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 PART
5: Militarism and
the war
on drugs
By
Henry C K Liu
PART 1: The failed-state
cancer
PART 2: The
privatization wave
PART 3: The business of
private security
PART
4: Militarism and
mercenaries
The 1878 Posse Comitatus law
that barred US federal troops from engaging in
arrests, searches and seizures within US borders
did not cover the use of the National Guard to
quell "civil disorders", but it virtually
eliminated the military's role in normal police
work. The logic is that while the National Guard
is the nation's militia, composed of citizen
soldiers, each state unit is under the separate
command of its governor for the purpose of
maintaining domestic order within each state,
without infringing on the principles of local
community control of police power. Laws enacted
since the early 1980s have weakened Posse
Comitatus restrictions, enabling military and
police bodies to collaborate in law enforcement.
The shift toward militarism began with seemingly
innocuous loans of military equipment to civilian
agencies for drug control. US ground troops then
began conducting training exercises along the
border for the interdiction of drug traffic. The
introduction of the military into police work
invariably escalates the degree of violence in the
maintenance of order.
In 1989, at the urging of the
administration of president George H W Bush, the
military consolidated its role in law enforcement
by creating Joint Task Force-6 (JTF-6), based at
Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The task force's
initial mission was to coordinate military support
for anti-drug efforts along the Mexican border.
JTF-6 matches police requests
with military units; police agencies get free
assistance while the military gets extra funds and
real-life, off-base training. For the Border
Patrol, JTF-6 provides a variety of military aid,
including equipment, construction assistance,
intelligence support, vehicles and aerial
surveillance. The task force also coordinates
training in small-unit tactics, raid planning and
execution, interrogation, pyrotechnics, target
selection, booby-trap techniques, rappelling and
more.
The military's anti-drug
missions along the Mexican border always have been
difficult to distinguish from immigration control.
The administration of president Bill Clinton
erased the line completely for 90 days in 1996,
ordering the military to participate in "enhanced
enforcement" of immigration laws in Arizona and
California. In 1995, the military broadened
JTF-6's geographic focus to the entire continental
United States. Since then, more than half of JTF-6
missions have been devoted to police forces
outside the southwestern US. By 1998, JTF-6 had
coordinated more than 72,000 troops on some 3,300
missions in 30 states.
An example of militarized law
enforcement within US borders was the federal
siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco,
Texas, that ended with 86 deaths on April 19,
1993. Specious drug and illegal-firearm
allegations against the Branch Davidians became
the pretext for military units aiding the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) in their raid
to eliminate a religious cult. The Branch
Davidians had their origins in the Seventh-Day
Adventist Church, which in turn had its origin in
the "Millerite" movement, a group who followed the
teachings of Baptist William Miller, who in 1833
concluded that Bible prophecy told the date for
the end of the world. JTF-6 arranged for military
equipment and for Army Special Forces troops to
assist with deadly raid preparations. The task
force also arranged for armored vehicles
retrofitted for gas warfare and tank-like army
vehicles used in the assault. Some aspects of the
military role, including the FBI's use of military
incendiary devices, flammable CS gas grenades that
killed 86 people, including 17 children, were
concealed from the public until years later. After
the disclosure, attorney general Janet Reno
appointed former senator John Danforth, a
Republican from Missouri, to investigate the
military involvement. Danforth's report concluded
that the involvement was technically legal,
without addressing whether it ought to be legal.
On May
20, 1997, camouflaged on a surveillance mission
for the Border Patrol, a team of four marines
hiding in bushes near the village of Redford,
Texas, shot and killed 18-year-old
Mexican-American Esequiel Hernandez, who was
herding his family's goats more than 180 meters
away. Hernandez' death came only a year after the
US "see no evil" policy on Nicaraguan Contra drug
dealers had been exposed. The incident was the
first time military troops engaged in drug control
had killed a civilian on US territory. The case
led to the first attempted civilian prosecution of
military soldiers on a drug mission, but defense
lawyers successfully argued that the troops had
performed appropriately "in defense of national
interests". The incident sparked no congressional
hearings over the military's role in law
enforcement. On the contrary, just three months
after the shooting, the House of Representatives
overwhelmingly voted to send 10,000 federal troops
to the border, but the Senate did not take up the
measure.
The military, for its part,
suspended the use of armed ground troops along the
border while reviewing their role in the drug war.
In January 1999, the Pentagon announced that such
troop deployment would require explicit
authorization by the secretary or deputy secretary
of defense. The change did not affect other JTF-6
anti-drug support: aerial surveillance, training,
equipment loans, construction and so on. The
defense secretary can reintroduce ground troops at
any time, and the Pentagon is not required to
report JTF-6 missions, not even to Congress, even
though they occur on US soil and even though their
stated purpose is to enforce domestic laws.
The
policy change did not affect the National Guard,
which could fill any ground-troop void. In
Arizona, where illegal crossings have become
endemic, property-owning vigilantes rounded up
thousands of illegal immigrants and demanded that
Governor Jane Hull send the Guard to aid the
Border Patrol, but she refused.
If
border tensions continue to increase, and
anti-illegal-immigration sentiments turn ugly,
fanned by the likes of CNN journalist Lou Dobbs,
frequent military deployment to restore "order"
can be anticipated. Sandia National Laboratories,
an Energy Department nuclear-weapons facility in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, that works closely with
the US military, assessed border "security" for
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
in 1993, depicting all unauthorized crossers as
"adversaries". A 1997 military intelligence
mission for the Border Patrol designed a "threat
assessment" for undocumented immigrants. At a
higher level, the Pentagon's Center for the Study
of Low Intensity Conflict helped design the Border
Patrol's "Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond". The
plan is almost entirely devoted to immigration
enforcement, under cover of the drug war. It
designed the blockades to close off preferred
crossing points. The model was Operation Hold the
Line, set up in El Paso, Texas, in 1993. Three
other blockades were set up, with "Gatekeeper"
being the largest. United Nations human rights
secretary Mary Robinson and Amnesty International
USA both condemned "Gatekeeper" for human-rights
abuse, saying it "maximizes the physical risks,
thereby ensuring that hundreds of migrants would
die".
