Rule No. 3
Emulate Second-Century Rome
rovincialism is the aspect of our national character that will keep the United States from overextending itself in too many causes. But owing to the wave of immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America that began in the 1970s, the United States is an international society comparable to Rome in the second century A.D., when the empire reached its territorial zenith under Trajan and, more important, was granting citizenship to elites in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. (Trajan and Hadrian, in fact, were both from Spain.) Our military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities must now turn to our Iranian-, Arab-, and other hyphenated Americans—our potential Joppolos. At a time when we desperately need more language specialists, it is shameful that we are seeking out so few of the many native speakers at our disposal. The financial incentives we offer them are simply insufficient, and the waiting period for security clearance has become farcically long. This situation has been changing of late for the better: it needs to continue to do so.
Trained area specialists are likewise indispensable. In 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entrusted the eminent Arabist and diplomat Talcott Seelye, in Lebanon, to carry out two discreet evacuations of American citizens from that war-torn country with the help of the Palestine Liberation Organization—which we did not recognize at the time. Seelye, who was born in Beirut, may not have wholly agreed with Kissinger's foreign policy—but that didn't matter. He knew how to get the job done. The fact that Arabists and other area specialists may be emotionally involved, through marriage or friendship, with host countries—often causing them to dislike the policies that Washington orders them to execute—can actually be of benefit, because it gives them credibility with like-minded locals. In any case, such tensions between policymakers and agents in the field are typical of imperial systems. We should not be overly concerned about them.
True, comparison is the beginning of all serious scholarship, and area experts are ignorant of much outside their favored patch of ground. Their knowledge of the current reality in a given country is so prodigious that they often cannot imagine a different reality. That is why area experts can say what is going on in a place, but cannot always say what it means. Still, it is impossible to implement any policy without them, as Kissinger and others learned.
Colonel Robert Warburton, the Anglo-Afghan who established the Khyber Rifles regiment on the Northwest Frontier of British India in 1879, was one kind of person needed to manage our interests in distant corners of the world. Warburton spoke fluent Pashto and Persian, and was at home among both aristocratic Englishmen and Afridi tribesmen. The normally cruel and perfidious Afridis held him in such high esteem that he did not need to go armed among them. Warburton was less a cosmopolitan than a nuts-and-bolts journeyman, whose linguistic skills came from birth and circumstance more than from intellectual curiosity. The American equivalents of Warburton can be found among Arab-Americans posted to Central Command and Latino-Americans posted to Southern Command—people who fit into places like Yemen and Colombia, but who want only to return to their suburban American homes afterward.
Southern Command, in particular, is full of Spanish-speaking noncommissioned officers: ethnic Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. The relative shortage of speakers of Arabic and other languages in the rest of the military indicates that in the Special Forces, at least, languages may soon have to be recognized as an "occupational skill"—like weaponry, communications, battlefield medicine, engineering, and intelligence, one in which every noncommissioned officer must spend a year specializing. If each Special Forces unit had a couple of officers who were fluent in several languages spoken in the theater command (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in CENTCOM, for example), our ability to project power would dramatically increase.
The forward basing of area commands is another strategy that would encourage area expertise and language skills. In the years to come we should consider moving Central Command headquarters from Tampa, Florida, to the Middle East, and Southern Command headquarters from Miami back to Panama, where it was until 1997. There is simply no substitute for being in the region when it comes to absorbing language and culture. As a journalist, I have found that in my profession people on location always have better instincts for the local situation than people back in the United States, even if they don't always draw the proper conclusions. Many a mid-level officer has told me that the same holds true in the military.
Rule No. 4
Use the Military to Promote Democracy
n an age of expanding democracy, military and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting themselves elected to high office—as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia. "Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special forces and the President's bodyguards," one Army Special Operations officer told me. "We've trained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage."
The U.S. military's bilateral relationships with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and Latin America. In some places, such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater liberalism than the civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s the civilian government was tainted by drug money; the military police, who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilateral relationship.
U.S. security-assistance programs also professionalize foreign militaries, thus helping to prevent coups and to improve the human-rights climate. In the 1980s in El Salvador, Colonel J. S. Roach, a member of the operational planning team there, observed that "the Salvadoran military understood they weren't supposed to violate human rights, but they believed they were driven to extreme measures by extreme circumstances." One can debate what members of El Salvador's military "understood," but Roach's team and others pounded home the point that violating human rights almost never makes sense from a pragmatic perspective, because it costs the military the civilian support so necessary to rooting out guerrilla insurgents. "Human rights wasn't a separate one-hour block at the beginning of the day," Roach said. "You had to find a way to couch it in the training so that it wasn't just a moralistic approach." Human-rights abuses didn't come to an end in El Salvador, but observers agree that they were sharply curbed.
