R2P's regime-change conundrum

If you haven't yet, I recommend you all read the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (pdf), the foundation of R2P doctrine. As far as reports go, this is a pretty good one: full of interesting thoughts and extremely readable. Please read all of it, but here we are going to focus on the sections related to military intervention and specifically chapter 4.

This report begins the discussion of deciding to intervene by establishing the starting point as the principle of non-intervention, comparing this principle to the Hippocratic principle - first do no harm (para 4.11, pg 31). States should respect other states' sovereignty as a starting point and should only violate their sovereignty when culprit states "shock the conscience of mankind" (more Americans should read and think hard about this principle - and not just within the context of Syria).

The report then goes on to establish six criteria for military intervention:

1. right authority
2. just cause
3. right intention
4. last resort
5. proportional means
6. reasonable prospects

The first two are discussed at length within the report.  But these are the go/no go criteria to determine if we should intervene. I think it would be difficult to for anyone supporting intervention in Syria to legitimately claim that criteria 1 and 6 have been met as of yet with some other criteria certainly disputable. Obtaining the right authority will be difficult and pro-interventionists have generally glossed over the Syrian military's ability to act against international intervention (admittedly, anti-interventionists have been particularly pessimistic on this criteria).  While the report's discussion of these criteria is interesting, it is not exactly earth-shattering stuff. 

Except for the section on right intention (para 4.33, pg 33):

The primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering. Any use of military force that aims from the outset, for example, for the alteration of borders or the advancement of a particular combatant group's claim to self-determination, cannot be justified. Overthrow of regimes is not, as such, a legitimate objective, although disabling that regime's capacity to harm its own people may be essential to discharging the mandate of protection - and what is necessary to achieve that disabling will vary from case to case. 

Overthrow of regimes is not, as such, a legitimate objective. While this aligns with R2P's primary purpose to halt or avert human suffering, this presents a massive hurdle to the reasonable prospects criteria.  The "although" clause seems to suggest that rendering the regime ineffective may be legitimate in some cases, but regime change is not a legitimate objective. In a case like Syria where the regime abjures its responsibilities by committing acts violence against its own citizens, the problem is with the regime itself. How is military intervention supposed to succeed if the objective of that military action cannot remove the source of the human suffering? I see three potential consequences of this statement if the regime does not step aside on its own accord:

1. The intervening force overthrows the regime out of operational and/or strategic necessity. However, such a precedence calls into question the legitimacy of R2P as violating its own principles. 
2. The intervening force does not overthrow the regime, remaining compliant with R2P's principles, but renders the regime ineffective by destroying its ability to use force - which in cases like Syria effectively destroys the regime's ability to govern. The potential for greater instability is quite significant through a lack of governance or a more evenly-matched civil war. 
3. The intervening force only limits the regime's ability to project force into safe zones in order to prevent instability - through defensive or offensive methods. However, the regime maintains the ability to use force, which could be projected in the absence of a foreign military presence. If you like decades-long military operations with little hope of resolution, you pick this option (see: Kosovo, Sinai). Is this a reasonable prospect? 

Dr. Slaughter and others smart on R2P have been pushing for military action somewhere between consequences 2 and 3. If the removing the regime is not in play, success is logically unlikely if the regime is the primary cause of the human suffering in the first place. This may be where R2P has its greatest doctrinal weakness as it attempts to align multiple principles that are often at odds with each other. 

The other problem with these criteria are their lack of application to the internal strategic formulations of potential participating nations. As Dan Trombly deftly observes, every military action should be placed within and debated in terms of ends, ways, and means. Colin Gray makes the same point with regard to counterinsurgency, but his comments apply to R2P as well - it cannot be a theory unto itself. What are the United States' interests in intervening, especially if it is likely to result in an extended military campaign? The report discusses this in chapters 4 and 8 with regard to domestic political will, concluding that good international citizenship should be a national interest. How extensive are the means we are willing to commit for good international citizenship when those means may more directly benefit the American people through domestic spending or kept in reserve for actual security threats?  Halting human suffering in Syria is an excellent objective, but if the means of doing so will be tied up for 10 years or more (most likely scenario), is it still worth doing? While military force may sometimes be in a nation's interest, good international citizenship is not inherently a national interest in every case. Especially if the cost is too high or the prospects for success too low. America does its best to do right by the world, but there are limits to that magnanimity because of our own internal interests and needs. 

