Endless War by Robert D. Kaplan
August 1, 2012 | 0900 GMT
By Robert D. Kaplan
Special operations forces have become U.S. President Barack Obama's weapon of choice in dealing with a variety of threats, notably those posed by al Qaeda militants in Yemen and in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. They likely also have been active on the Syrian-Turkish frontier. This is not surprising. In fact, it is a natural, organic development that has been ongoing since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The end of the Cold War signaled a decline in mass infantry conflict, as the hundreds of thousands of NATO and Warsaw Pact troops concentrated in Central Europe dissipated rapidly in the early 1990s. Coming to the fore after a century of conventional land engagements in Europe was a kind of warfare that struck journalists as something new but was in fact very old: low-level, endless warfare that is inextricable from political unrest and the everyday workings of diplomacy. It is warfare where the battlefield is vast -- fighting occurs in deserts and in Third World slum cities -- but where the number of armed combatants is small compared to conventional formations. Killing the enemy is easy in this sort of warfare; it is identifying and then finding the enemy that is the challenge. In this kind of warfare, conscript soldiers are much less valuable than highly skilled professional operators, men who look down on draft-era armies and refer to themselves as "warriors," just like the guerrilla insurgents they are fighting. From 2002 to 2006, I was embedded intermittently with these men in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
And I learned what President Obama has learned: The face of postmodern warfare is the avoidance of headlines. The sooner you deploy special operations forces to a place, the easier and the cheaper it is to deal with the problem. You want to deploy there when the country is still on page eleven in the news, before it moves up to page two in the headlines. For by that time there is little you can do without great expense and political risk. That is why special operations forces are currently deployed in dozens of places around the world simultaneously, something they have been doing since Bill Clinton was president in the early post-Cold War era.
Obama also figured out that the public wants protection on the cheap. The public wants protection without large-scale and controversial infantry deployments. It wants things -- killing, actually -- done quietly. The public grasps what the media often does not: that if you want purity, you'll get anarchy. Thus, the combination of unmanned aerial vehicles and special operations forces to efficiently kill people, even as one avoids putting boots on the ground in places like Libya and Syria, is precisely what the public wants, even if it cannot articulate it as I am. That is partly why U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney will have quite a challenge in denigrating Obama's foreign policy.
But the fact that Obama has used special operations forces to great effect does not mean that the special operations community is not without its own problems and challenges.
To begin with, the public confuses special operations forces with commandos, which, in turn, connote daring raids, or what the special operations community refers to as "direct action" or "kinetics." This is the special operations forces of Hollywood heroics. However, the truth as I learned it is far more mundane. Much of what special operations forces personnel do is train indigenous forces, or "indigs," as they call them. Training elite units of our Third World allies accomplishes three goals. First, it allows those militaries to solve their own security problems, lessening the load on the United States. Second, it helps professionalize foreign militaries, which is an essential part of stabilizing young democracies. Last, it provides valuable intelligence as to what is going on in these places.
One challenge, though, is linguistics. While Special Operations Command has made great strides over the past decade, special operations forces are not where they need to be in terms of speaking local languages, which facilitates training and bonding with allied indigenous forces. In Southern Command (Latin America), where the foreign language is overwhelmingly Spanish, this is not an issue. But in Pacific Command, where a plethora of languages is spoken throughout the area of responsibility, it is an issue.
Indeed, Southern Command is the model the American military, and especially special operations forces, must follow to further equip the Pentagon to fight in an era of low-level, never-ending conflict. It was the Latin American theater of the Cold War that conceptualized the manner in which the United States must now operate globally in the post-Cold War era.
Because of Latino immigration patterns in the United States, many special operations personnel during and after the Cold War speak Spanish. Moreover, because Spanish is an easy language to learn relative to others such as Arabic and Chinese, this further facilitates communications between special operations forces and indigenous forces in Southern Command. But here is what's really laudable about Southern Command, and why it should be a model for every other area of responsibility: Because Southern Command received little money to fight communism during the Cold War compared to NATO in Europe and Pacific Command in Asia, it was forced to evolve an economy-of-force approach. This approach emphasized intensive intelligence gathering, broad use of special operations personnel and coercive diplomacy -- all replacements for the heavy ground troop concentrations used in Germany, Japan and South Korea. The results were not always pretty. The United States received harsh media criticism throughout the Cold War for propping up Latin American dictators, for example. But the economy-of-force strategy worked to preserve American dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere. And it was not necessarily wrong. For it prevented the emergence of Marxist dictatorships that would have been worse than the regimes that were preserved by a host of tactics.
El Salvador in the 1980s constituted the ultimate economy-of-force exercise. No more than a few dozen special operations trainers were on the ground at any one time teaching the Salvadoran military to slow down a communist insurgency, even as the Salvadorans transformed themselves from a 12,000-man, ill-disciplined constabulary force to a 60,000-man professional army. El Salvador showed that you didn't need many people to help turn the tide of these small wars, but the ones you did have should be the best. That is another lesson of low-level, endless conflict: the need to emphasize quality of manpower over quantity.
The further articulation of special operations forces beyond the Southern Command model could feature such innovations as the introduction of women and the use of humanitarian relief operations to further aid in intelligence gathering. A future 12-man, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) A-team, for example, could be composed of both men and women who hail from exotic immigrant communities in the United States and thus speak difficult foreign languages. Such a team would be comfortable interacting with charity relief workers and training foreign fighters while occasionally taking part in direct action.
And so Obama, a liberal Democrat, is doing more than his share to evolve a 21st-century economy-of-force model, which owes much to the techniques the U.S. military honed in Cold War Latin America. This is not a president turning away from his liberal values but a president who is merely adapting to an historical phase of conflict, characterized by chronic political instability and low-level violence in the Middle East and other parts of the developing world. America's values cannot be promoted in a vacuum; they must follow from the projection of its power. But the American people are not comfortable with the large-scale use of force. The frequent use of special operations forces follows as a consequence.
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