Center for a New American Security

Human Rights Watch recently put out a report demanding a ban on fully autonomous weapons system and more scrutiny, as well as additional legal controls, to regulate the development and proliferation of robotic weapons. Human Rights Watch wants an international treaty prohibiting weapons that either “deliver force under the oversight of a human operator who can override the robot’s actions,” and “robots that are capable of selecting targets and delivering force without any human input or interaction.” In their report, seeking to advance policy to prevent indiscriminate warfare, they instead perpetuate a large degree of misperceptions about the way in which militaries operate in addition to needless fear-mongering about fully autonomous weapons which are highly unlikely to ever exist.

The first major problem is that HRW even has a category of “human-out-of-the-loop weapons” which are supposedly going to enter modern warfare. This is, needless to say, a logically ludicrous concept. No weapon is fully capable of taking humans out of the loop, unless it is part of its own command structure. The distinction HRW draws between “Human-on-the-Loop Weapons” and “Human-out-of-the-loop” weapons is totally arbitrary, particularly since one key criteria HRW draws is that “human-on-the-loop” weapons have human oversight which can override and veto their actions, and “human-out-of-the-loop” weapons do not.

Unless the U.S. were to design a weapon that, upon activation, simply began doing whatever its programming told it to do and nothing else, a “human-out-of-the-loop” weapon does not and will not exist. Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason for a human to want to deploy such a weapon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what commanding officer wants to swap out his subordinates with a machine that is going to be less responsive to his orders?

Weapons fall into a command structure. Every weapon, regardless of its level of autonomy, will conduct missions designed by humans and carried out under human orders, supervised by humans with superior power over it. Indeed, comparable to human subordinates, a “human-on-the-loop” weapon gives a commander more opportunities to micromanage combat performance. If anything, a commander has fewer opportunities to scapegoat subordinates for the actions of an autonomous system.

HRW worries victims of “fully autonomous” weapons cannot confront those who have wronged them in court, which somehow obviates accountability through commanding officer. Supposedly, the entity pulling the trigger is essential to the aversion and prosecution of war crimes. But in this sense, robots do not change much of anything. Artillery gunners and their commanding officers, for example, frequently lack the information necessary to assess whether their fire mission is fully lawful or ethical. They are dependent on the wisdom of the people calling in and ordering the strike. The pilot of an F-16 flying at hundreds of miles an hour frequently lacks adequate ability to judge whether his target, particularly infrastructure targets, are legitimate or not. He relies, as a robotic aircraft would rely, on the wisdom of those who collected the intelligence on his targets, who have eyes on it from the ground who, if necessary, can correct how he deploys his munitions.

There is nothing inherently indiscriminate about an autonomous weapon, even if we assume it is going to face permanent inability to assess every single criterion of discriminate force vis-a-vis a human infantryman. An autonomous weapon using conventional munitions ought be assessed contextually. A weapon or munition that is discriminate for destroying a tank battalion in the open is probably not discriminate for clearing snipers out of a populated urban center.

Some weapons are so indiscriminate in a range of normal military contexts, and indeed without redeeming virtues of strategic efficacy that might justify them as proportional instruments, that banning them is relatively effective and prudent. There is very little discrimination possible with a chemical weapon whose physical nature makes selecting individual targets nigh impossible, or a biological weapon, which, once deployed, will continue operating fully autonomously with no possible human input. Not only that, but these weapons were so frequently operationally or strategically useless - and indeed, very dangerous to one’s own side - that it was entirely reasonable to put in place an outright prohibition. Even then, many militaries frequently commit violations of chemical weapons protocols by employing less-lethal gasses such as C-series agents and white phosphorous that have legitimate uses when it seems tactically prudent.

The attempt to blanket ban autonomous weapons relies on a blanket presumption of failure to discriminate that fails to take into account the way militaries operate. A commanding officer deploying autonomous weapons should know the limits of his system. An unmanned aerial system which can evade and engage hostile targets should not be allowed to select target types such as civilian vehicles or groups of individuals, nor should an autonomous weapon which cannot distinguish between civilians and soldiers with high enough reliability be emplaced in a city. This is just as we would not permit a jet attack aircraft to select and engage its own ground targets in a similarly populated area.

Autonomous weapons receive orders and can be programmed with rules of engagement. If these safeguards fail occasionally, this is not a particularly convincing argument. After all, look at the record of U.S. attempts to enforce roadblocks in Iraq. An infantryman may, seeing a civilian vehicle speeding towards his checkpoint, kill civilians in error because he is tried or concerned with protecting his life and those of his fellow soldiers. Humans disobey orders and make judgment calls about ROE or commander’s intent all the time, whether they are in or out of the loop of their CO. Indeed, we could select a great number of alternate scenarios where a robot that has no fear for its own life, and no programmed ability to refuse or deviate from orders, may be more willing to enforce a strict ROE to the letter. This is not to impugn human combatants or to praise robots, but to note that autonomous weapons, like all weapons, will have limits and advantages.

So what if a commander cannot discipline or punish a robot? He can do things that he cannot do to a human deviating from orders. He can override its actions. Even if that mechanism fails, he could remotely self-destruct or destroy the robot in the midst of its commission of war crimes. A robot Calley is, in many ways, easier to deal with than a human war criminal. It is much less ethically difficult to deactivate or destroy a malfunctioning robot than to kill one of your men or women. Not only that, but the information collected and stored by a robotic weapon would prove much more useful in the prosecution of a war crime committed by a robot-operating unit than the testimony of soldiers who must grapple with the limits of human sense, psyche, and loyalty to each other.

HRW’s argument, then, seems so overbroad as to likely be utterly ineffectual. Much as when Britain tried to ban submarines during the Washington Naval Treaty as being inherently indiscriminate and criminal because of the specific role they played in World War I, no power with the capability to take advantage of the huge military benefits of adopting these weapons is likely to forgo them for a blanket treaty, if they even buy into such a treaty at all.

One might justify HRW’s piece as starting a conversation - and I join that conversation by saying the specifics of their proposal and the view they adopt of autonomous technology are utterly ill-considered. There can and should be limitations on the way weapons can be used. But for the great majority of weapons in the human arsenal, these need to be thought of contextually rather than rigidly. Like it or not, autonomous weapons are already present, and states are going to use weapons with considerably efficacious attributes. But measuring the legality of autonomous weapons against higly specific scenarios against the standards that very often seem to ignore how militaries and the human beings in them behave on the battlefield is the wrong way to start this debate, and certainly not a sound foundation for credible regulations of their use. There are many reasons to start a debate. What HRW appears to aim to do is to strangle it in the crib on the basis of hyperbolic supposition. I strain to think of arms control beginning from such a premise which has had lasting or beneficial effect.

The relationship of citizen to soldier within the United States is a complicated one. For most of American history, the brunt of federal military power came from volunteers. Even during the Civil War, when conscription was most justified since the Revolution, not even ten percent of Union troops were draftees or the more common paid substitutes. The primary restraint on the growth of the army was far more the willingness of Congress and delegated states to fund it than popular will, and between the Constitution’s division of war powers and the logistical constraints, it was in the chambers of power rather than by plebiscite that the country decided to use force.

The role and fundamental logic of centralized conscription is to advance the power of the state, by raising armies and molding the populations that serve them. For that reason it failed to reappear until the Civil War. When Madison proposed it in 1814, Daniel Webster opposed it vociferously even months after Britain razed Washington. The archetype of the American citizen-soldier was neither a federal volunteer nor a a conscript but the militia, who fought to defend hearth and homeland. Yes, the 1792 Militia Act compelled military availability, but that compulsion was linked, by the very nature of the militia, to the fact it would only fight in situations of utmost need, such as frontier conflicts, invasions, or rebellions. Indeed, in many cases militias were simply raised locally from geographically-relevant states. Military exigency and political expediency ruled these decisions. When wars could be fought without conscription at either federal or state level, it did so.

