How Iran Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Bombed?

Robert Farley has an excellent piece out at World Politics Review on aerial bombardment, the siren song of modern American intervention. Read it in full. The critique is damning, and it applies to a broad spectrum of proposed operations and political affiliations. Importantly though, Farley points out that most of the discussion about military strikes on Iran are occurring in the realm of sheer fantasy:

The Syrian debate echoes a similar conversation that has surrounded Iran for nearly half a decade. The most recent entry in the “Bomb Iran” symphony comes from Matthew Kroenig in Foreign Affairs, who argues that airstrikes are the least-bad option for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. As Colin Kahl points out, Kroenig maintains the exceedingly thin pretense that the United States and Israel could control the ladder of escalation in any war against Iran. While NATO did manage to avoid deploying significant ground forces against the Gadhafi government in Libya, the goal of the intervention escalated from civilian protection to regime change virtually overnight, committing the alliance to a much longer conflict that it had planned. In the absence of an armed, organized, coherent opposition movement in Iran, a similar escalation of objective would almost certainly evoke disaster.

While Max Boot proposes the “sensible” option of simply bombing Iran until something good happens, Jamie Fly takes Kroenig’s argument a step farther and contends that regime change should be the objective of any military campaign. Of course, Fly insists that airpower alone can do the job, without resort to the messiness of invasion and occupation — as if uncoordinated, unarmed Iranian opposition groups will seize power after the destruction of a few police stations and the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. Boot surely understands that there is little difference between his argument and Fly’s. After all, airstrikes can only delay an Iranian nuclear weapon, and probably not by much, unless their objective is to overthrow Iran’s current government. This conundrum would become obvious in the first few days of the air campaign, as a defiant Iranian regime promised revenge against America and its allies, making a campaign of regime change sadly necessary. Given the widespread support for the nuclear program among the opposition Green movement’s leaders, however, even regime change is no guarantee that Iran will renounce its nuclear ambitions.

As Farley points out in his analysis, the enemy gets a vote. Boot, in his column appraising these two futile options, argues that the potential for escalation after US air power could be mitigated by… even more air power? It’s unclear why exactly Iran would choose not to escalate if the only threat is more American air power. Clearly, if Iran chooses to respond, it will respond with assets not particularly vulnerable to air power, such as irregular and covert forces – a capability Iran has been building for decades and has used to kill Americans with a mere fraction of the willpower it would invest should it be the victim of an American attack. Further American strikes would not reduce this capability to safe ore manageable levels, because there is nothing about the structure of the Iranian regime or military or, for that matter, the history of the past half-century of aerially-dominant powers trying to counteract irregular warfare threats to suggest that it would.

Fly and Schmitt acknowledge that there is no reason for the Iranian regime not to retaliate and argue that even more bombing should occur until the deus ex demokratia appears:

Of course, there is no assurance that the Iranian regime would immediately crumble under such an onslaught. But as the cost to the country of the strike and the weakness of the current regime became clear, the door would open for renewed opposition to Iran’s current rulers. It is sometimes said that a strike would lead the population to rally around the regime. In fact, given the unpopularity of the government, it seems more likely that the population would see the regime’s inability to forestall the attacks as evidence that the emperor has no clothes and is leading the country into needlessly desperate straits. If anything, Iranian nationalism and pride would stoke even more anger at the current regime.

Simply being bombed does not make people change their regime. However bad the costs of bombing would be to Iran, it is highly unlikely they could exceed the costs of an eight-year full out land war with Iraq. The Iran-Iraq war was a massive blow to the Iranian economy, killed enormous numbers of Iranians, and continued years after a potential end was possible – because the hawks in the ruling elite thought the Islamic Revolution could be exported by force to Arab Shia. Yet the regime’s grip on power remained.

When air power proponents begin arguing that sustained bombings in weeks or months will be able to accomplish what the trial of massive land armies in years could not, it is time to remember Giulio Douhet. Douhet famously argued that air power, by inflicting heavy costs deep inside of a country, would destroy civilian morale and the government’s grip on power, resulting in demands for surrender. Of course, Douhet was soon proven wrong by World War II and every attempt to unseat a government by the infliction of aerial pain since.

During the Iran-Iraq war, which, unlike a potential US war with Iran, required large numbers of Iranian ground troops, Iran was still able to undertake mass repression of its own people. Nor did Iran have any trouble dealing with armed opposition. Back when the MEK was openly armed, they participated in the July 1988 offensive, in which they – a large, coordinated, armed opposition force  (with foreign close air support) – would attempt to unseat an Iranian government presumably worn down by years of incredibly costly, bloody conflict and a failed attempt to induce Shia revolution in the south. The result was the utter defeat of the MEK and the Iranian regime’s execution of probably around 5,000 prisoners (or possibly twice that, according to some studies) over five months. Of course, many had been critical of Khomeini’s handling of the war, and even more prominent dissent was raised over the decision to mass execute political prisoners. Ayatollah Montazeri, who the clerical elements of the regime preferred as Khomeini’s replacement was dropped from the potential list of successors after his denunciation of the killings. Despite serious disruption in elite support for the regime, it endured, because its coercive powers were intact.

Bombing Iran will not make Iran look weak. Bombing Iran and Iran failing to ruthlessly suppress opposition figures would make Iran look weak. What’s the obvious move for the Iranian regime if the bombs? Start killing the traitors. A scenario where people evaluate their support for the regime based on its air defenses and foreign policy but not its internal security forces is completely ludicrous. The United States cannot bomb away Iran’s ability to suppress its own people. Even in Libya, the success of regime change was dependent on the coherence of Libyan rebel forces, and was locked in stalemate until foreign support, arms, and internal organization forged them into a semblance of efficacy. It should be very obvious at this point that Iran’s internal security forces and armed forces are magnitudes stronger than Libya’s (the IRGC alone is extremely formidable), and its potential armed opposition consists of a largely defanged, ineffectual, and widely hated MEK, Kurdish forces that are relatively weak when compared to those operating in Turkey or Saddam’s Iraq, Jundullah insurgents without serious reach or appeal beyond Balochistan, and a bevy of other minor groups which have, in the past few decades, occasionally mustered a bombing. So long as Iran retains the capability to kill Iranians, and the will to do so, it will not look – or be – weak enough to fall.

This is all the more amusing because Boot previously argued this:

Colby and Long claim air strikes will unite Iranians around their regime. “Large-scale bombing campaigns didn’t break support for North Vietnamese or North Korean regimes, or for the German or Japanese governments during World War II,” they write. “Rather, they hardened support for them.” This may or may not be true. How do we know what the Vietnamese, North Koreans, Germans or Japanese thought about their governments when they had no opportunity to express their sentiments at the ballot box? But even if this is accurate it’s irrelevant. No one is advocating massive bombing of Iran to topple the regime. [It's relevant now, because now an argument he finds at least somewhat compelling argues exactly this]

Yes, you read that correctly. Someone actually wrote that we cannot assess the ability of bombings to produce regime change in autocratic states because their populace did not get a chance to vote and reveal their preferences. Because clearly, the percentage of people that would vote for the regime in an imaginary election is clearly the relevant metric for determining whether or not a regime would fall. Revolutions do not succeed because of an imaginary plebiscite. Revolutions succeed because a regime’s security services’ will, capacity, and capability to inflict repression fails. If people privately thought the regime deserved to fall, or supported ending the war, but in their outward behavior continued to support the regime or acquiesce to its policies, then their anger at the regime does not matter.

We should also note that even people against war do not automatically become willing to overthrow their regime. Certainly being bombed may have made Germans, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, and other people more eager to end the war, but it encouraged magnitudes fewer of them to risk their lives to overthrow a regime they saw as needlessly prolonging the war. Even the July 1944 plot against Hitler was by people who wanted to end the drain on Germany’s strength by concluding peace with the Western Allies, so they could continue the fight against the Soviets.

In other words, short-term limited strikes are unlikely to impose severe enough costs to make Iranians anti-war or anti-regime. Long term massive bombing campaigns such as those proposed by Fly and Schmitt, and suffered by Germans, North Koreans, and North Vietnamese, might make some in the populace more anti-war, but far less likely to change their actual support for the regime, and even less likely to attempt to overthrow it. Even if attempts did emerge, there is no real evidence of a country of Iran’s size and military strength would suffer so much damage from aerial bombardment that it would lose the ability to conduct that most simple task of government – violently dispatching those who would try to overthrow it. In other words, those arguing that airstrikes would undermine support for the regime are almost certainly wrong in the short term, still quite probably wrong in the long term, and, even if they are correct, it’s probably irrelevant because waning enthusiasm does not a successful coup make.

—

There is, of course, the vague counterexample of Serbia, but it should be noted that there was a prior – and quite vigorous – history of opposition to Milosevic in Serbia, and that the trigger for the overthrow was not so much the 1999 Kosovo War but the assassination of opposition figures without an effective broader apparatus of public order control and a mismanaged handling of elections. It’s a far from straightforward conclusion that bombing caused the overthrow of the Serbian regime, as there were a variety of other factors which made a country like Serbia more susceptible to some kind of regime change (considering many other post-Communist states would later have somewhat similar revolts against their own quasi-autocratic and corrupt regimes without the magic regime changing ingredient of NATO bombardment).

Spain and Syria

In a typical column in the slow but steady (and, as far as I can tell now, futile) drumbeat for intervention in Syria, this line stood out to me:

As in the Spanish civil war, when Britain and France preached non-intervention while Hitler and Mussolini sent arms and men to help Franco’s fascists, so the “international community” does nothing in Syria today while Iran and Hezbollah pour in Shia troops to slaughter civilians. Contrary to Syrian state propaganda, Sunni terrorists from al-Qaida are not in Syria to fight back against the regime just yet. But I cannot see them staying out for long.

This analogy very stirring and convincing, except for what the course of European history tells us.

Nick Cohen is hardly the first writer – especially the first writer in support of a foreign intervention – to wave the bloody shirt of the Spanish Civil War as proof of the moral turpitude and geopolitical complaisance of non-interventionism. The late Christopher Hitchens was very fond of this trope, which owed something to Orwell and perhaps something else to his fondness for anti-Stalinist Marxism (and of course Orwell, who, fighting for POUM, was among the truly beleaguered participants who sought both an anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian Spain).

In a conversation with Ronald Radosh, Hitchens outlined the logic of Western (that is, non-Soviet anti-fascist) intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Radosh wrote an article claiming that, in the contest between a Stalinist-dominated Spanish Republican force and Franco’s fascist nationalism, ultimately the victory of Franco’s forces was a triumph of the lesser evil. Firstly, because the Falangistas were a much smaller part of the coalition than the genuine fascists and National Socialists were in the governments of Italy and Germany, Spain’s internal repression was less brutal than the example set by Stalinist or fascist/National Socialist governments. In other words, Radosh made the case that an authoritarian Franco was more bearable than a totalitarian Spanish state drained of its republican content. Naturally most on the left found this argument reprehensible, but and here is the key point – Hitchens agrees that a Stalinist Spain, the Spain that seemed set to emerge after the Soviet Union intervened in the war, would have been a monstrous state.

What he proposed instead was Franco-British intervention, on the side of the true, anti-totalitarian left (a category encompassing not just social democrats, anti-Stalinist Marxists, but anarchists as well). Why? Because it would have been a setback to “fascism”:

Yes, absolutely, by revolutionary war in Spain itself, and, which would have been harder to get, and it may be asking a lot to have both, but also by the democracies realizing they had a common interest in the defeat of fascism and in stopping its spread.

