The Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton recently released their Cyber Power Index, which compares the G20 countries in their ability to resist cyber attacks while simultaneously leveraging information technology in their economy. The nations are ranked based on 39 indicators combined into 4 weighted attributes: Legal and Regulatory Framework, Economic and Social Context, Technology and Infrastructure, and Industry Application. The Cyber Power Index is in interactive tool so users can custimize the weighing as well as drill down into the details, but the default has all four factors as roughly equal, with slightly less emphasis on Industry Application. With these settings, the index holds a few surprises. The United States is second, behind the United Kingdom, and some of the countries often characterized to be cyber powerhouses like China and Russia did relatively poorly, 13th and 14th place respectively.

The Legal and Regulatory Framework was based on whether laws and policies maximize the value of the Internet and cyberspace, favoring openness, security, and collaboration. Security and openness were not seen as contradictory since some measures work to benefit both. Economic and Social Context measured societies’ capacity to adopt information technology into their lives.  Technology Infrastructure was defined as “core infrastructure; mechanisms and incentives to invest, invent, and innovate; and strategies to improve” in order to develop and maintain cyber power. Lastly, Industry Adoption compared countries abilities to integrate cyber technologies into their core industries such as health, finance, and energy.

Overall, several trends emerged. The countries near the top, the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, and Canada, were developed Western countries with a long history of Internet use. While there were minor differences across factors, these countries were fairly consistent, ranking in the top 7 for all 4 categories. There was also a large discrepancy between the best and worst performers, with Great Britain achieving a total score roughly three times as high as Saudi Arabia. The United States was a close second to the UK in Legal and Regulatory Framework, first in Economic and Social Context, a more distant second behind the UK in Technology Infrastructure Adoption, and third in Industry Application behind Australia and South Korea. Despite concerns over Chinese and Russian cyber attacks, both countries ranked near the bottom in Legal and Regulatory Framework and Technology Infrastructure, implying difficulty developing and implementing security policy. From the results, technical skills, high educational attainment levels, open trade policies, and an innovative business environment were discovered to be the foundation to cyber power and excelling across categories.

Originally from CTOvision.com

As is easily apparent from even a brief overview of American military interventions, the United States engaged frequently in limited, expeditionary actions to protect the lives of American citizens and U.S. interests abroad. While many of these interventions were undoubtedly imperial in nature, in many cases they were far more limited in scope and intent than the supposedly post-imperial actions the United States and other Western powers pursue today. Here, though, it is important to distinguish actions where the U.S. was directly concerned with gaining territory from the protection of U.S. interests.

As outlined in Federalist No. 8, Alexander Hamilton explained something of a core rationale in American geopolitics. The preservation of an open, liberal society was necessitated by the exclusion of potential military rivals from an American sphere of interest. American union was necessary both to prevent each state or grouping of states, without a sovereign federal authority, from sacrificing their liberty in the compelling interest of achieving safety from each others potential military threat. Hamilton saw the development of a maritime-centric U.S. military, under the auspices of a federal government, as a critical task for U.S. national security. For, without it, the U.S. would find itself in a dangerous neighborhood, and more likely in need of a strong army:

The jealousy of military establishments would postpone them as long as possible. The want of fortifications, leaving the frontiers of one state open to another, would facilitate inroads. The populous States would, with little difficulty, overrun their less populous neighbors. Conquests would be as easy to be made as difficult to be retained. War, therefore, would be desultory and predatory. PLUNDER and devastation ever march in the train of irregulars. The calamities of individuals would make the principal figure in the events which would characterize our military exploits.

This picture is not too highly wrought; though, I confess, it would not long remain a just one. Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

Hamilton did not believe in the democratic peace, nor did he see maritime and continental states as being at similar risk of tyrannical military rule:

… if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or, which is most probable, should be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe — our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.

Hamilton’s warning, of course, was proven correct by the secession of the Confederacy, which quickly plunged both the Union and the C.S.A. into mobilization of war economies which the territory of the United States would not see again until the total war mobilizations of the twentieth century. Additionally, as John Jay noted in Federalist No. 5, separate states or confederacies would be:

be more desirous to guard against the others by the aid of foreign alliances, than to guard against foreign dangers by alliances between themselves.

This is another prediction born correctly out by the course of the Civil War, in which the Confederacy probed using relations with the French and United Kingdom as a safeguard against the superior strength of the Union. Critical to the exclusion of foreign powers from bringing about the creation of a European-style security dilemma within the United States, and reinforced by the overcoming of that dilemma in a federal union, was a strong navy, capable of protecting the commercial rights of the whole union and excluding rival powers from the U.S. neighborhood when necessary. The vigorous use of expeditionary forces, in particular, by a permanently authorized U.S. Navy which, since the inception of the U.S., was able to act without a formal Congressional declaration of war, was a frequent feature of U.S. security policy, especially with non-Amerindian polities. In a survey of foreign interventions, a Library of Congress researcher accurately summarized:

The majority of the instances listed were brief Marine or Navy actions prior to World War II to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. A number were actions against pirates or bandits. Some were events, such as the stationing of Marines at an Embassy or legation, which later were considered normal peacetime practice.

During the Barbary Wars, the United States did attempt to support regime change, albeit one under the aegis of a coup d’etat by a rival claimant to the throne of Tripoli, rather than any kind of exercise in democracy promotion or nation-building (it was ultimately proven unnecessary by Jefferson’s successful negotiations with the standing government). Even when the United States overthrew overseas regimes, its primary interests were generally less about the promotion of democracy than the protection of American citizens, the punishment of regimes harboring pirates, bandits, and other violent non-state actors, and the prevention of third party governments from using the target regime as a proxy for attack against the United States (such was often the case in U.S. interventions in the Caribbean).

If the United States intervened in response to massacres, it was because the target regime (such as Ottoman Turkey) had engaged in or permitted a massacre of foreign and American citizens. Until the Spanish-American War, which was justified as much by conventional conceptions of national interest (and the rationales clear in Federalist of preventing foreign colonial encroachment in the Western Hemisphere) as it was by humanitarian ones, the maltreatment of foreigners by their own governments was not a justifiable trigger for hostilities (nor was the institution of democracy a normal and widely accepted rationale for intervention). On the other hand, the mere murder of an American sailor was enough to trigger the bombardment of villages or the deployment of Marines. One can contrast this to the European proto-humanitarian interventions which were often justified on the basis of protecting one’s preferred sect of Christians from another sect, or another religion entirely (a logic which, in secularized form, was later imported into American international juristic thought by James Brown Scott from the conquista-era Spanish theologian Vitoria).

The frequent use of a maritime-centric force to conduct limited interventions, often punitive in nature, or to stabilize a foreign government against insurrection or assist a U.S.-friendly faction in winning a civil war, then, should not surprise anybody. Yet to many commentators, drones, special operations forces, and naval forces are some kind of new and unprecedented threat to world order and national sovereignty. As Tom Engelhardt writes in a breathless summation of Obama’s new defense policies:

A new way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into focus and one thing is clear: in the name of Washington’s needs, it will offer a direct challenge to national sovereignty.

This is only new if one considers World War II to be the beginning of American engagement of the world. As it should be immediately obvious, the use of maritime-centric forces to launch punitive raids against countries which infringe upon the safety of U.S. citizens or threaten its interests is probably one of the oldest ways of American warfare. Indeed, one could call it an Anglo-American way of warfare, as the Royal Navy and Marines fulfilled a relatively similar purpose for a long time (although the British far more frequently ended up completely upending the sovereignty of their targets by incorporating them into a formal empire).  According to Tom Engelhardt, modern military technology will result in the fundamental destruction of land-based sovereign rights by a pernicious offshore power – a historically unprecedented event in and of itself. As another commentator recently put it:

It [is] immediately obvious that a naval fleet shielded by aircraft [is] no longer confined to the surface of the sea, that [purely] maritime weapons had become old style…

… independent air war, no longer confined to purely land war… presented a new type of war, with no analogies or parallels to the rules of traditional land war or sea war. The independent air force introduced an entirely independent application of force, whose specific results for the concept of enemy, war, and booty we must now consider.

By recently, I meant 1954, when Carl Schmitt described the development of modern aerial technology in the early 20th century in his Nomos of the Earth. Indeed, many of the criticisms of indirect war and offshore war actually date to the 17th-19th century trends in warfare that Schmitt chronicles in his genealogy of international law. Take for example the fear that offshore forces will stir resentment and hatred:

As opposed to an occupying land power, a sea power pursuing a blockade would have no interest in establishing security and order in enemy territory. Land forces can have autoritié établie, i.e., a positive relation to the occupied territory and its inhabitants, because military occupation can be accomplished only by an army that is present and establishes authority. This introduces the necessity of direct contact between the occupying army and occupying territory, and results in legal relations between the occupying power and the occupied country. By contrast, a blockading fleet has only a negative relation to enemy territory and its inhabitants, because it considers both the land and the people to be nothing more than the goal of a forceful action and the object a means of compulsion…

….

With air bombardment the lack of relation between military personnel in the air and the earth below, as well as with inhabitants thereon, is absolute. Not even the shadow of the relation between protection and obedience remains. Independent air war allows neither the one nor the other side a possibility to establish a relation…. [thus demonstrating] the purely destructive character of modern air war.

Schmitt later outlines what he sees as a fundamental tension between the desires for a truly universal world order in which the victor of the Cold War would “appropriate the whole earth – land, sea, and air – and would divide and manage it with his plans and ideas. Of course, where Schmitt departs from the many commentators who have followed in his footsteps contemplating the impact of new military technology and globalization on international order is in his sober assessment of their ultimate meaning, one rather surprising for somebody whose very country and idea for a new legal system was completely annihilated by the loss of World War II:

The existence of modern technology should neither make us drunk nor lead us to despair. We need neither abandon human reason nor cease to consider rationally all the possibilities of a new nomos of the earth.

A second possibility might be an attempt to retain the balance structure of the previous nomos, and to maintain it in a way consistent with contemporary technical means and dimensions. That would mean that England’s former domination of the oceans would be expanded into a joint domination of sea and air, which only the United States is capable of doing. America is, so to speak, the greater island that could administer and guarantee the balance of the rest of the world…. Continuation of the hegemonic balance structure… has the greatest chance of accepted tradition and custom on its side.

