Category Archives: War

At What Price Peacekeeping?: Part I of III

by Hayes Brown Posted on September 17, 2012

At a recent appearance promoting his new memoir, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan answered that he would institute a standing force within the United Nations when asked what one reform he would make to the U.N. to make it more effective in responding to crises. The goal would be a contingency of a size that it would rapidly deployable early in crises, with the goal of “showing force, so to not have to use force”.

My eyebrows were roughly through the roof at this point, as this is the kind of rhetoric that U.N. conspiracy theorists salivate over, and I was surprised his comments didn’t generate more buzz, in the room or in the blogosphere. As it turns out, the reason that there was little reaction is that the position is nowhere near new. Annan has been advocating the upgrades to the U.N.’s force deployment capabilities for over a decade now.

Clamoring for a UN Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) in some shape or form has been constant since 1945, coming from governments and NGOs alike. In the face of Annan presenting this opinion so clearly once more, with no hedging about whether it would be under the command of the United Nations, I was left wondering what such a force would look like.

To that end, and as we head into the U.N. General Assembly, I’ll be exploring different angles of the concept’s feasibility (because yes, it’s feasible, but no, it won’t invade Texas) and its effects on peacekeeping operations. In the interest of not having a 10,000 word blog post, I’m going to break this article up into a three part series: Legal Standing, Operational Feasibility, and Institutional Effects.

Before continuing, let me clarify what I mean by “peacekeeping operations” in this context. I’m working off the definitions of Michael Doyle and Nicolas Sambanis in their 2006 book Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations. Doyle and Sambanis describe four types of peacekeeping operations: Observer, Traditional, Multidimensional, and Enforcement.

1. Observer missions – restricted to observing actions such as a truce, troop withdrawals, or a buff er zone. Always deployed with the consent of the parties to the conflict. Examples are the UNMOT and UNMOP missions in Tajikistan and Croatia.

2. Traditional missions – also deployed with the consent of the parties, but with somewhat extended mandates such as policing a buff er zone and assisting in negotiating a peace agreement. Examples are the UNPRESEP mission in Macedonia 1995-99 and the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon.

3. Multidimensional missions – referred to as `second-generation operations’, the mandates, also consent based, are extended with activities intended to go to the roots of the conflict, such as economic reconstruction, institutional transformation (reform of police, army, judicial system, elections). Examples are the ONUSAC mission in El Salvador 1991-95 and the UNMIT mission in Timor-Leste (2006- ).

4. Enforcement missions -`third generation’ operations that do not require the consent of both parties, and therefore must draw on the authority of UN Charter articles 25, 42, and 43 to apply force to protect the activities of the operation. Examples are the UNPROFOR mission in former Yugoslavia 1992-95 and the UNMIS mission in Sudan (2005- ).

Throughout this series, I’ll be primarily concerned with Enforcement, as those are the missions a Rapid Response Force would be most useful in engaging in, but I will also mention the others periodically.

Legal Standing

Of the three considerations I’ll be going through when determining the feasibility of an upgraded U.N. force projection mechanism, the legality of the measure is the most clearly defined. The Charter of the United Nations provides the basis for the Security Council’s primacy in the realm of providing international peace and security. Indeed, under modern international law, the use of force by states is supposed to be presaged by either approval by the Council or invoking the right of self-defense under Article 51.

Though the actual use of force to restore peace is often outsourced to other organizations such as NATO or ECOWAS, via either Chapter VII use of force mandates or Chapter VIII’s regional bodies provisions, the Council was originally envisioned to be able to muster force to use directly. Further, under Articles 43 and 45 of the Charter, Member States were expected to have forces, particularly air forces, on standby for the use of the United Nations at the need of the Security Council:

  1. All Members of the United Nations, in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security, undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities, including rights of passage, necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.
  2. Such agreement or agreements shall govern the numbers and types of forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of the facilities and assistance to be provided.
  3. The agreement or agreements shall be negotiated as soon as possible on the initiative of the Security Council. They shall be concluded between the Security Council and Members or between the Security Council and groups of Members and shall be subject to ratification by the signatory states in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.

…

In order to enable the United Nations to take urgent military measures, Members shall hold immediately available national air-force contingents for combined international enforcement action. The strength and degree of readiness of these contingents and plans for their combined action shall be determined within the limits laid down in the special agreement or agreements referred to in Article 43, by the Security Council with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee.

In theory, the process would have worked whereby the Council determined a threat to the peace, declared it as such under Chapter VII, Article 40, and called up these air forces to act as a rapid response under Article 42, the “use of force” provision within the Charter. After the initial rapid response use of air power, the other forces detailed in Art. 43 were to have been deployed to finish the job. The Military Staff Committee mentioned in Article 45 will be discussed more later, but would be an important requirement to resurrecting the idea of providing the Council with a Rapid Response Force.

In actuality, the Permanent Five disagreed on the meaning of the clauses of Articles 43 and 45 almost from the beginning. Like most issues relating to interpretation of the Charter in the early days of the U.N., the split came in two flavors: between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union, and between the Permanent and non-permanent members.

The Soviets believed that each of the Permanent Five should provide forces to the United Nations of an equal number and equal composition of land, air, and sea forces. For members like the United Kingdom, still devastated in 1947 from World War II, the idea of putting up the same number of forces as the U.S. or U.S.S.R. was preposterous. The idea, of course, was that the United States and Soviet Union, already the clear superpowers, would only need to contribute as much to international security as those weaker members of the Council.

The dispute was never resolved, and the agreements of Article 43 were never concluded, or even started to my knowledge. This collapse of early support for the idea of a rapid response force, however, has not altered the contents of the Charter. In his Agenda for Peace in 1992, then-Secretary-General Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali urged:

“the bringing into being, through negotiations, the special agreements foreseen in Article 43 of the Charter, whereby Member States undertake to make armed forces, assistance and facilities available to the Security Council… not only on an ad hoc basis but on a permanent basis.”

At any time, the United Nations could undertake an initiative to begin and sign agreements with the current Troop Contributing Countries (TCC) to have contingencies of their forces on standby for an RRF.

In fact, the building of an RRF would be even more strictly speaking ‘legal’ than current peacekeeping operations of the Traditional and Multidimensional model, as they would fall squarely in line with Chapter VII unlike the former’s nebulous existence as what have been called “Chapter VI and a half” missions. These models, particularly the “Traditional” model, were the development of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in the wake of the Suez Canal crisis, and not featured anywhere within the Charter.

