Not-So-Special Operation

National Review ^ | ? November 19, 2001, issue of National Review. | Andrew J. Bacevich

[Razz]

Not-So-Special Operation
Bush adopts the Clinton way of war.

By Andrew J. Bacevich, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University
From the November 19, 2001, issue of National Review.

When it comes to America's ongoing war to destroy al Qaeda and topple the Taliban, any outcome short of decisive victory is simply unacceptable. But as President Bush and other members of his administration have repeatedly emphasized, the present conflict is not simply an isolated challenge to be confronted and overcome so that life can return to normal. There will be no such return. Colin Powell has rightly noted that, after just slightly more than a decade, the prodigal era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall has ended. The events of September 11 plunged the United States into a menacing new age of insecurity, in which we are destined to live out our days.

Thus, the ongoing Afghan war not only marks the Pentagon's response to the attack of September 11; it also provides a preliminary assessment of the nation's capacity to address the dangers awaiting it in this new era. In that regard, the war's first weeks offer little cause for comfort. Based on the available evidence, it appears that the world's most generously endowed and best-trained military forces lack the tools — conceptual as well as material — to deal effectively with the enemies we face. The conceptual deficit may be greater than the material one; it is not our weapons that have been found most seriously wanting in Afghanistan, but the ideas underpinning a deeply flawed "American Way of War."

President Bush has labeled the present struggle the "first war of the 21st century." Yet his administration's approach to waging that war does not differ appreciably from the methods on which the U.S. relied to wage the last wars of the previous century — namely, the sundry minor military adventures concocted by the Clinton administration during the '90s. In Operation Enduring Freedom, the Clinton legacy at its most pernicious lives on.

Beginning in 1993 with its failed war in Somalia and continuing until Bill Clinton's last day in office — an occasion coinciding with U.S. air strikes against Iraq, all but unnoticed because they had become so commonplace — the Clinton administration evolved a distinctive way of employing U.S. military power. The hallmarks of this Clinton Doctrine included the following: inflated expectations about the efficacy of air power, administered in carefully calibrated doses; a pronounced aversion to even the possibility of U.S. casualties, combined with an acute sensitivity to "collateral damage" (the media converted these into the chief criteria by which to "grade" any operation); a reliance on proxies to handle the dirty work of close combat (Croats in Bosnia, for example, or the Kosovo Liberation Army in the war against Yugoslavia); vagueness when it came to defining objectives (for example, bombing campaigns conducted not with expectations of actually achieving a decision, but with an eye toward "diminishing" an adversary's capabilities); and a tendency to convert limited commitments into permanent obligations (remember the solemn promise that the troops would be out of Bosnia within a year?).

Republicans found much to dislike about this doctrine. Adding to their irritation was the fact that the Clinton administration — its upper echelons salted with Vietnam-era draft evaders and antiwar protesters — had blithely discarded the hard-learned precepts regarding the use of force that had emerged from Vietnam and were codified during the Reagan years. Clinton and his lieutenants routinely violated the tenets of the Weinberger Doctrine, or the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine as it became known after the Gulf War had seemingly demonstrated its validity for all time. The conviction that force should be reserved for vital interests, the emphasis on overwhelming force, the crafting of precise military objectives, the attention paid to "end states" and "exit strategies" — all of these commander-in-chief Clinton chucked overboard during his peripatetic journey from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, with periodic excursions against Iraq.

Among the benefits expected to flow from the return of the Republican national-security professionals to power in January 2001 was that this silliness would end. A rational and principled use of force would once again become a hallmark of U.S. policy.

In point of fact, that has not occurred. Rather, seized by the notion that the war against terror is completely "different" and utterly "new," members of the Bush administration have themselves driven the last nails into the coffin bearing the remains of Weinberger-Powell.

Thus, for example, in the aftermath of September 11, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed Americans to "Forget about 'exit strategies': We're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines. We have no fixed rules about how to deploy our troops." How will we know when we have won this sustained engagement? According to Rumsfeld, "victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that is going to be over in a month or a year or even five years." That is, success lies in convincing Americans that real success will be a long time coming.

As a practical matter, the military bureaucracies that conduct wars cannot function without rules. If political leaders rocked back on their heels by the events of September 11 and its aftermath abdicate their responsibility to provide these rules, the generals will find them elsewhere — typically by adverting to the familiar. In short, they will fight the next war — whatever its character — by adhering to the routines they grew comfortable with in the last.

The Afghan war has illustrated this penchant. As it unfolded over its first month, Operation Enduring Freedom resembled Bill Clinton's Operation Allied Force — the 1999 war against Yugoslavia — far more than it did George H. W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm.