With the preclusion of removing the Syrian regime, interventionists must show reasonable prospects for success, keeping in mind the American people are probably not inclined to count another decade-long commitment of military force with an indeterminable outcome as a reasonable prospect for success.  I'm certainly not so inclined. 

On Values

Late last week the WaPo ran a series of opinions regarding U.S. intervention in Syria. The battle lines were as well drawn as they are on the blogosphere and Twitter. I don't intend to rehash the specifics of Syria this morning and instead want to dial in on the last paragraph of Anne-Marie Slaughter's contribution.

She begins her conclusion with the statement: "President Obama believes in sovereignty as responsibility." I can't disagree with the sentiment, but this sentence fills me with an unnamed dread. As she discussed in the previous paragraph, this position has been accepted by the UN as an emerging international norm. There seems to be a lot of variance around the terms included in "responsibility", especially with regard to war crimes and civil wars. That's not to say the United States isn't sure about those definitions, but certain other countries are allowing broad definitions based on their own self-interest and in order to maintain maneuver space in case they run into the same problems later. Therefore, as sovereignty as responsibility is technically codified as an international value it is nearly impossible to determine when that responsibility is violated based on the many possible interpretations of definition.

This discussion leads to Slaughter's second sentence of that paragraph: "Standing up for that principle will result in a world that will be more stable, prosperous and consistent with universal values - the values Americans know as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  There are two problems with this statement. First is that standing up for the principle of sovereignty as responsibility means that those with more liberal interpretations of responsibility are in conflict with those who have more archaic (by Western standards) views on responsibility or view each contentious situation through the lens of their own self-interest beyond the responsibility issues at hand. This conflict can be seen in any location where sovereigns have abjured or violated their responsibilities: Syria, China, Pakistan, Burma, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, just to name a few. Standing up for the principle of responsibility means standing against other powers who view responsibility differently. This is not a path to stability or prosperity, it is a path to political, economic, or military conflict. Syria is the cause du jour, but how many violations of the American sense of responsibility to we ignore out of our own interests? Some of the places I mentioned are allies or partners of ours because of some other strategic interest. Universally standing for this principle may be the right thing to do morally, but disabuse yourself of the notion that it leads to more stability or that liberal-minded nations even have the power to affect change.

The second problem with this statement is obvious if you read the words. Standing up for responsibility, according to Slaughter, will result in a world consistent with universal values. Which universal values? Why American values! A professional of Dr. Slaughter's caliber must know that defining universal values is nearly impossible. She must also know that American values are not universal. And yet American values are the values she suggests we act to preserve in the name of universality. As a great power, the United States is prone to act as other great powers have in promoting its own values globally. But do not believe for a second that our values are universal. We may think other countries are wrong or even evil for what they do to their people, but that is through our lens, by our measures.

This is not to excuse atrocities which are universally wrong. And I believe that what is happening in Syria should be considered wrong universally. But we are not yet at a point in human existence where this is the case and we need to recognize that. Not excuse regimes who have different values from our own, but recognize when this occurs. And recognize that often the United States does excuse regimes violating their responsibilities because it benefits our other interests, much as China and Russia do. How would we react if these two stalwarts of obstinacy decided to take Saudi Arabia to task for its treatment of women? Are their liberties not impeded?

Values are important to every nation. Some values are universal, but that list may extend only to sovereignty and life. And even these are negotiable depending upon with whom you are talking. Outside of the most egregious cases, most violations of universal values occur in the margins where values can be contested and especially where they intersect or diverge from interests. I'm also wary of a world where nations go to war to uphold their values beyond their borders. Such a world is fraught with nationalistic militarism more reminiscent of the early 20th Century instead of the 21st. I'm also wary of a world that except in the most exceptional cases uses war - the purposive taking of life - in order to protect life. There is a contradiction in the American use of lethal force to promote our values for human life and I'm not sure that parts of the world understand that. The potential for even greater suffering contrary to universal values is not only significant, it is likely. I am with Dr. Slaughter in her disgust for the Syrian regime for what they are doing to their own people. I agree that they have violated their responsibilities as leaders. But I hesitate to support the use of American military force to wage war in an action that is likely to result in the deaths of more civilians than the regime's current actions. Values are an American interest, but are they worth war without overwhelming support from the rest of the globe? I don't think so. Values are a great reason to flex the United States' ample diplomatic and economic capabilities as this approach is more in line with our values.

