Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 56

Likewise, the U.S. military’s ability to devote resources to capacity building of a host-nation military dwarfs that of our civilian counterparts, and could actually be working at cross-purposes to the wider mission of creating political stability. In the author’s experience advising within the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, our ability to train intelligence officers far exceeded the wider U.S. government’s ability to assist the Iraqi government with creating the necessary democratic institutions to exert civilian control over the Ministry of Defense. Contrary to Huntington, our implicit assumption that the way to ensure the Iraqi military’s nonintervention in domestic politics was through the creation of a “professional” Iraqi military may have laid the seeds for Iraqi democracy’s eventual demise by creating a relatively cohesive organization that could ultimately usurp power from elected civilians leading weak institutions.

Moving Forward

While apoliticism is arguably one method of ensuring military aloofness in domestic politics, the

result, particularly in highly politicized “small” or “limited” wars fought by multinational forces, is an increased likelihood that service members—whether generals, majors, sergeants, or privates—will misunderstand their domestic, multinational, and host-nation environment out of political ignorance. Returning to Clausewitz, “The less involved the population and the less serious the strains within states and between them, the more political requirements in themselves will dominate and tend to be decisive.”33 Service members might inadvertently engage in activities that are tactically appropriate but damaging at the strategic and political levels in their home capitals, those of the other multinational forces, and the capital of the state in which they are waging the campaign. In the words of Gen. Sir Rupert Smith, the former UN commander in Bosnia and later NATO deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, force will lack utility.34 To ensure political understanding, particularly in the officer corps, the U.S. Army ought to expand interagency and multinational broadening

Participants of the 2013 Army Congressional Fellowship Program receive a familiarization briefing from Egon F. Hawrylak, deputy commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region and the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, about the command’s vast roles and responsibilities within the National Capital Region, 26 November 2012.

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September-October 2013 ? MILITARY REVIEW

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