Caution and half-heartedness — not boldness, not ferocity — have been this campaign's signature characteristics. Despite the appalling wounds that the nation sustained on September 11, the Bush administration has committed to this struggle only a small fraction of America's actual combat capabilities. Although the Bush team has not explicitly forsworn the use of ground troops, it has — apart from a small contingent of special-operations forces — made no preparations to take the fight directly to the Taliban. Through the campaign's first month, overt action by U.S. forces in (as opposed to above) Afghanistan was confined to a single raid by a hundred or so Army Rangers, as inconsequential as it was brief. With the Northern Alliance unable or unwilling to take on the role of an effective proxy ground army, the Pentagon appears to be pinning its hopes for success on protracted aerial bombardment. Yet even as Pentagon briefers characterize U.S. air attacks as "sustained," "continuous," and "intensifying," the actual level of effort has fallen well short even of that visited upon the Serbs in 1999 — fewer than 100 attack sorties per day. Part of the problem is that such a backward, war-ravaged country offers a dearth of meaningful targets. President Bush vowed that he would not expend million-dollar missiles to knock over ten-dollar tents. But it will require the services of a very clever accountant to make a plausible case that the bombing of Afghanistan has been cost-effective.

None of this means that the cause is lost. Persistence and a couple of good breaks may yet enable the U.S. to get bin Laden and oust the Taliban. The enemy is unlikely to be as tough as the Pentagon, in its frustration, is making him out to be. When that victory is gained, parades and ceremonies honoring all who contributed to it will be in order.

But once the nation finishes patting itself on the back, the Bush administration should turn directly to the urgent task of rethinking how the U.S. fights its wars — devising new rules to guide the design and deployment of American military might. This new American way of war will not revive the tenets of Weinberger-Powell, which were never as useful as Republicans liked to believe, except as a way of avoiding another Vietnam. But if a return to the verities of the 1990s will be impossible, the administration's present position — that in this new age there are no fixed rules — is unacceptable. It is a formula for incoherence and exhaustion.

The precepts of the Clinton Doctrine never came close to offering an adequate basis for thinking about the proper use of force after the Cold War. But prior to September 11, the illusions nurtured by the likes of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright had exacted only the occasional penalty. After September 11, to permit the inanities of the Clinton Doctrine to survive would be deplorable.

[Quicksilver]

It's sad to see that National Review continues to slip. This is an especially inaccurate piece.

[Travis McGee]

Andrew J. Bacevich,

I can let you have a parachute and a rifle, and then you can jump out of a C-130 over Talibanland, and show us how it should be done.

Until then, SHUT YOUR STUPID REMF MOUTH about "half hearted measures".

[StockAyatollah]

Weak, very weak indeed. Who is the author and what qualifies him to judge a military operation? Does he not understand that this is a different type of war than Desert Storm? We are fighting a country whose government controls only parts of its territory. We are also fighting a terrorist organization stretched across dozens of countries. And last but not least, for the umpteenth time its only been a friggin' month since we started this campaign!

[There's millions of'em]

Perhaps someone would be kind enough to enlighten us regarding Mr. Bacevich's experiences as a commander during the gulf war. He is quite the wordsmith and ever the critic.

[SmartBlonde]

Bacevich bio: B.S., US Military Academy; Ph.D. Princeton

23 years officer in Army. Teaches American foreign policy, national security studies, WAR AND STATECRAFT.

[Nick Danger]

I'm not so quick to dismiss what this author is trying to do. It's also not obvious that he can be easily dismissed as a REMF. This piece, and another one here, both look to me like attempts by well-meaning and knowledgeable people to reach Bush's ear via the media, to lend support to those in the Administration who are trying to warn Bush that a combination of The Usual Suspects in the State Department, and a senior officer corps composed of the sort of men who would rise under Clinton, is not pursuing this war according to what Bush says he wants.

I'm not talking about any expectations that this is supposed to be some sort of walk in the park, or that after three weeks we should expect to see bin Laden's head on a stick. I am talking, as I think these authors are talking, about the timidity and caution that seems to characterize the entire effort so far.

Osama bin Laden took down two of the largest buildings in the United States, and attacked the headquarters of our military. It's a miracle that tens of thousands of people weren't killed... that was certainly bin Laden's intent. Does anybody here believe that an F-16 dropping a couple of bombs here and there, every day for a couple of weeks -- stopping on Fridays so as to observe our enemy's day of prayer -- is the proper response to such an act?

Oh look, a B-52. That's right, a B-52. Not a hundred B-52s, or even 30 B-52's. One goddamned bomber dropping a stick and then going home for the day. This isn't war, this is some clown with a calculator playing a video game in Florida, with one poor pilot out in the real world tasked with living out General Franks' push-button fantasy.

I do not trust Seymour Hersh, so I'm not inclined to believe the story that Franks allowed a lawyer to talk him out of blowing up Mullah Omar when he had the chance. I'd like to think that's not true. But nothing in Franks' behavior so far suggests that he would do otherwise.

When bin Laden attacked, we should have roared like a lion. Instead we peeped like a little bird. That moment is gone; it will never be back. The whole psychological moment when we could have scared those camel jockeys sh*tless was spent being timid, moving our little pieces around as if we were opening with the King's Bishop's gambit. Now the camel jockeys think they have seen the mighty United States, and they haven't seen squat. They couldn't be more wrong, but fighting them now is going to be a lot harder than if we had made it clear from the beginning that they had messed with the wrong guys.

