Will U.S. Military Advisors Face ‘Mission Creep’ in Iraq?

This article originally appeared in Cicero Magazine on 23 June 2014.

President Obama announced as many as 300 U.S. military advisers may be deployed to Iraq to assist the government in fighting the Sunni extremist group ISIS, which has invaded areas of western Iraq. The White House is also considering airstrikes. In 2012 President Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops from Iraq, keeping a campaign pledge to end the American presence there. The President has promised that “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq” and that military advisers will only be there to assist Iraqi forces to repel the ISIS invaders. But some have called this misleading and pointed out that U.S. military advisors certainly have engaged in combat in the past and will again if sent back to Iraq. But would the deployment of U.S. military advisers mean U.S. troops will be engaged in combat in Iraq again?

I served as a U.S. military adviser while attached to a Military Transition Team (MiTT) in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Our job was to provide for our assigned Iraqi infantry battalion what they did not have themselves–namely medical evacuation capability (MEDEVAC), air and artillery support, and certain forms of intelligence. We also facilitated training in administration, logistics, equipment and weapons maintenance, electronic communications, and operational and tactical strategy—all the skills of professional soldiers. We acted as liaison between our Iraqi battalion and its sister U.S. battalion responsible for the same sector. We also evaluated and reported on the readiness of the Iraqi unit to function autonomously. We were certainly engaged in combat, accompanying Iraqi units on patrols and cordon and search operations. Several U.S. members of our unit were killed and seriously injured in combat operations, along with scores of Iraqi soldiers.

Throughout WWII, U.S. military adviser General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and his staff provided high-level military assistance to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and commanded Chinese and Western troops as Chiang’s Chief of Staff. Though their role was originally envisioned to be purely advisory in nature, the United States pushed for Stilwell to be placed in charge of all allied forces in the Chinese theatre, something Chiang resisted until the last. Stilwell and his staff had to fight their way out of Burma following Chinese defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1941, and Stilwell spent the rest of his time in China fighting with Chiang rather than the Japanese.

The re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will not automatically mean putting American troops back into combat. But it could.

Perhaps the clearest example of U.S. military advisors becoming engaged in combat comes from Vietnam. Following the 1945 Japanese surrender, France attempted to regain control of its pre-war colony, Indochina. They returned to strong nationalist and communist resistance in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos which they lacked the understanding or will to fight. A small contingent of U.S. advisers were first dispatched to Indochina in 1950 to support the French military, still recovering from WWII and desperately trying to fight the communist insurgency with antiquated equipment. The U.S. mission was to train French forces on new military equipment the U.S. had supplied them to aid France in its fight against the communists.

After the final French defeat of the First Indochina War at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. began to directly advise the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem in its fight against communist North Vietnam and their indigenous Viet Cong allies. From 1955 to 1960, the U.S. mission grew to as many as 1,500 military advisors. As the Viet Cong insurgency grew in the South, the number of U.S. military advisors grew exponentially, with over 16,000 U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam by 1963. In an extreme example of ‘mission creep’, the soldiers of the Military Assistance Advisory Group-Vietnam (MAAG-V) and the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MAC-V) from 1950 to 1973 moved from a small advisory role to an allied Western military to an open combat role in a grinding Cold War counterinsurgency. They did much more than engage in ‘self-defence’, as once claimed by the Kennedy administration.

Not all U.S. military advisory missions have led to U.S. troops engaging in combat, however. Following WWII, U.S. military advisors assisted in the rebuilding of Germany, the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe, and reconstruction efforts in Japan, China and Korea. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. military advisers trained South American military forces to stabilise their governments against communist rebels during Foreign Internal Defense (FID) missions. More recently, the United States has increased its military advisory presence in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. U.S. military advisers have trained troops and advised governments in Nigeria, South Sudan, Chad, Congo, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines, among others, in recent years. Civilian civil servants with the U.S. Department of Defense also engage in military advisory missions through programs such as the Ministry of Defense Advisors Program (MoDA). The U.S. has frequently deployed civilian and military defence advisors during peacetime to assist allies through structures such as NATO in Europe and the defunct Cold War-era SEATO in Asia. The re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will not automatically mean putting American troops back into combat.

But it could. U.S. Special Operations Forces, especially U.S. Army Green Berets, were originally conceived with the intent of training and organising indigenous troops to become a competent and coherent fighting force to engage in unconventional warfare or to train allied government troops in Foreign Internal Defence or counter-insurgency missions. Building an effective fighting force can hardly be done solely in a theoretical, classroom environment, and even field training under simulated fighting conditions is no substitute for real combat. Special Operations Forces often provide theoretical instruction, followed by field training, and progressing into leading, advising and evaluating performance in combat operations when necessary. If U.S. military advisers are deployed to Iraq, they will likely be Special Operations Forces who possess language and cultural skills and years of previous experience on the ground in Iraq. Anonymous U.S. officials have said the Pentagon would ask for U.S. Special Operations Forces to be on the ground in order to support advisory and intelligence operations there.

The U.S. has already invested billions of dollars, scores of American lives, and six years into training and equipping Iraqi government troops. That is more years of U.S. military training and experience than I had when I first deployed to Iraq myself in 2003. The Iraqi military has been engaged in a counterinsurgency battle on their home turf for years so are not novices to combat. They have already been trained by U.S. advisors. Difficulties in agreeing to an acceptable SOFA agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are the reason there has been no U.S. military advisory presence in Iraq since 2012. Now al-Maliki and the Iraqi government want U.S. forces to return.

There is a historical danger a renewed U.S. military advisory mission in Iraq could “creep” from helping Iraq to help itself into doing it for them. The U.S. may launch airstrikes against ISIS forces—something President Obama has announced he is considering—but they could not do so effectively without trained American controllers on the front lines, which would necessarily place them ‘in combat’—something the President has promised not to do. During the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, President Obama promised there would be no U.S. presence on the ground and that the U.S. would take a backseat to its European allies. Behind the scenes, paramilitary forces from U.S. intelligence were indeed on the ground in Libya and the U.S. military played a much larger role than was publicly acknowledged.

JCS Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, once in overall charge of the American effort to train police and military forces in Iraq, warned that the U.S. does not have the intelligence capability to effectively lead and target airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq. The Iraqi army was not trained or equipped with communications equipment which would enable them to effectively guide U.S. airstrikes. The U.S. was rightly hesitant to train and equip a foreign military with that capability. Arguably only U.S. boots on the ground—filled by troops trained in combat air control—could make the difference.

In sum, U.S. military advisors have historically been deployed in both combat and non-combat roles. While there is a precedent, it does not necessarily follow that the re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will lead to “mission creep” or putting American troops into combat there again. For the option of U.S. airstrikes being employed against ISIS in Iraq to be effective, however, U.S. controllers would most likely have to be on the ground at the front lines. So how does one definitively determine if U.S. troops are “in combat”? This is probably the question that is easiest answer. Forget what the President, Congress, the lawyers, the experts or the media say on the issue. To quote one of Murphy’s Laws: “If you are being shot at, you are in combat.”

Book Review: Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

May, 2014

Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

In The Clash of Civilisations, Samuel Huntington offers a theory that seems accurate on the surface, but underneath leaves much to be desired. This review will outline some basic criticisms of Huntington’s theory.

