Guest post by Mark Buehner, in response to my “Can’t Quit” post. An invitation to Coldtype for a guest post is still open.
“He who seeks to be strong everywhere will be strong nowhere.” – Military truism
By Mark Buehner
The budget of the United States is on a collision course with its mounting debt. Entitlement and interest payments are set to overwhelm the budget, and no sector of government spending will be exempt from radical re-examination. The sooner we make difficult choices, the more thoughtful we can be, and the better result we can expect.
Defense is no exception. In 2010, over 680 billion dollars have been budgeted for the Defense Department, in addition to as much as $350 billion in defense related spending outside the DOD. This accounts for over 40% of military spending across the globe. It is immaterial whether this level of spending is justified, as it is simply unsustainable given our level of debt. It is in our national interest to examine our current defense philosophy and attempt to craft an intelligent new policy in line with the realities of a new century.
With the Cold War long over and the Terror War simmering, America must first reexamine our place in the world and commitment to power projection. Winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a trillion dollar enterprise that the country shows little appetite for repeating, and once they are decided we would do well to rethink our projection posture before launching a knee-jerk procurement course in expectation of similar wars in the future. This, along with the (expensive) relics of our Cold War era thinking will overwhelm our resources and leave less room for confronting more likely threats in the coming years. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and up-armored humvees are not going to deter rogue nations or a resurgent China, largely because we will not be conducting a preemptive nuclear strike, nor another IED riddled occupation, and everybody knows it.
Instead we should be focusing on the realistic ways our technology can justifiably deter these enemies at much more sustainable costs. UAVs and smart weapons are not the wave of the future, they are the reality of the present, and they have changed our ability to project force like nothing since the invention of the airplane. These systems are affordable, humane, and proven, and they should be the front line deterrent of a new defense doctrine.
The traditional American concept of warfare may be to meet and defeat an enemy upon the (foreign) fields of battle, but it needs to be recognized that such warfare, no matter how successful, is a result of multiple failures of diplomacy, foresight, and deterrence. Perhaps the most ancient truism regarding warfare is that the greatest victories are won before a shot is fired. America needs to re-embrace this fact and rely upon our unrivaled powers and the threats of those powers long before an actual fight can break out.
In a sense, the Bosnian War should be a model for future conflicts. We can reliably and nearly instantly reduce a belligerent nation’s ability to provide for the basic needs of its people by destroying power, infrastructure, communications, and ultimately natural resource production. Coupled with embargo and interdiction, this makes provoking the military might of the United States a losing proposition whatever the potential gain in question. All this can be done for virtually no risk to American lives and less expense than a month fighting in Afghanistan.
This strategy, like any, has caveats. One certain criticism is a recognition that airpower has never won a war. This is true and will remain true in our traditional definition of conventional total victory. However, historically speaking, the idea of defeating an enemy on the battlefield and forcing his unconditional surrender is more the exception than the rule. Worse, these types of victories often plant the seeds of the next war.
Hence, classic capitulation is not necessarily a wise goal in this context. Unconditional surrender is expensive in both blood and treasure. Many times, simply being willing to leave your enemy in worse shape than you are and walk away is a more credible threat than marshalling the resources needed for regime change (much less occupation). As it is our enemies may well feel a sense of security in recognizing our binary approach to warfare, ie either peace or conquest. It is easy for rogue regimes like Iran to play at brinkmanship with us so long as they fail to incite us into full scale conventional warfare with the expectation of total victory.
On the other hand, if a rogue regime like Iran had reason to fear a limited American strike (but not too limited, as often demonstrated in our past) that would truly cripple the enemy but leave America hardly troubled, we might actually see our security and interests better protected. This requires far more than simple pinpricks, but far less than actual regime change.
International cooperation and (ideally) consent is critical, both materially and morally. A rogue nation must feel isolated and helpless for the full psychological effect to take hold. Ultimately, the physical weakening of the regime combined with the isolation and destitution of the populace (or threat thereof) will be enough to either bring a favorably negotiated conclusion, or (as in the case of Bosnia) full scale regime change.
None of this is to say we won’t fund our more conventional and traditional forces, particularly ground forces. We must and will, and they must be prepared for the worst. But full scale land battles must be a last resort, and not the first.
The United States is certain to undergo a difficult and painful reckoning in the near future. Every aspect of our relationship with government will be examined and will very likely see a reduction in accustomed resources. If this is done in an ad hoc manner, particularly regarding defense, our national security will suffer in unpredictable ways. This is not to say we should ever think to abandon the traditional winning tools of a professional multi-branch military, but instead to examine every element of these entities with a careful eye towards a forward looking strategy. And this must mean tough decisions and excepting that we cannot afford every weapon systems even if it might serve quite well. In the bigger picture, it will cost us more dearly than we think.
Now is the time to reexamine our strategic vision for our projection of power, and to reassess the tools and strategies we have developed and are developing. By embracing the technological and practical realities we are faced with, we can come through this period with a stronger defense and more robust deterrent, and indeed a safer and more peaceful world.
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Good post by the way, and I largely agree with you.
However, I will also look at the example of Iran. Although the government is belligerent, much has been discussed of the Iranian people. Although the Iranian populace is deeply distrustful of the American government, they (by & large) have little qualms with us. To this point, I believe Iranians have not been involved in terrorist attacks (Hezbollah, sponsored by the government, is a different matter.
However, using any warfare (ground or air) is going to instigate individuals who are currently not interested in terrorist activities. Even if the Iranian government is “crippled” it might lead to the motivation of new terrorist groups that are independent of the Iranian government.
I am not trying to say that air superiority is a bad strategy, just that determining our “safety” is complicated by how the populace reacts to a strike.
I have several issues with this. First, I disagree with the basic premise, that our current level of military spending is unsustainable. We have had much larger spending as a percentage of GDP for most of our history; indeed, in those terms, defense spending is at historic lows. The problem, of course, is that you cannot simultaneously have easy in-migration, a welfare state and a free society. One of the three has to give. (Personally, I’d get rid of most of the welfare state, because I’m not convinced that you can have a welfare state and a free society no matter what you do with immigration, but YMMV.) I don’t think that anyone would disagree — well, anyone not a defense contractor or a pork-shoveling congressvermin — with the need to streamline military procurement and make programs affordable and successful. There are a number of ways to do that, but they are stymied by the very military-industrial-congressional alliances that Eisenhower warned us of as they were forming. Any strategy to break those alliances has to include the elimination of the DoD monopsony on American arms, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, sadly.
Second, I think you dance around a very important point (with which I agree), so I will state it outright: the United States has no identifiable strategic goal (grand strategy, if you prefer that term). In the Cold War, we had the goal of containment of communist expansion. In the interwar period, we had the goal of isolationism coupled with economic free trade, until the Smoot-Hawley tariffs killed that, leaving us with isolationism alone. Prior to WWI, we had the vestiges of our late-1800s foray into imperialism, and prior to that we had isolationism coupled with free trade. In a sense, it really looks like the natural state of American foreign policy, barring an immediate and large threat, is isolationism coupled with free trade; indeed, prior to 9/11, President Bush seemed to be moving in that direction.
But now we have a large and immediate threat: attrition warfare targeted at our civil society by non-state actors. And we have no grand strategy to deal with that problem. I think that President Bush started on such a grand strategy, by tying non-state warriors to the states that fund, support and defend them and attempting to convert those regimes into representatively-goverened societies hostile to jihadis. I think that abandoning that goal was a mistake, though clearly Iraq is not a repeatable model (for political, rather than military reasons). Nonetheless, we have abandoned it. There is no consensus on our grand strategy now, even on whether to treat ourselves as under attack, and I fear the circumstances it will take to get us back on the same general page again in that respect.
Third, while I do think that we need to have some force options other than nuclear war and occupation, I don’t think we’ve ever been that limited. We have conducted a number of interventions of more limited type, and I see no reason why that should not continue. I would like us to get away from the mentality that war should be bloodless on our side and on enemy civilians’ side, and nearly so among enemy fighters. That’s a pipe dream. In a sense, the “bomb them from above” idea is (while useful in some ways) a reflection of that mentality. It avoids the messy slog of getting down in the mud and fighting, and seems so much cleaner, more anti-septic. Yet the question is whether it achieves our goals, and in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it clearly would not have done so. It probably would in Iran, and I’ve been advocating precisely that for some years now. Limited strikes against infrastructure are a huge threat to a state, but no threat at all to our primary enemies, the jihadis, which is why we’ll need to get down in the mud, too. Maybe Iraq will be enough to (eventually) obviate that problem; probably not.
Fourth, I think it is chimerical to chase international consent, or even international acquiescence. That simply gives a false sense of equality to powers that have no equal status with us militarily. Thus, it gives up tangible influence on our part for, at best, a pat on the head. Perhaps, if there were a case where the US could not have acted without international consent, and that international consent allowed us to act, I would be more convinced. But even 1991, the post child for this meme, was basically the international community jumping on board once it was absolutely clear that we were asking nicely, but we didn’t really care about their answer. We would be better off doing exactly what every other country does: chasing our interests alone, with allies when we can get them and without when we must.
Finally, I think it’s worth considering whether or not we are simply overextended in the world. We’re in it now in the Middle East, and it’s too late to change that, but why are we so heavily deployed in Europe and SE Asia? That made sense in the Cold War. Now it seems that it just involves us in the affairs of others when we don’t necessarily need to be there. I would just as soon we withdraw largely from those areas, and that we do the same in the Middle East once we can do so in safety. That requires us to deal with Iran, and to install or influence governments hostile to exporting jihad. In a sense, this ties the circle back to my first point, of what our grand strategy should be. I don’t think that disengagement will save us money, but it will keep us out of a lot of unnecessary fights.
While I tend to agree with the majority of the post I must disagree with one specific assertion:
_However, historically speaking, the idea of defeating an enemy on the battlefield and forcing his unconditional surrender is more the exception than the rule. Worse, these types of victories often plant the seeds of the next war._
The obvious counterexamples are Germany after WW-I and Iraq after GW-I. In both cases victory was achieved but “not” followed up with occupation and regime change. In both cases the victory was disputed and attributed to other causes and we were required to go back in and finish the job.
In the case of Germany (and Japan) the occupation was long and included significant cultural changes as well. The changes removed the possibility of further militarism and subsequent engagements. In the case of Iraq, the occupation is proving to be much shorter, with the possibility of much less basic cultural change. We will see what the result will be, but the assertion that these kind of victories _plant the seeds_ of the next war is not justified by history.
