IT MAY SEEM OBVIOUS, but it is often forgotten that our greatest victories come when we exercise enough courage, intelligence, and discipline to win battles without ever having to fight. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, "To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."1 The best preparation for battle will sometimes mean that we do not have to use force at all. I learned this lesson during a deployment to Kenya.
Upon arrival, we drove in a convoy of sport utility vehicles and flew north on the B8 highway from the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa to remote Manda Bay. There, we had a small base at an important strategic location in northern Kenya, just south of the border with Somalia. Our drivers were members of the Guam Army National Guard, who drove with sunglasses over their eyes, a rifle at their side, and their foot on the gas; they served as a security taskforce for the base. We drove single file on the dirt road, following in the wide wake of each other's dust. Manda Bay, I learned, was a place remote enough that when I told Kenyans in Nairobi or Mombasa where I was going, they raised their eyebrows. I was curious about what I'd find there.
As we approached a village, the man in the passenger seat turned to me and said, "Hey, LT, the people in this village hate us; check out how they look at us." Kids dressed in ragged shirts and shorts—sticks in their hand—stopped, stood, and stared at our convoy. Goats ran away in a bleating pack. Adults in the village stood from their work, turned, and looked at us with hard eyes.
"LT, remember when those guys bombed the embassy?" He pointed out the window. "Intel said that they stayed in that village on their way through. Kenya's mostly Christian, but there are Muslims all up and down the coast, and in these villages they don't like Americans."
I'd been in Kenya ten years earlier on my way to Rwanda, and it might have been my earlier nonmilitary experience in the country, but when I looked at the villagers looking at us, I didn't see terrorist sympathizers. I saw angry parents. We had our windows rolled up, sunglasses on, rifles in our hands, and we were driving dangerously fast through a village full of goats and children. I was new, though, just arrived. These men had been here for months, and so I kept quiet.
I had arrived as the new commander of Naval Special Warfare Task Unit Manda Bay. I had been sent to relieve the previous commander, who had damaged relations with the local leaders, the Kenyan Navy, and his own men. My mission was to serve as commander of the operational task unit and also as base commander. I would be responsible for U.S. and Kenyan relations on the base, and I would learn a lot about how to be an ally and a friend there.
In 1998 two men drove a truck bomb to the gate of the parking garage under the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. The passenger jumped out of the truck, threw a grenade at the guard, and ran. The guard survived, the gate remained down, and when the terrorist driver saw the guard radio for backup, he realized that he would not be able to drive into the garage. Instead, he drove as close to the U.S. embassy building as he could and pressed the trigger.2
Two tons of explosives ripped apart a seven-story building next to the embassy, leaving only a pile of rubble and billowing smoke. All the windows of the Cooperative Bank House—a twenty-two-story structure a block away from the embassy—were shattered, as were the windows of other buildings as far as ten blocks away. Glass littered the streets. The embassy—built and used by the Israelis, who were accustomed to bombing attacks—withstood the blast and no one inside died.3 In all, 224 people died in the bombing (including 12 Americans) and an estimated 5,000 people were injured.4
In 2005 we continued to receive reports of terrorist activity in Kenya, much of it associated with the country's neighbor to the north, Somalia. Ever since the collapse of the Somali dictatorship in 1991, Somalia had existed in what political scientists called the "closest thing to anarchy" in the modern age of nation-states. Warlords fought fiercely over territory, and their clashes caused 350,000 people to die of starvation and disease.5 When the international community tried to ship food aid to the Somalis, warlords stole 80 percent of the aid and traded it for weapons.6 The United States provided military and technical support that drastically reduced mass starvation, but when the local warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers, the U.S. role changed from peacekeeping to hunting down Aidid. It led directly to the "Black Hawk Down" incident in 1993, when local militia shot down a U.S. helicopter, leading to a seventeen-hour firefight during which eighteen soldiers and hundreds of Somalis were killed.
