 82-84.
st
53 On future wars and conflict see Frank Hoffman “Conflict in the 21 Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” The
Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, December 2007.
54 Gian P. Gentile, “Misreading the Surge Threatens US Army Conventional Capabilities,” World Politics Re-
view, 4 March 2008; see Peter Mansoor’s response to this article in “Misreading the History of the Iraq
War,” Small Wars Journal Blog, 10 March 2008 (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/03/misreading-
the-history-of-the/); also see position paper written for current Army Chief of Staff by Colonels Sean Mc-
Farland, Michael Shields, and Jeffrey Snow, “The King and I: The Impending Crisis in Field Artillery’s
ability to Provide Fire Support,” available on line at NPR website: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=90200038
55 the standard work on the Vietnam War is still George Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States