Dean Kling
Hi all, thanks for taking the time to comment.
Alchemist- I should have been more careful about citing Iran because its clearly a volatile situation and actually unique in many ways. That being said, it comes to a point where you have to ask how far you will allow the Iranian government to go (and I deeply disagree with their responsibility for world wide terrorism, Iraq alone being case in point) in the hopes of an in house regime change or outright revolution? Iran shows all the signs of meeting our worst nightmares _without_ our first strike. At some point (and Im not convinced that point is today) we’re certainly going to have to decide on who’s terms we do challenge Iran, theirs or ours. Once they have atomic arms, the math changes radically and in fact an overthrow becomes _our_ worst nightmare. Once that happens stability is paramount over virtually any outcome, lest a nuke get launched by a dead ender or smuggled abroad.
Jeff- our history is increasingly irrelevant given our obligations. At some point we’re going to have to massively change the entitlements _just to stay solvent_ much less keep going as we are with our other spending. A simple look at the future budget shows that do to demographics, our budgets will be overwhelmed by paying out entitlements. The alternative is to utterly gut medicare and SS, and politically that is simply impossible. Defense _must_ be trimmed, its a question of when and how per force.
dfkling- You make a good case given US history, but I was pointing more toward history in general. Over many periods warfare consisted more of hurting enemy interests until a settlement was negotiated, and that was often the path of great maritime empire like the British. Conquest is fine when it works, but its always expensive and we are talking about sustainability. We cant afford another Iraq or Afghanistan, and if that is a given we need to figure the best alternative regardless.
Mark, so are you then recommending that the United States take the essentially European approach of assuming entitlements and treating defense as optional, with the only question being how closely that line can be walked without inviting foreign intervention?
_, so are you then recommending that the United States take the essentially European approach of assuming entitlements and treating defense as optional, with the only question being how closely that line can be walked without inviting foreign intervention?_
The entitlements are non-negotiable. Its a loan made 70 years ago and coming due, what’s the alternative? Our population is about to retire en masse. That’s not a political option, its a fact.
As far as the European view of defense, I don’t know how you can get that out of what I wrote. I encouraged a potentially more belligerent stance than we take _now,_ (if on a smaller scale). I’m simply trying to remove the redundant given realities. Do we need thousands of ICBMs when a half dozen submarines can devastate the earth? Can we afford it? Do we need B1s and B2s when cruise missiles and UAVs do the job for a tiny fraction of the price? Why? None of that indicates pulling up the drawbridge and hoping for the best- quite the opposite, to make this work we have to be even more engaged in confronting our opponents, lest they build too much power and force the kind of conventional warfare we _don’t need to fight._ They may mean more glorious victories, but we can’t afford them and if we can nip them in the bud, isnt that so much the better?
I hope that question didn’t come out overly belligerent. I’m just trying to nail down your ideas, not attack them. (Though I do see issues, and I’m not yet convinced we entirely agree.) The European view on defense is more or less than when the choice is between cutting the military and cutting entitlements, the entitlements are a given. That seems to be exactly what you are saying, unless I’m missing something. Both the British and the French, though their capabilities are smaller than ours, have within that context nonetheless undertaken overseas interventions.
I do think that you are a little off on what we have now, though. Our current ICBM fleet is around 450, not thousands, and is shrinking. We haven’t been modernizing our warheads either. So this aspect of your proposal is already effectively happening.
I think B1s and B2s are certainly on their way out. Future strike aircraft, both tactical and strategic, will almost certainly be unmanned, at cost savings in equipment, pilots and (in the event of war) lives. The Air Force is fighting a rearguard action on this, and manned fighters will be the last to go, but it’s clear that we will not be maintaining manned aircraft very far into the future.
I do think that we would be better served by more efficient military purchasing, driven towards an articulated grand strategy. I think that the former is doubtful, given the pork-dealing tendencies of Congress, as long as Congress can dictate down to the line item in the budget. I also think that, bang for the buck, fixing Social Security and Medicare so that we don’t need to go bankrupt (and the last time I looked, if we eliminated the entire defense budget, we’d still be running a deficit for this year and the last two) to have them is even more vital. Given the realities of Congress, we’d be more likely to see the military cut to the point that it could not perform its missions, with the most wasteful spending retained and the most useful spending cut. This is exactly what happened in the Carter years, so it’s not unprecedented.
Moreover, assuming that we were to focus the military and adopt a strategy of early preventive strikes, isn’t that also assuming a great deal of political courage our leadership of the last few decades has seldom shown? What has prevented us, until now, from undertaking such a strike on Iran? It’s certainly not lack of knowledge or lack of equipment or lack of cause. I can only come up with lack of will. And even then, we can be as engaged and up front as we like, but what happens if that spirals into a larger war? At that point, we need a total force able to deal with the crisis, because building a modern military from scratch today would take many years, simply because of lead time on complicated weapons systems. Would we have that time if things escalated, and we had a force capable of only limited interventions?
I don’t think you’re going in the wrong direction, actually, but you haven’t convinced me yet, either.
Gah! “More of less THAT when,” not “more of less than when.” Preview is my friend. Preview is my friend.
_In a sense, the Bosnian War should be a model for future conflicts. We can reliably and nearly instantly reduce a belligerent nation’s ability to provide for the basic needs of its people by destroying power, infrastructure, communications, and ultimately natural resource production. Coupled with embargo and interdiction, this makes provoking the military might of the United States a losing proposition whatever the potential gain in question. All this can be done for virtually no risk to American lives and less expense than a month fighting in Afghanistan._
You are aware of the laws governing the use of military force against civilian infrastructure? For example, the start about article 50 here; the US is a signatory nation of this protocol.
We were absolutely pushing the line with this stuff in Bosnia. Building a national strategy around it means essentially dispensing with the idea of noncombatant immunity — the bedrock principle of our ideas about _jus in bello_, and underlying much of the UCMJ as well as these international treaties and protocols.
Then I compound it with “more of” rather than “more or.” Twice! Man, I gotta get to bed.
Grim i think we have to have a _very_ serious conversation about that particular hypocrisy, why I agree we have signed on to voluntarily. But realistically how does whether we bomb a power station and kill a dozen engineers or send an armored division to engage in a ‘fair fight’ and see a town demolished and possibly thousands of civilians killed. Multiply that by any number.
We do our best to minimize casualties, period. Hell we can even announce our targets and have the enemy evacuate… or we could if our enemies haven’t learned the using human shields doesn’t draw the kind of moral outrage that you are talking about.
We are talking about rogue regimes that destabilize the world and victimize their own populaces. How do you separate the rulers from the levers of their power? How does an engineer in a rocket making plant differ from an electrician in a power plant, or a frightened conscripted soldier in his trench for that matter?
We don’t target civilians and we never will. But if we need to take down the levers of a regimes power, we can do so and sleep with a clear conscience. Clearer than most alternatives i’d argue.
As far as the international consensus, maybe its about time we started leading instead of following in that regard.
FWIW, there’s “an article at the Armed Forces Journal”:http://www.afji.com/2010/02/4387134 that bears more than a passing resemblance to mark’s proposals. (Via “Small Wars Journal”:http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/02/friends-of-ours-at-armed-force/ )
Mark, interesting ideas, forcefully presented.
I’m reminded of Clay Christensen’s idea of disruptive technology, with two distinct applications:
– hardware: 90% of the bang for 10% of the buck using innovative and fast-evolving tech (i.e. drones – not just air, but maybe sea, and (eventually) land…). This is a fairly conventional application of Christensen’s ideas.
– strategy: the kinetic war is the easy 10%, the occupation / rebuild is the hard 90%. But then three kinetic wars are one third the cost than one COIN op, and maybe more effective. Instead of (just) disruptive tech, disruptive strategy.
Two thoughts:
1) The rule for disruptive tech is that when you discover an application, you apply it, even if you disrupt yourself – better you disrupt yourself than someone else disrupts you. The drone-centric strategy – and the capability of massive fixed asset destruction that it affords – is appealing to tech/manufacturing savvy countries with large and growing economies. The percent of the world’s infrastructure susceptible to destruction by (e.g.) China is going to expand rapidly over the next decade. Just sayin’.
2) The United States of America cannot get out of bed in the morning and brush its teeth without provoking hysterical charges of genocide against bacteria. Something has to be done in this space regardless of hardware platform, spending, or strategy (other than pre-emptive, unilateral surrender).
_I think if we could at least get our own people to stop being among the hysterical screamers, we would be in much better shape._
While I think this will completely disappear, it has been massively reduced, at least on the field of battle. It’s pretty much understood that soldiers are doing the best they can in a very complicated environment. Even far left media outlets like Salon regularly report on how we should treat soldiers BETTER than they are.
Sure, they’re are groups like “code pink”, but they’re not very popular.
But to be honest, some pro-war politicians create this innuendo themselves… such as the pronouncement of bombing mecca a few years back… If you want to say a war that there is on tooth decay, I’m fine with that. If you want to say that gingivitis is a militant religion that hates us for our enamel (and must be eliminated so that we can eat peacefully), that sounds a lot more like genocide.
Are you opposed to genocide against gingivitis, Alchemist?
Mark,
The difference between an electrician in an electrical plant and your other two options is that the electrician is pursuing a project that does not only benefit the regime. It also benefits the civilian population, and indeed it is chiefly of benefit to them.
Furthermore, when we’re done taking down the regime, we’re going to have to get that power working again. It’s going to be necessary for basic civil order, for agriculture, and for hospitals and other methods of helping those injured in the war. It might be wiser not to take out the power in the first place, if we can come up with an alternative for doing so.
Which alternative, by the way, is actually our normal method: _collapsing_ a rogue regime is easy for us. Their military and security infrastructures, in spite of their best efforts, are fairly easy to segment and destroy. Conventional enemy armies are what our whole system is designed to destroy. We can target those regimes with weapons as precise as a CIA drone’s guided missile, or a SEAL team; or as general as a strategic nuclear missile deployed against a military base.
New ways of doing this is not what we need. This is not the challenge that our military faces.
The challenge we face is in establishing better forms of order in ungoverned or misgoverned spaces. That’s the hard part, and there’s no shortcut. Reducing the ability of the population to institute better government — as by destroying their power plants, for example — just makes the problem worse. We either end up having to fix that worse problem, or we leave the new problem to fester.