Shadows of 2003

Once upon a time there was a country in the Middle East ruled by a Ba'athist dictator. This dictator used special intelligence units and his military against his own people, often using horrible weapons to suppress his subjects. This dictator's regime has in the past supported terrorist organizations and is thought to possess weapons of mass destruction. Pundits and academics clamor for the United States to take action. Don't worry, they say, their military is weak, untrained, under-equipped, and not loyal. Don't worry, they say, we have limited objectives and military intervention will be easy against this flaccid force. Don't worry, they say, we won't have to govern this country after we intervene, we'll let them sort that out. Democracy's hard but this will be easy.

This sounded wrong in 2003 when it was said by Neoconservatives. It sounds wrong today when said by liberal interventionists. It feels right to want to help the Syrian people as much as it felt right to help the Iraqi people. But we have to actually be capable of helping them and so far the pro-interventionists are making about as valid an argument that intervention might work as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al did in 2003, even if the current scenario lacks cooked intelligence to give the casus belli. The military concepts are equally bad. And here's why after a quick primer on military planning.

In the Army (I don't know the exact terms in the other services), military planning is focused on objectives. These objectives in high-intensity warfare are usually enemy-focused. But even if they are not enemy-focused, the enemy will play a big role in the ability of the friendly force to achieve its objectives. Therefore the most important assumptions are done through intelligence analysis where intel officers create what are called the enemy's Most Likely Course of Action (MLCOA) and Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCOA). These are the most important assumptions in any military plan. The first, MLCOA is the best-guess assumption on what the enemy is actually going to do. This is derived from the best intelligence available and analysis and extrapolation of known capabilities versus friendly capabilities. Gaps in intelligence require assumptions, but the assumptions must assume some level of difficulty to friendly forces and cannot be assume away. MDCOA is an assumption on what the enemy could do that would be most dangerous to friendly forces or their objectives. This is not the most likely event to occur, but it's in the realm of possible. Simply stated, your military plan of operations is based upon your MLCOA assumption, but a branch or decision point is in hand in case the MDCOA becomes reality (in some cases the decision point may be to disengage from contact because the price isn't worth the benefit of meeting the objective). Briefly: plan for MLCOA, know what you'll do if the enemy executes the MDCOA.

This gets at why I have not yet heard a viable military option for intervention in Syria. The greatest proponents of intervention, Shadi Hamid and Anne-Marie Slaughter to name just two as an example (and two I very greatly admire on everything except their military operational planning skills), have laid out their ideas for what a U.S.-lead coalition could do militarily to slow and/or stop the killing of civilians in Syria (as well as break the Hezbollah-Iran connection and maybe stop Syria's WMD programs). But their "plans" are based on the Syrian military executing the Least Dangerous Course of Action (LDCOA: see here) with regard to friend forces. They, and they are by no means alone in doing this, have assumed away the Syrian military to the point that they seem to consider a nominally 300,000-man force as negligible. That is exactly what the Bush Administration Pentagon did and what CENTCOM did under their leadership with regard to Iraq. Assumed away the enemy forces. And we see how well that worked out. You cannot plan military operations based on the LDCOA. It must be based off of the MLCOA at a minimum and I don't think the Syrian military is just going to walk away from the field. That may have generally happened in Libya, but it's very rare and unlikely. Also, they cannot assume away a post-conflict environment potentially devoid of government. We did that in Iraq, too.  I think you get the point.

