iMP Magazine, July 2001
What the ambassador of 2015 needs to understand about war and peace today
“Dazzling as the new technologies are, another sea change sweeping through the political-military world promises to transform the professional climate of the future ambassador far more than the microchips in her wristwatch.”
As a class, diplomats seem to prefer the tough-guy stance. Cookie-pushers? Not. Well, maybe there is a lot of cocktailing on post, but even there, it’s a jungle and the individual diplomat a skilled combatant, going mano a mano across the canapés in the hunt for insight and leverage. Back in Washington, there is a touch of truth to the Pentagon’s joke that in a crisis, it is State that wants to go to war first.
Of course, diplomats as a class are peace-makers. It is just that after a 20th century of big wars, hot and cold, American diplomats are skilled at the superpower politics of shaping peace through war or the threat of war. Macho goes with the territory.
Doubtless there are many young diplomats out in junior postings today for whom Ambassador Richard Holbrooke models the modern diplomat they hope to be: an alchemist who deploys a combination of aggressive, high wire improvisation and the threat of immediate military attack to transmute the crisis de jour into peace—or at least into not-war.
That model may turn out to be less apt than it appears now. Our future ambassadors will navigate a much different world. The State Department might even have a working computer system by 2015 and who knows what other kinds of new gadgetry will be at the future diplomat’s elbow.
Dazzling as the new technologies are, another sea change sweeping through the political-military world promises to transform the professional climate of the future ambassador far more than the microchips in her wristwatch.
Although not yet reflected in American foreign policy, a profound transformation in the very natures of war and peace is bringing with it a profound change in the nature of peacemaking. Whether future diplomats will have much of a role in that or anything else of relevance hangs on whether the new generation tunes in now. Their success in their future high posts—and the future of many people in the world—hangs on their ability to fashion a practical new diplomacy of peace through peacebuilding to replace our outmoded practices of peace through war and the threat of war. More than obsolete, our current practices are damaging, draining political capital from both our international and domestic balance sheets. But that is peroration. We each need to decide for ourselves whether something new and important is afoot in diplomacy. Let me offer a brief, introductory tour of Community War, or CoWar, since this is going to be so commonplace a part of our lives that we’ll need shorthand. Then we can consider the implications for the diplomat.
CoWar—The New Form of Armed Conflict.
War left the battlefield. While many militaries busied themselves with the so-called “revolution in military affairs,” war put on new clothes and moved away. As armies around world were shopping for computers and missiles, war spent the 1990s mutating into some homely but exceedingly deadly forms largely immune to modern weapons.
Armed conflict no longer has much to do with formal battlefields. Less and less do we see opposing armies take to the field while the Geneva conventions shield civilians on the sidelines. Television journalists show us every day the new characteristic engagement: brutal, neighbor-on-neighbor killing. You still can watch soldier-on-soldier combat or dogfights between supersonic aircraft, but you will need to tune in to the History Channel right after the Battleships Were Beautiful hour. And if you do spot modern weapons in the news, most likely they are attacking civilian targets—Russian attacks on Chechen cities or NATO’s attacks on “military” targets picked out from the civilian infrastructure in Serbia, for example.
The new faces of war are a ragtag collection of ne’er-do-wells, teenagers and ordinary citizens dragooned into service by the local thug-in-chief. Our instinct is to dismiss them. How could a no-tech, no-training, no-discipline “army” risk anything important to the U.S. or one of our fellow great powers? And if they rampage among their own citizens, then we should (maybe) intervene only with protective “operations other than war” to limit the human carnage. These are tragedies, we say, but not threats. We should focus on preventing real war and guarding our vital interests.
We need to think again. Reexamined, these lethal rabble are as destructive in strategic terms as nuclear bombs—but with more lasting aftereffects. Their “organizations” and “doctrine” take forms that trump our superior firepower and confound our diplomacy. In head-to-head encounters with modern Western forces, they often come out the winners. Even in areas we consider our special province, such as the use of advanced information technologies, the rabble regularly outgun us.