While political and military changes eroded the viability of the militia system, this link between conscription and the immediate requirements of defending the nation remained relatively robust, even after WWI. It was notable that the only reason a peacetime draft passed in 1940 was because Congress forced language restricting the use of conscripts to U.S. possessions or the Western Hemisphere.

Many analysts and leaders, from General McChrystal to CNAS’s own David Barno and Thomas Ricks, are arguing that the conscription system which took such prominence in WWII and met its ignominious demise in Vietnam, needs a comeback. Without, as McChrystal put it, “skin in the game,” how can we be surprised when the country goes to war irresponsibly? Several recent academic studies also lend credibility to this argument.

This is a relatively new argument for the draft. In all previous systems the primary goal has been to augment the country’s military power rather than make the sharing of its burden more morally defensible. Equity entered the question only after the primary motivating criteria of mobilizing additional troops was satisfied, and even then frequently equity entailed satisfying legislators rather than a genuinely fair distribution. During peacetime or amidst smaller-scale wars and far-flung expeditions, the U.S. body politic generally saw no moral or political problem with relying on a volunteer force.

Even the authors of the Federalist Papers, in their advocacy for a federal army, generally intended it to rely on volunteers. The draft in World War II grew from fears of voracious Axis powers overwhelming an unprepared military rather than any desire to put “skin in the game,” while during the Vietnam War, Johnson feared the political consequences of mobilizing the National Guard and reserves more than conscription.

There is no doubt the volunteer force demands huge sacrifices from an incredibly small pool of citizens and their families, friends, and communities. There is also no doubt that in times of actual or perceived threat to vital or even existential interest, the U.S. has by majority assented to drafting troops. Yet the draft proceeded because the government invoked military necessity, civic obligation was what compelled reporting to duty, but that duty was always contingent on the circumstances of the war itself and what the government believed they required.

Using the draft to encourage better political behavior from the citizenry seems at odds given the frequently perverse effects past drafts incurred. In World War I, the draft did not meaningfully force reconsideration of the war's wisdom, it enabled the political coalition determined upon fighting it and which had successfully advocated it to continue doing so. The political dissent it invited was met not with reconsideration of the conflict but domestic censorship and crackdowns. The draft is a way to furnish sufficient means to accomplish prior held state aims, and if a majority decides to go to war on the basis of how they perceive the national interest, it is highly likely those conducting the war will look for ways to suppress or mitigate dissent before they look to limit or call off the conflict.

In Vietnam, the draft spread the costs of the war beyond volunteers, absolutely, but it hardly produced a wiser approach to the war. A seemingly small U.S. security engagement grew and the war’s political supporters used the draft to enable its perpetuation. Domestic political dissent and a change of political party in the Presidency failed to alter this. The draft in Vietnam began in 1964 and ended in 1973. Would it have been much shorter, escalated less, with fewer deferments and more franchised draftees?

It is difficult to say. As Horowitz and Levendusky acknowledge in their own paper on the caution-inducing effects of conscription, elite rhetoric has large implications for how a draft might alter political decisionmaking, and other research suggests partisan affiliation may too. Given the makeup of the U.S. Congress, we should take into account that where casualties come from (as well as the party structure in the U.S. generally) may have a large effect on how and when casualties change war support. Attitudinal unpopularity does not always trigger effective behavioral changes to policy.

Given Vietnam’s origins, we also ought to think through the potentially perverse effects of a draft for avoiding perpetual war. Many U.S. conflicts that might trigger a hypothetical future draft do not begin so obviously. Eisenhower was fiercely averse to deploying large amounts of conventional forces, Kennedy wanted advisory and assistance missions to take a larger role in U.S. security policy. Both helped escalate a war that would eventually trigger a draft.

That war had its beginnings in large part due to the development of policies which sought to avoid another Korea - that is, a large scale conventional deployment that would require a draft. His solutions ranged from smaller, stabilizing deployments such as Operation Blue Bat in Lebanon, to increased reliance on high-tech firepower such as nuclear weapons to substitute for U.S. troops, and the employment of U.S. airpower, advisors, and an increasingly paramilitarized CIA.

But in Vietnam, mistaken conceptions of the national interest, sunk-cost thinking and the psychological “Rubicon” all helped grease the slide from involvement in a region where conventional force seemed abhorrent to one where the country nationally accepted it. Despite the draft and public regret for engaging in the war, no combination of political representatives succeeded in preventing the war’s massive escalation (or geographic expansion). Indeed, in Vietnam, the National Guard and Reserve units left at home could engage in public order missions to respond to the growing anti-war movement and racial tension.

Today’s equivalents - the limited footprint wars where airpower, seapower, SOF and covert action bear the brunt of the action - would not be particularly likely to incur draftee casualties, at least initially (and in almost any scenario, for purely pragmatic concerns about cohesion and quality, I am not sure policymakers or commanders would know what best to do with drafted troops). Nor is it entirely clear that the current iteration of U.S. wars would necessarily trigger a draft, or involve very many drafted troops, although this depends on specifics. Nevertheless, even supposing drafted troops were adequately integrated and brought up to quality, a draft combined with a limited footprint model could actually give the military greater space to focus on supposedly short, small wars with low casualty risks and specialized units while still receiving resources to buttress unused capabilities in case they flare up. Not only that, but once casualties begin occurring in a conflict where the U.S. has already decided its national interests are at stake can bring about sunk-cost thinking.

So long as the draft coincides with broadly popular and short wars, it seems to have salubrious effects on civil-military relations and national unity. But when a draft persists in spite of a war with intense or widespread opposition, the political consequences in U.S. history are frequently disastrous for the military and society as a whole, particularly when a draft ends up enabling the country to fight an increasingly unpopular but still politically viable war. Indeed, perceptions of its wrongful or careless use in Vietnam are precisely why the all-volunteer force retains almost religious reverence in the U.S. today. The breach in trust many felt during Vietnam did enormous damage to the military and the country as a whole. Given the way in which conflicts evolve and escalate, and the impossibility of consistently forecasting military failures, the draft is a considerable gamble.

Ultimately avoiding foolish wars is, first and foremost, the duty of a responsible body politic, not an incentive for fearful conscripts. I will be the first to admit there is much to be done there. The country has to start caring more about foreign policy in the first place. It has to hold those who advocate and abet failed wars in office to electoral account. Civilians also need to take seriously the task of broadly debating war with a greater degree of strategic fluency and humility than it often gets. Unfortunately, as discussed in my last post, there are a variety of trends in U.S. strategic history which make “perpetual war” possible, ranging from changing conceptions of geopolitics to relative power and military-technical imbalances to changing U.S. objectives and planning processes.

The ability to draft remains a potentially important tool to provide for the common defense, and our obligations as citizens require us to answer it in those times of need. While it would likely induce more individuals to be cautious, the number of theoretical mitigating factors and the historical cases tell a more complicated story. Ultimately we need a great many more factors to explain why the U.S. began committing forces the way it did after the Cold War than the provenance of its manpower, and reimplementing the draft without fixing the many systemic problems in the way we think about and vote on foreign policy and national security could well turn the next draft into a societal and strategic fiasco rather than a boon for public policy or the military generally. If the goal is to relieve or make more equitable the burden of a prolonged war of vital national interest, then a draft may be appropriate. But I remain skeptical that a draft will produce or substitute for wise public choices rather than exacerbate the deeper or more widespread flaws affecting the country’s wars and decisions to wage them.

