Our definition of war is pretty good as it is

Lt Col Jill Long, an Air Force officer and student at the Army War College, wrote "What is War? A New Point of View" that was published at the Small Wars Journal. In this piece, Long attempts to redefine war beyond our current understanding based in dictionaries and Clausewitz. She finds the existing definitions limited and finds an expanded is necessary because of today's "global society" and its resulting "[t]errorism and violent aggression by non-state actors."  Because of this, she posits that war is a spectrum beyond mere violence and rather a spectrum of states between peace and unrestricted armed conflict. She proposes a new definition: "War is the coherent execution of all means to bring about sufficient adherence to a nation's will in the international (global) arena; resulting in armed conflict only when all other means fail." This problematic and maximalist view of war and the reasoning behind the need for a change in our understanding of war requires some discussion.

This discussion, like any that attempts to define war, begins with Clausewitz (the dictionary definitions that Long provides are irrelevant here as they are not used by strategists and have limited meaning to us). It would be helpful to read Clausewitz's definition of war in total from Book One, Chapter 1 (from the Howard/Paret translation of On War even though I generally prefer the Graham translation - I seem to be in the minority on this point, so Howard/Paret it is):

I shall not begin by expounding a pedantic, literary definition of war, but go straight to the heart of the matter, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries to through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.
War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.
Force, to counter opposing force, equips itself with the inventions of art and science. Attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it. Force -- that is, physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law -- is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare. That aim takes the place of the object, discarding it as something not actually part of war itself.

Italics are in the original.  Parenthetical comments aside (to be addressed in a moment), Clausewitz is quite clear on what war is: the use of force (I would probably use the term violence instead) as a means to achieve some political objective (from the discussion later in Chapter 1) that is the coherent statement of a group's will. One can infer that Clausewitz intends that acts of violence by political groups are war and that other non-violent acts by political groups are not war. Naturally for a treatise titled On War, Clausewitz provides almost no discussion of this latter set of actions, but based on comments throughout the rest of the book it seems he intends that political groups are at peace if they are not at war. But he does not expressly define peace as such.

Long says this is too limiting to modern war. War is, rather, "all means to bring about sufficient adherence to a nation's will." What would normally, but not doctrinally, be conceived as a spectrum from peace (if such a thing truly exists) to competition to conflict (non-violent) to war is, per Long's construct, really spectrum of war. She explicitly states that "world peace" (I am not sure why she included the descriptor "world" here) is an element of war, as are all political interactions up to and including "unrestricted armed conflict" (another phrase I am unsure of, but assume equates to total war). This is an extreme view of the state of human interactions to suggest that even when we are at peace we are at war. More importantly, this worldview is unhelpful in understanding war if war consists of every form of political activity. It is so comprehensive as to require specialization into the study of the many facets of war as to bring us right back to where we are today in understanding war. Further, what becomes of the study of warfare? Is the wielding of economic influence now to be considered an element of warfare? While economics can be corollary or complimentary to the conduct of war, it is by no means warfare itself. Philosophically, this combative worldview, if widely accepted, could only darken man's approach to political interactions - the last thing that should happen to the already stark interactions. For these reasons alone Long's definition should be abandoned.

Long fails to adequately describe how the world has changed or how the "Global Era" plays into this. She states that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 have changed how we should perceive the world. It seems that the she believes that that day should have awakened Americans to the threat of non-state actors. Long also states that "'interconnected systems of trade, finance, information, and security' demand a larger perspective when considering the engagement of imposing national will on others." Both of these points are stated in defiance of history. Globalists enjoy selling the greatness and threats of our "interconnected systems" in the modern day, but that presumes that the world is newly interconnected. We know this is not true. Interconnection in today's world may be faster and easier, but it is not new. States and other political groups have interacted over the elements listed for millennia - look only to the period of global colonization to see how long we as humans have been at this. Long does not describe how today's globalization is unique and why that changes how we define war.

The issue of state versus non-state actors, as pertains to the definition of war, is a silly discussion. The idea that this new "globalization" has resulted in the rise of non-state actors is also historically inaccurate and is prima facie absurd.  Civil wars have raged as long as long as humans have fought wars (indeed, civil war comprise a significant proportion of the wars humans have fought). Who are these wars supposed to have been fought by if not by non-state actors? Insurgencies and terrorism are also not new to the 21st Century (or even the Common Era) and it would take a peculiar interpretation of history to argue otherwise.