In other words, the American way of war and global strategy Engelhardt outlines is neither really a radical shift nor a historically unprecedented one – indeed, it is one that, as most realist commentators have since argued, is really an outgrowth of the British strategy – and one reapplied to American strategy, in which naval power kept continental threats at arms length while suppressing threats to commerce and the rights of U.S. citizens. Because of this latter task, Schmitt identified sea war as being a sphere where opponents did not always have legal equality and recognition, because it was often waged by states against pirates, bandits, and privateers, which were either illegal (in the case of the first two) or legal but without significant legal protections (the latter). Raids and destruction without obligation to populace on land were the order of the day. Now read Engelhardt:

And don’t forget the Navy, which couldn’t be more offshore to begin with.  It already operates 11 aircraft carrier task forces (none of which are to be cut — thanks to a decision reportedly made by the president).  These are, effectively, major American bases — massively armed small American towns — at sea.  To these, the Navy is adding smaller “bases.”  Right now, for instance, it’s retrofitting an old amphibious transport docking ship bound for the Persian Gulf either as a Navy Seal commando “mothership” or (depending on which Pentagon spokesperson you listen to) as a “lily pad” for counter-mine Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and patrol craft.  Whichever it may be, it will just be a stopgap until the Navy can build new “Afloat Forward Staging Bases” from scratch….

Onshore, American power in the twenty-first century proved a disaster.  Offshore, with Washington in control of the global seas and skies, with its ability to kick down the world’s doors and strike just about anywhere without a by-your-leave or thank-you-ma’am, it hopes for better.  As the early attempts to put this program into operation from Pakistan to Yemen have indicated, however, be careful what you wish for: it sometimes comes home to bite you.

Of course, the threat to sovereignty Engelhardt outlines has, in fact, existed since the development of global maritime power during the dawn of the European state system. Engelhardt is correct to note that this challenges the ability of other states to retain their sovereignty – but it does not challenge the concept of sovereignty itself. The doctrines of war and strategies it has replaced, such as wars which inherently required the overthrow of regimes, the restructuring of societies, and ones launched on the justification of a state’s domestic behavior, were and are far more dangerous to the concept of sovereignty than the pursuance of unauthorized raids.

In fact, most of the behavior that Engelhardt describes occurs with the implicit or explicit consent of the countries involved. Both Pakistan and Yemen’s governments are in fact quite involved with the decisions to conduct drone strikes within their countries, even if politicians use them to curry nationalist favor. These drone strikes receive implicit or explicit sanction in part because the United States tolerates Pakistan’s own “border busting” use of covert proxies in Afghanistan, and successive administrations in Islamabad have all decided that tolerating and seeking some involvement with drone strikes is preferable to taking less cool-headed American politicians up on their threats to bomb the entire country back to the stone age. In Yemen, the government in fact used the drone strikes to maintain the sovereignty of the Saleh regime by directing U.S. targeteers towards enemies of the Yemeni state rather than fighters necessarily involved in levying war against America. Similarly, the proliferation of Anti-Access/Area Denial technologies to challenge the ability of the U.S. to operate close to hostile shores, or deny use of bases for American aircraft or ships, will render this U.S. power projection capability far less invincible and unimpeded than the use of gunboat diplomacy during the 19th century.

Importantly, foreign great powers do draw a distinction between interventions against groups involved in attacking the United States and perceived wars of aggression and regime change. Compare the Chinese reaction to the 1999 Kosovo War or 2003 invasion of Iraq to its reaction to, say, the killing of Osama bin Laden. While China vehemently condemned American aggression in its support of Kosovar secession and the unilateral decision to invade Iraq, it has been far more supportive, or at least even-handed, in its treatment of the broader U.S. war on terrorism. For example, even criticisms of the War on Terror in Chinese state media condemn the United States, more than anything else, for its refusal to acknowledge China and Russia’s right to suppress their own insurgent groups in Chechnya and Xinjiang. Non-intervention is far more desirable to the Chinese as a principle for excluding foreign involvement in China’s internal affairs. China paid lip service to Pakistani sovereignty and acknowledgment of Pakistani sacrifices since 9/11, but this criticism was anything but its vituperative condemnation of U.S. policy in 1999, 2003, or even Chinese state-run media reactions to the war against Libya’s government.

China has never been one to shirk from the morality of launching brutal raids against pirates, brigands, bandits, and terrorists. Even countries with very strong conceptions of sovereignty, and fierce criticism of humanitarian intervention, R2P, or unilateral U.S. military action are indeed quite in favor of the sort of naval raiding strategies the U.S. Defense Strategic Guidance appears to be shifting the U.S. military towards. For example, take General Chen Bingde’s statement on piracy in Somalia. The chief of the PLA general staff argued that the international community should be launching amphibious operations and raids against pirate bases on the Somali coast, asserting, “For counter-piracy campaigns to be effective, we should probably move beyond the ocean and crash their bases on the land.”

India and Russia are also vigorous partners in the fight against Somali piracy, and indeed there is a similarly noticeable pattern whereby intervention against terrorist groups is envied or criticized for hypocrisy, rather than outright condemned, but intervention to overturn regimes or enforce human rights meets staunch opposition. By attempting to interlink the objectives of protecting the world with changing the domestic affairs or ideological stripe of U.S. foes, America actually sacrifices a large deal of favorable perceptions from other great powers. While India, China, and Russia all certainly use U.S. military interventions, whether they are favorable or unfavorable to their respective interests, as case studies for their own force modernization and strategic planning efforts, it is no contradiction to argue for the vigorous use of interventions to conduct limited raids to protect U.S. sovereign rights while fearing the effects of interventions seeking regime change, secession, or undue influence on a country’s internal behavior.

As Schmitt noted, one of the critical problems with continental states towards the naval, and later Anglo-American way of warfare was its applications of categories of political relations more commonly associated with sea warfare against irregular foes to total wars against legitimate governments. Richelieu, in his 17th century Testament politique, noted:

The sea is of all heritages the one over which rulers claim most, yet it is one over which the rights of everybody are least clear… the true titles of this dominion are force and not reason. One must be powerful to lay claim to that heritage….

A great state should never be in a situation of receiving an insult without being able to avenge it…. [England] could obstruct our fisheries, disturb our trade, and by blocking the mouths of our great rivers, force our merchants to pay whatever tolls it felt like asking. It might raid our islands and even our coasts with impunity…

The German geopolitician Friedrich Ratzel, writing centuries later, but before Schmitt, further concluded:

When the balance among the maritime powers is upset, one of them will have to secure for itself control of the maritime space involved. In time of peace, it is continental powers that aim at monopoly within their own territories, particularly in the area of trade; conversely, in time of war, it is maritime powers that tend toward monopoly.

The sentiments of both these thinkers were largely reaffirmed by interwar French naval strategist Raoul Castex, who saw in these sentiments, and American economic interests, the seeds of a “problematic” kind of “humanitarian imperialism. For Schmitt, the most worrying aspect of the navalist way of war was not that it violated sovereignty – in the eyes of many, international violent non-state actors could not use state sovereignty as a cloak to defend themselves – but the application of its criminal categories and unjust foes who had no justis hostis to states, which throughout the 19th century had been considered to have a legitimate right to wage war, as well as the norms of sea warfare, by which all people and property of an enemy state could be targeted without any of the reciprocal obligations inherent to military occupation – in other words, the treating of terrestrial citizens as pirates and privateers (though, it should be noted that Schmitt fully understood that the status of the insurgent and terrorist did not entitle him to the same rights as the conventional uniformed combatant).

Adam Elkus has often observed that the United States shift towards raiding against non-state threats is, in many respects, a return to the historical norm. However, that is not to say that the defense shifts ongoing are perfect. The increase and resources, public attention, and political cache of U.S. special operations forces may ultimately lead to an exhaustion of actual SOF capability, as U.S. policymakers and publics increasingly perceive and market this way of warfare as an inherently “special” activity. If a brief survey of U.S. military interventions makes anything about these sort of raiding operations in defense of U.S. interests clear, it should be that raiding is not special – it is normal. Robert Caruso, who outlined most of what Engelhardt is decrying now a few months ago, explained:

The only consistently forward-leaning and proactive branch isn’t –- it’s called the Marine Corps.

That consistency stretches back to the Barbary Wars. Much ink was spilled about the need for conventional forces’ “big war” doctrines to give way to MOOTW, but unfortunately the end of population-centric counterinsurgency as the ur-meme in U.S. strategic thought has too often meant that what is replacing it – raiding and other limited actions – is seen as purely the territory of SOF, and that an increase in these strategies is inherently at risk of over-expanding or compromise SOF capabilities. This is not so – if institutional and political disincentives and barriers can be overcome, the USN and USMC can arguably return to the role of raids, limited actions against irregular threats and non-state actors, and relieve some of the burden on SOF. For the purposes of destroying pirate bases, rescuing hostages, or storming ships, there do exist actual organic capabilities within the regular USN and USMC capable of doing what Naval Special Warfare makes headlines for doing. VBSS, FAST, and a variety of Marine expeditionary forces can do – and have done – what popular perceptions – and often policymaker perceptions – associate SOF with. The account of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in its takedown of pirates hijacking the Magellan Star is instructive in this regard. Counter-piracy is hardly the only case where a robust USMC and other branches with a more expeditionary posture could avoid the potential of a force over-dependent on SOF and a SOF exhausted from this dependence.

Creating conventional units that know how to conduct such operations across the spectrum of potential threats, and increasingly, raiding operations against foes with robust Anti-Access/Area Denial capabilities, will be a vital development. But the recovery of limited warfare methods to deal with genuinely criminal threats and infringements on U.S. sovereignty is complementary, not distracting, to the mission of deterring and confronting rival regional and great powers. By reverting to the limited warfare common to maritime powers in history, the U.S. will need to expend fewer resources on tasks of nation-building and societal transformation that had limited fungibility, and politically, a negative effect, on attempts to defend U.S. interests and stature vis-a-vis rival great powers. However, limited warfare means acknowledging that criminal categories must be, whenever possible, kept far away from state foes. While terrorists, pirates, and even sometimes proxies and insurgents must be dealt with by the norms Schmitt would associate with warfare at sea, the superimposition of such status to so-called rogue or criminal regimes must be undertaken only with caution. The delimiting of U.S. interests and the imposition of moral criteria which makes rival great powers feel unnecessarily threatened.