Small wars, overseas expeditions, and punitive raiding are endemic throughout U.S. history. From the outset of the republic, America began grappling with conflicts of tenuous definition and purpose. The constitution, despite vesting Congress with the power to declare war, was never particularly clear on what constituted adequate legislative justification, nor did it seek to deny the executive leeway over military initiative.

The power to make war, in the event of hostile aggression, remained with the executive. Additionally, far from being a vaunted tradition, the power to declare war has never required an official declaration of war to authorize military action. Indeed, this is the exception rather than the norm. Beyond the many naval actions conducted without any substantial Congressional writ, there is, beginning with the Quasi-War and the Barbary Wars, a long tradition of Congressional authorizations for war that are not formal declarations. From the Quasi-War to the Iraq War, the courts have upheld these distinction.

Yet there is clearly a large distinction between landing bluejackets against ports hosting pirates and privateers and today’s prolonged, massive targeted killing campaigns, at least in scale and scope. In logic, they are not so dissimilar. In the case of naval landings and punitive expeditions to defend American citizens and commerce abroad, the executive invoked unilateral prerogatives of national self-defense, or else the implicit (through Congressional maintenance of the standing navy) or explicit (Congressional authorizations of force) concurrence of the legislature. Acting against irregular actors, with varying levels of hostile state complicity, the executive used a large standing military force to engage in intermittent warfare.

There was a somewhat similar pattern of irregular and relatively small-scale hostilities during the many Indian Wars, but many of the Congressional authorizations lack meaningful modern analogues. More relevant, they were land wars, utilizing militias or federal troops mustered with direct Congressional approval. Despite occasional flirtations with a Napoleonic style land army from Federalists and nationalist politicians, the legislative constraints dovetailed with difficulties in central government resource extraction to limit a standing federal force that would grant the President leeway to engage in long land wars. Not only that, but given the relative weakness of the U.S. and the ubiquity of stronger European rivals, prolonged forays outside the American frontier were incredibly risky. So concerned was the early U.S. with interventions opening up broader conflicts that the Neutrality Act specifically circumscribed private citizens’ ability to follow their conscience or coin purse into combat.

I mention all of this because, as Micah Zenko and others have pointed it out, the possibility of a peacetime President seems increasingly distant. Zenko outlines a security policy where drones, SOF, and cyber capabilities all play a role in poorly-defined and vaguely-legitimated conflicts. I’m tempted, though, to frame things in a different light. Drones, SOF, and cyber certainly stand out as instruments with much more prominence, but they are also symptomatic of wider changes. Frequent military intervention, as I’ve explained above, is not unusual. What is unusual is that these ostensibly limited interventions and brushfire wars are now not simply prolonged, but massive in comparison to any historical antecedent.
Some, such as Andrew Bacevich here, suggest this is symptomatic of a “new American way of war,” in which inexpensive and small forces allow for perpetual warfare. But in a long-term perspective, we are not seeing traditional wars becoming wars in the shadows, but instead a strategic context where brushfire wars take on gargantuan proportions.

One major constraint on the duration, scale, and scope of small wars in American history has been the overall geopolitical context and great power rivalry. The potential consequences early of American actions against privateers or irregular threats becoming a conflict with a great power were vast - compare the Quasi-War to the War of 1812. Not only were there practical existential dangers in expanding a small war too far, there were compounding dangers to dragging it on too long, because a smaller, and less logistically-able force was simply incapable of bearing the strain. France’s relatively “light footprint” intervention in support of American independence - involving a mix of proxy support, naval forces, and limited land troops that might seem familiar today - helped bankrupt the country.

Today, the U.S., as Zenko and Michael Cohen argue elsewhere, is incredibly secure. That is a major part of why perpetual warfare is so appealing. China and Russia may occasionally grumble about U.S. violations of, say, Pakistani sovereignty but it takes essentially no action to back it up. In the case of Somalia, China and Russia are occasionally hawkish on questions of amphibious assault! Rival great powers know U.S. drones and SOF, while lethal for AQAP or Al Shabaab, are not particularly frightening to state actors on their own, nor do U.S. employments of them gravely threaten their allies’ key capabilities, and even where cyber capabilities pose a threat, other great powers are not new to that game. In essence, the U.S. faces little pushback from abroad over these actions, and maintains enough conventional strength to cover its bases that the “pivot to Asia” can coincide with ongoing military and covert operations in CENTCOM and expanding US presence in AFRICOM.

A second major constraint that now gone are internal constraints. Legislatively, Congress is willing to write blank checks to avoid being blame for the potentially large political costs of an attack, because there is no popular reward to oversight in the electorate and potential political costs for poor management. Fiscally, though, the transformation of the U.S. military, mostly under the crucible of large-scale, conventional wars, have left a military which had to fight its small wars on shoestring budgets with a military powerful enough to take on any force on the planet. While drones and SOF are undoubtedly present, the backing resources range from nuclear subs and carriers to huge numbers of conventional aviation platforms in both strike and support roles, as well as ISR aircraft that might otherwise be needed for conventional foes.

Rather than classic conventional wars moving into the shadows, if we are in an era of “perpetual war,” it is because we are waging small wars on steroids. Where before the United States would not have had the time or resources to do much more than send a few ships and land some Marines, it now has the resources to build massive air bases for everything from remotely piloted vehicles to F-15Es to U-28s to SOF teams to find, fix, and finish enemies which rarely muster more in the way of air defense than RPGs and large-bore machineguns. It may not be as excessive or reckless as a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen for the task, but what makes these wars shadowy is less the tools involved than the rest of the government and public’s relative indifference to strongly examining their use.

The final removal of constraint I’ll highlight here is ideological. The punitive raids and small wars of the past were small in part because they did not seek sweeping aims. The goal was very often to punish offenders, deter potential aggressors by example, and, if possible, establish the bare minimum of control or safeguard that might prevent the incident from occurring again. In the 19th century, there was little conceit the U.S. could build state capacity to stop piracy, nor interest in reforming the societies of the Barbary polities to bring them into a circle of friendly nations. Jefferson’s armed emissaries in the Barbary Wars were no liberal crusaders. They would plot a coup or familial betrayal one day and simply cut a deal with an offending sovereign the next. Gradually as U.S. interests came to include deterring third-party dominance or expanding U.S. economic activity in a country’s territory, it conducted interventions, such as those in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which required a degree of state capacity, albeit one comparably limited by today’s sweeping standards, and if, say, naval officers had to function as warlords in the interim, then they did.

Today, partly by sets of ideological goals and partly by a changing vision of what state capacity and stability actually look like, the U.S.’s objectives in small wars are far too broad for the 19th century’s short-lived expeditions to endure. Since the 20th century, perceptions of a shrinking world have made it harder for the U.S. to mentally separate instability or threats for allies or partners from its own interests and security. So too have changing moral and political standards made it harder to allow a Phase IV with a nasty dictator or endless civil war that might end without a pro-American faction on top. Addressing these concerns has massively increased the intensity and duration of conflicts against amorphous or irregular actors.

Sadly, even with additional Congressional oversight, it’s hard to see that procedural fix on its own providing a return to presidencies where peace appears the norm. The still comparably untrammeled geopolitical position of the U.S. removes much of the disincentives for potentially reckless adventurism and spending that checked it in the past. Even a military hit by sequestration will have vastly more leeway to bring its devastating power to bear in small wars than its predecing incarnations did. As for the normative and ideological changes, there horizons of alternative, ore limited visions of U.S. security policy are sadly limited in mainstream discourse, while the mantras of the new, deeply interconnected world, the desire to engage in capacity-building and regional stabilization, and other fixtures of modern U.S. foreign and security policy remain well embedded among policymaking elites, militating against self-restraint and even resource constraints. If these constraints remain eroded, and the incentives for U.S. self-discipline so low, achieving accountability will be a very daunting challenge.

