It is also one that requires a vast intelligence
apparatus, one that now constitute almost a fourth arm of government
that most Americans are almost completely unaware of. Yet, according to
the Washington Post, this empire includes some 1, 271 government
agencies and 1,931 private companies in more than 10, 000 locations
across the country, with a budget last year of at least $80.1 billion.
“At the heart of this new warfare,” notes the
Financial Times,” is high-tech cooperation between intelligence agencies
and the military” that blurs the traditional borders between civilians
and the armed forces. And it fits with the U.S.’s penchant for waging
war with robots and covert Special Forces.
But, by definition, the secrecy at the core of
the “new warfare” removes decisions about war and peace from the public
realm and relegates them to secure rooms in the White House or
clandestine bases in the Hindu Kush.
When the Blackhawk helicopters
slipped through Pakistani airspace, they did more than execute one of
America’s greatest bugbears, they essentially said another country’s
sovereignty was no longer relevant and consigned Congress to the role of
spectator.
Over the past several decades U.S. military
theorists have clashed over how to use the armed forces, though it is a
debate that gets distorted by the requirements of industry: the U.S,
does not really need 11 immense Nimitz class aircraft carriers, but the
Newport News Shipbuilding Company—and the aerospace giants that fill the
flattops with fighter bombers—do.
The arguments have revolved around three
different approaches, the Powell Doctrine, the Rumsfeld Doctrine, and
the Petraeus Doctrine.
The Powell Doctrine is essentially conventional
warfare a-la-World War II: massive firepower, lots of soldiers, clear
goals. This was the formula for the first Gulf War, which, after a month
of bombing, lasted only four days. But it is a very expensive way to
wage war.
The Rumsfeld Doctrine merged high tech firepower
and Special Forces with a minimal use of Army and Marine units. It also
relies on private contractors to do much of what was formerly done by
the military. The doctrine routed the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and
quickly knocked out the Iraqi Army in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Once
the shock and awe wore off, however, the Doctrine’s weaknesses became
obvious. It simply didn’t have the manpower to hold the ground against a
guerilla insurgency. The 2007 “surge” of troops in Iraq, like last
year’s surge in Afghanistan, was an admission that the doctrine was
fundamentally flawed if the locals decided to keep fighting.
The Petraeus Doctrine is old wine in a new
bottle: counterinsurgency. In theory, it is boots on the ground to win
hearts and minds. It draws heavily on intelligence—what Gen. David
Petraeus calls “bandwidth”—to isolate and eliminate any insurgents—and
attempts to establish trust with the locals. It is cheaper than the
Powell and Rumsfeld doctrines, but it also almost never works.
Eventually the locals get tried of being occupied, and then
counterinsurgency turns nasty. Building schools and digging wells give
way to night raids and targeted assassinations that alienate the local
population. According to U.S. intelligence, the current
counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is failing.
So, what is this “astounding change” that Nagl
speaks of? If you want to put a name to it, “counter-terrorism” is
probably the most descriptive, although with a new twist. Like
counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism has been around a long time. The
Phoenix Program that killed some 40,000 South Vietnamese was a variety
of the doctrine. Phoenix, too, paid no attention to sovereignty. During
the Vietnam War, Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols secretly went into
Cambodia and Laos.
In recent years, the U.S. clandestinely sent
Special Forces into Syria and Pakistan in a sort of shadow war against
“insurgents.” A number of other countries have done the same.
But the Obama administration openly admits to
sending a Special Forces Seal team into Pakistan to assassinate bin
Laden, and it was prepared to fight Pakistan’s armed forces if they
tried to intervene. And when Pakistan asked the U.S. to curb its use of
armed drones in Pakistani airspace, the Central Intelligence Agency said
it would do nothing of the kind.
It is as if counter-terrorism reconfigured that
classic line from the movie “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: “We don’t
need no stinkin’ badges, we got drones and Seals.”
The principle behind counter-terrorism is
eliminating people you don’t like. There is no patina of “hearts and
minds,” and the new strategy makes no effort to practice the subterfuge
of “plausible deniability” that has deflected the ire of target
countries in the past.
While clandestine warfare is not new, the
boldness of the bin Laden hit is. Certainly the people who planned the
attack wanted to make a statement: we can get you anywhere you are, and
impediments like international law, the Geneva Conventions and the
United Nations Charter be damned.
“Targeted assassinations violate well-established
principles of international law,” says law professor Marjorie Cohn.
“Extrajudicial executions are unlawful, even in armed conflict.”
From the U.S.’s point of view, the doctrine has a
number of advantages. It is cheaper, and its expenses are generally
hidden away in a labyrinth of bureaucracy. For instance, the $80.1
billion figure is only an estimate and does not include the cost of the
CIA’s drone war in Pakistan, or Homeland Security.
Recent moves by the White House suggest the
administration is putting this new strategy in place. “Petraeus’s
appointment to head the CIA is an important indication that the U.S.
wants to fuse intelligence and military operations,” a “senior figure”
at the British Defense Ministry told the Financial Times.
In the past the division between military and
civilian intelligence agencies allowed for a range of opinions. While
the U.S. military continues to put a rosy spin on the Afghan War,
civilian intelligence agencies have been much more somber about the
success of the current surge. That division is likely to vanish under
the new regime, where intelligence becomes less about analysis and more
about targeting.
The new warfare opens up a Pandora’s box, the
implications of which are only beginning to be considered. What would be
the reaction if Cuban armed forces had landed in Florida and
assassinated Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, two anti-Castro militants
who were credibly charged with setting bombs in Havana and downing a
Cuban airliner? Washington would treat it as an act of war. The problem
with a foreign policy based on claw and fang is that, if one country
claims the right to act independently of international law and the UN
Charter, all countries can so claim.
In the end, however, the biggest victims for this
“new” warfare will probably be the American people. Once an enormous
intelligence bureaucracy is created—there are some 854,000 people with
top-secrecy security clearance—it will be damned hard to dismantle it.
And, since the very nature of the endeavor removes it from public
oversight, it is a formula for a massive and uncontrolled expansion of
the national security state.
Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign
Policy In Focus, “A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent
journalist. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of
California, Berkeley. He oversaw the journalism program at the
University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years, and won the UCSC
Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as UCSC’s
Innovations in Teaching Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. He was
also a college provost at UCSC, and retired in 2004. He is a winner of a
Project Censored “Real News Award,” and lives in Berkeley, California.