So why does all of this matter? The enactment of a Rapid Response Force would bring clarity to the authority of the Council to authorize states or ad hoc coalitions to engage in enforcement measures – in short, it would be clear when the Council is acting on its own authority or whether it has delegated that authority to others. A strict reading of Article 42 only provides the Security Council with the ability to use force via the Article 43 arrangements, not the power to authorize the use of force by states (except when extending permission to Chapter VIII organizations’ actions until the Council can act – but even this mechanism implies the Council will be able to take action eventually). In practice, Article 42 has been read in conjunction with Article 48(1), which makes the decisions of the Security Council binding and requires states to carry them out. While a U.N. Rapid Reaction Force would not override that reading, it would allow the Council to more clearly delineate when they are acting under their own authority and when they are conferring that power onto other states, organizations, or coalitions.

Utilization of an RFF would also push to the side many of the legal concerns regarding sovereignty when enforcing decisions of the Security Council. As the deployment of an RFF would necessarily be under the Chapter VII, Article 42 powers of the Council, along with the requirement for states to comply, the oft-quoted need for the host country to permit entry would be overridden. Whether this would be able to be achieved on the ground is for a later section, but the very idea that a military force, no matter the size, could under the authority of the Security Council enter into a country regardless of government protests, has given states pause, no matter what the Framers of the Charter had in mind. For this reason, the vast majority of U.N. enforcement missions have depended on host country permission for access, including the original Congo crisis of 1960, unlike coalition missions as in Libya or Iraq.

Likewise, the concept does face a barrier in that no state has yet to conclude an Article 43 agreement, suggesting such agreements may be difficult to conclude even if the practice were accepted in theory. At present, the legal mechanism for the Security Council acquiring forces for official U.N. missions, such as MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is an individual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with each TCC. The document is fully binding on all parties, and can be taken up for arbitration at the International Court of Justice if disputes on its implementation can’t be resolved at the local level.

While MOUs could be used as a framework for an overarching Article 43 agreement, given the fight to get each of these MOUs signed, it would likely be a difficult struggle to reach an accord by which states agree to relinquish operational control of whole units to the United Nations and whomever controls these forces – a question that will be delved into more deeply in the Operational section.

Should some particularly charismatic future Secretary-General, one in the Hammarskjold mold, find a way to draw countries into Article 43 agreements, a U.N. RRF would rest on extremely solid legal footing. The difficulties would come more strongly in the operational use of such a force and the reverberating effects such a development would have on the United Nations as an institution.

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Four Percent for Freedom

by Jonathan Rue Posted on August 20, 2012

It’s campaign season and the defense budget, after a decade of bipartisan support for steady growth, is once again a battlefield for Democrats and Republicans. Having used a credit card to fund a forty-year bender, both parties recognize the need – in theory if not practice – to get a handle on the national debt. Representing 20 percent of total Federal government spending and 50 percent of Federal discretionary spending, the defense budget is a large target. And while it may not be the primary driver of deficit spending, to use a basketball analogy, it’s dishing assists like John Stockton. Even some prominent Republicans recognize that some reduction in defense spending is necessary if cutting the debt is to be a real goal and not just a talking point.

Mitt Romney apparently didn’t get that memo. He has pledged to increase the defense budget, spending a minimum of four percent GDP. Pegging defense spending to GDP is not a new idea. The Heritage Foundation wrote a series of reports in 2007 under the tagline Four Percent For Freedom. Around the same time, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen also publicly supported the four percent baseline. In 2009, Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. Trent Franks introduced a joint resolution that would have required DoD base spending to remain above the four percent figure.

A couple of themes emerge among the arguments for pegging defense to GDP. Some argue that “measuring defense spending as a percentage of GDP is the most appropriate and realistic means to gauge America’s commitment to ensuring an adequate national defense.” Without the four percent baseline, they claim that “America’s military will become a ‘hollow’ force placing the lives of our young men and women in uniform at risk and jeopardizing the Pentagon’s ability to defend the nation’s vital national interests.” Others note that because it is the primary responsibility of lawmakers to “provide for the common defense,” DoD is not just another line item in the Federal budget and thus deserves a baseline. And perhaps the most common refrain is that setting a four percent baseline sends a message that the United States is committed to its security.

Of course, the Constitution does not stipulate minimum spending on defense. Instead, the Preamble states that “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” (emphasis mine). The Oath of Office requires our elected leaders to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” (again, emphasis mine). Neither of these texts, however, defines defense or how to provide for it. A narrow interpretation might hold that these clauses require defense against threats to the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of the United States. A more expansive definition might include defending against threats to American interests far away from our shores. The former would seem to be guaranteed by a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and two oceans, and the latter by a robust navy, a moderately sized army, significant intelligence capabilities, a fleet of unmanned aerial systems, and special operations forces. Many might disagree with these prescriptions, and how well they serve in the defense of the United States and/or its interests, but that’s the point—there’s no Constitutional instruction for defense, and reasonable people can and should debate these points.

Instead, the premises often used to support a defense-by-GDP conclusion are a mixture of vacuous platitudes (hollow force!), red herrings (entitlements are the real cause of runaway government spending!), and/or irrelevant facts (we can afford it!) making the conclusion itself a giant non sequitur. Putting aside the illogical nature of the arguments, what are the practical consequences of setting a baseline on defense spending that is tied to GDP?

For one, pegging defense spending to GDP is divorced from the strategic environment. In the words of one budget specialist, it has “no analytical basis.” Defense spending does not occur in a vacuum. It takes place in the context of threats, interests, obligations, allies, revenues, and other spending requirements. None of these are static. Once upon a time, the U.S. fought Japan and Germany. Once upon a time, the U.S. faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. Once upon a time, the U.S. didn’t have a large network of allies. Pledging to spend four percent of GDP on defense disregards changes to the strategic environment. Furthermore, it focuses on only one variable of a multi-variable equation. Richard Betts writes:

Today’s supporters of increased military spending justify their advocacy by pointing out that current levels of spending, measured by the share of GDP devoted to defense, are well below those of the Cold War. This is both true and irrelevant. The argument focuses on only one component of the equation — spending — and conveniently ignores that the scope of commitments, the choice of strategy, and the degree of risk accepted can be adjusted as well. And it draws the wrong lesson from history, which when properly interpreted suggests that today’s lesser threats could be handled with greater aplomb.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that setting a minimum investment in defense sends a message to other branches of government, allies, and potential enemies that defense is a priority. But does anyone think that if the U.S. only spent 3.5 percent of GDP, which is roughly $525 billion, on DoD’s base budget, that we would be any less secure? Conversely, if we spent 9 percent of GDP, roughly the proportion we spent in 1968, would lawmakers feel more secure? Would we actually be more secure? Remember, no amount of money will completely mitigate risk.

