Reset Defense Blog

By Carl Conetta, 21 Dec 2015

There’s ample global storm and stress these days, and the cries of alarm will get worse over the next months as we approach the 2016 election. It’s an old story – to paraphrase: “With America in retreat overseas, exceptional threats and crises are looming. Decisive action is needed, but the White House has gone wobbly. And our armed forces – overtaxed and cut to the bone – are unready.”

This trope has gained prominence three times in the past 40 years, always to great effect. Its resurgence depends on the intersection of three conditions: 1. A troubled Democratic presidency, suffering a decline in popularity (initially for domestic reasons); 2. A period of reduced defense spending; and 3. A pending and hotly-contested presidential election. Carter faced it as did Clinton (in 1998-2000). Now Obama faces it. (A fuller analysis of this dynamic can be found in my 2014 report, Something in the Air: ‘Isolationism,’ Defense Spending, and the US Public Mood. A relevant excerpt is here. Both links are PDFs.)

Hawks are always ready to peddle the “America weak and endangered” trope, but it doesn’t gain traction absent the three conditions mentioned above. The dynamic works like this: Given a weakened Presidency, military leaders feel freer to exit the White House narrative and argue their institutional interests unalloyed: “Boost our budget, the nation is at risk!” This feeds the partisan mill and begins moving public debate and opinion rightward. (For a chart covering 50 years of US public opinion on Pentagon spending see Gallup’s Military and National Defense page.)

With an eye on the polls and sensitive to the drop in presidential popularity, some congressional Democrats follow suit, seeking to protect their right flank. The White House, too, tries to get ahead of the curve, adopting a more bellicose stance and pumping up the Pentagon budget. (Indeed, the administration itself many splinter, with some luminaries jumping ship.  Rather than stemming the tide, the hawkish turn among Democrats creates the impression of a new hawkish “consensus.” Many point to firebrands like McCain and Lindsey Graham, but it’s the Democrats in retreat that precipitate the stampede to the Right.

Obama has differed from Clinton and Carter in one respect: He’s accommodated the Pentagon from the start, hoping to avoid the dilemma that snared his predecessors. He boosted the DoD budget above Bush levels and kept it there for three years. As sequestration loomed, he argued against it and also allowed DoD and the Chiefs to lash out. Yes, he partially withdrew troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but slowly – and not before an Afghan surge. As troops came home, drone strikes increased and the administration enacted a “muscular” shift to Asia, an AirSea Battle strategy, and new military initiatives all across Africa.

But the gambit didn’t work. As soon as sequestration bit into the Pentagon and the President stumbled domestically (it was the economy, stupid), the hawks jumped. Now the President is left scampering after his hawkish critics. Whatever he says – bombs, troops, billions – they just say “more.” It’s not a pretty sight, nor one likely to win public confidence.

But aren’t today’s global crises real? ISIS, Russia in Ukraine, Chinese “assertiveness”? Well, yes to a degree, but certainly not exceptional, see: Our World Gone Wild? What *is* special about today are the three conditions mentioned at the top. But these reflect domestic political dynamics, not global strategic ones – and they’re shaping both popular perceptions and attitudes.

By Carl Conetta, 21 Dec 2015

 

 

● Washington Free Beacon. Dempsey: The Global Security Environment Is As Uncertain As I’ve Ever Seen It. Jul 2015.

● Defense News. Military Chiefs Warn Anew About Sequester Cuts. Feb 2015.

● Christopher Preble. The Most Dangerous World Ever? Sep/Oct 2014.

● Spencer Ackerman. ‘Apocalyptic’ ISIS beyond anything we’ve seen, say US defense chiefs. Aug 2014.

● Business Insider. 12 Prominent People Who Compared Putin To Hitler. May 2014.

● Business Insider. Chuck Hagel: Isolationism Won’t Protect Us From The World’s Troubles. May 2014.

● Bill Gertz. Dempsey: Threat of Conflict in Asia Increasing; US Military decline hastens global instability. Mar 2014.

● Military.com. Force Cuts Mean Army Can’t Fight Two Land Wars. Mar 2014.

● Media-ite. Harry Reid Likens Assad to Hitler. Sep 2013.

