When and How Should We Use Military Force to Fight Terrorism?

Several days ago, Charlie Savage had an important article in the New York Times  that reported that the Trump Administration is "exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from  drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan."  As Charlie reported, the President had already declared three provinces of Yemen to be  an "area of active hostilities" where less restrictive policies should apply.  The first use of this policy was the Special Operations raid in Yemen, which killed several civilians.  He is also expected to make a similar decision with regard to Somalia.

So what's the big deal?  Why shouldn't we "unleash" our military?  That is a question that I and 34 other former national security officials tried to explain in a set of principles that we sent to Defense Secretary Mattis.  As we explained in this principles, civilian casualties are not merely a human right problem.  They also hurt us in our fight against terrorist groups:

The United States has always put a strong premium on minimizing civilian harm in armed conflicts, both because it is the right thing to do and because doing so is strategically beneficial. However, even small numbers of unintentional civilian deaths or injuries—whether or not legally permitted—can cause significant strategic setbacks. For example, civilian deaths from U.S. operations can cause partners and allies to reduce operational collaboration, withdraw consent, and limit intelligence-sharing; increase violence from militant groups; and foster distrust among local populations that are crucial to accomplishing the mission. As a result, reducing civilian harm and appropriately responding to harm that does occur play an important role in helping the United States achieve its mission objectives.

We noted that attacks in countries outside the battlefield (in Yemen and Somalia) require special caution:

The use of force outside traditional war zones, particularly using drone and other air strikes, raises complex legal, strategic, diplomatic, and humanitarian considerations that warrant continued use of heightened standards and procedures. To ensure that such operations are both strategically effective and lawful, the executive branch should, absent extraordinary circumstances . [u]se lethal force only when there is a near certainty—or a similarly high standard—that no civilian harm will occur; this standard has proven useful for maintaining support for kinetic operations among foreign governments and populations, and for minimizing the downsides and unintended consequences that occur when the United States accidentally kills or harms civilians.  

The letter was  signed by an impressive list of former national security professionals, all of whom had to make tough life and death decisions in the fight against terrorism, and all of whom learned from the experience.  We hope that the Trump Administration will recognize that while military power is an important tool against terrorism, it needs to be used with great care.

You can read the entire letter here.

Why Winning Wars Requires Soft Power

President Trump has announced an increase in the Defense budget, and reportedly, will help pay for this increase with sizable cuts in the State Department and foreign aid budgets.  Apparently, President Trump has not listened to the views of his own military leadership, who have repeatedly explained that winning our current wars will require a "whole of government" approach that includes significant work by the Department of State.  Gayle Tzemach Lemmon of the Council on Foreign Relations explains:

“This plan is a political-military plan; it is not a military plan,” said Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “In the development of the plan, we have been completely engaged at every level with the State Department…Not only will it be a whole-of-government approach,” Dunford said, it’s “about a trans-regional threat.”

.  .  .

“The grievances of the civil war have to be addressed, the safety and humanitarian assistance that needs to be provided to people have to be addressed, and the multiple divergent stakeholders’ views need to be addressed,” Dunford said. “We do need to have a vision of how our military actions set conditions on the ground that actually then become the platform from which Secretary Tillerson goes to Geneva to come up with a political solution.”

 .  .  .

“Many policymakers, intelligence analysts, and academics believe expelling the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from Mosul and Raqqah is the key to the terrorist group’s defeat and the destruction of its self-declared caliphate. This is only partially correct,” said Gen. Joseph Votel in a paper he co-wrote for the Center for New American Security.  “The United States must develop a long-term strategy that focuses on both the top-down and bottom-up pressures that have created this unique threat. This strategy must include unprecedented intergovernmental cooperation and coordination as well as close collaboration with foreign partners, nongovernmental organizations, and private industry…Regionally-led and U.S.-backed reconstruction efforts and initiatives to strengthen government institutions are a critical component of this strategy. Reconstruction also may contribute to increased opportunities for employment and education.”

Read it all here.

As I explained in a previous post, the importance of State Department was previously emphasized in previous remarks by Secretary Mattis and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.  As Mattis put it, "“If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately."

