Angry Planet - Tracking America’s ‘shadow wars’

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

Right now, America is fighting a war in Afghanistan – the longest in its history – a war against the Islamic State in the Middle East, a war against Islamic radicals in Pakistan, several different operations in and around the Horn of Africa and – if you ask the Houthi rebels – a war in Yemen. That’s a short list. Today on War College, we sit down with freelance journalist and independent researcher Joseph Trevithick, who has spent the better part of the last year compiling a list of all the military operations America is fighting overseas. He uses the Freedom of Information Act and a spreadsheet to keep everything straight. As of this recording, his list of American military operations is up to 190. The nature of these conflicts is often small-scale and powered by special operations forces and drones. Trevithick says most of these operations aren’t secret, it’s just that they’re complicated and often, through legal loopholes, avoid Congressional oversight.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. For many years, there was an ongoing counterterrorism effort in the Philippines, for instance, that was very unpublicized. It was not secret, but it wasn't often talked about. And it was part of the global war on terror,

but it was seen as one of these shadowy conflicts detached from what we sort of thought of as that war. America's shadow wars, they may not be widely publicized, but they're happening. Today, comparing how the Pentagon talks about these far-flung conflicts to what Freedom of Information Act documents tell us. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is independent researcher and journalist Joseph Trevethic. Joe's work has appeared in Wars Boring. We are Mighty Reuters and Air Force Magazine. He's here to talk to us today about an aspect of the American military we don't often talk about or hear about. It's shadow wars. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. All right, so Joe, I want to define some terms first. What exactly do we mean when we say shadow war? This term is commonly used to describe wars that people sort of feel are secret. You know, it's often synonymous with people talking about America's secret wars. And, you know, the idea of a war in the shadow away from large conflicts that are readily acknowledged by the Pentagon. People have even described what's going on currently in Iraq and Syria as another new

shadow war. I personally do my best to stay away from these terms to try and keep a focus on what is actually secret and what is more unpublicized than really covert or otherwise kept away from the public's prying eyes. So we're talking about combat operations and special forces operations. America isn't operating in the Horn of Africa in the Middle East. That's correct? Predominantly, though, I mean, this extends sometimes to operations still in Latin America or in Asia as well.

For many years, there was an ongoing counterterrorism effort in the Philippines, for instance, that was very unpublicized. It was not secret, but it wasn't often talked about, and it was part of the global. war on terror, but it was seen as one of these shadowy conflicts detached from what we sort of thought of as that war. What are some of the regions America is conducting operations and that people may be surprised to learn about? I think you could find that American troops are conducting some level of operation, whether it's a war or training exercises or working with local forces and, you know, friends and allies doing a variety of different tasks or otherwise just coordinating with those groups in case there is a crisis. Then that's happening everywhere but

Antarctica. You know, the North and South Poles are basically the only place where American troops are not actively conducting some level of military operation. And I think a lot of people would be surprised to find that the military actually does talk a certain amount about a lot of these things and a lot of these activities. And a lot of them aren't wars and a lot of them aren't combat.

But a lot of them are combat and a lot of them involve combat. A lot of them involve something sort of in between that's halfway between actively being in combat and supporting local forces that are in combat. And these terms really, it's very hard to define what a war is at this point, and it's very hard sometimes to define legally anyways what combat is,

though the definitions of all of these things may seem pretty clear cut to any reasonable individual looking at what America is doing. Because remember, you know, the American forces are not necessarily on a combat mission in Iraq. You know, the Pentagon goes back and forth on that. American forces are not necessarily in a combat mission in Central Africa, supporting African Union troops hunting for the Lord's Resistance Army. America is not necessarily on a combat mission doing counter-narcotics work across Central and South America. But they are there, and they're carrying guns, and they're out with troops and police who are fighting, and, you know, they can often be very close to the those people. And so it's a, it is a, it can be a gray area. It can be shadowy. But often the Pentagon is happy to talk about being proactive in helping out America's friends and allies and

advancing America's interests, which is the military's goal. All right, let's drill into some specific operations first. Then I want to circle back around to the broader topic of why we don't talk about this stuff so much. But first, let's look at Yemen. Is America at war there and If so, what are the operations like? I think by any reasonable definition of the term, America is engaged in a war in Yemen. You know, there are a lot of euphemisms for this, and they are legally relevant. I mean, you know, war is a legal term in addition to being a term in common usage. But the United States is routinely flying over Yemen, spying on various militant groups.

