The Counterrevolution
Page 24
This second round of expansion of systems analysis—from defense strategy to all governmental decision-making—carried the possibility of major repercussions, or, in Edward Quade’s words, was “possibly even more radical” than the earlier developments.12 According to its proponents, systems analysis would allow policy makers to put aside partisan politics, personal preferences, and subjective values. It would pave the way to objectivity and truth. As RAND expert and future secretary of defense James R. Schlesinger explained: “[Systems analysis] eliminates the purely subjective approach on the part of devotees of a program and forces them to change their lines of argument. They must talk about reality rather than morality.”13 With systems analysis, Schlesinger argued, there was no longer any need for politics or value judgments. The right answer would emerge from the machine-model that independently evaluated cost and effectiveness. All that was needed was a narrow and precise objective and good criteria. The model would then spit out the most effective strategy.
The influence of systems analysis has persisted in federal policy making ever since, now often in the guise of what are called “economic impact analyses.” A decade after President Johnson embraced PPBS for his entire administration, President Carter’s Executive Order 12044 tasked all executive agencies with the duty to conduct economic impact studies of all major government regulations. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12291 assigned the responsibility to the Office of Management and Budget, which now oversees and coordinates the economic impact analyses.14 President Bill Clinton continued in this tradition with his executive order requiring impact analyses of all significant regulations, Executive Order 12866.15 The recent independent commission report on NSA surveillance, submitted to former president Obama, succinctly recounts the subsequent history of cost-benefit analyses to the present.16 As the report makes clear, systems analysis continues to influence public policy, even as the method itself is continuously revised.
Counterinsurgency theory blossomed at precisely the moment that systems analysis was, with RAND’s backing, gaining influence in the Pentagon and at the White House. The historian Peter Paret pinpoints this moment, in fact, to the very first year of the Kennedy administration: “In 1961, the Cuban revolution combined with the deteriorating Western position in Southeast Asia to shift attention to what was variously called guerrilla, subversive, sublimated, brushfire, and unconventional warfare.”17 Two days before assuming the presidency, on January 18, 1961, Kennedy had already set up a new Special Group, Counterinsurgency (SGCI) to push the military toward modern warfare.18 In April 1961, Paret tells us, McNamara “asked for a ‘150 per cent increase in the size of antiguerrilla forces.’” Kennedy would emphasize the new orientation toward unconventional warfare and would soon appoint a dedicated general for special warfare. A newly revised and expanded edition of the field manual for unconventional warfare was issued in 1961. In Paret’s words, “a new weapon system was in the making”—and that weapons system was counterinsurgency.19 A frenzy of activity surrounding counterinsurgency would ensue under the Kennedy administration.
RAND, of course, was developing all kinds of different military strategies—including nuclear-weapons strategy and policy, and ordinary operations research. But it got in the business of counterinsurgency early and would be one of its greatest advocates. It convened, as mentioned earlier, the seminal counterinsurgency symposium in April 1962, where RAND analysts discovered David Galula and commissioned him to write his memoirs. RAND would publish his memoirs as a confidential classified report in 1963 under the title Pacification in Algeria 1956–1958.20 (RAND would republish the memoirs for the public in 2006—the report was only declassified in 200521—to coincide with the publication of General Petraeus’s field manual.) Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain document in their book Acid Dreams the important role that RAND played alongside the CIA in developing counterinsurgency tactics, including the “strategies for counterrevolution and pacification that were implemented in Vietnam.”22
Incidentally, RAND continues to shape counterinsurgency theory with ongoing research and reports, such as for instance RAND analysts David Gompert and John Gordon’s 2008 report on War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency. That 518-page report, commissioned by the secretary of defense, was a comprehensive study that drew, in its own words, “on a dozen RAND research papers on specific cases, issues, and aspects of insurgency and COIN” and “included an examination of 89 insurgencies since World War II to learn why and how insurgencies begin, grow, and are resolved.”23 The research is sponsored by the Department of Defense and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy (ISDP) Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, which is described as “a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”24 (It should come as no surprise that some critics of RAND perceive it as an arm of the Pentagon or the CIA.25)
Counterinsurgency theory—itself largely incubated at RAND—drew directly on the central insights of the systems-analytic approach. As a result, the synergies remain clear today. General Petraeus’s field manual, for instance, made systems analysis one of the main considerations for the design of a successful operation. The manual described the systems-analytic considerations in the following terms:
Systems thinking involves developing an understanding of the relationships within the insurgency and the environment. It also concerns the relationships of actions within the various logical lines of operations. This element is based on the perspective of the systems sciences that seeks to understand the interconnectedness, complexity, and wholeness of the elements of systems in relation to one another.26
The key design considerations in the field manual included “model making” and “continuous assessment,” both core elements of systems analysis represented in the figures from Edward Quade’s RAND Report. The field manual described them in SA terms:27
In model making, the model… includes operational terms of reference and concepts that shape the language governing the conduct (planning, preparation, execution, and assessment) of the operation.