The Advantages and Limits of Air Power Against ISIL

For years, there was an intellectual battle within Defense and military circles about the effectiveness of air power.  Some (predominately Air Force, of course), have argued that Air Power alone is capable of achieving  military goals in many conflicts.  Others, have taken the view that Air Power is really only another form of artillery, and that Air Power is only marginally useful as an adjunct to maritime and ground forces.

As with most such debates, the truth is in the middle.  Air Power is not a silver bullet.  It is most often most effective when used in joint actions with ground and maritime forces.  Yet, there are examples, where Air Power alone did achieve objectives.  And this is a view shared by most Air Force leaders.  Indeed, former Air Force Chief of Staff General Norty Schwartz and I made this argument together in an article in Aviation Week (sadly behind a paywall) refuting a book that argued that the Air Force should be disbanded.  We said:

Farley offers an incomplete history of the effectiveness of combat air power in recent conflicts.  He is certainly correct that early optimism about airpower as a panacea for modern warfare has proven misplaced.  The strategic bombing campaigns during World War II did not have the decisive effect that early airpower advocates envisioned.  And, Farley is also correct that the bombing campaigns in Vietnam failed to accomplish their goal.  But Farley’s unstated assumption that airpower can never be decisive apart from support for ground troops cannot be reconciled with history.  As even Farley admits, without the NATO air offensive in Kosovo, Serbia would have been unlikely to come to the table.

 There are other, more recent examples as well.  While the intensive bombing campaign against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox in 1998 was heavily criticized at the time as ineffective, we have since learned that the operation was largely responsible for Saddam Hussein’s decision to end his WMD efforts.   U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in 2002 and in Libya in 2011 were largely exercises in air power.  And had we intervened in Syria, the focus of our efforts would have been on the use of air power.  Simply put, airpower is not a panacea that can replace the need for ground and naval forces–history has made that point abundantly clear–but in some circumstances, combat air power is an indispensable tool of national power.

I was therefore fascinated to find a great analysis of the power, and limits, of the use of Air Power in the war against the Islamic State, by Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institute.  First, Byman notes that Air Power has been effective in degrading the capability of terrorist organizations.  In addition to killing leaders, Byman notes that the use of Air Power limits a terrorist organizations capability:

Training on a large-scale is harder, if not impossible, as large gatherings can be lethal. Group leaders’ influence wanes, as they must hide or remain incommunicado. Trying to organize a kids’ soccer game, let alone a global terrorist network, becomes almost impossible if you can’t use phones or the Internet regularly. The indirect effects also matter. Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been laying low since U.S. military operations began, diminishing his charismatic presence from Islamic State propaganda and, presumably, disheartening his beleaguered troops. Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the spokesman who headed the group’s external operations, was also charismatic and inspired terrorists around the world to attack—and eventually the United States tracked him down and killed him in an airstrike.

Yet, in this context, Air Power has a serious limit.  We can degrade and destroy the enemy, but unless we address governance issues that allowed ISIS to arise in the first place, we can prevail in the battle and still lose the war:

Nor does air power address the biggest long-term challenges in fighting the Islamic State: governance. The United States has proven again and again that it can dislodge terrorists, insurgents, and forces loyal to local despots. Filling the vacuum so that they don’t return is much harder. The terrorists often come back, or, at times, chaos rules. Neither outcome is an improvement for locals, and new terrorist groups can breed if there is no government to keep them down. You can’t provide that governance with a drone.

Moreover, for air power to be effective, you need capable local allies. Their forces can provide the necessary intelligence to find and target Islamic State fighters. In addition, when they advance, they force Islamic State forces to mass—making them vulnerable to air power. If Islamic State fighters stay dispersed and hidden, then forces on the ground can root them out. Local forces can also fill the vacuum after victory, ideally establishing a legitimate government and preventing the terrorists from returning or new extremist groups from arising.

The article is well worth reading.  You can find my own expanded thoughts on the uses and limits of air power, in this book review.

 

Do Wars Against Terrorist Groups Last Forever ? When Does War End?

When do we declare a war over?  For traditional state versus state armed conflicts, this is usually a simple question,  There is usually a cease fire or a peace treaty.  We watch the signing ceremony and declare the war over.