It means that in its military testing ground, Spain, fascism has had a military reverse, a big one. Hitler and Mussolini had both been shown to be weaker than was thought. I don’t think then you’d get the Munich Agreement, or the setup of Czechoslovakia. And the Munich Agreement and the setup of Czechoslovakia is the immediate and necessarily prelude, as Trotsky pointed out, to the Hitler-Stalin pact.

So if fascism had been given a bloody nose and a scorched and singed paw and forced to back out of Spain, then you can’t just assume the rest of history is going to be the same.

Hitchens assumes here that a defeat of fascism in Spain is a serious blow to fascists everywhere – and identifies non-intervention in Spain as the predecessor to the appeasement at Munich. In this assumption he echoes the views of many – Orwell among them – that attach undue material reality to the geopolitical agglomerations each ideological category supposes to represent. However, unpacking  these simplifications reveals a much more unpleasant reality.

But how much would a loss in Spain really have weakened the Axis? The British could bleed Napoleon in Spain because Napoleon chose to devote enormous amounts of blood and treasure to maintaining his grip on the country. Were Germany and Italy necessarily so committed? I think not. Hitler’s grand desires were the overthrow of Britain’s liberal naval empire and the creation of an autarkic, racially-pure European continental fortress (at least in the initial phase of his Tausend Jahre Reich). We already know how willing Hitler was to divert resources for his plans of conquest because we have records of his meeting at Hendaye, in October of 1940.

Spanish participation on the Axis side in World War II would have required not just the diversion of even more troops, equipment, and supplies to North Africa, but it also would have created problems with the management of Vichy France, which had its own qualms with Spanish designs in the region. The negotiations were a massive failure, and when Hitler requested permission to assault the British position at Gibraltar a few months later, Franco again denied him. The British were still too much of a threat to Spain, and Germany would not be able to offer adequate protection. To prove his resolve in the Mediterranean to reassure Spain, Hitler would have actually had to weaken his military power by diverting resources to Iberia – a choice, again, Germany (and beleaguered Italy, too) was unwilling to make.

This gets to the heart of the problem with the logic Hitchens presents for Western intervention in Spain – it is based on manipulating appearances, not realities. Munich did not occur because the West merely appeared weak and Germany appeared strong – the West really was weak. As I wrote in a previous post about the abuse of the Munich analogy, the West was hardly ready for waging an offensive military war against Hitler, nor is it abundantly clear that Hitler would consider the failure of the relatively trivial (compared to the troops being mustered in any of his other operations) forces in Spain to secure victory a dire setback to his plan for conquest.

Leaving aside the actual balance of military capabilities to stand up to Germany in 1938, which I outlined in that post, there is also the issue of whether or not the French and British publics themselves would have been willing to lend enough support for the Republic to let it win – and really, how much should they lend to a civil war, that, however noble, turned out to be no hindrance to the defeat of the Axis powers? There were many pro-nationalist, and especially anti-communist, politicians and members of the public in both France and Britain. The British Ambassador to Spain was pro-Franco. Anthony Eden preferred a nationalist victory to a Republican one. Most of the British political establishment was anti-communist, and France, though its political left – more so than Britain’s – desired support for the Republicans, ultimately worried about opening the ideological rifts in its own country and the rise of the French right.

Far from invigorating the West against the Axis, intervention in the Spanish Civil War would have met domestic opposition both from those ideologically sympathetic to Franco, those incredibly fearful of a pro-Soviet regime in Western Europe and by a major British strategic chokepoint, and from those simply fearful of war. Even a successful intervention could have complicated future efforts to oppose more dangerous Axis threats. Indeed, opposition to intervention could have even led to its outright failure.

Hitchens also assumed that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 could have been avoided (indirectly, from avoiding Munich). But the very plan interventionists in the Spanish Civil War propose could easily have led to a major rift between Paris, London, and Moscow. A Spain of the non-Stalinist left would have required deliberately undermining Moscow’s designs in the country and the purging of its sympathizers from the ranks of the Spanish Republicans. Negotiating the complex politics of intervening in Spain would, at the very least, have severely complicated building domestic Western support for the war, and likely have soured relations between the USSR and the West anyway, in addition to opening the potential of a second Spanish Civil War whereby the anti-Stalinist forces clashed with Stalinist ones.

This long diversion is actually quite relevant to the debates about intervention today. Cohen’s piece trots out tropes we can see in the advocacy Hitchens made, and the advocacy of contemporary pro-intervention intellectuals. Just as Hitchens asserted that only Western intervention on the side of the anti-Stalinist left in Spain could have headed off the ugly choice between Stalinism and Franco, Cohen asserts that only Western intervention can prevent Syria from either becoming a haven for terrorists or remaining under the iron fist of the Assad regime.

The same problems that would make negotiating the complex internal dynamics of the Spanish Republicans a major diplomatic challenge alongside the military challenge of defeating Franco would be noxious to successful intervention in Syria. As the Spanish Civil War demonstrated, preventing a faction you are allied to out of convenience from taking power cannot be ensured without coercion. The pro-Moscow left and Spain, and their Soviet backers, did not ensure their ascendancy within the Republican faction merely by being nice and showing up, it was done with actual purges and show trials.

Additionally, the faction we support may not be quite as amenable to the intervening power’s interests as the interventionists assume it is. While there were undoubtedly members of the left with bona fide democratic commitments in the Spanish Republican ranks, the anti-Stalinist Marxists and anarchist forces may not have been particularly interested in advancing the agenda of Britain and France (and the anarchists, too, could have also run Spain into some other kind of ruin). As Libya demonstrated, the prerogatives of our supported faction will likely change once they have the task of actually running the country, and, less dependent on their foreign backers, they might also be less deferential to their interests. ICC fugitive from justice Omar al-Bashir’s visit to Libya, and Libya’s resistance to pressure to bring him to justice, should surprise nobody. Libya is a sovereign country again, and it is attempting to rebuild regional ties with a major regional player who was also an opponent of Gaddafi.

Furthermore, who’s to say that even in a free Syria, terrorism would not find a foothold anyway? Why would a fledgling Syrian democracy with a fragile governing coalition and a weak grip on the instruments of state power be able to better suppress groups such as al Qaeda and other extremists than Assad’s regime? Al Qaeda banners have flown up in Libya despite the Libyan government’s relatively pro-Western bona fides and democratic outlook. Just as it was far from clear that the Spanish Republicans were worth a war to support, it is far from clear that the Syrian oppositions, or the prospects of post-war Syria, are worth a war to support.

That is because the decision to intervene is not merely a simple moral question about whether or not the would-be enemy is morally noxious and does not deserve to win. Of course Assad was noxious, just as the Falange was, and of course Assad does not deserve to stay in power, just as Franco did not deserve to win. However, these moral questions are hardly sufficient to make the case for intervention. Intervention should be a tool of serving national interests, not an instrument of international political karma. Intervention into a complex civil war, where our preferred faction may succumb to co-belligerents almost (or even more) ideologically opposed to us than our common enemy, can never be a simple referendum on whether or not a given leader is evil.

Ultimately, the Spanish Civil War’s loss was far less a burden on the Allies’ war against the Axis than an intervention in Spain would likely have been. With no guarantee that the factions the Allies preferred would have come into power, and the distinct possibility they would have exchanged one kind of tyranny for another, one can fault their judgments and logic but ultimately not their decision. Far from being proof of a simple conflict where the choice to intervene was obvious, the Spanish Civil War was an extraordinarily complex conflict occurring in the context of a much larger, and much more serious danger of world war for which the Allies were hardly prepared. The situation today is less dire, but the case for Western military intervention in Syria, when the potential outcomes of success are so uncertain, is hardly any more obvious.

Notably, whenever the Spanish Civil War is invoked nowadays, it is to muster foreign state-led intervention. But states cannot merely be moral judges of other states’ activity, indeed, states must moderate their ideological distaste for their sovereign peers with the considerations of pragmatism and the national interest that promote the well-being of their own peoples. Individuals who found their country’s decision abhorrent and were willing to risk their lives, even though the government had determined their lives were not worth risking, went to Spain and fought on their own. Despite the invocation of the Spanish Civil War to justify interventions in Iraq and Syria, nobody I have seen has yet used it to justify or rally volunteer forces to fight against foreign tyranny. However noble these men were, however, Paris and London correctly calculated there was nothing at stake in Spain, nor any conditions of victory certain enough, worth the lives of those who had not already chosen to fight there. If anything, the Spanish Civil War is an example of why a conflict which seemed black-and-white from a distance is far more complex under scrutiny.

Cutting the Knot

I had the good fortune to attend a conference at Quantico in the fall of last year where, among many other fascinating topics, the subject of wicked problems came up. In the discussion that followed, the audience – a plurality, if not majority of which was Marines or former Marines – naturally became engaged in a debate about the nature of counter-insurgency as a wicked problem. The most memorable part of the exchange was when someone claimed counterinsurgency was far too complex to have any kind of straightforward solution. The reply from a Marine was: “We have a straightforward solution, but it’s not one you’d like.”

Adam Elkus, noting the brouhaha which erupted over William F. Owen’s “Killing Your Way to Control,” summarized the key points of Owen’s argument as:

• Victory is produced by combat, and the goal of operating forces should be to break the enemy’s will.
• The rule of law, governance, and other things seen as the goal of COIN are products of control, which requires destroying, deterring, and intimidating the enemy.
• The prize is not the population, but the control the government can gain when the enemy is destroyed.
• An inability to do these things is indicative of a policy or strategy failure.

…

It was not, as commonly thought, a call to exercise Soviet or Chinese-like tactics of “creating a desert and calling it peace” but a basic call for strategic sanity. Contrary to what is sometimes said, war is about “killing your way to victory.” The whole point of maintaining armies, air forces, and navies is to use force to either compel or deter. If you cannot do so, then your policy or the strategy you have employed may be suspect.

The challenge for this strategy, in both tactical and policy terms, is answering the question of who the enemy is. Tactics are a question for another author, let alone another post, but it suffices to say that if you do not have an intelligence apparatus capable of functioning in a non-permissive environment in those moments where popular support has yet to be won – because the enemy’s coercion is a more credible threat to the people than your troops are to the enemy – then you are in for a long and ugly conflict.

In policy terms, though, much of the problem has been with defining the enemy in relation to the ends we seek. When our goal in Afghanistan was creating a democratic, relatively free, pro-US Afghanistan with a monopoly on force, our objectives inevitably gave us a very broad set of enemies – not just al Qaeda, but the reconstituted Taliban, a panoply of other warlords and militias who did not particularly like Kabul or the people running it, criminals feeling left out of the implicitly US-sanctioned going concern the Karzai family was involved in, an ISI seeking to avoid either a pro-Delhi or Pashtun-revanchist government on the other side of the Durand Line, the Haqqani Network and any number of other AQ or ISI fellow-travelers, and ordinary Afghans – some of whom are in the armed forces we’re training – who took issue with the US goals or methods of achieving them. Changing our objectives would certainly alter the emphasis we needed to place on the various recalcitrants in this laundry list.

