DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Empire's changing face masks old
ambitions By Nick Turse
They looked like a gang of geriatric
giants. Clad in smart casual attire - dress
shirts, sweaters, and jeans - and incongruous blue
hospital booties, they strode around "the world,"
stopping to stroke their chins and ponder this or
that potential crisis. Among them was General
Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, in a button-down shirt and jeans,
without a medal or a ribbon in sight, his arms
crossed, his gaze fixed. He had one foot planted
firmly in Russia, the other partly in Kazakhstan,
and yet the general hadn't left the friendly
confines of Virginia.
Several times this
year, Dempsey, the other joint chiefs, and
regional war-fighting commanders have assembled at
the Marine Corps Base in Quantico to conduct a
futuristic war-game-meets-academic-seminar about
the needs of the military in 2017. There, a giant
map of the world, larger than a basketball court,
was laid
out so the Pentagon's
top brass could shuffle around the planet -
provided they wore those scuff-preventing shoe
covers - as they thought about "potential US
national military vulnerabilities in future
conflicts" (so one participant told the New York
Times). The sight of those generals with the world
underfoot was a fitting image for Washington's
military ambitions, its penchant for foreign
interventions, and its contempt for (non-US)
borders and national sovereignty.
A
world so much larger than a basketball
court In recent weeks, some of the possible
fruits of Dempsey's "strategic seminars," military
missions far from the confines of Quantico, have
repeatedly popped up in the news. Sometimes buried
in a story, sometimes as the headline, the reports
attest to the Pentagon's penchant for
globetrotting.
In September, for example,
Lieutenant General Robert L Caslen, Jr, revealed
that, just months after the US military withdrew
from Iraq, a unit of Special Operations Forces had
already been redeployed there in an advisory role
and that negotiations were underway to arrange for
larger numbers of troops to train Iraqi forces in
the future. That same month, the Obama
administration won congressional approval to
divert funds earmarked for counter-terrorism aid
for Pakistan to a new proxy project in Libya.
According to the New York Times, US Special
Operations Forces will likely be deployed to
create and train a 500-man Libyan commando unit to
battle Islamic militant groups which have become
increasingly powerful as a result of the 2011
US-aided revolution there.
Earlier this
month, the New York Times reported that the US
military had secretly sent a new task force to
Jordan to assist local troops in responding to the
civil war in neighboring Syria. Only days later,
that paper revealed that recent US efforts to
train and assist surrogate forces for Honduras's
drug war were already crumbling amid a spiral of
questions about the deaths of innocents,
violations of international law, and suspected
human rights abuses by Honduran allies.
Shortly after that, the Times reported the
bleak, if hardly surprising, news that the proxy
army the US has spent more than a decade building
in Afghanistan is, according to officials, "so
plagued with desertions and low re-enlistment
rates that it has to replace a third of its entire
force every year." Rumors now regularly bubble up
about a possible US-funded proxy war on the
horizon in Northern Mali where al-Qaeda-linked
Islamists have taken over vast stretches of
territory - yet another direct result of last
year's intervention in Libya.
And these
were just the offshore efforts that made it into
the news. Many other US military actions abroad
remain largely below the radar. Several weeks ago,
for instance, US personnel were quietly deployed
to Burundi to carry out training efforts in that
small, landlocked, desperately poor East African
nation. Another contingent of US Army and Air
Force trainers headed to the similarly landlocked
and poor West African nation of Burkina Faso to
instruct indigenous forces.
At Camp
Arifjan, an American base in Kuwait, US and local
troops donned gas masks and protective suits to
conduct joint chemical, biological, radiological,
and nuclear training. In Guatemala, 200 Marines
from Detachment Martillo completed a months-long
deployment to assist indigenous naval forces and
law enforcement agencies in drug interdiction
efforts.
Across the globe, in the
forbidding tropical forests of the Philippines,
Marines joined elite Filipino troops to train for
combat operations in jungle environments and to
help enhance their skills as snipers. Marines from
both nations also leapt from airplanes, 10,000
feet above the island archipelago, in an effort to
further the "interoperability" of their forces.