Huntington’s central argument is that the world is a collection of competing and conflicting ‘civilisations’, a state of affairs which continues today and can be useful in predicting world trends in future. He poses that there are Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin American and (possibly) African (45-48) civilisations. He defines civilisation (42-45) as ‘the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species’ (43). The trouble, which Huntington himself avoids by referencing earlier works to establish them, is trying in any detailed way to define the tenets or boundaries of individual civilisations, which would be vital if it is to offer any value in understanding their motivations or predicting their future actions. He identifies self-identification (43) with a civilisation as a factor and religion as another (42, 47). However, the former is chosen by an individual and the latter can be misleading as to where that individual falls on any issue based upon how strong their faith is. He acknowledges that civilisations change, ‘evolve’, ‘rise and fall’, ‘merge and divide’, and even ‘disappear’ (44). Though it may help explain the world as it is, the evolving nature of civilisations saps his theory of much of its predictive value.

Huntington’s most convincing point in defining civilisations is that civilisations are cultural groupings which outlive or transcend the politics, governments and states which govern them (43-44). Though the British Empire has fallen, there is still British civilisation. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the civilisation still exists in Turkey. China and Germany have seen multiple forms of state over the last 200 years, but still maintain distinct civilisations very similar in character to those which predate these changes. Civilisations are cultural communities which outlive political, economic and scientific upheavals.

A weakness in the theory, which Huntington alludes to, is that civilisations ‘do not, as such, maintain order, establish justice, collect taxes, fight wars, negotiate treaties, or do any of the other things which governments do’ (44). Civilisations simply exist and their underlying cultures, as discussed above, evolve, merge, divide or disappear. No one controls them. Mao Zedong attempted to alter China’s ‘civilisation’ during the Cultural Revolution, as did Western powers in their colonies, and Hitler and Stalin in their own attempts. Arguably, none of them succeeded in permanently altering cultures or civilisations, despite killing millions. Huntington devotes Chapter 3 (56-78) to the concept of ‘universal civilisation’, dominated by Western ideas which Modernists attempt to portray as the ideal civilisation the world should adopt in order to progress. Huntington actually agrees with his critics, such as Edward Said, that the attempt to impose or promote this Modernist, Western-dominated version of a universal civilisation is a major reason for the ‘clash’ between cultures which reject its imposition upon them. Huntington believes ‘Western universalism is dangerous to the world because it could lead to a major inter-civilizational war’ (311).

However, the specific activities which can be seen as evidence of the’ imposition’ of this idea are conducted by certain identifiable states, not Western civilisation, because no one controls Western civilisation or any civilisation--accepting Huntington’s definition of them. Civilisations exist independent of any control. States within the West, and within other civilisations, often go in opposite directions. The United States and others may claim or be seen as speaking for the West as what Huntington calls a ‘Core State’ (35), but the US cannot control the will of Western civilisation. The division between Western powers over the War on Terror and the Iraq War in particular are examples. GW Bush’s attempt to rally the West with a ‘with-us-or-against-us’ line failed miserably among allies.

When Huntington points out armed conflicts as ‘clashes of civilisations’ they are also still clashes between states. As Huntington himself points out above, civilisations ‘do not, as such, ...fight wars’ (44). ‘Civilisations’ themselves cannot conduct any of the actions which Huntington must cite as evidence of ‘clash’. States can act. Civilisations cannot. Even non-state actors such as terrorist groups and international institutions have only a weak claim to represent civilisation. Different civilisations or cultures may present cultural differences which can lead to conflict, but civilisations themselves have no vehicle for armed conflict, or peace, or governing. Civilisations do not clash; states or non-state actors clash and claim their fight is for the good of their version of ‘civilisation’. Civilisation cannot be controlled by any state, but state behaviour can be controlled.

Civilizations do not clash; states or non-state actors clash and claim their fight is for the good of their version of 'civilization'.

If Huntington is right and civilisations are indeed the vehicle through which clashes are increasingly occurring and civilisations are entities which no state or other institution directly controls, then the ‘clash of civilisations’ would seem to be inevitable and uncontrollable. The only path to peace is for civilisations to retreat into themselves and recognise the spheres of other civilisations. This is exactly the situation Huntington describes and what he prescribes for the West (312). In a section called ‘The Renewal of the West?’ (301-308) he deplores the erosion of moral values, specifically calls for a rejection of multiculturalism, revival of Christianity and a renewed commitment to ‘liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property’ (305), concepts claimed as central to Western civilisation. This can be seen as a return to basic principles akin to fundamentalism. As discussed in a section called ‘The Islamic Resurgence’ (109-119), Huntington holds that Islamic Fundamentalism is the Islamic world doing just that, in line with his advice for the West. His answer to Islamic Fundamentalism is Western Fundamentalism. Arguably, this sort of ‘fight-fire-with-fire’ response could just as well serve to widen any divide and perhaps hasten the very clash Huntington wants to avoid.

Huntington outlines early on (31-35) why other prevailing international relations theories leave room for his argument and makes his weakest argument against Realism (33). He believes Realism explains much about how states exercise power in pursuit of interests, but it doesn’t account for differences in how different states determine what their interests are or determine priorities among interests. He believes civilizational contrasts accounts for these differences. This may or may not be true, but he simply asserts that ‘states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms’ (34) without much more explanation. He then goes on to argue that international institutions have eroded state authority, that there is a trend toward secessionism and devolution of power to local governments and that globalisation and the internet have reduced states’ ability to control ‘the flows of ideas, technology, goods, and people.’ (35)

Huntington gives international institutions more authority than they actually have. The UN does carry much weight in the world today, but despite this, states continue to do what they consider in their interest and the UN, lacking autonomous enforcement mechanisms, must rely on states to enforce its collective will. Much like civilisations, international institutions only work when states play along. Institutions such as NATO and the World Bank, though international, fall under the sway of their dominant member states, such as the United States. Most devolved governments are still dependent upon national governments for revenue, law and order and security. These institutions don’t have a will of their own; rather they represent the will of their dominant state member(s). Many secessionist movements are in fact proxy conflicts between states. States such as China and North Korea show states are still able to control the flow of goods and ideas within their borders if they decide it is in their interest to do so. Most states have decided open minds and borders are in their interest and haven’t simply lost the ability to control their borders as Huntington argues. State behaviour can be changed and controlled, whereas the character of civilisations cannot be. A ‘clash of civilisations’ is not inevitable.

A major criticism of Huntington’s theory is that it is all about ‘clash’ and says very little about the positive aspects of what happens when civilisations meet. Huntington only explores the negative security dimensions of his theory. The success of Huntington’s Clash may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with those in government who take up the theory seeing only clashes . If the West were to follow Huntington’s prescription, it would retreat into its core, focus on intra-civilisational interaction and pursue isolationist foreign policy. The world has benefitted greatly from the open exchange of people, ideas, culture and technology between civilisations. For example, Huntington goes on in sections entitled ‘Islam and the West’ (207-217) and ‘Incidence: Islam’s Bloody Borders’ (254-258) to discuss at length conflicts between Islam and other civilisations it comes into contact with, but wholly ignores the historically positive benefits of trade, scientific exchange and political cross-pollination between them, for example, between the Ottoman Empire and Western or Orthodox states on the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Huntington’s theory would be much more acceptable if it balanced the ‘clash of civilisations’ with ‘cooperation of civilisations’. There is an argument to be made that even if civilisations clash at times, the benefits of cooperation and interaction outweigh the drawbacks.

