THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  If the United States, in the new context in which it finds itself, is to maintain its leadership in order to thrive as an entrepreneurial state, it will endeavor to do two things: to preserve its freedom of action abroad by limiting, to the greatest degree possible, the coercive harm other states can do to it; and to act consistently with its traditional moral aspirations but prudently within its means to “make the world available,” that is, to maximize the degree to which the persons of the world are able to choose their own destinies. If the security paradigm for the American nation-state was to make the world safe for democracy, then the paradigm of the American market-state must be to make a world that is hospitable to the individual conscience, that is, available. Individual goods, like economic opportunity and freedom of religion, do not exist in the world without nurturing practices. They are linked to “collective goods,” that is, things of benefit to the world as a whole.

  STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE: PROBLEMS

  What security policies flow from this paradigm, in the way that interven-ion in World War I and containment in the Cold War flowed from Wilsonianism? This question can be broken down into four: (1) what technology should the U.S. exploit; (2) what force structure should we deploy; (3) what criteria do we apply to potential cases for intervention; and (4) to what threats do we give priority?

  (1)

  The superior U.S. technology that won the Gulf War and defeated the Serbian army and the Taliban is the fruit of a revolution in military affairs that has been underway for twenty years, and which was presciently anticipated by Marshal Ogarkov and played a decisive role in the Soviet military's support for Gorbachev's reforms. The U.S. military is currently pursuing what is sometimes termed “a military-technical revolution,”9 an extrapolation of the computational, communications, and weapons innovations that won the Long War and brought us the market-state. These extrapolations would utilize various advanced technologies to enable the U.S. armed forces to see the entire battlefield10 and transmit information quickly to commanders in order to guide attacks more precisely as well as to detect and respond quickly to attacks by an enemy.

  Further progress in the microminiaturization of electronics promise ever “smarter,” meaning more autonomous and precise, weapons…. Exploited in combination, these technological advances hold the promise of replacing many of the functions that heretofore required the presence of human beings.11

  The driver of change behind radically new military capabilities is the rapid advance in computers operating in coordination with communications technology and the equally rapid declining cost of their synergy.12 The military-technical revolution promises a transparent battlefield, where commanders view operations on television screens and direct individual units (or nonmanned weapons) from remote locations and where helicopters launch missiles at tanks twenty miles away based on information from preplanted acoustic devices and airborne radar and satellite imagery, all operating in coordination.13 Intelligent weapons would take real-time information and guide themselves to their targets. Miniaturized aerial weapons would replace fighter planes and tanks.

  As previously noted, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov anticipated much of this discussion when, as chief of the Soviet general staff, he warned of an imminent technology-driven revolution that would give conventional weapons a level of lethality comparable to that of tactical nuclear weapons. “Armor on the march might find itself detected and attacked by conventional missiles showering self-guided anti-tank weapons, in an operation conducted from a distance of several hundred miles and with as little as 30 minutes between detection and assault.”14 This was profoundly disquieting to the Soviets, as their strategic plans depended upon massed tank assaults across the central front in Germany. The arrival of parity between the superpowers in some central nuclear systems (long-range ballistic missiles) and the collapse of escalation dominance by NATO at the subcentral level had for the first time in three decades made a Soviet assault across the central front of Europe a plausible scenario in some circumstances.15 There was always a significant chance that, no matter what the American rhetoric, Washington (and Bonn) would decline to “go nuclear” in a conventional war when doing so invited Soviet retaliation in kind. In the early 1980s this doubt may have crested; by the 1990s the rapid yet inexorable developments of high technology had brought about a nonnuclear stalemate in the field, and thus many years of Russian planning and expense were rendered pointless. Moreover, some Soviet leaders were well aware of the large gap between American and Russian computer development and the increasing speed with which developments were occurring in the West. In part because these developments were stimulated by research in the private sector, the Soviet Union was poorly placed to compete.

  Reviewing this history, we now ask: What technology ought we to adopt presently to ensure victory twenty or thirty years hence? Another way of asking this: which revolution in military affairs (RMA) ought we to pursue, because there are several different possibilities.

  One such option is basically the extension of current capabilities—stealth, precision guidance, advanced sensors, and reliance upon satellite systems. Extending this approach would rely on the information aspects of the RMA to inform long-range fire with more advanced target acquisition and more controlled execution. This option pursues the integration of advanced sensors, brilliant weapons, robotic craft, and simulation. This would allow the United States to destroy virtually any battlefield targets that possess a perceptible signature. Proponents of this approach hold that the pursuit and enhancement of these technical advantages will allow the United States to win large-scale, high-intensity conventional conflicts that are fought with large armored and mechanized forces.