Capitalizing on U.S. strengths, as Bernard Finel argued in the Armed Forces Journal in his case for the virtues of raiding, is important – and it should include training across the spectrum. However, the eclipse of U.S. impunity – if not U.S. predominance per se – will make the delineation of U.S. thresholds and interests for intervention, and a re-internalization of the norms and purposes of limited war, rather than just wars of aggression, regime change, or societal transformation, all the more vital. A framework of intervention that balances U.S. interests, military capabilities, and norms of sovereignty that alleviate avoidable aspects of great power tension is possible, but cutting through the hype and novelty surrounding the rhetoric about modern technology, limited warfare, raiding, and the reversion to a maritime-centric force posture is a vitally important first step.

Prince George’s County reported 8 fatal police-involved shootings in 2011, up from only one in 2010, and the Metropolitan Police Department of DC saw 5 people killed in police-involved shootings with none in the previous year. Officials say that this is due to officers getting attacked more often, but statistics on violence are mixed. In both DC and PG County, homicides decreased last year. While assaults on police officers in PG County stayed roughly constant, there was some increase in assaults against officers with guns and three officers were shot and wounded, which a spokesperson called “unprecedented.” In DC, while statistics for 2011 were not available, the FBI recorded assaults against police increasing slightly from 969 in 2009 to 998 in 2010. If this trend continued into 2011, the increase in assaults would be much smaller as a proportion than the increase in lethal force employed by police, so what might be driving these numbers, and how can we reduce them?

In any discussion on police use of force, it’s important to explain what ISN’T a factor in officer-involved shootings. There are many myths surrounding use of force, which this highly recommended video debunks. For example, in discussing deadly force, somebody always asks why an officer can’t just shoot the suspect in the leg or arm, or, worse yet, shoot the weapon out of his hand. Police officers shoot for the center of mass, they shoot to kill, and it’s safer that way. Often, when they shoot they don’t hit anything at all, not because they have lousy aim, but because hitting a moving target in a split second during a high-stress encounter, possibly while moving yourself, is much harder than hitting a target at the range. Shooting for a limb, which is smaller and even more mobile, isn’t just impractical, it’s also dangerous, as it increases the chance of hitting a bystander, the bullet ricocheting off the ground or a building, or the officer missing or otherwise failing to stop an assailant, who then hurts or kills somebody. And being shot in the arm or leg can easily prove just as fatal if a major artery is hit. Counter-intuitively, shooting to kill is meant to save lives. It means that a weapon should only be fired if absolutely necessary and the officer or a victim is in serious danger. Under those circumstances a wounded suspect can still be a threat. If officers shot to wound, they would also be firing their weapons much more often, an inherently dangerous activity as it risks harming bystanders and officers while still potentially killing the suspect. With a shoot-to-kill policy, gun use should be limited to absolute necessities.

What then has led to the increased use of force? It’s possible that, as officials have stated, police really are coming under attack more often. As this isn’t the result of more violent crime, it may be caused by a change in methods of policing. PG County, for example, has gotten more aggressive and proactive in going after dangerous offenders. This may also contribute to the simultaneous drop in violent crime. But in some ways, coming at dangerous suspects is asking for trouble. While calling in an assault team and going after a suspect where he lives is a traditional approach, it often makes much more sense to catch him on a commute where he is less likely to be prepared, armed, and aggressive.

In contrast to a confrontational and reactive manner of policing where officers are called in during or after the crime, preventative policing may be another way to reduce officer use of force and the dangerous situations that lead up to it. One often touted alternative to responding to 911 calls from a cruiser is the foot patrol, where officers interact with communities more freely, making their presence felt and breaking up trouble before it escalates. Foot patrol has had somewhat mixed results in crime prevention. Two major studies, one in Kansas City and the other in Flint, disagreed over whether foot patrols actually lowered the crime rate, though both communities stated they felt safer. Part of the success of the NYPD’s Impact Zones, which lowered crime in some of New York’s most afflicted areas by 33%, can be attributed to this approach. In Operation Impact, over 1,000 police officers were assigned to patrol New York’s highest crime areas on foot, where they not only practiced preventative policing but also apprehended individuals with outstanding warrants, presumably when they met on the streets rather than by storming their homes and hideouts.

Nationwide and noted  in reports on police use of force in the DC area, responding to a call regarding a mentally disturbed person often ends in violence. This includes those under the influence, those with mental illness or mental disability, and those extremely distressed or suicidal. Some departments, such as the Albuquerque Police Department, have responded to a high rate of force by creating crisis teams to deal with such instances where suspects cannot don’t respond to reasoning. They are trained in negotiation and mental health and have seen success in averting violence. From their websites and lists of specialized units, it does not appear that either MPD or PG County have crisis teams of this sort.

Another way to potentially lower the use of force is through training. The data linking police training and reduction of unnecessary or avoidable force is limited and largely inconclusive, though an albeit dated study showed that scenario based training had good results. Part of the problem, officers have noted, is a perceived and often real dichotomy between training and “the streets.” Red teaming helps bridge the gaps but as Fred Lelandof Law Enforcement and Security Consulting often notes,  to really drive lessons home and make them practical, supervisors and veterans must be constantly turning real life experience into teaching moments by advising, instructing, and performing after-action reviews.

The true cause for the recent spike in DC area police use of force is likely complex and a combination of multiple factors. It could be, for example, that, in a successful effort to bring down crime, police have become more aggressive at targeting violent offenders, and as a result see more dangerous assaults on officers. The remedy, to the extent that there is one or that one is necessary, is also likely to be complex. The first step is recognizing this alarming trend, then responding through training and strategies to both ensure that more force than necessary isn’t used and that police don’t find themselves in situations that require it unduly.

Young Beria’s book had a large credibility gap to clear. And it fell short. Sergo Beria’s portrayal of his father within the Beria family may be the truth as he remembers it. History records almost as many examples of men who were monsters at work but saints at home as it does of men who were saints at work but monsters at home. Sergo Beria’s portrayal of his father’s political views may reflect what his father told him they were. They may even be what the elder Beria believed his views were. But within Pa Beria’s mind there were many compartments. The extant historical record convincingly demonstrates that the elder Beria kept many of them compartmentalized away from his family. The younger Beria may know more about what was in those hidden compartments than he lets on. He may simply be ignorant that those compartments and their sordid contents even existed.

We don’t know, hence Sergo Beria’s credibility gap.

With that large asterisk in mind, Sergo Beria’s tale about one of the great mysteries of twentieth century history hints at how credibility is managed within the overall framework of statecraft. The circumstances surrounding the genesis of Operation Barbarossa and Stalin’s peculiar (for him) behavior before and after June 22, 1941 have baffled many observers. The conventional narrative is that Stalin obstinately refused to heed the many warnings provided by his world-class intelligence services and others, trusted Hitler too much, and refused to put the Red Army on alert, leaving it open to the massive damage it and all of Russia suffered at German hands during World War II. The biggest problem with this version is that credulity and trust are not the species of personality trait that Stalin normally displayed. So the conventional narrative asks us to believe that, for much of 1940-1941, Stalin ceased to be Stalin.

The leading counter-narrative about the beginnings of Operation Barbarossa was popularized in the 1987 book Icebreaker by V. B. Resun, a Soviet military intelligence apparatchik who defected to the West in 1978 and published many books under the pseudonym “Viktor Suvorov”. In Icebreaker, Resun claimed that the Red Army was thrown into fatal disarray because it was forward deployed in an offensive and not defensive posture. Stalin was planning on doing to Hitler what Hitler did to him with the only difference being that Hitler beat him to the punch and attacked first. Stalin was surprised because he’d finally met a man as duplicitous as he was.

Sergo Beria’s account of what happened in June 1941, if accurate, provides a bridge of understanding between the conventional and revisionist narratives. The younger Beria claims that Stalin knew that the Germans were going to attack but that Stalin wanted the Germans to attack first since Stalin pull off one of the greatest reverse flip-flops in human history. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia on August 23, 1939 had cleared the way for Stalin to partition Poland with German, sweep up the Baltic states, and extract territory from Romania, it’d left many in the West disillusioned with Stalin and his USSR. During the 1930s, a significant slice of Western opinion thought that Soviet Communism was the future. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact however, many were shocked out of this opinion since they’d seen the future and, whatever the future was. it didn’t re-partition Poland, annex the Baltics, or attack Finland. While Stalin’s hardened cadre of fifth columnists, fellow travelers, hidden agents of influence, useful idiots, and true believers reliably pivoted 180 degrees and relayed the new official Comintern line without deviation and with perfect devotion, a crucial swing constituency within Western public was lost. After Germany’s surprise conquest of France in May-June 1940, Stalin foresaw that he would need to win back this constituency if the Soviet relationship with the now more powerful Germany went south.

Sergo Beria claims that Stalin was fully aware of the panicked reports coming in from Richard Sorge and other Soviet intelligence assets. But Stalin calculated that the USSR would never regain its credibility in the West unless Germany clearly and unequivocally demonstrated that it was the aggressor. The younger Beria further claims that Stalin believed that all the expensive weapons produced by all those Five-Year Plans would enable the Red Army to absorb the initial German attack at the border and then immediately go on the offensive against the Wehrmacht. Sergo Beria implies that the Red Army was deployed in a defensive offensive formation. Whichever formation it was in, however, Stalin underestimated the tactical potency of the Wehrmacht and was shocked at the destruction wreaked on the Red Army in the first weeks of Barbarossa. It was this shock which, if Beria’s account is credible, explains Stalin’s well-attested absence during the first week of the German invasion.

Stalin was successful in regaining his credibility in the West but his success didn’t come cheap: it came at the cost of 25 million lives, untold destruction of property, and, for those that lived, suffering on an unprecedented scale. Even the incorrigible old reactionary Winston Spencer Churchill was forced to concede that, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” and play along with his old enemy. The swing in public opinion was dramatic enough that, at least for a time, large swaths of Western public opinion could credibly mistake the architect of the Great Terror for kindly Uncle Joe. In this, the darkest hour in Russia’s history and his own career, Stalin enjoyed a rare moment of general, and positive, credible influence among people who didn’t happen to be his avowed or covert personal creatures.

