military-policy
Transformation and Ground-Force Size: The 2006 Argument
In November 2006, the day after congressional elections that turned substantially on the conduct of the war in Iraq, the United States changed defence secretaries. The change was widely read as a verdict on the war. Within the profession it was read as something narrower and longer-running: a verdict on a theory of what the armed forces should be built to do.
The theory being tested
The theory had a name (transformation), and a fairly precise content. It held that advances in sensors, precision munitions and networked command had changed the arithmetic of ground combat, and that a force built around information advantage could achieve with fewer people what an earlier force had needed mass to achieve. Fewer heavy divisions, more air and space capability, faster deployment, smaller footprints. The reasoning was not casual; it drew on two decades of argument about the so-called revolution in military affairs, and it was supported by results.
The results were the problem, because they were results in the wrong phase of war. A force built to this specification is extremely effective at destroying an opposing army. The 2003 invasion is regularly cited in support of the theory, and correctly: the conventional campaign was conducted faster, with fewer troops, and at lower cost than the planning assumptions of a decade earlier would have allowed.
What the theory did not address was what follows. Holding terrain, protecting a population, controlling a border, training an indigenous force and conducting patrols in a city are tasks whose requirements scale with area and population and not with the number of enemy vehicles. They consume infantry, they consume it continuously, and no sensor reduces the number of soldiers required to stand in a particular street.
Where the pressure showed first
The strain appeared in the personnel system before it appeared in any strategic document, which is usually where structural problems surface first.
Deployment cycles lengthened, and the ratio of time deployed to time at home compressed to a level that the services themselves described as unsustainable. Reserve and National Guard formations were mobilised for roles and durations that their recruiting proposition had not contemplated, and the consequences of that appeared in retention figures a few years later. Individual augmentation (the practice of pulling soldiers out of their units to fill requirements elsewhere) became routine, which degrades the unit cohesion that the training system exists to build.
Equipment showed the same pattern. Vehicles designed for mobility instead of protection were the vehicles available for a conflict defined by roadside explosives, and the resulting procurement programmes were run at emergency speed with the cost premium that implies. The critique offered at the time was not that the earlier decisions had been stupid, but that they had optimised for one column of a two-column problem.
The phrase that carried the argument
The critique that circulated most widely in late 2006 fastened on a particular kind of language: rationalising the force structure, efficiencies, doing more with less. The objection was not to efficiency as such. It was that the language treated ground-force size as a cost to be managed rather than as a capability, and that the distinction is only visible in the kind of war the force is not built for.
The counter-argument deserves stating, because it is stronger than the retrospective consensus allows. Force structure is set years in advance and cannot be set for the war actually arriving. A military built for prolonged occupation would have been the wrong military for a great many plausible conflicts, and building one is a decision to accept risk elsewhere. The people who argued for a lighter force were not ignoring the possibility of a long ground campaign; they were, explicitly, declining to build for it.
What made the 2006 argument bitter was that the choice had already been made, the bill was arriving, and neither side could produce a force structure that would have been right for both cases.
What was settled and what was not
The immediate consequence was an increase in the permanent size of the ground forces, argued through over the following two years, and a reorientation of doctrine and training toward the tasks that had consumed them. Counterinsurgency moved from a specialist interest to the centre of professional education, and stayed there for roughly a decade.
The underlying question was not settled, and the subsequent shift back toward large-scale conventional competition shows why. Every force structure is a bet about which of several futures arrives. The lesson usually drawn from 2006 (build for the war you are in) is the same category error in the opposite direction, and the more defensible reading of the period is that the cost of being wrong is paid by the ground forces either way, in deployment length and in retention, some years after the decision was taken by people who were no longer accountable for it.
Questions and answers
What was the transformation argument?
That advances in sensors, precision and networked command had changed the arithmetic of ground combat, so a force built around information advantage could achieve with fewer people what an earlier force needed mass for. It was not a casual position; it drew on two decades of argument and it was supported by results in the conventional phase of a campaign.
Where did the theory fall short?
In what follows the conventional phase. Holding terrain, protecting a population, controlling a border and training an indigenous force scale with area and population instead of with the number of enemy vehicles. They consume infantry continuously, and no sensor reduces the number of soldiers required to stand in a particular street.
Was the criticism fair?
Partly. The critique that ground-force size had been treated as a cost as opposed to as a capability has held up. The counter-argument also holds: force structure is set years ahead and cannot be set for the war actually arriving, so building for prolonged occupation would have been the wrong choice for many plausible conflicts. Both sides were describing a real trade.