It is launching manned and unmanned aircraft to attack members of those groups. It is conducting security cooperation, whatever would be considered security cooperation with members of the Saudi-led coalition to varying extent. While it is paired back, the Pentagon is paired back at support for Saudi Arabia, specifically, it is still working very closely with the United Arab Emirates, and they're both cooperating to fight specifically al-Qaeda's franchise in Yemen. This is often one of the reasons why things get so convoluted is because who and what America and its partners are doing in any country can be complex and varied. And so, for instance, you have a set of operational names,

that get tossed around sometimes. And these nicknames, which are by definition unclassified, are arbitrary to an extent. But they refer to very specific campaigns. And in Yemen, there are two, at least that we know of right now. And one is called Operation Copper Dune. And one is called Operation Yukon Viking. Copper Dune has been linked to this overarching counter-duneration. terrorism campaign against al-Qaeda in the in the arabian peninsula which is al-Qaeda's

faction in the region and that has involved manned and unmanned drone strikes and either as a subset of that or as a separate action targeting different groups you have yukon viking which also involves drone surveillance and possibly drone strikes in yemen and exactly how those two things are related is not clear, but both of these things have been acknowledged to exist both in public statements and in information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by myself and by other journalists. So this information is out there. It is publicly available. It is official. It's not, you know, it's not a leak. It's not some person who is speaking on the condition of Anonymity who is talking about this.

These are, you know, contained in official statements from the military saying, we're doing these things. This is what they involve. And, you know, combined with leaks like the cablegate leaks that appeared on WikiLeaks many years ago now, and there are ways to corroborate these things. But there are a certain number of official statements as well. Okay. So the Pentagon would tell you, and I believe they have told you that they are not supporting the Saudi fight against the Houdi rebels in Yemen. Yes. And what that means, of course, is that they are not

actively fighting that rebel organization. The United States continues to refuel Saudi and other coalition aircraft who are attacking that group and had for a period also been supplying intelligence information to the Saudis to help with their targeting. That has since been pared down Now that gets into a certain amount of unofficial statements and off the record statements and such things about whether that was due to the fact that the Saudis weren't really paying attention and weren't doing a very good job of trying to avoid civilian casualties. And the United States decided that if they basically their people weren't going to be listened to, that there was no reason for them to be in the Saudi Command Center if they were sort of just there for show. So there, again, there is a, some of it's secret, some of it's unacknowledged, some of it is, you know, the Pentagon has been very happy to tell reporters exactly how many pounds of fuel they've pumped into Saudi aircraft, you know, with regular updates. You could, you could easily call the Pentagon and they would, they would have those numbers when we called last year. And last year it was already thousands of pounds of fuel pumped into Saudi planes. And so, you know, it's interesting. what they say they can't tell you and what they can tell you. And sometimes it's about

finding the right questions and sometimes it's hard to know what those questions are. Do we have any sense of how the rebels feel? Do they see America as a combatant? The rebels definitely feel that America is a combatant. I mean, and they would be hard-pressed to find reasonable people who would disagree that Saudi pilots flying American-made planes, dropping American-made bombs relying on American-supplied fuel was not an indication of an active American hand in attacks on them. It seems, that seems like a reasonable, one would say that it doesn't really matter what the pilot's driver's license says at that point. Again, the Pentagon would say they're hunting al-Qaeda in Yemen. That is the Pentagon's stated goal in Yemen is the neutralization of

al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Do we know if the rebels have any connection with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? They have actually come to blows with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And they are a sect.

You know, the Houthis are a predominantly Shia group. And al-Qaeda is a predominantly Sunni, Wahivist Sunni group. And they just, generally do not see eye to eye on many things. And they have already come to blows over these

issues as they both have vied for control in opposition to the Yemeni government, which is now split between the Saudis and, you know, the Saudi coalition and the Houthis. Factions within the Yemeni government have more or less split and picked sides and are currently engaged in fighting one another over control of this country. It's quite complicated. I wouldn't pretend to be able to get into it all here. A lot of people much more intelligent on the subject have written very good explainers on the various factions. But you can see how when America is fighting in a place like that, whatever stated goals may be, may not be what is, you know, it may be hard to hold to those goals. We talk about how complicated this stuff is and the different factions. Do you think that's why

it's not on the news and politicians don't like to talk about it because it's not simple and it's just really easy to ignore? I'm not sure if it's necessarily easier to ignore, but it's definitely harder to get into. When you talk about fighting in Afghanistan, for instance, which is rapidly becoming a shadow war of itself simply because it's completely faded from the popular view after more than, you know, now more than 15 years of fighting in Afghanistan, you can sum that up with some degree of accuracy by saying we are fighting these specific groups. They were linked to attacks on America. That makes sense.

