Center for a New American Security

King's College London professor John Mackinlay, one of my favorite European security analysts, has an interesting new essay at Prism. The gist? Britain's operational design is moving from projecting power abroad to a more insular of idea of security:

Is it unimaginable that Britain may soon find itself in need of armed forces that are much more versatile and have greater capabilities for dealing with other kinds of worst-case scenarios? In 2011, the short-term success of rioters and demonstrators associated with the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Bahrain, Oman, Djibouti, Kuwait, and Morocco seemed to push the techniques of political violence over the threshold of a new chapter. Across the region, the images and techniques of mass deployment by the population of one state seemed to incite violence in another. The crowds that surged into the streets were impulsive, leaderless, and without a deliberated manifesto. Their guidance through the streets relied on the widespread possession of cell phones and access to the Internet. In the UK, similarly leaderless crowds using similarly impulsive networking methods surged onto the streets of London, Manchester, and Birmingham.

Mackinaly argues that a number of environmental, economic, and migratory pressures on European security are coalescing, and this geopolitical event horizon may force Britain to choose between its traditional support of US operations abroad and ensuring domestic stability at home through an integrated mixture of security services. Moreover, public support for expeditionary operations has eroded over the last ten years and there is no longer an immediately compelling rationale for European "out-of-area" operations. He goes on to recommend a new kind of operational design rooted in gendarme capabilities.

Of course, anyone broadly familiar with 19th century history and the conservative reaction against revolutionary ideas after the Napoleonic wars might find this sort of idea vaguely familiar. These too were conceived of as broadly paradigm-breaking national security (although that term had not yet been invented) challenges, enabled by new ideologies and evolved technologies. French political theorist Paul Virilio has written extensively in Speed and Politics on how states have traditionally feared urban threats that use the urban commons as a medium for channeling revolutionary fervor to create a sped-up and terrifying new crowd power. Virilio's analysis begins with the French Revolution and the street fights of the late 1800s and reviews evolved responses to crowd power such as Baron Haussman's military-oriented renovation of Paris.  The Concert of Vienna was not just a mechanism for great power peace but a means of freeing up European states to focus on preservation of their own internal orders in the face of threats viewed just as apocalyptically as Islamic jihadism is seen today. The phrase "terrorist," after all, has its roots in the state terror of Maximilian Robespierre and his mobs. And just as Islamophobia is sometimes substituted for solid analysis of the domestic terrorist threat, the horrors of the French Revolution fueled bizarre conspiracy theories that still have resonsance among the tinfoil hat crowd today.

The difference, primarily, is that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism thinking have powerfully shaped the way security policymakers look at domestic complex operations challenges. Such a shift goes beyond the simplistic idea of police militarization, as European public security has traditionally featured the expansive use of domestic intelligence and expansive police powers for maintaining order. Though European counterinsurgency and counterterrorism thought has conceptual roots in colonial experiences, the guiding logic behind it can be seen as a liberal response to the same kind of threats that motivated the conservative reaction of the 19th century.

Aaron Ellis of the Tory blog Egremont has written about the concept of the "internationalization of the national interest" as conceived during the Tony Blair government. Broadly speaking, British policymakers argued that in a world shrunk by globalization far-off security threats required urgent attention lest they trigger domestic catastrophe. There is, however, little unique to Blair about such an idea. It became broadly accepted in the West after September 11. While Patrick Porter and others have focused on the degree to which this idea ties Western strategy to far-flung zones of action with little connection to core interests, the internationalization of the national interest is not really a cosmopolitan idea. It is actually quite a parochial one tied to the postwar European state's dilemmas of domestic order. 

By proposing the idea that domestic and international security threats were inescapably linked, Blair and others did not internationalize the national interest. Rather, Blair domesticated the international. Unruly, failed, or failing states became seen as extensions of existing domestic security problems. Foreign grey zones were areas that had to be pacified to fully realize the state's domestic monopoly of force, because those areas exerted influence that compromised domestic government authority.  There was, in a sense, an equation of pacifying Helmand with solving the problem of a "no-go" neighborhood in London. But unlike the 19th century European states, which conceived of domestic security problems as a problem to be dealt with Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot," the domestication of the international reflected the liberal norms and concerns of 21st century welfare states shaped by a desire to transcend a century of ideological turmoil. The management of order, especially in the context of publics vulnerable to extremist ideologies, was conceived from a frame of simultaneously extending security, policing malcontents, and gaining legitimacy through state largesse. 

