RETHINKING SECURITY

This post isn’t about unmanned aerial systems, cyber threats, or other tech issues but I think the opening paragraph summarizes what drives a lot of my own interests in those areas.

Last week I wrote about a pattern I’ve been seeing, one for which I wanted to create a new term. I’m still working on the terminology issue, but the pattern is basically this:

1) A new technology highlights something about our society (or ourselves) that makes us uncomfortable.
2) We don’t like seeing this Uncomfortable Thing, and would prefer not to confront it.
3) We blame the new technology for causing the Uncomfortable Thing rather than simply making it more visible, because doing so allows us to pretend that the Uncomfortable Thing is unique to practices surrounding the new technology and is not in fact out in the rest of the world (where it absolutely is, just in a less visible way).

Strategy is a field riven with selection bias. Academic audiences are more interested in cases of great strategists/strategies rather than those that failed absymally. Thankfully Infinity Journal is seeking to remedy this problem with a special edition on Strategic Misfortunes. Why is this useful? As A.E. Stahl points out in the introduction, we can learn to avoid strategic misfortunes by studying their bloody history. But studying them is also instrumentally useful for devoloping a better appreciation of strategy. Only by looking at both failures and triumphs in strategy holistically will we get a better understanding of it.

I have an article on the Chinese Civil War in the edition, but there are many useful and interesting pieces by authorities such as Antulio Echevarria, Colin S. Gray, and Gian P. Gentile. Gray’s piece on the Battle of Britain is particularly intriguing to me, as Gray successfully argues that, while German strategic failures were legion the sheer scale of their defeat can only be explained by the strategic acumen of British defense planners and tactical skills of the Royal Air Force.

While such a judgment may seem obvious, or even banal, it speaks to the complexity of analyzing failure. When we write about military campaigns and why they succeeded or failed, what explanations do we privilege? There were many, many problems with the Luftwaffe such as poor intelligence and planning, tactical rigidity, and means-end mismatch in strategic aims. But if one is looking for critical factors that a battle hinges around there is no way to improve on Gray’s assessment:

There were systemic reasons why the Luftwaffe of 1940 performed as it did in the way it did. Dowding was certainly fortunate in his enemy’s incompetence, but that is not to argue that he succeeded because he was lucky. It was true that he was the fortunate command legatee of two decades of high British competence in air defence. It is also true to say, however, that Dowding personally contributed very significantly to the future strength of that air defence by virtue of his enthusiastic endorsement of vital technical developments both before and after he assumed command in July 1936. Of course, the successful defensive performance in 1940 was won by a team of outstanding contributors to Fighter Command’s combat potency, but the overarching and most persuasive explanation for the victory was that the Command benefited from superior strategic leadership for long enough to give it decisive advantages over the Luftwaffe..

No comments, but Clayton Chun’s look at the Battle of Mogadishu has some recurring themes for the observer of post-Cold War US discrete military operations.

First, tactical rigidity and poor operational security:

Surprise was a key element for success in the TFR raids. Unfortunately, the location of TFR, at the airport, allowed many Somali contractors and observers to witness activities that could tip off the SNA on pending operations. A potential lapse in operational security allowed SNA operatives to alert the militia throughout the city. Similarly, the repeated use of templates for planning allowed the Somalis to create countermeasures to the Americans, such as using RPGs as surface-to-air missiles against the helicopters. The reward on Aideed also telegraphed the UN’s intention to widen the conflict. TFR’s arrival confirmed this view to the Somalis, as it was the means to accomplish Aideed’s capture. TFR also used its ability to operate at night to accomplish most of its previous raids. Unfortunately, it had to respond to what the situation dictated, and the October 3 mission was launched in daylight, negating TFR’s ability to surprise the Black Sea residents and the advantages of night operations.