Continuous assessment is essential as an operation unfolds because of the inherent complexity of COIN operations. No design or model completely matches reality. The Object of continuous assessment is to identify where and how the design is working or failing and to consider adjustments to the design and operation.28
Drawing on these design considerations, the counterinsurgency model views different strategies as fungible substitutes that need to be evaluated and compared in order to choose rationally the most effective. Monitoring mosques, collecting American telephony metadata, or enhanced interrogations become simply a set of promising alternatives whose effectiveness and costs need to be modeled and assessed against common criteria to determine preferences from among the range of options. Counterinsurgency theory views societies abroad or the population at home as coherent systems and posits their security as the purported objective. Different counterinsurgency strategies—from robot-bombs to digital propaganda—then become the promising alternatives that can be filtered through the systems analysis.
In the counterinsurgency view, the security objective is subdivided into several more defined goals, such as military operations to secure the civilian population, civil services to promote economic development, policing, or intelligence gathering. Each one of these goals then serves as a basis for the systematic comparison of tactics. These tactics might include the deployment of a SWAT team, or a sniper, or the use of a robot-bomb; undersea cable splicing or partnerships with telecoms; or special-operations forces or a drone strike. The tactics are interchangeable, and need to be evaluated and compared based on the criterion of cost, casualties, collateral damage, and reputation, among other things. Everything is evaluated through a systematic
lens, and then reevaluated for purposes of continual assessment.
Once again, the figures are telling. The design and iterative process that General Petraeus’s field manual set out is actually a mirror image of the RAND systems-analysis model depicted earlier. It simply combined the two graphs—Figures 1 and 2 above—into one visual, Figure 4-2 of the field manual (see Figure on next page).
It is here that we can locate the central logic of counterinsurgency: it is a systems-analytic approach. It is an integrated coherent system. It is neither piecemeal, nor improvised—nor, as we saw in the last chapter, based on a binary model of rule and exception. It is fully legalized and systematized.
Much of the operational logic of counterinsurgency is classified, and as a result, often difficult to document. However, one gets a strong sense of the systematic approach any time there is leaked information about counterinsurgency strategizing. One recent episode regarding interrogation methods is telling. It involved the evaluation of different tactics to obtain information from informants, ranging from truth serums to sensory overload to torture. These alternatives were apparently compared and evaluated using a SA approach at a workshop convened by RAND, the CIA, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Again, the details are difficult to ascertain fully, but the approach seemed highly systems-analytic.
Figure 4-2 from General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
What we know about the workshop comes predominantly from a RAND policy analyst named Scott Gerwehr, who was a behavioral scientist specializing in “deception detection” at RAND, in other words, the study of when people are lying. Gerwehr was also working in some capacity for the CIA.29 In July 2003, Gerwehr helped organize, along with the CIA and the APA’s senior scientist and director of science policy, a series of workshops on “The Science of Deception” sponsored by the three organizations. According to one source, the workshops analyzed different strategies to elicit information, including pharmacological agents “known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior,” the “use of ‘sensory overloads’ to ‘overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors,’” and different forms of torture.30
More specifically, according to this source, the workshops probed and compared different strategies to elicit information. The systems-analytic approach is reflected by the set of questions that the participants addressed: How important are differential power and status between witness and officer? What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior? What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors? These questions were approached from a range of disciplines. The workshops were attended by “research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists who study various aspects of deception and representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations. In addition, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security were present.”31
And in effect, from a counterinsurgency perspective, these various tactics—truth serums, sensory overloads, torture—are simply promising alternatives that need to be studied, modeled, and compared to determine which ones are superior at achieving the objective of the security system. Nothing is off limits. Everything is fungible. The only question is systematic effectiveness. This is the systems-analytic approach: not piecemeal, but systematic.
Incidentally, a few years later, Gerwehr apparently went to Guantánamo, but refused to participate in any interrogation because the CIA was not using video cameras to record the interrogations. Following that, in the fall of 2006 and in 2007, Gerwehr made several calls to human-rights advocacy groups and reporters to discuss what he knew. A few months later, in 2008, Gerwehr died of a motorcycle accident on Sunset Boulevard.32 He was forty years old.