Under the strategic plan, the
number of armed Border Patrol officers has
doubled, making the agency larger than even the
FBI. The military has built nine walls and dozens
of fences, and provided an array of equipment,
from trucks and helicopters to searchlights and
heat sensors. Since 1994, the INS budget has
tripled to US$4.3 billion, and the United States
spends $6 billion annually on enforcement along
its southern border. The show of force has been
deadly. A University of Houston study estimated
that 1,600 migrants died while trying to evade the
border blockades from 1993-97. The American
Friends Service Committee says the blockades have
led to more than 1,300 deaths since 1995. Most of
the victims drowned in the Rio Grande, the river
that separates Mexico from Texas. Southeastern
California and southern Arizona, meanwhile, have
seen sharp increases in deaths as immigrants try
to traverse that harsh land. The militarization
also seems to encourage police mistreatment of
immigrants. Complaints of misconduct by Border
Patrol agents doubled between 1995 and 1998; the
accusations include entrapment, illegal searches,
brutality, sexual assault and excessive firearms
use. Militarization has created a warlike
atmosphere in which hate groups and vigilantes
feel free to attack all immigrants, legal and
illegal.
The "war on terrorism" has
also become a license for domestic anti-immigrant
hysteria. As a result, numerous legislative
proposals have been made and laws passed targeting
undocumented immigrants with racial and ethnic
profiling. Former governor Pete Wilson of
California proposed denying citizenship to US-born
children of undocumented parents. California has
recently passed legislation that denies driver's
licenses and identity cards to undocumented
immigrants. In California, a state with little
public transportation, to be denied a driver's
license is to be denied a livelihood. New York
state is currently embroiled in the issue.
Meanwhile, large sectors of the US economy survive
through the open exploitation of illegal-immigrant
laborers, who are left with no legal protection.
The US immigration policy and operational abuse
contribute significantly to the status of the US
as a failed state.
For the most part,
border-control operations remained a civilian
law-enforcement operation until Operation Wetback
in the 1950s. This military-style operation by the
Border Patrol and other elements of the INS was
led by an ex-general who participated in John
Joseph Pershing's expeditionary force in World War
I. It was the most massive roundup and deportation
of undocumented Mexican immigrants in US history.
This was not the last time ex-generals would be
involved with the INS. President Jimmy Carter, in
response to concerns about undocumented
immigration and drug trafficking, appointed
another ex-general to head the INS in efforts to
strengthen the Border Patrol. Under the
administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H W
Bush, this "concern" grew to be called the "war on
drugs", or what many would call the "war on
immigrants". In 1981 the US Congress amended the
Posse Comitatus Act , loosening the military's
restriction on involvement with domestic law
enforcement. In 1986 Reagan declared the narcotics
trade a "national security" threat and shortly
thereafter launched Operation Alliance, a
multi-agency law-enforcement initiative targeting
the border area.
Bordering on racism
In 1993, Canada, Mexico and
the United States signed the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which became effective in
January 1994, bringing the three countries
together to create the world's largest free-trade
area. The purpose of NAFTA is to reduce trade
barriers and promote cross-border investment in
the region and thus increase economic and job
development throughout North America that may
affect immigration by changing the regional
economy.
NAFTA itself discussed the
temporary entry of the three signatory parties in
Chapter 16. The provisions for temporary entry
were modeled after those under the US-Canada Free
Trade Agreement (USCFTA). However, the US
immigration advantages extended to Canadians under
USCFTA are not available to Mexican citizens under
NAFTA for unspoken racial, ethnic and cultural
reasons.
The greatest controversy over
NAFTA's immigration provisions is the 5,500 limit
on the number of Mexican professionals who can be
admitted to the US in one year, while there is no
number limit on Canadians. NAFTA also states that
admission could be refused to a person whose entry
might affect adversely the settlement of a labor
dispute or the employment of a person involved in
such a dispute.
NAFTA proponents expected
Mexican migration, especially undocumented
immigrants, to decrease as soon as the agreement
was signed. Former Mexican president Carlos
Salinas de Gortari explained the relationship
between NAFTA and migration in this way: "Today,
Mexicans have to migrate to where jobs are being
created, the northern part of our country. With
NAFTA, employment opportunities will move toward
where people live, reducing drastically migration,
within the country and outside the country" (San
Diego Tribune, November 14, 1993). However, NAFTA
did not reduce, let alone eliminate, illegal
immigration to the US from Mexico.
NAFTA
displaced about 1.4 million rural Mexican workers,
largely due to changes in Mexican farm policies
and freer trade in agriculture products. With jobs
not being created for these displaced farmers in
the areas where they live, they are forced to
emigrate to where the jobs are, mainly across the
border to the US. One study estimated that about
600,000 NAFTA-caused illegal migrants to the US
would be added to the "normal" flow of legal and
illegal Mexican worker arrivals. The driving
factor behind NAFTA-increased illegal immigration
to the US is free trade in corn. Between 30% and
50% of all days-worked in rural Mexico are devoted
to the production of corn and beans. US farmers
can produce both crops cheaper than Mexican
farmers; the US corn price of $95 per ton early in
1994 was less than half of the Mexican price of
$205 per ton. Liberalizing trade in corn over the
15-year NAFTA phase-in is expected to shift North
America's corn production northward, since Iowa
alone produces twice as much corn as Mexico at low
US prices.
Some sectors of the US economy
have great demands for cheap, Mexican immigrant
labor, legal and illegal. Illegal labor is made
even cheaper to US employers by the fact that
these employees receive no benefits and
necessitate no payroll-tax contributions from
employers. Decades ago, the US did little to
discourage the entry of illegal workers from rural
Mexico. US employers were not punished by law for
employing illegal low-wage Mexican workers.
Legalization in 1987-88 permitted Mexican workers
to become significant components of the labor
force in food processing, construction, service
and manufacturing throughout the US. Welfare
reform and continued immigration continued to add
unskilled workers to the US labor supply in the
1990s. On the other hand, the US unemployment rate
dropped to its lowest level in 1997 and there were
reports of labor shortages, especially in low-wage
labor markets in areas with unemployment rates of
less than 2%. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board, warned Congress that a
labor shortage would drive up wages and inflation
rates unless lawmakers relaxed immigration
restrictions. With Mexican-born workers spreading
throughout the US in a period of rapid job growth
and low unemployment, networks bridging the border
were strengthened, increasing the availability to
meet the rising demand for immigrant workers and
making Mexican immigrant workers a permanent
enough feature of many US industries and areas to
temporarily delay the inevitable outsourcing of
jobs to low-wage locations.
Another factor in
NAFTA-increased illegal immigration is massive
unemployment. Recurring Mexican financial crises,
peso devaluation, and International Monetary Fund
(IMF) "conditionalities" imposed on Mexican fiscal
policies as well as neo-liberal prescriptions such
as privatization of government-owned industries
all resulted in mass layoffs. The economic
restructuring of rural Mexico made small-scale
farming unprofitable. In some areas of
west-central Mexico, illegal migration to the US
has become a way of life. Another factor that
affected Mexican immigrants is the diverse
networks of friends and relatives, employers,
labor smugglers and moneylenders who can tell
potential migrants about conditions in the US and
provide them with the means to take advantage of
illicit opportunities abroad.