Pledging to spend four percent of GDP is no more than a campaign slogan. It serves to cast Democrats in the role of dove played opposite the familiar Republican hawk, but does so without evaluating the strategic environment or (re)assessing potential threats and American interests and how the military should be used to protect them. And the great irony is that many of the proponents of setting a defense baseline have stated unequivocally “strategy should always guide the defense budget.” Pegging defense to GDP as one’s starting point would seem to violate this maxim.

Except, in the Republican worldview, it doesn’t. Mitt Romney and the Defense Defenders’ (worst band name ever?) plan to devote increasingly larger piles of money to the defense budget makes perfect strategic sense. In their view, which for all intents and purposes is a neoconservative one, U.S. military power is the only thing holding this crazy, anarchic world together. Moreover, it’s the only tool the U.S. has for getting what it wants. Rather than reassess commitments and obligations, or tailor strategies, they would double down on old ones, like defending Europe as if it was 1984, and take on new ones, like periodically bombing Iran and intervening in Syria. Thus, a perpetually rising DoD budget becomes necessary, and pegging it to GDP, rather than Federal government revenues (which go up and down), forms an appropriate benchmark.

In reality, setting a floor on defense spending pegged to “the number of Big Macs meals sold at McDonald’s” seems to be a myopic scheme designed to ensure the defense budget rises in perpetuity while assiduously avoiding consideration of the possibility that after spending $4 trillion fighting violent non-state actors, deposing regional pretenders, and fighting wars that never seem to end that maybe, just maybe, we’re doing it wrong. Throwing money at a problem might be good politics, but it’s rarely sound defense policy.

Posted in Analysis, Military, Strategery, War | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Protecting Advisors

by Jonathan Rue Posted on August 18, 2012

The bad news out of Afghanistan won’t stop. It’s like the longest nightmare ever and we just can’t wake up.

After seven green-on-blue attacks in the last eleven days, Gen John Allen has ordered all ISAF troops stationed on Afghan bases to remain armed at all times. The story does not specify if this order requires forces to be Condition 3 (magazine inserted, chamber empty) or Condition 1 (magazine inserted, round in chamber, weapon on safe).

When I last wrote about the green-on-blue problem in April, I wondered about this specific issue. Many observers will wonder why this order was such a long time coming, myself among them. But I think it would be a mistake to conclude that these pernicious attacks will be stopped simply because advisors are keeping their weapons loaded. To draw such a conclusion is akin to saying a movie theater patron with a concealed weapon would have stopped James Holmes before he killed twelve people.

I don’t recall a specific order from my team leader or our higher headquarters about our weapons condition. We were issued an M-4 carbine and an M-9 pistol as advisors. I carried both on the 200m walk from the advisor compound to my office. The advisor building was a windowless building located amongst the Iraqi office buildings. We had one entrance, with a high table just inside the door and sandbags stacked underneath. We kept two M240B machine guns nearby, I guess in case the Iraqis decided to lay siege to our building.

I never went to see my counterparts without my M-9 in Condition 1 status. Never. And this was in Iraq where the insider threat was much, much lower, maybe even nonexistent compared with the current situation in Afghanistan.

In the beginning, I tucked my utility blouse behind my hip holster so that the weapon could be easily seen, and reached. I tried to sit at the table with my back to a wall so that I could see everyone in the room and anyone who entered. After a couple months, once I got to know everyone (and some modicum of trust was established), I began covering my holster with my blouse. I sat with my back to the door. I let my guard down. Not so much that I was totally oblivious to my surroundings, but I definitely wasn’t constantly “at the ready.”

I’d like to think that I could have reacted quickly enough to save my life had someone walked in with a loaded AK and started spraying bullets indiscriminately. But the truth is I’m not sure that’s the case. The USMC taught me how to aim and fire the M-9 with lethal consistency, but it didn’t teach me how to draw like Doc Holliday. Not that it would have mattered–the aggressor in these attacks has the advantage.

Gen Allen’s order is welcome news, and long overdue. But we should temper our expectations about it making a significant difference in the lethality of green-on-blue attacks. Far more important than weapon status is the advisor’s mental alertness. Regular troops are used to keeping their guard up outside the wire, but everyone needs a place where they can let it down and recharge. At this point, ISAF advisors aren’t afforded this luxury. This obviously takes a toll over the course of a six- or twelve-month deployment.

Carrying a Condition 1 weapon is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for better protecting advisors. Hopefully, it will save some lives. But it wouldn’t surprise me if our advisors were abiding by Gen Allen’s order long before he issued it.

Posted in Afghanistan, Military, War | Tagged | 7 Comments

You Don’t Have to Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here: A Review of Last Men Out

by Diana Wueger Posted on August 7, 2012

I grew up hearing fantastical stories about the fall of Saigon from my dad, who witnessed the terrifying and chaotic final days of South Vietnam as a young foreign service officer. Panicked South Vietnamese parents, having heard horror stories about the brutality of the approaching North Vietnamese Army, tossed infants over the U.S. embassy gates in the hopes they’d be taken to safety. Rich politicians and their wives demanded that their gold-bar-filled luggage and prized dogs be allowed on board the tiny helicopters, even though space and weight were already at a premium. Helicopters were pushed off flight decks of Navy ships into the South China Sea so more could land. Stories like these seemed absurd and unbelievable to me, so when I was offered a copy of Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s Last Men Out to review, I jumped on it, if only to get some independent verification of these tales. Who knows? Maybe my dad made it all up.

Not pictured: My dad (he’s behind the cameraman).

Except… turns out he didn’t. In roughly 270 pages, Last Men Out covers the finals days of April 1975 when, in the face of General Van Tien Dung’s push towards Saigon, the United States finally closed up shop after 25 years in Vietnam and rocked a helicopter-based evacuation called Operation: Frequent Wind. Last Men Out narrates the fantastical evacuation through the lens of the Marine Corps Security Guards (MSGs) posted to the embassy at Saigon and a few other provincial capitals, and it’s all there – thrown babies, gold and dogs, the disposal of perfectly good helicopters into the sea.

The authors do not, of course, mention Afghanistan, but the parallels are hard to miss.* The heroes and villains are clear: the MSGs are the very portrait of Real American Heroes, while the CIA, the State Department, and Washington come out covered in mud. Sound familiar? The narrative of America in Afghanistan is that the troops are doing their best with the policies and information available to them, while the politicos and policymakers that are to blame for the way things are going.

