Not-So-Special Operation

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.

My time for that has passed unless we get truly desperate. But in my twenties I was a junior officer leading elite specops troops. I see nothing in this REMFs bio which indicates he ever strapped on a parachute or a closed circuit rig or anything else which permits him to pontificate on the best application of specops units in 2001 in Afghanistan from his warm and cosy Georgetown manor. "War college commandos" like him make me want to puke.

First of all, depending on how 'junior' of an officer you were, you should have some idea of how the focus changes as you move higher up the chain of command.

I think you missed the forest for the sake of a tree. The article ISN'T about "the best application of specops units in 2001 in Afghanistan." Its about the state of the military. A military effectively feminized by Clinton's policies. Read the article again. The man makes some good points, and each time I read it, I find more that I agree with.

Air power doesn't win wars by itself (unless by dropping nukes?). Ultimately, it comes down to the grunts. Everything is else is just to help the grunts win. And halfhearted dedication, halfassed application of force - that's what gets soldiers killed. If we learned nothing else from 'Nam, we damn sure better remember that. If we're gonna fight, give em hell. Don't hold nothin' back. If we're not prepared to do so, then don't fight. Our military are SOLDIERS, NOT cops. Washington needs to understand the distinction, or our troops are gonna get killed when they don't need to.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.