The world is a gritty, messy place, and there are no perfect solutions. But the fact is that Third World military men are more likely to listen to American officers who brief them about human rights as a tool of counterinsurgency than to civilians who talk about universal principles of justice. At any rate, it isn't only civilians who talk about universal principles: mid-level officers from around the world are regularly sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training in the history and necessity of protecting human rights. (The protestors who perennially chain themselves to the gates of Fort Benning, calling its previously named School of the Americas the "School of Torturers," are implicitly championing the worst possible strategy if they want Latin armies to take human rights seriously—a strategy of isolation, which cuts foreign officers off from American society and values.)
In fact, in places where democracy is especially weak (Peru and Indonesia are obvious examples), a phone call from a U.S. general to a local officer will often advance diplomacy (and also civil society) more effectively than a phone call from the ambassador. Particularly in previously hostile areas, such as the ex-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia, new diplomatic relationships are being eased by the U.S. military's training of border guards and security services. In other places, as in Chile a decade ago, the resumption of a bilateral military relationship with the United States cements a successful democratic transition.
The much larger truth is that the very distinction between our civilian and military operations overseas is eroding. In 1994 two Special Forces officers helped the Paraguayan government to craft new laws just after Paraguay's constitution was adopted. The U.S. military will increasingly churn out such chameleons: operatives who combine the traits of soldier, intelligence agent, diplomat, civilian aid worker, and academic. And at the same time that our uniformed officers are acting more like diplomats, our diplomats, particularly our ambassadors, are acting more like generals. It is under the State Department's auspices, not the Pentagon's, that helicopters are leased to the Colombian army to fight narcoterrorists and that a campaign is waged to track small planes suspected of transporting cocaine in the Colombia-Peru-Ecuador region. America's war against narcoterrorists in Colombia has two overseers: General James T. Hill, head of Southern Command, and Anne Patterson, the ambassador to Colombia.
The model for our future diplomats might be Deane Hinton, who oversaw the counterinsurgency operation as the ambassador to El Salvador in the early 1980s and then oversaw U.S. efforts to arm Afghan guerrillas as the ambassador to Pakistan from 1983 to 1987. In both those cases a military strategy would have been unavailing in the absence of a successful "interagency" strategy, which backed diplomatic initiatives and humanitarian aid packages with the power of a cocked gun. The same will be true in Colombia and in al Qaeda-infested Yemen. At the moment "interagency" is a dirty word among many in the field, connoting overlapping bureaucracies with conflicting agendas. But a supple and flexible civilian-military chain of command is an immensely useful tool.
Of course, in violent and chaotic parts of the world such as Afghanistan and Yemen, it is only natural that the soldier will at first be more conspicuous than the Peace Corps worker. Because parts of Yemen have become too dangerous for American civilians, the U.S. military is training the Yemeni military to better project power in the tribal badlands, so that, among other things, our foreign-aid personnel can return there. In Central and South America the U.S. military regularly vaccinates farm animals and treats them for diseases, and the villagers are not less grateful than they would be if the help came from civilians. The same was true with Mongolians treated by a four-person Air Force dental mission dispatched recently by Pacific Command to the Mongolian-Chinese border. The Air Force officers treated eighty-five local inhabitants the day I was there, and also handed out toys to the children. It is the efficacy of a humanitarian mission that morally sanctifies it; not whether it is carried out by civilians or soldiers. And if it serves U.S. interests as this one did—so much the better.
Rule No. 5
Be Light and Lethal
conomy of force—doing the most with the least—has been an imperative of the U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities since the beginning of the Cold War. It will become even more important as our resources are stretched. Here we can learn a great deal from the history of U.S. policy in Latin America over the past several decades: although many journalists and intellectuals have regarded this policy as something to be ashamed of, the far more significant, operational truth is that it exemplifies how we should act worldwide in the foreseeable future.
From the archives:
"Fourth-generation Warfare" (December 2001)
Pentagon mavericks have been trying for decades to reorient military strategy toward a new kind of threat—the kind we're suddenly facing in the war on terrorism. Now that we've got the war they predicted, will we get the reforms they've been pushing for? By Jason Vest With Europe the principal Cold War battleground, and Asia the secondary front because of the threat posed by Communist China and North Korea, Latin America took a back seat for decades. The U.S. military had to make do with limited resources while operating in a vast continent. It succeeded thanks to unconventional warfare, which helped the host governments do the real work. In practice that meant aggressive intelligence operations and Special Forces training of local units, combined with domineering diplomacy.