If Mackinlay is right, the consequence of a decline in public and elite acceptance of an internationalized interest and expeditionary operations means that complex operations are merely returning to their domestic origins. This would not mean literally carrying out military operations akin to Iraq and Afghanistan. But just as some US police forces have adopted counterinsurgency methods to domestic legal, normative, and political contexts it would mean--as Mackinlay suggests--an European operational design for a predominately civil security context.

Since 2001:

• The United States has had seven ambassadors to Afghanistan.
• The U.S. military has had eight military commanders in Afghanistan.
• The NATO coaltion has had 14 commanders in Afghanistan.

That is no way to win a war, folks. My column in World Politics Review this week looks at the way in which the United States and its allies, while complaining a lot about the government in Afghanistan, have not ourselves been the most dependable partners. 

True net assessment is a lost art these days, at least in popular military budget discussions. Let's take this Bloomberg piece, for example. First, the headline: "Obama's 'Paper Tiger' Pentagon Budget Spends Five Times China." I understand and respect that the piece is mostly about rebutting an election year claim that reductions of the defense budget will make the US militarily weak. I have no desire to wade into those muddy waters since they have been well-covered by others. But, as the article title implies, the piece supposedly rebuts the claim by looking at the data:

U.S. spending accounted for 41 percent of global military expenditures in 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China accounted for 8.2 percent and Russia 4.1 percent, the Stockholm-based policy group said in an April report.

And this is where the problem begins. It means nothing to state that the US outspends China by five times because flat aggregate comparisons of defense spending tells us little about operational and strategic outcomes. Let's start with the strictly material: The US is a global power with global responsibilities. China, on the other hand, regionally concentrates its forces. The US is operating at the periphery whereas China, an power rooted in the hard crust of the Asian landmass, has no such logistical problems. Such a figure also tells us nothing about the correlation of forces in the theater in question, or whether each power has managed to translate spending into usable military resources. Given that there have been a lot of news stories about whether or not the US has been getting value out of its latest aerial platforms and problems associated with aging Cold War-era systems as well as the way that personnel and per-unit major platform costs may be causing a "defense death spiral," such an omission has analytical consequences.

Doctrine and force employment matter too. During the late 70s, Phillip Karber ran a simulation of May 1940 for an overly quantitative theater balance methodology called WEI-WUV and found that it didn't account for French and British defeat. The Allies may have enjoyed quantitative and qualitative platform advantages but did not master the "modern system" of military operations that had evolved out of World War I. The Germans, on the other hand, were farther along in the path towards combined arms mobile warfare even if they had some serious material and doctrinal flaws of their own. Andrew Marshall also reminds us that the socio-bureaucratic set of relationships within a military hierarchy also have an impact on effectiveness.

Finally, let's go to the most important factor: the human. WJ Rue at Gunpowder and Lead explains:

Let’s assume that the U.S. and Russia spend the same amount of money on their respective militaries. Let’s further assume that the U.S. allocates a sizeable portion of its resources to training – we’ll say the average fighter pilot gets roughly 150 hours per year in the cockpit. Russia, meanwhile, elects to spend its resources on slightly more capable jets, but its pilots only get 20 hours per year flight time, and they ran out of money before they could build a simulator. If we assume that similar circumstances exist throughout the Russian armed forces, who has the more capable military? The well-trained one or the one with the expensive equipment that the troops don’t know how to use effectively?

Is it too much to expect this in a short piece ostensibly about US budget debates and election politics? Probably. But defense budget debates are also never served well by using total military spending as a good metric of comparison of military power. As Rue argues, military power has aspects that are easy to quantify and other facets that are difficult to express on a balance sheet. Hence, the utility of net assessment.