Less clear, but at least clear cut in terms of who the opponent was, you could say that about Iraq. We are fighting the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime. and terrorists who have allied themselves with them or al-Qaeda terrorists who has sprung up in this country. It's very clear cut, you know, at least in terms of what you would need for a soundbite. When you get into conflicts in Yemen, for instance, or in the Philippines, or in central or northwest Africa, the lines start getting very blurry. And then it becomes a matter of what are American forces trying to do? What are American partners trying to do?

And it starts getting to a point where you can't even sum up, you know, beyond saying it's a counterterrorism operation. People get sort of tired of hearing that. It's like, oh, it's a counterterrorism operation. What does that mean? Who are these terrorists? You know, are they actually a threat? And maybe they are, maybe they're not. But it does get more complicated.

And so if you have a 24-hour news cycle and you need to get through these topics really quickly, you can't spend an hour explaining to people the last 50 years of conflicts in a country to explain why these two or three groups have decided to form a shaky alliance to fight a central government that the United States kind of maybe sort of supports today. All right, let's change the gears a bit and talk about Africa more specifically. What kind of operations are American forces conducting in Africa and tell us what exactly is Operation Junction Serpent? So Libya, Junction Serpent is related to Libya, this operation called Junction Serpent, much of which remains unknown at this time. Myself and I know other journalists are trying to get more information about this, but it's been difficult to create a use of time line. In August 2016, the United States

started bombing specifically Islamic States faction in Libya. Islamic State in Libya. And they said that this operation that they were conducting was directly focused on attacking those people

in cooperation with the government of National Accord, which is the internationally recognized UN-backed government in the internationally recognized capital of Tripling. That bombing campaign was dubbed Operation Odyssey Lightning. But when they announced this to the public, a number of select outlets got additional operational names as part of a description of how they had set up the intelligence information, basically, how did you wake up one morning and actually know what targets to hit? And they said that this intelligence gathering had been, in one case, part of an operation called

Junction Serpent. And they had said that that was, in fact, the second of three stages, with Odyssey Lightning being the last, the actual bombing campaign. But we, at war is boring, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, knew that Operation Junction serpent had been going on at least since 2014. Because again, these operational names are unclassified. So you can get them through the Freedom Information Act. You might not be able to get any information about what they are, but you can get the names. And so we knew that by 2014, that was a thing that was happening.

We have other records that corroborate that, again, official records that we've obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. I just want to jump in here, Joe, and make sure that people understand that what you're alluding to is, well, America was already operating in Libya before they told everyone they were operating in Libya. Right. Okay. And not, so, so, yes, it's important to recognize that what all this is setting up for is a comment about how the United States said it was launching a new mission in Libya specifically related to one group. And it had, however, been making use of surveillance, you know, either spy plan,

or some other kind of intelligence gathering effort that had been long in place over Libya that predated the existence even of the government of national accord, which was the entity that America was supposed to be supporting and working entirely with for this operation. So you had a situation, this convoluted morass of things in which the Pentagon had publicly stated that it was doing basically bombing targets in a country with the support of that government. But it had been, but all of those bombings had been based on intelligence gathered in part well before them as part of a completely separate thing, which would have been focused on fighting either al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is al-Qaeda's local faction in Libya,

or any of a host of militia groups that have cropped up since Omar Gaddafi was ousted way back when now. And so you have this whole thing of can one operation suddenly become another operation? When does one operation begin and end? Can you just wake up one morning

and decide that you've been fighting one group of people all along and now you don't really need to fight those people or you can twist the mandate? It becomes very confusing about what authority the U.S. government

is working under in many of these cases. And again, so if you, you know, to go back to why no one talks about this, you would have to have legal experts go down the line of how the United States is basically conjuring up this legal authority in many cases to conduct these missions and how it's using various understandings of predominantly this so-called authorization for the use of military force. that Congress approved in 2001 to fight anyone and anyone associated with those people who may in some way be tied to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. And the United States government over the last 15 years has basically said that that that designation can be applied many, many ways, by association many ways.

that basically if you're associated with a group that's associated with a group that's associated with Al-Qaeda, this legal justification for attacking you applies. And that it doesn't need to go to Congress to get new authority to go and engage in these military operations. And so, you know, if you had five minutes to talk to an expert on CNN, they're not going to be able to get into that. They're going to be able to tell you whether they agree with that justification or not. they're not going to be able to get into the nuances of how that was done. And so you start not wanting to talk about all of these weird convoluted military operations. I mean, you know, we were bombing Libya every day between August 1st and more or less the middle of December. I forget exactly when it, when the operation officially ended.