Most
industrialized nations realize they should prevent
the depopulation of rural areas. The European
Union and the United States pay farmers directly
to stay on the farms - though gross domestic
products (GDPs) would rise faster if they left the
land. The 2002 Farm Bill pays US farmers a record
$190 billion over 10 years, with big farmers
getting the biggest checks. Mexico is too poor and
has too many farmers to subsidize at European or
US farm rates. US farmers, 2.7% of the workforce,
receive an average per capita subsidy of $20,000
annually. EU farmers, 4.8% of the workforce,
receive $16,000. Mexican farmers, 20% of the
workforce, receive $1,000. Chinese farmers, 80% of
the workforce, receive $35.
What
is missing in NAFTA is precisely the element that
makes the EU work as a free-trade bloc. The EU's
regional policy pays money directly from wealthy
industrialized nations such as Germany to less
wealthy agricultural nations such as Italy,
Greece, Portugal and Spain. The result is that EU
farmers stay on their farms. Like the US Farm
Bill, EU subsidies violate the principles of free
trade and comparative advantage, but do so for a
higher cause: social stability. The absence of a
regional stability mechanism in NAFTA is its great
weakness. Unlike the rural nations of Europe
(which included France and Italy when the EU
treaty was signed in 1955, and later Spain),
Mexico lacked the political muscle to insist on a
regional pact when NAFTA was signed. Washington,
unfortunately, was not farsighted enough, or did
not care enough, to see the need for one. The
result is that Mexico now faces an agricultural
crisis that affects the United States as well. The
pressures NAFTA puts on Mexico as farm tariffs are
gradually removed and as the date for
still-broader reductions comes nearer can only be
solved bilaterally. The administration of
President George W Bush should propose
negotiations leading to a transfer of funds that
helps Mexico's farmers stay on their farms and
reduces illegal immigration. Instead, the US opts
for using illegal immigrant workers to fight
inflation and for increasing the budget of the
Border Patrol through militarization to prevent
illegal immigration. NAFTA contributes to the
advent of failed statehood for both the US and
Mexico.
The war
on drugs: A poor example
Because the US National Guard
is both a state and federal militia, it may be
exempt from the limitations of the Posse Comitatus
Act when acting under the authority of a state
governor. That is, the Posse Comitatus Act does
not apply to state militias. A proposal by Senator
Barbara Boxer of California takes advantage of
this loophole by placing the Guard's new
immigration role under the auspices of the state
governor. The National Guard, in addition to the
army and the marines, has taken a more prevalent
role along the border. Using high-tech equipment,
it carries out reconnaissance missions and other
technical border-control activities. In addition,
it provides much labor in the inspection of cargo
at the border, building and repairing fences and
metal walls along the border, etc. The National
Guard, in addition to providing support for the
Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and other federal law agencies in
the interception of drugs, will now augment the
Border Patrol in its campaign against undocumented
immigrants. Drug and immigrant interception are
new and precedent-setting roles for the National
Guard, whose traditional missions have been to
fight in wartime and help states during natural
disasters or civil disorders.
US
drug czar John Walters announced on February 22
that the US would employ in its war on drugs some
of the techniques it has been using to fight
international terrorism. In his annual
drug-strategy document, President Bush proposed
spending a total of $12.4 billion in fiscal 2006,
an increase of 2.2% over fiscal 2005. The
anti-narcotics budget had increased from $1
billion in 1980 to $17 billion in 1998 and has
continued to climb since. The number of drug
offenders imprisoned in the United States has
increased 800% since 1980, helping the US achieve
the highest imprisonment rate in the
industrialized world: 550 per 100,000. Under the
banner of the war on drugs, a kind of creeping
totalitarianism tramples more human rights and
civil liberties each year: tens of millions of
"clean" citizens are subjected to supervised urine
tests at work; hundreds of thousands are searched
in their homes or, on the basis of racist
"trafficker profiles", at airports or on highways;
possessions are seized by the state on suspicion
alone. The protection of the innocent is forfeited
as part of the collateral damage of homeland
security. Americans are protected at the expense
of their liberty. Such tradeoffs are the standard
rationalization of dictatorial governments and
failed states.
Official US surveys show that
illicit drug use by American youth has increased
in five of the past six years. The US Drug
Enforcement Administration admits that hard drugs
are more available, less expensive, and more pure
than ever on the streets. Hard-drug abuse and
addiction among the urban poor remains widespread.
Cocaine continues to be a deal-making substance in
Hollywood and investment banking. Some judges have
even refused to apply harsh drug laws, such as the
Rockefeller drug laws in New York state, the
reform of which is supported by organizations such
as Human Rights Watch. Critics have called the
Rockefeller drug laws and the mandatory
imprisonment of minor offenders a form of
institutional racism. Opinion polls now show that
a majority of Americans do not believe the war on
drugs can be won. More and more people are voicing
their opposition and seeking alternatives to
punitive prohibition. The drug-policy reform
movement in the US is growing larger and more
diverse. The "war on terrorism" needs to take to
heart the dismal record of the "war on drugs",
rather than the war on drugs placing false hopes
on applying the techniques of the war on
terrorism. The very concept of waging war on
anything as a solution is fundamentally flawed.
An army of mercenaries
One of the systemic
propositions about the capacity of the US military
being tested in Iraq these days has to do with the
staying power of its all-volunteer force for long
conflicts. The end of the US draft in 1973 and the
conversion to an all-volunteer force fundamentally
changed the force structure of the US military
designed to prevail on short and narrowly focused
conflicts in a peacetime environment. For long,
drawn-out wars, volunteers tend to lose their
enthusiasm and become increasingly reluctant to
enlist. The draft supplied the citizen soldiers
for the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. Ten
million of the 15 million US soldiers who served
in World War II were drafted. An all-volunteer
force also changed the nature of the military, in
essence to a mercenary force. Mercenaries can
often be effective fighting machines, as
demonstrated by the French Foreign Legion. But
mercenaries, fighting for pay, lack the strong
commitment to national values that is necessary
for winning an all-out war.
The
father of the all-volunteer force was allegedly
economist Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel laureate in
economics for his achievements in the fields of
consumption analysis, monetary history and theory
and for his demonstration of the complexity of
stabilization policy. In fact, it was largely the
doing of his friend and fellow economist, W Allen
Wallis, president of the University of Rochester,
who died in 1998. On November 11, 1968, Wallis was
asked to speak to the local chapter of the
American Legion, a veterans' organization, on the
50th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World
War I. The title of his speech was "Abolish the
Draft". The backdrop was, of course, the
escalating opposition to the Vietnam War.