The CoWar Differences
In our modern democracies, the first purpose of the military is to prevent war—and to fight and win if prevention fails. But how do you prevent or prevail in these new forms of conflict that have turned many of the world’s neighborhoods into bloody battlefields?
Our innovations carry us in a different direction. We have attempted to narrow the focus of combat and reduce the killing in battle. Although modern forces deploy hugely destructive firepower, careful target selection and pinpoint strikes maximize weapon payoff and limit enemy casualties. And by attacking from a distance under the cover of electronic razzle-dazzle, it seems we can reduce our own casualties almost to zero. But as we push toward high-tech, low-blood combat, the rabble-warriors are rushing in the opposite direction. Choosing primitive strategies of close-in, person-to-person bludgeoning, they go for maximum death and disruption among civilians.
Example: During two days in July 1995 in eastern Bosnia, a hodgepodge of pseudomilitary Serb thugs mixed with a few professionals killed more than 7,000 men trying to break out from Srebrenica, a U.N. “safe haven.” The Serbs won this mobile battle in mountain forest terrain in less than 48 hours. Acting also to paralyze the U.S.-dominated command hierarchy of the protecting U.N. forces, they held the initiative so long that they had time to bury the evidence, evict the Dutch defenders and “cleanse” the town of residue women and children without being counterattacked. Not since major battles in World War II had Europe seen 7,000 killed in action. Serb casualties apparently were near zero.
Nor should we forget the spasm of killing in Rwanda a year prior. Armed with machetes and a few handguns, rampaging Hutus executed some 800,000 of their neighbors and friends in a hundred days. Compare this lethality to that of professionals: Hitler’s specially equipped killer units, the Einsatzgruppen, roamed the Eastern Front killing Jews and other unwanteds during the war on the Soviet Union. With “cleansing” as their sole mission, it took them years to match what loosely organized gangs, often teenagers, did in weeks in Rwanda.
More than body counts are at stake. When neighbor attacks neighbor, the paroxysm of violence destroys the skein of community. Churches and mosques are blown up. Schools are burned. Homes, if left standing, are seized. Rape rains trauma on the female victims, their families and neighbors, reinforcing the brutality of the attackers. Evicting people from their homes, burning their possessions and even destroying their identity papers (as the Serbs did to the fleeing Kosovars in 1999), the attackers strip away the sense of self and place that is vital to each of us in our daily lives.
There is more. Criminality and extremist politics well up in the chaos, join hands, and grab control. Whatever the contorted slogans about freedom or justice used to justify the violence, old-fashioned greed and police-state brutality take over. The architects of the “liberation” of Srebrenica and the long, deadly siege of Sarajevo were President Radovan Karadjic and General Ratko Mladic. Both became rich. Reportedly, Karadjic is now a billionaire. Although each was forced out of office when the West finally intervened, visitors to the statelet report that they continue to control and profit from the sale of almost everything—cigarettes, gasoline, weapons, drugs, even U.N.-furnished food supplies. In Colombia, the guerrilla bands that set out in the 1950’s to create a purist, Marxist revolution are now so tightly intertwined with the narcotics trade that it is hard to tell the difference between a high-minded revolutionary and an ordinary drug thug. In central Africa, control of the diamond trade shapes that huge war as much as political differences.
The creation and manipulation of refugees is another innovation. Citizens flee the violence, sometimes in convulsive human avalanches, sometimes in trickles, sometimes pouring into huge refugee camps, often ending up as the near-homeless residents of shantytowns on the fringes of big cities. Wherever they go, refugees generate advantage for the side that expelled them. As they fester in camps and slums, they set in motion the next rounds of anger and retaliation. With schools shut and families scattered, even pre-teen kids turn to crime and killing.
The result is a tangle of profound destruction beyond what any military commander would seek on a traditional battlefield. After World War II, Germany and Japan could pick themselves up from defeat and, with culture and community still intact, transform themselves into powerhouse friends. No such future is open to Bosnia or Kosovo or Rwanda. They, and the 40 or 50 other places where community wars now smolder or burn, face years of disorder. It may take decades of expensive, outside intervention before these societies can function and generations before they can prosper.