Interestingly, NVA’s General Dung, who (SPOILER ALERT) conquers Saigon in the end, is treated generously for refraining from attacking the city until Americans had left. The calculus behind his decision to wait for the Americans to evacuate gave me pause. While Dung certainly wanted to punish the U.S., he chose not to close on the city lest the Americans come back en masse to rescue or avenge their countrymen. I’m hardly suggesting we’ll see Kabul encircled by the Taliban on the day we finally close up shop – merely noting that the enemy has a say in how that day goes. Looking past the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan to the idea of a small advisory mission that will continue to help the Afghan National Security Forces, Last Men Out makes clear that as the number of U.S. troops declines, the risk to those still on the ground grows. The twin pressures of weak and fearful local allied forces and an enemy emboldened by fewer troops and the reduced likelihood of open hostilities could put any advisory mission in jeopardy.

In their treatment of the South Vietnamese, the authors display a frustrating tendency to stereotype – the politicians are corrupt, the civilians are childlike and helpless, the local security forces are sullen and liable to turn on their allies. Scattered moments of heroism and agency are all the more notable for their scarcity. The final moments of chaos in which the Vietnamese attempt to get to the roof to catch the last helicopter out make them seem like animals or barbarians – not frightened human beings who know what will happen when the NVA arrive. Again, this tracks with current popular understanding of the Afghans – politicians corrupt, civilians can’t help themselves, green-on-blue killings becoming endemic, etc. – with little attempt to understand the war from the Afghan perspective.

Honestly, it’s hard to read Last Men Out as straight history. It reads somewhat like a historical novel, like the war nerd’s version of The Other Boleyn Girl, and it’s a gripping story, especially if you’re not familiar with the intricacies and dramatis personae of Frequent Wind. You’re not sure who will live or die, whether the NVA will enter Saigon before the MSGs get out, or who gets left behind.  If you can suspend disbelief a little bit it makes for a real page-turner (the level of detail suggests some liberties were taken with the dialogue and descriptions, but the authors address this in the endnotes, so I’ll forgive them that).

But it also makes for some sobering reading when read with half a mind to the next war we’ll leave unfinished. Though the parallels are not perfect, it’s especially worth considering how we treat – and leave – our local allies, both civilian and military, and how they’ll perceive themselves to have been treated. The image of 400 non-Americans patiently standing in the embassy courtyard waiting for a helicopter that never came is haunting, much like the stories about Iraqi interpreters left languishing in visa application purgatory. While we can’t save everybody, and we can’t and shouldn’t stay forever, we should take care not to offer false hope and to do what we can where we can.

* NB: I’m not arguing that Afghanistan is Vietnam 2.0, nor am I suggesting analogical thinking is particularly valuable in this instance. I’m merely noting the elements of this narrative that led me to consider their modern parallels.

Posted in Afghanistan, Book Reviews, Iraq, Military, War | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Decoration Day

by Jonathan Rue Posted on July 25, 2012

No other country has vexed U.S. presidents over the last thirty years quite like Iran.

Jimmy Carter watched Iran go from stalwart ally to implacable foe when Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The ensuing hostage crisis sunk his reelection bid. Ronald Reagan sold Iran a bunch of surface-to-air missiles in an ill-fated attempt to free American hostages in Lebanon. At the same time, Reagan waged a low-level war against Iran in the Persian Gulf as the U.S. Navy sought to keep shipping lanes open and oil flowing. George H.W. Bush searched fruitlessly for the “elusive Iranian moderate.” Bill Clinton entered office deciding such a search was a waste of time, but left office having found that moderate in Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, only to have efforts at rapprochement thwarted by hardliners in the office of the Supreme Leader, Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the U.S. Congress. After cooperating briefly with Iran over post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush decided Iran was an “axis of evil” and refused to negotiate directly with it on any subject. As the U.S. became bogged down in Iraq, the Bush administration watched helplessly as the Iran provided Iraq’s Shia militias with powerful roadside bombs; Iran also restarted uranium enrichment. Barack Obama extended an olive branch, but when Iran burned the olive branch, he used it as leverage at the United Nations and instituted the most severe economic sanctions to date.

In The Twilight War, David Crist chronicles the ups and (mostly) downs of the troubled U.S.-Iranian relationship since 1979. During that time, the superpower and regional pretender have alternated between uneasy peace and de facto war. The relationship has always been long on emotion and short on understanding. Neither side understands the other because, as Crist said in a recent interview, “both sides are captive to history.”

To be sure, it’s a complex history, with both sides contributing to the impasse. Crist weaves together the narrative threads of the U.S.-Iran relationship in a way that illuminates why this struggle continues with no signs of resolution. Blood has been spilt by both sides: 241 sailors, soldiers, and Marines died at the hands of the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Beirut, while 290 Iranian civilians died when the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Iran Air flight 655. American troops have been killed in Iraq by Iran-funded militants. Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed on the streets of Tehran, and although U.S. involvement has not been conclusively proven, in the eyes of the Iranian regime it hardly matters. Perception is reality in this case.

Trust has always been hard to come by. After stating in his inaugural address “goodwill begets goodwill,” George H.W. Bush reneged on promises he made to Iran in return for the freedom of the last American hostages in Lebanon. Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance with UN Security Council resolutions and refuses to come clean about prior work done on weaponization.

And even in moments of relative calm and clear-headedness, negotiation offers have been refused. In 2003, Iran sent a fax to the State Department via the Swiss ambassador offering to put everything on the table, including their opposition to Israel and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. The Bush Administration refused to negotiate, believing the regime was on the brink of collapse. In 2009, Barack Obama offered to negotiate with Iran, but Iran thought the offer was meant solely to buy time for more sanctions and so refused.

This sweeping chronicle comes at a critical moment. The U.S. and Iran are (again) seemingly on the march to war. Defiant in the face of economic sanction, Iran continues to enrich uranium and fund terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. It’s also threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the United States political elite is debating—for at least the umpteenth time—whether or not to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. It has 40,000 troops and an armada of aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, and submarines patrolling the Persian Gulf. Yet despite this build up of punditry and equipment, the elites of DC seem oddly unaware of the nuances of our history with Iran – and thus the value of Twilight War becomes clear.

