Brian M Downing
The US’s dominant position in the world is no longer the certainty it was only a few years ago. A major withdrawal from world affairs is thought inevitable. Fiscal crisis, it is often argued, will force cuts in defense spending and require the removal of troops from many parts of the world and as war-weariness sets in over unpopular wars, a sizable pullback appears all but inevitable.
The world, however, is not a tranquil place that would ease withdrawal. An inexperienced youth now the leads North Korea. He may strengthen his position through aggressive actions or he may face assassination and coup attempts as his father did. China has alarmed neighbors by asserting claims over territories in which oil and other riches may lie. Al Qaeda has metastasized from Af-Pak and spread from the Maghreb to Southeast Asia. The denouement of the Arab Spring is unclear, but Tuareg mercenaries from Colonel Qaddafi’s military are pressing for autonomy in Saharan countries and Salafi militants are destabilizing Iraq and Syria. The Iranian nuclear program may lead to war, which in turn could cause sectarian fighting throughout the Gulf.
Washington is not stepping back from world affairs and US globalism will persist into the foreseeable future, though in a new form. There is no significant opposition in the public to high levels of military spending or the presence of troops around the world, nor is significant opposition likely to arise in the near future as globalism is firmly embedded in the American identity and the outlooks of most politicians.
Many countries are pressing the US for assistance in conventional warfare and counterinsurgency – more so than in many decades. The US is in turn pressing these countries to contribute more to their national defense and also make significant trade concessions. Further, US ground troops have attained a high level of competence and, owing to their origins in a narrow portion of the public, their deployments and even their casualties cause no great concern in congress or the general public. This gives presidents considerable latitude in foreign policy and military commitments.
The Military and Globalism in American Life
Though facing unprecedented fiscal troubles, the US has not made sharp cuts in defense spending. Nor is a consensus building to do so. The Pentagon has closed a few military bases inside the US, made it more difficult for colonels to become generals, and reduced purchases of major weapons systems, including the new generation of fighter aircraft. The military is looking less to conventional warfare with its costly aircraft and large combat units and looking more to counterinsurgency and counterterrorism with their less costly drones and special forces teams.
Washington is of course deeply divided along party lines. Each party opposes almost anything advocated by its foe and presidents must endure vicious partisan attacks in congress and the media. The issues of healthcare, gun control, abortion, and immigration are all highly partisan matters, but global military commitment and the defense spending enjoy support and even lofty praise from both parties. Little wonder: defense money pour into most congressional districts, providing thousands of jobs in support, research and development, and manufacturing. Defense spending is an important and high-paying part of the country’s troubled manufacturing sector and the next few years are not going to be an opportune time to cut such jobs.
Globalism is a basic part of America’s understanding of itself and will not be easily abandoned. A military presence in scores of countries around the world came as a surprise to Americans born before World War Two, but it was a fundamental part of the national identity to those born after the intoxicating victories across the globe. The American myths of prosperity and virtue at home became infused with power and mission abroad.
Defeat in Vietnam damaged the appeal of military might and globalism yet brought no withdrawal, only indeterminacy and paralysis. The mood did not last more than a few years. The helplessness of the Iranian hostage ordeal (1979-1981) angered the country and led many to feel that military might and prestige in the world had to be restored. Small, easy campaigns in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and the first Iraq war (1991) reacquainted Americans with the romance of power prestige. Ten years later, the nation felt that the September 11th attacks charged it with the mission of preventing terrorism at home through military campaigns from the Maghreb to the Philippines.
Voices calling for significant reduction in world affairs are rare and usually readily dismissed. Maverick congressman Ron Paul has long pointed out the high costs and adverse consequences of foreign involvement, but he is widely seen as an amiable eccentric if not far worse. Columnist Pat Buchanan’s critiques of globalism and unlimited support for Israel have led to being branded as backward-looking and anti-Semitic. Dennis Kucinich, another defense critic, recently lost his congressional seat and may disappear from the political scene.
Allies in the New American Globalism
American forces will continue to be the center of security arrangements in the Persian Gulf. Elsewhere, however, the US will insist on greater contributions from allies and greater concessions on trade. Both issues have irked the American public for decades and allied concessions will strengthen domestic support for continued globalism.
