Like Reagan, President Bill Clinton had come to appreciate the merits of shifting ever-greater slices of difficult-to-sell foreign policy missions into the private sector. Unlike Reagan, who had secretly and illegally privatized military and fund-raising operations in support of the Contras, Clinton’s “outsourcing” allowed him to do much of what he wanted on the books, legally, as a matter of policy, but without the public much noticing. Take, for example, the Balkans.
Commander in Chief Clinton had inherited this disaster when he came into office in 1993. The bloodbath had begun in the George Herbert Walker Bush years, when, in the euphoria of the Soviet breakup, the state of Yugoslavia started spinning off its component parts with all the centrifugal force that ethnic and religious differences can muster. Roman Catholic Slovenia declared its independence, as did Roman Catholic Croatia, as did the ethnoreligiously mixed state of Bosnia. Bosnia’s population was part Muslim, part Eastern Orthodox Christian (Serbs), and part Catholic (mostly Croats). Slobodan Miloševic, incensed at having lost much of the Yugoslav federation he had just taken over, stirred his Serbian followers into a fury of paranoid ethnic and religious hatred, seized control of the Yugoslavian Army (JNA) and its arsenal, and began a series of punishing attacks on these new, internationally recognized sovereign countries.
The worst Serbian rampage was in Bosnia, where the JNA and bands of Serbian paramilitary thugs cut a vicious swath beginning in April 1992. The Serbs killed more than twenty-five thousand Muslims, along with many Bosnian Christians who tried to protect them; they burned out entire villages, tortured and killed Muslim leaders and intellectuals, and raped more than twenty thousand women and girls. All told, a million and a half Muslims fled their homes during the Serbian blitz. The Serbian strongman on the ground in Bosnia called it “ethnic shifting.” A US State Department Human Rights Report called it “ethnic cleansing,” and said that the killing “dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.” Others called it flat-out genocide. The Serbs were undeterred by the world’s condemnation. They continued to shell civilians in the capital of Sarajevo, cluster-bombed other urban Muslim and Croat areas, and even shot down a plane carrying relief supplies into Bosnia. The Bosnian president lamented the “threat of extinction.”
But the Bush administration had its hands full and was determined to steer clear of this European war. Their shiniest new hero, Gen. Colin Powell, reportedly called Bosnia a “nonstrategic interest.” He wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “The crisis in Bosnia is especially complex … one with deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years. The solution must ultimately be a political one.” Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, put it succinctly: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”
Clinton had talked tough on Bosnia during the 1992 campaign. He said as president he would likely lift the UN-imposed arms embargo and help arm the Croatians and the Bosnians to fight the Serbs themselves. He also said he would order bombing runs on Serb artillery positions near Sarajevo and use military force to make sure relief supplies got to the Bosnian refugees. “I specifically would not foreclose the option of the use of force on that issue, because I’m horrified by what I’ve seen.”
“We lay great hopes in the new administration,” Bosnia’s foreign minister said a few days after Clinton’s election. “We hope they will fully understand the importance of the American role in halting the tragedy.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel buttonholed Clinton at a public event a few months into his presidency and implored him to do something to stop this unfolding European disaster. And Clinton really wanted to do something, really wanted to fix this nightmare in the Balkans.
But by the time the president bent himself to selling to the American people the notion of using American power to halt the Serbian-run massacre in Bosnia, he was already taking hard knocks in the public arena. A series of air strikes, critics sniffed, was a hopeless tactic suggested by a national security naïf. Sen. John McCain, a hero pilot and the country’s most famous Vietnam prisoner of war, was leading the charge against. “Can you guarantee me that no American will be killed?” he asked a fellow senator who was supporting the use of air power.
In public, McCain was even more forceful. “Air strikes would frankly not affect the situation, unless—and this is a huge unless—we are prepared to commit ground troops in a prolonged military operation in Yugoslavia. And frankly, the polls show, by two to one margins, the American people even oppose air strikes.… I will not place the lives of young Americans, men and women, at risk without having a plan that has every possibility of succeeding, a way in, a way to beneficially affect the situation, and a way out, and we do not have that.” Clinton’s plan, said McCain, “has a hauntingly familiar ring to me. It was the same rationale we used to start the bombing of North Vietnam. That’s the way we got our fist into a tar baby that took us many years to get out of and twenty years to recover from.”
McCain was carrying a lot of water for the Pentagon in those days. Popular myth to the contrary, the American institution often least interested in going to war is the US military; it is especially wary of a war civilian leaders promise will be limited. “The use of force was controversial,” wrote Nancy Soderberg, Clinton’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, “and the strongest opponent was the Pentagon and Powell.”
The holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, seemed to be aware that he was already a few points ahead of President Clinton in the earliest 1996 election polls, and that triple the number of Americans trusted General Powell in the arena of foreign policy than trusted the president. And he frankly judged Clinton as a bit too much of an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand academic. Long years on the national security watch had given the general a much stronger stomach than the new president when it came to absorbing the daily press accounts of prison camp survivors, or of homeless and starving Muslim and Croat refugees, or of the victims of Serbian artillery, snipers, and paramilitary knife-wielding thugs. Polite, slightly condescending, and occasionally testy was how Soderberg described Powell’s demeanor when he was engaged in steering Clinton and his national security team away from the “limited war” scenario of bombing runs followed by … more bombing runs. “Powell argued repeatedly that any such action would be tantamount to going to war with Serbia,” Soderberg wrote. “ ‘Don’t fall in love with air power because it hasn’t worked,’ [he said]. To Powell, air power would not change Serb behavior, ‘only troops on the ground could do that.’ ”
“Time and again he led us up the hill of possibilities and dropped us off on the other side with the practical equivalent of ‘No can do,’ ” Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright wrote in her memoir. “After hearing this for the umpteenth time, I asked in exasperation, ‘What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?’ ”
“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” Powell wrote of that moment.
“The Pentagon,” wrote Soderberg, “dragged its feet developing the military plans for Bosnia and raised numerous objections.… Senior military leaders were quick to point out that any such deployment would require a call-up of reserves, which would be politically unpopular, especially for a new president wanting to focus on domestic issues so early in his term.”
Meanwhile, some in the press were throwing down the gauntlet. “Nobody in Clinton’s administration has yet explained, simply and plainly, what America’s interests and objectives in the Balkans are,” the Economist editorialized. “[President Clinton] will have to do better than say that he has thought things over carefully. He will have to tell a puzzled people, with no great desire to put its children in harm’s way, why he is doing precisely that. It is, by a long way, the greatest test yet of whether he is up to the job.”
With his public approval ratings already sinking under the weight of policy fumbles like gays in the military and a failing health-care initiative, Clinton decided to take a pass on his Balkans test. In this game of
chicken with the Pentagon and mouthpieces like McCain, Clinton blinked. Clinton managed to commit the US military to a fairly impotent “no-fly zone” operation, and applauded the UN-formed “safe zones” in the Balkans, but other than that he sat back and watched while Miloševic and Serb warlords continued to grind down the Croats and the Bosnians, and then taunt the West. The Serbs waved off calls for peace plans or other diplomatic overtures. “Bosnia never existed,” said one of Miloševic’s deputies, “and it will never.” The nastiest general in the Serbian Army, Ratko Mladic, who would kill seven thousand Muslim men and boys (civilians all) in Srebenica, warned that if the Americans and their allies ever did try to stop them, “they would leave their bones in Bosnia.… If [the West] bombs me, I’ll bomb London. There are Serbs in London. There are Serbs in Washington.”
Even with a villain like Mladic to help his case, President Clinton never really expended much effort on the politically costly task of convincing the American public of the need to arm the Bosnians or Croatians, or the need to unleash American air power on Miloševic and the Serbs, or the need to put US boots on the ground. Instead, he found a way to do something without the necessity of making any vigorous public argument for it, and without much involving his own balky Pentagon. Thank you, MPRI!
It happened like this: In 1994, a little more than a year into Clinton’s presidency, the Croatian minister of defense asked Washington if he might, in spite of the UN arms embargo, get some help—like, say, weapons or training or a leg up in gaining admission to NATO. The Pentagon referred the minister (a native Croatian with a successful Canadian pizza business; well-spoken and serious, he was) to an outfit down the road in Alexandria, Virginia, called Military Personnel Resources Incorporated. A few months later, MPRI signed a contract with the Croatian government—sanctioned in advance by the US Departments of Defense and State—called the Democratic Transition Assistance Program. By early 1995, a cadre of former US generals, including a former Army chief of staff and a former head of US Army, Europe, together with retired line officers and NCOs, began “training [Croatian] officers in basic leadership skills and an understanding of where they fit into a democratic society,” according to an MPRI spokesman. “We teach general management, training management. We teach how to do planning, programming, the budgeting process, which is new to them.”
By the time MPRI’s “democratic transition assistance” work in Croatia got under way, the Clinton administration had already given a tacit go-ahead to other countries (particularly Iran!) to arm the Bosnians too. For allowing the flow of arms to Bosnia through its ports and across its airspace, the Croatians got a cut that added up to about 30 percent of the Iranian weapons shipments. While under the tutelage of MPRI, the Croats also bought a billion dollars’ worth of tanks and assault helicopters from the old Warsaw powers. And then they put them to good use.
