Angry Planet - Is the U.S. at war? Sorry, that's classified.

Episode Date: October 24, 2016

If you don't know whether or not the U.S. is at war, you're not alone. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are engaged all over the world. In many places they're involved in "kinetic warfare," military jargon that means that bullets are flying. So, the United States is at war, right?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You've had civilian political leaders saying, we've got to do something, military, you've got to do something. And we've had senior military officials, you know, joint staff, other senior leaders saying, are you out of your mind? The United States only wants one thing from its military. Everything. Need foreign troops trained? An enemy defeated? A nation rebuilt?

The Department of Defense has. become a one-stop shop for all of that and more. So, as anyone asked the Pentagon how it feels about all that? You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with Warsborn. Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University, and she's also a former Pentagon employee. She's the author of a new book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon. It's been glowingly reviewed, including by the New York Times.

So, Rosa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Good to be here. America's at war in Afghanistan. It's holding territory in Iraq. It's also looking to expand that territory with the Mosul offensive. It's running drones in the Middle East, North Africa, and special operations all over the globe. I think it's more than a hundred different countries. So that's a lot of war. But it doesn't feel like war to those of us living in the States.

So what's going on? Yeah, I think it doesn't feel like war to most Americans, partly because the wars are being carried out by a relatively small segment of the population. So the impact of the wars going on are not felt by everybody. I also think that a lot of our current wars are in the covert world. So not only to most ordinary Americans not have any contact with the military personnel or defense contractors who are involved in those operations, but they're actually classified. So even if you wanted to find out about them, you can't. So that doesn't mean, though, that it's not war. So, So can you describe what kind of war this is?

Good question. I don't think we know. I think one of the things that has happened in the last couple of decades is that our notion of what counts as war politically, legally, institutionally, has gotten really scrambled and really blurry. I mean, I think for most Americans, our idea of wars formed by all these World War II movies or maybe Vietnam movies, and we think of wars, we think of the invasion of Normandy, or we think of long lines of soldiers, you know, snaking through the jungle in Vietnam. And it matters what

we call a war because a lot of what the book talks about is this issue. You know, it matters what we call war because when we decide to call something war, that has legal consequences, a whole different set of rules operates. I think what's happened since 9-11, though, is that we've gotten really fuzzy on what we think counts as war. So we've counted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are, you know, clearly, by anybody's definition, are war when you bring scores of thousands of troops in by ship and by plane and have enormous bases, and you have firefights and large-scale military operations. We all think that's war. But then we also have this sort of secret war, which is carried out mostly by drone strikes and special operations

raids, and that doesn't have any borders that goes from place to place, that is one individual at a time. And we're also increasingly thinking about things like cyber conflict in terms of war. So we've got everything from sort of traditional hundreds of thousands of uniformed military personnel in ground combat to these really murky areas like cyber conflict and drone conflict, which are hard to categorize. And we're calling them all war, but they're very, very different. Rosa, why do you think that the American public tolerates this? Because we seem to be generally okay with it, or at least a large portion of us? Well, I think it's several reasons. You know, one is simply that, as I said, we don't feel the pain most of us. Less than one percent of the U.S.

population is in the military. And what that means is that for most Americans, if anybody is getting hurt, if anybody is getting killed, if people are having long deployments, which take a huge toll on family life and spouses' employment prospects, you know, we're not feeling it. Somebody else is feeling it. And it's a small segment of the population, and we geographically isolate a lot of members of our military community in bases that are pretty far away from major metro centers and major population centers. So it's not us, and if it's out of sight, out of mind, because so much of this is in the classified realm, we don't know what's happening. So all we ever hear is your government is working hard to get bad terrorists, and we think, well, that's a good thing, surely. But we don't really

the average person and frankly the average member of the media and even the average member of Congress has no real ability to know how much is this costing in budgetary terms, what are the tradeoffs if we spend money on this, what things are we not able to spend money on? Is this strategically effective? Are these drone strikes and so on? Do they make us safer? Are they actually increasing the amount of extremism that we're facing? All those questions are, the answers are unknown to most Americans and probably unknowable. So why care if all you ever here is people you don't know are getting rid of bad guys, so be happy. And we say, okay, good, thank you. You actually make it sound like 1984 when you talk that way. No, I mean it. Like Air Strip

