A Further Reflection on Killing and Breaking Things

EDIT: see this entry for an apology to the Major. I don’t feel that this was my best hour.

Beyond Maj. Cavanaugh’s distaste for violence and the notion of being seen as a killer and a breaker, he makes another argument that I would be remiss in not addressing:

To suggest the military’s purpose is to break and kill confuses purpose and task, ends with means. Ironically, this miscalculation came from a minister. To apply the error in ecclesiastical terms would be to claim that Jesus’s purpose was merely to die a painful physical death, without any higher design. This might seem like silly semantics to some, but to professionals carrying either cross or carbine, words matter.

Beyond the logic, consider U.S. military doctrine’s first among equals — Joint Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States — which affirms that “military power is integrated with other instruments of national power to advance and defend US values, interests, and objectives.” This purpose applies even to the ground-pounding infantry, whose mission is “to close with and destroy the enemy.” Again, “destroy” is a task, which does not a purpose make. And recent reality reflects a much broader set of tasks for the grunts than myopic fixation on stabbing and smashing, all of which serve the same purpose Joint Publication 1 describes: training the Ukrainian army, assuring the Baltics, supporting African states, not to mention the development of security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past decade. Doctrine and recent experience combine to confirm that killing and breaking are not the military’s sole purpose or occupation.

……Not everything has changed. The Spartans had a saying, which roughly translates to “Come back with your shield or on it.” The shield was valued above all, because in the ranks, the shield protected not just its immediate bearer, but also the next soldier, and on, and so on. The shield mattered more than the sword. The message was clear: If you do not have your shield, if you lost that implement of integrated defense, then you had better not come back at all. And this rings true today: The military is both the country’s shield and sword, but, always the shield over the sword.

This distinction is fundamentally mistaken and indeed tautological. To understand why, let us revisit why war occurs in the first place. From a certain perspective, war — especially today — is pointless. As James Fearon observed twenty years ago, if war is so costly, why does it happen? Why do states not simply subdivide the gains from war, given that they would achieve higher payoffs from doing so than fighting? A common explanation lies in the notion that states go to war due to incomplete information — if they only had known ___, they wouldn’t have fought. But this is tautological in nature. If the problem is lack of information, why don’t states just share information and resolve the information asymmetry? Fearon is, of course, not the last word in explanations for war. Another way of viewing war is as a violent bargaining process, in which states converge to equilibrium in the form of mutually shared expectations about their chances of success.

To some extent we will always struggle to scientifically explain how and why war occurs. Clausewitz argued that the causes and dynamics of war are stochastic and often highly nonlinear in nature, and recent scholarship on the generation of wars suggest that he may very well have been right. Perhaps the most basic element we need to explain war is simply the most basic — war as politics by other means. Clausewitz meant by this is that war merely represents as an extension of existing political dynamics, a willingness to use force and violence to get what would could not be gained via peaceful means. In the abstract, there is no logical limit to the level of violence that can be employed to achieve political means. In practice, there are various constraints — material, political, and ethical — to doing so. But what happens when those constraints are violated? We know that experimental evidence suggests doubt as to whether or not so-called “nuclear taboo[s]” last when the utility of using nuclear weapons is perceived as high enough.

It is at this point that we enter the primary reason why Cavanaugh’s essay is so fundamentally disturbing. Cavanaugh is arguing that the purpose of the military does not just boil down to fighting. Yet that choice is not his to make. Fighting occurs, roughly, because both sides seek to achieve aims through organized violence — in other words, killing and breaking things. Does this mean that war is the first choice? No. What it does mean, however, is that a military that does not see its core purpose as being able to kill and break in the service of policy will run into significant problems when it faces an opponent willing to escalate from jaw-jaw to war-war. Moreover, the level of violence to be employed to achieve policy aims is fundamentally a civilian political decision, not something for Army Majors to decide.

Assume that we engage in a African relief mission, in which the capacities of the military are devoted to supplying refugees and alleviating hunger. Then the President and his or her advisors determine that supplying refugees and alleviating hunger is impossible; the source of the refugee and hunger problem is political instability in the country in question and a rapacious warlord and his milita. The warlord is told to stand aside and allow the military to do their work. He laughs and says “make me” while his militiamen flex their assault rifles menacingly. There are two choices: fight and kill or allow them to continue obstructing relief. What then? Let us take a different scenario.

The military declares a “safe zone” for refugees fleeing a European civil war. The sectarian force that is ethnically persecuting them follows the refugees into the safe zone and demands that the US forces step aside. If the sectarian force is allowed to enter the safe zone, slaughter will result. Once again, a choice must be made. The soldiers can fight back — and kill — or stand aside and allow others to kill. What will they choose? Another similar scenario — a group of peacekeepers are standing watch over a Middle Eastern specifically designated zone to separate two warring groups. One warring group moves into the zone and begins to set up heavy weaponry. The soldiers have a choice — fight and kill to expel the intruders from the zone, or flee the inevitable riposte from the instruders’ adversaries. What will they do?