Meanwhile, in the Southeast Asian nation of
Timor-Leste, Marines trained embassy guards and
military police in crippling "compliance
techniques" like pain holds and pressure point
manipulation, as well as soldiers in jungle
warfare as part of Exercise Crocodilo 2012.
The idea behind Dempsey's "strategic
seminars" was to plan for the future, to figure
out how to properly respond to developments in
far-flung corners of the globe. And in the real
world, US forces are regularly putting preemptive
pins in that giant map - from Africa to Asia,
Latin America to the Middle East. On the surface,
global engagement, training missions, and joint
operations appear rational enough.
And
Dempsey's big picture planning seems like a
sensible way to think through solutions to future
national security threats.
But when you
consider how the Pentagon really operates, such
war-gaming undoubtedly has an absurdist quality to
it. After all, global threats turn out to come in
every size imaginable, from fringe Islamic
movements in Africa to Mexican drug gangs. How
exactly they truly threaten US "national security"
is often unclear - beyond some White House
adviser's or general's say-so. And whatever
alternatives come up in such Quantico seminars,
the "sensible" response invariably turns out to be
sending in the Marines, or the SEALs, or the
drones, or some local proxies. In truth, there is
no need to spend a day shuffling around a giant
map in blue booties to figure it all out.
In one way or another, the US
military is now involved with most of the nations
on Earth. Its soldiers, commandos, trainers, base
builders, drone jockeys, spies, and arms dealers,
as well as associated hired guns and corporate
contractors, can now be found just about
everywhere on the planet.
The sun never sets on American troops
conducting operations, training allies, arming
surrogates, schooling its own personnel,
purchasing new weapons and equipment, developing
fresh doctrine, implementing novel tactics, and
refining their martial arts. The US has submarines
trolling the briny deep and aircraft carrier task
forces traversing the oceans and seas, robotic
drones flying constant missions and manned
aircraft patrolling the skies, while above them,
spy satellites circle, peering down on friend and
foe alike.
Since 2001, the US military has
thrown everything in its arsenal, short of nuclear
weapons, including untold billions of dollars in
weaponry, technology, bribes, you name it, at a
remarkably weak set of enemies - relatively small
groups of poorly-armed fighters in impoverished
nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen
- while decisively defeating none of them. With
its deep pockets and long reach, its technology
and training acumen, as well as the devastatingly
destructive power at its command, the US military
should have the planet on lockdown. It should, by
all rights, dominate the world just as the
neo-conservative dreamers of the early Bush years
assumed it would.
Yet after more than a
decade of war, it has failed to eliminate a
rag-tag Afghan insurgency with limited popular
support. It trained an indigenous Afghan force
that was long known for its poor performance -
before it became better known for killing its
American trainers. It has spent years and untold
tens of millions of tax dollars chasing down
assorted firebrand clerics, various terrorist
"lieutenants," and a host of no-name militants
belonging to al-Qaeda, mostly in the backlands of
the planet. Instead of wiping out that
organization and its wannabes, however, it seems
mainly to have facilitated its franchising around
the world.
At the same time, it has
managed to paint weak regional forces like
Somalia's al-Shabaab as transnational threats,
then focus its resources on eradicating them, only
to fail at the task. It has thrown millions of
dollars in personnel, equipment, aid, and recently
even troops into the task of eradicating low-level
drug runners (as well as the major drug cartels),
without putting a dent in the northward flow of
narcotics to America's cities and suburbs. It
spends billions on intelligence only to routinely
find itself in the dark. It destroyed the regime
of an Iraqi dictator and occupied his country,
only to be fought to a standstill by ill-armed,
ill-organized insurgencies there, then
out-maneuvered by the allies it had helped put in
power, and unceremoniously bounced from the
country (even if it is now beginning to claw its
way back in). It spends untold millions of dollars
to train and equip elite Navy SEALs to take on
poor, untrained, lightly-armed adversaries, like
gun-toting Somali pirates.
