Center for a New American Security

Richard Betts on the difference between policing and war:

Some attempts to use force in this multilateral and limited manner – such as in the second phase of the Somalia intervention in 1993, “pinprick” punishments in Bosnia before 1995, or the initial assault on Serbia in 1999 – proved ineffectual and surprisingly costly. This was because the U.S. and NATO forces found themselves acting not as police suppressing individuals or small groups, but in acts of war, confronting organized mass resistance by force of arms. This was discomfiting to those who unleash force for humanitarian reasons because they do not like the idea of killing people and breaking things even for good purposes. They hope for clean application of force without casualties, or at least combat in which only the guilty are destroyed and large numbers of civilian deaths are an aberration.

 

War, in contrast, inevitably hurts the innocent as well – and as anyone who has studied or experienced war will insist to those who hope otherwise, the stress is on inevitably. Deliberate targeting of civilians may be prevented, but the nature of real war is that accidental collateral damage is a regular cost of doing business. …

 

Law enforcement aims to protect the rights and interests of individuals by apprehending transgressors and holding them to account for their crimes, and letting the guilty go free rather than unfairly harm an individual innocent. In war, the ultimate communitarian enterprise, the priorities are reversed; many individual interests are sacrificed for the nation’s collective interests. Soldiers die for their countrymen, not themselves, and civilians caught in cross fires are simply out of luck. This fundamental empirical difference between policing and war is not easily grasped by people of good will. Before unleashing force they need to recognize that war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals, and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.

Buy his excellent new book American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security here.

I apologize for the light blogging. I returned from a few days at Ft. Leavenworth -- education, not incarceration -- this morning and am in the middle of the final edits on a big report Bruce Jentleson, Melissa Dalton, Dana Stuster and I have been writing for CNAS. I preview one of our recommendations in this column for World Politics Review:

If Americans do not appreciate the Israeli-Egyptian peace now, though, they certainly will when it is no longer there. And for the first time in 30 years, that is a real possibility.

The United States needs to get serious about heading off confrontation between the new Egyptian authorities and our friends in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Read the rest here.

***

I have missed several events here in Washington featuring Toby Dodge this week, but on the way back from Ft. Leavenworth, I read a review essay on Iraq by the great Sami Zubaida in the International Journal of Middle East Studies that features Dodge's book. I recommend the former, at least, for any Iraq nerds out there. (I have never, actually, read the latter but know I should. And I love the fact that academic journals get around to reviewing books nine years after they were published.) 

Tom Friedman, today:

[The United States] gave Egypt’s military $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets, and it gave Lebanese public-school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program that is currently putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. I’ve recently been to Egypt, and I’ve just been to Lebanon, and I can safely report this: The $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.

I am more than sympathetic to arguments that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East must go beyond military partnerships, but this Tom Friedman op-ed is nonsense. First off, no where in this op-ed is there any discussion of U.S. interests in the region, which are, according to the president:

1. Countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons;
2. Securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; (read: access to hydrocarbon resources)
3. Standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.

That $1.3 billion in annual military aid? That is the price the United States pays to ensure peace between Israel and Egypt. For three decades, it has been a fantastic bargain. 

Second, I am a proud graduate of the American University of Beirut, but do you know who else counted the AUB as their alma mater? The two most innovative terrorists in modern history, George Habbash and Imad Mughniyeh. U.S. universities and scholarship programs are nice things to do and sometimes forge important ties between peoples and future leaders, but they can also go horribly wrong and do not necessarily serve U.S. interests. There is certainly no guarantee a U.S.-style education leads to greater tolerance or gender and social equality.

Third, I'm glad Tom Friedman is traveling, but after a few weeks (days?) in Cairo and Beirut, he can "safely report" nothing about the relative effectiveness of U.S. activities in Egypt and Lebanon.

Fourth, the military aid we give to Egypt does not come out of the International Affairs budget, so it's not a simple matter of moving some cash around. Tom Friedman will want to speak to the U.S. Congress about this. I was wrong about this! See this Congressional Research Service report (.pdf) for more. Also, Gulliver wrote in to add that "ISA (which includes Foreign Military Finance – particularly the earmarked Israel and Egypt money – and International Military Education and training) is a separate budget line to the humanitarian aid and educational exchange stuff. Congress specifically appropriates that money and would have to be the ones to change it."