But, you know, there were some breaks in there and it petered off at the end. But pretty much daily, and you never heard about that. I mean, bombing, bombing targets every day, bombing multiple targets every day, sometimes bombing two dozen targets in a day. You never heard about it. It just completely, it was, it was not deemed to be important enough. And this, you know, this was a named military operation against Islamic State, you know, a big-named terrorist group.

And it just was not, it was not, it was not suit. for mass consumption perhaps. But again, not done in secret. You know, not a, you know, a shadowy war maybe, but shadowy because it's sort of underpublicized because it was confusing and it didn't make a lot of sense and people sort of wondered how it had happened in the first place. And it kept sort of stutter starting and various troops

kept coming into the area and leaving the area. And there was a question about whether there was anybody actually on the ground in Libya or not or whether everybody was just the Marines off the shore. and then all of these things. And it just got so complicated. And, you know, most people just don't have time to sit and try and put all that together. You know, you don't, you know, people will complain. It's like, I need a, you know, I need a PhD to put all this together.

And, you know, newsrooms, you know, mass, mass market newsrooms don't have time for that. I think it's important to note that the budget for these operations is different than the normal Pentagon budget. Yeah. The number isn't always included. in the normal budget discussions because these operations are technically part of something else called the overseas contingency budget. And there, this is, when you get into how any of this gets paid for, you are starting, you know, you've, you've gone beyond this, beyond this legal morass and this morassive names. So, okay, so you think about it this way. You have a, you have this rabbit hole, so to speak, of operational nicknames and trying to figure out what, what bombing campaign or, you know, drone strike or what have you as part of X operation? Because then you can start to try and figure out the next thing of what authority that folds into.

And you have an Excel spreadsheet that keeps track of all of this, right? How many operations? Sort of. I long ago realized that I was never going to be able to mentally maintain. all of the operational nicknames and so I started collecting them. My table is not complete by any stretch of the imagination and it spans about probably about 30 years or so. You know, definitely extremely difficult to figure out when things start and end. But it's got it's got a it's got 190 entries in it basically and I keep

adding more and more as I become aware of them. And then, suddenly you know the questions to ask. Like I said, you know, it can be often the first step is just knowing what questions to ask. And then tangential to those issues about the legal authority to engage in a war, which goes into this discussion of what is a secret war and what is not, is how do you pay for this? You're right. There are two, there are two basically.

two defense budgets. When people talk about the defense budget, they're actually often talking about what are actually two defense budgets. There is the baseline budget, the so-called baseline budget, which is all the stuff the Pentagon has to do in a year. And it's paying people. It's housing them and feeding them. It's this operations and maintenance money, so to speak. And then it's buying weapons and researching weapons and training people and doing a lot of regularly scheduled foreign interaction, you know, going and training with NATO allies or whatever. I mean, these things are annual. And so they're included in the base defense budget.

And there is a certain portion of that budget, which is also set aside every year for supporting foreign allies and crisis. And there's a, there's a, there's a pot of money there in one in the base budget, in parts of the base budget. Often it's, it's already allotted out in the, in the future. It's approved, but it's already been sort of offered away through foreign military aid projects or foreign military construction. You know, we build buildings in foreign countries and stuff like this. And then you have a whole separate defense budget, which is, broadly known as the supplemental. It was known as the supplemental budget for many years.

And now it's become, you know, then it got nicknamed the Global War on Terrorism budget because that was what it became predominantly used for after 9-11. And after we stopped officially calling things the global war on terrorism, it became the overseas contingency operations budget, which is what we're calling the Global War on Terrorism officially now. And so this OCO supplemental budget, is full of all of these short-term things, and it's got even more money to support our, you know, our allies and partners fighting terrorism. It's got all the money to prop up the Afghan national

security forces. It's got the money to, you know, support America's ongoing military operations. And some of that is, you know, some, like I said, some of that includes these, these small, smaller shadowy wars, and some of it doesn't, because some of that's included in training money technically, or it's included in this foreign military aid money, which is longstanding, and there's a pot of money that you can dip into. And so some of it is, and some of it isn't. And if you had to explain that to most people who don't have time to learn how to read the defense budget, I know you, Matt Gault, have spent time reading defense budgets, and

And so I'm sure you are very well aware of how difficult it is to read that language. It is not English. It is written in the Roman alphabet using English words, but it is not English. And it takes a certain amount of time and energy to get to a point where you can read that. And I have no doubt that in part the Pentagon relies very heavily on the fact that most people will not take the time to read the defense. Just to give people a working idea of the numbers that we're talking about, and I'm going to call these averages, the budget is around $600 billion every year. Sometimes it's a little bit more, sometimes it's a little bit less, but for the past few years it's been around $600 billion. And the OCO, which again is separate from that, which is calculated separately, is $60 billion.