President Lyndon Johnson had announced a
military-selection lottery in hopes of reducing
resentment of America's burgeoning commitment in a
senseless war. Presidential candidate Richard
Nixon responded, "It is not so much the way they
are selected that is wrong, it is the fact of
selection."
Wallis was a graduate-school
classmate of economists Friedman and George
Stigler at the University of Chicago in the early
1930s. Stigler later became the 1982 Nobel
laureate in economics for his seminal studies of
industrial structures, functioning of markets and
causes and effects of public regulation. During
World War II, Wallis had, at the age of 30,
organized the Statistical Research Group at
Columbia University for his teacher Harold
Hotelling, under contract to the War Department.
Its stellar cast included Friedman, Frederick
Mosteller, professor of mathematical statistics
Abraham Wald, the founder of the field of
statistical sequential analysis, and Jack
Wolfowitz (father of now Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, a chief architect of the
present-day war in Iraq). The elder Wolfowitz
developed with Wald the Sequential Probability
Ratio Test (SPRT). Sequential analysis is a branch
of statistical experimentation in which
observations are taken sequentially, one at a time
or in groups. After each observation, a decision
is made based on all previous results whether to
continue sampling or stop. At termination, an
inference is made, for example, an estimate or
hypothesis test, concerning the distribution of
the observed random variables or some parameter(s)
or functional(s) of it. Wald and Wolfowitz were
the pioneers of modern sequential analysis,
proving the optimality of the procedure.
After
the war, Wallis returned with Friedman to Chicago.
As dean of its business school, he recruited
Stigler to Chicago before moving to Rochester in
1962. Friedman and Stigler (and Friedrich Hayek,
1974 Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, 1991 Nobel
laureate for his discovery and clarification of
the significance of transaction cost and property
rights for the institutional structure and
functioning of the economy, and elsewhere, James M
Buchanan, 1986 Nobel laureate in economics for his
development of the contractual and constitutional
bases for the theory of economic and political
decision-making) then proceeded to overturn much
of the view of government that had underpinned
Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal and sowed the seed
for the lasting anti-government ideology that
followed in its wake.
In his Armistice Day speech in
1968, Wallis put forth his objections to
conscription: "First, it is immutably immoral in
principle and inevitably inequitable in practice.
Second, it is ineffective, inefficient and
detrimental to national security." A month later,
Wallis saw Arthur Burns, an economist at Columbia
University who was head of Nixon's transition team
and who later became chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board. Burns told Wallis that if it could
be shown that a volunteer force could be
instituted for less than $1 billion in its first
year, he would put the matter before the incoming
president. Wallis quickly assembled a research
team to create a blueprint, formed a bipartisan
presidential commission, including liberal
economist John Kenneth Galbraith, with enlisted
pay quietly raised to market levels. In 1973, the
volunteer army became a reality. The last draftee
was discharged in September 1975 as the Vietnam
War ended.
By most accounts, the
volunteer force, a euphemism for a mercenary
military, has been a success as a peacetime
military, though recently, as the US has applied
the doctrine of preemptive war, it has been
showing signs of strain. One-third of those
entering fail to complete their enlistments,
compared with one out of 10 among draftees. The
retention of highly skilled personnel requires
periodic pay and benefit adjustments. Blacks
compose about a third of army enlisted ranks, but
less than 10% of its combat arms, so the service
represents far more of an opportunity to get ahead
for those shut out of the civilian economy than a
chance to serve as cannon fodder, as had been
feared. Some 85,000 Hispanic-Americans are on
active duty, representing about 7% of all
active-duty personnel. Latinos represent more than
6.2% of the army, 8.1% of the navy, 11% of the
Marine Corps, and 4.4% of the air force, numbers
that should continue to increase as all three
branches of the armed forces step up their
recruitment of minorities.
The
most significant aspect of the all-volunteer army
is that it had not had to face any major war of
long duration until the second Iraq war in 2002.
In a fundamental way, a nation that relies on a
mercenary force instead of a people's army is a
failed state, especially when volunteerism is
motivated mostly by the search for income and job
training by the poor.
From 1989-93, Paul Wolfowitz
served as under secretary of defense for policy
under then-secretary Dick Cheney for matters
concerning strategy, plans and policy, with
responsibilities for the reshaping of strategy and
force posture at the end of the Cold War, the
essence of which was to shift from a strategy for
being prepared to fight a global war, to being
focused on two possible regional conflicts, and to
downsize the US military by some 40%. The first
Gulf War in 1991 showed the US military to be very
good at what it does. The recent wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have shown it to be
mismatched with postwar aims of occupation to
spread freedom and democracy. These wars of regime
change pose critical challenges to the
all-volunteer army. If the volunteers realize they
are no longer volunteering for a peacetime army
but for long-term occupation assignments in
distant and hostile lands, will they demand higher
pay and benefits for re-enlistment? And if a
volunteer is a specialist, even among common
soldiers, what happens to the military culture of
all for one and one for all? Can a volunteer army
motivated by money sustain a long war?
In
Vietnam, the US Army explicitly contracted with
its drafted troops beforehand for a one-year tour
of duty. Grunts who made it that far, whether on
the front line or in the rear, and usually some of
each, could go home - no ifs, ands or buts about
it. But the Iraq tour of duty has been happening
on the fly, and now many troops who began their
training a year ago have been told that they
cannot go home. The stop-loss policy prohibits a
volunteer from leaving his or her unit to return
to civilian life even though his or her term of
enlistment has expired. This policy has been
invoked for people in units that have received
notification of being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan
or are already in one of those countries.
Now
the Pentagon is planning to call up two
5,000-soldier National Guard brigades to begin
13-to-16-month deployments in 2005 in relief of
soldiers and marines. Also in Vietnam, a
little-noticed concomitant of the draft was never
in doubt. It was understood that the military was
a planned social organism. Like the family, the
university and the church, it was almost entirely
free of market forces or economic logic. Its
organization was communitarian, ironically
communistic: "from each according to his ability,
to each according to his need". Its ethic was one
of absolute ends: to win in war. Its motto was:
whatever it takes, do the necessary. As a result,
those who became involved in military service
learned to attach a great deal of importance to
respect for the opinions of others, even if it
were grudging respect, at least in the early years
of the conflict, before morale faltered in an
aimless and unwinnable war. True, orders were
given, often unpopular and senseless orders, but
it was recognized that commands would lose their
effectiveness if troops were unwilling to obey.
Combat effectiveness was measured not in
competence or loyalty, but by sheer willingness to
fight, or at least remain in place under extreme
hostility and hopelessness.
Nearly
two years into an Iraq war has left more than
1,500 US troops dead and another 11,200 wounded.
