The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  Even more insidious and adapted to stealth warfare than IEDs is the ultimate weapon of today’s guerrilla and terrorist campaigns: the motivated individual prepared to give up his or her life in order to execute the mission. By one tally, suicide bombers were responsible for twenty-two of the thirty most lethal terrorist attacks around the world between 1990 and 2006. Martyrdom is an ancient motivation, and suicide warriors always appear in times of war. But since the 1980s, suicide attacks have increased dramatically, and their frequency and deliberate strategic use have no recent precedent. The combination of premodern motives and postmodern possibilities has proven devastating. Again, the three revolutions amplify the impact of suicide bombers. They take advantage of today’s unparalleled ease of travel, while the culture of martyrdom validates the perpetrator, brings in new recruits, and sharpens the effect of fear not only in the target population but also, thanks to the amplification of the media, far beyond. Moreover, the culture of martyrdom is ruthlessly effective, as it is almost impossible to completely defend against a suicide bomber whose only purpose is to approach the target, and has no interest in getting away.

  Dispersed and stealth warfare uses resolutely modern tools as well, of course. The Internet has become just as essential as IEDs or suicide attacks in the new decentralized landscape of war. At the frontier of cyberwar are hacker attacks on civilian and military infrastructure, as well as distributed denial of service (DDOS) and other disruptions of websites and platforms relied upon by the target government or population. But even simpler to access is the constellation of online militant voices that amplify hostile messages, spread propaganda materials and threats, and attract new recruits to their cause. Whereas in the United States and Europe some of the strident public voices in the war on terror have been mocked for their lack of military experience, the suicide bomber who carried out a successful attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan in December 2009 was a former “jihadi pundit” who took up arms. The Internet is not just an amplifying tool for these causes; it can also be a device for radicalization.34

  What all of these tools and techniques have in common is their sheer ease of access. As the head of Israeli military intelligence, General Amos Yadlin, pointed out in a late 2009 speech, Israel’s enemies were still well behind Israel in military capability, yet they were catching up “by means of precision missiles, computerization, anti-aircraft weapons, GPS and pilotless aircraft” He added that off-the-shelf computer products available commercially now gave Israel’s enemies significant abilities to encrypt their own communications and hack Israeli resources. “Cyberpower gives the little guys the kind of ability that used to be confined to superpowers,” he said. “Like unmanned aircraft, it’s a use of force that can strike without regard for distance or duration, and without endangering fighters’ lives.”35

  General Yadlin’s observation encapsulates the dilemma that now faces armies—and the governments who deploy them, and the citizens they are supposed to protect. The centrifugal force that has scattered power in politics, business, or religion has not stopped short of the military domain, as if it were untouchable. The decay of power has changed the terms and the possibilities of conflict, increasing the influence of small, nonstate and non-traditional players as the tools have generalized and the costs have tumbled. Media and communications disseminate the lessons of what works and help the effect feed on itself.

  As these new, small military powers succeed, others waiting in the wings, or yet to be born, discover how to emulate them. This scenario does not mean that endless small-scale conflict is inevitable—but it does carry deep implications for anyone concerned with peace as a moral or practical priority.

  It also has enormous implications for the way power is obtained, retained, and lost in our time.

  THE DECAY OF POWER AND THE NEW RULES OF WAR

  “Never again” is the universal motto of war’s survivors. Yet a day does not go by without a reminder that violence, terror, and coercion remain potent forces shaping human lives and communities. The Cold War’s “peace dividend” quickly fizzled in the face of the Gulf War, the first World Trade Center attack, the conflict in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, civil wars in West Africa, and more. Author Robert Kaplan warned of the “coming anarchy” as states propped up by the Cold War disintegrated and ethnic and religious tensions surged.36 The shock of 9/11, the rise of Al Qaeda and its clones, and the prosecution of a “global war on terror” under one name or another since then have compounded the sense of a world besieged by new forms of low-level but high-impact violence. Although coming from different perspectives, analysts such as Kaplan and Amy Chua, author of World on Fire, have argued that the rapid pace of globalization and the weakening of states have made violent conflict more likely, and that attempts to create Western-style democracies where they do not currently exist are likely to backfire into violence.37 Meanwhile terrorism, cyberwar, and narco-trafficking take place on amorphous, shifting, borderless fronts, liable to take their toll anywhere in the world on any given day.

  Call it low-intensity conflict, small war, irregular war, or, as scholars Marc Hecker and Thomas Rid put it, “‘War 2.0’—by any name, violent conflict today is drastically different from the forms that shaped the 19th and 20th centuries and that live on in History Channel documentaries . . . and in the defense spending patterns of most countries.”38 What is less clear is how to address this new landscape. Arguments for radical cutbacks and reform of the world’s major militaries founder on vested interests, the impression that they convey weakness, and the bigger worry of eroding the strength of conventional deterrents. Traditional interstate threats have not gone away, be they unresolved border disputes from the Caucasus to South America, military buildups by countries like Iran and North Korea, or the sharp and mutual suspicion between the United States and China. Meanwhile, prescriptions for how to address the spread of violence by nonstate actors depend on competing opinions about its root causes, which analysts pin variously on economic inequality, cultural disruption, the spread of corporate-driven imperialism, fundamentalist Islam, instigation by state sponsors, and a host of other factors.