But the one form of credibility that Stalin never lost was his negative credibility. From the moment that the Bolsheviks seized power during November 1917, they credibly demonstrated to incumbent power elites outside of Russia that communist revolution or conquest meant that they, their property, and their culture would be inevitably, efficiently, and utterly liquidated down to the last man, woman, child, and book entry. As Japan’s fortunes faded during World War II, Hirohito saw hints of revolution in the faces of Japanese civilians as he was driven through the burnt out remains of Tokyo. He and the Japanese imperial establishment saw the threat of quiet fifth columnists at home meeting up with the oncoming Soviet juggernaut. Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave them an excuse to throw the Japanese Army and its extremist nut jobs overboard and conditionally unconditionally surrender.

The Americans were erratic and prone to unpredictable swings between rage and sweetness. However, with the Americans there was always the possibility of hanging on until there was a favorable turn in policy. There was no such hope with the Russians: the Soviets consistently lived up to their reputation for wanton brutality. The threat of Soviet annihilation was more credible than the schizophrenic Americans promises of absolute destruction and absolute mercy.

Credibility, like all constructs of human imagination, is a mixed bag of deceptive simplicity and unfathomable complexity. If it were as simple as some leaders promise and much of  the public believe, establishing credibility would be easy. Consent would be manufactured as the inevitable byproduct of a sort of credibility by algebra where X end  + Y means = Z certain result. People could instantly tell you were credible: after all, your lips were moving.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

The unpredictability of armed conflict is one reason that, when it comes to current debates about counter-insurgency, I’m skeptical of the idea that the singular lesson of our recent experience is that we should never again put ourselves in a position where we are fighting against an insurgency. Surely, the position that we should be extremely hesitant to do so is reasonable, worthy of discussion; so too is the position that our current military posture is not worth its costs. But, at the end of the day, is never getting involved in another counter-insurgency situation our choice alone? Or not getting involved in another large-scale armed conflict?

This point is unfortunately lost in a lot of commentary on war and warfare. Even wars against state opponents can involve irregular actors. For example, in a potential strike against Iran to disarm its nuclear program, Israel or the United States could find themselves embroiled in retaliatory attacks by Iranian proxies in the Gulf and Lebanon. While such an attack would be a voluntary act on America or Israel’s part, it demonstrates the point. Such expansion of the battlefield is nothing new, and while the Iranian case is voluntary, states have long records of attempting to foment insurgencies and irregular threats against each other during wars. More importantly, though, dealing with irregular threats does not inevitably involve nation-building, state-building, or the exact replication of the population-centric COIN which serves as the boogeyman of the “irregular war, never again” crowd – although such changes would be significant departures from our current strategic and foreign policy assumptions.

This brings me to another one of my pet peeves – the so-called “old wars” and “new wars” paradigm that we are stuck with in the strategic studies literature. Old war, as defined by state-versus-state or “industrial” warfare, is actually a very new phenomenon. The total war arguably evolves between the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War and comes into full fruition during World War I. In other words, in historical terms, so-called industrial war is very new, and the modern state for state-versus-state warfare not much older. Irregular or “new war” on the other hand, is ancient, as wars against insurgent groups for the purpose of state-building and consolidating authority were present at the formation of states themselves. The insurgent, the private military contractor, the autonomous religious organization, the ethnopluralist and loosely networked polity and ungoverned space, the transnational corporation – these are old ideas. Their reassertion in global politics is less a return to the medieval than a return to reality.

Even in the 19th century, concerns about irregular warfare and rogue non-state actors could drive foreign policy. As Orlando Figes describes in his excellent The Crimean War, concerns of realpolitik encompassed not simply rival empires and gunboat diplomacy, but the ideologies and non-state actors such moves could empower. The Tsar of the Russian Empire, during an 1852 diplomatic crisis over Turkish concessions to France, feared the failure of the Ottoman state:

In the chaos of an Ottoman collapse he would be forced to take the capital on a temporary basis (en depositaire) to prevent ‘the breaking up of Turkey into little republics, asylums for the Kossuths and Mazzinis and other revolutionists of Europe,’ and to protect the Eastern Christians from the Turks.

This brings to light a theme I have written on before: if we look at the fuller history of great power politics, war, and warfare in the early 20th, 19th and 18th centuries (and, of course, beyond), the modern United States might profit from an understanding of how to conduct grand strategies such as offshore balancing and the management of an imbalanced multipolar system with a plethora of alternative political actors.

Managing insurgencies, irregular wars, and terrorist groups will certainly be harder in an increasingly austere age (as Daveed has pointed out in another article his post links to). The recent reports of deep cuts to the United States Army underscores this fact, reversing its growth after struggling to meet the personnel demands of regime change and counterinsurgency operations. Of the many erroneous conclusions one could (and some have) drawn from this news, one is that a United States without a large land army will soon find itself unable to face the threat of irregular warfare, weak states, and non-state actors. Another is that, whether this is true or not, a United States engaging in offshore balancing should stay militarily uninvolved in regions without great power competition and thus does not need to particularly concern itself with non-great power threats.

On its face, equating a large army with automatic success in irregular warfare is hardly a truism – Britain had a piddling army compared to its fellow European empires, but was far more successful in amassing an empire overseas than any of them. However, Britain and other European powers, when operating overseas, did craft strategies and operational models that emphasized expeditionary use of naval forces, marines, army deployments, mercenaries, and local partner forces.

Nor did Britain limit its military engagements to the area of concern for offshore balancing. The vast majority of its military activities and empire were outside Europe – which is precisely the point. By avoiding plunging headlong into European wars where balancing would suffice, Britain freed up resources for expanding British influence outside of Europe. A United States focused on East Asia and the Persian Gulf must integrate its approach there with exploiting opportunities in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere – occasionally pursuing that agenda will require force. What the deep cuts to the Army do make clear is that the old approach of using soldiers and land-bound marines to pay the blood price of full-blown democratic state-building is now economically unsustainable. As Libya and the early days of Afghanistan demonstrated, even limiting US ground commitment does not address the fundamental problem of the smash-build-and-liberalize model, even if it ameliorates its cost.

But there are ways to integrate a more modest strategy, more realistic political goals, and a lighter, more expeditionary force with a US strategy of offshore balancing and the inevitable recurrence of irregular war – and to do so in a way which bolsters, rather than drains, US preparedness for the full spectrum of threats.

The broader question, though, remains – is major armed conflict on its way out? The incidence of major conflict is certainly lower, but the explanation is much less clear. Timothy Snyder, in his review of Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, does an excellent job of explaining why the answer for today’s peace may be far more contingent than what many, like Pinker, suggest. Read the full review, as paraphrasing would not do the evisceration justice. While Pinker is correct, as Snyder acknowledges, to point out that the present is very peaceful, and the idealized past was actually an incredibly violent place (in the prehistoric model of raiding warfare against rival villages, the difference between war and genocide is trivial). Where he is likely wrong, however, is to try to fully detach the reductions in violence since the formation of states and other forms of political order from contingency, and his attempt instead to couch it in terms of moral improvement.

Pinker dismisses the World Wars as the product of “a few contingent ideas and events,” but what is important to remember is that contingent ideas and events are essentially the story of modern history. As Snyder ably demonstrates, the technological and moral evolutions which made European states literate and obedient also made them capable of mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Snyder notes that Pinker tries to explain World War II essentially through Hitler, as if there were no other potentially violent tendencies in Europe after the First World War. Perhaps this is unfair to Pinker, but it is a common trope in literature crafting a narrative of the decline of war (Mueller’s Remnants of War springs to mind).

What the proximate contingency Hitler posed unleashed was hardly the same as what it created (and many accounts which remain fixated on Hitler as some almost extra-historical malignant figure regrettably, as Snyder has said elsewhere, feed into the Nazi narrative of the Fuhrer as a man almost outside time). Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler’s thought (among, of course, many others) and the conservative revolutionaries’  integration of antiliberalism, romanticism and the adulation of technology through the military and war was apparent during and soon after the First World War (if not before), and Fritz Stern’s account in The Politics of Cultural Despair suggest anti-Semitism and illiberalism far antedated Hitler. Nor, of course, was Europe bereft of other reasons for warfare in the period before WWII. Piłsudski’s Prometheism and Intermarum concept all spoke to a deep fear of Russian imperialism, and there were plenty of virulent anticommunists which might have sought military confrontation with Moscow had events in Germany not propelled history in a different course. All of this, of course, leaves aside the issue of Japan, the quasi-fascism of which was never really broke with the Meiji Constitution (the Kodoha’s more radical, revolutionary conception of Japanese fascism, which bore more similarities to German National Socialism or Italian fascism, essentially exhausted itself after the February 26 incident) and which likely would have eventually provoked conflict with either the USSR, the Chinese, or the Euro-American colonial encirclement regardless of went on in Berlin.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that while World Wars I and II were very contingent events, so too has been the pacific trends which followed them. Had World War II not turned out the way it did, fascism would be a prominent ideology with sway over a significant number of the world’s economically developed states, its educated peoples, and intellectual luminaries (and, we should remember, Stalinist communism counted a huge number of moral, refined and powerful Western minds among its backers), and, as Lukacs argued, it would be much harder to ignore that nationalism and socialism have been at least as powerful trends in 20th century thought – arguably the two most important ones – next to liberalism and democracy.

The key, of course, is that war and violence is not a problem prone to extinction or solution, simply evolution. As Daveed and Snyder note, there are many potential causes of war, from non-state actors to the geopolitical aftershocks of economic and environmental change, which might propel future conflicts. Even if we can credit the United States and its unipolarity with the pacification of the global system since 1991, a solution which plays geopolitical and economic shell-games to disguise our limits to doing that is doomed to failure. But neither is simply hoping we will never need to confront wars or the kinds of wars we dislike fighting is a straightforward option. Exhausting American resources or diverting American willpower either to victory on unachievable terms with unsustainable forces, or to a world-transformational liberalism premised on shaky contingency rather than unstoppable moral change, will only impede efforts to husband resources for the fashioning of a global strategy and way of war suited to the coming years.

]]> http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/war-endures-the-way-it-was-and-the-way-it-will-be/feed/ 0 dptrombly http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/gulf-in-expectations/ http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/gulf-in-expectations/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:08:52 +0000 dptrombly http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/?p=666 Continue reading →]]> With America’s military withdrawal from Iraq and Ben Rhodes’s recent explanation of a plan to draw down US forces in the Gulf to a 1990 level, in combination with the revolts against the autocratic regimes the United States has thrown in its lot with, a major rethinking of America’s security posture in the Middle East seems to be in the making.

