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Abu Muqawama

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  • In my last post here, we looked at some of the issues inherent in the use of client and partner states in tackling the issues of counterterrorism. However, there are many cases where the United States has and will have to work with non-state or parastatal actors. At a time when America’s appetite for full-bore conventional interventions into failed or collapsed states (or states which we would like to induce failure or collapse in) is low, proxies, paramilitaries, and rebels seem like appealing, low-cost, and safe ways for the United States to influence outcomes abroad.

    The problem is, as with working with state and military actors, the groups the United States frequently tries to enlist into its myriad efforts at proxy warfare possess a separate set of interests from the United States. This diversion in interests is not necessarily nefarious. Groups may primarily seek wealth, local political power, or ideological aims that are not inherently anti-American. Yet very few groups will have sets of interests so limited and circumstances so pliant to patronage that they will subsume themselves into straightforwardly reliable instruments of U.S. foreign policy aims.

    The indirect approach with proxies, as with client or partner states, tries to obfuscate or eliminate a fundamental policy problem with a different strategic execution. Few would claim they wish to engage in nation-building in Syria, or advocate launching a counterinsurgency or counter-terrorism campaign there. To do so would evoke images and memories of Iraq and Afghanistan, of thousands of American troops and strategic folly.

    But trying to create a friendly state or quasi-state out of the Free Syrian Army through supplying them with weapons requires precisely them to execute policies we would rather leave unspoken. When we look at the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, we recognize that a Libyan government which effectively translates its pro-U.S. proclivities into meaningful policy outcomes will have to engage in counter-terrorism operations against jihadists. It will need to undergo nation-building efforts to develop a military powerful enough to take on militias and other paramilitary organizations, and develop criminal justice institutions and practices to ensure that the rule of law can prevail.

    In Syria, we frequently hear that providing arms to the rebels will enhance U.S. goals to unify the opposition, marginalize jihadists such as Jabhat al-Nusrah which operate outside the FSA’s already loose command structure, and earn the loyalty of the future government in Syria. This would occur, supposedly, through the U.S. preventing Qatar or Saudi Arabia from taking control of arms flows, outgunning the jihadists, and collapsing the Syrian regime before they can establish a foothold within the country.

    For U.S. patronage to translate into those outcomes, though, the U.S. must induce some nasty behavior by its friends on the ground. It should be very obvious that Qatar and Saudi Arabia will search for preferred proxies. As recent reporting reveals, the Qatari and Saudi governments are trying to steer arms towards hard-line Islamists, and rebel groups, in turn, are shifting their behavior and appearance to cash into these arms. One the one hand, this is heartening, as it means that alternate arms provision might at least discourage aping hard-line Islamist or jihadist practices. But these faux jihadists are hardly the real concern.

    If the U.S. seeks out groups it believes align with its values, this encourages the Saudis and Qataris to more aggressively support their own proxies, in order to maintain leverage among the rebel co-belligerents. It is entirely possible to have a scenario where aggressive patronage produces unity within each patron’s preferred factions of the rebel forces, but creates starker divide among the coalition overall. As much as the United States would like to disassociate itself from the concept, using proxies to shape political outcomes and state consolidation is still a form of nation or state-building behavior, one made palatable by the lack of direct exposure but all the more difficult by the lack of leverage.

    Frequently, the first impulse of a proxy group, whether it takes arms or not, is going to focus using them on fighting its primary enemy (the Syrian state) rather than asserting dominance over fighters who are driving at similar aims. When relatively moderate rebels killed an extremist leader, it was not because he was initially unwelcome, but because he was trying to assert control over rebel activities. Attempting to marginalize the jihadists sounds well and good, but it involves engaging in a severe and likely violent power struggle that jeopardizes the interests of several major regional state and non-state actors engaged in the Syrian civil war and its broader proxy conflict.

    So the United States is left with a situation where it must potentially fracture the rebellion by attempting this marginalization during the course of the conflict, or by hoping its arms have bought enough loyalty, capacity, and willpower for the rebel groups to undertake a second or third phase of Syria’s civil war in order to purge the country of jihadist groups. In either case, U.S. anti-extremist efforts work at cross-purposes with either unifying the rebels or shortening the civil war. This is doubly problematic when one considers that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states have demonstrated their ability to resource and implement proxy strategies in countries such as Libya. Even in the case of Syria, the United States would need the support of the very countries propagating the movements it hopes to quash.

    When the U.S. engages in proxy warfare in the context of the Syrian civil war, it thus encounters not simply implementation problems, but these implementation problems, like those of partner and client strategies, reveal a fundamental lack of ability to prioritize policy aims. Advocates of proxy warfare cannot decide or agree about their policy objectives, let alone their prioritization. It is nice to say that the U.S. wishes to shorten the Syrian war, build opposition unity, protect safe areas, and marginalize radicalism. These goals all conflict at various junctures (shorten the Syrian civil war requires minimizing infighting among rebels or killing off undesired rebels postwar), and without prioritization, the result is a mess.

    The U.S. has frequently employed proxies, but the aims were narrowly focused. During the Cold War, paramilitary proxies broadly existed to inflict maximum damage on hostile forces, with the outcomes for civilian welfare, war termination (the goal very often necessitated the opposite) or long-term state-building or capacity building.

    At the end of the day, whether there are boots on the ground or not, the question of how the U.S. uses proxy forces to consolidate a friendly or relatively liberal state in Syria are nation-building and state-building problems, and the question of how the U.S. uses proxy groups to marginalize jihadists is a counter-terrorism problems. By their nature, proxy strategies compound on existing flaws in these policies because they delegate a central role in the strategy to self-interested third parties. By their practice, proxy wars in areas where the U.S. lacks the intelligence or logistical capability to unilaterally furnish its desired partners with weaponry involve yet another set of external actors with their own interests and goals.

    Unilateralism is a dirty word these days, but very often the problem with it is that the United States grafts unilateral aims and approaches to policies which require far more consensus and complicity from other actors. Squaring the circle through indirect approaches seems appealing, but the reality is that whether the U.S. is conducting drone strikes or distributing arms, it is putting its policy and strategy at the mercy not simply of the enemy, but of its would-be partners, clients, and proxies. The deep and entangling double games and strategic surprises the U.S. so often finds itself in now, if anything, highlight the need for the United States to develop a set of genuinely unilateral options appropriate for achieving limited aims. As American relative power declines, the more indirect the U.S. approach, the less leverage it will have to shape the implementation and outcome of that approach to its own liking.

     

  • There's been a flurry of commentary and scholarship examining the idea that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) enabled a new kind of fluid, boundary-skipping form of warfare. Some observe that the conflict against al-Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) involves multiple political and spatial contexts. We balance between the interiority of the homeland, the exteriority of the battlefield, and a set of other spaces distinguished by the degree they permit access and power projection. All of these spaces are linked together by communication technologies, logistics networks, and financial flows. 

    From the late 1990s onwards, the disaggregated nature of emerging threats stimulated US government interest in interagency cooperation and networked military and security organizations. The refrain is familiar: an allegedly new threat requires novel methods that cross interagency lines and crack bureaucratic rice bowls. Of course the threat, while novel in character, is not entirely new. Similarly, the spate of analyses warning of unprecedented counterterrorist warfare reflect the same wrongheaded assumption:  AQAM is the only opponent political communities have fought whose uneven geography poses political, legal, and strategic challenges. Hence America's war against al-Qaeda sets a dangerous new trend.

    The historical record does not support this narrative. War beyond borders is actually more common than it might seem in today's very state-centric world. Transnational threats have never fit comfortably in neat political or legal categories, and states have often embraced unorthodox operating methods and organizations to enhance their security. Let’s start with a deep dive: in the premodern world, pirates, nomads, and secret societies were both geographically fluid and highly mobile. The anarchist writer Hakim Bey idolized the Assassins because they defied established borders and laws to create their own secret realm:

    Across the luster of the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a desiccate blue valley travelers find an artificial oasis, a fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden garden. ...As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hasan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone--those within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers & poisons.

    Bey argued that the Assassins and pirate communities were disaggregated communities of free spirits living in fortified sanctuaries; separated by oceans of sand and sea. In turn, nomadic powers moved as diffuse clouds throughout large landmasses and lived parasitically off of settled peoples. The Tartar peoples, Clausewitz observed, also constituted a collective warmaking entity that did not observe the neat separation between political, economic, and military divisions of labor common to states and empires.

    How did states and other political communities respond? You might be surprised how little really has changed. Pirates and bandits were regarded as "enemies of humanity" and were treated harshly. Sovereign boundaries were transgressed to capture non-state enemies that took refuge within settled political communities. Established legal and political concepts stress that only states have the “rightful authority” to wage war. Great powers also established counterterrorism networks and shared intelligence since the late 19th century. Upset about privatized war or the Human Terrain System? Contractor support, native intelligence networks, and targeted killings were also old hat to Army officers involved with the Indian Wars and Pancho Villa expedition.

    States may not want to admit that non-state networks can wage war against them, but transnational enemies won’t go away. States themselves use similar methods to mobilize power across borders, as Robert Kaplan observed of Iran's "virtual empire" of proxies and intelligence operators. The Soviet Union had a far-reaching global network of spies, client states, and proxies and the West feared the Comintern’s capacity for ideological subversion long before it feared the Soviet military.

    It’s hard not to conclude that World War II also stands as a giant rebuke to the idea that the global war on terror poses a unique challenge to questions of borders, neutrality, legality, and politics. As my blogmate Dan noted,  Axis naval, air, and mechanized power projection capabilities necessitated operating in neutral territory and sometimes invading and controlling entire states. Iran, Iceland, and Norway are just a few of the places that came under Allied power. World War II is also a case of "complex" war against a coalition held together by transnational ideologies. The Germans ruled a group of fascist states and non-state networks, and the Japanese and their local allies fought to establish a pan-Asian system radiating out from Tokyo.

    The West countered the complex threat by generating a astounding variety of interagency collaboration and hybrid organizations. Stanley McChrystal would be more at home during WWII than the Iraqi surge. Collaborative interagency research, analysis, and operations groups were assembled to plan economic warfare, crack codes, analyze adversary strategic culture, and assess asymmetric threats like the German U-Boat offensive. Indeed, WWII was also the heyday of groups ranging from covert operations organizations like the Office of Strategic Services and Special Operations Executive to oddball groups of mercenaries like the Flying Tigers.

    Just because the threat is old does not necessarily mean that we have a universal template that will erase the complicated political and strategic problems inherent in this kind of warfare. The AUMF is broad and wide-ranging because politicians and the public perceive that the threats are similarly unbounded. But that perception alone should not be a justification for hurrying down every rabbit hole and wasting resources and lives in the process. Policy and strategy can help clarify objectives and make them sustainable over time. Trying to develop a better understanding of the relationships between local and global threats is also necessary to avoid needless conflict, as are rigorous analysis of the effects of various political-military methods.

    What is not useful is an ahistorical narrative of unprecedented and spatially unbounded warfare that ignores the long record of states going beyond borders to fight threats to national security. One cannot expect politicians and security officials castigated for a failure to "connect the dots" and counter transnational threats before 9/11 to react sympathetically to such rhetoric. Pakistan exports terror abroad and is unwilling and unable to curb such negative externalities. Hence Pakistan's hue and cry over its sovereignty has fallen on deaf ears.

    The real risks lie in strategy and policy, not necessarily geography. What is the US theory of victory? How do we know who the enemy is? How do we know we are winning or losing? Are the costs of our effort sustainable? Are our targets enemies or bystanders we attack out of ignorance? The answers to these questions are still elusive. But the US public deserves to know, whether the enemy has a flag and capitol or hides in the shadows.

  • Although America’s past and emergent counterterrorism strategies frequently raise concerns about unilateralism, the multilateral and cooperative aspects remain relatively low in visibility. Actual or merely perceived unilateral acts, such as JSOC direct action raids and drone strikes capture much of America’s attention, while the role of host governments, proxies, and third parties of all kinds retains a relative background role. In reality, the inclusion of a wide variety of consenting foreign actors, ranging from militias to militaries, play a supporting and prerequisite role that is as troubling as it is vital.

    Take, for example, the cases of drone strikes in Pakistan. As the infamous Drunken Predator Drone explains in this excellent post, the covert and lightly-publicized quid pro quo between Washington and Islamabad over American counterterrorism efforts in South and Central Asia complicates the policies of both. Noting the wide ranging problems within Pakistan, he notes:

    The Pakistani political class is much happier to instead see the nation’s outrage, ink and airtime dedicated to a safer topic. Like sovereignty violations.

    And by cooperating with our counterterrorism efforts (including drone strikes,) the influential Pakistani military gets access to some of the choicest American defense hardware...

    As has been obvious for 10 years, U.S.  counterterrorism assistance represents a golden opportunity for Pakistan’s armed forces to gear up for war with India. Ending drone strikes would derail a $4.3-billion gravy train. And that’s far from the only American aid in the mix; development groups receive billions of dollars for education, shelter and basic nutrition in Pakistan. (Of course, many Pakistanis have no idea. American markings are often removed from aid shipments out of fear that they will become targets for militants.)

    The elected, legitimate government of Pakistan has weighed costs and benefits, and made a clear decision. Granting permission (however grudging or tacit it may be) for drone strikes represents a better option than risking a strategic break with America.

    Far from being a simple trampling of Pakistan’s will, the U.S. and Pakistan play a delicate - and relatively obscure - game which buys permission for America’s counterterrorism initiatives while bolstering some of the core objectives of the Pakistani deep state. Unfortunately, for too long American policymakers and publics have assumed American aid will engender a more comprehensive confluence of moral values, political principles, and strategic interests between them. Rather than simply presenting tactical and pragmatic ways to mitigate U.S. coercive potential, cash in on its immense political-military resources, and use them to advance prior objectives, America has for too long relied on a notion that America could strongly influence or control a country’s political will without actually exerting control.

