small wars and military culture

Culture and Society

Small Wars and Military Culture

James Warren

U ntil the initiation of the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs in Yugoslavia, the mainstream

media's coverage of military affairs in the United States over the past several years was tightly focused on a surprising topic: sex. From adultery among of- ricers, to abuse of female recruits by drill instructors, to the pitfalls of integrated training, a newspaper reader might well wonder whether gender relations hadn't displaced preparations for violent conflict as the enduring concern of the Department of Defense. Per- haps it's not surprising that reporters' attention was so riveted on military stories with sexual overtones: after all, Americans, like most people, are more inter- ested in sex than in the intricacies of contemporary military strategy or new developments in missile tech- nology. And the ongoing struggle of military women for equal treatment within the confines of a subcul- ture that is tradition-bound, hierarchical and male- dominated is inherently fascinating to a society with a deep-seated egalitarian impulse.

A story with deep and more enduring implications than those above attracted considerably less attention. Eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the armed forces finds themselves in the midst of a cul- tural transition wrought partly by radically altered geopolitical conditions, and partly by a growing con- sensus among policy makers that US armed forces should be used for purposes that range far beyond what stands indisputably as their main mission: to fight this country's wars.

People on active duty understand this as well, perhaps better, than the most astute observers of military affairs in our think tanks and universities. Upon gradu- ation, a class of 1987 West Point cadet asked the Academy's commandant if he thought that he and his classmates would ever see combat. Since he received his commission, that officer has found himself in a Panama invasion force; in a conventional war against Iraq; in combat operations in Somalia and most re- cently in Haiti as part of the American force sent to avert anarchy and humanitarian disaster in that im- poverished island country. "These days," he quipped to a Washington Post reporter, "it's just a matter of where the next one's going to be."

Has that enduring leitmotif of American foreign policy, the Vietnam syndrome, run out of steam at last? A reader of Defense Secretary William Cohen's 1997 Annual Report might very well think so: "There is and will continue to be a great need for US Forces ... not only to protect the United States from direct threats but also to shape the international environment in fa- vorable ways, particularly in regions critical to US interests, and to support multinational efforts to ame- liorate human suffering and bring peace to regions torn by ethnic, tribal, or religious conflicts."

The Wilsonian impulse underscoring the statement comes through loud and clear. Our forces can and should be used to accomplish missions far beyond fighting wars that challenge US security. In Cohen's view, in the view of the administration in which he

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serves, the military is a practical tool for expanding the scope of democratic institutions and practices around the world.

Low-intensity conflicts, peacekeeping and peace- making, small wars, operations other than war-- in short, military operations where objectives, military means or both are strictly limited in scope--loom larger in American military planning than at any other time in American history. The plethora of small wars and ethnic and religious factionalism bordering on war in central Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East; the decline of the long-standing international principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in the internal affairs of sovereign states; heightened political expectations among repressed minorities and ethnic groups have placed extraordinary pressures on the UN and the world's major powers. And they have led to an intensification of a long-standing debate among American foreign and military policy analysts over questions and principles of military intervention in small wars and conflicts.

Peacekeeping of the sort US forces now find themselves engaged in Bosnia and Kosovo is today the most visible example of the new type of mission, but even a passing glance at recent history and national security literature reveals a host of variants on that theme, all of which have unique force and strategy requirements, from "preventive deployments" designed to preempt a conflict from breaking out at all, to "humanitarian re- lief," the original mission of US forces in Somalia in 1992 and one of the current missions of NATO forces in Kosovo, to "peace building," the expanded mission US troops took on in Somalia in 1994--until the loss of 16 American Rangers' lives forced our withdrawal, and in the process revealed the Achilles' heel of Ameri- can operations that fall under the umbrella term of "Op- erations other than War."

Indeed, for the past several years the military services have been engaged in a delicate balancing act, adapting doctrines and training regimens to meet the pressing requirements of operations other than war while attempting to maintain the capability to fight two major regional wars simultaneously. With no single threat shaping US military doctrine, planning or training, our armed services now confront a wide assort- ment of new and delicate missions, most of which concern deployment at widely varying levels of strength and duration in small, limited wars, and crises.

