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Much of the army, indeed much of the U.S. armed forces, drew a curious lesson from Vietnam. Instead of concluding that they should employ better strategy and tactics in fighting small wars, they concluded, á la Jomini, that they should avoid fighting them altogether. As far as most officers were concerned, the bitter experience of Vietnam, when the military suffered abuse back home and plummeting morale and discipline in the ranks, reinforced the validity of Douglas MacArthur’s complaint about the Korean War: “In war there is no substitute for victory.” Never mind that to most people, the outcome of the Korean War does look like a pretty adequate substitute for victory—especially if total victory required going to war against Communist China and Russia. Nevertheless, a generation of young officers who received their baptism of fire in Indochina vowed: Never again! “Many of my generation, the career captains, majors and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war,” wrote one Vietnam veteran, “vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.”
That veteran made good on his pledge, or at least tried to. His name was Colin Powell, and in the 1980s he became the top military aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Together they produced what became known as the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine, or simply the Powell Doctrine. This consisted of severe preconditions that must be met before U.S. forces are committed to battle: (1) “the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interests or that of our allies”; (2) if the U.S. does commit troops, “we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning”; (3) the armed forces should have “clearly defined political and military objectives”; (4) the relationship between ends and means “must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary”; (5) “there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in the Congress”; (6) “finally, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort.” In succeeding years, another precondition became widely accepted as part of the Powell Doctrine—all U.S. deployments must have an “exit strategy.”
The Powell Doctrine, which grew out of the debacle of Vietnam and was nourished by the military’s traditional distaste for small wars, has come to stand for an all-or-nothing approach to warfare, with the ideal war being one in which the U.S. wins with overwhelming force, suffers few casualties, and leaves immediately. This has become the conventional wisdom in some corners. Presidential candidate George W. Bush declared in his acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention: “A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam. When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.”
It sounds like common sense. And sometimes the Powell Doctrine makes perfect sense. The U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 and of Panama in 1989 succeeded in removing rulers objectionable to the U.S. government through the use of overwhelming force. The failure of Desert One—the Iranian hostage rescue mission in 1980—and the tragedy of the peacekeeping mission to Lebanon three years later, which ended in the deaths of 241 marines, seemed to further confirm the wisdom of the Powell approach. Neither mission used sufficient force for the ambitious objectives it was trying to achieve, and both ended ignominiously.
Yet it is all too easy to overlook more successful applications of limited force; low-intensity operations that achieve their goals are apt to be ignored by the public, whereas failure is endlessly fascinating. (This helps explain why George Armstrong Custer is one of the most famous figures in American military history.) Even leaving aside covert U.S. support for insurgencies trying to overthrow foreign governments (e.g., the contras in Nicaragua or the mujahadeen in Afghanistan) and foreign governments trying to put down insurgencies (e.g., El Salvador in the 1980s and Peru in the 1990s), there has been no shortage of successful peacetime operations by U.S. troops.
Starting in 1982, U.S. troops have been part of a peacekeeping force deployed in the Sinai desert to serve as a buffer between Egypt and Israel. In 1986 U.S. warplanes bombed Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on U.S. servicemen in Berlin. On numerous occasions, U.S. Marines have successfully evacuated U.S. diplomats and civilians from war zones—for instance, from Liberia in 1990, 1992, and 1996, Sierra Leone in 1997, the Central African Republic in 1996, and Congo in 1997. Many of these missions, in the spirit of the Chinese Relief Expedition of 1900, involved a surprising amount of combat, often necessary to secure the grounds of U.S. legations from trigger-happy revolutionaries.
Perhaps the most successful, if least known, small war of recent decades occurred in 1987–1988. As part of the Iran–Iraq War, Tehran targeted oil tankers belonging to the Gulf Arab states, which were providing financial support to Baghdad. The Reagan administration responded by putting Kuwaiti tankers under the U.S. flag and sending U.S. armed forces to protect them. The navy and marines wound up engaging in numerous battles with Iranian gunboats and missile platforms. To reinforce the point that failure is more memorable than success, the Tanker War is best known for the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennnes and the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark, instead of for its overall success in keeping open a strategically vital waterway.
Iraq
None of these missions, from the Sinai peacekeeping to the Persian Gulf escort duty, fit neatly into the all-or-nothing paradigm. So few missions short of World War II satisfy the Powell checklist that, if strictly applied, it becomes a recipe for inaction. Indeed, General Powell, as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, even opposed a show of force that might have deterred Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait on August 1, 1990. In the months that followed, he displayed deep reluctance to launch Desert Storm, preferring to wait indefinitely for sanctions to take effect. Early on, Powell told Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: “The American people do not want their young dying for $1.50 a gallon oil.”