In conclusion, Huntington’s theory seems at the surface to explain the perceived intractable differences between the West and the Islamic world and between other civilisations, but, in depth, the picture drawn is an inaccurate representation of how these ‘clashes’ occur. Huntington’s prescriptions for the ‘clash’ are also questionable. He additionally fails to explore any positive aspects of the meeting of civilisations which could bring balance to his theory. However, the theory is not wholly without merit and deserves more in depth articulation and exploration.



NOTES
1. Booth, K. (1997) “Huntington’s Homespun Grandeur.” The Political Quarterly 68 (4): pp. 425–428.

'The Middle East is not so particular': Fred Halliday and his Critique of Orientalism

May, 2014

Introduction
The study of the Middle East, the Arab world and Islam owe much to a group of historians who call themselves ‘Orientalists’ and no study of these subjects would be complete without considering the critique of these historians by another group of Postmodernist thinkers who follow the writings of Edward Said, especially his 1978 book Orientalism. Together their views have formed two academic camps within the study of the Islam, the Middle East and its peoples. In his 2003 book Islam & the Myth of Confrontation, Fred Halliday criticises both camps for their lack of useful analysis and building a ‘particularist’ view of the Middle East in which the region is treated as peculiar from the rest of the world, with conditions there only being explicable through a unique regional prism or by a particular Western program of domination of the region. This essay will explore Halliday’s critique of Orientalism in support of his view that ‘the Middle East is not so particular’ as the Orientalists or Postmodernists would have it.


‘If [Bernard] Lewis is arguing that for Muslims history is about the production and maintenance of a legitimizing set of historical myths, then Muslims are hardly unique. The same could surely be said of the Irish, the Serbs, the Hindus, the Boers, the Americans, the Japanese, and indeed almost anyone. What appears as a specific, defining characteristic turns out to be something shared with many others. The Middle East is not so particular’ (Halliday, 2003:205) [emphasis added].

Here Fred Halliday criticizes an assertion by Bernard Lewis, intellectual and personal arch-enemy of Edward Said, in the New York Review of Books which begins ‘For Muslims, history is important’ (Lewis, 1991). Halliday cites Lewis’ views in the article as an example of Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ and explains what Lewis actually means is ‘history in the sense of an accurate assessment of the past does not actually matter for them [Muslims]’ (Halliday, 2003:205). Halliday argues that the ‘production and maintenance of a legitimizing set of historical myths’ (ibid.) is not unique or particular to the Middle East as Lewis would have it and cites other non-Muslim peoples who maintain their own self-regarding historical myths.

Abizadeh (2004:292), writing on nationalism particularly in the context of Western liberal democracies, holds that ‘the national memory must be a wilfully selective memory. This mythical element in its shared memories is what enables the nation’s common history to provide it with a motivating power, so much so that the academic study of history poses a threat to the capacity of the nation to hold together’. The common memory of this manufactured history unites people and ties them together and the unsentimental, objective study of history threatens that narrative. Negative reaction to histories, such as many Americans’ reaction to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), which seek to counter such sanitised, nationalised histories by telling the bad along with the good are labelled as revisionist (Greenberg, 2013) by those who do not wish to hear them. Russians, Chinese and Britons for example—all non-Middle Eastern societies—each have just as strong national or origin myths, often historically inaccurate, about their nations and ethnic origins as people of the Middle East. ‘American exceptionalism’ provides a particularly strong example of a non-Middle Eastern society with a selective attitude toward its own history. As Tyrrell (1991:1031) puts it, ‘nowhere has a nation-centred historical tradition been more resilient than in the United States. There, modern historicism, with its emphasis on the uniqueness of all national traditions, was grafted onto an existing tradition of exceptionalism. The pre-historicist idea of the United States as a special case "outside" the normal patterns and laws of history runs deep in American experience.’ Halliday is correct that a selective, oft-inaccurate view of origin and history is not particular to the Middle East as asserted by Bernard Lewis and other Orientalists; it is common throughout humanity.

It is these and similar assertions of the particularity or uniqueness of the Middle East and its people and culture that Halliday’s criticisms are aimed at. He believes ‘In approaching the analysis of the Middle East the element of particularism, uniqueness or impenetrability has been greatly overrated’ and argues that ‘particularism’ by both Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis and Postmodernists such as Edward Said has prevented better academic analysis of Middle Eastern society (Halliday, 2003:215). He holds Orientalists have ‘asserted that the only way to understand the behaviour of Middle Eastern societies is through analysis of “Islam”: that class politics, or revolutions, or even social consciousness do not arise there, or that democracy, in either its literal or socialist sense, is not possible in such countries’ (ibid.:13). Nonetheless, he also points out that Islamists, Arab Nationalists and Arab intellectuals are just as guilty of ‘vaunting the uniqueness and specificity of the “Arabs”, and arguing that forms of oppression found elsewhere—based on class, gender or ethnicity—do not operate in the Arab world’ (ibid.). Al-Azm, among others, calls this approach of extolling the superiority or the contrasting of these specific ‘oriental’, Islamic or Arab values in contrast to Western values, in its most distilled form, ‘Occidentalism’ (Al-Azm, 2011:6). Halliday argues that Postmodernist Saidists are guilty of claiming a ‘special European animosity towards Arabs, let alone towards Palestinians or Muslims, [which] does not bear historical comparison’ (ibid.:210). Though the Islamic world certainly has legitimate grievances against the West, it is not historically accurate to declare, as Said does, the Middle East occupies a special place as a Western target.

Halliday (ibid.:215) explains that there are many issues in the Middle East which can be analysed or explained in either a ‘particularist’ context through concepts such as the prism of the ‘Middle East’, the ‘Arab mind’ or ‘Islam’, but offers that they can also be equally or better analysed or explained using the social sciences in the same way as studying phenomena common and present in other regions and societies elsewhere throughout the world. The issues and problems of the Middle East are also issues and problems in the rest world. They are not particular to the Middle East.

The issue of the structure of Middle Eastern states provides an excellent opportunity to explore Halliday’s criticism of particularism in studying the Middle East. One of the main issues in Middle Eastern society today is that the majority of its constituent states are run by despots who repress political opposition, free expression and political participation, many of which have been or are supported by Western governments, some of which installed these very governments during their rule or as or after the colonial era drew to a close.

The United States, United Kingdom and France, as well as the Soviet Union/Russia and China, have been influential in Middle East politics throughout the Cold War era and after. For example, between 1946 and 2011, the United States provided over $118 billion in aid to the Egyptian government, the majority of which was directed toward military spending, Egypt receiving fully a quarter of all US foreign military aid (Sowa, 2013). The tanks this money bought are on display in Cairo at places like Tahrir Square today. The Soviet Union and then Russia also poured comparable amounts of money into the coffers of Middle Eastern dictators, such as Syria’s al-Assad regime (Hopwood, 1988:72-77), also a continuing relationship. Some Middle Eastern dictators, such as Egypt’s Nasser, were as wily as to receive money from both the US and USSR at times during the Cold War (Goldschmidt, 2008:167). Beyond solely economic or military support, there are also personal relationships between Western and Middle Eastern elites. The special, decades-long business and political relationship between the Bush family and the royal family of Saudi Arabia (Unger, 2007) is an example. That the West ‘props up’ repressive Middle Eastern governments is a valid criticism.