The impact of the new strategic environment on the military is everywhere in evidence. At the service's staff colleges, where senior officers of tomorrow learn

the finer points of military leadership, the curriculum now includes a hefty dose of courses on Operations other than War, including "peace enforcement"--when soldiers are deployed to a locale where at least one hostile faction operates--to counter-terrorism, humanitarian intervention and drug trafficking interdic- tion. While the total number of people on active duty in the services has declined from 2,170,000 in 1987 to about 1,400,000 today, the number of deployments has moved in the opposite direction: Between 1990 and 1997 alone, US forces were deployed 36 times compared to 22 between 1980 and 1989. In many of those missions, US special forces--our elite troops with expertise in unconventional, small war-type operations, have played a significant role.

The Army's first peacekeeping Field Manual (100- 03) was published in late 1994, and the effort to coor- dinate peacekeeping operations with the UN, and to train soldiers in the subtleties of this new high profile mission continues unabated as of this writing. The Army's peacekeeping budget has jumped exponen- tially over the past five years.

Meanwhile, the Navy's strategy for the late 1990s, as articulated in its White Paper "Forward ... From the Sea," places great emphasis on projection of naval expeditionary forces from the sea to the land--and there- fore, deployment in a wide array of conflicts and crises even if they are primarily land-force oriented. Gone is the "blue water Navy" of the Cold War era, whose main objective was to train to engage the Soviet fleet on the open oceans of the world. The Navy's new strategy marks a radical departure from the past when domi- nance of the sea itself was the central focus.

Statements from the upper echelon commanders stress the Navy-Marine Corps' key role in suppress- ing nasty local crises before the escalate into wars that threaten US vital interests: "Forward-deployed US forces--primarily naval expeditionary forces--are vital to regional stability and to keeping these crises from escalating into full-scale war," says a joint statement issued by Admiral Jay Johnson, chief of naval operations and Charles Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps: "To those who argue that the Unites States cannot afford to have this degree of vigilance anymore, we say: the United States can't afford not to ... Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, Haiti, Rwanda, Iraq and Taiwan Straits are merely examples of the types of continuing crises we now face."

The Navy appears to have sold itself quite well as a tool of intervention, despite strong arguments by Army and Air Force people who claim new technologies and

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airlift capabilities would permit more effective and cost-efficient responses by Army and Air Force units directly from the United States. So far at least, the Navy seems to be winning the contest: since the end of the Cold War, the size of the Army has been re- duced by more than 30 percent, while Navy and Ma- rine Corps personnel cutbacks have been negligible.

But some authorities--military analysts, ex-gen- erals, even active military officers talking off the record, worry that increasing focus on small wars and crisis resolution may lead to serious problems for our military institutions. No serious student of military affairs disputes that American forces are the most capable in the world, broadly speaking. But small, limited wars and operations other than war, they point out, do not play to America's military strengths. That strength, simply put, rests in the prosecution of conventional war between professional armed forces. Conventional war fighting environments are now over- whelmingly dominated by the army that has the most missile platforms, airlift, and of course, the technol- ogy that procures the most valuable commodity to any commander: information about the enemy's locale and vulnerabilities (see the Gulf War, for example). Ameri- can forces' capacity to fix the enemy in place and maneuver rapidly to destroy his forces is unmatched in world history.

Small wars, fueled as they often are by deep-seated ethnic and religious conflict and perpetuated by guerrilla forces which cannot be easily contained without inflicting unacceptable damage on civilians and prop- erty, do not lend themselves to conventional military tactics and strategies. They tend to be protracted affairs to boot, and both the American public and the media are famously impatient for quick results in military operations--another compelling reason for opt- ing not to engage.

Operations other than war, along with small wars, seem almost impervious to technological sophistication, and operate along entirely different axes than conflicts between conventional types of forces. Guerrilla- style armies don't have to win on the battlefield to achieve their objective. Look at Vietnam, Afghani- stan, or even the American Revolution. These were not conflicts where the victors vanquished the enemy on the battlefield in any tactical sense. Menacing and frustrating a superior force that can beat you on the battlefield will do fine for the military weaker party. In small wars patience, flexibility, and endurance can triumph over sophistication and naive confidence in technological solutions to intractable problems.

One of this country's most respected military analysts, Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr., himself an infantry veteran of Korea and Vietnam, has described the recent fascination with Operations other than war, and with military intervention generally, as the latest politco-military fad. Summers sees the penchant for throwing US (and UN) troops at the assorted array of national and international crises that have cropped up since the Cold War's end as a potentially dangerous development. Vast increases in the number of peacekeeping and crisis response missions, he argues, threaten the combat readiness of an American force that has already endured painful budget cuts and the loss of a number of critical forward bases over the last few years. Within a month after the outbreak of the Kosovo Crisis in March 1999, reports of short- falls of ammunition, spare parts and personnel dotted the newspapers, leading many to question whether the Defense Department's claim that it was prepared to fight two regional conflicts simultaneously and re- spond to brushfire crises was credible.

