Enter the Engelhardt
Gap, which really ought to replace the Lippmann Gap as the touchstone of
strategic analysis. It consists of the yawning chasm opened up over the past
decade featuring, on the one side, an American military giant that far outclasses the rest of the world in overall expenditures and destructive power and, on the other, a state whose actual uses of military power produce no benefits and
lead to pernicious consequences. The theory behind building such an awesome
destructive force is that force retains great utility; experience shows that
its utility is, as it were, subzero, operating with utmost effectiveness as a
machine for destabilization and blowback but invariably incapable of achieving
its announced objects.
The Engelhardt Gap
derives its name from Tom Engelhardt, editor of the website TomDispatch, which
features some of the best writing on the web. One of his contributors, Andrew
Bacevich, has described The Gap in great detail, really given chapter and verse
of the thing, but has not named it. Nor has Engelhardt. It needs a name. The phenomenon it discloses is of
the utmost consequence.
The following extracts
come from a recent Engelhardt essay asking "What Planet Are We On?"--or "Why
Washington Can’t Stop: The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts.”
You would do best to read the whole thing, but these extracts give the gist:
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In terms of pure projectable power,
there’s never been anything like it. Its
military has divided the world -- the whole planet -- into six “commands.” Its fleet, with 11 aircraft carrier battle
groups, rules the seas and has done so largely unchallenged for almost seven
decades. Its Air Force has ruled the
global skies, and despite being almost continuously in action for years, hasn’t
faced an enemy plane since 1991 or been seriously challenged anywhere since the
early 1970s. Its fleet of drone aircraft
has proven itself capable of targeting and killing suspected enemies in the
backlands of the planet from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia with
little regard for national boundaries, and none at all for the possibility of
being shot down. It funds and trains
proxy armies on several continents and has complex aid and training
relationships with militaries across the planet. On hundreds of bases, some tiny and others
the size of American towns, its soldiers garrison the globe from Italy to
Australia, Honduras to Afghanistan, and on islands from Okinawa in the Pacific
Ocean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Its weapons makers are the most advanced on Earth and dominate the
global arms market. Its nuclear weaponry
in silos, on bombers, and on its fleet of submarines would be capable of
destroying several planets the size of Earth.
Its system of spy satellites is unsurpassed and unchallenged. Its intelligence services can listen in on
the phone calls or read the emails of almost anyone in the world from top
foreign leaders to obscure insurgents.
The CIA and its expanding paramilitary forces are capable of kidnapping
people of interest just about anywhere from rural Macedonia to the streets of
Rome and Tripoli. For its many
prisoners, it has set up (and dismantled) secret jails across the planet and on
its naval vessels. It spends more on its
military than the next most powerful 13 states combined. Add in the spending for its full national
security state and it towers over any conceivable group of other nations. . . .
Despite this stunning global power
equation, for more than a decade we have been given a lesson in what a
military, no matter how overwhelming, can and (mostly) can’t do in the
twenty-first century, in what a military, no matter how staggeringly advanced,
does and (mostly) does not translate into on the current version of planet
Earth.
Let’s start with what the U.S. can
do. On this, the recent record is clear:
it can destroy and destabilize. In fact,
wherever U.S. military power has been applied in recent years, if there has
been any lasting effect at all, it has been to destabilize whole regions. . . .
It’s now clear that George W. Bush and his top
officials, fervent fundamentalists when it came to the power of U.S. military
to alter, control, and dominate the Greater Middle East (and possibly the
planet), did launch the radical transformation of the region. Their invasion of Iraq punched a hole through
the heart of the Middle East, sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war that has now
spread catastrophically to Syria, taking more than 100,000 lives there. They helped turn the region into a churning
sea of refugees, gave life and meaning to a previously nonexistent al-Qaeda in
Iraq (and now a Syrian version of the same), and left the country drifting in a
sea of roadside bombs and suicide bombers, and threatened, like other countries
in the region, with the possibility of splitting apart.
And that’s just a thumbnail
sketch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re
talking about destabilization in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been on
the ground for almost 12 years and counting; Pakistan, where a CIA-run drone
air campaign in its tribal borderlands has gone on for years as the country
grew ever shakier and more violent; Yemen (ditto), as an outfit called al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula grew ever stronger; or Somalia, where Washington
repeatedly backed proxy armies it had trained and financed, and supported
outside incursions as an already destabilized country came apart at the seams
and the influence of al-Shabab, an increasingly radical and violent insurgent
Islamic group, began to seep across regional borders. The results have always been the same: destabilization.
. . .
Consider this one of the wonders of
the modern world: pile up the military technology, pour money into your armed
forces, outpace the rest of the world, and none of it adds up to a pile of
beans when it comes to making that world act as you wish. Yes, in Iraq, to take an example, Saddam
Hussein’s regime was quickly “decapitated,” thanks to an overwhelming display of
power and muscle by the invading Americans.
His state bureaucracy was dismantled, his army dismissed, an occupying
authority established backed by foreign troops, soon ensconced on huge
multibillion-dollar military bases meant to be garrisoned for generations, and
a suitably “friendly” local government installed.
And that’s where the Bush
administration’s dreams ended in the rubble created by a set of poorly armed
minority insurgencies, terrorism, and a brutal ethnic/religious civil war. In the end, almost nine years after the
invasion and despite the fact that the Obama administration and the Pentagon
were eager to keep U.S. troops stationed there in some capacity, a relatively
weak central government refused, and they departed, the last representatives of
the greatest power on the planet slipping away in the dead of night. Left behind among the ruins of historic
ziggurats were the “ghost towns” and stripped or looted U.S. bases that were to
be our monuments in Iraq. . . .
What planet are we now on? Why is it that military power, the mightiest
imaginable, can’t overcome, pacify, or simply destroy weak powers, less than
impressive insurgency movements, or the ragged groups of (often tribal) peoples
we label as “terrorists”? Why is such military power no longer transformative
or even reasonably effective? . . .
It’s clear enough that Washington
still can’t fully absorb what’s happened.
Its faith in war remains remarkably unbroken in a century in which
military power has become the American political equivalent of a state
religion. Our leaders are still high on
the counterterrorism wars of the future, even as they drown in their military
efforts of the present. Their urge is
still to rejigger and reimagine what a deliverable military solution would be.
Now the message is: skip those
boots en masse -- in fact, cut down on their numbers in the age of the
sequester -- and go for the counterterrorism package. No more spilling of (American) blood. Get the “bad guys,” one or a few at a time,
using the president’s private army, the Special Operations forces, or his
private air force, the CIA’s drones. Build new barebones micro-bases
globally. Move those aircraft carrier
battle groups off the coast of whatever country you want to intimidate.
It’s clear we’re entering a new
period in terms of American war making.
Call it the era of tiny wars, or micro-conflicts, especially in the
tribal backlands of the planet.
So something is indeed changing in
response to military failure, but what’s not changing is Washington's
preference for war as the option of choice, often of first resort. What’s not changing is the thought that, if
you can just get your strategy and tactics readjusted correctly, force will
work. (Recently, Washington was only
saved from plunging into another predictable military disaster in Syria by an
offhand comment of Secretary of State John Kerry and the timely intervention of
Russian President Vladimir Putin.)
What our leaders don’t get is the
most basic, practical fact of our moment: war simply doesn’t work, not big, not
micro -- not for Washington. A superpower
at war in the distant reaches of this planet is no longer a superpower
ascendant but one with problems.
The U.S. military may be a
destabilization machine. It may be a
blowback machine. What it’s not is a
policymaking or enforcement machine.
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