Fifth, in 1975, Lebanon was arguably the best educated and most cosmopolitan population in the Arabic-speaking world. I don't need to tell the guy who wrote this book what happened next, but for the rest of you, I'll just say that only in a twisted way did it involve "transforming [Lebanon] into what it should be and can be."

I am teaching a class today in how civil wars and insurgencies end. I am also, meanwhile, writing my column for World Politics Review this week on the conflict in Syria. The following articles, then, have been on my mind as I think about how the conflict there might end:

1. Stephen John Stedman, "Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes," International Security 22:2 (Fall 1997), pp. 5-53.
2. Roy Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993." American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 681-690.
3. Chaim Kaufman, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars." International Security 20:4 (Spring 1996): 136-175.
4. David T. Mason, and Patrick J. Fett. "How Civil Wars End: A Rational Choice Approach." Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (1996): 546-568. 

Know of any other good literature on the termination of civil wars and insurgencies? That's what the comments section is for.

"I think that Vogue is always on the lookout for good-looking first ladies because they're a combination of power and beauty and elegance. That's what Vogue is about. And here was this woman who had never given an interview, who was extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore, qualified to be in Vogue." -- Joan Juliet Buck

I have an op-ed on Bloomberg View on the way in which the profusion of camera phones and other new-ish technology has caught the U.S. military off-guard. 

The proliferation of camera phones and social-media networks has caused problems for the U.S. military as an institution. Much of this has to do with the generational divide in understanding technology. Most of the men and women serving in the lower enlisted and company-grade officer ranks are what the defense expert Thomas Rid identifies as digital natives. They grew up with e-mail, Facebook and the Internet playing as much a part in their childhoods as Saturday morning cartoons did.

 

The senior ranks of the military, on the other hand, are populated by digital immigrants. E-mail is something they can remember using for the first time. As late as 2008, at a conference at the U.S. Army War College, Rid asked a collection of senior officers and civilian defense officials how many of them had a Facebook profile. Only four of about 50 people in the room raised their hands.

 

He then asked how many people had heard of Twitter, and only two people raised their hands. Today, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself has a lively Twitter feed -- but the generational divide remains.

Read the rest here. With respect to this latest incident in Afghanistan, I continue to think this represents a failure of leadership on the part of whichever officers and noncommissioned officers were supposed to be supervising these soldiers. But there is a bigger issue surrounding new technologies that the U.S. military hasn't quite wrapped its head around, and in part I blame the fact that the people setting policy are often those least likely to understand the technology itself.

I have written about the difference between capability and intent before, but in my World Politics Review column this week, I tackle the intelligence problems related to intent, which are normally much more difficult than those related to capability. Specifically, I tackle the (understandable) failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to determine whether or not Israel will attack Iran -- a failure that matches my own inability to do so.

My column was inspired by both a book I read and a conversation I had last week. On the way to and from my incredible, kick-ass hometown for a short trip, I read Bob Jervis's Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War. Jervis provided me with much of the framework through which I examined the problem. I then followed that book up with a lengthy lunch conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written extensively about what might be going through the heads of Israel's leaders regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program. I first fleshed out the thesis of my column over lunch and was grateful for the pointed questions he asked.

(Goldberg noted, though, that it is problematic to call Israel, as I do, "by far the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the end of World War II." I referenced and hyperlinked a report by the Congressional Research Service (.pdf) that itself noted Israel is "the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II." But Goldberg noted that South Korea or Germany have received a lot more overall aid when you count U.S. military posture, and he has a good point. My sense is that most U.S. Congressmen and Americans do not count this as aid. But maybe they should. Also, we have never actually gone to war for Israel -- no matter what some loons say -- but we have gone to war for South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others. That surely counts for something too, yes?)

1. I do not know why we continue to be surprised that initial reporting and statements on the raid to kill Osama bin Laden were innacurate. It will be a long time -- maybe even decades -- before the facts of the raid fully see the light of day. As far as journalistic accounts are concerned, I have no reason to doubt the reporting of my friend Nick Schmidle and others, but bear in mind Mark Bowden wrote his original award-winning articles on "Blackhawk Down" four years after the event. And in the case of Abbottabad, we're talking about a highly sensitive special operation that was and necessarily remains cloaked in secrecy. So caveat lector, as always.