Along with a number of congressmen with military experience, Col. Summers also worries that increases in peacekeeping operations and training in- evitably means dissipation of the "warrior ethic"--that highly prized outlook and attitude that combat soldiers see as a more important ingredient in success in war than any weapon or technological innovation. The true warrior's mindset, his entire being, is firmly fixed on destroying the military forces and the will of the enemy. Colonel Summers cites a quip by former De- fense Secretary William Perry approvingly in The New World Strategy: "We field an army, not a salvation army."

The argument that operations other than war dilute American readiness and the warrior ethic has been dismissed by critics who point out that our defense budget is still greater than that of the next six nations in the world combined, and that such talk amounts to little more than angling to keep budgets high. Yet a November 1997 article by Richard J. Newman in US News and World Report, "Can Peacekeepers Make War?" provides ample evidence, both anecdotal and statistical, that these concerns are widely shared among knowledgeable people in and around the US military.

Another reason many military people worry about the plethora of operations-other-than-war missions is that the political component of policy tends to cir- cumscribe the military component, thereby blunting military effectiveness and diminishing the field commander's decision-making power. The brilliant

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ea r ly -19 th -cen tu ry Prussian theoris t Carl von Clausewitz, whose thinking has dominated the Ameri- can officer corps for decades, was well aware of the tension between what he called "ideal" or "absolute" war, which is "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will," and small wars fought with strict political constraints, which Clausewitz saw as external to the inherent logic of war: "The less intense the mo- tives, the less will the military element's natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character."

Notwithstanding the changes in military doctrine and training wrought by the new geopolitical environment, senior Pentagon officers and the last two administrations they have served have often been very reluctant to put troops in harm's way even when there has been considerable moral pressure to do so. In 1992, when the American public first learned that the Serbs were massacring Muslims by the hundreds and constructing detention camps with striking similari- ties to those managed by the Nazis 50 years ago, Presi- dent Bush flatly refused to send in troops, saying "... we are not going to get bogged down into some guerrilla warfare. We lived through that once."

Bush's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, was no more sanguine over the pros- pect of American forces in Bosnia. Powell, of course, had seen "guerrilla warfare" up close and personal in Vietnam. Like most officers of his generation, he didn't much like the waffling and half-hearted way Washington had conducted that sorry effort, and he was anything but anxious to engage the forces he then commanded in yet another quagmire. In remarkably candid statements to a New York Times reporter at the time, Powell indicated that since a US intervention could not possibly achieve a decisive objective, and fast, with acceptable US losses, we ought not to try. "As soon as they [politicians] tell me it is limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result of not. As soon as they tell me [the mission is] "sur- gical, I head for the bunker."

Powell's thinking reflects a deeply held view that has persisted in the US officer corps since the debacle in Vietnam, despite all the talk and fanfare over operations other than war: that it far better to stay clear unless you can get in fast, with maximum force, and get the nasty business over with before body bags erode public support, and troop morale. The so-called

"All or Nothing" school, whose most prominent mem- bers are probably Summers and Powell, are not in fact neo-isolationists. They know America must play a key role in world affairs. As students of history, they are keenly aware that both the United States and Great Britain have conducted some successful "small war" campaigns. Certainly the US Army achieved its objectives in the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the century. That engagement was unpopular and con- troversial in the United States, but in the end some 70,000 US troops crushed Emilio Aguinaldo's forces. Success in that the insurgency was due in part to the Army's adopting enlightened anti-guerrilla tactics, and in part to the American government's promise of to the Philippine people of eventual independence.

US Marine interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the late teens and 1920s were for the most part successful operations. The insurgents against whom they fought were not very well- armed. They did not enjoy deep support among the populace, nor could the rebels easily escape Ameri- can (or American-led) infantry by retreating to a base area in a neutral country (as the North Vietnamese did throughout the Vietnam War). In the Malayan Emer- gency of 1948-1960, the British won the day against communist insurgents because they were able to iso- late the largely Chinese guerrillas from their support bases in China. Ethnicity was also a crucial factor: the local Malayan population remained hostile to the ethnic Chinese. It still took the United Kingdom 12 years to end the fighting.