There are a couple of reasons this matter and isn't a mere matter of opinion on the fighting capabilities of the Syrian military. Firstly, by committing forces to fight for American interests we would need to ensure the military plan is viable and established upon a solid set of assumptions. Current intervention proposals simply are not. Their assumptions are based on hearsay or intuition, not analysis, that the Syrian military isn't a serious fighting force. It is almost word-for-word the nonsense I heard in the Kuwaiti desert in March 2003. And I have yet to see any evidence that they will not react, potentially with effect, against any intervention. Without such evidence you must assume that they will be capable of reacting with some effect. Second, any proposal that puts American lives and resources on the table requires some assessment of what point is the intervention worth doing. That's what the MDCOA would provide in this type of situation. How much is it worth intervening? Assad using WMD against his people or against us? What if the civil war expands significantly and the death toll mounts higher and fast than if we had not intervened? Are 10 years in Syria potentially conducting population-centric counterinsurgency worth our doing something, anything now? These cannot be assumed away. They need to be addressed through thorough and dispassionate analysis to determine if they're possible and what the United States would do if they occurred.

These pundits may feel they do not need to convince me on the merits of intervening in Syria and may think this a matter of disagreement. But this is the lowest level of rigor the military will apply to any plan they come up with. If you are so ready to commit foreign troops into harms way because you feel it's the right thing for America and her allies to do, the least you can do is apply the same level of rigor to propose military options. I'm not asking for synchronization matrices. I'm asking for a thorough and rigorous analysis of the MLCOA and MDCOA if we intervened in whatever way you envisioned. If you keep spouting this LDCOA-assumption malarkey, I and many others who possess understanding on the use of force will continue to compare your plans with those of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Franks, even if we agree with the sentiment that drives you to want to execute these plans. Yes, a lot of people are dying. But intervening might cause more deaths. I can't tell because your assumptions are, in a word, useless.

These aren't the ends you're looking for

When I wrote about austerity and how it will affect our definition of victory in conflict, I failed to make an important distinction related to this excellent post by Adam Elkus on R2P and the gap between policy and strategy/tactics. Contrary to how we've described our policy goals these past 10 years, I was trying to argue that our policy goals (ends) will be limited in the future and that winning (as Adam says: accomplishing your political object) can no longer be maximal statements of everything to everyone. Or even worse, interpreted in many ways to substantiate practically any military strategy imaginable. Clarity and focus should best describe our political objects in war since we seem unwilling to pay for much more than that. A change in how we perceive victory has to do with our ends, not in our ways. We are, in other words, going to take a much harder look at the first two questions of the Powell Doctrine before we intervene.

There are a few aspects of this that apply to R2P. First among these is the apparent lack of understanding of the military art and science by the policy proponents of R2P. Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent op-ed in the NY Times is a perfect case in point: she attempts to provide a military solution to end the violence that ostensibly uses minimalist objects. A "no-kill zone" sounds like a limited objective, but militarily it is not. Providing the Free Syrian Army with such materiel as "countersniper and anti-aircraft weapons" gives the impression that we'll give them a few tools and some advice and they can carry the fight. However, countersniper weapons are usually other snipers, tanks, artillery and airstrikes, according to U.S. military doctrine. These are weapons of offense, not defense. And they are weapons most effectively used by an intervening force, not a loose coalition of Syrian anti-regime forces. Also, please read Adam's discussion of stalemate and how it's not an end as well as Robert Caruso on the logistics of intervention and Spencer Ackerman on how Dr. Slaughter's plan could easily spin beyond our intended trajectory.

The point of all of this is that statements of ends cannot be "limited" if the ways and means required to affect them are not. Syria is a very good example that limited ends require ways and means that in reality create a new, maximal ends in order to achieve them. This is not to suggest that policy should be dictated by the military - such a path would be against our traditions, however often it actually happens - but policy should be informed by the military perspective to avoid a disconnect between policy and strategy. CvC himself hits on this point:

If policy is right, that is, if it succeeds in hitting the object, then it can only act with advantage on the War. If this influence of policy causes a divergence from the object, the cause is only to be looked for in a mistaken policy.

It is only when policy promises itself a wrong effect from certain military means and measures, an effect opposed to their nature, that it can exercise a prejudicial effect on War by the course it prescribes. Just as a person in a language with which he is not conversant sometimes says what he does not intend, so policy, when intending right, may often order things which do not tally with its own views.

This has happened times without end, and it shows that a certain knowledge of the nature of War is essential to the management of political intercourse.