Toby Jones, whose previous article in the Atlantic I wrote about here, has another piece arguing that the US needs to militarily withdraw from the entire Persian Gulf, and asserts that this will both give the United States more leverage, stabilize the region, and reduce threats to the United States. Jones argues that the Gulf is less important than it previously has been to energy security:

The world today is awash in oil and natural gas. Protecting the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to global markets is far less necessary than it once was. Over the past generation, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other oil producers in the region have grown accustomed to bloated national budgets and expensive state-run, cradle-to-grave welfare services, which means that there is greater pressure on them to sell oil than to horde it.

It is true that oil sources outside the Gulf are growing in importance, and I agree that more US resources should be directed towards ensuring their development and reliability. However, the concern here is not about the Persian Gulf states “hoarding” oil, but using military force or the threat of it to drive up prices, deter Western interference with their internal affairs, or, in the extreme case, seize fields to monopolize supply. The desire is less about buying or selling than controlling and manipulating. Though exploration and global recession have mediated some of the problems of high oil prices, the likely future increase in oil demand from growing countries may change this happy state of affairs.

Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab Gulf states claim that their fears of Iranian ambition are existential. It is certainly true that Tehran is locked in a regional balance of power struggle with Saudi Arabia and that Iran seeks greater influence. But Iran does not seek the destruction of Saudi Arabia or the overthrow of Arab world’s political order. In spite of claims to the contrary by the Saudi and Bahraini governments, Iran’s revolutionary imperative is a relic of the past.

Yes, it is true that since the massive costs of the Iran-Iraq war and the failure of Iran’s revolutionary ideology to set the Arab Shiites aflame that Tehran has channeled its revisionist inclinations into other activities. However, Iran did not cease because it became less revisionist, but because it suffered enormous casualties at the hand of the Gulf’s (and to a lesser extent, America’s) hired champion, Saddam Hussein. After several years of brutal warfare, Iran discovered that its defeat of the Iraqi invasion would not bring about the capture of Basra, and that in turn would not lead to an Arab Shia embrace of Khomeinism.

Instead, since its conventional defeat, Iran has massively expanded its networks of armed proxies to bleed its foes, as Iran has in Iraq and Lebanon today. In many ways, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ covert forces and its proxies are the new spearhead of those revisionist efforts, though Iran has not recently tried to overthrow a foreign government. Rather, Iran has found a sufficiently strong proxy force allows it to achieve a favorable political outcome in the target country and bleed out-of-Gulf foes such as Israel and the United States without the risk of a major conventional war. However, even though Jones believes Iran is less militantly revisionist than it was before, he does not attribute this change to US security posture:

The presence of the American military in the Gulf has not only done little to deter Iran’s ambitions, it has emboldened them. Surrounding Iran militarily and putting it under the constant threat of American or Israeli military action has failed to deter the country. Instead this approach has strengthened hardliners within Tehran and convinced them that the best path to self-preservation is through defiance, militarism, and the pursuit of dangerous ties across the Middle East. The rivalry between Iran, the U.S., and its regional partners has turned into a political and military arms race, one that could easily spin out of control.

So, Iran’s revolutionary imperatives are relics of the past, but America’s presence in the Gulf during and immediately during and after the twilight of those imperatives had no effect? I find this somewhat difficult to believe. In the latter years of the Iran-Iraq war, the US had a major naval presence in the Gulf that was actively involved in combating Iranian military forces. Rather than merely a looming presence, the US navy engaged in overt hostilities against Iran as part of Earnest Will, attacked its ships as part of Praying Mantis, used special operations forces against Iranian mining and small boat attacks during Prime Chance, and attacked IRGC bases on oil platforms for Nimble Archer. Unlike regime change, Iran still maintains an active interest in militarizing the Persian Gulf and has been modernizing its navy accordingly. While it still threatens to do so, this does not mean the US military presence in the Gulf fails to deter it any more than crises where the Soviet Union or United States threatened to use nuclear weapons meant the other side’s nuclear deterrent was worthless.

As for emboldening Iranian ambitions, the change in their nature actually reflects, in part, the effectiveness of the conventional deterrent that US forces have posed. Iran’s aforementioned diversion of resources to irregular and proxy forces reflect a desire to capitalize on a strength and a vulnerability of its foes. The problem with the mass American conventional presence is not that it makes Iran more aggressive or bold. Even in rhetoric, Iran’s militarist bluster from the hardliner pales in comparison to the days when the regime insisted the road to Jerusalem went through Karbala. The problem with America’s major conventional presence is that it is suffering from rapidly diminishing returns because of cost and an inability to deal with Iran’s irregular capabilities effectively. Nor is the US solely responsible for Iran’s ties to unsavory states and non-state actors in the Middle East, those began during the very early years of the regime and have far more to do with Iran’s initial desires to foment revolution and create friendly governments and populations to bolster Tehran against the Arab governments which were Iran’s traditional foes and particularly militant foes of Khomeini.

I agree with Jones that the US does enable its allies to behave recklessly, and that it ought to restrain them lest it be dragged into wars started by them. I disagree, however, that the United States would have greater leverage to improve their domestic behavior.

The challenge is less about finding friendly ports to station personnel than it is about charting clearer and more effective terms of political engagement with allies and rivals. And this requires a new strategic doctrine, one that makes clear to regional actors that the era of open security guarantees — which have proven so dear to both Americans and to the hundreds of thousands who have died since the United States began its military build-up — is over. This would not mean the loss of leverage or influence, but in fact the opposite. Once it is clear that the United States is not solely committed to preserving the status quo, regional states will no longer believe they can ignore American calls for reform, restraint, and respect for human rights. Indeed, it is the belief in the Gulf States that they have “special relationships” with the United States.

I disagree that American security guarantees are completely open – they are not when it comes to domestic behavior. The United States since the Cold War, unlike past examples of counterrevolutionary powers (such as the Soviet Union after the consolidation of the Warsaw Pact, the Holy Alliance after Napoleon, and the other European powers which tried to quash the French Revolution) does not prefer to intervene to keep mass revolutions from succeeding. If a Gulf leader does not put a lid on their population, the United States will not ensure the continuation of their regime.

Nor, actually, are America’s massive arms sales to the Arab world particularly necessary for the success of internal repression. The multi-billion dollar arms sales the US makes to Saudi Arabia are for expensive land, sea, and air combat systems and the associated support. While US contractors do provide training as well, the fact of the matter is that Gulf regimes have more than enough money to purchase the requisites of running an internal security force – batons, rifles, body armor, and warm bodies willing to wield them. America is hardly the only necessary vendor. Much hay is often made by other commentators about how Egyptians find tear gas canisters with ‘Made in America’ written on them. Regrettable, yes, but Egypt can make its own wooden batons to bludgeon its people with, it has one of the most expansive chemical weapons programs in the world (as an non-signatory to the CWC), and it manufactures its own ammunition.

Jones notes that withdrawal will expose the Gulf to the free market of capital and labor – this applies to arms and security patronage as much as it does to other goods. France, among other European states, also sell large amounts of arms to Gulf regimes. Russia’s arms industry is always looking for new business, and with some concern about their favorite regional customer in Damascus, they would likely eagerly supply whatever arms the US was unwilling to give. China also has a burgeoning arms industry and it has shown no qualms about selling armaments to its repressive economic and political partners in Africa. Ending the cozy relationship between US arms vendors and the Gulf states just means the US will have to compete for leverage with other vendors and in the future, other potential external security guarantors.

Neither will US withdrawal make the region more stable. It will, in the most optimistic scenario, spread the costs of the instability further. Arab states will still loathe Iran and Iran will loathe them in turn. Each side will continue converting their revenue into arms purchases for both internal and internal security. The arms race, in other words, will continue. We already saw the worst-case results of this during the Iran-Iraq War and the Tanker War. The arms race, and conflicts, are both symptoms of real geopolitical rivalries. While it would be nice if other countries could share the burden of upholding the public good of keeping the Gulf open, this lofty idea is unlikely to work in practice.

Firstly, few other powers beside the US currently can patrol the Gulf, excepting the ones that are there – which of course defeats the purpose of an international force to stabilize it. The European countries are for dire want of power projection, and the US did most of the naval heavy lifting in Libya. Projecting force into the Gulf would require a major investment in European or Japanese naval power projection capability that does not currently exist. Russia’s navy would also need to undergo significant expansion and modernization to patrol the Gulf. For India and China to contribute an equal share, for all the hype that surrounds their fleets, would require an enormous leap in their military capabilities. Having a strong navy is relatively easy, making one capable of assuming even a limited security burden against major regional powers hundreds or thousands of miles away is extremely hard.

Even for the United States, the loss-of-strength gradient still applies. Without pre-positioned logistics, even for a purely aerial and naval operation to open the Strait of Hormuz, things could become extremely unpleasant extremely quickly. A forced entry into the Gulf would not be as easy as in the 1980s, when mobile replenishment was sufficient. Iran’s military vis-a-vis America’s is far improved from the lopsided 1980s, when Iran had to devote most of its military resources to the Iran-Iraq war on land. A forced entry would occur against a vastly improved constellation of Anti-Access/Area Denial systems that could do serious damage to a fleet that would be much harder to adjust against without friendly facilities and pre-positioned logistics onshore. Regrettably, the underway replenishment which supplied American fleets during the Cold War has actually become more difficult, as critical weapons systems such as VLS – the backbone of a modern US surface warship’s strike capability against shore targets – cannot be replenished while underway. Achieving the fire and sortie generation necessary for a hypothetical war with Iran, in the geographically unfavorable environment of the Gulf, while under fire from an enemy with already considerable and growing strength for local defense purposes (if not power projection) would be extremely challenging, and something very few of the wars the US has fought for decades will have prepared it for.

A foreign navy accomplishing a similar task would be even more unlikely, in fact, they would likely need to construct forward bases of their own. France, which has been trying to rebuild its power projection capability, has realized this itself, and opened a new base in Abu Dhabi for this express purpose. Notably, that base also supports French operations off the coast of the Horn of Africa – just as the US Fifth Fleet does. Nor would foreign navies necessarily want to cooperate in upholding US interests in the Gulf. India and China have notably more favorable attitudes towards Iran than the United States does, and vastly different attitudes about conditioning support or curtailing pursuit of geopolitical interests on the basis of a regime’s internal behavior.