● NY Post. Assad is like Hitler: Kerry. Sep 2013.

● Joseph I. Lieberman and Jon Kyl. The regrets of U.S. isolationism. Apr 2013.

● Breaking Defense. Gen. Amos: Marines Can’t Fight Major War If Sequestered. Apr 2013.

● Michael Cohen. America’s military can handle anything – except a budget cut. Feb 2013.

● Micah Zenko. Most – Dangerous – World – Ever. Feb 2013.

● Foreign Policy Initiative. The Dangers of Deep Defense Cuts: What America’s Civilian and Military Leaders are Saying. May 2012.

● Politico. Panetta paints doomsday scenario. Nov 2011.

by Charles Knight, letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, 24 Jan 2014. This post appeared first in PDA’s now archived Defense Strategy Review blog.

Preventing war with China requires diplomatic wisdom, not more US military investment. Nicholas Burns (The trouble with China, Op-ed, Jan. 16) cites a recent mini-crisis in the E.China Sea as a warning sign for “congressional leaders in both parties supporting deep cuts in the State Department and Pentagon budgets.”

However, the modest budget reductions that have been proposed — next year the Pentagon is actually getting a $20 billion raise — would in no way prevent the United States from performing shows of force such as the recent flight of B-52s through China’s newly claimed airspace in the East China Sea. The Pentagon’s budget would have to be cut in half to get close to touching overwhelming US military dominance in the Pacific.

A quick look at a map of the region will reveal that China has critical national interests in unencumbered access to the shipping lanes off its coasts and through the passages to the south. Accommodating these interests is the best path to peace in the long run.

America will be much better served by helping to establish an inclusive cooperative economic and security zone in the region, rather than pursuing an ultimately losing game of indefinitely overmatching China’s military power in its own neighborhood.

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The trouble with China: It’s the responsibility of the US to prevent war over East China Sea islands
by Nicholas Burns, Boston Globe, 16 January 2014.

As the White House struggles to cope with a burning Middle East, another vital challenge is arising on the far horizon — China is flexing its muscles with real consequences for America’s future in Asia.

In the East China Sea, the United States worries about a stand-off between our ally Japan and Beijing over conflicting, historical claims to small, uninhabited islands the Japanese call the Senkakus and the Chinese call the Diaoyu. China opposes Japan’s ownership of the islands and, in November, announced creation of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea that directly challenged the right of Japanese, American, and other aircraft to transit airspace in the area without prior notification to Beijing. China has made equally extravagant legal claims in the South China Sea against Filipino and Vietnamese territorial claims.

As my Harvard colleague, Graham Allison, recounts in the National Interest, China’s actions are playing out on a broad historic canvas with Beijing and Washington as the main actors. He reminds us of the “Thucydides Trap”— when, in past centuries, “a rapidly rising power rivals an established ruling power, trouble ensues. In 11 of 15 cases in which this has occurred in the past 500 years, the result was war.”

Conflict between the United States and China is far from inevitable. But the East and South China Seas crises illustrate the American challenge in working with China’s assertive new leadership. The United States and China are partners on a range of issues, from trade to climate change and proliferation. But they are also strategic rivals for power in Asia. That is why the White House should be firm that the United States and its allies won’t be bullied by China’s peremptory and unilateral territorial claims.

The immediate challenge is in the East China Sea. Tokyo defends its long possession of the islands through naval and air patrols while Beijing counters with its own naval vessels and aircraft to contest it. The obvious risk is potential collision by two powerful militaries at sea and in the air. The stakes are very high for the United States as our defense treaty with Japan obligates us to come to its assistance in the event of conflict with China.

The United States has rightly stood by Japan against China’s unilateral claims. Washington is also counseling China to gain better control of the often-willful People’s Liberation Army and submit its territorial claims to international adjudication rather than assert them by fiat and intimidation.

To be fair, however, Washington is also advising Japan’s nationalist Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to lower the temperature in his rivalry with China. His recent visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals from the Second World War are buried, as well as Japan’s refusal to acknowledge the horrific actions of its military during the Second World War, are unnecessarily provocative to the Chinese, South Korean, and Filipino peoples.