Right on, Carl. The problem we're facing is that much of the policy world is calling for action to end the violence against civilians in Syria, yet these individuals - while brilliant in many things - have such little understanding of the mechanisms of war that they are unwittingly calling for things which do not tally with their own views. This is a difficult topic as their calls for action come from an honest place: their own humanity. But a full understanding of the military implications of their policies may require more killing that already exists and will very likely naturally expand their intended ends. This also puts those who better understand the required military strategy in the position of allowing the continued killing of civilians by opposing action. Do not confuse this with inhumanity. It (generally) comes from the calculus that intervening (i.e., waging war) will create a great humanitarian calamity and that the risks/benefits equation for the United States doesn't add up to force change to the status quo.

The situation in Syria is tragic, but there is no limited-ends policy to abate it. The military strategy required to affect limited ends create new, broader ends that are likely unpalatable to a nation that has been at war for 10 consecutive years.

Redefining victory doesn't mean not winning

It appears that I may have made a bit of a bloomer with my last post on how DoD's coming age of austerity will redefine how we think about "victory". The catalyst of that post was an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter from this fall - and this is where I went off the rails a bit - that I complimented. I was and am aware that her piece was actually an argument for more military interventions for R2P or other such operations and that warfare as we've known it is dead based on the lessons observed since 2001. I could not disagree more and we'll talk about that in a just a minute. I approved of the piece because of the idea that we'll be looking to influence others with our military force, not decisively defeat and occupy other nations - I thought the idea of influence vice victory interesting and that we should expect to use limited means towards limited ends in the near future, but not for her reasons and not the interventions she suggests. Anyone who has read my writing here for the past two plus years should know I never buy into the "War and warfare have fundamentally changed!" bunk. The reality is that Dr. Slaughter's piece suggests just that, so I admit I oversold it. There are some good ideas in it though, that I don't think Dr. Slaughter necessarily intended, that lay the foundation for what I see as a flawed thesis. But we shouldn't throw out the good ideas because of the rest.

So what did I mean in my post? Sometimes others say what you mean better than yourself, so please go read Adam Elkus on There is No Substitute for Victory and Part II to that post as well as Dan Trombly at Slouching Towards Columbia. These are excellent posts on what victory actually means and contribute significantly towards this conversation. When I talked about redefining victory, I didn't intend to suggest that we will no longer look to decisively win whatever engagements we embark upon. That would be stupid - as Adam asks correctly, why use force if you don't intend to win? I intended this redefinition, in the next 10 to 15 years marked by limited resources, to show that we will most likely strive towards more limited military goals than we have in the past 10 years. That we'll have to move away from "winning" as a goal in itself and instead need to define what winning means very specifically in each operation or campaign. The former use of the term, such as a candidate or politician saying "We should give the generals what they need to win in Afghanistan" having no idea what the generals' concept of winning in Afghanistan actually is, is vapid and useless and all too prevalent.

This is what needs to stop - winning is not a political or policy objective in itself nor is it a military objective. Winning is what happens when the military succeeds in its operational objectives such as: destroy or defeat this force, protect these people, defend this place, whatever. Winning or victory is simply the military achieving its ends and we need to stop using these terms in lieu of describing what the hell we actually mean - at both the political, policy, strategic and tactical levels. So yes, our military should look to win whenever it's put on the field, no doubts about that but we should instead say what winning means.

The other side to my post was that we need to examine limited objectives for the limited use of military force in the next decade and a half (or so) based on scarce resources. We'll need the type of constrained ends exhibited during the Gulf War, not the ones used during the Iraq War. Scarcity should always drive the focused application of resources. We'll have to narrow the scope of our national security interests. We should hedge our expectations on what we can and want to achieve with military force. Where we may have once put lots of troops on the ground to achieve rather nebulous objectives we should look more to strategic raids and precision strikes for very specific results. We shouldn't be looking to fight and win wars, we should be looking to influence our adversaries with more moderated means. That will mean we need to really specify what our objectives are - what it means to win. I should stress that I foresee this being for a limited time only. The three major reasons we'll return to less limited ends:

1. A better economy means we have more revenue to spend on defense resources;
2. We become engaged in an existential conflict or limited conflict with a near-peer competitor; or
3. Some other conflict pops up that we can't possibly fathom at the moment during which we can't achieve or don't want to use limited objectives and need to escalate.