However this state of affairs is not unique to the Middle East. Western states, especially throughout the Cold War era, ‘propped up’ many unsavoury, repressive, non-democratic dictatorships throughout the world. At alternating times, the United States and the Soviet Union provided economic, political and/or military support to oppressive regimes throughout the world. In Southeast Asia, they supported opposing sides: Ngo Dinh Diem or Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam (Immerman, 2011:120-143), Sukarno and then Suharto in Indonesia (Brands, 1989:785-808; Evans, 1989:25-48), and King Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Kiernan, 1985). In Sub-Saharan Africa, the two superpowers funded competing regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Uganda, among others (Friedman, 2011:247-272; Westad, 1996:21-32). In the Americas, the USSR devoted great attention to the Castro regime in Cuba (Fursenko & Naftali, 1997) while the United States continues to work with friendly dictatorships throughout Latin America (Livingstone, 2014). Moscow devoted its greatest efforts to building and supporting oppressive regimes in Eastern Europe, in places like East Germany (Harrison, 2000:53-74), Hungary and Poland (Kramer, 1998:358-384). No matter which side the people of these particular nations were on, they were abused, oppressed and threatened by their own governments. The Middle East has not been a particular victim in the political power games of Western or European states as Edward Said claimed.

Additionally, if one looks at the grievances that Middle Easterners aired during the recent ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, it is easy to see that for many their complaints are the same as other peoples throughout the world. As Zubaida (2011:1) explains, ‘the "revolutions" in Tunisia and then Egypt seemed to eschew religion and nationalism in favour of classic political demands of liberty, democracy and economic justice.’ The signs protestors carried and their complaints to media of the corruption and lack of justice and representation in their governments in places like Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria were mirrored by those voiced by the ‘Occupy’ movement in Western cities such as New York, Washington, London and Berlin. This solidarity and recognition of common goals between East and West was understood and embraced by the protestors themselves (Shanker & Gabbatt, 2011).

Many Orientalists generally argue, with some variation, that the prevalence of despotic regimes in the Middle East today exists because there is a basic historical and/or social incompatibility or conflict between Islamic society and modern notions of liberal democratic government that has created or aided in creating this state of affairs. For example, William Montgomery Watt (1988:3-8) argues that Muslims see the world and society as ‘unchanging’ and therefore people can live today just as they did in the time of the Prophet and Islam is the ‘final’ religion, living any other way being against God’s will . New, modern concepts such as equality, democracy, and tolerance for different lifestyles do not enter easily into their thinking. Bernard Lewis explains that the history of Islam is different from Christianity or Judaism (and by inference, Buddhism and Confucianism as well), where the central figures of Jesus and Moses were spiritual leaders whose people finally triumphed, but who were never actual heads of a state. Lewis writes that ‘from the days of the Prophet, the Islamic society had a dual character. On the one hand, it was a polity—a chieftaincy that successively became a state and an empire. At the same time, on the other hand, it was a religious community, founded by a Prophet’ (Lewis, 2003:9). He also points out that as the head of a state, Muhammad was also a military leader (ibid.:23). He goes on to explain that Islam conferred the authority on the Prophet and his successors and for Muslims Islam is the only real source of legitimacy, with all forms of secular government incurring ‘reserve, even mistrust’ (ibid.:10). Not all Orientalists see the Islamic world in this way, of course.

Edward Said would argue that these Orientalist views are the result and part and parcel of the process of Orientalism: ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1995:3). Said continues: ‘To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise’ and ‘since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did’ (ibid.: 4).

Nonetheless, oppressive, despotic states restricting civil liberties and avenues of political input from the population they rule are just as common in Africa, Asia and South America and are not particular to the Middle East. North Korea, the Central African Republic, Venezuela or China and Russia can be seen as equally as despotic, repressive and non-representative as any Middle Eastern state. According to the Freedom House report Freedom in the World 2014 (2014), the Middle East and North Africa have the worst civil liberties protections in the world, but there are more people in the world living without freedom outside of the Middle East than in it. While the report shows five of the ten least free countries in the world are Muslim-majority societies, the other half are not. 25% of the world’s states are classified as ‘not free’. The report shows declines in political freedom, stability and civil rights in every region of the world outside of Europe (ibid.).

However, the Postmodernists would reject Freedom House’s criticisms of the Middle East and North Africa as imposing a Western measuring stick onto a non-Western region, with Saidists pointing to Freedom House, a Western-based ‘think tank’, as an example of Foucauldian ‘knowledge as power’ and part of the Western, Orientalist government-corporation-academia nexus which Said discusses at length in Covering Islam (2007:135-161). That the Freedom House report shows declines in freedom throughout the world except Europe could arguably show that the measuring stick is rather Eurocentric.

Orientalists are surely wrong in asserting that the prevalence of despotic regimes is an issue caused by the particular society, history or conditions of the Middle East. Clearly comparable regimes exist in similar circumstances throughout the rest of the world and generally the academics who study these other regions refrain from making sweeping statements about regional incompatibility of freedom, civil rights or democracy there. However, Postmodernist Saidists are also wrong in asserting that Western criticisms of Middle Eastern despotism are particularly aimed against them when, especially in the case of organisations such as Freedom House, they are applied equally or universally to the rest of the world. Postmodernists harm their own case by criticising Western support for oppressive Middle Eastern regimes but then also rejecting Western criticisms and sources which support that argument. Ibn Warraq points out this dilemma between having to utterly reject Orientalist knowledge or selectively accept it as evidence when necessary as a problem in Said’s Orientalism (Warraq, 2007:22-3), where Said alternately rejects Orientalist assertions, but accepts some of them as authentic at other times. As Halliday (2003:211) puts it, ‘Said implies that because ideas are produced in a context of domination, or directly in the service of domination, they are therefore invalid.’ Anything the West asserts about the Middle East is invalid because of its dominant position over it. In that light, anything regarding the Middle East that emanates from the West is unacceptable to Postmodernists.

Postmodernists, if they are true to Said’s thought, cannot even accept Eastern-generated knowledge. For Edward Said, there is really no such thing as the objective ‘truth’, there are simply ‘representations’ which cannot be separated from the interests of the ‘representer’ (Said, 1995:272). By that logic, if Western criticisms of the East are representations of Western interest, then Eastern rejections of these criticisms are also representations of Eastern interest. This creates a circular logic in which nothing anyone says can be considered ‘true’. There is only discourse without truth or talk without substance.

This is another of Fred Halliday’s criticisms. He professes to believe in the ‘now supposedly outmoded and pre-modernist view that there is such a thing as reality, and that it is the task of concepts and theories to analyse it, and that their efficacy and values are above all to be judged in terms of how much they explain it’ (Halliday, 2003:196). Said’s Orientalism and its Postmodernist adherents criticise the theories and discourse of those it calls Orientalists as agents of a cultural process of Western--especially British, French and American--domination of the East (Said, 1995:3). They seek to counteract the Orientalist narrative by questioning the truth and motives behind its representations. Yet Postmodernists do not offer an alternative version of the facts. They pose questions, but give no answers. Edward Said seems to deny that the ‘Orient’ exists at all other than as a concept the West has created (Warraq, 2007:22). This begs the question: If the Middle East is not that way, then how is it?

