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Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan by Derek Leebaert

As I mentioned previously, I enjoyed Derek Leebaert’s earlier Cold War history, The Fifty Year Wound, so I was pleased to be sent a courtesy review copy of his latest work, Magic and Mayhem:The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan. Leebaert, a professor of government who teaches foreign policy at Georgetown university, does not disapoint; Magic and Mayhem is a lively and highly provocative excoriation of of the dysfunctional political culture of making foreign and national security policy in America.  While I found many fine points of disagreement with Leebaert in Magic and Mayhem, his broad themes constitute a healthy challenge to a dolorous status quo in Washington.

In Leebaert’s view, American foreign policy suffers from being crafted under two related evils: a culture of “magical thinking” and a cadre of professional alarmists, the “Emergency Men” who constitute a kind of self-appointed, adrenalin-addicted, national security ecclesia who exploit the magical thinking of the public and labor under its delusions themselves. It is this dual embrace of ends without a priori examination of means or ways and a lust for action that leads our foreign policy elite to embrace all manner of costumed charlatans with polished English language skills who are allegedly willing and able to be America’s “partner” in dangerous neignorhoods. From South Korean autocrats to African kleptocrats to figures of a more recent vintage. Leebaert writes:

Afghan president Hamid Karzai, with his Western-style technocrats and talk of democracy, was immensely appealing to Washington after the Taliban was ousted.  For more than seven years, reports the Times Dexter Filkins, Karzai was a “White House favorite – a celebrity in a flowing cape and dark grey fez” a dramatic outfit that he had designed himself but that had no origin in Afghani dress…..

….”We thought we had found a miracle man” moaned one diplomat. On closer inspection, the sorcerer proved unconvincing as the opium trade and corruption flourished.

I have always wondered where the hell that cape came from.

Leebaert takes aim at a wide variety of targets. I definitely do not agree with his assessments of everything and everyone who has caught his ire, but it is a list that is breathtaking in expanse; a parade of names and terms that includes, but is not limited to:

George Kennan
Douglas MacArthur
Paul Nitze
Detente
Robert McNamara
McGeorge Bundy
Peter Rodman
Brinkmanship
Donald Rumsfeld
COIN
Richard Holbrooke
Henry Kissinger
The CIA
NSC-68
John McCain
Arms Control
John F. Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Curtis LeMay
Defense intellectuals
Lyndon Johnson
Maxwell Taylor
Dick Cheney
Cyrus Vance
George W. Bush
Neocons
Oliver North
Revolution in military affairs
Richard Perle
Crisis management
MAD theory
Strategic/Security Studies
Walt Rostow
Wiliam Westmoreland
Robert Kennedy
Bernard Lewis
Thomas P.M. Barnett
Lawrence Summers
George Tenet
Robert Kaplan
Samuel Huntington
John Abizaid
Stan McChrystal
Barack Obama
David Ignatius
Thomas Friedman
David Brooks
US Public Diplomacy
Jimmy Carter
Michael O’Hanlon

That, by the way, was not comprehensive.

It would be a much shorter list to cite those statesmen of whom Leebaert approved – men like Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, Matthew Ridgway, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, George Schultz and Ronald Reagan. The book is not flawless. There are minor factual errors. Not every person or doctrine in Magic and Mayhem is considered in depth.  At times, Leebaert comes across as glib or superficial in his criticism, but predominantly, as with the cases of Kissinger or Rumsfeld, his bitter jeremiads are skewering their targets.

Leebaert argues for a considered retreat from policy alarmism and the cult of emergency, and for a reduction of ambitious American policy grandiosity that would flow from recognizing and respecting the agency of other nation’s leaders and peoples. Implicitly, a call not so much for isolationism, as for restraint and a sense of proportion, coupled with a dimunition of status and power for national security “celebrities” and the cottage industry of think tank consultancy for which they stand.

Magic and Mayhem is a book that was written to demystify shibboleths and smash idols.

Would DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ever tolerate Border Patrol agents using the TSA “security” procedures on arrested illegal aliens that she demands American citizens submit to in order to catch a plane?

The woman really thinks she’s a central committee secretary of a small Eastern Bloc country circa 1982. Perhaps her view of ordinary Americans as dangerous security threats will change somewhat if she leaves office to become one of them again.

Then we can get a DHS Secretary who will take notice of the giant failed state to our South imploding under the attack of a rapidly expanding narco-insurgency instead of making it a top priority to get Mexican officials to use naked scanners at their airports. WTF?

What planet does she live on?

ADDENDUM:

Apparently it is “Planet Oligarchy”.

Former DHS Secretary Chertoff has a lot of business riding on the USG enforcing the use of scanners on an unwilling public, which explains the TSA’s militant but politically inept position on scanning and groping. One of the bigwigs is trading on his government service and expects to feed at the public trough, so the bureaucrats are going to “hang tough”. Who the hell are we to dare to complain anyway?

Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice

SWJ Blog has been featuring Octavian Manea talking to COIN experts about counterinsurgency godfather David Galula:

Interview with Dr. John Nagl

“Counterinsurgencies are after all learning competitions.”

What is the legacy of David Galula for US Counterinsurgency doctrine? Is he an intellectual father?

The most important thinker in the field is probably Mao whose doctrine of insurgency understood that insurgency is not a component or a precursor of conventional war but could by itself accomplish military objectives. The greatest thinker in my eyes in COIN remains David Galula who has the enormous advantage of having studied and seen the evolution of insurgency in France during WW2, then spending a great deal of time in Asia, and really having thought through the problem for more than a decade before he practiced COIN himself for a number of years. His book is probably the single biggest influence on FM 3-24, the COIN Field Manual. David Galula is the best COIN theoretician as Kennan was for containment.

Interview with Dr. David Ucko

What was the role of David Galula in shaping the mind of the US Army or the Army Concept? Could we see him as an intellectual founding father? And what specific beliefs do you have in mind when you assess his role in shaping the organizational culture of the US military?

As certain individuals and groups within the US military again became interested in counterinsurgency, this time as a result of the persistent violence in ‘post-war’ Iraq, one of the more immediate reference points for how to understand this type of political violence were the scholars and theorists who had marked the US military’s previous ‘counterinsurgency eras’, during the 1960s primarily, but also during the 1980s. In the former camp, the thinkers of the 1960s, David Galula stands as an intellectual forefather to much that was finally included in the US Army and Marine Corps’ FM 3-24 counterinsurgency field manual; indeed I believe his book is one of the three works cited in the manual’s acknowledgements. I think it is fair to say far fewer people have read than heard of Galula, and it would be an interesting study to go through his writings more carefully and see to what degree they apply to our understanding of counterinsurgency today. Nonetheless, even at a cursory level, Galula has been extremely helpful in conceptualizing some of the typical conundrums, dilemmas and complexities of these types of campaigns: the civilian capability gaps in theater; the political nature of counterinsurgency; the importance of popular support, etc. These were issues that US soldiers and Marines were confronting in Iraq and struggling to find answers to; Galula’s seminal texts were in that context helpful.

In terms of influencing US counterinsurgency doctrine, perhaps one of Galula’s main contributions is the emphasis on the political nature of these types of campaigns, and – importantly – his concomitant warning that although the fight is primarily more political than military, the military will be the most represented agency, resulting in a capability gap. Galula’s answer to this conundrum is explicitly not to restrict military forces to military duties, a notion picked up on in US doctrine, which also asks the US military to go far beyond its traditional remit where and when necessary. In a sense, this line of thinking is one of the greatest distinctions between the Army’s first interim COIN manual in 2004 and the final version in 2006: in doctrine (if not necessarily in other areas, such as force structure), Galula’s view of military forces filling civilian capability gaps had been accepted. Of course, it should be added that all of this is much easier said than done, and perhaps some of the implications of involving military forces in civilian tasks (agriculture, sewage, project management) have not been thoroughly thought through – do the armed forces have the requires skills, the training, and how much civilian capability can one realistically expect them to fill? Also, the danger with following Galula on this point is that by doing what’s necessary in the field, the armed forces may also be deterring the development of the very civilian capabilities they reluctantly usurp.

How relevant is Galula’s “Maoist Model” of insurgency anymore?

It is certainly possible for a Maoist insurgency to be successful in today’s world under the right conditions. This was proved, ironically, by Maoists in Nepal who managed to shoot their way, if not into power, into a peace agreement with other Nepalese political parties who united with the Communists to topple Nepal’s monarchy in 2006. Conditions were nearly ideal for an insurgent victory: Nepal is a poor, isolated, landlocked nation which had an unpopular and tyrannical king who was, at best, an accidental monarch; and who lacked an effective COIN force in the Royal Army. Nor was India, which passed for the Royal Nepal goverment’s foreign patron, willing to consider vigorous military intervention or even military aid sufficient to crush the rebellion. For their part, the Maoists were highly disciplined with a classic Communist hierarchical system of political-military control and were relatively-self-sufficient as a guerrilla force.

