It looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. In the inky
darkness, men in full combat gear, armed with automatic weapons and
wearing night-vision goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable
hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then, in a flash, each
“fast-roped” down onto a ship below. Afterward, “Mike,” a Navy SEAL who
would not give his last name, bragged to an Army public affairs
sergeant that, when they were on their game, the SEALs could put 15 men
on a ship this way in 30 seconds or less.
Once on the aft deck, the special ops troops broke into squads and
methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in Jinhae Harbor, South
Korea. Below deck and on the bridge, the commandos located several men
and trained their weapons on them, but nobody fired a shot. It was,
after all, a training exercise.
All of those ship-searchers were SEALs, but not all of them were
American. Some were from Naval Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado,
California; others hailed from South Korea’s Naval Special Brigade.
The drill was part of Foal Eagle 2012, a multinational, joint-service
exercise. It was also a model for -- and one small part of -- a much
publicized U.S. military “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia, a
move that includes sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to
Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in Singapore,
strengthening military ties with
Vietnam and
India,
staging war games in the Philippines (as well as a drone strike there),
and shifting the majority of the Navy’s ships to the Pacific by the end
of the decade.
That modest training exercise also reflected another kind of pivot.
The face of American-style war-fighting is once again changing. Forget
full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian
mainland; instead, think: special operations forces working on their own
but also training or fighting beside allied militaries (if not outright
proxy armies) in hot spots around the world. And along with those
special ops advisors, trainers, and commandos expect ever more funds and
efforts to flow into the militarization of spying and intelligence, the
use of drone aircraft, the launching of cyber-attacks, and joint
Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized “civilian” government
agencies.
Much of this has been noted in the media, but how it all fits
together into what could be called the new global face of empire has
escaped attention. And yet this represents nothing short of a new Obama
doctrine, a six-point program for twenty-first-century war,
American-style, that the administration is now carefully developing and
honing. Its global scope is already breathtaking, if little recognized,
and like Donald Rumsfeld’s military lite and David Petraeus’s
counterinsurgency operations, it is evidently going to have its day in
the sun -- and like them, it will undoubtedly disappoint in ways that
will surprise its creators.
The Blur-ness
For many years, the U.S. military has been talking up and promoting the concept of “
jointness.”
An Army helicopter landing Navy SEALs on a Korean ship catches some of
this ethos at the tactical level. But the future, it seems, has
something else in store. Think of it as “blur-ness,” a kind of
organizational version of war-fighting in which a dominant Pentagon
fuses its forces with other government agencies -- especially the CIA,
the State Department, and the Drug Enforcement Administration -- in
complex, overlapping missions around the globe.
In 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began his "revolution in military affairs," steering the Pentagon toward a
military-lite model of high-tech,
agile forces. The concept came to a
grim end
in Iraq’s embattled cities. A decade later, the last vestiges of its
many failures continue to play out in a stalemated war in Afghanistan
against a rag-tag minority insurgency that can’t be beaten. In the
years since, two secretaries of defense and a new president have
presided over another transformation -- this one geared toward avoiding
ruinous, large-scale land wars which the U.S. has consistently proven
unable to win.
Under President Obama, the U.S. has expanded or launched numerous
military campaigns -- most of them utilizing a mix of the six elements
of twenty-first-century American war. Take the American war in Pakistan
-- a poster-child for what might now be called the Obama formula, if
not doctrine. Beginning as a
highly-circumscribed drone assassination campaign backed by limited
cross-border
commando raids under the Bush administration, U.S. operations in
Pakistan have expanded into something close to a full-scale robotic air
war, complemented by
cross-border helicopter
attacks, CIA-funded “
kill teams” of Afghan proxy forces, as well as boots-on-the-ground
missions by elite special operations forces, including the
SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
The CIA has conducted clandestine intelligence and surveillance
missions
in Pakistan, too, though its role may, in the future, be less
important, thanks to Pentagon mission creep. In April, in fact,
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
announced the creation of a new CIA-like espionage agency within the Pentagon called the Defense Clandestine Service. According to the
Washington Post, its aim is to expand “the military’s espionage efforts beyond war zones.”
Over the last decade, the very notion of war zones has become
remarkably muddled, mirroring the blurring of the missions and
activities of the CIA and Pentagon. Analyzing the new agency and the
“broader convergence trend” between Department of Defense and CIA
missions, the
Post
noted that the “blurring is also evident in the organizations’ upper
ranks. Panetta previously served as CIA director, and that post is
currently held by retired four-star Army Gen. David H. Petraeus.”
Not to be outdone, last year the State Department, once the seat of diplomacy, continued on its
long march to militarization (and marginalization) when it agreed to pool some of its resources with the Pentagon to create the
Global Security Contingency Fund.