Said has no answer. In fact, he admits ‘no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are’ (Said, 1995:331). Yet, though admittedly lacking the ‘interest’ or ‘capacity’ to say what the Orient and Islam are, he has no trouble saying they are not as the Orientalists would have them. According to Fred Halliday, the value of concepts and theories should be judged on how well they explain the region (Halliday, 2003:196). Edward Said and his Postmodernist adherents fail woefully in this category because they do not—and in fact refuse—to explain the Middle East or Islam at all. One would be ill served in turning to Edward Said or Postmodernists when trying to understand the Middle East.

Halliday also points out that the Middle East is not alone in struggling to deal with or overcome a Western-dominated imperial or colonial past. Regions as diverse as Ireland, Scotland and the Basque region to the former colonial states of Indochina to virtually the whole of Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012:71-89) and South America have a history of imperialist and colonial domination by Western states. This treatment was not solely reserved for the Arab world. Though European Christians launched multiple ‘crusader’ armies into the Middle East supposedly to liberate the holy land over a period of centuries (Davies, 1997:358), it also launched similar centuries of ‘crusades’ afterwards into South America and Africa to convert the native populations to Christianity and exploit their labour and resources, wiping out entire nations of indigenous peoples and sending countless thousands back as slaves. Between 1490 and 1890, the native population of North and South America declined 96% as a result of contact with the West (Taylor, 2002:40). Ward Churchill compares Christopher Columbus--formerly considered one of the great European explorers--to Hitler’s executioner Heinrich Himmler due to the deaths of millions of indigenous South and North Americans following his ‘voyages of discovery’ (Churchill, 1993:12).

This does not place the West in a better light, but it does show that the exercise of the West’s expansionist, colonial, imperial drive was not particular to the Middle East alone. Native North and South Americans and Africans by this measure have a stronger claim to being the victims of a particular European animus. Their attempts at resistance were quickly overcome and those peoples who survived the onslaught were unable to regain control of their own lands or cultures until decolonisation in the 20th century. The major indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa were either enslaved or driven to virtual extinction within a few centuries. Tens of thousands of Africans were transplanted into the Americas, losing all connection with their ancestral land and culture. Their stories are utterly lost to history.

In fact, because of the strength of Middle Eastern kingdoms during the period of the Crusades they were able to resist and finally force out the Christian European invaders, eventually themselves returning the favour by invading and occupying European Christian lands as far north as Tours, France (Lewis, 2003: 47). Peoples of the Middle East were able to preserve their own kingdoms, religion and culture and were able to invade, colonise and dominate Western lands for centuries before being turned back themselves. The Middle East still retains its broad geographic, ethnic, religious and political identity today. Other peoples who were the target of Western expansion are gone. There is no one to speak for them. The Sioux, Comanche and Zulu do not have their own Edward Said.

Both Saidian Postmodernists who attempt to explain the prevalence of despotic government and lack of freedom in politics and society in the Middle East as occurring as the result of particular Orientalist imperial crimes and the Orientalists they criticise for creating the false idea that modern, free, democratic governments are incompatible with Islamic society are leaving out a large part of the story of the rest of the world.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Fred Halliday is correct that the Middle East is not so particular. The Orientalist assertion that Middle Easterners are more susceptible to nationalised, religious or ethnic foundation myths as opposed to objective historical truth is clearly false--the rest of the world suffers from this problem as well. The fact most Middle Eastern states are despotic dictatorships in which its people are not represented is not a particular feature of the Middle East either. The Orientalist assertion that this occurs because there is a basic incompatibility between Islamic society and modern democracy ignores the fact that the West has built and supported these regimes in support of their own interests. They are not indigenous. However, the Middle East is not the only region where Western states have and do support oppressive regimes. The Islamic World was not singled out.

The Postmodernist view of Orientalism criticises and rejects these Western views of the Middle East as part of this domination of the East by the West, but refuses to offer any alternative explanation of the ‘truth’ because, to Postmodernist Saidists, there is no such thing, only subjective representations of it. Halliday believes there is a ‘truth’ and concepts and theories are judged on how well they explain that truth. Said’s Orientalism offers a one-sided critique of the West, but no analysis of the Middle East. It does not explain it at all. The peoples of the Middle East are not the particular victims of Western, imperialist, colonial crimes or hatred and historically fared better in many ways than other peoples who were targets of European expansion. Fred Halliday is correct in his critique that ‘both [Orientalists and Postmodernists] fail us in what I have defined as the central intellectual task, namely the analysis of the societies in question’ (Halliday, 2003:201) [original emphasis]. The Middle East is not so particular.




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Rand Paul is Wrong; International Development is Vital to U.S. National Security

This article originally appeared on PolicyMic on 18 March 2013.

It's not a stretch to say that there is a lot of dishonesty in our political discourse in America. One of the most brazen but overlooked examples comes from the wing of one of our major political parties that claims to believe in no or very little government, yet is led by figures who spend their entire careers working in government under the questionable claim that they do so to protect the rest of us. To expect figures such as Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to be good shepherds of government policy and programs they ideologically oppose is the same as trusting a cat with your gold fish bowl. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans accept government has a role to play in our lives, especially regarding our national security. Unfortunately, blind ideological allegiance to slashing government in ignorance of this vital role threatens our national defense.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and we should not ignore the lessons we learned from our struggle there. I served two tours in Baghdad and often the best metrics we had to measure the impact of our security operations and reconstruction was to measure how many hours of electricity were provided each day, how many shops were open, if the water, sewage, and trash removal were working, and how long the gasoline lines were. We learned that we can never ignore the aftermath of military actions and simply hope for the best. However, we also should have already picked up this lesson following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, as made famous by Charlie Wilson’s War. Had we spent money on international development then, perhaps we wouldn't be fighting there now. It would be more than a mistake to make the same mistakes twice.

Our troops were forced into the role of international aid workers, social workers, and public works directors. Though they certainly rose to meet the challenge, such work is best left to professionals who are experienced in such matters so our troops can concentrate on winning the fight. Our military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan learned through experience on the ground that providing public works and educational and economic development is just as valuable as performing traditional military operations. They requested funding for such programs. CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis recently testified before Congress, "If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition." That is quite an endorsement and these hard-learned lessons should not be ignored now.

Unfortunately, small government zealots such as Paul are doing just that. Just recently here on PolicyMic and elsewhere Paul has lumped spending on important international development programs in with the massive amount spent upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an example of out-of-control spending that needs to be cut. Rather ironically, it was Paul's own party that pushed hard for America to enter into these long and costly wars. It seems to be a dishonest attempt to capitalize on the misunderstanding the public have on the amount spent on "foreign aid" to lump these two very different categories together. It is just as dishonest for Paul and others to lump international development in with our trade and borrowing deficit with China, a wholly unrelated issue.

In fact, the U.S. spends less than 1% of its entire budget on international development. Spending on international development returns much more benefit than military spending. Those truly concerned about getting the best for taxpayer dollars spent should take heed. It costs over half a million dollars to put one soldier in the field in places like Iraq or Afghanistan for one year. The effect of spending an equal amount to build schools or water treatment plants or a new local market lasts decades longer than a soldier's one year tour and the effect multiplies as local conditions are improved. It also keeps our troops out of harm's way when it works. If Paul or others are concerned with how America spends its money, they should welcome these programs.

