How 9/11 Changed Our Ways of War New Edition

By James Burk

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8659-1

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………viiContributors………………………………………………………ixIntroduction James Burk……………………………………………1Part I: C hoosing War………………………………………………1 The End of (Military) History? The Demise of the Western Way of War
Andrew J. Bacevich…………………………………………………132 Assessing Strategic Choices in the War on Terror Stephen Biddle and
Peter D. Feaver……………………………………………………273 The Rise, Persistence, and Decline of the War on Terror Ronald R.
Krebs…………………………………………………………….56Part II: Using Force……………………………………………….4 Odysseus Prevails over Achilles: A Warrior Model Suited to Post-9/11
Conflicts Joseph Soeters…………………………………………..895 What “Success” Means in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya Christopher
Dandeker………………………………………………………….1166 Torture, Harm, and the Prospect of Moral Repair James Burk…………..149Part III: Mobilizing Resources………………………………………7 Isomorphism within NATO? Soldiers and Armed Forces before and after 9/11
Gerhard Kümmel……………………………………………………1838 The Mobilization of Private Forces after 9/11: Ad Hoc Response to
Inadequate Planning Deborah Avant…………………………………..2099 Globalization and al Qaeda’s Challenge to American Unipolarity Pascal
Vennesson…………………………………………………………232Conclusion James Burk and Christopher Dandeker……………………….261Index…………………………………………………………….277

CHAPTER 1

The End of (Military) History?

The Demise of the Western Way of War

Andrew J. Bacevich

“In watching the flow of events over the past decadeor so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamentalhas happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essaythat made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attentiontoday, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the ColdWar, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “Thetriumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident … inthe total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Today the West, its leading members wrestling with entrenched economicproblems, no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the firstdecade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint ofsorts. Although Western liberalism retains considerable appeal and liberaleconomies may yet demonstrate an ability to get their house in order, theWestern way of war has run its course. Whatever doubts may have remainedon this score, events since 9/11 have removed them.

For Fukuyama, history implied a Hegelian dialectic. During the twentiethcentury, that dialectic had found expression in a fierce ideological competition,a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism.By the time he published his famous essay, that contest was reaching itsdenouement. Defined as an unfolding sequence of events, history was likely tocontinue. As teleological process, however, history, according to Fukuyama,had arrived at an endpoint likely to prove definitive.

Yet from start to finish, military might as much as ideology had determinedthat competition’s course. Throughout much of the twentieth century,great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instrumentsof coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously,there were weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets andmissiles, poison gas and atomic bombs—the list is a long one. Yet in their effortto gain an edge, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrineand organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligencecollection and war plans.

All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain,Germany or Japan, Russia or the United States, derived from a common belief inthe plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military traditionreduces to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft,the accouterments of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

Great Expectations

That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars, told a decidedly differentstory. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethalityand destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggeringmaterial, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain.In that regard, the war of 1914–1918 became emblematic: even the winnersended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not tocelebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned hisessay, faith in war’s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as1945, among several great powers—thanks to their affinity for war, now greatin name only—that faith disappeared altogether.

Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted thistrend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge fromWorld War II stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, createdas a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm andthe criminal regime of Nazi Germany. By the 1950s, both countries subscribedto this conviction that national security (and, arguably, national survival) demandedunambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American andIsraeli politics, peace was a code word. The essential prerequisite of peace wasfor any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanentinferiority. In this regard, the two nations—not yet intimate allies—stoodapart from the rest of the Western world.

So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and militaryelites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw nocontradiction between rhetoric and reality. In the United States, this preoccupationwith war gave rise to the national security state, a vast network ofinstitutions, governmental and nongovernmental alike, centered on the misleadinglynamed Department of Defense. In Israel, the preoccupation withwar found expression in the creation of a people’s army, which became (andremains) the preeminent manifestation of the nation and the state. To be anIsraeli citizen, remarked one Israel Defense Force (IDF) chief of staff, “was tobe a soldier on eleven months annual leave.”

Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds thetemptation to put that power to work. This is especially true among nations(like the United States) fired by crusading instincts, sometimes borderingon messianic delusions, or those (like Israel) imbued with a deep and pervasivesense of insecurity, sometimes bordering on paranoia. For missionariesand for the fearful, armed might held in readiness to defend the nation doesnot suffice. Thus does “peace through strength” all too easily translate into”peace as the product of war.”

Israel succumbed to this temptation in the conflicts undertaken in 1956and then in 1967. Both were wars of choice, begun because Israelis (politiciansin 1956, generals in 1967) saw an opportunity for what they expected to be aneasy win.

Although the Suez War yielded none of the expected results, the Six DayWar proved a turning point. The IDF smashed several Arab armies and seizedhuge swathes of territory. Plucky and audacious David had defeated—andthereby became—Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about inVietnam, Israelis appeared to have succeeded in mastering war.

It took a quarter-century before U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991,Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator SaddamHussein, showed that American troops, like Israeli soldiers, knew how towin and to do so quickly, cheaply, and humanely.

U.S. generals such as H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves thattheir brief desert campaign against Iraq had matched—even surpassed—thebattlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan, YitzhakRabin, and Ariel Sharon. For the U.S. military, Vietnam now faded into irrelevance,an embarrassing memory happily expunged (or at least buried).For the American officer corps, Desert Storm signified redemption. Betterstill was the conviction that this successful foray into the desert was anythingbut a one-off event; American soldiers (and many members of the Americanpublic) deemed it a portent. Desert Storm foretold a future in which conflicts,according to one senior U.S. officer, were certain to be “short, decisive, andaccompanied by a minimum of casualties.”