With the benefit of hindsight it is obvious that Powell and other senior generals overestimated Iraqi capabilities. They insisted that no offensive operation could be undertaken unless the U.S. deployed 500,000 troops. President George Bush did not flinch. He approved the troop request and decided to fight exactly as the post-Vietnam army thinks wars should be fought: using massive, overwhelming firepower to pulverize the enemy and minimize U.S. casualties. The result, as the world well knows, was one of the most lopsided victories in military history—a triumph that the elder Bush claimed had buried “the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
Yet the Vietnam mindset—characterized by excessive caution about open-ended, low-intensity operations—was very much alive in the war’s aftermath. President Bush, at General Powell’s urging, decided to end the ground war after just 100 hours, allowing at least half of the Iraqi Republican Guard to escape destruction and Saddam Hussein to hold on to power. A decade later, when Bush’s son became president, the Iraqi dictator was still developing weapons of mass destruction, still thumbing his nose at America, still destabilizing the region.
Why didn’t the U.S. armed forces go all the way to Baghdad in 1991, as some at the time had suggested? There were a plethora of explanations—it would generate unwelcome images of U.S. forces slaughtering fleeing Iraqis (e.g., the “Highway of Death”), it was not part of the U.N. mandate, it would fracture the allied coalition, it would lead to the dismemberment of Iraq, it would not result in a “desert democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran” (in Powell’s sarcastic words)—but underlying all of them seemed to be the reluctance of the Pentagon and the administration to undertake an occupation of Iraq—precisely the sort of nebulous political mission the military was desperate to avoid after Vietnam. President Bush, Powell writes, “had promised the American people that Desert Storm would not become a Persian Gulf Vietnam, and he had kept his promise.”
Instead, it turned into a Persian Gulf Hungary, a replay of 1956, when the U.S. encouraged a rebellion against the Soviets and then stood by as the rebels were crushed. At least in Hungary the Eisenhower administration had the excuse that its military options were severely limited, for fear of starting World War III. Not so in Iraq, where the triumphant, all-powerful U.S. armed forces easily could have crushed the remnants of Saddam’s army. Instead the U.S. did nothing as Saddam’s men slaughtered the Shiites and Kurds who had risen up to challenge his rule at American instigation.
In April 1991, after the initial revolts had been suppressed, the U.S. finally stepped in to provide relief for Kurdish refugees in the north and to establish a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. A year later a no-fly zone was added over southern Iraq. The U.S. Air Force spent the next decade patrolling these no-fly zones, sparring with Iraqi air defenses and launching occasional punitive strikes as part of an effort to contain the regime in Baghdad. It was a poor substitute for toppling Saddam when the opportunity presented itself.
Somalia
In November 1992, a year and a half after Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, General Powell and the other senior brass reluctantly acceded to another humanitarian mission, this time to feed the starving of Somalia. The generals went along in no small part because they wanted to deflect attempts to involve U.S. armed forces in stopping ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, a mission they viewed as a hopeless “quagmire.” Somalia, by contrast, appeared to offer a chance to burnish America’s do-gooder credentials without risking serious combat. Just deliver relief supplies and leave. Simple. Or so it seemed.
A joint army–marine task force, backed by an aircraft carrier battle group offshore and working in cooperation with other foreign contingents, had little trouble securing control over much of Somalia in December 1992. It quickly became apparent, however, that merely delivering bags of food would not be enough. Long-term relief would require bringing order to Somalia’s chaotic political situation, dominated by warring clans.
The Pentagon and administration had no intention of getting U.S. troops involved in long-term “nation building.” Having long since forgotten U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and conveniently overlooking more recent experiences in Germany and Japan, the generals thought of only one thing when they heard this dread term: another Vietnam. Thus the armed forces did little or nothing to disarm Somalia’s heavily armed political factions when they had the chance—a decision that one U.S. Army officer on the scene called “the critical mistake of the intervention.” The second critical mistake was to pull out the bulk of the 26,000 U.S. troops in May 1993 and turn over the difficult tasks that remained to a United Nations force that included a small U.S. contingent. “This was like a doctor going home once the cancer patient was sedated but before the tumor was removed,” wrote the army officer.