That program will allow the Defense Department even greater say in how
aid from Washington will flow to proxy forces in places like Yemen and
the Horn of Africa.
One thing is certain: American war-making (along with its spies and
its diplomats) is heading ever deeper into “the shadows.” Expect yet
more clandestine operations in ever more places with, of course, ever
more potential for blowback in the years ahead.
Shedding Light on “the Dark Continent”
One locale likely to see an influx of Pentagon spies in the coming
years is Africa. Under President Obama, operations on the continent
have accelerated far
beyond the more
limited interventions of the
Bush years. Last year’s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of
airports and bases in Djibouti,
Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of
30 ships
in that ocean supporting regional operations; a multi-pronged military
and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including
intelligence operations, training for Somali agents,
secret prisons,
helicopter attacks, and U.S.
commando raids; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across
East Africa; a possible
old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft;
tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops
expeditionary force (bolstered by
State Department experts)
dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph
Kony and his senior commanders, operating in Uganda, South Sudan, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the
Central African Republic (where U.S. Special Forces now have a new
base) only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.
Even less well known are other U.S. military efforts designed to
train African forces for operations now considered integral to American
interests on the continent. These include, for example, a mission by
elite Force Recon Marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground
Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12) to train soldiers from the Uganda People's
Defense Force, which supplies the majority of troops to the African
Union Mission in Somalia.
Earlier this year, Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from
the Burundi National Defense Force, the second-largest contingent in
Somalia; sent trainers into Djibouti (where the U.S. already maintains a
major Horn of Africa base at Camp Lemonier); and traveled to Liberia
where they focused on teaching riot-control techniques to Liberia’s
military as part of an otherwise State Department spearheaded effort to
rebuild that force.
The U.S. is also
conducting
counterterrorism training and equipping militaries in Algeria, Burkina
Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia. In addition, U.S. Africa
Command (Africom) has 14 major joint-training exercises planned for
2012, including operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South
Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and what may become the Pakistan of Africa,
Nigeria.
Even this, however, doesn’t encompass the full breadth of U.S.
training and advising missions in Africa. To take an example not on
Africom’s list, this spring the U.S. brought together 11 nations,
including Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Liberia, Mauritania, and Sierra
Leone to take part in a maritime training exercise code-named Saharan
Express 2012.
Back in the Backyard
Since its founding, the United States has often meddled close to
home, treating the Caribbean as its private lake and intervening at will
throughout Latin America. During the Bush years,
with some
notable
exceptions, Washington’s interest in America’s “backyard” took a
backseat to wars farther from home. Recently, however, the Obama
administration has been ramping up operations south of the border using
its new formula. This has meant Pentagon
drone missions
deep inside Mexico to aid that country’s battle against the drug
cartels, while CIA agents and civilian operatives from the Department of
Defense were
dispatched to Mexican military bases to take part in the country’s drug war.
In 2012, the Pentagon has also ramped up its anti-drug operations in Honduras. Working out of
Forward Operating Base Mocoron
and other remote camps there, the U.S. military is supporting Honduran
operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
addition, U.S. forces have taken part in joint operations with Honduran
troops as part of a training mission dubbed Beyond the Horizon 2012;
Green Berets have been
assisting
Honduran Special Operations forces in anti-smuggling operations; and a
Drug Enforcement Administration Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team,
originally created to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan, has joined
forces with Honduras’s Tactical Response Team, that country’s most
elite counternarcotics unit. A glimpse of these operations made the
news recently when DEA agents, flying in an American helicopter, were
involved in an aerial attack on
civilians that killed two men and two pregnant women in the remote Mosquito Coast region.
Less visible have been U.S. efforts in Guyana, where Special
Operation Forces have been training local troops in heliborne air
assault techniques.
“This is the first time
we have had this type of exercise involving Special
Operations Forces of the United States on such a grand
scale,”
Colonel Bruce Lovell of the Guyana Defense Force told a U.S. public
affairs official earlier this year. “It gives us a chance to validate
ourselves and see where we are, what are our shortcomings.”
The U.S. military has been similarly active elsewhere in Latin America, concluding training exercises in Guatemala, sponsoring “
partnership-building”
missions in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Panama, and
reaching an agreement to carry out 19 “activities” with the Colombian
army over the next year, including joint military exercises.
Still in the Middle of the Middle East
Despite the end of the Iraq and Libyan wars, a coming drawdown of
forces in Afghanistan, and copious public announcements about its
national security
pivot toward Asia, Washington is by no means withdrawing from the Greater Middle East. In addition to continuing operations in
Afghanistan, the U.S. has consistently been at work training
allied troops, building up military bases, and brokering weapons sales and arms transfers to despots in the region from Bahrain to Yemen.