One, which is what England is referred to as. Yeah. You know, there were just these periodic reports of changing enemies and victories, right? There's no real reports of failure. I mean, is that an apt comparison, or am I just being melodramatic? It's got apt elements to it. I don't think we're in a totalitarian state in this country yet by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think that there are some pretty disturbing pieces of U.S. policy, which have very Orwellian qualities, and it's an overused word, but there absolutely are. I do, you know, as an American citizen, I'm very troubled by the covert war, the mostly drone, mostly special operations. raid, war, and I'm troubled by that just because I don't think in a democracy you ought to have a secret conflict. I think that the drone war by most journalistic and NGO estimates has probably

killed four to five thousand people in at least five or six countries around the globe, in none of which we are actually at war in the traditional sense. These are countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. And I find it kind of disturbing to live in a country where, where our government is using our tax dollars to kill thousands of people in foreign countries where we're not at war, but is still formally not acknowledging it. I mean, the official answer of the U.S. government, when asked about all but a tiny fraction of the drone strikes that have made up that secret war has been we can neither confirm nor deny that any such activities occurred.

And that does bother me. And it bothers me that the legal framework that the government uses to justify those strikes remains classified, and it bothers me that the strikes themselves. We know so little about them. So can we go back to something that you mentioned earlier? It's kind of an area of fascination for me. You know, 1% of the population is fighting these battles. And, you know, as you said, they're isolated into camps that are not near major population centers. In your research, is there any sign of any disaffection between the military and the population of the United States? Is there any sort of hard or growing line between the two? Well, you know, I mean, on the one hand, I think, even though

I brought up that statistic a little while ago, I think in some ways its cultural impact and importance can be overstated. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that only 1% of the population serves. We don't need a larger percentage of the population to be in the military, and for most of American history, with the exception of major wars, temporary major wars, World War I, World War II, for most of U.S. history, the American military has been professional, all-volunteer, and quite small, and nobody thought it was a crisis. I think that the reason I'm concerned about it now is that we have only a very small segment of the population that knows anything about the military at a time when the role of the military has actually

been expanding dramatically, that's when you get a problem, you know, when you get a sort of imbalance between the strategic and national importance of the military's role and it's the size of the population that knows anything about it. What has happened since 9-11, and this is not saying anything everybody doesn't know, we've really turned support of the military into a kind of a civil religion. Everybody is to... discounts for the troops and uniform military personnel board airplanes before everybody else. And, you know, there are banners that say we support the troops and, you know, find an American who will not say I support the troops. There are not a lot of them. And at the same time, I think

that support, you know, it both, it can prevent people from asking questions they should ask about military budgets, about policies and so on, because nobody, nobody, nobody wants to be seen is not supporting the troops, and it's very easy for politicians to spin any critical question as, oh, why do you hate the military? And every goes, oh, sorry, sorry, forget I asked, you know, and that's a bad thing. I do think that there is a little bit, and I say this, and I'm married to an army officer just retired, so I've spent some time on those isolated bases. there is a little bit, I think, within the military community of a feeling that the widespread we love the troops, you know, please, how can we support you with a new discount at Home Depot?

There's a little bit of shallowness to that, obviously, and that there is a little bit of resentment within the military community of a sort of widespread cultural assumption that the, you know, the Home Depot discount and a lot of thank you for your service statements should make up for not having a clue what it is that we're asking members in the military to do. So I think there's a little bit of resentment of feeling like, stop thanking me for my service. I don't need a discount, but I would like you as a citizen. I would like you to care a little bit more about what's happening in the world and what you're asking me and members of my community and members of my family to do in your name.

And I'd certainly heard that it's often the military that's the most cautious on foreign policy. Yeah, I think there's truth to that. Military leaders tend to be very acutely aware of how costly it is to take military action. You know, the military, it's funny. It's really sort of fascinating in the last 20 years or so. The military has become really the only public institution that Americans trust and consider to be competent. You know, you look at these annual Gallup polls on confidence in public institutions, and, you know, nobody can stand Congress, only about 10% of Americans have any confidence in Congress.

You know, about 30% of Americans trust the presidency. I think the Supreme Court gets about 30 or 40% confidence ratings. But the military has been consistently over 70% for years and years now. And there's a little bit of a tendency even on the part of, you know, elite decision makers in the White House and on the Hill to sort of think, oh, the military is like magic, you know, it can do anything. just sort of point the military at a problem and say, military, go solve it, and it will get solved. And there's a tendency, therefore, to turn a little too often to the military as a foreign policy tool. The trouble is, of course, you know, you often do that without really

thinking about the costs. And I think we have seen a number of situations, including more recently discussions about military action or no-fly zones in Syria, where you've had civilian political leaders saying, we've got to do something, military, you've got to do something, and we've had senior military officials, you know, joint staff, chairman of the joint staff, other senior leaders saying, are you out of your mind, you know, you have any idea how hard that is, do you have any idea how dangerous that is, do you have any idea how costly that is, do you have any idea how risky it is in terms of getting drawn into a broadening conflict with no end in sight? You know, and it makes sense. And I think we, you know, that doesn't mean there,