It is important to note that in his definition, Clausewitz does not describe war as act of force between states. War is engaged between enemies as the means to achieve political objectives. Of course, political objectives are not the sole purview of states as many non-state groups have exhibited and Mao so logically codified. This is not to say that Clausewitz did not intend his definition and the rest of the book to discuss war between states in the best traditions of the post-Westphalian world. He clearly speaks of states throughout the book, as indicated in the parenthetical comment in his definition of war (I did say I would return to that point). But this does not limit On War solely to war between states as mean scholars have, most prominently historian John Keegan and strategist Martin van Creveld to name a couple. It does not take that large of a leap of thought to read On War and understand that states can be any organized political group, that princes can be any leaders of those political groups, and armies can be the armed elements of those political groups. A literalist reading of Clausewitz would be as unwise as a literalist reading of Plato or Aristotle and saying their writings do not apply to the modern world because we are no longer city-states. A non-literalist exegesis of On War easily provides for the incorporation of non-state war into Clausewitz's thesis. As a last point on non-state actors, Long indicates that these offspring of globalization are driving this need for a new definition of war and yet her new definition specifies that means required are to bring about "sufficient adherence to a nation's will." This suggests that only nations have wills or that the means of war could only be used to achieve national wills. Ergo, only nations can be at war. I suspect that non-state actors would like to know how to label their activities if "war" is closed to them.

The world and the nature of the interactions of its politically organized inhabitants have not changed so much in the past 11 years as to require a new definition and view of war. Lt Col Long's proposal is at the same time both too inclusive and too restrictive and is based on this perceived change in human activity. To call activities beyond the use of force towards political ends threatens to create the view of a Hobbesian international order. The world is bleak enough without calling all state activities "war," nor is it helpful in understanding what war actually is. I assume that Long intended to broaden the focus of state activities to combat terrorism to include activities not traditionally within the purview of war, i.e., the combat. The problem with this intention is that it attributes to war activities that, while possibly conducted in support of war, are intellectually, scholastically, and philosophically outside of war. Activities we engaged in, in support of war and as elements of other means, long before 9/11. As such, Lt Col Long's proposed definition does not help us understand war or how to wage it and that Clausewitz's definition continues to serve us well.

Monday's strategy word-mash

Over the weekend, SWJ ran a piece called "The Natural Law of Strategy: A Contrarian's Lament" (pdf) by an NDU professor named William J. Olson. The essay touches on a subject that's near and dear to my heart, and I read it with no small amount of interest. I'm disappointed to report that the few kernels of sensibility and insight that form the sub-structure of Olson's non-argument are largely obscured by his positively unbearable writing style. The author is clearly a man of wide reading and serious education, but I found this paper to be damned near unreadable. (You might do well to seek an explanation from Mark Safranski, who gave Olson's essay "Top Billing!") As a public service, I've tried to pull out the bits that strike me as meaningful and generally clear so that you don't have to muddle through the rest of the text.

Last things first: Olson's ostensible thesis statement comes in the third-to-last sentence of an 11-page paper:

The basic problem now is that what passes for strategy is actually serial operational and tactical plans that do not arise from a strategic cultural capable of providing the legitimizing context for what might be a strategy.

Gotcha. That I should have to go to the end of the essay to find what ought to come at the beginning is characteristic of what strikes me as a serious problem that contributes to the paper's lack of clarity: the argument is basically made backwards.

[C]urrent ideas of strategy actually make it impossible to have a strategy.

Fair enough.

[T]here is a disconnect between policy formulation and strategy, which is meant to bridge the gap between intention and action. If so, then the idea of incorporating „ends‟ into strategy seems amiss. Strategy, as such, is not about ends, which are provided by another, perhaps mysterious, process and handed off. There is no trinity of ends, ways, and means.

This point is well-taken: strategy's ends should be provided by policy. That is, the government ought to decide how it wants things to be, and the strategist should apply means along appropriate ways to achieve the derived ends.

