The Roots of Military-Led Nation Building: How Peacekeeping Operations Transformed the Army's Language of War and Politics

Abstract

In contrast to the theme of this conference, this paper argues that international crisis is not sufficient to explain the U.S. Army’s recent acceptance of counterinsurgency warfare and nation building as core capabilities. I contend instead that this change in Army thinking would not have been possible without a long-term erosion of the Army’s dominant discourse, which held that the military’s responsibility was to fight wars, not to transform politics and society. This process was decades in the making. Only after substantial shifts in the language officers and soldiers used to describe the Army’s mission was a group of officers and experts from inside and outside the government able to institutionalize a new discourse effacing the barrier between war and politics.

I first compare the Army’s capstone doctrine of 1993, 2001, and 2008 to show that while the recent changes should be considered a transformation of Army thinking, there were substantial shifts between 1993 and 2001.

I then analyze Army themes of Army discourse during the 1990s to understand whether there were significant shifts away from the dominant, Weinberger-Powell paradigm of the 1980s. I find key shifts in the way the Army discussed its main goals; the Army’s identity as a force rooted on the ground; the ineffectiveness of the civilian-led interagency process; and the decentralization of command. Because some of this new language appears to have been shared by a broad base of officers and intellectuals, the Army’s recent embrace of counterinsurgency and nation building may have found, in the 2000s, support from elements of the Army where we might not expect it.

The evidence suggests that some significant seeds of the later institutional changes were sown in the 1990s. This indicates that this transformation was not only a result of the politics of hard times but was decades in the making. Deeper study of the 1990s is necessary, as are comparisons with the 1980s and 2000s.

Keywords: Army doctrine, foreign policy, counterinsurgency, nation building, politics and history, American politics, American political development, international relations