The U.N. was not up to the job and the cancer quickly metastasized. The emboldened warlords, previously cowed by American soldiers, especially the marines, were not bashful about challenging the U.N. troops that remained. A month after the handover to the U.N., 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 50 wounded by gunmen loyal to warlord Muhammed Farah Aidid. The U.N. Security Council authorized Aidid’s arrest, and U.N. troops, including Americans, went after him and his clan. Trying to nab a warlord in Mogadishu proved no easier than trying to capture one in northern Mexico eight decades earlier. As frustrations grew, the local U.S. commander requested the dispatch of a Special Forces team to aid in the hunt. The Clinton administration and General Powell, the Joint Chiefs chairman, departed from his doctrine long enough to agree to send Task Force Ranger, consisting of the elite Delta Force reinforced by army Rangers.
A month and six frustrating (but well-executed) raids later, it all went awry. On October 3, 1993, the hunters became the hunted in the back streets of Mogadishu. After two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were downed by rocket-propelled grenades, Task Force Ranger was besieged by thousands of Somalis firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles. The Special Forces troopers remained trapped until the next morning, when the U.S. 10th Mountain Division organized a relief expedition by borrowing tanks and armored personnel carriers from the Pakistani and Malaysian U.N. contingents. Eighteen Americans were killed, 82 injured, one captured, making this the costliest single day of combat for the army since Vietnam.
Americans were horrified to see, in the days that followed, television footage of American corpses being abused and dragged through the streets by jubilant Somalis. President Clinton, embarrassed by this debacle so early in his administration, quickly announced that the U.S. was pulling out of Somalia within six months.
On one level this episode seemed to reinforce the validity of the Powell Doctrine by showing what happens when it is not followed. The U.S. had gone to war against Aidid and his clan but had refused to publicly acknowledge what it was doing, or to send sufficient forces to win. The scapegoat became Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who was sacked in part because he had refused local U.S. commanders’ requests for tanks. Yet General Powell, while supportive of the armor request, had opposed sending powerful AC-130 gunships that might have helped rescue Task Force Ranger. He and others in the Pentagon had also been intent on pulling out the bulk of the initial U.S. expedition as quickly as possible.
Much of this decisionmaking was premised on a fear of “mission creep” and “gradual escalation,” catchphrases that have become ubiquitous in military discourse since the Vietnam War. The Special Forces raid was seen as a quick, painless alternative to the slow, hard grind of a pacification campaign. “It seemed to promise victory without much of a commitment,” writes an army officer, “a short-cut to success, an almost nonmilitary surgical strike, the mythical grail sought by many in Washington’s policy elite.”
The irony of Somalia was the opposite of what it had been in the Gulf War. In the Gulf, fear of a small war (the occupation of Iraq) had prevented a big war from being carried out to a completely satisfactory conclusion; in Somalia fear of a big war prevented a small war from being waged effectively. These are the yin and yang of the Vietnam Syndrome, still a prominent part of U.S. military thinking decades after the fall of Saigon.
Haiti
The Gulf War and the Somalia debacle shaped the conduct of U.S. small wars for the rest of the 1990s. In the popular imagination, the former taught that war could be waged successfully with few if any casualties, while the latter seemingly demonstrated that the American people and their leaders had no stomach for deaths suffered in a merely “humanitarian” expedition.
American skittishness in asserting its power was on full display eight days after the battle of Mogadishu. The USS Harlan County, loaded with Special Forces and Canadian soldiers, approached the piers of Port au Prince, Haiti, and was turned away by a small mob threatening “another Somalia.” This shows what happens when a superpower cuts and runs: Its next mission becomes much harder to accomplish.
President Clinton subsequently decided to occupy Haiti in order to restore deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide, but this invasion had little in common with its 1915 predecessor. Eight decades before, U.S. forces had moved quickly and decisively to pacify the entire country and impose a government that, for all its problems, gave Haiti a measure of peace and stability that it had seldom known before or since. In 1994, by contrast, the U.S. occupiers were told not to get their hands dirty with the hard work of governance. The author Bob Shacochis, who spent time with a Special Forces “A Team” in the countryside, recounted how these tough troopers were forbidden from disarming FRAPH (Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti) paramilitaries and taking other steps to establish the rule of law. The Green Berets were frustrated that, as one sergeant put it, they couldn’t “take care of the bad guys, like we were supposed to be doing.”