The problem is, there cannot be, no, there shouldn't be, any strategy independent of its context, that is it cannot be considered separate from the non-strategic struggles that shape it (inter- or intra-agency, inter-branch, public discussions and debates). But for much of current strategy and for much of the way it is taught, that is precisely what is happening, that is, strategy is considered as somehow a separate phenomenon that can be understood as a thing unto itself. As a result, it is divorced from its meaning... What is clear is that one of the single most important elements in strategy, however conceived, has tended to disappear from the process, that is its political nature. [Emphasis in original]

(This extended clip ought to give you a window into just exactly why the entire piece is so difficult to digest.) I take this to mean that strategy is being developed without an understanding of the what for, or in fact even without a what for at all. This may not be the point that Olson is trying to make, but later comments about a lack of strategic culture indicate that he believes strategy is impossible because broader policy has no narrative or motive force. (Like I said: I could be wrong.)

[T]he consequence of such instrumentalized thinking is to equate strategy with the resources necessary to achieve it, and ultimately to reduce everything to a discussion of resources and how to make strategy conform with and confirm the institutional agendas of the players whose resources are at issue. Without a strategic culture that tames this tendency, there can be no strategic thought only the illusion of it.

In other words, the structure of the national security apparatus serves to exert a deforming influence on the strategy(/ies) it creates. Strategy is build backwards from resources and programs rather than forwards from foundational assumptions. I'm extremely sympathetic to this argument (assuming Olson is actually making it).

There is not a single, decisive source nor any precise moment that determines the national interest and no fixed decisions on what its elements are.

Word. I would only add that this is, to a certain extent, one of the limitations of republican government (which the United States can only be said to pathetically imitate when it comes to national security). Frederick the Great, Jomini, and Delbruck all recognized this, explicitly or otherwise.

[W]e have a security architecture based on a doctrine, containment, that no longer applies, responding to a threat, the Soviets, that no longer exists. What passes for strategy today, along with all the institutional means for developing strategy, are legacy habits and institutions marching to the sound of the last drummer.

This echoes the excerpt two before this one ("without a strategic culture that tames this tendency"). It's tough to know whether Olson means to say that we really have no "strategic culture" or that we simply operate with one that's a holdover from times gone by (as this latter quote would seem to indicate), but functionally the two criticisms are the same.

"Strategy" as such is now the province of bureaucratic mechanisms, most of which are under the Department of Defense. Unlike the processes leading to NSC-68, presidents, cabinet secretaries, Congressional leadership are largely irrelevant to the development and implementation of strategy beyond endorsing bureaucratic products or tweaking the margins, hence the disconnect with ends and the repeated, mainly bureaucratic effort, to find in present circumstances the types of existential threats that recapitulate the Cold War menace and thereby justify the elaborate establishment necessary to meet such a threat.

Yes. This sentence went on about forty words too long, but yes.

What I take from all of this is that real strategy -- that is, process: the thinking application of ways and means to accomplish policy ends -- is impossible without a clear understanding of national priorities in global context, and that our system of government makes it basically impossible to determine and achieve consensus on such priorities absent a specific set of geopolitical circumstances like those produced by the World Wars or the Soviet threat. I don't agree that it must be this way, but it's a provocative explanation for America's repeated strategic failures.

The U.S. is not the new Prussia

Yesterday, the Small Wars Journal carried a post by Franz-Stefan Gady on the militarism of the United States, comparing this phenomenon to Prussian militarization. While not addressing every point in this piece, I do want to hone in on a couple of issues the author raised about the interaction of a nation with its military.

Politicians and the Military

To any observer it is fairly easy to see that the U.S. military has inequitable clout in U.S. foreign policy, the most recent review of our policy in Afghanistan being the shining light example. There is an imbalance that needs to be righted. What Gady doesn't discuss is a likely causation for this or how to fix it (save his comments later in the piece on the Defense budget, which I'll get to). Politicians defer to general and flag officers on matters of war too frequently, but the big question is why? I can't say for sure, but I've postulated before that the civilian leadership has abdicated there roll of military supervision because they don't really know what they're doing. Waging war, especially limited war, has become so complex that it requires special expertise often not found in career politicians. So they look for that expertise in those that have been conducting and training for war most of their lives (to include their former military, civilian advisors). As part of my grand strategy series, I pointed out the nature of U.S. military officership, which puts a high premium on initiative, nearly demands that officers fill in decision-making void created by civilian politicians. I don't see how this is done any differently with any highly specialized function of government. I'm not supporting this as something that should happen, just observing it.

