Last week, President Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The troop surge is part of a new strategy set forth by General Stanley A. McChrystal. The strategy shifts focus from kinetic to non-kinetic operations: protecting civilians, development projects, and winnings hearts and minds. It will be central to America’s operations in Afghanistan for years to come, and even the basis for an American endgame there. Army, Marine, and Air Force roles in the McChrystal approach are clear. The former two are boots on the ground, while the latter provides logistical, intelligence, and combat support. The Navy, however, appears to have little place in this new strategy. The Navy’s primary contribution so far has been combat air support. But, airstrikes have fallen out of favor in Afghanistan as of late due to mounting civilian casualties. McChrystal’s new strategy should worry the Navy leadership, since Secretary of Defense Gates has demonstrated a strong preference for funding programs with applications in current conflicts, and a willingness to cut programs failing that criteria (and more importantly: to fight legislators’ attempts to block cuts). Does the Navy have a place in McChrystal’s war? Yes, but not without some soul-searching.
The Navy can play a significant role in McChrystal’s strategy. Every year, thousands of sailors deploy on humanitarian, development, and disaster relief operations around the world. Sailors have repaired schools in the Pacific, organized health clinics in South America, and delivered disaster aid in the Caribbean. These operations are outside traditional military education and have required developing a new set of skills, notably the ability to plan and work side by side with different services, agencies, governments, and NGO partners. The missions have given the Navy hard won experience adapting military resources to humanitarian, development, and disaster relief challenges. This is particularly true of short term, high impact programs, the type of military involvement in development envisioned by Secretary of Defense Gates. The Navy could have precisely the type of soft-power experience McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy requires.
The main obstacle to a major Navy role in Afghanistan is not material, but cultural. The Navy’s leadership is dominated by line officers. This perpetuates an institutional culture valuing warships and warplanes. However, the enemy has neither fleet or coastline. All the carrier strike groups in the world will not find victory in the mountains of Afghanistan. To win over the hearts and minds, McChrystal’s strategy requires a surge of a new sort: of nurses, doctors, dentists, engineers, and civil-affairs units, the domain of the staff corp officer. While staff corp officers have a secondary role in the Navy’s traditional warfighting focus, they have played a major part in the Navy’s humanitarian and development cruises. Staff corp officers might not be able to plan a defense of the North Atlantic, but they can run health clinics, manage construction projects, and coordinate with NGOs. They are America’s soft-power specialists. If the Navy is going to take advantage of the humanitarian and development institutional knowledge of its staff corp officers, it must overcome its cultural biases towards the interests of line officers. In the 1980s, the Soviet Army learned that Afghanistan was not the Fulda Gap. Now, the US Navy must accept it is not the Taiwan Strait either.
Christopher R. Albon is a political science Ph.D. specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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Chris: Great post. I think you are right that the Navy has developed significant non-military skills that would prove a fantastic fit for the Afghanistan campaign. I wonder to what extent the Navy might be well served sharing their knowledge with the other branches rather than closely guarding their turf (as often happens).
Why not develop a best-practices program or humanitarian center-of-excellence for the US Military where the Navy takes the lead in cross-branch training, etc.? They build up good will and credibility across the military and elevate their position within the government in an area that is sure to increase in visibility and import in the coming years. Just a thought.
It just so happens….
1. Does the Navy have a dog in this fight? Absolutely. The Individual Augment (IA) program has over 14,000 “boots on the ground”. Sailors and Officers in country doing non-traditional missions – from convoy duty to provincial reconstruction. http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=67551
2. Do line officers have a role? Yup. They are the bulk of the Navy’s officer corps and they make up the bulk of the IA’s and, soon, the Af-Pak Hands. The Af-Pak hands program that seeks to “further develop proficiencies in counter-insurgency doctrine, regional languages and culture” (http://www.npc.navy.mil/NR/rdonlyres/5FEBF498-F8E2-457A-BD53-B0C67E256EB7/0/NAV09280.txt) How does six months in country and six months at home for 3-5 years sound?
3. Isn’t there a center of excellence? The Naval Postgraduate School hosts a center that does exactly that. http://www.csrs-nps.org/logistica/public/home.cfm
None of your post, or Bill’s comment, address the question of how or why the humanitarian and reconstruction mission has been wholly absorbed by the military. Obviously there is manpower and a can-do attitude, but is this the right course for the services – or is it just a decade long gap-filler because there is no alternative?
@Matt T: Thanks for the excellent links and info, will check them out.
DoD’s Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance onboard Tripler AMC builds a lot of capacity in USGov and partner nations. Check them out: http://www.coe-dmha.org/index.htm . Always been impressed working with them, they most definitely understand the public health/political/information nexus.
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