What accounts for this reluctance? Fear of taking any casualties on a merely “humanitarian” mission. The commanders of the 10th Mountain Division, Shacochis found, “weren’t letting any of their boys outside the gates of Cap [Haitien] unless they traveled in a reinforced platoon—about forty guys, with mortars and armored vehicles—and were accompanied by either a battalion commander or an executive officer.” Quite a contrast from the swashbuckling days of Smedley Butler and Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken. The irony is that during the second invasion of Haiti in 1994, the U.S. deployed more than 20,000 combat troops, versus a maximum of 3,000 during the 1915 invasion. Yet American troops, or at least their commanders, were far more cautious the second time around. In Shacochis’s paradoxical, but accurate, formulation, “U.S. soldiers had invaded Haiti for the primary purpose of protecting themselves.”
Not surprisingly, a mission designed above all to minimize casualties accomplished little else. Aristide was restored to power, but it was a hollow victory. The U.S. left behind a cesspool of corruption, incompetence, and violence—and a president who turned out to be no democrat. The situation in Haiti deteriorated further in the years that followed.
Bosnia
America’s political and military leaders were even more reluctant to get involved in the Balkans, another situation that did not fit neatly with the Powell Doctrine’s win-and-get-out-quick approach. In the early 1990s many voices, in and out of government, pushed for a “lift and strike” policy—lifting the arms embargo to the Bosnian Muslims and using air power to hit Serbian positions. The Pentagon, in the person of General Powell, was adamantly opposed. “No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict,” Powell wrote of Bosnia in 1995. And in part because Powell’s stature was so vast, overshadowing a president who had never served in the military, nothing was done—at least not until the general retired. Finally in 1995, after some 300,000 people had died, NATO told Serbian forces to stop their aggression in Bosnia or face air strikes. Many senior U.S. generals and admirals opposed this limited use of force. But it took remarkably few sorties by NATO, principally U.S, warplanes—combined with a Croatian ground offensive—for the Serbs to agree to a peace treaty that, for all its faults, ended the killing in Bosnia.
Even after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord, which called for the dispatch of peacekeepers, the U.S. military remained reluctant to get “bogged down” in the Balkans “quagmire.” U.S. troops sent to Bosnia received the most restrictive rules of engagement possible. “When I received my written mission from Division,” recalls a battalion commander from the 1st Armored Division, “absolutely minimizing casualties was the mission prioritized as first, so I in turn passed it on in my written operations order to my company commanders.” But what happens if the dictates of “force protection” clash with the job at hand? “If mission and force protection are in conflict, then we don’t do the mission,” an army major recalled being told by his brigade commander in Bosnia. In keeping with this ethos, the U.S. military was reluctant to arrest Bosnian war criminals or undertake the tasks of civil administration, making it much harder to forge a lasting peace—and, ironically, making it less likely that the U.S. troops could be brought home soon.
Kosovo
The easiest way to minimize casualties is to not send troops at all. Hence in the 1990s cruise missiles became America’s preferred instrument of waging war. In 1998 President Clinton launched these unmanned weapons against Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. These strikes, which resembled a navy bombardment of native villages in the nineteenth century, achieved little beyond demolishing a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant and turning Osama bin Laden into a worldwide celebrity. This ineffectual raid may have emboldened bin Laden’s al Qaeda network to undertake its deadly attack against the Pentagon and World Trade Center three years later.
The trend toward push-button war reached its zenith in Kosovo. “The Services were against any commitment there,” General Wesley Clark later wrote. When the order to begin bombing was given on March 23, 1999, Clark, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, told his subordinates that the top priority was “not to lose aircraft”; “impact[ing] the Yugoslavian military and police activities on the ground” was a secondary concern. While NATO pilots were flying safely out of anti-aircraft range, the Kosovars they were supposed to be protecting were at the mercy of Serb ethnic-cleansing squads. It is a curious morality that puts greater value on the life of even a single American pilot—a professional who has volunteered for combat—than on hundreds, even thousands, of Kosovar lives. This has led some to suggest that the safest people on a modern battlefield are those who wear an American uniform.
Whatever its morality, this strategy was not particularly effective, notwithstanding some attempts to paint Kosovo as the first war won by air power alone. Seeing that high-altitude bombing was having little effect on the dug-in Yugoslav armed forces, and knowing that ground troops were out of the question, General Clark requested the dispatch of tank-busting AH-64 Apaches, the best combat helicopters in the world. The senior Pentagon brass disapproved; they viewed this as step closer to a Vietnam-like quagmire. To dissuade the White House, they made outlandish claims that Task Force Hawk, as the chopper unit was called, would suffer 50 percent casualties in a few days of battle. (Clark later wrote that this estimate reflected “a plain lack of knowledge” and that “this was just a way of saying, ‘Don’t do the mission.’”)
