Now, in light of Iraq and Afghanistan, the benefits of this doctrine are far more apparent. S military power. The Weinberger Doctrine reflected a dominant strain in the U. The first version of what is now known as the Powell Doctrine was in the National Military Strategy , which reflected purported lessons from the Gulf War. The unique element was the concept of Decisive Force:. Once a decision for military action has been made, half measures and confused objectives exact a severe price in the form of a protracted conflict which can cause needless waste of human lives and material resources, a divided nation at home, and defeat.
Therefore one of the essential elements of our national military strategy is the ability to rapidly assemble the forces needed to win—the concept of applying decisive force to overwhelm our adversaries and thereby terminate conflicts swiftly with minimum loss of life.
General Colin Powell again articulated his perspective with greater fidelity in a major essay published in Foreign Affairs. He laid out the considerations that he believed senior leaders needed to define and satisfy prior to employing military force. When all nonviolent means have failed— only as a last resort. When the costs and risk are acceptable, in terms of expected gains.
Many observers including myself felt that the doctrine reflected a reluctance to get involved in anything less than all-out conventional conflicts. The New York Times editorial staff opined the Pentagon should offer a range of options more sophisticated than off or on, stay out completely or go in all the way to total victory.
I was concerned that few situations would meet all the criteria for employing force effectively, and that our influence and diplomacy would be adversely affected. I was equally concerned about the impact on civil-military relations of senior military officers prescribing conditions about when, why and where military force should be employed. The notion that senior military officers, serving officials, would pronounce conditions rather than advise on how to best employ force effectively was troublesome.
Moreover, the Powell Doctrine was largely irrelevant to the kinds of conflicts we could have expected in a Post-Cold War era wracked by anarchy and contingencies that did not match the Gulf War paradigm. I would go on to note in Future conflicts will most likely resemble Beirut, Panama, and Somali.
A pattern of small-scale operations in future conflicts is fairly certain. The U. My concern on this particular point was not unique. His The Savage Wars of Peace demolished the myths behind calls for overwhelming force tied to the seemingly sweeping success of Operation Desert Storm.
Boot, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, peeled back the many inconsistencies in the so-called Powell Doctrine and highlighted its limitations in light of a security environment marked by small but violent conflicts. Even Vietnam veterans like James Webb have come to recognize the limitations of the Powell checklist. While many feel that the Powell Doctrine was little more than the codification of the fears of his Vietnam veteran generation, others strongly believe that they represent a dose of both realism and common sense.
The considerations he offered, however, are still debatable looking back at the last decade of war. Clearly Defined Objectives and Winning. The objectives laid out were important, but not necessarily clearly defined enough to the military which focused on the Taliban and let Bin Laden escape in Afghanistan.
Of course, in Iraq, the military believes it was assigned clear and attainable objectives, but it is not clear that the right objectives were assigned beyond the capture of Baghdad or Saddam. Events have a way of making them look reasonable, even wise. Skip to content. By John T. Sending Signals The doctrine, by whatever name, came under intense attack when the Clinton Administration took office in January John T.
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These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. The US had wide scope to define its adversary one terrorist network, terrorism itself, or beyond that to Iraqi Sunni supremacists, war lords or Hamas? The most compelling argument for the Weinberger doctrine is the history of what happened when it was most radically abandoned.
The invasion of Iraq in was undertaken in a spirit antithetical to the careful statecraft laid out by Weinberger. Rather than carefully defining limited goals, the makers of war in ignored warnings that toppling Saddam could sow mischief in a fractured and frightened Iraqi population, assuming instead with exiles urging them on that overthrowing the regime would naturally call unleash a peaceful democracy.
In an in unipolar moment, hawkish liberal idealists argued, America should unleash its power and not pay heed to doctrines of self-restraint. The war killed 4, U.
Looking after them will not be cheap, given the costs of long-term treatment and disability benefits flowing from post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD and traumatic brain injury TBI.
It also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in communal violence. To be sure, Iraq now has a constitutional government of sorts, no longer under yolk of Baath party rule.
But it is becoming an increasingly authoritarian state that is still wracked by communal violence. Thousands have been killed and wounded in bombings since American withdrawal. If there is an emerging winner geopolitically, it is Iran.
And all of this to overthrow a regime crippled by sanctions, with no serious ties to Al Qaeda. These are disappointing gains for such heavy costs. It would be unwise to conclude that the grand lesson is to prepare to fight such an unforced war more competently.
The essence of the Weinberger Doctrine, as in , is to restore strategy to limit war, not just refine tactics to get it right the next time. Moments of overreach have prompted debate before about strategic doctrines and the scope of military commitments. The former expanded what could have been a successful limited territorial war into a conflict against communist China, and after many credible warnings from the enemy and from informed observers were ignored. The latter proved to be the most polarizing, costly and demoralizing conflict of the Cold War, endangering the very legitimacy of containment.
Both represented a shift from territorially-conceived and bounded security interests to psychological and universal ones. The embrace of a limitless concept of strategic interests and the scope for military action has weighty policy implications.
Defeating instability through effective counterinsurgency operations is therefore a core mission of the Defense Department. Besides, military occupations are not, historically, optimum antidotes for addressing instability, either away or at home as France found in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Besides, September 11 was more linked to American entanglement in the politics of the Arab-Islamic world than some generic condition of instability. In pursuit of absolute security, they would put America on a footing of endless war. In place of careful means-ends calculation, they offer a field manual.
Reagan denounced the attack, pledged to stay, ordered retaliatory bombings but only months afterwards withdrew US Marines offshore. In response to Islamists using asymmetric methods, Reagan did not decide that America had no choice but to get into an ambitious land war of regime change and armed nation-building.
He pulled the ground forces out. A disciplined and prudent choice was available and he took it. That decision is rarely spoken of as a great strategic blunder.
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