Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank in Washington, told TWI that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops required an inescapable calculation of risk. “The worst thing in the world is to have these people over there getting shot at, not being able to make progress, and the situation [in Afghanistan] just sort of gradually eroding, so it’s that versus the risk of breaking the force, [or] the risk that you’re not prepared for another contingency,” said Krepinevich. “So how do you weigh those risks? There is no formula or algorithm that’s going to give you the answer. It’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

McChrystal wrote in a late August assessment that the U.S. faces a “decisive” moment in Afghanistan. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote nearly three months ago. While deployment times vary, no brigade can be deployed to Afghanistan overnight, raising questions about how much time remains to turn the war around even if McChrystal gets the 40,000 troops that various news accounts have stated — without official confirmation — that the general wants.

Krepinevich testified on Tuesday before a House Armed Services subcommittee in favor of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, and appeared to lend support to a troop increase of roughly 40,000. He said that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations to increase the total size of the Army and Marine Corps would mitigate against prolonged deployments. “Even if Gen. McChrystal’s request is honored by the president, the combined total of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be significantly below the levels reached during the Surge,” he told the panel.

But the 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.*

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

That concern was echoed by Bing West, a Reagan-era senior Pentagon official who traveled to Afghanistan in October. “There is near-unanimous agreement that deployments on the lines over eight months are too long,” West reported for the blog Small Wars Journal on Nov. 1, citing interviews with “dozens” of soldiers and Marines. “Aggressive patrolling decreases as the length of tour increases. The troops wear down.”

Korb — who, like Krepinevich, supports the Afghanistan war — said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force, a point echoed by Krepinevich in an interview with TWI. But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. George Casey, whose institutional role includes protecting the health of the force, endorsed a troop escalation earlier this month. “I believe that we need to put additional forces into Afghanistan to give Gen. McChrystal the ability to both dampen the successes of the Taliban while we train the Afghan civilian forces,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Nov. 8. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also has responsibilities for balancing the needs of the Afghanistan war with those of the overall military and threats to the U.S. worldwide. He told Congress in September that more troops were “probably” needed in Afghanistan as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate, has told Congress earlier this year that he would seek to lengthen dwell time for the Army in the coming years. In January, he testified that he and Army chiefs wanted to extend dwell time to 15 months at home for every 12 months deployed by October 2010, but in July, he revised that plan and indicated that the Army might be able to shift to 15-month dwell times by summer 2010. But Gates reiterated in July a commitment to ultimately giving soldiers at least two years of dwell time by 2011. The Army public-affairs officer who released this information to TWI clarified that no unit was available unless it had ended a previous deployment by at least November 2008, indicating a continued 12-month dwell time policy.

That proposal was devised before McChrystal’s request for additional forces, and it is unclear how the fulfillment of that request will impact the dwell-time policy, if at all. Spokesmen for both Gen. McChrystal and Sec. Gates did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

*Update, 4:35 p.m., Nov. 19: Maj. Stephen Platt, public affairs officer for the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, writes to inform me that the brigade has indeed been scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in “early 2010″ for what will be its fifth combat tour since 2002. I missed a press release from the Pentagon in July announcing the deployment, and word of the upcoming tour was not included in the information provided to me by the U.S. Army. I appreciate Maj. Platt’s clarification.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) (WDCpix)

Fresh from a trip last week to Afghanistan, where he scored a diplomatic coup by securing Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s acquiescence to a runoff election, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) urged President Obama to endorse a counterinsurgency campaign targeted at the Pashtun areas of south and eastern Afghanistan, provided that the United States could also boost civilian governance and development projects to consolidated military success.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Officials from U.S. civilian agencies like the State Department and USAID “must be ready to follow swiftly with the development aid that brings tangible benefits to the local population,” said Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a speech to an overflow room of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “Deploying additional troops won’t result in sustainable gains if the Afghan security, civilian and governance capacity isn’t there. And right now, as our generals will tell you, in many places, too many places, it isn’t.”

Kerry’s formal entrance into the Afghanistan strategy debate came as Obama and top advisers concluded their sixth meeting exploring a strategy reboot. One of the two leading alternatives up for discussion in the review — which Kerry praised as wise — are to accelerate and deepen a focus on counterinsurgency, as preferred by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, along with an affiliated request for tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. The other, favored by Vice President Biden, urges a narrowed focus on hunting and killing members of al-Qaeda and affiliated extremists, primarily based in the Pakistan tribal areas.

