The Worth of War (22 page)

The US government was to be able to “plausibly disclaim responsibility” for all covert operations.
⁷⁸
Carrying out successive secret presidential orders, usually framed as NSDs, the CIA overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and installed the shah, who ruled Iran for the next quarter century. During the 1950s, the CIA also overthrew governments in Guatemala, Egypt, and Laos that were deemed to be unfriendly to the United States.
⁷⁹
The CIA helped organize and, for a number of years, subsidize anti-Communist politicians and political parties in Western Europe. In some instances, of course, CIA operations resulted in embarrassing failures such as the abortive “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba in 1961. Nevertheless, covert CIA operations have been used by presidents to advance American interests in virtually every corner of the globe—literally from Afghanistan to Zaire. From its inception, the CIA was a presidential instrument with the Congress exercising little or no supervision over its activities. Indeed, until the 1970s the agency lacked procedures for even responding to congressional concerns about its activities. Such procedures were not deemed necessary. To the extent that Congress was even informed about CIA operations, such information usually came after the fact.
⁸⁰
In the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate investigations, both houses of Congress, to be sure, established intelligence oversight committees with subpoena powers and budgetary authority over intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, Congress continues to acquiesce in the notion that intelligence is an executive function, and congressional intervention in the operations of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has been superficial at best.
⁸¹

For the most part, the nation's new intelligence capabilities were directed outside its own borders. Truman hoped to avoid infringements on the civil liberties of Americans and opposed Director J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to expand the domestic intelligence activities of the FBI.
⁸²
By executive order, however, Truman created a Loyalty Review Board, which brought together a number of World War II programs designed to screen prospective government employees and to investigate charges of treasonable or disloyal conduct. Individual agencies were authorized to develop their own loyalty programs.
⁸³
Truman also issued a number of executive orders, establishing a classification system for government secrets that ultimately led to the classification of millions of pages of documents and allowed the president and the various federal agencies to stamp as “secret” almost any information they chose not to reveal to the public and the Congress.
⁸⁴
This policy continued under subsequent presidents and continues today as the National Security Agency conducts “secret” monitoring of Americans' phone and email conversations, and other agencies engage in secret renditions and interrogations of terrorist suspects. We shall return to this topic in
chapter 5
.

FROM CITIZEN SOLDIER TO MILITARY PROFESSIONAL

As the expansion of presidential war powers reduced the role of Congress, another set of developments reduced the immediate impact of war on the citizenry and, hence, the potential for war to produce popular mobilization. Foremost among these developments was the professionalization of the American military. For two centuries, America had relied upon citizen soldiers to fill the ranks of its armed forces and spurned the idea of a professional army as being inconsistent with democratic values. In the wake of the Vietnam War, however, presidents and military planners realized that dependence upon citizen soldiers could impose serious constraints upon the use of military forces. The risks facing citizen soldiers provided opponents of the use of military
force on any given occasion with a potent issue to use against the government. The casualties and hardships borne by citizen soldiers, moreover, reverberated through the society and might, as the Vietnam case illustrated, fuel antiwar movements and resistance to military conscription. University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who served as a member of the Gates Commission created by President Nixon to examine the elimination of military conscription, argued that three-fourths of the opposition to the Vietnam War was generated by the draft.
⁸⁵
Citizen soldiers might be appropriate for a national war in which America was attacked and domestic opposition driven to the margins. Anti–Vietnam War protests, however, convinced President Richard Nixon and his successors that an army composed of professional soldiers would give them greater flexibility to use military power when they deemed it necessary.
⁸⁶

Accordingly, Nixon ended the draft in 1973 and began conversion of the military into an all-volunteer force of professional soldiers. The presumption was that sending military professionals into battle would spawn less popular and political resistance than deploying reluctant conscripts, and this supposition seems to have been bore out. Indeed, in 2002, some opponents of President George W. Bush's buildup of American forces for an attack against Iraq argued for a renewal of conscription precisely because they believed that president would be constrained from going to war if the military consisted of draftees.
⁸⁷
Members of this new professional force, moreover, especially those recruited for its elite combat units, receive extensive training and indoctrination designed to separate them from civilian society, to imbue them with a warrior ethic emphasizing loyalty to the group and organization as primary values, and to reduce their level of integration into the larger society.
⁸⁸
This training is designed to immunize the military against possible contagion from antiwar and defeatist sentiment that may spring up in civilian America and appears to have produced a military, especially an officer corps, that views itself as a distinct caste.
⁸⁹

To a significant extent, the current military lives as a state within a state, subject to its own rules, norms, and governance.
⁹⁰
Many are
recruited from families with a strong military tradition and from areas of the country, primarily the South and West, where conservative politics and support for the military are widespread.
⁹¹
This is a military better prepared for the idea that war is a normal state of affairs and whose members are less likely to complain to the media and members of Congress about the hardships and dangers they may endure in their nation's service. The creation of this all-volunteer force has sharply reduced the constraints upon the use of military power and rendered it more difficult to mobilize opposition to the continuing use of military force once a campaign is launched. Thus, for example, while the national news media and opposition politicians sought to make an issue of the American casualties suffered during the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the public's response was muted. Military families were generally prepared—albeit not pleased—to accept the risks to which their loved ones were exposed. They were trained to be “stoical” in the words of defense analyst Eliot Cohen.
⁹²
Most Americans, secure in the knowledge that their children would not be called upon to serve in the armed forces, were more concerned with other political issues.
⁹³