Thomas Rid criticizes Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot for proposing what he views as an misunderstanding of the basic norms of civil-military relations:

Boot and Rubin take issue with the president not following the advice of his generals to continue sending American soldiers into harm’s way to help bring about change in Afghanistan through counterinsurgency ....One on politics, just as a reminder: is strategy taking a back seat to politics? Isn’t that what we call democracy? But even in non-democracies that is the case, and classic military thought and strategic theory says it should be that way. You don’t think so? Read this book. Why would it be superior to defer decisions on extraordinarily costly long-term strategy to decision-makers who are not democratically elected (read: generals and admirals)?

Rid is certainly correct that classical strategic theory states that politics drives strategy. The ambiguous part, of course, is how Clausewitz defines "politics" and whether or not he is being primarily descriptive or normative. The original German usage does not neatly correspond to either our understanding of policy--an condition or behavior of state--or politics--the process of deciding "who gets what, when and how." There is also a similar tension in Clausewitz (and Clausewitzians) between a normative and descriptive theory of politics. Clausewitz simultaneously describes violence as an outgrowth of the political process (which could imply a negative impact) and calls for politics to be placed at the head of military operations. My favorite Dead Old Prussian (sorry Moltke the Elder!) also places the reason of the state as one element in a three-pronged tug of war between the rage of the people and the play of chance on the battlefield.

There is also really little in Clausewitz that explicitly states what kind of civil-military relations should predominate. That's not surprising, as in those days it was not uncommon for heads of state to take the field. Policy, strategy, and tactics resided in the body of one person. It was not until later that civilian political leaders came to predominate in warfare.

All of this is of course irrelevant to the actual discussion of the Afghan war. The charge being leveled is not that the political leader is exercising his sound judgment but "playing politics"--placing domestic political considerations (politics) over the reason of the state (policy). The fact that domestic politics produces policy does not enter into such discussions. Why? Because American strategic culture, while implicitly accepting of civilian control in operational practice, abhors the symbolic implications of civilian control. People like to hear that the generals are in charge.

Why is this? One might be tempted to argue that American culture has become militaristic. But the answer is more complicated. First, American faith in government as a whole has significantly declined over the last 50 years. The idea of the benign civiian expert using rational tools to govern is dead and buried, and the last 20 years of electoral politics fired a shotgun blast into the grave just to make sure. Simultaneously, political polarization has also increased for structural reasons that political scientists have well-documented. It is unsurprising that the military survives as the only institution whose technical expertise remains unquestioned--in large part because of the cultivation of operational art as a neutral and technical sphere of expertise after Vietnam. Politicians (especially those without military backgrounds) are no longer are viewed with an expectation that they can be trusted to keep the nation safe.

Moreover, the idea of politics and war that Clausewitz lays out is rooted in a classical European context that views war as a normal aspect of state-to-state relations. The US in contrast, has always seen war as a disruption of the normal state of affairs. And if war represents the end of politics and the beginning of an battle of all against all, then the role of the politician is implicitly imperiled. Of course, any casual glance at the historical record shows that such symbolic politics are not reflected in American political-military practice. Americans have supported degrees of civilian control that defy even the Huntingtonian ideal. Abraham Lincoln organized military force at operational and even at times tactical levels, to say nothing of the way FDR exercised supreme command.

Afghanistan is too unpopular a war to test the divide between symbolic politics and operational practice. The McCrystal affair--the most explicit clash between military-technical expertise and civilian politics--had a tiny domestic impact. But the divide certainly exists. 

Yesterday, I watched some folks describe the United States as a "police state" because of some allegations of police brutality in Chicago. Without either defending the Chicago police department or agreeing with its critics, I tweeted that those who describe the United States as a "police state" have never lived in or visited an actual police state. I then watched as leftists went berserk in response. 

As regular readers of this blog know, I believe language matters -- as does the precision with which we use it.

So let's first explore the term "police state." Political science literature has a lot to say about authoritarianism and police states, but here is the plain vanilla definition from Merriam-Webster:

a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.