Recruiters are having difficulty as the US Army
strives to sign up 80,000 recruits this year to
replace soldiers leaving the service. The army in
February, for the first time in nearly five years,
failed to achieve its monthly recruiting goal. It
is in danger of missing its annual recruiting
target for the first time since 1999. Recruiting
for the army's reserve component - the National
Guard and Army Reserve - is suffering even more as
the Pentagon relies heavily on these part-time
soldiers to maintain troop levels in Iraq. The
regular army is 6% behind its year-to-date
recruiting target, the Reserve is 10% behind, and
the Guard is 26% short. The Marine Corps, the
other service providing ground forces in Iraq, has
its own difficulties. In January and February, the
marines missed their goal for signing up new
recruits - the first such shortfall in nearly a
decade - but remained a bit ahead of their target
for shipping recruits into basic training.
Iraq
marks the first protracted conflict for US forces
since the end of the draft in 1973, which ushered
in the era of the all-volunteer military. If the
military fails to attract enough recruits and the
US maintains a large commitment in Iraq, the
nation may have to consider some form of
conscription, predicts Cato Institute defense
analyst Charles Pena. The question is whether the
"war on terrorism" can survive the domestic
politics of a general conscription.
A
top-to-bottom audit of the effectiveness of the
all-volunteer force is unavoidable in the coming
years, in the context of the current "global war
on terrorism", where the opponent is not another
army but local insurgents. In gauging the success
of the US Army's experiment with market ways, it's
important to keep in mind not just its performance
as a fighting unit, but the role of the military
in manifesting the basic values of society at
large. Most of the political leadership of the
generation born after 1955 lacks any battlefield
military experience, and defense of the United
States is reduced to a commodity that can be
purchased at the lowest possible price.
The pervading importance of
the army
The key
mission of the US strategy of wars to implement
regime changes in rogue or failed states around
the world rests squarely on the army. The other
services serve important offensive functions, but
it is the army and only the army that can bring
about the end game with manpower-intensive
operations. The US Army currently is composed of
more than a million volunteers. About half of
these men and women are on full-time active duty.
The other half is in the reserve component, which
is composed of the Selected Reserve and the
Individual Ready Reserve. These three groups
compose the total army. The Selected Reserve,
sometimes known as the Drilling Reserve, consists
of people who belong to organized units that train
or drill one weekend a month and spend at least
two weeks a year on active duty. The army's
Selected Reserve has two branches: the Army
National Guard and the Army Reserve. Both
components serve as backups to the active-duty
army.
Army National Guard units,
which are in all 50 states, can be used by the
states as militias for natural disasters or civil
disorders when they have not been mobilized by the
federal government, which pays for more than 90%
of their costs and thus has first call on their
services. It comprises combat and combat support
units such as civil affairs, transportation and
military police. Army Reserve units are under the
control of the Department of the Army and can be
mobilized by the secretary of the army. The Army
Reserve is composed mainly of combat support
units.
The Individual Ready Reserve
(IRR) is composed of individuals who have
completed their active-duty service and have not
joined a Selected Reserve unit, but who still have
time left on their eight-year military-service
obligation, which, by law, they incurred when they
joined the army. For example, a person who
enlisted in the army for four years in 1998 would
have been released from active duty in 2002, but
would remain in the IRR until 2006. Members of the
IRR receive no pay, training or benefits.
Currently there are about 100,000 people in the
IRR.
Special Operations forces,
elite or commando units from the army, navy and
air force, are trained to perform clandestine
missions behind enemy lines. Currently, there are
about 50,000 personnel in these units. About 8,000
Special Operations forces are deployed in 54
countries.
The active army is organized
into 10 divisions and the Army National Guard into
eight. Each division has between 10,000 and 18,000
people organized into at least three brigades or
regiments composed of 3,000-5,000 people. These
brigades, in turn, consist of battalions of
between 500 and 800 people each.
The
ability of any military to perform its missions
depends on smart people more than on smart bombs.
As Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's secretary of
defense and the architect of the all-volunteer
army put it this way: "People, not hardware, must
be our highest priority."
The
priority given to the men and women of the US
armed forces today, especially those in the army,
appears to have diminished, as overextension and
overuse, as well as inattention to quality-of-life
issues, place severe strain on the troops.
Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed
deeply troubling cracks in the organization and
structure of the million-strong volunteer US Army.
These problems have been exacerbated both by the
current challenges of the global
international-security environment and the way in
which the Bush administration has used the
active-duty and reserve components since September
11, 2001. As a result, the US is closer to
breaking its volunteer army today than at any
other time in its 30-year history.
Since
September 11, 2001, the volunteer US Army has been
called upon to assume greater and broader
responsibility than ever before. US soldiers are
needed to battle terrorism around the globe,
protect the US homeland, and engage in occupation,
peacekeeping, stabilization, and nation-building
operations. Few imagined that the total volunteer
army would be used in such a manner when it was
designed 30 years ago, and the Bush administration
has failed to make the appropriate changes to
reflect the new environment. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's famous defense was, "You go to
war with the army you have, not the army you
wished you had." As a result, the active-duty US
Army is not large enough and it does not have the
mix of skills necessary to meet current needs;
moreover, the reserve component is being used at
unsustainable levels. This threatens not only the
quality and readiness of the all-volunteer army,
but also its ability to recruit and retain troops.
The Total Force
Richard Nixon put the
all-volunteer model into place in 1973, in
response to widespread public dissatisfaction with
conscription and its use during the Vietnam War,
when most of the United States' elite managed to
avoid service in what Colin Powell has referred to
as an "anti-democratic disgrace". While the draft
had allowed the government to pay subsistence
wages, the creation of the all-volunteer force
required a dramatic increase in military salaries
at a time when it was also necessary to increase
spending on military equipment and technology. To
keep costs under control, the Pentagon decided it
had no choice but to reduce substantially the size
of its active-duty military to some 2.2 million
people, or about 18% below its pre-Vietnam level
of 2.7 million. Because finding volunteers was
always harder for the army than for the other
services, the army bore the brunt of these
reductions, dropping from more than a million
people before the Vietnam War to 780,000 in 1974,
its lowest level since before the Korean War. Yet
the new task of wars to implement regime changes
place heavy demand on US Army manpower.
To
compensate, the Pentagon developed the concept of
the "Total Force". Under this plan, the US
military's Selected Reserve component would,
theoretically, receive enough resources to make it
a full-fledged part of the military. The National
Guard and Reserves were given separate accounts,
and the Selected Reserve's share of the budget was
doubled. To prevent a repetition of Vietnam, where
successive presidents managed to avoid the
political costs of waging an unpopular war by
using only the active-duty force and not calling
up the Reserves, General Creighton Abrams, as army
chief of staff, put fully half of the army's
combat units (divisions and brigades) in the
reserve component. In addition, certain non-combat
components that were deemed to be in essence
civilian functions, such as military police,
engineers and civil-affairs personnel, were
allocated almost entirely to the Reserves. These
skills would be needed only for postwar
stabilization, or what is now called
"peacekeeping".