When Task Force Hawk was finally dispatched, the generals insisted that 6,200 troops and 26,000 tons of equipment, including 14 ultra-heavy M1A1 Abrams tanks, be sent along to safeguard the unit’s base in Albania. The pilots were eager to fly, judging the risks acceptable, but the Pentagon dragged its feet so long that the Apaches never went into combat. Slobodan Milosevic decided to pull out of Kosovo anyway, but only after the KLA guerrillas had launched a ground offensive—which forced Yugoslav units out into the open where they could be hit by NATO air power—and after Western leaders had threatened a major ground war.
In the aftermath of the bombing campaign, a multinational peacekeeping force was sent to occupy Kosovo, including a U.S. contingent. As in Bosnia, the U.S. Army’s risk-averse mentality impeded attempts to establish a durable peace. American troopers seldom ventured outside their fortified compound, Camp Bondsteel, without wearing their forbidding “battle rattle”—body armor, Kevlar helmets, the works. This impeded their ability to interact with local civilians, gather intelligence, and spread goodwill—prerequisites for a successful occupation. British soldiers, by contrast, looked more confident and approachable in their green berets and rolled-up sleeves.
Although dressed for battle, U.S. forces shied away from any confrontation. They did little to stop Albanian militants from using Kosovo as a base from which to stage an uprising in 2001 against the multiethnic government of neighboring Macedonia—an insurgency that threatened to imperil the tenuous peace of the Balkans.
In the Balkans the U.S. was trying to play the role of imperialist on the cheap, an imperialist unwilling to act as forcefully and decisively as the U.S. had in years gone by. And much of the explanation can be found in a “no casualties” mindset.
The Body Bag Syndrome
The impulse to avoid indiscriminately sacrificing the lives of American servicemen and women is noble, and it is certainly preferable to the callous attitude of the Russian military toward its rank and file, whether in Chechnya or aboard the Kursk, the submarine that sank in 2000. But in the immediate post–Cold War era America’s political leaders were more careful to husband the lives of volunteers—men and women who have sought out combat and its risks—than their predecessors were with the lives of draftees in years past.
Sometimes this policy can backfire cruelly: If foreign enemies know that killing a few Americans will drive the U.S. out of their country, they are far more likely to target American soldiers or civilians. And their task will be facilitated by force protection strategies—as at Khobar Towers in 1996 or in Beirut in 1984—that conveniently group American service members in one building. Every time U.S. forces flee some country after suffering casualties, it makes it less likely that the U.S. will be able to accomplish its objectives in the future without using force.
Those whose lives are on the line do not ask for a no-casualties policy. In one survey of 12,500 service members conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 86 percent agreed with this statement: “If necessary to accomplish a combat/lifesaving mission, I am prepared to put my own life on the line.” The CSIS study also found that “excessive aversion to casualties has . . . led to some confusion in the military, where self-sacrifice and the willingness to accept casualties in military operations has always been a key part of the ethos.” Nor are most of the rank and file intrinsically opposed to “humanitarian” missions; many report that they like helping people and, like the sergeant in Haiti, express frustration with force protection policies that keep them from doing more.
Political and military leaders justify this preference for sanitized, high-tech warfare by arguing that the American people simply will not tolerate casualties anymore, at least not in a “small war,” that as soon as the body bags start coming home support for a mission will evaporate. This is said to be a fact of life in the television age. The military analyst Edward Luttwak has even mounted an elaborate justification for the “body bag syndrome”: He claims that families are more reluctant to lose sons than they once were because they have fewer children today. (Actually the decline in family size predates casualty-phobia.)
What evidence is there to support this thesis? Three examples are usually cited: Vietnam, Beirut, and Somalia. Consider each in turn.
Support for the Vietnam War did not decline until after 1968—until, that is, after more than three years of intense combat with little to show for it. Even as late as 1968, roughly as many Americans favored escalation (37 percent) as withdrawal (39 percent). Afterward public sentiment shifted in favor of withdrawal, but a plurality still favored only a gradual pullout.
Support for the peacekeeping mission in Beirut was never high to begin with, even before the blast that killed 241 marines on October 23, 1983. If anything, this calamity caused a temporary spike in support; many enraged Americans wanted revenge. Before long, public sentiment returned more or less to where it had been before the suicide truck bombing.
