Underestimating an adversary’s will to win can be a costly mistake in war, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in an interview last week. He said the U.S. had made that error recently in assessing the Islamic State, just as it did nearly 50 years ago in evaluating the staying power of the Viet Cong.
Clapper’s comment was part of a broader trend over the past week in which senior military and intelligence officials have been unusually forthright about issues involving President Obama’s strategy for combating the Islamic State. In addition to Clapper’s remarks, this “push back” has been evident in comments by Gen. Martin Dempsey and Gen. Ray Odierno, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and chief of staff of the army, respectively, about the possibility that ground combat troops might be needed in Iraq and Syria.
It’s as if senior officials, having been through the vortex of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, don’t want to make the same mistake this time of suppressing concerns or misgivings. Many military, intelligence, and foreign-service officers had doubts a decade ago about the wisdom of invading Iraq, but those worries were mostly unexpressed. Not this time.
An interesting footnote to Clapper’s comment about estimating willpower in warfare is that this issue was actually a central point of internal government debate about Vietnam during the mid-1960s. After my column last week, an intelligence official pointed me to official CIA documents that show how skeptical CIA analysts were about policymakers’ rosy expectations that their strategy in Vietnam would work.