    The political benefits of such an indirect approach are as apparent in the American public arena as they are in Pakistan. While the consequences of dysfunctional clientelism are made more and more apparent with each insider attack in Afghanistan, where America’s force posture puts conventional boots on the ground and lives on the line, the clandestine assets in Pakistan elicit no such public attention or outcry because they create no similar degree of risk. Yet this basic crack in the policy assumptions of clientelism-enabled counterterrorism remains. C. Christine Fair has outlined a plausible way forward: acknowledging the two countries will sometimes have irreconcilable aims and mitigating the negative effects accordingly. But Pakistan is hardly the only country where we see the same problems.

    In Yemen, the elite units which received U.S. military aid were redirected to regime preservation rather than counterterrorism. But aid to the Yemeni regime was the cost of political acquiescence to U.S. strikes, helping to foster a Yemeni deep state (even if Saleh is gone) with interests that may tolerate anti-American radicalization, so long as its existence and internal power remains secure.

    While U.S. aid has had varying degrees of success in making military forces more organizationally cohesive, operational proficient, and generally professional, it has faltered when it comes to changing the policy objectives that guide the militaries and the regimes they serve themselves. Just as many rightly call for more scrutiny of the consequences of drone strikes, they are just the latest privilege the U.S. has purchased from regimes and militaries in exchange for enhancing their military power and political longevity. Distressingly, many alternatives proposed to drone strikes fail to solve this deeper problem. An effective capture program nearing the scale of the drone program would require similar, if not greater U.S. concessions to local regimes, while a policy of promoting partnership, training, and advisory roles for the U.S. necessitates capacity building for regimes even if their intentions remain in many respects malignant towards U.S. interests.

    Complicating this matter, few of the local regimes where the U.S. wages its counterterrorism campaigns (and assists in the counterinsurgency campaigns of others) have Huntingtonian security forces. The evolution of the “deep state” in many of our former Third World partners gave security forces and their partners and proxies a political, social, and economic role alien to the Weberian ideal or the misleading state/non-state typology. Given the known and possible radicalizing and destabilizing roles of harsh imprisonment regimes, brutal local security forces, and the political machinations of rentier states and their proxy forces, devising a policy that tackles the essential principal-agent problem in current U.S. counterterrorism operations is as essential a task as finding alternatives to the strategies such as targeted killing themselves. Even if the targeted killing strategy were to give way, the dangerous game that enabled it may yet persist.

  • Jason Fritz at Ink Spots has an excellent review up of Anthony Beevor’s new single-volume history of World War II. I haven’t read the work (although Fritz’s review has moved it further up my to-read list), but the post raises some excellent points about how we view World War II which have vital implications for today. First, Fritz praises Beevor for attempting to highlight the political and strategic complexity of the conflict:

    As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank.

    We frequently hear in foreign policy circles that the 21st century’s geopolitics is vastly more complex than that of the 20th, particularly with reference to the relative simplicity of great power politics in a state system or the simple strategic viewpoints which sufficed for the clash of bipolar blocs, along with changing trends in economics, technology, and society. Yet looking at WWII and its preceding decades show a world’s complexity that would be mind-boggling even to the sharpest, forward-looking policymakers and strategists today.

    World War II featured a system with a much more pronounced multi-polarity, both diplomatically and ideologically, and with a patchwork of sub-state party systems, insurgents, and factions of all kinds attempting to seize control of state machinery and the mass populace. The political tumult of 1930s Japan, with the vying Imperial Way and Control Factions seeking influence over the military and the state generally, emerged from a context of ideological, social, and political discord and actual false flags and outright coup attempts puts today’s grappling with modern political transitions in some perspective. Even in amidst the great power clash of WWII, non-state actors with obscure ideologies could exert profound effect. Take for instance Darlan’s assassination at the hands of a French Resistance cell led by an ultraconservative with monarchist and integral nationalist tendencies.

     While this world was undoubtedly different, dismissing it as irreconcilably simpler in a geopolitical sense risks privileging a post-hoc teleology. Despite the growth and change in populations, technologies, and economies, making the case for a policy-relevant epochal great is likely to obscure a far greater deal more than it reveals. While tacticians and students of operational art and military strategy frequently plumb the depths of World War II, the policy planning, diplomacy, and general foreign policy issues of the period frequently appear as so beholden to antiquity as to be irrelevant, or so straightforward as to become unexamined mantras.

    That brings us to the next issue, which is the problematic “good war” narrative of World War II. As Fritz explains:

    It is important to note that Beevor does not suggest that World War II was an unjust war, he in fact says that is (from the Allied perspective, naturally), but rather that we should remove our rosy glasses on the West’s activities during the war and understand analysis of the war and its events for what they are and why “good” is not a descriptor of this war. He describes the war as “so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion.”

    The historical lessons of World War II are far too often transmuted and echoed through the experiences of the Cold War and the War on Terror. While a narrative of the U.S. grappling with ideologically-extreme foes provides a satisfying continuity to the past three quarters of a century, the historical lessons most often drawn from WWII often seem simplistic in the extreme.

    There is the perpetual invocation of Pearl Harbor, without adequate consideration for the diplomatic and domestic political maneuvering, sanctions, and U.S. policy decisions, and Japanese provocations and reactions, which preceded war’s outbreak (December 7th was, as Gaddis has noted, hardly a surprise in the way 9/11 was). There is the even more frequent agonizing over Munich, appeasement and the importance of prevention, without regard for the diplomatic issues, the military unpreparedness for launching an efficacious attack on Germany, or the possibility that an unpopular and hastily-conceived war might have brought pro-Axis or anti-war politicians greater influence by peaceful means in their home countries.

    What is rarely invoked in public policy discourse is equally telling. The avoidance or ignorance of how the European theater of the war, in brute material and human terms, was actually won is politically and rhetorically understandable but historically incomprehensible. The messy deals and compromises of interwar and World War II era are uncomfortable, but potentially illuminating to those who seek to put “the study of dilemmas” into practice in ways the good war narrative, useful for polemical nostalgia, can never be.

    The myriad difficulties of waging World War II that Fritz earlier outlined culminated in human tragedy and moral compromise, which challenges both the simple label of the “good war,” and for today, demands we scrutinize our contemporary context rather than reinforcing the whitewashed symbols and credos of the mythologized past. In recognizing the complexity of World War II, we not only refine our historical understanding, but also recognize relevance of its lessons at the highest levels of strategy, policy, and politics without resort to tired clichés.

  • While cheap precision weapons, supposedly expendable drones, and invulnerable standoff fires continue to fascinate publics and intrigue policy makers, we should be careful before subsuming these developments into a coming “new way of war.” As a recent RAND study points out, in a comparison between reusable platforms (think strategic bombers and strike aircraft) and expendable weapons (think cruise missiles), expendable weapons become less cost-effective during prolonged conflict. As Thomas Hamilton explains:

    The conflict duration at which exclusive reliance on expendable platforms becomes prohibitive depends on a number of assumptions about the cost, availability, and  utilization rates of weapon systems, but for any realistic possibilities, expendable platforms become costly for conflicts persisting on the order of ten days.

    Of course, no war uses purely expendable weapons, and no expendable weapon is purely expendable – weapons such as the TLAM are incredibly dependent on the presence of naval vessels which costs enormous sums and must be made to stick around for a long while. But the limitations of expendable weapons have important implications for thinking about future warfare.

    For example, despite the proliferation of cheap precision-guided munitions, as my co-blogger pointed out in a recent post, these payloads are still extremely dependent upon reliable platforms to deliver them. The greatest recent advances have not been in expendable long-range weapons (U.S. efforts to develop hypersonic weapons and Prompt Global Strike munitions have been marred with difficulty lately), but with small, inexpensive missiles or bombs that tactical attack aircraft can carry. Colombia’s Super Tucanos and America’s relatively small Predator and Reaper drones are so feared by their insurgent targets because precision weapons, when loaded on such platforms, allow for sortie generations to attack insurgent groups and other irregulars that were too mobile and dispersed to target before.

    When the U.S. chooses to conduct combat operations in countries such as Kosovo and Libya, strategic bombers must still make an appearance alongside expendable weapons such as TLAMs. Strategic bombers played a significant role in target servicing over Kosovo, and B-1s had record-breaking persistence during their deployment in Afghanistan. But reusable platforms are aging, expensive, and save for B-2s, very dependent on SEAD sorties to clear the way for their operation.

    One concern frequently leveled against armed drones is that they make wars easier, because they are inexpensive, and since they are remotely piloted, morally expendable too. Of course, if drones made war easier to conduct, they would hardly be the first system to enhance the margin of superiority of the U.S. over its opponent. But how credible of a claim is expendability, and how much does the low price of blood and treasure in drones shift the paradigm for warfare? Not so much, it should seem.

    While there is no blood price to shooting down a drone, the cost is still hefty, and it comes atop a high accident rate. It is telling the U.S. secures permission or acquiescence from countries such as Pakistan and Yemen when it flies armed drones, and in the case of Libya, waited out the destruction of its air defenses by conventional means. If completely expendable Tomahawk missiles do not drastically reduce costs of prolonged strike operations, armed drones, which are fundamentally reusable platforms by nature, are even less likely to do so.

    Another question this study suggests is how the U.S. and its allies will keep up with the logistical costs of future conflicts. Even the relatively low-intensity period of sustained strikes in Libya early on taxed the resources of NATO allies. Campaigns such as Iraq required 800 cruise missiles, and Syria might take up to 700. While standoff expendable systems such as the TLAM and ALCMs allowed NATO countries to support U.S. counterparts in the way Europe’s lack of strategic bombing capability cannot, ultimately it is America’s vastly superior stocks and financial resources for warfighting that allow it to conduct such sustained bombardments.

    Preventing the overstrain of that logistical chain is increasingly important, and ultimately, it will severely limit the ability to treat remotely piloted systems as expendable assets like cruise missiles, and ensure a continued role for larger and costlier platforms in the vein of B-2s, F-16CJs, and EA-18Gs that help make operating environments safe for drones fulfilling the strike roles of their manned counterparts.

    Similarly, the pervasive role of dispersal and deception in countering U.S. fire superiority demands the persistence of ISR assets that standoff expendable systems simply cannot provide on their own. Though “shoot and scoot” weapons are becoming more advanced, putting enough of them into a theater at a reasonable price requires reusable platforms if only to defend non-expendable C3I and ISR assets.

    The logistical challenges of keeping future offshore warfare cheap will likely pose a significant problem in future conflicts. As the fiscal sinews of American war power weaken, maintaining meeting voluminous sortie generation demands will get more challenging, even cheaper PGMs will remain largely dependent on a host of platforms to find, fix, and finish targets, while expendable standoff munitions, let alone exepndable UAVs, will be unable to take a central role in conflicts of longer duration. While covert wars and conflicts such as Libya seem within U.S. limits, even prolonged periods of high-intensity strikes will ensure that the “old way” of air warfare will remain quite persistent.

  • Let's face it: American landpower is in crisis. As blogfather Andrew Exum pointed out in a January column, without a dominant adversary or geographical template (the Soviet Union, Central Europe) landpower's case is getting harder to make. The counterinsurgency era provided a breather, but not necessarily a solution. It was common not too long to ago to see a flood of books and articles making the case that the Army had innovated towards a form of war (counterinsurgency) that would dominate the future of conflict. However, as Exum observes, this ignored the fact that Army/Marine counterinsurgency in Iraq was a contingent innovation designed to help the US through a war that many COIN thinkers regarded as a mistake. In 2012, the American defense landscape has moved away from large-scale stability operations and privileged air-sea battle, foreign internal defense, and unconventional warfare scenarios. None of these seem, at first glance, to be particularly promising for the big battalions.

    Some predict that the "man on the scene with the gun" will be replaced by the culturally sensitive special operative, cyberwarrior, or Predator pilot. Afghanistan in 2001-2002 and Libya last year is often trotted out to support this thesis. Certainly US airpower and Gulf Cooperation Council unconventional warfare units saved the Libyan rebels from defeat and gave them the support and organization necessary to win. But holes in the narrative emerge when we consider that the decisive weight was Libyan ground forces. Similarly, the success of the "Afghan Model" in 2002 should be properly credited to the Northern Alliance's Afghans. Moreover, relying on airpower and special operations forces as the US main effort also had costs. The fact that the US cannot diplomatically operate in a Libya whose citizens and government are ostensibly pro-American or even properly investigate the Benghazi consulate attacks speaks volumes about the problems of confusing reliance on ground proxies with actual political control. Granted, these costs are small compared to large-scale ground engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they still complicate the now-trendy vision of indirect warfare.

    Douglas Ollivant has also soundly observed that we cannot assume that special operations forces will be a salve for every security challenge we face. Some scenarios will simply be too big for SOF to handle alone. Even in the US does not seek to reconstruct collapsing states, securing weapons of mass destruction and leadership targets in the aftermath of an implosion of Syria, North Korea, Libya, or any number of other states would be demanding tasks that special operations would have difficulty handling by themselves. Some sanctuary-raiding missions would require larger ground forces. Others may simply lend themselves better to general purpose forces. Recent African success waging combined land-amphibious operations in Somalia suggests that land forces executing amphibious raiding in Africa could inflict substantial damage on pirates and other foes. In other situations we may not be able to rely on proxies to do the job for us, either because of a principal-agent mismatch or lack of capability. Finally, SOF and airpower in recent conflicts also depend implicitly on the enemy lacking the ability to threaten the bases and supply networks that sustain them with ground power, commando forces, or long-range weapons.  Should Afghanistan’s government lose substantial amounts of territory or collapse outright after US withdrawal, the basing arrangements upon which we base our proxy warfighting would be threatened.