If the goal was pure CT, we could just focus on killing al Qaeda and their close affiliates. If our goal was to simply have some kind of government and we did not particularly care how they treated their people, as long as they kept AQ out and the lid on Afghanistan on, we could take many other groups off this list. And so on. I won’t pretend to solve the Afghan war here, but to demonstrate that the friend/enemy distinction, and the violent relationship it describes, as a bridge between war and the political.

Joseph Fouche, my Fear Honor and Interest co-blogger, brilliantly described how this dynamic played out in his discussion of Ollivant’s debunking of the “New Orthodoxy” surrounding the Iraq surge (something Adam also comments on in the aforementioned post). The surge did not succeed simply because it protected the population – this is far too reductive. Instead, the surge ultimately capitalized on the Sunni failure to win the Iraqi civil war, at which point cooperation with the United States and the government in Baghdad seemed like a more attractive option. Although there is certainly truth in the argument that AQI overplayed its hand, Ollivant demonstrates the more comprehensive answer is that AQI were dead-enders perpetuating a conflict that was now posing an existential threat to the political viability of the Sunni in Iraq. Similarly, victory in the civil war allowed Maliki to begin a process of internal – and yes, quasi-authoritarian – consolidation that we still see in motion today.

As for the role of the US military, Ollivant points out that the so-called industrial scale killing machine of JSOC, with support from Brigade Combat Teams, also played an important role in targeting the dismantling the absolute enemies – AQI and the most direct pawns and partners of the Iranian Qods Force, while many of the effective forms of civilian protection employed, such as the concrete barriers Coalition forces began erecting everywhere, were not exactly heart-and-mind winners.* I do not think Ollivant does not use “political” in exactly the sense I do in this post, but this quote is nevertheless vital:

However, determining which portion of the insurgency can be acceptably integrated— again, keeping in mind the interests of both the host and intervening nation—is an inherently political decision.

I would go further and argue that, because this question is fundamentally tied up with the purpose of the host government and the intervening state’s objectives, the distinction between friend and enemy is the essence (dare we say, The Concept) of the Political. If your stated enemies cannot be killed without subverting your objectives, then you have likely defined your objectives wrongly or too broadly. In focusing your objectives more narrowly, you also gain clarity about who the main enemy is (and conversely, recognizing your enemy throws light onto your objectives). As Adam said earlier, the inability to identify the enemy towards which we must direct our force is a policy failure. Trying to go around this problem by papering over the gaping void in policy and strategy through aimless and unsustainable attempts to court the populace, engorge the local economy on aid, or creating a fractious coterie of political actors willing to accept becoming rentiers of the US commander as a temporary diversion from killing one another are not policy solutions, but, bereft of the political decision about objectives and the enemy, salves which make the costs of policy failure more bearable (though, as the Decent Interval showed us, perhaps salves which make the most psychologically painful political decision bearable – the one that says we have no enemies worth dying to defeat, and ends US involvement in the war entirely).

That, in a roundabout way, brings me to the discussion of the new Defense Strategic Guidance, something I discussed even more tangentially in the last post (yes, this is me being  focused. Well, for a blog). Jason Fritz has some interesting thoughts up at Ink Spots about limited objectives in the age of austerity. I agree, of course, with his overall point – the attrition of war revealed the political truth that the United States cannot sustain the military efforts required to make the regime-change-and-rebuild model of war-making standard operating procedure. The United States will no longer able to go around refashioning governments in its own image. This is not a bad thing, and it is not really necessary for fighting insurgency.

However, I am not sure I agree with Fritz and Dr. Slaughter, who he approvingly cites, when they speak of the end of victory. While I agree that for too long the American frame of reference for what victory means has been not just the total destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, but the overthrow of their government and the remaking of their political order. The definition of victory is a function of the policy aims set by civilians. If our definition of victory is too expansive, it is entirely the fault of policymakers, either for vaguely or wrongly identifying political aims suited to the interests and capacities of the United States. Fritz identifies the first Gulf War as a case of limited war – I agree. But it does not jibe with the 21st century vision of warfare Slaughter offers, in which the United States will seek to influence rather than conquer. The first Gulf War was very much a “twentieth century war.” It was fought with twentieth century equipment for the control of territory. The US victory conditions were to liberate Kuwait and to destroy Baghdad’s offensive military capacity. The United States succeeded, not through influencing Iraq but by killing its soldiers, seizing territory, and breaking the will of its leadership. That was victory – the problem came when the United States began cumulatively and in some cases retroactively piling on additional victory conditions that were irrelevant to the original aims of the war – the protection of Iraqi civilians, the cease of Iraq’s WMD programs, and finally, by 1998, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government was enshrined as a matter of US policy.

If the United States were truly embracing limited war, we would be moving back to the objectives of 18th and 19th century great powers as much as leaping into those of the 21st. After the decline of Hapsburgs seeking universal monarchy and before the rise of revolutionaries and Napoleon, who would seek to overthrow the illiberal regimes of Europe, what we would call limited warfare was the most prominent form of war. Wars over succession relied expressly on maintaining and legitimizing the sovereign credentials of monarchy itself. Because the capacity for completely destroying or reconstructing the enemy’s society did not exist, and very often the capacity for completely destroying the enemy’s army did not either, war’s objectives faced both serious material and normative constraints. But managing limited war requires a lot more from policymakers. As Fritz astutely notes:

At the civilian level above the military, I hope that it means that political guidance to the military will also be clearer, because without unlimited (or at least voluminous) assets that we’ve had the guidance needs to be clear. Hopefully it also means that we’re going to narrow our definition of interests to ensure our (increasingly) scarce resource are only used for what they’re really needed.

I agree, but again, I think there are large gaps between this and what Slaughter is elucidating and even larger ones between Fritz’s concept and what policymakers are actually likely to do. One of the major problems with Mr. Y’s concept of “credible influence” is that it seeks essentially the same outcomes but without recognizing the capacity for political and military decision necessary to achieve them. In the list of objectives Slaughter outlines, there are not just truly limited aims such as killing terrorists and pirates, but ones such as civilian protection and the prosecution of criminal regimes. These last two are not limited objectives. They are both outcomes of Owen’s control of government (or denial of governance), as achieved through military victory, not through influence. The war in Libya already proved that when it comes to civilian protection against criminal regimes, the notion that NATO was simply disabling Gaddafi’s security forces without destroying them was fantasy. It soon became very obvious that the only way to get Gaddafi to stop trying to suppress the revolt against him was to remove him from power, and NATO acquiesced with the Gulf-supplied rebel ground forces to this end. NATO’s Libyan objectives were not really limited, nor did the war succeed because of credible influence. It succeeded because of military decision on the ground, as fought by armed forces, and its victory conditions could only be achieved, all along, with the destruction of Gaddafi’s military and paramilitary forces, followed by the complete overthrow of his regime. Similarly, Clinton’s wars in the Balkans were only limited in terms of the means allotted to conduct them (primarily airpower, although a ground invasion was threatened for Kosovo). The actual military decision occurred on the ground through the action of Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar forces. When the Croats launched Operation Storm, or the KLA decided to throw off Serbian government, they were absolutely seeking victory – and insofar as we aided abetted them, we did too.

Rather than a world where normal victory and political decision through force of arms give way to a world of credible influence, I see this concept ushering in a world where America’s objectives remain expansive – seeking to create social and political change – but where “twentieth century” warfare continues as usual, obscured by multilateral efforts and prosecuted as much as possible by local forces. Because the objectives are essentially unchanged – overthrow of criminal regimes, integration of societies into a dynamic liberal international order, protection of civilians – one of my real fears about the Defense Strategic Guidance is that, confronted with conflicts and challenges to our interests, and with a paradigm of military aims just as expansive as before, we will slouch inevitably towards unsustainable ways of war. Already, the new objectives of civilian protection are blurring into the old objectives of democracy promotion and liberalization – just look at the title of the new State Department Office of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

On another note, I reject that the defense cuts must lead inevitably to a United States that can do nothing but AirSea Battle in Asia. Many very intelligent people have worried that the United States is putting itself at risk by investing in a conflict it seems less likely to fight than additional insurgencies and irregular threats by cutting land forces. Firstly, as I’ve said earlier, there are many historical models for a maritime-centric military with limited ground capabilities leveraging combinations of limited objectives, emphasis on light or irregular force deployments, and leveraging of power projection capabilities along with use of partners and clients to confront the problem of unconventional warfare (expect more on this later, but two words for now: Banana Wars). Secondly, however, the American ability to engage in irregular warfare operations abroad is a function of our power projection capability and our conventional military capability, in both its ability to compel and to deter.

Conducting large counterinsurgencies in Eurasia or Africa is a luxury for the United States. Had the United States not possessed enormous military assets, Richard Armitage threatening to send Pakistan back to the stone age at the Afghan War’s outset would have been an empty threat (and the ability to airlift in supplies after it quickly became apparent we weren’t willing to do so when they cut off NATO routes would also have been quite difficult). The ability to supply and fight a counterinsurgency in Iraq, or fight even a limited war against its second-rate conventional military in 1991, were also dependent on the United States having overwhelming conventional military superiority and large amounts of “twentieth century” assets. Even in a world where the United States is overwhelmingly relying on Special Forces and Special Operations Forces for limited interventions, those will still need serious power projection capabilities that only air and naval forces can provide. For an offshore maritime power, putting a large land counterinsurgency force in another country is a luxury. It means that you are already operating in a permissive environment with sufficient access to the global commons. It means the enemy’s foreign backers are not willing or able to increase the intensity of the conflict. It means that you can muster the logistical gumption to maintain overwhelming conventional military superiority in the field to make simply attempting to overrun and destroy your COIN contingents militarily impractical. In other words, unless the United States is essentially invited in for a FID mission and no rival states want to disrupt it, it cannot continue conducting COIN missions around the world. As Andrew Exum noted, provided you retain institutional knowledge and doctrine, you can reconstitute land forces for COIN much more easily than you can reconstitute the military hardware and overall capacity for power projection.

In other words, the ability of us to engage in the kinds of wars we have recently – and indeed, to get away with in futility prolonging or even losing them – is a function of our overwhelming conventional military superiority. Retrenching our defense capabilities to ensure we retain the capacity to sustain such a military force is a good idea, and so too is cutting our land footprint, the use of which has always been a political luxury enabled by our conventional superiority. The British Empire of the 19th century and the US experience (sometimes by negative example) of the 20th demonstrated that even in small wars, it’s a better idea for proxies, clients, and partners less able to provide the conventional capabilities we do to be doing the quantitative majority of the mud-and-blood fighting – and “Wilfian” killing – that ultimately provides victory even in irregular conflicts. The economic logic of this appears to hold as well.

There will, of course, be sacrifices we will need to make – including getting rid of our expansive or nebulous conceptions of our military objectives, and the correspondingly vague or extreme definitions of who our enemies are. But this requires becoming much more modest about what outcomes our military forces we can achieve – and trying to “merely” influence societies without breaking the wills of political authorities that do not want their societies to be influenced. That still requires combat leading to victory. If you are fighting a war where victory is not possible, that is utter policy failure. If you have defined victory, but in such a way that the use of force cannot achieve it, that is policy failure. In both these cases, you should not be in a war. Recognizing these truths is essential to making a pared-down military effective. In many ways, the Defense Strategic Guidance is putting the US military back to basics – ensuring that the United States does not atrophy or lose the capabilities that ensure it maritime and aerial dominance, preventing the degradation of the deterrence, compellence, and power projection capabilities which give the US the freedom and scope of action to throw its resources into COIN, and ensuring the US economy can sustain the military it fields. But ultimately, the largest changes still need to come from policymakers, who need to understand that limited war is not just fighting for the sort of sociopolitical outcomes we have become accustomed to fighting for, but without means or ends that recognize the need for political and military decision. If an austere military is to succeed in protecting and advancing America’s national interest, policymakers must slice through the Gordian knot of mismatched and misconceived ends, ways, and means they have launched the wars of the past decade with.

