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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 U.S. 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-U.S.) 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 U.S. 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 counterterrorism aid for
Pakistan to a new proxy project in Libya. According to the New York Times, U.S.
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
U.S.-aided revolution there.
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that
the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. military actions abroad remain largely below the radar. Several
weeks ago, for instance, U.S. personnel were quietly deployed to Burundi to
carry out training efforts in that small, landlocked, desperately poor East
African nation. Another contingent of U.S. 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, U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. “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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. military should have
the planet on lockdown. It should, by all rights, dominate the world just as the
neoconservative 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.
How Not to Change in a Changing World
And that isn’t the half of it.
The U.S. 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 U.S. 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, cyberwarfare, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 reevaluation 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 U.S.
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 U.S. military’s record since World War II has been a litanyof
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 U.S. 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 U.S. military needs to reinvent itself and its raison d’être 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 U.S. 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.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12324-a-failed-formula-for-worldwide-war-how-the-empire-changed-its-face-but-not-its-nature