might not be times that political, that political civilian leaders will say, well, you know, thank you, we heard you, but we need to do it. But, but I think it, it intuitively makes sense that the institution that will bear a lot of the costs will be pretty cautious. What do you think of the, are the consequences of all of this, kind of foreseen and unforeseen? Well, I think we have consequence, I guess I divide them into different categories. You know, one set of questions is just a strategic set of questions. And that's the questions about, are these counterterrorism, drone strikes, and so on,

are they making the world safer and more stable for Americans and for U.S. interests or not? And I think we don't know the answer to that, but it is certainly true. Is there less violent Islamic extremist terrorism today than there was 10 years ago? I think anyone would have to say, no, there's not less.

arguably there's more. So that doesn't necessarily mean that no individual strike has a strategic impact. Maybe some of them do or maybe together they do. But I certainly am fearful, and I think a lot of observers are similarly fearful that while tactically they're successful, you know, look, we got another bad guy, that the hole is less than the sum of the parts and maybe is even kind of self-destructive in the sense that, you know, when you kill a suspected terrorist by a drone strike or a special operations raid, you know, even if that's a very bad guy, you, and even if you don't end up accidentally killing civilians, it's pretty terrifying to the surrounding communities. You know, death comes out of the sky, nobody takes responsibility for it. And there's certainly

a fair amount of evidence that we are actually, you know, creating a gift to terrorist recruiters by doing this. So that's one issue I'm concerned about is just whether strategically we're actually doing something that's turning out to be self-destructive rather than helpful. But I also, you know, I worry about

it from a democratic accountability perspective, as I said. I worry also very much about the precedents we're setting internationally because here you have the globe's sole remaining superpower the United States and a

champion of democracy and the rule of law, saying essentially to the rest of the world, we get to be the ones who decide which individuals around the world need to be killed. And we can kill people anywhere. If their government consents and if their government doesn't consent, we can still use force in their territory if we feel unilaterally that they're not taking appropriate action to address a threat that we think exists. And we don't have to show you world the evidence that led us to evaluate the threat in the way we did. We don't have to show you the evidence that led us to decide that a particular individual had to be killed. And we don't even have to acknowledge to you when we go and kill somebody. We just get to do it. You know,

anywhere on earth and we get to keep it secret. And if you ask questions, we just say we can't confirm or deny and we need to protect sources and methods. And sorry, trust us. We'll never, we'll always do the right thing. And I do worry, that's a dangerous set of arguments to put out there because people like Vladimir Putin are only too happy to pick up such arguments and use them with a whole lot less scrupulousness than U.S. officials do. So I think we're essentially handing the world's dictators and human rights abusers a playbook to use to kill anybody anywhere anytime for any reason. You know, and I worked at the Pentagon for several years and many of these people are people I know. They do their best to make these decisions carefully and responsibly

and they're not doing it based on personal vendettas, and they're not doing it for partisan reasons or financial reasons. But I don't particularly trust that every state on earth is going to be that scrupulous. We've basically created a set of legal precedents and action precedents that are going to come back to bite us. When you're talking about Vladimir Putin or China or any other rising power, is this some sort of stick that they can beat the U.S. with, not just a matter of whether they can use similar tactics, but what kind of position

does it put the United States in when you're talking about a situation in Ukraine or some other flashpoint? Yeah, no, it really erodes our credibility and gets used against us. And in fact, your stick metaphor is one that Vladimir Putin himself is rather fond of, the always quotable Vladimir Putin in a few years back when, remember when Kosovo, you know, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. The United States and the European Union had long assured the Serbians and their Russian sponsors, don't worry, we're never going to support Kosovo independence. You know, we think there should be some obviously political autonomy for Kosovo within Serbia, but we respect Serbian sovereignty and Kosovo is part of Serbia and we will not

support, because we respect sovereignty, we will not support Kosovo's independence. And then when Kosovo went ahead and just declared. independents unilaterally, both the U.S. and the EU within a couple days, had said, okay, we recognize Kosovo now as a new independent state. And the Russians were furious, because this is obviously the Russians and Serbians have been very close for a very long time. Russians were absolutely furious. And Vladimir Putin said, and this is pretty close to an exact quote, I may not have every word, right, but he said something along the lines of you states, such as the United States that have recognized Kosovo's independence, you

are undermining 200 years of international law and international norms in terms of sovereignty here. And you need to understand that this is a two-ended stick and the other end will come back and hit you in the face. And a few years later in Ukraine and Crimea, exactly that happened. You know, the Russians turned our willingness to undermine sovereignty against us and said, hey, well, you know, you know there are times when sovereignty is not the only issue. Sorry about that. And we were left kind of fuming. At the very beginning of the book, you bring up another book that I thought was very interesting, and I wanted you to kind of explain to us and walk us through it a little bit. Unrestricted Warfare. What is that book, and do you think it was prescient?