  If, however, one believes that the least likely eventuality in twenty years is that the United States will be forced to confront heavily armored and mechanized regional powers—like North Korea, Iraq, Iran—then one is compelled to rethink the RMA question. Jeffrey Cooper captures this well:

  New opponents may decide… to pose… challenges that an RMA narrowly focused on the DESERT STORM scenario and based on technologies demonstrated in that conflict may be less capable of addressing. [O]ur next opponent [might try to prevent our force deployment—as Saddam Hussein did not—and] possess nuclear or other WMD and long range delivery systems capable of threatening not only U.S. forces but allies and third countries who control essential transit and staging facilities…. Alternatively, an enemy may also decide to pursue a different set of strategic objectives—damage, disruption to civil society, or interference with key global links and use different strategic concepts—long range attack, clandestine forces, urban warfare… terrorism, or subornation and blackmail of civilian populations, using modern communications to bypass government itself.16

  Current U.S. strategic planning largely ignores these possibilities in exploiting the RMA, in part because U.S. intervention doctrine is in such disarray. One question with which this book began—what are the appropriate criteria for the use of force—like the question “Which RMA?” can-not be answered in the absence of general strategic plan. The plan we currently employ is the product of a classic nation-state confrontation, the Gulf War that occurred just as the market-state was beginning to stir.

  (2)

  Since 1991, the United States has undertaken three major defense policy reviews: the Bush Base Force Review (1991), the Clinton administration's Bottom-Up Review (1993), and the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review (1997). Despite their advertising, these reviews were little more than budget drills, rationalizing an ever smaller force structure to the same roles and missions. The Bottom-Up Review, for example, postulated that the United States should focus on combat readiness to face threats of major regional conflicts such as those that might occur in Korea or the Persian Gulf. The Quadrennial Defense Review retained the two-major-regional-conflicts scenario, though adding the need to prepare for smaller scale contingencies (while cutting the total force by 115,000 unif
ormed personnel).17 There was little in either report addressing the future absence of access to forward bases (or their vulnerability), critical infrastructure and computer attacks, attacks to space-based systems, urban operations, deep inland operations, or new forms of attack against the U.S. homeland.*

  During the same period U.S. strategic planning for intervention moved from the well-defined but limited strictures of the Weinberger Doctrine to the somewhat muddier—but therefore less limiting—policies of the Clinton administration. If the Weinberger Doctrine can be said to have taken concrete shape with the U.S. experience in the Gulf War, then it is easy to see why it is harmoniously consistent with the two-major-regional-war strategy that governs U.S. force structure. On the other hand, because U.S. forces have been frequently deployed since the Gulf War in numerous nontraditional, interventionist roles, it is harder to explain why the Clinton administration neither changed its general concepts for the force structure nor articulated a new doctrine for intervention. Harder to explain, but not impossible. The administration did make, as we shall see, several early efforts to redefine a doctrine for intervention that was better suited to the realities of 1990s conflicts; in the end, it was determined to maximize flexibility by simply not committing the United States to any particular doctrine. For much the same sort of reasons, the Clinton administration clung to the two-regional-war scenario because it believed it could perform smaller operations (like Bosnia and Kosovo) out of a force structure configured for but not limited to major operations.

  (3)

  Although Weinberger proposed his criteria for U.S. intervention following the debacle in Lebanon in 1982 – 1983, the six requirements of which it is composed more obviously reflect conventional criticism of the U.S. intervention in Viet Nam. Weinberger's requirements for intervention were (1) vital American interests were at stake; (2) there was a clear intention to seek military victory; (3) the intervention was in pursuit of precisely defined political and military objectives; (4) there was a reasonable assurance of support by Congress and the American people; (5) there was a continual reassessment of the relationship between objectives and the size, composition, and disposition of U.S. forces; and (6) force was only undertaken as a last resort. By the time the Congress pushed President Ford to abandon Viet Nam, the intervention there had indeed failed each of these criteria, as the Nixon and Ford administrations flailed about in their search for a mission statement that could be said to have been fulfilled and as the members of both parties in Congress coalesced around an account of the initial U.S. intervention that would justify their withdrawal of support. According to this agreed-upon account, the United States failed to consider other, nonmilitary alternatives to intervention in Viet Nam or (its twin criticism) did not truly seek military victory; nor was there a discernible national interest at stake; nor did the public and the Congress overwhelmingly perceive and verify that interest. Frankly, I do not believe the facts will sustain this characterization of our experience in Viet Nam, however frequently or tenaciously it is asserted.

  Therefore, whether the Weinberger criteria would have prevented American intervention in Viet Nam is a debatable question. What is indisputable is that the Gulf War gave the doctrine a firm foundation because to many it showed that there were in fact some interventions that did fit the doctrine, and that success would rapidly follow if the criteria were met. General Colin Powell, who had been a young infantry officer in Viet Nam, endorsed the Weinberger Doctrine while serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed Powell gave an Army spin to the criteria Weinberger had offered, emphasizing that the clear intention of winning should be manifested by the use of overwhelming force and that Weinberger's precisely defined political and military objectives should be clearly linked.

  The Clinton administration's first secretary of defense, Les Aspin, had been critical of the Weinberger Doctrine as a congressman. He and others complained that the criteria left the president with only two options: total force or nothing. And he argued that a more flexible doctrine, with more options, was required.18 The new administration, however, was initially attracted to “assertive multilateralism” as a way of finessing the issue: acting through the United Nations and other formal institutions, the United States would avoid confronting the problem of unilateral intervention that must be justified on the basis of unilaterally determined interests. The widespread perception that the U.N. mission to Somalia was a failure, however, resulted in Presidential Decision Directive 25 in May 1994, which simply grafted the key criteria of the Weinberger Doctrine on to the decision of whether to support multilateral action.*

  Nevertheless, PDD-25 has had little discernible impact on U.S. policy and its criteria have never been included in the National Security Strategy, nor did they appear to have been applied regarding U.S. missions to Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo. Aspin's successor, William Perry, was more influential when, also in 1994, he provided various criteria that have since rationalized U.S. action (and have been incorporated in every subsequent edition of the National Security Strategy).19 Perry distinguished between three sorts of American interests—vital, important, and humanitarian—and argued that different uses of limited, not necessarily overwhelming, force were appropriate to protect those interests. The selective use of force was to be commensurate with limited objectives. This description was further elaborated by national security advisor Anthony Lake in a speech at George Washington University in 1996 in which he described seven broad circumstances that “may call for the use of our military forces.”†

  These general descriptions were intended to modify the exclusivity—amounting almost to a doctrine of massive retaliation in the intervention sphere—of the Weinberger ideas, but they did not accomplish the objective of actually telling anyone what criteria had to be met before American troops would be sent abroad. General Powell himself recognized both the feint in this direction as well as its vagueness when he stated just before retiring:

  We can modify our doctrine, we can modify our strategy, we can modify our structure, our equipment, our training, our leadership techniques, everything else we do these other missions, but we never want to do it in such a way that we lose sight of the focus of why have armed forces—to fight and win the nation's wars.20

  To some, Powell's words appear to assume a certain contingency for which we must prepare—the two-major-regional-war scenario—for if our strategic objectives were otherwise, fighting to achieve those objectives would compel, not guardedly permit, some important modifications. Conversely, we cannot bring about any effective modifications unless we have a clear idea of what sort of wars we expect to undertake.

  (4)

  In other words, we cannot decide which RMA to pursue, what force structure to provide, or what criteria to set for intervention until we have a clear idea of the threats we will face. Trying to answer these questions separately leads either to unstated assumptions that are not examined and debated or to ad hockery, where the decisions in each arena are taken as a matter of temporary expediency and a comprehensive strategy is replaced by rules sufficiently flexible always to permit citation but never to enable guidance. What is required is some explicit confrontation of what might be called the “ABC” problem.

  “ABC” refers to the classification of potential competitors of the United States by a scheme that would be familiar to any society hostess. States belong to either an “A” list of peers such as Germany, Japan, France, or Russia, a “B” list that includes mid-level developing states with modernized conventional forces and primitive weapons of mass destruction such as Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, or North Korea, or a “C” list composed of militarily modest states—such as Libya, Serbia, Cuba—and nonstate actors, such as various terrorist, criminal, or insurgent groups that often pose threats to American national interests.21 The ABC problem may be stated as follows: should the United States focus on outdistancing potential peer competitors to such a degree that the position we now enjoy—of having no hostile peers—can
be indefinitely extended; or should we instead focus on those states and conflicts that might threaten our vital interests in theatres of traditional importance to us such as Europe, Pacific Asia, and the Persian Gulf; or realign our thinking to focus less on conflicts like the Gulf War and more on conflicts like that in Yugoslavia, as well as economic, developmental, and nontraditional threats including terrorism and disease. (That is, which threats should drive U.S. policies— A, B, or C?)