One of the interesting aspects of the recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa is a reversal of militarization. Many politicians have been calling for military intervention, particularly in Libya, and it has been the military pouring cold water on great ideas. How does this phenomenon fit into our understanding of civil-military relations at the national government level? I'm not sure yet, but I think it speaks volumes against Gady's argument. It seems that in most cases civilian politicians will defer to defense officials on defense matters as a matter of course (let's face it, the Ike Skeltons of the world are few and far between). Because they are the experts, whether you like it or not. I believe that these uniformed experts do provide their advice, which more often than not lately have become policy, based on their understand of the nation's objectives and (almost always) not on how they see these decisions would affect their own prestige or sense of militarism. In sum, I don't see this as militarization as much as highly specialized functions of government wherein the politicians defer to those that have more expertise than they. Politicians shouldn't do this, but policy details don't win elections, popular stances do. Which brings us to the next topic...

The People and the Military

I'm not sure what Gady's point is about strangers buying drinks for servicemembers in uniform and that this wouldn't happen in Europe. Strangers buy drinks for servicemembers because in this age of limited war waged by a small all-volunteer military, it's about the only thing they can do to recognize the many sacrifices made by these men and women and their families. I have been fortunate to have been on the receiving end of this symbolic gesture and it was almost always accompanied by thanks for my service and/or sacrifice. I don't see this as militarization of the U.S., but instead as a sense of doing something for someone who does give a lot (not necessarily directly for the drink buyer) and is quite foreign to most of the population. I think a good question to ask is why doesn't this happen more in Europe? As much as the U.S. population's love for the military has been a knee-jerk reaction to Vietnam, Europe's apathy or disdain for its militaries are still reactionary from World War II (generally speaking - it obviously differs country to country but in the stated case of Germany...).

This sense of distant gratitude does not explain the recurring election or campaigning for office of former generals and admirals. Why do the American people put so much stock in military service when considering political candidates? I'd like to say that for a lot of the electorate it is the belief that officers have spent their lives in service to their nation and not themselves, they are proven leaders under difficult circumstances, they are proven executives, that they are honorable and truthful people, etc. I think we all know that's not the case for every retired officer who runs for office. There's also the idea that experience equals expertise and that an expert in defense issues would better protect the nation, also an erroneous idea. I think it's more of the former ideals of military service that people think so highly of former servicemembers when considering them for elected office. Maybe this is a sign of militarism in the United States and I for one would like to see more study on this topic.

The Defense Budget

Gady states that "[r]educing the defense budget would not threaten the security of the United States or lead to a decline in its international standing." His not being a paper on defense economics, that is quite a statement to make. In my opinion, should DoD make cuts? Yes, to improve efficiencies lost of the past forever years. But Gady seems to suggest that this should be done to decrease the militarism of the United States. I haven't read the Adams and Leatherman article referenced (I stopped my subscription to Foreign Affairs last year), but generically stating that we can maintain our security and international status is dubious at best. Even by taking the bloat out of the Pentagon's budget and stop paying the $100B or so for Iraq and Afghanistan, it still costs a lot of money to maintain and equip the world's most advanced military (in most regards at least) and to procure equipment needed for the future. Oh, and good luck telling Congress to make a ton of cuts. The recent budget battle has just reinforced the idea that Congress uses the DoD as a jobs program in manufacturing jobs, which has nothing to do with militarization.

Civil-military relations have been a hot topic lately and will continue to be one for the foreseeable future. I haven't covered nearly everything in Mr. Gady's paper here and do not intend to in the future. Suffice it to say that I think there is a tilting towards militarism in the United States in some of the ways that Gady suggests. I do not think many of the things he discusses are militarism, but instead are practical (if not necessarily correct) reactions to environmental stimuli as outlined here. While I've been thinking about it, I cannot begin to suggest how to correct for either actual militarism or reactions that resemble militarism. I do believe that Gady is way off on suggesting that the United States is the new Prussia. We may be on a path to such a state of affairs, but if we are we've only just begun and have time to turn back. Being stuck in two very long wars that will likely result in our achieving few objectives will most likely help us not to continue down such a path.