Yeah, I realize I should have said ALL bacteria… in the knowledge that we need some bacteria to survive….and should focus our ruthless onslaught on gingivitis and other problems.
bq. “Furthermore, when we’re done taking down the regime, we’re going to have to get that power working again. It’s going to be necessary for basic civil order, for agriculture, and for hospitals and other methods of helping those injured in the war. It might be wiser not to take out the power in the first place, if we can come up with an alternative for doing so.”
Grim, your reasoning only holds if the USA has an interest or inclination to shape the new order.
If it decides it does not, there is no obligation to do anything. That was the penalty, repeat the behaviour and we’ll repeat the penalties. Don’t, and we won’t bother you. You’d like to rebuild? Have at it, we’re a bit short on cash.
Which is pretty much what happened with Libya, though the targets were more explicitly regime/military related.
Ultimately, I think the rebirth of “punitive expeditions” is more or less inevitable, given current trends that portend ever-rising stakes. It’s also far more honest.
The population now has to weigh the consequences of collaboration with a regionally or globally dangerous regime much more carefully, thus lowering those regimes’ survival rate and leaving them more open to covert destabilization.
As threats grow, the toolbox must grow. And at some point, most certainly will grow. It’s already growing, as the Chinese/Russian approach to counter-insurgency gains adhernts and ground around the world.
bq. “We can target those regimes with weapons as precise as a CIA drone’s guided missile, or a SEAL team; or as general as a strategic nuclear missile deployed against a military base.”
Our history says that no, we can’t. Please provide examples of regimes changed using these approaches.
bq. “Building a national strategy around it means essentially dispensing with the idea of noncombatant immunity — the bedrock principle of our ideas about jus in bello, and underlying much of the UCMJ as well as these international treaties and protocols.”
I don’t recall much concept of noncombatant immunity as recently as World War II. An innovation of the last 50 years, which may have been a mistake (and will increasingly NOT be honored around the world), can hardly be a bedrock principle of a 1,000 year old tradition, without very serious qualification. Beginning with recognition of the changes as one moves along the spectrum from limited war, to general war, to total war.
And I would argue that your concept of immunity for an enemy regime’s power plants (which may be critical to, say, a nuclear weapons program) should be immune, verges on insanity.
Its obvious unworkability in practice is, I contend, why its eventual defeat and replacement is a certainty.
_Grim, your reasoning only holds if the USA has an interest or inclination to shape the new order. If it decides it does not, there is no obligation to do anything._
So, on your way of thinking, un/misgoverned spaces are no problem? We can stop worrying about al Qaeda and all the rest of the things that might come out of them, because we’ll… what? Stop them using the intelligence we won’t have because we won’t be involved in these spaces?
We couldn’t stop the Christmas bomber using our security apparatus even _with_ such involvement giving us intelligence leads. However, we were able to use the intelligence from those leads to find and destroy the people involved in the backstory. Without the leads, though, we can neither hope to have even as much chance to stop an attack with our security apparatus, nor retaliate in the event of an attack.
_Our history says that no, we can’t. Please provide examples of regimes changed using these approaches._
Since the range of approaches cited was everything from assassination and commando strikes to the use of strategic weapons, I’d have to point to every regime we have changed over the years. If you want to limit it to assassination, commando strikes and other sorts of ‘small wars’ tactics, the Marine Corps was used in this way repeatedly in the early 1900s; even Noriega counts as a small-war replacement of a regime.
_And I would argue that your concept of immunity for an enemy regime’s power plants (which may be critical to, say, a nuclear weapons program) should be immune, verges on insanity._
Article 52(2) authorizes a strike on a power plant if and only if it produces a military benefit such as you specify here. Taking out the power plants merely because ‘they are in service to the regime’ is to target them in their civilian capacity.
_I don’t recall much concept of noncombatant immunity as recently as World War II. An innovation of the last 50 years…_
No; it is WWII that was the variant, which reinforced a much older standard. The principle of noncombatant immunity originates in the Peace and Truce of Christ movement of the Middle Ages, and was reinforced numerous times in the years since.
WWII was not the first time that armies have set it aside; but it was the very people who won the second world war that crafted the Geneva Conventions. These were not starry-eyed idealists, but people who understood what it took to win wars. If they chose to reinforce a standard they had set aside for a time, there is a reason they felt it was important to do so.
That reason may be worth considering. What do you think it might be? As Chesterton said, when someone sets forth to abolish something you should first make sure he understands why it was there: a fence in the street didn’t grow there, nor is it likely that madmen slipped loose one night and put it up. When you know why a fence was wanted to start with, why your fathers felt it was so important, then perhaps you might remove it. Yet first be sure you know why they built it.
bq. “So, on your way of thinking, un/misgoverned spaces are no problem?”
See the Armed forces Journal article. Ungoverned spaces may represent a far lesser problem than determinedly hostile states, with far more resources and advanced capabilities at their command.
In a world of limited resources, that may be a better problem to choose.
Quick, which is a larger problem: al-Qaeda in a completely ungoverned area, or al-Qaeda shielded by being in the supposed territory of a nuclear-armed state (Pakistan)? It’s B, of course.
bq. ” If you want to limit it to assassination, commando strikes and other sorts of ‘small wars’ tactics, the Marine Corps was used in this way repeatedly in the early 1900s; even Noriega counts as a small-war replacement of a regime.”
Which, for various reasons, can’t be repeated on less than an Iraq scale. That doesn’t work.
bq. “That reason may be worth considering. What do you think it might be? As Chesterton said, when someone sets forth to abolish something you should first make sure he understands why it was there: a fence in the street didn’t grow there, nor is it likely that madmen slipped loose one night and put it up. When you know why a fence was wanted to start with, why your fathers felt it was so important, then perhaps you might remove it. Yet first be sure you know why they built it.”
That’s a fair point. They built it because at that time, the level of suffering and devastation created by the lack of said civilian immunity, and to which they were reacting, required the resources of governments to create. If you get the governments to agree, problem solved.
That underlying governments-only premise is getting less and less true, as these capabilities head for lower and lower tiers in the system. And more and more governments do _not_ agree – are in fact using the agreement as just another weapon of war, while openly disregarding it in their own offensive actions (vid. Iran). Amidst the growth of ideologies (principally Islamism, but not exclusively so) whose frameworks go beyond industrial war to genocidal total war. And a corollary development of hollow states whose existence is a fiction.
So, the underlying premise is decaying on all levels. The risks of mega-scale civilian suffering, which prompted these conventions, is becoming a steadily larger risk at the hand of states and non-states who reject them, except as a cynical shield. The principle of civilian immunity is becoming, de facto, a principle of military immunity. Regime change and occupation is not economically viable as a strategy, and hence has weak deterrent power. And internal uprising odds in those regimes are damped down sharply by the expectation of no consequences for collaboration, vs. horrible consequences for dissent and resistance. Which perpetuates those very regime risks in the world, and ups the odds that we will need to fight the enemy on their chosen terms – which is what WW2 was.
Meanwhile, on a lower level of risk, problems are arising in areas with fictional states, which means action against governments is by definition futile (vid. Somalia). But action against the populations actively creating the problem is not futile.
It’s hard to think of a more comprehensive failure in the making. Unless you count US naval shipbuilding, of course.
The fence is only standing because the termites are holding hands, Grim. They won’t sing “kumbaya” indefinitely.
Those trends are both bigger than us, and don’t give a tinker’s damn what we think of them.
Joe pretty much covered what I was going to say. If you believe the premise that we can’t afford another Iraq/Afghanistan fiscally or politically, there’s no point in dwelling on whether its effective or not. You have to decide what the best solution is given our resources.
We have two choices- sending the message that we will either placate rogue states until we invade and rebuild them (which we won’t be doing any time soon), or send a strong doctrine based message that those days are over and the days of punishing regimes is back in vogue. Hence it is incumbent upon the people of those places to deal with their leaders.
That being said, Grim I think you (and the Armed Forces article btw) are entirely too optimistic over being able to create regime change, certainly via a limited assault on their military, but also via the comprehensive strategy outlined above. I think it is _possible_ that regimes will crumble, particularly if the majority of the world is working against them and they don’t have strong foreign enablers. But I don’t think it is by any means an eventuality. Look how long Hussein survived our attempts to kill him and weaken his regime… and 2/3rds of his population _hated_ him. Strong men are in power for a reason in the first place, they have a power base and it may not be easy to destroy or even weaken that base.
Hence the goal isn’t regime change. The goal is deterrence. If the regime knows that we are in fact willing to leave them in power but in ashes, that is a far more disturbing thought for them than gambling we won’t send a hundred thousands troops to pull him out of a rat hole.
As far as targeting infrastructure versus purely military/regime fixtures, its impossible to differentiate in any meaningful way. Doesn’t a military benefit a civilian population.. ie how Iraq would have dissentigrated and been left open to its neighbors after our invasion? On the flip side, things like electricity are the levers of power a regime both uses for itself and to control the population. Electricity in particular has been a traditional target since its inception and the idea that it is now off limits seems fantastic, nor will it ever be respected by us or anyone else.
I’m going to respond to a couple of specific points you gentlemen make, and then I’ll sketch an alternative position you haven’t considered.
_Quick, which is a larger problem: al-Qaeda in a completely ungoverned area, or al-Qaeda shielded by being in the supposed territory of a nuclear-armed state (Pakistan)? It’s B, of course._
The problem with this argument is that you’re dealing with un/misgoverned spaces on _both_ sides of the equation. A proper comparison to make my point: what’s a bigger problem, al Qaeda in a place like Afghanistan/Pakistan, or al Qaeda in France?
The goal, then, needs to be making places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc., more like Singapore, the Philippines, or Columbia. That is, you want to _build partner capacity_ in the government; you want to turn an un/misgoverned space into a space that has a functional government. The government need not be perfect — the Philippines and Columbia have significant problems — but it needs to be stable and functional.
_Hence the goal isn’t regime change. The goal is deterrence._
Both regime change and deterrence have their place. Neither is always the right answer.
For example, regime change may happen with no effort from us — consider the possibility of a North Korean collapse. That creates a massive problem. How do we address it? Not with deterrence!
On the other hand, Pakistan could experience a regime change internally, and deterrence would be a fine answer; or possibly we would be able to build a partnership with the new regime.
You need a certain strategic flexibility. Now, as for a third option:
_Strategic Partnerships_
Look at the Columbia/Philippines model. Iraq may eventually achieve this model as well; Afghanistan probably won’t, in my reading, because of a lack of commitment from us to it. But let’s say it’s the goal.
