The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  In current military language, guerrilla wars are “irregular” and “asymmetric.” They are irregular because they are launched by an antagonist that, while armed, is not a traditional military force. And they are asymmetric because the opponents are mismatched in brute military power, as measured by personnel and materiel. Today, irregular and asymmetric conflicts have become the norm. In Afghanistan, for example, more than 430,000 Afghan and coalition troops have been unable to subdue a Taliban force barely one-twelfth as big. In Iraq, at the peak of the surge in October 2007, more than 180,000 coalition forces and nearly 100,000 Iraqi security forces were pitted against as many as 20,000 insurgents.

  Russia had a similar experience in Chechnya: in 1999–2000, in what is called the Second Chechen War, more than 80,000 well-armed Russian troops were stalled for five months by an estimated 22,000 insurgents fighting for independence. Eventually the Russian army prevailed and restored Russian federal control over the territory, but not before launching a brutal campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian casualties and the deaths of more than 5,000 Russian soldiers.19

  Across Africa and Southeast Asia, one can find dozens of new and long-running insurgencies—from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. And military conflicts that are not tied to defending a particular territory, but instead are motivated by potentially borderless ideological, criminal, religious, or economic goals, are clearly on the rise. Of the military conflicts that erupted in the 1950s, only a minority were between states and nonstate armed groups. In contrast, during the 1990s conflicts with armed groups were in the majority. In 2011, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn explained that conflict is evolving from “intense but short periods” to “longer and more drawn-out engagements.”20

  Smaller forces are proving successful with increasing regularity, at least in terms of advancing their political goals while surviving militarily. The Harvard scholar Ivan Arreguín-Toft analyzed 197 asymmetric wars that took place around the world in the period 1800–1998. They were asymmetric in the sense that a wide gap existed at the outset between the antagonists as measured in traditional terms—that is, by the size of their military and the size of their population. Arreguín-Toft found that the supposedly “weak” actor actually won the conflict in almost 30 percent of these cases. That fact was remarkable in itself, but even more striking was the trend over time. In the course of the last two centuries, there has been a steady increase in victories by the supposedly “weak” antagonist. The weak actor won only 11.8 percent of its conflicts between 1800 and 1849, as compared to 55 percent of its conflicts between 1950 and 1998. What this means is that a core axiom of war has been stood on its head. Once upon a time, superior firepower ultimately prevailed. Now that is no longer true.21

  The reason is due in part to the fact that, in today’s world, the resort to barbarism by the stronger party—for example, indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian populations in World War II, the use of torture by the French in Algeria, or the targeted assassinations of the Vietcong under the Phoenix program in South Vietnam—are no longer politically acceptable. As Arreguín-Toft argues, some forms of barbarism—the controversial Phoenix program, for example—can be militarily effective in relatively short order against the indirect attacks of a guerrilla warfare strategy. But in the absence of a true existential threat to a stronger state, especially a democracy where military policy can come under intense public scrutiny, no such strategy is politically viable. As retired General Wesley Clark, a Vietnam veteran and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, told me: “Today, a division commander can directly control attack helicopters 30 to 40 miles ahead of the battle, and enjoy what we call ‘full spectrum dominance’ [control of air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace]. But there are things we were doing in Vietnam that we cannot do today. We have more technology but narrower legal options.” The “successes” of an autocratic Russia’s savage tactics in Chechnya or of Sri Lanka’s brutal suppression of the Tamil Tigers are bloody examples of what it takes for superior firepower to win today over a tenacious, if militarily weaker, adversary.

  The prominence of political factors in determining the outcome of asymmetric military conflicts helps explain the ongoing rise of the ultimate small actor—the terrorist. We have come a long way since terrorism’s roots in the state during the revolutionary French regime’s “Reign of Terror” from September 1793 to July 1794. Although the US State Department has designated around fifty groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the number of active groups is easily double that, some with dozens of members, others with thousands. Moreover, the ability of a lone individual or small group to change the course of history with an act of violence was evident even before the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo helped start World War I.

  What sets apart modern terrorism—as epitomized by 9/11; other Al Qaeda actions in London, Madrid, and Bali; the Chechen attacks in Moscow; and Lashkar-e-Taiba’s attack on Mumbai—is the elevation of terrorism from a matter of domestic security (i.e., for each country to handle in its own way) to a global military concern. Terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden and his organization prompted governments from more than fifty countries to spend well over a trillion dollars safeguarding their populations from potential attack. A key French defense strategy paper of 1994 contained 20 references to terrorism; its 2008 update mentioned it 107 times, far more frequently than war itself—“to the point,” wrote scholars Marc Hecker and Thomas Rid, “that this form of conflict seems to eclipse the threat of war.”22

  THE END OF THE ULTIMATE MONOPOLY: THE USE OF VIOLENCE

  The more small and nonstate actors have grown in relevance and effectiveness in modern war, the more they have undermined one of the core principles that guided politics and allocated power for the last several centuries. “The state,” wrote Max Weber, “is an association that claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” In other words, part of the definition and raison d’être of the modern state was its ability to centralize military power. Mustering an army and police was the prerogative of the state, and preventing the use of violence by other parties on its territory was one of its responsibilities, an element of the social contract grounding its legitimacy. That new monopoly on violence meant the end of medieval marauding bands and soldiers for hire, and the end of Russian-doll hierarchies of feudal lords and vassals, each with his own army, patrolling the same terrain. Military control was profoundly tied to sovereignty.

