Arms and influence

Recruitment

IN THE NEWS

So why hasn't the Bush Administration acknowledged the dangerous military overstretch that the Iraq war has created, and step up recruitment efforts? Short of reviving the draft, there are other measures that would ease the strain on the US Army and Marines. Even after giving recruiters aggressive quotas, activating the stop-loss option, and exercising other, less above-board options, the more public efforts to sustain US war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have not even been tried.

During World War II, when the Draft Board enrolled young Americans into mandatory military service, the US government still pushed hard to increase voluntary enlistment. The emotional, often lurid appeals to civic duty in enlistment posters are now famous icons of American history.

In contrast, public appeals for enlistment in the current "Global War on Terror," "The Long War," or whatever we're calling this week, look the same as they did before the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon's TV and magazine ads for recruitment have not changed. The recruitment page from the US Marine Corps web site contains nary a picture of 9/11 or Iraq. (Instead, the Marines have a Flash-based gallery of their most famous campaigns and leaders.)

Clearly, leaders in the White House and Congress are uncomfortable making a public appeal for enlistment. Appealing to the American conscience would highlight the paucity of sacrifices that the wealthy and powerful seem to be making themselves. Worse, it would call into question the political basis of the Iraq war itself. As George III once did, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy, and inexpensive war, and is now unwilling to own up to the harsher realities.

Instead of stirring recruitment posters, the only icon of the post-9/11 war effort is the shopping bag icon that appeared in many store windows in the Christmas 2001 season. If a single picture ever were truly worth a thousand words, that image certainly qualifies.

Where are our legions?

Where are our legions? IN THE NEWS
This article about the highly qualified progress made against Colombian drug traffickers and guerrillas (who are often the same people), despite years of effort and billions of dollars of military aid, quickly made the rounds of the blogs. (Thanks to Steve Taylor at Poliblogger for the original link.) Based on the reactions of fellow bloggers, the Colombian story isn't alarming because the US government failed to choke off the Colombian narcotics pipeline, which has been a national priority ever since Nancy Reagan urged us to say no to drugs. Instead, this news fits a larger, more disturbing pattern: because of the Iraq war, the United States is not able to address other threats. Ultimately, not just the theater strategy of the United States in Latin America and elsewhere is at risk. The entire US grand strategy is at stake.

If you're not convinced, think of the other national security issues that the Bush Administration has been powerless to address, except through characteristic bluster and reluctant diplomacy:

• The Iranian nuclear program.
• The North Korean conventional and unconventional military threat to South Korea.
• The mutation of Al Qaeda into a looser structure (sometimes likened to a franchise, other times to an open source movement), capable of supporting more terrorist operations across a wider range of global targets.
• The vastly expanded global support for Islamist terrorist and guerrilla groups. (In other words, the jihadists aren't just going to Iraq, though it may be the biggest opportunity to kill Americans.)
• The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
• The constant flow of narcotics into the United States.
• The increase of opium production and export from Afghanistan.
• The increasing indebtedness of the United States to the People's Republic of China, which is currently increasing its military capabilities in key areas that give China more influence over world affairs.
• Potential political instability in both Russia and Pakistan, two countries with nuclear weapons and raw feelings of national grievance.
• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which may be on the brink of a civil war between Hamas and other Palestinian factions. The Occupied Territories remain the single biggest grievance in the Arab and Muslim worlds against the West in general and the United States in particular, which has been bench-sitting through the last five years of conflict (or giving the Israelis more latitude than is warranted).
• The well-entrenched leader of Venezuela, the largest oil exporter in Latin America, is clearly working against US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the world oil market.
• Magical technological gains have yet to dispel American dependence on imported oil, at a time when (1) the Saudis have reached peak production, and (2) the US is competing with the growing economies of India and Japan for oil.
• If the avian flu turns out to be a real threat, and not a made-for-TV piece of hysteria, the United States faces the worst pandemic since the WWI-era influenza epidemic.
• The war in Darfur continues with murderous intensity, threatening to inspire other inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian conflicts in Africa.

No doubt I've forgotten a few key items. However, even with an incomplete list, every bullet point strikes the same disquieting chord: the United States is not on top of these situations.

