On Violence

As soon as we started rolling on my second convoy in Afghanistan, the sergeant in the front seat turned around and told me that though they weren’t supposed to, they listened to music in their truck. As he put Aerosmith through iPod speakers, I thought, “Not bad music to be listening to if we get into contact.”    

Soldiers listen to music. Soldiers are people, people listen to music; a war zone doesn’t change that. It is the life blood of our emotions. From hip-hop to heavy metal to any sort of rock, music makes sense in the war zone, to prepare your mind and steel your nerve. And with technology such as it is, the modern American soldier has more music at his finger tips and in the little white ear buds of his iPod than ever before. Yes, it isn’t standard operating procedure (SOP) but it is a core of the daily soldier’s life.

There is something about this, though, some gut impulse that listening to music in war feels wrong, impolite, or obscene. It violates some vague notion of justice for soldiers to simultaneously jam to tunes while executing violence, often on a personal level. The music trivializes the battle. The most mainstream example of this condemnation is a scene from Farenheit 9/11 as soldiers shoot Iraqis, while pump rock music plays. Or the videos soldiers create of blowing things up or combat, set to heavy metal soundtracks. Or Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kilgore storming a beach to Wagner. Society, it seems, wishes our soldiers took to combat with solemnity, and less like a video game.

Ironically, soldiers express similar dismay about war music when it comes from the opposite side. The Taliban listens to music over the radio right before they launch an attack and now many units monitor different frequencies on ICOM radios to know if attacks are imminent. What I remark on here, though is that U.S. soldiers take offense to the music, as if it personally offends them that they would listen to music during or before an attack. Perhaps it is a conditioned response, or perhaps it is because they hate everything about their enemies.

The irony is, it is all the same. Music and war have been together from the dawn of time. Caesar used drums before a battle, civil war draftees marched to flutes. Music causes punk kids to mosh, suicide bombers to attack, and it keeps the guy in the turret sane while he goes on another patrol.

Perhaps, if the music promotes wanton violence, it has gone too far. More likely music isn’t a value opinion either way; it is just another fact of war, and life.

Flipping through the Foreign Affairs for March/April 2009, I couldn’t help noticing that the articles, on the whole, reflect the globalization/interconnectedness of our modern world. In addition to the standard articles on the military, diplomacy and politics, there were articles on climatology, religion and culture, and technology.

Two trends have combined to create this new study of foreign affairs. First, academia has expanded its approach to cover more topics using a more sophisticated analysis. The rise of computers have given researchers access to more numbers, statistics and data than ever before, and the increase in computing power and technology allows researchers to manipulate this data in new, unexpected ways. Take this (possibly inaccurate) example of data analysis of casualties form the Iraq war.

This computing power enables researchers to look beyond the traditional position papers, memoirs, and memorandum that defined foreign affairs in the past but the rise of the internet has also expanded researchers access to these materials, thousands of files and papers available at your finger tips. Just look at the recent Twitter revolutions.

Complimenting the digital revolution of accademia was the social revolution in academia in the 1960s, which changed the focus off the single individual (White Men) to societal issues. By the eighties, they looked at the identity, or the group (Black studies, chicano studies or women’s studies). Now we have holistic approaches, (Environmental studies or global studies). As universities have expanded their scope foreign affairs and political science academics and theoreticians have more resources and fellow disciplines with whom to share ideas, finding new solutions to new problems.

Globalization, like it or lump it, is no longer a theory but a reality. The changes in technology, intermeshing of financial markets, and movement of people and goods now influence the policies of every nation. American or Chinese car emissions effect the Island nations of the pacific, East African hackers scam American seniors. This new academic focus is the only way to address these changes.

The only thing left to conclude is whether or not I see this change as good or bad. As far as globalization goes, I haven’t made a decision. As for a more expansive study of foreign affairs, I am clearly a huge fan; it moved from studying the Great White Men to the cultural and social forces affecting humanity. If we are to understand the forces affecting change in our world, contemporary students of foreign affairs must study the interrelated fields of economics, military affairs, globalization, social science and culture.

(Today, I continue my study in defining contemporary war.- I caution that my approach is in no way exhaustive; I will likely leave out many terms and give all the terms much too short of a discussion. Without putting too much thought into it, I have divided up the terms into three parts: terms I dislike, terms I like, and the one phrase that I believe captures the feeling of contemporary war.)