The "All or Nothing" school adherents are aware of these counterinsurgency success stories, yet they exhibit an enduring skepticism about recent Ameri- can decision-makers' ability to discern where, when and how to use military force effectively. Deeply worried about "mission creep" and the pursuit of lofty generalities such as "the expansion of democracy and freedom" in places with long histories of intractable ethnic and religious conflict, they recoil from the deployment of ground forces far more than they do the use of air or sea-launched cruise missiles. Having lived through the horrors and humiliations of Viet- nam, they have good reason to believe that many of the "New Interventionists," in the words of Stephen John Stedman, "lack a sufficient sense of the dilem- mas, risks and costs of intervention."

Their concerns are shared by a great many senior people in and around the US military. And so the usual response to the possible use of force--particularly ground force--is, "Don't do it." When senior Penta-

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gon officials and military officers discuss armed American intervention in a crisis, writes Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in Foreign Affairs, "the likeli- hood of combat and the probable magnitude of US casualties are invariably dominant in their delibera- tions. Hence the usual recommendation of such con- claves is to avoid armed intervention altogether, ex- cept for bloodless visits by American naval forces to nearby waters or perhaps reconnaissance flights .... "

Indeed, the irony is that often the greatest brake on the use of American military force to achieve the nation's foreign policy objectives is not that such forces would prove ineffective if deployed, but that deployed forces would soon take a few casualties, re- sulting in the rapid erosion of public support for the mission. This, of course, is exactly what happened in Somalia in 1994. The first month of the Kosovo conflict (March 1999) revealed dramatically just how critical a factor American casualties and the public's im- patience for quick results are in the strategic equation. Administration spokespersons went to great lengths to assure the American people that ground operations were not even being contemplated, despite the fact that air power alone had never succeeded in bringing about the removal of an invading army from captured territory. When a single F-117 pilot was shot down, the media treated the event as a national crisis of epic proportions. Questions of doubt about NATO success began to arise before the first week of the campaign was out.

Luttwak goes on to argue that the American people's basic conception of war - -a conception shared by most active military off icers-- is that it should only be fought for grand national and moral purposes. This "Napoleonic view" of war, in which US armed forces are seen as crusaders for the good, not as "professionals going about their business," is to Luttwak's way of thinking outmoded and likely to bring us to grief in the post-Cold War environment. He advocates a return to a "pre-Napoleonic" concept of warfare- - the notion of war held by the Romans, among others, in which patience is "a sig- nal mi l i t a ry vir tue," and " l e s s - t han -d rama t i c progress is not seen as failure." Indeed, it a conception of war which dismisses the idea that "only decisive results are worth having." If Luttwak had his druthers, the United States would use its military forces not only to protect the nation's security narrowly defined, but to challenge renegades and bad guys such as Slobodan Milosovic who don't play

by the rules, thereby threatening the security of the entire international system: "To avoid combat and do nothing allows not only aggressive small powers such as Serbia, but even mere armed bands such as those of Somalia, to rampage or impose their victories at will."

The debate over the proper use of military force among Americans is nothing new. At least since the war in Korea, scholar Christopher Gacek points out in The Logic of Force, American military policy has been deeply affected by a tension between an "all or nothing" approach to the use of force--sometimes called "the American Way of War" as exemplified by World War II and the Civil War--and those see the military force as one of a number of tools to achieve a wide variety of objectives on the international stage.

The limited war theorists, mostly civilian academ- ics and think-tank researchers, came to the fore in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the drawbacks in the Eisenhower administration's reliance on nuclear forces and "massive retaliation" to deter communist aggres- sion in the Third World, were becoming all too clear. After all, the Russians had the same weapons and could use them to devastating result. Among those who advocated the development of forces capable of fighting what we call today brushfire wars or "low-intensity conflict" were William Kauffman, Robert Osgood and Henry Kissinger, all of whom criticized the Ameri- can tendency to focus on the Napoleonic conception of victory in war as being complete and absolute. Kissinger, in his Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, argued that such a view of war unwisely constricted US strategy. As Gacek describes Kissinger's thesis, "there needed to be room for policies between total war and stalemate."

The limited war advocates made an indelible im- pression on policymakers of the Kennedy administration, whose strategy, of "flexible response" in- corporated their essential paradigm and outlook. Nevertheless, there were many prominent military authorities who questioned the wisdom of deploy- ing forces in operations where clear and rapid domination of the enemy's armed forces was not the basic objective. This was very much the case when limited intervention in Laos in 1961 and 1962--wi th a view to preventing a communis t takeover--was often on the agenda of the National Security Council. The chiefs of the armed services were not at all anxious for another land war in Asia- -unless they were given a free hand as to the use of force.

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