By the mid-1980s, the
all-volunteer force became the most professional,
highly qualified military the United States had
ever fielded, and a high-tech fighting machine at
that. One of the reasons for its success is that
norms and standards were established for the use
of both the active and reserve components. When
reservists were called up for the first Gulf War
or for peacekeeping duties in the Balkans or the
Sinai, they were not kept on duty for more than
six months, which most analysts felt was necessary
to get and keep people in the reserve component.
This was in keeping with a long-standing Pentagon
personnel policy that forces should not spend more
than one-third of their time away from home. In
fact, many reservists actually volunteered to go.
Moreover, active-duty forces sent on peacekeeping
missions were rotated home after six months and
were not deployed overseas again until they had
spent at least a year at home. These standards and
norms for the use of the volunteer army began to
break down after September 11, 2001, however, due
in part to extremely poor planning for the postwar
transition in Iraq and the inability of the United
States to get substantial combat-troop
contributions from other nations.
When
Donald Rumsfeld took charge of the Pentagon in
January 2001, he did so with a mandate to
transform the military by ensuring that its
weapons systems and tactics took advantage of
advances in technology. He did not, however, focus
on the question of the size of the army and the
balance between active-duty and Reserve soldiers,
which became critical issues only once the United
States launched the "global war on terrorism" and
went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (see The war
that could destroy both armies, December 23,
2003).
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ23Ak01.html
Thomas Hall, the assistant
secretary of defense for reserve affairs,
indicated two years ago that the Pentagon's
civilian and military leadership was aggressively
studying such issues. In his first press briefing
of 2004, Rumsfeld admitted that rebalancing the
way reserve forces are used should be his first
priority for the coming year. The army has begun
the process of shifting the duties of some 100,000
personnel, but this process is not yet complete.
Thus the percentage of military functions
currently allocated to the Reserves is
substantially the same as it was in 1973 - and
better represents the challenges of that era than
of the present one. Reserves currently account for
97% of the army's civil-affairs units, 70% of its
engineering units, 66% of its military police, and
50% of its combat forces. Moreover, the size of
the active-duty army has shrunk: at about 480,000
soldiers, it currently makes up a smaller
proportion of the total US military, about 35%,
than at any other point in US history. As a
result, the all-volunteer army is being
overstretched and misused in an effort to meet the
new challenges presented by national and homeland
security threats.
By the
numbers
The US Army
currently has about 350,000 soldiers deployed in
more than 120 countries around the globe. The bulk
of these troops - about 200,000 - are in Iraq,
Afghanistan, South Korea and the Balkans. In 2004,
26 of the active-duty army's 33 combat brigades
(or almost 80%) will have been deployed abroad.
Nine of the 10 active-duty divisions in the army
were deployed to, getting ready to deploy to, or
returning from Iraq or Afghanistan this year.
About 40% of the 140,000 troops in Iraq are from
the reserve component, as are almost all of the US
troops in the Balkans. All told, three combat
brigades from the Army National Guard are
currently in Iraq and four are preparing to be
deployed to Iraq in the next year.
According to a Defense Science
Board study presented to Rumsfeld last August 31,
the US military does not have sufficient personnel
for the nation's current war and peacekeeping
demands. This overstretching leaves the US
potentially vulnerable in places such as South
Korea. In fact, one of the two US Army brigades
stationed in South Korea has already been sent to
Iraq. It also means that combat units have been
sent on back-to-back deployments or have had their
overseas tours extended unexpectedly beyond the
duration that had been promised. For example, the
1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division spent
December 2002 to August 2003 in Afghanistan, was
deployed to Iraq only five months after its
return, where it served until April 2004, and is
now slated to return to Afghanistan for at least
another year. The 3rd Infantry Division, the 1st
Armored Division, and the 2nd Infantry Division's
2nd Brigade had similar experiences. In July 2003,
the military announced that army units would have
to spend a full year in Iraq, double the normal
tour for peacekeeping duties.
Experience over the past 30
years shows that retention rates will decline if
the army keeps soldiers away from home for more
than one year out of three, especially among
mid-career personnel such as army captains, senior
non-commissioned officers, and seasoned warrant
officers, most of whom have not made a lifetime
commitment to the army. This is how the career
army was broken in Vietnam. Not retaining
sufficient numbers of mid-career personnel will
result in a hollow army that will be less capable
and less ready to carry out the demanding
challenges it currently faces and challenges that
are expected to intensify in the future, with
flashpoints such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Taiwan
and North Korea.
Since September 11, 2001, more
than 400,000 reservists have been called to active
duty. Several National Guard and Reserve units
have been kept on active duty for longer than
anticipated, sent overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan
without effective training for the missions they
are expected to carry out, and mobilized without
reasonable notice. This practice not only
undermines the readiness of the reserve soldiers
to carry out their tasks, it also puts an unfair
burden on the families and the employers of the
reservists by leaving them with very little time
to adjust to the absence of the soldier. Members
of the Michigan National Guard, for example, were
sent to Iraq with only 48 hours' notice. In
another example, the Maryland National Guard's
115th Military Police Battalion has deployed three
times since September 11, 2001, and by the end of
their last tour, some of these soldiers had been
on active duty for more than 24 months. All of
this has occurred in spite of the fact that
Lieutenant-General James Helmly, the commander of
the US Army Reserve, has stated that a reserve
soldier ideally should be given at least 30-day
notice before being mobilized and not be kept on
duty for more than nine to 12 months in a
five-year time frame.
The Bush administration has
been forced to notify about 5,600 Individual Ready
Reservists that they will be called to active duty
in order to replace casualties in the Guard and
Reserve units deployed to Iraq or to fill out
understaffed units that have been mobilized to go
to Iraq. These are men and women who have
completed their active-duty service and have not
joined a Guard or Reserve unit but who still have
time left on their eight-year military-service
obligation. In addition to facing the unfairness
of being called back involuntarily after having
already served their country, many of these
individuals are being sent to combat zones without
any recent training. Thirty-seven percent of those
Individual Ready Reservists who were to report to
duty by last October 17 failed to show. All told,
more than 2,000 of these former soldiers have
resisted returning to active duty. The trend can
be expected to continue if not escalate as initial
patriotic sentiment for the war subsides.
