“A Failed Formula For Worldwide War”
How the Empire Changed Its Face, But Not Its Nature
By Nick Turse
http://tiny.cc/3m9qmw
“They
looked like a gang of geriatric giants. Clad in smart casual attire –
dress shirts, sweaters, and jeans – and incongruous blue hospital
booties, they strode around “the world,” stopping to stroke their chins
and ponder this or that potential crisis. Among them was Ge
neral
Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a
button-down shirt and jeans, without a medal or a ribbon in sight, his
arms crossed, his gaze fixed. He had one foot planted firmly in Russia,
the other partly in Kazakhstan, and yet the general hadn’t left the
friendly confines of Virginia.
Several times this year,
Dempsey, the other joint chiefs, and regional war-fighting commanders
have assembled at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico to conduct a
futuristic war-game-meets-academic-seminar
about the needs of the military in 2017. There, a giant map of the
world, larger than a basketball court, was laid out so the Pentagon’s
top brass could shuffle around the planet – provided they wore those
scuff-preventing shoe covers – as they thought about “potential U.S.
national military vulnerabilities in future conflicts” (so one
participant told the New York Times). The sight of those generals with
the world underfoot was a fitting image for Washington’s military
ambitions, its penchant for foreign interventions, and its contempt for
(non-U.S.) borders and national sovereignty.
A World So Much
Larger Than a Basketball Court: In recent weeks, some of the possible
fruits of Dempsey’s “strategic seminars,” military missions far from the
confines of Quantico, have repeatedly popped up in the news. Sometimes
buried in a story, sometimes as the headline, the reports attest to the
Pentagon’s penchant for globetrotting.
In September, for
example, Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslen, Jr., revealed that, just
months after the U.S. military withdrew from Iraq, a unit of Special
Operations Forces had already been redeployed there in an advisory role
and that negotiations were underway to arrange for larger numbers of
troops to train Iraqi forces in the future. That same month, the Obama
administration won congressional approval to divert funds earmarked for
counterterrorism aid for Pakistan to a new proxy project in Libya.
According to the New York Times, U.S. Special Operations Forces will
likely be deployed to create and train a 500-man Libyan commando unit to
battle Islamic militant groups which have become increasingly powerful
as a result of the 2011 U.S.-aided revolution there.
Earlier
this month, the New York Times reported that the U.S. military had
secretly sent a new task force to Jordan to assist local troops in
responding to the civil war in neighboring Syria. Only days later, that
paper revealed that recent U.S. efforts to train and assist surrogate
forces for Honduras’s drug war were already crumbling amid a spiral of
questions about the deaths of innocents, violations of international
law, and suspected human rights abuses by Honduran allies. Shortly after
that, the Times reported the bleak, if hardly surprising, news that the
proxy army the U.S. has spent more than a decade building in
Afghanistan is, according to officials, “so plagued with desertions and
low re-enlistment rates that it has to replace a third of its entire
force every year.” Rumors now regularly bubble up about a possible
U.S.-funded proxy war on the horizon in Northern Mali where
al-Qaeda-linked Islamists have taken over vast stretches of territory –
yet another direct result of last year’s intervention in Libya.
And these were just the offshore efforts that made it into the news.
Many other U.S. military actions abroad remain largely below the radar.
Several weeks ago, for instance, U.S. personnel were quietly deployed to
Burundi to carry out training efforts in that small, landlocked,
desperately poor East African nation. Another contingent of U.S. Army
and Air Force trainers headed to the similarly landlocked and poor West
African nation of Burkina Faso to instruct indigenous forces.
At Camp Arifjan, an American base in Kuwait, U.S. and local troops
donned gas masks and protective suits to conduct joint chemical,
biological, radiological, and nuclear training. In Guatemala, 200
Marines from Detachment Martillo completed a months-long deployment to
assist indigenous naval forces and law enforcement agencies in drug
interdiction efforts.