    Still, the question remains: how to rebrand landpower? The Army War College's Antulio Echevarria II has a great piece at the Strategic Studies Institute taking on the challenge. In the past, Echevarria has written about how the United States lacks a "way of war" but instead had developed a "way of battle" oriented around destroying enemy armies. Destroying armies is necessary but not sufficient for decisive victory. In a new compilation of case studies on the subject of hybrid warfare edited by Williamson Murray and Peter Mansoor, there are copious examples of strategic misfortunes induced by conflation of Napoleonic victory with actual defeat of the enemy. Eliminating the bulk of French forces in 1871 forced the Prussians to contend with makeshift armies and partisans. The US' inability to manage the challenge of fighting insurgents, partisans, and main force units simultaneously played a strong role in its defeat in Vietnam. And in Korea today the US and South Korea will contend with North Korean main forces, special operations groups, and paramilitary networks in any ground scenario.

    We've argued for a while as to what to call these conflicts, from Fourth Generation Warfare to various forms of "complex" irregular war. But the bottom line is that future conflicts will involve the need to gain control over populations, whether the opponent is a positional force, guerrillas, or both. Echevarria offers a way out of the morass:

    Some will want to argue that Landpower's raison d'être is to defeat an opponent's ground forces. However, if more than 2 centuries of military operations are any guide, America's political leaders will see that as only “mission half accomplished.” The Indian wars, the Philippine insurrection, the Banana wars, World Wars I and II, the interventions in Asia and Latin America, the Balkans, the Middle East, and many other areas suggest that Landpower is generally employed not only to defeat an opponent's ground forces, and the quicker the better, but also to establish and maintain control over people and places thereafter. This is what Landpower brings to the table that Airpower and Seapower cannot. The idea is, again, to extend the reach of policy.

    Echevarria is not saying the role of landpower should be to build states. The conflation of defeating one's opponents with governing them has been one of the most destructive trends in recent national security policy. Echevarria addresses this head-on. In contrast to the stereotypical idea of an American way of war based around unlimited political objectives, Echevarria argues that Presidents have often sought to only use as much force as appropriate. Even in eras of total war, we have always considered conserving our own resources. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of fighting Germany in World War II, and US did not completely completely mobilize its resources for the task. Even during the Cold War, the US never adopted a "garrison state" mode akin to the Soviet total warfare state. 

    Adopting a holistic definition of landpower allows the Army and Marines to market themselves for a range of missions while still building a core set of skills oriented around offense, defense, and stability and support operations. This would certainly preserve all of the experiential gains of the last ten years in fighting insurgents, guerrillas, and illicit networks, but not limit the military to believing that one strategy should guide response. Indeed, it would also emphasize the productive use of land forces in situations short of war for shaping operations and rapid response. Finally, this conception of landpower would be a good basis for integrating landpower with cyberpower and special operations warfare. The Landpower Group currently examining the future of the concept is fruitfully looking at that intersection, as well as landpower’s adaptation to other emerging security challenges.

    To return to Echevarria's original point, an new conception of the American way of war would emphasize not only the armies of the opponents but the social and political contexts that generate them. It would privilege Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini but also leave room for John Arquilla. However, such a conception would require forces built around around combat. In the last ten years American soldiers have hunted down the enemy and engaged in the close fight in some of the most physically demanding regions of the Earth. And historically there is nothing soft about small war, whether chasing down Pancho Villa overland in Mexico or fighting dug-in al-Qaeda units on the mountains during Operation Anaconda.  To recognize this is not to denigrate the importance of cultural knowledge or persuasion, but it is to point out that everything else rests on the ability to threaten or violently coerce. Combat could occur anywhere, as daring attacks against American rear areas and supply columns have proved over the last ten years. As William F. Owen observed, expansive political objectives must be purchased by operations that grant control. Otherwise, the enemy always has the ability to spoil the plan.

    This vision of landpower would not necessarily be a call for large land forces on the model of 1917-1991. Rather, it would be a use of landpower familiar to policymakers throughout most of American history: boots on the ground to give America a say in what happens in unstable regions of interest to American national security, protect American diplomats and commercial interests from the predations of states and sub-state groups, and attack non-state organizations that threaten American lives. If framed that way, landpower could remain a competitive advantage even if scaled down.

  • With some apologies to AC/DC, the latest Economist has an interesting story on increasingly cheaper and deadlier conventional weapons. Systems are coming online that can engage more targets at a lowered cost, ranging from rockets to more advanced unmanned systems: 

    An early sign of this change came in March, with the deployment in Afghanistan of the APKWS II (Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System) made by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman. The APKWS II is a smart version of the old-fashioned 70mm (2.75-inch) rocket, which has been used by America’s armed forces since 1948. It is also cheap, as guided missiles go, costing $18,000 a shot. The APKWS II is loaded and fired in the same way (pictured above) as its unguided predecessors, from the same 19-round pods, making its use straightforward. The difference is that it can strike with an accuracy of one metre because it has been fitted with a laser-seeking head which follows a beam pointed at the target by the missile’s operators. This controls a set of fins that can steer the missile to its destination. Standard practice with unguided 70mm missiles is to use as many as two pods’ worth (ie, 38 rockets, at $1,000 a round) to blanket a target. That means the APKWS II comes in at less than half the cost per kill. It also means that many more targets can be attacked on a single mission.

    The story goes into similar standoff engagement systems, but doesn't examine the flipside: the increasing diffusion of precision-strike capabilities able to target US forces and infrastructure. Thomas Mahnken and others chronicling the "maturing revolution in military affairs" have predicted that the biggest problems will lie in protecting fixed infrastructure. Bases, ports, logistics nodes, and other immobile and inflexible targets will be vulnerable. Indeed, greater US investment in long-range strike systems in the Pacific also likely portend a shift from deterrence by denial to deterrence by punishment. 

    Camp Bastion demonstrated the low-tech side of dangers to US bases overseas, which in the near term may be more likely than any standoff assault. Holding American bases at risk in the Persian Gulf, for example, may raise the cost of US action but also is likely to trigger a devastating military response. Iran's preferred method of proxy warfare and state terrorism is considerably more below-the-radar and thus more politically difficult to counter.

    There are also interesting political implications of cheap precision-strike weapons to consider. Paul Bracken predicted in 1999 that Asian armies were shifting away from land-based, infantry-heavy peasant armies to organizations that place higher prestige on long-range strike, ballistic missile units, and unconventional weapons. The political effects of these new long-range weapons varied, as Bracken predicted some states would use their weapons to increase their freedom of action in the international system. Others would use them to empower certain groups of national elites, like Iran's Pasdaran. The rise of Hezbollah actually is a case in point of a sub-state actor generating political effects from its collection of indirect fire platforms. It exerts some measure of international influence it would not otherwise have from its ability to punish Israel's strategic rear and can market itself as a defender of Lebanon's national interest with its anti-tank standoff weapons. Hezbollah is unlikely to be the last sub-state actor to exploit access to indirect fire weapons in the same way.

  • Some familiarity with strategic theory might not save the hopelessly confused debate on targeted killings in the "AfPak" region, but it might help. The basics: policy is a condition or behavior. Strategy is an instrumental device that accomplishes the policy. Policy, in turn, is created and continuously shaped by political processes. Even a good strategy can be rendered meaningless by bad policy. Targeted killing is not a "policy," as many have argued, as an action cannot be policy. Policy is a precondition to action. Strategy, in turn, is not entirely about fighting but is mainly based around the threat or use of military force. Hence targeted killing is a strategy of the state, not a tactic. All strategy takes empirical form in tactics but the art of strategy itself is arranging those tactics in a manner that achieves the political object.

    Sometimes a strategy will be ineffective and cannot achieve the desired policy ends. The sudden collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 rendered irrelevant the Chinese Communist Party's strategy of building a conventional army around northern base areas while simultaneously building guerrilla bases farther to the south. Sometimes the policy itself is delusional and no strategy can save it, as was the case with the Islamic Republic of Iran's dream of conquering 1980s Iraq after it repelled Saddam Hussein's troops. Strategy and policy, however, have to be meaningfully separated and discussed in order to find clarity.

    Most discussion about targeted killings in Pakistan revolve around questions of strategy--is a targeted killing strategy preferable, given the alternatives? By far, Joshua Foust is distingushing himself as one of the most thorough commentators on this question. A strategy of targeted killing may do less harm than the traditional Pakistani (and first British) method of exercising control over the regions criscrossed by American combat platforms: "butcher and bolt" punitive combined-arms raiding. It would certainly be preferbable if Pakistan would exercise its sovereignty with a method other than indirect rule and collective punishment. That's unfortunately as unlikely as Pakistan ceasing its support for militant groups engaged in armed aggression against its neighbors.

    It also makes little sense to raise the cost of targeted killing if doing so will set back the policy the United States is seeking to achieve. If the policy is presumed to be correct, then the dominant concern should be ensuring that the right targets are selected. If greater transparency incentivizes this process, then we should all be for transparency. Strategy accomplishes the policy by either disarming the opponent or breaking his will to fight on. Killing the wrong people should be avoided, and if less and more precise strikes accomplish this goal then targeting authorizations should be tightened. But it makes little sense--if we feel the policy is correct--to limit the levels of force employed if the alternatives to achieving the policy goal are distinctly suboptimal.

    Now, all of this presumes that the policy is correct. That proposition is in fact extremely debatable, and this uncertainty has implications for the implicit strategic and ethic calculations we are debating. First, US policy towards Pakistan has been, as Christine Fair notes, a case study in catastrophe. The United states has attempted to transform Pakistan's domestic politics through various forms of statecraft, all of which have ended in failure. If Bob Woodward is to be believed, the 2009 Afghan surge was built around the implicit idea that stabilizing Afghanistan would help the US better manage Pakistan. And as Greg Scoblete has noted, the intensity of the targeted killing campaign--and its attendant collateral damage--in part issues from the necessity of fighting the Pakistani border side of the war in Afghanistan.

    Also embedded in the conversation about targeted killing is the problematic policy assumption that the greater problem is al-Qaeda rather than Pakistan itself. As Scoblete noted: "is the U.S. targetting militants that threaten the Pakistani state, or those sponsored by the Pakistani state. It's rather perverse to argue that drones are critical to protect Pakistan from militant violence when that country's intelligence service believes it is at war with you and uses militants to advance its own interests." This has immense implications for the American theory of victory behind the targeted killing campaign. There is no theory of victory if the policy presumes that we are unable to disarm or coerce the enemy because Pakistan's geostrategic postures make doing so impossible.

    If the policy goal itself is flawed, then the targeted killing campaign may not, in fact, be the best way for the United States to defend itself from its declared enemies. Thus the ethical calculations that we presume when weighing air strikes vs. Pakistani air-ground offensives may be more complex than we think. Fair has outlined an alternative set of policies--containment and neglect--and a set of politico-military instruments that may obviate the need for the US to rely on targeted killings altogether. Or at least change the shape of how the United States employs force within Pakistan. A shift in regional posture, such as the United States adopting a different policy towards Afghanistan itself, may also open up different coercive options.

    The question of policy is unfortunately rarely raised. Rather, we seem to prefer an circular conversation about the morality of machine warfare that was empirically decided a hundred years ago with the invention of Maxim guns, indirect fire systems, and ground-attack aircraft. Even talking about strategy may not necessarily yield insights. Let's focus on the policy.

    UPDATE: James Joyner pointed out in Para 3 I use the phrase "policy" to refer to targeted killings. Mea culpa: the pervasiveness of the use of the public language has infected even my head. I have changed the paragraph.

  • Marisa Porges has a forceful op-ed in today's NYT making the case for beefing up the capture component of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Read the whole thing:

    At the moment, the United States has nowhere to hold and interrogate newly captured terrorists. America just handed over control of its detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a significant step toward transferring security operations to Afghans. And while Guantánamo Bay remains home to nearly 170 men that the United States believes are still a threat, no captured terrorist has been transferred there since August 2008. Yet in the past four years, drone strikes and airstrikes targeting Al Qaeda affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have increased dramatically.

    Since 2010, there have been about 2,000 such strikes in Pakistan alone, with hundreds more in Yemen and North Africa. Meanwhile, only one alleged terrorist outside of Afghanistan — a Somali named Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame — was captured, held and interrogated. He was later flown to New York to stand trial.

    ....

    The fact that the United States now has nowhere to hold a terrorist — and no policy to deal with him once captured — means that a dangerous suspect might very well be let go. At present, there is no standard course of action approved by the president and relevant government agencies for what to do in the days and months following capture.

    This situation creates disturbing incentives for troops on the battlefield. It encourages soldiers and policy makers in Washington to opt for the “five-cent solution” — a bullet. Rather than shooting people, we should be exercising due process, and bringing transnational terrorists to justice. That’s an approach that would help America maintain the moral high ground in the ongoing fight against Al Qaeda.

    That there needs to be more human intelligence collection in U.S. CT is beyond dispute. So too are the issues currently wracking American detention policy. Warsame, for example, spent a good deal of time onboard the USS Boxer, which Spencer Ackerman fairly described as a "floating Gitmo" when put to this use. But that's not the worst of it. Warsame was lucky enough to make it to a U.S. courtroom, but as Jeremy Scahill has documented, Somalia's NSA and the CIA run some dreadful sounding facilities where not just fighters found in Somalia, but alleged terrorists from Kenya face interrogation and detention. If U.S. detention policy ultimately ends up relying on building Bagrams and Guantanamos across AFRICOM and CENTCOM, or else employing the U.S. Navy to this end, counterterrorism with a human face might not turn out all it's cracked up to be.

