Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  The Cold War monolithic threats spawned fixed patterns of response based on military doctrine, but now the decision-making process had to be rethought for asymmetric threats—adaptability takes precedence over traditional models. Abrams, whose presentation was academic and abstract, high on reasoned solutions, loved to talk about “transcending the dogma,” refining the uncertainty factor “so the enemy can never predict our actions,” and more than once he genuflected before the blinking altar of information technology. The general was, as were so many of the officers in the room, a warrior-scholar, ornamented with postgraduate degrees alongside combat medals. Cerebral and flinty, eggheads with guns, as overeducated in theoretics, I sometimes felt, listening to their esoteric badinage, as the Modern Language Association. Not that they didn’t exist, but you had to go out of your way to find a certified idiot in this crowd.

  The idea was to balance the dynamic of war—coercion—with the dynamic of peace—influence. Simple enough, but it meant a radical shift in the military’s approach to non-war-fighting tasks. In order to avoid war, the Army’s Special Operations wanted to build professional regional engagement forces (REFs) for dealing with operations other than war—counterproliferation, combating terrorism, foreign internal defense, pyschological operations, civil affairs, direct action, unconventional warfare, combat search and rescue, counterdrug activities, humanitarian assistance—in recognition “that the military was continuously on an operational footing.” But the regional engagement concept was not without its troubling aspects. For one thing, it reflected, as the head of the US Army Special Operations Command, Lieutenant General William Tangney, explained, constant presence; that is, military globalization by any other name, but with a lighter footprint than the massive worldwide encampments of the recent past.

  But as I listened to the conference’s three days of symposia, it was apparent to me that the REF concept wasn’t going to propel the Army into the twenty-first century anytime soon. As General Shelton warned, the hierarchy of the conventional Army still didn’t quite grasp what its own Special Operations Forces did, though many of the officers in attendance believed the entire force was going to become more SOF-like in the future. “Only a small group in SOF are trying to make the concept of regional engagement happen,” said another general, Sidney Shachnow. “The majority couldn’t care less.” Another panelist worried that REF, because of its focus on global scouts and information, would precipitate significant changes in the law that, without proper vigilance, would “break the firewall between intelligence gathering and operations that has been there for thirty-five years.” Another speaker was even more pessimistic: “With every passing decade, the media and the international community’s sensitivities are more attuned to what you’re doing. We didn’t invent Special Forces to do peacetime engagement. SF is not going to be used as Mother Teresa. The SF pulls off the humanitarian mask and is suddenly doing covert operations.”

  The discussion turned frequently toward the role of the individual soldier. Major General William Boykin, head of the Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), was not happy with the SF recruiting ads, which focused on humanitarian assistance rather than warrior skills. “Train warriors,” he said, “and everything else will fall into place. This nation needs warriors.”

  Major General Shachnow: “There are two extremes of ­soldiers—the warrior door-kickers and the great humanitarians. The SF doesn’t emphasize one or the other but operates across the full spectrum . . . whether they’re dealing with a waitress or a guerrilla leader.”

  General Peter Schoomaker, commander of US Special Operations: “We have a fundamental problem in the well-resourced Western world dealing with warrior-class cultures. Sometimes I wonder if anybody’s been in a fistfight, deep down within that logic.”

  From a military point of view, Schoomaker was right: the bombing campaign was a coercive political tool, really designed to affect the morale of civilians and soldiers, a textbook Clausewitzian extension of policy meant to persuade Milošević that he couldn’t afford the political cost of keeping his forces in Kosovo. From the perspective of a senior Army officer deeply involved in combat operations at Task Force Hawk on the ground in Albania, this political reliance on the Air Force, which the Air Force eagerly embraced, in effect deep-sixed the Powell Doctrine, allowing politicians to underresource the military without accountability, and that path was booby-trapped with familiar hazards.