  Looking at war today through the lens of the decay of power will not resolve such debates. But it can produce some needed clarity about what forms of conflict are here to stay, and what new realities any military strategy—whether that of a Western democracy, an aspiring superpower, a developing country, or a militant or insurgent group—must account for if it is to succeed.

  Military Hyper-Competition Is Here

  Easily available weapons; a blurring of the lines between soldier and civilian and military and consumer technology; and a rise in the number of conflicts whose stakes are less about territory than about money, commodities, and ideas set the stage for hyper-competition in the arena of war and security. Like major political parties or the behemoths of industry and banking, the great military institutions are encountering new competitors no longer held back by traditional barriers to entry. A major defense ministry like the Pentagon no longer has a lock on the tools and resources needed to prosecute a conflict. Skills that are valuable in conflict can now be gleaned not just in basic training, officer academies, and defense universities but in an insurgent camp in northwest Pakistan, a madrassa in Leicester, England, or a computer school in Guangzhou, China.

  In this scattered landscape, the traditional military apparatus remains important and impressive. It possesses the advantages of public resources and the ability to make itself the top priority in government budgets; national sovereignty gives it the moral heft that attracts recruits and justifies investment and spending, and the political legitimacy to enter into alliances. It has tradition on its side. What it has lost is exclusivity. Two crucial monopolies—one philosophical, one practical—have vanished and exposed its vulnerabilities. First is the state’s philosophical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The second is a practical monopoly bestowed on the military by the geopolitical competition among sovereign
states and the need for ever-more complex technology to win it. The rise of powerful nonstate actors and the breakneck diffusion of technology beyond the realms of specialists have destroyed that nuts-and-bolts advantage.

  Today, national armies are attempting to adjust—with different speeds and results—to “full spectrum” warfare in which weapons are digital as much as physical, methods are psychological as much as coercive, and combatants are civilian and scattered as much as uniformed and coordinated. Hyper-competitive conflict does not necessarily mean more or worse conflict than before, whether measured in lives lost or economic benefits forsaken. Nor does it signal, by any means, the end of national armies. But it puts in a new perspective what a national army can be expected to achieve.

  Military Might No Longer Equals National Security

  The transition from conventional interstate war to decentralized small-scale conflict has largely ended the specialization advantage of a large military. Therefore, any national security strategy that relies on military might or superior firepower is suspect. Realizing this, the major armies have been trying to adjust. As noted above, a US military directive in late 2008 announced that irregular war was to be considered “as strategically important as traditional warfare”—a major statement of doctrine with implications for the whole scope of military planning, from personnel to equipment to training.39 For the United States, a focus on irregular warfare means giving more importance to special operations, intelligence gathering, counter-insurgency, and what the military calls “low visibility operations,” as well as more attention to operations in partnership with allies and local forces. According to plans announced in 2012, the US Special Operations Command, which has forces deployed in roughly seventy-five countries, will grow by about 6 percent from sixty-six thousand personnel in 2012 to seventy thousand in 2017.40 With this growth comes the discovery that today’s counterinsurgency, for instance, may be different from the kinds that were featured in special-operations manuals. As a recent National Defense University study pointed out, insurgencies today are less likely to follow an ideology and established leadership (à la the Vietcong) and more likely to be “coalitions of the angry” that can spring up almost spontaneously (à la the Palestinian intifada).41

  Other militaries are going through their own parallel adaptations. China’s People’s Liberation Army has shrunk in size in the last two decades, trading surplus personnel for more modern technology. It has significantly increased its participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions, which was nugatory before 2000, and its navy is making more and more port calls. Moreover, kidnappings and killings of Chinese workers in places like Sudan have provoked new thinking about how China can enhance its ability to protect its increasingly numerous citizens and interests overseas. Military analysts scour the experiences of leading forces like those of the United States, China, India, Britain, France, and Israel in search of “best practices” to prepare for today’s most likely military assignments: counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, humanitarian intervention, and peacekeeping.42

  The possibility of war on the electronic frontier is a particular concern. A record of attacks in the last decade has set out the wide scope of the threat that nations face—for instance, attacks on systems to immobilize them or plant malicious agents, attacks on information networks to collect sensitive data or prevent communications, and attacks on key infrastructure such as power grids.43 Cyber-warfare also includes “message war” actions such as distributing propaganda and redirecting websites. Various forms of cyber-attack have been reported against systems in the United States, Iran, Georgia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and else-where. Privately owned services like Twitter and Google Mail have also been attacked—for instance, during the unrest in Iran in summer 2009. But cyber-war has yet to experience its analog to, say, 9/11—an event so massive in scale, damage, and visibility as to focus resources and galvanize public support. The evidence suggests that governments have been slow to adjust to cyberspace as a battlespace, and it is clear that hackers and cyber-attackers still enjoy a wide berth in terms of the opportunities they have to disrupt critical governmental functions. And time is of the essence: “Staying ahead of the game is important in light of the dizzying change of pace in the cyber world,” argued Amos Yadlin, the Israeli military intelligence chief: “at most, a few months in response to a change, compared to the years that pilots had.”44