Second, a clear mismatch between political ends and the willingness to devote sufficient means to the task:

The Pentagon’s desire to keep the force in Somalia small, while conducting actual military operations, seemed contradictory. Under UNITAF, the United States contributed two divisions and many support forces to conduct peacekeeping operations. The only American combat forces available in October were TFR and the QRF to raid and strike against one of the most powerful clans in Somalia. Under UNITAF, the Army and Marine Corps units could intimidate the clans. The UNOSOM II forces did not have the same impact as the American UNITAF forces, which conducted continual sweeps and checkpoint security around the city. TFR and the QRF could not provide the same level of presence nor reaction to the SNA as UNITAF. Unless Washington provided overwhelming military force, TFR/QRF operations ran a greater risk of failure.

The above picture depicts a man waving the flag of declared enemies of the United States over US government property on the anniversary of September 11. Some reflections on what the incident tells us about strategy and policy follows. My friend Dan will have a more complete analysis in the morning.

First, Mark Ambinder notes the following:

At the same time, we live in a world where American provocateurs can easily arouse the militancy of Muslim extremists who are more ubiquitous than even I would like to admit, or, at the very least, allow bad people to use extant anti-American sentiment to whip crowds into frenzies.  In either case, innocent people, including Americans, die.

While this is true, we should dig a bit deeper. If the rantings of a preacher most Americans have never heard of are enough to whip up frenzied mobs abroad whose rage can be manipulated by local political figures, the issue here is expressively not Terry Jones. Rather, it is the way we think about our method of influence abroad. The admittedly panicked US Embassy in Cairo reacted to Jones’ provocation by attempting to engage through social media, tweeting that it “firmly reject[ed] by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of other.” This statement’s failure to stand up for free speech has been noted by others, but it is worth noting how the embassy and consulate attacks cast doubt on a cherished American idea about how it will win the wars of the future.

One of the enduring cliches of the post-9/11 era is that the United States is engaged in a “war of ideas” against its adversaries. Victory in such an conflict would be contingent on developing and selling a winning message. Antulio Echevarria has critiqued this idea by noting that the idea of a purely ideational conflict neglected the actual role of physical events in determining the outcome of “wars of ideas.” But another flaw in this idea is that it presumes that the United States and foreign audiences are using the same standards to judge the information competition. Some Americans may consider domestic culture as a enduring strength that will help make foreigners appreciate the United States, pointing to the supposed role of Western popular culture in undermining the Eastern bloc through samizdat bootlegs.

Actual operational analysis of jihadist doctrine has found a remarkably consistent idea among militants that American popular culture constitutes a kind of organized information warfare designed for the purpose of subversion. This viewpoint is actually not limited to Islamist militants. As Timothy L. Thomas has observed, military officers in Russia subscribe to a belief that the West won by waging a “Third World War” by means of popular culture and information to subjugate the Soviet Union. Other military theorists have written similar sentiments about the importance of “public opinion warfare“  and warned of the risks to domestic stability from Western popular culture. The book Occidentalism contains a repository of loathing of Western culture from individuals ranging from 19th century Russians to al-Qaeda. To be fair, Western states have had moments of panic too over what they viewed as information wars against them, but never to the degree often seen abroad.

The implications of these beliefs for US policy is that foreign audiences may be convinced that the US is waging war against them even if the United States government has little to do with the cultural product they find objectionable. To be fair, many of those audiences live in societies with a far different relationship to news, propaganda, and governance than many Americans are accustomed to, as well as have strikingly different attitudes about free speech. And this brings us back to the unfortunate Mr. Jones. If we do live in a globalized world with instant communication, anyone with a Twitter or YouTube account can become a Terry Jones. And they have a right to do so under the Constitution.

Angry mobs were convinced that Jones was part of an insidious American plot to wage war on Islam, despite the fact that the US Embassy in Cairo bent over backwards to assuage their anger and deny a United States government connection. If we subscribe to the idea that American soft power originates from American society, we must reckon with the problem that foreign audiences are already primed to believe that seemingly innocuous aspects of American culture constitute acts of coercion against them—and that any time a crank yells into a microphone we instantly go “off message.”

