Now, when Pentagon staffers briefed these concepts, they were masters at making this outcome seem downright insulting to American pride. And are we going to let this little pissant dictatorship disrespect Uncle Sam like that? But when you stood back and thought about it for a while, the level of assumed U.S. responsibility for global order suggested by this pairing of concepts was nothing less than staggering. In effect, our national interest was limitless.
In the Cold War we had our friends to worry about and the Soviets had theirs. Then there was the occasional tug-of-war over client states in the Third World. It may have seemed like a lot, and it was, but the level of responsibility for the status quo was fairly manageable: hold the line against the Soviets in Europe and Asia, and if they got too friendly with anybody else around the world, you got even friendlier with that country’s next-door neighbor. I mean, it wasn’t like we had a standing order to reverse any act of aggression around the planet, at least not after we ditched the “domino theory” in Southeast Asia and realized that losing a Vietnam or Cambodia did not exactly signal the fall of Western civilization.
But even stranger was the notion that now that the East had actually fallen, the Pentagon somehow felt so responsible for global security that it wanted to be able to reverse any significant act of aggression anywhere in the world. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but you’d better be able to explain your choices to the American people, and that is where the lack of a guiding vision came into play. Of course, the Pentagon had no such desire to play global cop—far from it. They were simply searching for the toughest list of tasks they could come up with to justify the largest and niftiest package of military capabilities possible. That is the budget game in a nutshell. So if you want to play that game well, you gin up a host of strategic concepts like “access denial” and asymmetrical warfare, and then tell the senators that in a world of chaos and complete uncertainty, we need to be able to overcome these devious opponents wherever they are found.
In retrospect, where we should have been applying this concept of asymmetrical warfare was not so much to regional rogues but to transnational terrorist networks like al Qaeda. Here, just about everyone involved in national security planning missed the boat. By focusing on nation-states as the great source of violence and threat in the system, we ignored the rising role of transnational terrorism. Simply put, we refused to realize just how successful America had become in deterring both global and interstate war, but we refused to move off that dime until something bigger—and frankly, more compelling in a budgetary sense—came along. That something turned out to be 9/11, which has progressively altered funding priorities not only across the defense budget but across the federal budget as a whole.
The defense community, however, should have seen this change coming long before 9/11. The evidence had grown with each passing year. The history of U.S. crisis response over the past three decades indicated a progressive downshifting of our focus from system-level threats to state-level threats, and finally to threats that arise from failing states—or what I call the disconnected states. In short, history was telling us that we were moving progressively away from warfare against states or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals.
This downshifting of U.S. crisis-response patterns can be tracked decade by decade. As far back as the 1970s, much of our crisis response was focused on countering the perceived Soviet advance into the Third World, such as their growing support for “countries of socialist orientation” in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. So our crisis-response pattern in the seventies looked like a long “arc” of containment that ran from the Mediterranean through the Persian Gulf, wrapping around the underbelly of Asia all the way up to the Korean peninsula. In effect, we had spent the fifties and sixties largely focused on keeping the Soviets from expanding their influence east or west, but by the seventies we were more concerned about their heading south.
In the 1980s, we downshifted from this system-level perspective and focused more openly on a series of interstate conflicts or wars concentrated in the Middle East, or what the Pentagon likes to call Southwest Asia. Two key events helped focus our attention at the end of the seventies: the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Shah fell in Iran. At that point, our crisis-response pattern became very tight, as the bulk of our activity focused in and around the Persian Gulf (Iran-Iraq War) and the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and a spiking of radical Islamic terrorism across the region).
In the 1990s our pattern of crisis response seemed to drill down even further on a cluster of mini-containment situations involving failed states (Somalia, Haiti) and rogues (Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein) who needed to be kept in their boxes lest they commit too much violence against their own people. So in the 1970s we were still dealing with the “evil empire,” while in the 1980s we downshifted to “evil states,” and in the 1990s we downshifted further to “evil leaders.”
This downshifting was not a sign of the world coming apart but rather an indicator of where big violence was heading. By the end of the 1980s it became clear to everyone that system-level war had long since departed the scene, and by the end of the century it became clear that interstate wars had similarly disappeared. All that really leaves in the international system today is mass violence within states and the terrorists that tend to emerge from those endemic conflicts over time, like all those al Qaeda operatives who cut their teeth on Afghanistan’s internal violence.