Though its benefit is harder to quantify than the number of terrorists captured or killed, it has a real recognizable impact and for a longer period. The question should not be "can we afford to build a school in Afghanistan and not in America," but rather "is it more cost effective to build a school there now to avoid possibly having to send our troops there later?" Those concerned with spending our security dollars in the most effective way possible understand this.

Such spending also builds a positive image for America, as opposed to conducting armed house-to-house searches that, though often necessary, receive a negative response. A national security operation that builds a positive image and costs far less than fighter jets and smart bombs should be a welcome tool. Our military understands why international development funding is important, but some in Congress are not listening to them. They cannot honestly claim to know better.

The world today is a complex place and America cannot afford to retreat within its own borders as isolationists. Sen. Paul and his followers want a "little America" that has a smaller role in world events and that willfully gives up its mantle as world power. Such behavior will not make threats and our problems go away and they'll show up on our doorstep sooner or later whether we like it or not. The world is a safer place with America active in it. We cannot afford to ignore the lessons our troops fought and paid so dearly to learn. International development paired with the proper application of military force when necessary is an effective tool America should fully fund and apply. We cannot afford to ignore these lessons or to relearn them again the hard way.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Shift to the East: American Foreign Policy Looking Forward

This article originally appeared in Small Wars Journal on 18 March 2013.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, a war that will perhaps never hold a sure place in America’s history. It is time to reflect on what we should have learned from it and to add these to the lessons our combined American history teaches us and apply them to our world today. Though the headlines are still gripped by news from the Middle East, in the bigger picture, we should be shifting our attention toward the Far East. Shifting our concern to China and the East is not an argument of moral imperative based upon violent oppression or extremism, nor is there a justification of self-defense. We’re not being attacked. We have a real competitor, a state of affairs America hasn’t faced yet in all of its years of post-WWII hegemony.

My grandfather fought in WWII, my father in Vietnam, and I fought in Iraq. WWII was a war of industrialized nations fought around the globe. Broadly, our enemy was Japanese and German fascism. Vietnam pitted industrialized America against an underdeveloped Vietnam over fears of the spread of Russo-Chinese communism in Asia. It is much harder to nail down the reasons for the Iraq War since many of them turned out to be false. In the broader scheme, the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns were/are a fight against Islamic extremism in response to 9/11. As time has gone on whom, why and what America fights for is becoming harder to define, as is deciding when we should decide to do so.

The days of war on the European continent are gone and aren’t coming back anytime soon. There are many reasons for this. WWII devastated virtually the whole of the continent and left the major economies—Germany, France, Britain--weak and in crushing debt. The only combatant to come out of the war in a stronger position than it went in was America and this is a position we have maintained with little world competition in the 68 years since. Europeans understood afterwards that they had more to gain from mutual cooperation with each other and with America than they had in competing and trying to strike and shift balances of power.

Out of this understanding came two of the most important organizations to European and American commerce and security—the European Union and NATO. These organizations ensure that European states remain engaged with one another and with America and vice versa. The EU recently—rightly—won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many who don’t know the history and original idea behind the EU and the common market and currency scoffed. What started out as a joint enterprise between West Germany and France involving coal and steel concentrated along their common border to ensure they never went to war over these resources again has evolved into the largest common labor and commerce market in the world, a 27-country block which carries heavy weight in world markets. NATO has and continues to be the security mechanism that ensures America and Europe remain mutually engaged and cooperate in each other’s security, throughout the Cold War and into today.

The attack on Pearl Harbor that finally drew the U.S. into WWII came from Japan and the fight in the Pacific was just as furious as that in Europe. However no huge mechanized U.S. divisions had to make the slog through continental Asia. The U.S. experience in the Korean War—a forgotten war—shows that this would likely have been a more difficult proposition. The atomic bomb ended the war before the U.S. had to make such a major shift. We can perhaps be thankful our enemy was the island of Japan and not on the mainland of Asia. Early American difficulties in Korea may be blamed on defense budget cuts and a general aversion to investing money, equipment, and lives in another war in Asia so soon after finishing a first. Technically, the Korean War is still not over.

Some of this begins to sound familiar. After ending Iraq and soon Afghanistan, America is war weary and will be cutting defense spending—some voluntarily, most via sequestration. Yet world events continue to call. See Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and other lesser-known fights in places like Yemen, the Philippines, and the horn of Africa. What is different is that Europe seems to be waking up to the world again. European military and diplomatic contributions have been more forthcoming than at any time since WWII. Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Mali are proof.

The wars in Iraq and Vietnam are always a controversial parallel to draw. America fought them both virtually alone. They became very unpopular politically at home, unpopular internationally, and they suffered from unclear goals, ‘mission creep’, an enemy hard to define or pin down, and were aggravated by bigger states becoming involved by fighting a proxy war against America. Both wars also have those who feel a better result would have been achieved if America had fully committed and ‘stayed the course’. They’re not necessarily wrong.

It must be understood that every conflict America has fought in the post-WWII era has carried with it the potential to expand into much wider conflict—WWIII even. Even seemingly small events such as the Cuban missile crisis or the fall of the Berlin Wall all carried the specter of a much wider battle with the USSR if things had gone differently. America didn’t go ‘all in’ in Korea because it risked war with the Chinese and perhaps Russia. A larger commitment expanding further outside the borders of Vietnam risked the same and the reason the U.S. only made temporary incursions into Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. didn’t chase bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Afghan Taliban into Pakistan because it didn’t want wider war in the Middle East either. Though there is evidence Pakistan has been playing for both sides and that Iran fuelled the Iraqi insurgency, Americans would not support a fully-committed fight. Yet two years later America invaded Iraq on thinner pretense. We get ourselves into these things easily, but can’t finish them.

This hesitancy to fully commit and stay the course is also not wrong. Before America goes to war it should always decide if it is willing to go the distance. There are times when a small, limited, focused campaign can achieve results—see Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya. But this is the exception and not the rule. Lack of a clear mission with defined goals and commitment to full victory can lead to quagmire and drift as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The current administration’s hesitancy to become involved on the ground in the Arab Spring uprisings, Syria, and Africa seems to come from an understanding of this problem. One should not sleepwalk into wars or try to fight them on the cheap, as early on in Afghanistan.

Though controversial, drone strikes against targets in the Middle East and Africa are one of a few ways for America to act against opponents who don’t have a state or wear a uniform and doesn’t require U.S. boots on the ground or put troops’ lives at risk. The only other alternative, short of going to war, is to do nothing. As America, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Doing something—ground combat, air interventions, drone strikes—is just as unpalatable as doing nothing and allowing extremists to control wider swathes of territory to the terror of the people that live there.

In order to maintain its position in the world, America cannot go back to sleep. Underneath it all, we’re not the lone masters of the universe anymore. Amid turmoil elsewhere, China is growing, flexing its muscles in the Pacific, in the markets, and in the cyber-world. Though the U.S. takes no official position, the arguments between China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over uninhabitable Pacific islands is actually about the oil and gas deposits under them. China’s economy and military spending has grown by leaps and bounds since 2008. China is indisputably conducting industrial and state espionage against America on the ground and online. With these points in mind, it is clear to see why the Obama administration is making a strategic shift to the East.