Unipolarity is not omnipotence. It's not even necessarily hegemony, if the single superpower commits serious mistakes. Imperial Rome, the unipolar superpower of its era, faced a similar crisis when it lost three legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The first emperor, Augustus, had crafted a delicately balanced system of frontier defense that depended on having just enough military strength to keep Rome's enemies at bay, and not so many legions in reserve that they might fall under the sway of ambitious Roman politicians, leading to a repeat of Rome's catastrophic civil wars. The massacre in Teutoburg Forest strained Augustus' "just enough" grand strategy to the breaking point, particularly on the German frontier.

Augustus responded quickly, adjusting deployments and rebuilding the lost legions. However, it proved not to be enough. Teutoburg Forest was the 9/11 of first century Rome, a shocking disaster that Romans burned to avenge. While they finally did recover the lost legionary standards, Roman grand strategy grew more expansionist. Defending the frontier was not enough; crossing the frontier to pre-empt threats from the Germans, Gauls, and Parthians became the objective.

While Rome did expand its borders, Augustus failed to prevent another outbreak of civil war. Beyond the acutely troubled period of the "barracks room emperors," Rome through the rest of its history often settled imperial succession through the clash of legions. While Augustus was no Republican, his lighter touch as emperor—often depending on persuasion over edict, maintaining many of the outward forms of the old Republic—gave way to the autocratic methods of his successors. The military backgrounds of future emperors, and the military clashes that "elected" them to imperial office, accelerated the drive towards autocracy.

In the end, Rome survived the threat to its foreign policy, but its domestic policies—the preservation of some vestiges of the Republic, and the prevention of civil war—failed. Today, we stand to lose both our foreign and domestic policy goals. Not only is the Bush Administration ignoring the slow-motion Teutoborg-like disaster that is crippling the US Army, but it is also far too willing to sacrifice legal and Constitutional principles in the name of national security. At least Augustus and his successors secured the frontiers.

Distrust of government

IN THE NEWS
The theft of personal data about 26.5 million US veterans makes the point more eloquently than I did the other day: it's better not have to trust the federal government with private information by keeping it out of the hands of government officials.

The TSA vs. the Horde

IN THE NEWS

I know it's hard to make out what this TSA employee is doing in this picture, so I'll provide a little explanation. I was on my way home from a business trip last week when I got through security, put my shoes and belt back on, turned around, and saw the TSA agent in question sitting a few feet away, absorbed in something he was doing on his laptop.

As it turns out, he was playing World of Warcraft.

I assume he was on break, and the laptop in use was not a government system. (It's tough to install anything on a government computer, since the "image' is usually pretty locked down.) Still, it was a bit of a surprise to see someone from the TSA keeping us safe from trolls and dragons.

Sorry for the bad picture. I snapped it with the camera in my cell phone, so the quality is less than optimal.

Fear God, dread naught.

IN THE NEWS
Lawyers, Guns, and Money has been on a roll lately, and their recent posts posts about the battle of Jutland are no exception. (Click here, here, and here for the first three in this series.)

Aside from being just plain good reading, it's also worth remembering Jutland in light of current events. Two decades after Jutland, this kind of battle was already largely obsolete. By World War II, the submarine and the airplane both made clashes between surface fleets the exception, not the rule. The Kriegsmarine's menacing battleships, such as the Bismarck (pictured here) turned out to be effective raiders on Allied shipping, not instruments of sea control. Even if the Nazis had built a larger surface fleet, the Allies likely would have used submarines and aircraft to hunt them down and kill them long before the German navy could force a Jutland-like decisive battle. That sort of asymmetric escalation would have proved far cheaper, more effective, and more obvious than a tit-for-tat construction of more British and American navy's battleships.

I'm sure you can see where I'm headed with this. It took only 26 years, between the battles of Jutland and Coral Sea (the first naval clash in which the ships never saw each other), to make the dreadnought, the battleship, and their kin obsolete. (Well, not exactly. They still played an important role in supporting amphibious landings at Normandy, Tarawa, and elsewhere.) If US conventional forces were rendered obsolete in most conflicts, such as the counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how long would it take? And would we even recognize the moment of obsolescence when it arrived?