2. I spent yesterday with the students at Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my mother has taught for over two decades. I was really impressed by the intelligence and intellectual curiosity of the girls, which served as a nice antidote to the Tennessee state legislature's war on science. My family farm is about five miles from where John Scopes went on trial in 1925, and I would have thought we Tennesseans had come a long way since then. Most folks in my hometown with whom I spoke, to be fair, seemed depressed about the fact that we are the country's laughing stock again and spoke of their desire for the legislature to focus on issues that matter. Personally, I am just happy that Henry Mencken is dead and can't weigh in on the matter.  

If it's any consolation, though, the sponsor of the so-called Monkey Bill is an alumnus and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Baylor School. My alma mater, the McCallie School, taught me that intellectual life can live in harmony with a strong faith in Christ. McCallie has accordingly produced statesmen, captains of industry, war heroes, and some of our nation's leading public intellectuals. Our bitter rivals, meanwhile, can take now take pride in the war its alumni wage against ... the scientific method.*

3. Speaking of intellectuals, my old friend and professor Peter Stallybrass recently sent me an old article of his titled "The Mystery of Walking" from the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I recommend this article to all literary-minded infantrymen out there. It is delightful. 

*Problematically, Pat Robertson also went to my alma mater, but in deference to our rivals, I am not allowing trivia like "facts" or "exculpatory evidence" to get in the way of my arguments today. 

Anne Barnard -- whose husband wrote a very solid book on Hizballah last year -- has herself written a very solid article on Hizballah and Syria in today's New York Times:

Deprived of Hamas’s political cover, Hezbollah has been accused of sectarian hatred, and has been its target as well. Syrian rebels have burned the Hezbollah flag, claimed that its snipers are killing civilians in Syria, and named their brigades after historic warriors who defeated Shiites in Islam’s early schismatic battles. Early on, some analysts thought that if a Sunni government would arise in Damascus it might support Hezbollah against Israel. But now, says Michael Wahid Hanna of the Century Foundation, Hezbollah may have missed a chance to hedge its bets. ...

 

Hezbollah seems in no danger of losing its most hard-core supporters. But some of its loyalists have questions.

 

In the Sidon cafe, the health worker declared that Syrians, with free education and medical care, had no reason to rebel. Her friend, a Shiite from Hezbollah’s heartland in southern Lebanon, disagreed. “They have things,” she said, “but they are fighting for their rights.” ...

 

A Hezbollah party member said that government shelling had killed many civilians, but it was justified because the victims had let the rebels use their houses “as bunkers.” Israel used a similar argument, which Hezbollah condemned, to defend its bombing of Hezbollah neighborhoods in 2006.

In addition to this article, those with access to scholarly journals will want to read Bilal Saab's review of Nick Blanford's excellent book in this issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. (No link, alas.) 

The U.S. occupation of Australia has begun. U.S. officials claim the occupation has nothing to do with the behavior of China, leading defense analysts to conclude this has more to do with helping Australia counter the well-publicized scourge of baby-stealing dingos down under. The problem with this kind of dingo-centric "strategy" -- can you even call it that, or is it just a collection of tactics? -- is that it's hard to see how the U.S. Marine Corps will maintain its core competencies while in Australia. I have made a careful study of the U.S. Marine Corps from 1942 to 1945, and based on that study, I have concluded that amphibious landings are really the heart and soul of the Corps. The history of the U.S. Marine Corps from 1775-1941 and from 1946-present is also quite interesting and may well have included some other stuff, to include counter-dingo operations, but it is largely irrelevant as far as Marine culture and doctrine are concerned. No, amphibious operations are the only thing that really matters, which is why I am also concerned the costly deployment of Marines to Australia will endanger the long-term health of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, without which the U.S. Marine Corps would surely decide to turn in their uniforms and weapons, grow out their hair and take up hemp farming in Idaho.

There are other things that trouble me about this deployment. How many cultural advisors, for example, have these Marines deployed with? How many Marines in each platoon speak the local language or have any training in the tribes and customs of the Australians? How many Marines know that an "Australian" is what you call a native, whereas an "Australiani" is the local unit of currency? (I predict that ten years from now, it will still be possible for esteemed professors of international relations at Harvard to get these two terms confused in the pages of the New York Times.) I understand that U.S. Marines believe "Fosters" is the Australian word for beer, but I worry that few of them know that it is also the Australian word for "cat urine." 

