The Atlantic – Joshua Foust: How Short-Term Thinking Makes the U.S. Worse at Fighting Wars
In his column for the Atlantic, ASP fellow Joshua Foust writes about how the lack of long-term thinking has affected US ability to fight wars.
Is there a way to plan for such a thing? In a direct way, there is not — humans are not very good at predicting the precise consequences of our behavior. But what can happen is for us to change our perspective. For example, why not assume that sending troops somewhere constitutes a long-term commitment?
Think of this way: when have ground troops been committed for a short-term project? It happens in some places — Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994 — but for the most part, when boots are put on the ground, they stay there for a long time. There are still 6,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, 13 years after intervening there. They still face some attacks, and Kosovar troops depend on NATO for resupply. This intervention was initially sold as a limited thing, lasting just a few months and using only air power. It has lasted well over a decade in part because, in the initial stages of the intervention, few thought there would need to be a long term presence there, and fewer still ever planned for it.
In 2002, few thought there would be 80,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan in 2012, to say nothing of 2014. As a result, the war never benefited from long-term planning or sufficient efforts to grapple with the long-term consequences of short-term U.S. and NATO decisions. If a commander didn’t assume soldiers a decade later would still be dealing with the consequences of his decisions, he wouldn’t make decisions that accounted for things in a decade’s time — hence, he’d make decisions with an eye only on short term gain and wouldn’t keep track of consequences down the line (and future commanders might not have enough information to trace current problems back to earlier decisions).