But Kerry rejected both approaches, although he leaned far closer to McChrystal than to Biden. Kerry dismissed a “narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban” as flirting with the risk of “civil war,” and doubted that such a counterterrorism mission could accomplish its objectives without a robust military presence to collect intelligence in support of counterterrorism operations. “For now, we need the boots on the ground to get the information and protect our interests,” he said.

Bolstered by his credibility in delivering the biggest tangible diplomatic success for the Obama administration on Afghanistan to date, Kerry endorsed a counterinsurgency strategy in the Pashtun areas of “the southern and eastern theaters of Afghanistan,” and limited to “major population centers,” saying “we cannot and should not undertake a manpower intensive counterinsurgency operation on a national scale.” He praised McChrystal as “understand[ing] the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area,” but said McChrystal’s current plan “reaches too far, too fast.”

Mark Moyar, a scholar at the Marine Corps University who focuses on counterinsurgency, said narrowing U.S. focus on south and east Afghanistan “makes a certain amount of sense,” as the Taliban-centered insurgency is based in that region. But it runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disperse and set up shop unchallenged elsewhere in the country. “There is a danger, as there has been in a number of other counterinsurgencies, to focus on area, make it a high priority, but [insurgents] eventually figure it out and go somewhere else,” said Moyar, author of a new book about counterinsurgency, “A Question of Command.” “Already, [the insurgency is] starting to get stronger in the north and west” of Afghanistan.

Kerry urged the Obama administration to strengthen “governance and development capacity, the other two legs of counterinsurgency,” so a “narrowly focused” counterinsurgency campaign in the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan does not produce the bifurcation of the country that he derided a counterterrorism mission for potentially yielding. He said it was not necessary to focus on large-scale development projects when Afghan elders he spoke to in Helmand province had far more basic and immediate concerns. “One of the leaders got up after a couple other people talked and he said, ‘We have no drinking water in my family compound, no wells, no canals and no infrastructure,’” Kerry said, advising the Obama administration to “work with the tribes more sensitively and directly,” using development aid and other support to “bolster effective tribal leaders.”

But the ability of the Afghan government to provide basic services is in doubt. Kerry provided a robust defense of Karzai, a third of whose ballots in the August 20 election were invalidated because of fraud concerns, as a “patriot.” But he said the test of whether the U.S. commitment to the Afghan government will be tested by “the decisions made and actions taken in the weeks and months ahead,” as they will be “what really gives meaning” to what Kerry called the “opening” provided by the runoff election. “We must insist that [Afghan] leaders embrace lasting reforms,” including corruption “at every level of government” and “redefin[ing] the Afghan government beyond Kabul” by urging “a more decentralized approach” to governance, a favorite approach of both Karzai rival Abdullah Abdullah and many in international aid circles.

The U.S. commitment “has to evolve away from a U.S.-military dominated effort to support for Afghan institutions and Afghan answers,” Kerry said. “And it only makes sense to continue moving forward if our commitment is reciprocated by Afghans themselves in the form of improved governance and increased Afghan capacity, civilian and military, something President Karzai and his cabinet and I discussed at great length.” Kerry said that his discussions in Kabul gave him hope that it was possible to move to “a new relationship” with the Afghan government on those terms.

As a result, Kerry conditionalized the terms under which he would support a U.S. troop increase. The critical considerations underlying the viability of the U.S. mission, he said, were the ability of Afghan troops; local tribal leaders and U.S. civilian officials to build on the security gains won by U.S. combat forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan. If those are in place, he said, “then I would support the president, should he decide to send some additional troops to regain the initiative.” Accordingly, Kerry urged the Obama administration to create a “valid assessment” those conditions will be in place “before we consider sending more soldiers and Marines to clear new areas.”

It is unclear how prepared Obama may be to affirm such conditions, particularly as regard to the U.S. civilian deployment to Afghanistan. While the State Department has the goal of coordinating the deployment of a so-called “civilian surge” to over 970 U.S. civilian advisers in Afghanistan by the end of the year, the State Department’s so-called Civilian Response Corps, a Bush-era initiative with bipartisan support, remains small, with fewer than 100 active members from across eight agencies. As a result, senior Obama administration officials have been forced to take an ad hoc approach to recruiting civilian advisers from traditionally domestic agencies like Justice and Agriculture to deploy to Afghanistan. In a briefing today, the deputy secretary of state, Jack Lew, said that “we’re going to have, when we’re fully deployed, 388 civilians outside of Kabul,” up from 157 presently.