On 9/11 America got a real dose of what asymmetrical warfare is going to be in the twenty-first century. It isn’t going to come from rising near-peers like China, who are rapidly integrating into the global economy, nor is it going to come from rogue regimes, whose fixed position we can surround at our leisure and attack at will. The real asymmetrical challenge we will face will come from globalization’s disenfranchised, or the losers largely left behind in the states most disconnected from globalization’s advance. The main thrust of this challenge will be led by educated elites, like an Osama bin Laden, who dream of disconnecting societies from globalization’s grasp and—by extension—from America’s “empire.” Like the intellectual Lenin and his Bolsheviks a century before, these transnational terrorists will use every dirty trick in the book against the powers that be, and they will grow more perverse in their violence over time because they know, deep down, that time is not on their side. Over time, globalization’s advance will rob the al Qaedas of the world of the opportunity to seize control of societies and turn back the clock.
Al Qaeda’s victims were not going to be our soldiers but our citizens. We lost more Americans in combat on 9/11 than on any day since the Civil War, and it was completely by design. Bin Laden fears what globalization and U.S. military hegemony are doing to his people, and so to personalize the danger he sees in this historical process, he brings his violence directly to American citizens in a war he believes he is fighting quite symmetrically—even if the U.S. government does not.
Put these two images together and the asymmetrical outline of bin Laden and al Qaeda’s strategy seems far more logical. The United States cannot be defeated on the nation-state level, but it can be humbled on an individual level if enough Americans are murdered, and even defeated on the system level if we are induced as a nation to withdraw militarily from the Persian Gulf.
You could say that America pursued the knee-jerk reaction in response to 9/11. Since we could not easily track down the individual terrorists spread across this global network, we did the one thing we know how to do well: we invaded a nation-state. Of course, al Qaeda was largely concentrated in Afghanistan in terms of its senior leadership and its training camps, but the notion that we could destroy their global network of individual operatives by eliminating their main hideout is a little like assuming you could disable all McDonald’s franchises around the world by taking out Hamburger U.
The fact that we did invade Afghanistan should tell us plenty about
the ultimate enemy that we face—disconnectedness. When Vladimir Lenin wanted to create the world’s first socialist state in defiance of the capitalist world system, he ended up in Russia, a nation whose economic development was significantly retarded—or precapitalist. Correspondingly, when bin Laden and al Qaeda sought to launch their worldwide resistance to the United States-led globalization process, they invariably settled in a nation whose economic connectivity to the outside world was severely retarded—or preglobalized.
The task that the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. Government woke up to on September 12 reflected the very fracturing of the global security environment we had spent a decade or longer ignoring. This global war on terrorism is simultaneously fought across all three of the levels I cited earlier: network war across the global system to disrupt terrorist financing, communications, and logistics; state-based war against rogue regimes that harbor or support such terrorist groups; and special operations that target individuals for either capture or—when dictated by circumstances—serial assassination.
What immediately became apparent in late 2001 as America’s multilevel response to terrorism unfolded was that this war was going to involve a whole lot more than just the Defense Department. Since the system-level response is largely financial, the Treasury Department plays a huge role in a new form of war that involves lawyers, banking officials, data-mining experts, and customs agents. Since our war against individuals will occur not only in disconnected states where Special Operations forces lead the way, but likewise in advanced states where law enforcement agencies typically take control, the Justice Department commingles its efforts with that of the U.S. military to a degree that has never been seen before. Even on the level of state-based war, where the Pentagon will clearly lead any efforts at regime change or preemptive strikes, the bulk of any follow-up will naturally revert to the State Department, as we increasingly witness in postwar Iraq. In short, the Pentagon can no longer plan for war solely within the context of war but increasingly must plan for prosecuting such war within the context of everything else.
I had spent the 1990s trying vainly to reconnect the military to the world outside the Pentagon: to the fracturing of the security market, to the rise of the lesser includeds, to the reality that wars now occur within the context of everything else. I readily admit that despite my considerable briefing skills, I mostly entertained but did not inform my military audiences, which found my strategic concepts truly fascinating but not applicable to the world they recognized. In short, I expanded minds but did not change them.
I am not going to kid you: I was not the lone visionary trying to reconnect the Pentagon to the larger world of globalization. It was simply the case that my superior briefing skills gave me far more opportunities than anyone else to pitch that product and make that sale. In the end, all such efforts were overtaken by the events of 9/11. In one blinding flash, the U.S. defense establishment was taught a lesson about needing to broaden its perspective beyond its historically myopic focus on nation-states. Moreover, the Pentagon learned that its long-held assumptions regarding the so-called lesser includeds had grown dangerously out-of-date. We were completely unprepared for this new form of multilayered war, and it was our own damn fault.
As our nation continues in this rule-set reset, we must be careful not to view 9/11 as a historical aberration or a onetime event. As far as the Pentagon must be concerned, there can be no such thing as lesser includeds anymore.
