SUNDAY, SEP 17, 2017 12:30 AM +0700
Out everywhere and winning nowhere
WILLIAM
J. ASTORE, TOMDISPATCH.COM
In this May 2004 photo, a group gathers around a GBU-43B,
or massive ordnance air blast (MOAB) weapon, on display at the Air Force
Armament Museum on Eglin Air Force Base near Valparaiso, Fla. U.S. forces in
Afghanistan struck an Islamic State tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan on
Thursday, April 13, 2017, with a GBU-43B, the largest non-nuclear weapon ever
used in combat by the U.S. military, Pentagon officials said. (Mark
Kulaw/Northwest Florida Daily News via AP)(Credit: AP)
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two
fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with
tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously
for years and yet doesn’t haveenough pilots to fly its combat jets.
Ground troops who find themselves fighting “rebels” in Syria previously armed
and trained by the CIA. Already overstretchedSpecial Operations forces facing growing demands as their rates of mental distress and suicide rise. Proxy armies in Iraq
and Afghanistan that are unreliable, often delivering American-provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various
enemies. All of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is
once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune
of nearly a trillion dollars a year.
What gives? Why are highly maneuverable and
sophisticated naval ships colliding with lumbering cargo vessels? Why is
an Air Force that exists to fly and fight short 1,200 pilots? Why are
U.S. Special Operations forces deployed everywhere and winning nowhere?
Why, in short, is the U.S. military fighting itself – and losing?
It’s the Ops Tempo, Stupid
After 16 years of a never-ending, ever-spreading global
war on terror, alarms are going off in Asia from the Koreas and Afghanistan to
the Philippines, while across the Greater Middle East and Africa the globe’s
“last superpower” is in a never-ending set of conflicts with a range of minor
enemies few can even keep straight. As a result, America’s can-do
military, committed piecemeal to a bewildering array of missions, has
increasingly become a can’t-do one.
Too few ships are being deployed for too long. Too
few pilots are being worn out by incessant patrols and mushrooming drone and bombing missions. Special Operations forces (the
“commandos of everywhere,” as Nick Turse calls them) are
being deployed to far too many countries — more than two-thirds of the nations
on the planet already this year – and are involved in conflicts that hold
little promise of ending on terms favorable to Washington. Meanwhile,
insiders like retired General David Petraeus speak calmly about “generational struggles” that will essentially never
end. To paraphrase an old slogan from
ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” as the U.S. military spans the globe, it’s
regularly experiencing the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory.
To President Donald Trump (and so many other politicians
in Washington), this unsavory reality suggests an obvious solution: boost military funding; build more
navy ships; train more pilots and give them more incentive pay to stay in the
military; rely more on drones and other technological “force multipliers” to
compensate for tired troops; cajole allies like the Germans and Japanese to spend
more on their militaries; and pressure proxy armies like the Iraqi and Afghan
security forces to cut corruption and improve combat performance.
One – the most logical – is never seriously considered in
Washington: to make deep cuts in the military’s operational tempo by decreasing
defense spending and downsizing the global mission, by bringing troops home and
keeping them there. This is not an isolationist plea. The United
States certainly faces challenges, notably from Russia (still a major nuclear
power) and China (a global economic power bolstering its regional militarily
strength). North Korea is, as ever, posturing with missile and nuclear
tests in provocative ways. Terrorist organizations strive to destabilize
American allies and cause trouble even in “the homeland.”
Such challenges require vigilance. What they don’t
require is more ships in the sea-lanes, pilots in the air, and boots on the
ground. Indeed, 16 years after the 9/11 attacks it should be obvious
that more of the same is likely to produce yet more of what
we’ve grown all too accustomed to: increasing instability across significant
swaths of the planet, as well as the rise of new terror groups or new
iterations of older ones, which means yet more opportunities for failed U.S.
military interventions.
