THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Again, it must be emphasized that by sharing technology and information, the United States enhances its power; a failure to develop modalities of sharing will induce competitors to develop and provide similar services and products.46

  (7)

  Apart from these specific proposals, I will offer one suggestion that goes to the process of U.S. decision making. It is important that the United States, at the highest levels, create a strategic planning group analogous to the “vision teams” used by private industry. At this moment more than at any other time since Colonel E. M. House set up The Inquiry in 1918,* the United States needs to find the resources and commitment to engage in a strategic planning process.

  As Kees van der Heijden has recently observed,

  [t]he need for efficient strategic thinking is most obvious in times of accelerated change when the reaction time of the organization becomes crucial to survival and growth…. The problem is that such periods of change alternate with periods of relative stability, when organizations often get stuck into established ways of doing things, making them ill-prepared for when the change comes.47

  This is precisely the situation I have described with respect to the proposed “paradigms” for U.S. policy currently in play. But not just any process will do. One important element of such a process in an age of uncertainty is scenario planning.

  The traditional approach [to planning] tries to eliminate uncertainty from the strategic equation, by the assumption of the existence of “experts” who have privileged knowledge about the “most likely future,” and who can assess the probabilities of specific outcomes. [By contrast] [s]cenario planning assumes that there is irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity in any situation faced by the strategist, and that successful strategy can only be developed in full view of this…. The most fundamental aspect of introducing uncertainty in the strategic equation is that it turns planning for the future from a once-off episodic activity into an ongoing learning proposition.48

  Appropriate scenario planning can create an institutionalized learning system. I will have more to say about the scenario process in Chapter 26. For the time being, let me simply urge that a true strategic planning group be created linking the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council, and the Policy Planning Staff and that a true “vision team” be simultaneously convened, in secret, encompassing a broad range of opinions to aid that planning group. Such a team, in contrast to House's Inquiry—which was composed mainly of lawyers and academics—should include business executives, not necessarily only American, as well as scientists, technologists, and editors from the news media. In other words, this team ought to be different in composition from the think tanks that are a prominent source of ideas in Washington.

  It would be absurd to make long-term forecasts about future security environments that would aim to offer guidance for force planning, force sizing, and force structure. No one scenario about the future is certain enough to justify this. Rather, what I am urging is more thought about how our present decisions are likely to play out in bringing about different worlds. As Paul Bracken has written:

  It is not common to think about national security in such terms. Usually, policy goals are formulated and then force structure implications derived from them. History is not so clear in its causal relationships, however, and radically new improvements in military capacities can have their own impact on international relations.49

  Let me be clear about the purpose of the seven proposals thus far canvassed. I am not proposing that the main force of the United States be converted from a large conventional army into a boutique force, capable only of high-tech special operations and humanitarian interventions. I strongly believe the greatest threats to American security in the early twenty-first century will come from powerful, technologically sophisticated states—not from “rogues,” whether they be small states or large groups of bandits. And I believe that large defense budgets will be required to deter or, if necessary, meet these threats without resort to nuclear weapons. I have stressed the innovations just discussed rather as a way of coping with the fact that the United States is often ill equipped to act within the confines of the market-state, with its aversion to casualties and its sensitivity to events in remote theaters that do not impinge upon U.S. vital interests. The current U.S. force posture tends to lock it into a two-major-war contingency—the least likely of eventualities—and thus constrains the United States from using force appropriately in the battles it does fight.50 And the U.S. emphasis on large platforms tends to lock in American budget commitments for decades at a time, precisely when new technological developments demand nimble, flexible procurement policies.

  There are other proposals that would doubtless also serve this model—a robust debate within the parameters of the market-state will surely ensue. These seven are offered as exemplary only. What is important is that the United States adapt its leadership to the new society of market-states, and that it gradually abandon those attitudes and proposals (for a “new” Bretton Woods, or for a rapid reaction force for the U.N., or for enlarging the responsibilities of the World Trade Organization [WTO], to take three popular proposals) that arise from a mentality geared to the society of nation-states that is already decaying.

  STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE: PROGRAMS

  Experienced diplomats and military leaders are creatures of the dominant strategic rules of the nation-state, but are soon to be called upon to make decisions in a world—and before the publics—of market-states. The demands upon these decision makers by their publics, who are sensitive to the sufferings of others and to those of their own armed forces in a way that is quite distinct from earlier generations, are met with a mixture of cynical deflection or perplexed frustration. The professionals knew, for example, that it would have taken at least 100,000 troops to pacify Bosnia, and they knew the public would never stand for such a massive deployment, but they were under great pressure from that public, and from politicians responsive to that public, to do something that would stop the ethnic cleansing in that region. So decisions oscillated between the public declaration of “safe areas” and private decisions to abandon their safety, between—to take another example—the highly publicized hunt for a Somali warlord and the humiliating scampering off when this hunt ended with the deaths of seventeen American soldiers. Two scholars writing in International Security summed up the Clinton administration's performance at this time by saying this:

  The accommodations that the Clinton administration strategy [of the first term] has made with the obstacles it has encountered have been incremental, rhetorical, disjointed, and incomplete. In theory, the incoherence of the current strategy could produce a series of new difficulties for the administration, and conceivably a disaster.51

  And another writer asked, “What might explain this failure to define a grand strategy?… Is the failure due to Clinton, the person? Or to America, a society that is exceptional in its assets, aspirations and afflictions? Or to the post-bipolar setting?”52

  This author concludes that it is all of the above; I think it is none. Rather, the Clinton administration, like its predecessor, was attempting to apply the policy tools of a mentality that was inappropriate to the context within which it had to operate. The Somalia misadventure provides a good example of this.

  The Somalia intervention came to a sudden end after the bloody failure of a daring helicopter raid in true commando style—a normal occupational hazard of high-risk, high-payoff commando operations. But given the context at hand—a highly discretionary intervention in a country of the most marginal significance for American interests—any high-risk methods at all were completely inappropriate in principle.53

  Many factors, including the immediacy and power of televised images, drastically lowered birth rates, the sense of heightened opportunities forgone by the wounded and killed, account for the public's increased sensitivity to humanitarian issues—including, of course, its sensitivity to casualti
es in the armed forces. But whatever its cause, the effect has been a drastic shift in the appropriateness of military means, accompanied, paradoxically, by increasing demands for its use as an instrument of humane intervention.

  It is true that we can avoid flip-flops like the Somali embarrassment by setting criteria so confining that force is only used in situations that threaten our vital interests, have overwhelming public support, can be exited quickly, and so on, as former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger has proposed. But this is simply to apply the strategic mentality of the nation-state so thoroughly that problems with which it cannot deal are no longer to be treated as susceptible to the use of force at all. The Weinberger Doctrine is not so much a remedy as it is a symptom of the military's inability to deal with the shifted context.54 There are casualties, however, attendant to this approach, too, among them the defense budget (for why should the public pay for a force structure that is so unresponsive to the public's perceived needs?) and the moral leadership of the world community (for why should the world defer to the richest and most powerful state in history when that state demands to sit passively by and expects other states to run the risks and bear the costs of humanitarian intervention?).

  There are other alternatives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Edward Luttwak argued that the concept of war that governed American action had much to learn from the cabinet warfare of the territorial state. Eighteenth century wars, Luttwak noted, were characterized by

  [d]emonstrative maneuvers meant to induce enemy withdrawals without firing a shot [and were] readily called off if serious fighting ensued. Superior forces avoided battle if there was risk of heavy casualties even in victory…. [E]laborately prepared offensives had unambitious objectives, promising campaigns were interrupted by early retreats into winter quarters merely to avoid further losses, and offensive performance was routinely sacrificed to the overriding priority of avoiding casualties…55

  Luttwak's essay is perhaps most helpful not as a recommendation that the strategic style of territorial states provides a model for use today, but rather as a reminder that that style was superseded when state-nations achieved ascendancy. Indeed Luttwak lamented that the current American military establishment is so thoroughly imbued with the nineteenth century Clausewitzian criticism of eighteenth century thought. It is the grip of such criticism—and its affirmative ideas about the overwhelming use of force, the necessity of great battles and decisive conflicts, etc.—that has made American power so helpless in the face of post – Long War crises both before and since the Gulf War.

  Luttwak realizes that adapting to this new historical context will require not only a change in outlook as regards the means to be applied to military situations but also a greater modesty as to the objectives sought by these means. This insight is indispensable if we are not to dismiss some of the most useful of market-state military and nonmilitary strategic alternatives as merely ineffectual. By such alternatives, I have in mind economic sanctions, covert action, bribes and financial incentives, sustained campaigns of precision air strikes, novel military and political uses of intelligence products, information warfare, missile defense, simulation, the use of proxy forces, and the entire range of new technologies and tactics discussed earlier as the revolution in military affairs.

  If economy in lives risked and efficiency in resources used to accomplish the goals of the public are the two guideposts of the market-state, then let us see how we might judge some of these seven programs.

  (1)

  Economic sanctions include a wide range of economic and financial measures—asset freezes, trade embargoes, expropriations, the withholding of credit, boycotts, and the like—that have become more difficult to maintain as the market has become globalized. Economic sanctions were not unknown to the state-nation—Napoleon's “continental system” is one famous example—but the sharp distinction between the operations of the market and the operations of government often made such sanctions hard to enforce. It was not thought unseemly that throughout the Napoleonic Wars, British bankers continued to finance French enterprises. The nation-state has not been so detached: with the coming of total war there arose also an intensified economic warfare against the civilian society.

  The collective organizations of the society of nation-states have had a mixed record with such sanctions, however. The League of Nations was first called upon to apply economic sanctions to Japan following her invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League condemned Japan's actions as unlawful, but drew back from invoking economic sanctions for fear of provoking a Japanese attack on colonies in the Far East belonging to the League's European members. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, the League called for an embargo on arms, bans on loans and credits, the boycott of Italian imports, and an embargo on the export of key raw materials to Italy. All this failed to stop the Italian conquest, and when Ethiopia sued for peace, the sanctions were withdrawn. When Germany invaded Poland three years later, the Western powers simply declared war; the League's elaborate peacekeeping machinery, with its emphasis on economic sanctions, was completely bypassed.

  Nor has the United Nations's record, until recently, been much better. As with the League, collective economic sanctions were given a key role in international peacekeeping, but because action by the Security Council requires a unanimous vote of the permanent members, such sanctions could never be invoked against a great power or against a protégé of such a power. Even when a great power allows the Council to condemn the actions of a friendly state, it usually vetoes economic sanctions, as the United States has done for Israel and the Soviet Union did for Iran. From 1945 to 1990, economic sanctions were invoked only once, against the white government of Rhodesia, which was in revolt against a permanent member of the Security Council, the United Kingdom.

  The coming together of the great powers at the time of the Gulf War, however, allowed the U.N. to impose economic sanctions on Iraq. Oil exports have been barred, with limited exceptions to pay for Iraqi imports of food and medicines. Since 1990 these sanctions have been the principal means by which the coalition states that fought the Gulf War have controlled what would otherwise have been the rapid recovery of Iraq's military forces. It is estimated that during the first seven years following the Gulf War, sanctions have kept $110 billion out of the Iraqi treasury. Similarly, though less dramatically, the denial of Serbian imports and exports eroded the political base of the Serbian leader, Milosevic, and doubtless played an important role in his extradition to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

  As in other matters at the time, this represented an Americanization of the U.N., though one of uncertain duration. For the Americans have relied on the economic weapon to a greater degree than any other state: since World War II, we have invoked economic sanctions against China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Iran, the Soviet Union, Libya, India, Pakistan, and Poland, among others. Indeed there has hardly been a time in which the United States was not applying economic sanctions against at least one foreign state. Partly this is owed to the important economic position of the United States in the world, and our crucial assets, a vast and lucrative market coupled with a self-sufficient economy. States that are vulnerable to retorsion are seldom enthusiasts for sanctions. Partly also the use of this instrument is a function of the gradual emergence in the United States of a market-state, and that sort of state's emphasis on market tools and its aversion to risking lives.

  Despite this reliance, however, there is a consensus that economic sanctions do not “work,” and they are seldom studied by military strategists. This conclusion is the result of a profound misunderstanding about the role of such sanctions. Economic sanctions are used precisely because they are unlikely to result in the kind of change of constitutional regime sought by nation-states in war. If such sanctions really could drive another state to total collapse, they would just as surely lead to armed conflict, and it is the avoidance of armed conflict that gave sanctions their unique role in the post–World
War II environment. If the grain embargo imposed on the Soviet Union by the United States at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan really had starved Russia into famine, it would not have driven that country into political submission but rather into a war for food.56 Sanctions are useful when conventional war is against one's own interests and therefore the relative costs of going to war, which are usually very high, must be kept high. Sanctions so powerful that they gravely weaken the opposing state quickly—as a decisive battle or military campaign can—would just as greatly lower the relative costs of war. It may be that this is what happened to the Japanese as a result of the U.S. oil embargo in 1941; the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor moved from being a clever theoretical possibility to a daring course of action acceptable to Japanese political authorities when the relative costs of war plummeted owing to the threatened imposition of a stringent oil embargo.57

  Sanctions work by raising the cost of pursuing a particular political path—for both parties. (Thus they are especially useful to a rich power, like the United States, who can afford to play for “table stakes.”) Sanctions can help to discredit a policy—again in both states, the applying and the applied-to—and are therefore most useful where there is an active opposition party in the state to which the sanctions are applied, and no powerful interest group that is forced to bear the cost in the applying state. Even against a dictatorial government, sanctions can have a useful effect because such regimes are no less rational for being authoritarian. The crucial points to bear in mind are that sanctions' true utility lies in the modesty of their impact, a useful thing for the market-state that tries to shun warfare where possible, and that only an internationally coordinated effort, as exemplified by the sanctions against Iraq and Serbia, can be effective in an era of globalized markets and transient capital.