Thailand and Singapore are excellent final-stage models. If there is a problem in these areas, it’s not a problem for the US taxpayer — although we make investments in training their militaries. (We recoup some of this by selling them weapons.)
If North Korea does collapse, who is our partner? South Korea. But we should also be working out ‘rules of the road’ with China, to see how we might be able to partner with them.
The US doesn’t have to pay the way, and it doesn’t need to build grand coalitions. All it needs is to find sub-regional partners and help them grow strong enough to stand up on their own.
We invest in a whole-of-government model that helps their governments achieve the stability of a Thailand or a Philippines — perfection is not the standard! “Good enough to handle problems” is the standard.
This model is cheaper than Iraq-style war, but far more effective at building real security than the disengagement implied by deterrence. And instead of making a state that is almost-able to be a partner unable to be one, it builds up potential partners so they _can_ be.
It doesn’t work everywhere: there may be an Iraq in the future someday. (I don’t buy that we _really can’t_ afford another one; if we _really had to_, we’d find a way, even if it meant finally cutting the entitlement spending that is the real source of all of America’s financial problems. Investments in global stability create global trade, which benefits America as much or more than anyone else. Entitlements are the problem, not the far-lower defense investments, which are broadly beneficial.) If there is, though, we go into this future Iraq intending to build a stable state that can serve as a partner in that area in the future. It will pay for itself, as our relationship with Japan and Germany has profited us in the generations since WWII; or that our trade with the Philippines more than justifies the investments we’ve made there.
Grim: You’re well aware that we are in an actual war, and that it has an economic component. Bin Laden and the more sophisticated of his successors and supporters know that if they can cause us to expend billions or trillions, or do equivalent damage to our economy, while they spend millions, that they can wear us down.
We’ve been letting them get away with it. In self-inflicted damage like DTS ‘security theater’, and also in playing by rules that they ignore. We have the most highly trained, smartest, and most deadly armed forces the world has ever seen; but also the most expensive to deploy. If we insist on whole-of-government engagements, commitments, and judgment of success, then we’re allowing ourselves to become strategically fixed in place. The enemy can find more hellholes like Yemen, Somalia, Chad, the NWFP and the like, than we have will and treasure to build and prop up nation states there. The legacy of Metternich is becoming rather pricey.
We know that the jihadis, whether it’s AQI or Taliban, eventually wear out their welcome with their oppressive measures. Unfortunately, we also know that once established with sufficient resource, vid. Iran, they can continue to rule for a long time, commanding the resources of a nation state. Why is it out of the question to remove those national resources, or to bring the pain directly onto those individuals or tribes responsible for being or hosting our enemies? Where is it written that raiding as a tactic necessarily obligates occupation and (re)construction as a strategy?
At a meta level, I’m sure you’re aware that this place is about as friendly and sympathetic to the military as you’ll find in a middle-of-the-road blog. If you’re having trouble selling here, what does that say about the level of long-term political support that’s likely to be available for a ‘Barnett-like’ approach to security? I don’t think the discussants here are suggesting bailing on Afghanistan, much less Iraq, but we are saying that continuing that depth of engagement as a strategy is worthy of question. I may not agree with mark b in detail, but he’s got the right direction.
Grim, nothing you said I disagree with. I’m certainly not saying we abandon alliances and partnerships in favor of a first reaction bombing the enemy to dust and forget them. That’s a last result of provocation, not a first. As you say, NK or Iran could collapse tomorrow and we would have to respond somehow- but the point being (at least in Iran’s case) it wouldn’t look like our Iraq policy. There are all types of possibilities of engagement in such cases that don’t include US troops patrolling the streets, and we will certainly entertain any of them.
But I think you are putting the cart before the horse and under-appreciating the difficulty of the regime toppling to begin with, at least without sending army and marine divisions to ensure it. Regimes do topple, but even more often they linger around even in terribly desperate straights. Waiting for them to keel over of there own inertia and then moving in has been a tried and true failure for decades running in places like North Korea and Cuba. We could wait 50 years for Iran to topple and still be waiting. Or it could go tomorrow. If some critical American interest is on the line, waiting won’t be an option. And simply sending smart bombs at palaces won’t likely work either. So what then?
As far as digging deep to find the resources if we really need to, maybe. That always works until it stops working, at which point your empire collapses or at least sees a strategic leg lopped off. I also think it a mistake to try to transfer the German and Japanese models elsewhere. Iraq isn’t going to be a partner like Japan in 20 years, let alone Afghanistan. Its just not the same place. Germany and Japan were global powers before and during the war which is why we were at war. Syria doesn’t become a functioning world economy simply by having the good luck to go to war with the US. Assuming we will see a ‘return on investment’ given these kinds of occupations is probably a very bad assumption. Iraq might not even be _talking_ to us in 10 years, let alone a strategic partner.
I don’t think I’ve even advocated “regime change” as a normal condition. What I’ve advocated is looking for partners; we may, in some cases, need to change a regime to create partners, but I doubt that’s the normal condition.
Don’t read me as advocating major wars; just as not stating that they should be said to be off the table. If something happened such that we felt we had to wage another one, we certainly could do so. If nothing does, and we cut our defense spending almost completely, we’ll still be bankrupt — by the social spending. Unless we get a handle on that, it’s not going to matter.
_At a meta level, I’m sure you’re aware that this place is about as friendly and sympathetic to the military as you’ll find in a middle-of-the-road blog. If you’re having trouble selling here, what does that say about the level of long-term political support…_
There is no policy that can be expected to enjoy “long term” political support in America. We’ve reached a point at which the people turn against first this thing, and then that one, with equal force. Wave elections throw power to the Republicans, then the Democrats, and now we’re shaping up for another wave election against the Democrats.
Our politics are not stable, and I don’t think they will become stable for a long time.
The one thing we can do is try to craft a policy that won’t rise to popular attention. That’s the advantage of partnerships: we’ve been working with Thailand closely since the 1970s, and few know it; with the Philippines since the 1890s, and few realize we have a task force deployed there; with Columbia for decades; etc.
We can’t do that with Afghanistan because we over-committed to it; it should have remained a low-level SF-led operation (like JSOTF-P). But the Thailand/RP model is the one I think we should be looking at.
bq. If nothing does, and we cut our defense spending almost completely, we’ll still be bankrupt — by the social spending. Unless we get a handle on that, it’s not going to matter.
No argument there. In fact it looks like the _denouement_ that many knew was coming is arriving early, due to the recession and the government’s discouragement of investment. The Social Security in/outflow recently went negative, which wasn’t supposed to happen for a few years yet.
bq. Our politics are not stable, and I don’t think they will become stable for a long time. The one thing we can do is try to craft a policy that won’t rise to popular attention.
Accurate diagnosis, I fear, and astute prescription for long term strategies.
bq. …we’ve been working with Thailand closely since the 1970s, and few know it; with the Philippines since the 1890s, and few realize we have a task force deployed there; with Columbia for decades; etc.
So long as we have our current media establishment, that’s likely both accurate and sustainable – so long as no one screws the pooch in a public and politically useful fashion.
bq. We can’t do that with Afghanistan because we over-committed to it; it should have remained a low-level SF-led operation (like JSOTF-P). But the Thailand/RP model is the one I think we should be looking at.
Perhaps, then, we should accept getting Afghanistan back to that level as a reasonable goal, rather than trying to set up a national government of questionable integrity and with unsustainable levels of armed force and police establishment?
Granting that the Thai and Philippine models are a success – and I agree they are – how do they speak to regions that lack an effective central government and/or are questionable or inimical in their alignment?
I think we need to recognize that the RP/Thai cases are both similar and different. They are similar in two respects: the ethnic nature of the conflict; and fact of the central government being very far removed from the troubled areas. JSOTF-P works with WESTMINCOM in Mindanao, which is a long way from Manila. (HQ is in Zamboanga, with a range of deployments.) Thailand’s insurgency problem is in the very far south, in Pattani province, a long way from Bangkok.
Yet they are different cases in another respect: in Thailand, the central government claims undisputed authority over the region; in the RP, they created an autonomous region (ARMM) in order to give the insurgents a stake in the government.
Afghanistan has all the problems, but none of the capacities. Its central government is far from the contested areas. It has an ethnic split between the combatants. And it has a quasi-autonomous area, but not one it has created to give the insurgents a stake: one the insurgents are creating themselves.
We can approach this in two ways. We could try to make it more like the RP, by creating an autonomous region that would be formally recognized in return for adherence to certain rules (like preventing suicide bombings, and agreeing not to host al Qaeda). Or we could try to make it more like Thailand, by helping them develop the strength to exert control over the area by main strength.
This second approach is why GEN McChrystal and others believe that building up the ANA is the core of the process. We can talk about the Afghan situation, though I’d like to make clear at the start of the discussion that I think we made a mistake by investing it with large number of regular forces; and that I doubt we have the commitment necessary (as we did in Iraq) to see that process through. I have a feeling our political situation is going to undermine the Afghan mission; but instead of adjusting the mission to recognize the reality, we’re both doubling down and yet declaring our intent to leave. That seems very unwise to me, and I don’t hold out much hope for the mission’s success if we continue in this policy.
bq. I think we made a mistake by investing it with large number of regular forces; and that I doubt we have the commitment necessary (as we did in Iraq) to see that process through.
We are agreed on both the mistake and the potential outcome. I’d add that building up a central government requiring resources far beyond those available indigenously is inherently unsustainable.
I’m wondering if there’s a third possibility implied by the latter observation, and which is also a possible backdown from the current strategy:
There’s a known way to build the economy of a resource-poor region, which is growing the human capital through education, while freeing up local markets. To this distant observer, the Pashtun seem cool, if not inimical, to the choice of education and the inevitable attendant social change. It also seems that the Hazara, Tajiks and other northerners seem more welcoming and flexible, though my data there is damned thin and all hearsay.
So is there an intermediate plan that reflects this? A de facto Pashtostan, a “South East Frontier Province” nominally within A’stan, but in fact home ruled – under the understanding that hosting jihadis or exporting terror will draw repeat visits from SF or the Reaper. (The implications for Pakistan are – ummm – interesting.) Meanwhile, try to build more sustainable and secure federated statelets out of the northerners (and declare victory).
Credible, or a load of hooey?
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for a proposal on how we apply the Thai or Philippine lessons to, say, Yemen, Somalia and Eritrea.