As the 20th century has turned into the 21st, moral justifications for going to war have become unclear, politicized, and suspect. Yet, despite outcries, there has never been as much care taken in the military operations of Western states for avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties in combat as there is today. They are a consideration in every engagement. We have gone from indiscriminate day and night bombing raids on urban areas to using intelligence-driven surgical strikes on individual targets which may soon require a judicial process to approve them. As much as this is a laudable improvement, the enemy knows how to create media churn when innocents are killed. This despite that attacks by Islamic extremists often kill scores more innocent civilians for every Western soldier, diplomat, or civilian they themselves kill.

Will there ever come a time again when it is clear America must act or has our thinking become too morally relativist? It is right to always be skeptical of the use of military force. War is an ugly thing for everyone involved and it is always right to question it. My father and I are American veterans of wars that will never have a clear place in our history. Many Vietnam veterans feel America had the communists on the run after the 1968 Tet Offensive, but domestic political and public opinion had turned against continuing to fight. There is historical support for this view. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine that many veterans of that generation didn’t want the same thing to happen to their sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan. This fear informed the ‘stay the course’ mantra of the George W. Bush era and other leaders such as Senator John McCain.

Both Vietnam and Iraq suffered because of a lack of clear ideas and communication to people at home what it was we were fighting for and how exactly we would know when we won, not to mention the huge costs in lives and money. Neither fight was ever short on cited justifications, but in neither case was there an answer in one sentence. In Vietnam, the enemy was communism. Yet we knew that we were never going to actually take on the real sources of communism directly—Russia and China. Similarly yet more confusingly, in Iraq the enemy was a WMD threat, Saddam Hussein, and the ambiguous enemy of ‘Islamic extremism’. There were no WMD. We deposed Saddam. There is no identifiable single source of Islamic extremism and America continues to reiterate constantly that Islam itself is not the enemy. The fight still goes on elsewhere even after killing bin Laden and rendering the original iteration of al Qaeda ineffective as an organization.

It was clear we had to fight WWII because eventually we would be fighting for our own continuing free existence one day. There was also the moral imperative to free other nations from an illegitimate foreign invasion accompanied by ethnic cleansing and holocaust. That is a pretty clear measuring stick. Does this mean that the circumstances must always be this clear before America turns to military force? What did German minorities, Chinese, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, Dutch, Belgians, French, and Britons of that era think? Did America wait too long to join the fight? There is some truth behind the argument that we waited until it really became our problem and that all was forgiven when we came as liberators—though too late for many. We invested tens of thousands of troops’ lives and billions of dollars in the war eventually anyway.

The onset of the Cold War and the atomic age presented new problems. Though clear lines were drawn again between NATO-West and Warsaw Pact-East, the ‘mutually assured destruction’ that nuclear weapons guaranteed ensured we would often come to the brink of WWIII, but never over the line. The West understood, in the words of George Kennan, that, “Soviet power . . . bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” By placing pressure militarily, economically, politically, and socially on the USSR, we were able to hasten its demise, though it did take forty-five years.

In many ways, America continues to apply this strategy to other states today. We’ve pressured states such as Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, and others in a similar fashion, attempting to affect change by identifying, creating, and exploiting cracks in their internal systems’ foundations. But these states, especially the Middle Eastern variety, have something the USSR never had—oil and gas wealth and religious, social, and ethnic unity. Even amid regional clashes based upon sectarianism, tribalism, and ethnicity, the people of the greater region often conclude, temporary alliances aside, that their differences with America are bigger than their differences amongst each other.

During the Cold War, the West could offer its foes religious, cultural, political, and economic freedom or liberalization. These were things dissidents wanted and called for and the Soviet state had to suppress. But it is not the same case in the Middle East and Maghreb. Though the people there do strive for political freedom from totalitarianism and more economic freedom, they often still reject the Western culture that is seen to come along with it. This presents people of the region a choice between the lesser of two evils; change their deeply-embedded culture in the name of progress or keep their traditions and suffer advancement at a snail’s pace. They’re not ready to buy what we’re selling, at least not as much as the East block was, or at least not yet. We’re in the position of trying to give something to them they’re not ready for and we want them to thank us for it. It isn’t working.

But it may work elsewhere. Asia certainly has its cultural differences from the West, but the differences between the two do not set us so far apart. America has excellent relations with India, a state that may just end up eclipsing China in decades to come. Japan has every opportunity to regain the economic power it had in the 1980’s. South Korea is also experiencing tremendous growth. America has normalized relations with Vietnam and strong relationships with the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan, among others. Many of these states are seeking an alliance to balance against Chinese regional pressure. Though the region has pariah states in Burma and North Korea, most Asians are looking for the kind of political, economic, and cultural liberalization that America and the West has to offer, albeit with their own cultural twist. A shift to the East is certainly a good idea.

It is perhaps wrong to look at China as an enemy of America in the Cold War sense of the word. It is clear that China is the number one competitor with the U.S. for world hegemony. Moral relativism dictates that this shouldn’t matter and if we walk around with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Yet it is America’s dominance in the world that allows Americans to enjoy what it is we love in our society. One thing that is clear about Americans is that we will not happily accept a decline in our standard of living so that others elsewhere can have more. We don’t like bumps in the road. Despite fighting two long and costly wars in the Middle East over the past decade, the average American hasn’t felt a bump at all. There is no draft, no rationing, and only 1% of the population serves in the military. If competition means a decrease in security or living standards or increases in costs, Americans will not accept it. Morality aside, this is a facet of the American character.

The truth is that states such as North Korea and Iran do not pose a real threat to American hegemony for all of our concern over their weapons programs. They never have. They do have the ability to harm and kill a large number of Americans or our allies and, in the case of Iran, have done so. I witnessed first-hand the results of Iran’s proxy involvement in the Iraq War through arming and training Iraqi insurgents. Yet there is no scenario in which Iran could overtake America militarily, economically, or diplomatically. Though we should always remain concerned and watchful of such states, the amount of attention devoted to them should be proportionate to the true threat they represent, especially when there are bigger opponents in the game.

China is the only competitor who may present a real challenge to U.S. dominance. It is big enough, land, population, and resource-wise. Its economic growth has been impressive, as has the growth in its military spending. It is no secret that many of the military technologies China has unveiled in the past several years have often been based on pirated U.S. technology. China unveiled its own stealth fighter, having allegedly paid top dollar for pieces of a downed U.S. stealth bomber in Bosnia and from the crashed stealth helicopter used on the bin Laden raid in Pakistan. Recent reports show that China-based hackers, likely from a Chinese military unit, have infiltrated the computer systems of almost every major U.S. government institution, large media and law firms, and major corporations. Chinese agents on the ground in the U.S. are buying our military and civilian trade secrets and technologies.

But cultural and social change is coming along with China’s state-controlled opening and economic prosperity. The Chinese state seems to be making an attempt at a version of totalitarian capitalism and may soon wander into Russian-style ‘managed democracy’. They’ve been able to keep the brakes on any undesirable side effects to this point. But if history is any guide, economic liberalization brings political and social liberalization with it. In China’s case, this may become an uncontrollable, possibly bloody affair that makes Tiananmen Square look small in comparison. When people begin to want more freedoms in life, they begin to question the state as to why they cannot have it. America knows this from its own history. These are questions the Chinese government may not like to hear.