There is a case that the direct US presence in the Gulf is too expensive or immoral to be worth the geopolitical benefits, but it is not a case that can reliably claim it will make the Gulf more economically stable, peaceful, or free. America’s leverage really will be much lower, because it will be forced to compete for influence with rival great powers which will not share its ideological preferences about Gulf regime behavior. Gulf regimes are neither reliant on US military support for their own internal security, nor can the United States exert leverage effectively when other states will be able to compete for leverage and provide the arms sales the US did, and perhaps even assistance in internal security it was far less involved in furnishing. Even if these movements did succeed (and if they did, it would be highly unlikely US withdrawal of support is the deciding factor), it is far from clear that revolutions and mass politics will prove to be a blow to radicalism or a force for peace, as any student of European or Asian history can attest. At best, the US would be able to more credibly exonerate itself for the crimes of its clients. Our hands would be clean, but leverage would still be out of our reach.

Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, and the ability of a local war to escalate and spook markets will have greater credibility, and a conflict to force open the Straits will become increasingly costly. So too will the ability of the US to use economic and political leverage to pursue its own national interests be constrained. While a political solution for Iran would be desirable, and I am certainly no proponent of an offensive war for nuclear disarmament, a lack of US military presence would undermine many non-military efforts. Take the example of the proposed oil embargo to cripple the Iranian nuclear program – if Iran is denied access to oil, it has much stronger incentives to close the Gulf to punish the oil-importing states which imposed the sanctions and to prevent its Arab Gulf rivals from reaping the benefits of increased oil prices. But US naval force attempting to open such a blockade would face greater challenges and be a less credible threat to deter Iran from closing Hormuz – in other words, the US would no longer dominate the middle rungs of the escalation ladder.

There is much appeal in the idea of setting up different bases to service the Gulf as an alternative to current bases for operational reasons, though they would need to be closer to the region than the US’s current major naval bases in Diego Garcia and Europe. Iran’s irregular threat also demands a rethinking of American military and covert posture both within and without the Gulf, one that will not require the same kind of facilities and support as before. In the very long run, the rise of China and the expansion of its influence in the Gulf may win over Arab regimes looking for an all-weather supporter as they clamp down on nationalist revolutions. Under such conditions, a US-Indian-Iranian axis might be a worthy idea. But for now, the United States must accept that retrenchment is not an unalloyed good. While hegemonic stability did not make the catastrophically erroneous US invasion of Iraq any more tolerable or advance our goals of promoting democracy within the region, it is not to blame for all the region’s ills, and ending it will exacerbate, not resolve, many current quandaries of American foreign policy.

]]> http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/gulf-in-expectations/feed/ 0 dptrombly http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/a-black-swan-at-70-the-care-and-feeding-of-pearl-harbor/ http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/a-black-swan-at-70-the-care-and-feeding-of-pearl-harbor/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:13:51 +0000 Joseph Fouche http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/?p=657 Continue reading →]]>

Before

During

After

Fable

In statecraft, there are:

• truths: Oahu is an island.
• assumptions: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good naval anchorage.
• theories: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good naval anchorage. Ships based at Pearl Harbor can sortie into the western Pacific at will and block attacks into the eastern Pacific.
• hypotheses: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good naval anchorage. Ships based at Pearl Harbor can sortie into the western Pacific at will and block attacks into the eastern Pacific. Basing the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor instead of San Diego is close enough to deter Japan but far away enough to keep it safe from Japanese attack.
• guesses: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good naval anchorage. Ships based at Pearl Harbor can sortie into the western Pacific at will and block attacks into the eastern Pacific. Basing the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor instead of San Diego is close enough to deter Japan but far away enough to keep it safe from Japanese attack. The Japanese lack the competence, will, or capability to attack Pearl Harbor with planes launched from carriers.

These are all examples of faith. Eventually, they all end up reduced to fable. But each flavor of faith or fable differs in the rigor of ritualized attention it demanda, the fallout triggered when it is followed or ignored, and the lessons it aspires to teach listeners and true believers. The biggest risk in statecraft is mistaking one kind of faith or fable for another and acting on that mistaken notion. Acting on a guess that you’ve mistaken for truth when the truth is that it is only a guess reveals the mismatch between hard truth and hazy guess. It’s the impact of these mismatches that separates the harmful from the harmless and the tolerable from the inevitably fatal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposed two distinct realms of human experience in The Black Swan:

• Mediocristan: the realm of truths, safe assumptions, verifiable theories, reasonable hypotheses, and best guesses
• Extremistan: the realm of absent truths, unsafe assumptions, fantasies slumming as theories, crazed hypotheses, and wild guesses

The titular black swan is the kind of event that separates Mediocristan from Extremistan:

1. The black swan is disproportionately consequential.
2. The black swan cannot be predicted.
3. The black swan inevitably acquires a tight bodyguard of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses disguised as truths.

A black swan, contrary to its common portrayal, is not always a negative black swan. In Taleb’s writings, a black swan can be a negative or a positive development. Taleb’s black swan is neither intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. A black swan is what you make of it. It can be boon or disaster depending on its interplay with the residue of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses it collides with. The right residue of faith and fable can turn black swan into a progress. The wrong residue of accumulated mental debris can turn a black swan into an ever-expanding chain of cascading woes.

December 7, 2011, a day living in infamy, was the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese air raids on Pearl Harbor. One question, as usual, is automatically asked as scheduled: could the attack be stopped? Each fable about Pearl Harbor focuses on answering this annual question. Each fable differs in its particulars but their story lines clump together around a few premises:

• Americans were innocent victims of Japanese treachery
• Americans pushed Japan into war with a series of provocative sanctions but didn’t realize that the blowback included a Japanese attack
• Americans expected Japanese attacks but though they’d be focused on seizing British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and not American targets
• Americans expected a Japanese attack but thought it would fall on our forces in the Philippines or elsewhere in the western Pacific
• The Roosevelt Administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor but expected American forces in Hawaii to repel it
• The Roosevelt Administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor and deliberately sabotaged efforts to defend the base from Japanese attack

This focus on prevention is an assumption. Pearl Harbor fables assume that the right warning to Japan, the Roosevelt Administration, Admiral Kimmel, General Short, or Superman would prevent tragedy. This is the purpose of the moral of their fable, elevating its slant on events and its conclusions to truth, assumption, theory, hypothesis, or (when honest) guess.

This longing for prophecy misses the point: the black swan came. Pearl Harbor sucked Japanese and   American alike into the vortex of war in all of its primeval fury, wild contingency, and brutal instrumentality. There were no more angels of prevention left in the whirlwind. Theory and hypothesis went out the window, leaving nothing but the hard truths of bombs, bullets, and torpedoes, the misplaced assumptions of peacetime training, and the frantic guessing of frightened boys in metal boxes who were little more than food for burning petroleum and exploding powder.

Whether the right warnings would have changed history cannot be known. There were so many balls up in the air. The Japanese had never performed a carrier launched aerial attack on a naval base. The Americans had never defended a fleet at its moorings from an aerial attack. If American fighters had been in the air, the Pacific Fleet had gone to sea, or the U.S. Navy been at battle stations, the Japanese attack force might have suffered higher casualties, killed fewer Americans, and sunk fewer ship. The Japanese plan assumed higher losses in men and material that the attacking force suffered so the lopsided outcome in their favor was a pleasant (but unnerving) surprise.

Surprise didn’t kill 2,402 Americans, sink 4 American battleships and 2 destroyers, and destroy 188 planes on the ground. The Japanese did and it was the poor American response that let them do it. The dysfunctional American effort is only partly explained by shock. American defenses were poorly organized anyway and fatally split between an Army and Navy at war with each other. The U.S. national security establishment from Washington to Pearl Harbor to Manila was still running at peacetime tempo despite a world increasingly running at war speed. Japanese naval fliers had recent combat experience in and around Chinese waters. The U.S. Army had experienced fliers to counter them but they were away training in and around Chinese airspace. It was the accumulation of small differences like these that disproportionately rewarded Japanese attackers and disproportionately punished American defenders.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt got his war. He’d wanted a provocation. He’d actively conspired to trigger a provocation. However, it’s unlikely he conspired to trigger this provocation. This provocation inflicted significant damage on FDR’s beloved Navy, the very instrument he needed intact to win the war he wanted to fight. FDR’s preferred provocation would have been a Japanese (or, better yet, Germans) surprise attack on Mom, Home, and Apple Pie. An attack on Mom, Home, and Apple Pie would have been a massive symbolic blow but it would’ve left America’s core war fighting potential untouched.

The critical decision in the care and feeding of a black swan is what you do with it afterwards. This is where faith and fable meet contingency: statecraft sees opportunity or peril in a black swan through the lenses of the truths, assumptions, theories, hypotheses, and guesses that it brings to the scene of the crash. Many of the actions that leaders in this warring states period took were based on the faiths and fables they took away from fighting the last war.

• U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt took away several lessons from his World War I experience. These were the lessons that led his conduct following Pearl Harbor:
  1. The need to preemptively keep a single power from dominating Europe. Thomas Woodrow Wilson intervened against Germany because he feared that the threat of a victorious Germany meant the permanent militarization (“Prussianization” is what Wilson called it) of the United States of America. Wilson’s intervention, for all of its flaws, kept the U.S from Prussianization for another 19 years.
  2. The need to beat Germany (and anyone else) totally into the ground so they’re left with absolutely no illusion that they’d lost the war.
  3. The need for an unconditional postwar settlement that left the defeated no wiggle room to get out from under its treaty obligations.
  4. The need for more robust international security arrangements. FDR wanted the four quarters of the globe patrolled by the “four policemen”: the US, USSR, UK, and China. The facade of this four way division was a more muscular League of Nations 2.0 in the new United Nations. The reality of this four way partition was based on America running China as a puppet, reducing Britain to a compliant poodle shorn of its empire, and mesmerizing the USSR with personal charm.
• For Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament; Lord of the Admiralty; Lieutenant Colonel, 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers; and minister of munitions, Pearl Harbor offered a replay of his experience of 1917-1918. Timely American assistance saved France and Britain from defeat and preserved his precious empire. American entry into World War II would also let Churchill propose countless variations on Gallipoli where American servicemen were repeatedly thrown against the Alps guarding Europe’s “soft underbelly” in the name of outsized British interests that seemed to balloon even as Britain itself shrank.
• For Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler of the Bavarian Army, Pearl Harbor only confirmed the inevitable. Hitler’s strategy sought to create an integrated political and economic unit on the European continent with the power and clout to resist the material resources commanded by the Americans and British. This would prevent a replay of his experience of 1918-1919 when American and British material power forced Germany into a armistice followed by an Anglo-American naval blockade in 1919 that starved Germany into signing Versailles. Hitler would first kick away the English-speaking power’s best tool on the continent, Soviet Russia, and then he’d be able to face the maritime military and material might of America and Britain with the full resources of Eurasia at his command. Hitler already thought FDR, president and tool of the center of world Jewry, was at war with him. Pearl Harbor only made the war explicit under international law.
• For evil commie Joseph Stalin, it allowed him to live another day while setting the imperialists against each other, leaving the Communists to exploit the disarray after the war like Lenin did after World War I. Stalin didn’t even need a sealed train since he already had sealed moles in the White House.
• The leadership of the Japanese army saw a rerun of their short but splendid wars in World War I and earlier in the Russo-Japanese War where the shock of quick and surprising victories by little yellow men over large white supermen led to a favorable peace before Japan exhausted its limited resource base. They hoped to bleed the soft Americans white through demoralizing defeats and brutal battles.