Finally, it may make sense today to limit the U.S. mission in Australia to a struggle to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the dingo menace. But inevitably, U.S. Marines will be drawn into adjudicating the petty internal rivalries of Australia. Without a proper understanding of Australia's culture or troubled history, U.S. Marines will create winners and losers among the population, which will eventually tire of our heavy-handedness. Equally inevitably, well-meaning U.S. Marines will offend Australians by asking awkward questions, like, "Why are all your rugby players from Fiji?"    

Australia is a land populated by criminals, which is why Alexander the Great stopped well short of there. (Alexander the Great understood defense in depth.) The British Empire has been humiliated in Australia time and time again, and there is no reason to imagine that we Americans will have any more luck. I fear we are embarking on another fool's errand.

Let me wade into the debate over whether academic journals are relevant to policy professionals in international relations. Dan Nexon kicked things off with an angry lament on the state of his field. James Joyner then weighed in with respect to what he saw as the irrelevance of scholarly journals. And finally Dan Drezner voiced a full-throated defense of academic political science journals.

I work at a think tank that produces policy papers for both a general audience as well as professionals in the national security community -- to include policy-makers in both the executive and legislative branches. Part of my job, as I see it, is to bridge the gap between theory and praxis. I have to be familiar with and understand the relevant literature in my areas of study -- principally, Middle East Studies and Strategic Studies -- and translate the ideas and observations in that literature into language that policy professionals will understand. 

I do not expect most policy professionals -- especially those working in time-intensive positions in the National Security Staff, the Pentagon, or the Congress -- to read the latest academic literature. If those people find the time in their busy schedules to read just one article from Foreign Affairs or Survival each week, that is great, frankly, because most of them barely have time enough to get through the Early Bird each morning.

I do think many of the articles that are in political science journals would elude the policy professionals who are actually running the government but whose education probably ended with a master's degree from a public policy school or, more likely, a law degree. I am skeptical of a lot of the statistical work being done in Middle East Studies for substantive reasons*, but in addition, the math-heavy work featured in a lot of journals raises the bar of admission for potential readers. So academics hoping to be policy relevant should consider publishing their work in various media. Try boiling down the main concepts in your latest APSR article, for example, into an op-ed or blog post. Or, better yet, an article in Foreign Affairs.

I know great young scholars who largely shy away from blogging or publishing more "popular" work because they believe their academic colleagues will take them less seriously. That may be true, but you have to decide whether or not you value climbing the rungs of the academic ladder or affecting policy in Washington. I've clearly made my own choice but certainly don't begrudge anyone who chooses another path. (Just don't complain how no one in the policy world ever listens to your great ideas.**)

Nonetheless, in case anyone is interested, these are the journals I dutifully scan for articles, listed in the order I typically read them. I realize these are not all the journals I could be reading, but these are the ones I make time for in a schedule that features a lot of stuff begging to be read.

Peer-Reviewed

1. International Security
2. The International Journal of Middle East Studies
3. The American Political Science Review
4. Perspectives on Politics

Non-Peer-Reviewed

1. Foreign Affairs
2. Survival
3. The National Interest

*The Arabic-speaking world is a particularly data-poor environment, generally speaking, and the iron law of quantitative analysis (or any analysis, for that matter) is that garbage in = garbage out.

**One more thing that annoys me: when academic scholars bust on us policy scholars for getting predictions wrong. Look, I would love to work in a data-perfect environment or pick and choose my research questions based on where the data was richest. Scholars working in academia have the luxury of doing that. Bully for them. But do you know who doesn't have that luxury? Policy makers. Policy makers have to make very difficult decisions in an environment in which the data is often very poor and where the options available are not terribly clear in terms of their costs or benefits. That's also the environment in which most think tank policy scholars work. When I do my analysis, I try to do it with some degree of rigor and to make my assumptions explicit. But I'm going to get some things wrong. To pick but one example, I argued, based on an order of battle analysis and reporting on the Free Libyan forces, that an assault on Tripoli would take months. I was wrong -- probably because I did not have very good reporting on the morale or performance of the Qadhdhafi forces. As long as I stay in this line of work, I'm going to continue to get stuff wrong, too. It's a hazard of the profession. My only goal is to do work that makes sense methodologically and reflects a bona fide attempt to grapple with the key issues. Now pick your TI-84 back up off the floor and get out of my office.