Taking professionalism a step further and removing war even further from the popular political domain is the presidential use of private military contractors. Thousands of heavily armed private contractors were employed by American public and corporate entities in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 to provide security and other services for US operations. These contractors were involved in intense fighting alongside regular US troops in the spring of 2004 and incurred significant casualties.
⁹⁴
Indeed, the existence of these private soldiers was brought to the attention of the American public in March, 2004, when four employees of “Blackwater, USA,” a North Carolina security firm, were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi town of Fallujah and their bodies mutilated and dragged through the streets. The four men, former army special operations personnel, were serving as security officers for American firms working in Iraq.
⁹⁵
Later that year, eight Blackwater commandos, assisted by the firm's helicopters, repelled an attack by Shiite militiamen against the US headquarters in the town of Najaf. At the
peak of the fighting, the various US security firms working in Iraq formed an operational alliance to share intelligence and resources.
⁹⁶

The ability of private firms to deploy heavily armed, professional soldiers has given presidents access to military capabilities outside the scope of public or congressional scrutiny. Indeed, several recent presidents have employed private military contractors to engage in activities that Congress has expressly declared US military forces could not undertake. For example, when authorizing assistance to Columbia to prosecute the “War on Drugs” in the 1990s, Congress placed strict limits upon the use of American military forces to support the Columbian military. US forces were prohibited from engaging in counterinsurgency efforts and from providing assistance to Columbian military units with poor human rights records. The Clinton administration, however, believed that drug gangs and antigovernment insurgents were often difficult to distinguish and found it difficult to identify Columbian military units with unblemished human rights records. Accordingly, the administration employed private military contractors, at a cost of roughly $1 billion, to circumvent what it saw as burdensome congressional restrictions. The use of private contractors allowed the administration to claim it was following the letter of the law and, at the same time, to provide “deniability” and political cover if military plans went awry.
⁹⁷
Thus, MPRI was given a contract to develop the Columbian government's overall military plan and another contractor, Northrup Services, was engaged to provide technical specialists for such tasks as staffing radar sites.

Two additional firms, Virginia Electronics and DynCorp, provided what amounted to fully equipped combat troops. Virginia Electronics employed former US Navy Seals to operate gunboats along the supply lines used by Columbian rebel groups, while DynCorp provided training and support for the Columbian Air Force. According to many reports, DynCorp pilots actually flew combat missions against Columbian rebel groups.
⁹⁸
Private military contractors also were employed by the Clinton administration in Bosnia, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, and Liberia to circumvent congressional restrictions on the use of
American military forces.
⁹⁹
In these and many other instances, military contractors have provided presidents with the means to pursue their own policy goals without having to defer to congressional views and priorities.

While a more professional and centralized military might diminish the political constraints on presidential war making, it could not fully eliminate them. Many Americans might be willing to accept the idea of sending professional soldiers into harm's way, especially if their own children were not subject to conscription. But, even professional soldiers are Americans with hometowns, parents, relatives, and friends, and the Vietnam conflict had demonstrated that American casualties could become a political liability and, ultimately, a constraint on the use of military force. This problem was one of the factors that led successive administrations to search for means of waging warfare that would minimize American casualties. After the carnage of the Civil War, American military doctrine had already begun to emphasize technology and maximum firepower in order to keep casualties low and maintain public support.
¹⁰⁰

In the years after the Vietnam War, the military services invested tens of billions of dollars in the development of cruise missiles, drone aircraft, precision-guided munitions, and a multitude of other advanced weapons systems capable of disabling or destroying America's opponents while reducing the risks to which American troops were exposed.
¹⁰¹
Thus, in the 1990 Persian Gulf War—and even more so in the 2001–2002 Afghan campaign, precision-guided weapons inflicted enormous damage on enemy forces and gave US troops all but bloodless victories. In the 2003 Iraq War, pilotless aircraft, precision-guided munitions, battlefield computers, and new command-and-control technology helped bring about a rapid victory over substantial Iraqi forces with what once might have been seen as impossibly low casualties.
¹⁰²
Military analysts have pointed to these developments—sometimes called a revolution in military affairs—as indicative of a technological revolution in the conduct of war.

Like past transformations in military tactics, however, this one has
been caused as much by political as technological or exclusively military factors.
¹⁰³
At any rate, to the extent that US casualties can be limited to smart bombs and pilotless aircraft, popular opposition to the use of military force is less likely to become a political problem. After one Predator drone aircraft was downed, an air force officer involved in the program said, “It was on page six of the
Washington Post
. If that had been a [manned] F-16, it would have been page one.”
¹⁰⁴
In 2012 and 2013, with most American combat troops removed from the Middle East, the Pentagon and the CIA continue to send hundreds of drones every month against suspected terrorists. While some in the media question this practice, few Americans show any interest. Unmanned drones fired at shadowy enemies seem more like a video game than a war.

IMPERIAL OVERREACH?

America's Constitution and its lively popular politics offered some protection from the sort of imperial overreach and decline described by Paul Kennedy. Whatever imperialist inclinations America manifested tended to be self-correcting. War was quickly followed by popular mobilization, Congressional opposition, and a return to civilian concerns. Today, this pattern seems to have come unglued. War has less impact on civilian politics than it once did thanks to the professionalization of the military. If the use of robots continues to grow, the citizenry will have even less reason to become agitated about military conflicts. At the same time, presidential unilateralism and congressional marginalization have made a shambles of Constitutional checks and balances. The Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war. What a quaint and forgotten idea! Having become a more imperial republic, the United States no longer seems immune from imperial decline.