Once upon a time, when there were still two superpowers
on Planet Earth, Washington’s worldwide military posture had a clear rationale:
the containment of communism. Soon after the Soviet Union imploded in
1991 to much triumphalist self-congratulation in Washington, the scholar and
former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson had an epiphany. What he would
come to call “the American Raj,” a global imperial structure ostensibly built
to corral the menace of communism, wasn’t going away just because that menace
had evaporated, leaving not a superpower nor even a major power as an opponent
anywhere on the horizon. Quite the opposite, Washington – and its
globe-spanning “empire” of military bases – was only digging in deeper and
for the long haul. At that moment, with a certain shock, Johnson realized
that the U.S. was itself an empire and, with its mirror-image-enemy gone,
risked turning on itself and becoming its own nemesis.
The U.S., it turned out, hadn’t just contained the
Soviets; they had contained us, too. Once their empire collapsed, our
leaders imbibed the old dream of Woodrow Wilson, even if in a newly militarized
fashion: to remake the world in one’s own image (if need be at the point of a
sword).
Since the early 1990s, largely unconstrained by peer
rivals, America’s leaders have acted as if there were nothing to stop them from
doing as they pleased on the planet, which, as it turned out, meant there was
nothing to stop them from their own folly. We witness the results
today. Prolonged and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Interventions throughout the Greater Middle
East (Libya, Syria, Yemen, and beyond) that spread chaos and destruction.
Attacks against terrorism that have given new impetus to jihadists
everywhere. And recently calls to arm Ukraine against Russia. All of this is
consistent with a hubristic strategic vision that, in these years, has spoken
in an all-encompassing fashion and without irony of global reach, global power, and full-spectrum dominance.
In this context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the
full scope of America’s military power. All the world is a stage Ω or a
staging area — for U.S. troops. There are still approximately 800 U.S. military bases in foreign lands.
America’s commandos deploy to more than 130 countries yearly. And even the world is not
enough for the Pentagon as it seeks to dominate not just land, sea, and air but
outer space, cyberspace, and even inner space, if you count efforts to achieve
“total information awareness” through 17 intelligence agencies dedicated – at a cost
of $80 billion a year – to sweeping up all data on Planet
Earth.
In short, America’s troops are out everywhere and winning
nowhere, a problem America’s “winningest” president, Donald Trump, is only
exacerbating. Surrounded by “his” generals, Trump has – against his own instincts, he
claimed recently – recommitted American troops and prestige to the Afghan
War. He’s also significantly expanded U.S. drone strikes and bombing throughout the Greater Middle East, and
threatened to bring fire and fury to North Korea, while pushing a program
to boost military spending.
At a Pentagon awash in money, with promises of more to
come, missions are rarely downsized. Meanwhile, what passes for original
thinking in the Trump White House is the suggestion of Erik Prince, the founder
of Blackwater, to privatize America’s war in Afghanistan (and
possibly elsewhere). Mercenaries are the answer to Washington’s military
problems, suggests Prince. And mercs, of course, have the added benefit
of not being constrained by the rules of engagement that apply to America’s
uniformed service members.
Indeed, Prince’s idea, though opposed by Trump’s generals, is compelling in one
sense: If you accept the notion that America’s wars in these years have been
fought largely for the corporate agendas of the military-industrial complex,
why not turn war fighting itself over to the warrior corporations that now regularly accompany the
military into battle, cutting out the middleman, that very military?
Hammering a Cloud of Gnats
Erik Prince’s mercenaries will, however, have to bide
their time as the military high command continues to launch kinetic strikes
against elusive foes around the globe. By its own admission, the force
recent U.S. presidents have touted as
the “finest” in history faces remarkably “asymmetrical” and protean enemies,
including the roughly 20 terrorist organizations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan
theater of operations. In striking at such relatively puny foes, the U.S.
reminds me of the mighty Thor of superhero fame swinging his hammer violently
against a cloud of gnats. In the process, some of those gnats will naturally
die, but the result will still be an exhausted superhero and ever more gnats
attracted by the heat and commotion of battle.