    But even leaving aside navigating the legal and logistical issue of where to put terrorists once we capture them - an issue that Porges readily acknowledges - there is an issue of how to bring back warm bodies from where we currently have drones buzzing overhead. This is a critical question, because the means the U.S. employs to capture terrorists and suspected terrorists will have a great impact on the costs, benefits, and relative merits and demerits of capturing HVTs as opposed to the current targeted killing campaign.

    In Afghanistan, the massive conventional presence of U.S. forces was and still is a significant enabler for capture operations. Afghanistan's infamous night raids, now under the control of the Afghan military or specialized CIA-trained elements, are a prime example. Yet many familiar issues emerged. Civilians resented property damage, casualties, mistaken targets, lack of transparency or accountable due process, and increasing the role of the ANSF may not have significantly improved the situation.

    In many respects though, Afghan night raids are easy. Special operations enjoy significant legal and operational freedom of movement. Large amounts of on-the-ground intelligence and conventional forces enable better targeting and mitigate the risks of raids. Try to pick up targets in, say, Somalia, and things get much harder. JSOC raids into that country required air and naval fire support, while the enabling conventional force in question was the Ethiopian military, which did not do much to win Somali hearts or minds. Penetrating Somalia has required a patchwork of often unsavory partner military forces, militia proxies, private contractors, and covert operations. While America has learned much from 1993's most infamous attempt to conduct HVT capture, its foes in Somalia continue to pose stiff security challenges - though fortunately Shabaab seems to be losing ground.

    In Yemen, the U.S. has a number of options for conducting capture operations, none of them particularly appealing. It can rely on Yemen's government and U.S.-trained troops, whose political loyalty and human rights credentials are not great. Though drone strikes are destructive, so are smash-and-grab expeditions into ungoverned or hostile space, particularly with a partner state's less, well, delicate touch (this is the country that named its counterinsurgency against the Houthis Operation Scorched Earth, after all). While we should always remember that U.S. airstrikes - manned or unmanned - rely on significant theater basing and local covert ground presence, capture missions would likely increase the footprint of U.S. operations. In Yemen, geography is favorable enough to allow sea-based raiding, but maintaining raids at the tempo of drone strikes would likely mean a vastly expanded U.S. military presence in the area. Or else it might rely on the Yemeni government, the prisons of which helped radicalize an earlier generation of al Qaeda.

    In Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, too, we see similarly pressing problems. As C. Christine Fair rightfully points out, it's been Pakistani conventional offensives (which would provide the presumed enabling element for an increased tempo of capture raids) that have done the most damage and displacement to the region's population. A law enforcement approach's outlook is bleak because the entire region, whether the U.S. likes it or not, falls under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a colonial piece of legislation which makes playing by host rules and occupying the moral high ground an ethical gymnastics act. While Pakistan is willing to tolerate, to some extent, drone strikes on its soil, will it be so willing to replace them with more cross-border activity from JSOC, the CIA-trained Counterterrorism Pursuit Team, or let the U.S. direct its own security forces to a degree amenable to U.S. interests?

    In areas where government capacity is strong and politically pliant, using the FBI to capture terrorist suspects will likely remain viable. When the U.S. tried to capture the 1993 CIA headquarter shooter, Aimal Kasi, the FBI worked with the Pakistani government to render him to the U.S. But they could not capture him until he entered Punjab province, and even then the U.S. initially hid the extent of Pakistani government involvement due to the controversy of the extradition. This was one arrest in 1997 - conducting arrests and renditions at a high tempo today simultaneously demands a much larger host government role while straining the political space for it to participate.

    All this said, on balance the U.S. still must reorient its HVT program towards collecting HUMINT. For pragmatic and ethical reasons, the U.S. also must do something to fix the current legal and logistical morass of its detention policy. Yet assessing the proper role of capturing terrorists, and the likely degree of practical and moral surplus derived from it, demands a frank assessment about the demands of substituting captures for kills, and the capacity and willpower of the U.S. to undertake such operations. Even with the legal problems sorted out, and a system of prisons without the lingering insidious reputation of Guantanamo, Bagram, or CIA black sites, we still have the matter of kicking down the doors of suspected terrorists in well-armed and unfriendly neighborhoods and spiriting them away to a host or foreign prison. This is a process that will still likely get civilians killed, families unjustly torn apart, and put armed men and military hardware in places where they are not wanted. Dealing in such generalities, it is extremely hard to say whether this would appear, to the broader population, more moral, more desirable, or less encouraging of radicalism than drone strikes, in part because it is already so difficult to accurately measure very much about drone strikes in these regions to begin with.

    Just look at the Phoenix Program, the massive effort to capture suspected foes in Vietnam to dismantle VC infrastructure. As William Rosenau and Austin Long explain in their invaluable report on its relevance for modern operations, the Phoenix Program unduly gained a lasting reputation as an "assassination" campaign of marauding "death squads" - a reputation so widespread that even President Nixon thought this was what the CIA-handled Provincial Reconnaissance Units were really aiming for. Whether using local governments, proxy forces, special operations, or some other element, snatching somebody from their home at night at gunpoint is a risky proposition for seeking political kudos. Particularly when placed alongside host governments that engage in disappearing opponents, brutal methods of counterinsurgency, and generally repressive practices, the perceptual and counter-radicalization benefits of a similar-tempo capture campaign might rapidly wane.

    Doubtlessly, expecting all of this from an op-ed is a curmudgeon's (and a blogger's) game, but shifting the frame somewhat is necessary from a policy perspective. We must at least broach the question of what kind of force commitments and operational guidelines we need to effectively conduct a capture campaign is essential, as well as when and where we ought to employ such means.  While it's undeniable the HUMINT value of capture operations are higher, the costs of undertaking them may well reduce or even eliminate the presumed ancillary benefits.

  • Though Kindred Winecoff may have written this about Stephen Walt, it also speaks to Pankaj Mishra's op-ed today predicting the allegedly inevitable US decline in the Middle East:

    How does any of this indicate that the geopolitical position of the U.S. has been weakened? The U.S.'s antagonists are quite literally fighting for their lives....regional democratization is underway -- albeit not in the way they had expected -- and the broader transformation of the region is proceeding in a direction that is amenable to the U.S.'s long-term interests. The Middle East is less engaged in proliferation than it was a decade ago, Tehran's intransigence notwithstanding. There are fewer security dilemmas in operation than at any point in decades...the frictions that many believed had developed between the U.S. and its NATO allies over Iraq appear to have been transitory rather than permanent.

    Dan is also correct that, contrary to recent analysis, the Russians, Chinese, Brazilians, and other external powers also still sit on the periphery of Middle East power relations. This structural realist line of analyis doesn't address the societal changes Mishra describes, but his argument is unconvincing on that level as well. The postcolonial wave has been a consistent challenge globally for US foreign policy since the 1950s, but it never posed a overwhelming threat to American power in the Middle East. Why? Its effects are not uniform across states, and always remain vulnerable to national, regional, and extra-regional dynamics. This isn't to say that people do not share strong political commonalities or even necessarily weak civilizational ones. But in the case of the Middle East, the regional challenge to American influence never really emerged. In fact, as the Cold War deepened and post-colonial fervor hit its height the United States actually increased its power and alliances in the Middle East.

    If Nasser and the forces he unleashed could not drive the US out, it's highly unlikely that the Arab Spring will. Had the idea of Arab unity been able to seriously mobilize a preponderence of power, it would have succeeded in its recurring series of projects aimed at regional unity. Yet whether in the confused strategy of the Arab states that lost the 1948 Israeli war of independence or the failure of the United Arab Republic, we've never seen a cohesive force able to really dispel external influence. One can take a constructivist explanation, as Michael Barnett does, or a standard neorealist explanation oriented around anarchy and the balance of power to figure out why. Either way, Mishra does not convince as to why today's upheaval is different.

    This sort of talk unfortunately obscures the real issue: the variable shape of American involvement in the Middle East and how highly contingent that involvement really is on American perception of value.  The US is not going to "withdraw" from the Middle East--we're yoked to it for cultural and economic reasons that cannot simply by wished away. But so are a host of other powers that nonetheless have different postures in the region than we do. In the absence of a Soviet strategic threat to the Persian Gulf and Iran's declining strategic position, how long the United States chooses to maintain its current network of alliances, political relationships, and force deployments will likely depend, as Dan has said, on both domestic opinion and policymakers' conception of costs and benefits.

    Plainly put, the US intervenes in the Middle East to sustain and sometimes modernize US alliances structures and political relationships. It also sporadically intervenes to try to change the Middle East's domestic and cultural spheres, with varying degrees of success and failure. Though American intervention is mainly political and economic there is also a heavy military dimension. The former is unduly ignored and the latter is often unfairly blamed for America's problems in the region. The larger point: political and strategic relationships do not sustain themeselves. They have be constantly refreshed and defended, The US can skimp on that cost in the hope that clients and partners will, on their own, pick it up at the expense of competing domestic priorities. But it will find that those costs---like a rent bill--do not pay themselves. The Arab Spring, Iran, and emerging 2nd wave jihadist challenges pose political and diplomatic costs. The political-military "landlord" (to continue an awkward metaphor) also must be paid in Asia too, if the post-Vietnam American policy there is to be sustained.

    Sometimes the bill can be paid by other actors, but not necessarily in the way the US desires. We are seeing a dramatic example of this in the South China Sea. Japan and China are engaging in a kind of conflict that was prevented in the past by the US' postwar policy of keeping Japan from becoming a threat to China and providing stability for Japanese economic and political development. American policies of dual containment in the 1990s against Iran and Iraq came as a consequence of the failure of attempting to play both against each other in the 1980s--a failure that prompted direct American military intervention to protect economic interests.

    Right now, the US is willing to pay the costs of the current policy. But external shocks in other regions and further economic disruptions may shift this calculus. We should not also rule out nationalism as a possible factor in American policy shifts. In the past, as Dan notes, isolationism was originally expressed as an American feeling of superiority over a morally corrupted world dominated by European power politics. The popularity of the recurring "Muslim rage" concept plays on an traditional American idea that the blame for American failures to transform the societies of others should be laid at those societies themselves. So while we shouldn't bet on anything more than near-term US retrenchment (a different thing than decline) in response to current economic realities, retrenchment that leads to a different conception of achieving American interests shouldn't be conclusively ruled out in the early 21st century. But contra Mishra, that would have more to do with factors external to the Middle East than Frantz Fanon 2.0.

  • One of the preemiment problems with the way that guerrilla warfare is discussed is the almost commonplace idea that it is a fundamentally different type of war, requiring fundamentally different interpretive and operational methods. Last weekend's spectacular assault on Camp Bastion should disabuse everyone of that notion. The assault on the heavily fortified airbase demonstrates an Taliban special operations capability that has yielded strategic effect. Since the 2008 Kabul Serena Hotel attack, the Taliban (likely guided by their Pakistani patrons) have developed a capability for complex, high-risk assaults that now seems to have taken center stage. The war of position has hardened, as swathes of the country remain in the hands of either Mullah Omar or the Haqqani Network and the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) continues what has been a problematic effort to consolidate their gains in the south. The Taliban are now using special operations to bolster the political effect of their territorial holdings and make their mark on Afghanistan's new politics.

    James Kiras, a historian of special operations, writes that special operations are "unconventional actions against enemy vulnerabilities in a sustained campaign, undertaken by specially designated units, to enable conventional operations and/or resolve economically politico-military problems at the operational or strategic level that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with conventional forces alone."  Special operations generate cumulative moral or material attrition on the opponent in conjunction with conventional forces. Both moral and material vectors are vulnerabilities for the United States and its Afghan ally. Seven percent of the Marine Corps' overall Harrier fleet went up in smoke, and each high-risk assault in a Afghan urban center and targeted killing of an Afghan official adds to the perception of Taliban will and capability. While the Taliban special operations community may not look much like the Anglo-American model of special operations honed in World War II, it is still capable of formidable feats. The raid on the heavily fortified and geographically remote Camp Bastion required solid operational planning skills and intelligence prepartion of the battlefield. As Jeffrey Dressler argues, the complexity of the operation suggests planning and direction from Pakistan's intelligence services.

    Under Kiras' model, special operations and regular forces both produce effects to support a political end. That end, as the transition process nears, is political position in Afghanistan's new order. There is nothing particularly unique about that kind of warfare. In major conventional wars after World War II, operations frequently were designed to bolster an overall political position rather than lead to decisive victory. The ending phases of the Korean and Vietnam wars both were marked by intense battles to gain a favorable position before the cease-fire. North Korea has repeatedly utilized a range of conventional and unconventional military tools for brinksmanship over the last few decades, and seems to be expanding its special operations and information warfare capabilities. Special operations, which utilize specially trained and tasked men to undertake difficult missions, are ideal for achieving strategic effect under such political conditions.

    The idea that the Taliban could field a special operations capability and deploy it in a manner consistent with historical campaigns is not shocking when one considers that they originally gained political power in Afghanistan through mobile warfare to seize territory in the mid-90s. This required combined arms coordination, operational logistics, and command--all helped by generous Pakistani support. They lost political control through the similarly successful Northern Alliance prosecution of maneuver operations, which leveraged combat power to convince both Taliban elites and rank-and-file to change sides. Force destruction and the seizing of territory certainly can certainly achieve strategic ends all on their own (think Napoleon's most glorious campaigns) but the political element of war is paramount in every mode of warfare. The problem is not that Afghanistan is a uniquely political kind of war--all wars are---but that we forget that strategy involves the use of battle to generate political currency. The opening gambit of the current civil war cycle was, after all, a Soviet direct action raid to decapitate and destroy the Hafizullah Amin regime.