  The delay in making the adjustments needed to survive on the new, scattered landscape of war is not necessarily the fault of military minds, Arquilla, the military scholar, points out. “Awareness of these issues has been slowly but steadily growing over the past two decades,” Arquilla wrote in 2010. “But senior commanders will tend to fall back on a fatalism driven by their belief that both Congressional and industrial leaders will thwart any effort at radical change.”45

  Moreover, it is not as if the arguments for traditional military buildup with advanced technology and superior firepower have vanished. The scholar Joe Nye, who coined the concept of “soft power,” argued that military power “still structures expectations and shapes political calculations.” Even when a conventional military is not deployed in active conflict, its deterrence role remains important. “Military force, along with norms and institutions, helps to provide a minimal degree of order,” Nye wrote.46 But if brute military force is no longer enough to ensure dominance, the question then becomes one of how resources are allocated among traditional vectors of power and their new, relatively untried alternatives. No one thinks terrorists can stop great powers from existing, but surely they can affect their behavior and deny them options that they used to take for granted.

  Money Talks More Than Orders Do

  Who, in fact, are the Zetas? On one level, they’re just one of the many armed parties involved in Mexico’s long-running drug war. This war is no metaphor: from December 2006 to early 2012, almost fifty thousand people died in drug-related violence.47 The conflict has subtracted huge realms of both physical territory and economic activity from the authority of the Mexican government. In this picture, the Zetas are especially powerful. They control key territory in northeast Mexico and watch over the bulk of drug shipments into the United States through the busy Laredo crossing. A militia of an estimated four thousand people, they are notorious for a reign of terror over the areas where they operate, and for their reach elsewhere in Mexico and across the US border. Among the many opponents Mexico faces in this battle, the Zetas may be the most daunting. But what sets them apart is their origins. The Zetas were recruited from Mexico’s elite national military and police units to become the private army for the Gulf Cartel. Corruption and defection are common in Mexico, but the Zetas elevated it to a new scale. Now the Zetas are undergoing a further transformation. As the power struggle among rival cartels shakes out, the Zetas, once a militia of enforcers, have become a narco-trafficking organization of their own, battling for key markets and distribution routes and reportedly expanding into Europe through a tie-up with the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.

  The shift of the Zetas from government soldiers to private soldiers to traffickers illustrates the interchangeable nature of roles in conflict today. It has echoes in the rise of kidnapping as a business among Iraqi insurgents, themselves often veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army; in the intermingling of the Taliban with the Afghan drug trade; in the rise of piracy. These examples illustrate how economic opportunity—from better pay to the windfalls of criminal enterprise—drives participants in conflict. Money has always been one motivation to take up arms (and sometimes to put them down); but in an environment of decentralized conflict where the most useful tools are ones that are easily obtained, economic incentives are especially strong and the merits of obeying a command-and-control structure are correspondingly weak. From crime to insurgency to private military firms, market opportunities abound for people with relevant training in weapons and logistics, which themselves involve more and more traditionally “civilian” technology.<
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  In other words, orders carry less weight in conflict today than material incentives. In the traditional military, the level of pay is secondary; the primary motive for participation is loyalty, citizenship, a sense of mission or purpose—a phenomenon illustrated in striking fashion by military enrollments in the United States after 9/11. That sense of calling extends to some insurgencies—and to violent organizations as well, of course—that lure recruits with appeals to defend a land against occupiers or a faith against infidels. But the dispersal of military roles and the rise of nonmilitary ways to participate in conflict mean that the signals of the market—prices, payments, opportunity costs—now shape patterns of violence to a degree not experienced in the modern West in at least a century.

  The Decay of Military Power Affects Everyone

  The centrifugal force that has scattered conflict, unpacked military capabilities, and transported these capabilities into a hybrid military/civilian realm has not limited its impact to large national armies. Even new players in conflict are at risk of falling prey to the same dispersal that has facilitated their own rise.

  For examples, look no further than the jihadi movement. The 9/11 attack and the ones that followed in Madrid and London were the result of long months, even years, of planning and the effort of a network with a core leadership in the persons of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. More recent attacks traced to Al Qaeda have been smaller and—once thwarted—almost comical considering the personalities of the would-be “shoe” and “underwear” bombers. Why the difference? One reason may be the improved capability of counterterrorism agencies to disrupt large plots before they reach fruition. But another has to do with the effects on the jihadi world, and on Al Qaeda itself, of the decay of its power and capabilities. Studying the “cracks in the jihad,” scholar Thomas Rid has examined the different niches that jihadis occupy. Local insurgencies fighting for terrain are typically not interested in global reach. Some jihadi insurgents have turned the corner into organized crime and trafficking, motivated by money over mission, not unlike the Zetas. Still more jihadis come from a Web-enabled diaspora in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Some of these have found their way into full-fledged military operations; a case in point is Alabama-raised Omar Shafik Hammami, who went from popular high school student in middle America to major guerrilla leader in Somalia.48