COIN of the Realm

* By Jeff Huber at-Largely *

The short version of an old joke about U.S. defense spending goes like this:

An overweight nuclear submarine skipper baffles the congressional defense appropriations subcommittees with a line of technical gobbledygook Einstein wouldn’t understand, and the subcommittees give the Navy whatever it wants. A short, bald fighter pilot feeds the subcommittees a ration of dwarfed egotism and threatens to defile their daughters, and the subcommittees give the Air Force whatever it wants. Then a fit, ruggedly handsome infantry officer tells the subcommittees in modest, straightforward language what he needs to win the wars they send him off to fight, and the subcommittees give the Army nothing.

That was back before counterinsurgency became the (ahem) COIN of the realm.

In the good old days, the Cold War days, the Army’s main function was to get slaughtered in the Fulda Gap while the Navy and Air Force deep struck the Soviets into surrendering. The “blue” services dominated the defense budget with high tech, big-ticket weapons designed to defeat the Soviets’ maritime forces and air defenses. That the Soviets’ maritime forces and air defenses didn’t work worth a pig’s wings didn’t matter; their mere existence served as a sufficient stratagem to keep us in a wartime economy for over a half century.

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, Pentagon brass began scrambling for a way to protect their phony-baloney jobs. The next year, Air Force stealth bombers and Navy land-attack cruise missiles stole the show in Operation Desert Storm. By the time the “red” services (Army and Marine Corps) began the ground operation, the war was virtually over. Big Daddy Bush declared the peace dividend and the inter-service budget rivalry kicked into high gear – between the Navy and the Air Force, that is. Land power became such a rusty barrel in the nation’s arsenal that by the time of the Kosovo War (1998-1999) it was wholly irrelevant. The Kosovo War was the first American armed conflict commanded by an Army general (Wesley Clark) that was won with naval and air power alone – sort of.

Including naval power in the equation may be a tad kind. The Bad Guy’s navy stayed tied to the pier, and for good reason; it was a collection of rust buckets that would have sunk from natural causes before they made it out of port.

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