The Series: Insurgency and Fourth Generation Warfare: Unveiling the Wars We Live
Section VI. Military Force vis-à-vis Other Options and Considerations
The Balkans, Chechnya, East Timor, Somalia, Rwanda and Iraq have shown the limited capacity of the major powers to deploy forces relevant to keeping the peace and rebuilding states shattered by civil war. Civil affairs capabilities have proven to be almost non existent. Keeping the peace requires soldiers to act like policemen, a job for which they are ill prepared and ill equipped. Yet, an effort to create an international police force for Bosnia and Kosovo has stalled. The scarcity of engineering units has also restricted efforts to rebuild civil infrastructure.
It should not be too surprising that many Third World countries resent the U.S. ready resort to military power:
Since the Bush invasion of Iraq, large majorities around the world have grown to fear the easy resort to force that the US claims rights to. (pre-emptive strikes, and lies and bullying to get its way with allies and the UN.) Clearly, the U.S. is rushing to court unpopularity across the world, contrary to expectations that the Bush national security establishment would conduct itself with a degree of sophistication. There is little sign of the maturity, balance and sobriety expected of the ‘reluctant warrior’ Colin Powell … The U.S. policy in the first month of President George Bush was suggestive of a lack of coherence and hegemonic arrogance. Time will tell whether this disorientation is caused by the GOP's 8 years out of office or this is the U.S. as the new cowboy on the rampage. The Bush administration set a record for alienating so many nations in such a short period. (18.)
And perhaps U.S. policy-makers can shrug off the warnings of former Soviets, like Mikhail Gorbachev:
It is time for America’s electorate to be told the blunt truth: that the present situation of the United States, with a part of its population able to enjoy a life of extraordinary comfort and privilege, is not tenable as long as an enormous portion of the world lives in abject poverty, degradation and backwardness …
Instead of seeing an increase in U.S. security, the end of the Cold War has seen a decline. It is not hard to imagine that, should the US persist in its policies, the international situation will continue to deteriorate. U.S. willingness to see force as a desirable way to solve many of the world’s problems even disturbs many fellow Westerners. Having conned world opinion into a false belief on the scale of Serbian atrocities, operating without legal sanction and having made a diplomatic resolution impossible, Clinton and Blair started the air bombardment on March 24th, 1999. Almost certainly more people were killed in the bombardment than in the Serbian campaign it was intended to deter. A similar disaster holds true in the Iraq and Afghan wars of 2001-2004.
We perhaps forget the lesson of the Tao Te Ching, that any use of “power,” even (especially) if it is successful, breeds resentment and may plant the seeds of future conflict. (19. NOTE: Boyd, Chester and most liberals miss the point of Bush’s actions. Having grasped the seriousness of Boyd’s predictions about 4GW, the US has been forced to accelerate its program of global domination. Though some mistakes were made – as in all conflicts – Bush seeks to draw out potential large nation enemies so that the US can destroy their conventional forces and reduce their support to insurgents. Then the US will only face 4GW and strategic threats of a diminished nature.
Boyd and Sun Tzu both insisted that to be most effective, the military option must be integrated within the entire collection of tools available, and because it involves physical destruction and death, be used sparingly. In the present circumstances of the US, these other tools include:
1. Diplomacy, which Sun Tzu considered second only to attacking an adversary’s strategy as a means of waging war. Boyd placed a high premium on diplomacy as the operational element of grand strategy, with the goal of isolating opponents from not only physical support, such as re-supply, but from the moral and mental (including informational) interactions necessary to keep their populations united and to make rational assessments of the situation.
2. Economics, which although much maligned, can shut down the internal processes of all but the most primitive countries. To be effective, of course, it must be combined with diplomacy as a component of grand strategy.
3. Adherence to national ideals: Attracted by democracy and the free market system, millions of people every year attempt to enter the US. Any adversary attempting to mobilize his population to fight against the US has to contend with the fact that a sizable fraction of them would likely prefer to be on the other side. Some tens of thousands of Chinese students study at US colleges and thousands work for American companies. All of these foreigners experience to some degree to our ideals and freedoms. One of the main themes of Boyd’s grand strategy is to increase the numbers of these people as much as possible before hostilities begin.
As a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency put it:
Formulating a contemporary strategy that has political, economic, cultural and functional substance, as well as a liberal amount of public understanding and support, must be the goal. [ Alas, this is slow, expensive, difficult with 9/11 immigration concerns and no longer a possible path for the US]
The US will undoubtedly use military force to protect what it considers vital national interests of the moment. Such force should be used as one component of a careful strategy for realizing these interests and that when it is used, it should conform to Sun Tzu’s three criteria and Boyd’s grand strategy. However, the national interests approach is only marginally useful for creating forces, since it requires planners to make fairly specific predictions about what these interests will be, where they will be threatened, and what type of adversary will be confronted. Because these predictions must be made decades in advance, they would, in the best case simply prove irrelevant, and they could telegraph the chosen national strategy to potential opponents.
What is needed is an approach that will provide effective forces when called for, but which does not require accurate predictions of the future. The concepts advanced by Sun Tzu and John Boyd provide a resolution to this dilemma by stepping up one level and asking, “Regardless of the specifics of how they will be used, what makes military forces ‘effective’ in general?” If the US creates forces along these lines, and equips and trains them for maneuver conflict and 4GW, then operating in conjunction with allies and using the other tools for advancing vital interests, it can field an effective and affordable military force.
Peacekeeping
In the initial stages of a peacekeeping operation, military forces may be needed to engage hostile military forces before true peacekeeping can begin. This is a standard use of force and presents no conceptual problems, since the primary mission of the military is to defeat opposing armed forces by death and destruction if necessary. This is what they study, equip, and train for. People are promoted (or should be) for their proficiency as war fighters and leaders of warriors. It is generally considered a full time occupation, and even reserve forces usually require refresher training, especially at the unit level, to prepare them to engage in it.
In true peacekeeping, the mission is protection, not destruction. It is more akin to policing than to soldiering, and uses of force must be carefully controlled. In fact, one of the largest threats to effective peacekeeping is the orientation that the underlying problems can be solved by application of force. This mindset can be reinforced if it seems that armed military groups cannot be quickly eliminated or, as in Somalia, that they keep reappearing after a successful initial stage. Such a situation could indicate that the armed groups enjoy wider support among the population than originally thought – that U.S. forces are engaging in fourth generation warfare without knowing it – and so the venue is not ready for “peacekeeping” at all.