  “The Air Force preaches you don’t need all the tools,” said the officer, but then you regressed back to a Lyndon Johnson scenario, signaling the key to your enemy’s eventual success. The polar extremes of the US military, labor (the Army) and technology (the Air Force), were tumbling out of their correct proportions. The thinking, called Halt Phase Strategy, was that you didn’t need a big army, or even an active army; you just needed reserves, because the Air Force was so good. “But if you run across a completely committed foe”—say, for instance, the Somalians, rather than the Serbians—“if you use technology, all you do is drive the conflict down the scale to guerrilla warfare. If the question is, How do you want your armed forces structured in twenty-five years? your determination to advance technology and forget labor will always be for naught.”

  Well, maybe. This is an ongoing argument in which the Air Force will likely persevere, but the ironies generated by the clash of operational doctrines are profound riddles. Unlike Kosovo, the Battle of the Black Sea in Mogadishu was a military victory for the United States, but it was a political disaster exploding through American society, and so no victory at all. The political victory in the Balkans, though it took ten years and cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, was, as an example of American military power, something along the order of a grand nonevent—a steely gesture of morality. It’s not unfair to say that the military wasn’t even looking for a “victory” in Kosovo.

  The ambiguity of the relationship between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the United States and NATO underscores the paradox at the core of the post-Cold War doctrine of humanitarian intervention: we do not deploy our military with belligerence in our hearts. Instead, we merely choose to believe we have no enemy, just countries we deal with when their behavior crosses the line of what we find acceptable. With such an absence of long-term strategy or a consistent foreign policy, tactical operations applied to the moment—bombing Serb positions in Bosnia, protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, removing a tyrant in Haiti—create the illusion of a genuine, coherent, and extended political commitment to justice, democracy, and nation building. In fact, the post–Cold War interventions have been mostly marked by futility, a lack of resolution, and a lingering sense of betrayal, because what we ultimately seem most willing to invest in is the status quo—Iraq out of Kuwait, a weak Aristide returned to his palace, the refugees back in Kosovo. Beyond that threshold, the costs mount, the risks escalate, the political will falters, and our good intentions are met with skepticism. In such an environment, the Army’s concepts of constant presence and perpetual operations dwindle toward hollow self-justification.

  4. Singing Songs with the Refugee Girls

  The smallest female officer in Marine history, four-foot-ten-inch Captain Gabrielle Chapin, insisted on lending me her sleeping bag. “It’s clean,” she wanted me to know, though I would have been equally grateful if it were not. I was being choppered ashore from the USS Kearsarge with a platoon of reinforcements to Camp Hope, a refugee camp in central Albania, where the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, provided external security.

  Daily life was almost too welcoming, wholesome, and affluent aboard the Kearsarge, which at times seemed nothing so much as the military’s version of Lake Wobegon—the women strong, the men good-looking. “Our Marines are motivated, and the food is good,” Captain Chapin would say in a self-mocking tone, parodying her assignment as the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s public affairs officer, responsible for coddling the visiting press, invariably bored
with the Kearsarge’s insularity and unnewsworthy narratives until they discovered the ship’s ATM machines.

  And the food, as she wryly advertised, was good. In the four mess halls, the ship’s nutritionists had carefully labeled each slice of cake or serving of fried shrimp with its caloric count. The cappuccino machine was appreciated, the salad bar outstanding—unless you knew about the 1st Infantry’s salad bar in Macedonia, extravagantly supplemented by an individual pizza bar, a burger bar, a taco and burrito bar, a fruit bar, and a tantalizing dessert bar stacked with locally made pies and tortes, all this bounty in addition to a full-service cafeteria line, the feast wolfed down beneath the flickering images of the mess hall’s big-screen TV and then worked off in Task Force Sabre’s warehouse-size gym.

  Here on the ship life was mellow, almost festive at times. Occasionally there’d be a barbeque on deck, or tuna fishing off the belowdecks stern with the crew in charge of the air defense guns, or even romance. Of the approximately 850 personnel on the ship, about a third of them were women. (At Task Force Hawk’s vast compound ashore, plenty of the troop tents were coed.) Belowdecks, when the ship went to red lights in the early evening, there was easy laughter, archipelagos of music, brash flirting, only infrequently punctuated by the far-above whoosh of Harriers taking off, the noise punching down through the decks like a massive airlock being secured. College instructors traveled with the MEU, so you could work on your degree. The ship had centralized television, its own channel stocked with a thousand movie titles. And for anybody who still felt, as at times everyone did, that he or she was in a faraway place, engaged in a faraway war, and that this wasn’t real life, or a real family, homesickness had been diluted by e-mail.