  Today that monopoly has been fractured on multiple levels. Governments from Mexico and Venezuela to Pakistan and the Philippines have lost control of swathes of national territory used by armed groups as the base for military activities that often support cross-border ambitions or enterprises. Even the basis of guerrilla war has shifted. In the past, guerrilla movements typically sought to overthrow an invader or colonizer, and to gain or restore sovereignty. Where they operated, according to guerrilla theorists, popular support was key to their legitimacy. “The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition,” wrote Che Guevara. Now guerrilla warfare is increasingly borderless: it no longer subsists on popular support—for the simple reason that it is no longer tied to physical territory. Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan may require winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but fighting Al Qaeda and the imitators it inspired as they attack New York, London, or Madrid may require more the craft of intelligence agents than that of economic development experts. Meanwhile, facing increasing budgetary pressures, states have sought ways to reduce the burden of huge standing armies and “outsourced” a growing chunk of what used to be their sovereign responsibility.

  The convergence between the modern state and the modern military was not just a matter of ideology or political philosophy. It was also deeply practical. It reflected the costs and the technology of war.
For centuries the means of violence scaled up, from the rise of firearms through heavy artillery, tanks, fighter jets, and computer mainframes—all of which increased the cost and the logistical requirements for a military effectiveness.

  Military theorists speak of four generations of warfare since the founding of the modern state. Each corresponds to a phase in world history but also reflects contemporary technological advances and tactical innovations. Until the rise of the machine gun, for instance, armies concentrated firepower by massing huge battalions of soldiers in lines and columns oriented to fight for small patches of territory. Battles resulted in fields strewn with dead bodies from close combat. The gruesome pattern played out from the Napoleonic War to the American Civil War, culminating in the trenches of World War I. This kind of combat rewarded the largest and best-organized armies, emphasizing size (and thus disposable manpower) as well as coordination. In the first half of the twentieth century, it gave way to heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft, and a model of combat in which these weapons cleared the way and infantry followed to take over the terrain. This was more effective—and more expensive, too. The cost of these new armaments only made it more necessary for armies to scale up. Surveying the landscape of the early twentieth century, Max Weber observed that there was no inherent reason why private, capitalist enterprises could not carry out war; but a strong, centralized structure could not be avoided. The requirements of scale, skills, and technology made the military the epitome of the modern, centralized hierarchical organization. A decentralized military, Weber argued, was bound to fail.

  That consensus began to crack in World War II, under the hammer blows of Germany’s Blitzkrieg and its defeat of static defenses like France’s Maginot Line. The use of flanking, surprise attacks, and airborne troops required faster and more nimble action, the kind that officers on the ground would have to initiate with no time to wait for instructions from high command. Too much centralization could be a handicap. Later in the twentieth century, new conflicts brought forth the third generation of warfare in earnest. Nimbleness and flexibility became increasingly valuable. Sophisticated equipment like surface-to-air missiles grew more portable, allowing local commanders to make more consequential decisions. Still, the polarization of the Cold War, the arms race it prompted, and the hovering threat of classic interstate conflict meant that the world’s main armies continued to emphasize scale over other priorities—as military theorist John Arquilla put it, “a reliance on a few big units rather than a lot of little ones.” In the case of the US military, Arquilla noted, its structure changed little from the Vietnam era to this day. The US military, he added, “has a chronic ‘scaling problem,’ i.e. the inability to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers. Added to this is the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better—the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less.”23

  Many of today’s fighters would beg to differ. A Taliban insurgent setting an IED, a Colombian FARC rebel, a Hamas commander, a jihadi blogger sitting at a computer are all doing “better with less.” They are not traditional enlisted soldiers or officer graduates of service academies, but they are no less relevant to military affairs today. And it is not just the “bad guys”—the terrorists, insurgents, pirates, and criminals—who are growing more numerous and more effective. On the side of the national armies of Western democracies is a growing array of private military companies that carry out military and security jobs once reserved for armies and police.