Across the globe, in the forbidding
tropical forests of the Philippines, Marines joined elite Filipino
troops to train for combat operations in jungle environments and to help
enhance their skills as snipers. Marines from both nations also leapt
from airplanes, 10,000 feet above the island archipelago, in an effort
to further the “interoperability” of their forces. Meanwhile, in the
Southeast Asian nation of Timor-Leste, Marines trained embassy guards
and military police in crippling “compliance techniques” like pain holds
and pressure point manipulation, as well as soldiers in jungle warfare
as part of Exercise Crocodilo 2012.
The idea behind Dempsey’s
“strategic seminars” was to plan for the future, to figure out how to
properly respond to developments in far-flung corners of the globe. And
in the real world, U.S. forces are regularly putting preemptive pins in
that giant map – from Africa to Asia, Latin America to the Middle East.
On the surface, global engagement, training missions, and joint
operations appear rational enough. And Dempsey’s big picture planning
seems like a sensible way to think through solutions to future national
security threats.
But when you consider how the Pentagon really
operates, such war-gaming undoubtedly has an absurdist quality to it.
After all, global threats turn out to come in every size imaginable,
from fringe Islamic movements in Africa to Mexican drug gangs. How
exactly they truly threaten U.S. “national security” is often unclear –
beyond some White House adviser’s or general’s say-so. And whatever
alternatives come up in such Quantico seminars, the “sensible” response
invariably turns out to be sending in the Marines, or the SEALs, or the
drones, or some local proxies. In truth, there is no need to spend a day
shuffling around a giant map in blue booties to figure it all out.
In one way or another, the U.S. military is now involved with most of
the nations on Earth. Its soldiers, commandos, trainers, base builders,
drone jockeys, spies, and arms dealers, as well as associated hired guns
and corporate contractors, can now be found just about everywhere on
the planet. The sun never sets on American troops conducting operations,
training allies, arming surrogates, schooling its own personnel,
purchasing new weapons and equipment, developing fresh doctrine,
implementing novel tactics, and refining their martial arts. The U.S.
has submarines trolling the briny deep and aircraft carrier task forces
traversing the oceans and seas, robotic drones flying constant missions
and manned aircraft patrolling the skies, while above them, spy
satellites circle, peering down on friend and foe alike.
Since
2001, the U.S. military has thrown everything in its arsenal, short of
nuclear weapons, including untold billions of dollars in weaponry,
technology, bribes, you name it, at a remarkably weak set of enemies –
relatively small groups of poorly-armed fighters in impoverished nations
like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen – while decisively defeating
none of them. With its deep pockets and long reach, its technology and
training acumen, as well as the devastatingly destructive power at its
command, the U.S. military should have the planet on lockdown. It
should, by all rights, dominate the world just as the neoconservative
dreamers of the early Bush years assumed it would.
Yet after
more than a decade of war, it has failed to eliminate a rag-tag Afghan
insurgency with limited popular support. It trained an indigenous Afghan
force that was long known for its poor performance – before it became
better known for killing its American trainers. It has spent years and
untold tens of millions of tax dollars chasing down assorted firebrand
clerics, various terrorist “lieutenants,” and a host of no-name
militants belonging to al-Qaeda, mostly in the backlands of the planet.
Instead of wiping out that organization and its wannabes, however, it
seems mainly to have facilitated its franchising around the world.
At the same time, it has managed to paint weak regional forces like
Somalia’s al-Shabaab as transnational threats, then focus its resources
on eradicating them, only to fail at the task. It has thrown millions of
dollars in personnel, equipment, aid, and recently even troops into the
task of eradicating low-level drug runners (as well as the major drug
cartels), without putting a dent in the northward flow of narcotics to
America’s cities and suburbs.
It spends billions on
intelligence only to routinely find itself in the dark. It destroyed the
regime of an Iraqi dictator and occupied his country, only to be fought
to a standstill by ill-armed, ill-organized insurgencies there, then
out-maneuvered by the allies it had helped put in power, and
unceremoniously bounced from the country (even if it is now beginning to
claw its way back in). It spends untold millions of dollars to train
and equip elite Navy SEALs to take on poor, untrained, lightly-armed
adversaries, like gun-toting Somali pirates.