    The Taliban are unlikely to use special operations to achieve anything that dramatic. However threatening their recent exploits may be, one concrete lesson of special operations history is that pinpoint raids do not obviate the need to painstakingly eliminate the opponent's ability and will to resist. The culminating point will be reached if the Taliban's reliance on special operations gets too far removed from what their main forces achieve. There are many people in Afghanistan and the wider region with a vested interest in seeing that the Taliban do not return to power, and a hard force-on-force fight looms. But Camp Bastion has demonstrated that Taliban special operations are nonetheless an important threat.

  • When over a dozen insurgents attacked Camp Bastion’s airfield with explosive vests, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and possibly truck-borne mortars, they inflicted the greatest loss on VMA-211 since December 8, 1941, when the unit – then designated VMF-211 – lost twelve aircraft during Japan’s opening assault on Wake Island. The eight Harriers destroyed or damaged in Afghanistan, though, recalled a type of attack the U.S. dealt with many times in theaters from Indochina to Puerto Rico.

    My co-blogger Adam helpfully pointed to this RAND study on ground attacks on military airfields, which, chronicling them from 1940-1992, noted that relatively unsophisticated and lightly-equipped forces were able to destroy 2000 aircraft during this time period. While hostile air attacks on U.S. airbases (excepting, of course, missile threats) look relatively unlikely in the near term, determined ground attackers, acting either as part of regular or irregular forces, have used a variety of small arms, light artillery, and assorted other man-portable weaponry to disrupt air operations.

    Whether in full-blown theaters of war such as Afghanistan or less-active and more secure theaters of conflict, America’s large military bases are an attractive target. Their potential vulnerability to ground assault makes such attacks provides a badly-needed recourse for those facing America’s massive aerial firepower. Particularly as the U.S. turns away from large-footprint ground wars and their associated operational risks and political costs, U.S. bases provisioning air support for partner forces, hosting intelligence and advisory personnel, and providing “lilypads” for Special Operations Forces and clandestine capabilities may become increasingly important, especially if maintenance and cost issues end up degrading the readiness of America’s surface-borne aerial assets.

    The 2009 Camp Chapman attack, along with this one, provides another important reminder about the multifarious potential vulnerabilities in such a “low footprint” strategy. In that case, a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide vest, killing several intelligence personnel at a facility heavily involved in servicing targets for airstrikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though his objective may have been killing personnel rather than airframes, it demonstrates the continued vulnerability of American bases.

    Particularly as the U.S. embraces a model where it provides support and standoff firepower to a local force doing the bulk of the ground fighting, it will be particularly vulnerable to insider threats and beholden to the reliability (both in competency and loyalty) of foreign forces. Exposed forward facilities in America’s “secret wars,” from Lima Site 85 to today, will become increasingly attractive targets. Even U.S. conventional opponents may try to exploit such sapper tactics in order to strike against American airbases (such attacks might feature prominently in the outbreak of large-scale hostilities between the United States and an opponent with sophisticated irregular capabilities, such as Iran).

    While the attacks on Camps Chapman and Bastion may be less likely in a theater where a country’s population is less mobilized (and its insurgency far less battle-tested) U.S. presence than it is in Afghanistan, the fact that groups such as Puerto Rico’s violent Machetero separatists could conduct similar operations against a base on U.S. soil is a warning against complacency. If America wants to scale-down its forward presence and power projection footprint, it will need to focus more energy and attention on force protection. Attacks on such facilities target capabilities that are relatively difficult for the U.S. to sustain in the face of concerted attrition. While limiting one’s presence in a country to those necessary to operate and support missions providing aerial and naval firepower, advisory roles, intelligence gathering, special operations, and civilian roles such as those the State Department fills certainly will certainly not generate as many casualties as those an occupying counterinsurgency force generates, the loss of aircraft, highly-trained Special Operations personnel, or diplomats can dramatically set back U.S. operations in a context of limited resources and multiple theaters of operation.

    Not only that, but attacks on such critical facilities can create significant escalatory effects and political pressures. While we may now associate the supporting and advisory missions of these bases with the political dénouement of U.S. involvement in a conflict, effective strikes on U.S. aircraft, naval vessels, and vulnerable facilities unleash political fallout that might undermine the determination of policymakers to effectively tame the scope and scale of a U.S. “secret war” or limited conflict. The notion that a lack of “boots on the ground” means American lives and security are at little risk is fallacious. Any kind of sustained U.S. military presence will generate potential targets for enemy attack, and the U.S. will need to find ways to effectively conduct force protection missions in such environments if these sorts of activities are to be tactically and operationally viable.

  • When Egyptian rioters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, raising the black banners (and bizarrely enough, some were hiding behind Guy Fawkes’s now ubiquitous visage), the news was bad enough. A handful of well-financed cranks, advancing a deluded and hateful but crushingly unsurprising agenda, helped ignite a crisis in a critical U.S. partner. The Embassy’s security personnel managed to avoid harm to its staff or the exercise of deadly force (today, it seems, Egyptian internal security has finally showed up at the compound walls). Yet despite the presence of Egyptian security services in the area, the rioters still stormed the walls, desecrated the flag, and flaunted those of the country’s foes – all on nominally sovereign U.S. territory.

    In Benghazi, the stronghold of a revolution that, with aid from America and its allies, toppled the murderous Gaddafi regime, worse fears came to pass. Beset by militants – let no media outlet utter again the ridiculous phrase “armed protesters” – firing automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades, U.S. personnel returned fire. An outmatched Libyan security force proved basically ineffectual. One U.S. diplomat died, at least another was wounded, and the whole consulate burnt to the ground after the mob finished looting it.

    UPDATE: As I woke up to edit this, news broke reporting that in addition to a potential three additional U.S. deaths, a high-level official – possibly a Consul or even U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, died as a result of the assault there. This new information, if it is verified, makes this all the more urgent, and the record of warning signs below all the more troubling.

    This was not, of course, the first attack on diplomats in free Benghazi.  Militants fired rocket propelled grenades at British embassy vehicles, and bombed an Egyptian diplomat’s car. America’s Benghazi legation also suffered an IED attack. I discussed the apparent compromises with, or neglect of, Libya’s extremist armed groups in a previous post, when they were mostly focused on razing Sufi shrines. Today, the inability or unwillingness of the Libyan security forces to rein in these actors cost American diplomats their lives. The last Ambassador to die in duty was Adolph Dubs, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, killed after a botched, hasty raid on his militant kidnappers in 1979. That same year, three American embassies – Tripoli, Tehran, and Islamabad – all suffered sieges. As in Tehran, there was a record of targeting foreign diplomats and officials (including by groups such as the MEK) before the siege. Unfortunately, the hindsight is too late.

    What is to be done? The most obvious solution would be for the governments of Libya and Egypt to perform their diplomatic obligations and curb attacks on other countries’ diplomats. Yet compelling even a friendly government to conduct such a task when it disrupts transitional regimes’ relationships with violent, and powerful political actors, is a task difficult even when the government in question is deeply dependent on American largesse.

    For those few for whom hasty (and later repudiated) Embassy press releases and tweets might tip the balance from violent assaults on American lives and sovereign soil to less ferocious forms of truculence, there is public diplomacy, information operations, and the “war of ideas” (which Adam critiques magnificently). For everyone else, there’s the Marine Corps. In addition to the Marine Security Guards at U.S. facilities, today’s Marines maintain FAST units – Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams and RRTs – Rapid Response Teams – to protect American officials, citizens, and interests abroad.

    Far from being historically unprecedented, the Marines and Navy have long been the big stick that enables American diplomats to speak softly, and for merchantmen to go about their business peaceably. In the hundreds of military interventions from America’s founding to today, many concerned specifically the enforcement of widely recognized sovereign privileges. These were initially, and especially, the rights of maritime shipping, upon which global trade and diplomatic communication depended. Depredations against American merchantmen, murder of sailors, and piracy all earned swift and limited punitive action. Revolutionary upheaval prompted landings in defense of American lives and property.

    When the Marine Corps hymn sings of the “shores of Tripoli,” they really mean Derne, in Cyrenaica, where Marines, supporting a Consular official leading an army of mercenaries, with the backing of American offshore power, hoisted an American flag over foreign shores. The goal was not to liberate Libya but to discourage its governments from violating America’s maritime rights.

    Similarly as important and almost universally recognized, in both practice and law, as legitimate sovereign privileges, are the rights of diplomats. All these rights have limits, of course. In 1984, when anti-Gaddafi protesters surrounded the Libyan embassy, Britain sent police officers for crowd control. The Libyan officials inside decided to open fire on the crowd, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Libya then used its diplomatic bags to smuggle the submachine gun out of the country. Diplomatic missions and associated officials have obligations to avoid interference with domestic affairs and especially breaches of the peace, and host governments have responsibilities to assist them in that task. When that becomes impossible, diplomatic missions have a right to repel offenses with violence.

    Effective diplomacy demands the safety of diplomats. When diplomats feel they cannot leave the embassy, their professional duties suffer for it. In 1866, when bandits attacked the American consul in Newchwang, the USS Wachusett landed bluejackets to apprehend them. In the late 19th century, America landed forces in Samoa, Argentina, and Chile, in part to protect consular officials and properties – and these were acts where there were far more legitimate grievances about America’s role, such as its overt backing of rival partisans in the Chilean case. America landed also, in the early 20th century, to protect consular officials in Honduras, and even further aflung, in Syria and Abyssinia. America landed troops frequently in China throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, and defended legations in Korea frequently. In more modern times, George H.W. Bush deployed military forces to defend and evacuate U.S. diplomatic facilities in Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America.

    The U.S. may not need be as audacious in its expeditions now, particularly since in the case of Egypt and Libya, the U.S. diplomatic presence is, however influential, nowhere near as powerful in each country’s internal political situation as America’s legations were in say, Latin America or the Pacific during the early 20th century. Yet the U.S. must remain willing to deploy the Marines as precautionary measures, and it must be willing to defend its diplomatic personnel with lethal force. While questions of punitive expeditions are more complicated, the use of military force in the defense of nigh-universally recognized sovereign rights is a principle in keeping with American interests, history, and its proper comportment under international law and state practice.

    The alternative to effectively securing American diplomats through traditional means is not pretty. The rise of private security contractors owe much of their current prominence in part to this fact. After the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing, private contractors took increasingly large roles in providing facility security, with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security hiring contractors in 1994 to protect State Department personnel in Haiti. Expanding the role of the State Department sounds well and good, but a more robust diplomatic presence requires security, and when military forces are unavailable, private contractors fill that gap, to frequently problematic results.

    So, if and when the U.S. Department of State returns in full force to Libya, it may again be bringing a few hundred mercenaries with it – not to overthrow the government, but to keep its lack of will or martial capability from threatening its ability to maintain a presence in the country. The complement, or worse, the alternative, will likely be diplomatic missions – and their clandestine counterparts who rely on diplomatic covers – even less willing to leave the facility, less willing to engage with the local population, and less effective at actually doing the job of professional diplomacy (or intelligence collection and covert operations, as the case may be).

    It is far too early to reasonably outline any kind of punitive measures for what has occurred now. In theory, the bulk of the work of securing cities for diplomats will fall to host governments. Yet it is manifestly unclear how or how soon governments such as Libya’s, (particularly given the almost total denial of reality some Libyan spokesmen have evinced by blaming these acts on Gaddafi bittereinders) can adequately secure these facilities, or if they really have the will to prioritize them.

    In the past, offenses such as these – even against, say, sailors of naval vessels – prompted a punitive expeditions against non-state groups such as bandits or partisans, followed by the imposition of an indemnity on the government for the U.S.’s troubles. In Libya, nothing so dramatic is likely to occur. Yet the capability to rapidly respond to evacuate or assist State Department officials under threat will remain essential, even if the full expeditionary power of a Joint Task Force or MAGTF is unlikely to be unleashed.

    The readiness to defend American diplomatic rights is a cornerstone of American foreign policy. The strength of the State Department is bolstered, not detracted, by deterring power of the limited military detachments which accompany it and stand over the horizon to defend it. The more that deterrent and security is weakened, the less able the State Department can operate safely and effectively without a growing reliance on private security or other measures.  Regardless of what policy options should or do play out in Libya, the US Department of State – together with its colleagues in the USMC – ought ensure that anyone contemplating to forcibly enter our legations or partake in an open season on our diplomats do so only with a great and well-founded fear for their lives.

    Lastly, and perhaps most striking, is something Joshua Foust reminded me of on Twitter today – since World War II, more Ambassadors have died in the line of duty than general officers. During many years of American history since, it has arguably even been more dangerous to be a member of the Foreign Service than the Armed Forces. The complexity and difficulty of protecting diplomatic personnel, as outlined above, leaves them in a deeply vulnerable situation. Responsible for the constant maintenance and crafting of the vast and inscrutable beast that is U.S. foreign policy, they assume serious amounts of personal risk, knowing that by the nature of their trade they must leave themselves exposed, and that the very nature of their profession will inherently constrain what their country can do to save them in an hour of need. In theory they are protected by inviolable sovereign rights and centuries of diplomatic tradition. In reality, the options for the Marines attached to the legations will always be circumscribed by the foreign policy considerations those they protect serve to advance. With the enormous amount of risk State Department civilians face, it is imperative the military components supporting the State Department ensure they retain the capability to protect those rights if called upon, and deter breaches of those rights so they need not be called upon in the first place – and it is also imperative that policymakers give them an effective mandate to support those missions. They fight so that we might not lose men such as Ambassador Chris Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and it appears in Benghazi,  some lay down their lives to do so. 

  • Reading John Arquilla's latest Foreign Policy piece makes, me, as I am wont to, think about dead Prussians. Arquilla takes a look at the battle for Obama's "strategic soul" and contrasts it to Reagan's own deliberations about the best response to the first wave of Middle Eastern terrorists to strike the West. Arquilla, relying on intelligence histories of the period, argues that Reagan briefly considered unleashing special operations and intelligence operatives against the terror masterminds:

    Soon after that weekend conclave of experts, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 138 -- most of which is still highly classified. Christopher Martin's declassified history of political and military policy during this period points out that the directive called for "secret FBI and CIA paramilitary squads and use of existing Pentagon military units -- such as Green Berets and the Navy SEALs -- for conducting what amounted to guerrilla war against guerrillas...a de facto declaration of war."

