A Continuation of Management by Other Means
On Reihan’s recommendation, I read Stephen Biddle’s tentative, diffident, hedged defense of the war in Afghanistan, in which he admits that continuing our counterinsurgency campaign in the Hindu Kush is not an easy case to make (hence the old “title phrased as a question” cop-out). Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the CFR, says “the war is a close call on the merits,” but follows that with perhaps the least stirring call to arms in recorded history: “failure is not inevitable.”
I’m willing to accept that we need a class of civilian military analysts along with our political leaders (to whom we assign moral responsibility for the exercise of power) and our military (whom we expect, rightly, to complete the mission they are given). I’ll accept for the moment that the complexity of modern security demands a special technocratic layer between warriors and their political leaders. Even so, is it too much to ask the academics of war to pay lip service to the unique moral burden of military decisions? To regard casualties as more than a political obstacle?
If arguing for your war of choice involves all of the following: describing it as “costly, risky and worth waging—but only barely so;” calculating “a net cost-benefit calculus perilously close to a wash;” resigning yourself to “a war whose merits skirt the margin of being worthwhile;” eschewing “clarion calls to great sacrifice for transcendent purpose;” you do not actually have a case for war. You have a policy proposal. I hope that our politicians and our generals alike can tell the difference.
Hear, effin’ hear.
— John Schwenkler · Aug 11, 08:41 PM · #
No kidding.
— E.D. Kain · Aug 11, 08:42 PM · #
I agree 100%.
I’m still not sure how that plays out in the future, though. If Islamists take over Somalia and we get attacked by a group hosted there, is it okay to MOAB and run, or do we at least have the duty to make an old college try at nation building before we say fuck it and bail?
Or do we get really punitive and send in the blue helmets?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 11, 10:04 PM · #
Presumably, if he cared about the “unique moral burden of military decisions”, he would have found a different line of work.
What bothers me more about this piece is how completely full it is of pseudo-rigorous horseshit. I mean, we learn early on that it involves “a net cost-benefit calculus perilously close to a wash”, only to find out a few paragraphs later that he has no idea how much it’s actually going to cost. Not to put to fine a point on it, but you can’t do a real cost-benefit analysis without a pretty good idea of the cost. If you’re don’t understand why, ask an MBA. And I would love to see an itemized benefits list that added up to even, say, the trillion dollar floor on our Afghan money-sink. But hey, the guy’s reasonable; after all, his completely imaginary cost-benefit analysis only slightly favors his argument.
Not that any of this matters. Obama’s going to go along (and along and along and along) with any half-baked idea for remaking Afghanistan, and Republicans (with a few conservative Dems thrown in) are going to shut down the legislative branch if Obama tries for any sort of disengagement. Like it or not, let’s hope this strategy works, since we’re going to find out any way.
But hey, it’s nice for Biddle to give lip service to the idea we have a choice in this.
— Bo · Aug 11, 10:44 PM · #
Matt, your observation is completely unfair. I have my problems with Biddle’s article, which is as wishy-washy as it comes and then suddenly gets all assertive that withdrawl is “the wrong course on the merits” — especially given that Biddle’s own talk since his last Afghan trip has been increasingly bearish and nuanced. But implying that somehow he’s not adequately valuing casualties is goofy. Biddle has spent his whole life working among soldiers, probably counts a few of them as his closest friends, and probably thinks harder about spending them than, say, Matt Frost or John Schwenkler do. But it’s not done to make that kind of moral calculus in this kind of analysis (of which, again, I don’t think this paper is a great specimen) because frankly Biddle doesn’t know the value of a human life any more, or less, than anyone else, and there’s not a lot I’d get out of his beating his breast about all the TBIs we’re going to see; he tries to give you casualty estimates and there ya go. He’s exactly doing what you get at in the last paragraph: talking about policy aims, then the people and their representatives can figure out what its worth to them to fulfill those aims (for example, if I believed that a massive troop surge in Afghanistan had a real great shot at stabilizing Pakistan for a good long time I’d spend a lot of soldiers on that and count it cheap). If an elected leader does that, it’s different, because his job — not Biddle’s — involves putting a figure on that life: is a war worth those policy gains? And that’s I think another place you get it wrong: exactly what I want my military analysts to give me is “policy proposal.” You parodied something for your title and didn’t even stop to think about what you parodied! “Policy proposal” is a case for war, the only real case. It’s just this one is weak.
What Biddle’s doing is standard. If you read the Small Wars Journal you’ll find the same: nobody knows how to value a casualty, a military family destroyed, and nobody tries. Or great writiers like Tom Ricks make the same cold, look, what is the policy gain? argument, for example in Ricks’ general defense of our remaining in Iraq (while at the same time thinking the mission is falling apart): reading Ricks’ new blog you have no question that he feels, deeply, for soldiers and their families, it’s just not how he presents policy. Or, take COL Reese’s recent “declare victory and go home” memo from Baghdad. You don’t see a lot of deep worry about casualties there, do you? No weighing of the unique moral burden? Well, it ain’t his job or his purpose in that memo. But you appreciate that it would be thoroughly unintelligent to tell me Reese isn’t aware of the weight of his men’s lives: that guy has surely had the fun job of talking to their familes, many times. He’s trusting you to be able to decide what those families are worth and so, appropriately, is Biddle.