  “It’s very deceiving,” said a female sailor, an African American from Philadelphia, as we stood in the forecastle the morning I left the ship, looking at the sun rise over the mountainous Albanian coastline. “It’s all so beautiful out here, and there’s so much horror on shore.”

  She wished she could go in and do something to help, cook for the Marines, hand out blankets to the refugees, anything to feel she was more a part of it. “It’s surreal to be out here, everything so calm, on such a beautiful day.” Above our heads, there was a sudden crack of M-16s—live fire practice up on the flight deck, the bullets slapping into the water about a quarter-mile off the port side. The Marines practiced every day: marksmanship on the deck, or, down below in the ground transport cargo hold filled with hovercrafts and armored Humvees, they learned a few phrases in Serbian and Albanian—Drop your weapon! Lie down now!—and rehearsed detention and arrest techniques, or practiced how fast they could drop to one knee and jam a fresh clip into their rifles. Unlike the conventional Army, they actively trained for humanitarian ops too, to prepare for what the Marine Commandant General Charles Krulak called the corps’ three-block model—feeding people in the morning, house-to-house fighting in the afternoon, low-intensity conflict in the evening.

  The beauty of the day remained by the time I walked off the Sea Knight helicopter into the blazing heat of the Albanian plain; what had changed was the feeling that you were getting closer to war, somebody’s war. Every night, in the hayfields surrounding the refugee camp, you heard AK47 fire and unnerving bursts from machine guns, standard nighttime fare, the entire population toting assault rifles after the nation disassembled in 1997. Several nights before I moved in, the company of Marines guarding Camp Hope had come under direct fire, bullets impacting in the dirt throughout their wide-open compound, whizzing over their new Eureka! tents. The gunnery sergeant had brought forward a Humvee-mounted TOW antitank missile launcher and used its thermal sights to locate the gunmen out in the pastures, then sent a stream of illumination rounds streaking past their heads.

  Nights grew considerably quieter after that, but force protection, so abused by the conventional Army in Haiti, had become a legitimate obsession. Backhoes had clawed out firing positions, berms of sandbags were stacked waist-high, battle-ready Marines in full body armor manned checkpoints and snipe positions throughout the area twenty-four hours a day. In the irrigation canals that bordered the camp, frog gigging was locally popular after dark, and the Marines had given villagers chemical lightsticks to keep them from getting shot.

  “There ain’t no business as usual around here. Period,” drawled Major Bill Jurney, an amiable, squint-eyed, fearless gentleman from North Carolina. He had been to Liberia, the Gulf, Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and now this, commanding the first Marines ashore in Albania, tacked on to the first Joint Task Force Shining Hope mission. The 160 men, the major explained as he showed me to my quarters—a piece of cardboard covering the bare ground in an open-walled supply tent—had come up against “a good dozen shoot/don’t shoot situations” since they arrived on Easter Sunday. Jurney was continuously, persistently, reevaluating his security measures, in dogged adherence to Patton’s growling axiom: Plans should be made by the people who are going to execute them. “You create your own picture of what’s going on in your area,” said the major. “You don’t rely on national agencies.” When he first came ashore he walked around with a digital camera, filling a disc with images of the site, which were then taken back to the Kearsarge and made into a cyberlandscape to train the troops who would be rotating into the camp.