Now, by that definition, I think most observers of U.S. politics and comparative politics would be hard pressed to classify the system by which we we govern the United States as a police state. But let's look at the United States in comparison to other nations using the Freedom House and Polity IV surveys. The 2012 Freedom House survey (.pdf) ranks the United States as among the most free countries on earth with respect to both political rights and civil liberties. And here is the 2010 Polity IV country report for the United States (.pdf), which raises questions about some post-9/11 legislation passed in the United States (and also this crazy thing called the Electoral College) but otherwise gives the United States a clean bill of democratic health.

None of this is to say that the United States is perfect or that violations of civil liberties do not occurr too often for any of us to be comfortable with. And yes, I realize that a white guy such as myself shouldn't take his largely positive interactions with law enforcement authorities as being representative of, say, the experiences of African-Americans who live in my neighborhood.

At the same time, though, when polemicists and activists on both the left and the right so carelessly throw around pejoritive terms like "police state" and "facism" and "totalitarian," the only thing they accomplish is to strip these terms of any real meaning so that when we really do need them, they are rendered useless.

After all, if the United States is a police state, can Syria really be that much worse?

In the Principles of War, the Principle of Mass calls for the commander to concentrate combat power at the decisive time and place. Sounds simple enough. Those who allowed themselves to be defeated in detail learned firsthand the price of forgoing this maxim during Napoleonic engagements. The Allied inability to reinforce the advance force at Arnhem in World War II stands as a modern operational example of concentration's importance. But this obscures one problem: while the Principle calls for concentration at the decisive time and place, militaries can concentrate in exclusively  spatial or temporal dimensions. A military can certainly concentrate in the decisive time and place, but it can also concentrate either in a defined space or execute a simultaneous concentration in many contigious or noncontigious spaces linked together by an common operational design. For example, a commander could throw his or her combat power in one sector of the enemy's defenses in the hope of effecting a breakthrough or press multiple points at the same time.

There is some controversy in the Civil War historiographical community as to whether or not Archer Jones or James McPherson should be credited with the idea of concentration in time. Either way, as the linked blog makes clear, the notion is somewhat of an anachronism. Civil War operational artists certainly thought in term of simultaneous advances, but the notion of those advances equating to a kind of temporal concentration should not be taken as a given. Whatever the origins of the concept, the idea of concentration in time holds that it is possible to generate a significant concentration of force across an theater of war, or in the case of a multitheater strategic offensive, throughout any and all important areas of military competition. McPherson's argument in Tried by War, to some extent reinforced by James Schneider's idea of a distributed campaign made up of several simultaneous and/or successive operations, is that Lincoln and his generals conceived of later strategic offensives as continent-wide. Operations in one theater reinforced the other in service to one overriding strategic design. Concentration in time generates cumulative rather than wholly sequential pressure on an adversary, leading to a cascading military failure. In an odd way, concentration in time--especially when it pursues a strategic center of gravity--is the real "effects-based operation."

Schneider makes clear that distributed campaignng is not by any means easy. Concentration in time requires continuous logistics to support the complex architecture of a distributed campaign, and instaneous command and control is also needed to deal with the increased tactical and operational opportunities that a distributed force encounters.  The obsession with "self-synchronization" in the network-centric literature is one example of an effort by information-age militaries to deal with the problem of command and control in a distributed campaign. As befitting the continental bias of the operational art literature as a whole, concentration in time is obviously dependent on having the resources to mount simultaneous and successive operations. Concentration in time looks more realizable with lesser numbers in a naval context, with a exponentially larger operational space and powerful platforms capable of exerting power over operational distances. Naval power is still governed by Schneider's basic set of requirements despite its general difference from the continental model of military theory the notion of operational art issues from.

The past ten years of operations seem to suggest that Western military forces struggle to meet any of Schneider's basic requirements for distributed campaigning. Logistically, as Jonathan Riley points out, Western forces struggle to supply continuous logistics:

In modern campaigns, static operations in theatres like the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan have brought their own problems in over-stretching military logistic units and military forces that rely on contractors to provide many functions. This situation is almost the reverse of Napoleonic times. Once the line of communication has been established, the use of contracts allied to food technology and other commodity storage have made it far simpler to maintain a static force than a mobile one.