It is, in the end, difficult to document, but what is clear is that systems analysis has had a direct and significant influence on the development of The Counterrevolution.33
Counterinsurgency was born of a systems-analytic approach, and as it has been refined, extended, and domesticated, now forms a closed, coherent system. The logic of systems analysis pervades the practices and rhetoric, and has come to infuse, almost subconsciously, much of what has been written about the experience on the ground—for instance, by military officers and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who frequently include offhanded references to “systems,” to “military social systems,” or simply to “the system.”34
Even the violence that we might find aberrational—the waterboarding, the drone strikes, the monitoring of mosques—fits neatly within the systems-analytic logic. The counterinsurgency method sanctions any effective strategy—any promising alternative—that achieves the political objective. A comparative analysis of promising strategies was there from the inception. Sometimes, depending on the practitioner, the analysis favored torture or summary execution; at other times, it leaned toward more “decent” tactics. But these variations must now be understood as internal to the system. Under President Bush’s administration, the emphasis was on torture, indefinite detention, and illicit eavesdropping; under President Obama’s, it was on drone strikes and total surveillance; in the first months of the Trump presidency, on special operations, drones, the Muslim ban, and building the wall. What unites these different strategies is counterinsurgency’s coherence as a system—a system in which brutal violence is heart and center. That violence is not aberrational or rogue. It is to be expected. It is internal to the system. Even torture and assassination are merely variations of the counterinsurgency logic.
Counterinsurgency abroad and at home has been legalized and systematized. It has become our governing paradigm “in any situation,” and today “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power.” It has no sunset provision. It is ruthless, game theoretic, systematic—and legal. And with all of the possible tactics at the government’s disposal—from total surveillance to indefinite detention and solitary confinement, to drones and robot-bombs, even to states of exception and emergency powers—this new mode of governing has never been more dangerous.
In sum, The Counterrevolution is our new form of tyranny.
OCKHAM’S RAZOR, OR, RESISTING THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
AT THE HEIGHT OF THE PAPAL INQUISITION IN 1318, THE Franciscan friar William of Ockham was summoned to the papal enclave at Avignon to account for certain theological and political ideas contained in his writings. Suspected of heretical thought, Ockham traveled, as a mendicant, from England to Avignon to face the accusations—at grave risk to himself. He was absolved of those charges, but became embroiled a few years later in another papal quarrel over Franciscan poverty. Ockham ultimately sought refuge in the court of Louis IV of Bavaria, and there penned a short treatise in response to the overreaching, inquisitorial, sovereign power of the Avignon Papacy—but not before writing, in staccato form, while still in Avignon, undaunted and in an insolent rhetoric reminiscent of the Cynics of antiquity, that the series of papal bulls on poverty and Church property were chock full of “haereticalia, erronea, stulta, ridiculosa, fantastica, insana et diffamatoria”—“heresies, errors, stupidities, ridiculousness, fantasies, insanities et defamations.”1
In the short treatise on tyrannical government that ensued—the Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico—Ockham fearlessly spoke against the absolute powers that the popes claimed over both theological and secular matters. Boldly, in a frank but insolent tone once again reminiscent of the cynical parrhesiasts, the Franciscan declares that “subjects should be warned not to be subjugated more than is strictly necessary.”2 To accept the plenipotentiary power of the pope over temporal matters, Ockham protests, would amount to a form of servitude that would be “truly dreadful and incomparably greater than under ancient law.” To fail to actively resist, Ockham declares—at the risk of his very li
fe—would produce not “a realm of freedom,” but instead, “the rule of intolerable servitude.”3
Not to be governed in this tyrannical fashion. Not to be subjected to a regime of intolerable servitude. That was precisely the reason to reject ancient laws and embrace a new path, which, Ockham adamantly maintained, “represents not a greater servitude, but precisely a lesser servitude” than the earlier regime. “It is evident,” Ockham wrote, “that it would simply be wrong to impose a yoke as heavy to bear, or found a bondage as constraining as the laws of our ancestors.”4
Ockham called, courageously, for less tyrannical subjection: for a political realm in which forms of sovereign power—inevitable though they may be, necessary in certain domains, eternally recurring—would be contained and limited, chastened as much as possible. He called not for a world devoid of subjection—that would not be possible—but one in which the reach of the tyrannical is restricted, limited to the greatest extent possible. Not, as Michel Foucault would remind us more than five hundred years later, a world without government, but one in which we are “not governed like this”—referring precisely to those elements of political tyranny, repression, and domination that Foucault witnessed in French president Georges Pompidou’s security measures of the early 1970s and analyzed in Cardinal Richelieu’s suppression of the Nu-pieds peasant rebellions of 1639.5 And the first step in that direction is to understand, as Ockham underscored, that “subjects cannot be on guard against excessive subjection unless they know what kind and how much power is being exercised on them.”6