Noah opens his big mouth about defense issues

As the self-deprecating title of this post makes abundantly clear, I am no expert on defense issues. But it seems to me that this article is right - by shifting our focus from military modernization to counterinsurgency, Bob Gates is getting us ready to fight the last war.

Shifting our focus toward counterinsurgency is a popular idea in liberal foreign-policy circles, for obvious reasons. Donald Rumsfeld's insistence in modernizing the military led him to treat Iraq as a conventional military challenge instead of the occupation/counterinsurgency fight that it eventually, inevitably became.

But the obvious solution to our difficulties in Iraq wasn't to have a military better suited to fighting insurgents; it was to not have gone into Iraq in the first place. Instead of reorienting our military toward counterinsurgencies, we should reorient our foreign policy toward avoiding counterinsurgencies.

Looking at our history, it's hard to avoid the conclusion: The U.S. is terrible at being an empire. In the Philippines, in Vietnam, and now in Iraq, we've shown again and again that our people have little taste for occupying and pacifying weaker nations. We see little benefit in it; our country is big enough, isolated enough, and has enough of its own resources that we see no pressing economic or security reasons to become an empire. Our entire founding creed is based on the idea that countries shouldn't try to conquer and rule weaker countries; the image of U.S. troops calling in airstrikes on shirtless Vietnamese farmers is deeply contrary to our sense of fairness and justice.

But what we are good at is stopping other empires. Our greatest military successes have all come when we picked on someone more or less our own size; when they tried to conquer, we simply smashed their armies and went home. And this allowed us to look like the good guy, in the World Wars, in Korea and in the Gulf War. We didn't want to conquer, we wanted to create a world where no one conquers anyone. We were able to build and lead a stable international order because other countries believed that our power would be used only to foil the imperial designs of the bad guys.

Looking ahead to our near future, we will probably be able to avoid getting embroiled in any more counterinsurgencies. But if China decides to extend its challenge to the international order into the military realm, we will be forced to either confront that mighty nation or allow the current order to crumble. And, though I'm no expert, my intuition says that advanced weapon systems like the F-22, though useless for counterinsurgency, are the only way we could deter an adversary with 4.5 times our population.

So I do think Gates is getting ready to fight the last war. It was a war we shouldn't have fought, a war we could have avoided. The next war is the one we should be worried about.