conversation

Covert Operations Conversation With Jennings
Question: You seem to be changing your opinion on the Iraq War do you now oppose the American invasion of that country?
Answer: No, not at all, the American military operations in Iraq were the right thing to do. I just object to the way we did it and how we are doing it. Instead of a massive invasion we could have done the job through special forces and covert operations like we did in Afghanistan.
Question: What exactly are you suggesting here?
Answer: I’m suggesting that we return to the kind of limited military operations we excelled at during the Cold War and in Afghanistan. Instead of massive invasions, do most of the work through proxy like we did in Afghanistan hire local soldiers to do the job. Send in a few special operations teams and CIA squads to organize and lead them. This enables us to defeat our enemies without massive military operations and lots of casualties. We developed excellent capabilities to do this during the Cold War. Capabilities we still have as the Afghan situation demonstrates.
Question: Can you give some examples of this?
Answer: Yes, for example the American involvement in the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s. President Truman didn’t send in troops he sent General Mark Clark and other advisors who reorganized, trained and advised the Greek Army. They led the Greeks to victory over Communist forces. Greece was never Communist. It had troubles but it never suffered as other Eastern European nations did. Or El Salvador in the 1980s, instead of sending troops, Ronald Reagan only sent military advisors who reorganized and retrained the local army. It defeated the Communists in the field without a massive occupation as in Vietnam. The victories in the Balkans in the 1990s where Americans worked behind the scenes and with air power to stop the war without ground forces. Or Afghanistan where American supplied and advised guerrillas humiliated the Red Army.
Question: How does this strategy relate to Vietnam?
Answer: Vietnam was a perfect example of what not to do. Instead of limiting aid to advisors we went in and fought the war ourselves. It happened because Lyndon Johnson refused to limit the war. LBJ refused to say no to the generals, just as Bush did in Iraq. Johnson refused to say no and we saw the result. Reagan got it right in Latin America by refusing to use the regular military except in Grenada where the war would be short and limited.
Question: If we have these excellent covert operations capacities why do we end up resorting to counterproductive use of traditional military forces?
Answer: It boils down to politics the military has to justify the vast amounts of money it spends on weapons and training. If covert ops can do the job without the vast expenditures that calls the whole military establishment into question doesn’t it? Backing up the Pentagon are all the defense contractors who profit from this spending and their allies in Congress. If all we need are special ops teams backed up by aircraft why should we spend money on armored divisions, infantry and the surface navy? Those are questions the Pentagon doesn’t want asked. After Afghanistan the brass got scared, real scared. So they had to justify their existence. It’s hard for presidents especially ones with no or little military experience to stand up to the brass and say no to them. After all who is the former governor of Texas who is dogged by allegations of draft dodging to say no to some guy with a chest covered with medals? The situation is made worse by the media where retired officers, professional experts, politicians, intellectuals and other armchair generals go on TV and criticize every move we make in the war. The constant allegation we don’t have enough troops in Iraq for example. Remember all the criticism that we let Bin Laden get away in Afghanistan because we didn’t drop the Seventh Airborne on Tora Bora?
Question: Are there other factors that mitigate against limited warfare?
Answer: Limited thinking and a lack of imagination. The general consensus in the media and the experts is that the only choices we have are accept the status quo or resort to all out war. This is the mantra of the peace movement and the intellectuals. The problem is that we have other choices, unfortunately they are rarely discussed because of politics. In the debate over the Iraq War the discussion was either accept Saddam or go to war? Nobody asked why can’t just send in a special ops team to kill Saddam and replace him with somebody else. Or why we didn’t just run Iraq through the Iraqi Army? Or Shiite religious groups. The only options given were things that we knew wouldn’t work, sanctions, the UN, our worthless European allies.
Question: What does it take to go to such a strategy?
Answer: In the Cold War it took the backlash against the Vietnam War and the destruction of two presidents’ political careers. Not to mention 60,000 American deaths. It also took a popular and strong visionary president namely Ronald Reagan. Reagan refused to accept the status quo and also refused to believe World War III was necessary to defeat Communism. He was ready to listen to unorthodox strategies and adopt them. He also had a consistent policy of limited military action. Reagan was also not intimidated by the military he was willing to tell them what to do. In the 1990s, Clinton did something similar but it was based on risk avoidance and only in some circumstances.
My guess is the mess in Iraq will force us to adopt such a strategy but we need somebody with the guts to adopt it. Probably a Republican because the only alternatives we get from the Democrats are do nothing and hope the Europeans can do something.
Question: What else mitigates against such a strategy?
Answer: The whole culture in Washington. The traditional diplomats at the State Department like all diplomats are dedicated to preserving the status quo to working with formal governments even in places where they don’t exist. The military is designed to wage massive wars, the intelligence establishment to gather data about traditional governments. You also have to actually work with other peoples, understand their cultures and respect their values that’s difficult. It’s much easier to preach at them about democracy from the top of a tank. Beyond that we are conditioned by the popular culture, and conventional wisdom to think of war as a massive battle on a formal battlefield, World War I, World War II or Vietnam. Even though that isn’t the reality of modern war. It takes a very intelligent and creative visionary person like Ronald Reagan to change strategies and overcome politics and bureaucracy. Reagan also stood up to the left and the peace movement he stopped them cold by refusing to play their games.
Question: Do you see anybody like that on the horizon?
Answer: Unfortunately no. With the present media environment in which every windbag senator, retired general, armchair strategist, and loud mouthed activist can get a national audience it’ll be difficult. To make matters worse, the Democrats like the Republicans seem more interested in building up bureaucracies than real change, John Kerry’s proposal for a US military police or constabulary force to do peacekeeping in world trouble spots, in other words recreate the British Empire? The last thing we need is a massive peacekeeping bureaucracy a UN Pentagon. That’s what Kerry and company want.
Question: Could things change?
Answer: Yes they will the mess in Iraq will make massive military operations politically unacceptable but we’ll still need to take action. That means we’ll be forced to turn to covert ops, special forces etc. Take the nuclear dispute with Iran if instead of a diplomatic battle and sanctions leading to war, we’d just sabotage the Iranian nuclear program we could avoid a conflict or sanctions which would hurt the Iranian people. Unfortunately there’s a massive bureaucracy at the UN and in Washington that needs a dispute over the Iranian nuclear weapons to justify its existence. My guess is the cost of such a dispute will force our leaders to seek other answers.
Question: How long will this take?
Answer: Too long, the Vietnam War dragged on for five years before Nixon realized it was a mistake and started troop withdrawals. During the Cold War the Pentagon was planning for an all out battle with the Red Army in Western Europe even though the Soviets were loosing the covert war badly. It’ll take near disaster in Iraq to get us to change strategies.
Question: Any final thoughts?
Answer: Yes, the old truism is that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That seems to be the case here. We seem to be repeating some of the same mistakes we made in Vietnam in Iraq albeit on a much smaller scale. Unfortunately, the stakes are much higher here. Losing in Vietnam just meant humiliation. A loss in Iraq would mean massive terror attacks on the US and other countries in which tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands would die. It’s time we started thinking and stopped reacting.