How Not to Change
in a Changing World: And that isn’t the half of it. The U.S. military
devours money and yet delivers little in the way of victories. Its
personnel may be among the most talented and well-trained on the planet,
its weapons and technology the most sophisticated and advanced around.
And when it comes to defense budgets, it far outspends the next nine
largest nations combined (most of which are allies in any case), let
alone its enemies like the Taliban, al-Shabaab, or al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula, but in the real world of warfare this turns out to
add up to remarkably little.
In a government filled with agencies routinely derided for
profligacy, inefficiency, and producing poor outcomes, its record may be
unmatched in terms of waste and abject failure, though that seems to
faze almost no one in Washington. For more than a decade, the U.S.
military has bounced from one failed doctrine to the next. There was
Donald Rumsfeld’s “military lite,” followed by what could have been
called military heavy (though it never got a name), which was superseded
by General David Petraeus’s “counterinsurgency operations” (also known
by its acronym COIN). This, in turn, has been succeeded by the Obama
administration’s bid for future military triumph: a “light footprint”
combination of special ops, drones, spies, civilian soldiers,
cyberwarfare, and proxy fighters. Yet whatever the method employed, one
thing has been constant: successes have been fleeting, setbacks many,
frustrations the name of the game, and victory MIA.
Convinced nonetheless that finding just the right formula for
applying force globally is the key to success, the U.S. military is
presently banking on that new six-point plan. Tomorrow, it may turn to a
different war-lite mix. Somewhere down the road, it will undoubtedly
again experiment with something heavier. And if history is any guide,
counterinsurgency, a concept that failed the U.S. in Vietnam and was
resuscitated only to fail again in Afghanistan, will one day be back in
vogue.
In all of this, it should be obvious, a learning curve is lacking.
Any solution to America’s war-fighting problems will undoubtedly require
the sort of fundamental reevaluation of warfare and military might that
no one in Washington is open to at the moment. It’s going to take more
than a few days spent shuffling around a big map in plastic shoe covers.
American politicians never tire of extolling the virtues of the U.S.
military, which is now commonly hailed as “the finest fighting force in
the history of the world.” This claim appears grotesquely at odds with
reality. Aside from triumphs over such non-powers as the tiny Caribbean
island of Grenada and the small Central American nation of Panama, the
U.S. military’s record since World War II has been a litany of
disappointments: stalemate in Korea, outright defeat in Vietnam,
failures in Laos and Cambodia, debacles in Lebanon and Somalia, two wars
against Iraq (both ending without victory), more than a decade of
wheel-spinning in Afghanistan, and so on.
Something akin to the law of diminishing returns may be at work. The
more time, effort, and treasure the U.S. invests in its military and its
military adventures, the weaker the payback. In this context, the
impressive destructive power of that military may not matter a bit, if
it is tasked with doing things that military might, as it has been
traditionally conceived, can perhaps no longer do.
Success may not be possible, whatever the circumstances, in the
twenty-first-century world, and victory not even an option. Instead of
trying yet again to find exactly the right formula or even reinventing
warfare, perhaps the U.S. military needs to reinvent itself and its
raison d’être if it’s ever to break out of its long cycle of failure.
But don’t count on it. Instead, expect the politicians to continue to
heap on the praise, Congress to continue insuring funding at levels
that stagger the imagination, presidents to continue applying blunt
force to complex geopolitical problems (even if in slightly different
ways), arms dealers to continue churning out wonder weapons that prove
less than wondrous, and the Pentagon continuing to fail to win. Coming
off the latest series of failures, the U.S. military has leapt headlong
into yet another transitional period – call it the changing face of
empire – but don’t expect a change in weapons, tactics, strategy, or
even doctrine to yield a change in results. As the adage goes: the more
things change, the more they stay the same.”
NABJ/PABJ founder Reggie Bryant is buried at Eden Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