But Beth Cole, a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace who researches U.S. civilian capacity for reconstruction and conflict stabilization operations, said it might be possible to get a sufficient core of 500 civilian officials for “key spots” in south and east Afghanistan. “The CRC is not going to be able to fulfill all the slots at this time,” she said, but if “we’re up against the wall, and we have to turn the situation around, I would call CRC to see what it could deliver.” Alongside an added corps of contractors and civilians from the Defense Department to make up the gap, Cole said she thinks it remains possible to “fulfill a lot of the core function” in Afghanistan.

Kerry said that one advantage the U.S. did have was the widespread unpopularity of the Taliban. While he did not devote much emphasis to so-called “reconciliation” plans to either divide the Taliban from al-Qaeda or fracture its coalition, he embraced proposals from the Afghan government — backed by McChrystal — to lure insurgent foot soldiers away from their commanders with economic aid. “Many can be lured away by the right combination of money, diplomacy, reintegration into society, and smart outreach to Pashtun tribal leaders,” he said, “including those who currently back the Taliban.”

“Clearly, Al Qaeda is a threat not only to the U.S. homeland and American interests abroad, but it has a murderous agenda,” one senior administration official said in an interview initiated by the White House on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity because the strategy review has not been finished. “We want to destroy its leadership, its infrastructure and its capability.”

The official contrasted that with the Afghan Taliban, which the administration has begun to define as an indigenous group that aspires to reclaim territory and rule the country but does not express ambitions of attacking the United States. “When the two are aligned, it’s mainly on the tactical front,” the official said, noting that Al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters in Afghanistan.

Another official, who also was authorized to speak but not to be identified, said the different views of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were driving the president’s review. “To the extent that Al Qaeda has been degraded, and it has, and to the extent you believe you need to focus on destroying it going forward, what is required going forward?” the official asked. “And to prevent it from having a safe haven?”

My emphasis. The administration is now considering two alternative propositions that require delicate assessment.

The first is, as the piece reports Richard Holbrooke is arguing, whether the Taliban would allow al-Qaeda back into Afghanistan if it took control. And there, the available evidence appears to support Holbrooke’s contention that it wouldn’t. Taliban elements have free reign in many areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, yet the administration is contending that there are only an estimated 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

Now, even a Taliban fulsomely backed by Pakistani intelligence couldn’t take control of the entire country, so it’s unlikely that any Taliban “victory” scenario is going to end up with the Taliban and its affiliates running all of Afghanistan, and accordingly the administration will have to ask whether quantitative gains in Taliban control would lead either al-Qaeda or the Taliban to change the current dynamic. What’s more, it has to ask whether, say, the upcoming Pakistani military offensive in Waziristan would make al-Qaeda’s senior leadership look for safer haven.

The danger for the administration is clear: premising a strategy on an optimistic scenario or a dimunition of danger is both substantively and politically troublesome. That’s not to say it’s necessarily wrong, but it’s what Gen. McChrystal would call a high-risk option.

The second consideration is whether the public will support a war that really does decouple al-Qaeda from the Taliban. So far the polling doesn’t suggest the public will. But there the considerations are actually much easier: if the public doesn’t support such a war and such a decoupling is necessary, then it’s the war that should be scaled down. Any temptation to overstate the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in order to sustain support for the war will be a disaster. But that’s too often the kind of inertial thinking that takes over Washington at war.

Back in Washington, some civilians involved in the review grew concerned that McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan went beyond what they believed was stated in the white paper. “Secure the population” was always a “military phrase,” one senior civilian participant said. “That was the way they extrapolated from Riedel’s plan,” but “it’s not in Riedel’s plan.”

This takes about two seconds to refute. From the third page of the Riedel plan, this is part of the very first “recommendation” for strategy:

Our counter-insurgency strategy must integrate population security with building effective local governance and economic development.  We will establish the security needed to provide space and time for stabilization and reconstruction activities.