Crist’s sources are top notch – recently declassified documents and personal records and interviews with all the major characters you’ve never heard of – and that’s just on the U.S. side. His sources in Iran’s political and military elite are every bit as good. He logged thousands of miles conducting over 400 interviews in the U.S. and throughout the Middle East.  The senior historian for the Joint Staff and Marine Reserve officer, Crist is at his best when describing in amazing detail the almost minute-by-minute account of the Tanker War. In fact, he spends roughly one third of the book recounting it. Those looking for comprehensive analysis of the major decisions and flashpoints of the relationship may be disappointed as Crist keeps his own cards close to his chest, only revealing some of them at the end. This, however, is a real strength of the book. There’s no angle and he’s not pushing policy. It’s simply a rich history of two antagonistic countries struggling to figure each other out.

Finding a way out of permanent hostility will take a diplomatic miracle, not to mention a large dose of political courage. As Crist notes, “neither side has much desire to work to bridge their differences. Distrust permeates the relationship. Three decades of twilight have hardened both sides.” In other words, the U.S. and Iran are the Hatfields and McCoys of international politics – caught in a cycle of distrust and animosity that feeds on itself. The actions of the last thirty years have shaped the political, foreign policy, and military elite of both countries.

Iran specialist Afshon Ostovar recently commented that the majority of leaders on both sides don’t want war. He’s right, but if the last thirty years are any indication of the future, neither side really wants peace either.

Buy the book, which I highly recommend, here.

Posted in Iran, Middle East, Reviews, War | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Meditation on Memorial Day

by caidid Posted on May 28, 2012

I have been lucky. Many of my friends and family members – and I know many of those who are kind enough to read Gunpowder & Lead – have people close to them who have given their lives in service. I have never lost anyone like that. I know I don’t carry the kind of raw personal connection to Memorial Day that, to name one, Alex Horton writes about so achingly beautifully. I do try to honor it each year, though, because the sacrifice these people and their families have made – and the fact that it has ever been, and continues to be, necessary – matters to all of us.

For the last few years, I have spent a little time each Memorial Day at the flag garden planted on Boston Common by the Massachusetts Military Heroes Fund. There are 33,000 flags this year, one for each MA service member who has died in service from the Civil War to today.

There are a lot of stories that stick with me through the year, and the one I found myself thinking about most today as I looked at the field of flags fluttering across the hill was that of Sgt. Dennis Weichel. I didn’t know Sgt. Weichel, but I know what kind of man he was by how he died.

This past March, Sgt. Weichel’s unit was traveling in a convoy in Laghman Province, Afghanistan, when they came on a group of children in the road. Sgt. Weichel was one of the men who got out of their vehicles to clear the road. As the MRAP started to move again, he saw that one little girl had run back into its path.

That is a split-second kind of moment. There isn’t time to consider whether an attempt to save her might be fatal, to weigh the value of your own life against that of a small Afghan girl. What you do in that moment is not about being a man, or a soldier, or an American. It is not about training, or calculation, or decision-making. It is built into who you are.

Sgt. Weichel jumped into the street. He pushed the little girl to safety. She was unhurt. He died. That’s hero stuff. A huge vehicle was about to hit a little girl. He made sure it didn’t. I didn’t know Sgt. Weichel, but he’s who I’m remembering this Memorial Day.

The flag garden is a beautiful and somber reminder of the sacrifice made by these service men and women, and their loved ones. Even more than that, to me, it is a reminder of how much we should all passionately want peace, and work to nurture it, and build it, so that in the future we won’t have to lose so many of the best of us this way.

It is easy to get angry and look to attack, to get impatient with diplomacy, or even to get overwhelmed by heartbreak when something terrible happens in the world, but looking at those rows upon rows of flags, or the rows upon rows of white tombstones at Arlington, it seems to me that the best way to honor their sacrifice is to do all we can to try to make future such sacrifices unnecessary.

Forget anger and blame toward the many people, institutions, situations, cultural features, interests, and social mores that might lead us into war. Forget outrage and pique at those who question the circumstances that lead to these sacrifices. Forget semantic battles over what it means to be a hero. Blame doesn’t make it better. Outrage doesn’t satisfy anyone. Semantics are meaningless. Let’s take all that energy that is so often spent on blame and outrage and use it to connect and build, to take tiny steps to nurture peace in whatever ways we can.

No one wants the fields of little flags to grow.

Posted in Uncategorized, War | Tagged , | 1 Comment

We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?

by caidid Posted on May 22, 2012

‘We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?’

This is how the target selection process sounds to me when I read about it. My semi-secret fear is that this might be quite close to how this process actually works. The Global War on Terror, the shadow war, the overseas contingency operation – whatever you want to call it, I’ve long worried that its reach and the place of importance it is given are out of proportion to any threat posed by Al Qaeda or any similar group, and I’ve long feared that the way we go about ‘countering’ terrorism may in fact cause more problems than it solves, possibly by orders of magnitude. I am no insider. I don’t see the process. I would like to think that more care is put into these decisions than it seems from the outside. But from here, from the outside, it seems like no matter how many times – through decades of experience – we see the second and third order effects, the collateral damage, the side effects of our actions, the people making the decisions are not really concerning themselves with taking time to consider how the benefits balance out against the potential unintended consequences and long-term effects. And it’s not just about doing things we maybe shouldn’t be doing; it’s also about failing to do things we maybe should be doing.

Then when I read an article like this one by Kimberly Dozier (and I strongly recommend reading that), it reads very cart-before-horse to me, like ‘Who are we going after with these drones and SOF guys?’ and not ‘This AQ leader is a terrible threat. What are we going to do about that?’ I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have contingency plans in place for how to deal with potential real threats to U.S. security, but it seems like more than that. I fear that maybe we use these tactics just because we can, that because we have drones and incredibly skilled and versatile SOF teams and such, we just look for people to use them on. That scares me because it implies a casual attitude toward the many forms of potential collateral damage, scant consideration of long term effects (and therefore the absence of a robust long term guiding strategy), meaning finally, an approach to national security that is not actually optimized to keep our nation secure.

The drones aren’t the issue any more than any other tool or tactic is – they are a tool, and can be a very valuable one – but if we’re looking around for people to kill with them rather than using them only in service of a true strategy or to counter a clear threat that has arisen, then we’re doing it wrong, and if we’re doing it wrong – and this is true even if you are concerned only with American interests and are fully indifferent to the collateral damage done to and within local populations in the areas of operation – we risk having to pay a harsh price in five years, or ten, or twenty, when the right things we didn’t do and the collateral effects of the things we did do comes back to haunt us. 

But please tell me I’m wrong. I’ll feel a lot better if I am.

