Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 53

MYTH OF COMPLEXITY

(Department of Defense photo by Sgt. Brendan Stephens)

A young girl appears amused to find U.S. Army soldiers lined up against the walls of her house 21 February 2000 in Mitrovica, Kosovo. The
soldiers from Company B, 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and United Nations police were conducting a house-to-house
search for weapons. The 82nd Airborne Division unit from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was deployed as part of Kosovo Force, a NATO-led,
international military force conducting a peacekeeping mission known as Operation Joint Guardian.

environment. Second, it undercuts the notion that our
recent campaign in Afghanistan witnessed something
particularly new, something more complicated than previous campaigns. If anything, our operations there have
produced efforts, results, and lessons that are strikingly
similar to those from before.
More recent examples. Sixteen years ago, a retired
U.S. Army general described a conflict in which there
was “no clear international consensus to fight, no sure
cause, ambivalent public support, no long deployment
and build-up, an incredibly complex theater environment, and difficult climatic, demographic, and geographic conditions on the battlefield.”19 This was not
a prediction about Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather,
an assessment of the Kosovo conflict of 1999. Former
NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley K. Clark’s
description of the largely forgotten campaign serves as
a reminder that complexity in unstable operating environments certainly existed prior to the 9/11 terrorist
attacks. Was Clark exaggerating or were we simply not
paying attention?
Still, it is not hard to understand how the magnitude
of 9/11 lead many Americans to view the world as a suddenly more dangerous, more complicated place. It was as
if a multipolar world was born overnight. The campaigns
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

that would be fought as part of the Global War on
Terrorism were filled with enough discovery, surprise,
and frustration that the military looked for new ways
(and terms) to define the task at hand. “Full spectrum
operations” and “asymmetric warfare” became the focus,
and a strategic shift to counterinsurgency operations
brought sweeping changes in U.S. doctrine. In 2006, the
Army produced the highly touted Field Manual 3-24,
Counterinsurgency, which provided guidelines for fighting the “exceedingly difficult and complex” problem of
an insurgency.20 By 2007, the United States was fully
immersed in what former marine and Assistant Defense
Secretary Bing West called “enlightened counterinsurgency,” which focused more on nation building and less
on purely kinetic military operations.21 The results, both
in Iraq and Afghanistan, were underwhelming, with
very little in the way of measurable military or political
success being achieved, to the point where Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates referred to the wars as “an albatross around the nation’s neck.”22

Learning from the Past
While we cannot yet speak or write about the
United States’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq
wholly in the past tense, any significant change in the
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