There's been a flurry of commentary and scholarship examining the idea that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) enabled a new kind of fluid, boundary-skipping form of warfare. Some observe that the conflict against al-Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) involves multiple political and spatial contexts. We balance between the interiority of the homeland, the exteriority of the battlefield, and a set of other spaces distinguished by the degree they permit access and power projection. All of these spaces are linked together by communication technologies, logistics networks, and financial flows. 

From the late 1990s onwards, the disaggregated nature of emerging threats stimulated US government interest in interagency cooperation and networked military and security organizations. The refrain is familiar: an allegedly new threat requires novel methods that cross interagency lines and crack bureaucratic rice bowls. Of course the threat, while novel in character, is not entirely new. Similarly, the spate of analyses warning of unprecedented counterterrorist warfare reflect the same wrongheaded assumption:  AQAM is the only opponent political communities have fought whose uneven geography poses political, legal, and strategic challenges. Hence America's war against al-Qaeda sets a dangerous new trend.

The historical record does not support this narrative. War beyond borders is actually more common than it might seem in today's very state-centric world. Transnational threats have never fit comfortably in neat political or legal categories, and states have often embraced unorthodox operating methods and organizations to enhance their security. Let’s start with a deep dive: in the premodern world, pirates, nomads, and secret societies were both geographically fluid and highly mobile. The anarchist writer Hakim Bey idolized the Assassins because they defied established borders and laws to create their own secret realm:

Across the luster of the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a desiccate blue valley travelers find an artificial oasis, a fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden garden. ...As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hasan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone--those within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers & poisons.

Bey argued that the Assassins and pirate communities were disaggregated communities of free spirits living in fortified sanctuaries; separated by oceans of sand and sea. In turn, nomadic powers moved as diffuse clouds throughout large landmasses and lived parasitically off of settled peoples. The Tartar peoples, Clausewitz observed, also constituted a collective warmaking entity that did not observe the neat separation between political, economic, and military divisions of labor common to states and empires.

How did states and other political communities respond? You might be surprised how little really has changed. Pirates and bandits were regarded as "enemies of humanity" and were treated harshly. Sovereign boundaries were transgressed to capture non-state enemies that took refuge within settled political communities. Established legal and political concepts stress that only states have the “rightful authority” to wage war. Great powers also established counterterrorism networks and shared intelligence since the late 19th century. Upset about privatized war or the Human Terrain System? Contractor support, native intelligence networks, and targeted killings were also old hat to Army officers involved with the Indian Wars and Pancho Villa expedition.

States may not want to admit that non-state networks can wage war against them, but transnational enemies won’t go away. States themselves use similar methods to mobilize power across borders, as Robert Kaplan observed of Iran's "virtual empire" of proxies and intelligence operators. The Soviet Union had a far-reaching global network of spies, client states, and proxies and the West feared the Comintern’s capacity for ideological subversion long before it feared the Soviet military.

It’s hard not to conclude that World War II also stands as a giant rebuke to the idea that the global war on terror poses a unique challenge to questions of borders, neutrality, legality, and politics. As my blogmate Dan noted,  Axis naval, air, and mechanized power projection capabilities necessitated operating in neutral territory and sometimes invading and controlling entire states. Iran, Iceland, and Norway are just a few of the places that came under Allied power. World War II is also a case of "complex" war against a coalition held together by transnational ideologies. The Germans ruled a group of fascist states and non-state networks, and the Japanese and their local allies fought to establish a pan-Asian system radiating out from Tokyo.

The West countered the complex threat by generating a astounding variety of interagency collaboration and hybrid organizations. Stanley McChrystal would be more at home during WWII than the Iraqi surge. Collaborative interagency research, analysis, and operations groups were assembled to plan economic warfare, crack codes, analyze adversary strategic culture, and assess asymmetric threats like the German U-Boat offensive. Indeed, WWII was also the heyday of groups ranging from covert operations organizations like the Office of Strategic Services and Special Operations Executive to oddball groups of mercenaries like the Flying Tigers.

Just because the threat is old does not necessarily mean that we have a universal template that will erase the complicated political and strategic problems inherent in this kind of warfare. The AUMF is broad and wide-ranging because politicians and the public perceive that the threats are similarly unbounded. But that perception alone should not be a justification for hurrying down every rabbit hole and wasting resources and lives in the process. Policy and strategy can help clarify objectives and make them sustainable over time. Trying to develop a better understanding of the relationships between local and global threats is also necessary to avoid needless conflict, as are rigorous analysis of the effects of various political-military methods.

What is not useful is an ahistorical narrative of unprecedented and spatially unbounded warfare that ignores the long record of states going beyond borders to fight threats to national security. One cannot expect politicians and security officials castigated for a failure to "connect the dots" and counter transnational threats before 9/11 to react sympathetically to such rhetoric. Pakistan exports terror abroad and is unwilling and unable to curb such negative externalities. Hence Pakistan's hue and cry over its sovereignty has fallen on deaf ears.

The real risks lie in strategy and policy, not necessarily geography. What is the US theory of victory? How do we know who the enemy is? How do we know we are winning or losing? Are the costs of our effort sustainable? Are our targets enemies or bystanders we attack out of ignorance? The answers to these questions are still elusive. But the US public deserves to know, whether the enemy has a flag and capitol or hides in the shadows.

Jason Fritz at Ink Spots has an excellent review up of Anthony Beevor’s new single-volume history of World War II. I haven’t read the work (although Fritz’s review has moved it further up my to-read list), but the post raises some excellent points about how we view World War II which have vital implications for today. First, Fritz praises Beevor for attempting to highlight the political and strategic complexity of the conflict:

As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank.

We frequently hear in foreign policy circles that the 21^st century’s geopolitics is vastly more complex than that of the 20^th, particularly with reference to the relative simplicity of great power politics in a state system or the simple strategic viewpoints which sufficed for the clash of bipolar blocs, along with changing trends in economics, technology, and society. Yet looking at WWII and its preceding decades show a world’s complexity that would be mind-boggling even to the sharpest, forward-looking policymakers and strategists today.

World War II featured a system with a much more pronounced multi-polarity, both diplomatically and ideologically, and with a patchwork of sub-state party systems, insurgents, and factions of all kinds attempting to seize control of state machinery and the mass populace. The political tumult of 1930s Japan, with the vying Imperial Way and Control Factions seeking influence over the military and the state generally, emerged from a context of ideological, social, and political discord and actual false flags and outright coup attempts puts today’s grappling with modern political transitions in some perspective. Even in amidst the great power clash of WWII, non-state actors with obscure ideologies could exert profound effect. Take for instance Darlan’s assassination at the hands of a French Resistance cell led by an ultraconservative with monarchist and integral nationalist tendencies.

 While this world was undoubtedly different, dismissing it as irreconcilably simpler in a geopolitical sense risks privileging a post-hoc teleology. Despite the growth and change in populations, technologies, and economies, making the case for a policy-relevant epochal great is likely to obscure a far greater deal more than it reveals. While tacticians and students of operational art and military strategy frequently plumb the depths of World War II, the policy planning, diplomacy, and general foreign policy issues of the period frequently appear as so beholden to antiquity as to be irrelevant, or so straightforward as to become unexamined mantras.

That brings us to the next issue, which is the problematic “good war” narrative of World War II. As Fritz explains:

It is important to note that Beevor does not suggest that World War II was an unjust war, he in fact says that is (from the Allied perspective, naturally), but rather that we should remove our rosy glasses on the West’s activities during the war and understand analysis of the war and its events for what they are and why “good” is not a descriptor of this war. He describes the war as “so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion.”

The historical lessons of World War II are far too often transmuted and echoed through the experiences of the Cold War and the War on Terror. While a narrative of the U.S. grappling with ideologically-extreme foes provides a satisfying continuity to the past three quarters of a century, the historical lessons most often drawn from WWII often seem simplistic in the extreme.

There is the perpetual invocation of Pearl Harbor, without adequate consideration for the diplomatic and domestic political maneuvering, sanctions, and U.S. policy decisions, and Japanese provocations and reactions, which preceded war’s outbreak (December 7^th was, as Gaddis has noted, hardly a surprise in the way 9/11 was). There is the even more frequent agonizing over Munich, appeasement and the importance of prevention, without regard for the diplomatic issues, the military unpreparedness for launching an efficacious attack on Germany, or the possibility that an unpopular and hastily-conceived war might have brought pro-Axis or anti-war politicians greater influence by peaceful means in their home countries.

What is rarely invoked in public policy discourse is equally telling. The avoidance or ignorance of how the European theater of the war, in brute material and human terms, was actually won is politically and rhetorically understandable but historically incomprehensible. The messy deals and compromises of interwar and World War II era are uncomfortable, but potentially illuminating to those who seek to put “the study of dilemmas” into practice in ways the good war narrative, useful for polemical nostalgia, can never be.

The myriad difficulties of waging World War II that Fritz earlier outlined culminated in human tragedy and moral compromise, which challenges both the simple label of the “good war,” and for today, demands we scrutinize our contemporary context rather than reinforcing the whitewashed symbols and credos of the mythologized past. In recognizing the complexity of World War II, we not only refine our historical understanding, but also recognize relevance of its lessons at the highest levels of strategy, policy, and politics without resort to tired clichés.

Let's face it: American landpower is in crisis. As blogfather Andrew Exum pointed out in a January column, without a dominant adversary or geographical template (the Soviet Union, Central Europe) landpower's case is getting harder to make. The counterinsurgency era provided a breather, but not necessarily a solution. It was common not too long to ago to see a flood of books and articles making the case that the Army had innovated towards a form of war (counterinsurgency) that would dominate the future of conflict. However, as Exum observes, this ignored the fact that Army/Marine counterinsurgency in Iraq was a contingent innovation designed to help the US through a war that many COIN thinkers regarded as a mistake. In 2012, the American defense landscape has moved away from large-scale stability operations and privileged air-sea battle, foreign internal defense, and unconventional warfare scenarios. None of these seem, at first glance, to be particularly promising for the big battalions.

Some predict that the "man on the scene with the gun" will be replaced by the culturally sensitive special operative, cyberwarrior, or Predator pilot. Afghanistan in 2001-2002 and Libya last year is often trotted out to support this thesis. Certainly US airpower and Gulf Cooperation Council unconventional warfare units saved the Libyan rebels from defeat and gave them the support and organization necessary to win. But holes in the narrative emerge when we consider that the decisive weight was Libyan ground forces. Similarly, the success of the "Afghan Model" in 2002 should be properly credited to the Northern Alliance's Afghans. Moreover, relying on airpower and special operations forces as the US main effort also had costs. The fact that the US cannot diplomatically operate in a Libya whose citizens and government are ostensibly pro-American or even properly investigate the Benghazi consulate attacks speaks volumes about the problems of confusing reliance on ground proxies with actual political control. Granted, these costs are small compared to large-scale ground engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they still complicate the now-trendy vision of indirect warfare.

Douglas Ollivant has also soundly observed that we cannot assume that special operations forces will be a salve for every security challenge we face. Some scenarios will simply be too big for SOF to handle alone. Even in the US does not seek to reconstruct collapsing states, securing weapons of mass destruction and leadership targets in the aftermath of an implosion of Syria, North Korea, Libya, or any number of other states would be demanding tasks that special operations would have difficulty handling by themselves. Some sanctuary-raiding missions would require larger ground forces. Others may simply lend themselves better to general purpose forces. Recent African success waging combined land-amphibious operations in Somalia suggests that land forces executing amphibious raiding in Africa could inflict substantial damage on pirates and other foes. In other situations we may not be able to rely on proxies to do the job for us, either because of a principal-agent mismatch or lack of capability. Finally, SOF and airpower in recent conflicts also depend implicitly on the enemy lacking the ability to threaten the bases and supply networks that sustain them with ground power, commando forces, or long-range weapons.  Should Afghanistan’s government lose substantial amounts of territory or collapse outright after US withdrawal, the basing arrangements upon which we base our proxy warfighting would be threatened.

Still, the question remains: how to rebrand landpower? The Army War College's Antulio Echevarria II has a great piece at the Strategic Studies Institute taking on the challenge. In the past, Echevarria has written about how the United States lacks a "way of war" but instead had developed a "way of battle" oriented around destroying enemy armies. Destroying armies is necessary but not sufficient for decisive victory. In a new compilation of case studies on the subject of hybrid warfare edited by Williamson Murray and Peter Mansoor, there are copious examples of strategic misfortunes induced by conflation of Napoleonic victory with actual defeat of the enemy. Eliminating the bulk of French forces in 1871 forced the Prussians to contend with makeshift armies and partisans. The US' inability to manage the challenge of fighting insurgents, partisans, and main force units simultaneously played a strong role in its defeat in Vietnam. And in Korea today the US and South Korea will contend with North Korean main forces, special operations groups, and paramilitary networks in any ground scenario.

We've argued for a while as to what to call these conflicts, from Fourth Generation Warfare to various forms of "complex" irregular war. But the bottom line is that future conflicts will involve the need to gain control over populations, whether the opponent is a positional force, guerrillas, or both. Echevarria offers a way out of the morass:

Some will want to argue that Landpower's raison d'être is to defeat an opponent's ground forces. However, if more than 2 centuries of military operations are any guide, America's political leaders will see that as only “mission half accomplished.” The Indian wars, the Philippine insurrection, the Banana wars, World Wars I and II, the interventions in Asia and Latin America, the Balkans, the Middle East, and many other areas suggest that Landpower is generally employed not only to defeat an opponent's ground forces, and the quicker the better, but also to establish and maintain control over people and places thereafter. This is what Landpower brings to the table that Airpower and Seapower cannot. The idea is, again, to extend the reach of policy.

Echevarria is not saying the role of landpower should be to build states. The conflation of defeating one's opponents with governing them has been one of the most destructive trends in recent national security policy. Echevarria addresses this head-on. In contrast to the stereotypical idea of an American way of war based around unlimited political objectives, Echevarria argues that Presidents have often sought to only use as much force as appropriate. Even in eras of total war, we have always considered conserving our own resources. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of fighting Germany in World War II, and US did not completely completely mobilize its resources for the task. Even during the Cold War, the US never adopted a "garrison state" mode akin to the Soviet total warfare state. 

Adopting a holistic definition of landpower allows the Army and Marines to market themselves for a range of missions while still building a core set of skills oriented around offense, defense, and stability and support operations. This would certainly preserve all of the experiential gains of the last ten years in fighting insurgents, guerrillas, and illicit networks, but not limit the military to believing that one strategy should guide response. Indeed, it would also emphasize the productive use of land forces in situations short of war for shaping operations and rapid response. Finally, this conception of landpower would be a good basis for integrating landpower with cyberpower and special operations warfare. The Landpower Group currently examining the future of the concept is fruitfully looking at that intersection, as well as landpower’s adaptation to other emerging security challenges.

To return to Echevarria's original point, an new conception of the American way of war would emphasize not only the armies of the opponents but the social and political contexts that generate them. It would privilege Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini but also leave room for John Arquilla. However, such a conception would require forces built around around combat. In the last ten years American soldiers have hunted down the enemy and engaged in the close fight in some of the most physically demanding regions of the Earth. And historically there is nothing soft about small war, whether chasing down Pancho Villa overland in Mexico or fighting dug-in al-Qaeda units on the mountains during Operation Anaconda.  To recognize this is not to denigrate the importance of cultural knowledge or persuasion, but it is to point out that everything else rests on the ability to threaten or violently coerce. Combat could occur anywhere, as daring attacks against American rear areas and supply columns have proved over the last ten years. As William F. Owen observed, expansive political objectives must be purchased by operations that grant control. Otherwise, the enemy always has the ability to spoil the plan.

This vision of landpower would not necessarily be a call for large land forces on the model of 1917-1991. Rather, it would be a use of landpower familiar to policymakers throughout most of American history: boots on the ground to give America a say in what happens in unstable regions of interest to American national security, protect American diplomats and commercial interests from the predations of states and sub-state groups, and attack non-state organizations that threaten American lives. If framed that way, landpower could remain a competitive advantage even if scaled down.

Some familiarity with strategic theory might not save the hopelessly confused debate on targeted killings in the "AfPak" region, but it might help. The basics: policy is a condition or behavior. Strategy is an instrumental device that accomplishes the policy. Policy, in turn, is created and continuously shaped by political processes. Even a good strategy can be rendered meaningless by bad policy. Targeted killing is not a "policy," as many have argued, as an action cannot be policy. Policy is a precondition to action. Strategy, in turn, is not entirely about fighting but is mainly based around the threat or use of military force. Hence targeted killing is a strategy of the state, not a tactic. All strategy takes empirical form in tactics but the art of strategy itself is arranging those tactics in a manner that achieves the political object.

Sometimes a strategy will be ineffective and cannot achieve the desired policy ends. The sudden collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 rendered irrelevant the Chinese Communist Party's strategy of building a conventional army around northern base areas while simultaneously building guerrilla bases farther to the south. Sometimes the policy itself is delusional and no strategy can save it, as was the case with the Islamic Republic of Iran's dream of conquering 1980s Iraq after it repelled Saddam Hussein's troops. Strategy and policy, however, have to be meaningfully separated and discussed in order to find clarity.

Most discussion about targeted killings in Pakistan revolve around questions of strategy--is a targeted killing strategy preferable, given the alternatives? By far, Joshua Foust is distingushing himself as one of the most thorough commentators on this question. A strategy of targeted killing may do less harm than the traditional Pakistani (and first British) method of exercising control over the regions criscrossed by American combat platforms: "butcher and bolt" punitive combined-arms raiding. It would certainly be preferbable if Pakistan would exercise its sovereignty with a method other than indirect rule and collective punishment. That's unfortunately as unlikely as Pakistan ceasing its support for militant groups engaged in armed aggression against its neighbors.

It also makes little sense to raise the cost of targeted killing if doing so will set back the policy the United States is seeking to achieve. If the policy is presumed to be correct, then the dominant concern should be ensuring that the right targets are selected. If greater transparency incentivizes this process, then we should all be for transparency. Strategy accomplishes the policy by either disarming the opponent or breaking his will to fight on. Killing the wrong people should be avoided, and if less and more precise strikes accomplish this goal then targeting authorizations should be tightened. But it makes little sense--if we feel the policy is correct--to limit the levels of force employed if the alternatives to achieving the policy goal are distinctly suboptimal.

Now, all of this presumes that the policy is correct. That proposition is in fact extremely debatable, and this uncertainty has implications for the implicit strategic and ethic calculations we are debating. First, US policy towards Pakistan has been, as Christine Fair notes, a case study in catastrophe. The United states has attempted to transform Pakistan's domestic politics through various forms of statecraft, all of which have ended in failure. If Bob Woodward is to be believed, the 2009 Afghan surge was built around the implicit idea that stabilizing Afghanistan would help the US better manage Pakistan. And as Greg Scoblete has noted, the intensity of the targeted killing campaign--and its attendant collateral damage--in part issues from the necessity of fighting the Pakistani border side of the war in Afghanistan.

Also embedded in the conversation about targeted killing is the problematic policy assumption that the greater problem is al-Qaeda rather than Pakistan itself. As Scoblete noted: "is the U.S. targetting militants that threaten the Pakistani state, or those sponsored by the Pakistani state. It's rather perverse to argue that drones are critical to protect Pakistan from militant violence when that country's intelligence service believes it is at war with you and uses militants to advance its own interests." This has immense implications for the American theory of victory behind the targeted killing campaign. There is no theory of victory if the policy presumes that we are unable to disarm or coerce the enemy because Pakistan's geostrategic postures make doing so impossible.

If the policy goal itself is flawed, then the targeted killing campaign may not, in fact, be the best way for the United States to defend itself from its declared enemies. Thus the ethical calculations that we presume when weighing air strikes vs. Pakistani air-ground offensives may be more complex than we think. Fair has outlined an alternative set of policies--containment and neglect--and a set of politico-military instruments that may obviate the need for the US to rely on targeted killings altogether. Or at least change the shape of how the United States employs force within Pakistan. A shift in regional posture, such as the United States adopting a different policy towards Afghanistan itself, may also open up different coercive options.

The question of policy is unfortunately rarely raised. Rather, we seem to prefer an circular conversation about the morality of machine warfare that was empirically decided a hundred years ago with the invention of Maxim guns, indirect fire systems, and ground-attack aircraft. Even talking about strategy may not necessarily yield insights. Let's focus on the policy.

UPDATE: James Joyner pointed out in Para 3 I use the phrase "policy" to refer to targeted killings. Mea culpa: the pervasiveness of the use of the public language has infected even my head. I have changed the paragraph.

Though Kindred Winecoff may have written this about Stephen Walt, it also speaks to Pankaj Mishra's op-ed today predicting the allegedly inevitable US decline in the Middle East:

How does any of this indicate that the geopolitical position of the U.S. has been weakened? The U.S.'s antagonists are quite literally fighting for their lives....regional democratization is underway -- albeit not in the way they had expected -- and the broader transformation of the region is proceeding in a direction that is amenable to the U.S.'s long-term interests. The Middle East is less engaged in proliferation than it was a decade ago, Tehran's intransigence notwithstanding. There are fewer security dilemmas in operation than at any point in decades...the frictions that many believed had developed between the U.S. and its NATO allies over Iraq appear to have been transitory rather than permanent.

Dan is also correct that, contrary to recent analysis, the Russians, Chinese, Brazilians, and other external powers also still sit on the periphery of Middle East power relations. This structural realist line of analyis doesn't address the societal changes Mishra describes, but his argument is unconvincing on that level as well. The postcolonial wave has been a consistent challenge globally for US foreign policy since the 1950s, but it never posed a overwhelming threat to American power in the Middle East. Why? Its effects are not uniform across states, and always remain vulnerable to national, regional, and extra-regional dynamics. This isn't to say that people do not share strong political commonalities or even necessarily weak civilizational ones. But in the case of the Middle East, the regional challenge to American influence never really emerged. In fact, as the Cold War deepened and post-colonial fervor hit its height the United States actually increased its power and alliances in the Middle East.

If Nasser and the forces he unleashed could not drive the US out, it's highly unlikely that the Arab Spring will. Had the idea of Arab unity been able to seriously mobilize a preponderence of power, it would have succeeded in its recurring series of projects aimed at regional unity. Yet whether in the confused strategy of the Arab states that lost the 1948 Israeli war of independence or the failure of the United Arab Republic, we've never seen a cohesive force able to really dispel external influence. One can take a constructivist explanation, as Michael Barnett does, or a standard neorealist explanation oriented around anarchy and the balance of power to figure out why. Either way, Mishra does not convince as to why today's upheaval is different.