Yeah, so Unrestricted Warfare is a little book. It's short. It's more like a pamphlet or an extended essay that was published in 1999, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while since I cited it, by two colonels in the Chinese People's Liberation Army. And they argued in this book, and this obviously comes out a few years before the 9-11 attacks, they argued that we were entering a world, we not just meaning China, not just meaning the U.S., but we meaning meaning everybody, all human, were entering a world in which the essential hardware elements of war, the weapons, soldiers, battlefields,

were all going to become irrelevant and changed beyond recognition. And what they meant by that was that we conceptualize war still in that sort of World War II paradigm. You know, we think of uniform soldiers fighting on a spatially bounded area, You know, there's a battlefield, there's the front, there's the rear, there are places that are at war, there are places that are neutral. We think you can tell the difference between soldiers and civilians because soldiers wear uniforms and so on.

And we know what a weapon is. It's a gun or a bow and arrow or a nuclear warhead for that matter. And they said, we're entering an era in which none of those things are going to be true. The soldiers may be financiers, they may be propagandists. The battlefield can be anywhere on the globe, and weapons may take the form of lines of computer code or bioengineered viruses. And what this is going to do, they predicted, was render all of the laws, all of the institutions, all morality that has been developed to tame and contain war. It's going to blow it up because we won't be able to figure out how to apply our laws. and we're going to enter a world in which they said, their term, at least the English translation,

most commonly used of their term, is unrestricted warfare, that will enter a world in which there are no spatial boundaries, no temporal boundaries, and no moral or legal boundaries around war. And I think it's a very frightening image, and they were oppressive in all kinds of ways. I think when the book came out before 9-11, nobody paid very much attention. You know, there were a few China watchers in the intelligence community in the military who said, oh, this is interesting. You know, here's an interesting perspective on what some Chinese military thinkers are talking about, but who cares? It was only after 9-11 that I think a lot of people picked that little pamphlet up again and said,

you know, they saw more clearly a future. They were less in denial about a future that the U.S. is only just beginning to fully recognize and grapple with. That sounds an awful lot like hybrid war as it's being used right now. The United States and others have accused Russia of committing that sort of hybrid war. It's economic, it's hacking, it's propaganda. Do you think that this is an example of what the Chinese strategists were talking about? They were talking about a sort of deeper and more metaphysical challenge to our frameworks. I mean, in some ways, hybrid war, in that term gets tossed around.

and used pretty sloppily. In some ways, hybrid war is just a way of saying that warring parties will do whatever they have to do when they get desperate. They will try to use propaganda. They'll try to use economic techniques. And in some level, obviously, there's nothing new about any of that.

I think they were saying something that goes a little deeper in the sense that they were not just saying parties in conflict will be creative and won't simply stick to strictly military operations, that they will find other ways to try to compete with one another and confuse each other and so forth. They were actually saying we're entering an era in which, for technological reasons, there will no longer be any meaning to the statement military operations. There will no longer be any meaning to the statement, you know, I know what a soldier is, I know what a weapon is. So something that goes a little,

bit beyond, yeah, people are going to kind of mix it up in various ways to the mix is the new normal. The exceptions will swallow the norm. And there will be no such thing that we can clearly categorize as war or a battlefield or a soldier or a weapon anymore. And I think what we see with the Russians, what we've seen in Ukraine, for instance, is it's certainly moving in that direction in all kinds of ways, but what they're foreseeing, I think, goes even beyond that. All right, Rose, I've got one more question for you to follow up on that. I'm the kind of guy that thinks that the only way out usually is through. And looking at this new era of unrestricted warfare, does it then kind of become incumbent on

us to actively think about new laws and maybe even a new morality to frame this kind of of stuff and kind of keep it in check? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know that we need a new morality, but I do think that we are, we sort of have inherited this particular legal system that is very dependent on a particular set of categories, you know, state, non-state, foreign domestic, civilian combatant, you know, armed conflict, crime. And those categories, I think we, what I think mostly our problem right now is that we sort of fall into the trap of thinking of these categories as somehow sacred and eternal.

And if things don't fit neatly into them, we just jam them in. You know, we feel like we've got to jam them in rather than saying, hey, maybe these categories just don't make that much sense anymore. And we need to think of some new categories. And we need to think of what are the rules rather than saying, gee, you know, terrorism doesn't fit that well into the war category or the crime category. Let's just jam it into the war category and apply war rules that we do better to think of, you know, okay, yeah, terrorism doesn't fit that well.

It's kind of like war and it's kind of like crime. How can we figure out what rules, it makes sense to apply, what rules both recognize that the security threat is a real one, it's not an imaginary one, and yet also are consistent with the values that we care about, with democratic accountability, with due process, and so forth. So I don't, it's not so much that you have to reinvent all of human morality, but rather do a common sense effort of saying, you know, we do have moral instincts. We have moral instincts. We have deeply held beliefs about the rule, of law about rights and so forth. And yet we have these rather rigid legal categories that we're shoehorning everything into, which is leading to a situation where we're often not applying our basic morality in ways that make sense anymore. We're ending up with results that don't make any sense. So let's take our moral instincts and let's take the security imperatives and let's come up with a legal and institutional framework that we think makes sense and is consistent with our

values for those in-between situations of which there are going to be more and more and more. We humans have repeatedly reinvented rules and institutions when circumstances have changed, and the most recent, you know, big upheaval was post-World War II. You know, it's within living memory. And yet we strangely have somehow convinced ourselves that, you know, oh, no, no, you can't possibly do that. But we've done it before. No reason we can't do it again.

It is interesting, though. Chemical warfare and biological warfare, to some extent, are considered beyond the pale. But it is acceptable still to shell cities where there are civilians. And somehow morality is always selectively employed in warfare, right? Yeah, well, we change our views on what's considered acceptable and what's not. I mean, during World War II, we considered it acceptable to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima Nagasaki and, you know, firebomb cities like Tokyo and Dresden. And today, I think most military lawyers and most courts, international and U.S.,

would say those would be war crimes today. If somebody did them today, they would be war crimes. And they would be war crimes in part because we no longer believe it's acceptable to employ weapons that are so indiscriminate and that kill so many civilians. We'd say that those civilian deaths were out of proportion to the military objectives. but we also would say that because our technologies now allow us to differentiate between targets much more effectively than was the case during the 1940s. So our technologies have sort of enabled us to have a more demanding form of morality

and a more demanding form of legal rules than we had at the time. So yes, states are always self-interested, but I also think that people's conceptions of right and wrong do change and evolve and technological changes. have something to do with that. You know, the fact that we can now target individuals is clearly better to target one bad guy and kill one bad guy when he's all alone, driving through the desert, than it is to drop bombs that kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of people. And it's good that we have the technology to do that. On the other hand, I think that there is something that, in going back to George Orwell, it's a little creepy to think that a state,

can target one specific individual for death, thousands of miles away, without acknowledging it, you know, based on secret evidence. That's a little creepy, more than a little creepy, right? And it calls for a different set of rules, you know, that we always say things like when people say, well, shouldn't there be some kind of judicial review of these drone strikes, somebody always says, oh, that's ridiculous. You know, you can't have courts on the battlefield. Everybody knows that. And of course, that's true. if the battlefield is the beaches on D-Day, you can't have a court deciding whether it's okay to shoot at that German machine gun nest at the top of the hill. It would be crazy. You know, things are too chaotic. You don't have enough time. Everything is too confusing. On the other hand, you know, if the battlefield is anywhere on Earth, that means the stakes are very, very high. And if the person you're going to target is someone who you have been monitoring and tracking for weeks or months or even years and you know the name of their wife and where they went to high school, school and what they like to put in their tea on Thursdays at which cafe, there's absolutely no reason

you can't involve some sort of judicial or quasi-judicial process in evaluating the evidence beforehand. You've got plenty of time. You've got all the time in the world to do it. The tactical window in which the strike may open up suddenly, but that doesn't mean that you haven't had months or years to prepare for it to open up and to have whatever level of due process you've decided as appropriate. So, you know, the individualization is a good thing if we are willing to adapt our rules to make it consistent with our norms about due process. Rosa Brooks, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a fascinating conversation. Yes, thank you.

Thank you both. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it and you're not a subscriber, we'd love it if you became one. We'll fill your favorite podcatcher with gloom and doom. information every week. We'd also love it if you take a second to rate the show or write a review on iTunes. It's one of the best ways to help new people find it. You can reach out to us directly. We're on Twitter. We are at war underscore college. You can tell us what you think about particular episodes. You can also suggest new episodes that you want to hear. War College was created by me,

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