We’ve gotten a start on Somalia/Eritrea with AFRICOM. It’s advancing the basic concept of whole-of-government partnership with their neighbors.
One thing that then-MG Lynch was good at in Iraq was deploying aid to a village as a way of motivating neighboring villages. We can probably deploy that methodology on a national level, too, if we deploy a diplomatic strategy. You have to make the effects strong enough to motivate people to want them; but then also reach out and let them know what you’d want in return for helping them.
That’s a ten-year model, but it’s not a bad one. We need to start by letting them see what good we can do in their neighbor’s yard. Then, we reach out and let them know that we’d be willing to consider helping them too; and we’d be happy to do so in a way that respects their sovereignty. We just want a few things in return….
We’d have to pick things they could do, which may not be much at first. Yet doing those things establishes a basis for further help. In providing that help, we also increase their capacity; and then we ask for larger effects, using that increased capacity, to justify our next project.
It’s slow, but it’s not a bad approach. Bombing a place like Somalia doesn’t accomplish much — there’s not much to break in the first place, and they’re already accustomed to doing without. By the same token, small and inexpensive projects have the capacity to have major effects, because their expectations are so low.
I have zero issue with “Grim’s strategic partnerships”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/strategy_on_a_budget_-_guest_post.html#c23 model in #23. Kaplan’s books “Imperial Grunts”:http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Grunts-American-Military-Philippines/dp/1400034574/ref=pd_sim_b_1 and “Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts”:http://www.amazon.com/Hog-Pilots-Blue-Water-Grunts/dp/1400061334 both capture how that works. It should definitely be part of the spectrum of American capabilities, and be an ongoing thing.
The question arises: what happens when that isn’t an option? It won’t always be. Obvious limitations are exemplified by Iran, Somalia, and possibly Afghanistan. A hostile government has no partnership option. A non-existent government may have no partnership option that is viable (Somalia), or no option that is affordable (Afghanistan a question mark).
In those cases, we’re talking about a different kind of military force, and force structure, and how it should be used. I hear Mark, and “Bernard Finel’s AFJ article,”:http://www.afji.com/2010/02/4387134 saing “in those cases, avoid counter-insurgency, and focus on consequences.”
I think that’s usually – but not always – a better answer than the “invasion and Counter-Insurgency” model. Even as I share the view that Finel is over-optimistic concerning regime change.
Grim writes:
bq. “Both regime change and deterrence have their place. Neither is always the right answer.”
A truism. Plus, I hear Grim adding “strategic partnerships” (can be a good response), and Mark adding “punitive expeditions” (can be a good response).
The crux of the issue isn’t about the methods various parties want to add, though there is an implicit debate in this argument about the costs of “full-blown invasion and counter-insurgency” as the USA practices it. But the additional options I’m seeing here are all well below that threshold, and so I’m not seeing them attract the same caveats.
The exception is Afghanistan, which prompts a lot of head-scratching all around. I think that’s best a separate, special case discussion because it’s good at illustrating the limits of all models presented here.
With those issues out of the way, the remaining debate I see is about the option I’m hearing Grim advocate for _removing_ from the table, i.e. punitive expeditions.
Which drew my response in #20. That response does not remove alternatives like strategic partnerships, though larger dynamics I describe in #20 will act on partnerships, too.
I’m not even trying to take ‘punitive expeditions’ off the table. 🙂 I just want to be sure we honor the concept of noncombatant immunity when we conduct them. If you want to conduct those raids against police stations and military bases, the presidential-dictatorial palace and his tent in the desert, go right ahead. The only thing is — if you happen to kill him? — we want the good people of the country to have a fair shot at setting things right in his absence.
Who knows? They might become partners.
Ok, that refines the discussion. The question is whether punitive expeditions should follow “North Vietnam target restriction rules.” No dams, no power plants, etc.
I believe that, for all the reasons noted in #20, that idea is untenable. Experience, in North Vietnam and since, also teaches us that it’s a bad idea. In practice, it always ends up being more restrictive, and providing de facto immunity to clear military targets. As well as encouraging human shield tactics, and hence greater civilian casualties.
The only restriction I’d favor is not carpet bombing population centers as part of anything less than a full war of national survival. But power, dams, ports, any form of infrastructure would be fair game, and civilians in or too near those places would be at risk, per announcements beforehand. This allows strikes with maximum effect, and also removes all human shield incentives. It is up to the regime in question to keep people away from such areas, if it wishes, not up to us.
Now, I would be inclined to go after the military/security targets first anyway – if they exist. That would make anything that follows both safer, and more effective if unrest follows. And, there’s always a chance that it makes further efforts unnecessary.
As I’ve noted before, in the end, I think the globally understood policy, from a set of actors that go far beyond just the USA, will be something very much like that anyway.
Well, human shield incentives! I’ve written about that at length, and I think you know my position on the virtue of being willing to kill children while waging war. That willingness (as examined at length through “several hundred comments”:http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/08/on_the_virtues_.html at BLACKFIVE) is rooted in the principles of noncombatant immunity and the doctrine of double effect. It wasn’t based on the idea that they were legitimate targets, but that we could minimize the use of them as shields by not allowing ourselves to be so deterred. That doesn’t really speak to cases where they aren’t being used as shields, but merely happen to ‘live near a dam.’
You’re effectively proposing to dump both principles, even as _principles_ — to say, in effect, that we don’t care, even in theory, how many thousands or millions of people we hurt in making a point with a rogue state.
Setting aside the moral issue entirely, that seems problematic strategically: all those partnerships we were discussing will now have to be based on pure fear and material advantage. There will be no more “El Salvadors”:http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/10/if-i-had-to-com.html who come to fight with us out of respect and fellow-feeling. (When I was in Iraq in 2007, while Joe Biden and his compatriots were working on their ‘great success,’ the El Sals were holding down at FOB Delta in Al Kut, dealing with al Sadr’s boys). The partnership we have with Thailand, which we were talking about highly, was also based on such feeling: following the fall of Cambodia, after the end of the Vietnam War, they invited us because they wanted a hedge against Communism’s excesses.
RP-type partnerships, which are based initially on conquest, would still be possible. However, since you’re setting aside conquest as something you’d like to do very often in the future, we’d have a limited number of options for new partnerships along the RP line.
I am thinking of how we might have employed this principle against Saddam, instead of invading Iraq. It’s not hard to pick the right dam to target: the dam at Mosul. It’s likely to fail anyway; a good bomb would just hurry it along. That would have destroyed the city of Mosul and put parts of Baghdad under 15 feet of water; open source estimates on its failure put the likely death toll around 500,000.
However, it would also have removed one of Saddam’s major electrical sources, and caused a massive refugee crisis that he’d have to deploy forces to deal with. It would have hampered his capital city intensely to have parts of it turned into Venice. It would have had shockwave effects throughout the agriculture sector of Iraq, which would have led to crop failure (due to lack of irrigation water) and a major spike in food prices.
Now, knowing everything we know about Saddam, do you think that our threatening to blow the dam would have deterred him? I think we’d have to say “No,” given that he wasn’t deterred by a full-scale invasion; and also given that he may have had plans to blow the dam himself, though the PUK immediately secured it so that no harm could come to it.
Or, perhaps you mean to say ‘smaller dams’ are what you mean; things that wouldn’t cause destruction on such a scale. If that’s what you mean, there are two questions instead of one:
1) If the threat of the destruction of the Mosul Dam wouldn’t have deterred him, why would Saddam be deterred by a lesser threat?
2) Aren’t you now heading back to the doctrine of double effect? “I wouldn’t blow the Mosul dam, but only a smaller dam with less harm,” is the language of protecting civilians — letting them serve as ‘human shields,’ so to speak. That means you’re starting to think about proportionality, which is one of the key tests of the doctrine.
If you’re going to apply that kind of a test, why should we prefer your version of it to — say — St. Thomas Aquinas’? “Pragmatism” isn’t the answer, from (1), above: we’re already admitting that we’re adopting a less-pragmatic target to avoid civilian harm.
I don’t mean that personally — you’re a smart guy, and I’ve always respected your work. But why should we think any modern thinker — you, me, or anyone else — is going to substantially better the standard that arose from a thousand years of work by saints and knights and soldiers, from the early Middle Ages until the Geneva Conventions filed after the Second World War?
It is an axiom of mine to trust the wisdom of these men to inform my actions. Of course the choice has to be ours, and no two cases are just alike. Still, if I am looking for _principles_, it is likely to be to them that I look.
_”to say, in effect, that we don’t care, even in theory, how many thousands or millions of people we hurt in making a point with a rogue state.”_
Nobody is saying that. There are always going to be judgment calls in war. How many innocent civilians were killed trying to get Hussein by going after his palaces? Was the justified? You can’t conduct war with zero tolerance for collateral damage just as you won’t conduct war with zero consideration of collateral damage. Hence, somebody will always have to decide if the cost is worth it and that a terrible decision to have to make. But its inevitable.
_”all those partnerships we were discussing will now have to be based on pure fear and material advantage.”_
Ultimately all partnerships in international relations are based on fear and/or material advantage. Anything else we’ve convinced ourselves of with our niceties is a facade, one that has been shown to be hollow any number of times when the actual rubber meets the road. Nations have interests. Full stop. Its small wonder that smaller nations happen to have interests that line up with the principle of keeping stronger nations idle, by whatever argument necessary.
_”There will be no more El Salvadors who come to fight with us out of respect and fellow-feeling.”_
El Salvador is in Iraq out of the good feelings in their heart? That’s naive. El Salvador has a chance to demonstrate loyalty as an ally, a wise move for a nation that receives much US aid. Could something we do cause them to rethink that math? Of course, but it won’t be the warmth of their hearts, it will be cold calculus. As it should be.
_”I am thinking of how we might have employed this principle against Saddam, instead of invading Iraq”_
… _”That would have destroyed the city of Mosul and put parts of Baghdad under 15 feet of water; open source estimates on its failure put the likely death toll around 500,000.”_
I’d deem it highly unlikely that any of those repercussions would have unseated Saddam given everything else he survived. Instantly enough reason to abandon the thought.
_”1) If the threat of the destruction of the Mosul Dam wouldn’t have deterred him, why would Saddam be deterred by a lesser threat?”_
The threat to the Mosul Dam wouldn’t have shaken Saddams regime as much as you suppose, I think, because it would have indeed galvanized the populace. Destroying Saddam’s oil fields, on the other hand, could well have deterred him.