Indeed, contractors have become indispensible to projecting force across strategic distances and for austere militaries it is also financially easier to build supplies off networks of contracts than generate sustainment as a core competency. If Napoleonic armies foraged off the land and industrial logistics created a continuous stream of mobile supply that could follow a campaign, even shattering operational successes like the Gulf War were dependent on prestocked logistics and base infrastructure. My Abu Muquwama blogmate Dan Trombly has also written at his own site about the importance of prestocked equipment in maintaining a capacity for intervening in the Hormuz strait.

Instantenous command and control has also recently eluded Western military forces. Martin van Creveld has written often about the growth in headquarters staffs and the growing complexity of what used to be a simple staff process for generating orders and processing operations. To some extent, this is a result of technological and organizational complexity. Witness the Herculean struggles of an brigade commander in Afghanistan:

Few people would recognize the sheer amount of complex equipment fielded to a brigade today that requires sync. There is much, much more to integrate. We have UAVs employed by every echelon from Company to Theater level, plus helicopters and CAS to manage. The airspace is complex and must be deconflicted. We have signals collection gear that does some amazing stuff. We have ground penetrating radar mine detectors. We have precision guided mortar rounds. We have explosive detection dogs. Electronic jamming gear. We have various MISO/PSYOP assets, such as portable radio stations. We have balloons to integrate into the ISR plans with all kinds of towers. We have a host of interagency and joint embeds. We have ISAF/NATO countries which may or may not speak the language. We have SOF assets playing in our area with their own enablers. The list goes on but you get the idea. None of this can be employed haphazardly or we lose the effect of the system, or worse, the systems "fratricide" each other unless someone is looking holistically at the employment. So mission command has its limits.

The cost of this complexity, especially when it comes to even more organizationally tangled Coalition operations, is the ability to exploit local opportunities and respond to local conditions. Granted, commanders in previous wars dealt with an equally complex array of weapons, units, and armies (Alexander, Hannibal, and the Persians had large multinational armies with platforms ranging from horse archers to war elephants) but did so with the benefit of unity of command, more personalized command and control, and smaller operating environments. Moreover, as David Johnson has argued about the 2006 Lebanon War, the languid (compared to mobile campaigns like 1940, 1967, or 1991) pace of guerrilla wars accustoms operational planners to a far different style of operations then would be characteristic either of mobile or static conventional wars. Finally, modern wars has added the legal problems inherent in the modern targeting process and the concept of operational "lawfare" to the already tangled command and control loop.

These complex military organizations are also simply much smaller than they used to be. Technological advances have made individual weapons and units more powerful, but at the price of investing in complex platforms that require a more technically complex support infrastructure. The complexity of qualititvely superior platforms and their attendant personnel costs feeds into the problem of a contractor-augmented "tooth-to-tail" ratio and fuels the growing fiscal crisis of Western democracies. Escalating per-unit costs of technologically complex weapons designed for qualitative superiority fed through a dysfunctional design and acquisition process are responsible not only for problem-plagued aerial dominance fighter aircraft, but also a host of other troubled platforms. Even the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), originally conceptualized as a light craft to extend Western power to littoral regions, has become a financial sinkhole. Cost growth in major weapons platforms and growing personnel costs (which as noted before have a symbiotic relatioship) add to the costs of replacing and/or modernizing aging Cold War platforms.

This "wicked problem" has been dubbed the "defense train wreck." This, as Dakota Wood noted a couple years ago about the threat posed to the Marine Corps's institutional design by the fiscal drain of the F-35B and the Expenditionary Fighting Vehicle, not only complicates employing core platforms but threatens service and theater strategies writ large. It goes without saying that these problems, while toleable in a flush fiscal climate, are deadly in today's atmosphere of fiscal austerity. And at a certain point, quantity has a quality all of its own, particularly when expeditionary forces are far from their strategic base area and are confronted by local forces with an abundance of cheap but deadly weapons. This, without DoD buzzwords, is what "anti-access" amounts to. The United States, after all, relied on anti-access capabilities in the 19th century with its coastal fortress network and defensive naval strategy.

