Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 13

WINNING WARS

(Image from Islamic State Twitter site, courtesy Iraqi News website)

The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria announced the names of countries it seeks to imminently control and published a map 10 October 2014. The map includes all Arab countries, nearly half of all African and European countries, including Spain, and 25 percent of the
area of ​​the continent of Asia.

plaything of policy that can be deployed without considering the actual human dimension or c osts of deployments
involved in war, either at home or on the battlefield. In such
circumstances, decisions to order long-term deployments or
endless rotations aimed at achieving limited and vague objectives that are well below what is required to achieve clear
victory have become all too easy to make. Abetting such a
policy mindset, over time, our entire military (especially the
Army) has inflicted on itself similarly sterile and impersonal policies that don’t manage people, but rather manage
systems of rotational assignments—from individual, to
unit, to the worldwide augmentee system going back to the
Vietnam War (a loss).
The result has been entrenched and overly bureaucratic policies that stipulate repeated rotations
overseas for long periods of time on missions that have
no clear pathway to the terminal objective of victory. Experience has shown that these policies place an
immoral burden on our soldiers—particular among the
junior ranks and junior NCOs. Not surprisingly, such
policies appear to be a significant factor in the greatly
increased number of divorces, collapse of families, and
suicides among our returning servicemembers.2
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

Additionally, such debilitating policies, incrementally developed over years, have produced a downward slope in the intellectual and attitudinal military
mindset of our leaders who have now been habituated
throughout their careers to accept as the new normal
weak “wish-for-the-best” losing military strategies that
usually aim at maintaining a status quo vis-à-vis the
enemy and not the objective of victory.
Concurrently, our government bureaucracy,
especially inside the Pentagon, has evolved over time
a similar intellectual complacency encouraged by an
ineffectual and rice-bowl-centric interagency process.
This bureaucracy places such a chokehold on how the
military operates today that we are now incapable of
envisioning a politically feasible, realistically achievable victory as the end state of the operations that the
military is tasked to perform, much less planning and
executing the steps necessary to develop or execute a
viable strategy for attaining victory.

Broad Principles for Mitigation
As a first step to mitigate such a morass of contributing factors preventing our military from being able to
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