Empire of Trust of Conquest: How to Plan and Decide

Source: "The Petraeus Doctrine," by Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic, October 2008.

There is a debate going on in the military as to the likelihood of different kinds of missions in the future and how to best prepare for that future. The author identifies two camps as polar extremes in the debate:

• One believes that the experience in Iraq and Vietnam required U.S. military capacity to protect civilians and to change entire societies in order to stabilize them, and that the military should prepare for more such missions in the immediate future,
• The other continues to advance the Powell Doctine which emphasis on overwhelming force, assuming that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent, fought by a coalition of allies.
  

The prototypical proponent from the second camp believes:

that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.

"The Long War" prospect, calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, appears to imply political objectives of democratic transformation or imperial domination: thus the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades.

In a world with an increasingly self confident Russia and China, the lack of a military capable of fighting an old-fashioned conventional war has obvious military and diplomatic risks.

Where should we institutionalize nation building capacity?

Hubert Humphrey, in his last days, sought to consolidate the various organizations implementing portions of U.S. foreign assistance into one agency reporting directly to the President. In that long distant time, the U.S. Agency for International Development was involved in nation building, and Humphrey saw the need to integrate all the nation builders into one civilian agency. The intervening years have seen a limitation of our foreign assistance to much more modest objectives, with a corresponding elimination of those from the civilian agencies who thought in terms of the big picture of nation building.

Thus there is a real possibility that the United States will develop a policy in which our military power is focused on the Long War and nation building, and our civilian development assistance community is limited to marginal roles, especially in support of the political objectives of the State Department.

Thomas Madden, in his new book Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World suggests that the United States is in fact established a an "empire of trust" through the creation of powerful networks of allies, and extending an umbrella of protection based on its own military strength and the strength of its coalition to those imperiled states that sought its aid. The provision of development assistance focusing on nation building by civil authorities when invited by developing nations is consistent with that empire of trust. A nation building military, involved in long term occupation to following invasion and conquest, in order to stabilize a new government allied to the United States is consistent with an empire of conquest.

It is important that military experts put forward the implications of each strategy. In the United States, it is even more important that elected civilian authorities decide on which strategy will actually be used. If we have a military designed and capable of the Long War, it is likely that we will have an administration sooner or later that will use it to try to transform the United States into an empire of conquest.

A comment on the process of analysis

Bacevich notes in his article:

The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today’s Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.

First, I don't see the lieutenant colonels and colonels as "the bottom" but rather a key mid level in the military organization. In my experience, large complex organizations often, indeed almost always, delegate policy analysis to this level. The top administrators are, I suppose, to busy with the running of the organizations, and are necessarily dealing with a broad range of issues and concerns. Indeed, often the best policy analysts are ill suited by temperament for senior administrative posts in large organizations. (In scientific laboratories it is in my experience not uncommon to have a chief scientist and a chief operating officer, working closely together, to obtain complementary skills of administration and investigation.)

The issue in organizational design and managing large organizations is to get both the good administrators and the forward thinkers to do what each does best, and to get the two to listen to each other.

As we face the election in November, it is hard to see which future each candidate would be more likely to foster. I think, however, that Obama is likely to opt for the United States aspiring to be an empire of trust, and McCain is likely to opt for an empire of conquest. McCain has called for the Long War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama knows from his experience in community development how very hard it is going to be to change culture.