Regardless Saddam might have been an outlier because he seemed to have indeed _been_ deterred but failed to convince the US and our allies that this was so. Saddam did some very poor calculating, but part of that _was_ our fault exactly because of the binary response to war we’d displayed- either half hearted attacks on his personal playthings (as Grim seems to suggest as wise), or full scale invasion. I’d maintain that had we convinced Saddam we would keep him out of the oil business indefinitely unless he played ball, we might have struck a deal. I’m not saying that was the way to go, but it likely would have worked.
Grim, I don’t really understand what you are suggesting. How do you confine a target list to one that doesn’t hurt (much less kill) civilians? How is that not tantamount to saying you won’t go to war at all? If you agree that _any_ targets, even simple assassinations even if entirely successful will kill civilians, aren’t we just playing a game of how many is acceptable? Which is fine, because that’s real life. But i think the lines you are drawing are arbitrary. If taking down a power plant _does_ have a chance to short circuit a full blown war, isn’t it in fact morally preferable? I think your distinction is untenable.
_The threat to the Mosul Dam wouldn’t have shaken Saddams regime as much as you suppose, I think, because it would have indeed galvanized the populace. Destroying Saddam’s oil fields, on the other hand, could well have deterred him._
I want to explore this further- there is a large difference between a threat that would seek to topple a regime, and one that seeks to _inflict pain_ on the regime. I think the former may be less effective than the latter if our goal is compliance over regime chance, as I’ve posited is a good idea in general.
In other words, threatening to bomb the dam not only has to be credible (which is wouldn’t be given our historic respect of innocent lives) but also leave the enemy with sufficient outs to justify cutting a deal. For example if you threaten to nuke a nation for every relatively small infraction, it loses its power fairly quickly unless you execute it. Pretty soon its revealed as an empty threat, because its all or nothing. Threatening something like oil fields, on the other hand, is something you can easily demonstrate that simply hurts the regime without forcing them to choose to go ‘all in’ or not. They can back down and cut a deal. Making an overarching threat is almost certain to invoke overarching demands (ie- step down and leave the country), whereas making smaller threats allows for more easily met demands.
I’m not sure what you think I’m suggesting, since you appear to believe I hold that we ought to pursue penny-ante targets only. I supported the war in Iraq, both philosophically and materially. I think there may be cases, in the future, where actual invasions and wars may be called for: it’s not me that’s arguing we should take that off the table.
The only thing I’d like to take off the table is _war against civilians_. Everything else in the gamut is fine with me, from assassination of political leaders to fomenting insurgencies to outright invasion, and from the destruction of military targets at any level to the use of strategic weapons, including nuclear weapons, in certain cases.
Armed Liberal used to quote John Boyd’s “work”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/a_path_toward_democracy_and_information_warfighting.html that included this warning:
_Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*_
_*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides._
You say it is naieve to believe that the El Sals were there in any part for fellow-feeling; nations, you say, have only interests.
Napoleon said that the moral is to the physical as three to one; some have said the most important fact of the 20th century was that the United Kingdom and America both spoke English. We might have sided with Germany in the first world war, at least; why didn’t we? Chiefly because of fellow-feeling and felt history; and that determined the course of the first world war, and therefore the fact of the second world war; and the course of that war also.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the moral sense in war. It is more powerful than you believe.
_Grim, I don’t really understand what you are suggesting. How do you confine a target list to one that doesn’t hurt (much less kill) civilians?_
That’s not at all what I am saying. What I am saying is that the laws of war, including the doctrine of double effect, have to apply. What I am saying is that hurting/killing civilians can neither be you _end_, nor the _means to your end_.
Furthermore, you must not endanger them in a way that is disproportionate to the good you expect to achieve.
So, if I bomb Mosul’s dam, destroy Mosul, flood Baghdad, etc., was killing civilians my _end_? No: my end was trying to force Saddam to do something I wanted.
Is it the _means to my end_? No, and we can test that: if by miracle all the civilians survive, I’ll be perfectly satisfied. If it had been a necessary means to my end, I couldn’t be happy with the result.
Is it _proportionate_ to the good to be achieved?
Well, you seem to think it might be, if it could avoid a war. That means either that Saddam would have to be deterrable, or that the destruction of the dam would have to be sufficient to drive him to do what we want.
We seem to agree that the first is not the case; you don’t believe the second is the case either. Therefore, while it might pass the discrimination test, it doesn’t pass the proportionality test.
You mention ‘galvanizing the populace,’ by the way, which is nothing but a moral effect on warfare. Nations have interests, yes; but people do not have to serve their nation’s interest. They can resist, refuse to help, even try to overthrow their government. Our allies are this way: will they support us if it is against the feeling of their people?
No; one of the chief interests of nations is internal stability. As we saw with the case of Spain, where the moral is not present, the nation topples at the first blow. The moral feeling of the people is critical to the choices of the nation, whatever its other interests may be. This is especially true in democracies, though even the harshest dictatorship has to give careful attention to trying to manipulate the moral feeling of the people.
_”The only thing I’d like to take off the table is war against civilians.”_
I don’t think anybody is advocating that- but regardless, are you making a moral or a pragmatic argument, or both? If moral, how do you reconcile the fact that a conventional war will produce orders of magnitude more death and suffering than, say, bombing a duel-use power plant? And what about traditional weapons like embargos that are certain to harm the populace- perhaps even more than the regime? Did you support the embargo on Iraq, even given the supposed millions of Iraqi children suffering and dying?
Now if you are making a pragmatic argument, we are basically on the same page, we may just differ in our opinion of cause and effect.
You talk about morale, quite rightly, but traditionally a lot of wars have ended because the morale of the people to resist was broken. The American Civil War and both World Wars are good examples where ultimately cutting off of supplies and resources led materially to a collapse of resistance. We bombed the hell out of Germany, famously, but we also starved them out twice.
Now i’m not saying this is a model for every conflict, but the premise is undeniable. Even the most hated regimes ultimately have a power base and that power base is people. I think we’ve demonstrated pretty conclusively that even hated regimes can have tremendous resilience, _until you hack away their underlying supports._
I’m still not sure if we’re talking about effectiveness or morality. I don’t think the morality issue is tenable- nearly anything short of genocide is better for civilians than conventional warfare, certainly in the short term. And I’m arguing we can be _more_ effective (certainly cost effective) by going after the underpinnings of a regime to either compel compliance in resilient regimes or perhaps topple others. Obviously some targets just don’t make sense, morally or pragmatically, but there are plenty of others to choose from.
We can’t send marines to drag every dictator that threatens our security out of a rat hole. We can dump enough ordinance on what he considers important to make him and others like him rethink his cost/benefit of crossing us, and we can do it cheap and inexpensive in money and lives (ours and theirs). Thats a pretty damn good deal in my opinion.
The moral argument includes the pragmatic argument. Always, when talking about war, you have to apply a pragmatic test. You can’t make moral arguments about war without one.
If there is no chance that you can win a war, you cannot be justified in waging one (even if you are totally in the right). The harm you will cause necessarily will be greater than the good you can do, since there’s no hope of victory. By the same token, if a strategy cannot succeed, it can’t be moral no matter how many other tests it passes. I would not be justified in proposing a letter-writing campaign as my strategy for resisting the Nazis, for example, because it would have no chance of succeeding at preventing the evil they were planning to work.
So, any argument about how we wage war has to have a pragmatic element. It’s possible to dispense with the moral element (though not wise, per Napoleon); but you can’t dispense with the pragmatic part.
Now, I’m also confused by what you say. You’re not suggesting that we wage war on civilian populations? What, then, did you mean by this?
_We can reliably and nearly instantly reduce a belligerent nation’s ability to provide for the basic needs of its people by destroying power, infrastructure, communications, and ultimately natural resource production._
Destroying — not a nation’s military, security apparatus, research facilities, etc. — a nation’s “ability to provide for the basic needs of its people” is waging war on civilians.
It’s not permitted because it fails the test above. Is it your _end_? No; your end is making Saddam (or whoever) bend to your will.
Is it the _means to your end_? Yes, and we can test it: if you drop your bombs and fail to destroy nation’s “ability to provide for the basic needs of its people,” your mission has failed. Unlike in the case where — by miracle — no one drowns when the Mosul damn fails, it’s not possible for the harm to the civilians be avoided and still achieve success as you have defined it.
So, it’s indiscriminate (in the language of war). And it’s also distinct from the case of “dual use” facilities, which can sometimes be justified using the test, and under Art. 52(2) of the part of the Conventions I cited.
Now, there are cases when we have done truly horrible things, like Sherman’s March, and cases when we have planned to do even worse (Mutually Assured Destruction). Sometimes these are acceptable actions.
Those cases are about the ‘strategies must have a chance to succeed’ principle. Kuwait violated this principle in its planned defense against Saddam, which was inadequate to the task; and therefore, they ended up being absorbed. They needed a more robust defense.
Such a defense could have been justified, even if it surpassed normal limits. In cases when the nation’s destruction is threatened, anything that might preserve it (provided it has a reasonable chance of success) becomes more permissable.
We’re not talking about those cases here, though. We’re talking about cases ‘like Bosnia,’ or like Iraq, where we have a range of options and are choosing how to apply force. In that kind of war — what the Left likes to call ‘wars of choice’ — you have a much greater responsibility. It’s hardly proper to start a war you don’t have to, and then wage it against the civilian population of the country (‘targeting the nation’s ability to provide for the basic needs of the populace’). The kind of country that does that deserves to have to worry about its citizens changing sides.
_”Destroying — not a nation’s military, security apparatus, research facilities, etc. — a nation’s “ability to provide for the basic needs of its people” is waging war on civilians.”_
I am of the opinion that murdering civilians is making war on civilians. Putting them in the dark and living off the charity of their neighbors because their leadership is vile is not the same thing. Not that I said the _regime’s_ ability to provide for their needs, not that their needs can’t be provided for. It removes a powerful lever arguing for the existence of the regime.
Furthermore every war ultimately does these things. Embargo? Heck, the ability to retain self defense and internal order is one of the fundamental needs of a population, and wars primary focus is traditionally to destroy those tools. Think how the evaporation of the Iraqi military complicated the post-war and ultimately forced our hand in occupation.
_”Is it your end? No; your end is making Saddam (or whoever) bend to your will.”_
In order to do so you need to target what he holds dear, and what he holds most dear is his power, and his power derives from his ability to keep his power base fed and watered. Strip him of those tools and they will tear him apart with their teeth and find somebody else that can get along with the guys with the bombs. Much like the mafia, if the guy can’t earn, what good is he?
