America's Maginot Line

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There's a symmetry about the White House's approach to intelligence and counterterrorism that is, sad to say, a reflection of the thinking that went into the construction of the Maginot Line. I'm sure that people in the Administration would bristle at the comparison, if for no other reason than I'm comparing them to the French. However, the parallels—the prohibitive costs and the unmanageable risks of a forward defense—are clear.

The French government built the Maginot Line to secure their frontier against the German army in another world war. France's old network of forts, including the famous fortress at Verdun, helped stabilize the front lines in 1914, which after the Battle of the Marne did not change significantly for the rest of the war. You can understand why French leaders thought a new, more expansive string of fortifications would stop the Germans cold the next time they invaded, saving France (and Europe, for that matter) the horrors of another world war.

Of course, we know that the Maginot Line failed, not because of stupidity, but politics. To cover all of France's eastern frontier, the Maginot Line would have to extend across France's border with Belgium, which France had committed to defend from any German invasion. Sealing off the Belgian border would have nullified this promise, signaling instead that the Belgians were on their own. In 1940, the Germans exploited this hole in the Maginot Line, sweeping through Belgium. The Wehrmacht also gained operational surprise by pushing armored and motorized divisions through the supposedly "untankable" Ardennes Forest. Not having defended this sector as fully as they should have, Allied commanders compounded the mistake by throwing forward a joint French-British army north of where the main German thrust lay. Suddenly, the Germans had outflanked France's fortifications in the south, while a substantial number of its defenders were extending themselves in the wrong direction in the north.

The problems of forward defense resurfaced during the Cold War, when NATO faced a similar dilemma in West Germany. Viewed from a purely military perspective, NATO should have deployed its forces for a defense in depth. In this scenario, the front line, which included the border between East and West Germany, would be manned with enough troops to slow the Warsaw Pact assault. Just as critically, other NATO forces would be held in reserve far back from the front line, available to stop any breakthrough the enemy made, and possibly counterattacking when the opportunity arose. Just as the French in 1940 looked at the last war to decide their current strategy, NATO commanders drew cautionary lessons for the defense of Europe from the German blitzkrieg, including the battle for France.

However, NATO had its own political problem that echoed the French dilemma with Belgium.  NATO could not abandon West Germany, which any defense in depth would have effectively done. Warsaw Pact breakthroughs were calculated to be inevitable, so the real battle would be decided after the Soviets and their allies had seized (and undoubtedly decimated) much of West Germany. Fearing what might happen if a West German government used defense in depth as a rationale for declaring neutrality and leaving the alliance (what used to be called "Finlandization"), NATO commanders deployed their troops for a more forward defense.

Ironically, this strategy increased the chance that West Germany would be devastated in the worst fashion possible, if the Warsaw Pact invaded. The enemy still had a high likelihood of breaking through, despite the reinforcement of the front line. Without conventional troops to plug these holes and prevent the encirclement of the first line of defense, NATO would have to contemplate using tactical nuclear weapons against the massive Warsaw Pact formations. Aside from the catastrophic casualties and damage that tactical nuclear weapons themselves would cause, there was a high risk that the Soviets would retaliate in kind, and perhaps even launch pre-emptive attacks at targets elsewhere. The United States and its NATO partners, fearing pre-emption, would themselves have to contemplate pre-emptive attacks on the Soviet Union…You can see where this line of argument is going. To deter the Soviets, the US and its European allies had to make it appear convincing that global Armageddon was the likely result of any conventional invasion. It was a bluff that NATO leaders would have preferred not to make, but the politics of defending West Germany led to this conclusion.

How does this discussion of forward defense relate to the present day? There is a common thread in the Bush Administration's approach to national security: throw as much resources as possible against counterterrorism's front lines. Today's front line don't always exist on a map, but they represent a real commitment of resources to stop any "penetration" of American defenses at its frontiers. In other cases—most notably, Iraq—the Administration has worked to create a geographic front line where it did not exist, and then pour resources into its defense.