The US’s ascendance in world affairs came at the end of World War Two when much of Europe had been devastated, much of the rest of the world lay undeveloped, and the US economy was untouched by enemy bombs and enjoying robust health from war production. Over the next half century, Europe and Japan recovered and East Asia and many other parts of the world grew immensely. From the perspective of many Americans, these countries benefited from US military protection since 1945 and they must now provide far more to their national security.
Last year, amid the Libyan intervention. outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates angrily scolded the NATO allies. Though the effort was successful in ousting Colonel Qaddafi, it demonstrated critical shortcomings in the alliance. Three months into a tactical air campaign on a small military not far from many European capitals, armaments ran low and pilots became overburdened. Gates’s rebuke amplified longstanding though rarely voiced American resentments and reverberated in many capitals allied to the US. It is clear that they must do more, militarily and economically.
The Libyan intervention will serve as a template for future operations including counter-terrorism, fighting insurgencies, and perhaps most importantly keeping watch on China. Washington will insist on this. It is already the case in the Horn of Africa where regional troops including those from Uganda, Kenya, and Burundi, fight al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen. US participation is confined to drone aircraft and a small number of intelligence personnel. A similar arrangement with many of these same countries is coalescing around South Sudan, which faces aggression from Sudan and its guerrilla proxies to the south. In each case, the issue of securing basic commodities and markets for US interests is at play, as is keeping them out of the Chinese sphere.
Perhaps the most important arrangement is falling into place along China’s periphery and along the sea lanes stretching to its oil resources in the Persian Gulf. China’s recent actions to assert territorial claims in East and Southeast Asia have raised alarms throughout the region. A Chinese admiral recently raised eyebrows by telling a US counterpart that the US navy should pull back to Midway Island, well to the east, and leave the waters of East and Southeast Asia in the capable and strengthening hands of the Chinese navy.
The admiral’s observation alarmed his peers along China’s periphery. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and India all see China’s rising economic power as the basis for a serious geopolitical threat. They see China as thinking in 19th-century militaristic terms, not in the less aggressive ways that have been coming into place since the end of World War Two, if only slowly and incompletely. The paradox that western powers thought precisely that way when they carved up the world is not lost in China and elsewhere, but neighbors are nonetheless concerned. South Korean defenses continue to look north across the DMZ, but Japan has reoriented its defense posture away from Russia and toward China. India is deeply concerned over Chinese influence in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. It is building aircraft carriers and even its own fighters. Mountain troops and theater missiles are being deployed along the extensive border with China.
The US role in this regional response is not behind the scenes but neither is it as prominent as it would have been a decade or more ago. The US is coordinating security arrangements among regional powers, perhaps most notably maneuvers by Indian and Vietnamese navies and by Indian and Japanese forces as well. The message is clear: a regional alliance backed by the US can threaten China’s sea lanes to Persian Gulf oil for many years to come, limiting China’s range of activity along its periphery; and Chinese hegemony will not deprive the US of important trade and geopolitical partners.
Amid this emerging strategy is a “geopolitical economy” – a combination of military strategy and economic policy. The US is pressing allies to purchase American military equipment, which enjoys an edge over almost all Russian and Chinese materiel, and to open their markets to US goods after many decades of protective tariffs. This will add jobs to the US economy, ease its balance of payment woes, and reduce public resentment over shouldering too much of the world’s security burden.
Internal Chinese politics may allay regional concerns more than external coalitions can. The Chinese state is divided between an old elite based on heroic revolutionary myths and a new elite based on comparatively uninspiring business models. Recent moves on the world stage have gone beyond the acquisition of commodities and export markets and into a quest for honor and glory. Whether this is a short-lived debate or the reassertion of forces opposed to the bourgeoisification of the nation, is uncertain.
Business-oriented parts of China’s leadership will attempt to convince the guardians of national honor that today there are few areas around the world to establish hegemony over and most weak countries have skillfully forged protective alliances. The quest for power prestige, they may note, is best left to a navalist and imperialist past that ultimately led to destructive wars and weakened economies.
The Post-Vietnam Army
Since the end of the Vietnam War (1964-1973), the military has gone through remarkable changes. The “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) introduced astonishing precision-guided munitions, surveillance systems, communications equipment, and other technologies into the battlefield. Their devastating capabilities have been ably demonstrated twice against Saddam Hussein’s army. This RMA has offered the promise of shorter wars that use smaller forces and inflict far fewer civilian casualties than previous wars did.