    As Arquilla notes, Reagan ultimately stepped back from the brink. He was persuaded by military advisors concerned about an "unfocused revenge approach." Moreover, the United States had conventional tools for disrupting terrorist sponsors such as Libya. There are certainly parallels to today's concerns over the use of special operations forces, intelligence, proxy fighters, and unmanned aerial systems against terrorists, but most of the conversation about the uses of these elements of national power have been remarkably content-free. Arquilla does us a great service by dredging up a historical episode with some teaching value. 

    The phrase "unfocused revenge approach" is actually an oblique acknowledgment of a central problem of counterterrorist strategy: finding the enemy's center of gravity (COG). The COG is a relatively minor concept in Clausewitz that nonetheless has engendered a good deal of misunderstanding. I will not bore readers with the details, but want to point to a recent eludication of the concept by the Strategic Studies Institute's Antulio Echevarria. As I noted in an article I wrote on the subject a couple years ago, Echevarria makes the point that the COG is essentially "effects-based."

    Drawn from classical physics, Echevarria explains that the COG should be considered the "point where the forces of gravity can be said to converge within an object, the spot at which the object's weight is balanced in all directions." Striking at it or upsetting it can cause the target to lose its balance or equilbrium. The catch is that to have a COG, an object must have sufficient connectivity between its parts. The concept does not apply if the enemy elements are disaggregated. For example, the Axis powers in World War II had no COG and barely cooperated with each other. Echevarria chided doctrine writers for often assuming a single COG bound together a disaggregated set of enemies.

    Reagan's advisors were ultimately grasping for a COG. They couldn't find one, because the terrorist threats facing America in the 80s had little to do with each other. The bombing of American forces in Beirut involved Iran and its local allies, and the mercenary Abu Nidal Organization and its Libyan backers were another matter entirely.  Thus, Reagan and his advisors were undestandably reluctant about conducting a wide-ranging war. Diplomatic complications were a concern, and the Cold War conventional balance in Europe as well as side contests in Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia demanded attention. Nonetheless, Reagan committed to tackling both issues separately--and somewhat unsuccessfuly. Conventional force against Libya did not halt their acts of terror, and Iran's use of proxy groups and proclivity for terrorism is still a constant in its foreign policy.

    Today, there is still a rigorous debate over the structure and dynamics of al-Qaeda. That debate is complicated by the fact that al-Qaeda, like most violent non-state actors seeking to survive, exists in a murky realm. Intelligence--closed or open source--shines a light into the cave but cannot illuminate the entire structure. The main problem with the targeted killing program is precisely uncertainty over who the targets really are and how their deaths lead to strategic effect. Much of the structure was more visible after the September 11 attacks, and it became clear that the COG was al-Qaeda's base system in Afghanistan. Destroying this system in an military assault and aggressively targeting its financial links complicated our understanding of the COG. Moreover, al-Qaeda and its affiliaties worldwide today may not have a single COG, just as the Axis lacked a common connectivity that gave them order and purpose.

    Al-Qaeda is certainly less dissegrated than the complex reality behind the 1980s idea of a comprehensive terrorist network targeting the West. Ryan Evans, Peter Neumann, and Rafaello Pantucci make a case here that the organization's middle managers are precisely the connective tissue that would constitute a COG, and others have discussed AQ's structure without the use of Clausewitzian theory. Still, there is a risk today that without a strong sense of where the blow should land, our efforts will be unfocused. And as in the 1980s, there are also competing strategic priorites that decisionmakers will inevitably have to manage. Getting the COG right will be a difficult--but ultimately essential--task for American strategists.

  • Robert Haddick has a provocative post at Foreign Policy suggesting that the rise of strategic air power and anti-ship weaponry might render carriers obsolete, and cause major inter-service conflict to boot. He might be right about the second part, but I have strong doubts about the first.

    This isn’t the first time the aircraft carrier as we know it received an early obituary. In the wake of World War II, the advent of strategic bombing and nuclear weapons strongly suggested to a number of overeager politicians, along with Army and Air Force officers, that the Navy and Marine Corps were on their way out. The arguments? Expensive supercarriers capable of fielding aircraft that could carry the day’s five-ton nuclear bombs were too expensive, unwieldy, and vulnerable compared to strategic bombers, immediate aerial force, rather than support of ground operations, was the overwhelming concern for rapid response, and access to theater land basing would be either reliable or unnecessary.

    There certainly was a massive breach in inter-service relations, as the Revolt of the Admirals and the attendant fallout revealed. Yet the carrier did not die. and indeed it rose in prominence as an instrument of U.S. power. Today, though, Haddick suggests carrier killer technologies are sufficiently disruptive, and carriers sufficiently expensive, to keep them out of useful combat range, to the point where they would require sortie-limiting midair refueling.

    This misses half of the anti-access/area denial challenge. Certainly, countries such as china and Iran have increasing access to anti-ship weapons ranging from cruise missiles to small boat swarms. However, these countries also possess increasingly sophisticated capabilities to strike land basing. As RAND studies of air warfare have pointed out, China could also choose to rain ballistic or cruise missiles on U.S. air bases in the Western Pacific, forcing the U.S. to operate from a long distance and rely on tankers anyway. Countries can also simply choose not to provide overflight or access to theater basing for tactical aircraft.

    Haddick suggests that bombers with precision weapons could elide these issues. Yet the continuous presence of strategic bombers is still dependent on thorough SEAD. SEAD operations, though stealthy aircraft can participate, still rely in significant part on specialized short-range aircraft such as the EA-18G and F-16CJ, as well as hundreds of TLAMs from naval vessels. Haddick recognizes that longer-ranged carrier aircraft, such as carrier launched-UAS, could shift this balance (as lighter nuclear bombs shifted the logic of carriers after the Revolt of the Admirals), but then asks why intercontinental drones could not work,

    Simply looking at carriers ability to dispense aerial firepower, however, is insufficient to understanding their value. Carriers project power, not just firepower. Bombers can support troops in contact in Afghanistan, sure, but Afghanistan isn’t exactly the height of the A2/AD challenge (and you can see plenty of F/A-18s providing airstrikes there too). Indeed, with the exception of landlocked countries, anywhere that the U.S. is providing close air support to American troops in contact, it will likely have a naval presence nearby. Indeed, if access to theater basing for tactical aircraft is diminishing, than projecting a ground presence into an area is more, not less, likely to necessitate a carrier. Carrier Battle Groups will likely need to integrate their operations more with strategic bombers and tactical aircraft, to confront A2/AD challenges, but for some kinds of crisis response, strategic bombers likely won’t cut it.

    The best response to a crisis isn’t always delivering the largest amount of warheads to the largest amount of foreheads. You can’t evacuate American citizens to a B-2, or drop a JSOC team out of one. Maritime power remains more flexible than air power for supporting ground operations thousands of miles away from home, and where maritime power goes, it is good to ensure a whole variety of tactical aircraft - from helicopters to EW and SEAD platforms to close-air support and air superiority jets - can follow. Despite the run of good luck in Libya, The messy business of ground operations won’t always be easy to outsource, and theater basing will not always be easy to procure. The spectrum of operations necessary to conduct under those circumstances will likely quantitatively overburden and qualitatively outstrip the limits of the bomber force.

    As a final point, naval power provides an effective show of presence and force that intercontinental bombers cannot. Although gunboat diplomacy may seem like 19th century skullduggery, the ability to park a huge amount of floating combat power offshore is a more effective demonstration of presence than strategic bomber patrols, and more politically flexible (and economically inexpensive, in many cases) than trying to secure theater basing for non-amphibious ground forces or tactical aircraft. Ultimately, A2/AD is going to make it more difficult for all forms of power projection, not just carriers. Even if the platform’s halcyon days are behind it, the continued dependence of U.S. forces on maritime control and power projection generally is likely to give the carrier a continued, if increasingly circumscribed, role well into this century.

  • This will be my last post on this blog for at least a year. I am about to start a fellowship program with the Council on Foreign Relations that will place me in the U.S. government for the next 12 months. Because this blog has become such a big part of my idenity, I want to use this last opportunity to explain why I blog and how social media has both amplified and enriched my policy work.

    A few years ago, Steve Biddle, arguably the finest defense policy analyst of his generation and a valued mentor, gave me some particularly good advice. When you write a policy paper, he told me, you should always be thinking of the scholarly journal article version of the policy paper you are writing as well as the op-ed version of the article you are writing. The idea, of course, is to make sure you reach the widest audience possible and get the most out of the research you have done. 

    While subscribing to all of Steve's wise counsel, my approach to research is a bit different, and I have, since arriving at CNAS in 2009, encouraged our junior research staff to broaden the approach Steve first offered me. In addition to thinking about the ways in which one can turn one's policy paper into an op-ed for the New York Times or article in International Security, one should also think several layers down: how can one blog about one's research? How can one tweet, in real time, about the research one is doing?

    The limitations of the old approach -- and of most research produced by think tanks and academia -- is the communication is largely one-way. The scholar in the ivory tower thinks deep thoughts, consults with his or her colleagues, locks the door and then emerges months later with a paper or book that he or she delivers to the masses. A "response" to a journal article might be published a year later. This is not an altogether bad thing. And if it's a choice between tweeting about college football and producing great books like this, by all means do the latter.

    But an approach that incorporates social media into the research process has greater potential than the old approach. Note, quickly, that I am talking about the research process and not the marketing process. Lots of scholars, myself included, want to harness social media to publicize their latest reports and books. I get books from publishers in the mail on a weekly basis addressed not to "Andrew Exum" but to "Abu Muqawama" in the apparent hope that I will blog about a new book on the Middle East or Afghanistan. But I am writing here about using social media during the research itself.

    The first great advantage that social media has over traditional media is that it is a two-way conversation. Although this can be quite scary for some policy scholars, social media requires one to climb down from the ivory tower and expose one's self to the slings and arrows of the unwashed masses. Once down among hoi polloi, one quickly discovers something: there is a rich and diverse community of amateur and professional scholars out there with interests and educations that complement one's own. Tweeting or blogging about a book you are reading on Afghanistan? Prepare for a barrage of tweets and comments telling you how good or bad that book is while offering other recommendations -- recommendations for books or articles that you, despite your fancy education, might not yet have discovered. Social media, then, exposes the policy researcher to immediate feedback on his or her bibliography and research methods. It can serve as a quick external validator -- or tell you where you're going wrong. 

    Second, policy research is also very much about a world of competing ideas. Whether you are opining about air-sea battle or health care, you must recognize that other scholars out there might have also been researching your issue and have reached different conclusions with regard to policy preferences. One of the most effective -- and without a doubt quickest -- ways I have discovered to identify weaknesses in my own arguments has been through social media. I am constantly wrestling with the comments on my blog or the tweets people send back in my direction. Some of them are silly, and others are ugly, but many more are valuable. I can also observe how other policy proposals are received. Filtering out the sarcasm and snark, one gets a sense for where other scholarship falls short.

    Third, we at CNAS believe that one of our core missions as a think tank is to identify the next generation of policy professionals. In my short and young career, I have already benefitted from many great mentors, and like the Army officer I once was, I consider it my duty to seek out and mentor others younger than me. Social media -- especially Twitter -- has been a great way to identify and meet some of the most promising young people writing on issues related to defense policy. I "met" both of this blog's caretaker bloggers -- Adam Elkus and Dan Trombly -- over social media. Many others have made the jump from tweeting back and forth with me to having coffee in my office shooting the bull about jobs and careers. This is how it should be, because Lord knows, I have spent plenty of time in other people's offices seeking advice about my career.

    The key ingredient to engaging with social media as a part of the research process is humility. You must be prepared, for example, for some 20-year old senior at George Washington University <cough> Trombly </cough> to systematically destroy your initial argument, thereby making your second draft better. You must be prepared to accept that you are not the "expert" your think tank homepage says you are. You are merely a student. And you can thus learn from the many other amateur and professional students around you. And you must be prepared to laugh at yourself. There is a reason the mascot of this blog -- and the avatar for my Twitter account -- is a Lego militant. It says, "I'm going to talk about serious things, but I'll be damned if I am going to lose my sense of humor in the process." The moment one loses one's sense of humor, an officer in the Special Air Service once told me before a mission in Iraq, is the moment one starts thinking of one's self as too good -- too cool -- to get killed. Researchers shouldn't take themselves too seriously either, for that's the road to embarassment. We are unbelievably privileged to be doing this for a living, and we should remember that as we engage as broadly as possible with the people that both consume and inform our work.

  • A few months ago, it was still fashionable on the American Right to blame President Obama for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq and thus squandering any residual U.S. leverage over events there. I pressed back on this narrative, pointing out that it was the Bush Administration that, to its credit, successfully negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement in the fall of 2008 that established the terms for the U.S. withdrawal. It was not logical, I argued, for critics of the Democratic Obama Administration to blame it for faithfully executing a course of action established by the Republican Bush Administration.

    The American Left, though, is increasingly giving the president credit for the withdrawal from Iraq. Here is former New York Times editor Jospeh Lelyveld writing in the New York Review of Books:

    Barack Obama can claim two big foreign policy accomplishments: getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding “Global War on Terror” into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the al-Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.

    The Left needs to be reminded, today, of what we reminded the Right yesterday. The Bush Administration started the disastrous war in Iraq, but it also ended it. I remember the debates on Iraq in the 2008 presidential campaign, and what neither campaign was quick to acknowledge was that the U.S. mandate in Iraq expired on 1 January 2009 and that it would thus be the Bush Administration -- and neither a McCain or Obama Administration -- that would negotiate a withdrawal with the government in Baghdad. Campaign debates over Iraq policy were thus of little consequence. Any administration would inherit a policy largely dictated by the parameters established by the one that preceded it.

