Punishment and Its Perils
At Marginal Revolution, there is an intriguing retrospective on the failure of “Broken Windows” crime policies:
Why did the experiment fail? Longer sentences didn’t reduce crime as much as expected because criminals aren’t good at thinking about the future; criminal types have problems forecasting and they have difficulty regulating their emotions and controlling their impulses. In the heat of the moment, the threat of future punishment vanishes from the calculus of decision. Thus, rather than deterring (much) crime, longer sentences simply filled the prisons. As if that weren’t bad enough, by exposing more people to criminal peers and by making it increasingly difficult for felons to reintegrate into civil society, longer sentences increased recidivism.
Instead of thinking about criminals as rational actors, we should think about criminals as children. In this light, consider the “Becker approach” to parenting. Punishing children is costly so to reduce that cost, ignore a child’s bad behavior most of the time but when it’s most convenient give the kid a really good spanking or put them in time out for a very long time. Of course, this approach leads to disaster–indeed, it’s precisely this approach that leads to criminality in later life.
It should not surprise frequent readers that I feel that the implicit distinction made here between “rational” actors and “children” is highly dubious. Forecasting is not really an observed strength of many of the individuals and entities that we discuss in strategy and security, and impulse control much less so if we acknowledge that impulses may be understood as reactive behaviors necessary to cope with a dynamic and hostile world. Nonetheless, I do think that the “Becker approach” that the author criticizes explains much about a recurring problem in security affairs.
A number of years ago, we faced a debate between those favoring forward involvement and state-building and those that sought a policy based on disengagement with the threat of a large-scale raid as a way of keeping unruly local actors that might pose a threat to US national security in check. The former approach has been so thoroughly discredited that I am rather embarrassed about the qualified praise or consideration I would sometimes grant it. Criticism of the Obama administration’s often highly lukewarm approach to national security not involving drones often presumes that the latter approach has been discredited as well. That is, of course, not really correct. In retrospect the Obama approach has really revealed itself to be the so-called “limited liability” approach of Liddell-Hart, albeit without Liddell-Hart’s sense of bizarre enthusiasm about the magical power of aeroplanes.
However, the fact that the “strategic raid” approach has never really been tried is not a vote in its favor. I revisit its flaws to illustrate a fundamental problem that US national security has yet to solve — the issue of punishment and deterrence. As David Auerbach recently observed in Slate, the notion of “cyber-deterrence” is ridiculous. Why would anyone in their right mind be “deterred” when there is no credible threat of retaliation for the kind of hacks (none of which are lethal) that currently cause so much panic and angst? When Obama administration officials talk tough to China about their recent spate of hacks, one is tempted to ask “OK, so what are you going to do about it? Give Bao Bao the Baby Panda at the National Zoo a time-out?” The farcial case of so-called “cyber deterrence,” however, is at best sui generis. The vast majority of US national concerns have to deal with threats willing and capable of causing physical harm or death. But I do not think that we have had a much better record in dealing with them than we do in the cyber case. And it has a lot to do with the dynamics that similarly doomed Becker’s approach to crime and punishment.
Put simply, punishment is costly. Automatic, repeated punishment is difficult if not impossible to sustain over an indefinite period of time. Especially when the unit of punishment is a full-scale war. The US invasion of Afghanistan was judged to be cheap in its reliance on special forces and local allies, but if we had to be ready to indefinitely repeat it on a moment’s notice we would find it much less cost-effective. Yet this was, in essence, what many advocated as an alternative to state-building. Repeatedly hitting any successor regime dumb enough to host al-Qaeda again 2001-style. Even maintaining the repeated punishment of Iraq after 1991 proved expensive as well, and by the time of the 2003 war the sanctions-and-bombing regime was likely on its last legs.
The implications of punishment being costly is that states and groups may get away with all manner of things before it becomes too much and they are hit hard. This is, though, not exactly efficient either. Saddam Hussein was quite plausibly shocked by the American military reaction in 1991 because everything prior to the Gulf War had suggested that the world would turn a blind eye to his activities. There are much older historical cases of Latin American states that have been repeatedly invaded by the US due to their failure to get the infrequently delivered “message” that we sought to transit via armed coercion. Because of the costly nature of punishment, a raiding regime designed to punish and set an example after a state or strong terrorist or insurgent group attacks the US will likely run up against similar obstacles simply because punishment will be inconsistent and infrequent in nature. Israel can obviously afford to do this because projecting force in its neighborhood is easy. The US? Much less so.
What can be done? First, US strategy — when it comes to acts short of state violence — should not aim to “send a message” for all eternity. The idea that we can achieve a sense of finality in the transmission of the “Do not fuck with Uncle Sam (TM)” code through large-scale punitive raids simply commits the US to an endless cycle of raids. Rather, we ought to keep in mind a very specific strategic aim in doing so. First, narrow forms of coercive military strategy may compel certain actors to alter their behavior. But more broadly, we ought to simply think more carefully about what kind of behavior alterations are feasible in the first place and how to achieve them with the threat or direct usage of force. It’s also important to remember recent evidence that even the Taliban didn’t really want al-Qaeda on its territory and may have been powerless to forcibly remove them. We may not be able to avoid future wars of unlimited objectives no matter how hard we try.
However, I do wonder if even the following paragraph concedes too much to the idea of the usage of force as a process of punishment. Years ago, I wrote about a possible “net assessment” approach to counterterrorism strategy. The point of Andrew Marshall’s original work on strategic competitions was the realization that certain rivalries could be assumed to be long-lasting. The US would have to think on longer timescale and identify the comparative advantages and asymmetries in the competition. Given the enormous damage to our way of life and finances that an uncontrolled competition with al-Qaeda and associated groups has entailed, perhaps we ought to remember something of similar importance about the Soviet Union. Some were certain that the USSR could collapse under its own contradictions but did not know when, others made no assumptions that they would see a world in which the USSR and the US were not competitors. Maybe it is time that we adopted a similar perspective.
It may be objected that such an approach is a recipe for “endless war.” But Aaron Friedburg makes a plausible argument that accepting the reality of long-term competition did not compromise the American way of life. Decisionmakers living in the “shadow of the garrison state” structured US defense and national security policy to preserve the US way of life while nonetheless facing up to the reality of a zero-sum ideological struggle with the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War was a scary time, but it was not uniformly experienced in the West as a collective quivering under the looming threat of nuclear annihilation. In fact, many look back with nostalgia towards the social and cultural conditions of the first segment of the Cold War (which, in military-technical terms, was objectively one of the scariest periods).
In any event, today’s fixation on a form of ultimate punishment that we must deliver to our enemies — or the willingness to repeatedly deliver devastating blows — is simply not realistic. We ought to either rethink the idea of how we use coercive force or reinvision it as something conceptually different. I am not as young as I was when I started to become interested in in strategy but I am still a young man. I do not want to see, as my years advance, the same set of mistakes repeated over and over again concerning the same problem.