For the kinds of armed conflict we have engaged in more recently against non-state actors, the end of war is a more date to determine  We are unlikely to see a signing ceremony involving ISIS or al Quida.  Indeed, we may never even see a formal agreement with the Taliban.  Success in an armed conflict with non-State actors is more likely to be reflected in reducing that actor's ability to cause us harm, and not any formal agreement.

The issue of when war ends is an important one.  In wartime, we can target enemy combatants with lethal force. In peacetime that is murder.  In wartime, we can detain the enemy with no trial as prisoners of war.  In peacetime, they must be released.

The Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict has just issued a Report that attempts to address the question of when war ends.  As the authors of the Report explain in a Lawfare post international law as it now stands is inadequate:

[I]nternational law, as it now stands, provides insufficient guidance to ascertain the end of many armed conflicts as a factual matter (when has the war ended?), as a normative matter (when should the war end?), and as a legal matter (when does the international-legal framework of armed conflict cease to apply in relation to the war?). The current plurality of legal concepts of armed conflict, the sparsity of international humanitarian law (IHL) provisions that instruct the end of application, and the inconsistency among such provisions (sometimes, even within a single legal instrument) thwart uniform regulation and frustrate the formulation of a comprehensive notion of when wars can, should, and do end.

The Obama Administration took the position that armed conflict still existed when the capacity of a terrorist organization to launch a strategic strike against the U.S. was coupled by the will to do so, and assessed that under this standard, we are still engaged in war with al Quida.  The Harvard Report suggests four other approaches to the issue:

In light of the sparsity of legal doctrine in this particular area, we put forward, drawing from existing international law and scholarship, four theories on when a NIAC ends and when the international-legal framework of armed conflict ceases to apply in relation to it:

• The two-way-ratchet theory (as soon as one of the constituent elements of the NIAC—sufficiently intense hostilities or sufficient organization of the non-state armed group—ceases to exist);
• The no-more-combat-measures theory (upon the general close of military operations as characterized by the cessation of actions of the armed forces with a view to combat);
• The no-reasonable-risk-of-resumption theory (where there is no reasonable risk of hostilities resuming); and
• The state-of-war-throwback theory (upon the achievement of a peaceful settlement between the formerly-warring parties).

Under some of these theories, the Obama Administration’s position on the continuation of an armed conflict with terrorist organizations holds; on others, it fails. What approach the Trump Administration might take remains to be seen.

This is a report that should be taken seriously.  The lead author is Gabriella Blum, the Rita Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.  Unlike many academics in this field, she has actually given legal advice on Law of Armed Conflict issues to military leaders.  Before joining the Harvard Faculty, she served for seven years as a Senior Legal Advisor in the International Law Department of the Military Advocate General’s Corps in the Israel Defense Forces, and for another year, as a Strategy Advisor to the Israeli National Security Council.

The Obama Administrations' discussion of the problem can be found here.You can find the entire Harvard Report here.  A good summary on Lawfare is here.

Islamic Terrorists and American Mass Shooters Have Something in Common

In an earlier post, I discussed some social science research that supported the view that actions such as the Travel Ban that focus on Muslims is counter-productive because it adds to the very sense of alienation that leads to radicalization in the first place.  It turns out that this same dynamic of alienation is also behind  American mass shooters who have no connection to Islam.  Alana Connor, the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions explains in a Defense One post:

We treat right-wing extremists and radical Islamic killers as if they are two separate issues. But in fact, research suggests that the same underlying factors cause homegrown Americans to break bad—whether they join a radical Islamic terrorism group or the Ku Klux Klan.

According to research conducted by my fellow cultural psychologists Sarah Lyons-Padilla and Michele Gelfand, Muslims in the US radicalize when they believe their lives do not matter—a belief that arises from the feeling that they don’t really belong anywhere. Discrimination, racist rhetoric, and xenophobic policies only exacerbate these feelings of “cultural homelessness.” Radical Islamic groups exploit these emotions by targeting young people who feel alone and adrift, and then restore their sense of belonging and meaning. Thus radical Islamic terrorism is not primarily a religious problem; it is a social problem.

Research from our Stanford University lab, led by Lyons-Padilla, suggests that a similar psychological process may drive white Americans to join white supremacist and other militant right-wing groups. The slow death of manufacturing, the isolation of smaller American towns and rural areas, and stagnating working- and middle-class wages have left a broad swath of Americans feeling unmoored and insignificant. The widespread acceptance of redneck jokes, white-trash impressions, and comments about “basket of deplorables” rub salt into these wounds.