As the United States seeks to keep the peace in the East China Sea, the immediate danger is not so much that Japan or China will decide to launch a war for the islands but that they might stumble into conflict by mistake or miscalculation.

British historian Margaret MacMillan warns of such a risk in a recent Brookings Institution essay. She recounts the improbable and unplanned events that led to the outbreak of war in 1914 in which 16 million combatants and civilians eventually perished. Her essay is a direct warning — we can’t take the current Great Power peace for granted. Human folly, frailty, and hubris could lead the great powers of our time — among them China, Japan, and even the United States — into a conflagration we never believed was possible. “The one-hundredth anniversary of 1914 should make us reflect anew,” she warned, “on our vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophe, and sheer accident.”

The East China Sea Crisis and the lessons of World War I remind Americans of a final stark reality — global peace and security still depends on us more than any other country. It is thus essential that we remain the world’s strongest diplomatic and military power. Congressional leaders in both parties supporting deep cuts in the State Department and Pentagon budgets should remember that in Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, we are still, as Madeleine Albright once rightly claimed, the world’s “indispensable” nation.

Nicholas Burns is a professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

an interview with Charles Knight, PDA, and Alfred P. Rubin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Law, The Fletcher School, Tufts University. Edited transcript by Jim Cronin, The Boston Globe Magazine, 30 January 2005.

Accusations of torture and the highly publicized prison abuse in Iraq have cast a shadow over the US military’s treatment of detainees. Harvard Law School is offering a spring semester course, “Torture, Law and Lawyers,” on the ethics and legality of torture. This leads to a question: Can torture in military interrogations of terror suspects ever be justified? We asked Alfred Rubin, professor emeritus of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, to address it.

 

RUBIN: If you’ve caught someone and you know that person has information, then torture for tactical information is justifiable. But if it cannot produce useful information, it is morally reprehensible. Legally speaking, the UN Convention Against Torture requires every state to forbid torture, and that [enforcement] is really up to the states that practice it. Many states that have signed the convention don’t enforce their national law against torture. The United States is one of the few states that we do have national laws that forbids torture. But torture is believed to be practiced morally correctly [by the United States] when, as with the Bush administration’s explanation for torture in Guantanamo, the information obtained can be used to prevent a more serious moral default.

KNIGHT: It is in our interest to further a practice which we would advocate that all nations have? Is that a world we favor moving forward into?

RUBIN: If you capture the guy who has hidden a bomb that’s going to kill 10 innocent people – say, schoolchildren – and the torturer genuinely feels he can get the information of where the bomb is, torture would be justified. It’s a moral evaluation made by the person who’s doing the torturing. One has to recognize that torture is practiced by many states, including the United States.

KNIGHT: It’s very rare when you have this perfect situation where you know that a particular prisoner has information that’s immediately useful. It’s a misleading scenario. Torture turns out to be routinely unproductive. In domestic laws, we forbid confessions under duress in part because they almost never get to the truth. That same knowledge should be applied to our international conflicts. It demonstrates a huge lack of creativity and imagination in our intelligence agencies that resort to torture. It goes very quickly to the abuse that was seen at Abu Ghraib. The interrogators wanted the prison guards to “soften up” the detainees, whether or not they knew anything. It’s a very dangerous process.

RUBIN: The enforcement of law is multifaceted, and the violation of law is serious. The 1949 Geneva Conventions don’t actually forbid torture; they require states to forbid it, which we do, and the same with the UN Convention Against Torture. We have enacted the laws that forbid torture, and those laws have been violated in Abu Ghraib, where we were trying to keep it a secret. Those laws should be enforced.

KNIGHT: There’s a huge realm of secrecy that is expanding. The [US] government won’t let me assess their behavior in a practical way. When I don’t know what my government is doing to prisoners in, say, Guantanamo, I have no information on which to exercise my democratic responsibility to make a judgment on my government. It goes against the very principle of democracy.

RUBIN: And yet the majority of Americans have shown by our last election they prefer not to know, and they reelect a government which keeps secrecy. I think a lot of them are prepared to say that power to keep secrecy belongs with the federal government, and they fool themselves into thinking they need not live with the consequences of secrecy and torture. But democracy frequently elects antidemocratic leaders. Certainly in Vietnam, Johnson and Kennedy were prepared to support [President Ngo Dinh] Diem, and the current administration seems to support governments in China, Albania, Russia, and others.