I share the concern of these authors that our military is in the hands of Clinton's favorite officers, and so long as that obtains we will never do what Bush says he wants done. I applaud the efforts of these authors to prod Bush into going farther down into the ranks, to see if there are any warriors down there that we can put in the place of Clinton's peacekeeping bureaucrats.

[blondee123]

i tend to agree with you, nick, as we are being too cautious & too concerned about civilian casualties, as i've said before you cannot be Nice & fight a war. it's one or the other.

[self_evident]

It's a miracle that tens of thousands of people weren't killed...

Thank you for your post. I simply don't understand what is going on anymore. I am baffled by those that think the mere act of writing an article pointing out the timidity of our response to date are somehow not supportive of our effort. If we don't even ask for an aggressive effort, is there any chance that we will get it?

[self_evident]

23 years officer in Army. Teaches American foreign policy, national security studies, WAR AND STATECRAFT.

I found a bio here. He is certainly qualified to comment from what I can determine.

[Jim Noble]

Travis, please see Nick Danger's post #7 above (with which I totally agree), and reconsider.

You know very well that success in war requires the relief of many high level REMFs who have achieved their positions of command under peacetime conditions, using inside the beltway skills that are a detriment on the battlefield. This was true in 1861, it was true in 1917, and it was most certainly true in 1941-42.

In 1950 we still had a few experienced combat commanders to send to ROK. The failure to replace political commanders in 1965 with real soldiers was a catastrophe from which we have barely recovered.

I can see you thinking Bacevich should not publish at a time like this (I don't agree, but I can see it).

But do you really think he's wrong? What do you think you had to do to get a third or fourth star from Cohen and Clinton? What sort of a man do you think you had to be?

[aBootes]

I also agree with Nick. Perhaps our leaders thought the Northern Alliance was more fit to fight, and perhaps they thought that the southern tribes would rise in revolt. Whatever. Now it is clear that we are going to have to go it mostly alone and therefore the eagle must be more fully unleashed. One bomber is a joke.

[bimbo]

In spite of the poll numbers, Bush will be a one-term president, undone by HIS OWN FAILURE to remove the Clintonites from the executive branch.

[Freedom'sWorthIt]

"What do you think you had to do to get a third or fourth star from Cohen and Clinton? What sort of a man do you think you had to be?"

Exactly.

Uncle Bill - do you or others have a link to the story about a group of military top brass who threatened to resign en masse to protest certain Clinton actions (or maybe just to protest his treacheries en masse)? I seem to remember that these generals were told - oh no you won't - and they were all removed from their positions BEFORE they had the opportunity to go public and do the mass resignation action.

If that story was just a part of the nightmare of the Clinton years - my apologies. But, I do remember reading it - here of course.

If it's true - President Bush could start his search for military leaders he needs right now among that group perahps.

[Freedom'sWorthIt]

"What do you think you had to do to get a third or fourth star from Cohen and Clinton? What sort of a man do you think you had to be?"

Exactly.

Uncle Bill - do you or others have a link to the story about a group of military top brass who threatened to resign en masse to protest certain Clinton actions (or maybe just to protest his treacheries en masse)? I seem to remember that these generals were told - oh no you won't - and they were all removed from their positions BEFORE they had the opportunity to go public and do the mass resignation action.

If that story was just a part of the nightmare of the Clinton years - my apologies. But, I do remember reading it - here of course.

If it's true - President Bush could start his search for military leaders he needs right now among that group perahps.

[Harrison Bergeron]

bttt

[Razz]

This is an especially inaccurate piece.

Is it? The whole thing, or just parts? If the latter which parts?

I find it disturbing, and see no factual inaccuracies. As for opinion, it fits the bill from my perspective.

Mostly, it seems that this 'war' is targeted more at our civil liberties and Constitution moreso than any foreign enemies.

[Razz]

Until then, SHUT YOUR STUPID REMF MOUTH about "half hearted measures".

Sir, are you then on the front lines of this 'war'?

[Travis McGee]

So what did he do in the Army, polish General's buttons? Make coffee for the Chief's of Staff? If he had any specops experience, his bio would have mentioned it prominantly.

[jwh_Denver]

So far from what I've seen I'm not impressed with the way this "war" is going. One question I ask is how in h are we going to be able to say we've won in Afganistan? Even if we do stop fighting the country is going to be a sink hole for billions of dollars of aid paid by us and the dump will always be screwed up because the people are.

I do have one hope and that is to fight a smart war. We are only hearing a fraction of what I hope is going on in finding these freakin fanatics. When we do make em talk, bring on the drugs and get everything you can out of them and kill them. Boom. Dead, no more problem from that moron. (side note here. I would not kill bin Laden but rather place him in a small jail in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. No mail or communication in or out). I figure there are people who know how to get these Arabic countries to start fighting each other. Be sneaky, ruthless, and smart.