Analysts call for 'soft power' tactics in future conflicts

WASHINGTON

Six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush went to the wounded Pentagon to prepare military leaders for what he said would be "a long campaign."

"This is a different type of enemy than we're used to," he told reporters. "It's an enemy that likes to hide and burrow in, and their network is extensive. There are no rules. It's barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective. That is beyond comprehension."

As the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war this week, the president's grim forecast may be the one thing that critics and admirers can agree he got right.

And regardless of whom Americans elect to succeed Bush, it is clear the campaign will drag on – in Iraq and Afghanistan and on fronts still to be opened.

Conflicts like that in Iraq, against small groups of radical Muslim jihadists, are likely to be the principal threat to U.S. safety for the foreseeable future, according to a new study by The Rand Corp., commissioned by the Pentagon.

But America should not fight those wars as it has fought in Iraq, a growing chorus of uniformed and civilian military analysts contends.

"America's goal must be to defuse such a war, not to wage and win it," the Rand study asserts. "Trying to crush insurgency by military brute force in the Muslim world risks validating the jihadists' claim, increasing their appeal, and replacing their losses."

Force "is but one instrument of counterinsurgency. ... It ought to be subordinate to a political strategy of offering the people a government deserving of their support," the report adds.

Unless that political strategy produces a worthy government, the Rand authors say, military success against insurgents is likely to be fleeting.

The case these analysts make for a different approach to today's wars – using doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, police officers and other civilians as nation-building "warriors" – is attracting considerable attention inside the Pentagon and beginning to generate a buzz on Capitol Hill.

With the price tag for five years in Iraq pushing $1 trillion, by most estimates – to say nothing of the physical and emotional toll the war has taken on service members and their families – there is ample incentive for a new approach.

"Our defense establishment has suffered some 4,000 fatal casualties, forced the Army into offering enlistment bonuses of $40,000 to raw recruits, begun a program of buying armored jeeps that cost a million dollars each, and run up a generational spending obligation" likely to top $2 trillion, writes military theorist Chet Richards, a retired Air Force colonel.

"We did all this not while engaging some worthy foe armed with tanks, missiles and aircraft similar to ours, nor while contending with massed armies of skilled troops on fields of battle. No, we incurred these costs while trying to suppress resistance to our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance by lightly armed civilians and poorly equipped militias."

"Now the generals even say you can't win these things by military means alone," said David Gompert, principal author of the Rand report.

In early March, a group of 52 retired senior military leaders, including six former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced plans to lobby Congress to overhaul and pump billions of dollars into overseas aid programs.

The generals and admirals want lawmakers to create a corps of civilian workers trained and deployed to work directly with the military and help build education, transportation, economic and political systems in troubled countries.

No one knows better than troops how helpful such allies would be in Iraq, retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni, one of the group's founders, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month.

Zinni's son, a Marine officer serving in Iraq, recently reported that his unit's signature achievement has been helping Iraqis reopen an oil refinery, the general said.

The Marines got the job done, but that's not the kind of work they ought to be doing, the elder Zinni argued.

"We desperately need civilian partners who have the same robust capabilities that we have," he said.

No less an administration leader than Defense Secretary Robert Gates makes essentially the same argument. In a speech last fall to an audience dominated by Army officers, Gates pushed hard for an expansion of America's "soft power," arguing that "the most important military component in the war on terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern themselves."

The Navy, lacking a front-line role in land wars against groups such as al-Qaida, is implementing a new global strategy that recasts it as an arm of diplomacy and a vehicle for humanitarian aid.

More than a year in the making, the strategy argues that the sea service is uniquely positioned to respond to insurgencies. Their ships, Navy leaders argue, can serve as offshore bases from which troops and civilian workers can move inland to quell violence and provide aid without becoming provocative occupiers.

"We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars," the chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard declared in a statement accompanying release of the strategy.

Such sentiments are a dramatic shift from the complaints about President Bill Clinton's use of the military for nation-building in Bosnia that marked then-Gov. George W. Bush's campaign for president in 2000.

Yet for all the talk of soft power, or "smart power" in Zinni's formulation, Gompert argued that the $250 million the administration proposes to spend next year on soft-power programs is a sliver of what's needed.

It's also less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the $105 billion Bush has asked Congress to provide for new guns, ships, aircraft, tanks and other weaponry in his 2009 budget. Additional billions are targeted to provide pay and benefits for 92,000 soldiers and Marines that the administration and lawmakers want added to the military by 2012.

Most of those weapons were conceived in an era when the Pentagon assumed it might have to fight a similarly well-equipped national power.

Richards argues that the ownership of nuclear weapons has made wars between such major powers impossible. For other threats, a force the size of today's Marine Corps (about 200,000 troops), combined with a cadre of special operations commandos and enough air and naval support, would be more than adequate to defend America, he says in a new book, "If We Can Keep It."

At perhaps $250 billion per year, that force would cost less than half of today's U.S. military. Richards would spend an additional $50 billion-plus to combine the revamped military with today's diplomatic and intelligence services in a new Department of External Affairs. Its mission would be to rebuild and enhance U.S. intelligence-gathering and processing around the world.

"Defense and intelligence should operate together as an integrated facility for understanding what is going on in the world," Richards writes. And "from time to time and with great finesse and support from our allies," the United States should apply what it learns from all that intelligence and use military force to head off emerging threats and bolster shaky allies, he suggests.

But many in Congress say the United States could once again face an enemy on par with the Soviet Union and cannot afford to drop its guard. They point to China's booming economy and to North Korea's and Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Programs conceived for conventional wars also persist because their advocates say they can be adapted for use against insurgents, Gompert said.

Even the U.S. fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines, designed and built to safeguard the open sea and equipped with missiles that can hit targets hundreds of miles inland, has been marketed as a weapon against terrorist insurgents, he noted.

Gompert sees Congress as part of the problem. Its military committees are dominated by members who represent districts that are home to major defense contractors and military bases and who are predisposed to question any initiative to redirect defense dollars.

But he argues that for as little as $30 billion, about 5 percent of the current defense budget, Bush's successor could make a start at developing a real soft-power approach to the wars of the future.

The job will not be easy, he acknowledged, and the new president will need special help from civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon to shift substantial money away from established programs and conventional defense.

The status quo, Richards observes, has strong bipartisan support, and the top presidential candidates of both parties are promising to spend even more to rebuild and replace what the military has lost or damaged in Iraq.

He thinks it is up to voters to accept the reality that many of the billions being spent on defense aren't really buying more security and to push the new administration and Congress toward change.

Otherwise, he wrote, "we will elect our democracy right out of existence."

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com

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