Benghazi, the Rules of Engagement Fallacy, and US National Security Politics

The House Select Committee on Benghazi will continue their absurd inquiry by questioning David Petraeus and Leon Panetta tomorrow. Meanwhile, Michael Bay’s new dramatization of the attacks will be out soon in theaters. I have written about the Benghazi attacks in the past and have been harshly critical of much of the administration (and its numerous defenders’) defenses of administration conduct in the matter. However, my critique has always been different from that of others. Why?

Beyond rank partisanship, the Benghazi obsession represents a particular view of politics and war that I have often found problematic. This view casts strategy not as a struggle to instrumentalize violence, but as a matter of moral purity, dedication, and manly derring-do. Certainly all of these elements are present in conflict, but a view that exclusively focuses on them is a myopic one. If only our lads were not held back by the sniveling lawyers and politicians, the reasoning goes, we would have triumphed. Or, at the very minimum, disaster would have been averted. Hence, the analysis of Rules of Engagement (ROE) becomes a ritualistic obsession, with hawks forever searching for evidence of the sniveling stuffed shirts holding back the caged tiger that is the American man at war.

This is certainly the case with the Benghazi attacks. The underlying reasons why spies, diplomats, and operators were placed out in the middle of bandit country and left exposed to attack are not up for discussion. The administration’s philosophy of “smart power” — aka hegemony by the cheap — would have inevitable costs well-known to students of history and political science. [1] Sticking a tiny amount of men and materiel out in a fractious and unstable region depends on the assumption that local elites — whether they be President or Prime Minister of X or the local warlord commanding a heavily modified pickup truck — are willing to incur costs to protect the emissaries of a distant foreigner. When push comes to shove, those locals often tend to pursue their own interests, or are incapable of assisting United States interests. This problem is certainly elided by the ritualistic defense of the administration that “diplomacy is dangerous.” [2] However, it is also elided by a ritualistic obsession with the ROE and tactical response.

The problem with obsessing over essentially tactical matters is that tactics do not exist in a vacuum. High-level policy and strategy decisions determine possibilities for response; high-level policy and strategy decisions also determine the manner in which force is allowed to be utilized. Infantry veteran and fellow Georgetown alum Billy Birdzell dispenses with one of the fantastical Benghazi rescue plans at Tom Ricks’ page. [3] The important thing about Birdzell’s analysis is simply how much of the tactical elements were essentially locked in place by higher-level decisions. Forces that might have been able to assist were based in Europe. Different policy and strategy decisions might have made a difference, but if we are in the game of counterfactuals different policy and strategy decisions about LIBYA itself — where Benghazi is located — might have also been nice. [4]

Unfortunately, the ROE obsession suggests that there is ultimately no viable alternatives to the most problematic and counterproductive elements of US foreign policy. At National Review Online, an outlet that one would expect to have opposition party criticism of administration policy, we see nothing but the same tired obsession over the ROE. The author, at one point, comes tantalizingly close to a real assessment of the problems with US statecraft:

America’s enemies, moreover, have consistently and flagrantly disregarded the laws of war. Arguably, the United States has not fought a nation that substantially complied with the [law of armed conflict] since it squared off against the Germans in the trenches of Western Europe in World War I. Instead, both the regular armies (Nazis, Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese, and North Vietnamese) and the insurgencies (Viet Cong, Taliban, and al-Qaeda) have brazenly violated the law at every turn. The modern result is a military farce. American forces play by the rules while our enemies exploit those same rules to limit our freedom of action, create sanctuaries where they can rest and rearm, and then launch international propaganda campaigns when our painstaking targeting proves to be the least bit imprecise.

So true! But then the author returns back to the low-level tactical minutae and military jargon that characterizes the entirety of the piece. But why, then, is this “farce” tolerated? Why do we live in a “world where our Army is a glorified police force and our commanders face prosecution for fighting a real war” if that is indeed the case? The author volunteers an explanation:

[N]o true oversight exists. Political leaders increasingly don’t understand the military, much less the weapons and tactics needed to prevail on the battlefield. Every branch of government blanches in the face of left-wing critics who speak as if by reflex of “war crimes” any time civilians die.

But this is ultimately not satisfactory. Political leaders don’t understand the military? OK, but what else is new? That has been the reality for very long. [5] Moreover, the idea that the US government is seriously intimidated by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Code Pink is ultimately bizarre and laughable. What is more plausible is that the US finds itself constrained by a thicket of norms, regulations, and compacts, often made or influenced by those hostile to the idea of realpolitik and the projection of national power. [6] Still, that is not quite satisfactory either. Why does the US feel bound by such compacts and conventions in the first place, even to the point of absurdity? Surely there is an explanation for this other than bloodnessness — the US has certainly shed much blood via special operations and air attacks since the beginning of the Obama administration.