The
Bush administration has compounded this problem by
invoking its stop-loss authority for individuals
in both active-duty and reserve units. This policy
prevents an individual in a unit that has been
notified that it is being deployed to Iraq or
Afghanistan - or is already in one of those
countries - from leaving the service until three
months after the unit returns from overseas. To
date, more than 40,000 men and women have had
their enlistment extended or retirements put on
hold, some for as long as two years, because of
stop-loss. On December 6, eight of these soldiers
challenged this army policy in court. And on
December 8, a soldier in Kuwait who was headed to
Iraq publicly asked visiting Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld how much longer the army will continue to
use its stop-loss power to prevent soldiers from
leaving the service who are otherwise able to
retire or quit.
Many of the reservists who
have been called up without appropriate notice and
kept on duty too long are police officers,
firefighters and paramedics in their civilian
lives, that is, first responders who are vital to
the safety of their local communities. When these
personnel are called up for military service and
kept on active duty for long periods, it can
reduce the ability of their communities to deal
with terrorism. In addition, the fact that
National Guard units have been deployed overseas
undermines the ability of states to deal with
natural disasters as well as potential terrorist
attacks on the homeland. For example, Governor
Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican from Idaho and
departing chairman of the National Governors
Association, said recently that he was worried
because 62% of Idaho's National Guard had been
called up to active duty by the Pentagon. Like his
colleagues in California, Washington, Oregon and
Alaska, where wildfires are a significant problem,
Kempthorne was concerned that he would not be able
to use the Guard troops to help with firefighting.
The current system has led to
a decline in the overall operational readiness of
the US Army. In fiscal year 2003, the army
canceled or postponed 49 of its 182 scheduled
training exercises because the units were either
going to or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. In
December 2003, a senior army official informed
reporters that four divisions due to rotate back
from Iraq in the spring of 2004 would not be fully
combat ready for as long as six months. This, in
turn, would leave only two of the army's 10
active-duty divisions ready for conflict outside
Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the army has
decided to send the 11th Cavalry Regiment, its
elite training unit, to Iraq this year, taking
them away from their mission of training other
units.
Personnel readiness, which
depends on the experience level of the soldiers in
a unit, is also declining. According to a survey
of US troops in Iraq by the military's own Stars
and Stripes newspaper in late 2003, the Bush
administration's approach to Iraq risks doing to
the all-volunteer force what Vietnam did to the
conscript service. After polling almost 2,000
troops, Stars and Stripes found that about
one-third of them thought the war against Saddam
Hussein had been of little or no value and that
their mission lacked clear definition. A full 40%
said their missions had little or nothing to do
with what they had trained for. And, most
ominously, about half of the soldiers surveyed
indicated that they will not re-enlist when their
tours end and the Pentagon lifts the stop-loss
order that prevents troops from retiring or
leaving the service at this time. A survey of
Guard and Reserve units conducted last May by the
Defense Manpower Data Center had similar findings.
According to the survey, fewer than half of the
Army and Marine Corps reserve personnel who served
in Iraq say they will likely or very likely stay
in uniform. Compared with a similar survey from
May 2003, even non-deployed personnel are less
inclined to stay in because of the threat of being
recalled, and the morale of all reservists
declined over the past year.
Were
it not for the stop-loss policy, which even
high-ranking US officials admit is inconsistent
with the principles of voluntary service, the
all-volunteer force and the Total Force would be
in severe jeopardy, lacking the necessary
personnel to complete their missions. For example,
one infantry battalion commander deployed in
Kuwait and headed for Iraq said he would have lost
a quarter of his unit over the next year were it
not for the stop-loss order. Through a series of
such stop-loss measures, the army has prevented
more than 24,000 active-duty troops and 16,000
reservists from leaving its ranks. Yet even with
these rules in place, the Army Reserve failed to
achieve its re-enlistment requirements for fiscal
year 2003. The Army National Guard fell 12% short
of its overall recruiting requirement for 2004 and
missed its goal of reactivating people from the
active force by 44%. The active-duty army,
meanwhile, met its recruiting requirement for 2004
only by dipping into its delayed-entry pool of
people scheduled to go on active duty in 2005, and
lowered its educational and aptitude standards for
the new recruiting year.
The
Pentagon is also having difficulty keeping enough
experienced Special Forces personnel on active
duty as more and more of these elite warriors are
beginning to accept offers from private security
contractors who are performing military functions
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, the US needs
to use so many private security contractors
because the Special Forces are not large enough to
carry out all of the functions they are assigned.
The US taxpayer thus ends up paying twice, once to
train the personnel for the Special Forces and
then again for contractor services. These
contractors pay up to $1,000 per day for work in
war zones such as Iraq, far above the average
military salary for generals. Currently, the
Special Forces units are manned only at the 85%
level. The experience and capability level of the
army has also been hurt by the discharge of
thousands of men and women for being openly
homosexual and violating the "don't ask, don't
tell" policy. A number of those discharged were
soldiers with critical skills, such as
Arab-language abilities and operators of special
equipment.
The Bush administration has
exacerbated personnel problems by attempting to
cut back benefits that members of the volunteer
military and their families need. The timing of
these cuts fueled the perception of disregard for
the well-being of the same troops that the
administration relies on to execute its foreign
policy. For example, the administration proposed
cutting imminent danger combat pay by one-third
for US troops in the war zones in Iraq and
Afghanistan. It also proposed cutting family
separation allowances by nearly two-thirds for
those troops away from their home base. Public
pressure ultimately forced Congress to reject the
White House proposals. In addition, thousands of
US soldiers have been injured abroad, yet fewer
than one in 10 applicants to the military's
disability compensation system is receiving the
long-term disability payments they request. Almost
one-third of sick or injured National Guard and
Reserve veterans returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan are forced to wait more than four
months to find out if they will be compensated.
The majority of those who do receive disability
pay leave the military with a one-time, lump-sum
payment that is inadequate to make up for the loss
they have suffered. David Chu, the Pentagon's
under secretary for personnel and readiness,
announced on February 1 that the lump-sum death
gratuity of $12,420 would be increased to $100,000
in the 2006 budget. Life-insurance payments for
deaths in the two "combat zones" would be raised
from $250,000 to $400,000, with the government
paying the extra premiums necessary.
Finally, the Bush
administration also requested a 14% cut in
assistance to public schools on military bases and
other federal property. In what one army commander
called an act of betrayal, the civilian leadership
at the Pentagon is considering closing or
transferring control of the 58 schools it operates
on 14 military installations. These decisions
threaten not only the quality of education for the
children of soldiers, but also the morale and
support of military families. Ultimately, these
decisions threaten the long-term viability of the
all-volunteer force.