What Can We Do?
In the Cold War we never wavered in our understanding that prevention of a nuclear exchange was our core imperative. Today, the lethalities of neighbor-on-neighbor war are achieving levels of destruction well beyond what we feared from tactical nuclear exchanges. In Kosovo, Serb President Slobodan Milosevic was able to flush most of two million people from their homes, and damage two-thirds of their houses and schools—this across a mountainous province the size of Maryland—without a single nuke being used. With more of these cancer-like community wars threatening, prevention must be our first strategy.
Not a problem! you might say. These are just rabble. If intervention were our assignment, it would not be a demanding mission. These folks couldn’t stand up to us if we really took them on.
It might not be that easy. Seen across our television screens and computer terminals, these seem barely armed irregulars, ethnic primitives trapped by genes and custom in cycles of ancient and local violence. That is a dangerous misreading. Our failure to understand these new forms of war and to recognize that they are popping up all over the globe traps us in habits of inaction that feed and accelerate these armed conflicts and steadily erode our own political and military advantages.
Here are some “advances” in the arts of war, innovations that can best us in head-to-head encounters. Unlike our high tech and high cost inventions, which appear in manufacturers’ brochures years before they enter service, these homely tricks already are battle tested and have almost nothing to do with technology—yet.
Invisible infantry. A loosely organized mob can achieve astonishing killing rates with whatever assortment of knives and small arms are at hand. But against us? Ask the U.S. special forces. With the fabled Delta Force fighting alongside, they lost a 1993 firefight in the streets of Mogadishu against a mixture of citizens and warlord gangs. Even though the Somalis took heavy casualties—perhaps several hundred killed versus 18 of our own—the Americans had to withdraw to survive. Their defeat collapsed the entire U.N. intervention.
The innovation? Citizen-warriors. The Somali gunmen (and women) were not soldiers in civilian disguise—they were real civilians.
Then-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic used a variation against us in Kosovo. As NATO aimed a high-tech attack at Serbia, he unveiled a motley force prepositioned in Kosovo. Unpaid Serb army “volunteers” augmented by paramilitary thugs flushed a million and a half Kosovar Albanians into the hills and across borders into huge, burdensome refugee camps. Operating largely on foot and moving among civilians, they held key towns, roads and borders for months, keeping the province essentially invasion-proof and themselves untouchable—all in the teeth of an intense NATO air attack. Not until some of their forces began to operate as conventional ground units did NATO inflict any meaningful damage. Pulling out only when ordered, they left with most of their small stock of fighting vehicles undamaged.
In both cases barely organized ground forces trumped the best high-tech, high-firepower, info- and aerospace-dominant military and the most macho diplomats in the world. Could we have won in either place? Yes, eventually, but only with large ground-air forces of our own. In both cases, the politics moved on before we could decide.
This is especially significant because it is the exact opposite of what U.S. military leaders claim they are about to achieve. Just keep writing the checks for the new equipment, they say, and we’ll create the perfect battlefield. Everything will be seen, everything will be targeted. We’ll finish the fighting and hand over to the diplomats a tidy situation in which they hold all the high cards.
It is not working out that way. Grappling with invisible opponents—combatants indistinguishable from civilians; regular military equipment, if any, hidden away; operations masked by elaborate deception campaigns—our combat operations typically drain political capital and leave the diplomats with an even more muddled field of action.
Wars without end. In contrast to our preference for short, clean wars, those who set neighbor against neighbor find their advantages in chaos. The rogue politicos of community war profit most if the fighting is long and dirty. But they must solve two problems to get there: first, how to keep ordinary citizens fighting when most would prefer to live more or less in peace; second, how to keep us from intervening as their machinations pile up bodies, refugees and rubble.