The answer is, sadly, that in believing that we are somehow single-handidly responsible for upholding — anywhere and everywhere — an amorphous global “liberal order” out of an exaggerated fear of the alternatives, we open ourselves up to all manner of strategic problems. [7] The mind-boggling amount of contortions, contradictions, and complications of waging liberal war have been well-documented by a host of authors. [8] However, the most fundamental of these contortions can be summed up as follows:

1. The habitual blurring of lines to exercise power. Perhaps the most ironic thing about the so-called “gray wars” literature that American defense analysts are obsessing about is the idea that the US is incapable of contesting the zone in between war and peace. The US blurs that line every day — whether in terms of elite obsessions with so-called designs for “grand strategy” that makes everything, no matter how ridiculous, a national security concern, the usage of antiseptic terminology like “police action” to describe large-scale organized political violence, or the blurring of the line between military and civilian authorities in covert action. [9] While much of this stems from the ideology of the liberal way of war, much of this can be ascribed to responses to the nature of the threat that flows from this way of war. [10] The transformation of warfighting into targeting stems from the way in which both sides blur the lines to fight each other. The enemy dresses as a civilian to hide from retaliation, we allow civilians piloting drones to fight the enemy. But in a past era of conflict, it was understood that enemies dressed in civilian garb could be shot as spies or hung after a drumhead court martial. The mimicking of the enemy stratagem in order to fight the enemy may be seen as an structural failure of US policy and strategy.
2. Habitual lying to ourselves and lying to the American people. The liberal way of war amounts to a systematic denial that war is actually being fought. [11] Some critics, such as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, have glimpsed the shadows cast by this problem. But their fixation on media and discourse as the vehicle for it is wrongheaded. Why, for example, do we invent a million different defense buzzwords for what amounts to basically the same phenomonon — enemy perfidy and a failure to call it for what it really is? I have discussed this at length previously with my reference to the “care bear” theory of strategy. I should be clear, however, that what all of this represents is both a willingness to lie to the American people and a willingness above all else to lie to ourselves. Neither is, in the long run, a wise course of action for both ethical and purely instrumental reasons. And while I am willing to recognize that it represents to a large extent the influence of politics on strategy — as a dead Prussian would have predicted — it also should not be regarded as a positive or beneficial trend in both its causes and consequences.

The true failure of those obsessing over Benghazi is that all of this is essentially beyond debate or discussion. It amounts to an unconscious operational code that has been so thoroughly ingrained in the way that the US makes foreign policy and security decisions that uprooting it would be as painful as a root canal operation. [12] So, go on and obsess about the tactical details of X or Y military operation and the convenient scapegoat of the lawyers and politicians crafting ROE. As long as we ignore the deeper rot, there will be many more Benghazis to come.

References

[1] A classic is certainly Nexon, Daniel H., and Thomas Wright. “What’s at stake in the American empire debate.” American Political Science Review 101, no. 02 (2007): 253–271.

[2] Certainly it is, but only a rank fool or an craven apologist for the Obama administration would deny a significant distinction between the “dangerous” of a posh assignment in Europe where one’s biggest problem is violence from Marxist radicals and holding down a spartan outpost in a war-torn country populated by heavily armed militias and insurgents.

[3] Trust me, Billy is also REALLY not a fan of the administration either; he won the NRA ring of freedom which is not exactly a common endorsement offered to those that are generally fans of the administration.

[4] See here, here, and here for assessments of the Libya decision. TL: DR — it was yet another example of self-delusional Americans with good intentions screwing things up.

[5] Leebaert, Derek. Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan. Simon and Schuster, 2010. The Shakespeare play Coriolanus also suggests that this is not exactly a modern problem either.

[6] Jones, David, and M. L. R. Smith. “Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy.” International Affairs 91, no. 5 (2015): 933–952.

[7] Simons, Anna, Don Redd, Joe McGraw, and Duane Lauchengco. The Sovereignty Solution. Naval Institute Press, 2011, and Porter, Patrick. The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power. Georgetown University Press, 2015.

[8] Cromartie, Alan, ed. Liberal Wars: Anglo-American Strategy, Ideology and Practice. Routledge, 2015.

[9] None of these practices are new by any means, they are as old as the United States itself (and were practiced by Americans even before the US achieved its independence).

[10] The character of a conflict is determined by the choices of both actors. See Vinci, Anthony. “Becoming the enemy: convergence in the American and Al Qaeda ways of warfare.” The Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 69–88 for more.

[11] Mark Safranski summarizes dimensions of this self-deception here and here. However, one can also see it in the basic dignification of the systematic violation of the laws of war as “asymmetric warfare”; the treating of enemy behavior that we would otherwise regard as criminal as some kind of novel and ingenious tactic or stratagem.

[12] This is a deliberate nod to the famous “operational code” of the Politburo. See Walker, Stephen G. “The evolution of operational code analysis.” Political Psychology (1990): 403–418, George, Alexander L. “The operational code: A neglected approach to the study of political leaders and decision-making.” International Studies Quarterly (1969): 190–222, and Leites, Nathan Constantin. The Operational Code of the Politburo. RAND Corporation, 1950.