Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, The End of War As We Know It?
Posted by Danny Sjursen at 7:55am, May 26, 2020.
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Consider it strange. The U.S. has been fighting in
Somalia on and off (mostly on) since the early 1990s. (Who, of a certain age,
doesn’t remember the “Black Hawk Down”
fiasco?) Almost 30 years later, at a time when the U.N. secretary-general,
supported by dozens of countries, has reasonably enough called for a global ceasefire so that humanity
can refocus on “the true fight of our lives,” bringing Covid-19 under control,
the U.S. is still at war there. At a time when American naval vessels are
turning into pandemic hot zones and
the man in the White House has repeatedly denounced this country’s “ridiculous endless wars,”
the Pentagon’s war in Somalia against an insurgent terror group by the name of
al-Shabaab is actually escalating. No kidding.
Of course, if you were only attending to the
mainstream media, filled with little but coronaviral news (and even more viral
news about our president), you wouldn’t know it. You might hardly know that the
U.S. military was involved in Somalia at all. You would have to read TomDispatch Managing
Editor Nick Turse’s recent investigative piece at
the Intercept to discover that U.S. air strikes in that
country have risen radically in recent times. In the Obama years, from
2009-2017, the U.S. carried out a total of 36 such strikes in Somalia.
According to U.S. Africa Command, by early April 2020, only four months into
this devastating year, 39 such strikes had already been launched, essentially
ensuring that the annual bounty of destruction there will top last year’s
record 63 strikes. And mind you, at this moment, Covid-19 is beginning to tear a path of
death through that country’s capital, Mogadishu.
And that, as retired U.S. Army Major
and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen makes clear
today, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to America’s never-ending
wars of this century. That they are now becoming pandemic wars seems
to matter little in Washington. With that in mind, Sjursen, whose new
book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the
Age of Endless War, will be published this fall, takes a deep
dive into the future of American war in a Covid-19 world. Hang on tight. Tom
The Coming of a Social-Distancing
Version of War
The Future of Forever War, American-Style
By Danny Sjursen
The Future of Forever War, American-Style
By Danny Sjursen
Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy,
may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question
America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad.
Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad,
there’s been speculation that
the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove
an unintended peacemaker -- and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon
has proven impotent as a virus
challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of
“defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease
control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have
been so much better.
Curiously enough, though, despite President Trump’s
periodic complaints about America’s “ridiculous endless wars,” his
administration has proven remarkably unwilling to agree
to even a modest rollback in U.S. imperial ambitions. In some theaters of
operation -- Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Somaliaabove all -- Washington has even escalated its
militarism in a fit of macabre, largely under-the-radar pandemic opportunism.
For all that, this is an obvious moment to
reflect on whether America’s nearly two-decade-old “war on terror” (perhaps
better thought of as a set of wars of terror) might actually end. Predictions
are tricky matters. Nonetheless, the spread of Covid-19 has offered a rare
opportunity to raise questions, challenge frameworks, and critically consider
what “ending” war might even mean for this country.
In some sense, our post-9/11 wars have been
gradually subsiding for some time now. Even though the total number of U.S.
troops deployed to the Middle East has actually risen in the Trump
years, those numbers pale when compared to the U.S. commitment at the
height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of American soldiers taking
fire overseas has, in recent years, dropped to levels unthinkably low for those
of us who entered the military around the time of the 9/11 attacks.
That said, in these years, even unwinnable,
unnecessary wars have proven remarkably unendable. For evidence of this, look
no further than that perennial war hawk Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina. Given the lack of success of
the various campaigns run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, across that
continent and the Pentagon’s stated desire to
once again pivot to great-power competition with China and Russia, just before
the pandemic arrived on our shores Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announcedplans for a
modest troop drawdown in parts of Africa. Appalled by even such minor
retrenchments, Graham, leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers, reportedly confronted
Esper and threatened to make his “life hell,” should the secretary downsize
U.S. forces there.
Less than two months later, AFRICOM declared a
public-health emergency at the largest of this country’s African bases in
Djibouti amid concerns that even far smaller, more spartan American facilities
on that continent lacked the requisite medical equipment to fight the spreading
virus. Whether the pandemic facilitates Esper’s contemplated reductions remains
to be seen. (A mid-April AFRICOM press release offering
reassurance that the “command’s partnership endures during Covid-19” doesn't
bode well for such a transformation.)
Still, the disease will surely have some
effect. Just as quarantine and social-distancing measures have transformed
people’s lives and work in the U.S., Washington's war fighting will undoubtedly
have to adapt, too. Minimally, expect the Pentagon to wage wars (largely hidden
from public view) that require ever fewer of its troops to fight
shoulder-to-shoulder with allies and fewer still to die doing so. Expect
Washington to mandate and the Pentagon to practice what might increasingly be
thought of as social-distancing-style warfare.
Soldiers will operate in ever smaller teams.