The suffering of Somalis remained severe. The country was still ruled at the local level by warlords who fought over scarce resources and terrorized local populations. Four hundred thousand people were still displaced and living in overcrowded and unsanitary refugee camps.7Some foreign aid workers had been killed and many others driven out, and a severe drought created the lowest crop harvest in a decade. To the extent that it was possible to collect any reliable data, it seemed that 43 percent of the population lived below the extreme poverty line.8
Somalis needed food aid more than ever, but pirates continued to raid these shipments, creating the lowest levels of food aid stocks in five years. The problem of piracy was so severe that in 2005, the World Food Programme, the UN's food aid branch, switched to transporting goods overland instead of by sea, despite the 25 to 30 percent increase in costs.9
With the history of terrorism in Kenya, instability to the north in Somalia, and piracy at sea, Manda Bay was an important outpost in the wider struggle against terrorism. Our American compound stood on the campus of a large Kenyan naval base. Our grounds were probably no larger than two football fields. We would later name the base Camp Simba, after the young hero in the Disney animated film The Lion King, because we thought of ourselves as small but ambitious. The chain of command told us, however, that "Camp Simba" wasn't a tough enough name, so after that we just called the base Camp Lion.
As I stepped onto our base, a dozen baboons rushed into the tree line. Our compound was centered around a small house that had once been in shambles—broken roof, smashed walls, trees growing through the floor—but was now, after several deployments of special warfare personnel, structurally sound with a new red roof and a fresh coat of white paint. Inside the house we had a closetful of MREs, a room for treating medical casualties, and a small cramped office loaded with desks and computers and radios.
Surrounding the main house stood five khaki-colored, ten-man tents that hummed with small air-conditioning units used to keep them cool at night. Our camp dog, Basa—short for Mombasa, the port city where we picked up supplies—had been a sick, wounded stray. The guys nursed him back to health, and he was now a vigorous thirty-pound mutt whose self-appointed mission was to deter baboons from stealing our MREs. Basa would bark and run at the baboons when they approached our camp, but the baboons didn't fear Basa; one time I even saw a male baboon pick the dog up and toss him two feet through the air. Hippos cooled in a watering hole down the road.
We were a joint special operations task unit, "joint" because we had Army, Navy, and Marine Corps personnel, and "special operations" because the fighting portion of our unit was mostly Navy SWCC operators, who conducted operations with RHIBs, jet-ski-like vehicles, and indigenous craft, while also running a training school for Kenyan special forces personnel. The mission in Kenya, much like the mission in the Philippines, was to work with, by, and through local Kenyan forces to conduct counterterror training and operations.
In places like the Philippines, and here in Kenya, we aimed to build relationships of goodwill and mutual advantage. We needed to be prepared for a gunfight, but we expected to have few outright battles with terrorists. Our objective was to create positions of strength and to accumulate advantages that would help us defeat terrorists if they surfaced, hunt them if they were hiding, and minimize their ability to recruit others to their cause.
America had declared that we were fighting a "war" on terrorism, and Americans tend to think of war in terms of ultimate victory, like achieving checkmate in chess. But that way of thinking about conflict can be misleading. As others have pointed out, "Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game is absolute advantage—that is to say, its outcome is total victory or defeat—and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board." But in a conflict with terrorists, the fight is different. If we wanted to make an analogy to a board game, it was better, perhaps, to think in terms of the Asian game of go: "The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress."10
Our goal in Kenya was persistent strategic progress. Our men launched their boats into Manda Bay alongside their Kenyan counterparts. They taught the Kenyans how to track suspect craft, how to control prisoners, and how to fight as a team. Our men ran sprints with the Kenyans down asphalt roads—fireman-carrying each other on their shoulders—to build character and camaraderie. If we trained Kenyans who could stop al Qaeda associates running explosives and weapons from Somalia, we made strategic progress.
We sent our men with cameras and radios in indigenous craft to conduct special reconnaissance operations in places that had previously not been accessible to us. If we saw more, understood more, and became wiser, we made persistent strategic progress. We visited with mayors from nearby towns and our civil affairs officers sat with them over tea to discuss wells and schools and the health of local children. If we could build allies so that al Qaeda would have fewer friends, then we made persistent strategic progress.
