Loren Dejonge Schulman has an interesting piece in The Atlantic examining the proliferation of undeclared and semi-declared U.S. military deployments in light of the death of four U.S. soldiers in Niger last month. While the seemingly endless deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan garner the bulk of the public’s shrinking attention, the military has quietly dispatched thousands of soldiers to over 100 countries to “train, advise, and assist;” “build partner capacity;” and otherwise attempt to build up the forces of allies and partners so they can do the dirty work of fighting nascent terrorist and insurgent organizations without requiring large U.S. forces. As Schulman notes, “this approach has grown more popular—and for good reason: It’s seen as a sweet deal.” The embedded link is telling, pointing as it does to Mara Karlin’s article in Foreign Affairs arguing that such assistance programs, particularly when they focus solely on military capability and capacity building, at best disappoint and at worst undermine partners’ security and stability.
Meanwhile, Eric Prince is still peddling his scheme to equip an American “viceroy” in Afghanistan with a mercenary army and get the U.S. military out of the nation building business there entirely. While Hell will freeze over before I support Prince or his plan, he may recognize a problem that more conventional thinkers refuse to acknowledge. We are so dazzled by the lasers and computers and precision capabilities of the modern military that we miss its parallels with more ancient forms of martial organization.
The Industrial Revolution enabled rapid leaps in technology for general consumption, but for that very reason, the defining feature of industrial age armies was not technological dominance but rather the proliferation of cheap, simple technologies to hundreds of thousands and then to millions of soldiers. The vast size of industrial armies was both enabled and necessitated by the low cost and simplicity of military hardware. While more primitive in an absolute sense, the crossbow of the medieval mercenary was both more expensive and more technically demanding than the bolt action rifle of the doughboy. As late as the Korean war, technical disparities between the opposing sides were marginal, with the North Koreans fielding everything from long arms to jet fighters that were equal or even superior to U.S. equipment. Production capacity mattered far more than technical capability. By the 1960s, the U.S. began fielding remote sensors, night vision devices, and precision munitions that exceeded the technical capabilities of their enemies. in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, that trend came to full fruition and the U.S. with its allies was able to defeat an Army of roughly equal size with friendly casualties despite the historical advantages of the defense.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that the trend towards technical dominance continues. While there were individual instances of intense, bloody combat (Fallujah, Wanat), overall U.S. and allied casualties have remained extraordinarily low. After 16 years of war, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have only slightly exceeded the U.S. deaths on Omaha beach on D-Day. Small U.S. losses do not reflect a lack of lethal action but rather extraordinary capabilities in intelligence, long-range strike, and force protection. The deaths are overwhelmingly on the other side. In turn, high tech weapons require highly trained specialists to employ them. The U.S. military recruits a tiny percentage of its population–approximately 1% v. 11% in World War II–pays them quite well, and trains them for many years. In return, it expects them to serve for decades and to deploy repetitively in what are effectively colonial wars. Modern American soldiers fight without the mobilization of the population at home, without the implicit promise that they can return home permanently upon victory, without even the prospect of anything resembling victory. The advisory missions that Schulman discusses may be undertaken on behalf of corrupt, repressive regimes that rob U.S. soldiers of the soothing mantra that they are defending “freedom.” Repeated calls for national service tend to miss this fatal impediment–the country does not need anywhere near that many soldiers, and we could not train, pay, or employ them if we had them.
We may be entering a new era of warfare that looks an awful lot like an old era of warfare. Perhaps we will graft the national loyalty of the industrial era onto the mercenary compensation and expertise of the late middle ages, but I doubt it. If Eric Prince were ever to get a shot at his mercenary army in Afghanistan, you can rest assured he would not be able to man it entirely with American ex-servicemen. Market forces would drive such a force to recruit worldwide. Moreover, I know a number of retired U.S. soldiers currently serving as “consultants,” “contractors,” and other convenient euphemisms from Donetsk to Angola to the Philippines. Schulman is correct to question the legal basis and organizational ambiguity of U.S. advise and assist missions, but the problem may be far greater than simply obtaining some form of definitive, and therefore limiting, congressional authorization. It may be that “light footprint” operations are the way of the future in a world with vast technological disparities and the escalatory threat of nuclear war in almost every corner. If so, then our industrial age organization, laws, values, and processes will need to adapt.
James W. Vizzard 