Readers conversant with mid to late 20th century history will recognize where I am drawing these examples from, so I will not bother to elaborate further. Maj. Cavanaugh has argued throughout the essay that viewing the military’s purpose to kill and break is fundamentally reductive. And in recent years such sentiments have been widespread. It is about “whole of government” efforts, “non-kinetic lines of effort” and whatnot. But all of these efforts are only useful in a permissive environment, in which the enemy does not have the ability to thwart them by escalating the level of violence. Colonel Kurtz’s horror story about vaccinating children only to find that the enemy had mutiliated them in response in Apocalypse Now was not fantastical; if providing non-lethal effects strengthens American military objectives then any enemy with half a brain will most certainly use lethal force to stop such non-lethal efforts. Violence in war — including supposedly new forms of irregular war — is selective in nature. Maj. Cavanaugh may believe that there is a better way, but it only takes one enemy soldier that disagrees with him to force him to kill.

In shrinking from violence, suggesting it is one of many tools, and downplaying its significance to his profession, Cavanaugh becomes logically incoherent. He will kill if he must, but his purpose is far more than just killing. Fair enough. Yet unlike law enforcement, in a conflict zone lethal force does not arise from force protection concerns. It is purposeful in nature, it arises because there is no other way to achieve a political objective but to kill and to destroy. The reason why we have a military is precisely so that it can kill if it must. As cliched as it now is, General Mattis precisely understood this in his two statements about killing: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all. …..Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” The capability and willingness to inflict violence is inherent in the nature of the military profession.

We have a military because, while it executes many variegated functions according to policy, it has a capability that no other institution does. When a militiaman in a ‘Stan decides to “fuck” with General Mattis, and General Mattis’ political masters have determined that it is unacceptable that a militiaman “fuck” with the good general, Mattis is empowered to use whatever resources that the political mission allows to wipe them off the face of the Earth. This is what it means to “kill and break things,” and why Cavanaugh’s emphasis on JP-1 is tautological. Yes, “military power is integrated with other instruments of national power to advance and defend US values, interests, and objectives.” But what makes military power distinctive is the latter part of Mattis’ plea — yes, he has come in peace but if you fuck with him he will kill you without a second thought. As long as American politicians are willing to use the military to kill and break things, no foreigner dealing with Maj. Cavanaugh will take seriously his pleas about just being a nice guy that, ya know, advances and defends US values, interests, and objectives. Why?

The most egregious aspect of Cavanaugh’s essay lies in its usuruption of civilian political authority. The “unequal dialogue” of civil-military relations has some very clear implications for this line of argument. It is not Maj. Cavanaugh’s job to philosophize about how much force ought to be used to accomplish objectives, it is not his place to say “[b]ut Clausewitz was writing in an era of limited options, when a bloodsucking leech was often the medical profession’s first and only recourse.” That is a fundamentally political determination. If the President believes that there is no other option but war to deter the rulers of Bumfuckistan from doing something injurious to American interests, whether or not Maj. Cavanaugh believes that hugging the Bumfuckistanians more, dispensing chocolates, or training the Antibumfuckistanians to resist the Bumfuckistan aggression is completely and totally irrelevant. His job is to obey and to kill as many of the Bumfuckistanians as his training and policy dictates.

Paul Tibbets, a soldier one rank above Maj. Cavanaugh, was ordered one August many decades ago to execute a special kind of mission. He was ordered to utilize the most powerful, indiscriminate, and destructive weapon known to man, a kind of Singularity that emerged from the concentration of power to kill and break in one compact package. Tibbets did not write an op-ed about why his purpose as an airman was more than just dropping atomic bombs and destroying entire cities; he did not say that dropping atomic bombs and destroying entire cities misrepresented who he was as soldier; instead of worrying about what his children would say he owned his participation as an instrument of the state in the most horrific bombing in human history. He did so because policy had determined that the only way to end the war was to escalate to the pinnacle of violence, to use the atomic bomb to crush Japanese resistance. Had the war on Germany not ended when it did, it would have been used instead there.

Was Tibbets right to do so? That will forever be debated. But what cannot be debated is that the decision to drop the bomb arose out of politics and the military’s role as an instrument of policy. For our nuclear deterrence to work, we have men and women sitting at dashboards, waiting for the signal to place a button that may end human life as we know it forever. They do so because policy determined that it was the correct choice decades ago, and we are unwilling to back away from that judgement. So they sit, waiting for Armageddon, waiting to push the switch to turn cities and entire continents into desolate wastelands that bear witness to the life that once thrived there before it was extinguished in a spasm of apocalyptic violence. If we all agreed tomorrow that such an outcome is so horrible as to render the mere existence of nuclear weapons an unacceptable calamity, the likes of the men and women who operate our nuclear weapons could retire. But nuclear zero aside, the efficacy of nuclear violence is judged as such so that it is too risky to give up the bomb. And so they continue to wait at their consoles for the end of the world.

Whether or not the day-to-day function of the military amounts to using violence for policy is a matter of context. But regardless of the situation, we know that if the military’s political masters decide that force must be used to secure a objective, they will use it to kill and to break. The notion that the military is always the “shield over the sword” is erronneous and even farcial; we keep it around so that the terrible swift, sword, can be unleashed on our enemies to accomplish policy. It may do many other good things, but the minimization of such a brute fact is simply self-delusion. Whether or not it is the shield or the sword depends on the policy, but if we were to make a hard choice it will likely always be the sword.