Karl Hack on Malaya and counterinsurgency

After last week's post and the brief discussion that followed it, this could not have come along at a better time: "Setting the Record Straight on Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy: Interview with Karl Hack" at Small Wars Journal.

I hate to keep hinting at a big, earth-shaking post that I keep not writing, but this bit in particular just absolutely nails something that I think is absolutely essential to understanding COIN in a broader context and to talking and writing about it in an accurate, honest way:

Yet for counterinsurgency, people do sometimes ask ‘what is the one key ingredient’? The answer is, menus do not work like that, and neither did the Malayan Emergency. There were distinct phases or stages. I would argue that many other insurgencies are also likely to have distinct stages, and indeed that within a single insurgency different provinces or regions may be at different stages at any one time. It is quite possible that Helmand and Herat, Kandahar and Nangarhar, could simultaneously be at very different stages, requiring very different policies.

The question above, therefore, encompasses what I would like to dub the ‘temporal fallacy’ (that policies abstracted from one defining moment might be equally valid in qualitatively different phases), and the spatial fallacy (that different geographic regions will be in the same phase, so allowing a single strategy for a country no matter how fractured and diverse).

Much popular writing and most military messaging about counterinsurgency is guilty of both the termporal fallacy and the spatial fallacy; whether this is a matter of disingenuous manipulation of public and political opinion or innocent but misleading oversimplification is still something of an open question.

Why "drafting the U.S. civil service for counterinsurgencies" is either a really dumb idea or an awesome piece of satire

Yesterday Small Wars Journal published a piece by one Michael A. Clauser entitled "Not Just a Job, an Adventure: Drafting the U.S. Civil Service for Counterinsurgencies." In it, the author -- a Congressional staffer -- demonstrates a staggering misunderstanding of the fundamental roles and missions of the U.S. government, draws mistaken conclusions about the commitment made by and compensation provided to U.S. civil servants, and offers an ineffective "cure" that would carry with it side effects far more damaging than the imagined "disease." Viewed as a piece of Swiftian satire, it is excellent. Considered as a serious policy proposal, it is colossally, catastrophically bad.

Clauser kicks off his modest proposal with the curiously-punctuated truism "[i]t's become trite to state that the solution for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is 'political,' and not solely 'military,' in nature." If that's the case, we're meant to wonder, why has the approach of successive administrations focused on the infusion of more combat troops? Well, it's the fault of those diplomats and engineers and urban planners and food safety experts safely ensconsed in comfortable D.C. offices and lavish embassies abroad, obviously: "neither President [sic] could find adequate numbers of willing foreign and civil servants to accompany our men and women in uniform." And this, quite obviously, is a problem. Michael Clauser thinks it's basically a supply problem -- not, apparently, that America lacks sufficient supply of qualified civilian experts, but rather that our system of laws and the general fecklessness, laziness, and/or cowardice of our non-DoD civilians combine to sabotage the government's efforts to apply this ready supply of expertise to important missions in combat zones and post-conflict environments. So our man has a drastic solution:

If the U.S. is serious about winning the war in Afghanistan through a political solution, Congress should change current law and begin to draft civil servants with the right skill sets and training for national objectives abroad.

Serious indeed.

There are a number of very significant problems with both Clauser's assessment of the situation and his proposed solution. The most troubling of these is that he seems to misunderstand the very purpose of the United States government and the fundamental roles and missions of its various component parts. Simply put, the organizing principle of the USG is not overseas warfighting, or even war-winning. The Departments of Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture do not base their organizational priorities on those of the Pentagon (or even State), and those departments do not plan, organize, hire, train, educate, or incentivize personnel to support foreign contingencies. Simply put, it's not their job, and it's not what their people signed up for.

