Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
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.
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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?”
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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.
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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 casualties 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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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 oppo
sition 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.
(2)
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.”
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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.