How 9/11 Saved The Pentagon From Itself
As the Pentagon entered the new century, it was clear to many national security experts that the Defense Department had basically spent the nineties buying one type of military while operating another. Sound hard? It was. But the weirdest thing was, the Pentagon did this to itself and knew it was doing so all along, in large part thanks to the light leadership touch displayed by the Clinton Administration for eight years. After starting off on the wrong foot by picking Les Aspin as Defense Secretary and then leading with a fight over gays in the military, the Clinton White House quietly backed off from trying to run the Pentagon about halfway through its first term, yielding two of the quietest secretaries the Pentagon has ever had: William Perry and William Cohen. In the second half of the 1990s, it often felt as though the military was “home alone” in the Pentagon, which is why the Bush Administration felt that they had to reestablish civilian control over the military when they came into power in 2001.
If the Clinton secretaries had displayed a better leadership capability, would it have made a difference? Probably not, because the military itself was basically coming apart at the seams, splitting into two rival camps over the decade: one that had to deal with the international security environment as it was and another that preferred to dream of one that “should be.” The result was that the Pentagon kept building a military for some distant, downstream threat that they were convinced would eventually appear, only to leave the current military on its own to deal with a messy “here and now” collection of lesser includeds. So when the military tells you they were treated badly by the Democrats over the nineties, don’t believe them. The military treated itself badly over the 1990s; the Clinton Administration simply let them do it.
What happened to let this split emerge within the military? All the services experienced the same sort of inner crisis that drove the Navy and Marines to gin up . . . From the Sea—that search for a new enemy or new standard against which to measure themselves. The Army’s self-doubts were the worst, because after the Cold War it was the service immediately targeted for the cruelest cuts in force structure. Later, in the mid-1990s, as the concept of “transforming” the military took root, the Army got even more nervous, fearing that this next-generation military would do without ground forces altogether. That suited the Air Force just fine, because its leadership was under the distinct impression that air power had won the first Persian Gulf War all by itself, and later the Kosovo campaign to boot.
By the end of the Clinton Administration, all the services eventually came to realize that they were buying one sort of military for the future while the present demanded something dramatically different, primarily because the extensive overseas operations of the 1990s had worn down, or “hollowed out,” the forces somewhat. In essence, the misalignment of strategy and operations had become painfully obvious to most observers by 2000, as each service was cannibalizing platforms like aircraft for spare parts, and military families were stressing out from the high rates of overseas deployments by their loved ones.
Watching this unfold over the years, I was reminded of the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor complaining that every time he twists his arms far behind his back and then jumps up and down on the floor, he feels a stabbing pain in his spine. So he complains, “It hurts so bad when I do that, doc!” To which his physician replies, “Then don’t do that!”
I was one of those doctors telling the Pentagon to knock it off over the nineties, to no avail. Our message was a simple one: You cannot keep buying these expensive, high-tech platforms for some distant future war and expect the military to have enough resources left over to deal with all of today’s operations. Following my experience with the Navy’s White Paper . . . From the Sea, I participated in a CNA study that looked at how the U.S. Navy should plan to alter its “force structure” (i.e., the mix of ships, submarines, aircraft, etc.) over the coming years in response to the “emerging strategic environment” (strategic environments are always “emerging” in the Pentagon’s vernacular).
I reunited with my longtime CNA mentor Hank Gaffney in this study. Hank and I had written up a celebrated article that described the intra-Navy debates that had raged during the creation of the white paper, or the three camps I had dubbed the Transitioneers, Big Sticks, and Cold Worriers.◈ In this force structure study, we wanted to see what would happen if the Navy actually pursued the specific advice of those three camps in deciding which ships and aircraft it should buy over the coming generation. By showing
naval leaders the different fleets they could end up with twenty years later, depending on which vision they followed, we hoped to open some eyes regarding the big trade-offs we knew eventually had to be made given budgetary constraints.◈ Let me just describe the two extreme cases here: the Transitioneers, who wanted to manage the here-and-now world of lesser includeds, and the Cold Worriers, who wanted to wait for the Big One down the road. I will focus on these two arguments because they essentially capture what actually happened across the nineties. In effect, the Pentagon split the difference between the two opposing visions, buying the military favored by the Cold Worriers while trying to manage the world in the manner advocated by the Transitioneers.
Because the Transitioneers wanted to manage the messy world as they found it, they argued that America needed a force with lots of platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft, personnel vehicles). This is basically what happened across the 1990s: the U.S. military was involved with operations all over the Gap, often engaging in multiple situations at the same time. If the Transitioneer advice had been followed, the Pentagon would have bought high numbers of relatively cheap platforms, or ships and aircraft full of technology we already had and therefore did not have to spend a lot of money developing. Could we have spent less on technology? Yes, because the opponents we faced in all these lesser includeds were not of the high-end variety we associated with the Big One. Somalia was a quagmire, all right, but it was not World War III in terms of technology requirements.
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