This sort of talk unfortunately obscures the real issue: the variable shape of American involvement in the Middle East and how highly contingent that involvement really is on American perception of value.  The US is not going to "withdraw" from the Middle East--we're yoked to it for cultural and economic reasons that cannot simply by wished away. But so are a host of other powers that nonetheless have different postures in the region than we do. In the absence of a Soviet strategic threat to the Persian Gulf and Iran's declining strategic position, how long the United States chooses to maintain its current network of alliances, political relationships, and force deployments will likely depend, as Dan has said, on both domestic opinion and policymakers' conception of costs and benefits.

Plainly put, the US intervenes in the Middle East to sustain and sometimes modernize US alliances structures and political relationships. It also sporadically intervenes to try to change the Middle East's domestic and cultural spheres, with varying degrees of success and failure. Though American intervention is mainly political and economic there is also a heavy military dimension. The former is unduly ignored and the latter is often unfairly blamed for America's problems in the region. The larger point: political and strategic relationships do not sustain themeselves. They have be constantly refreshed and defended, The US can skimp on that cost in the hope that clients and partners will, on their own, pick it up at the expense of competing domestic priorities. But it will find that those costs---like a rent bill--do not pay themselves. The Arab Spring, Iran, and emerging 2nd wave jihadist challenges pose political and diplomatic costs. The political-military "landlord" (to continue an awkward metaphor) also must be paid in Asia too, if the post-Vietnam American policy there is to be sustained.

Sometimes the bill can be paid by other actors, but not necessarily in the way the US desires. We are seeing a dramatic example of this in the South China Sea. Japan and China are engaging in a kind of conflict that was prevented in the past by the US' postwar policy of keeping Japan from becoming a threat to China and providing stability for Japanese economic and political development. American policies of dual containment in the 1990s against Iran and Iraq came as a consequence of the failure of attempting to play both against each other in the 1980s--a failure that prompted direct American military intervention to protect economic interests.

Right now, the US is willing to pay the costs of the current policy. But external shocks in other regions and further economic disruptions may shift this calculus. We should not also rule out nationalism as a possible factor in American policy shifts. In the past, as Dan notes, isolationism was originally expressed as an American feeling of superiority over a morally corrupted world dominated by European power politics. The popularity of the recurring "Muslim rage" concept plays on an traditional American idea that the blame for American failures to transform the societies of others should be laid at those societies themselves. So while we shouldn't bet on anything more than near-term US retrenchment (a different thing than decline) in response to current economic realities, retrenchment that leads to a different conception of achieving American interests shouldn't be conclusively ruled out in the early 21st century. But contra Mishra, that would have more to do with factors external to the Middle East than Frantz Fanon 2.0.

When over a dozen insurgents attacked Camp Bastion’s airfield with explosive vests, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and possibly truck-borne mortars, they inflicted the greatest loss on VMA-211 since December 8, 1941, when the unit – then designated VMF-211 – lost twelve aircraft during Japan’s opening assault on Wake Island. The eight Harriers destroyed or damaged in Afghanistan, though, recalled a type of attack the U.S. dealt with many times in theaters from Indochina to Puerto Rico.

My co-blogger Adam helpfully pointed to this RAND study on ground attacks on military airfields, which, chronicling them from 1940-1992, noted that relatively unsophisticated and lightly-equipped forces were able to destroy 2000 aircraft during this time period. While hostile air attacks on U.S. airbases (excepting, of course, missile threats) look relatively unlikely in the near term, determined ground attackers, acting either as part of regular or irregular forces, have used a variety of small arms, light artillery, and assorted other man-portable weaponry to disrupt air operations.

Whether in full-blown theaters of war such as Afghanistan or less-active and more secure theaters of conflict, America’s large military bases are an attractive target. Their potential vulnerability to ground assault makes such attacks provides a badly-needed recourse for those facing America’s massive aerial firepower. Particularly as the U.S. turns away from large-footprint ground wars and their associated operational risks and political costs, U.S. bases provisioning air support for partner forces, hosting intelligence and advisory personnel, and providing “lilypads” for Special Operations Forces and clandestine capabilities may become increasingly important, especially if maintenance and cost issues end up degrading the readiness of America’s surface-borne aerial assets.

The 2009 Camp Chapman attack, along with this one, provides another important reminder about the multifarious potential vulnerabilities in such a “low footprint” strategy. In that case, a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide vest, killing several intelligence personnel at a facility heavily involved in servicing targets for airstrikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though his objective may have been killing personnel rather than airframes, it demonstrates the continued vulnerability of American bases.

Particularly as the U.S. embraces a model where it provides support and standoff firepower to a local force doing the bulk of the ground fighting, it will be particularly vulnerable to insider threats and beholden to the reliability (both in competency and loyalty) of foreign forces. Exposed forward facilities in America’s “secret wars,” from Lima Site 85 to today, will become increasingly attractive targets. Even U.S. conventional opponents may try to exploit such sapper tactics in order to strike against American airbases (such attacks might feature prominently in the outbreak of large-scale hostilities between the United States and an opponent with sophisticated irregular capabilities, such as Iran).

While the attacks on Camps Chapman and Bastion may be less likely in a theater where a country’s population is less mobilized (and its insurgency far less battle-tested) U.S. presence than it is in Afghanistan, the fact that groups such as Puerto Rico’s violent Machetero separatists could conduct similar operations against a base on U.S. soil is a warning against complacency. If America wants to scale-down its forward presence and power projection footprint, it will need to focus more energy and attention on force protection. Attacks on such facilities target capabilities that are relatively difficult for the U.S. to sustain in the face of concerted attrition. While limiting one’s presence in a country to those necessary to operate and support missions providing aerial and naval firepower, advisory roles, intelligence gathering, special operations, and civilian roles such as those the State Department fills certainly will certainly not generate as many casualties as those an occupying counterinsurgency force generates, the loss of aircraft, highly-trained Special Operations personnel, or diplomats can dramatically set back U.S. operations in a context of limited resources and multiple theaters of operation.

Not only that, but attacks on such critical facilities can create significant escalatory effects and political pressures. While we may now associate the supporting and advisory missions of these bases with the political dénouement of U.S. involvement in a conflict, effective strikes on U.S. aircraft, naval vessels, and vulnerable facilities unleash political fallout that might undermine the determination of policymakers to effectively tame the scope and scale of a U.S. “secret war” or limited conflict. The notion that a lack of “boots on the ground” means American lives and security are at little risk is fallacious. Any kind of sustained U.S. military presence will generate potential targets for enemy attack, and the U.S. will need to find ways to effectively conduct force protection missions in such environments if these sorts of activities are to be tactically and operationally viable.

Reading John Arquilla's latest Foreign Policy piece makes, me, as I am wont to, think about dead Prussians. Arquilla takes a look at the battle for Obama's "strategic soul" and contrasts it to Reagan's own deliberations about the best response to the first wave of Middle Eastern terrorists to strike the West. Arquilla, relying on intelligence histories of the period, argues that Reagan briefly considered unleashing special operations and intelligence operatives against the terror masterminds:

Soon after that weekend conclave of experts, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 138 -- most of which is still highly classified. Christopher Martin's declassified history of political and military policy during this period points out that the directive called for "secret FBI and CIA paramilitary squads and use of existing Pentagon military units -- such as Green Berets and the Navy SEALs -- for conducting what amounted to guerrilla war against guerrillas...a de facto declaration of war."

As Arquilla notes, Reagan ultimately stepped back from the brink. He was persuaded by military advisors concerned about an "unfocused revenge approach." Moreover, the United States had conventional tools for disrupting terrorist sponsors such as Libya. There are certainly parallels to today's concerns over the use of special operations forces, intelligence, proxy fighters, and unmanned aerial systems against terrorists, but most of the conversation about the uses of these elements of national power have been remarkably content-free. Arquilla does us a great service by dredging up a historical episode with some teaching value. 

