THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

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  The utility of the strategic alternative of covert action is also not widely appreciated. Even sophisticated commentators persist in thinking that covert action involves any clandestine action by a state's secret services. In fact, “covert action” is a term of art in intelligence operations, referring to those operations by a state that are intended to influence the politics and policies of a target state without the hand of the acting state being disclosed. Thus covert action includes the training provided by the United States to the Philippine anti-insurgency forces, requested by the Aquino government but denied by both the United States and the Philippines at the time; and the provision of radio transmitters to the mujahedin attempting to destabilize the Iranian regime; and the cash contributions to the Christian Democratic Party in Italy after World War II, and the subsidies to Encounter magazine at the same time. Covert action must therefore be distinguished from intelligence collection, counterespionage, and intelligence analysis and forecasting.

  Of late, covert action has been generally held in low esteem in the United States. Writing in Foreign Affairs, former American official Roger Hilsman concluded that “covert political action is not only something the United States can do without in the post–cold war world, it was something the United States could well have done without during the cold war as well.”58 Such an observation, whatever its historical merits, is a revealing example of how disputes and positions taken during the Cold War tend to hang over into the new market-state context. In this new context, however, covert action is a far more viable and potentially useful tool. The most discrediting example of covert action—the Iran-Contra fiasco—was a fumbling attempt to privatize covert action, an objective consistent with the methods of the emerging market-state. A brief study of that affair provides an excellent object lesson in the home truth that all government acts must be consistent, however, with the constitutional law of the State, regardless of its constitutional order.

  In the aftermath of the 1976 revelations of the Church Committee, which had convened to investigate whether the CIA had been involved in the Watergate Affair, various statutory and regulatory rules were promulgated that sought to limit U.S. covert action. The Reagan administration came into office in 1981 believing that the Carter and Ford administrations had been far too restrictive of CIA operations, and it wished to use covert action programs in Central America to challenge the new Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A skeptical Congress cut back financing for such operations, and in 1983 adopted a complete ban on CIA operations against the Nicaraguan government. Moreover, thoughout this period it had become increasingly difficult to plan and execute covert operations without their exposure to the press—sometimes, it was said, by members of the oversight committees in Congress that the post-Watergate statutes had put in place.

  Thus in the early 1980s CIA operations in Central America were imperiled by a statutory cutoff in funding, and the Reagan Administration believed that it risked exposure of these operations and others by compliance with the statutory requirements to fully inform Congressional committees, some of whose members were hostile to the very idea of covert action. This picture was made more troubling by a rise in anti-American terrorism and the apparent inability of U.S. agents to penetrate and neutralize the groups responsible. Throughout 1984, the United States was the target of a wave of bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and kidnappings in Lebanon. The stateless chaos that reigned in that country provided the perfect milieu for such crimes because the traditional methods of counterterrorism depend upon careful and experienced police work backed by firm legal authority.

  In this situation, the director of the CIA proposed the development of a quasi-private covert action agency. This scheme offered several important advantages to the administration: (1) using private persons as liaisons, the new agency could manage the Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government, providing the tactical and operational guidance that had been coming from CIA before its funding and participation were cut off by Congress; (2) it would avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of Congress because it would not be a government operation, dependent on government funding, and thus would not come within the provisions of various statutes that imposed congressional oversight; (3) a private agency could act more daringly, avoiding the legal prohibitions contained in prior Executive Orders (against assassination, for example) that it would have been embarrassing to repeal, and in defiance of international norms against violent reprisals; thus it was hoped the United States might recapture the initiative that seemed to have been surrendered to the terrorist groups; (4) because of the agency's dissociation with official government, it would provide the president with the option of “plausible denial” should the private agency's operations be exposed. Statutes adopted in the late 1970s had greatly increased the political costs of maintaining such presidential denials because these laws required that the chief executive actually sign a written verification of the necessity for each covert operation and report this “finding” to Congress; therefore there always hovered the possibility that such written authorization might be discovered by the press after an official denial had been made.

  The plan of using a privately funded agency to provide, in the words of one of the conspirators, “a self-sustaining, stand-alone, off-the-shelf covert action capability” was a natural market response to the problem of overregulation. In many ways it resembles the legal schemes by which multinational corporations take their enterprises offshore to escape onerous regulations by the state in which their operations are resident. Major General Richard Secord, the chief operating officer of the new covert action entity, called it simply “the Enterprise,” a very apt term. Although the public's understanding of this agency appears to be that it was created to manage the American arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, and then expanded its portfolio by diverting black-market profits from those arms deals to the Contras, in fact the chronology is the other way around. The agency was set up to manage the Contra account that Congress had taken away from the CIA; as the agency grew, it took up other accounts, conducting covert operations in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. It was intended to be staffed and available for use for any covert operation that needed its special scope and freedom from legal restraints. Had “Enterprise” operations in Iran not been exposed by the Iranians themselves, its executives believed that it would have taken on further assignments, in Angola and elsewhere.