Fear and brutality are used to create citizen-warriors. Each of us harbors a variety of us-them impulses. Identity politics heat those emotions into hatred and convert them into anger that an “enemy”—formerly your friend and neighbor—has what is rightfully yours. With a spark, the human tinder flashes into violence. The Hutu-on-Tutsi killing in Rwanda models the pattern. In Bosnia, a Muslim refugee told how a stranger, a Serb outsider, pushed into her house, shot her Serb friend in the house across the street, and then left as a “spontaneous” Serb mob mobilized to avenge the killing and drive all Muslims out of town.
Once started, the brutality leaves no easy path back to normal, tolerant life. Self-renewing cycles of violence and revenge spin on as the leader-perpetrators harvest power and fill Swiss bank accounts. To keep us from spoiling the game the offenders market the mob emotions as “historic enmities,” which, of course, no intervention could hope to mitigate.
Although he later corrected himself, President Bill Clinton made his early decision to stay out of Bosnia because, he said, “These are ancient hatreds. Until these people stop killing each other there is not much we can do”—exactly the line marketed by Milosevic’s propaganda apparatus in Belgrade. Then, when we do intervene as peace-keepers late in the spiral of violence, our presence is easily manipulated to sustain what we came to stop. Checkmate.
Dominant knowledge. The U.S. military touts its information dominance. No one has an array of satellite sensors, communications networks and computing power to match ours. Alas, leaders of the local rabble regularly display better awareness of our situation than we of theirs.
How? Our information-rich society is our strength and our vulnerability. Forget spies. Almost everything we know and anything we might be thinking about doing is flashed worldwide minute by minute on global TV channels and the Internet. Dissecting the 1996 Goma refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, BBC journalist and researcher Nik Gowing followed a trail of disinformation to show how the Rwandan government deliberately misled humanitarian organizations in the field so they, in turn, would feed distorted assessments into the media and intelligence services. The result, as intended, was a U.S./U.N. decision to stand clear as the Rwandans gained a major tactical victory in confused, neighbor-on-neighbor fighting. The conflict has now drawn seven countries into what some call Africa’s first world war.
Where is their edge? While we create high-tech systems to track military things on the battlefield—things these fighters do not need—they use our open media to track and shape our thinking.
Teflon command. We know little of the decisions and habits of most of the leaders stirring up trouble in various corners of the globe. Even in cases where we know the top dog—like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein—people and politics around them are a mystery. Often, as in central Africa today, we know not even all the names of the parties to the fighting, let alone their politics and allegiances. The consequence: operational immunity for the brigands. Ignorant of their thinking and thus unable to seize the initiative, we stumble into huge mistakes.
This turns Sun Tzu on his head: fail to know your enemy as well as he knows you and you should fear every battle. It is also a personal challenge to every diplomat whose core competencies rest on a rich, personal understanding of what the other fellows are thinking and why.
No-cost combat. Armies are expensive. In a democracy, the politics of paying for an army in the field has as much to do with strategy as the generals’ plans. The new class of warrior-thugs escapes this constraint. By setting unpaid neighbor against neighbor and helping to ensure that the destruction becomes unforgivably brutal, they create fighting forces that live off their own land and free emotional ammunition. In a nice bit of fiscal judo, they seize the initiative and make a profit while we still are tied up in budget politics and fret about the impact of one more operation on our forces’ readiness.
Diplomacy is left on the sidelines as the domestic politics of money swirl through and confuse the policy making of the professionals.
The Prevention Imperative
If these new-age fracases are that tough, what can we do?
Clearly, prevention must be our priority. We want to do what we can to avoid letting local brouhahas metastasize into full-scale cancers.
But how to do that? It is easy to talk about prevention, difficult to practice it in the gritty climes of real politique. How can we make prevention practical?
Unless we come up with a practical strategy of prevention, more and more of these nasty wars lie squarely in our future. They will be even more daunting, whether we go in shooting or under blue helmets as armed peace-keepers. Milking the growing interconnections between drugs, crime and conflict for cash, local warlords will deploy leading-edge electronics, move up from knives and pistols to high-technology lethality and run ever more sophisticated media-manipulation operations. Upcoming are community wars even harder to manage than those that be-devil us now.