Support for the relief mission to Somalia was so high in its early days that the public barely noticed eight fatalities suffered by U.S. forces. Popular enthusiasm had waned, however, well before 18 Rangers were killed on October 3, 1993. Even after this tragedy, the public did not demand immediate withdrawal, the option chosen by the Clinton administration. “Had the administration chosen instead to galvanize public opposition to Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed,” write two political scientists, “our research suggests that Americans would have tolerated an expanded effort to catch and punish him.”
These examples suggest that casualties are hardly the dominant factor in public attitudes toward most military expeditions. Social scientists and pollsters find that other factors—such as the odds of success and the stakes involved—count much more. This helps explain why the American public favored a pullout from Somalia but not from Saudi Arabia, where 19 airmen were killed in the 1996 Khobar Tower bombing. The U.S. stake in Saudi Arabia was obviously much greater.
Moreover, polling data suggests that if the elites in government and the media are united in favor of a mission—as they were, for instance, during the early days of Somalia—the public is willing to go along, even if the mission does not conform to the dictates of “national security,” narrowly defined. A Triangle Institute for Security Studies report found that for missions such as peacekeeping in Congo “the mass gives substantially higher estimates of acceptable casualties than do civilian or military elites.” In fact, suffering casualties can actually increase American public support for a military operation, so as to ensure that their soldiers did not die “in vain.” Thus when leaders choose not to enter a war or choose to fight with the most antiseptic means possible, they should not cite “public opinion” as an alibi for their actions.
This is not to suggest that the American people are insensitive to casualties. They are not, nor should they be. Few foreign policy objectives are worth buckets of blood; ends and means must be in balance. Small wars, by definition, have relatively small rewards, and they must be conducted accordingly. But even the best-run operations will suffer some losses. In the Banana Wars of the 1910s and 1920s, the marines lost 79 men in combat. Not bad for occupying three countries (Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua) for a combined total of 48 years—but presumably too costly by today’s standards.
Would things be different today, now that television cameras are available to beam to the public back home every detail of their troops’ involvement overseas? Not necessarily. To be sure, a frisson of excitement courses through the body politic when soldiers are committed abroad—the first SEALs and marines to land in Mogadishu in 1992 found more foreign cameramen than Somalis to greet them—but interest usually wanes as the entanglement drags along. In the decade following the Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force conducted combat operations daily over Iraq, with hardly any notice taken back home.
The American military knows that it cannot ignore the power of pictures. In the media age it is impossible for U.S. soldiers to employ some of the brutal methods that were common, for instance, in the Philippine War. (Just imagine one of the victims being interviewed on network television.) Americans today are not necessarily any more sensitive than were their early twentieth-century compatriots about having their soldiers kill large numbers of foreigners, even foreign civilians—no one knows or much cares, it seems, exactly how many Somalis were slain in the Battle of Mogadishu—as long as the events are not brought home to the living room in vivid color. The Pentagon is aware of this, and since Vietnam it has taken pains to ensure that the U.S. press is not given unfettered access to the modern battlefield.
Television has necessarily modified how U.S. forces conduct operations, but it has hardly made it impossible to wage small wars effectively. Indeed, the British army, representing a society every bit as media-saturated as the United States, has shown far less sensitivity to casualties in its small wars (e.g., in Sierra Leone and Kosovo) than its overly cautious cousins across the Atlantic do.
America’s no-casualties mindset was finally jettisoned in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. America’s leaders decided that the country was ready to support military action that risked sending body bags home. It is sobering to speculate what might have been achieved if this conclusion had been reached earlier. Might Osama bin Laden have been prevented from launching these bloody attacks if the U.S. had done more than lob a few cruise missiles at him in 1998?
The Big-War Force
It is hard to say exactly who was responsible for the military’s no-casualties mindset, demanded neither by ordinary civilians nor by ordinary soldiers. Political leaders blame the generals and admirals, claiming they are still psychologically traumatized by the scars of Vietnam. The generals and admirals blame political leaders, claiming that the men and women in uniform are unwilling to take risks because if something goes wrong, they will be left to twist in the wind by their political masters. Both explanations have merit, insofar as military policy is set through a complex interaction between the Pentagon, White House, and Capitol Hill.
A similarly complicated process—with the added lobbying clout of defense contractors thrown in—produces the structure and equipment of the armed forces. In the 1990s and early 2000s, that structure often proved ill-suited to the demands of “contingency operations,” the newest argot for “small wars.” “Still trying to fight our kind of war—be it World War II or Desert Storm—we ignore the real war-fighting requirements of today,” says retired Marine General Anthony Zinni. “My generation has not been well prepared for this future, because we resisted the idea.”