The actions these men and millions of others took followed the groves carved by the mental models they’d gleamed from previous experience. But the actions they took were taken after the attack, in circumstances and challenges it created. Their past did not allow them to foresee the black swan of Pearl Harbor. It only led their actions afterwards. But it’s not the black swan that matters. It’s how you care for and feed the opportunities and perils that the black swan unleashes that matters.

In 216 B.C., a Carthaginian army led by Hannibal Barça defeated Rome at Cannae, reputedly sending over 50,000 Romans to their death in just a few hours:

Following the battle, commander of the Numidian cavalry Maharbal urged Hannibal to seize the opportunity and march immediately on Rome. It is told that the latter’s refusal caused Maharbal’s exclamation: “Truly the Gods have not bestowed all things upon the same person. Thou knowest indeed, Hannibal, how to conquer, but thou knowest not how to make use of your victory.

Whether Pearl Harbor was an American or Japanese victory to make use of remains unanswered. Whether FDR or his peers knew how to make good use of the event is ambiguous. The attack itself consisted of a few frantic hours. But the attack on Pearl Harbor has been in constant use ever since. As original vintage memories of the attack fade, the black swan of Pearl Harbor will waste away to anonymous gray. There will be no one left to care and feed it. But the faith and fable of Pearl Harbor, glommed from half-truths, lazy assumptions, tenuous theories, fragile hypotheses, and ignorant guesses, goes moralizing on. Any truth in Pearl Harbor’s faiths and fables will only show when the terrors of December descend again on innocence from another clear morning sky.

via CTOvision.com

Earlier this month, a pump burned out mysteriously at a water plant in Springfield, Illinois. Log data traced the problem back several months to a command from an IP address in Russia that forced the pump to turn on and off repeatedly until it broke. When this news was leaked to the media from a cyber expert convinced that we were under attack by Russian hackers, a media frenzy ensued that made it all the way to Congress. On MSNBC, Rep. Jim Langevin, the  founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, lamented our state of preparedness and called the attack, allegedly the first against the United States with a kinetic effect, yet another “wakeup call.” The weakness of American supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems was referenced by an anonymous hacker on PasteBin, which some in the press believed to be a confession. The worst fears of cybersecurity experts had been confirmed, foreign hackers could cause damage to US critical infrastructure through the internet.

Except that wasn’t what happened in Illinois, which highlights the difficulty of forensics and attribution in cyberspace. The DHS and FBI, who were investigating the alleged attacks, denied from the beginning that there was any proof of intrusion on the SCADA logs and recently concluded the investigation, releasing the results. The failure was due to a faulty command inputted by a contractor several months ago who accessed the system remotely while travelling through Russia on personal business. Over time, his mistake caused greater and greater errors until, several months later, the pump failed. While, as the source who initially leaked the suspicious information noted to defend his claims, there is no proof that the water plant wasn’t hacked, it seems very unlikely given corroborating evidence of the mistake.

The overreaction and debunking of this attack hurts both the cybersecurity field and the cybersecurity of the nation, as in this case those for and against the claims were both right and wrong. As this incident illustrates, when attacks come in the form of data and commands rather than bombs and bullets, it’s difficult to tell an enemy action from friendly fire, another side of the attribution problem which is just as important as tracking criminals through cyberspace. And, given the prevalence of cyber yellow journalism and cries of “cyberwar” and “cyber Pear harbors”, overreactions like this hurt the credibility of cybersecurity researchers and solution providers. This is problematic as, at the other end of the spectrum, the constant need for “wakeup calls” shows that we are still lagging behind the threat. In this case, though no attack took place, the SCADA failure proves that one can easily be implemented. All it took was a command from a contractor’s computer on his or her own time to damage and shut down critical infrastructure in the United States. That means that a malicious actor can get unauthorized access to SCADA systems abroad to produce the same effects, perhaps by stealing a contractor’s credentials through a fishing attack. And, it would be difficult to tell a mistake from a malicious insider or a hijacked account.

Though this alleged attack turned out to be a false alarm, it still serves as a “wakeup call,” one that we’ve gotten many times before. Thus, rather than dismissing the kinetic effects of cyber because this attack never happened, we need to try out best to make sure that it never will.

One of the consistent errors of offshore balancing discussion has been the tendency to believe that it necessarily demands there be no military engagement with the world beyond dealing with great powers, and that this military engagement must necessarily not include the use of ground forces, especially outside the core areas of engagement. In the current American context, the combinations of military draw downs in Iraq and eventually Afghanistan, along with the lack of US occupation in the Horn of Africa and Libya, among other locales, and the rise of AirSea Battle as a new concept for future military efforts all give the impression of a US military that will rarely act onshore. At the same time, the so-called “pivot to Asia” and the increasing prominence of offshore balancing in grand strategic discussions all give the impression that the cumulative effect of these operational, strategic, and grand strategic changes will be a US force that rarely, if ever, gets involved in land warfare, and rarely, if ever, gets involved in warfare outside of Asia.

If American offshore balancing will be anything like British offshore balancing, though, we ought draw very different lessons for future US grand strategy and military operations. Particularly if we recognize Britain as a prime example of a great power using an offshore balancing strategy, we can recognize that offshore balancers frequently commit ground forces to wars, and very often outside of the context of great power politics. Britain’s offshore balancing strategy emerged earlier, but not not much earlier, than the unification of the Kingdom in 1707. At this point the period of land warfare on the isles had largely subsided, and the UK could consolidate itself into a more capable great power. Simultaneously, the efforts of centralizing monarchs in France, Prussia, and Russia and the end of the religious wars were inaugurating the period of relatively secular great power politics that many international relation theorists generally (and likely mistakenly, I think) mark as the beginning of the state system. A study of British history from that point on makes it obvious that Britain’s land army, though it was not the decisive factor in most of the contests between coalitions of smaller states against the potential continental hegemon, was frequently engaged in warfare in Europe. Britain contributed troops to the War of Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Secession, and naturally the wars against Revolutionary France and the French Empire.

Throughout the whole of the 18th and 19th century periods of balancing, Britain was engaged in frequent warfare in North America, Asia, and Africa, even though its primary great power threats were in Europe. While many often contrast offshore balancing with a strategy of empire, the historical record shows they are often coexistent and indeed, mutually reinforcing. Britain’s ability to force continental powers to divert their military efforts to land warfare and preparation for land warfare on the continent gave Britain the ability to exploit their comparative inability to devote resources to overseas conquest and empire building. In virtually every war between the European great powers which Britain became involved in, it sent troops to expel its European rivals from their colonies. Offshore balancing also allowed Britain to deny targets for imperial expansion potential European allies to balance against British encroachment, which allowed Britain to more easily conduct its campaign of territorial aggrandizement. Britain did not offshore balance so it could “nation-build at home,” it offshore balanced so it could empire-build abroad. By limiting its opponents options for overseas expansion, it forced them into ploys for seeking continental dominance that could only come at the expense of their relatively powerful neighbors, thus presenting Britain with a natural array of allies should any state attempt to usurp it. The residual effects of this strategy on geopolitical outlooks was obvious as late as 1941, when Hitler chose to invade the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa was justified not simply on the basis of Hitler’s racial theories, but on the argument that quickly defeating Moscow would force the surrender of the British Empire by denying it any potential allies, while allowing Germany to overcome its lack of a world-spanning naval empire through mass territorial expansion.

What does this mean for the United States today? Firstly, we need to recognize that a shift to an offshore balancing strategy in Asia does not mean that all US activities in other regions will necessarily resemble offshore balancing there. American grand strategy in areas outside the Eastern Eurasian geopolitical nexus of great powers must serve to build on the advantages delivered by offshore balancing there, rather than distract from the necessities of offshore balancing abroad. To be more clear, the US strategies of hegemonic stability only became  anathema to the goals of offshore balancing when they weaken US abilities to the advantage of rival great powers. The diversion of massive amounts of blood and treasure to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the expense of the US economy and necessary efforts to prepare the US for the challenge of anti-access/area-denial threats were the problem, not that the US was involved in these regions to begin with. Additionally, US military interventions that antagonize its relationships with other powers, particularly those that could be potential partners in balancing against regional threats, can be problematic even without extended nation-building campaigns.

So what does offshore balancing in East Asia mean for the rest of the world? It will not mean the end of US military interventions in regions such as the Horn of Africa. Instead, US interventions should be calculated to serve specific US national interests and conducted in ways that do not come at the detriment of America’s ability to respond to great power threats. Rather than conducting nation-building and occupations, the United States will use a variety of proxies, local partners, contractors, and limited conventional military capabilities to advance its goals. However, it will frequently deploy ground forces, particularly covert forces, Special Forces, and Special Operations Forces on the ground.

It will also need to retain the ability to conduct land warfare operations across the spectrum of potential threats. Unfortunately Iraq and Afghanistan have led many to believe that the Pottery Barn rule applies to all US military operations. This is simply not a universal rule. In some cases, US national interests will dictate that the destruction of an enemy force is the primary goal, or that the destabilization of an area may advance US interests, because it forces a rival power to pick up the pieces. The Pottery Barn rule applied mainly because US planners belatedly realized that the exploitation of a shattered Iraq by Iran and Al Qaeda was a serious threat to US forces in the region and the broader regional order. The US desire to fix Iraq by instituting a pluralistic, relatively liberal democracy rather than some kind of new authoritarian regime further increased America’s wartime commitments.