The "front-line defense" thinking may be part of the Bush Administration's mania for piles of information, from wiretaps to Google's search archive. While there may be other motives at work, at least some people in the executive branch may be fearful what might happen if they don't have access to all possible information at all times. (They may also be afraid of what happens if a superior catches them not trying to get all information available, even if the information isn't necessarily useful.) However, this strategy is founded on the mistaken idea that more information is better information.

As many, including the 9/11 Commission, have pointed out, the 9/11 hijackers succeeded because no one in a top-level decision-making role pieced together related pieces of information into a coherent whole. The information needed to draw the conclusion that Mohammed Atta and other members of the Al Qaeda cell were plotting to hijack airliners and use them as weapons. More information would not necessarily have helped decision-makers reach that conclusion more certainly or more quickly. In fact, it may easily have made it harder:

• More information means more content to sift for what's useful, or how different facts may be related. Taking the Administration's claim that the secret wiretaps only monitored suspected Al Qaeda members, the amount of information could still easily outstrip the ability of intelligence analysts to make sense of all of it.
• Some "information" may be misleading or just plain wrong, throwing people off the scent. The qualifying adjective suspected, as in suspected Al Qaeda member, indicates that some percentage of the people under surveillance had nothing to do with Al Qaeda at all.
• Raw information, such as a cell phone intercept, needs to be channeled to particular audiences and packaged for them. One of the complaints FBI agents made about the post-9/11 wiretaps was the lack of useful contextual information: who was talking; what they may have been discussing (often in code); and why anyone in the FBI should believe any of it to be important.
• Information gathered illegally or inappropriately may be so tainted that prosecution of terrorist suspects is impossible. Unless we're going to abandon law enforcement as a tool of counterterrorism entirely, this presents a real problem.

In other words, shifting finite resources to expand the collection of information isn't inherently useful, It's the intelligence equivalent of the Maginot Line, a massive investment in defense at the very periphery of potential conflict. In this case, the border is comprised of information.

Shifting the soldiers of the intelligence war—CIA analysts, NSA signal intelligence collectors, Justice Department attorneys—to the front lines makes it harder to detect any "penetration" that may have occurred. Once again, the failure of forward defense in an era of maneuver warfare provides an apt analogy. The German Wehrmacht showed how, once they had punched a hole in their opponents' front line, they could create panic and indecision by rampaging unopposed through the enemy's rear areas. The story was the same in Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and the Soviet Union in 1941: the Germans seemed everywhere all at once; too few troops were rushed where the Wehrmacht was strong, and too many where there were no Germans at all; the Wehrmacht capitalized on this confusion to surround pockets of the enemy and force them to surrender.

Similarly, enough of the "soldiers" responsible for counterterrorism need to be positioned in the "rear area," to prevent confusion and chaos when penetrations actually occur. Intelligence professionals can then alert their colleagues in the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, the State Department, local law enforcement to take immediate action against the right people.

You often hear that the French defeat in 1940 was the result of "last war" thinking. In this view, the French government and army were framing military preparations in terms of World War I, in which the Maginot Line would have been more effective than in an era of highly mobile armor and motorized infantry divisions. This interpretation, however, is almost completely wrong. While some French military and civilian leaders may have suffered from "last war" thinking, the French army was already in the midst of a major reform that embraced the new realities of maneuver warfare.

French military planners knew that the Germans were ahead in their doctrine, organization, training, and equipment for this new style of warfare. Unfortunately, the Battle of France occurred before the French army completed these reforms. French leaders knew that, with or without the Maginot Line, they had to adapt their tactics to better fit the new era of blitzkrieg warfare. They already realized that Maginot Line was not a 100% reliable defense. In all likelihood, the Germans could blow a hole through one or more sections of it, in which case the French army would have to rush to plug these holes before the operationally nimble Wehrmacht could exploit them. Since the Belgian gap was a hole that already existed in the Maginot Line, this weakness forced French military thinkers to solve a problem with their own doctrine and organization that would have  existed anyway. The Belgian gap merely illustrated in the starkest possible terms how important it was to discard obsolete notions, such as seeing the tank primarily an infantry support weapon, and replace them with important innovations, such as using the tank as the new arm of decision. Had these reforms been completed by the German invasion, the Battle of France—which was by no means a sure German victory—could have ended more like the Battle of the Marne.