The future of small wars requires pretty much what the past did—well-trained infantry. Although high-tech gadgets can come in handy and close air or light armor support can be invaluable, many of the expensive weapons systems the U.S. armed forces have come to rely on are neutralized in small war settings—unless the war in question consists of nothing but punitive strikes. Seventy-ton M1 Abrams tanks are too big to make it down the streets of a Third World city. (The 1st Armored Division found its tanks more hindrance than help when it was sent to Bosnia in 1995.) There are few targets for B-2 stealth bombers to hit when fighting guerrillas. Aegis guided-missile cruisers cannot separate warring factions. Yet in the armed services, most careers are built around such technologies.
In the 1990s, even as it grumbled about the expense of too many deployments, the Pentagon continued ordering superexpensive new weapons systems such as the VSNX aircraft carrier and the Crusader self-propelled howitzer, as well as both the F-22 fighter plane and the Joint Strike Fighter. This is not to suggest that these systems are useless or unnecessary; the military must continue to prepare for big wars and small, and some costly platforms (such as B-52 bombers) can readily be adapted for lesser contingencies. But the military has placed too much emphasis on these systems at the expense of technologies (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator and Global Hawk) that hold great promise but have little constituency inside the Pentagon.
The bigger concern is that the military found itself badly configured for the missions it was called on to undertake after the end of the Cold War. The problem was especially acute in the army, organized in a divisional structure that has changed little since Napoleon’s day. Although the army had plenty of heavy divisions, there was not enough fast sealift or airlift to deploy them to a battle zone quickly. It took six months to assemble an army during the Persian Gulf War; in the future the armed forces are unlikely to have so long. When it had to assemble a small-war force, the army often had to mix and match parts from various commands because it did not have self-contained units ready for the job at hand. This disrupted training routines, lowered combat readiness, and created hardship for those left behind, who had to pick up the workload of the soldiers who were deployed. Hence complaints about an excessive “operations tempo.”
Sometimes there simply were not enough of the right people in the regular forces—especially in specialties such as military police and intelligence—to get the job done, forcing the army to call up reservists. Over 95 percent of the army’s civil affairs and psychological warfare specialists are in the reserves.
This was, at least in part, another legacy of Vietnam. In the 1970s the army restructured itself to make large-scale conflict virtually impossible without reservists, on the assumption that no president would call up the reserves for an unpopular war. But this policy has made smaller-scale deployments overly dependent on part-time soldiers, who grumble, rightly, that they signed up with the understanding that they would be deployed only in a major emergency.
By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. armed forces had begun to recognize that they were not properly configured for the challenges ahead. The air force reorganized itself into expeditionary units. The army set up an experimental medium-weight brigade designed to deploy anywhere in the world within 96 hours. But the armed forces need to change more than their organizational chart; they need to change their outlook. Their mindset remains that of a mass army composed of conscripts mobilized to win a big war, but that is not the role of the armed forces early in the twenty-first century. They are a smaller, all-volunteer force, one of whose duties is policing the Pax Americana.
“The mentality of an imperial army is, of necessity, utterly different from that of a mass army,” writes strategist Eliot Cohen. “The former is composed of soldiers; the latter crusaders. The former accepts ambiguous objectives, interminable commitments and chronic skirmishes as a fact of life; the latter wants a definable mission, a plan for victory and decisive battles. In the imperial army the trooper finds fulfillment in the soldier’s life; in the mass army in the belief that he exists to ‘fight and win America’s wars.’”
The incompatibility between the armed forces’ big war mindset and their small war missions accounts for a good deal of the angst suffered by the services, especially the army, since the end of the Cold War.
The Small-War Force
The American armed forces—1.4 million strong as of 2001—are a wide and variegated lot, so it stands to reason that not everyone in uniform will be resistant to small-war missions. The two most notable exceptions have been the Special Operations forces and the marines.
Although technically a part of the army, the Special Operations forces are almost a fifth branch of the armed forces. The army’s Special Operations Command, headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is composed of some 26,000 soldiers, including the Rangers (light infantry), the Delta Force commandos, an air support squadron known as the Night Stalkers, civil affairs and psychological warfare groups, and the Special Forces. (These forces in turn report to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which also encompasses navy and air force commandos.) The civil affairs/psy-ops and Special Forces are especially focused on political, peacetime missions.