The RMA has been much discussed but that has come at the expense of looking at developments in the rank and file of ground forces – armor, infantry, and special forces. The cohesion and efficacy of US ground troops are at least as important as the better-known technological marvels in understanding how the US overwhelmed the immense Iraqi army so swiftly and alarmed capitals around the world so rudely. Furthermore, the peculiar detachment of the American public from their military is critical to the new American posture in the world, though few Americans like to acknowledge it. The new military and its detachment from the public both grew out of defeat in Southeast Asia.
Vietnam undermined the desirability of military service, which had been unquestioned since at least World War Two and which lay at the core of the antiwar movement tearing the country apart. In the early seventies President Nixon reduced troop numbers in Vietnam and draft levels as well, eventually ending the draft altogether (1973) and making the military an all-volunteer force. Antiwar fervor declined sharply, but so did the connection between the general public and military service.
The all-volunteer army was initially unpromising. Disciplinary problems were common; morale and cohesion, already problematic after years of war and tumult, worsened; and experienced sergeants and officers left the service in large numbers. In less than a decade, however, the military became highly motivated, exceptionally skilled, and shockingly effective.
Combat units are far more homogeneous than during conflicts of the previous century, which used a large number of conscripts drawn from across the social classes. Soldiers today come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, where community ties and national traditions remain forceful, despite their erosion in cities and suburbs – especially more affluent ones. Military service and national prestige are honored more so than they are in cities and suburbs where prosperity and modernity have brought highly-individualistic, consumer-centered lifestyles. In rural areas and small towns, Vietnam is remembered as a shameful page in the nation’s history – one that must never be repeated and one that had to be avenged. War is central to national traditions and casualties are accepted as regrettable parts of those traditions. Fortunately, tight-knit communities provide essential support for grieving neighbors.
The experience of Vietnam left many cultural legacies, one of which was the diminution of unrealistic expectations about war in those entering the military. Vietnam books and films created a sobering template for them just as WW2 books and films had made a glorious one for their fathers. Nothing can adequately prepare young soldiers for combat, but today at least they have fewer illusions than their forebears did.
War is depicted as hard, cruel, and often pointless. Victory in the traditional sense is elusive if not irrelevant, heroism goes unrewarded, suffering ennobles, and tragedy is simply part of the deal. Meaning is found not in shining victory or effusive homecoming but with initiation into the brotherhood and an attendant sense of honor and accomplishment in playing parts in momentous events far from the ordinary – events few others will experience, comprehend, or appreciate.
Soldiers today acquire far more training than predecessors did during World War Two and Vietnam, when urgency precluded more than a few months of training before overseas deployment. Mastery of weaponry, physical power, and long-term solidarity with fellow soldiers has created an extraordinary ethos that is almost completely incomprehensible to outsiders, especially those from cities and suburbs. The experience of war today has only little resonance with that of older veterans, most of whom simply put in their time, often grudgingly and often disdainful of career sergeants and officers above them. Older veterans might quietly but rightly point out that they endured much higher casualties and that the comparatively light casualties today, tragic though they are, play no small role in sustaining cohesion and morale.
Socializing recruits into the harshness of war is less difficult than in past soldiers in whom religious and familial sentiments had been firmly instilled. Post-Vietnam America is markedly less religious, far coarser, and clearly more violent, making reluctance to fight and kill less of a problem for the military. Between impulse and action, the shadow no longer falls. Armies once had to devote considerable energy, in training and with soldiers new to combat, to breaking down reluctance to kill. The coarseness and violence pervading American life have made this task less difficult, and violent predispositions that are problematic in civilian life are channeled into national objectives by military authority.
For civilians, war has become something foreign and unknowable. In some quarters, it is a sacred national undertaking that cannot be comprehended and should not be questioned. Armed conflicts have become spectator events in which unknown actors and half-forgotten myths perform great dramas across the globe. Criticism of the military is diligently avoided, at least in public. That would be deemed as an unpatriotic act that might bring back the bitter passions of the sixties which savaged anyone in uniform from a four-star general to a private just back from the A Shau Valley. Casualties there are, but happily far fewer than in Vietnam let alone World War Two. And more happily, almost no one knows anyone in uniform. Few Americans today have any substantive acquaintance with military matters and cannot speak from experience or with insight, only with great passion – most of which is short-lived.
Leaders since at least the Great War have had to contend with public reaction to the human costs of war. The US public, however, is effectively detached from its soldiers and wars. After initial congressional authorization, presidents can send the military into extended campaigns with only limited consequences in the public or congress. Today, about seventy percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan yet no significant debate has emerged. Presidents now have more leeway in warmaking than their predecessors did – and probably more than the Constitution intended.
