The end of (military) history
By Andrew J Bacevich
"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid
the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history."
This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household
name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had
convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand. "The triumph of the
West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident ... in the total
exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism".
Today, the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the
first decade of the present century have delivered
history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain
considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.
For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting
democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous
essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.
Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition's
course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the 20th century, great powers
had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of
coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were
the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison
gas, and atomic bombs - the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an
edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and
organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence
collection and war plans.
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain,
Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in
the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military
tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument
of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance
its utility.
Grand illusions
That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century,
told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached
new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured
everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage.
Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became
emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped,
the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well
before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war's problem-solving capacity had
begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers - thanks to war,
now great in name only - that faith disappeared altogether.
Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend.
One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from World War
II stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created as a
direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s,
both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and,
arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the
lexicon of American and Israeli politics, "peace" was a codeword. The essential
prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to
accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations -
not yet intimate allies - stood apart from the rest of the Western world.
So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites
in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no
contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the
temptation to put that power to work. "Peace through strength" easily enough
becomes "peace through war." Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For
Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and
then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam,
Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.
A quarter-century later, US forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, "Operation
Desert Storm", George H W Bush's war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly,
cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves
that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated - even eclipsed -
the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and
Yitzhak Rabin. The Vietnam War faded into irrelevance.
For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive.
Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991
decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than
real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.
On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a
Greater Israel - disregarding Washington's objections - set out to assert
permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet "facts on the
ground" created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance
Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly
growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor
assimilate.
In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991
likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the
eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional
stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical
reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an
unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington
now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim.
Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its
writ.
During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own
variant of a settlement policy. Yet US bases dotting the Islamic world and US
forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli
settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked
(or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger
at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they
regarded as neo-colonial infidels.
Stuck
No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed
unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel's near abroad, its tanks,
fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks,
fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.
So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not
translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the
prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how
badly battered and beaten, the "terrorists" (a catch-all term applied to anyone
resisting Israeli or American authority) weren't intimidated, remained
unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.
Israel ran smack into this problem during "Operation Peace for Galilee", its
1982 intervention in Lebanon. US forces encountered it a decade later during
"Operation Restore Hope", the West's gloriously titled foray into Somalia.
Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing
peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration,
embarrassment, and failure.
And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the
IDF's glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy
rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of
dirty wars - unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding
problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada
(2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and "Operation Cast Lead", the
notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.
Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates
emerged as a looming threat - a "demographic bomb," Benjamin Netanyahu called
it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed
pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as
the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into
submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a
majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be
Arab.
Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless
succeeded in duplicating the IDF's experience. Moments of glory remained, but
they would prove fleeting indeed. After the September 11, 2001 attacks,
Washington's efforts to transform (or "liberate") the Greater Middle East
kicked into high gear.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W Bush's global "war on terror" began
impressively enough, as US forces operated with a speed and elan that had once
been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to "shock and awe," Kabul fell, followed less
than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior army general explained
to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:
We are now
able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new
sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented
near real-time situational awareness, increased information availability, and
an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of
the battlespace ... Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force
will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in
decision superiority.
The key phrase in this mass of
techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: "decision superiority." At that
moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced
that it knew how to win.
Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns
advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American
troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions
that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.
Winless
If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq wars (and from
their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera. Counting on
today's enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense
as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.
Meanwhile, as the US economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their
equivalent of Israel's "demographic bomb" - a "fiscal bomb." Ingrained habits
of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of
long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on
endless wars exacerbated that threat.
By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without
giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted.
High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning - at least as a
Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to
not lose. In Washington as in US military command posts, the avoidance of
outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.
As a consequence, US troops today sally forth from their base camps not to
defeat the enemy, but to "protect the people", consistent with the latest
doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping US commanders cut deals with warlords
and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.
A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan
war commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this
American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed,
"military solutions" do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, "we
can't kill our way out of" the fix we're in. In this way, he also pronounced a
eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.
The unasked question
What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military
history?
In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of
ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples
and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.
With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically
motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain
marginal utility. Yet the prospect of big wars solving big problems is probably
gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can
believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels
anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world.
To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.
It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms
with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so,
accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics.
That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for
example, shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and
influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance.
Meanwhile, the People's Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page
from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner
of "dollar diplomacy".
The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited
choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history
of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and
security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the
international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist
project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk?
Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time
remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust
in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame
them?
In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel's demographic or
geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater
freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in
preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For
the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of
money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security
state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are
campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and
military, there are ambitions to be pursued.
And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and
insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of
backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means
coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend
Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views
that they deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters
relating to national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for
example, that Petraeus' appointment as the umpteenth US commander in
Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.
Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the
UN, demanded to know: "What's the point of having this superb military you're
always talking about if we can't use it?" Today, an altogether different
question deserves our attention: What's the point of constantly using our
superb military if doing so doesn't actually work?
Washington's refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption
and dishonesty permeating our politics.
Andrew J Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations
at Boston University. His new book,
Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War, has just been
published. Listen to the latest TomCast audio interview to hear him discuss the
book by clicking
here or, to download to an iPod,
here.
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