One can reasonably argue that our national security apparatus ought to be reformed and restructured to better operate in a world where "defense" and "security" cannot be so cleanly separated from the other functions of the state. Many have made this case, and the current Secretaries of State and Defense have both indicated support for a proposal to pool resources and authorities so as to streamline U.S. efforts to build the security and governance capacity of foreign partners. One may go even further and assert that the work of those departments and agencies not traditionally understood to be focused on international concerns -- the USDOTs, the USDAs, the DOJs -- should by dint of philosophical fealty to some Constitutionally-derived idea of the "proper role of government" be suborned to the imperatives of national security. That the Department of Agriculture should first and foremost understand its mission as one of support to the defense of the American people, subject to the judgments and determinations of the Commander-in-Chief. One can certainly offer these arguments, which span from the reasonable but somewhat frought to the frankly absurd, and discussion of the consequences of which would expand this post beyond all get-out and really just kill the rhetorical force of the whole thing. But let's be clear: that's not the argument Michael Clauser is making.

(As an aside, Clauser works for a guy who has been reasonably forward-thinking on this issue; Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) introduced legislation (pdf) in March of 2001 that expressed the following in its findings section:

(1) The security of the United States homeland from nontraditional and emerging threats must be a primary national security mission of the United States Government. Attacks against United States citizens on United States soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely during the next quarter century, as both the technical means for carrying out such attacks, and the array of actors who might use such means, are proliferating despite the best efforts of United States diplomacy.

(2) Attacks on United States soil may involve weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass disruption. As porous as United States physical borders are in an age of burgeoning trade and travel, its cyber borders are even more vulnerable, and the critical infrastructure upon which so much of the United States economy depends can now be targeted by governments as well as individuals. The preeminence of the United States makes it more appealing as a target, while its openness and freedoms make it more vulnerable.

The bill would have united the various agencies dedicated to border security, infrastructure protection, and emergency management under a new Homeland Security Agency; it would provide the broad outlines, several months later, for the establishment of DHS. If Michael Clauser wants to make a thoughtful argument about the way the government can be reorganized or repurposed to deal with a nontraditional threat environment, he should have a conversation with his boss.)

Back to the main effort here: the argument that Clauser is making is that the government does have the personnel, resources, and expertise to perform the necessary mission -- which he sums up by writing that "the U.S. must make it the top priority to train, advise, and equip Afghan officials to build their capacity to govern effectively and honestly" -- but that it merely lacks the authority to compel those people to show up and do the job. And that's simply just not true. The USG's efforts to build Afghan civilian governance capacity, which Clauser describes as "at best haphazard and improvised," are summed up like this:

Currently, undertrained Foreign Service officers and uniformed military personnel are left as the principal advisors to Afghan officials across all sectors of government such as education, transportation, public works, law enforcement, environmental protection, and agriculture. These U.S. personnel are supported by a host of contractors to augment their expertise--but at great taxpayer expense.

He goes on to assert that

[t]he U.S. needs to leverage the taxpayer-funded expertise of civil servants resident in federal departments like Education, Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services. It takes a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee to effectively train his counterpart at the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock, not a diplomat and certainly not a soldier.

Seems simple enough, right? After all, we've heard plenty of people arguing against the inefficient use of military personnel to perform inherently civilian functions, criticism of the inappropriate militarization of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. And it may be correct to say that it's not a soldier's job, nor even a diplomat's. But here's a news flash: the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn't have a massive, ready supply of ministerial trainers on hand. They have a whole bunch of ag-oriented bureaucrats. They don't have a whole bunch of people whose day job involves teaching other people how to be ag-oriented bureaucrats.

We're really talking about two different things here: 1) performing quick-win, high-visibility development functions as part of a campaign plan to secure control of territory in a counterinsurgency effort; and 2) building ministerial and institutional capacity in the host-nation government to take care of longer-term sustained development and governance activities. The first of those mission sets can be performed by military personnel, and in many (even most) cases the security situation will demand it. (I'm reminded of what Dag Hammarskjold said about peacekeeping: "it's not a soldier's job, but only a soldier can do it." There's some other content directly related to this subject at that link, too.) The second task is the one that ought not be done by folks in uniform, but the dirty little secret is that this expertise just simply does not exist in the quantity most people talking about a "civilian surge" imagine it to. Here's an even dirtier little secret to illustrate the difficulty of what we're talking about here: the military, which is experienced operating overseas, trained to support civil authorities, and operationally organized -- that is, set up to do stuff, not just as a staff -- basically has no idea how to support the requirement to provide ministerial and flag-level training and mentoring... to foreign DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENTS. Let me make this more clear: the Defense Department is not good at teaching foreign ministries of defense how to perform the same functions that the DoD accomplishes for the U.S. It's just not something we're set up to do. So you shouldn't be surprised if you find out that there aren't a whole bunch of people sitting in the HHS building over on the Mall with the necessary expertise to help a foreign government set up a health system. There is a difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to establish, train, staff, and incentivize an organization in another country to do that same thing.