* As a side note, Ollivant’s point about police is also a significant counterpoint to traditional counterinsurgency narratives and a lesson for Americans seeking to implement counterinsurgency. Ollivant notes that in a relatively non-permissive environment, i.e., a war zone, tasking military forces with training policemen and not militaries is not a very good use of resources. He notes that allied countries with gendarmerie forces should take a stronger role. Contrary to much of the fretting about militarized policing or a “police state” in the United States, American police forces are neither tasked with nor capable of restoring order in internal conflict zones (the National Guard generally fulfills this function, on the rare occasions it arises), whereas many countries with a gendarmerie or actual Military Police component involved in public order have far more experience in creating the sort of police forces unstable governments need.

Biodefense and the case of H5N1

I’m very pleased to be able to feature Willard Applefeld for a guest post today on the flu, biodefense, and scientific ethics. We are all very lucky he has chosen to use his powers for good, and not for evil.

Willard Applefeld is currently a first year medical student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He is interested in newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, biodefense, security issues, and biotechnology in general. He has done both bench-top research in the life sciences as well as policy planning. He His views and opinions are his own and do not reflect, nor should be attributed to, those of the University of Maryland, his friends, family, previous employers, or any other organizations he currently is or previously was affiliated with.

It can be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the one question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it, or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it. The example of the discoveries of Nobel is characteristic, as powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who lead the peoples towards war. I am one of those who believe with Nobel that mankind will derive more good than harm from new discoveries. –Pierre Curie Nobel Lecture on 6^th June 1905.

Last month, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) had the unenviable job of making a recommendation to the scientific community on matters of national security. Scientists, as a whole, tend to be purists — their professional development has instilled in them the belief that if something was worth doing, it is worth publishing. Therefore, most scientific information is widely disseminated and easily found, provided one has a way of getting passed the pay-walls set up by scientific journals. Advancement in one’s field, and prestige within the scientific community as a whole, is closely tied to the number and quality of one’s publications. The old adage of “publish or perish” spans not just scientific disciplines, but other fields as well. Indeed, the entirety of the academic system relies upon a hierarchy established by one’s publications. In almost all fields this is the case, save for one notable exception: National Security. In this arena, previous publications might get one a job, but it is the work that goes on “behind closed doors” that matters. This notion, for scientists, is somewhat difficult to reconcile with their normal experience.

But this is not a historically novel problem. Indeed, there is a large branch of research concerned with military applications of science. This is because prudent use of technology serves as an effective and powerful force multiplier. Nuclear Physics, which was previously only theoretical, was brought to bear against Imperial Japan during the Second World War and was instrumental in securing American victory in the conflict. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction created a bipolar geopolitical system that was uniquely stable. This stability brought about an era of uncommon peace where great power conflict was confined to proxy-wars between superpowers. Even today, American military grand strategy fundamentally relies on using an asymmetric advantage in technology to secure victory in conflicts. The proliferation of drones in theater reveals the extent to which the Armed Forces rely on technology to achieve objectives, both strategic and tactical.

It is important to note that past syntheses of science and military matters have all been conducted under the watchful eye of Pentagon. This has previously been accomplished by doing all the science “in house” or by contracting it out to carefully monitored (and controlled) corporate partners. This model has been quite successful. Both DARPA and Skunk Works represent a triumph of applying novel aerospace solutions to meet strategic needs, despite the fact that one is public sector and the other is private. Academia composes the third piece of the defense-research trinity, with useful advancements and discoveries proceeding in university labs before they are channeled into the industrial pipeline for further development. In all aspects, this development pathway in tightly controlled.

Biology presents a unique situation. First, all research is purely defensive in nature. The United States’ offensive bioweapon program ceased in 1969, when it was disestablished by an executive order of Richard Nixon. Since that time, the United States government has devoted considerable resources to develop a biodefense program. This effort has historically been spearheaded by the US Army, CDC, and academic research labs, though in the post-9/11 years the number of parties working on biodefense has increased dramatically. A focus on the basics of benchtop biology has meant that research efforts have proceeded in a more decentralized fashion. As of 2007, there were upwards of 1,300 Biosafety Level 3 laboratories in the United States alone. These labs, both federal and academic, focus on research of newly emerging or re-emerging pathogens, many of which pose as significant threat to US national security. Elucidating the nuances of these pathogens, of which there are many, could be done in academic centers. The fact that many of these pathogens were microbial threats to both health and national security was not an issue of great concern, since these investigators were forbidden by both law and morality from weaponizing the organisms they worked with. But as science is prone to do, the circumstances and the research as changed.

Two laboratories, one at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the other at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, have modified the H5N1 flu virus to make it much more virulent and, more worrisome, able to transmit between humans easily. The implications of this are numerous. Understanding flu virulence, transmission, and pathology will no doubt aid future investigators in the discovery of new vaccines and therapeutics. Yet unscrupulous individuals exist who would use such knowledge to construct a terrifying and effective biological weapon. It should be noted that the efforts of the Netherlands and Wisconsin teams were purely peaceful in nature – no one set out to make a bioweapon. And this is certainly not the first time research on emerging and hyper-virulent pathogens has been conducted; nearly every country maintains dedicated government labs to research such pathogens and numerous universities have an active role in creating biodefense solutions.  But just like advancements in any technology, there are dual-use applications. Biowarfare is a tragic trend that permeates history –The Black Death spread in large part due to the use of plague-laden carcasses during the siege of Caffa, Amherst gave smallpox blankets to Chief Pontiac’s Ottawa Indians, Aum Shinrikyo tried extensively to develop and deploy bioweapons like Botulism toxin, and Al Qaeda has actively sought a biological weapon. Therefore, the scientific community is at a unique juncture with the national security community with regards to the dissemination of the information on this new flu strain. This will be the first time that research on how to make a natural pathogen more virulent will be made available in a public journal.

This is not to say that research like this hasn’t been done before. The USSR maintained a multi-billion ruble biowarfare-industrial complex which focused on enhancing the virulence of natural pathogens and also developing chimeric organisms more deadly than any found in nature. But this research, labeled with sinister titles like “Project Bonfire” and the “Hunter Program”, were ensconced in multiple labyrinthine layers of secrecy. After the collapse of the USSR, the United States sunk millions of dollars into programs that would prevent Soviet bioweapons scientists from using their knowledge and skills to develop and disseminate bioweapons to this century’s security threats.

Understandably, many view the publication of the Rotterdam and Madison research as a how-to manual for prospective bioterrorists. To some extent this is true, publication of the techniques as to how to increase the virulence of an already virulent pathogen could aid unscrupulous individuals. But this is a relatively simplistic view. As Laurie Garrett argued earlier this month, publications were faced with three options:

1)     Advise all credible scientific publications to decline release of the papers, essentially censoring the work;

2)      Allow full and free publication of both papers;

3)      Advise publication, but with key passages related to how the feats were performed, deleted.

The NSABB essentially went with option 3 and in doing so attempted to walk a fine line between “censorship” and publication of potentially dangerous information. Although I eagerly await reading whatever is eventually published, I suspect that their efforts to contain harmful information while avoiding outright censorship will be futile at best. Even if the publishing journals do censor the “materials and methods” sections of the papers (where techniques used to do the experiments are described), the end result itself will appear in print. The “Results” and/or “Discussion” sections will no doubt describe the particular mechanism through which viral transmission and virulence were increased. This is to say, there will be a description of the new virus and how it differs from its less virulent progenitor strain. I personally suspect it is due to enhanced affinity of a viral protein for a cell surface binding receptor that is responsible for the human-to-human transmission and increased virulence (perhaps a different isoform of Hemagglutinin); though at this point it is just idle speculation. Still, once the features that account for increased viral virulence are described, the mystery of why this particular strain is more lethal will be removed. When that happens, the “materials and methods” section is largely irrelevant. Any budding virologist (pardon the pun) with sufficient laboratory experience and knowledge of molecular biology techniques would be able to construct a virus similar to the one described by the Rotterdam and Madison teams. Censoring only the “materials and methods” section will only slightly delay a prospective bioterrorist and certainly not discourage one in the slightest.

After all, every student of history and biology already knows that a flu virus has the potential to be much more virulent than the ones currently circulating the globe – just not the how of the matter. Although the teleology of the virus is known, the pathway of getting there is still unclear to most students. Simply put, most scientists know that a more virulent flu can exist and has existed in the past, just not what exactly makes it that virulent. Once the je ne sais quoi of the virus is known, it can be produced in a well-stocked molecular biology lab by an individual with sufficient expertise and animus.

Ms. Garrett is correct when she argues that

The NSABB decision will satisfy almost nobody. Advocates for scientific openness will bristle at any censorship, whether it involves a few sentences or an entire article. Conversely, those that fear bioterrorist use of such information will scoff at the notion that deleting a few paragraphs of methodology will in any way deter dedicated miscreants.

On one hand, open disclosure of the material would allow for a more open discussion within the scientific community. It would also avoid a situation where the government requested that a given publication censor data, only to have that journal refuse. This still is a very real possibility as Nature is a British publication which may not comply with the extent of censorship recommended by the NSABB. If this happens, it will become incredibly apparent how little authority the NSABB has to actually censor data. Yet a recommendation of full censorship would prevent a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” type of publication which does nothing to substantively discourage bioterrorists.

The best course of action to balance scientific with national security concerns would be to make the data only available to reputable investigators. The NSABB should mandate that all future work on this new virus be done only in Biosafety Level 4 Laboratories. This would accomplish multiple objectives. First, it would alleviate many safety and security concerns about working with a virus that has a 60% mortality rate (for reference in the Kikwit outbreak of Ebola Zaire the case fatality rate was 77%). Second, it would allow the consolidation of research into closely monitored facilities and groups. The majority of BSL-4 suites are owned and operated by the United States government or the governments of other nations with strong diplomatic and scientific ties to the U.S. Investigators who work in BSL-4 suites must undergo rigorous background checks and obtain security clearance. Mandating that all future work on this virus be done in a BSL-4 would help the proper regulatory authorities closely monitor this research all the while not occluding the process of scientific discovery.