At any one time, there are 1,200 to 1,500 Special Forces operators—popularly known as Green Berets—deployed in dozens of countries around the world, working on missions ranging from removing land mines to training friendly foreign militaries. The Special Forces’ basic unit is the A Team, typically composed of a dozen hand-picked veterans—one captain, one warrant officer, ten sergeants. These tough operators pride themselves on being “culturally sensitive,” “linguistically able,” and proficient in surviving without the elaborate infrastructure the U.S. military customarily lugs overseas, using their wiles to accomplish a wide range of tasks far removed from conventional warfare. Their nickname—the “snake eaters”—sums up their ethos.
In preparation for overseas assignments, the psy-ops and civil affairs specialists receive even more extensive language and cultural training than do the Special Forces. This author visited one classroom at Fort Bragg where an African-born professor teaches a course on his native continent that would not be out of place in America’s leading graduate schools.
The psy-ops soldiers are the military’s experts in marketing and advertising. Their job is to undermine enemy morale, smooth the path for American troops, and achieve U.S. objectives with a minimum of bloodshed. Civil affairs specialists undertake the essential task of governance wherever American troops may find themselves—otherwise known as imperialism (a term that, needless to say, they never use). Psy-ops and civil affairs soldiers, wearing distinctive red berets, are an essential element of U.S. occupations in countries ranging from Haiti to Kosovo—as their predecessors were in Germany and Japan, and in the Philippines before that. Without their work, a battlefield triumph may amount to little. Hence the civil affairs motto: “Secure the Victory.”
Unlike the army’s civil-affairs units, the marines are not known for their tact or diplomacy, yet they too embrace small-war missions, so much a part of their tradition as the “911 Force.” In the 1980s the marines even reprinted the Small Wars Manual and made it part of the curriculum at the Basic School, where all newly commissioned officers are trained. In the 2000s, they set about writing an updated Small Wars Manual.
What makes the marines suited for these missions? Traditionally they (like the Special Forces) have focused on people, not weapons systems. They see themselves less as “tank drivers” or “fighter pilots” than as warriors. Their famous credo: Every marine a rifleman. The marines are also flexible in organization. Marine expeditionary units can be formed quickly by drawing on infantry, air power, artillery, armor—whatever is appropriate for the job at hand. Within these units, marines stress flexibility and initiative down to the lowest ranks, a vital requirement in the chaotic and fast-shifting environment of a small war.
The marines are far from perfect. In Beirut in 1983, because of overly restrictive rules of engagement, they were caught unprepared and lost 241 servicemen. But by and large they have been far better at small wars than the army. The contrast was on vivid display in Somalia.
The marines took an aggressive attitude. They patrolled actively and always bristled with firepower, letting Somalis know they were not to be messed with. Paradoxically the marines wound up killing far fewer Somalis—some 500—than the army, which tried a more diplomatic approach but ended up killing 5,000. After the marines left, the warlords, especially Muhammed Farah Aidid, became bolder in challenging U.N. and U.S. forces. Casualties ensued. As special U.S. envoy Robert Oakley said, “The departure of the heavily armed, aggressively patrolling marines from south Mogadishu obviously had a much greater psychological effect on the Somalis, especially the SNA (Aidid’s Somali National Alliance), than the continued presence of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) from the (army’s) 10th Mountain Division.” The ultimate result was the death of 18 U.S. soldiers.
By contrast, the marines read their Small Wars Manual, which counsels that “the morale effect of tanks and armored cars is probably greater in small wars operations than it is in a major war.” They brought in armored vehicles to surround warlord compounds and did not suffer any disasters. (The marines employed light armor, well suited for the situation, not the heavy armor that the army tried to take into the Balkans with little success.)
Although sometimes caricatured as homicidal Neanderthals (see, e.g., Full Metal Jacket), the marines have shown themselves to be the most intellectually supple of the services. A visitor to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina—East Coast base for marine expeditionary forces—finds the marines practicing not only traditional amphibious assaults but also newer missions such as crowd control in urban areas. The marines know that the world is becoming heavily urbanized and realize they had better develop a strategy for urban warfare; otherwise they will suffer as heavily as the army did in Mogadishu. The army by contrast takes the approach that it doesn’t “do” cities; it prefers to go around, rather than through, urban areas. Just as in earlier days the army preferred not to “do” counterinsurgency. Alas, America’s enemies are seldom obliging enough—Saddam Hussein being a notable exception—to fight the kind of wars many in the Pentagon would prefer. Indeed the costliest foreign attack on American soil—the September 11, 2001, airliner hijackings—came from terrorists utilizing box cutters and knives, not the kind of foes the regular military establishment has spent most of its energy preparing to fight.