The results were not always pretty and, frankly, not always moral—consider what occurred in Chile in the aftermath of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende Gossens. Yet for a relatively small investment of money and manpower the United States defeated a belligerent Soviet and Cuban campaign at its back door while paving the way for the democratic transitions and market liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s. Our "quiet professionals" helped to hunt down and kill the hemispheric agitator Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. Fifty-five Special Forces trainers in El Salvador accomplished more than did 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam. A four-member Special Forces "mobile training team" convinced the Salvadoran police that rather than shooting leftist demonstrators at rallies, they should provide escape routes for the protesters to run away. That turned out to be the most effective kind of human-rights policy.
Economy of force in Latin America produced regimes that in almost every case were better than what the Cubans and the Russians offered. Even in Chile, despite the iniquities of the dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who took power following Allende's overthrow, the military regime lowered the infant mortality rate from seventy-nine to eleven per 1,000 births and reduced the poverty rate from 30 percent to 11 percent. Privatization gave post-Allende Chile Latin America's only economy comparable to those of the "Asian tigers." America's no-frills molding of political reality in the Western Hemisphere did not require the approval of the UN Security Council, and it did not run the risk of quagmire. There were usually few Americans on the ground in any one Latin country.
Economy of force offers a logic appropriate to an intractable world. Becoming implanted in more than a handful of countries at once spells disaster. And everyone—humanitarian interventionists included—now admits that nation-building, whether in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Colombia, is fraught with danger, difficulty, and great expense. We shouldn't try to fix a whole society; rather, we should identify a few key elements in it, and fix them.
For example: Because a national army is essentially unreformable without wholesale social and cultural change, we should work to improve only its elite units, using trainers from the U.S. military elite. When it comes to military operations, specialized units should concentrate on the most critical targets; in Colombia, for instance, these would be the 150 or so hydrochloride laboratories throughout Colombia that refine cocaine into its final form. And because individual leaders affect history as much as large social forces do, our efforts should be invested primarily where current leaders seem particularly talented and determined. (Alvaro Uribe Vélez, the President of Colombia, is by all accounts a dynamic workaholic, however embattled, committed both to protecting human rights and to eliminating rogue forces. Were Andrés Pastrana, Uribe's less forceful predecessor, still Colombia's leader, it is doubtful that the United States would be making quite the effort it is in a place like Arauca.)
The most obvious tool to carry out an economy-of-force strategy is the Special Forces, which, as Lieutenant Colonel Kevin A. Christie told me, can perform the military equivalent of "arthroscopic surgery." Relatively small numbers of Special Forces and Marines can maximize U.S. influence in a large number of countries without risking what the Yale historian Paul Kennedy has called imperial "overstretch." Nevertheless, we shouldn't get carried away. A big increase in the number and use of Special Forces could make them less special, and therefore less effective.
A less obvious resource is the Coast Guard, which handles most anti-terrorism and drug-interdiction efforts at sea. Even in the jet-and-information age 70 percent of intercontinental cargo travels by ship, making the seas as strategic as ever. The U.S. Coast Guard, with 38,000 in its active ranks, is the world's seventh largest navy. In Colombia, which has more miles of navigable river than of passable roadway, the Coast Guard has been essential in drug-patrol training. In Yemen, Bob Innes, a retired Coast Guard captain who worked for many years in Colombia, is building a coast guard to prevent more al Qaeda attacks on oil tankers. Our strategy in Colombia and Yemen is unspoken but simple: establish not a totally reformed military but a self-sustaining structure of a few specialized units. That's the best we will be able to do, and it will not require a heavy American military presence.
The ultimate in economy of force is the "one-man mission," in which a single officer is attached to a foreign army, often at a remote base, to train and advise it. Because there are usually no other Americans around, the officer cannot escape from the local environment, even when he is off duty. Thus he rapidly acquires a hands-on knowledge of the terrain and its inhabitants, making him an intelligence asset for years to come. The military should consider making more use of such missions.
Rule No. 6
Bring Back the Old Rules
refer to the pre-Vietnam War rules by which small groups of quiet professionals would be used to help stabilize or destabilize a regime, depending on the circumstances and our needs. Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization, and in an age when an industrial economy is no longer necessary for the production of weapons of mass destruction, the American public, burdened with large government deficits, will demand an extraordinary degree of protection for as few tax dollars as possible. Impending technologies, such as bullets that can be directed at specific targets the way larger warheads are today, and satellites that can track the neurobiological signatures of individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.