Credible deterrence in the Cold War hinged on our ability to fight and win should deterrence fail. When it seemed that larger Soviet forces could overwhelm NATO in a traditional war, we threatened the use of a huge nuclear arsenal as a counterweight. By the time the Cold War closed, we had turned the tables. Our high-tech, high-firepower forces could, both sides calculated, defeat the still-huge Soviet military in a head-to-head fight. The result of this armaments duel was a half-century without a world war.
But a strategy of military deterrence—prevention through firepower—is no longer an option. No one can defeat the large NATO armies in a traditional fight, but these new neighbor-on-neighbor wars are being fought in ways and places where raw firepower con-fers no decisive advantage and the diplomat’s threat of attack is almost meaningless.
The nuclear threat doesn’t work either. Nuclear and biological materials are proliferating so fast that almost anyone serious about them—especially these well-funded gang-ster-politicians—can acquire a bang so deadly that we, with more to lose, must stand clear.
So how to prevent, if not through firepower? And if the military is not the primary instrument, what is? We have expected generals to do much of our thinking about security, who should do it now?
Here is where I invite the younger diplomats to jump in with their own views. It is they who must equip themselves to be effective when it is their turn to be confirmed as Ambassador by the Senate. Starting now, we need to see the new generation working through these problems for themselves.
Without preempting that thinking, I close with a coda outlining what we in The Strategy Group have learned about practical prevention in the past few years in the field.
Moving Upstream to Peacebuilding
One quickly discovers that a policy of prevention is not enough. Prevention is still tinged by reaction, anticipatory reaction, but still reaction. Our work in various at-risk regions shows that you must move all the way upstream to peacebuilding if you are to be effective. Rather than finding peace in the lee of military might, the new generation of diplomat will need to engage directly.
Briefly, here are some of the emerging principles:
We “go local.” We assume that the primary actors are and must be local leaders. Our goal is to help incubate a locally-led, long-term strategy. The primary venue is not the U.S. interagency arena or the U.N. Security Council. It is the informal arena where a combination of citizen leaders, officials, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and diplomats can collaborate. In this arena a savvy junior officer in the embassy can have more impact than a state visit by the president.
We involve the whole community. We acknowledge that a genuinely “peace-able” society is built of more than politics. Citizens must be engaged, women enabled to play the leadership roles they naturally claim in most cultures, youth included not just as students but as thinking, yearning peaceniks in their own right and not least, business leaders engaged. Diplomats can play a crucial role in catalyzing the connections among these groups but that leverage is not automatic—it must be earned by a skillful, tuned-in professional.
We use advanced simulations as a real-life, local laboratory. Our PeaceGames and PeaceLabs are upside-down wargames especially constructed to help map all the players in a potential conflict or the stakeholders in a durable peace. With those maps the role-playing participants design for themselves a workable path to a long-term peace—something that the last-minute, coercive interventions of a Holbrooke, no matter how dramatic, cannot achieve.
Real Diplomats Do Peace
Famously, the Army, fresh from its 100-hour victory on the bare desert battlefields of the Gulf War, said, “We don’t do mountains” when presented with the opportunity to engage in the rugged terrain of the Balkans. Would that we had a better, more macho-sounding label than peacebuilding. While the peace-words may sound a bit soft and woolly, our future ambassadors are going to find the work everything they hoped for when they imagined a muscular career in the Foreign Service.
During his naval career, Larry Seaquist commanded several warships, including the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61), and served in strategy assignments on the Navy Staff, the Joint Staff, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is the founding chairman of an international, nonprofit “do tank,” The Strategy Group, a Global Action Network of Professional Peacebuilders. He heads peacebuilding projects in Central Asia, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Colombia and in U.S. high schools. He invites your e-mail comments to larry@strategygroup.org .
iMP Magazine: http://www.cisp.org/imp/july_2001/07_01seaquist.htm © 2001. Larry Seaquist. All rights reserved. Released: July 23, 2001.