The Bismarck spent a great deal of time in port, including safe havens in the Norwegian fjords, from which it would occasionally sortie for a raid. How different is that picture from conventional American and Iraqi forces, sheltered in their bases, venturing forth only for the occasional raid or patrol?

Government's wicked ways

IN THE NEWS
I noticed, after commenting on Armchair General's escapade with his car insurance, that he had updated his original post. The General feels better that the USAA representative assured him that the extra information the company requested was purely for their own records, and that they wouldn't possibly share private information with the federal government.

Uh, right. Much like the gigantic database of phone calls won't be used to retaliate against reporters and their sources. To quote Peter Cushing's character (the consummate bad bureaucrat, Grand Moff Tarkin) in Star Wars, "You're far too trusting."

I know the General was trying to make the best of a bad situation, but this anecdote illustrates how far Americans have come from their political roots. Clearly, the Bush Administration's MO is, Trust us as much as humanly possible. However, this country was founded on the principle that government is inherently untrustworthy. Even the most well-intentioned policies are subject to abuse.

Rather than use an example you might expect (say, something to do with the NSA's warrantless wiretaps), I'll cite welfare as a good example. Back in the day when conservatives were people who were skeptical about big government, many conservative thinkers, such as William F. Buckley, said that welfare programs were corrosive to the spirit. They had a point: being on welfare meant opening everything about your life—what you owned, who lived with you, what you did with practically every moment of your time—to the scrutiny of a government employee. Where did you get that radio? How did you pay for it? Who is this man living with you? Is he contributing to the rent? How much time did you spend looking for work? Can you verify that you made these job applications? Etc. Naturally, this approach made many welfare recipients resentful of this intrusion, and resistant to the, er, helpful suggestions they received from agents of the federal government. Clearly, these officials were trained and rewarded to be distrustful of their subjects, putting the representatives of the US government immediately at odds with a certain class of American citizens.

If you believe in this sort of critique of welfare, it's hard to see where widespread surveillance is much different. You might say that the professional busybodies who poked and prodded into the lives of welfare recipients were just protecting the taxpayer's investment in social welfare. How different is that from protecting the taxpayer?

James Madison used terms like "wickedness" to describe the realities of human nature that the Constitution needed to take into account. The Framers were well aware of the potential abuses of government, particularly when these abuses could be framed as necessities for public order and national security. The original Articles built a system of shared powers and overlapping responsibilities to make the tyranny of the majority or the dictatorship of a single man impossible. Since they felt they weren't clear enough on a few key points, the Framers added the Bill of Rights, in which the federal government is barred from indefinitely imprisoning criminal suspects, forcibly quartering troops in citizens' homes, and declaring monopoly control of the weapons needed to maintain a "well-regulated militia."

The government might claim exigent reasons for all these abuses. For example, during the Whiskey Rebellion, the government might have thrown suspected rebels into prison until prosecutors could find evidence against them. Government troops might have demanded they be quartered immediately in the homes of local residents, while the wagons containing their tents caught up with them. Officers might have ordered the immediate seizure of all weapons in the area of the rebellion. National leaders might have claimed all these steps were necessary, since the "first new nation" was so new that an uprising might fracture it. To their credit, the first generation of American leaders were confident that they could handle challenges like the Whiskey Rebellion without reverting to British methods, the policies that inspired the American War of Independence in the first place.

If empowering government busybodies in the name of national security is a bad idea, enrolling corporate busybodies in the same campaign is worse. Civil servants are at least accountable to some measure, and their activities can be swiftly regulated or de-funded if things get out of hand. It's inherently harder to monitor people outside of the government, and it's more difficult to police their actions. Just as mercenaries are no substitute for US soldiers, insurance agents and customer service representatives at companies like USAA are no substitute for the FBI.

Even the most self-consciously villainous people will cite good reasons for their villainy. The Framers, whose jaundiced view of human nature recognized this fact of life, built a system of government to keep power out of the hands of accidental or deliberate villains.

The Canadian peril

IN THE NEWS
Remember Jerome Corsi, who helped turn the 2004 presidential election into a debate over how many Purple Hearts John Kerry deserved? Well, he's baaaaaaack, working hard to steer the national discourse yet again into the toilet.