Lastly, confining this research to a BSL-4 suite would actively fast-track influenza virus research as an area of biodefense. This would be advantageous for public health as well as national security infrastructure. All things being equal, a bioterrorist would more likely select a pathogen other than the flu. This is because bioterrorists are terrorists with a bit of a biology background. Terrorists want to inflict terror as efficiently as possible and, because of this, will choose agents that exist in the collective nightmares of society. While the flu is incredibly destructive and has the potential to shake society’s foundations to its core; it is not pathogen that everyone fears the most, and thus may not best suit the organization’s strategy. Anthrax, Plague, Ebola, and Smallpox are diseases that would cause abject terror – and be more readily associated with terrorism – if even a single case was identified in the United States. Yet millions of people get the flu every year. A bioterrorist would select an organism that people know and, more importantly, fear – an organism where even the rumor of a single case, no matter how well contained, would frighten every member of society. This is because such diseases bear the signature of a terrorist. Of course, if a bioterrorist could easily develop a flu virus which had mammalian transmission and a 60% mortality rate, it would obviously be utilized. But if all diseases were equally difficult to acquire and produce, the flu would not be at the top of the list for a bioterrorist. But nature doesn’t work that way. Nature bears a special place in her cold, capricious, and uncaring heart for the flu virus. It is an old adage in the virology community that a massive flu outbreak hits every 20 years or so. We are currently 80 years overdue. The absence of “the big one” is due to a combination of clever public health measures but also a great deal of dumb luck on our part. If research on hyper-virulent flu were included as part of biodefense research portfolio, we all will be much better prepared for when the inevitable naturally occurring hyper-virulent flu does hit.

The decisions and actions taken by regulatory and advisory agencies now will shape the future of research on not just biodefense, but also on the more broad class of hyper-virulent pathogens. It is important to note that neither safety nor an act by a bioterrorist is a fait accompli. It is crucial that we strike the right balance between safety and discovery, censorship and openness now while we still have the luxury of doing so.

 

War endures… The way it was, and the way it will be.

My boss and co-author Daveed Gartenstein-Ross recently wrote a post at Gunpowder and Lead responding to the question of whether major armed conflict had come to an end. In his explanation, he notes that not only is major armed conflict still a possibility, but that the United States should be skeptical that it can pick and choose what sort of military engagements it will become involved in:

The unpredictability of armed conflict is one reason that, when it comes to current debates about counter-insurgency, I’m skeptical of the idea that the singular lesson of our recent experience is that we should never again put ourselves in a position where we are fighting against an insurgency. Surely, the position that we should be extremely hesitant to do so is reasonable, worthy of discussion; so too is the position that our current military posture is not worth its costs. But, at the end of the day, is never getting involved in another counter-insurgency situation our choice alone? Or not getting involved in another large-scale armed conflict?

This point is unfortunately lost in a lot of commentary on war and warfare. Even wars against state opponents can involve irregular actors. For example, in a potential strike against Iran to disarm its nuclear program, Israel or the United States could find themselves embroiled in retaliatory attacks by Iranian proxies in the Gulf and Lebanon. While such an attack would be a voluntary act on America or Israel’s part, it demonstrates the point. Such expansion of the battlefield is nothing new, and while the Iranian case is voluntary, states have long records of attempting to foment insurgencies and irregular threats against each other during wars. More importantly, though, dealing with irregular threats does not inevitably involve nation-building, state-building, or the exact replication of the population-centric COIN which serves as the boogeyman of the “irregular war, never again” crowd – although such changes would be significant departures from our current strategic and foreign policy assumptions.

This brings me to another one of my pet peeves – the so-called “old wars” and “new wars” paradigm that we are stuck with in the strategic studies literature. Old war, as defined by state-versus-state or “industrial” warfare, is actually a very new phenomenon. The total war arguably evolves between the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War and comes into full fruition during World War I. In other words, in historical terms, so-called industrial war is very new, and the modern state for state-versus-state warfare not much older. Irregular or “new war” on the other hand, is ancient, as wars against insurgent groups for the purpose of state-building and consolidating authority were present at the formation of states themselves. The insurgent, the private military contractor, the autonomous religious organization, the ethnopluralist and loosely networked polity and ungoverned space, the transnational corporation – these are old ideas. Their reassertion in global politics is less a return to the medieval than a return to reality.

Even in the 19th century, concerns about irregular warfare and rogue non-state actors could drive foreign policy. As Orlando Figes describes in his excellent The Crimean War, concerns of realpolitik encompassed not simply rival empires and gunboat diplomacy, but the ideologies and non-state actors such moves could empower. The Tsar of the Russian Empire, during an 1852 diplomatic crisis over Turkish concessions to France, feared the failure of the Ottoman state:

In the chaos of an Ottoman collapse he would be forced to take the capital on a temporary basis (en depositaire) to prevent ‘the breaking up of Turkey into little republics, asylums for the Kossuths and Mazzinis and other revolutionists of Europe,’ and to protect the Eastern Christians from the Turks.

This brings to light a theme I have written on before: if we look at the fuller history of great power politics, war, and warfare in the early 20th, 19th and 18th centuries (and, of course, beyond), the modern United States might profit from an understanding of how to conduct grand strategies such as offshore balancing and the management of an imbalanced multipolar system with a plethora of alternative political actors.

Managing insurgencies, irregular wars, and terrorist groups will certainly be harder in an increasingly austere age (as Daveed has pointed out in another article his post links to). The recent reports of deep cuts to the United States Army underscores this fact, reversing its growth after struggling to meet the personnel demands of regime change and counterinsurgency operations. Of the many erroneous conclusions one could (and some have) drawn from this news, one is that a United States without a large land army will soon find itself unable to face the threat of irregular warfare, weak states, and non-state actors. Another is that, whether this is true or not, a United States engaging in offshore balancing should stay militarily uninvolved in regions without great power competition and thus does not need to particularly concern itself with non-great power threats.

On its face, equating a large army with automatic success in irregular warfare is hardly a truism – Britain had a piddling army compared to its fellow European empires, but was far more successful in amassing an empire overseas than any of them. However, Britain and other European powers, when operating overseas, did craft strategies and operational models that emphasized expeditionary use of naval forces, marines, army deployments, mercenaries, and local partner forces.

Nor did Britain limit its military engagements to the area of concern for offshore balancing. The vast majority of its military activities and empire were outside Europe – which is precisely the point. By avoiding plunging headlong into European wars where balancing would suffice, Britain freed up resources for expanding British influence outside of Europe. A United States focused on East Asia and the Persian Gulf must integrate its approach there with exploiting opportunities in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere – occasionally pursuing that agenda will require force. What the deep cuts to the Army do make clear is that the old approach of using soldiers and land-bound marines to pay the blood price of full-blown democratic state-building is now economically unsustainable. As Libya and the early days of Afghanistan demonstrated, even limiting US ground commitment does not address the fundamental problem of the smash-build-and-liberalize model, even if it ameliorates its cost.

But there are ways to integrate a more modest strategy, more realistic political goals, and a lighter, more expeditionary force with a US strategy of offshore balancing and the inevitable recurrence of irregular war – and to do so in a way which bolsters, rather than drains, US preparedness for the full spectrum of threats.

The broader question, though, remains – is major armed conflict on its way out? The incidence of major conflict is certainly lower, but the explanation is much less clear. Timothy Snyder, in his review of Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, does an excellent job of explaining why the answer for today’s peace may be far more contingent than what many, like Pinker, suggest. Read the full review, as paraphrasing would not do the evisceration justice. While Pinker is correct, as Snyder acknowledges, to point out that the present is very peaceful, and the idealized past was actually an incredibly violent place (in the prehistoric model of raiding warfare against rival villages, the difference between war and genocide is trivial). Where he is likely wrong, however, is to try to fully detach the reductions in violence since the formation of states and other forms of political order from contingency, and his attempt instead to couch it in terms of moral improvement.

Pinker dismisses the World Wars as the product of “a few contingent ideas and events,” but what is important to remember is that contingent ideas and events are essentially the story of modern history. As Snyder ably demonstrates, the technological and moral evolutions which made European states literate and obedient also made them capable of mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Snyder notes that Pinker tries to explain World War II essentially through Hitler, as if there were no other potentially violent tendencies in Europe after the First World War. Perhaps this is unfair to Pinker, but it is a common trope in literature crafting a narrative of the decline of war (Mueller’s Remnants of War springs to mind).

What the proximate contingency Hitler posed unleashed was hardly the same as what it created (and many accounts which remain fixated on Hitler as some almost extra-historical malignant figure regrettably, as Snyder has said elsewhere, feed into the Nazi narrative of the Fuhrer as a man almost outside time). Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler’s thought (among, of course, many others) and the conservative revolutionaries’  integration of antiliberalism, romanticism and the adulation of technology through the military and war was apparent during and soon after the First World War (if not before), and Fritz Stern’s account in The Politics of Cultural Despair suggest anti-Semitism and illiberalism far antedated Hitler. Nor, of course, was Europe bereft of other reasons for warfare in the period before WWII. Piłsudski’s Prometheism and Intermarum concept all spoke to a deep fear of Russian imperialism, and there were plenty of virulent anticommunists which might have sought military confrontation with Moscow had events in Germany not propelled history in a different course. All of this, of course, leaves aside the issue of Japan, the quasi-fascism of which was never really broke with the Meiji Constitution (the Kodoha’s more radical, revolutionary conception of Japanese fascism, which bore more similarities to German National Socialism or Italian fascism, essentially exhausted itself after the February 26 incident) and which likely would have eventually provoked conflict with either the USSR, the Chinese, or the Euro-American colonial encirclement regardless of went on in Berlin.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that while World Wars I and II were very contingent events, so too have been the pacific trends which followed them. Had World War II not turned out the way it did, fascism would be a prominent ideology with sway over a significant number of the world’s economically developed states, its educated peoples, and intellectual luminaries (and, we should remember, Stalinist communism counted a huge number of moral, refined and powerful Western minds among its backers), and, as Lukacs argued, it would be much harder to ignore that nationalism and socialism have been at least as powerful trends in 20th century thought – arguably the two most important ones – next to liberalism and democracy.

The key, of course, is that war and violence is not a problem prone to extinction or solution, simply evolution. As Daveed and Snyder note, there are many potential causes of war, from non-state actors to the geopolitical aftershocks of economic and environmental change, which might propel future conflicts. Even if we can credit the United States and its unipolarity with the pacification of the global system since 1991, a solution which plays geopolitical and economic shell-games to disguise our limits to doing that is doomed to failure. But neither is simply hoping we will never need to confront wars or the kinds of wars we dislike fighting is a straightforward option. Exhausting American resources or diverting American willpower either to victory on unachievable terms with unsustainable forces, or to a world-transformational liberalism premised on shaky contingency rather than unstoppable moral change, will only impede efforts to husband resources for the fashioning of a global strategy and way of war suited to the coming years.

Gulf in expectations

With America’s military withdrawal from Iraq and Ben Rhodes’s recent explanation of a plan to draw down US forces in the Gulf to a 1990 level, in combination with the revolts against the autocratic regimes the United States has thrown in its lot with, a major rethinking of America’s security posture in the Middle East seems to be in the making.

Toby Jones, whose previous article in the Atlantic I wrote about here, has another piece arguing that the US needs to militarily withdraw from the entire Persian Gulf, and asserts that this will both give the United States more leverage, stabilize the region, and reduce threats to the United States. Jones argues that the Gulf is less important than it previously has been to energy security:

The world today is awash in oil and natural gas. Protecting the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to global markets is far less necessary than it once was. Over the past generation, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other oil producers in the region have grown accustomed to bloated national budgets and expensive state-run, cradle-to-grave welfare services, which means that there is greater pressure on them to sell oil than to horde it.