Similarly, the intelligence battlefield today has a " Belgian gap" in its version of the Maginot Line—and once again, it is the result of politics. The intelligence community has learned to work within limits set by the US Constitution, several decades of executive orders, and various pieces of legislation. During the Cold War, when no one had to verify the existence of WMDs (thousands of them were pointed at us), intelligence professionals learned to work around these restrictions. More than just one life was at stake, or a few thousand—millions could die if the US government missed warnings of an imminent Soviet nuclear attack.

Constraints breed resourcefulness, and such was the case with the intelligence community. In the 1950s, the Red Scare led to all sorts of ridiculous warnings about who might be a Communist agent. In some cases, this hysteria sometimes obscured the work of real spies who were attempting to steal American nuclear secrets. (See the complex history of the Rosenberg case for a good example.) A decade or two later, counterintelligence professionals could focus on who might credibly be a Soviet agent, instead of sifting through unfounded rumors about who might be the Red agent living around the block.

In other words, the US government does not have to discard the legal and administrative restrictions on surveillance to defeat terrorists (which, it's worth remembering, come from both within the United States as well as outside of it).  Some restrictions undoubtedly needed revision. For example, some wiretap restrictions were based on pre-wireless telephone technology, when the only way to listen into a conversation was to physically tap into a phone line. However, being able to tap everyone's cell phone conversations won't save the life of even one person (to cite White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's weak attempt to defend the indefensible wiretaps).Only by keeping a significant number of people off the information-gathering "front line" will we be able to detect and stop another terrorist attack.

Comments

[J.]

I've often thought the Maginot Line analogy also worked for the White House's national biodefense strategy, such that it is. Here we have a tri-fold effort - BioWatch, with detectors in 30 cities, BioShield, trying to buy med countermeasures (which won't be available for 10 years or so), and BioSurveillance, trying to link all the labs - and each one is not sufficiently funded to support a national effort.

Instead of spreading ourselves so thin, if there is a desire for a "national biodefense strategy," maybe the strategy ought to be one of a defense in depth - funding the betterment of the public health infrastructure and working on increased medical surveillance and response. Considering the low probability of the threat and the billions of dollars a national effort costs, it seems like a better alternative.

[No Nym]

I generally like (okay, I really admire your work) your blog, but I have to say your comparison of what is essentially an offensive strategy to a past failed defensive strategy is both misleading and a bit tendentious.

The Maginot Line succeeded brilliantly, in that it was never really attacked. I think Luttwak even made your main point, the perimeter defense is not merely constrained by resources but also politics. It is generally the weakest, operationally, but the smartest, strategically.

That said, I don't see how you can compare shoddy information gathering to any kind of perimeter defense. To my eye, this looks like an elastic defense in the crisis stage: the perimeter is breached and we have lost contact with the (covert) enemy units. Where is the enemy? Where to apply our reserves?

One might argue that a proper homeland defense ought to be in depth, by reinforcing first responders and having ready reaction forces to move in (be it military, LEO, or aid). To an extent I agree this would be a good thing, but any candidate running on the platform that perimeter breaches are inevitable and perimeter defenses are thus a waste of time would lose handily.

What you gain in dispensing with the annoying and ineffectual TSA you lose in electoral credibility.

I also wonder if you disagree with the "lily pad" forward concept generally (since you seem to value minimizing boots on the ground for many reasons, the lily pad saves money and potentially increases mobility), or merely in its current incarnation of using conventional units in a counterinsurgency mode. i.e., if you had infinite dollars and total command authority, what "transformations" would you make to the present force? Divide into conventional heavy/mixed units plus a "colonial" counterinsurgency force, or dispense w/ the conventional forces altogether, or what?

I like your counterinsurgency series, but your invocation of Maginot seems a bit strained.

[Michael J. O'Neill]

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