Just as senior leaders constantly counseled us junior
officers in the bad old days to “put an Iraqi face between you and the
problem,” so today’s and tomorrow’s troopers will do their best to place drones
or (less precious) proxy lives between themselves and enemies of any sort.
Meanwhile, the already immense chasm between the American public and the wars
being fought in its name is only likely to widen. What may emerge from these
years is a version of war so unrecognizable that, while still unending, it may
no longer pass for war in the classic sense.
To grasp how we’ve made it to a
social-distancing version of war, it’s necessary to go back to the earlier part
of this century, years before a pandemic like Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar
screen.
American Wars Don’t End, They Evolve
When, as a young Army lieutenant and later
captain, I joined what were then called “surges” in Iraq in 2006
and Afghanistan in 2011, conventional foot soldiers like me were the main game
in town. The doctrine of counterinsurgency, or COIN, then ruled the
Pentagon’s intellectual roost. The trick, so key commanders believed, was to
flood the war zone with infantry brigades, securing the conflict’s "center of gravity":
the locals. Behind the scenes, Special Operations units were already taking on
ever-larger roles. Nevertheless, there were ample “boots-on-the-ground” and
relatively high casualties in conventional units like
mine.
Times have changed. Full-scale invasions and
long-term occupations, along with COIN as a war-on-terror cure-all, long ago fell
out of favor. By Barack Obama’s second term, such unpopular and costly
campaigns were passé. Even so, rather than rethink the efficacy of imperial
interventionism, Washington simply substituted new methods masquerading as the
latest strategy of success.
By the
time Donald Trump delivered his “American carnage"
inaugural address, the burdens of Washington war-making had flipped. When I
served in Iraq and Afghanistan, about half of the Army’s 40-odd combat
brigades were deployed in those
two regional theaters at any given time. The remainder were training for their
next rotations and already on the "patch chart" where
each unit’s logo indicated its future scheduled deployment. This was the life
on the conveyor belt of
American war that a generation of soldiers like me lived. By January 2017,
however, the number of conventional brigades deployed in the war on terror
could be counted on one hand.
For instance, the Army’s most recent round
of deployments, announced this
April, included just six brigades. Of these, two were aviation units and, among
the ground forces, one was headed for Europe, another for Kuwait. Only two
ground combat brigades, in other words, were slated for Iraq, Syria, or
Afghanistan and one of them was a reconstituted Security Force Assistance Brigade --
essentially a skeleton crew of officers and noncommissioned officers meant to
train and advise local troops. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Special Operations
forces, which had by then crested above 70,000, a
figure so large as to
raise questions about how
“special” they remained, stepped onto that conveyor belt. America’s commandos
now bear most of the burden of
forever-war deployments and (modest) casualties.
A Two-Tier War-Making System
When the virus struck, the Pentagon had long
been developing a bifurcated military machine with two separate and largely
discrete roles. The commandos -- with key assists from drones, CIA paramilitaries, local
proxies, and private security contractors -- continued to fight the
lingering war on terror. They were generally handling the lethal end of
American war, calling in airstrikes, while training, advising, and sometimes
even leading often abusive indigenous
forces.
Conventional active-duty brigades -- reduced to 32 --
were largely given quite a different task: to prepare for a future revamped Cold War
with Russia and, increasingly, China. That crew --
infantry, armored brigades, and Navy carrier squadrons -- had the “new,” purportedly
vital mission of checking, containing, or challenging Moscow in Eastern Europe
and Beijing in the South China Sea. Senior generals and admirals were comfortable with
such Cold War-style tasks (most having been commissioned in the mid-1980s).
However, viewed from Russia or China, such missions looked increasingly
provocative as ever more American riflemen, tanks, and warships regularly
deployed to former Soviet republics or,
in the case of the Navy, to Western Pacific waters that abut China, making the
risk of accidental escalation seem ever more conceivable.
Meanwhile, those shadowy special operators
were directing the ongoing shooting wars and other conflicts, which, though
given precious little attention in this country, seemed patently counterproductive, not
to say unwinnable. For the Pentagon and military-industrial-complex profiteers,
however, such unending brushfire conflicts, along with a new great-power
buildup, were the gift that just kept giving, a two-tiered modus operandi for
endless war-funding.
Enter the coronavirus.
In Cold Blood
Thought of a certain way, American war will,
in the future, increasingly be waged in cold blood. While Covid-19
spreads virally through
respiratory droplets, the disease of endless war continues to be blood-borne
(even if ever less of it is American blood), ensuring that the
social-distancing-style combat of the future could become even more of an
abstraction here.
In addition, the preferred post-pandemic
warriors of that future may not be uniformed soldiers, special or otherwise, or
necessarily American -- or in some cases (think drones and future robotic
weaponry) human. U.S. war fighting has already been increasingly privatized.
Only recently, Erik Prince, the former CEO of the private military company
Blackwater, an influential Trump ally as well as the
brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, pitched the
president on a far-fetched plan to privatize the whole Afghan War.