    The Right wants to blame the Obama Administration for withdrawing from Iraq without recognizing the role played by the Bush Administration in 2008. The Left, by contrast, wants to give the president credit for withdrawing from Iraq -- again without recognizing the role played by the Bush Administration. Neither should be allowed to both have their cake and eat it too. 

  • State formation and regime consolidation, as any astute reader of Charles Tilly could tell you, is an ugly business. Just as ugly, though, can be what its absence brings. Since foreign aircraft, foreign arms, and local manpower toppled the Gaddafi regime in Libya, a debate simmered between skeptics, who feared the infiltration of al Qaeda, jihadists, and widespread instability, and optimists, who saw potential in a new Arab-formed democracy forming in the wake of a low-cost intervention against a brutal regime. Both sides have sought to wring evidence for their positions out of a muddled state of affairs. While jihadist groups appeared to increase their presence in Libya, relatively secular, even so-called liberal and independent politicians and coalitions dominate the Libyan government. Though Libya’s patchwork of legal and extralegal armed groups remains, these myriad militias have not reduced the country into a new Somalia on the Mediterranean shore.

    The Weberian monopoly on force is a hallmark of political science and a historical analysis, but it is also an ideal-type. No state has a total monopoly on force, and many eke out a form of status quo where coercive instruments remain outside the state’s hands. In the U.S., militias were intended to be the last line of defense against the overlong extension of federal power, but when paramilitary groups overstepped an acceptable political threshold, as they did during the Reconstruction era, federal troops would intervene.

    Libya’s recent shrine bulldozing crisis similarly reveals a tenuous equilibrium between Libya’s various coercive agents. Groups many suspect adhere to Salafist teachings demolished two shrines last weekend, prompting Interior Minister Fawzi Abdel A'al to resign, and then reverse his resignation. Yet in doing so, he defended his refusal to use security forces to stop extremist groups demolishing shrines, claiming:

    "If we deal with this using security we will be forced to use weapons, and these groups have huge amounts of weapons. We can't be blind to this. These groups are large in power and number in Libya. I can't enter a losing battle (with them), to kill people over a grave," he told reporters.

    It was up to the country's religious bodies to stop the desecration, he said.

    "If all shrines in Libya are destroyed so we can avoid the death of one person (in clashes with security), then that is a price we are ready to pay," the minister added.

    What is going on here is certainly more complicated than simply state failure, but it also underlines the difficulties for policymakers trying to navigate the interplay of paramilitary groups and state-formation. Despite vigorous Western intervention, support for favored NTC militias, and a government at least theoretically opposed to violent extremist groups, Libya’s security forces remain incapable or (perhaps worse) unwilling to exercise the political prerogative of a sovereign government and prevent armed groups from acting unimpeded in Libya. It may be that the Libyan government will not concern itself with the destruction of religious property (though the assumption that desecration and death are alternatives, rather than potential bedfellows, seems quite naive).

    In many cases, states or political elites allow violent non-state groups to flourish so long as they pursue narrowed aims that do not threaten the sovereign government’s ideological, power-political or rentier interests. In some cases, sympathy, sanction, or outright support for these groups is a viable means for supplementing a political community’s capacity beyond conventional limits. Rightist paramilitary and terrorist groups performed this function in Latin America, while white supremacist paramilitaries and terrorists served much the same function for the parties, classes and interests opposed to Reconstruction in the U.S.

    While the sheer volume of arms and weakness of state security forces in Libya suggest incapacity plays a significant role in this crisis, the Interior Minister’s acknowledgment that some members of the security forces (which arguably amount to the integrated, approved militia groups in Libya) may be sympathetic or active participants in the attacks suggests a lack of will is also at play. After all, if unfettered desecration is preferable to risking the lives of the state’s security forces, and then left to religious institutions to check, that is a tacit political sanction or concession in the evolving negotiations between Libya’s armed entities.

    Such stories should make us skeptical, too, about the ability of arms provision to paramilitaries and proxy forces to reliably advance foreign political interests. In Syria, many arguments assert that a more vigorous role in arming the relatively secular or moderate opposition will undermine the position of al Qaeda and jihadist groups. Yet arms provision in Libya, and indeed the consolidation of the most favorable government the West could ask for, failed to create a force organized and coherent enough to actually stamp out local extremists. Aaron Zelin and Andrew Lebovich, in their earlier analysis, make a persuasive case that jihadist groups did not dominate the Libyan rebels. Nor, of course, do jihadist groups need to totally dominate a country’s territory or the composition of its militia groups to pose a significant concern. Yet today the new government supposedly faces groups better armed and organized than their own, or at least well enough such that the state forces cannot effectively suppress them. How could this come to pass?

    Asessing combat power, political cohesion, and other factors vital to understanding the sorting-out that occurs of armed groups in a multi-faceted rebellion, requires recognizing qualitative elements. Radical groups are not always the largest or best-armed group initially, but they may be more organizationally coherent thanks to shared ideology. Additionally, unlike militias primarily focused on overthrowing a tyrannical regime, success at that aim does not lead to their dissolution. They may also have superior access to foreign advisors that allow them to tap into a well of experience and superior tactics, techniques, and procedures.

    Further, arms remain instruments, and do not reliably alter the political agency of their users. In Syria, the fact that many rebels buy their arms from regime troops, or from Iraqi soldiers reselling U.S.-provided arms, should suggest that any foreign power that floods Syria with arms is likely to see those weapons used for undesired purposes in unexpected places. Not only that, but as Libya demonstrated, merely providing arms to rival groups does not preclude the existence of others.

    Many Libyan militias appear to be seeking primarily to extract political and economic rent from access to state revenues and local control. Creating a monopoly on force could actually severely disrupt this process, and what benefits does it offer the militias? Similarly, in Syria, while foreign patrons can arm friendly militias, how can they exclude the wrong militias from being armed by other actors, their own proxies, or as a result of regime caches entering the market? The more likely scenario than undesirable groups fading away is a multiplicity of armed groups existing simultaneously. As Libya should now demonstrate, supporting a rebel group and new government does not guarantee it will be ready, willing, or even able to stamp out the armed undesirables. More extreme groups may choose to focus more on preserving and expanding their combat power and revolutionary agenda, while groups whose political aims mainly sought overthrow of a regime may, with their ideological objectives satisfied and primary threat extinguished, may face fewer incentives to enhance their combat readiness or mobilize politically.

    The result, then, is that groups that may be a popular or political minority, and even outside the bounds of a new government’s security infrastructure, maintain a share of combat capability large enough to pursue their aims or at least hinder or deter the new regime’s attempts to extinguish it or curtail its influence. They may do this in spite of relative disfavor in foreign political ties and arms trade, and in spite of a failure to contest or undermine the popularity or non-coercive operations of the new regime. Warlords’ games are not so easily or durably won, which is why states approximating the Weberian ideal type will not play by their rules in the first place, and refuse to tolerate such groups’ existence.

    State formation and the maintenance of state power involves tacit deals with potentially dangerous and undoubtedly unsavory actors as often as it does, whether by might or right, the imposition of a monopoly on force. Whether through a corrupt bargain that tolerates or legitimizes racial violence and disenfranchisement, a stable arrangement between a government and powerful narcotics traffickers, or the integration of gruesome paramilitary and its allies into an expanding state, we should be wary about letting Hobbesian anarchy color our metrics for success or failure. We should be even more wary about pursuing policies that seek to tame the complex and ugly business of finding a working distribution of political and violent power in a transitioning political community. Ultimately, the covert remedies so popular today must grapple with many of the problems of nation-building and state formation that supposedly belonged to the failed policies of the past.

  • If I wrote a blog post each time something I read annoyed me, I would obviously blog more frequently. Two things that I have noticed over the past few days, though, deserve especial mention this morning.

    1. If you study conflict and conflicts long enough, you will either gain invaluable perspective over your peers or lose your perspective entirely. By the end of his career, for example, the late John Keegan, who once wrote this masterpiece which forever changed the way military historians write history, was writing silly things like, "Politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning." (Step forward, Hew Strachan.)

    Robert Fisk has his defenders and his detractors. I have never been accused of being the former, though I re-read a lot of his reporting for The Times in the 1980s as part of my doctoral work and came away impressed by his earlier work. Fisk has been accused by his peers of being a fabulist, and today he writes columns for the Independent. He once bragged to me, after I questioned the veracity of one particular column, that his editors never question what he writes. I'll let you decide whether or not that is a good thing. Of late, meanwhile, Fisk has been the target of some pretty withering satire.

    Fisk's column today is the result of what happens when an observer of conflict loses all moral perspective. Fisk does not excuse any atrocities or crimes. No, he does the opposite. For Fisk, all crimes of war are now for all intents and purposes equal, and all armies at war are criminal. This is a valid perspective, I guess, in that one could make a moral argument in its favor. But unlike this, it doesn't tell me anything useful about what is taking place in Syria. If all acts of wars are crimes and they are all equal, I don't need Robert Fisk's first-hand observations, do I? They don't tell me anything of substance. 

    Among his peers, Fisk is arguably the least popular journalist covering either conflict or the Middle East today. That's probably because in addition to the alleged fabulism and lack of any useful perspective, in Fisk's narrative of conflict and conflicts, there is only room for one truly good man: and that man's name is always "Robert Fisk."

    2. I finished Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War this weekend -- yes, I realize that reads exactly how Robert Fisk might begin one of his columns -- and a few things struck me:

    a. The successful Roman counterinsurgency campaign in Gaul took eight years.

    b. The enemies against which Rome fought were not a unitary actor, and neither were Rome's allies. 

    c. Rome's allies one summer were often Rome's enemies by winter. And visa versa.

    But the two things that made the biggest impression on me were the following:

    d. Caesar was the commander for eight full years, and he enjoyed similar continuity among his subordinate commanders.

    e. Caesar very rarely sent green units into the offensive. By the fourth and fifth year of the campaign, he is still making those legions which were the last to be raised in Italy responsible for guarding the freaking baggage. He relies over and over again on those legions -- most especially the Tenth -- that have proven themselves in combat in Gaul.

    With Caesar's commentaries in mind, I read Doug Ollivant's lament about Gen. Joe Dunford. Gen. Dunford will be the fifteenth commander of NATO-ISAF in eleven years of combat in Afghanistan and the ninth U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Each of his subordinate commanders have rotated on an annual basis. Gen. Dunford -- who is, by all accounts, an excellent officer and highly respected by his peers -- has never served in Afghanistan

    The cultures, politics, tribes and peoples of Afghanistan are at least as complex as those of ancient Gaul, yet we Americans are so arrogant to think that we can send officers there with no experience and, owing to our superior knowledge of combat operations, watch them succeed. We will then send units which have never deployed to Afghanistan to partner with Afghan forces and wonder why they do not get along.

    This is madness. The casual arrogance with which the U.S. military has approached the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has a direct relation to the difficulty with which we have fought each war. That we think we can send a commander to Afghanistan with no prior knowledge of Afghanistan and watch him be successful in the eleventh year of the conflict shows that after eleven years of conflict, we really don't know too much about Afghanistan. And we might not know too much about conflict either.

  • The French Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, recently stated that France is willing to help impose a “partial” no-fly zone in Syria, pending international legitimacy and participation, and so long as it was not a full no-fly zone, since that would be “tantamount to war.” There are several curiosities to unravel here, and they are not exactly unique to this case.

    The modern obsession with finding forms of military intervention short of war is a quixotic enterprise. As Micah Zenko has extensively studied, and co-blogger Adam has written about elsewhere, Discrete Military Operations such as no-fly zones are tantamount to wars in many respects. They are, if not sanctioned internationally, acts of aggression. They will often be treated by the target actor as an act of war. The dynamics of conflict and military action still apply.

    What is particularly revealing here is that a “partial” no-fly zone is floated as some sort of non-war action, but a nationwide no-fly zone in Syria would be “tantamount to war.” But of course, imposing a no-fly zone over part of Syria or the whole of it is a matter of quantitative degree rather than qualitative difference. As I explored in a piece for the United States Naval Institute, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria would likely mean conducting intensive Suppression of Enemy Air Defense to destroy Syria’s air defenses and air force. Even a partial no-fly zone would likely require some strikes outside its limits in order to degrade Syrian airfields, early-warning radars and mobile or semi-mobile air defense systems.

    Imposing even a partial no-fly zone would be tantamount to war, just as arming Syria’s rebels would be an act of war, and constitute foreign engagement in the Syrian civil war, and their success would rely on the combustible cocktail of passion, reason, and chance that all wars do. The difference between these “time-limited, scope-limited kinetic military actions” and war is ultimately an arbitrary distinction of political language which gives away when either the target or the intervening force, in order to achieve its objectives, escalates force to the point where the label is no longer tenable or useful.

    In Iraq, the case is instructive on the dangers and shortcomings of such short-of-war thinking. In the wake of Desert Storm, despite the battlefield defeat of the Iraqi army and widespread desertion or imprisonment of Iraqi conscripts, Iraq maintained the will to suppress revolts in its north and south, resulting in the imposition of no-fly zones under Operations Northern and Southern Watch. The result was continued U.S. engagement in warfare against Iraqi air defenses and air forces and Iraqi warfare against rebelling forces in both no-fly zones. Saddam repeatedly violated America’s imposed standards despite the experience of 1990-91, which occasionally required the threatened reinsertion of Western ground forces or, in the wake of Saddam’s intervention in the Kurdish Civil War, and ended pretenses of respecting them due to strikes nominally aimed at his WMD program (but in practice, at many other critical political and military facilities). Ultimately, America’s political goals in Iraq, as codified in the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, required a military action everybody rightfully identified as a war.

