When we ponder what went wrong, it seems clear that although the U.S. is unrivaled in conventional, high-end military hardware, its enemies do not have to match equipment in order to hurt us. The leading cause of death of U.S. troops in Iraq is the improvised explosive device. Many of these weapons consist of nothing more than an artillery shell wired to a cell phone or garage-door opener. Nothing fancy, but it works. Much of the advantage that the U.S. armed forces enjoy in long-range warfare disappears when they get within eyeball’s range of the enemy, as they are forced to do in order to police a country like Iraq.

The United States must continue innovating to maintain its technological lead. The same biotechnology that enemies use to produce deadly germs can also provide lifesaving antidotes. Advances in laser systems hold out the hope of stopping rogue missiles—or even artillery shells—in midflight. Yet the kind of military strength that this country really needs today requires innovation that the current system does not provide.

In U.S. military war games, the armed forces are still fighting the way the generals prefer—against mirror-image adversaries. The armed services would become far more adept at perfecting the innovations they sorely need if the military put its efforts into staging more realistic war games in which adversaries use unconventional tactics.

Man Versus Machine
The lobbying clout of defense contractors is such that the Defense Department buys all manner of very expensive weapons programs that troops or sailors are unlikely to ever use, when what they really need is more personnel. Occupation duty and nation-building—the prerequisites for turning a battlefield triumph into a long-term political victory—continue to demand vast numbers of old-fashioned infantry, as well as specialists in civil affairs, intelligence and policing. It is too late to undo the U.S. problems in Iraq, but even a small increase in soldiers stationed there would help. The U.S. might be able to control Baghdad, for example, if the Pentagon could send in an additional 20,000 to 40,000 troops, both combat and noncombat soldiers. The current army can clear an enemy area, but the troops cannot hold their ground there and rebuild it.

Yet U.S. forces also need more troops of a different kind—people who understand the enemy’s language and culture. Unless this country can produce more diplomats, soldiers, spies and aid officials who can influence tribal chieftains in fluent Arabic or Pashto, military strategists may find that the world’s most sophisticated weapons provide scant protection from the world’s most ruthless insurgents. And to foil the plots of terrorist cells and stop them from winning more recruits, the U.S. will need to cultivate expertise in areas such as human intelligence and information operations—two major weaknesses exposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. military planners need to be much more context-specific than they are. If in 2003 they had been able to identify the moderate leaders in Iraq on both the Sunni and Shiite sides, they could have strengthened the moderate Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and undermined his fiercely anti-Western rival Muqtada al-Sadr. Some of the Pentagon’s small-scale counterinsurgency campaigns have shown that military leaders can stabilize a war zone by taking a multipronged approach that involves developing allies among the locals. In 2005, for instance, Colonel H.R. McMasters was able to enlist local forces to route out insurgents in Tal Afar.

Ultimately, defeating the Islamist insurgency will require not simply killing insurgents, but also changing the conditions that breed anti-American violence—in particular failed states and rogue states that foster a fertile climate for terrorism. Even more importantly in the long run, the U.S. must compete effectively with al Qaeda and its ilk in the battle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world. The sooner the Pentagon recognizes that successful warfare today is as much a matter of countering the enemy with information as with weapons technology, the more successful, and safer, we will become.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.