In Afghanistan and Iraq the cost of operations, inflexible logistics easily disrupted by political concerns or enemy action, and small forces spread out over large distances hampers the ability of military forces to gain strategic control. Just as in naval strategy, the cost of gaining control over a large area with small distributed forces is substantial. The cost, on the other hand, to the enemy of disputing control is very small. Joshua Foust has noted in his Afghanistan metrics series that the ability of the Taliban to sustain complex attacks in Kabul over many years has had a significant political cost to Afghan perceptions of safety and security, and Foust has argued elsewhere that military pressure in Helmand came at the expense of security in other equally important regions.

Looking to the future, the growth of urban megacities does not particularly bode well for small expeditionary forces. John Collins argued in his Military Geography that the Schlieffen Plan, if dodgy in 1914, might be impossible today due to the slowing power of extensive urbanization in what used to be terrain fit perfectly for mobile war. It is difficult for even host nations to exercise control over large cities, as anyone familiar with Latin American public security problems may surmise. For a long time, criminals in Rio de Janeiro controlled fortified neighborhood expanses and police, like American troops pre-Surge, engaged mainly in raiding operations. Peace in El Salvador was (albeit perhaps temporarily) granted by a truce between the country's two most powerful gangs, not a government political-military operation.

If concentration in time was really a 19th century innovation borne out by the power of industrial command and control and logistics, the political and military economy of Western defense suggests a potential return to the military methods of an era before the age of mass armies. Armies moved in dense blocks, proficient through rigid command and control at intrabattle maneuver but struggled at intratheater maneuver--to say nothing of strategic power projection. Some accounts of 18th century operations read like modern news clippings. Modern operations, like the 18th century depot system that so frustrated the generals of that period, are increasingly tied to dense stockpiles. Contractors taking over core military competencies is not, as commonly portrayed, really an alarming product of today's politics. Rather, it is a return to what really can be considered a military norm in recent Western history. Finally, brittle platform-intensive Western militaries may not be risked for fear of damage and loss of expensive machines or valuable personnel, just as Frederician militaries were similarly frustrated by the cost of direct battle. 

Concentration in space, which assumed paramount importance in the days in which low-ranged and relatively inefficient weapons needed to be massed to achieve tactical effect, may come back to the fore. The primary difference is that the space in which concentration occurs has grown exponentially larger. We aren't going back to Leuthen or Cannae-type engagements.  The other crucial difference is that the means by which military power is concentrated also do not have to fit a 19th century continental model of military power.

American power projection has traditionally prized a different form of strategic concentration than either the continental or purely naval schools of strategy. As Dan has pointed out, drones and special forces are simply the latest manifestation of the age-old American design for naval-backed discrete operations:

The broad authorization for use of military force which began the War on Terror and its “undeclared” nature has very little to do with drone technology, and more to do with the fact that the United States has never formally declared war on a non-state actor in its history. Even in areas frequently identified with drone warfare, such as the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and Pakistan, non-drone US interference has occurred at varying levels of frequency during the War on Terror. As I have argued before, drones increase operating tempo more than anything else. ...The tradition of undeclared wars against belligerent irregular foes across poorly defined regions is something very familiar to the Founding Fathers. .... The all-volunteer force, private contractors, and sea-deployed small units conducting raids into sovereign countries are products of the US body politic’s rejection of the heavy costs of mass mobilization, but continued interest in responding to actual or perceived threats and slights to broadly conceived notions of America’s international rights – in many respects, it is a return to the Barbary-style of warfare (the tradition of which is reflected in the “Small Wars” era of USMC operations in the early 20th century), where irregular threats did not merit a formal declaration of war and were dealt with without conscription or mass mobilization of the army. 