As the US cuts costs and commitments, the ability to raise and sustain large land deployments for nation-building and occupation will become increasingly more difficult. Future US land warfare will likely involve launching military expeditions, often from the sea, to quickly destroy enemy threats and pave the way for proxies, partners, and other forces to assume responsibilities for post-conflict operations. It will also involve US covert and special operations forces taking a greater role in training and assisting the development of such proxy forces to advance US interests and assisting partner countries in fulfilling these goals.

Correctly implemented, an offshore balancing strategy should allow the US greater freedom of action outside of East Asia and greater ability to exploit, as the United Kingdom did, the ability of an offshore power to create constellations of military bases, partners, and economic areas of interest. It would do so by reducing the ability of great powers in eastern Eurasia to disrupt US lines of communication extra-regionally, as well as by devising new US military operational concepts and force postures to destroy local threats to those lines of communication and regional interests. To do so, however, we need to understand that a “pivot to Asia” must serve to enhance US ability to pursue its interests outside of Asia, and reject the false antithesis between offshore balancing and onshore warfare.

“The strategic success of the Byzantine empire was of a different order than any number of tactical victories or defeats: it was a sustained ability, century after century, to generate disproportionate power from whatever military strength could be mustered, by combining it with all the arts of persuasion, guided by superior information.” ~Edward Luttwak

There has been a lot of talk recently in the wake of responses to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its nationwide evolution on the topic of militarizing police forces. This topic has also come up in regards to police raids in their various forms throughout the country. Yet “militarization” is seldom defined and has grown to mean whatever the author doesn’t like about modern law enforcement. Often it’s about gear, but dressing in black does little to militarize an agency. Expanding tactical capabilities also do not justify the widespread outrage, as a more capable police force is, all else being equal, always preferable.

Though automatic weapons and armored vehicles in law enforcement are usually associated to the War on Terror, it’s important to remember that SWAT was a response to several sniping incidents against citizens and police in 1960s Los Angeles and the rise of urban guerrilla movements. The North Hollywood shooting in 1997 is yet another example of a conventional crime turned unconventional, when an armed confrontation between two heavily-armed bank robbers and the LAPD. This incident left police outgunned to the point they had to go commandeer weapons from a local firearms dealer.

We are witness to a worldwide evolving threat from highly trained active shooters. Westside Middle School, Thurston High School, Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, the Amish school house in Pennsylvania and many other schools, universities and campuses have been victims of active shooting incidents. Terrorists have used small arms and small unit swarming tactics at luxury hotels, restaurants, train stations, community centers, cinemas, police headquarters and other public locations.  Recent examples include the coordinated attacks in Mumbai, India and the premeditated shootings at Fort Hood, Texas and the gangs and narco-terrorists on the Mexican border.

Police departments large and small need to have forces capable of handling violent criminals who would arm themselves and use those arms to harm police as they attempt to stop various degrees of criminal activity. Domestic violence, drug raids, robberies, ongoing deadly action (active shooter situations), barricade, and hostage rescue situations are only a few examples. This show of force does much to help keep officers safe in the performance of their duties, as well as keep any innocents safe from harm.

The term “militarization” is often used when that force goes too far, such as in the recent UC Davis pepper spray incident. Yet there is nothing military-like about mismanaging force, and we do not train out service members to harm civilians. Of all the tacit or overt definitions of militarization in the press, the most interesting and useful comes from the former Chief of Police of Seattle, Norm Stamper, who suggests that the problematic, militarized element of law enforcement is the paramilitary bureaucracy and culture. Reliance on internal reviews, a “just following orders” mentality, and rigid hierarchy may expedite the process of war, but they hinder the agility and accountability needed in the civilian world for a peace officer.

Ironically, the military itself is moving away from this brand of militarization as it’s faced with complex scenarios and interactions outside of the battlefield. As recent tactical failures, from botched raids to heavy-handed yet ineffective responses to the Occupy protests have demonstrated, law enforcement must follow suit in order to better balance force and persuasion, the core of a peace officer’s mission.

There is definitely a place for SWAT teams and more highly trained full spectrum street officers capable of handling the conventional and unconventional crisis situations they find themselves in. The question is; are we using these units and tactics in appropriate ways? Are cops doing their homework and developing enough actionable information prior to taking action? Are the courts who sign off on warrants to search and arrest asking tough enough questions before they sign off?

Probable cause just means that information gathered would warrant a reasonable police officer to believe that the person sought for arrest would have most probably committed the crime or the location to be searched, and the evidence sought would be at the specific location. Police work is based on this premise, a much lower standard than in court which is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In the case of probable cause, cops do not always have all the information. As a matter of fact, in most situations there are numerous things cops do not know or cannot know prior to their taking action. For example: does the person they seek have any weapons and is the person capable and willing to use a weapon against the police when they respond to conduct a raid, etc?  What type of criminal background the person has can be researched, but what if there is no criminal background? What if the person sought has a minor or no criminal back ground but the circumstances and lessons from history show that the crime and manner of arrest lead to a potential for violence, such as with drug dealers and even street level drug use?  What about the minor crimes or infractions such as traffic violations that have led to the deaths of officers on the street? The motives and intent of people are often unknown and erratic and the circumstances surrounding arrests and raids can create psychological and physiological responses such as fight or flight, making people very unpredictable and hence police full of uncertainties as they carry out their duties.  How do we prepare for this? Are we considering options such as taking a subject into custody at a location other than the home where it may be safer and more advantageous, more tactically sound?

This being the case, police must respond utilizing tactical judgment based on what they know and what they do not know to prepare for all possible contingencies. This is one of the main reasons why there is the need for highly trained response teams. The question is, are we using these teams effectively? Are we using them in the right circumstances? Are we training officers to a high enough standard, do we have the right standards and do we have the right people, with the right attributes on these teams? Are those leading the teams the right people who understand conflict, violence, and the moral, mental, and physical aspects – dynamics of potentially violent encounters? Do they understand crowd dynamics in the case of a protest or employee strike, or human nature when entering a persons home, and how the tactics they choose can potentially create or decrease conflict? Are we just using attrition type tactics because that is what we are familiar with or are we thinking things through and using them when there necessary?

There must be a balance sought in the use of persuasion and force. This balance is not easily gained in a world where violence and the loss of life weigh so heavily. Cops are being killed and ambushed in record numbers but we still must understand our mission and intent, which all stems around public service and the standard mantra to protect and serve. This, rather than snappy uniforms and accreditations, is what is meant by police professionalism. All professions have their own unique standards and requirements that would seem outlandish and extreme in a different trade. Pilots are required to sleep at least 8 hours a night, taxi drivers must know a city like the back of their hand, and cops must be able to manage complex conflicts with incomplete information to achieve desired tactical and strategic outcomes.

To return to the example of pepper spraying UC Davis protesters, much of the debate has focused on rules and regulations surrounding the use of OC spray. Pepper spray is typically officially justified when subjects resist, causing critics to decry police training and procedure as brutal. Yet just because pepper spray could be justified in this instance doesn’t make it the right choice. Rather than follow policy and habit like automatons, professional police officers must consider the physical, mental, and moral implications of their actions, Physically, instead of preventing campus police from having to lay hands on the now-disoriented protesters, pepper spray necessitated it. Mentally, it escalated the conflict, riling up the crowd and increasing confusion among the ranks of campus police. Morally, it was a tremendous blow not only to campus police but to UC Davis and law enforcement trying to control the protests everywhere.

Just like the military is trying to reform their hierarchy, bureaucracy, and culture with the mission order, which spells out the goals of an operation first and foremost so that commanders have the flexibility to tailor tactics in a changing battlefield to the desired end state, police officers need to first think of “why” they are performing an operation before they consider how they will go about it and what they will do. This runs counter to the “militarized” model of sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and chiefs dictating what to do and relying strictly on procedural checklists for how to do it. Many of the problems attributed to militarization can be overcome with this approach. Overuse of SWAT, for example, can be reduced if rather than deploying a team for every drug warrant, the department asks WHY they are arresting the suspect, WHY use a team, and WHY perform a raid this night. More often than not, they will find that the suspect is not a clear and present danger to anyone, does not require an immediate intervention, and can be arrested more smoothly the next day away from home by regular patrolmen.

Giving officers the “why” and trusting them to shape the how and what to fit the dynamic situation on the ground, however, is only possible and beneficial if each member of the organization is a true law enforcement professional. That means that “trained observers” must actually be trained to observe, that those who wield force understand how to balance it with persuasion, and that, in a job that primarily consists of community interaction, cops sharpen their interpersonal and communication skills, including understanding body language. Professionals should have as much hands-on training as possible so that they may be agile police officers with a wide array of workable options open to them.

Still, none of this replaces specialized units and fuller spectrum street cops. The terrorist threat is rapidly evolving and drug cartels are using more violent and innovative tactics, criminals are using more violence in their methodologies to rob banks, commit workplace violence. Sometimes and more frequently today people with no criminal backgrounds at all are resorting to violent acts testing the street cops tactical ability to handle with only the basic tools. The teams are necessary. It is in how we are using the teams and more advanced equipment that needs to be thought about to ensure we keep support of the people we serve. Staying safe and going home at the end of your shift is the priority, but let’s not lose sight of WHY we do what we do and think about our tactics, the HOW we do what we do to win in the moral, mental and physical dimensions.

Stay Oriented!

BIO:

Alex Olesker is a security and technology analyst who writes for websites including Fear, Honor, and Interest and CTOvision.

Fred T. Leland, Jr. is the Founder and Principal Trainer of LESC: Law Enforcement & Security Consulting (www.lesc.NET).In addition to his work with LESC, Fred Leland is an active Lieutenant with the Walpole (MA) Police Department. He previously worked as a deputy with the Charlotte County (FL) Sheriff’s Department and before that spent six years with the United States Marines including as a squad leader in Beirut, Lebanon.

Leland is an accomplished trainer with more than 28 years experience teaching law enforcement, military and security professionals. His programs of instruction include handling dynamic encounters; threat assessment; non-verbal communications; decision making under pressure; evolving threats; violence prevention; firearms; use of force; officer created jeopardy and adaptive leadership. He is also a 2004 graduate of the FBI National Academy Class 216, and a current instructor for the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee. Outcomes based training and education (OBTE) is his approach to creating and nurturing decision makers to observe, orient, decide and act while considering consequences.