Bonus reading: h/t to Rob Caruso for linking up three great recommendations for current reading on operations (which yes, very much do consist of more than just drones): “Offshoring CT: Towards a Dissection” – Dan Trombly for Abu Muqawama; “The Vickers Doctrine” – Robert Caruso at Rocky Shoals; and “U.S. Foreign Policy and Contested Sovereignty” – Micah Zenko for CFR. All good reads that bear on various aspects of this subject, none quite addresses the question of what kind of big-picture, long-term strategy guides these operations, although Caruso comes closest to getting into this in that his (very interesting) post offers guidance on structure and prioritization in operations going forward.

Posted in Military, Strategery, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War | 9 Comments

Gimme Shelter

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 17, 2012

In 1972, Marine captain Francis “Bing” West published an unadulterated account of a Marine Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam. The Village was and remains the seminal account of the Marine Corps Combined Action Program. Born out of lessons learned in the Banana Wars of the early 20th century, the Combined Action Program paired a Marine rifle squad with Vietnamese Popular Force militiamen and assigned the combined platoon responsibility for protecting a village or hamlet. West’s chronicle of fifteen Marines who lived, fought, and died alongside their Vietnamese brothers for 485 days in Bing Nghia offered a trove of lessons for military advisors fighting a brutal counterinsurgency.

Forty years later, Owen West, a Marine reserve major and Bing’s son, has published his own gripping saga of a modern day variant of the Combined Action Platoon – the Military Transition Team (MiTT) – fighting a similarly brutal counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Snake Eaters follows the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division (3/3-1) of the Iraqi Army and their American military advisors – known by their all-too-appropriate radio call sign, Outcast – during the dark days of 2005-07 as they attempt to defeat an insurgency and win the allegiance of Khalidiya, a village halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. It’s a raw account of a motley crew of reservists called up for duty to fight a war for which they were ill prepared, ill equipped, and ill supported. Through force of bravery and grit, Outcast and their Iraqi brothers-in-arms overcome the enemy and, sometimes, their own chain-of-command.

In a sense, Outcast was lucky. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Troster, the team leader during the hard days of 2005-06 and a Drug Enforcement Agent when he wasn’t moonlighting as a reserve infantry officer, instinctively understood both advising and counterinsurgency – many MiTTs had leaders that didn’t. Troster understood the necessity of constant patrolling. He also knew his MiTT needed to accompany 3/3-1 on every patrol in order to gain credibility so that their advice would be heard and heeded. He knew that in order to run constant patrols with a ten-man team, normal rank protocol went out the window. He flattened Outcast’s hierarchy – every man did every job. The military hadn’t trained him for this, but he knew what needed to be done and did it.

Troster led a team varied in complexion; it was a typical group of reservists. Sergeant First Class Mark Huss ran a plumbing company in Iowa and spent his reserve weekends “teaching soldiers how to maintain laundry facilities.” Sergeant First Class Eliezer Rivera, the team’s senior non-commissioned officer, was a post office supervisor. Specialist Joseph Neary was “a heating technician by day and a rock-and-roll guitarist by night.” Sergeant Shawn Boiko was a flooring manager. None had infantry training.

Once teams like Outcast were assembled, the Army and Marines had to train them. Here too, efforts fell far short. But as West incisively notes, much of this was a result of the divide between ground truth and Washington fantasy about the war’s progress and the nature of counterinsurgency. Early advisor teams received, as they described it to West, “forty five days of ill-conceived classes crammed into ninety.” The classes at Camp Atterbury were taught mostly by people who had never been to Iraq and who had never been advisors. The entire training program was premised on the notion that the advisor teams would be living on large, American run Forward Operating Bases, training Iraqi soldiers in basic soldiering skills and staff work. “It was as if Atterbury was preparing the advisors to defend a log fort against a Sioux attack in 1863,” West writes.

As Outcast brutally discovered in late summer 2005 upon arriving in Iraq, their training had been worthless. The Snake Eaters, the name 3/3-1 gave itself, were coming off six months of hard combat and expected more as they were newly responsible for of the more dangerous areas of Anbar Province. The Iraqis didn’t need classroom teachers – they needed combat advisors.

Outcast shouldn’t have succeeded; at least, not on paper. A disparate group of ten reservists with no infantry training or combat experience is a perfect metaphor for America’s efforts in Iraq. But Outcast conducted over 1,500 combat patrols. Team members like Sergeants First Class Huss and Rivera each logged more than 450 combat patrols in a ten-month deployment. Outcast hit fifty improvised explosive devices. Seven of the ten were wounded. One died.

And yet they persevered, overcoming the normal aspects of hard combat and a Spartan existence on a small combat outpost, devoid the normal accouterments found on the larger FOBs, and even a lack of support from their own side. Outcast looked to Task Force Panther, a National Guard unit – who, it should be noted, was also ill prepared and ill equipped for the mission and fight they were given – that was supposed to “partner” with 3/3-1 and support the advisors. But Panther and its higher headquarters didn’t get it. First, there was the order mandating the Iraqis patrol in armored vehicles. Think about that one for a second. Then there was Panther’s refusal to conduct joint patrols with 3/3-1. And as if Outcast’s existence wasn’t Spartan enough, Panther removed the main generator providing power to Outcast’s small outpost. With insightful vignettes like these, West demonstrates one of the main challenges advisors often face is the U.S. military command.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that many of the lessons gleaned forty years ago were either discounted or forgotten when the U.S. military scrambled to field advisors to the newly rebuilt Iraqi Army in the summer of 2004. This inability to retain lessons learned is somewhat surprising. Combat advising is not a new concept – the United States has been in the business of training foreign militaries for at least 100 years. The Marine Corps, as noted earlier, has a long heritage of partnering with and advising foreign militaries. As all Marines are steeped in the Corps’ history, there is institutional memory and widespread awareness of Marines as advisors. The U.S. Army institutionalized combat advisors by creating the Special Forces; however, the pernicious effect of this decision was to insulate this mission within this small community – regular Army units and commanders came to despise the mission. Since their inception in the early days of the Cold War, the Green Berets have been the principal force for advising foreign militaries. They spend years training, and when it comes to advising, the Green Berets are the best the United States has to offer. Regrettably, the task of building and advising the new Iraqi Army after it was disbanded in 2004 vastly exceeded the capacity of the Green Berets to do alone. The Army and Marine Corps were thus forced to field advisor teams like Outcast.