While we should see a change in what winning means (limited objectives), that change will be short-lived in the grand scheme of history. This does not mean a fundamental change to war - this will be a temporary blip in how we do business. This is where Slaughter and I disagree. At some point in the future we'll engage in a large-scale ground war and probably with convoluted and poorly expressed objectives; to think otherwise is pure fantasy. Until then we should think of (decisively!) influencing those we need to and not defeating them in the sense we've been thinking of these past 10 years. If you're reading this and thinking to yourself "no shit we're going to have less resources and will rely on more limited objectives," I urge you to think about the implications of this as we look to extricate ourselves out of Afghanistan and what "winning" is going to look like there in the midst of a U.S. defense drawdown. Winning there in 2014 is going to require some hyper-contortionism to ISAF's mission statement between now and then. So yeah, we're going to have to redefine victory.

Austerity will redefine victory

If you want an excellent analysis on the implications of the new "strategy" rolled out this morning by the President and, seemingly, every GO/FO in the Pentagon, go read Gulliver's post. I endorse his post completely completely. But I want to take a moment to look down the road a bit further and think of the second order implications of the coming "austerity" (which loses the sarcastic quote marks if sequestration is indeed invoked) on strategy development within the military. Specifically with regards to how we will formulate "Ends" in the next 10 years.

I've been thinking this evening about an excellent article written by Anne-Marie Slaughter this past fall portending the end of 20th Century warfare. To a great extent she was spot on what the Administration is now selling. However I think she oversells how revolutionary change will be from the U.S.'s military perspective a bit (she also focuses a bit much on criminality and protection of civilians for my taste). The reality is that the coming decade is more likely to resemble the last decade of the last century rather than a fundamental change in how America projects and uses its military power. While more on that in a minute, her most prescient thought in that piece was what she sees a fundamental change in U.S. expectations with regard to Ends: that wars will be fought for influence in the future, not for victory.

Gulliver is spot on that today's strategy does not mean the end of major land war and that we will be able to raise and deploy the resources we need as fast as time will allow. But I think we will be hard pressed to fight wars requiring such rapid mobilization. Instead we are more likely to return to the application of power seen during the Bush I and Clinton years: limited actions with limited objectives. If we have lots of capability but little capacity, we will have restricted options to do otherwise. Because of the flux in power distribution at the time, recent memory of a true peer competitor that presented an actual existential threat to the United States, and the subsequent prominence of hostile non-state actors, the military did not codify how it did business during those years. The fact that they codified the next 10 years, which should prove to be an anomaly in U.S. history, in doctrine is another discussion.

If we look back on those days we will see that the President(s) insisted on limited actions of influence. George H.W. Bush did not seek victory (in the sense that his son did) against Iraq. Ditto Clinton in Somalia or Iraq again (Operation DESERT FOX). The U.S. had limited objectives to influence and bend our adversaries to our will, not defeat them in the way we've sought against our enemies past and (delusionally) present. There will be no more "win" or "victory". There will be no more mission statements to defeat our enemies. Barring some existential threat to the U.S., I don't see how any military objectives after Afghanistan can have any end states other than very specific policy or political goal that doesn't include the eradication of our adversary. The next 10 years of austerity should be the death knell for victory as we've known it.

And this isn't a bad thing. Limited objectives of influence will give our strategies and campaigns clarity. "Victory" (or it's doctrinal term "defeat) is the obvious and simplistic strategic objective - it provides commanders no tangible or realistic concept of what success looks like at the end of hostilities. Anyone who's served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has read the crap mission statements hung in every headquarters knows that these statements didn't mean anything and weren't worth the paper on which they were printed. Limited objectives will ensure that military commanders and units are focused on accomplished what exactly they're supposed to do, other than "win." At the civilian level above the military, I hope that it means that political guidance to the military will also be clearer, because without unlimited (or at least voluminous) assets that we've had the guidance needs to be clear. Hopefully it also means that we're going to narrow our definition of interests to ensure our (increasingly) scarce resource are only used for what they're really needed.

So yes, Dr. Slaughter, you're right on our objectives in the future - or at least you should be right. The President and SECDEF have laid out today that we're focusing on precision strikes and strategic raiding to influence our adversaries abroad when diplomacy fails. The terms victory and winning will lose their meaning of today and be relegated to merely meaning that we influenced in the way we intended. Good. It's about time we added rigor to how we define success when we deploy our armed forces. Austerity, real and imagined, will help ensure that we limit what we expect from our applications of force so we can apply it more efficiently.

R2P is NOT the new COIN, but Ulfelder is just as wrong as Safranski about why*

I’ve got about a half-dozen half-written posts on the subject of R2P, which – thanks largely to Anne-Marie Slaughter – seems to be the hot topic in my blogospheric circles of late. The fad is both reflected and observed by Mark Safranski at ZenPundit, who yesterday asserted that “R2P is the New COIN.” This claim struck me as a bit aggressive and not altogether accurate, and I was heartened by its coincident rejection by Jay Ulfelder (a much smarter man than I). I do think, though, that Jay and Mark are talking past one another to some extent, so my contribution here is an attempt both to dispel what I see as a few misconceptions and to highlight how these two may have misunderstood one another.

* Ok, so the post title is sort of inflammatory, and it's not really a terribly accurate representation of what I think. But sometimes you've got to do crazy stuff to get ahead in this game, you know?

Safranski’s point – if I’m reading him properly – is a pretty simple one: he argues that R2P has the intellectual heft and internationalist “elite” sanction to replace counterinsurgency as the new “it” phenomenon for enlightened commentators and policymakers – basically that it can (or will) become the new narrative for those who are uncomfortable advocating for American primacy on its face to justify continued internationalism. Here’s how he puts it:

[I]n it’s current policy trajectory, R2P is going to become “the new COIN”.

This is not to say that R2P is a military doctrine, but like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for it’s bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy. The proponents of R2P (R2Peons?) appear to be in the early stages of following a policy advocacy template set down by the COINdinistas, but their ambitions appear to be far, far greater in scope. […]

R2P is following the same COIN pattern of bureaucratic-political proselytization with the accomplished academic theorist Anne-Marie Slaughter as the “Kilcullen of R2P”. As with David Kilcullen’s theory of insurgency, Slaughter’s ideas about sovereignty and R2P, which have gained traction with the Obama administration and in Europe as premises for policy, need to be taken seriously and examined in depth lest we wake up a decade hence with buyer’s remorse.

I want to very strongly endorse Mark’s recommendation that we examine in depth any theoretical construct on which we intend to base American grand strategy or foreign policy in the future, but I think he overstates the influence of both Slaughter’s and Kilcullen’s ideas. It’s worth noting that the U.S. does not actually pursue a foreign and security policy that is geared to defeat “globalized insurgency,” whatever the Australian guru may have recommended, and that Slaughter’s thoughts on the erosion of state sovereignty – even paired with the advocacy of folks like Sarah Sewall – haven’t driven a significant uptick in armed humanitarian intervention. But I’m drifting away from the point somewhat.

The point (which Safranski acknowledges to some extent in his fourth paragraph): the recent “institutionalization of COIN” across the American political and military cultures is more attributable to its apparent viability as a policy expedient in difficult circumstances than a testament to the overwhelming power of the so-called COINdinistas’ “bureaucratic-political proselytization.” The way that “COIN wisdom” has infiltrated both doctrine and the vernacular of the political class is unlikely to be replicated by R2P for the simple fact that COIN was pitched as the necessary savior of American Iraq policy, not a new, clean-slate paradigm for U.S. engagement in the world. The COINdinistas were obviously more than disinterested spectators, and their politically-astute advocacy certainly greased the skids for widespread acceptance of their politico-military concepts. But they wouldn't have even had a hearing were it not for the deteriorating situation in Iraq. If FM 3-24 had been published in the insurgency-free context of say 1999, the foreboding parallel to R2P would make more sense.

Ulfelder agrees in principle:

In my opinion, R2P stands no chance of becoming the next COIN because attempts to make civilian protection a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy will be resisted stiffly by the U.S. military.

The specific collection of beliefs and ideas we now call COIN (link) became ascendant in the latter half of the 2000s because it spoke to the needs and desires of civilian and military leaders alike. In the mid-2000s, the U.S. and its allies appeared to be losing the wars they had started a few years earlier in Iraq and Afghanistan, or at least not winning them. Policy-makers responded to the risk of failure by groping around for fresh ideas on how to tip those messy and costly wars toward “victory.” COIN took shape in response to this demand. COIN gave military leaders new things to try in place of the old ones that were failing, and it fanned policy-makers’ hopes for a way to bring those costly wars to some successful end.