I first came across the phrase “using a sledgehammer to kill gnats” while
looking at the history of U.S. airpower during the Vietnam War. B-52 “Arc
Light” raids dropped record tons of bombs on parts of South Vietnam and Laos in
largely failed efforts to kill dispersed guerrillas and interdict supply routes
from North Vietnam. Half a century later, with its laser- and GPS-guided
bombs, the Air Force regularly touts the far greater precision of American
airpower. Yet in one country after another, using just that weaponry, the
U.S. has engaged in serial acts of overkill. In Afghanistan, it was the
recent use of MOAB, the “mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear
weapon the U.S. has ever used in combat, against a small concentration of ISIS
fighters. In similar fashion, the U.S. air war in Syria has outpaced
the Russians and even the Assad regime in its murderous
effects on civilians, especially around Raqqa, the “capital” of the Islamic
State. Such overkill is evident on the ground as well where special ops
raids have, this year, left civilians dead from Yemen to Somalia. In other words, across the Greater Middle
East, Washington’s profligate killing machine is also creating a desire for
vengeance among civilian populations, staggering numbers of whom, when not
killed, have been displaced or sent fleeing across borders as refugees in these wars. It has played a significant
role in unsettling whole regions, creating failed states, and providing yet more recruits for terror
groups.
Leaving aside technological advances, little has changed
since Vietnam. The U.S. military is still relying on enormous firepower to kill
elusive enemies as a way of limiting (American) casualties. As an
instrument of victory, it didn’t work in Vietnam, nor has it worked in Iraq or
Afghanistan.
But never mind the history lessons. President Trump
asserts that his “new” Afghan strategy — the details of which, according to a
military spokesman, are “not there yet” – will lead to more terrorists (that is,
gnats) being killed.
Since 9/11, America’s leaders, Trump included, have
rarely sought ways to avoid those gnats, while efforts to “drain the swamp” in which the gnats thrive have served
mainly to enlarge their breeding grounds. At the same time, efforts to
enlist indigenous “gnats” – local proxy armies – to take over the fight have
gone poorly indeed. As in Vietnam, the main U.S. focus has invariably
been on developing better, more technologically advanced (which means more
expensive) sledgehammers, while continuing to whale away at that cloud of gnats
– a process as hopeless as it is counterproductive.
The Greatest Self-Defeating Force in History?
Incessant warfare represents the end of democracy.
I didn’t say that, James Madison did.
I firmly believe, though, in words borrowed from President Dwight D. Eisenhower,
that “only Americans can hurt America.” So how can we lessen the
hurt? By beginning to rein in the military. A standing military
exists – or rather should exist – to support and defend the Constitution and
our country against immediate threats to our survival. Endless attacks
against inchoate foes in the backlands of the planet hardly promote that
mission. Indeed, the more such attacks wear on the military, the more
they imperil national security.
A friend of mine, a captain in the Air Force, once
quipped to me: you study long, you study wrong. It’s a sentiment that’s
especially cutting when applied to war: you wage war long, you wage it
wrong. Yet as debilitating as they may be to militaries, long wars are
even more devastating to democracies. The longer our military wages war,
the more our country is militarized, shedding its democratic values and ideals.
Back in the Cold War era, the regions in which the U.S.
military is now slogging it out were once largely considered “the shadows”
where John le Carré-style secret agents from the two superpowers matched wits
in a set of shadowy conflicts. Post-9/11, “taking the gloves off” and seeking knockout blows, the U.S.
military entered those same shadows in a big way and there, not surprisingly,
it often couldn’t sort friend from foe.
A new strategy for America should involve getting out of
those shadowy regions of no-win war. Instead, an expanding U.S. military
establishment continues to compound the strategic mistakes of the last 16
years. Seeking to dominate everywhere but winning decisively nowhere, it
may yet go down as the greatest self-defeating force in history.
A TomDispatch regular, William Astore is a
retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. His personal
blog is Bracing
Views.
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Original post: salon.com
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