_”So, it’s indiscriminate (in the language of war). And it’s also distinct from the case of “dual use” facilities, which can sometimes be justified using the test, and under Art. 52(2) of the part of the Conventions I cited.”_
Would virtually anything we did strategically in WW2 pass that test? Its not indiscriminate, of course not. I’m talking about legitimate strategic targets that since the dawn of time have been legitimate. A regimes center of gravity _cannot_ be held sacred simply because civilians will suffer, that logic leads to pacifism.
_”Those cases are about the ‘strategies must have a chance to succeed’ principle.”_
Ah, but that is a completely subjective measure! Sherman’s contemporaries thought he was mad and doomed to failure. How do you measure a ‘chance to succeed’ definitively without trying? All you are arguing is that the strategy i’m outlining won’t succeed, and hence it shouldn’t be tried. Which should be obvious on any level.
_”It’s hardly proper to start a war you don’t have to, and then wage it against the civilian population of the country (‘targeting the nation’s ability to provide for the basic needs of the populace’).”_
Who the hell is advising starting a war you don’t need to? Of course you shouldn’t ever go to war unless what you are going to war over is considered vital, in the near or far term. Once you make that decision, you’d better pick the best way to end the war quickly and efficiently because in the long term that saves lives.
_”The kind of country that does that deserves to have to worry about its citizens changing sides.”_
A nation that extends wars and becomes entangled in ground operations unnecessarily will see a lot worse. They’ll lose wars, which, if you accept that you only go to war when vital, is unacceptable.
Finally the best way to avoid war is to avoid war, and deterrence allows that. Showing a regime that you know how to hurt them and hence avoiding a war is far better than getting involved in a bloody ground war out of a-historic nicety because you are worried about making civilians too uncomfortable. Its a war! That ain’t gonna happen regardless, so get it over quickly and efficiently or deter it in the first place.
There are actually only a few things we did in WWII that are clear violations. Our strategic bombing of Dresden, etc., was a violation — we did it with the declared intent of “unhousing” the population of Germany, for example. Almost everything we did in the second world war was clearly correct, and targeted not the people of enemy states, but their armies and navies. That is one reason that we were able to manage the pivot we did in Italy.
Essentially every version of “sanctions” fails to be acceptable — not because the harm done to the civilian population is great, as with Saddam’s alleged million deaths under the UN sanctions regime was an obvious fraud — because they have no chance of being effective. We are causing some (small) harm, for no purpose; sanctions don’t work. The regime passes the harm onto the people.
As for who is saying they want wars when they don’t require them, I had thought you were saying so. You said that Bosnia was your model; what was our compelling strategic interest there?
You had said that we should destroy the regime’s ability to provide for the populace; now you say that it’s only “the regime’s” ability to do so that you mean. Yet when I objected, above, that we’d then have to fix the power plant, I was told that we’d have no such obligation. That suggests that you intend not merely to remove the regime’s ability, but any ability.
Perhaps, though, you meant to say that we should use the Bosnian model — but only for wars we can’t avoid. And we should remove the regime’s ability to provide basic services — but then we should step in and provide them. Without, ah, occupation, since that seems to be the main thing you want to avoid.
Or possibly you mean that we should deter regimes from fighting us by being very ready to bomb their civilians into misery, making no effort then to assist them if we then feel called to do so. That, though, doesn’t make sense of your claim that you’re only talking about ‘the regime’s’ ability to provide for them.
You may be in danger of arguing that we should simply punish people who happen to live in rogue states until they do the right thing and overthrow their leadership. If fomenting a revolt is your goal, though, this is hardly the way to do it! You’re leaving any allied group with no argument except misery; and the enemy regime’s attempts to paint them as traitors will be very resonant, because they will in fact be working with enemies of the people. Fomenting revolts is a fine policy to have, but you don’t go about it this way; you go about it by building allies within the populace, not by alienating the populace.
_”Almost everything we did in the second world war was clearly correct, and targeted not the people of enemy states, but their armies and navies._”
Thats absurd. Total blockades on Germany and Japan? Why haven’t you addressed embargos and blockades, probably the most straightforward and ancient example of what i am talking about? Forget Dresden, what about the rest of our strategic bombing campaigns? Attacking everything even tangentially related to the regime or its underpinnings? I need hardly mention Hiroshima AND Nagasaki! You honestly think we hesitated a second to take out electricity production? Fuel production? I’m betting the winter of 45 in Germany wasn’t exactly cheery and warm for the entire populace.
_”That is one reason that we were able to manage the pivot we did in Italy.”_
That’s one reading (and one I hadn’t heard before). I believe the more popular version goes that the Italians didn’t _want_ to see their cities bombed and shelled into cinders- not because they envisioned us being so nice if we had to fight the Italian government up the boot. The idea that they flipped because we were such nice guys is.. novel.
_”We are causing some (small) harm, for no purpose; sanctions don’t work. “_
Sanctions don’t work because they are too limited. Embargos DO work, and have worked, and are incredibly effective because they aren’t limited, because they cause a real pinch. This disproves your point, because a limited policy that only seeks to affect the regime directly is indeed doomed to failure- they can too easily steal from the people. If the people have little to steal the dynamic changes fast.
Your advocating the direct approach, and i’m advocating the indirect.
_”You said that Bosnia was your model; what was our compelling strategic interest there?”_
I said the _execution_ was a good lesson, I never spoke about getting involved and I think that’s pretty clear. You’re putting words in my mouth.
_”making no effort then to assist them if we then feel called to do so.”_
And again putting words in my mouth. That straw man is looking haggard.
_”Fomenting revolts is a fine policy to have, but you don’t go about it this way; you go about it by building allies within the populace, not by alienating the populace.”_
Thats worked remarkably well in NK, Cuba, or Iran. Regardless, again you are misrepresenting me by claiming i would inflict pain on civilians as an end or indiscriminately. My intent is to remove the levers of power of a regime as humanely as possible. Which in warfare is _everybody’s_ goal (that isn’t a butcher). I’m simply being honest about the fact that pain will be inflicted- you’re drawing these illusory distinction that somehow a tank rolling over your house is different than a smart bomb flattening the power station you work at.
The steel embargo on Japan was the proximate cause of Pearl Harbor. If this is your method of avoiding wars, it’s not a very good one: embargoes are acts of war, and license reprisals.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, etc., are all strategic bombing campaigns. The reason I said “Dresden, etc.,” was to include all similar campaigns.
As for what you call a straw man, all I’m doing is trying to understand your position. You’ve made a series of contradictory assertions. You want to deny the regime the power to provide services, but help provide those services, but not in a way that would involve occupation. Except that you have argued that we aren’t obligated to help the population, but can ‘really pinch’ them in order to get our way; and that this will encourage them to revolt, unless it galvanizes them.
No disrespect intended, but that is not a coherent argument. You seem to lack a strategic vision that would move this from state α (enemy state/non-enemy people) to state Φ (non-enemy state/non-enemy people), instead of state Ω (enemy state & enemy people). If all you achieve is the latter, you have indeed “galvanized” the people into support for the state — hardships or not.
What you seem to want to say is “We should be able to use air/naval forces without committing ground forces, and just keep up the pressure until they give us what we want.” That mode of argument used to be called network-centric warfare. As a component of an Air-Land campaign, it works fine; it can weaken and freeze the regime, so that ground forces can shatter its power and very quickly seize control of the collapsing state. However, it also gives rise to the very problems that you cite re: the evaporation of the Iraqi army.
Absent a land component, it doesn’t really work: you need the hammer to go with the anvil. Once you’ve fixed and weakened them, you need the land component to shatter them.
If it was going to work without a ground force component, it would have worked in the Gulf War. Indeed, if we had been willing to follow on by supporting the Shi’a uprising, that might have provided the necessary land component to making that work. Just like in Afghanistan, the local partnership can provide the land component — but you need a land component.
There’s just finally no substitute for boots on the ground. They can be your boots, your allies’ boots, or the boots of your partners within the culture/nation. They’re going to need support, though; they are going to end up having to do the Civil Affairs work and the CMO work and the medical operations, etc., to stabilize the new regime. They’ll need help with that.
If you just walk away, though, you’re guaranteed a bad result. Saddam stayed in power after the Gulf War because we didn’t back the Kurds and the Shi’a. When Charlie Wilson ran a very good ‘foment the insurgency’ campaign in Afghanistan, our later abandonment of the nation led to the formation of the Taliban. We had the opportunity in both cases to avoid the problems we have today; but it was through engagement, not abandonment, that we might have avoided them.
_The steel embargo on Japan was the proximate cause of Pearl Harbor…_
Pardon me; that’s in error. It was our efforts to embargo Japan’s oil supply that was the proximate cause of their invasion of the oil fields in the East Indes; which, as it would bring us into war with them, necessitated their attempt to knock our navy out of the war. The earlier steel embargo was not what brought the war into being, though it did nothing to avoid it.
_”The steel embargo on Japan was the proximate cause of Pearl Harbor. If this is your method of avoiding wars, it’s not a very good one: embargoes are acts of war, and license reprisals.”_
The aggression of the Japanese war machine was the ultimate cause of our entry into WW2. If the alternative was allowing Japan free run of the hemisphere, I suppose we could have done so. If you are insinuating that not embargoing Japan’s oil supply would have ended their imperial ambitions, I think you are dead wrong. Some wars only need an excuse.
And btw American blockade of Japan (particularly via submarines) was a huge part of defeating her. I _still_ haven’t heard your take on embargo and blockade.
_”You want to deny the regime the power to provide services, but help provide those services, but not in a way that would involve occupation.Except that you have argued that we aren’t obligated to help the population, but can ‘really pinch’ them in order to get our way; and that this will encourage them to revolt, unless it galvanizes them.”_
And again, you’re taking a series of statements out of context and claiming they say something they don’t. I’m arguing that threatening the roots of the regime is effective. That means sometimes people will suffer. That is true for _any_ level of warfare. I’m arguing for removing the facade that we can fight a bloodless war, mainly because we can be more effective by doing so. Im mainly arguing that taking a whole host of traditionally obvious targets off the list because it offends the modern sensibilities of a handful of Western nations that have long forgone their own defense is lunatic. More importantly its a fantasy, because the first time those targets are deemed vital they WILL be targeted, by any nation in the world. Condemning the entire Allied strategic bombing campaign may make you feel good 60 years later in the light of peace and prosperity, but the people that executed it didn’t see it that way- _it wasn’t even an issue._ If bombing German ball-bearing plants is beyond the pale, we’re through the looking glass, to mix a metaphor. Its just not realistic given the context of any real war.