In August 1995, about half a year after MPRI took up their instruction at the Petar Zrisnki Military Academy in Croatia, the Croats launched an offensive called Operation Storm. The objective was to take back a former Croatian region called Krajina, which the Serb Army had violently seized a few years earlier. Within a week, the Croat Army had routed the Serbs, surprising everyone in the Balkans, and the world. “The lightning five-pronged offensive, integrating air power, artillery and rapid infantry movements, and relying on intense maneuvers to unhinge Serbian command and control networks, bore many hallmarks of U.S. Army doctrine,” a reporter in Krajina wrote at the time. “It was a textbook operation,” said a British colonel in charge of UN troops in Krajina, “though not a [Yugoslav Army] textbook. Whoever wrote that plan of attack could have gone to any NATO staff college in North America or Western Europe and scored an A-plus.”
Suspicions for training up the Croatian Army into a lethal, Western-style fighting force naturally fell on MPRI, but the contract generals took pains to remind anybody who asked that the company was just there to provide “democratic transition assistance” and not to plan battles or game out wars. Clinton didn’t appear to care one way or another about MPRI’s actual role in Operation Storm. He was giddy with the result. “I was rooting for the Croatians,” the president wrote in his autobiography. “It was the first defeat for the Serbs in four years, and it changed both the balance of power on the ground and the psychology of all the parties. One Western diplomat in Croatia was quoted as saying, ‘There was almost a signal of support from Washington. The Americans have been spoiling for a chance to hit the Serbs, and they are using Croatia as their proxy to do the deed for them.’ ” Clinton apparently agreed with the diplomat’s assessment enough to quote him, and proudly.
After four years of assuming Western impotence, if not outright approval, Miloševic finally felt the noose tightening. Within weeks of the Croat victory at Krajina, in the face of ever more energetic NATO air strikes, and with the prospect of facing a newly armed (American-trained and -supported) coalition of Bosnians and Croatians, the Serb leader knuckled under. He came to the negotiating table to sign a deal that ended his genocidal four-year rampage.
So it was soon after the peace accords were signed that those twenty thousand American peacekeepers—who would be joined by twenty thousand private citizens under contract to provide support services—arrived in Bosnia and Croatia as part of an international force to keep Miloševic and his Serbian military under heel. And did Clinton have a hard time selling that manpower commitment to the American people? He did not. He was helped greatly by—what else? Outsourcing. Clinton had only had to make a minimal call-up of Guard members and Reserves. “An Army planner told us they could have asked the national command authority to increase the force ceiling and reserve call-up authority,” according to a US government audit of the Bosnian operation. “However, because they had LOGCAP as an option, it was not necessary to seek these increases to meet support needs.”
It was also not necessary for a skittish and unsure president to put himself on the line seeking a real show of public support for our mission. And Congress didn’t take a stand one way or the other. The president simply shipped American troops off to a possible war zone and both houses of Congress offered a mealy vote of almost-approval, expressing reservations about the president’s policy but agreeing to support “the men and women of the United States Armed Forces who are carrying out their missions in support of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina with professional excellence, dedicated patriotism and exemplary bravery.” The Clinton administration got this not-quite-approval approval largely because it assured Congress that the mission would be short and limited.
More than three years later, there were still thousands of American troops in Bosnia. And when Miloševic’s Serbian Army started menacing a new target in former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Clinton had a game plan at the ready. NATO started up another bombing campaign and the president prepared to deploy an entirely new contingent of US soldiers to keep the peace in yet another former Yugoslavian state. “How could the U.S. military find a way to provide the logistics for its forces, without calling up reserves or the National Guard, while at the same time helping to deal with the humanitarian crisis that the war had provoked?” asked Peter W. Singer in his book Corporate Warriors. “Simple: the U.S. military would pass the work on to someone else.… Instead of having to call up roughly 9,000 reservists, Brown & Root Services was hired.”
Cheney’s little “augmentation” program had proved a godsend to the Clinton administration. “It is often necessary to use LOGCAP in these missions,” noted the Government Accounting Office report on Bosnia in 1997, “because of the political sensitivity of activating guard and reserve forces.”
That political sensitivity is there for a reason. Mounting an overseas military operation should force a national gut-check about wars that presidents might otherwise rush us into. It lessens the possibility of stranding our military in conflicts the country doesn’t support or, worse, doesn’t care about. Having a work-around for that political sensitivity must have felt like genius to th
ose who wanted war without the hassle, but even in the short run, that work-around had clear unintended consequences. Not only was there little public debate about the merits of a major American deployment, there was also less pressure to bring the mission to a quick conclusion. American peacekeeping troops were in the Balkans for more than eight years, without the general public much noticing. Even at the time of the initial deployment, little more than a third of the country was closely following the story; only a fifth understood the details of the US contribution to the international peacekeeping force. The American public, according to a Pew Research Center poll, was much more interested in a recent blizzard and a weekend-long federal government shutdown. Eight years into the Balkan mission, the American public was even less engaged.
“Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait … U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu.…
“Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.” To infinity and beyond, in other words, with a pay-to-play pop-up army.
By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot—without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We’d gotten used to it.
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power Page 18