Nonconventional Warfare

NONCONVENTIONAL WARFARE….Speculating on what might happen if Robert Gates stays on for a while as Secretary of Defense seems a little frivolous when we don’t even know if Gates is truly in contention for the job, but let’s do a bit of it anyway. Gates has taken the position that the Army should focus almost exclusively on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare in the future, something that Michele Flournoy, who’s heading Obama’s defense transition team, has criticized:

She said the document appropriately emphasizes irregular warfare — focused on terrorists and rogue regimes bent on using insurgency or weapons of mass destruction — but might go too far. “I think irregular warfare is very important, particularly in contrast to preparing solely for conventional warfighting, but it shouldn’t be our only focus,” Flournoy said, adding that countries such as China likely are preparing for “high-end” warfare and attacks involving anti-satellite technologies and cyberspace.

Barron YoungSmith thinks this is going to cause some tension:

If Gates ends up staying on at the Pentagon, he and Petraeus will almost certainly be able to impose these counterinsurgency-oriented priorities on what Flournoy, who has long-standing plans to revamp DoD, hoped would be a top-down review starting from scratch.

I’ll take the other side of this issue. My guess is that the Army’s institutional culture is so dedicated to conventional warfare that even a massive push from Gates and Petraeus in the other direction will turn the battleship only a few degrees. Especially if all this stuff is part of a top-down review (which it will be, since the QDR process will be starting up in 2009), a clear and concentrated focus from the start on nonconventional warfare is probably the only way we’ll make any progress at all. I think I might be on Gates’s side on this.