The Denial of Destruction
I don’t really agree with Bruce Hoffman that ISIS/ISIL is “winning” but there is a lot here that makes profound sense.
It must start with the recognition that ISIL’s appeal will not diminish nor its allure end until this movement is militarily defeated and pushed out of Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are patently incapable of this task. ….The inadequacy of the embryonic U.S. efforts to train Syrian rebels was also laid bare last month when terrorists loyal to al Qaeda kidnapped the commander of Division 30, the American-backed indigenous force, along with six other senior officers. The al Qaeda fighters then attacked the unit’s headquarters, killing or wounding nearly half of the remaining men — effectively negating U.S. hopes that the unit would be a model for future training initiatives. …. Second, we have to finally ask why, after a decade and a half, we do not have even one case of host nation counterterrorist training that is an unambiguous success story? Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali or Yemen our efforts to build partner capacity have all foundered. In each, terrorist numbers have grown faster than we could effectively train indigenous security forces, their control over territory expanded while governmental sovereignty contracted, and their operational effectiveness appreciably outpaced that of their government opponents.
Hoffman is saying something that many do not want to hear. He is saying that ISIS is a political-military movement, that it is reaping the spoils of battlefield success, and that this battlefield success stems from the lack of forces willing and able to fight, kill, and destroy them. Such activities were once the core focus of American defense thought — the management and application of armed violence. This is increasingly shunned, treated as old-fashioned, and countered with the suggestion that there is somehow a kinder, cleverer, better way. I would be remiss in not admitting that there was a time when writing on this blog and its ancestors agreed with such sentiments. And to some extent I still do. However, after more than a decade of watching continued denials of such unfortunate but very real elements of security and defense it is time to grudgingly admit that the people who thought otherwise were right.
The US taxpayer lavishes immense amounts of funds to maintain a defense and intelligence establishment. The taxpayer pays this cost not only to the governmental entities that officially build such capabilities but also the myriad of private entities that advise, contribute, and support such efforts. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that such monies are wasted when many elements of this massive establishment seem to increasingly abjure, scorn, and otherwise shy away from the task of directing how force will be applied to secure national objectives. Instead, it prefers “smart power” and other fads and euphemisms that foreigners unsurprisingly refuse to take seriously. While all of this may seem like a exaggeration, it may be an understatement. This may be seen in the decline of military history as well as the simple fact that, as David Betz recently noted, the conduct of war seems to be routinely ignored in institutions that produce the next generation of policymakers and researchers. The very nuts and bolts mechanics of what we use the military for are also now apparently becoming passe.
Our opponents — unfortunately — who do not have the luxury of the security, prosperity, and power we enjoy, understand something we do not and practice it. Force is used to secure political objectives. The application of force is not easy nor is it confined to solely military considerations; it certainly has always involved many other things and it especially does today. This may be seen not only in the failure of various convoluted approaches to avoid the simple matter of what dealing with groups like ISIS entail but also the grotesque record of US attempts to somehow pass off this duty to foreign entities either wholly underequipped to fight the enemies we have designated or wholly uninterested in our conception of who the enemy of importance is. If we cannot reckon with the basic task of applying force or threatening it to secure our goals; if we continue to pretend that we can simply bloodlessly build “partner capacity” (as if what we are doing is somehow a glorified development project rather than attempting to get other people to fight, kill, and die for us); if we continue to above all else deny the nature of what even limited objectives in our struggle with ISIS require we might as well hang up our hats and call it a day.
It is not that Putin, ISIS, or any of the other bogeymen we have turned into ten foot tall giants are somehow strategic masterminds or particularly fearsome combatants. Compared to the US they are materially weak and often far more shortsighted and ad hoc than we give credit. Nor, however, are they simply unthinking brutes who “only understand force.” The problem is that we have simply failed to take them seriously. Even before the rise of ISIS we failed to grapple with the basic notion that al-Qaeda could have purpose, intentionality, and direction in how it used its scarce resources against us. But this certainly goes beyond our response to groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. In general, we have told ourselves “no, they just wouldn’t do that” only to see “them” turn around and do that from Europe’s revitalized battlegrounds to looming great power tensions and military competitions in Asia.
A lot of it, depressingly, simply boils down to the willingness to call a bluff and test pieties and shibboleths that we have unthinkingly bought into. The basic notion that NATO’s Article 5, for example, defines a compact of collective defense that its various members will not shirk was a commonplace assumption of defense planning. I say “was” because polling now indicates that, in light of the particular “shadow of the future” that Russian movements creates, this assumption ought now to be severely questioned. This ought not to be surprising. People suddenly begin to think more seriously about their willingness to fight when fighting becomes a near-term possibility. And this is why many Baltic states sitting right next door to Putin and his “little green men” are now mulling or actively reinstating conscription.
This is not, to be sure, another overheated argument that the world has somehow become dramatically more complex or dangerous than it once was. However, just as modern society increasingly denies the reality of death and strains with every technological and scientific contrivance to somehow escape it, there is a similar denial of a basic and unfortunate element of the role that force and violence plays in the world we live in today. Politics is about the division of power. Sometimes, for reasons we cannot yet scientifically explain quite well, that dispute over “who gets what, when, and how” manifests itself in violence when actors decide that they will turn to force to achieve what they could not otherwise gain. As long as the application of force remains an integral element of political and social life we must understand and adapt to this reality as need be. Else, we might as well ponder about how to give up aims that might otherwise be thwarted by an armed faction or adversary that is willing to use force to stymie us.