We also experimented by, for example, mounting guns and GPS units and radios on our jet skis for operations. I wasn't sure how practical the jet skis really were as operational craft—they ripped around the bay, motors screaming; they had limited range, couldn't carry a boarding party, and had no room for sensors. But we all loved the idea of using the jet skis to run down terrorists and pirates, and if we could invent new, effective tactics to deter terrorists, we made progress.
Our actual operations were straightforward. Our task unit executed operational preparation of the environment (OPE) missions in towns along the Kenyan coast. The task: provide senior commanders with critical information regarding the logistical infrastructure of Kenyan ports so that we could plan for future operations along the entire Kenyan coast, from Tanzania to Somalia. If we wanted to conduct operations out of Kenyan coastal towns, we had to know where we could harbor boats safely, where we could buy fuel, where we could post guards, and where we could feed and rest our special operations teams. It's fun to think strategy, but logistics are the key to successful operations, and by conducting these assessments, our task unit made it possible to carry out operations along the entire coast of Kenya. Persistent strategic progress.
At the same time, we worked closely with Kenyan Navy authorities to secure permission to use their radar stations along the coast in conjunction with maritime interception operations (MIO). The Kenyans had large radar stations capable of monitoring traffic off the coast, but they'd never used these stations to work with Kenyan special boat units. For the first time, we established radio communications and standard operating procedures to use the radar stations to help us intercept suspect vessels. This new capability greatly improved the ability of the Kenyan Navy to exercise control over their own coastline. Persistent strategic progress.
We established a more aggressive MIO schedule for the RHIB detachment. We doubled their time on the water and interdicted more suspect craft. In practice, this meant that the Kenyan Navy, like a beat cop, was on post more of the time. A space that had been largely ungoverned was now patrolled by Kenyan special operations units. Persistent strategic progress.
For us, the key to every positive step was to build strong allies. As the base commander, part of my job was to oversee the quality of Kenyan-U.S. relations in the area. And here is where I learned the most important lesson of my Kenyan deployment: a single, perhaps inadvertent, slap can undo months of patient work to build good relations. In my case, the slap centered on a marooned forklift.
A few months before I arrived, our jet skis were motoring back to port after a test run in the bay. The driver of the jet ski stepped off his ride into shallow water and waved to an American contractor operating a forklift on the beach. The guy on the forklift thought that the guy with the jet ski was signaling for help, so the forklift driver started to drive the forklift down the beach to tow the jet ski out of the water. The man on the jet ski saw trouble and waved with two hands to tell the man to stop. The forklift driver interpreted this as an "emergency" wave and stepped on the gas. The surface was soft and the forklift became impossibly stuck in the sand at low tide. The water started to rise. By high tide, the ocean covered all but the driver's cage at the very top of the forklift.
The port where the forklift was marooned was, unfortunately, used by both U.S. and Kenyan personnel to put boats in and out of the water. The buried forklift presented a hazard to navigation and the Kenyans wanted to move it.
What should have been a very simple affair (hire local Kenyans with a tow truck to haul the forklift out of the sand during low tide) became unsimple. In my office, previous commanders had a stack of memos filled with advice about "the Forklift." I learned that the United States couldn't legally give the forklift to the Kenyans (they offered to drag it out for free if they could use it for scrap metal) unless it was officially declared unserviceable. And though the forklift had been stuck in salt water for months, officers in Djibouti—one thousand miles away—wanted to debate its functionality. Moreover, to give the forklift away, the U.S. government had to figure out who actually owned it. Whose forklift was this, anyway? No one in the U.S. government seemed to know. For months, the greatest superpower in the world was unable to move a forklift, and we couldn't even grant permission to the Kenyans to take it. It was an absurd situation, and for me it stood as a reminder that there are two U.S. militaries. There is the fighting military, where troops are led and operations are conducted. Then there is the Department of Defense. Many great people and great warriors work in the Department of Defense, but too often, men and women dressed in camouflage sit at computers alongside civilian contractors and send e-mails and reports and briefs in circles around what is the largest and often one of the most risk-averse, uncreative, inefficient bureaucracies in the world.