It is true that oil sources outside the Gulf are growing in importance, and I agree that more US resources should be directed towards ensuring their development and reliability. However, the concern here is not about the Persian Gulf states “hoarding” oil, but using military force or the threat of it to drive up prices, deter Western interference with their internal affairs, or, in the extreme case, seize fields to monopolize supply. The desire is less about buying or selling than controlling and manipulating. Though exploration and global recession have mediated some of the problems of high oil prices, the likely future increase in oil demand from growing countries may change this happy state of affairs.

Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab Gulf states claim that their fears of Iranian ambition are existential. It is certainly true that Tehran is locked in a regional balance of power struggle with Saudi Arabia and that Iran seeks greater influence. But Iran does not seek the destruction of Saudi Arabia or the overthrow of Arab world’s political order. In spite of claims to the contrary by the Saudi and Bahraini governments, Iran’s revolutionary imperative is a relic of the past.

Yes, it is true that since the massive costs of the Iran-Iraq war and the failure of Iran’s revolutionary ideology to set the Arab Shiites aflame that Tehran has channeled its revisionist inclinations into other activities. However, Iran did not cease because it became less revisionist, but because it suffered enormous casualties at the hand of the Gulf’s (and to a lesser extent, America’s) hired champion, Saddam Hussein. After several years of brutal warfare, Iran discovered that its defeat of the Iraqi invasion would not bring about the capture of Basra, and that in turn would not lead to an Arab Shia embrace of Khomeinism.

Instead, since its conventional defeat, Iran has massively expanded its networks of armed proxies to bleed its foes, as Iran has in Iraq and Lebanon today. In many ways, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ covert forces and its proxies are the new spearhead of those revisionist efforts, though Iran has not recently tried to overthrow a foreign government. Rather, Iran has found a sufficiently strong proxy force allows it to achieve a favorable political outcome in the target country and bleed out-of-Gulf foes such as Israel and the United States without the risk of a major conventional war. However, even though Jones believes Iran is less militantly revisionist than it was before, he does not attribute this change to US security posture:

The presence of the American military in the Gulf has not only done little to deter Iran’s ambitions, it has emboldened them. Surrounding Iran militarily and putting it under the constant threat of American or Israeli military action has failed to deter the country. Instead this approach has strengthened hardliners within Tehran and convinced them that the best path to self-preservation is through defiance, militarism, and the pursuit of dangerous ties across the Middle East. The rivalry between Iran, the U.S., and its regional partners has turned into a political and military arms race, one that could easily spin out of control.

So, Iran’s revolutionary imperatives are relics of the past, but America’s presence in the Gulf during and immediately during and after the twilight of those imperatives had no effect? I find this somewhat difficult to believe. In the latter years of the Iran-Iraq war, the US had a major naval presence in the Gulf that was actively involved in combating Iranian military forces. Rather than merely a looming presence, the US navy engaged in overt hostilities against Iran as part of Earnest Will, attacked its ships as part of Praying Mantis, used special operations forces against Iranian mining and small boat attacks during Prime Chance, and attacked IRGC bases on oil platforms for Nimble Archer. Unlike regime change, Iran still maintains an active interest in militarizing the Persian Gulf and has been modernizing its navy accordingly. While it still threatens to do so, this does not mean the US military presence in the Gulf fails to deter it any more than crises where the Soviet Union or United States threatened to use nuclear weapons meant the other side’s nuclear deterrent was worthless.

As for emboldening Iranian ambitions, the change in their nature actually reflects, in part, the effectiveness of the conventional deterrent that US forces have posed. Iran’s aforementioned diversion of resources to irregular and proxy forces reflect a desire to capitalize on a strength and a vulnerability of its foes. The problem with the mass American conventional presence is not that it makes Iran more aggressive or bold. Even in rhetoric, Iran’s militarist bluster from the hardliner pales in comparison to the days when the regime insisted the road to Jerusalem went through Karbala. The problem with America’s major conventional presence is that it is suffering from rapidly diminishing returns because of cost and an inability to deal with Iran’s irregular capabilities effectively. Nor is the US solely responsible for Iran’s ties to unsavory states and non-state actors in the Middle East, those began during the very early years of the regime and have far more to do with Iran’s initial desires to foment revolution and create friendly governments and populations to bolster Tehran against the Arab governments which were Iran’s traditional foes and particularly militant foes of Khomeini.

I agree with Jones that the US does enable its allies to behave recklessly, and that it ought to restrain them lest it be dragged into wars started by them. I disagree, however, that the United States would have greater leverage to improve their domestic behavior.

The challenge is less about finding friendly ports to station personnel than it is about charting clearer and more effective terms of political engagement with allies and rivals. And this requires a new strategic doctrine, one that makes clear to regional actors that the era of open security guarantees — which have proven so dear to both Americans and to the hundreds of thousands who have died since the United States began its military build-up — is over. This would not mean the loss of leverage or influence, but in fact the opposite. Once it is clear that the United States is not solely committed to preserving the status quo, regional states will no longer believe they can ignore American calls for reform, restraint, and respect for human rights. Indeed, it is the belief in the Gulf States that they have “special relationships” with the United States.

I disagree that American security guarantees are completely open – they are not when it comes to domestic behavior. The United States since the Cold War, unlike past examples of counterrevolutionary powers (such as the Soviet Union after the consolidation of the Warsaw Pact, the Holy Alliance after Napoleon, and the other European powers which tried to quash the French Revolution) does not prefer to intervene to keep mass revolutions from succeeding.

Nor, actually, are America’s massive arms sales to the Arab world particularly necessary for the success of internal repression. The multi-billion dollar arms sales the US makes to Saudi Arabia are for expensive land, sea, and air combat systems and the associated support. While US contractors do provide training as well, the fact of the matter is that Gulf regimes have more than enough money to purchase the requisites of running an internal security force – batons, rifles, body armor, and warm bodies willing to wield them. America is hardly the only necessary vendor. Much hay is often made by other commentators about how Egyptians find tear gas canisters with ‘Made in America’ written on them. Regrettable, yes, but Egypt can make its own wooden batons to bludgeon its people with, it has one of the most expansive chemical weapons programs in the world (as an non-signatory to the CWC), and it manufactures its own ammunition.

Jones notes that withdrawal will expose the Gulf to the free market of capital and labor – this applies to arms and security patronage as much as it does to other goods. France, among other European states, also sell large amounts of arms to Gulf regimes. Russia’s arms industry is always looking for new business, and with some concern about their favorite regional customer in Damascus, they would likely eagerly supply whatever arms the US was unwilling to give. China also has a burgeoning arms industry and it has shown no qualms about selling armaments to its repressive economic and political partners in Africa. Ending the cozy relationship between US arms vendors and the Gulf states just means the US will have to compete for leverage with other vendors and in the future, other potential external security guarantors.

Neither will US withdrawal make the region more stable. It will, in the most optimistic scenario, spread the costs of the instability further. Arab states will still loathe Iran and Iran will loathe them in turn. Each side will continue converting their revenue into arms purchases for both internal and internal security. The arms race, in other words, will continue. We already saw the worst-case results of this during the Iran-Iraq War and the Tanker War. The arms race, and conflicts, are both symptoms of real geopolitical rivalries. While it would be nice if other countries could share the burden of upholding the public good of keeping the Gulf open, this lofty idea is unlikely to work in practice.

Firstly, few other powers beside the US currently can patrol the Gulf, excepting the ones that are there – which of course defeats the purpose of an international force to stabilize it. The European countries are for dire want of power projection, and the US did most of the naval heavy lifting in Libya. Projecting force into the Gulf would require a major investment in European or Japanese naval power projection capability that does not currently exist. Russia’s navy would also need to undergo significant expansion and modernization to patrol the Gulf. For India and China to contribute an equal share, for all the hype that surrounds their fleets, would require an enormous leap in their military capabilities. Having a strong navy is relatively easy, making one capable of assuming even a limited security burden against major regional powers hundreds or thousands of miles away is extremely hard.

Even for the United States, the loss-of-strength gradient still applies. Without pre-positioned logistics, even for a purely aerial and naval operation to open the Strait of Hormuz, things could become extremely unpleasant extremely quickly. A forced entry into the Gulf would not be as easy as in the 1980s, when mobile replenishment was sufficient. Iran’s military vis-a-vis America’s is far improved from the lopsided 1980s, when Iran had to devote most of its military resources to the Iran-Iraq war on land. A forced entry would occur against a vastly improved constellation of Anti-Access/Area Denial systems that could do serious damage to a fleet that would be much harder to adjust against without friendly facilities and pre-positioned logistics onshore. Regrettably, the underway replenishment which supplied American fleets during the Cold War has actually become more difficult, as critical weapons systems such as VLS – the backbone of a modern US surface warship’s strike capability against shore targets – cannot be replenished while underway. Achieving the fire and sortie generation necessary for a hypothetical war with Iran, in the geographically unfavorable environment of the Gulf, while under fire from an enemy with already considerable and growing strength for local defense purposes (if not power projection) would be extremely challenging, and something very few of the wars the US has fought for decades will have prepared it for.

A foreign navy accomplishing a similar task would be even more unlikely, in fact, they would likely need to construct forward bases of their own. France, which has been trying to rebuild its power projection capability, has realized this itself, and opened a new base in Abu Dhabi for this express purpose. Notably, that base also supports French operations off the coast of the Horn of Africa – just as the US Fifth Fleet does. Nor would foreign navies necessarily want to cooperate in upholding US interests in the Gulf. India and China have notably more favorable attitudes towards Iran than the United States does, and vastly different attitudes about conditioning support or curtailing pursuit of geopolitical interests on the basis of a regime’s internal behavior.

There is a case that the direct US presence in the Gulf is too expensive or immoral to be worth the geopolitical benefits, but it is not a case that can reliably claim it will make the Gulf more economically stable, peaceful, or free. America’s leverage really will be much lower, because it will be forced to compete for influence with rival great powers which will not share its ideological preferences about Gulf regime behavior. Gulf regimes are neither reliant on US military support for their own internal security, nor can the United States exert leverage effectively when other states will be able to compete for leverage and provide the arms sales the US did, and perhaps even assistance in internal security it was far less involved in furnishing. Even if these movements did succeed (and if they did, it would be highly unlikely US withdrawal of support is the deciding factor), it is far from clear that revolutions and mass politics will prove to be a blow to radicalism or a force for peace, as any student of European or Asian history can attest. At best, the US would be able to more credibly exonerate itself for the crimes of its clients. Our hands would be clean, but leverage would still be out of our reach.

Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, and the ability of a local war to escalate and spook markets will have greater credibility, and a conflict to force open the Straits will become increasingly costly. So too will the ability of the US to use economic and political leverage to pursue its own national interests be constrained. While a political solution for Iran would be desirable, and I am certainly no proponent of an offensive war for nuclear disarmament, a lack of US military presence would undermine many non-military efforts. Take the example of the proposed oil embargo to cripple the Iranian nuclear program – if Iran is denied access to oil, it has much stronger incentives to close the Gulf to punish the oil-importing states which imposed the sanctions and to prevent its Arab Gulf rivals from reaping the benefits of increased oil prices. But US naval force attempting to open such a blockade would face greater challenges and be a less credible threat to deter Iran from closing Hormuz – in other words, the US would no longer dominate the middle rungs of the escalation ladder.