Counterinsurgency
Trends in budgets and training indicate that counterinsurgency (COIN) will be a significant part of US foreign policy in upcoming decades. It is far less expensive and requires far fewer troops than conventional warfare. Insurgencies exist or are building in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa as Qaddafi’s Tuareg mercenaries return to their homelands and as the contested secession of South Sudan unfolds. Thailand and the Philippines have faced intermittent insurgencies for decades and today they are connected, though only loosely, to the international al Qaeda movement. The US may be encouraging Kurdish and Baloch insurgencies inside Iran and may soon support one against the Assad regime in Syria.
COIN has a curious and perplexing history in the US. Once a prized doctrine of the vaunted Green Berets, COIN became discredited after Vietnam and its records were packed away into archives. Post-Vietnam officers, even high-ranking ones, had only a nodding familiarity with COIN, drawn from conversations with the old guard and occasional lectures. Having sworn to avoid such a war and hopeful that political leaders had as well, their understanding of insurgency was akin to what modern engineers might have regarding ancient bridge construction. It was something of interest that added breadth to their knowledge, but they did not expect to put it into practice anywhere.
COIN is credited, probably uncritically, with easing the Iraqi insurgency and it was put into operation with much hope in Afghanistan. COIN has thus far been unsuccessful in Afghanistan and insights drawn from the effort will be critical in shaping future uses of it. Timing might be foremost in the lessons. After expelling the Taliban, the US failed to see to political and economic development – in part because it withdrew intelligence units, engineer battalions, and special forces for the invasion of Iraq. With government weak and corrupt, an insurgency quickly grew.
Development projects, when they were eventually embarked upon, brought a large and unwelcome presence to Afghan villages. Soldiers, consultants, public relations personnel, and the like – almost all of them foreigners and non-Muslims – came into rural areas which had never been accustomed to such a presence and which had been suspicious of outsiders for centuries. The intrusions, though usually well-intentioned, underscored the idea of foreign occupation, which of course became a central part of insurgent propaganda and recruitment campaigns. A smaller contingent might have accomplished more and alienated less, as was the case when the French army pioneered COIN in Algeria back in the sixties. Further, western experts often imposed their plans over the recommendations of local notables. Regardless of who was right in purely engineering or political terms, local sensitivities were not respected.
For all the elaborate thinking and resources allocated to countering an insurgency, and for all the skill and tact of the officials charged with the program, the conduct of young soldiers is critical in winning over support from locals, or alienating it. Afghan villagers seldom come into contact with high-ranking officers and embassy officials whose education and experience have imparted tact and respect for local sensitivities. Instead, villagers have far more contact with rank-and-file soldiers, which inevitably entails routine collisions of an old traditional society with a youthful postmodern one.
American soldiers come from a subculture that instills swagger, coarseness, and a post-modern individualism bordering on arrogance. Trained in an institution prizing aggressiveness and controlled violence, then deployed into remote villages far from most authority, many soldiers interact with local Afghans in a manner unlikely to win local support. Even if the overwhelming majority perform their duties in strict accord with the principles of COIN and the directives of high-ranking officers, the effect of a small number of abusive soldiers will badly damage the effort, perhaps fatally so.
No institution can completely detach recruits from their civilian orientations. Accordingly, one sobering lesson from Afghanistan may be that American youth culture and others like it may be incompatible with an effective counterinsurgency program, especially in a traditional society. Locals will see many soldiers as helpful and even idealistic but too many others as arrogant and violent. Paradoxically, the same coarseness and violence in American life that make young men so devastatingly effective in conventional war make them largely unsuited for counterinsurgency.
Using troops as ethnically and culturally similar to local people as possible is of course important to the success of a counterinsurgency. As the Afghan campaign has been chiefly a western program, this has been almost impossible. Only the contingents from the United Arab Emirates and Turkey even approximate the local populace. Operations in Somalia may be more promising, where African Union troops enjoy a measure of local support in countering al Shabaab militants. The US operates largely behind the scenes providing electronic intelligence and drone operations. This an extreme but welcome case of the new American globalism and one that will cause less resentment to the use of the country’s might and might be a more successful one as well.
Copyright 2012 Brian M Downing
Originally published in Geopolitica
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.