To play the game of the “war of ideas” as conceived in popular American discussion is to play a game with little appreciable strategic return on investment if it can be instantly undermined every time an American soldier makes a cultural mistake or a village idiot makes a home movie.  That is why the anger at Jones is ultimately misplaced. He is bigot that thrives on attention, for sure. But the US government will always be obligated to protect his right to make a fool out of himself. What is the alternative? Censoring every Jones that comes along? This is not Southeast Asia, where malcontents are suppressed to preserve social harmony, or Europe, where bigots and cranks are prosecuted by the state.

We have already condemned Jones’ actions to little effect. Anger instead should be directed at the criminals who violated diplomatic norms by assaulting the American embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi. Anger should also be reserved for the foreign governments that shirked their sovereign obligations to protect US diplomatic property and personnel. This is not say that we should toss out the entire idea of information operations, public diplomacy, or military information support. Any tool the United States can employ to realize its interests should be used, and IO, PD and MISO all have valuable roles to play as instruments of national power. But we should be realistic about what they can achieve.

And if we are talking about sending the wrong message, the image at the beginning of this post sends one that certainly damages the United States brand in ways that many often underrate. From 1979 to tonight, we have a troublesome habit of allowing rent-a-mobs of armed “students” and “protestors” to gain access and control over US diplomatic facilities. Perhaps the consistent failure to secure these facilities, prevent entry. and exact costs on governments that fail to protect them plays a role in their continued seizure?

I have a new piece at Infinity Journal tackling the question of whether or not we will see the end of war as we know it.

David Ucko has a typically sound piece on Sri Lanka and the political implications of its counterinsurgency campaign a couple years on. However, I am dubious about the emerging idea of the “illiberal peace” as identified by David Lewis and others. Ucko correctly diagnoses the ways in which the Sri Lankan government has resisted the West, and I am not quibbling with his analysis. Rather, I am looking at the larger frame from which we think about liberal vs. illiberal modes of peacebuilding.

The problem is that while Sri Lanka certainly has illiberal politics and ethics, it is not clear how it—or any other state conducting an internal peacebuilding effort—benefits from these politics when trying to tamp down on violence. Second, it does not make sense to ascribe the methods—either in terms of military strategies or postwar policies—as necessarily liberal or illiberal.

First, to Sri Lanka. The government’s policy was that Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity be preserved and the privileging of the Sinhala over the Tamils continue. This political object is, undoubtedly, partially illiberal—but only the ethnic domination implied by restoring the status quo ante can be really classified as totally illiberal. Every state—liberal or otherwise—wants to preserve its territorial integrity and is willing to fight hard to do so. Preserving territorial integrity and preventing the secession of a armed minority can also have, after all, liberal political purposes.

The Sri Lankan strategy used military force to both disarm the enemy and shatter his will to continue fighting. Here is where the problem with the illiberal peace model really begins to intensify. Granted, the Sri Lankans operated against their opponents in the war’s closing offensive without considering even the most basic norms of noncombatant protection and also deliberately targeted noncombatants. But this has been true of their military conduct elsewhere in the war. Deliberate and indirect cruelty to civilians is peripheral to what ended the civil war: the material destruction of the enemy’s means of resisting and the concurrent political choices made by guerrilla leaders that they could not gain their political object because of the new reality force had created. This is basic Clausewitz.

One might also question the analytical problem that this poses for thinking about World War II. If a strategic approach with either deliberate or indirect cruelty as a prominent feature can make a war “illiberal” than what does Hiroshima and Nagasaki mean for the liberal ends pursued by the United States in prosecuting World War II? What does the destruction of the South’s civilian component of making war mean for the liberal end of preserving the Union, ending slavery, and creating a new democracy free of the South’s rural aristocracy? Roosevelt and Truman’s postwar vision of “Four Policemen” keeping the peace throughout the globe and the end of the old colonial order was liberal to the core. But they dropped two atomic bombs to realize it.