I was told that the commander of the Kenyan base was unhappy with the American military presence for a number of reasons—forklift included—so I drove with my senior enlisted advisor to pay the base commander a visit.
The captain's office was simple—white walls unadorned but for a single calendar and the black, green, and red flag of Kenya. A low stack of papers sat on his desk. The captain, a thin man about five eight, had cracked a window to let in a breeze, and he was chewing a cheekful of khat—a mild stimulant popular in Kenya. We shook hands, his secretary brought tea, and we sat on a couch just outside his office.
"Sir, thank you for making the time to see us. It's good to meet you. Your men have been a pleasure to work with and I understand that the maritime operations course is going very well."
The captain gave a half-smile. "Yes, we are very proud of this course."
After a cup of tea, we came to discuss the forklift, and he said to me, "This is a troubling and confusing issue. I don't understand why the Americans cannot move it or why we cannot move it. We can move it for you."
"I agree," I said. "You and I see the issue the same way."
"Yes, but it has been months, it is sitting there in a port. It's not in a convenient place. I don't understand why it can't move. It's a very funny thing, isn't it?"
We talked for a good half hour about many things that we had in common—the future of the maritime operations course, the need for a boat ramp at the post, the baboon population on base. At the end of the conversation, I invited him to dinner. I said, "You are very gracious hosts for us here on the base, and we'd love to have you come to our compound, to host you and your team for dinner. It would be an honor to have you there."
He said, "Thank you, that would be nice. But you know, I went there some months ago and they asked to search our vehicle. And I was surprised because this is my base. And that was a very funny thing."
"I apologize," I said. "These men, I understand, had orders to search every vehicle that came into our compound. The fact that they failed to recognize you is embarrassing for us because, after all, this is your base, sir, and you are in charge here."
He didn't accept my invitation, but I left impressed by the captain's patience. I imagined how an American base commander would respond if a visiting Kenyan unit marooned a forklift in our port and searched our senior officers on American territory.
I went back to our compound and read through a stack of forklift e-mails. It became clear that no one had actually ordered us to leave the forklift in the bay. Instead, what had happened was that people had started asking for permission to move the forklift, and then a few dozen e-mails bounced from Manda Bay to Nairobi, to Bahrain to D.C. to San Diego to Djibouti, and back to Manda Bay, but everyone was waiting for permission from someone else. I drove back to see the captain again.
"Sir, this forklift has been an issue for you for far too long. So let's get it out of your port."
"So, we can move it?"
"Yes sir, feel free to move it as you see best, and of course my men and I will help you to move it, if you'd like for us to do so. And this, sir, is for you."
I handed him a VIP placard that he could put in his vehicle so that our security task force could identify him and render the proper respect when he came to our compound.
I also paid a visit to the mayor of Lamu, the nearest city. Old Town Lamu, Kenya, is one of the oldest inhabited towns in East Africa. Mentioned in the journals of Ptolemy in the second century, Lamu has always been a bustling merchant town that has attracted traders from Persia, India, Portugal, and other trading posts around the world.11 As we approached the city in a Kenyan water taxi, I saw white block houses, some thatched with dried palm leaves, others with flat tops and red terracotta roofs. Green palm trees climbed for the sky between the houses, and wooden ships lined the harbor wall, piled with crates of food and boxes of construction supplies. Many of the ships were loaded so heavily that the bay water lapped inches from the gunwales. Sunken ships and drownings, I learned, were not uncommon.
I stepped off our boat and walked up the wet concrete steps onto the wide dirt road that ran along the harbor wall. Here knobby-kneed boys with sticks tapped the backsides of donkeys carrying loads of concrete, wood, and grain. Donkeys were everywhere. Donkeys nosed in the faded yellow-and-green telephone booths and slumbered outside mosques. Other donkeys carried coral stone loaded in woven sacks and dragged long wooden poles cut from mangrove trees. Still other donkeys were ridden by young boys who raced them along the packed dirt roads of the island. I was told that there were over two thousand donkeys on the island.