There is much appeal in the idea of setting up different bases to service the Gulf as an alternative to current bases for operational reasons, though they would need to be closer to the region than the US’s current major naval bases in Diego Garcia and Europe. Iran’s irregular threat also demands a rethinking of American military and covert posture both within and without the Gulf, one that will not require the same kind of facilities and support as before. In the very long run, the rise of China and the expansion of its influence in the Gulf may win over Arab regimes looking for an all-weather supporter as they clamp down on nationalist revolutions. Under such conditions, a US-Indian-Iranian axis might be a worthy idea. But for now, the United States must accept that retrenchment is not an unalloyed good. While hegemonic stability did not make the catastrophically erroneous US invasion of Iraq any more tolerable or advance our goals of promoting democracy within the region, it is not to blame for all the region’s ills, and ending it will exacerbate, not resolve, many current quandaries of American foreign policy.

Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties

Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.

This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.

The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at a certain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both). It’s notable, actually, that the US actually requires significant international cooperation to maintain the bases it wants to launch drone strikes from, and only in Libya has the US ever used drones against a government it admitted to being at war with (as opposed to Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, where the US strikes non-state actors with some degree of compliance from the local government).

This does of course make war-making easier to some extent, but why we should find this alarming is unclear. Similar effects could be achieved with advances to manned aircraft, stand-off guided missiles, advanced naval weapons, and so on. Drones are an incremental advancement in technology, so far they have no prevented a major alteration in the offense-defense balance, they have merely made military operations we already preferred to fight – such as the US targeting of al Qaeda with air strikes in 1998 – more effective, but without the acquisition of bases capable of generating large volumes of combat sorties, a sustained war would not be “easy” by any means – and those bases would also increase manned-aircraft sortie generation. The loss-of-strength gradient still applies.

Lin, in the same thought, notes:

He compared our use of drones with the biblical David’s use of a sling against Goliath: both are about using missile or long-range weapons and presumably have righteousness on their side. Now, whether or not you’re Christian, it’s clear that our adversaries might not be. So rhetoric like this might inflame or exacerbate tensions, and this reflects badly on our use of technology.

I’m going to have to assume he’s alluding to Buddhists or Hindus or some other faith, because the story of David and Goliath, being in the Old Testament (it’s, a Jewish reference, if that’s not clear), is present not just in Christianity but in Islam! Let’s review (2:251):

So they defeated [the Philistines] by permission of Allah , and David killed Goliath, and Allah gave him the kingship and prophethood and taught him from that which He willed. And if it were not for Allah checking [some] people by means of others, the earth would have been corrupted, but Allah is full of bounty to the worlds.

So, that covers that. I really doubt that China is concerned about Abrahamic rhetoric by American policymakers, even if it does distrust the expansion of Christianity in China (the CCP is far more piqued by their secular political self-righteousness), and – wait, weren’t we talking about drones?

On that subject, we get to one of my favorite charges against new military technology, that it will embolden our enemies because they will think we are cowards (emphasis mine):

Relatedly, we already hear criticisms that the use of technology in war or peacekeeping missions aren’t helping to win the hearts and minds of local foreign populations. For instance, sending in robot patrols into Baghdad to keep the peace would send the wrong message about our willingness to connect with the residents; we will still need human diplomacy for that. In war, this could backfire against us, as our enemies mark us as dishonorable and cowardly for not willing to engage them man to man. This serves to make them more resolute in fighting us; it fuels their propaganda and recruitment efforts; and this leads to a new crop of determined terrorists.

This has been said, I think, about virtually every military innovation since the machine gun, and they should have said it about artillery too if they didn’t. Sebastian Junger, in his excellent War, explains it well:

A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battalion, at least for a while, which changes the whole equation of what it means to be brave in battle…. Machine guns forced infantry to disperse, to camouflage themselves, and to fight in small and independent units. All that promoted stealth over honor and squad loyalty over blind obedience….

As a result much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor: it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.

Does anyone think it matters that soldiers of counter-insurgent or counter-guerrilla forces, think insurgent tactics are dishonorable? Do you think Taliban or Badr Brigade members wrote missives to each other worrying if Dragunovs, L-shaped ambushes and IEDs with explosively formed penetrators were going to cause them to lose the respect of the American occupiers? War is not won with style points. It is conducted with the maximum amount of lethal force a country feels appropriate for the accomplishment of its political goals, and policymakers must intervene to ensure it does not exceed that. Now, yes, avoiding being hated by the civilian population does matter, but if you replace “robot patrols” with “tank patrols” or “white men with body armor and wraparound sunglasses,” you get a similar answer – the problem isn’t unique to drones, because people tend to have a basic and healthy distrust of armed foreigners anyway.

As for winning the enemy’s respect, we should remember, as Betty White once put it, “I’m going to attack you with this, and you use respect to defend yourself.” The enemy already thinks American soldiers are cowards with expensive machines, this is nothing new. Beyond the tanks, the over-the-horizon artillery barrages, and the enormous bases, there is air power. To the average terrified insurgent soldier, there is little moral difference whether it is a Harvest Hawk or a Reaper slinging Griffins at them. In either case, it is a nigh-invincible machine which the Americans can dispense death from. To a guy with an Kalashnikov or a DShK, that Harvest Hawk’s crew might as well be in Creech – they can’t be stopped. It’s not that we’re killing people with drones that drives terrorist recruitment, it’s that we’re killing people. If we just sent American fighting men and women into hostile villages wearing nothing but loincloths and swinging heavy sticks, people would still be very mad at you when you beat somebody to death.

The additional disrespect that weapons technology earns soldiers is generally more than outweighed by the casualties and incurs and fear it induces in the enemy. To the extent that it causes anger, it is through collateral damage and the death of compatriots, but drones are hardly unique in doing so. The way in which weapons – any weapons – are used in war generally far outweighs the weapons themselves in the overall psychological effect.

Many of these new ethical questions are in fact very old. Take this example:

Without defenses, robot could be easy targets for capture, yet they may contain critical technologies and classified data that we don’t want to fall into the wrong hands. Robotic self-destruct measures could go off at the wrong time and place, injuring people and creating an international crisis. So do we give them defensive capabilities, such as evasive maneuvers or maybe nonlethal weapons like repellent spray or Taser guns or rubber bullets? Well, any of these “nonlethal” measures could turn deadly too. In running away, a robot could mow down a small child or enemy combatant, which would escalate a crisis. And we see news reports all too often about unintended deaths caused by Tasers and other supposedly nonlethal weapons.

So what we’re worrying about is a robot creating a situation where an American covert asset uses lethal force against armed pursuers and tries to evade capture, creating a massive diplomatic crisis? Gee, I didn’t know Ray Davis was a Terminator!

An additional misplaced concern the drone program is disproportionately saddled with is that of collateral damage:

Another worry is that the use of lethal robots represents a disproportionate use of force, relative to the military objective. This speaks to the collateral damage, or unintended death of nearby innocent civilians, caused by, say, a Hellfire missile launched by a Reaper UAV. What’s an acceptable rate of innocents killed for every bad guy killed: 2:1, 10:1, 50:1? That number hasn’t been nailed down and continues to be a source of criticism. It’s conceivable that there might be a target of such high value that even a 1,000:1 collateral-damage rate, or greater, would be acceptable to us.

How on earth is this a new problem because of drones? This was a problem when we were using manned aircraft and it is a problem with naval missile and gunfire support and artillery as well. We’ve never had a magic ratio that resolved this debate and never will. This problem, again, precedes drone warfare and will outlive it. But the concern is particularly strange since drones actually allow us to reduce collateral damage significantly compared to many alternatives, since it is easier for a drone to loiter and strike with greater precision than it would be for the pilot of a jet aircraft.

This next problem isn’t Lin’s, but it is reflective of one of the stranger standards in IHL:

Let’s say we were able to create a robot that targets only combatants and that leaves no collateral damage–an armed robot with a perfectly accurate targeting system. Well, oddly enough, this may violate a rule by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which bans weapons that cause more than 25% field mortality and 5% hospital mortality.

This rule does not particularly make sense to me, since, again, the lethality of the weapon seems to depend on the circumstances under which it is employed. A well-trained sniper with a rifle, who’s setting up his shots to kill, is going to be more lethal than an infantryman who is going to use a rifle to provide suppressing fire. In some cases ammunition which is extremely lethal is effectively banned – hollowpoints and exploding bullets come to mind (although countries have no qualms about firing explosive-tipped rounds from vehicular chain guns at people). But again, I don’t see this problem as being perfectly unique to robots, since in theory a sufficiently advanced targeting system on another vehicle-mounted weapon would accomplish the same thing, except the human pressing the button would be physically closer to the action.

Then, there’s the final proliferation argument, which I’ve tangentially addressed before in a previous post.

Related to this is the all-too-real worry about proliferation, that our adversaries will develop or acquire the same technologies and use them against us. This has borne out already with every military technology we have, from tanks to nuclear bombs to stealth technologies. Already, over 50 nations have or are developing military robots like we have, including China, Iran, Libyan rebels, and others.

So what? Our adversaries are going to develop technologies to fight us with regardless of what we do. Does anyone really think that if we stopped using drones, our enemies would do the same? Of course not, countries develop military technologies to further their own interests, not to spite Americans. My previous skepticism about the drone war “coming home” still holds, as it should be extremely clear by now that any country stupid enough to host a drone base outside US borders for striking American targets, let alone the country stupid enough to try flying the drones in the first place, would be on the receiving end of a very large amount of firepower.

The piece concludes:

Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a “do first, think later” (or worse “do first, apologize later”) approach, but it helps us win the moral high ground–perhaps the most strategic of battlefields.

No, the moral high ground is not the “most strategic of battlefields.” War is not a morality play. In every war, the victor has done horrible, horrible things, not necessarily any better than the things the vanquished did to avoid their fate. There are plenty of legitimate ethical trade-offs in war, particularly because ethical questions intersect with the political nature of war itself. However, the notion that we can “win the moral high ground” and that this is a “strategic battlefield” is a quixotic endeavor. What adversaries, neutrals, and observers understand as “moral” is not going to be the same in war, and war can absolutely be won without proving one’s moral worth to the enemy population: just ask the Japanese after World War II. Yes, there are ethical considerations about drones, but these are largely the same questions that have dogged us since the advent of the machine gun and air power. Overemphasizing the supposed uniqueness of drone war ethics and the importance of being “respected” by the enemy the US is trying to maim and kill will just set us up for another round of disappointment, when the new supposedly ethical and humanitarian variations on warfare fail, yet again, to make the violent imposition of a foreign power’s will a palatable experience for those on the receiving end.

The time is not now

When Kim Jong Il’s death was finally reported by KCNA, I warned the commentariat – well, begged, really – not to employ the term “Korean Spring.” While so far no writer (or enterprising Presidential candidate looking to needle the administration) has taken up the phrase in earnest, let’s be clear why a “Korean spring” is not in the making, and why attempting to destabilize North Korea’s government now would be a terrible idea.

While some articles, such as this piece in Foreign Policy, have suggested taking actions to precipitate the fall of the regime, the fact remains that every single attempted North Korean uprising has been met with lethal force. Even concessions, as we saw during the failed 2009 North Korean currency reforms, end with executions of parties responsible for bad policies. No matter what, the North Korean state has shown it is willing to use lethal force to perpetuate the Kim family regime. As in the case of Libya and Syria, any protest movement against such a repressive regime, even with high-level defections, continues in the best case as a civil war, one which would almost certainly put off Russia and especially China to supporting international efforts to induce revolution.