This week, I start with terms I dislike. The terms I dislike fall into two categories: those that I feel mischaracterize current conflict and those that are synonymous but negative in origin.

In the eighties and nineties, the military differentiated war into two categories: Low Intensity Conflict and High Intensity Conflict. These provide two easy acronyms (HIC and LIC) and the ability for maneuver forces to ignore LIC as being for Special Forces, CA, and other military branches. Unfortunately, as the example of Iraq, Vietnam or Somalia can attest, war is very rarely delineated into HIC or LIC. Usually, the stages merge together as fighting in LIC conflicts can feel extremely intense. Particularly, if one gauges the intensity from the point of view of the local population, it is hard to call an insurgency “low intensity.” Therefore, I do not prefer that term.

In addition to their intensity, the military community also tends to refer to contemporary wars by their perceived size or length. The term Small Wars has been around since the late nineteenth century, and has been used extensively by the British and is the name of a Marine Corps manual from the 1930s. One of the most popular military blogs and online forums uses this term and it basically refers to the small brushfire wars the Colonial powers waged since the late nineteenth century (think the Philippines, the Malayan Conflict, and the French in Algieria).  Again, I think calling the insurgencies in Afghanistan or Iraq small horribly miscalculates their impact on American foreign policy or their cost to our economy. Also, no war feels small for the country on whose soil it is being waged.

I am not sure how long the term has been around, but some contemporary blogs refer to our current fight as the Long War. The problem with defining current warfare as either long or short is that it gets confused with the struggle against extremist terrorist groups and our counter-insurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. I agree with other theorists who caution against lumping Al Qaida extremists and all other terrorists together in the term "terrorism." Also, by labeling terrorism a war we risk limiting ourselves to only a single solution, the military.

Asymmetric war gained cogency in the early days of the Iraq conflict as a way to define the tactics of the enemy compared to our overwhelming technological advantage. Basically, asymmetric warfare is the acknowledgement of the huge technological advantage of the US military and the adoption of guerilla or terrorist methods to fight against the US. This terminology gives a very big power versus small power view of contemporary warfare. This view of warfare ignores states where the ruling party has only a minimal technological or political advantage over its opponents. Asymmetric warfare also emphasizes the technological nature of warfare, a bias all to evident in the American way of warfare. While I don't have enough room to prove on this post, in the long run, I would argue that when America's wartime leaders emphasize technology over people we lose.

The final two terms are probably the most common when discussing guerilla warfare, insurgencies and their ilk. They are unconventional, which describes conventional as major units lining up to fight and unconventional as everything else, and irregular, which describes regular as state on state warfare and irregular as everything else. One term primarily discuss the means of fighting and the other who decides to wage it. In fact, the American military waged irregular conflict in its origin during the American revolution and continued to do so until modern times. The British fought unconventionally throughout their history, possibly more than they fought conventionally. Since 1960, the American army has fought irregularly and unconventionally in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and currently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its only conventional fights were during Panama and the first Gulf War. Therefore, using negative terms (unconventional and irregular) to describe contemporary warfare would seem to ignore the surprising frequency in warfare and because of this these are terms I do not like.

Even though I disagree with these terms in principle, I cannot say that they won't pop up on our blog from time to time. However, in the long run all the terms I discussed today limit our military in terms of viewpoint and creativity in fighting future wars.

In the last week, I’ve read four books on war and dozens of articles from the New Yorker, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. Since starting this blog, I’ve spent hours reading both pro-war and anti-war blogs, FP and IR and Military Affairs websites while listening to NPR and the PBS’ NewsHour. Since I moved to Italy, I’ve talked to Soldiers and Officers, some liberal, some conservative, some pro-war, some anti-war.
    
Despite this research, this week a friend told me I couldn’t understand war because I’ve never been there. He was half correct; I don’t understand war. Despite all this reading, watching, listening, and talking, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what war is, and what violence means. I don’t think I ever will understand it.

But he was also half wrong. He made the assumption that you can understand war. I don’t think you can. Soldier, officer, war reporter, civilian, politician, academic; none of us has a clue what war is actually about. We all have bits and pieces of the same jig saw puzzle, but none of us can see the full picture.