I sat with the mayor and talked over tea. He was a middle-aged man of obvious energy, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt. I had heard that he had the privileged use of the town's only motor vehicle besides Lamu's one ambulance. At one point, the mayor pointed out the window, not in any specific direction, but only to indicate "out there," and he told me that American civil affairs officers had promised to help build a school, but that the construction had been halted. I shook my head as I left.
As Americans we often have a tendency to want to build things in an effort to promote goodwill. We'd often be far better off investing in people. Trying to build a school in Kenya is a difficult venture, hampered by corruption and local politics. In any building project there is a strong tendency for local officials to fight over petty advantages. Building projects are capital intensive, and because Americans usually aren't closely involved in the actual building process, once a school is built, the U.S. often receives little credit. The United States will, however, be blamed for every failing roof, broken desk, and cracked sink. More importantly, a building cannot speak, cannot act as an ambassador of goodwill. At best, Americans are present for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and then we're gone. We'd be far better off paying for the quality training of quality teachers and then even paying some teachers' salaries. A beginning teacher in Kenya makes $1,560 a year.12 By investing in people, we could build pro-American ambassadors to teach the next generation of schoolchildren, and those teachers would feel personally connected to the United States. They would be in the classroom every day. If we were investing in projects to make friends, why wouldn't we invest in people? It's hard to be friends with a building.
Every morning I went out to run along the straight dirt road that led away from our base. The road, wide enough for a car and a half and flanked by thin-trunked trees on either side, served as a gathering place for baboons. I'd seen baboons in zoos before, and years earlier when I'd come through Kenya on my way to Rwanda, I'd seen a troop of baboons in a game park—but I'd never been this close to them. Baboons are scary. The males standing on the side of the road looked like they weighed seventy to eighty pounds, and when they tilted their heads back to yawn, I saw pairs of two-inch yellow fangs. They lounged on the road like a pack of thugs. One of the guys told me to clap when I saw them, and so I raised my hands in the air and clapped and the baboons turned and saw me and scampered into the tree line.
I picked up my pace. I was training for a marathon at the time, and I hoped that some kind of Kenyan marathon magic would find its way into my legs. About a mile outside the base, I came to a village, and the road was lined with children walking to school in their uniforms: bright white shirts and blue shorts.
"Jambo," I said.
"Jambo," replied a boy.
"How are you?" I smiled at them.
"Good. How are you?" one boy said and started to run with me. The kids got used to seeing me every morning, and as I ran, they would call from house to house, "Mzungu, mzungu"—the white man is coming—and kids streamed out of houses and ran beside me. Often I'd have three or four boys join me for a full quarter mile, smiles on their faces, their backpacks bouncing on their backs as they jogged alongside.
When I returned to the base after a run one day, one of the Kenyan guards stood from his seat to greet me and asked, "Sir, you're a runner? How far do you run?"
"About eleven miles today," I said.
"You should run with me," he said, "so we can see who is faster." A smile turned up the corners of his mouth.
The next morning I met the guard, Daniel, at the guard shack. About six foot two, Daniel started down the road, and his legs seemed to leap from the ground with the most fluid, powerful stride I had ever seen. As I huffed beside him I asked, "Have you run much?"
"No, not lately. The last time I competed internationally was in South Africa several years ago."
I said, "Well, that's OK, the last time I competed internationally was never." As we ran, we talked. I learned that Daniel worked an eight- or twelve-hour shift at the guard shack every day. He lived in a room with dozens of other guards, and he hadn't been paid in two months.
"Do you," he asked, "work with the men on the special operations training course here?"
"Yes, we do," I said.
"Those men," he said, "are very proud. One day I would like to join those men."
Time and again, when we met Kenyans one on one, they gave us friendly smiles, exuded hospitality and warmth. It was only when we drove through town in a nasty dust cloud, or fouled a harbor, that we were resented.
Our relations seemed poor to me, and so I wasn't surprised that the U.S. intelligence picture in the Horn of Africa was weak. Much of what I read consisted of recycled news headlines repackaged as intelligence. Real, valuable intelligence only came from real people, yet we hadn't done much to meet and work with the people of Kenya. I told my senior enlisted advisor that I wanted to take our guys to the "bad" village that we'd driven through on our way to Manda Bay. We'd get out of our trucks, meet people, and buy some fruit.
