Revolutionizing Strategy: Institutional Resistance, Asymmetric Warfare, and the Downing Plan in Afghanistan and Iraq

Every once in a great while, something comes along that completely redefines the system and changes the way things work. Almost paradoxically, it seems that (as often as not) when these moments occur, we generally don't realize it until well after the fact or, if we're actually aware of the revolutionary change coming before us, we tend to be suspicious and resist such changes to the status quo. This was the case, for example, when Zack Snyder directed a re-make of George Romero's classic zombie movie, "Dawn of the Dead." Knowing that the zombie franchise was in trouble because slow, plodding undead buffoons just don't inspire terror in movie watchers, Snyder took a page from "28 Days Later" (whose zombies aren't undead, but the "infected") and made his zombies run. That's right, they run. Fast. And if you weren't expecting it, it really does catch you by surprise when Sarah Polley's husband leaps onto the car and starts punching her windshield. But Romero fans being dogmatic zealots who can't suffer any departure from canon, this was taken as a sign of insult to their cherished traditions (which only makes me wonder, if they want no deviation from the original, why even bother with a re-make?).

Or witness Bill Walsh and the emergence of the "West Coast offense" during his tenure as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Today, most of the NFL is using Walsh's playbook and formations, but when he first came to the Bay Area, the league still believed that the key to offensive success was establishing a solid running game, which would draw in the secondary and open up the defense to be exploited by the passing attack. Walsh, on the other hand, posited that precision passing drills could force the defense into guarding against the pass, thereby creating running lanes for the running backs. Because NFL coaches were slow to change their styles, Walsh (with help of a quarterback named Joe Montanta) was able to exploit the league for Super Bowl championships in 1981, 1984, and 1988, before the rest of professional football (and indeed most of college football) adopted the method as well. In fact, throughout the nineties, successive USC Trojan coaches and alumni argued that the program would only return to greatness when they were able to restore the Power-I of the glory years. Granted, the Power-I served the Trojans well when Mike Garrett, O.J. Simpson, Anthony Davis, Ricky Bell, Charles White, and Marcus Allen carried the football, but those teams (as great as they were) never had the success that Pete Carroll and Norm Chow were able to generate when they handed the football to quarterbacks Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart.

In military history, this whole phenomena is generally referred to as a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and scholars debate about how great the change has to be to constitute an RMA, or how many have actually occurred. Everyone agrees that the development of gun powder, the rise of the nation-state, and nuclear weapons are RMAs-- but the devil is in the details, and we argue about the "lesser" breakthroughs as if we would be able to determine precisely how many angels dance on the head of a pin (by the way, the answer is sixteen skinny ones or seven fat ones... those fat angels are really, really big...) Regardless, we can point to numerous events in history-- such as King Henry V's use of archers to decimate a much larger French for at the Battle of Agincourt-- wherein the very concept of how we fight was called into question (and ultimately changed). Another example of this occurred shortly before World War II, when a French general named Charles De Gaulle wrote The Army of the Future, in which he proposed that professional armored and infantry forces be structured into dynamic, highly mobile mechanized divisions instead of static fortified defenses manned by conscripts. The French high command rejected De Gaulle's proposals in favor of the Maginot Line, but the Germans refined it and used it to destroy the French Army with their doctrine of blitzkrieg.

Three weeks ago marked the four-year anniversary of the resignation of retired General Wayne Downing as deputy national security advisor to the President. A revered former commander in chief (CINC) of Special Operations Command (and the SOF community doesn't just revere anyone), Downing led troops in Vietnam, Panama, and Operation Desert Storm, and came out of retirement to coordinate America's expeditionary counter-terror operations in the days after 9/11. Today, he is probably best known for pushing a public role in counter-terrorism as Director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, but General Downing's most intriguing legacy yet might be for advocating what has become known as the "Downing Plan": the suggestion that modest indigenous insurgents, directed by US and Coalition special operations forces, and supported by US Air Force air power can topple unpopular, tyrannical regimes like Afghanistan's Taliban and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The plan was first advanced against Saddam back in 1998, when President Clinton was rattling the saber, but the Clinton Administration rejected it in favor of the targeted bombing campaign of Operation Desert Fox (reportedly, the highest-ranking official to support the Downing Plan was none other than Vice President Al Gore). But after 9/11, the Bush Administration gave Downing's recommendations prime-time consideration and used it as the foundation of the strategy that became known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Special operations, supported by precision-guided munitions dropped by the US Air Force, successfully directed the five-factions of the Northern Alliance, Ismail Khan's mujahideen in the west, and future President Hamid Karzai's militia in the south in overthrowing the Taliban regime and driving it from power. It could not have worked out better if Steven Spielberg or Oliver Stone had been directing the script, although it is important to note that Hollywood movies almost always leave out the next stage-- the messy Phase IV reconstruction and counterinsurgency-- that lesser men like myself were unable to master.

In any case, now in the Bush White House, with the Taliban defeated and US forces securing the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, the hope for ultimate victory was being dashed by a refusal of Middle Eastern security and intelligence services to cooperate with America in shutting down the financing, recruiting, and covert support to terrorist organizations that had long characterized the behavior the region. The Bush Administration decided that the only way to force a change in the behavior of these states was to pick a target, destroy its regime (preferably without UN consent), and put the world on notice that 9/11 had forever changed American resolve by making us willing to expend blood and treasure if that was needed to defeat the threat. If John F. Kennedy were still alive, he would have recommended we call it "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty"-- an American approach that had been refuted by subsequent Nixon and Carter Administrations (albeit for different reasons), and briefly revived by the Reagan Administration (albeit not to advance freedom so much as to destroy Soviet Communism). For obvious reasons, Saddam's Iraq was selected as the only viable target and thus began the preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Having been battle-tested in Afghanistan, the Downing Plan resurfaced as an option for removing Saddam once and for all from Baghdad. In this iteration of the plan, US and Coalition special operations would have been paired with the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north and the Shi'a militias in the south-- two regions where Saddam's influence was highly circumscribed in the first place-- while air strikes and changing tides would encourage defections from Saddam's Sunni-dominated Ba'athist Army to reject the tyrant and, perhaps, establish a credible Sunni presence in the Triangle (critical to understanding the success of this asymmetric strategy is this dynamic of defection, which we saw work tremendously in Afghanistan). This was, in many respects, the moment that President Clinton himself had perhaps anticipated: his Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 had made $97 million available to to fund the training of and provide military equipment to anti-Saddam insurgents. And if we had executed it, the most likely outcome would have been a contemporary Iraq divided into three autonomous sub-divisions centered on Mosul (the Kurds), Baghdad (the Sunni), and Basra (the Shi'a)-- although, in fairness, if we were following the Afghan gameplan, then it is likely that a multi-ethnic government-in-name-only would have been installed in the capitol, with limited influence and legitimacy that would have been extended slowly through nation-building, elections, and Andy Krepinevich's much-debated "oil spot" strategy (subscription required).

In the end, however, it became a moot point. Perhaps we rejected the Downing Plan because of the public relations hits we were taking in Afghanistan by media-types denouncing our "deal with the devil" (i.e., the racalcitrant warlords) and proclaiming Karzai the "Mayor of Kabul." Perhaps there were other reasons. What we do know is that the Administration chose to shelve the Downing Plan, General Downing resigned from the White House, and we went into Iraq with a larger force that eventually (and fatefully) postured itself not as liberators, but as occupiers, complete with an American-led Coalition Provisional Authority that had very little connection to the Iraqi people it purported to govern. (Although estimates of projected troop strength vary, I have it from a very reliable source-- and no it is not General Downing himself-- that the plan would have utilized 16,000 US and Coalition troops). Readers of this blog know that I tend to weigh strategy more heavily than raw troop numbers (the latter of which I think receives so much media attention because so few critics-- including the reporters-- are trained in military strategy, although they think it so simple that they could be a General Patton by merely reading books about him), and yet, unfortunately, hardly anyone ever concentrates on the strategy. Politicians prophesize that we're doomed to fail and so an immediate withdrawal is preferable to a slow bleed-out (Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, and most recently, Dennis Kucinich), or that victory can only come when trained Iraqi security forces emerge on a strict timeline (Stenny Hoyer), or that the current strategy must be tweaked, but timelines are a bad idea (Wes Clark and John McCain), or that we're on the right track and just need to emphasize certain aspects (Joe Biden)-- the point is, little attention is being paid to the particular details that matter and a lot of attention is being to the soundbites that might affect an election.

That's really too bad. Because there's a reason that the Downing Plan might never get the consideration it deserves from the community that should be considering it most-- if it can be applied, it certainly puts the rest of the conventional military in a position where their very viability becomes tied to their ability not to do what they want to do (i.e., defeat Soviet maneuver forces pouring through the Fulda Gap) and instead become more capable of things like counterinsurgency, nation-building, peacekeeping, low-intensity conflict, non-kinetic operations, and a host of other less sexy approaches. It's not necessarily in the interest of the conventional force to become more special operations-like (although, interestingly enough, Army Chief of Staff General Pete Schoomaker-- the SOCOM commander who succeeded General Downing-- is trying to do precisely that with his emphasis on the Warrior Tasks and Drills, combatives, and livefires).

And so I'm asking everyone to think about the Downing Plan for a moment. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it. You don't even have to believe that it existed as a viable option. I'm just asking you to think about it, discuss it, consider it as an alternative to the repeatedly-executed alternative that we have seen in Iraq. Even if you don't agree with the War in Iraq, we're there and we're likely to be mired in future conflicts before our generation crosses the clouds for that final voyage. Rather than run from this alternative because it claims the world isn't flat, just think about it and give it the attention that all new ideas deserve. And that's really the irony here. If you know General Downing-- and I've met him, most recently at West Point's Senior Conference last month-- he's actually a very humble, very unassuming, almost shy man; I know a lot of General Officers, and unlike so many of his peers and predecessors, General Downing doesn't seem to crave the spotlight or desire glory and attention. Perhaps for that very reason, we need to turn the spotlight onto what he's said.

Okay, enough rambling. I promise a follow-up post soon in which I'll embed the Downing Plan under a conceptual framework that might highlight its strengths and weaknesses, how it could be applied and how it couldn't. Until then, I invite you to rent both "Dawn of the Dead" movies, and think about who doesn't think Snyder's version is a better horror movie...