Now, perhaps it’s still the case that McChrystal’s proposed implementation of the plan involves calling too many audibles and moving the strategy out beyond where the Obama administration is comfortable. That’s at least a debatable point, and it’ll be up to the president to decide whether it’s the case. But it’s just a misrepresentation of the March plan produced by Riedel’s study group at the behest of President Obama to say that securing the population is McChrystal’s invention.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s behind-the-scenes account of the Afghanistan-Pakistan debate within the administration, continuing through the present strategy review, exposes the fissures that quote concealed. It’s a masterful piece, and its central question is whether the Obama administration — indeed, whether President Obama — understood the costs entailed by embracing counterinsurgency. Damaging quote number one:

“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

But there was an assessment. That was the white paper, the result of a weeks-long process chaired by Brookings’ Bruce Riedel and co-chaired by Flournoy and special representative Richard Holbrooke, with contributions from many others, including lead skeptic Tony Blinken, Vice President Biden’s longtime foreign policy adviser. That paper’s embrace of a rather fulsome counterinsurgency strategy — fulsome in the sense of its focus on far more than just military measures, but governance and development and communications and regional attitudes as well — led lots of people to believe that the policy was set. Administration officials, that day and for months after, referred the white paper when questions about the strategy got raised.

Someone who read the white paper was Gen. Stanley McChrystal. That’s why to nearly everyone who asked, he portrayed his approach as his take on what would be required to flesh out Obama’s strategy — which he thought was the white paper. As he told Frontline for a forthcoming documentary, “When I hear the president talk about the commitment to Afghanistan as he did in the spring when he announced more forces, I believe that most Americans probably recognize or share his resolve.” And the feeling that the White House might no longer have that commitment, after placing McChrystal in Afghanistan precisely to design and conduct a counterinsurgency campaign, is why some in uniform have been thrown for a loop by this process. I have heard a great deal of frustration from civilians that they are not sure whether, in their day-to-day work, they are actually executing the president’s strategy, as that strategy may change. Damaging quote number two:

“We were operating under the assumption that when they said COIN, that’s what they meant,” said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan, “and they were serious about committing the necessary resources.”

It’s one thing to rethink basic assumptions, and to use setbacks as an opportunity to examine whether the entire enterprise is on a secure intellectual footing. But it’s another to adopt that footing without thinking through its implications — while assuring everyone that you had.

Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent US Representative to the United Nations

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Brennan, one of Obama’s most important advisers, wasn’t in last week’s meeting; neither was Donilon or Rice.

Obama pledged not to return to a counterterrorism approach, where troops “shoot and then fall back to the base,” Bond said.

Obama told the lawmakers that “nobody on his team was proposing that,” Bond reported, which lawmakers took to mean that the president was leaning toward a strategy heavily focused on counter insurgency, which is of course more manpower intensive.

Whether that means Obama ruled out a counterterrorism approach, a live question up for debate in the strategy review, or ruled out going back to the mostly-counterterrorism-heavy-but-underresourced approach in place before Gen. David McKiernan, the predecessor of current commander Stanley McChrystal, is unclear from the piece. (As is whether Bond is trying to put a thumb on the scale.) New TPM White House reporter Christina Bellantoni says the White House isn’t itself sure, so it would be surprising if Obama told the assembled lawmakers something so definitive. More soon.

Except for a previously filmed interview. On Oct. 13, next Tuesday, excerpts from a chat McChrystal had with PBS’s “Frontline” will be included in its (excellent) documentary about both the Afghanistan war and the debate surrounding it, “Obama’s War.” It will probably seem to the public that McChrystal is speaking after Jones and Gates’ mild admonishment. And if so, that might actually help McChrystal.

On camera, McChrystal doesn’t say anything politically charged. In four appearances — ‘Frontline’ sent me a screener today of the documentary — McChrystal makes an observation about holding the volatile southern province of Helmand (”Once you clear something and don’t hold it … I would argue that it’s worse. Because you create an expectation, and then you dash it”); another about the difficulties of the war (”There will be as many frustrations as there are times when you think you got it right. But, I think there’s no alternative”); another on Pakistan (”I think they’ve also found the resolve internally”); and finally on the value of the public debate — much as he said in London:

Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans and expend more treasure is something worthy of very detailed debate. There ought to be a lot of skepticism. There ought to be a lot of discussion. Before an American soldier is put in harm’s way, I hope that not just that political leadership, but the American people give it a lot of thought. So I think it’s appropriate.