"You sure you want to do that? Something goes wrong, and that's a career ender."
"I'm sure," I said. "We need to do something to begin to build some good relationships here. And the guys'll be happy about the fruit."
We had no fresh fruit or vegetables at Manda Bay. Our supply officers in Djibouti tried to get us fresh fruit, but it was difficult to transport an orange from Europe to Djibouti, from Djibouti to Mombasa, and from Mombasa up to Lamu. We ate peaches soaked in syrup packaged in MRE bags. Meanwhile, local markets had stalls full of fresh fruit and vegetables. The Department of Defense wouldn't provide us with funds, however, to make purchases from an "unapproved supplier." The guys were fine living on MREs, but I thought that buying at the local market would be an excellent way to build positive relationships with the local villagers.
I grabbed a wallet full of my own money and a holster to conceal a pistol, and we drove a small convoy to the local village. The guys stepped out of their vehicles and—as I'd asked them to—pushed their sunglasses up on their heads so that the villagers could see our eyes. We shook hands with people. As we picked through the fruit stalls, the villagers—who had previously only seen us driving back and forth with our sunglasses on, windows rolled up, rifles in our hands—asked us questions.
"Where are you from?"
"How do you like Kenya?"
"Do you want something to drink?"
In the name of "force protection," the military often rolls up windows, builds walls, and points rifles at the outside world. The best force protection, however, is to be surrounded by friends and allies. If we'd had permission to buy local food, we could have fed ourselves at one-tenth or even one-twentieth of what it costs American taxpayers to provide us with food. We'd have had better food, and we might have built valuable friendships.
Some reports indicated that when the terrorists who bombed the American embassy came to Kenya, they stayed in the village where we were now buying fruit. The whole attack might have been prevented if we'd had a few friends willing to share intelligence with us. I knew that we weren't going to change the world buying a few bags of fruit, but the risk-averse mindset of much of the military bureaucracy can often prevent leaders from taking even small commonsense steps. A leader who walls his men away from the local population in the name of force protection is rarely questioned, while those who take risks to build relationships are sometimes punished in case of failure. As we drove back to base, the guys were chattering like I'd never heard them before.
"Yeah, I started talking with that one guy about fishing..."
"I bought ten of those mango things. Dude, these are good."
"That one lady liked you, man. She was all smiley and stuff."
"Did you see that kid's shirt with all the holes in it? We should take him one of our shirts."
Shortly after, the captain of the base invited us to join him for a dinner to celebrate another joint Kenyan-American course completed.
Later, when I went to Iraq, I'd find that the entire campaign turned on simple actions like these; where we built friends and allies, we won. George C. Marshall, commander of American forces during World War II, and later secretary of state, secretary of defense, the architect of the Marshall Plan, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, had three simple rules for going to war: "Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, never fight for long." What he believed then is still true now: the longer we fight alone, the longer we'll have to fight.
Daniel and I kept up our morning runs, and the night before I was scheduled to leave, Daniel biked to our base. Our guards radioed me from the gate, and I told them to let Daniel in. I walked out to meet him and he pedaled to me and then stopped and stood with the bike between his legs. We shook hands.
"How are you, Daniel?"
"Very good, sir, very good." There was an odd formality in Daniel's voice. I wondered if it was because he was on our compound.
Daniel looked at the ground. "Sir, I was wondering if it would be possible to get some MREs before you leave."
"Of course, Daniel," I said.
Working with foreign military forces, Americans often have to negotiate how much to give. In places like the Philippines, Kenya, and Afghanistan, the gulf in resources between American forces and our counterparts can be so vast that it makes for awkward choices. We can't be seen as a piggy bank to be dipped into and taken advantage of, but if we assist with nothing, we lose face and friends.
We couldn't have every Kenyan on base bicycling in to ask for boxes of MREs, but Daniel had become my friend. "So Daniel, you know if I come back, I'll come back faster."
"Yes, perhaps," he said, "but maybe I'll be faster, too."
I helped Daniel tie the box of MREs onto his bicycle. We shook hands again, and he pedaled away.