Dan gets to the heart of where strategy really becomes linked to political economy. Traditional European continental military powers that in earlier eras pioneered the era of mass warfare no longer have the capability to exert power beyond their borders and generally lack threats to justify large mobile combined-arms forces for warfare on the Eurasian landmass. The United States has traditionally rejected the continental model of military power and large standing forces were maintained only after World War II and Korea made clear the necessity of projecting worldwide military power. The Cold War can be seen as an exercise in grand strategic concentration in time. The United States aimed, when possible, to project military and paramilitary force in theaters both crucial (Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Northeast Asia) and peripheral (Southast Asia, most of the Middle East, and Latin America) rather than forfeit any kind of advantage to what was viewed as a monolithic Communist threat.

Such a worldwide threat is a historical aberration. A landscape of discretionary wars and humanitarian interventions with small contractor-supported and paramilitary-intensive military forces is actually truest to American political tradition. The late 1700s to early 1900s yields many examples of interventions waged by flexible naval-enabled forces, from American participation in the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion to the Banana Wars. When Eisenhower attempted to implement the "New Look," it was a attempt to consciously do away with the continental operational model of massive land forces in the hope that nuclear forces could bridge the gap. As Dan notes, the political economy of American strategy and operations is, contrary to dreams of an better past, extremely conducive to undeclared wars and covert operations. Take a look at the Quasi War and the Barbary Wars, waged under extremely questionable legal backing and in the case of the latter supported by foreign militias raised by American operators. And as David Parrot argues in The Business of War, Western militaries as a whole have traditionally preferred flexible forces augmented with contractors and local auxilaries in a "plug-and-play" fashion to large national armies. Such methods, to the extent they are politically viable, constitute the best chance of enabling Western power projection in the new fiscal environment.

Does this mean that these interventions will manifest in strategic effect? Not necessarily. But this is not necessarily a problem with the means provided by American material or the ways dictated by American operational art. Rather, it is a problem of strategic ends. If political economy dictates a certain style of operations for the near term, American strategists ought to take note of what such force can and cannot realize on the world stage. But a reversion back to older ways of using force does not necessarily imply a simultaneous reversion to older political and strategic conceptions of military goals. The challenge for military planners is to reconcile, as always, the means and ways available to a political determination of ends wholly (and rightly) outside their sphere of influence.

As some of you may know, I am planning on taking a leave of absence at the end of the summer from CNAS in order to participate in the Council on Foreign Relations' International Affairs Fellowship program. When I do that, I will no longer be able to blog at Abu Muqawama. But if the truth be told, I have not found the time to blog as much as I used to over the past year, and the quality of the blog has already suffered as a result.

In the past, I have been helped out on the blog by some pretty fantastic co-authors. Amil Khan and Erin Simpson were my two longest-running partners in crime, but I was also helped out by some anonymous folks who have gone on to serve at high levels in the Dept. of Defense, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Army. These folks have to remain anonymous, but their contributions really added something great to the blog.

I realized earlier this spring, even before I knew I was going to have to take a leave of absence, that if the blog was to continue, I would need some help. So I began to scout around for some of the smartest younger folks out there writing about issues related to strategy, counterinsurgency and defense policy. As it turns out, there are some fantastically bright young analysts out there, and they deserve a bigger platform. So over the summer, I will begin to incorporate some of these younger voices into the blog.

The first two young turks to join me will be Adam Elkus and Dan Trombly. When I first approached these guys about blogging here, they informed me that it would be an honor because they had been reading this blog since high school. (I took a strong sip of whatever I was drinking at the time and continued my pitch.) Adam is a PhD student in International Relations at American University. He helps edit the Red Team Journal, contributes to CTOVision.com, and blogs at his own site at Rethinking Security. Dan has not yet graduated from George Washington University, but his kung-fu is already strong. He blogs at Slouching Towards Columbia. You can follow both of these trouble-makers on Twitter at @aelkus and @stcolumbia, respectively.

I told both Adam and Dan that we'll take a look at things as the summer progresses and might consider adding some more voices -- likely folks who can either write on security issues related to the Middle East or people who have on-the-ground experience in either Iraq or Afghanistan they can share. But Adam and Dan will be running the show when I leave, so please welcome them to the team.

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.

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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."