And that isn't
the half of it.
How not to change in a
changing world The US military devours
money and yet delivers little in the way of
victories. Its personnel may be among the most
talented and well-trained on the planet, its
weapons and technology the most sophisticated and
advanced around. And when it comes to defense
budgets, it far outspends the next nine largest
nations combined (most of which are allies in any
case), let alone its enemies like the Taliban,
al-Shabaab, or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
but in the real world of warfare this turns out to
add up to remarkably little.
In a
government filled with agencies routinely derided
for profligacy, inefficiency, and producing poor
outcomes, its record may be unmatched in terms of
waste and abject failure, though that seems to
faze almost no one in Washington. For more than a
decade, the US military has bounced from one
failed doctrine to the next. There was Donald
Rumsfeld's "military lite," followed by what could
have been called military heavy (though it never
got a name), which was superseded by General David
Petraeus's "counterinsurgency operations" (also
known by its acronym COIN).
This, in turn, has
been succeeded by the Obama administration's bid
for future military triumph: a "light footprint"
combination of special ops, drones, spies,
civilian soldiers, cyber-warfare, and proxy
fighters. Yet whatever the method employed, one
thing has been constant: successes have been
fleeting, setbacks many, frustrations the name of
the game, and victory MIA.
Convinced
nonetheless that finding just the right formula
for applying force globally is the key to success,
the US military is presently banking on that new
six-point plan. Tomorrow, it may turn to a
different war-lite mix. Somewhere down the road,
it will undoubtedly again experiment with
something heavier. And if history is any guide,
counterinsurgency, a concept that failed the US in
Vietnam and was resuscitated only to fail again in
Afghanistan, will one day be back in vogue.
In all of this, it should be obvious, a
learning curve is lacking. Any solution to
America's war-fighting problems will undoubtedly
require the sort of fundamental re-evaluation of
warfare and military might that no one in
Washington is open to at the moment. It's going to
take more than a few days spent shuffling around a
big map in plastic shoe covers.
American
politicians never tire of extolling the virtues of
the US military, which is now commonly hailed as
"the finest fighting force in the history of the
world." This claim appears grotesquely at odds
with reality. Aside from triumphs over such
non-powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada
and the small Central American nation of Panama,
the US military's record since World War II has
been a litany of disappointments: stalemate in
Korea, outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in
Laos and Cambodia, debacles in Lebanon and
Somalia, two wars against Iraq (both ending
without victory), more than a decade of
wheel-spinning in Afghanistan, and so on.
Something akin to the law of diminishing
returns may be at work. The more time, effort, and
treasure the US invests in its military and its
military adventures, the weaker the payback. In
this context, the impressive destructive power of
that military may not matter a bit, if it is
tasked with doing things that military might, as
it has been traditionally conceived, can perhaps
no longer do.
Success may not be possible,
whatever the circumstances, in the
twenty-first-century world, and victory not even
an option. Instead of trying yet again to find
exactly the right formula or even reinventing
warfare, perhaps the US military needs to reinvent
itself and its raison d'๊tre if it's ever to break
out of its long cycle of failure.
But
don't count on it.
Instead, expect the
politicians to continue to heap on the praise,
Congress to continue insuring funding at levels
that stagger the imagination, presidents to
continue applying blunt force to complex
geopolitical problems (even if in slightly
different ways), arms dealers to continue churning
out wonder weapons that prove less than wondrous,
and the Pentagon continuing to fail to win.
Coming off the latest series of failures,
the US military has leapt headlong into yet
another transitional period - call it the changing
face of empire - but don't expect a change in
weapons, tactics, strategy, or even doctrine to
yield a change in results. As the adage goes: the
more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nick Turse is the managing
editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the
Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his
work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the
Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the
author/editor of several books, including the just
published The Changing Face of Empire: Special
Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases,
and Cyberwarfare (Haymarket Books). This piece
is the final article in his series on the changing
face of American empire, which is being
underwritten by Lannan Foundation.
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