The Donald passed on the offer, but that it
was even considered at such a high level suggests the role of private
contractors and soldiers of fortune in future American war-making may be here
to stay. In that sense, the recent fiasco of an armed
raid led by former Green Berets-turned-mercenaries and aimed at the Venezuelan
government of Nicolás Maduro may prove as much a foreboding glimpse
of the future as it was a farce.
When uniformed U.S. service members are
deemed necessary, the trend toward using just handfuls of them to run an
increasingly proxy-war machine is likely to accelerate. Such teams will fit
well with public-health guidelines limiting gatherings to 10 people. For
instance, drone ground control stations,
essentially mobile trailers, require only a pair of operators. Similarly, the
military’s newest cyberwar branch (formed in 2015) may not be made up of the
hackers of Donald Trump’s imagination (“somebody
sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”), but they, too, will work in tiny
teams abroad, and at a great distance. Pushing those guidelines just a tad will
be Army Special Forces A-Teams of 12 Green
Berets each, which may prove to be core building blocks for a new American
version of post-pandemic warfare.
Most disturbingly, American
social-distancing ways of war will likely operate smoothly enough without
suppressing terrorist groups any more successfully than the previous versions
of forever war did, or solving local ethno-religious conflicts, or improving
the lives of Africans or Arabs. Like their predecessors, future American wars
in cold blood will fail, but with efficiency and, from the point of view of the
military-industrial complex, lucratively.
Here, of course, is the deep and tragic
paradox of it all. As the coronavirus should have reminded us, the true existential threats
to the United States (and humanity) -- disease pandemics, a potential nuclear
Armageddon, and climate change -- will be impervious to
Washington’s usual military tools. No matter the number of warships, infantry
and armored brigades, or commando teams, none of them will stand a chance
against lethal viruses, rising tides, or nuclear fallout. As such, the
Pentagon’s plethora of tanks, aircraft carriers (themselves petri dishes for
any virus around), and towers of cash (sorely needed elsewhere) will, in the
future, be monuments to an era of American delusion.
A rational (or moral) system with any
semblance of genuine legislative oversight or citizen input might respond to
such conspicuous realities by rethinking the national security paradigm itself
and bringing the war state to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, if
America’s imperial past is
any precedent, what lies ahead is the further evolution of twenty-first-century
imperial war to the end of time.
Post-Pandemic War
Still, Covid-19 may prove the death knell of
American war as classically imagined. Future combat, even if broadly directed from
Washington, may be only vaguely “American.” Few uniformed citizens may take
part in it and even fewer die from it.
During the prolonged endgame of wars that
don’t really end, U.S. military fatalities will certainly continue to occur in
occasional ones and twos -- often in far-flung places where few Americans even
realize their country is fighting (as with those four U.S. troops killed in an
ambush in Niger in 2018 and
the Army soldier and two private contractors killed in Kenya earlier this
year). Such minuscule American losses will actually offer Washington more
leeway to quietly ramp-up its drone attacks, air power, raiding, and killing,
as has already happened in Somalia, with assumedly ever less oversight or
attention at home. As in the Horn of Africa of late, the Pentagon won’t even
have to bother to justify
escalations in its war-making. Which raises a sort of “if a tree falls in the
forest and no one is there...” conundrum: if the U.S. is killing brown folks
around the world, but hardly anyone notices, is the country still at war?
Moving forward, policymakers and the public
alike may treat war with the same degree of entitlement and abstraction as
ordering items from Amazon (especially during a pandemic): Click a button,
expect a package at the door posthaste, and pay scant thought to what that
click-request set in motion or the sacrifice required to do the deed.
Only in war, one thing at least stays
constant: lots of someones get killed. The American people may leave their wars
to unrepresentative professional
“volunteers” led by an unchecked imperial
presidency that increasingly outsources them to machines, mercenaries, and
local militias. One thing is, however, guaranteed: some poor souls will be at
the other end of those bombsights and rifle barrels.
In contemporary battles, it’s already
exceptionally rare that a uniformed American is on that receiving end. Almost
midway through 2020, only eight U.S. service members have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq and
Afghanistan combined. Yet many thousands of locals
continue to die there. No one wants U.S. troops to die, but there’s something
obscene -- and morally troubling -- about the staggering casualty disparity
implicit in the developing twenty-first-century American way of war, the one
that, in a Covid-19 world, is increasingly being fought in a socially-distanced
way.
Taken to its not-unimaginable extreme,
Americans should prepare themselves for a future in which their government
kills and destroys on a global scale without a single service member dying in
combat. After the pandemic, in other words, talk of “ending” this country’s
forever wars may prove little more than an exercise in semantics.
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular,
is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He
served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has
written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the
Age of Endless War, will be published in September. Follow him on
Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his
podcast “Fortress on a Hill."
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen
