When Honor and Strategic Advantage
Converge: A Jominian Argument for Abandoning Torture as a Tactic Intended to
Contribute to Security in the Altered Strategic Landscape of Terror Warfare
by Davida Kellogg
“The
most basic of the principles of war is the need to constantly challenge,
reevaluate, and modernize all of them. The job is never done.” — B.G. Charles
J. Dunlap Jr.
Introduction
When American military thinkers talk about a
“revolution in military affairs,” the image of dissension from high within the
officer corps does not ordinarily come to mind. Individual American Generals
(perhaps most famously, Gen. Douglas MacArthur) have disagreed with their
Commanders-in-Chief over the prosecution of our wars. But that no less than six
retired Generals who held recent commands in the war in
Based on his observations in the field, B.G.
Aylwin-Foster urged that we take a more “hearts and minds” approach in
Despite allegations that any probing of areas of
weakness in our Iraq strategy indicated by the critical Generals plays into the
hands of our largely anti-war political Left,[4] party politics is not what truly matters here. However one may feel about the
morality, legality, or strategic wisdom of concentrating our military efforts
on Iraq, what is at stake on our making the right (or at least a satisfactory)
choice of a strategy for the greater Global War on Terrorism is at its core a
matter of the utmost ethical consequence. It is nothing less than that most
basic of human rights, the inalienable natural and legal right of innocent
non-combatants of all civilized nations to their own lives. That old soldiers’
truism to the effect that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” in
fact simply reminds us that all strategies, even those that have so far been
successful, require re-evaluation from time to time. The so-called “dissident”
generals, a loaded term that to my mind does them a disservice, have only
confirmed what those of us who follow the news from Iraq already strongly
suspected — that our current strategy is not producing the necessary results to
secure that right for our own and our allies’ peoples. Whether one agrees with
retired Marine M.G. Anthony Zinni that we’ve already
“wasted three years” losing ground in
My object in writing this paper is to begin this
process, if only on a small scale, by reassessing the utility of the practice
of torture in extracting intelligence in the context of highly politicized
warfare in which public perception of our actions, if not everything, is “‘way
ahead of everything else.” I offer it in the hope of raising interest in
convening a conference, or at least sparking discussion, in the course of which
current and proposed Coalition strategies would be examined in the light of the
full spectrum of “net assessment” systems running the gamut from statistical
cost-benefit analysis to game theory[5], construction of logical decision trees and other
analytical “tools,”[6] to more traditional systems and their modern
permutations with which almost all U.S. military officers have at least a
passing familiarity. Ideally, a number of different analyses would be made
independently, then jointly examined for common “nodes” of agreement and,
perhaps more telling, points of disagreement, and then synthesized into a new
strategic doctrine more likely to secure our national grand strategic
objectives in the G.W.O.T. than our current failing strategy.
To that end, it seemed to me that a system of
Jominian-type Principles of War, updated and specifically adapted to the
morally as well as strategically asymmetrical terror warfare, specifically the
“neostrategicon” system proposed by B.G. Charles Dunlap,[7] might serve as a useful lens through which to focus
initial analysis of the concerns raised by the retired Generals on questions of
what we stand to gain and what we would have to give up in order to take their
advice, and whether it is it worth our doing, or ought we to be hedging our
bets on other strategies, or taking another tack altogether, etc.
The Jominian system of nine principles of war,
originally intended to provide a “scientific” framework for planning and
evaluating French strategy and tactics for the Napoleonic Wars, was taken up by
U.S. officers with such enthusiasm that it used to be said of West Point
graduates that they rode into battle with a sword in one hand and a copy of
Jomini in the other. The nine classic Jominian principles still prominently
displayed on classroom walls at U.S.M.A. when I was there on a Military History
fellowship in the early ‘90s were indelibly etched on the minds of generations
of West Point graduates and R.O.T.C. commissionees alike in the form of the
acronym M.O.S.S. M.O.U.S.E. for mass, objective, security, surprise, maneuver,
offensive, unity of command, simplicity, and economy of force. It is to them
that M.G. John Batiste was referring when he “homed in on [Sec. Def.]
Rumsfeld’s leadership style and decision-making,” warning that “When decisions
are made without taking into account sound-military decision-making, sound
planning, then we’re bound to make mistakes... When we violate the principles
of war with mass and unity of command and unity of effort, we do that at our
own peril.”[8]
Of course, not all nine principles are of equal
importance in every military engagement. No general ever has all of them
working in his favor; they may even conflict, as they in fact often do. The
“art” of war may be said to lie to a considerable extent in knowing where and
when to sacrifice the benefits of employing one principle in favor of others in
order to maximize strategic gains. And though the nine original principles may
be deeply ingrained in the American military consciousness, other
considerations may also apply. In the ‘80s I understand that there was some
talk, at
The perception, stemming from our frustrations with
guerrilla warfare in
The Altered Strategic Landscape of
Irregular Warfare
The tack I will be taking in this paper approaches
analysis of the strategic problems posed by guerrilla and terror warfare from
an oblique angle to Dunlap’s, converges on the same strategic issues, and leads
to many of the same conclusions. A geologist by education and original
profession, I envision differing styles of war as presenting sometimes very
different “strategic terrains” over which opposing armies must maneuver. When
one party to a conflict radically alters its style of war, it is as though its
war planners had sterilized a great sand
table and rebuilt it with strategic hills and valleys and fords so located as
to improve their side’s likelihood of prevailing.[9] The more
asymmetrical — the more surprising, the stranger, the more “foreign,”
and even, as in the case of terror warfare, morally repulsive — the altered
style of war is to the opposing side, the greater the strategic advantage that
accrues to the side that has initiated the shift. The one constant in this
shifting strategic landscape is that its contours are controlled by the
relative “weight” given in a particular style of warfare to the various
considerations captured by the principles of war, and how that weight is
applied or countered. That is, different styles of warfare place different
amounts of emphasis on the core elements of different strategic principles. The
“high ground” one must seize and hold to the last man in one style of war, may
be so different in another that strategic planners may not at first even
recognize it. To my mind, the “take away” lesson of the Vietnam Conflict, for
example, may well be that the contours of the strategic terrain of modern
irregular warfare is fundamentally different from that of conventional war, and
what constitutes effective maneuver is determined by the nature of that altered
terrain. Air Mobility was a highly sophisticated technological solution to the
logistical problem of maneuver over
The first step, therefore, to effective strategic
planning for this conflict would be to accurately locate the domains, or areas
of influence of particular principles of war, in which the high ground lies in
terror warfare — not where one would expect them to lie from our successful
experience with conventional and even cold war, or would have them lie to
facilitate the prosecution of the kinetic style of war we favor, but where the enemy’s style of warfare has relocated
it. In terror warfare it lies in the political, that is primarily in the
domains of objective and morale. Specifically, it lies in Dunlap’s principle of
perceived worthiness (or lack thereof) of the Coalition campaign in
If a perceived lack of a clear objective for the
current phase of the war in Iraq has sown confusion among our military leaders
and troops, as Aylwin-Foster maintains (and it does seem that the greatest
threats to our own and our allies’ lives and liberties are issuing from Iran
and Syria and from terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas which
have assumed the roles of de facto governments
in Lebanon and the would-be Palestine), it has left our civilian population
back home wondering what we are doing in Iraq in the first place, rebuilding
Baghdad city infrastructure while New Orleans still lies in ruins. Perceptions that the war in
Allegations that the war in Iraq is both immoral and
illegal, and accusations (some few justified, most not) of “war crimes” leveled
against our troops are uninformed by any demonstrable knowledge of either
thousands of years of Just War Tradition or the corpus of International Law of
Armed Conflict (the L.O.A.C.). Nevertheless, such negative perceptions of both
our methods and means of war have a ripple effect impinging on the domains of
several other principles of war, chief among them mass, maneuver, and security.
In Dunlap’s terms, the creation and spreading of such negative perceptions
about the Coalition’s methods, means, and reasons for fighting the G.W.O.T. is
“strategically anchored”7 to terror warfare.
Mass
Given conditions of
1.
a small
2.
supposedly “expansible”
3.
all-volunteer army, almost entirely dependent on recruitment and retention
because of perceived widespread voter resistance to a draft,
and
4.
the challenge of a widespread and multifaceted war, in which mass becomes a —
possibly the — critically limiting
factor to our ability to achieve our overarching objective. As missions
proliferate and number of boots on the ground stay the same, or even decline,
recruitment shortfalls present a real possibility for disaster as attrition,
rotation, and retirement relentlessly thin
our “lines.”
I contend that the sort of misconceptions about the
morality and legality of our purpose and conduct in
1.
Jeremy Hinzman, an A.W.O.L. U.S. Army paratrooper, who recently applied for
refugee status in Canada on the grounds that returning to duty with his unit
would oblige him to participate in actions which would render himself and his
fellow soldiers criminally liable for the deaths of Iraqi civilians and,
thereby, war criminals,
and
2.
Some of our nation’s most prestigious law schools, which have denied J.A.G.
Corps recruiters access to their 3rd year students on the grounds that the
military’s contentious “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards gays violates
university nondiscrimination policy.
Hinzman’s appeal was denied by the Canadian
Immigration and Refugee Board, and rightly so, on the grounds that he had not
demonstrated that the U.S. Army had any such institutional policies towards
Iraqi civilians as he alleged. But his case, which is now in the process of
appeal, has encouraged other troubled and confused enlisted men to file cases
of their own, and is championed on university campuses, where he is widely
viewed as a something of a martyr to the cause of “peace in
A recent Supreme Court ruling now requires
universities to allow military recruiters equal access or risk loss of government
funding. But the controversy over “don’t ask-don’t tell” has already done
considerable damage to our efforts to recruit J.A.G. officers. These officers’
function is to determine whether proposed targets are legal under the L.O.A.C.
and advise on other legal matters such as the treatment of “high value”
prisoners that have become crucial to our ability to defuse the moral and legal
claims leveled against us by apologists for terrorism. As such, these officers
are especially needed in the context of the highly sophisticated style of
political war presented by terror warfare which Dunlap termed “Lawfare.”[12] The posting of this new generation of “warrior
lawyers” to the right hand of commanders in the field is the closest thing to a
desperately needed “Lawfighting” doctrine[13] we have so far devised.
While the Supreme Court decision has been condemned
in certain circles as institutionalizing
prejudice against gays in the military, it nevertheless rationally prioritizes
the greater necessity for all citizens to make personal sacrifices in time of
war for the common defense over insisting on such individual “goods” as a right
to open sexual self-expression in a military setting. And being law of the
land, it must take legal precedence over individual university policy.
But even though the Supreme Court’s decision has
resolved the issue of equal access for recruiters for the time being, we are
left with the pressing problem of convincing young people to join up. As
mission creep, attrition and retirement take their tolls, we can no longer
afford to have our recruiters simply disengage, as has been the practice on my
campus, and end up routinely not making their vital mission. Therefore, I
propose that, for reasons of mass and maneuver, we arm our recruiters with a
solid basic understanding of Law of War and Just War theory that would enable
them to overcome protesters’ arguments in private conversation with potential
enlistees and cadets (not direct confrontation with protesters, which would be
futile, off-mission, and non-contributory to our overall objective).
In the end though, we are not the only ones
threatened by terrorism. Other nations including
This is no small challenge in an intellectual
climate of post-’60s cultural relativism that has left a highly vocal segment
of our own and European, society reluctant to acknowledge the necessity for
going to war, even against an enemy that has committed unspeakable atrocities
specifically named as war crimes in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva
Conventions (and threatens to commit more
against our own and our allies’ civilian populations) because of a
post-’60s societal taboo against “judging” the motives and actions of other
“cultures.” Followed to its logical conclusion, such unreasoning political
correctness would have us standing like the proverbial deer in on-coming
headlights, wondering uselessly (since there is little we can practically do
about our sworn enemies’ most deeply ingrained cultural and religious
prejudices) “why do they hate us so?” Whatever the answer,
religio-socio-economic resentments (the so-called “root causes” for terrorism),
however deeply felt they may be, can neither morally nor legally justify the
commission of the atrocities and crimes against humanity that are the defining
characteristics of terror warfare.[15] For while unfair conditions may exist[16] that may call for some form of reasonable
remediation, nothing gives anyone the moral or legal right to
deliberately and with malice aforethought murder
innocent noncombatants; no such right exists in either the Just War Tradition
or modern International Law of Armed Conflict.13
As a teacher, I am naturally inclined to believe
that simple ignorance of Just War theory and the L.O.A.C. can be overcome by
education, without which I have long argued our civilian voting citizenry
cannot adequately fulfill its constitutional obligations inherent in civilian
control of the military. But, even if we institute such vital citizenship
education in our public schools tomorrow, it will be years until an adequately
educated cohort of voters is of age to influence
Maneuver
The sort of willful ignorance that actually has
educated Americans seriously suggesting that we adopt a more “sophisticated
European attitude,” and learn to live with terrorism — an abomination of an
attitude that plays directly into our enemy’s politically skillful hands — is
even harder to counter. But it is both widespread and deeply held in certain
strata of Western society. It is imperative that we find a way — and soon — to reach the remainder of our
civilian population, and those of our allies, as well as Coalition troops, not
with clumsy attempts at propaganda like transparent out-sourced advertising
campaigns that are rejected out of hand by a public grown as mistrustful of
government as ours has, but with a clear, honest, rational, and convincing deconstruction
of terrorist apologetics and the public unmasking of terrorist methods, means,
and objectives for the hypocritical hate propaganda and the cause of untold
civilian death and suffering they are. For it is here, in the domains of
perceived worthiness and its direct effects on morale — of our own and our
allies’ civilian populations and of Coalitions troops — that the controlling
high ground in the strategic terrain delimited by political warfare lies. It is
in convincing the civilized nations of the world that a vast and unbridgable
moral and legal gap exists between ourselves and those who wage terror warfare
on all our peoples that our last best chance for taking this high ground from
them resides. The (mis)perceived worthiness of terrorist war aims [19]is, really, the only
principle of war they have working for them. But it is a powerful one, most
especially in the strategic terrain of terror warfare. And apologists for
terrorism have so far proved far more adept at exploiting it — that is at
getting their viewpoint across to civilian supporters in the Middle East and
abroad — than we have so far been at debunking their twisted rhetoric.[20] And radical philosophies tend to carry the weight
of religion with their adherents.
Consider this lesson from our recent military
history: Although the Vietnam conflict was at bottom about access to land (read
wealth in that largely agrarian society), our “hearts and minds” strategy with
its pigs and chickens, and vaccinations against childhood diseases, simply could
not cover the same socio-economic-political terrain as the Communist promise of
land redistribution. The problem in Iraq is even more complicated by old and
deeply felt religious sectarian differences among those whose affection and
co-operation we aim to win than it was in Vietnam. And any strategic Devil’s
advocate worth his brimstone must ask: if the Vietnamese were willing to
sacrifice over a million guerrilla fighters’ lives for a functional secular
religion that deconstructs to mere Marxist economic ideology of economic
redistribution, what would the Iraqis and others in the Middle East not do for
the sake of their genuine religious contentions? For the objective of the
terrorism coming out of the Middle East these days is all about a struggle for religious
hegemony, something we seem not to fully appreciate, perhaps because we have
been raised to believe, to the foundations of our national identity, is a
matter of personal choice and public toleration.[21] There really
is, if not a “clash of
civilizations,” then a quite possibly unbridgeable gap between Islamic and
Western culture — vid.
capital charges recently brought against an Afghani convert to Christianity,
for which crime of apostasy, unknown to modern Western courts, Sharia law would
have sentenced him to death by beheading. The fact that those charges were
dropped and he was allowed to emigrate to Italy would appear to demonstrate
just how vulnerable fundamentalist Islamist states and organizations are to the
threat of withdrawal of international public support. And they are exquisitely
vulnerable there, in the heart of their greatest if not only strength, because
of the demonstrable, inherent, and, therefore, irremediable illegality and
immorality of their methods and means of war13 Targeting the
subversion of terrorism’s supporters in the domain of perceived worthiness of
the terrorist way of war contributes to
our strength in the Jominian principle of objective.
Objective
Aylwin-Foster urges a “hearts and minds” approach to
gain the willing co-operation of the Iraqi people[22] in attaining
our objective of neutralizing radical Islamic terrorist organizations operating
out of the Middle East by convincing them that we understand and appreciate
their point of view on the major conflicts in the area. And there is undeniable
advantage to be gained in
“knowing your enemy,” as Sun Tzu advised. But I would caution that there is an
ideological “tipping point” at which “understanding” other people’s motivations
slides over into tacitly approving of, making excuses for (as in the flawed and
dangerous “root causes” arguments for terrorism ably deconstructed by
Elschtain), or even actively adopting it
(what the British Army in India used to call “going native”).
Our agreeing to step over this point and adopt an
Islamist point of view towards Middle Eastern conflicts may well turn out to be
the price demanded for a positive response to our efforts at
reconstruction. And that is a price we
cannot, and should not pay, even if we could. For one thing, there is no single
Islamic, Arab, or even Iraqi viewpoint, but a vicious religious conflict
between Sunni and Shiite almost as old as the religious conflict between
Moslems and “Infidels” (adherents to every other religion). So deep are these
divisions that the vast majority of Iraqi civilians killed almost daily in
Iraq are the direct and intended victims
of sectarian violence, and not collateral, much less directly targeted
casualties (as apologists for terrorism so hypocritically claim) of
conventional Coalition warfare , which honor binds its practitioners to
minimize any possible harm to non-combatants, even at increased peril to their
own lives. In this religio-political atmosphere, any rapport achieved with
leaders of one sect would almost certainly be taken as our making common cause
with their enemy by the other. Therefore, strict neutrality would be called for
on our part, but there is little chance that either side would not demand our
actively taking their part in return for its co-operation. Morally, there is
little to choose between them; both sides have innocent blood on their hands up
to their elbows. Politically, Sunnis are the majority in Iraq. But we have to
contend with the more threatening reality that, though the Shiites might be
Iraqi by nationality, their (stronger) religious sectarian loyalties may lie
across the border in Iran, which is shaping up to be a far more formidable
(nuclear capable) enemy to us than Iraq ever was. Further, we have made
unsavory alliances in the Middle East before to our disadvantage in the domain
of the principle of perceived worthiness, and there does not seem to be anyone
in power, or capable of seizing it, with whom we could make an advantageous and
honorable alliance.
While I am on the topic of religious intolerance,
one demand pretty much any Moslem ally we may hope to gain in the Middle East
would almost assuredly make of us is that we alter our foreign policy towards
Israel to facilitate, or at least turn a blind eye to, the achievement of
plainly stated Palestinian and more worrying Iranian objectives in the Middle
Eastern conflict.[23] Primary among these is the “removal of Israel from
the map of the Middle East.” The legal term of art for an war aim such as this
is “ethnic cleansing,” and this charming little euphemism describes, not a
reasonable objective in the Just War tradition, but a crime against humanity
under international law to which we cannot allow ourselves to become a party
and retain our honor or gain strategically controlling perceived worthiness in
our own or others’ eyes. Neither can we afford to lull ourselves into imagining
that the Palestinian (and now, Iranian) clamor for such ends are only
overwrought ethnic rhetoric full of idiomatic overstatement, which we
misinterpret literally and take too seriously; the bombing
of the World Trade Towers was, by the admission of al-Qaeda spokesmen, planned
and fully intended as an act of genocide, the site having been specifically
targeted because it was thought to house large numbers of Jewish business
people during working hours.
We must also ask ourselves, what we really stand to
gain in the Middle East by allowing the destruction of our most reliable ally
in the region in order to win over an unproved one. Certainly there will be
negative international political and strategic consequences for demonstrating
anything that might be interpreted by our European allies and potential allies
as untrustworthiness or lack of moral fastidiousness in making alliances in
Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. For it is they — along with moderate
Islamic states like Indonesia, where Ralph Peters[24] has argued we stand our best chance of success —
that I would argue we really need to win over in order to present an
implacable, united, and overwhelming opposition to terrorist organizations and
sponsor states. Yet, in our efforts to avoid losing more ground in the domain
of security to terrorist blackmail — a mostly defensive position that sacrifices the principle of offensive to
little or no advantage — we have lost track
of the fact that the key to victory lies in taking
the terrorists’ most valuable high ground — ground that is as vulnerable to
assault by us as it has been strategically valuable to our enemies — that lies
in the domain of perceived worthiness and associated morale. Own that ground —
undermine support and sympathy for terrorist means and methods of war — and
terrorist mass and ability to maneuver collapses; security will follow. Here, I
believe, is another “node” of agreement between my own and Dunlap’s
interpretations of principles of war.
Security
Restoring security for our civilian population is,
of course, what we are talking about when we say that our national grand
strategic objective in waging the G.W.O.T. in which we find ourselves,
willingly or not, embroiled is to neutralize the threat of terrorist
organizations and their sponsor and enabling states. But in order to
accomplish this objective, we will need the co-operation of our allies and
potential allies worldwide, the civilian populations of moderate Middle Eastern
states, and our own civilian population. And in order to win and keep their
co-operation we will have to earn their confidence that for the civilized
nations of this world, the best chance for security lies in solidarity and a credible
counter threat of overwhelming kinetic force made possible by the mass and
materiel of our combined military forces.
Once that mass is achieved, we will be better able
to provide security for those in the Middle East who would take our side except
for fear of terrorist reprisals like the targeting of Iraqi men queuing up to
apply for jobs with the new Iraqi police force or to enlist in their own
country’s military. The need for sufficient mass to supply such security is one
reason for my advocacy of a “Europe first” policy for our application of a
“hearts and minds” strategy in the war on terrorist organizations and their
sponsor states. Towards that end, we and our allies in the U.N. might do well
to launch a very public diplomatic effort to have the U.N. explicitly declare
acts of terrorism crimes against humanity, and begin trying apprehended
terrorists in the I.C.C., out in public where such trials arguably belong and
can do the most to bring the worthiness of our stance re terrorism before our own and our allies’ civilian populations.
For although military tribunals do have certain advantages (such as a greater
level of security for H.U.M.I.N.T. providers and the possibility of hearing
cases relatively quickly and cheaply overseas in the war zone where the alleged
criminal activity took place and witnesses reside), the more valuable
advantages in public perception to be had from transparency is sacrificed. Whether we succeed in achieving these aims —
and in the current atmosphere at the U.N., we probably will not — is almost
immaterial, as the international discussion that would be opened in the media,
if kept focused on the international legal issues, would serve our greater
objective of forcing the civilian public to confront the demonstrable immorality
and illegality of terrorism. It is the, for lack of a less cynical sounding
term, “public relations” dividend that is the objective of this maneuver in the
strategic terrain created by political war.
But we cannot hope to achieve this advantage if we
cannot convince our allies and potential allies that both our strategic aims and the tactics employed to achieve them
are worthy. And we cannot hope to convince anyone, even ourselves, of their
worthiness unless they are worthy.
Half measures will not be sufficient to this purpose, but will be interpreted
in the media and many domestic and foreign civilian quarters as attempts to
deceive. A case in point was President Bush’s signing the Military Commissions
Act of 2006. Among other things, “this legislation says the president ‘can
interpret the meaning and application’ of international standards for prisoner
treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive
interrogation methods that otherwise might be seen as illegal by international
courts.”[25]
The issue of security at home is even more fraught,
because our civilian population demands security, but is deeply suspicious of
any measures that smack of “racial profiling.” Even such individual-focused
security practices as “behavioral profiling” may be spun as racial or religious
profiling). At the same time, we are vehemently resentful of security measures
that would subject all citizens and foreigners alike to equally stringent
scrutiny. Just how unwilling Americans are to give up some measure of privacy
for increased security may be illustrated by the significant number of civilian
volunteers who have left my own organization (the C.G. Aux. — lead civilian organization in the Department
of Homeland Security) rather than submit to security checks before being
allowed to participate in direct operational support of Coast Guard activities.
Such an understandably touchy issue as infringement on personal liberties for
the sake of tightened security must be handled with the proverbial kid gloves —
the announcement of the Dubai ports deal at the same time that an extension of
the contentious Patriot Act was under consideration in Congress was nothing if
not politically clumsy. The recent decision to send funds for humanitarian aid
to the Lebanon, where they will no doubt be disbursed to the local populations
by Hezbollah representatives, may well turn out to be another cause for
resentment among our taxpaying public. Any such arrangements must in the future
be made transparently and subject to public debate, if not ultimate approval.
A problem perhaps not fully appreciated is that what
may constitute an area of relatively high ground which may be occupied to
advantage in the domain of one of the original or revised principles of war may
at the same time constitute an area of strategic disadvantage, or relative
lower ground, in the domain of another principle. The problem is to determine
in the domain of which principle, or constellation of principles, the key
terrain to occupy in order to achieve our national grand strategic objectives
lies. This may necessitate the sacrifice of advantageous terrain in the domain
of other principles. A case in point is that while maneuvering for the high
ground of security we have made use of certain techniques for intelligence
gathering which have been widely condemned as torture or other maltreatment of
prisoners of war. It has opened us to counter charges of tu atque that have provided terrorist apologists with a smoke screen
behind which to hide the unbridgable moral and legal differences between our
way of war and theirs, and has weakened and charges of violation of the Torture
Convention of 1990 we might wish to bring against them for mistreatment of any
Americans they may take captive. And it has stranded us in an area of negative
strategic advantage with respect to the domains of morale and perceived
worthiness, where the controlling or key terrain in the kind of highly
sophisticated political warfare which, like it or not, we are engaged, actually
lies.
I propose that we must now consider the question of
whether our employment of torture, which may contribute to intelligence (an
area of high ground in the domain of security) should be discontinued because
it places us in a strategic trough with respect to the key terrain in political
warfare which lies in the domain of perceived worthiness. We must also keep in
mind when considering any strategy that in this age of “television warfare” we
can no longer keep anything our military does from public scrutiny.
Even if we could effectively cover our resort to
torture, it may not be all that efficacious in delivering usable intelligence.
Recent critics have pointed out that intelligence extracted under extreme
duress may be unreliable because pain either clouds the memory of subjects who
actually do know something valuable, or causes those who do not to lie in order
to avoid further pain.[26] Those able to tolerate the pain of low-grade to
moderate torture may still lie in order to deny us the intelligence they
possess. The application of a heavier hand may result in death, in which case
we are also out the intelligence we hoped to extract. And “breaking” a
subject’s will to withhold intelligence by disrupting his diurnal biorhythms,
keeping him isolated and in the dark, or exposing him to painfully loud rap
“music” etc. takes time, which we may not have if the intelligence we are
after, such as the details of an impending terror attack, is time sensitive.
Research into so-called “truth sera” may hold out the greatest possibilities
for extracting timely and reliable intelligence. But no drug, even aspirin, has
zero probability of causing death or life threatening side effects, and
psychoactive agents may so loosen the subject’s hold on reality that he
produces little more than useless psychedelic ravings.
Prohibiting
the most aggressive of our interrogation techniques now in use (water boarding,
for instance) and scaling down the intensity of those remaining will probably
not result in any significant improvement in our “perceived worthiness rating.”
What would a society so unused to making finely shaded value judgments that it
categorically calls almost every interaction our military has with suspected
terrorists “torture” consider acceptable interrogation techniques anyway —
harsh words? the mere threat of same?
All levity aside, it does not seem likely that anything Western society would sanction would have much
utility in extracting intelligence from a hostile and unwilling subject. More importantly, any use of torture techniques on our part will almost assuredly
be used as justification for the reciprocal use of the same or even harsher
techniques on any of our own military personnel who are taken captive, or on
kidnapped reporters, contractors, and other U.S. civilians etc. If there is one
thing preventing their torture and murder at the hands of their captors, it is
the ground terrorists would lose in the domain of perceived worthiness if their
actions were exposed before their European supporters by a blameless U.S. We
would probably do far better to concentrate on scrupulously legal and narrowly
targeted surveillance, infiltration, and the turning and cultivating of
informants.[27] Although these measures too would be subject
to the special pleading of apologists for terrorism, any case they could make
in mitigation of acts of terror would be far weaker and more transparent in the
absence of any evidence of torture on our part. More importantly, they would
put terrorist organizations and sponsor and enabling states on an untenable
defensive with regard to their own resort to torture.
Although I can conceive of instances in which the
threat posed to innocent non-combatants is so great and so imminent that the
moral case for torturing a subject known to be in possession of critical
intelligence would outweigh moral and legal prohibitions on torture (the
so-called “Dirty Harry” scenario), torture under less fraught conditions is an
advantage decimator in the strategic landscape created by highly political
terror warfare. Furthermore, the moral
and legal threshold beyond which torture might be justified could be lowered
with the escalation of terror warfare. But, in the context of the present
situation, the contours of the high ground in the domain of the principle of
security defined by intelligence gathered by resort to torture appear to be
relatively low in comparison to the elevation of the high ground in the domain
of morale and perceived worthiness currently occupied by terrorists and their
apologists. I believe that this ground is key to victory in the G.W.O.T. I also
believe that we can take it. But in order to do so we will have to scrupulously
“clean up our act.” Part of that process may be abandoning torture outright.
Exploitation
In advocating our abandonment of torture, I am by no
means suggesting that we fight the G.W.O.T. without benefit of intelligence,
only that we consider shifting the greater part of our intelligence gathering
efforts from techniques which have become a hindrance to maneuvering in the
politicized strategic landscape presented by terror war to more effective means
including H.U.M.I.N.T. and (scrupulously legal)[28] use of electronic and other surveillance
techniques. The question of our continuing resort to torture is moot in any
case. Even if torture were demonstrably more effective in rendering reliable
and timely military intelligence, the American civilianry has pretty much
determined that we abandon torture, and under Constitutionally established
civilian control of the military, our strategic planners and Military
Intelligence personnel are oath-bound to accept that.
But even if we had a choice, strategic analysis
would appear to argue for our abandonment of torture. This is where the art in the
“art of war” resides — in having the fineness of judgment to perceive the relative strategic
value of the high ground in the domains of competing principles of war, the
sheer strategic guts to relinquish the advantages of one principle for greater
advantage in the domain of another more crucial principle, and the quickness of wit to exploit that advantage to the fullest.[29] Even a cursory perusal of American military history
would reveal that we do not have much of a track record when it comes to
effective use of the principle of exploitation. But in abandoning torture, we
have the opportunity to gain strategically controlling high ground in the
domain of our enemy’s most effective principle of war. The question is not
whether to take that ground (we should), or if we can take that ground (we
can), but how to exploit the advantages holding it will give us in the domain
of perceived worthiness. We shall have to get very good very fast at getting
our message across to the nation, our allies, and our enemies’ civilianry
alike.[30] And we shall have to back those words up with our
actions, so that anybody with eyes can see that we are the ones fighting for a just and humane cause in a just and
humane manner. But here, at long last, is the one thing our cadet students have
repeatedly told us they most desire — the possibility of fighting even a
dishonorable enemy honorably, and
with a fighting chance to prevail. I am well aware that a strategy of fighting
a lawless, immoral, and demonstrably merciless enemy according to the precepts
of the Just War tradition and International Law of War is counterintuitive at
first thought. Only consider this possibility —
what if we have fortuitously been driven, like the Union troops on the first
day of the Battle of Gettysburg, not into helplessness and defeat, but onto the
finest fighting ground on the altered strategic battlefield of terror war, one
that may be made to suit our own preferred methods, means, and aims of warfare
far better than it suits those of the enemy who, blinded by unreasoning anger
and religious zeal, redelineated its contours? Wouldn’t the exploitation of
such a possibility be worth considering?
NOTES
[1]David Cloud and Eric Schmitt, “More Retired Generals
Call for Rumsfeld’s Resignation,” The
[2]Hendrik Hertzberg, “Rummyache,” The New Yorker,
1/5/06.
[3]B.G. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, “Changing
the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” Mil Rev., Nov.-Dec. 2005.
[4]Charles Krauthammer, “Dissident Generals Suit the
Anti-War Left,”
[5]Col. Max Manwaring. “The New Master of Wizard’s
Chess: The Real Hugo Chavez and Asymmetric Warfare,” Mil. Rev. Sept. - Oct.
2005.
[6]Col. John Wagelstein, “What’s Wrong in
[7]B.G. Charles Dunlap Jr., “Neo-Strategicon:
Modernized Principles of War for the 21st Century,” Mil. Rev., March-April,
2006.
[8]Sean Naylor, “Retired Generals Blast Rumsfeld,” Army
Times, 4/24/06.
[9]In a similar vein, M.G. Robert Scales (“Clausewitz and World War IV —,” Armed Forces Journal, 2006-7) likened this transformation in style of warfare to the “moving of tectonic plates.”
[10]What Scales has aptly termed “psycho-cultural” war.
[11]Davida
Kellogg and Maj. Michel Reid, “Terror Warfare, Perfidy, and the
[12]Col. Charles Dunlap Jr., “Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Century Conflicts,” 2001, on line at <www. duke.edu/pfeaver/dunlap.pdf>
[13]Davida Kellogg, “International Law and Terrorism,” Mil. Rev., Sept.-Oct., 2005, pp. 50-57.
[14]This is actually an economy of force argument, which
is closely related to mass.
[15]Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Just War Against Terror,”
Basic Books 2003.
[16]Michael Radu noted in his F.P.R.I. talk on teaching 9/11 that “the theory that people join terrorist organizations out of poverty, injustice, etc. is losing ground.” Radu’s point is supported by the fact that the would-be plane bombers thwarted this August came from relatively comfortable British circumstances.
[17]Col.
Ralph Baker, “The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s
Perspective on Information Operations,” briefing to Information Operations
Symposium II, Ft.
[18]Kenneth Payne, “The Media as an Instrument of War,” Parameters, Spring 2005, 81-92, goes much further in designating the media — ”ostensibly non-state actors” — as “instruments of war,” in the context of terrorism’s highly politicized war of words. He further calls for greater control of the media by the military, and even for the modification of existing International Law of War specifying the non-combatant status of journalists and media buildings and installations in view of the effective military nature of such terrorist apologists as Al Jazeera and Al Manar.
[19] Emblematic of this misperception is the frequently cited equation of “one man’s terrorist,” who murders civilian noncombatants in suicide bombings and decaptitates captives or forces their religious conversions literally at sword’s point, with the “freedom fighter” of a civilized people whose soldiers do everything within their power (even to their own detriment) to spare civilians, and who, when abuses do come to light, try and punish the perpetrators
[20] “In which murderers are renamed ‘martyrs,’ to deliberately cause the deaths of innocent civilians becomes to do the ‘will of God,’ and all efforts at self defense by those targeted by terrorists becomes ‘aggression,” Davida Kellogg, “On the Need for Moral Armoring of our Soldiers in the Rhetoric Wars of Terrorism,” Canadian Conference on Ethical Leadership, 2002.
[21]“Throughout most of the 1990s, intelligence personnel were not quite forbidden to consider religion as a strategic factor, but the issue was considered soft and nebulous — as well as potentially embarrassing in those years of epidemic political correctness.” Ralph Peters, “Rolling Back Radical Islam,” Parameters, Autumn 2002, pp. 4-16.
[22]I should mention here that Baker especially dislikes this term because he feels it gives his troops an unrealistic understanding of their mission as making friends with the Iraqis they encounter — a dangerous and ultimately impossible goal. What he advocates is the cultivating of certain influential persons who command the ear of some target segment of the Iraqi population. Such tactics have in fact netted him successes in I/O operations and the acquisition of valuable H.U.M.I.N.T., but it is questionable as to whether we can make a strategy of cultivating — or even find — enough leaders to discredit acts of terror in a sufficiently large segment of the world-wide Moslem population to bring about the cessation of terror warfare. That probably being the case, I contend that the credible threat of overwhelming force from the civilized nations of the world might suffice as a deterrent and serve our strategic purposes as well, if not longer and more reliably.
[23]Such
thinly veiled objectives were recently broached by former Iranian
president Khatami, who urged that the
[24]Since, as Peters (“Rolling Back Radical Islam,” Parameters, Autumn 2002, pp. 4-16) “much of the Arab world has withdrawn into a fortress of intolerance and self-righteousness as psychologically comfortable as it is practically destructive. They are, through their own fault, as close to hopeless as any societies and cultures upon the earth
[25]Nedra
Pickler, “ Bush Signs Bill for Terrorist Trials,”
[26]At a DOD news briefing on a new Field Manual 2-22.3 on human intelligence collector operations that “establishes the DOD-wide interrogation standard consistent with law, the Geneva Convention and DOD policy”(CQ Transcripts Wire, “Defense Department News Briefing on Detainee Policies,” The Washington Post, 9/6/2006), no less an authority than L.G. John Kimmons, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, stated the following:
“No good intelligence [obtained through “interrogation” defined here as “getting truthful answers to time-sensitive questions on the battlefield] is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that. Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been — in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices in clever ways” [italics mine]. His views were seconded in a letter to Sens. Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary arguing that “proposals now before Congress concerning how to handle detainnees suspected of terrorist activities run the risk of squandering the greatest resource our country enjoys in fighting the dictators and extremists who want to destroy us — our commitment as a nation to the rule of law and the protection of divinely granted human rights” written by a group of “experienced intelligence and military officers who have served in the frontlines in waging war against communism and Islamic extremism,” including 15 CIA officers, a retired Director of Defense Humint Services, and the Deputy Coordinator of the Office of Counter Terrorism Dept. of State).
[27] The recent foiling of a relatively large-scale
plot to smuggle the components of bombs in liquid form on board several
[28] Properly issued warrants and fastidiously legally conducted searches are the tools which come readily to mind, although we may have to have some serious legal debate over what constitutes just cause in the context of terror warfare. Attempts to change the law to facilitate monitoring and prosecution of suspected terrorists will almost assuredly come across as finagling to a large part of our and our allies’ populations, and therefore a “force decimator” when it comes to securing their perception of the worthiness of our ways, means, and aims in the war on terrorism.
[29] One case in point is our failure so far to fully exploit the recent Islamic radical strategic blunder in capturing two Western journalists and converting them, literally at sword’s point. Plainly and truthfully presented in all its details, without editorializing or spin, this truly offensive violation of the religious freedoms of these civilian members of the fourth estate would make the international furor raised by offended Muslims that threatened freedom of the press worldwide over a few supposedly insensitive cartoons in a Danish newspaper appear silly in comparison, and focus public attention on the illegal and immoral nature of the methods, means, and evident aims of terror warfare.
[30] Baker had some very interesting ideas about how to accomplish this on a Brigade Combat Team scale. While leafleting is probably not applicable to the U.S. population, ways of implementing his policies of relentlessly telling the truth about the consequences of each act of terror in terms of human costs, and not covering up our own transgressions but swiftly moving to correct and/or punish them, deserve serious consideration.