How well does such a “Maoist Model” of revolutionary warfare reflect conditions of insurgency that we see today in Mexico, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Yemen? Or in central Africa? 

Not very well at all.

For that matter, how relevant was “the Maoist Model” for Mao ZeDong in actual historical practice as opposed to retrospective mythologizing and theorizing that lightly sidestepped the approximately 4 million battlefield casualties inflicted on Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army? Prior to the invasion of China proper by Imperial Japan, Chiang Kai-shek’s “extermination campaigns” had a devastating effect on Mao’s forces and had Chiang been free to concentrate all his strength against the Communists, it is difficult to see how Mao’s revolution would have survived without significant Soviet intervention in China’s civil war.

If David Galula were alive today, I suspect he’d be more interested in constructing a new COIN model from empirical investigation than in honing his old one.

National security, or some of the inside-baseball politics thereof, is shifting.

Within hours of the polls closing and buried in the noise over politics:

Control of intelligence budget will shift

NEW ORLEANS – Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Tuesday that he has won a “conceptual agreement” to remove the $53 billion national intelligence budget from Pentagon control and place it under his purview by 2013, as part of an effort to enhance his authority over the U.S. intelligence community.

“To me, it’s a win-win,” he told an audience at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference here. Clapper’s deal with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would take “$50 billion off the top line” of the Pentagon budget and give the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “more authority and oversight” of the budget. The $27 billion military intelligence budget would remain under the Defense Department, Clapper said.

….With his trademark wry humor, he also said he is bringing back “a certain unnamed intelligence officer from Afghanistan” who wrote a report critical of intelligence gathering there; this officer will help improve intelligence sharing among federal agencies and with state and local agencies. “Hey buddy,” Clapper quipped, “you can help me fix it.” The “buddy” is Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who wrote his report for the Center for a New American Security. He will become an assistant director at the ODNI

The DNI, who garnered a colossal $ 50 billion in budgetary authority over the IC that formerly resided with Defense, gave up turf on “cybersecurity”, seen as a future gold mine by Pentagon contractors.

It is noteworthy, that among the Democratic fallen in the House yesterday was Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a true expert in military affairs with a passion for strategy. Exiting with him are three other moderate Southern Democrats, putting the minority Democrats on Armed Services most likely under the leftist Pelosi ally, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, as new GOP members take over.

Presumably, this intel agreement moves oversight over a vast chunk of sensitive IC activity away from Armed Services to the House Intelligence Committee. Hard to say now exactly to what extent. It would also take defending these programs off of Secretary Gate’s plate when the budget knives come out and into the lap of the DNI and the White House.

Finally, I will add that CNAS is emerging as the equivalent of the RAND of the 21st century.

 For national security buffs, this is definitely worth a look:

Congressional Research Service – Richard Best :The National Security Council: An Organizational Assessment (PDF)

The NSC has a few fundamental tasks, not all of which are mutually compatible:

1. Honest broker on policy options and steward of the inter-agency coordination process.

2. Enforcement of bureaucratic accountability for PDD/NSDD orders from the President.

3. Analysis of bureaucracy-generated “options” ( usually artificially restricted to suit departmental interests) and proposing policy alternatives for the President.

Historically, most NSCs can do at least one of these tasks well, though sometimes not even that. Eisenhower’s NSC, in sync with the rest of his administration, was much more effective than most. However, this case was due not only to Ike’s oorganizational preferences as a former holder of supreme military command, but the close working relationships of his SECSTATE, John Foster Dulles, DCI Allen Dulles and Chief of Staff Sherman Adams.

Eisenhower ran a very tight ship. Most presidents come into office not knowing what they do not know and their NSC is seldom structured to compensate, being redesigned in the first national security directives to suit the preconceptions of the incoming POTUS and his political advisers. Presidents get what they ask for in an NSC, not what they will actually need.

Interestingly, “operational control” sometimes is covertly lodged in the NSC when a POTUS attempts to outflank a hostile bureaucracy rather than confront blatant insubordination from five levels below an ineffectual or indifferent Cabinet member. This usually has had very mixed results, permitting both brilliant tactical moves and ill-considered cowboyism from policy types attempting to “wing” directing delicate intelligence, diplomatic or military actions.