Finally, the insight that the Sri Lankan government has relied on coercion for state consolidation is rather banal. State formation in history is coercive. State consolidation involves many sophisticated means of managing and neutering violence and coopting or destroying competing centers of power within a state. Even what we consider to be “liberal” modes of peacebuilding rest on a hard core of coercion, applied by either a central government or its international backers. Finally, Bruce Bueno De Mesquita has also cataloged numerous means of how regimes can govern without achieving the kind of consensus-building, inclusion, and legitimacy often called for in liberal peacebuilding models. The term “legitimacy” also has strikingly different meanings across the world. We should not assume it always means what we want it to mean.

What is undoubtedly illiberal is that the Sri Lankan government has not addressed the grievances of the Tamils. But peace has often been created and maintained throughout history without addressing grievance. Perhaps a more relevant question for the Sri Lankan government is whether its power of coercion and ability to control the organizing capability of the Tamil diaspora is sufficient enough to justify the threat of renewed conflict from those grievances. Such a determination, however, would rest on an intelligence assessment over whether or not those grievances can be practically mobilized and converted into military power. Grievance itself does not equal conflict—it must be instrumentalized by elites who see some hope of achieving a realistic outcome. Anything less is a matter for gendarmerie to mop up.

If the idea of the illiberal peace merely focused on the illiberal politics involved in ventures like the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war—particularly its component of sectarian domination, it would be fine. There would still be a problematic idea that one can put ideological labels on things such as dominance of central governments and territorial integrity of the state—things that liberal and illiberal states both care about. But the conflation of a state’s illiberal political goals and character with its strategic methods is particularly troubling.

What is reflected through these discussions is a growing recognition that the post Cold War peacebuilding model itself has critical flaws. A certain set of peacebuilding norms appealed to Western states that had conveniently forgotten how their own states were formed and ultimately consolidated. Now that a variance in methods has been exposed, there is a temptation to categorize different modes of peacebuilding according to ideological boxes (“liberal and illiberal”) that are themselves incredibly recent in vintage when considered across the multi-millennial spectrum of military history.

Certainly liberalism has a lot to do with whether or not a state is ultimately successful and equitable. Eric X. Li and other apologists for China’s current regime overlook significant flaws that stem precisely from China’s form of government. But when it comes to waging war and consolidating government control easy distinctions between liberalism and illiberalism are difficult to maintain.

At the Atlantic, Michael Vlahos described the video game Modern Warfare 3 as a harbinger of a growing “culture of defeat” fit more for a warrior culture in love with the spectacle of apocalyptic battle than a liberal democracy:

Hence MW3 is no parable of “The Long War” where U.S. soldiers fight for freedom and democracy among the outcast margins of civilization. Instead this is battle to the death with the Mordor of our age, a terrorist coalition lead by Russians that have brought fire and sword to the peoples of the West. New York in ruins, Paris in ruins, Berlin in ruins—yet unlike the ring saga, as our fighters lay waste to endless infestation, they lay waste to our world as well.

I have a different take, although I commend Dr. Vlahos for bringing such thoughtful analysis to a game that I mostly associate with angry, profane 12-year olds yelling at me through their headsets in the multiplayer mode. 

First, MW3 is a poor candidate for the War on Terror cultural zeitgeist. The single-player storyline plays on fears about the fragility of our larger society that are frankly very old. When the terrorist protagonist declares (constantly) that all it takes is the “will of one man” to set the world on fire, the series taps into fears of ideological destruction from within as old as the French Revolution. There is little connected to the War on Terror beyond specific platforms and period-appropriate uniforms and weapons. The tired geopolitical plotlines (“Russian Ultranationalists” with nuclear weapons) are 1990s Steven Segal fare. Finally, as one commenter observed, the single-player campaign is not what most play first-person shooter games for. Focusing on the single-player mode would be like reviewing a movie solely through a detailed analysis of its trailer.

There is, in fact, a “culture of defeat” in American entertainment. And it has little to do with videogames. Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American action and war cinema come with a bunch of embedded cliches, which I’ll bullet point. 

• The government is secretly engaged in a morally transgressive conspiracy that goes up to the highest levels.
  

• The hero is either a morally conflicted agent of the state (or a former one) or a innocent victim of the state that fights back.

• The state’ immorality has caused an agent to “go rogue” and seek retribution.

• The cause for which the hero thinks he’s fighting for is either an outright lie or fraught with moral peril. 

• The hero risks becoming a bad guy in his fight against the villains, or is morally or psychologically polluted by his experience in a lost war.

• The war is a lost cause and a bitter farce.

Now, these tropes are all fairly old too. But they embedded themselves as a cultural reaction to Vietnam, Watergate, and the general sense of malaise and loss of faith in institutions. Even something as dumb as Predator boils down, in the end, to a CIA conspiracy that nearly gets Ah-nuld killed. Lethal Weapon and Rambo introduced the pernicious action movie stereotype of the out-of-control vet crippled by the horrors of war. Apocalypse Now made Vietnam into a kind of grotesque fantasia. These cliches are so widespread that it even has colonized the science fiction universe.

A generation of filmmakers also came of age during that period with pronounced antiwar and antigovernment biases. The Iraq and Afghan wars have seen a stream of movies and television series that reflected these tropes. Perhaps the most blatant mainstream product was Green Zone, a wish fulfillment fantasy in which a buffed-up Matt Damon exposed The Conspiracy Behind It All with the help of a pretty journalist and a bunch of nauseating shakycam action shots. Then there was the critically overrated Hurt Locker, with its portentous Chris Hedges quotes about war being an addictive drug and unrealistically autonomous EOD team. Even 24, an action series most see as jingoistic, reverted to the 1970s paranoid thriller formula of the government, not the terrorists, being the real enemy.

There is your “culture of defeat.” The blunt truth is that a good deal of Hollywood is predisposed towards seeing the worst about the US, its wars, and the people who fight them. The tragic thing about this very typically American formula is that it ascribes American strategic difficulties to deliberate and often conspiratorial moral perfidy rather than poor choices, incompetence, structural problems, or intellectual myopia. It’s, in a sense, hardly different from the kind of narrative that 9/11 Truthers push. These are films for people that somehow think the Iraq War was all about the oil.

It’s ironic that, given the fixation with Vietnam tropes, few filmmakers have ever bothered really to look at just how the US failed in Vietnam. One of the few films to actually do so was Phillip Noyce’s 2002 adaptation of The Quiet American. We can see the perennial American penchant for state-building as war strategy, naive faith in the ability of the US to solve deadly political conflicts through technocracy, and ineffective meddling in others’ domestic politics in microcosm through the character of Brendan Fraser’s aspiring democratizer Alden Pyle. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s certainly better than the vast majority of American Vietnam thrillers. When strategic outcomes have gone south in US history, its usually been the fault of the Alden Pyles rather than the Cigarette-Smoking Man.

Yes, there’s a culture of defeat in American entertainment, but it’s in the cinema. I’ll just play with Modern Warfare 3’s angry gun-toting tweens instead of wasting my time and money at the movie theater.

Douglas Ollivant has a must-read over at Battleland on Little America:

It is an open question whether there is sufficient human capital in Afghanistan to accomplish the reforms that United States policy calls for—particularly given the demand for educated Afghans as a) military translators, b) diplomatic translators, c) drivers/translators for contractors, whether private military or construction, and d) “fixers” for journalists that leaves very few to actually do the work of administering the country.

As they say on the Interwebs, Read The Whole Thing. As Ollivant says, the book (or at least the plentiful excerpts I’ve seen) largely misses the point. Yes, the civilian surge was bungled. Yes, the military, diplomats, and aid elements of national power did not play too well together. These are all failures that should be corrected. But Ollivant writes “[i]t is an open question whether there is sufficient human capital in Afghanistan to accomplish the reforms that United States policy calls for.” The focus should be on policy.

In war, examples can be found of numerous tactical deficiencies, some which of very serious import. Abraham Lincoln, for political reasons, had to give militarily inexperienced political bosses military commissions to lead troops on the battlefield. Air-ground fratricide killed many American soldiers and even a general in the Normandy campaign. A civil-military fracas worse than anything in Afghanistan nearly derailed the Korean War. But in each case, we got the politics, policy, and strategy right—even if it took some time to calibrate those strategies or match them with appropriate tactics and operations.