The phrase "unfocused revenge approach" is actually an oblique acknowledgment of a central problem of counterterrorist strategy: finding the enemy's center of gravity (COG). The COG is a relatively minor concept in Clausewitz that nonetheless has engendered a good deal of misunderstanding. I will not bore readers with the details, but want to point to a recent eludication of the concept by the Strategic Studies Institute's Antulio Echevarria. As I noted in an article I wrote on the subject a couple years ago, Echevarria makes the point that the COG is essentially "effects-based."

Drawn from classical physics, Echevarria explains that the COG should be considered the "point where the forces of gravity can be said to converge within an object, the spot at which the object's weight is balanced in all directions." Striking at it or upsetting it can cause the target to lose its balance or equilbrium. The catch is that to have a COG, an object must have sufficient connectivity between its parts. The concept does not apply if the enemy elements are disaggregated. For example, the Axis powers in World War II had no COG and barely cooperated with each other. Echevarria chided doctrine writers for often assuming a single COG bound together a disaggregated set of enemies.

Reagan's advisors were ultimately grasping for a COG. They couldn't find one, because the terrorist threats facing America in the 80s had little to do with each other. The bombing of American forces in Beirut involved Iran and its local allies, and the mercenary Abu Nidal Organization and its Libyan backers were another matter entirely.  Thus, Reagan and his advisors were undestandably reluctant about conducting a wide-ranging war. Diplomatic complications were a concern, and the Cold War conventional balance in Europe as well as side contests in Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia demanded attention. Nonetheless, Reagan committed to tackling both issues separately--and somewhat unsuccessfuly. Conventional force against Libya did not halt their acts of terror, and Iran's use of proxy groups and proclivity for terrorism is still a constant in its foreign policy.

Today, there is still a rigorous debate over the structure and dynamics of al-Qaeda. That debate is complicated by the fact that al-Qaeda, like most violent non-state actors seeking to survive, exists in a murky realm. Intelligence--closed or open source--shines a light into the cave but cannot illuminate the entire structure. The main problem with the targeted killing program is precisely uncertainty over who the targets really are and how their deaths lead to strategic effect. Much of the structure was more visible after the September 11 attacks, and it became clear that the COG was al-Qaeda's base system in Afghanistan. Destroying this system in an military assault and aggressively targeting its financial links complicated our understanding of the COG. Moreover, al-Qaeda and its affiliaties worldwide today may not have a single COG, just as the Axis lacked a common connectivity that gave them order and purpose.

Al-Qaeda is certainly less dissegrated than the complex reality behind the 1980s idea of a comprehensive terrorist network targeting the West. Ryan Evans, Peter Neumann, and Rafaello Pantucci make a case here that the organization's middle managers are precisely the connective tissue that would constitute a COG, and others have discussed AQ's structure without the use of Clausewitzian theory. Still, there is a risk today that without a strong sense of where the blow should land, our efforts will be unfocused. And as in the 1980s, there are also competing strategic priorites that decisionmakers will inevitably have to manage. Getting the COG right will be a difficult--but ultimately essential--task for American strategists.

This will be my last post on this blog for at least a year. I am about to start a fellowship program with the Council on Foreign Relations that will place me in the U.S. government for the next 12 months. Because this blog has become such a big part of my idenity, I want to use this last opportunity to explain why I blog and how social media has both amplified and enriched my policy work.

A few years ago, Steve Biddle, arguably the finest defense policy analyst of his generation and a valued mentor, gave me some particularly good advice. When you write a policy paper, he told me, you should always be thinking of the scholarly journal article version of the policy paper you are writing as well as the op-ed version of the article you are writing. The idea, of course, is to make sure you reach the widest audience possible and get the most out of the research you have done. 

While subscribing to all of Steve's wise counsel, my approach to research is a bit different, and I have, since arriving at CNAS in 2009, encouraged our junior research staff to broaden the approach Steve first offered me. In addition to thinking about the ways in which one can turn one's policy paper into an op-ed for the New York Times or article in International Security, one should also think several layers down: how can one blog about one's research? How can one tweet, in real time, about the research one is doing?

The limitations of the old approach -- and of most research produced by think tanks and academia -- is the communication is largely one-way. The scholar in the ivory tower thinks deep thoughts, consults with his or her colleagues, locks the door and then emerges months later with a paper or book that he or she delivers to the masses. A "response" to a journal article might be published a year later. This is not an altogether bad thing. And if it's a choice between tweeting about college football and producing great books like this, by all means do the latter.

But an approach that incorporates social media into the research process has greater potential than the old approach. Note, quickly, that I am talking about the research process and not the marketing process. Lots of scholars, myself included, want to harness social media to publicize their latest reports and books. I get books from publishers in the mail on a weekly basis addressed not to "Andrew Exum" but to "Abu Muqawama" in the apparent hope that I will blog about a new book on the Middle East or Afghanistan. But I am writing here about using social media during the research itself.

The first great advantage that social media has over traditional media is that it is a two-way conversation. Although this can be quite scary for some policy scholars, social media requires one to climb down from the ivory tower and expose one's self to the slings and arrows of the unwashed masses. Once down among hoi polloi, one quickly discovers something: there is a rich and diverse community of amateur and professional scholars out there with interests and educations that complement one's own. Tweeting or blogging about a book you are reading on Afghanistan? Prepare for a barrage of tweets and comments telling you how good or bad that book is while offering other recommendations -- recommendations for books or articles that you, despite your fancy education, might not yet have discovered. Social media, then, exposes the policy researcher to immediate feedback on his or her bibliography and research methods. It can serve as a quick external validator -- or tell you where you're going wrong. 

Second, policy research is also very much about a world of competing ideas. Whether you are opining about air-sea battle or health care, you must recognize that other scholars out there might have also been researching your issue and have reached different conclusions with regard to policy preferences. One of the most effective -- and without a doubt quickest -- ways I have discovered to identify weaknesses in my own arguments has been through social media. I am constantly wrestling with the comments on my blog or the tweets people send back in my direction. Some of them are silly, and others are ugly, but many more are valuable. I can also observe how other policy proposals are received. Filtering out the sarcasm and snark, one gets a sense for where other scholarship falls short.

Third, we at CNAS believe that one of our core missions as a think tank is to identify the next generation of policy professionals. In my short and young career, I have already benefitted from many great mentors, and like the Army officer I once was, I consider it my duty to seek out and mentor others younger than me. Social media -- especially Twitter -- has been a great way to identify and meet some of the most promising young people writing on issues related to defense policy. I "met" both of this blog's caretaker bloggers -- Adam Elkus and Dan Trombly -- over social media. Many others have made the jump from tweeting back and forth with me to having coffee in my office shooting the bull about jobs and careers. This is how it should be, because Lord knows, I have spent plenty of time in other people's offices seeking advice about my career.

The key ingredient to engaging with social media as a part of the research process is humility. You must be prepared, for example, for some 20-year old senior at George Washington University <cough> Trombly </cough> to systematically destroy your initial argument, thereby making your second draft better. You must be prepared to accept that you are not the "expert" your think tank homepage says you are. You are merely a student. And you can thus learn from the many other amateur and professional students around you. And you must be prepared to laugh at yourself. There is a reason the mascot of this blog -- and the avatar for my Twitter account -- is a Lego militant. It says, "I'm going to talk about serious things, but I'll be damned if I am going to lose my sense of humor in the process." The moment one loses one's sense of humor, an officer in the Special Air Service once told me before a mission in Iraq, is the moment one starts thinking of one's self as too good -- too cool -- to get killed. Researchers shouldn't take themselves too seriously either, for that's the road to embarassment. We are unbelievably privileged to be doing this for a living, and we should remember that as we engage as broadly as possible with the people that both consume and inform our work.