So an extra 10% of the base defense budget that people don't talk about when they talk about the budget. It's this other pot that the Pentagon uses to pay for these operations. And remember, this also doesn't include the intelligence community budget, which was long classified, thanks to the Federation of American Sciences and other groups who fought with the intelligence community over this. the intelligence community now releases the intelligence baseline number every year. And so that's another, it's less than the OCO budget. It's in the tens of billions. And it also doesn't include the money that is in the State Department budget,

which is even smaller than that, which also the State Department has its own authority to ship weapons and support to America's friends and allies. And so that is also not included in the defense budget. And you will not see State Department operations assisting local military and police, which is a thing they can do, usually with the help of private contractors. For instance, the State Department has an air wing with more than 100 fixed wing aircraft and helicopters that operate on three continents. And they also fly armed helicopters in places like Latin America to go, you know, hustle drug runners and things like that with, you know, in cooperation with local police and military. And so that, you know, those budget, you know, the defense budget doesn't include that money or those operations either.

So there are, there are so many line items in the overall U.S. government budget that go to defense and security. You know, that it becomes very difficult. You know, many people have tried and many people then become confused as to what they're looking at. You know, the intercept has tried very valiantly to pick apart the different programs and budget line items and special pots that keep being created in the budget to send weapons and assistance to people. And it's hard and it's confusing. and it involves so many different people working for so many different people. And the weirdness of where terrorism ends and where crime starts or where terrorism ends and drug running starts is very vague in many cases. And so the Pentagon's counter drug money sometimes gets used for what normally be considered counterterrorism or vice versa.

And it's, you know, it's starting to get very clear. why it's hard to talk about what the U.S. military and what U.S. person, you know, government personnel broadly are doing overseas when it comes to fighting or supporting people who are fighting. All right, Joe, I've got one more question for you. We've got a new, new administration coming in. President-elect Donald Trump has made a lot of big promises about the military in changing the way America fights.

Do you have any clear sense that any of this will turn? change, or do you think that he's just going to be inheriting a bureaucracy that's kind of going to, you know, continue operating as it is? From his public statements, you know, never is a long time, so I won't say never, but from his public statements, Donald Trump has expressed a certain lack of interest, I'd say, in understanding the deep inner workings of government and has clearly sought to surround himself with what he would refer to as the best people and people who, you know, understand these things. Those people from what we've seen so far, his Secretary of Defense pick, retired General James Maddoz,

and his national security advisor, retired general Michael Flynn, they're not looking to roll back security cooperation. And they're not looking back to roll back America's fight of terrorists wherever they might be. So if they are truly guiding policy, then it is unlikely that we will see a reduction in these kind of limited engagements. And we've also seen Trump indicate, you know, that he might be interested in larger military engagements if it seems useful to his view of American interests. Again, it's very unclear what his true policy goals are. But he's made a number of statements that are especially tough on defense kind of thing. He tough on international actors and talking about not letting North Korea develop a nuclear

intercontinental ballistic missile and other things like this. So it doesn't look right now like there's going to be any scaling back of the places where America is, fighting or doing something very close to fighting. Joseph Trevithick, thank you so much for joining us and walking us through a very complicated topic. I'm sure I've just succeeded in confusing more people, but I would at least hope that people are a bit more interested in digging into this now and are willing to keep their ears open for the latest news of these little shadowy wars all around the world.

Thank you for listening. to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedek. It's hosted by Matthew Galt and produced by me, Bethel Hoppe. If you enjoy War College, please subscribe to us on iTunes and leave us a rating and review there. It very much helps other people find the show. And tell a friend about us. Leave us ideas for future shows and any feedback you have on our Twitter page. We are at War underscore College. Till next week. I hope folks don't mind if I close out this week's show with a personal note.

I'm leaving Reuters to join the U.S. Holocaust Museum. War College will continue with Matthew Galt at the helm. I've loved doing this show, and I'll stay on as a committed listener. If you're interested in finding out what happens to me next, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Jason Q. Fields. All that's left is for me to thank Craig Hedick for. developing the show with me, Matt Galt for making it work, and Bethel-Hobtee for making it better every week. And to everyone who's listening to me say these words, I want to thank you, too.