_”You seem to lack a strategic vision that would move this from state α (enemy state/non-enemy people) to state Φ (non-enemy state/non-enemy people), instead of state Ω (enemy state & enemy people)._”
True- because as I said to begin with THIS ISN’T THE GOAL. Forcing compliance is the goal. Youre right, if you insist on a _guarantee_ of removing a bad regime (saying nothing for what the next will look like), sending divisions of troops to dig them out of rat holes is the only sure-fire solution. But my entire contention is that this is not a solution we can afford, and hence we can’t afford to base our procurement and defense posture around its implementation! Nor is it necessary! And we don’t even know if it is effective in the long term.
_”If all you achieve is the latter, you have indeed “galvanized” the people into support for the state — hardships or not.”_
No- wiping out civilians can galvanize a populations. I’m not sure why you find a problem differentiating the targeting of civilians en masse with death, and turning their lights off. Conflating these two things is silly.
_What you seem to want to say is “We should be able to use air/naval forces without committing ground forces, and just keep up the pressure until they give us what we want.”_
You are again working in a theory of victory where the bad guys are gone and the American flag is flying. That isn’t what i’m suggesting. Again. Compelling compliance IS entirely possible by threatening interests regimes hold more dear than whatever it is we are demanding. That should be obvious. I’m NOT talking about bombing willy-nilly and hoping for the best. I’m talking about threatening what the regime considering VITAL for its goals and survival, forcing them to cut a deal or sacrifice these things. Chances are it wouldn’t even require a bombing campaign. A single tomahawk aimed at a single oil pipeline (with the threat of many more to come- indefinitely) would force the hand of a regime like Hussein’s.
_”There’s just finally no substitute for boots on the ground.”_
You’re hellbent on the idea of conventional victory. Its a WW2 relic that is not all that common in history. Hell, even WW1 was ended by treaty. Total victory is TOO EXPENSIVE, and that being the case its going to give our enemies the false sense of security that they can jack us around all they like so long as they don’t push us so far that you get your big invasion.
No, I’m not arguing for a ‘conventional victory’ at all. Whether our flag ever flies is of no interest to me; in many cases, like Afghanistan, I think we shouldn’t commit regular combat forces. The ground component is indispensable; but it need not be an American ground component (as in the Shi’a rebellion example).
What I’ve argued here is that it is critical that we develop a way of handling these issues that doesn’t become big enough to rise to the level of public or political interest. The way to do that is with partnerships.
I’m addressing the ‘too expensive’ argument from the perspective of creating partnerships. Those partners can carry a lot of the weight (and expense); ideally, as in the RP, almost all of it, besides a training/support function. The JSOTF we have there is quite sparse and cheap.
The one indispensable condition, though, is that we remain on the side of (at least some part of) the local population. Partnerships become untenable if we actually are enemies of the people.
_True- because as I said to begin with THIS ISN’T THE GOAL. Forcing compliance is the goal._
Your argument on this point has been this:
1) We can pressure enemy regimes to comply with us by targeting what they hold dearest.
2) What they hold most dear of all is their power.
3) Targeting the population’s basic needs will threaten the regime’s ability to hold power.
4) Therefore, the regime will comply if we do enough harm to their population’s ability to sustain their basic needs.
You’re aware — because you have cited them yourself — of the failure of this method in Iraq under the sactions regime; in Cuba; and in North Korea, where basic services have nearly completely failed without the regime becoming one bit more compliant. My understanding of your response is to add an additional condition:
5) If this doesn’t work, go to a full-on embargo.
In other words, “do it harder.”
This hasn’t worked either; and it doesn’t work because we don’t have the power to make it work. In Cuba we haven’t been able to prevent other nations from trading with Castro’s regime; in Iraq the UN and several nations, including allies of ours like France, actively undermined the allegedly punitive sanctions through ‘oil for food’ smuggling; and in North Korea, another great power — China — has such an interest in preventing the DPRK’s rapid collapse that it has arranged a method of supplying them in spite of us. The Soviet Union used to do this all the time as well.
So, embargos against powers with relatively similar strengths to our own lead to war (as with Japan in WWII — you might wish to read “this piece by Pat Buchanan”:http://www.theamericancause.org/patwhydidjapan.htm on the origin of the war, by the way; you and he seem to have much in common). Embargos against weaker powers can be undermined by greater powers that have an interest in the area, or who wish to use the opportunity to compete with us for a stake in the area. Unless we are willing to risk war with those greater powers (whether the Soviet Union, China, or France), they get away with it.
Partnership relations work. They require that we be on the side of the people, if not the government; but they offer long-term benefits, and avoid the high costs you fear in an Iraq-style war. Embargos don’t work; sanctions don’t work; and air/naval power without a land component doesn’t work either.
This would be a good point in the discussion to pause and restate that my disagreement is not meant to imply disrespect; I greatly appreciate the man who is willing to think seriously about the problem set, even if he and I cannot come to any sort of final accord.
_”What I’ve argued here is that it is critical that we develop a way of handling these issues that doesn’t become big enough to rise to the level of public or political interest. The way to do that is with partnerships.”_
I agree with this completely. I think the point I’m talking about is an argument for what happens when all else fails and your coalition isn’t going to produce timely results on a vital problem. In other words the point that here-to-fore would mean full scale war. Prior to that I am open to all manner of international pressure, attack on specific assets (raids), special forces etc.
_”4) Therefore, the regime will comply if we do enough harm to their population’s ability to sustain their basic needs.”_
Not the population in general- the power base. Those are different things. And not the population to destroy them, but to make them rethink the support of their leader because their lives suddenly aren’t so great because of his actions. THis should be combined with propaganda, international pressure, etc. No promise that this will topple the regime, but even the threat will frighten them. And again, i’m not talking about carpet bombing civilian populations. Putting Tikrit in the dark isn’t exactly Dresden.
_”In Cuba we haven’t been able to prevent other nations from trading with Castro’s regime;”_
I’m talking about blockades, which our navy is fully capable of instituting. And again- this is the equivalent of a full blown declared war, not our everyday diplomacy. Not mining Hanoi’s harbor is looked at as one of the mistakes of the war, for instance. If you are concerned about bringing in other powers you better have that conversation _before_ the shooting starts. If they aren’t going to let you blockade the ports how are they going to let you roll tanks into the capital and slap bracelets on the leadership? And if not, why get involved, which is probably the most important and forgotten Vietnam lesson- if you are going to prevent yourself from decisive victory out of fear of the neighbors, what are you doing there? The logical conclusion of a defensive campaign is surrender, as they say.
_”Embargos don’t work; sanctions don’t work; and air/naval power without a land component doesn’t work either. “_
Again- our definition of what we are trying to accomplish is different. All those things can work if done wisely. Of course not buying oil from Iran means nothing if they can sell it to anyone else. But blowing up their pipelines is a different story. Your just arguing that doing things that are ineffective aren’t effective, which is obvious. What i’m suggesting is something far different. And it will be called ruthless, but in fact its far more humane than another Iraq… and to reiterate that’s the distinction i’m making. This isn’t the kind of thing you do just because you can. Its full blown shooting war.
And Grim- I apologize that i’ve gotten heated in this discussion as well. I respect your argument and respect you personally very much. You’re helping focus the debate, which is a good thing.
And to square the circle- if you design your defense doctrine around doing this instead of being ready to invade and potentially occupy, you can radically restructure your defense budget.
This has been a fascinating exchange.
The one place I’ll poke at it a bit is in the – fact, I think – that there’s an assumption at the root of this which is tied to the contemporary Western mores of war. Because we’re morally precluded from ‘killing them all and letting God take his own’ the fundamental nature of war changes (for the far better I think).
The problem is that if we entirely structure our defense along these lines, we risk failure facing an adversary who doesn’t operate in the same framework.
The flip side, of that argument, of course, is that if we build a defense that’s capable of operating outside those norms, we’re going to be continually tempted to use it.
It’s a three-pipe problem…
Marc
We certainly have the ability to wage war that way, Marc; we don’t do it by choice, really. There are good pragmatic reasons for not doing it, as we’ve discussed here; and there are some good moral ones, also.
Yet we could have bombed the Mosul dam; we could have deployed nukes against Saddam’s suspected WMD sites, thus rendering them uninhabitable and making whatever he was doing there immaterial.
That might be a reasonable approach to the Iran problem — the only things arguing against it will be the environmentalists, who will be horrified at the idea of intentional nuclear polution of the earth; and the anti-nuke crowd, which includes some very serious thinkers like the Federation of American Scientists, but whose prejudice against nuclear weapons is categorical.
It certainly wouldn’t run across any objection from me, as it satisfies my test completely. Attacks on weapons production facilities are perfectly OK; and if we attack things we think are weapons production facilities that turn out to be (say) asprin factories, well, morality doesn’t require you to be perfectly correct about the facts.
The problem with ‘turning the lights off in Tikrit’ may be that the lights were never on in Tikrit in any regular fashion; you’d have to ‘press them’ a lot harder than that to make an effect on them. So if you start by saying, “Hey, it’s OK to inconvenience civilian supporters of the government,” you find that inconvenience isn’t enough. Then what?
Imagine, for example, that France or China found a way to shut the lights off where you are — hackers, perhaps. They started doing it regularly, saying through propaganda, “You must force your government to comply with us or we will continue to shut off your power.” Would that press you into their camp, or would it make you hate them enough to defy them at cost?
So now they start bombing your town. The Germans did this to London in WWII; it seems to have only galvanized support.
So eventually they move to fire-bombing cities, like Dresden or Coventry. Well, even Coventry didn’t get it done. Even Dresden didn’t. Even Hiroshima didn’t; it was the combination of Nagasaki with the Soviet army pushing into position to start invading Japan that prompted surrender. No one wanted to surrender to the Soviets.
If we want a war with Iran that doesn’t involve regular forces in large numbers, I think that means we need to develop allies within Iran who can fight. We could use air power to support them, as in the early phases of Afghanistan; give them SF advisors, or CIA ones. We could avoid an Iraq-style situation, but I think we still will need a ground component — even if that component is locally-grown, rather than a coalition of nations or our own forces.