The One Great Taboo of Our Wars: Asking “Why?”
In the years since I first got to know him, Kelsey D. Atherton has become not only an excellent defense and technology reporter but also an astute observer of some of the contradictions and paradoxes of our wars. Today, he said something quite profound on Twitter.
Atherton is referring to several recent stories that are so depressingly moronic and shortsighted that I will not, for once, link to them. I leave it up to the reader to locate them through Googling. But nonetheless, Atherton would have been correct regardless of the prompt. Asking basic questions about 14 years of war has become a taboo. And one cannot understand drone hysteria without stating this outright.
Deceptions and self-deceptions
It falls on a clownish demagogue like Donald Trump to state outright that Iraq was a horrendous failure with catastrophic geopolitical consequences, and as Joshua Foust and others have noted we seem all too eager to sweep still-raw failures into the memory hole. That’s not to say that I believe that an honest recounting of the decade and a half of war is something I would expect; a massive blame game is much more likely. But it still matters that we have collectively agreed to forget about basic aspects of policy and strategy, and that only a grotesque court jester figure like Trump has the nerve to remind us.
If there has been one condition that has characterized most of the wars I have observed in my short life since 2001, it has been collective denial and self-deception. A small sampling follows from things that immediately spring to my mind — and a very small sampling given the various sad episodes of denial, magical thinking, and delusion in our wars. My former graduate school professor Christine Fair is an expert chronicler of the basic denial and self-deception we engaged in over Pakistan. In Afghanistan we suppressed warnings that could have saved lives and tried to muzzle one of the few government agencies that dared to investigate whether desired outcomes were being met. In Iraq we told ourselves a bed time story about the success of our efforts that was cruelly shattered when the government whose capacity we bolstered could not consolidate itself and the army we trained melted away when it came time to fight the Islamic State. And as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has often lamented, analysts have gone as far as to deny basic observed facts about al-Qaeda when they contravened a narrative. MLR Smith has gone even further in observing structural flaws in how we reason about the enemy; many have certainly observed that the West is also not the rest but assumes it as such.
Certainly one might quibble with the idea that most of this is explainable in psychological terms. There are political, bureaucratic, and strategic dimensions to the production of this capacity for bullshitting ourselves that longtime readers of this blog can readily recite. One particular theme I have examined for years that Smith has recently taken up far more succintly is the failure of liberal univeralism as an ideological worldview guiding the conduct of Western statecraft. I would check out Smith’s piece for more, but things I have said on the subject is that such a viewpoint denies the basic elements of human conflict and thus finds itself routinely shocked and surprised when they assert themselves on the world stage. They also paper over the seedy compromises necessary to make liberal war work, such as the usage of proxies or the tolerance of what any unbiased observer would regard as ethnic cleansing by our valued “partners” in Iraq during the first phase of our involvement. Even today, the US casts the Islamic State as unworldly savages for doing what is often commonplace down over in Riyadh: brutalizing people based on a fundamentalist conception of religion.
Whatever the explanation, at the end of the day the common theme that runs through all of this is our impressive capacity for self-delusion and our discomfort when those illusions are challenged. A while back, John Robb called the DC security-industrial complex the “money/fantasy machine,” provoking a debate in the still embryonic defense blogosphere over the nature of the term and how accurate it was. Was he right? Kenneth Payne recently completed a study of the Vietnam War that suggests that strategy isn’t really about ends, ways, and means. It’s a quest for self-esteem, and validating our own beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes, as Lynn Rees pointed out, that can be a blessing.
Lawrence Freedman has argued that Churchill’s strategy in 1940–1941 is vastly different from the strategy contemporary strategic studies holds up as an ideal. His strategy was the triumph of hope over experience, one of the great fantasy spectaculars of the 20th century. His soldiers were tired, his people were dispirited, his aircraft carriers carried biplanes, his generals were mulish, and his empire was restive. The only anchors in reality for Churchill’s strategy were the inability of Nazis to march over or part the English Channel and American reluctance to see faltering Britain replaced by revanchist Germany. All else was theater.
Churchill won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. This is revealing: Churchill was a better writer than orthodox strategist. His delusions were as larger than life as his correct notions were. But Churchill’s resort to grand narrative was far more successful than strategic orthodoxy can capture or comprehend. More often than not, the strength of conviction behind a strategy’s more tenuous elements wins more in war than its tenuous connection to reality warrants.…. Churchill’s strategy in World War II consisted of holding on to a series of deluded and contradictory beliefs about the British Empire in the hope that something would turn up. Self-appointed strategic professionals often diagnose a possible strategic outcome as impossible only to be confounded when someone clings to impossibility until the possible turns up. Mere clinging has a long and distinguished record of unmasking the impossible as only the improbable under the wrong circumstances and the all too probable under the right circumstances.
In other words, the lesson of Churchill’s strategy was simply that hope can be a plan and often is. And that epistemic consistency or even simply just basic internal coherence often matters more than instrumental rationality. Like believers in Communism, many in national security circles held to fantastical notions (“Pakistan is our ally!”) despite the increasingly violent conflicts with reality such beliefs provoked. And when that failed, they attempted to preserve internal coherence through ridiculous gestures like the revival of body counts, Friedman Units, the preservation of mythical justifications, and the tried and true mechanism of “spiking the football.” You can also see this on a more basic level in the Terror Management Theory literature in psychology. All of us must die. Yet somehow we must nonetheless live. How do we do this? Similarly, Freedman’s book on strategy suggests simply that we are driven to strategize nonetheless even if it is not clear that doing so even loosely would grant us a better outcome than strategy as muddling through.