— Sanjay · Aug 12, 07:40 PM · #
Sanjay,
If an elected leader does that, it’s different, because his job — not Biddle’s — involves putting a figure on that life: is a war worth those policy gains?
The article — Biddle’s article — is titled “Is It Worth It?” His answer is yes. Sounds like we agree that he’s doing the job of an elected leader instead of his own. Your comment even suggests that you and I share the same understanding of what distinguishes a “policy proposal” from a “case for war,” but then you equate the two.
— Matt Frost · Aug 12, 08:46 PM · #
I do equate the two, at least at a start point, so no we don’t agree, and in terms of at least classical military thinking, you’re wrong, again by the very thing you lifted the post title from. Before waging war you ask, what is the policy goal? If there is one, you may have an option to achieve it through war. Simple.
The politician — not the military theorist, not the colonel — might decide it’s still a terrible means to effect policy. Biddle’s range of interests, and Reese’s, is limited. They’ve only got hammers.
Yeah, the title of the article is one of many terrible things about it. But you notice it’s really not about those other options: he takes as a given the political framing Obama’s put there. When you say he’s eschewed “clarion calls for great sacrifices for transcendent purposes” it’s a bit misleading: he points out that Obama has done that (and one gets, admittedly, the sense that he doesn’t think that that’s a bad way to frame the policy) and now he’s going to write about, in that context is there still really a policy goal? If W. were around you’d have an explicit democracy promotion policy in theory in place and so Biddle’s arguments would have to revolve around, OK, (1) is that achievable and (2) do you pay for this war by hurting that policy elsewhere (in Pakistan)?
But I think that’s an aside. Where you seem to be biting Biddle is for failing to really consider the death-and-damage, “special moral status” of war. That’s dumb, and the Reese example helps show why. Look, Reese doesn’t talk about the moral weight of his own men’s deaths because, well, that’s the deal. He does what the politicians say, and they decide what Private Snuffy’s life is worth. It’s very much not Reese’s job to judge the rightness, he judges the means and the policy and he obeys the damn law.
Well, that Reese memorandum is the kind of thing Biddle or Peters or someone reads twenty of a day (and I read a few). And the reason those guys at CNAS and CFR and SWJ write their analyses that way, is that that’s their intended audience, and that’s the conversation they’re taking part in. There’s an entirely different kind of analysis one can do where one thinks about either moral issues (Andrew Bacevich, for example, writes both kinds of articles, but kind of keeps them separate) or about military options as one of many policy alternatives (David Ignatius comes to mind). Biddle, Ricks, Peters, West, Keegan etc. don’t do that. I don’t think it’s smart to see that as a moral failing.
— Sanjay · Aug 13, 01:31 AM · #
Frost, gimme what you got! (beat) Gimme what you got!!!
Seriously, I want to know what you think about nation-building if we are compelled to attack a place like Somalia. Should we even care about the skinny assholes? Do we have an enlightened self-interest in fighting for truth justice and all of that stuff? Do we install a friendly? What?
I know your default is Glib, and I know you’re very smart. But on this question I want my Frost serious, dammit. Do it.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 13, 01:39 AM · #
Sanjay,
Biddle’s job is to answer the question “can the US, through the application of military force, prevail in Afghanistan, and what are the costs of both success and failure?” His answer, structured as it is into Stakes, Costs, and Prospects, is cogent enough in that respect. But under that argument, he smuggles in the claim that we should continue the war in its emerging form.
Any think tanker, in any field, is going to blend analysis and advocacy. That’s what they do. But Biddle’s doing so in what I consider a slippery fashion, and evading or ignoring the moral/political implications of his advocacy. Hence the title: he’s burying what should be political questions under “managerial” (loosely understood) analysis.
KVS,
I try not to say much on the subject of nation-building and global “empire,” (note the scare quotes! They indicate irony, or something!) because I’m a former neocon who was mugged by eight years of war, and nobody’s more annoying to hang with than an ex-smoker. If my take on this or similar questions is ungenerous or unfair, it’s the fervor of the convert, and I apologize. I’m trying.
People like Reihan and James Poulos have kept me from going all the way over to the Larison/Bacevich side. I’m a fan of CJCS Mike Mullen’s Thousand Ship Navy idea, and I’m probably an Offshore Balancer if I had to pick a label. Generally, I think our Navy should be the good cop and our ground and air forces the bad cop, and orienting our military toward COIN means deciding in advance that we’ll be forever choosing our allies from the ranks of the incompetent and/or illegitimate.
Nation-building as a COIN or pacification strategy seems wrong-headed, since it requires our military to apply control systems that are less than violent, but still humiliate their subjects and are incompatible with any political freedom that we’d hope to nurture. I mean things like biometrics and hovering killbots, which there’s no precedent for in the history of democratic evolution. So no, I don’t think that we owe the world another round of nation-building if we get attacked from Somalia.
Thanks for asking, though.
— Matt Frost · Aug 13, 04:00 AM · #
I’m a former neocon who was mugged by eight years of war.
Me too. Sigh. It was a great theory though.
A toast then, to the men we used to be. As Dylan said, I used to care but . . . things have changed.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 13, 02:52 PM · #
Oh, and thanks.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 13, 03:03 PM · #