From the archives:
"Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks" (December 2001)
"We're not in the Boy Scouts," Richard Helms was fond of saying when he ran the Central Intelligence Agency. He was correct, of course. By Thomas Powers As for international law, it has meaning only when war is a distinct and separate condition from peace. As war grows more unconventional, more often undeclared, and more asymmetrical, with the element of surprise becoming the dominant variable, there will be less and less time for democratic consultation, whether with Congress or with the UN. Instead civilian-military elites in Washington and elsewhere will need to make lightning-quick decisions. In such circumstances the sanction of the so-called international community may gradually lose relevance, even if everyone soberly declares otherwise.
Bringing back the old rules would help to circumvent the UN Security Council, which in any case represents an antiquated power arrangement unreflective of the latest wave of U.S. military modernization in both tactics and weaponry. In the future we should attempt to manage most problems long before they get to the Security Council, by increasingly emphasizing Special Forces and an intelligence service bolstered by its own military wing—an emphasis we applied successfully in Afghanistan. Of course, the CIA's military wing will never be large enough to do everything. Thus the CIA and the Special Forces need to coordinate their efforts more closely, under "black," or super-clandestine, rules of engagement. Not only should the CIA be greener (that is, have a larger uniformed military wing), but the Special Forces should be blacker.
To be sure, such clandestine methods might not be enough to change a regime like Iraq's. But that kind of regime is exceedingly rare; the diplomatic farce at the UN a few months back, with France and Germany working indefatigably to contain the power of a democratic United States rather than that of a Stalinist, weapons-hungry Iraq, need not be repeated.
As shocking as some of the above may sound, much of what I advocate is already taking place. The old rules, with their accent on discretion, were on the way back even before 9/11. Witness the increasing use of security-consulting firms and defense contractors that employ—in places as diverse as South America, the Caucasus, and West Africa—retired members of the U.S. military to conduct aerial surveillance, to train local armies, and to help struggling friendly regimes. Consider Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), of northern Virginia, which during the mid-1990s restructured and modernized the Croatian military. Shortly afterward Croatian battlefield success against the Serbs forced Belgrade to the peace table.
Encouraging an overall moral outcome to the Yugoslav conflict involved methods that were not always defensible in narrowly moral terms; the Croats, too, were murderers. And moral ambiguity is even greater in protracted wars, such as the Cold War and the war on terrorism, in which deals will always have to be struck with bad people and bad regimes for the sake of a larger good. The war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified—in terms of universal principles—to the satisfaction of the world media and world public opinion. The old rules are good rules because, as the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty work are morally preferable to launching a war.
Rule No. 7
Remember the Philippines
he first large-scale encounter between the U.S. military and a guerrilla insurgency came as the United States tried to consolidate control over the Philippine archipelago, a former colony of Spain, after our victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Unfortunately, many of the lessons our military learned from that encounter were for a long time ignored, because the military's performance in one dimension was overshadowed by allegations involving another. As Brian McAllister Linn wrote in his dense and masterly book The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 (1989), some charges of American brutality against Filipino civilians were certainly justified, and without question the brutality drew press attention that colors the episode still. Brutality is always inexcusable—but in this instance it was hardly the whole story. Max Boot concludes in The Savage Wars of Peace (2002) that U.S. actions in the Philippines constitute "one of the most successful counter-insurgencies waged by a Western army in modern times." Given the challenges ahead, our experience a century ago in the anarchic Philippines may be more relevant than our recent experience in Iraq.
Modern communications, which seem to unify the world to some degree, often foster the illusion that policies can be one-size-fits-all. Mid-level commanders in the Philippines, however, lacking helicopters and radios, were forced to become policymakers in their own patch of jungle. That was a good thing, and it promoted skills that we need more of: in a rugged topography given over to anarchy—which describes much of the world today—the political, military, and cultural situation is going to vary from micro-region to micro-region. The commanders in the Philippines who were particularly successful emphasized small, mobile units; developed native intelligence sources; and gained information by interrogating captured guerrillas. In some parts of the archipelago the United States was able to exploit ethnic divisions; in other parts it was foolish even to try. In some parts a purely military strategy was called for; in others a civil-affairs and humanitarian-aid component was an absolute necessity. Nevertheless, as Linn observed,
It was only when the Army could separate the guerrillas from the civilians and prevent the guerrillas from disrupting civil organization that social reform was possible. Officers in the Philippines, no matter how benevolent their intentions, realized that the military objective, the defeat of the guerrillas, was the most essential of their tasks.
In other words, in areas still not pacified by our troops, it is perfectly appropriate to see more soldiers than aid workers. But those soldiers, as William Howard Taft (then the head of the Philippine Commission) and Brigadier General Frederick Funston both observed, should be led by field officers of exceptional character, with hands-on area expertise.
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