This isn’t unique to war. In the film Waking Life, a character describes the difficulty in describing anything. Think about a “tiger” and you picture a tiger. But is your tiger, the picture in your head, anything like the tiger in my head? What about concepts like love, truth or beauty? The gap only grows larger when our ideas/concepts become more complicated. War is both concept and thing, is life and reality multiplied. It is immense, almost past our conception.

I recently re-read O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This is a book by someone who has been to war (Vietnam), a war about as ugly as any war can get. And, he doesn’t understand it himself.

“It’s difficult,” O’Brien writes, “to separate what happened from what seemed to happen...there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue but which represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”

In his way, O’Brien attempts to recreate his feelings and experiences in Vietnam, as best and as feebly as he can. The main theme of The Things They Carried is how hard it is to understand war, or to describe it. “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.”

In one interview, O’Brien explains how the mundane details were made up, but the incredible details were based in fact. “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”
    
Why does this matter? Ultimately, it is because of the subject matter. War, and the decision to go to war, is not some small, trivial thing. It matters, it's literally a matter of life and death.

No, I’ve never been to war, and I never will go to war. Still, I'm trying to understand it even though I probably never will.

It’s hard to watch or read the news and not be reminded of the struggling economy. Mentioned almost as often as the troubled economy is the massive and rising deficit. Next year, America’s debt will continue its meteoric rise and top billions. I do not know economics, so I don’t claim to be able to cure all our budget ills. Instead, I humbly submit one solution to simply lower our tremendous deficit: eliminate overseas military bases in Europe and Japan. These holdovers from a previous military era do not keep us safe or help our economy.
    
The military could trim their budget in many ways, but none as easy as bringing our troops home from European bases. Sure the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are exorbitantly expensive, but it will take years to extricate from those countries. Sure we waste millions on defense procurement, but, as the battle for the F-22 shows, the spending culture of the Pentagon will not be fixed over night.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars support our troops to live overseas. Stationing thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen overseas is expensive. The Army has three brigades forward deployed to Europe, each manned with several thousand soldiers with thousands more in support. The government pays to shipping American food to Europe, pays to subsidize gas to American prices, pays to ship Soldier’s cars and furniture, and pays thousands of landlords rent every month. Instead of giving welfare to Italy, England and Germany, we should invest this money in America.
    
National security aficionados need not worry about US security either. Thousands of forward deployed troops did not prevent 9/11 nor did they stop the attacks in Madrid or London. They did not even contribute significantly to the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. True, the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team jumped into Iraq, but airborne operations can originate from across the planet, say a base in North Carolina instead. (C-130 combat aircraft can fly non-stop around the world with mid-air refueling) Further, if we are willing to deploy our soldiers from Germany and Italy to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, then clearly the security situation does not require their presence.

Forward deployed troops do not make America safer nor significantly advance our national security agenda; we should save the money and bring them home.

Nothing is new under the sun. As a military, we forget that truism after every war. Perhaps, it’s because whenever the old resurfaces, the US Army calls it the new. Thus, Iraq and Afghanistan are not guerilla wars, or irregular conflicts, or terrorism, or low-intensity conflict, they are insurgencies, or fourth generation war or hybrid wars.

One could persuasively argue that the current fights, while they feel new in our American military, are not unique at all in the scheme of things. The Spanish fought a guerilla war during the Napoleonic Age, and gave that style of war a name. America fought an insurgency in the Philippines. The Marine corps gave it the name, “small wars.” The British fought countless small wars and called them “irregular war,” as if regular war was something between nations.

Yet our trend of naming the old the new continued. Thus, we now have revolutionary war, asymmetric war, insurgency, counter insurgency, civil wars, foreign internal defense, terrorism, irregular or low intensity conflict, long wars, asymmetric wars and unconventional.

Currently, the military, journalists and politicians settle for insurgency.

Lack of clarity in terms destroys debates and only complicates issues. Thus, before we venture much further into posting on this website I want to define the terms I will use, clarifying how and why I use them, explaining which ones I prefer and do not prefer and finally, offer my description of modern war and how I view it. I will not reference official Army doctrine, these are my opinions on these terms and why I use them.

But, do any of these terms truly capture why these wars occur? Do they confuse the issue by having so many terms? As a community, we counter-insurgenistas need a term that captures our current conflict, and can last into the future. That is what the next few week's posts hope to provide. (A bold, impossible goal but blogs allow us to dream.)