Now that we've established that the government isn't really set up to do this, that the necessary expertise may not exist, and that the stuff Clauser wants civil servants to do isn't really their job at all, let's forget about all that for a minute. Imagine we decide this is the number one national priority, that this is absolutely necessary, that we have the people to do it and we just need to get them there. How about this draft idea? Well, it's a really, really bad one. Put simply, Clauser makes the dubious argument that the extant legal requirement for U.S. males to register for Selective Service upon turning 18 somehow grants Congress the moral authority and justifying precedent to enact legislation impressing into involuntary foreign duty all U.S. civil servants who aspire to senior (non-political) leadership in government. I'll let him elaborate:

In the absence of adequate volunteers at time of war, this legal requirement provides a massive recruitment pool of U.S. citizens who either felt it their duty to make themselves available for uniformed service to their nation in dangerous places or sought some public benefit from the government and must make themselves available to the needs of the State accordingly.

The same principal [sic] can and should be transferred to the civil service. Title 5 of U.S. Code should be amended to require that career U.S. federal employees, as a pre-requisite for non-political appointment into the Senior Executive Services (SES), “register” with the Civilian Response Corps. Non-political employment within or promotion to the SES should be terminated for those who refuse to register or if having registered and called to service refuse to deploy. The legislation should authorize the Director of the Office of Personnel Management and the Secretary of State to jointly prescribe regulations to carry out this mandate. Waivers should be available for those with disabilities or other appropriate medical or family disqualifications. Not everyone who registers would deploy within their career. The legislation could be less than two pages in length—far shorter than this article.

After all, those in the career SES are the top-earners in federal government. They hold prominent titles that include words like “Administrator,” “Director,” and even “Secretary.” Is it unreasonable to ask that those interested in the highest levels of management, power, and pay in the civil service make themselves available to the full range of national needs?

The reader will note repeated use of words and phrases that suggest an antiquated, statist, borderline un-American view on the relationship of a citizen to his government. Those who fill out a selective service card with their drivers' license renewal form do so, in Clauser's telling, because they "[feel] it [is] their duty to make themselves available for uniformed service to their nation in dangerous places" or because they "[seek] some public benefit from the government" and choose to "make themselves available to the needs of the state." (Never mind the fact that registration for selective service is not precisely the same thing as declaring draft eligibility -- only documenting that one is in a draftable demographic -- and that it's REQUIRED BY LAW.) This is no more true than when Clauser writes of government employees, referencing their "taxpayer-funded expertise" and compensation as if to suggest that civil servants owe some debt to the nation beyond that which they are contracted and compensated to provide. If you get a government paycheck, it's apparently not enough to provide fair value for money, to do the work that's expected of you, to be a professional. One must "make [him or herself] available to the full range of national needs."

Needs of the state. Full range of national needs. Why not just put all federal employees on orders and deploy them as befits the "needs of the service"? After all, "America needs its best and brightest today to win the wars we're in." Leave aside the fact that the "best and brightest" that "America needs" in this context are the people most capable of going abroad to perform a teaching and mentoring function with international partners, and that those best suited for this job will almost certainly not hold SES rank (and many, if not most, will not care to pursue it). Leave aside the fact that aspirants for SES rank or departmental leadership in HHS, for example, may never have been abroad, may have absolutely no international component to their jobs, may not serve in a teaching or mentoring role at any point in their careers, and may find the suggestion that they ought to involuntarily serve abroad in wartime to earn their spurs in a government agency dedicated to American public health to be flatly ludicrous and insulting enough to force their resignation and departure from government. Leave aside the fact that many of these people, if they were to go, would perform the job no more effectively than the soldiers or diplomats or contractors that have been doing it in their stead, and the consideration that perhaps the "best and brightest" in our nation's public health system should be performing jobs that are dedicated to the public health mission, not national security.