Even if a mixture of bought-off KPA generals, dissidents reinfiltrated across the border, and spontaneously invigorated Korean people was able to coalesce into a serious fighting force, the regime would likely retain enough support to militarily crush such a rebellion, and would be able to use its nuclear weapons to ward off any kind of foreign military intervention. While the KPA is hardly a perfect military, the Kim family regime’s Songun policies put the strengthening of the military force first. Contrast this to Gaddafi’s explicit weakening of the military and reliance on a variety of security services, mercenaries, and local paramilitaries, and one can see why the KPA would be a much more formidable fighting force for an incipient revolution to confront.

Now, one hopes that nobody will begin discussing military options, but given that some Presidential candidates are already asking them with Syria and Iran, let’s reiterate the reasons why such a move would be a totally catastrophic idea. North Korea has nuclear arms. North Korea, even without using them, can deliver hundreds of thousands of rounds of artillery an hour into Seoul if it so chooses to. North Korea’s army is almost certainly strong enough to inflict heavy casualties on the ROK army before American reinforcements arrive. Additionally, an advance aimed at decapitating the North Korean regime will almost certainly begin Chinese contemplation of military counter-moves to secure the Yellow Sea and perhaps create a buffer zone along its own border. China is not opposed to reunification per se, but it also will not accept a united Korea militarily aligned to the United States extended to its own borders, nor is the United States likely prepared to make the concessions that would make a neutralized or Finlandized Korean state possible.

Finally, the fact is that outsiders understand remarkably little about the North Korean regime’s internal workings. After all, foreign intelligence services did not know about Kim Jong-Il’s death until KCNA saw fit to announce it, not because some massive failure, but because of the incredibly secretive nature of the regime itself. While nobody can know the future, the prospects of regime change in North Korea are even more bleak than in Syria, Iran, or Burma. Short of rolling the iron die, it’s unlikely foreigners will have much opportunity to change this.

—

One more thing: could media sources please stop uncritically reporting the claim that Kim Jong Il was born in 1942? Kim Jong Il was far more likely born in eastern Russia near the Amur river in 1941 than in 1942. Do reporters really think he was born on Baekdusan in an event foretold by a swallow and commemorated with a double rainbow and a new star appearing in heaven?

“Democratic Realism,” refuge of fabulism

I had managed to avoid reading this column before writing on the Russian elections, but all things come to an end. Via Daniel Larison. E.J. Dionne attempts to rejuvenate the grand strategic abomination of “democratic realism,” a doctrine not merely satisfied to rest its case on the moral virtues of promoting democracy, but one which feels compelled to justify them in utterly fantastical “realist” notions of geopolitical advantage.

It was gratifying to hear a despotic leader blame the United States for the rise of a democratic protest movement against his regime.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, wants his people to think that those who have taken to the streets to express their rage over rigged elections are nothing but tools of American foreign policy, put to work by none other than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

So, naturally, what Dionne wants to do is to confirm the suspicions of people such as Vladimir Putin by throwing US support behind a movement it does not actually understand and has little control over, and one in which actual non-nationalist liberals, rolled together,  poll 4% against a United Russia, that, in all likelihood, probably only polled 40-45% instead of 49%, a Communist Party which polled 19%, and a Liberal Democratic Party (which one could describe either as extreme nationalists or perhaps mild fascists, take your pick) which polled 11.6%. Even the most palatable major Russian opposition party for Westerners, Just Russia, has never really broken with United Russia on issues of foreign policy, nationalism, immigration, or really even human rights. Just Russia has virtually always couched their opposition to the Kremlin on economic terms by seeking to create a moderate socialist alternative between United Russia and the Communist Party. As Larison concisely summarized it:

If there are liberals in the opposition, their significance is usually exaggerated, and they are taken to be much more representative of the country than they are. If there are illiberal populists, nationalists, or religious fundamentalists with a much larger following within the local opposition, their influence is usually downplayed or ignored entirely.

The banned National Bolsheviks probably have a better shot of running Russia after Putin than the liberals do, which is not saying much because it’s impossible to think a political persuasion which cannot poll in the double digits in a legislative election and virtually shut out of all major centers of power is going anywhere, even in a crisis (perhaps especially in a crisis). Yes, Russia had voting irregularities, but if United Russia was going to deflate the vote counts of any parties, it would be of the Communists, Just Russia, or the LDPR, not the piddling liberal parties which the Kremlin does not consider a real threat.

So what exactly is so great about him blaming the US? Clinton’s words do not resonate with Russian protesters, as Saunders noted, and they do not rattle Putin, even if the protests themselves might. Instead they give him a convenient distraction. Russian historical experience shows the Russian voters roundly reject US interference, and just because Putin decries it does not mean it is a credible threat to United Russia’s grip on power. It’s not clear from what Dionne has said that taking a stand on Russia has accomplished much of anything besides shaking the Russian press statement Magic 8-ball.

There’s more, though:

She also gave what will be seen as a historic speech to a United Nations group in Switzerland describing gays and lesbians as “the invisible minority.”

Who thought an American leader would ever say the following?

“It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished.”

Her words made me want to stand up and sing the refrain of that song they always play at Republican conventions: I’m proud to be an American.

 So, on the “realist” side of the “democratic realist” scorecard, and by realist I’m meaning not just actions in service of the American national interest but actions which actually change the real world, the only behavior Dionne acknowledges Clinton has changed is his own, by instilling within him pride in his country. Normally, I would have to do some political-psychological speculation about the self-affirming moralism of proponents of muscular democracy promotion, but I will let that last sentence in the excerpt stand on its own.

It’s all well and good that opinion writers are now willing to sing patriotic tunes (there must have been a line about this somewhere in the National Security Strategy), but it takes more than saying that violations of human rights is wrong to actually change things. I’m not seeing the “realism,” here, as making that statement has thus far changed no one’s behavior, nor has it advanced US interests.

Something important has happened to President Obama’s foreign policy. For some time after he took office, he only rarely spoke out for human rights or used the word “democracy.” In the wake of the George W. Bush years, he was focused on rebuilding alliances and moving toward both a more measured and prudent use of American power. It was an approach much closer to the old-fashioned realism practiced by the first President Bush.

Overall, it was a change for the better. But for a while, it seemed that the administration decided that because the second President Bush used democracy promotion as a rationale for a mistaken war in Iraq, too much democracy talk might be a bad thing. This was the wrong conclusion. Those who think of themselves as progressives should never avoid their obligations to democracy — even if there are both prudential and moral limits to America’s capacity to impose it on others.

I am aching to see the costs of that lack of “democracy talk” beyond pundit hand-wringing.  By my reckoning, despite not a lot of democracy-talking, the “Arab Spring” still happened – but maybe more “democracy talk” would have made it more liberal and less, well, democratic?

Ultimately, “democratic realism” is still just as much of a hollow concept as it was in 2004. It was then, and is today still, an attempt to re-brand the unwanted label of “neoconservative.” It supposes it is in America’s interest to support democracy everywhere and always, but asserts that it will only require blood and treasure when it is in America’s strategic interest. Well, what does that mean? Krauthammer could at least explain that through his construct of the “existential enemy,” even if it was an imaginary axis of countries which never particularly liked each other except when America painted them into the same corner. Besides, isn’t democracy always in America’s interest? Well, perhaps we’ll only do so when it’s “prudential,” but shouldn’t our strategic interests dictate what’s prudential? Ultimately you end up with the mishmash of circular reasoning that’s of no use for any kind of serious doctrinal debate, but a great post-hoc justification for opportunism.

Reviving democratic realism and its strategical “democracy talk” appears to have accomplished very little for US national interests aside from providing a consensus among Washington Post columnists. If “we want a constructive foreign policy debate,” then reviving democratic realism would only be useful to showing how limited and unsatisfying the acceptable range of foreign policy debate among the political classes really is, and dispel the myth that the Obama administration and its partisans were ever, as conservatives too often claim, a bunch of cold, heartless realists.

Welcome, democracy! (goodbye, liberalism?)

There are two seemingly unrelated trends in European politics that have caught American attention lately – one is the rise of the far right, especially in Hungary, and the other is the persistence of Russian protests over United Russia’s vote-rigging in the recent Duma elections. The first story is couched in the narrative of the economic crisis, as Paul Krugman put it, and tells the story of oligarchic tendencies in Western democracies giving way to fascism with a new face. The other, commentators portray as part of the popular uprisings which swept post-Soviet states and the Middle East to demand more accountability.

These are not opposing trends. In both cases, they are reactions to the failure of a status quo, which justified itself, in part, on supposedly technocratic reformism (this is why Putin invokes Stolypin) which, under the stress of crisis, revealed corruption and mismanagement. None of this is to equate Budapest with Moscow, but there are still important lessons.

In Russia, the supposed optimistic case, the portents for liberalism are actually rather dismal. Of the two liberal parties participating in the election, Right Cause and Yabloko, together they garnered about four percent in the elections, as Paul J. Saunders noted. The next most palatable party, as far as Western interests are concerned, would probably be Just Russia, which is a left wing social democratic party, albeit one with a relatively nationalist bent on foreign policy, to the extent it makes noise about foreign policy at all. Actually, it’s important to note that A Just Russia, like the liberal Right Cause, is a Kremlin-endorsed creation designed to siphon votes from the Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (a pack of rabid nationalists).

Some optimists have said that the Kremlin routinely overplays the power of nationalists to govern in order to stifle real reforms. This is true, but the Kremlin is also largely correct. While no Russian opposition party is as well-organized as say, the Muslim Brotherhood is in Egypt, there is no question that the nationalists and Communists are better organized and have a broader potential base of support than the liberals. It should also be noted that some of the truly extreme elements, such as the truly disturbing National Bolshevist parties, were not even allowed to participate in the elections.

Even if the Kremlin were to undertake serious reforms, it is ludicrous to imagine that concessions to liberals would serve its interests better than support to nationalists and populists. The raw numbers make it very clear that there is virtually no governing coalition possible in Russia without the support of either Putin’s United Russia, left-nationalists, Communists, or extreme nationalists. Nor, as Saunders notes, is America’s support for the protests likely to change this essential reality.

In Hungary, the rise of Jobbik, and the silent undermining of democracy there (a trend which parallels events in Nicaragua, South Africa, and other recently democratized states) reflects a different threat to relatively liberal democratic principles. Even where it is the status quo, the forces of crisis rarely propel people straightforwardly to the forces of moderate, liberal democracy.  Governments which justify themselves on a technocratic basis, whether they are democratic or authoritarian in nature, encounter crisis and friction, after which nationalism is often a necessary glue for a resilient political coalition.

It is obvious to many historians and historical thinkers that today’s age is part of “democratic age” – but democracy does not inevitably result in liberalism. Indeed, many liberals were extremely skeptical of democracy and the democratic spirit. Nationalism and democracy, on the other hand, have always been bedfellows, and the revival of both in modern Western political thought is much more closely linked than liberalism and democracy ever was.

Since the close of the Cold War we have seen the culmination of an American universal order, the expansion of a supranational, European Union, and under the auspices of both the expansion of liberal and pluralistic democracy. The first two developments are now under serious duress. As democracy expands beyond the reach of prevailing liberal ideals, we should be not be surprised if its supposedly vital liberal moorings prove less potent than the nationalist forces democracy unleashes.