For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive.Apart from fostering large illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991decided remarkably little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparentthan real, especially with regard to political implications. From winningcame unintended and undesirable consequences. Worse still, triumphalismfostered massive future miscalculation.

On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponentsof a Greater Israel—disregarding Washington’s objections—set out toassert permanent control over territory that Israel had gained. Yet “facts onthe ground” created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhanceIsraeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growingand resentful Palestinian population that the Jewish state would not assimilateand the IDF could not pacify.

In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991likewise proved ephemeral. Despite his defeat in the so-called Mother of AllBattles, Saddam Hussein survived, becoming in the eyes of successive U.S.administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perceptionprompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of U.S. strategy.The Carter Doctrine of 1980 had declared that the United States would preventany unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf.After 1991 that was no longer enough: Washington now sought to dominatethe entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the implicit aim. Yet theUnited States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.

During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked upon what became its own variantof a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S.forces moving in and out of the region proved hardly more welcome thanthe Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the IDF soldiersassigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided apretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionistsin their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded asneocolonial infidels.

The Six Day War had not really ended in six days. The Persian Gulf Warof 1990–1991 had not really ended with its celebrated 100-hour ground campaign.Seemingly decisive victories had created conditions conducive to moreviolence. Most Europeans would have found such an outcome unsurprising.Yet few Israelis and fewer Americans were prepared to assess the implicationsof this troubling fact.

Stuck

No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyedunquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel’s year abroad, its tanks,fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks,fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.

So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance didnot reliably and predictably translate into concrete political advantage. AlthoughIsraeli and American national security elites remained deeply investedin the Clausewitzian conception of war as an instrument of policy—”politicsby other means”—the outcomes achieved when employing that instrumentrarely lived up to expectations.

Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion regularly producedever more complications and more than a few nasty surprises. No matterhow badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term appliedto anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) were not intimidated, remainedunrepentant, and kept coming back for more, devising tactics againstwhich forces optimized for conventional combat did not have a ready response.The term invented for this was “asymmetric conflict,” loosely translatedas war against adversaries who won’t fight the way we want them to.

Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee,its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later duringOperation Restore Hope, the West’s self-congratulatory titled foray intoSomalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Ratherthan producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended infrustration, embarrassment, and failure. There were also moral problemsthat clashed with Israeli and American assertions of a humane and liberaldemocratic identity. Both armies preferred to make war against armies;increasingly, they found themselves fighting groups that the term “army” didnot adequately describe.

According to its “iron wall” strategic paradigm, a militant Israel demonstratingimplacable strength would ultimately leave its adversaries no alternativebut to make peace on terms acceptable to the Jewish state. By theend of the twentieth century, that strategy had achieved modest but notinconsequential success. First, in 1979 came a peace agreement with authoritarianEgypt. Then in 1994 came an agreement with the Hashemite Kingdomof Jordan, a weak state held together by a precarious monarchy. More importantthan either of these was Israel’s hard-won alliance with the UnitedStates, forged in the last third of the twentieth century. American armsand diplomatic support played an invaluable role in buttressing Israel’siron wall.

Yet for Israel, the episode in Lebanon proved but a harbinger of worsethings to come. By the 1980s, the IDF’s glory days had passed. Rather thanlightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli militaryhistory became a cheerless recital of dirty wars—unconventional conflictsagainst irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987–1993),the Second Intifada (2000–2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), andOperation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008–2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformedto this pattern. One effect of these encounters was to tarnish Israel’simage internationally. Actions that Israeli governments depicted as taken inself-defense looked to others like heavy-handed bullying. This had profoundpolitical implications as Israel faced increasing criticism from abroad andeven diplomatic isolation. For better or worse, this served to increase Israel’sreliance on the United States as its superpower patron. Stubbornly persistingin their belief that war works, the two democracies stood together, butincreasingly alone.

Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birthrates emerged as a looming threat—a “demographic bomb,” Benjamin Netanyahucalled it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces,unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress.American-manufactured F-16s or Apache attack helicopters were of novalue in suppressing Arab fertility rates. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly andfutilely to bludgeon movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah into submission,demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majorityof those living within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.

Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the U.S. military nonetheless succeededin duplicating the IDF’s experience. Moments of glory remained, butthey would prove fleeting. After 9/11, American efforts to dominate (or, inWashington’s preferred term, to “liberate”) the Greater Middle East kickedinto high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush’s global war on terrorbegan impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with the speed andélan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to “shock and awe,”Kabul fell in 2001, then Baghdad in 2003. In remarkably short order, militaryaction had seemingly achieved its intended political objectives.

Landing on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003,George W. Bush sought to affirm that verdict. Here lay the symbolic significanceof the famous (or infamous) “Mission Accomplished” banner thatserved as a flamboyant backdrop for that visit: by declaring the job all butdone, the commander in chief, his personal prestige and authority at theirhighest, was attempting to rebut or refute the view that war had becomepointless. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, American technology, professionalism,and bravery had made war once again purposeful—controlled,cost-effective violence yielding intended outcomes. The results so spectacularlyachieved in Afghanistan and Iraq seemingly proved this.

As one senior Army general explained to Congress the following year, thePentagon had war all figured out:

We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networkedsystems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producingunprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased informationavailability; and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout thebreadth and depth of the battlespace…. Combined, these capabilities of thefuture networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision,and result in decision superiority.

The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurredtwice: “decision superiority.” The American officer corps knew it knew howto win.
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