  This agency ultimately collapsed because it was fundamentally incompatible with American constitutional law. The exposure of the “Enterprise,” in a different political climate, could well have led to the impeachment of the U.S. president. Unlike other states—unlike even other representative democracies—the United States does not permit the private funding of federal operations because this would evade the legitimating check of representative government. Only when the persons for whom the electorate has voted require the taxpayers to pay money for government acts is there a direct link between voting and government operations. Otherwise, the framers thought, and our constitutional structure and practice reflect, the link between citizen responsibility and governmental authorization is broken. It is a very pleasing thing to have others pay for the operations of the State, but even gifts to the U.S. government cannot be accepted without statutory authorization. To do otherwise allows the government to undertake functions for which it has no authorization from the people.

  But if the Iran-Contra Affair was a textbook case of how not to conduct a covert action, there is nevertheless an important role for such activity in the arsenal of the market-state. Usually such operations amount to the financial and technical support of local elements in foreign countries with whom the United States is in some sympathy, or at least with whom we are willing to cooperate for a common goal. Rarely, arms may be provided. Paramilitary forces may be supported by the provision of intelligence, logistical support, or financing. It is doubtful the Russian defeat in Afghanistan would have occurred absent U.S.
support for the mujahedin. The key elements are strict accountability of funding; careful professionalism and planning; and setting achievable goals. With the multiplication of entities operating in the international environment, and the increasing sensitivity of most governments to public opinion, the potential usefulness of covert action increases with the emergence of the market state, as do the costs of exposure.

  The Iran-Contra Affair was the result of a government that in some respects anticipated the new market-state and was eager to use its tools, but was insufficiently attentive to the rules of the American constitution into which the norms of the new constitutional order must be translated. Far from discrediting covert action, the affair should enable us to use this instrument with more care in the future by emphasizing the crucial role of the legal setting of the market-state. A deregulated state does not mean an unregulated state; indeed, the legal rules that remain after deregulation have an importance that is, if anything, more salient than under the ends-justify-the-means ideology of the nation-state. The Russian state has been imperiled by its involvement in black-market activities, precisely because it has been unable to heed this rule. Whether the United States can marshal the imagination and daring to execute significant covert actions in the new politically fraught context of the market-state remains to be seen.

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  Sustained precision bombing: In Operation Linebacker, conducted in Southeast Asia in 1972, some nine thousand laser-guided bombs were fruitlessly dropped near Hanoi and Haiphong over eleven days—roughly the same number as were dropped with far greater effect during the entire Gulf War. So-called surgical strikes are among the most desired, and most elusive, options in the military handbook. Three difficulties have thwarted their promise of low-risk, low-collateral damage and high destruction: (1) air crews are inevitably put at risk because precision bombing requires low-release altitudes, and the very technology that enables target acquisition and homing for the bombardier is also used by antiaircraft missiles with integral radar systems; enhancing bombing accuracy also usually means employing air crews more intensively—the “smartest” of smart weapons was, after all, the kamikaze; (2) precision-bombing campaigns require enormous quantities of real-time intelligence to locate targets and track them; this intelligence relies both on satellite tracking, which is only now becoming achievable, and on highly efficient collection methods; (3) such bombing campaigns require patience—which the publics of market-states, fed as they are by hyperbolic media and sensitized to the suffering of civilians who are harmed by the bombing, will seldom tolerate—and modest goals. Contradicting the promises of early strategic bombing theorists, like Douhet and Billy Mitchell, it is extremely difficult for strategic bombing alone to effect a constitutional change in a hostile regime.

  All of these perceived shortcomings were in the minds of U.S. planners when they considered the problem of attempting to lift the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. Despite intense pressure from the public and Congress, senior military officials refused to carry out bombing raids against the Serbs in Bosnia on grounds that strikingly reflect the interplay between market-state constraints and nation-state military mentalities. These officials forcefully rejected any area-bombing campaign on the grounds that too many civilians would be killed, reports of which would horrify the American public, and they rejected precision bombing on the ground that the public would not tolerate a long-drawn-out campaign. Given the rugged terrain in Bosnia and the fact that Serbian mortars and even howitzers could be quickly moved and easily camouflaged, any air operation short of a long campaign or area carpet bombing would be ineffective. In any case, it was reasoned, air strikes alone could not resolve the political conflict in Bosnia, or even safeguard civilians from the campaign of massacres, rapes, and deportations. Indeed, any bombing by the United States risked retaliation by the Serbs, who might take hostages from locally deployed U.N. forces, which, if withdrawn, would only lead to a demand for American ground troops, something else the public would not support.59

  In the end, it was the insistence by military and diplomatic officials in many countries that bombing could not be decisive that was itself decisive. Military moves that could win the war and force the Serbs to surrender their goals required tactics that the public would reject; anything else was futile and risky. In these two demands—the insistence by the public on quickly terminated action, and by security personnel on achieving total objectives—we see the intersection between market-state and nation-state, between, that is, the new role of media-driven public sensitivities and the military demand for definitive state action.