For the rest of this month, I plan to roll out my definitions on war in the contemporary world. I ask all readers, what terms do you think adequately capture modern war? What terms fail to do so?

For my brother’s commissioning ceremony, I half-seriously begged him to quote a passage from Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness. He gave a good speech, but this is what he didn’t say:

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer...hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that is it is the opposite of primitiveness. ... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

                            -- The Left Hand of Darkness
                                Ursula K. LeGuin

If I could define war, this would be it.

Certain quotes can strike you so deeply and purely, it is hard to look at the world the same again. We’ve all, at some time or another, heard a truism that once learned can’t be forgotten, that shakes or forms your entire world view there after. We should always question our values and the things we take for granted, but nothing has shaken this understanding for me.
    
This quote is true, too true. In my writing on this website and in my fiction, this concept, war as civilization’s opposite, informs every word I write. War is killing. War is destruction. War, especially total war, disregards tradition, custom and social order; people kill people and destroy things. War has degrees, too, and some wars destroy the social order more than others, but all war is a march away from civilization.
    
This leads to many possible conclusions and problems. Why should/would someone participate in this thing? Can war, civilization’s opposite, be used to save civilization? Can it possibly be redemptive?
    
I don’t have all/many/some/any of the answers, but this feels like a good starting point.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “9/11 Blame Game” and how both Democrats and Republicans blame the other side for 9/11; and last week Eric continued this topic by describing how Republicans, mainly Dick Cheney and other pundits, have already begun blaming Obama for the next attack. As I wrote the “9/11 Blame Game,” I wondered if conservatives would start blaming President Obama for losing, if we do, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure enough, only six months in to his Presidency, they have.

Victory is far from assured in either war. Despite the success of the surge in Iraq, the war is far from over; in Afghanistan, the situation grows more tenuous every month. While conservatives could make a case--and probably will in 2012-- that President Obama is responsible for the outcomes of each conflict as President, from a historical perspective this is unsupportable.

I feel that the best historical analogy for Barack Obama is Richard Nixon’s inheritance of the Vietnam war. Few blame Nixon for the fall of south Vietnam. He did what he could to pull out of Vietnam, and still it took years to do so. When historians, politicians and journalists analyze Vietnam, the blame falls on President Lyndon Johnson and the recently deceased Robert McNamara--the men who increased US involvement passed the point of no return.

Further, if by pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan violence spikes in either country, Barack Obama will not be to blame.Whenever the US pulls out of a nation our removal portends better things in the long run. As Bennet Ramberg writes in the March/April Foreign Affairs, in the article called “Precedents for Withdrawal,” violence usually increases directly after the US pull out of a nation (Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Somalia) but then levels out. When, President Obama finally pulls all troops out of Iraq, the country will likely surge in violence again. In the years after, though, the country will stabilize.

Beyond historical analogies, blaming Obama for Iraq ignores the situation he inherited. President Bush never clarified our country’s intention before or after the invasion. Whether building democracy, toppling Saddam, fighting terrorists or finding weapons of mass destruction, we either never specified the goals; or we didn’t leave when they were accomplished. As for the successes of the recent surge, Thomas Ricks describes in this post how the tactical gains of the surge never actually fostered political reconciliation. Even if violence surges in Iraq after the surge that should not be held against President Obama.

Yet, the biggest target for Obama is not Iraq but Afghanistan. After appointing Lt. General Bill McChrystal to ground commander in Afghanistan, the current war narrative now describes this as Barack Obama’s war. This description ignores the length of our stay in that country and it is premature to call it his war. We have occupied Afghanistan for going on eight years, and the country still looks like it belongs in the fourteenth century. The Taliban own the countryside; and have for the last eight years. The war started poorly, and continued worse for eight years. Whatever Barack Obama does accomplish--even if the US pulls out and the Taliban take over--cannot be held against him. It’d be like replacing a football coach in the fourth quarter down sixty points and expecting him to win.
    
If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq end poorly, some will blame them on President Obama and the Democrats. Unfortunately, no situation will ever be that simple. A situation as complex as two counter-insurgency wars fought in the larger context of a war against Islamic extremism will never boil down to blame between one President or the next. Unfortunately, the entire national security, military, and Congressional branches all share blame. Right now, instead of assigning blame, we can only work towards winning our current conflicts.