But I think Jay is wrong to focus so much on the acceptance of the military, which is, frankly speaking, a matter of near irrelevance to policymakers. (As the occupation of Iraq should have amply demonstrated, the White House doesn’t ask “do you have doctrine for this?” before assigning a mission to the military.) The principles of R2P may not be codified into military doctrine the way COIN has, but this isn’t nearly so important as it seems: doctrine is a guide to tactical and operational action, but viewed from another perspective it can be boiled down to “the list of tasks that I as a military leader need to train my forces to perform.” And there’s not a whole pile of stuff under the “R2P” heading that doesn’t also fall into one of the other bins the U.S. military is already training on.

R2P is a legal concept and perhaps even a prescriptive guide to state action, but it’s not a military mission. What are the “R2P tasks” for military forces that aren’t already covered by offense, defense, and stability operations? There may be some additional responsibilities for operational and strategic leaders, but the tactical tasks are essentially those of combat operations, peacekeeping, and peace-enforcement. (We have a legitimate expert on this subject here at the blog, so I hope he’ll chime in, but I’s also encourage others in the know to please correct me if I’m wrong.)

[Added for clarity: "additional responsibilities for operational and strategic leaders" are the sphere of policy, not doctrine; it's reasonable to assume that DOD might drag its feet on putting out policy (that is, issuances or directives) as to the specific functions and responsibilities associated with civilian-protection operations. But such policy already exists for combat operations and stability operations, so this seems to me a bit of a red herring.]

The military may not like the idea of armed humanitarian intervention gaining pride of place in American security policy, but that won’t keep it from executing the missions or training on the required tasks. After all, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for small wars in general (including COIN), Military Operations Other Than War, humanitarian assistance, security cooperation and security force assistance, and so on over the last several decades, but we’re still doing ‘em. After all, the SECDEF might not have favored the Libya intervention, may not have understood the alleged strategic rationale, may not have had high confidence in our ability to constructively shape conditions there, etc., but: U.S. forces still created and enforced a no-fly zone, waged interdiction operations against Libyan regime assets, and supported the operations of NATO allies in the Libyan AO… all without liking it much or having adapted culturally or doctrinally to the mission. The success (however fortunate) of the NATO operation weakens the claims of those who might argue that new doctrine and concepts are needed to effectively execute an "R2P mission."

All of which is just a long way of saying this: Ulfelder is likely right that R2P is unlikely to form the basis for future American security policy, and Safranski is likely wrong. But Ulfelder is likely wrong about the reasons why not, or at least those that pertain to the military – he’s on much more solid ground when he emphasizes the “emergency” justification for COIN in both the military and political spheres.

Trombly and Foust on R2P, sovereignty, Libya, and a rational basis for U.S. foreign policy

I haven't had time to write about this subject (though if you follow me on Twitter it should be plain that I have strong feelings about it), but Dan Trombly and Josh Foust are absolutely killing it on Libya and the so-called "responsibility to protect."

First, see Anne-Marie Slaughter at The Atlantic.

Now read Foust at PBS Need to Know.

And finally, check out Trombly's comprehensive take-down of R2P opportunism at Slouching Towards Columbia.

I like Anne-Marie Slaughter -- I think she's charismatic and engaging, and her enthusiasm to correspond with analysts and students on Twitter is an admirable example for other policy big-wigs to emulate. But Foust and Trombly are so effective in categorically dismantling the philosophical and logical foundations of her argument that the reasonably-minded can only lament their comparative distance from the levers of power.

(It seems like an appropriate time to offer this aside: Dan Trombly is a freaking superstar. I don't know the guy personally, but if this kid spends his 20s making copies for the Michael O'Hanlons of the world, it will be a damned tragedy. It's depressing to consider how completely the so-called "foreign policy establishment" is walled off to original thinking, but I hope he gets an opportunity to do meaningful work. Read his blog. Every day. (No, seriously.))

Don't expect much from me over the long weekend, as I'll be on a train to New York this afternoon. (Hopefully I can get through the last 300-ish pages of The Makers of Modern Strategy, but I'm not holding out a ton of hope.)