There have been, for sure, gross failures with the “whole-of-government” approach to warfare in Afghanistan. But there also have been innovations with strategic effect, such as threat finance and collaborative warfare targeting. Had our goals in Afghanistan been more realistic, the failures described in Little America might have only been (like the failures of planning and execution in the Gulf War and Kosovo) only popularly recognizable in retrospect. It is better to “win ugly” than to not win at all.

We have not yet achieved our political object and there remains significant uncertainty over whether the goal will be achieved. We are beginning a process of re-evaluation, and the beginnings of such revisions sadly focus on tiny tactical pieces of the whole. Unlike Gian P. Gentile (who quotes Sun Tzu’s famous aphorism about the “slow road” to victory without tactics) I think strategy without at least “good enough” tactics is impossible. But a reading of Gentile’s op-ed also demonstrates another useful point: bad tactics also can flow from bad policy or strategy.

Peter Munson gets at the wider problem here:

Unless we are ready to take on a neo-colonial or mandatory level of responsibility for governing a foreign land, we will have to accept the Afghan legitimacy of flawed actors.  Actors like Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, Abdul Rahman Jan, and the Karzais are surely unsavory, but we have forgotten the Charles Tilly reading (see also Giustozzi) of the history of western state development in that states arise from warlords and organized crime.  Even in America, politics of our recent past were far more unsavory than we are willing to admit.  Thus, we shouldn’t be so surprised at the lack of success in rooting corruption, for example, with what a friend of mine in Kabul calls the “Anti-Gravity Task Force.”  When you look at the troubled transitions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, is one of the biggest problems with COIN perhaps our misunderstanding of the messy process of building state capacity and institutions to the point at which democracy can have more constructive outcomes?

Munson gets at the real problem. It’s not that Afghanistan is too exotic to fix, or that a “graveyard of empires” exists. Afghanistan’s problems are actually mundane but it has been a very long time since a Western state has dealt with prolonged civil war, entrenched corruption, feudal warlordism, and persistent lethal subversion from a neighboring state. The civilian surge was a set of tactics intended to implement a policy idea:  the key to making Afghanistan stable was to ensure it was at least governed in a “good-enough” fashion. But the United States—with the set of resources realistically available to it at the time—could not realize such a policy aim.

Comparisons are often made to Korea and postwar Germany. But nation-building is much easier when political consensus exists about what kind of order should the nation be built-upon. Alice Hills makes this point in regard to policing: police in post-conflict societies are constructed by order. Police, development aid, etc does not construct order. How does order form in countries like Afghanistan? When one side achieves a preponderance of force. Empirical research on warlordism, like Kimberly Zizk Marten’s work, has teased out the process of when warlordism ends. Outsiders executing civilian surges do not figure much into the process of order-building.

This doesn’t mean that the US shouldn’t have used civilian power or devoted energy to carrying out activities different from warfighting. In my own writing I fear I have sometimes unnecessarily downplayed such elements. Strategic failures also doesn’t excuse failures in the whole of government or mean that the US shouldn’t devote energy towards making all parts of the government work together on the ground in war. But force is the dominant coin of the realm in war precisely because political actors want to dispute the existing political order with violence and subversion. Nations may be built, in short, when no one with a gun feels like he can disrupt the process because he disagrees with the order behind the nation-building.

Outside of regional analysts, I have not seen very much attention at all to the politics of Afghanistan and state formation/consolidation. This—and how it relates to American interests—should be central. Little America should be the beginning rather than the end of the conversation.

(Note: my Abu M post for today touches on similar ground).

At Saturday at Abu M, I completed my trilogy of posts on existential threats.

I have a guest post at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense speaking up in defense of Colin S. Gray’s work on strategy and irregular war.

Unfortunately, I somehow subconsciously managed to mangle both the date of the battle of Cambrai AND the spelling of a certain Canadian military platform. That being said, this is an issue that is unlikely to go away and I think that Dr. Gray has produced some of the best writing to correctly understand how to wage it.