The Pentagon 2005 Third
Quadrennial Review (QDR3) put together by the
Rumsfeld team is focused on four core challenges
that resemble a matrix of future threats,
identifying four types of dangers - conventional
warfare, "irregular" challenges such as the
insurgency in Iraq, "catastrophic" attacks
employing weapons of mass destruction, and
"disruptive" breakthroughs that give adversaries a
sudden gain in capabilities. The matrix assumes
that the likelihood of major conventional combat
is receding, while the probability of the other,
unconventional dangers is rising. Defense
contractors and analysts will parse QDR3 debate
for hints of which weapons programs might be
favored, cut or terminated, strongly impacting the
future of the defense industry. The US Air Force,
for example, will press its case for restoring
cuts made in the Lockheed Martin Corp F/A-22
fighter program. The Pentagon's fiscal 2006-11
budget forecasts savings of $10.4 billion by
ending the program in 2008 and cutting 96
aircraft, bringing the total down to 179. But the
air force suggests the plane might be useful in
countering China's growing inventory of new
Russian-made aircraft. The F/A-22 fighter will
upgrade US capability to counter growing threats
in the Pacific from China.
If the
US plans to spread democracy unilaterally by
destroying, occupying and rebuilding countries
such as Iraq around the world, in essence by
itself, while also meeting its other global
commitments, protecting its homeland, and treating
the men and women of the military fairly and in a
way that ensures that they will join and remain in
the volunteer army, it must increase the army's
budget, taking funds from other parts of the
overall 2005 baseline defense budget of $420
billion. Defense experts have suggested that
programs that can be reduced without undermining
US ability to wage a "global war on terror"
include the national missile defense program, new
nuclear-weapons research programs, and Cold
War-era programs such as the F/A-22 fighter and
the Virginia Class submarine. The cost of adding
to the army budget can also be offset by reducing
the number of people on active duty in the navy
and air force, both of which are currently
exceeding their target end-strengths.
'China threat' to the
rescue
Supporters of
threatened programs are seeking justification for
preserving them. They have found it in the issue
of China's alleged military ascendance. With
Central Intelligence Agency support, the Pentagon
is preparing to ratchet up its assessment of the
threat of China's expanding military, in a signal
that the Bush administration is increasingly
concerned about China's growing ambitions in the
region. The CIA, battered by intelligence failure
related to the September 11 terrorist attacks, is
desperately seeking to identify new dangerous
enemies. Reaching into its overused bag of tricks,
the new CIA director, Porter Goss, pulls out China
as the reliable standby target. "Beijing's
military modernization and military buildup is
tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan
Strait," Goss told the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence on February 16. "Chinese capabilities
threaten US forces in the region," he said. It was
more than a casual warning. The Taiwan Relations
Act, a US domestic law, stipulates that the United
States must sell more arms to Taiwan to maintain a
balance of power.
The 2005 QDR3, the formal
assessment of US military policy, is expected to
take a more gloomy view of the challenge posed by
an emerging Chinese superpower than the 2001
overview of four years ago. Douglas Feith, under
secretary of defense for policy, identifies the
rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as
one of the most important issues being examined in
QDR3, which is expected to be completed this
September. A Pentagon spokesman stated that the
manner in which national-security capabilities are
organized to address the "global war on extremism"
will continue to dominate ongoing activities, but
it is important to step back and examine the
strategic landscape beyond these ongoing
activities, and "the PRC's emergence as a global
actor is one undeniable reality".
The
CIA report and QDR3 are dismissed by China as
overreaction. Beijing insists that the theory of
the China threat is unsupported by data. Citing
Western media, Chinese Foreign Minister Li
Zhaoxing at a press conference on March 5 took
note that US defense expenditures had reached
$455.9 billion, 3.9% of its GDP in 2004, while
China spent 211.7 billion yuan ($25.5 billion) on
national defense, 1.6% of its GDP. In 2003, US
defense expenditures took up 47% of the global
total, exceeding the accumulated expenditures of
the following 25 biggest defense spenders. "China
is a staunch force for peacemaking, and it's
ridiculous to accuse China of [being] a threat,"
Li said.
After the US-Japan Security
Consultative Committee in Washington held by the
foreign and defense ministers of the two
countries, the United States and Japan issued a
joint statement on February 19 listing for the
first time "encouraging" the peaceful resolution
of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through
dialogue as one of their common strategic
objectives. In their joint statement, the US and
Japan tried to mollify China by listing
development of a "cooperative relationship" with
Beijing as another strategic goal. The US and
Japan have agreed on a new joint security
arrangement, which calls on China to increase
transparency in reporting its military expenditure
and expansion. For the first time, Japan publicly
identified Taiwan as a shared security concern
with the US. China denounced the joint statement
as interfering in China's sovereign rights,
internal affairs and territorial integrity. The
US-Japan security alliance has shifted from a Cold
War-era anti-Soviet posture to a post-Cold War era
anti-China focus. Japan's 2000 White Paper on
defense said for the first time that Chinese
military development poses a threat to Japan. In
its 2004 White Paper on defense, Japan claimed
that it is facing direct missile threats from
China. Beijing is deeply concerned about Tokyo's
increasingly assertive approach to security
issues, a concern that has become an obstacle to
improved relations between the two Asian
neighbors.
Washington and Tokyo have
never before explicitly listed Taiwan as a
bilateral strategic issue, and Japanese officials
have generally avoided public discussion of
cross-strait issues while privately calling for a
peaceful resolution. China has repeatedly served
notice that Taiwan's move toward independence will
trigger an immediate military response. Washington
is legally committed by the Taiwan Relations Act
to supplying Taipei with adequate arms for
defense, and has long hinted that the US will
"help" Taiwan defend itself in the event of a
military threat from Beijing. Whether that means
direct US involvement remains ambiguous.
In
response, China has passed its own domestic law
against secession as a countermeasure for the
United States' Taiwan Relations Act. Now, both
governments are obliged by domestic law to
military confrontation over the issue of Taiwan
independence, with China committing itself by law
to use force to stop Taiwan from any move toward
independence and the US committing itself to help
Taiwan defend itself. Thus the Taiwan issue is
taken out of the flexible sphere of diplomacy to
the fixed realm of a conflict between the domestic
laws of two nations. It is a conflict that leaves
little room for diplomacy and will lead to war.
There
is also a change on the issue of Taiwan for Japan.
In the past Japan had said that war across the
Taiwan Strait would have an impact on East Asian
security. Now it says China's use of force to
prevent Taiwanese independence will "threaten"
Japan directly. For Japanese strategists and
politicians, it is vital that Japan can hold back
an overall strategic challenge from China by the
so-called curb on China's use of force in solving
the Taiwan question.
With this background, the
February joint statement evidently forecasts a | | | |