The full transcript of McChrystal’s interview is already posted on the documentary’s Website. In the interview, as in London, McChrystal declines to get drawn into saying that Obama should increase troops:

Do you have enough troops?

In the “oil-slick” technique, as you know, you go where you can — the highest value areas, typically population centers and whatnot — and then you go out from there. And we’re going to have to do that in accordance with our priorities. …

Are you requesting new troops to come in? … Do you know where you need more?

… What we do is we take those forces that we have, particularly mating them with the Afghan National Army [ANA] and Afghan National Police [ANP], and try to grow from there, with the troops that we have trying to maintain enough security in each area. We hope that over time the force requirements in the latter parts of hold-and-build will go down, and in fact will shift to just the police. But it takes a long time. Could be months, could be years in some areas before you could go all the way down to typical status quo security.

If anything, the starkest assessment in the documentary doesn’t come from McChrystal, but from Brig. Gen. William Mayville, his director of operations:

How does this end? And how long is it going to take?

We’re going to leave here under shades of gray. We’ll have stability — at least reasonable stability. We’ll have a firm understanding that more has to be done. But in the end, you’ll have an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem. And that’ll be good enough.

With counterinsurgency on everyone’s mind, starting with Obama’s, Gates addressed whether the Army is too focused on counterinsurgency, to the detriment of traditional war-fighting competence. Not surprisingly, he defended the concept of “full-spectrum operations,” the service’s new construct that gives COIN a seat at the table but not the entire table:

For the last few years, there has been a concern that our force is too focused on counterinsurgency, and has lost its edge for complex, conventional operations involving multiple brigades or divisions. The experiences of the British colonial army before World War One and the Israeli military in Lebanon have even been cited.

This is a legitimate concern, and we continue to work toward finding the right balance. But the notion that the changes we have seen amount to turning the Army into some sort of counterinsurgency constabulary that is losing its core competencies – above all, to shoot, move, and communicate – does not reflect the realities of the current campaigns. Take, for example, the battle of Sadr City last year. In that campaign, U.S. troops had to synchronize air power, artillery, and ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], all while maneuvering through an incredibly complex urban environment and coordinating with numerous dispersed units.

And let there be no doubt that modernization plans for the full spectrum of warfare continue. The Army is accelerating the development of the Warfighter Information Network and will field it – and proven FCS spinoffs – across the entire force. I remain committed to the Army’s ground-vehicle modernization program – but it has to be done in a way that reflects the lessons we’ve learned the last few years about war in the 21st century, and that incorporates the Department of Defense’s nearly $30 billion investment in MRAPs.

We have to recognize that the black-and-white distinction between conventional war and irregular war is an outdated model. Simply possessing the ability to annihilate other militaries in a conventional fight in no way insures we can achieve our strategic goals – a point driven home in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In reality, the future will be more complex. Where all conflict will range across a broad spectrum of operations and lethality. Where even near-peer competitors will use irregular or asymmetric tactics and non-state actors may have weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated missiles.

Even as we prepare for the future and pursue modernization plans, we must always recognize the limits of technology – and be modest about what military force alone can accomplish. Advances in precision, sensor information, and satellite technologies have led to extraordinary gains that will continue to give the U.S. military an edge over its adversaries. But no one should ever neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of war or succumb to the techno-optimism that has muddled strategic thinking in the past. That is especially true for the ground services, which will be in the lead for – and bear the brunt of – irregular and hybrid campaigns in the future.

And look at what The New York Times credits as a major reason why:

Now there is a sense within the military establishment that the situation in South Waziristan cannot be allowed to be perpetuated. The blockade is nearly three months old, and the military, which has been conducting limited airstrikes, is running out of targets.

The Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, described Waziristan as an intelligence black hole. “We have to move in,” he said recently.

One of the major contentions of the counterinsurgency advocates within the Obama administration is that without a population-protection strategy, Afghans will have no reason to cooperate with the U.S. and, in turn, provide it with the on-the-ground intelligence tips vital for targeting high-value enemies. The counterterrorism advocates counter that the CIA is able to get precisely such intelligence over the border in Pakistan, which hosts no U.S. ground troops — and, for that matter, practically no Pakistani troops in the tribal areas that host al-Qaeda.

But now Pakistan is saying that they’re running out of intelligence in the area and need to throw ground troops into the equation. That observation, which bolsters the counterinsurgents, will doubtlessly be much debated within the Obama administration.