EBO? BFD.

IN THE NEWS
A few days ago, I posted a critique of a thoughtful essay on FX-Based, a blog that is sympathetic to the "effects-based operations" (EBO) school of thought. You can read the rebuttal by Sonny, the author of the original FX-Based post, in the comments section of my response. Let me continue the dialogue here.

[Sonny:] Regarding "Shock and Awe": Is Saddam in power right now? Shock and awe was succesful in meeting its intended effect: depose the Saddam regime. "Shock and awe" was never meant to address the reconstruction and insurgency.

"Shock and awe" didn't depose the Ba'athist regime. In fact, it manifestly failed. Remember the prepatory bombing that was supposed to decapitate the Iraqi leadership? Not only did it miss the intended target, but it also didn't compel the Iraqi military to surrender. In fact, it was a far less impressive display of air power than the weeks of bombing in Operation DESERT STORM that preceded the "ground war."

While this result wasn't surprising at the time, recent revelations make it even more consistent with many observers' expectations. The recent Foreign Affairs article, "Saddam's Delusions," provides some new insights into the people who were supposed to be affected by effects-based operations. Unfortunately, the articles' conclusions point in the opposite direction of what "shock and awe" advocates had claimed. Hussein's regime was already politically fragile. If his generals were unwilling to make a Stalingrad-esque defense of Baghdad, Hussein's time was clearly up--as long as ground forces were poised to achieve that result.

[Sonny:] "But that's not what Duohet, Wolfowitz, and other members of the EBO school have been arguing. Instead, they've claimed that attacks on the strategic foundation of an enemy's warmaking ability can single-handedly win a war."

[Sonny:] Find me a quote by Douhet (or Wolfowitz who I don't think even knows what EBO is) that claims that.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, Duohet is not commercially available in English translation (he was an Italian general between the two world wars). Since I'm not at a university library at the moment, I'll fall back on my copy of the essay, "Voices from the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists", by David MacIsaac, included in Makers of Modern Strategy. To date, I've never heard anyone take issue with this summary--feel free to quote Duohet back at me, if your references contradict this characterization of his ideas.

...Duohet's theory of war broke down into a few key points that might be abbreviated as follows: (1) modern warfare allows for no distinction between combatants and noncombatants; (2) successful offensives by surface forces are no longer possible; (3) the advantages of speed and elevation in the three-dimensional arena of aerial warfare have made it impossible to take defensive measures against an offensive aerial strategy; (4) therefore, a nation must be prepared at the outset to launch massive bombing attacks against the enemy centers of population, government, and industry--hit first and hit hard to shatter enemy civilian morale, leaving the independent government no option but sue for peace; (5) to do this an independent air force armed with long-range bombardment aircraft, maintained in a constant state of readiness, is the primary requirement.

That's exactly the reading of Duohet that informed the "shock and awe" theorists of the Cold War, the government and think tank strategists who looked for ways to win a war with the USSR, the PRC, or other adversaries through strategic nuclear attacks. It's also the sort of approach that, out of desperation, many governments with no other good options hope will work. However, wishes and theories are not the same thing.

[Sonny:] ROLLING THUNDER? Not an EBO.

Au contraire, Operation ROLLING THUNDER was one of the purest applications of Duohet-style EBO in the last 50 years. The Johnson Administration, unwilling to trigger a theater escalation like the one that occurred when US forces invaded North Korea, used strategic bombing in an effort to force the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to make peace with its South Vietnamese and American adversaries. If MacIsaac's summary of Duohet doesn't sound enough like ROLLING THUNDER to you, here's a quote from the Pentagon Papers, in which the US government outlines its rationale behind the strategic bombing of the DRV:

1. We emphasize that our primary target in advocating a reprisal policy is   the improvement of the situation in South Vietnam. Action against the North   is usually urged as a means of affecting the will of Hanoi to direct and support   the VC. We consider this an important but longer-range purpose. The immediate   and critical targets are in the South--in the minds of the South Vietnamese   and in the minds of the Viet Cong cadres...