Unfortunately, the services did so with little understanding or appreciation for the task in front of the MiTTs. As West notes:

Our generals are uncomfortable prescribing advisors as a solution to these twenty-first century wars. Advising a foreign military requires nontraditional training that takes years; soldiers need a wonk’s cultural awareness, the rudimentary language capability of a border cop, a survivalist’s skills, and the interpersonal savvy of a politician. Military hierarchy is built on control, so it feels unnatural for the leadership to dispatch these small bands of advisors, who on paper cannot give orders, to live among foreign, sometimes hostile soldiers in an effort to stabilize their countries.

Indeed, being an advisor requires patience, understanding, and tact – three traits not normally emphasized in military training and culture. Throw in an organizational culture that disdains advising as an inferior mission and promotion policies that delineate a career path to the top – advising is, uh, missing – and the result was an advisor selection and training program that emphasized quantity, not quality.

Advising is a mindset. An otherwise outstanding officer might be a terrible advisor, and the most incompetent infantry corporal might be incredibly effective. It’s less instruction and more persuasion. The Army initially turned to reservists like Outcast and later adopted the Marine Corps model, meeting its requirements by pulling individuals from disparate units across the fleet, which sometimes incentivized commanders to send underperformers. West, in his typically blunt manner, notes, “Selection for advisor duty was not rigorous. Soldiers could not be overly prejudiced, handicapped, or too fat to deploy.”

In his history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Summons of Trumpet, retired Army Lieutenant General Dave Palmer writes: “Another unchanging reality of advising is the more or less constant cocoon of frustration enveloping the advisor. Adjusting to advising is a greater individual challenge than can be easily imagined by anyone who has not done it.” The challenges an advisor faces over the course of a combat deployment are impossible to overstate. Owen West succeeds simply by telling Outcast’s tale. But what really sets The Snake Eaters apart from the other advisor memoirs* to come out of Iraq is his sharp, evocative prose – “a group of jundis who were watering the pavement with spent brass casings” – and his thorough account of the various challenges Outcast faced and their relation to the strategic direction of the war.

When the American military was fielding advisor teams like Outcast in 2004-2005, they could almost be forgiven for forgetting lessons learned from successful advising concepts from wars past. After all, the military did an exceptional job of purging the lessons of Vietnam during the late 1970s and 1980s, and by 2004 Vietnam was but a distant memory. The same cannot be said for our advisory efforts in Afghanistan.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the U.S. is beginning the transition out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior staff non-commissioned officers pulled from the same brigade staff, so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like Outcast. More good news is that the SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing on individual and team military skills like land navigation, weapons usage, and patrolling techniques. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training repeats many of the same mistakes from 2004. After the SFATs complete training at their home station, they’ll go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they’ll receive – wait for it – three weeks of advisor training. Three weeks.

Given the spike of so-called “green-on-blue” incidents in the last six months – 22 ISAF deaths in 2012, or 13% of total ISAF KIA, have come at the hands of Afghan security force personnel turning on their advisors – the lack of cultural, negotiation, and language training is troubling. Like the advisors sent to Iraq in 2004-05, the SFATs are not getting the proper training. Green Berets spend years learning how to advise foreign militaries. Even the Marine Corps puts its MiTTs through roughly five months of pre-deployment training, with a heavy emphasis advisor skills like best practices for speaking through an interpreter and cultural do’s and don’ts. These are reinforced throughout the training program so that they become second nature. Of course, this training isn’t perfect, but at least the USMC MiTTs are being set up for success.

The story of American military advisors in Iraq and Afghanistan is not well known. Should Americans read The Snake Eaters and learn more about a little known aspect of the savage wars less than one per cent of their fellow citizens have been fighting, great. But the audiences who will gain the most from reading West’s book are mid-career officers attending the Army and Marine Corps staff colleges in Fort Leavenworth and Quantico. Outcast is a testament that advisors can succeed even when the armed services do not appreciate their mission. The advisor needs robust, appropriate training and the full support of his command as soon as his boots hit the ground because as long as we continue to wage counterinsurgencies as a third party, advisors are our saving grace. As West notes, “No matter how we enter these murky twenty-first century wars, all roads out lead through the combat advisor.”

* Here are the three other memoirs about the military advisor experience to come out of Iraq. Interesting that all four are written by Marine officers.

Folsom, Seth. (2010) In the Gray Area: A Marine Advisor Team at War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Gray, Wes. (2009) Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Navarro, Eric. (2008) God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army. Washington: Potomac Books.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, Reviews, War | 3 Comments

Still in Saigon

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 7, 2012

GEN Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has released his Chairman’s reading list. So far, this one is receiving better reviews than the reading list he released during his short stint as Army Chief of Staff last summer, which received some harsh reviews. Just about every general officer publishes a reading list, formal or informal, but the Chairman’s reading list and those of the service chiefs generally get the most press.

These reading lists are easy to poke fun at and critique because no list is perfect. That said, they serve a useful purpose. Most of the books, especially those targeted to field grade and general officers, are intended to get the military reader thinking and learning about larger, strategic issues that govern the military profession or affect U.S. foreign policy. For instance, both of Dempsey’s reading lists had Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power and Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. On the other hand, the generals have a tendency to include some weird stuff, like books about starfish and spiders.

Last summer, I re-read E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. The GOP primary season was nearing its pinnacle of farce and I thought to myself that this book ought to be required reading for anyone who sought the office of President because anyone who wants to be Commander-in-Chief needs to bone up on the consequences of their decisions to send American boys and girls to war. While the military does an exceptional job of publishing reading lists to help officers and staff non-commissioned officers better understand civilians, the reverse is, sadly, not true.

In that spirit, here is a reading list that, if the G&L collective was President or National Security Advisor, it would require each civilian political appointee working in State, Defense, or the NSC to read. Like GEN Dempsey’s list, this one is not exhaustive and I’m sure there are some things we missed or omitted. This will be a list-in-progress and we’ll be adding/subtracting titles. So, feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments section.

America, F Yeah!