  This, too, is not completely new. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, war-making and policing often took place through hire. But today’s private military services market, which has been estimated at $100 billion a year, was virtually nonexistent a generation ago. And it has grown beyond supplies and logistics—important functions for any military campaign, but well behind the front lines. Private military companies have taken on some of the most sensitive tasks, including prisoner interrogation. In 2011, at least 430 employees of American contractors were reported killed in Afghanistan—more than the number of military casualties. If L-3 Communications, one such defense contractor, were a country, it would have the third-highest loss of life in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the United States and Great Britain.24 “Not within the last two centuries,” wrote scholar Peter Singer, an expert on the topic, “has there been such reliance on private soldiers to accomplish tasks directly affecting the tactical and strategic success of engagement.”25 Often starting as small companies out of anonymous office parks in the outskirts of London or suburban Virginia, firms such as Blackwater (now renamed Academi), MPRI, Executive Outcomes, Custer Battles, Titan, and Aegis took on key roles in different military operations. Some were bought by larger firms, some went out of business, and some remained independent. Among other recent opportunities, private military firms have found a market for their services in protecting commercial vessels from Somali pirates. Mercenaries, with all the ancient associations of the word, have turned into a booming and diverse industry.

  American military thinkers coined the concept of fourth-generation warfare (4W) to describe a conflict characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian.26 This is a conflict where a violent nonstate actor (VNSA) fights a state and where engagement is military not just in the narrow sense of armed hostilities but also in the sense that it plays out in media and public opinion, each side seeking to undermine the other’s grounding and legitimacy as much as to defeat it in the battlefield. Terrorism, cyberwarfare, and propaganda are commonly used in a fourth-generation war.27 The idea of fourth-generation war was initially formalized as early as 1989, when the Cold War was coming to an end. In that respect, the growing success of the fourth-generation adversaries of the United States, far less wealthy and well-equipped than America’s armed forces, is all the more remarkable.

  A TSUNAMI OF WEAPONS

  For decades the tools of war kept growing more complex, costly, and, as a result, harder to obtain. But though the United States and other countries still have their share of gold-plated wonders, the military aircraft best suited to warfare today is not a fighter jet but something far less expensive and far more flexible: the unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone.

  A wide range of drones now serve as decoys, conduct reconnaissance missions, or launch missile strikes for a growing number of nations. Their cost ranges from as low as a few thousand dollars for a simple noncombat, short-range drone to about $15 million for a Reaper hunter-killer drone. Drones are not a new concept. But technological advances in recent decades have made them much more powerful, and their low cost and ability to fly unmanned make them more attractive for combat missions.28 And they are finding nonmilitary uses—for example, by real estate agents filming houses from above, ecologists monitoring the rainforest, and ranchers following their herds of cattle as they roam the prairies. More than three dozen countries now operate drone fleets, and dozens of private companies are now offering to fly them on behalf of other countries that lack the support infrastructure to do so.29 More disturbingly, ordinary hobbyists and private users abound: in the United States in 2012, a group called DIY Drones already had twenty thousand members. In 2004, Hezbollah flew a drone into Israeli air space; the Israeli military downed it, but the psychological effect of the violation, and the message it sent about Hezbollah’s capacities, endures.30 What happens when any disaffected, delusional, or deranged individual has the capacity to wreak havoc from the sky? As Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama, who has been building his own drone to take better nature photos, has observed: “As the technology becomes cheaper and more commercially available, moreover, drones may become harder to trace; without knowing their provenance, deterrence breaks down. A world in which people can be routinely and anonymously targeted by unseen enemies is not pleasant to contemplate.”31

  Drones are hyper-sophisticated compared with the most devastating weapon in military conflicts of the past few years—the improvised expl
osive device. IEDs come in multiple types with many combinations of munitions and detonating systems; they do not follow a particular standard and often can be assembled with readily available ingredients: agricultural supplies, or chemicals from a factory, drugstore, or hospital. They may lie at the opposite end of sophistication and technical requirements from the equipment in big-army arsenals, but IEDs are especially well-suited to today’s decentralized wars. They require no complicated supply chain or time-consuming deployment. Instructions for manufacturing the devices are fairly simple and circulate over the Internet. The proliferation of loose munitions from places like Iraq, the former Soviet Union, and Libya further reduces the cost and complexity of manufacture. They are small and easy to camouflage and do not require the fighter to expose himself; their raw impact, killing or maiming the enemy, is stark and scary. In fact, the sheer contrast between the homemade quality of these weapons and the technological superiority of the forces that they undermine can feed a David-versus-Goliath narrative, scoring a public relations win for insurgents.

  The amount of money that Goliath has thrown at the problem while the casualties mount only adds to that effect. The United States has spent more than $20 billion since 2003 to combat IEDs. A variety of groups and agencies within the US defense establishment have been tasked with this challenge, leading to such classic bureaucratic problems as working at cross-purposes, rivalries, poor coordination and, of course, waste. Even the acronym of the lead agency involved, the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), suggests its unwieldy character.32 Innovations like special armored vehicles, mine-clearing robots, and special protective garments have saved the lives of countless soldiers and civilians. But trying to stem the IED tide remains difficult. In 2011, for example, the number of improvised explosive devices that were cleared or detonated in Afghanistan alone rose to 16,554 from 15,225, an increase of 9 percent. The number of Afghans killed or wounded by IEDs jumped 10 percent in 2011, compared with 2010; the IEDs alone accounted for 60 percent of all civilian casualties.33