Now: Just think for a moment about this one question: do we want to undertake the sort of philosophical reimagining of what we are as a country that's implied by our granting the state explicit authority to assign each and every citizen who aspires to leadership in public service -- oh! Except political appointees! -- to whatever corner of the globe it chooses, in order to perform whatever function the state deems that person best suited for? Because I know what I'd say to that question: GFY.

There's nothing I'd like more than for Michael Clauser to show up and say "nyah nyah! Gotcha! The original title of this essay was A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Civil Servants of America From Being a Burden to Their Government or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Nation, but then I thought it would be too obvious! Thanks for taking the bait!" But I don't think that's going to happen. (But if it does: Dude, brilliant!)

On counter-terror financing

If Abu Muqawama and Ink Spots didn't solidify it already, this ought to cement the Washington Irish as the go-to rugby club for defense and security analysis: teammate Bob Guido published a paper in SWJ yesterday that seems like just about the best resource I've seen lately on the subject of U.S. efforts to interdict al-Qaeda financing.

U.S. Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing: Progress Made and Future Challenges

by Robert M. Guido

Download the Full Article (pdf): U.S. Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing

The United States and the international community have made great strides against al Qaeda since September 11, and counter-terrorist financing policies will remain a vital component of future efforts. The successes in tightening and shoring up the international financial system in the post-September 11 era, however, cannot be taken for granted. Al Qaeda and its affiliates have shown remarkable resilience and an ability to structurally evolve to survive the best efforts of the international community. To maintain progress in squeezing al Qaeda’s finance, governments will need to continually adapt counter-terrorist financing policies to address the simpler but untraceable methods of moving cash and assets such as hawala, and work collaboratively to combat alternative methods of finance that capitalize on the ever-present and growing field of international criminal activity.

Check it out -- a great resource on an under-studied subject, with excellent sourcing for those who want to dig deeper. (And I'm not just saying this because Guido's a friend!)

Check this out if you're in NYC (and also, GIVE TO SWJ)

SWJ has already covered this, but just in case you're stupid enough to read us and not them, see below.

(Speaking of which, DONATE TO SMALL WARS JOURNAL. Seriously. It's easy. They take PayPal. You can even set up a monthly donation. Here's a good equation to figure out how much you might want to give:

1. Think about the number of hours you spend on SWJ every week
2. Imagine you had to spend that time doing something else
3. Now imagine that the "something else" is work
4. How many extra cups of coffee would it take for you to get through that work every week?
5. Multiply that number by two dollars
6. Set up a monthly donation for that much money, times some reasonable number of months (I went with a year)

Ok, so I didn't actually use that system, or else I'd be giving a hell of a lot more than what I am. But you should. So DO IT.)

Back to the NYC thing: We got an email this week from Sterling Yee of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival -- which is taking place over the next two weeks at New York's Lincoln Center -- asking us to push out word to our readership. I have no problem doing this if only because I just finished reading War by Sebastian Junger, which documents the fifteen-month deployment of 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley and is sort of the book companion to Restrepo. Can't wait to see it when it comes to DC. So here's their promotional flyer:

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns to New York, 10-24 June. This year we are proud to present two astounding documentaries that focus on the obstacles the Afghan citizens and US military face during times of war and rebuilding.

Camp Victory, Afghanistan - Drawing from nearly 300 hours of vérité footage shot between 2005 and 2008, Camp Victory, Afghanistan skillfully explores the reality of building a functioning Afghan military. We are delighted that filmmaker Carol Dysinger will be present for a discussion after the screenings. Find out more.

Restrepo - Winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, Restrepo chronicles the deployment of a platoon of marines [actually, no, but close!] in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings in the US military. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you. We are delighted that filmmaker Tim Hetherington will be present for a discussion after the screenings. Find out more.

We think your colleagues and readers would be interested in these films because they touch upon issues facing not only Afghan society, but also the international community. With so much global attention on US involvement in Afghanistan – we hope that the films will teach and inspire New Yorkers to learn more about Afghanistan and become more active in their communities.

So go check it out. And if you do, I'll have two reasons to envy you New Yorkers next weekend: the film festival and the finals of the Churchill Cup (ok, it's in Jersey, but close enough)!

Also while you're at it, see Karaka Pend's review of War here (on SWJ, coincidentally).