KNIGHT: I’m fearful we will pay for this abuse of foreign prisoners in our own society for generations. The United States is now training hundreds, maybe thousands, of new interrogators. Abusive relationships traumatize both the victim and the abuser. We are training and having our own people experience this abuse, and they will be returning home to our communities. We know from domestic abuse that this abusive pattern can be replicated through generations.

RUBIN: I disagree. A sadist who wants to torture is going to torture. People make up their own minds whether or not to torture.

KNIGHT: Following the revelation about Abu Ghraib, some of the insurgent hostage-takers escalated to severing hostages’ heads. You could feel a direct “we can do you one better” in terms of cruelty. The United States did not have an understanding of the insurgency they were facing. They began to round up people in a very indiscriminate way. If you’re not prepared to handle the complexities of what you’re dealing with, there’s a gravitation toward using violence to solve the problem.

Also see:

Torture by Proxy: International and Domestic Law Applicable to ‘Extraordinary Renditions’, The Committee on International Human Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University School of Law (PDF).

By Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives, Briefing Memo, 12 March 1998.

In the words of one strategic analyst, attrition is “war waged by industrial methods.” In the attrition approach, the adversary is defined as a series of targets to be “serviced” (that is, destroyed). Other than the achievement of initial surprise in the attack, there is little art or artifice in the approach. As an ideal type it takes as its prime objective the physical destruction of the adversary’s material strength; it associates success with material superiority; and it adopts as a basic principle the simple imperative; “more.”

In maneuver warfare, by contrast, “the goal is to incapacitate by systemic disruption” and dislocation. The target is the coherence of the adversary’s combat systems, methods, and plans. The hope is that a very selective action can have a cascading effect — an effect disproportionately greater than the degree of effort. An analogy from architecture would be the removal or destruction of the keystone of an arch. Here the arch is conceived as a “system” whose dynamic element is gravity which has been converted to useful purpose by the positioning of the keystone — the removal of which disrupts the stability of the system, resulting in its destruction.

The three basic principles of maneuver warfare are: (1) identify and target enemy centers of gravity, (2) set and maintain favorable terms of battle, and (3) find and exploit “gaps” in enemy strength.

In the example of the arch, the keystone is a “center of gravity” (in the strategic, not literal sense). Notably, it is not a “weakness,” nor a “strength” of the system (arch), but rather a source or enabler of strength. In war, centers of gravity are not absolute, but instead relative to the adversary’s character, methods, objectives, and plans. (In the First and Second World Wars, for instance, one of the Allied powers’ strategic centers of gravity was the secure industrial capacity of the United States, which Germany targeted indirectly by means of submarine warfare.) If centers of gravity have a universal or defining attribute, it is this: attacking them successfully has a cascading or catastrophic effect on enemy morale, organization, and operations. Centers of gravity exist at every level of war, and the epitome of maneuver is for a unit to upset an enemy center at one or more levels higher than its own level of organization, and to do so with minimal combat.

Setting the terms of battle (which among other things may include time, place, pace, intensity, and type of engagement) means ensuring that combat proceeds under conditions favorable to the defense. In general, the aim is to set terms that accentuate friendly strengths and enemy weaknesses while minimizing friendly vulnerabilities and enemy strengths. The challenge for the practitioner of maneuver is to establish and maintain this condition.

Despite its linear connotation, the injunction to “find and exploit gaps” means aligning friendly strength against enemy weakness in the combat process. Success in setting the terms of battle facilitates this effort while restricting enemy opportunities to exploit gaps in friendly strength.

The three aspects of maneuver operate together to achieve disproportionate effects, in the following fashion: centers of gravity define the objective, the imperative to find and exploit “gaps” defines the approach to the objective, and setting the terms of battle facilitates the effort overall while controlling for enemy counter-initiatives. Indeed, the greater the success in setting the overall terms of battle, the easier it is to find gaps and compromise centers of gravity.

Any significant success in the maneuver contest depends on first, achieving and maintaining a relative advantage in the flow of accurate information, and second, possessing greater relative flexibility in the allocation of combat power.