In fact, Yemen, like its neighbor, Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden,
has become a laboratory for Obama’s wars. There, the U.S. is carrying
out its signature new brand of warfare with “black ops” troops like the
SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force undoubtedly conducting kill/capture
missions, while “white” forces like the Green Berets and Rangers are
training indigenous troops, and robot planes
hunt and kill members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, possibly assisted by an even more secret contingent of
manned aircraft.
The Middle East has also become the somewhat unlikely poster-region
for another emerging facet of the Obama doctrine: cyberwar efforts. In a
category-blurring speaking engagement, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton
surfaced at the recent Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Florida where she gave a
speech
talking up her department’s eagerness to join in the new American way
of war. “We need Special Operations Forces who are as comfortable
drinking tea with tribal leaders as raiding a terrorist compound,'' she
told the crowd. “We also need diplomats and development experts who are
up to the job of being your partners."
Clinton then took the opportunity to
tout
her agency’s online efforts, aimed at websites used by al-Qaeda's
affiliate in Yemen. When al-Qaeda recruitment messages appeared on the
latter,
she said,
“our team plastered the same sites with altered versions… that showed
the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people.” She further
noted that this information-warfare mission was carried out by experts
at State’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications with
assistance, not surprisingly, from the military and the U.S.
Intelligence Community.
These modest on-line efforts join
more potent methods of
cyberwar being employed by the
Pentagon and the CIA, including the recently
revealed
“Olympic Games,” a program of sophisticated attacks on computers in
Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities engineered and unleashed by the
National Security Agency (NSA) and Unit 8200, Israeli’s equivalent of
the NSA. As with other facets of the new way of war, these efforts were
begun under the Bush administration but significantly accelerated under
the current president, who became the first American commander-in-chief
to order sustained cyberattacks designed to cripple another country’s
infrastructure.
From Brushfires to Wildfires
Across the globe from Central and South America to Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia, the Obama administration is working out its formula for
a new American way of war. In its pursuit, the Pentagon and its
increasingly militarized government partners are drawing on everything
from classic precepts of colonial warfare to the latest technologies.
The United States is an imperial power chastened by more than 10
years of failed, heavy-footprint wars. It is hobbled by a hollowing-out
economy, and inundated with hundreds of thousands of recent veterans --
a
staggering 45%
of the troops who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq -- suffering from
service-related disabilities who will require ever more expensive care.
No wonder the current combination of special ops, drones, spy games,
civilian soldiers, cyberwarfare, and proxy fighters sounds like a safer,
saner brand of war-fighting. At first blush, it may even look like a
panacea for America’s national security ills. In reality, it may be
anything but.
The new light-footprint Obama doctrine actually seems to be making
war an ever more attractive and seemingly easy option -- a point
emphasized recently by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
General Peter Pace. "I worry about speed making it too easy to employ
force,"
said Pace
when asked about recent efforts to make it simpler to deploy Special
Operations Forces abroad. "I worry about speed making it too easy to
take the easy answer -- let's go whack them with special operations --
as opposed to perhaps a more laborious answer for perhaps a better
long-term solution."
As a result, the new American way of war holds great potential for
unforeseen entanglements and serial blowback. Starting or fanning
brushfire wars on several continents could lead to raging wildfires that
spread unpredictably and prove difficult, if not impossible, to
quench.
By their very nature, small military engagements tend to get larger,
and wars tend to spread beyond borders. By definition, military action
tends to have unforeseen consequences. Those who doubt this need only
look back to 2001, when three low-tech attacks on a single day set in
motion a decade-plus of war that has spread across the globe. The
response to that one day began with a war in Afghanistan, that spread to
Pakistan, detoured to Iraq, popped up in Somalia and Yemen, and so on.
Today, veterans of those Ur-interventions find themselves trying to
replicate their dubious successes in places like Mexico and Honduras,
the Central Africa Republic and the Congo.
History demonstrates that the U.S. is not very good at
winning wars,
having gone without victory in any major conflict since 1945. Smaller
interventions have been a mixed bag with modest victories in places like
Panama and Grenada and ignominious outcomes in Lebanon (in the 1980s)
and Somalia (in the 1990s), to name a few.
The trouble is, it’s hard to tell what an intervention will grow up
to be -- until it’s too late. While they followed different paths,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq all began relatively small, before
growing large and ruinous. Already, the outlook for the new Obama
doctrine seems far from rosy, despite the good press it’s getting inside
Washington’s Beltway.
What looks today like a formula for easy power projection that will
further U.S. imperial interests on the cheap could soon prove to be an
unmitigated disaster -- one that likely won’t be apparent until it’s too
late.
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