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If We Can Keep It by Chet Richards Editor, Defense and the National Interest
Introduction
In our attempts to deal with the problems of the early 21st century, we have acquired three convictions, akin to religious dogma, that are shaping both our national objectives and how we pursue those objectives. The purpose of this book is to explain why all three are false and so are dangerous. Near the end, I will also offer advice for the administration that will take office in January 2009, not so much for fixing our current problems but for making changes to ensure that we do not find ourselves in situations like Iraq again. Three national myths The first is that “terrorism” poses the most serious threat to our survival and our way of life. In fact, the physical damage that terrorism does is small compared to other threats to our national well-being, and there are means available to reduce it even further. The greatest threat of “terrorism” is the damage we do to ourselves in sincere but misguided attempts to deal with it. The second national misperception is that we still require a military establishment whose cost exceeds not just that of the next most powerful nation or even the next three, but of all the rest of the world, combined. Most of this expense goes into conventional (non-nuclear) forces that are no longer needed or even useful. The reason for this is not that world brotherhood has broken out, as earlier generations of pacifists mistakenly assumed, but that nuclear weapons have made wars between major powers impossible. States that are not nuclear powers, on the other hand, are either U.S. allies or are far too weak to pose any kind of military threat, and our attempts to use military force against non-state opponents, such as the “terrorists” mentioned in the previous paragraph, have not proven particularly successful. The third, and perhaps the most dangerous because it seduces us into thinking that we can make military force into a normal tool of policy, is the notion of counterinsurgency theory. The problem is not that insurgencies cannot be defeated, but that proponents of this theory sometimes fail to distinguish between different meanings of the term “insurgency.” Several observers, recognizing this limitation, have proposed classifications: Biddle (2006) distinguishes between “people’s wars,” in which groups try to overthrow the government, and “communal civil wars,” where groups are fighting to avoid genocide. Metz (2007) classifies insurgencies based upon whether a legitimate government exists or can be created. These are both valuable and help explain why some insurgencies succeed where others do not. The present work, however, is concerned with the specific question of when foreign, particularly U.S., troops could be effective in ending insurgencies. “Fabius Maximus” (2007a) proposed a differentiation of insurgency types that addresses this issue. This book adopts his scheme, incorporating a modification to account for recent observations by van Creveld (2007):
This distinction illuminates the arguments for and against counterinsurgency theory. When people claim that counterinsurgency is feasible, the examples they offer are generally of the first type, and history does show that governments can often defeat insurgencies in their own countries. Problems arise when trying to suppress groups that oppose occupation by foreign troops. If future administrations continue to view military force as a tool of policy, we will again find ourselves in this second type of insurgency. Unfortunately, the historical record suggests that occupations are difficult to maintain because the conditions for applying classical counterinsurgency theory – such as gaining the support of the population – are virtually impossible for an occupier to achieve. Even the use of outside military forces to support an endangered local government is risky and succeeds for the most part in those cases where insurgency is not defeated but avoided (Sullivan, 2007). Chapter IV will examine this problem in great detail. Recommendations The next administration should focus on reclaiming the heritage that made this country great. It should fix the flaws in our national system – in particular, the self-inflicted wounds of the ill-conceived “war on terrorism” – and, where the Department of Defense is concerned, redirect our national resources into uses more productive of our well-being than hardware designed to defeat the Soviet Union. In the specific area of national defense policy, I recommend that the Department of Defense be gradually downsized to roughly the current U.S. Marine Corps plus special operations forces and supporting tactical air. This is more than adequate to deal with any future military threat. Concerning strategic – nuclear – forces, 10,000 weapons are more than we need to preserve the proven doctrine of mutually assured destruction (Blair, 2007a). Some reduction in this arsenal is clearly feasible. Such a reordering of priorities towards our real problems implies a restructuring of the federal government. We should immediately disband the terrorism bureaucracy, particularly the Transportation Security Administration and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security and should review the roles and functions of the other agencies and departments. Over time, as the Defense Department assumes its natural size, as has already happened with most of our European allies (Bacevich, 2005), intelligence will assume a more important function. Although military operations in the future will be rare, it becomes more important than ever that they be perceived by our friends and allies as justified, and when they do occur, they must be rapid, daring, and successful. Achieving this standard requires a step-function improvement in the integration of intelligence, diplomacy, and operations, so it will make sense to consolidate these functions in a single body where the controlling function is intelligence. Implementation Some have suggested that a book like this should include a “roadmap,” a list of steps or “actionable items” that the next Congress and administration could take to bring about my recommendations. It seems reasonable: What do we do when we come in Monday morning? I have not included such a list. For one thing, it would be presumptuous in the extreme for any non-elected person to tell Congress which bills to pass or bureaucrats which regulations to promulgate. Anyone who has ever seen a congressional act in writing knows how complex they are and how they must be balanced among a range of competing interests in order to get passed. Performing these negotiations and writing the bills are what we pay our representatives to do. Perhaps a better reason, however, is that people who know much more about how Washington works than I do have tried offering roadmaps for reform, and the one thing they have in common is that they all quickly became irrelevant. Long-time congressional insider Winslow Wheeler wrote a superb study of pork-barrel politics in 2004 and concluded with a “Twelve-Step Program for Recovering Wastrels.” The impact of his proposals can be gauged from the fact that the most recent emergency act to fund the war in Iraq, passed in May 2007, contained $17 billion for such militarily essential items as a $650 million increase in funding for children’s healthcare and $3 billion for emergency aid to farmers. For the FY 2008 budget itself, Congressional requests for “earmarks” – spending projects that were not submitted by the concerned departments – reached a record of 30,000. Wheeler himself sighed that “Absolutely nothing has changed.” (Solomon & Birnbaum, 2007). This book aims for a more modest goal, to describe and make palatable a direction for national security policy that will not only provide as much security as military forces can – most things that threaten our quality of life, such as traffic accidents, disease, narcotics and the crime that accompanies their distribution and sale, and declining real incomes are not amenable to solutions by military force. To illustrate this direction, I have included some recommendations that should be taken in just that spirit: to illustrate the possibilities and differentiate my direction from the status quo. My model is the famous “Long Telegram” written by a senior American diplomat, George Kennan, in 1946 from his vantage point in Moscow. In it, Kennan made the case that communism suffered from such incurable internal contradictions, that if we could just contain it long enough – not doing anything really stupid in the meantime – it would collapse of its own accord. And so it came to pass. My advice on implementation, then, is conceptually the same as Kennan’s:
Ultimately, implementation can only be done by the American people, and the first thing we must do is stop voting for demagogues – few of whom have served in the military – who puff out their chests, pound the podium, and spit out tough guy slogans. Otherwise, we will elect our democracy right out of existence. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon fate for representative governments, from Rome to Revolutionary France to Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933. A note on “terrorism.” I use the word “terrorism,” faute de mieux. As far as I know, there are no true terrorist groups operating in the world today. These would be organizations in the business of killing civilians, presumably for fun or profit. All so-called terrorist groups have other aims, ranging from crime to national, ethnic, or religious liberation. They all kill people from time to time, but they use the violence to serve their primary purposes. Lumping them all together as “terrorists” is a form of mental laziness, and failure to think clearly about their various purposes will not serve us well. All uniformed military forces, for example, kill civilians, and most wars kill more civilians than military, either accidentally or through famine and disease. Sometimes, though, it is deliberate. The Nazi atrocities to control partisans and guerrillas, and our own bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were attempts to exert influence by killing civilians. Yet we generally do not refer to members of state military organizations as “terrorists.” Finally, I have used a simplified version of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual for citing ideas and information derived from the works of other authors. The APA’s format has the great advantage of eliminating the need for most of the footnotes in a work and is especially appealing to authors who intend to post their ruminations on the Internet. As with all works of this type, readers should assume that all passages not cited, and all errors of fact, induction, and deduction, are my own creation.
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