For much of the past twenty years of America’s post-9/11 wars, the US military worked to build capable and effective security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This mission took on various guises: there were special operations forces conducting foreign internal defense, one of their core activities. In Iraq, military transition teams were and national police transition teams. Conventional forces conducted patrols and missions with partner forces. And ultimately, the US military services created dedicated jobs and entire units to the task—the Air Force’s air advisors and the Army’s security force assistance brigades, for example.
And yet, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, US efforts struggled to overcome challenges and build capable partner forces. In the wake of those struggles, there is an important discussion taking place about what role security force assistance should play for the United States in the very different strategic environment that is taking shape. Will it be a mission that the US military be required to do in order to compete with Russia and China? Or will it become tangential to US preparations for large-scale combat operations? And given the obstinate challenges confronted over the past two decades, what needs to happen to achieve better outcomes in the future?
Will Reno, a professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, and Franky Matisek, an Air Force officer and associate professor in the US Air Force Academy’s Military and Strategic Studies Department, have researched the topic deeply, including conducting hundreds of interviews in the field. They join this episode of the MWI Podcast to discuss their findings.
Listen to the full conversation below, and if you aren’t already subscribed to the MWI Podcast, be sure to find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode!
Image credit: Kay M. Nissen, NATO
From the second paragraph of the introduction page to our podcast above:
"Will it (security force assistance) be a mission that the US military is required to do in order to compete with Russia and China? Or will it become tangential to US preparations for large-scale combat operations? And given the obstinate challenges confronted over the past two decades, what needs to happen to achieve better outcomes in the future?" (Item in parenthesis here is mine.)
As to these such questions, let us consider them from the perspective of Russia and China, today,
a. Believing that they are existentially threatened by such things as Western "liberalism" and, thus, Russia and China
b. Organizing, ordering and orienting their own states and societies — and as best they can the rest of the world also — this, so as to "contain," and indeed to "roll back," same.
As to this such suggestion, consider the following:
First, re: China:
“Compelling as it may seem, this argument, too, has some empirical difficulties: Until the past few years, the dominant socioeconomic or political positions in the Chinese intellectual world were clearly liberal ones: most intellectuals argued for greater institutional restraints on state activity, free market reforms, and stronger protection of civil and political rights. Even today, Pan and Xu’s paper finds that highly educated individuals are generally more liberal than less educated ones. When cultural conservatism reemerged as a somewhat influential ideological position during the later 1990s, its proponents could arguably reap greater social benefits by developing a liberal affinity, rather than a leftist one. For the most part, this did not happen.
Why not? Reading the early work of prominent contemporary Neo-Confucian intellectuals such as Jiang Qing or Chen Ming, one feels that this was a carefully considered — even principled — decision: They saw themselves as defending Chinese traditions against a distinctly hostile Western liberal intellectual mainstream. The ‘other’ they defined themselves against was not some version of socialism or leftism, which at this time was clearly a minority position, but rather a supposedly intolerant liberalism that had dominated Chinese sociopolitical thought since the 1980s.”
(From the 2015 “Foreign Policy” article “What it Means to Be ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ in China: Putting the Country’s Most Significant Political Divide in Context” by Taisu Zhang.)
Next, re: Russia:
"During the Cold War, the USSR was perceived by American conservatives as an 'evil empire,' as a source of destructive cultural influences, while the United States was perceived as a force that was preventing the world from the triumph of godless communism and anarchy. The USSR, by contrast, positioned itself as a vanguard of emancipation, as a fighter for the progressive transformation of humanity (away from religion and toward atheism), and against the reactionary forces of the West.
Today positions have changed dramatically; it is the United States or the ruling liberal establishment that in the conservative narrative has become the new or neo-USSR, spreading subversive ideas about family or the nature of authority around the world, while Russia has become almost a beacon of hope, 'the last bastion of Christian values' that helps keep the world from sliding into a liberal dystopia.
Russia’s self-identity has changed accordingly; now it is Russia who actively resists destructive, revolutionary experiments with fundamental human institutions, experiments inspired by new revolutionary neo-communists from the United States. Hence the cautious hopes that the U.S. Christian right have for contemporary Russia: They are projecting on Russia their fantasies of another West that has not been infected by the virus of cultural liberalism."
(The paragraphing here is mine. See the December 18, 2019, Georgetown University, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs article "Global Culture Wars from the Perspective of Russian and American Actors: Some Preliminary Conclusions," by Dmitry Uzlaner. Look to the paragraph beginning with "Russia and the United States as screens for each other’s projections.")
Bottom Line Question — Based on the Above:
If we look at our "conflict environment" today more from the "Russia and China against Western liberalism" perspective that I offer above, then what will the answers to the three questions posed by my quoted item from our podcast introduction page look like? Here again are these three questions:
"Will it (security force assistance) be a mission that the US military is required to do in order to compete with Russia and China? Or will it become tangential to US preparations for large-scale combat operations? And given the obstinate challenges confronted over the past two decades, what needs to happen to achieve better outcomes in the future?" (Item in parenthesis here is mine.)
Great illustration of how and why anecdotal stories from the field matter and are powerfully rich conveyors of important information that is easily lost in quantitative structures.