Mr. Arquilla's Worst Enemy is a disappointment, especially since the book is written by a former DOD official who now instructs at the Naval Postgraduate School, where the military sends some of its brightest young field-grade officers. My sense in reading the book was that Mr. Arquilla had a deadline to meet and ended up cranking out a hurried product. The result is a book that tries to cover too much ground and uses weak arguments to make its points. That's a shame, too, because some of the issues Mr. Arquilla discusses need to be debated.
In one chapter, Mr. Arquilla criticizes the Air Force for its almost religious attachment to the doctrine of strategic bombing. A legitimate issue to discuss. But then he goes on to prove his point by saying that Allied air power failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein from rule during Desert Storm, and so that proves that strategic bombing was a failure. In fact, Saddam Hussein remained because President Bush Sr. knew the coalition would fall apart if we tried to remove Saddam from power. So we chose instead a strategy of containing Saddam. The failure to remove Saddam was a lot more complicated than just the relative success or failure of strategic bombing.
In another chapter, Mr. Arquilla discusses sexual assualt in the military. Again, this is a topic that should be discussed and debated. But again, he uses poor examples. He says Army Specialist Lynndie England (later court-martialed and convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib) was "impregnated" by a male soldier. True, but she became pregnant as a result of consensual sex. So how does this even speak to sexual assault? In the same chapter, Mr. Arquilla says the military needs to prosecute sexual assualt. That is also true, and in my experience as a military officer, it seems that it is prosecuted. Could the military do a much better job? Certainly, but Mr. Arquilla offers absolutely no facts to back his arguments. No data, no statistics, just an assertion.
Mr. Arquilla zeroes in on the dangers of military officers becoming too involved politically. He cites skewed intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq under President Bush Jr. He takes the military and the CIA to task for cooking the books on the issue of WMD. But in this chapter, he fails even to mention a few other names of people who might have had something to do with this selective use of intelligence. Names like Vice President Cheney, SecDef Rumsfeld, Deputy SecDef Wolfowicz, DOD strategy czar Feith. If one is going to talk about this subject at all, it is absurd to not mention the roles of these individuals.
Mr. Arquilla even makes this same mistake when he talks about abuse of prisoners. Here he is not simply making an oversight, he makes an inexcusable omission. He says the military failed by abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other places. This is true, but the fact is the only agency which has actually prosecuted its members for these crimes is the Department of Defense. And once again, when he talks about this subject, he fails to include even one member of the administration. We now know that from very high levels, prisoner abuse was given legal sanction.
Mr. Arquilla uses all these examples of military failings (and a lot more) to eventually get to his thesis that the military must reorganize into small teams to fight "Network Warfare." This is an interesting subject in and of itself, but the first part of the book does little to lead to this discussion. In effect, it's as if he wanted to write two books, but did not have the time. This does not mean it is not a valid subject to talk about. But even when he talks about this subject, his evidence is scant and misses the mark.
He cites the 9/11 terrorists of an example of a small network based operation that can carry out its operations at low expense and with a high degree of secrecy. What? Criminal enterprises always work this way, and making the point that in this case these criminal-terrorists were unfortunately successful is not an argument for the DOD to organize this way. He also says operations in Afghanistan did not succeed until SecDef Rumsfeld was able to overcome the objections of the generals and insert special ops network-based teams. That might be true, at least operationally, except the part about Don Rumsfeld ever worrying about what objections a general might have. But even if we did defeat the Taliban, we still have a huge strategic quandry in Afghanistan.
To me, this is the biggest disappointment of the book coming from someone with Mr. Arquilla's resume. There are vast differences between tactics, operations, and strategy. He blends them all in the same pot. We did not get into a mess in Iraq because of a failure to insert special ops teams. We are still battling in Iraq because we had no national strategy on why we were there, how we expected to fill the governance vacuum after we took out Saddam Hussein and his military, how we expected to rebuild Iraq, and what our exit strategy was. These things should have been thoroughly vetted at the outset, but the administration would not allow any such strategic considerations.
This book is worth reading, but only to start discussions. The author needed to spend a lot more time writing it if he really wanted to prove his points.