  Force protection—a doctrine that includes morale-boosting ­quality-of-life comforts such as movies, hot meals, barbells, phone ­service—had its contemporary roots in Southeast Asia and the bombing deaths of 241 Marines in Lebanon during an ill-fated, ill-conceived, and politically foolish peacekeeping mission in 1983. For the Marines, Vietnam and Beirut were the big lessons, maximum comeuppance. “Now we don’t deploy unless we can be self-protected, the rules of engagement have to be decisively clear, and we don’t like to stay anyplace too long,” said one of the Kearsarge’s Cobra pilots, Captain “Bull” Marro. Force protection, however, had been taken to preposterous extremes in Haiti, the 10th Mountain Division apparently believing it had been sent to the island only to guard itself, and although it was miraculously true that no American soldier had been killed by hostile fire since the peacekeeping forces arrived five years ago in Bosnia, it was also true that no French or British soldiers had been killed either, yet the Americans were “turtled up”—required to wear full body armor—and the Europeans weren’t. Madeleine Albright’s conceit of an “indispensable nation” had trickled down to produce the individually indispensable GI sheltered by a society that expected its military to be not only omnipotent but immortal. Civilians, aid workers, ­journalists—these are the ones killed in today’s war zones, not soldiers.

  At the Special Forces conference in April, Brigadier General William Boykin was one of the few top-ranking officers I heard address the issue straightforwardly. “As for force protection,” said the general, “we’ve gone too far with it. It can’t be a mission. If you let soldiers believe that their job is to not get hurt and that’s how you measure success, then we’ve made a mistake. . . . We don’t want anybody hurt, but we’re breeding a generation of young officers that believe that way, and that’s a problem.”

  Many of the commanding officers of infantry units I spoke with in Albania and Macedonia believed that American troops presented a “higher-value target” than troops from other NATO nations, which necessitated not just a more aggressive posture but greater prudence. And as you moved closer to the “front,” force protection was a logic few felt the need to question. Task Force Hawk, at the Rinas airfield outside of Tirana, was vulnerable to attack from shoulder-held missiles fired from the surrounding hills, surface-to-surface missiles launched from Yugoslavia, or Serbian MiGs stationed in Montenegro, five minutes’ strike time away. Hawk lived on high alert under camouflage netting and walls of stackable bastions; its men turtled up round the clock with armored vests, sweaty helmets, gas masks bouncing on hips as they ran for cover during air raid drills.

  “What’s interesting to me,” said Lieutenant Colone
l Paul Brygider, senior commander of the MEU troops, “is the American public’s acceptance of civilian casualties [here in the Balkans]. When we start taking military casualties, I wonder if they will accept them any better.” “I hate to say it,” Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Gandy told me out on the Kearsarge, “but there seems to be a parting of the ways between society and the military. We’re citizen soldiers, but we’re used to getting on ships and sailing away from society, taking care of ourselves. We’ve asked nothing from our country but to be allowed to go to the forefront and fight, without complaint. The DOD used to be hawkish, State used to be pacifist. Now it’s switched. You have to understand the human cost of deploying for fuzzy principles.”

  Until the day in mid-June when they crossed the border into Kosovo, though, there would be nothing overtly fuzzy about the Marines’ immediate mission. When the Kosovars were cruelly herded toward the borders after the bombing commenced on March 24, over twenty nations mobilized assistance to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the organization ultimately responsible for managing the welfare of 900,000 displaced people. Israel came as well as Saudi Arabia, the Germans, the Japanese. US Air Force Major Tom Dolney described the scene as kind of like a pickup game on a school lot—“It’s not countries getting along, it’s a whole bunch of helicopter pilots getting along.” Within three months, twenty nations grew to fifty.

  In the middle of April, NATO, belatedly, created Operation Allied Harbor, expanding its humanitarian effort, so far limited to hauling cargo and replenishing stocks, to actually building camps and shuttling refugees. Joint Task Force Shining Hawk, commanded by an Air Force three-star general, was conceived by the American military to organize a framework for the United States’ humanitarian relief effort but not actually to do the work. The Air Force subcontracted the Bechtel Corporation to build Camp Hope, someone from the Defense Department oversaw quality control, CARE ran the camp, US Army Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC) orchestrated the contractors and non-governmental organizations such as ADRA (food distribution), Merlin (medical emergency unit), and Save the Children. The French were there, the Turks, dozens of Albanian workers, and about 3,000 refugees.