Like radical Islamic groups, white supremacist and other right-wing terrorist groups offer people (especially men) who feel isolated and disempowered a chance to feel important and welcome. It’s the same psychological phenomenon, different culture war. And thus the KKK gains new recruits along with ISIL.

Read it all here.

Why Any Immigration Barrier Directed At Muslims Is Counterproductive

In a letter that I signed, together with about 100 other former national security officials, we argued that the Trump Refugee Ban Executive Order, in addition to being unnecessary and wrong,  “will harm our national security” because  “it has already sent exactly the wrong message to the Muslim community here at home and all over the world: that the U.S. government is at war with them based on their religion.”  In my posts on Facebook about the Order, I made a similar point—that such a ban makes us less safe, not safer.

As you might expect, we have received pushback for this point.  Isn’t it better to take no risks?  Given the terrorist attacks in Europe, isn’t there at least a small risk that one person from this country intends us harm?  If, so, why take even this small risk?

Even apart from the obvious point that we accept far greater risks in our everyday lives, this question also fails to consider the possibility that imposing such a ban itself increases the risk of radicalization.

As explained in an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times, there is actually some research that supports our fear that anti-Muslim actions and rhetoric will contribute to the radicalization process, and thereby increase the risk of developing home grown terrorists.  The academics of conducted this study, Sarah Lyons-Padilla of Stanford and Michael Gelfand of the University of Maryland explain their study:

We conducted a survey with nearly 200 American Muslims, half of whom were immigrants, half of whom were born in the United States. We asked them about their experiences as religious and cultural minorities, including their feelings of being discriminated against on the basis of their religion. We also asked how they managed their dual identities as Americans and Muslims, and how they felt toward fundamentalist Islamic groups and extremist causes.

Our findings were clear: The more our participants reported feeling culturally homeless — that is, fully belonging neither to American culture nor to that of another nation — and discriminated against on the basis of their religion, the more they said they experienced a lack of meaning in their lives. In turn, this loss of meaning was associated with greater support for fundamentalist groups and extremist causes.

This finding was consistent with research by the social psychologist Arie Kruglanski that showed that the psychological need for significance, not religion or ideology, is what propels people toward extremism. Extremist groups offer a sense of purpose, certainty and belonging to those who work on their behalf.

These groups go after Muslims who feel culturally homeless, leaning heavily on the claim that the West is anti-Islam. In this context, Mr. Trump’s original ban, which sent a strong message that Muslims were not welcome in this country and could not be “real” Americans, amounted to free propaganda for extremists. As one poster argued on a pro-Islamic State web channel, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the declared leader of the Islamic State, should consider Mr. Trump’s executive order a “blessed ban.”

You can find the article here.  The full study is also interesting and can be found here.  

While it appears the original Executive Order will be pulled back, it will replaced with an Executive Order that will still target immigrants from predominately Muslim countries.  It too will send a message that will hurt our efforts to prevent radicalization.

A Double Standard on Religious Violence?

I used to blog at the Episcopal Cafe, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how faith, politics and life intersect.  Follow them!  David Allen has a very interesting  post at the Episcopal Cafe discussing the double standard Americans have toward religious violence.  When Christians engage in religiously motivated violence, we reject them as legitimately Christian.  On the other hand, when Muslims commit such violence, not so much:

A recent poll by the folks at PRRI bears this out. 75% of the folks in the US believe that people who commit acts of violence in the name of Christianity are not Christian. But only 50% of the folks in the US believe that people who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam are not Muslim. That’s a double standard when it comes down to who folks in the US believe commit acts of violence.

It gets even more interesting when those who hold this double standard are broken into various groups, such as Republicans vs Democrats. 75% of Republicans don’t believe that Christians who commit violent acts are really Christians, while only 33% of Republicans don’t believe that Muslims who commit violent acts are really Muslims. The Democrats do a little better but still have a double standard. 79% of Democrats don’t believe that Christians who commit violent acts are really Christians, while 55% of Democrats don’t believe that Muslims who commit violent acts are really Muslims.

Read the full post here.  You can find the full survey results here.