In other words, ROLLING THUNDER was supposed to strike at the enemy's willingness to continue fighting via the National Liberation Front. Later, the modifications of ROLLING THUNDER--the gradual escalation, the pauses, etc.--were part of a very Duohet-like strategy against the North Vietnamese regime's willingness to sustain its war effort.

[Sonny:]  There is no such thing as "EBO enthusiasts". EBO is not a hobby. Most people who use EBO approaches actually do this for a living.

That's a snide way of trying to deflect criticism by taking issue with a particular choice of words. If I had said "EBO advocates," would you have objected that EBO isn't a political action committee?

[Sonny:] Most of the critics only criticize. Seldom they provide viable alternatives. Most of the time they don't have to. We practicioners, on the other hand, have to come up with solutions every day. EBO is just one of the many toola in our toolkit.

That's an even more snide deflection. If you read this blog (see the "Core Topic" postings to the left for some examples), or many others like it (see the list of blogs to the right), you'll find that many people critical of "shock and awe" and American strategies in Iraq have been taking great pains to propose alternatives. Rather than invent new doctrines, we've been falling back on the battle-tested methods used to defeat terrorists and insurgents. The problem is, people high up in the Administration weren't interested in hearing what has worked before, until long after "shock and awe," "tipping points," and other overheated fantasies devolved into more prosaic, more protracted realities.

Either EBO is some new approach, worthy of its own acronym, or (as Sonny himself seems to say at the end of this post), it's old strategies dressed up in new rhetorical clothing. Either way, EBO isn't worth that much consideration.

[P.S. What exactly is a "methodology," other than one of the several layers of strategy? And what great wisdom does the rather pedestrian quote Sun Tzu  ("You have strengths and weaknesses. These come from your position.") convey, other than re-state the obvious?]

The meaning of the PATRIOT Act

IN THE NEWS
What does the PATRIOT Act mean to you? If you try to refinance your house, in most cases, the amount of paperwork has gone up at least 50%. Apparently, we're more security if Al Qaeda can't purchase condominiums in Sarasota, Florida.

That's the sort of trivial, brainless response to 9/11 that's all to commonplace, but might be relatively innocuous. However, this anecdote from Armchair Generalist is anything but harmless. What does it mean if you can't perform any standard transaction, such as paying off your automobile loan, without having to endure intrusive scrutiny? How many other private organizations than your bank and your phone company are willing to act as de facto arms of the US government's surveillance apparatus?

We've quickly entered a world in which the federal government claims sweeping powers to monitor US citizens, then hands off much of the actual monitoring to private corporations. If you throw in the government's claim that the Justice Department lacks the clearances needed to investigate how this surveillance is being conducted, you have a program with no effective control or accountability. Once you lose people like John Robb, who is about as dedicated to the defeat of terrorists as you can get, you've pretty much lost the core of informed observers who might have suspended disbelief about the effectiveness of these programs.

Denial

IN THE NEWS
Robert at Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted this excellent analysis of the likely Iranian strategy, were there a war between the United States and Iran. Certainly, the Iranian government is likely to fall back on the strategy that was effective in the 1980s: sea denial.

The Iranians seem to be gaming a guerilla at sea approach, focusing on small boat attacks against US warships and neutral shipping. It's pretty unlikely that these could do much damage to a US Navy warship, but they could make life uncomfortable for some of the big tankers. It's unlikely that Iranian attacks could sink one of the supertankers, but they might threaten enough damage to close off, at least temporarily, oil transit by sea in the Gulf.

This is exactly what the Iranians did during the Reagan Administration: keep a credible threat to the supertankers moving through the Persian Gulf. The US Navy might wipe the Iranian navy from the map, and as long as a few light craft survive, the fragile flow of oil through the Gulf would still be at risk.

There's more to high oil prices than this threat, but it weighs heavily on the commodities market. Oil prices stay high, as long as uncertainty is the defining feature of Middle Eastern politics. The Iranian government's demonstrated ability to seize the political and military initiative from the West is generating a great deal of discomfort and uncertainty about Persian Gulf oil supplies. (Of course, the Iraqi insurgency plays its part, too.) Last time, the Iranians were foolish enough to force a confrontation with the US Navy. This time, they might have learned their lesson, keeping a "fleet in being" as yet another trump card to play in their confrontational diplomacy with the West.