Democracy in America
Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy
For the Common Defense
9/11 Commission Report
The New American Militarism
Arsenal of Democracy
Buying National Security

The dogs of war, they’ll carry you away (or: How smart people make bad decisions)

The Guns of August
The Best and the Brightest
Rubicon Theory of War

On combat (or: Carrying shit and killing people is not pleasant)

The Face of Battle
With the Old Breed
If I Die in a Combat Zone
A Rumor of War
Achilles in Vietnam
No True Glory
On Killing

Big(ish) Think

On War (Books I-III, VIII)
Twenty Years' Crisis
Bureaucracy
Arms and Influence
War and Politics
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
War and Change in World Politics
Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy
Shield of Achilles

Posted in Analysis, Civil-Military Relations, Military, War | 3 Comments

Orwells and Oppenheimers: Drone Opponents’ Marriage of Convenience

by Drunken Predator Drone Posted on May 3, 2012

As a self-aware Predator drone, I get my share of criticism. “You’re flying lost-link again!” “You vaporized a playground!” “You’re trying to usher in a post-human robo-dystopia!” Some of this is valid, some of it…okay, most of it is valid. But sometimes, the public discourse over drones like me becomes so turgid and dramatic that it obscures reasonable discussion of my pros and cons. And when the hyperventilating gets most hyper, when the language becomes most overwrought, when the prognostication gets most preposterous, I see it stemming from the conflation of two very different issues. And I don’t think that that’s an accident.

Two distinct constituencies use UAVs as a touchstone. One is concerned with the national security and foreign policy implications of drones, and the other with their privacy and domestic law enforcement applications. For brevity’s sake, I’ll call the first group “Oppenheimers,” after a guy who got a good look at a new kind of warfare and spent the rest of his life championing international institutions to make sure it never took place. They feel that remotely-piloted aircraft represent a qualitative shift in the ability of a nation, and a chief executive, to use force. And not a shift for the better.

Oppenheimers think drones will usher in an Imperial presidency. The capitalization there is important, because we’re talking Imperial as in Palpatine at the helm of the Galactic Empire. They fear that through technical means, drones are reducing or eliminating the political impediments to war, and blurring the line about what kind of conflict constitutes war in the first place. (Nobody puts a flag over drone wreckage, let alone puts it on the nightly news.) Oppenheimers also deplore the role that drones play in the larger framework of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, which the Obama administration interprets as giving them clearance to use force (whether under Titles 10 or 50) against al-Qaeda or its affiliates anywhere on the planet.

Oppenheimers advocate for the application of international law to the use of drones, and where such laws don’t exist, for their development and implementation. They see UAVs as tools that let rich countries violate human rights, flout national sovereignty, circumvent the judicial process, and do it all in a legal gray area that requires no real accountability for those who command them. And they foresee a world in which a string of tactical successes, a veritable terrorist Whack-a-Mole, leads to a crippling strategic failure by turning local populations against us through faceless violence.

The second constituency I’ll call the “Orwells.” Their primary concern about drones is domestic. They see the technological potential for drone surveillance, the interest from law enforcement and government agencies, and the massive aerospace industry primed to meet the demand. While there are often noises made about UAV safety, the primary gripe of Orwells- who can point to an actual passage in 1984 which describes small unmanned aircraft peering through people’s windows- is that drones are vanguards of a pervasive surveillance culture. The police watch you outside with robots, corporations like Facebook and Google parse your user data to better bombard you with ads, and the NSA hoovers up your phone and email communications to feed through a secret counter-terrorism algorithm.

But the Orwells face a problem of domestic case law. Despite fractious debate over “reasonable expectations of privacy,” the Supreme Court has consistently held that police departments are permitted to conduct aerial surveillance of private citizens and property, so long as they traverse publicly-available airspace and use the same technology commonly available to members of the public. Those rulings made no distinction between whether the platform used for such surveillance was manned or unmanned, nor do many court-watchers expect that precedent to be soon overturned.

While the Orwells demand action from the FAA (which, as I’ve complained, is a safety regulator and not a privacy watchdog) the only real recourse will come from state and federal legislation to restrict such searches. But it’s certainly not imminent, thanks in large part to burdensome FAA regulations and review processes. Right now, police departments drone programs lag behind such surveillance ninjas as hobbyists and high school science teachers.

The Oppenheimers want to curb the executive branch’s authority to conduct lethal operations overseas, primarily through the military and intelligence community. And they want international norms and laws to constrain the kinetic use of remotely-piloted aircraft. Conversely, the Orwells want to more carefully govern the power of local, state and federal law enforcement to conduct surveillance and evidence-gathering on Americans.

On the surface, the distinction between Orwells and Oppenheimers may not seem significant. But they truly are. Yes, both are trying to rein in the use of flying robots, which, depending on who’s talking, are assuming a role in society somewhere between J. Edgar Hoover and a winged Terminator. And both want to accomplish that goal by bringing national security and surveillance law into the 21st century. But the similarity ends there, and they are doing two important discussions a twin disservice by deliberately allowing the public to conflate them.

The Oppenheimer challenge is relevance. Why should the vast majority of Americans care about the particular platform our spies and soldiers use, when they’re using it to kill people we’ve never met, in a country we’ll never visit, as part of an effort we generally support? And the Orwell challenge is harm. Why should Americans worry about the police using drones when most of us have never seen one, most of us will probably never be surveilled by one, and even if we are, police helicopters do this kind of thing already?

By allowing the two questions to blur together- drones abroad and drones at home- the Oppenheimers demonstrate relevance and the Orwells show harm. The recent FAA reauthorization, despite the hype, allowed only a gradual phasing-in of government drone usage over the next three years. And yet it was a gift to both sides; by using stock photos of MQ-1s, MQ-9s or Global Hawks, media outlets implied that military-grade, Cessna-sized robotic weapons platforms would be found under the Christmas trees of every police department from Manhattan to Mayberry.

It’s a lot easier to make people uneasy over privacy concerns when you pair the article with pictures of a targeted-killing machine. Same way it’s easier to make people care about collateral damage in Yemen or the Phillipines by being able to say with a straight face, “You may be next.” This line-blurring is inaccurate, widespread, and actively harmful to an informed debate.

Oppenheimers are wrestling with the problem of how America uses force in hostile, fluid or ungoverned territory; Orwells are trying to apply 250 years of the rule of law to a new police technology. Both are doing so, by and large, in good faith. But establishing international standards for the deployment and operation of lethal military assets will do precisely nothing to curb the rise of the surveillance state within America’s borders. Nor will enhanced American legal protections against police UAV surveillance somehow prevent collateral damage in the lawless regions of Pakistan or Yemen.

While I actually agree with many of the concerns of both groups, pretending that their goals have anything in common, just because they use the same stock photography, is ridiculous. And when Orwells and Oppenheimers imply that the New Jersey State Police will soon rain Hellfire missiles onto Garden State Parkway speeders, it creates a rhetorical fog bank that’s too thick for logic to penetrate.

These guys are way more of a problem than I'll ever be.
Posted in Analysis, Slightly Larger Arms, War | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments