Center for a New American Security

Raymond "Galrahn" Pritchett argued as much on his maritime strategy blog today:

I truly believe the think tank community in Washington DC is one reason why the US Army has so much influence right now in the Pentagon. About 70% of the defense analysts in think tanks that focus on defense issues are veterans of the US Army, and it has been like that since around the time of Gulf War I.

It is probably a coincidence the Army has been fighting a land war in Asia for over a decade, and the Army has been fighting a second land war in Asia for almost a decade. Probably. And it is also probably a coincidence that the US Navy has been shrinking during that same time period.

In response to the figure cited by Pritchett, my research intern and I went through the following think tanks and scanned their security-related research programs for veterans: the American Enterprise Institute (0!), the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (9), the Center for a New American Security (7), the Center for American Progress (2), the Council on Foreign Relations (2), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (10), the Brookings Institute (1), the Heritage Foundation (4), the Institute for the Study of War (4), and the Atlantic Council (4).

We did not count active-duty military fellows and only looked for people with military service in their official biographies. So I'm sure we missed a few people. We also did not look through the federally funded research centers like Rand or the Institute for Defense Analyses. So this is a decidedly non-scientific exercise. Galrahn's assertion just piqued my interest. 

The results of our informal survey, though, show 18 veterans of the U.S. Army, 11 veterans of the U.S. Navy, 10 veterans of the U.S. Air Force, three veterans of the U.S. Marine Corps, and one lone Coast Guard veteran currently working on defense policy issues. Even allowing for the fact that our survey was unscientific and that Galrahn is a product of the Arkansas public schools system, 43% is not "about 70%." The service break-down of veterans working on defense policy issues in think tanks does, though, seem to roughly correspond to the respective numbers of active duty officers in each service: U.S. Army (39.3% of all active-duty officers), U.S. Navy (22.8%), U.S. Air Force (28.7%), U.S. Marine Corps (9.2%), and U.S. Coast Guard (3.6%). 

Based on our initial research, we can advance the following hypothesis: there is no think tank conspiracy against the U.S. Navy.

Regarding the focus on ground forces over the past decade, Galrahn has probably inverted his causal relationship: are think tanks focused on issues related to the ground forces because we have been in two ground wars for the past decade, or have we been in two ground wars for a decade because think tanks focus on the ground forces? I think the former is a lot more likely than the latter.

Further complicating Galrahn's tin-foil musings is the fact that -- aside from the whole "the U.S. Army has so much influence right now in the Pentagon" thing, which Ray Odierno and Lloyd Austin U.S. Army officers everyone in the Pentagon will find hilarious -- our most recent report on the future defense budget has made our own U.S. Army veterans personnae non gratae in the Dept. of the Army. Led by LTG (Ret.) David Barno (USMA '76), our team argued that if you're going to cut the budget for a service, you should cut the budget of the U.S. Army. You'll need the U.S. Navy and Air Force, our report argued, to meet the future security challenges in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

[I tease Galrahn because his Razorbacks beat up on my Volunteers each fall, but his blog is seriously great. Check it out here.]

As those of you who follow my Twitter feed know, I have been drawn into a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Will McCants about whether or not one can be a "terrorism expert." Greenwald's position, as articulated on his blog:

I had a somewhat lengthy debate on Twitter last night about the Awlaki assassination with several people often identified as “Terrorism experts” — such as Will McCants and Aaron Zelin — and they and others (such as Andrew Exum and Robert Farley) objected rather vigorously when I said I found the entire concept of “Terrorism expert” to be invalid, as it is a honorific typically assigned due to ideology and interests served rather than actual expertise.  This is exactly what I meant: in U.S. political and media discourse, Terrorism means little more than: that which America’s Enemies du Jour (generally Muslim Enemies) do to it, but not what America and its allies do to anyone. Terrorism is not a real concept in which one develops “expertise”; it is, and from its introduction into world affairs always has been, a term of propaganda designed to legitimize violence by some actors while delegitimizing very similar violence by others. See the interview I conducted a couple of years ago with Remi Brulin of NYU for more on that.

Annoyingly, Greenwald has a point in both his post and in his earlier tweets. The study of "terrorism" in the United States over the past decade has been shaped by the American experience on September 11th of 2001, and when Americans speak of terrorism in the popular discourse, as Greenwald noted in a tweet, the word is often short-hand for Islamist terrorism. Travel to the United Kingdom, by contrast, and a "terrorism expert" may have done his or her field work in Northern Ireland. Travel to Spain, and an expert may have done his or her work in the Basque country. Thomas Hegghammer has written more eloquently than I about the way in which the study of both terrorism and jihadi groups has evolved in the United States after 2001, and it's only natural that the study of terrorism will be distorted by the local experience of the country or region in which the research is conducted.

But before I get side-tracked, let me break my response to Greenwald into two arguments. First, let us very briefly review the state of the literature in the study of terrorism and coercive violence. Greenwald is correct that "terrorism" has a pejorative connotation in the popular discourse. In the scholarly literature, though, terrorism has always meant something along the lines of "the threat or use of physical coercion, primarily against noncombatants, especially civilians, to create fear in order to achieve various political objectives." (O'Neill, 2005) Greenwald makes it seem as if states are never mentioned as terrorist actors, but there is a lot of literature on the use of coercive violence by states and state terrorism. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Schelling (1966); Mitchell, Stohl, Carleton and Lopez (1986); Kalyvas (2006); and Biddle and Friedman (2008). (I'm sure readers of this blog can think of literally dozens more examples. Please do so in the comments section.)

The literature on terrorism and terrorist groups did not spring forth on September 12, 2001. Researchers at my alma mater and elsewhere had been writing about the phenomena of terrorism and groups who use terror tactics for decades. Sometimes these researchers were doing case studies on Islamist or Palestinian groups. Sometimes they were doing case studies on Irish (PIRA) or German (RAF) groups. And sometimes they were comparing and contrasting varied groups. Walter Laqueur originally published this book, for example, in 1977. Bruce Hoffman published this book in 1999. I'm pretty sure those two guys are terrorism experts without the scare quotes.

Second, let me consider the case of my friend Will McCants, who Greenwald very much picked on in his Twitter feed along with Aaron Zelin (who I do not know well but who seems really smart in his own right). Greenwald is correct that the decade after the September 11th attacks created all kinds of incentives for self-proclaimed terrorism "experts" to rise to the fore, hawking their "expertise" and opinions on both the consulting market as well as in the mainstream media. Too often, this expertise has been ignorant or barely concealed Islamophobia. Ironically, though, one of the scholars who has done the most to condemn what he calls "CT hucksters" is Will McCants. Will is one of the more rigorously credentialed scholars studying violent Islamist extremist groups as well as being one of the most careful. Will fell into a study of terrorism after doing a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. He had no initial academic training in strategic studies or military affairs as far as I know, but his Arabic and understanding of the intellectual currents of political Islam made him ideal to work on al-Qaeda as a case study. And just like I started a dissertation on Hizballah with a background in Middle Eastern Studies and boned up on the theories related to small wars and insurgencies as I went along, so too did Will with respect to terrorism as a phenomenon. At the end of the day, Will is best described as an Arabist, perhaps, but if he is not a bona fide terrorism expert as well -- again, no scare quotes necessary this time -- I don't know who is.

What irked me most about Greenwald's tweets and post is that he is disparaging an entire class of very reputable scholars with the allegation that the only people taken seriously as terrorism experts in the United States are taken seriously because of some media gate-keeper's ideological bias -- and not because of their study of specific terrorist groups and a phenemenon that has a deep body of peer-reviewed literature dedicated to it. Greenwald is attempting to limit and discipline the discourse in his own way. He is signaling to his readers that no true expertise on terrorism as a phenomenon exists and that those who write about it are hopelessly ideologically compromised in principio. That strikes me as close-minded intellectual bullying. 

If you're going to bully people, bully the bad guys. And if you're going to make blanket judgments about entire fields of study but are not yourself an expert in that field of study, have a little humility when you do so. After all, you don't see me telling Glenn Greenwald what's what about due process or Constitutional law, do you?

My column in the World Politics Review this week is full of depressing observations on NATO:

[The] Libya intervention demonstrated that the militaries of non-U.S. NATO nations have not invested in an appropriate amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms or in in-flight refueling capabilities. Virtually all of the targeting and air tasking orders were provided by the United States, which also had to provide much of the ammunition once the allies simply ran out. In addition, a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute notes that up to 85 percent of the fuel for the air campaign in Libya was provided by the U.S. Air Force.

Read more here.