Droning on while Victor Charlie gets stronger
Returning back to Atherton’s point, it is taboo to talk about this taboo. We would rather, for example, take refuge in saying that war is somehow more complex than it actually is or repeat the bizarre criticism that we are losing because we believe war in the main involves killing people. Discussion of strategy is often tautological, boiling down to the banal insight that we could have better balanced ends, ways, and means. OK, but how? What different choices would you have made, and how could you justify those choices in light of the situation at hand? How much would you be willing to risk being wrong? And most of all, how could you have imposed any choice you made on the often unruly and squabbling corners of the US government more effectively than Obama and Bush did? And no, saying “well, I wouldn’t have gone to war at all” isn’t an acceptable answer unless you believe that the US ought to have simply just sucked up more terrorist attacks after 9/11 because you have a greater chance of dying in your bathtub than being killed by Bin Laden. By that token, why care at all about nuclear weapons? What was/is the probability of those being used after Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
Drones became a totem due to a number of elements. First, the empirically observed tendency of technopanics among the commetariat. Second, as Rich Ganske and Dave Blair have often observed, there is also blatant bureaucratic self-interest among those that felt that their rice bowls and institutional identities were threatened by what drones represented in American strategy and security. One can also point out the anti-war movement’s knee-jerk opposition to basic self-defense and inability to articulate even the most cursory of alternatives for US counterterrorism as well as the frequently empirically barren and utopian fantasies of international lawyers, NGOs and other advocate groups about how force ought to be utilized in irregular conflicts. And then there’s always also flat-out propaganda as well. But that only scratches the surface. The greatest sin of the drone campaign is not that it makes going to war easier or that it is somehow violating either domestic or international norms of propriety — both farcial notions that have been addressed at extreme length over the years elsewhere. Rather, the biggest sin of the drone is that it is both efficient at surveilling and targeting but is far more efficient at helping policy elites mislead the public and themselves about war and peace.
By turning larger issues of basic issues of statecraft into “drone” questions (we need a drone treaty! We need drone norms!), it became easy to dodge the inconvenient question of why existing treaties and norms about the use of force had been troubled for some time. Drones certainly highlighted those troubles, but did not originate them. Likewise, inconvenient questions about US power, title 10/50 authorities, and public support in warmaking similarly became “drone” questions and thus were dodged at a more fundamental level than whether or not America can fly remotely controlled death machines around. Drones were quite literally a device for us to ignore the elephant in the room screaming “allah akbar!” before it detonated the explosive vest strapped to its body: Pakistan killing our soldiers and our local allies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies. I am not going to rehash what amounts to a book’s length written by Daniel Trombly on the subject, so I will direct you to his blog archives to get a taste of what went wrong.
In short, we externalized a host of weighty issues onto a technology that we believed to best symbolize the most available conceptual representation of those anxieties circa 2011–2015. You can see this in the “Drone Warrior Sparkle” story that Atherton refers to, in which the public is invited to gawk at the deviance of female drone pilot that is unashamed that her job involves killing people from a distance. Next up: an exclusive interview with the archers at Agincourt about how creepy, strange, and bad it is to shoot an armored knight full of arrows rather than let him run you down. We would like to place all of our anxieties, discomforts, and feelings of inherent contradiction and worry about the war itself on “Sparkle’s” petite shoulders, Othering her for pressing a button on our behalf so we don’t have to feel bad about giving her the order to press the button to release the Hellfire missiles onto yet another target on one of our many battlefields.
Will we ever get it right? What can we do now?
The question arises naturally if we will ever get policy and strategy right, if both its past and its present seem to have much more in common than we are willing to admit. Ultimately I can’t answer that question, as this somehow presumes we can objectively define what “right” is. Perhaps one thing we can also accept is simply that the insistence that we can use violence to impose our will on others and accomplish our aims is ideological in nature and unfalsfiable. No one has answered Richard Betts’ question of whether strategy is an illusion, including Betts himself. That’s not really as bad as it sounds, as per Imre Lakatos all research programs rest on a unfalsifiable “hard core” of belief. But it does suggest something about why this question is so hard to answer.
Noah Shactman responded to Atherton’s tweet by suggesting that we can only focus on what is observable (drone killings) rather than what is not (strategy, if it exists).
Shactman is not alone in making this argument. But I also believe that it is a dubious one. Our government arguably has a strategy. It just isn’t a good one. And through open-source reports (such as the useful work that Shactman’s colleagues at the Daily Beast produce on the fight against the Islamic State) and the statements of officials we can discern revealed preference and assess — imperfectly — -what is going on. As James Burnham observed decades ago, laying bare the relation between the aims and instrumental means of elites in society lies at the cornerstone of how political realism can defend human freedom. And in describing — without the moral panics of technophobia — how our woes stem from the relation between our goals and our behavior, the defense analyst can perform a revolutionary act of truth-telling by laying bare the contradictions, assumptions, and messy politics at the root of our strategic problems.
So, if there is something I hope we have learned from 14 years of war, it is that asking “why?” and questioning first principles must not be a taboo that we only dance around. The task of the analyst is to rise above the shadows of Plato’s Cave instead of being trapped by them, of being unafraid to declare in bold terms that the emperor has no clothes, and of being willing to constantly question the basic aims and instrumental approach of war rather than be content to focus on its merely epiphenomenal outgrowths. That is a difficult task, for sure, but one that ultimately will serve us better in the long run than the frequently superficial and unserious debates we have today.
