"National Security" As A Talisman to Ward Off Inconvenient Claims

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former Pentagon and NSC staffer, now at the Center for a New American Security, has a a must read essay about how those of us in the national security establishment have created an environment in which Trump is allowed to use claims of  "national security" as a magic word to avoid scrutiny on questionable actions.  The most recent example, is the Supreme Court's upholding of the Trump Travel Ban in Trump. v. Hawaii.  Despite the fact that "a long list of bipartisan national security, intelligence, and military officials agree" that there is no national security justification for the travel ban, the Supreme Court upheld it:

It’s just bigotry disguised as national security, the Twitter-verse said Monday. How could the Supreme Court endorse it?

And there’s the rub. The Supreme Court goes out of its way to not rule on the boundaries on the president’s national security prerogatives; Justice Roberts notes, in his majority opinion, that “our inquiry into matters of entry and national security is highly constrained” and its expertise is limited. What constitutes a national security justification for deference to the executive is historically out of the hands of the judiciary and instead the remit of the national security community itself. While the despicable policies of the Trump administration are on its own conscience, its path was partly cleared by the good intentions of national security professionals, themselves.

Why does the national security community need to take responsibility?  According to Loren, our own actions have created an environment in which these claims can't be questioned:

Natsec professionals never meant to build a smirking priesthood that avoids questioning of its actions, but we did. Every conversation we halted with an “I know more than you, national security, you realize” laid the groundwork for avoiding close scrutiny of our actions. Every email we overclassified for convenience. Every policy we didn’t trust to the general public. Every airstrike we refused to acknowledge. Every security theater we performed at airports. Every new agency we mustered some half-hearted excuse to create. Every covert program we developed to avoid the absence or inconvenience of congressional authority. Every detainee we kept from receiving basic rights. Every former servicemember or official who parlayed their rank into a gig as a cable news national security or military analyst despite lacking any experience or training in analysis. Every partial release of intelligence to support our preferred narratives. Since 9/11 we’ve made everything about national security and national security about everything, a well-intentioned impulse to close ourselves off from threats and the smallest risks. Yes, we worked hard to protect the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, but weren’t quite clever enough to prophecy someone like Trump would take our precedents and stretch them to the max.
 We drank our own Kool-Aid, believing toughness meant inscrutability and the American people didn’t deserve to know what we knew. We claimed “national security” as a means to avoid explanation and transparency, believing that even a minor check weakened the credibility of our profession, until the parameters of national security became so flabby and insecure as to absorb Trump’s “religious animus.” We share the blame for this.
 President Trump has made national security justifications a staple of his practice of policy, a craven sort of politics that makes us less safe and demands loud condemnation. But the national security community created the environment in which such arguments would be heard with a straight face.

Read it all here. 

  

America's Unique Experience With War

Franz-Stefan Gady wrote an essay a few months ago that I think merits careful consideration.  His point is that Americans have experience war very differently than other countries around the world.  As a result, this makes us perhaps too eager to use armed force:

True to George W. Bush’s mantra “We’ll fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” U.S. troops have fought in the faraway mountains of North Korea, the rice paddies of South Vietnam, the rolling hills of Bosnia, the snowy tops of the Hindukush, and the urban jungle of Baghdad, places foreign and far away to most Americans. During that time period, not a single American battlefield defeat, and there were a few, resulted in American civilians taken prisoner or American towns razed.

This unique American experience of war is first and foremost the result of a combination of geographical distance — the United States is protected from any threats of land invasion by two oceans — and the preponderance of American military might — the United States was and remains the world’s strongest military power. The most salient feature of what one may call the American Way of War is not only superior technology or massive firepower but geographic distance. America’s wars for the past hundred years have been fought thousands of miles away from American soil, scarcely exposing American territory to danger (with the exception of the ever-looming nuclear threat) and shielding Americans from many of the terrible consequences of war.

He points to several specific aspects of the American experience of war: American civilians has shielded American civilians from the horrors of military conflict, our military and civilian infrastructure has not been destroyed,  we have a "snapshot" view of deployments "where men and women are exposed to war for short time periods and rotate in and out of a combat zone without developing an understanding of the specific nature of the unfolding conflict, and our decisionmakers "often emphasize the changing character of warfare (how wars are fought) over the “constant” nature of war (chaotic, unamenable to human control, bloody, and catastrophic)."

This, Gady argues has consequences for our decisions to use force:

As a result of the four distinctions outlined above, American policymakers and military leaders, despite continuously waging war, paradoxically have a more “benign” and “cleaner” understanding of war, contributing to what I call the “War Gap.” Almost by definition, war for Americans now denotes conflict in a faraway country where only American troops and foreign combatants and civilians are killed. No American homes are ransacked or bombed and no foreign occupational regime (if only temporarily) is imposed. American citizens remain physically removed from mayhem and death. This is in stark contrast to the European, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern experience of war in the same context.

 . . . 

 A pernicious effect is that war, without an adequate understanding of its closely lived complexity and horror, appears more manageable to U.S. policymakers. As a result, American decision-makers are more prone to advancing military solutions over other options than leaders in other advanced democracies. Additionally, a more technological prosecution of war offers the illusion that policymakers have more choices during a military conflict than they actually obtain. Lost is the insight that the only real freedom to devise policy pertaining to a military conflict is before the outbreak of any hostilities.

Read it all here.  Clearly, we have had some attacks on our homland--Pearl Harbor and 9/11 being the best examples, but it is certainly true that our experience of war differs qualitatively from those in other countries.  What do you think? Do we use military power as a result? 

A Primer on the Proposed "Space Force"

Last week, President Trump spoke to the Space Council and announced his direction to the Department of Defense to create a new military service--a "Space Force"--to join the current Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.  In reading lots of commentary on this proposal, it was clear to me that most Americans are really not understanding what this is all about.  The purpose of this post is to offer a primer on the idea, and to express my own views.  (By way of background,  I was involved with our Nation's Space military operations while serving as Air Force General Counsel, and currently serve on the Board of the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit federally funded research and development corporation that advises the Air Force and Intelligence Community on technical issues involving operations in space.)

The most important thing to understand about President Trump's announcement is that he is not proposing to "militarize" space--instead, the proposal is to reorganize how the Department of Defense organizes existing (and future) space operations,  The United States military is already heavily dependent on space operations.  We use satellites to detect missile launches and thereby provide early warning of nuclear attacks.  The GPS satellite constellation provides essential position information for military forces (and many of our our weapons).  Communications, which are essential for command and control of our global military forces, largely occurs over satellites.  And spy satellites provides critical intelligence information that is used for both strategic and tactical decisions.  It is safe to say that neither our intelligence community nor our military could do their job without our space assets.

And it is also worth emphasizing that our Nation also relies heavily on space for many non-military applications as well--GPS, weather, entertainment and communications.  Most of our point-of-sale payment systems would not work without space.

For many years, space was not really a contested environment.  We launched our highly sophisticated (and stunningly expensive) satellites into orbit (low earth orbit, high elliptical orbits, and geostationary equatorial orbits) with little concern that an adversary could take them out.  That is no longer the case.  And it the fact that space is now a contested environment that has led to proposals to create a separate space force.

While all of the services have at least part of the Department of Defense Space mission, the Air Force has the lion share of the responsibility.  Through its Space Command, the Air Force is responsible for developing the architecture for the satellite constellations, acquiring satellites and their ground-based communication systems, launching the satellites,  and then operating the satellites while in orbit.  A newly arising mission is the make sure that our space assets are resilient, and capable of surviving in a wartime environment against emerging Russian and Chinese capabilities.  And because space is also an increasingly crowded environment, the Air Force Space Command is also responsible for keeping track of every item in space near Earth.

Several members of Congress, most notably, Mike Rogers of Alabama and Jim Cooper of Tennessee, have argued that the Air Force is not paying sufficient attention to the space mission.  And by not "paying attention," I think they really mean that the Air Force is not allocating enough resources to the space mission.  The concern is that the Air Force prioritizes aircraft such as the F-35 and the new bomber over needed investments in space. The New York Times has a good article today that describes this argument.  President Trump has apparently agreed with Rogers and Cooper, despite the fact that Congress itself resoundingly rejected the argument earlier this year.

So what do I think?  While I think our nation needs a new and more innovative focus on the problem of providing resilient space operations in a contested environment, I don't think that a separate space force will help us get there.

First, I was deeply involved in Air Force and Department of Defense budgeting decisions from 2009 to 2013, and I did not see an Air Force that ignored the space mission in order to fund the space mission.  It simply did not happen.  In addition, during my tenure at the Air Force, I saw leaders of the Air Force Space Command, such as General Willie Shelton, raise the concerns about a contested space environment only to see their proposals rejected as too expensive by the Department of Defense leadership (not Air Force leadership) and by the General Accountability Office space experts.  While the Department of Defense has changed its tune since 2014, in my view, the Air Force is not the reason we now play catch up to the Chinese and Russians.

Second, while the space mission is vitally important, from a manpower point of view, it is really too small to justify an entirely new military service.  Air Force Space Command, for example, has about 22,000 military members and 9,000 civilians.  A new Space Force would likely have no more than 30,000 military members and perhaps 10,000 civilians.  Given the entirely new infrastructure that would need to be created--a recruiting command, a training command, a space staff and a civilian secretariat (not to mention the inevitable Space Academy and Space Band)--this  seems too small a force to justify an entirely new military service.

So what should we do instead?  Quite frankly, much of what needs to be done seems to be underway: we need to change how we design and deploy satellites so they are more resilient, we need to reform the acquisition process so we can respond more rapidly to emerging threats, and we need to train airmen, soldiers, marines and seamen to fight through interruptions in space assets.  While I don't think a new Space Force necessarily makes sense, it may make sense to create a new Combatant Command devoted to space military operations just as we created a separate Cybersecurity Combatant Command.  (My caveat here is that Strategic Command now has the joint space mission and General John Hyten, the former Commander of Space Command, is the best strategic thinker we have ever had on space issues).

In short, when you think "Space Command", don't think of manned and armed space craft of science fiction lore.  And don't even think about Death Stars or weapons in space directed at targets on Earth.  It is instead simply a proposal about how we best organize how the military organizes space assets.  While there are certainly ways we can improve how we organize this mission, a "Space Force" is the wrong approach.