    Ultimately, although using labels such as “humanitarian intervention,” “kinetic military action,” or, to get really old school, “Quasi-War” may be politically or historically sensible, particularly in retrospect, they remain, from the perspective of military analysis grappling with prospective scenarios, frequently misleading. It is only the result of an equilibrium between the preferences of the belligerents engaged, and frequently devolve into war because each side retains the capacity to frustrate the political objectives of the other without an unmistakable increase in willpower or commitment. In Iraq, that increase ultimately came in the form of an invasion force. In Libya, luckily enough, it was a combination of NATO airstrikes and a weak government military which allowed escalation to proceed on much more favorable terms. Any application of concerted military force against a sovereign state is “tantamount to war.” Being vague or conflicted about its ends and obscure about its ways and means just makes it more politically convenient to discuss openly, but less convenient to discuss effectively.

  • Not to be confused with the Miles Davis song or dearly departed Philly eatery, green-on-blue violence is confounding U.S. commanders in Afghanistan and -- together with the 2,000th U.S. casualty -- has thrust the war back into the headlines here in the United States. I spoke about the killings this morning on public radio and wrote my final column for World Politics Review on the subject.*

    These attacks are similar to the epidemic of military suicides in that we can discern an obvious pattern, but it remains difficult to determine what, precisely, is causing the problem. Once you dig deeply into each incident, they begin to seem sui generis -- each prompted by a unique set of circumstances. That makes them arguably more difficult to address than Taliban infiltration, which is a counter-intelligence problem for which we have some precedent. If these attacks instead represent a structural erosion in the relationship between coalition and Afghan forces, that's a lot tougher to fix.

    A few things worth noting in addition to what I argued today in my column:

    1. The United States may be in its eleventh year in Afghanistan, but a lot of soldiers and officers are fighting Year One. What I mean by that is that many of those serving in Afghanistan may have combat experience in Iraq but are new to Afghanistan. Contrast those folks, few of whom have any linguistic training or real cultural education, with Afghan forces who, in some cases, have been fighting in the same corner of the country for six or seven years. You could see how each could rub the other the wrong way. The Afghan might think the American arrogant and aloof, while the American might see the Afghan as lazy -- when in actuality he's just a little tired for having fought this war, in the same place, watching Americans come and go each year, for the better half of a decade.

    2. I have said it before, but I will say it again. A "Green Beret" from the U.S. Army's Special Forces gets over a year of training before he ever steps foot in a foreign country. He receives specialized skills training and both language and cultural education. And he joins a small team that likely has decades of experience already. Contrast that soldier's training and selection process with the one we use for trainers and advisors recruited from the general purpose forces. The training we afford to the former is no guarantee of success. But you can never eliminate risk in war. What you can do is take measures to reduce and mitigate it.

    *Also, since I am apparently the only analyst in Washington working this August, I was interviewed for earlier articles on the subject herehere, and here.

    UPDATE: In the comments, my cousin -- who served as a combat advisor in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps BECAUSE HE EMBARASSED HIS FAMILY BY JOINING THE BLEEPING MARINE CORPS SERIOUSLYHOWCOULDYOU -- points me toward what he wrote a few days ago on his iPhone instead of spending quality time with his grandmother.

  • I just subscribed to the New York Times. Just now. My actions were entirely prompted by this article and video by C.J. "Chris" Chivers and the accompanying photographs by Bryan Denton. In the interests of full disclosure, both Chris and Bryan are friends of mine, but I had never before been moved to shell out my own money for the right to enjoy their journalism. I was today, overwhelmed with appreciation for the quality of the work these men have done over the past week.

    I grew up working at my family newspaper in Tennessee and have made a lot of friends through my work over the past decade who are paid to report on both the greater Middle East and the world's conflicts. I have a real appreciation and some small understanding for what these men and women do, but I also know that the logistics and costs associated with sending men like Chris and Bryan to Syria are considerable. Last month, in fact, the New York Times Co. posted an $88 million second-quarter loss.

    I am not inclined to treat for-profit companies like charity cases, and the New York Times Co. has made a lot of poor business decisions that have nothing to do with the work its journalists produce. I also realize that I am now helping to pay the salaries of some reporters and columnists who shall remain nameless but whose work I respect less than that of Chris and Bryan. (Or any of the many other men and women on the staff of the Times whose work I admire.)

    But if I have to underwrite some columnist's misguided thought experiment to help pay for Bryan's life insurance or the college tuition for Chris's kids, I'm okay with that. If you are too, click here

  • Andrew Davies at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute recently highlighted a fascinating work taking the long view of weapons technology development. The argument essentially goes that, as weapon power has increased exponentially in past millennia, so too has the density of combatants in the field appeared to decrease substantially. The relationship here is obvious, but also obviously not one-sided. The increased lethality of weapons raises the risk of concentrated formations, but additionally, technological advances in logistics, battlefield mobility and communications enable more dispersed formations as well.

    Take, for example, this report from the Colombian think-tank CNAI (Esp.), which, among many, many other things, explains the shift in FARC tactics in response to Colombia’s use of light attack aircraft such as A-37s and Super Tucanos. FARC, for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s, was able to operate in quasi-conventional formations and challenge Colombian forces for territorial supremacy in a number of provinces, as well as to construct large encampments. In certain terrain environments, the Colombian military was long impaired in bringing indirect fires to bear against FARC concentrations.

    Contrary to the caricature of irregular war and COIN that rejects a role for heavy weapons and airpower, Colombia has not only exploited airpower quite effectively in destroying FARC force concentrations, but also made significant gains in putting it towards campaigns of high-value targeting, including (across borders when necessary). FARC, consequently, was forced to re-disperse its forces and adopt a series of newer techniques, tactics, and procedures in order to mitigate its vulnerability to Colombian fires. This all came at relatively insignificant political cost (perhaps excepting the 2008 Andean crisis), as Colombian public opinion appears to largely support or at least accept Colombia’s aerial campaign, though there is much more criticism of Colombia’s use of proxy forces and ambiguous ties with paramilitaries, or the human rights conduct of Colombian ground troops and intelligence services.

    The pattern of counteracting concentrated firepower with forms of dispersal, then, demonstrates a significant degree of continuity between regular and irregular wars. In Kosovo and Iraq, target governments responded to air power by dispersing and camouflaging their forces to wage a protracted defense against Western military might. The response of Serbian Integrated Air Defense System to American air power was in many ways similar to FARC’s - the dispersal of forces, the decreased reliance on fixed rather than mobile combat assets, and a focus on attrition and harassment rather than outright contestation of the battlespace.

    In irregular war, the “political” aspects of the war appear more salient because, in addition to geographic dispersal of the battlefield, there is also a social dispersal by the irregular force by adopting ruses and perfidy to disrupt the enemy’s ability to present concentrated targets. This includes not simply the disguising of combatants as noncombatants, but the integration of noncombatants more directly into logistical and other supporting functions - using unarmed noncombatants to courier information, provide intelligence, transport and procure supplies, et cetera. For countries obeying modern laws of armed conflict and especially those with modern liberal norms, dealing with that kind of dispersal requires non-military means by virtue of the counterinsurgent forces’ own political standards. The Lieber Code and other customary laws of war which sanctioned summary executions and reprisal measures through a wide variety of means and a wide spectrum of persons and properties, were ultimately political measures rather than reflections of the nature of the conflict per se.

    Nevertheless, regularized or conventional forces frequently blurred these arbitrary lines in the past as counteractions to hostile combat power. Sherman and Sheridan were contributors to the American traditions of total conventional war and counterinsurgency both. That the application of massive conventional force to problems of insurgency does not simply reflect arbitrary political decisions, but also the military circumstances that limit the overwhelming application of superior firepower generally. The most powerful fires are not always the easiest to bring to bear, if geography, intelligence, and the logistical tail do not permit it easy introduction to the theater or a leading role in its operations. The sort of limitations that initially prevented Colombia from making good use of fires in its counterinsurgency operations also occur in conventional battlefields, albeit under different circumstances, and the response of dispersal will continue to frustrate firepower. The dispersal of a combatant in response to superior firepower can involve a transmutation in organizational form is a reminder that, in part, the configuration of a foe is, ultimately, a strategic choice bound by capability, rather than essence.

  • I temporarily lose my ability to speak and write freely in about two weeks, so I am using what time I have left to stir up as much controversy as possible. Over Twitter two days ago and in my World Politics Review column yesterday, I broached a subject that might anger some of my fellow veterans.  

    When we talk about what we owe veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we immediately begin to talk about entitlements. The intellectual space devoted to veterans issues, in fact, is almost entirely filled by advocates. (Our research program at CNAS, I am happy to note, is exceptional in this regard.) But as much as I respect organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Veterans of Foreign Wars -- I am a member, in fact, of both -- we rarely take a step back and ask the hard philosophical questions about service and entitlements.

    The fact is that the military that has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan is not a military of conscripts like the ones that fought in our nation's previous wars. Each man and woman who has served in Iraq has volunteered and signed a labor contract to provide a service in exchange for compensation. Compensation is not the only thing that motivates servicemen, of course -- far from it -- but the terms of the initial contract are clear.

    We Americans, I argue, need to decide whether or not military service is truly a service or whether, in the era of the all-volunteer force, it is a profession like many others in the federal government. Our decades-long inability to decide between these two poles has lead to an ambiguous situation in which we have lifted up our professional military onto a ridiculous praetorian pedestal. The example I always use is that of the uniformed military serviceman in peak physical condition being allowed to board an airplane before a mother with two small children. Every veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan that I meet thinks this is ridiculous. But those kinds of no-cost perks are delivered along with a lot of very real and costly veterans benefits -- such as the new G.I. Bill -- given at a time when the rest of the country is making tremendous sacrifices. I write:

    If the military is a service, then we can and should expect those who serve to do so humbly and for little reward, in exchange for the grateful thanks of their nation. We might provide compensatory benefits on the back end for the families of those killed and for those wounded or injured while serving. If the military is a profession, by contrast, then we should expect those who choose this profession to provide a contractually obligated service in exchange for pay and benefits. 

    Either way, the policy implications are the same. If veterans of a professional all-volunteer force have simply provided services to the public in exchange for compensation, then we veterans deserve the same benefits provided to other public servants -- no more, no less. If the military, by contrast, is a truly selfless service, than veterans should be among the first in these times of austerity to lead by example and accept fewer public benefits. At the very least, we should be helping that mother with kids onto the airplane ahead of us.

    Anyway, read the whole thing. What I don't want to see is my fellow veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan become like the baby boomers -- spoiled and entitled, unwilling to either give up benefits or accept new taxes, and putting our own selfish desires over those of the greater good. That's not what I want my military service to be about.

    Speaking of World Politics Review, subscribe here. My column ends next week, but if you've enjoyed my column, you'll likely be really excited to see who my replacement is.

    P.S. Steve Walt wrote a post on Tuesday asking why no one was talking about Afghanistan. It's a question worth asking, and absent any real guidance from the campaign, I spent last week's WPR column trying to imagine what a Romney Administration's Afghanistan policy would look like.

  • Dan Byman and Natan Sachs have a great article in the new Foreign Affairs on the rise of settler terrorism in the West Bank. I suspect that some will argue Byman and Sachs are "brave" to tackle such a "controversial" issue, but reading the article last weekend, one of the things that struck me was how much the article makes sense in the context of Byman's other research. Byman has basically spent the past decade studying the threats posed by violent non-state actors to the state of Israel and then evaluating Israel's response to those threats. If Byman was to follow an honest definition of terrorism, it was only going to be a matter of time before he dealt with the violent Jewish extremists who have both terrorized the Palestinian population of the West Bank and posed a real challenge to the authority of the Israeli state. Regional specialists have been sounding the alarm about the changing character of the Israeli settler movement for quite some time, so again, it makes sense to see security studies specialists now paying attention to the issue.

    Byman and Sachs have contributed a valuable service by sketching out the way in which the settler movement has changed, why it has resorted to violence (spoiler: it's working!), and why both the Israeli and U.S. governments should be more concerned than they are. A few ironies that struck me while reading the report:

    1. This will be awkward for all parties involved, but Palestinians are the new Israelis:

    The situation recalls the bitterness Israelis felt when dealing with former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat as Palestinian suicide bombings continued: either he could stop the violence and chose not to or he was unable to end it, in which case there was little reason to talk. As settler violence increases, the Palestinians will begin to say the same about Israel's leadership.

    2. The recommendations Byman and Sachs put forward often echo the recommendations so often put forward regarding Islamist terrorism. Specifically...

    ...mainstream rabbis should denounce their radical brethren and demonstrate how their views contradict centuries of religious tradition. When extremist rabbis incite violence, they must face prosecution.

    Now where have we heard something remarkably similar to that before!

    I had never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories prior to 2006 but have been four times since. I am a very amateur student, then, of both Israeli society as well as the debates on Israel and the U.S. relationship with Israel that take place here in the United States. (I am better versed in the theological debates within my own faith tradition regarding the state of Israel, but theology is not a subject I wish to blog on anytime soon!) I have to tell you, though, that I have never once heard anyone from any of the Jewish organizations that support the U.S.-Israeli relationship condone settler violence or speak about it with anything other than condemnation. So I do not think the problem is with the often maligned American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the American Jewish Congress or any other similar group. I wonder, though, what many evangelical Christian groups like John Hagee's Christians United for Israel think about settler violence -- if they think about it at all. And I wonder also if those groups will be an obstacle to some of the recommendations Byman and Sachs make regarding cracking down on funding for extremist groups in the settlements. Because sadly, we American Christians have a history of turning a blind eye toward terrorism when we approve of the ends.

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