  In the event, an extremely modest bombing campaign conducted over a series of days without any obvious stopping point in fact lifted the siege of Sarajevo—the longest siege of the century, longer than Verdun or Stalingrad. As the memoirs of the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke wholly demonstrate, it was in fact this open-ended bombing campaign— over the strenuous objections of the British and French—that brought the siege to an end and, with the Croatian ground campaign, brought the Serbs to the negotiating table.60

  By contrast the NATO campaign against Serbia to force acceptance of an international protectorate for Kosovo relied on aerial bombing from the outset.61 During the course of the campaign, nearly 40,000 sorties were flown with virtually no losses.62 When Slobodan Milosevic acceded to alliance demands, delivered by Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin and Finnish president and E.U. special representative Martti Ahtisaari on June 3, not a single NATO ground troop had entered Serbia.63 How was this possible and what lessons are there for the future use of this arm for the market-state? Each of the three vulnerabilities of precision-guided attacks that had been used to forestall NATO action in Bosnia had been blunted. First, stealth aircraft—aircraft whose radar profiles are so attenuated as to render them invisible to radar-guided attack—had taken out anti-aircraft missile sites that would otherwise have posed lethal risks to American pilots. Second, new technology had allowed for more accurate target acquisition, and the targets themselves were not confined to tactical strikes against Serb forces but included strategic strikes against Belgrade and the Serbian infrastructure. Third, NATO's political objectives were sufficiently modest and did not require a change of regime in Belgrade.

  More important for our study, each of these three potential shortenings of precision-guided attack is likely to be even further ameliorated. In the past, precision-guided munitions depended upon some sort of homing technology—relying on either guidance from a command operator, or using emissions from the munition itself, or homing in on energy bounced off the target by an external transmitter or energy emitted by the target. Currently, however, the United States has the capability to use radar onboard the munition to generate midcourse corrections for an inertial guidance system or to fly to a precise set of coordinates using a guidance system updated by a Global Positioning Satellite system. Naval vessels lying offshore or aircraft distant from the target can launch these pilotless munitions with an accuracy that even the kamikaze would be hard-pressed to match. This, plus the introduction of Stealth technology, can greatly lower the risk to pilots and the likelihood of collateral damage to civilians.

  Just as significantly, however, the United States set modest, achievable goals in the Yugoslav campaigns. NATO was willing to settle for something far less than victory; this did not prevent “ethnic cleansing,” but it did enforce an end to the Serbian armed presence in the provinces where Serbs had conducted their ethnic campaigns.

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  The term information warfare usually* refers to the capacity both to penetrate and degrade an adversary's electronic communications and to protect one's own communications from interference. Such warfare played an important role in the Gulf War and doubtless will play an even larger role in future conflicts as electronic monitoring and control becomes more extensive, and the links to commanders more numerous.

  This use of information technologies is potentially a highly valuable strategic option for
the market-state. More important, however, the United States can also use information as a diplomatic and strategic commodity with which to create incentives and deterrents affecting the political behavior of other states. Of course it has long been true that the United States has shared information with allies—using satellites to aid Britain in the Falklands War, or forwarding decrypts to Stalin that revealed the impending Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—but this was undertaken as an adjunct to military activities and not something that was pursued as a strategic alternative in itself. Now, however, dramatic developments in information technologies—the increased capabilities of intelligence gathering combined with the enormous synthesizing powers of computers—have made possible for the first time a truly global system of near-real-time monitoring.64

  It is already the case that weather satellites, medium-resolution imaging systems, worldwide air traffic control networks, television links, and the like are being used by civilian corporations, while the U.S. military can rely on extensive photo reconnaissance abilities, infrared missile launch detectors, radar satellites, unmanned aerial sensors, remotely planted acoustic devices, and various military guidance tools. The United States could undertake to expand this technology in order to achieve a complete system of satellite sensors that would provide real-time monitoring on many wavelengths.65 The architecture for such a space-based information system is new, but the necessary communications technology is already emerging from the private sector. The entire system, however, depends upon affordable space lift, and this is something the U.S. government must undertake.