The question of whether or not China should be looked at as a competitor is an academic one. China clearly is a competitor. It remains to be seen if China is a foe. Chinese would likely argue that they’re not doing anything that America isn’t doing itself. They’re not wrong. We still spend more on our military than the next sixteen nations combined. We spy on China as well. From the point of view of moral relativism, it would be unfair to decry them for doing the same things we’ve been doing for decades. But the moral relativist doesn’t pick a side.

Choosing America’s side, China presents an unclear case. China has never really had imperialist ambitions and rarely involves itself in events outside its own borders, yet reacts jealously to actions it sees as taken against its interests or involvement in its domestic affairs. China may not have ambitions against America, but the question is if the competition they present will be a threat to the United States’ hegemony. Moral relativism would hold that they’re just as entitled to it as we are and if they can beat us at our own game then they deserve to win. These sound much like the words of George Kennan speaking on confronting and defeating the Soviet Union during the Cold War. We cannot just say they’re as entitled to it as we are and throw the game wide open. We’re still playing.

What should America do? We’ve always been good at forging long-term mutually beneficial alliances, something many other states have been unable to do, or at least not as successfully. Our enduring security relationship with Europe through NATO and the connections forged with former enemies using the Marshall Plan are examples. America should attempt to build and strengthen similar institutions that build multilateral cooperation in Asia.

Despite rhetorical accusation from the far left, America is not and never has been an empire. This argument does sell books though, as does reports of America’s premature demise. We do use our economic and military strength to push our interests forward, but this is a far cry from Rome, the Ottomans, and colonial powers like France and Great Britain. Though many may grumble America usually seems to get its way like the big kid in the schoolyard, countries that build cooperation with the United States find it is a mutually-beneficial relationship. Compare this with the exploited positions of European colonies or satellite states of the USSR. Even in the overwhelming majority of states where the U.S. has troops stationed or deployed, they are there by agreement, not invaders, and provide an economic boon.

If America is going to continue to compete, we need to give Asian states reasons to choose our side. Ensuring China isn’t allowed to push around its smaller neighbors is a good place to start. If we do, we will have to assure them that we are interested in the area for good and are not just fair weather friends who will abandon them, leaving them to suffer the wrath of their much bigger neighbor China. The U.S. must be ready to make as much a long-term commitment to our Asian allies as it has to our European partners.

Some will argue this will draw Chinese ire and increase friction, but allowing sometimes-ridiculous Chinese claims to territory and waters to stand may look like appeasement and only encourage further infractions. At the current level of Chinese espionage in the United States, they cannot honestly complain of U.S. involvement in their domestic affairs with clean hands. America refraining from playing at China’s borders should be dependent upon them refraining from playing too much within ours.

At the same time, continuing to trade heavily with China will continue its growth and, theoretically, the liberalization that will come with it. However we should encourage and incentivize China raising its product safety and labor standards. This will in turn increase the cost of Chinese goods to a level comparable with the rest of the world and support improved conditions for average Chinese workers to raise their wages to a comparable level as well—and demand more freedoms that come along with them. America should continue and expand military and educational exchange as well to grow a better mutual understanding of one another’s system and culture. America has always been an open book; China has not been.

In our meandering, unclear, adventurist, and sometimes-profligate relations with the rest of the world in the post-Cold War era, we shouldn’t lose sight that there are still sides to be chosen. Our position in the world is not assured by ‘American exceptionalism.’ It is always proper to question whether the choices we are making are morally correct. Yet this questioning must not translate into hesitancy or a failure to understand that we may have to take action, even military action, for the things we want to keep as a country or what we believe in or even for our very existence. When that time comes again—history tends to show it will—we will have to be prepared to compete or even fight with clear objectives in mind and accept no less than victory.

This is the kind of country my grandfather grew up in and the kind of war he fought in, though arguably the lines were much more clearly drawn then and there was a clear and present threat to our country. Things are more ambiguous in the modern world. Many Americans have become too comfortable with our position. Some believe unquestioningly in the absolute creation myth that this is a God-chosen nation that is the unique pinnacle of human development--a belief that ignores the hard work and sacrifice that built this country and keeps it where it is.

On the opposite side, other Americans have come to question so much about our position and dominance in the world that they seem to welcome the idea of the U.S. being taken down a notch and feel little connection to the country despite the advantages and benefits life here affords them. Both of these viewpoints are quite naïve and dangerous, yet represent the sides that divide America today—one believes in American infallibility, the other in unjust American imperialism. Both of these positions are wrong and neither is tenable.

America is moving out of its adolescence. In many ways we’re not fighting to advance anymore; we’re just fighting to hold on. This struggle is most present in the great American middle class, with the children of the baby boom generation facing the likelihood of having a lower standard of living than their parents. The men and women coming home from years of war in the Middle East are struggling to find a place in the workforce and society. In many ways, it seems that America has lost its way. One side holds that our best days are already behind us and it is to these idealized glory days we must return. The other believes we should seek some sort of utopian equilibrium with the rest of humanity that has never existed and likely never will.

America has to find its point again. For us to maintain our good standard of living and spread opportunity to the majority of citizens it must be recognized that we have to do it from a position of strength that continues to put our interests first. This also means accepting that the face of America itself is changing—ethnically, socially, and economically. This does not require an America that believes blindly in its own righteousness and rectitude and always presses its advantage to the pain of others. The world doesn’t need another empire. It needs a power that can provide stability and sound judgment in the rest of the chaos. For the last 75 years America has provided that stability.

There is no shortage of paranoid regimes that seek to wield their influence. Imagine American power in the hands of Iran, North Korea, or Russia. Despite our historical mistakes, America has always refrained from grossly abusing the full power it has in the world. It is true that there has never been a nation as strong as America. It is also true that there is no other power that has shown as much restraint in using it. To those who believe we should use it to our full advantage, know it is this very restraint that has allowed us to maintain it. For those who believe we have used it too often, know that America has used its power more justly than any other great nation before it.

Knowing the balance between when to exercise power and when to hold back is vital to maintaining America’s strength. Our adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq should teach us that. We should have foreseen from the beginning and now in hindsight that these fights were against larger enemies that we either lacked the understanding to recognize and/or the will to take on fully. Lacking that understanding or commitment, we should not have started anything we were not going to finish. That does not mean blindly ‘staying the course’ once chosen, rather it means if we are not willing to pursue the fight from the beginning to the outcome of nothing less than total victory, then every minute, every life, and every cent spent upon it is wasted effort.

America itself is not immune from the strategy it applies against the rest of the world. When al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, they did so knowing that America would have to respond. It was what they wanted. It has worked. As a consequence, America has been embroiled in war in the Middle East for over a decade at the cost of thousands of troops’ lives, over $1 trillion spent, and great domestic and international political turmoil. Despite the cost and effort, very little has changed in the region. Islamic extremism remains a threat and new organizations have sprung up every few years.

Our opponents have found cracks in the foundation of our system and are attempting to exploit them. This is a trick we know well because it is our game. When George Kennan wrote of communism containing the seeds of its own destruction he also wrote that American-style capitalism does as well. We must answer to the pressures put upon us by our foes, but do so in a way that does not waste effort, resources, or time. This is no time for America to become complacent. America worked and fought hard to obtain its place in the world and keeping that place will require just as much work and fighting.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Will Military Action Be Necessary to Stop Iran's Nuclear Program?

The article appeared on Truman Doctrine and PolicyMic in December, 2012.

At times America has hesitated to act when it should or could have. Earlier action against Iran could have halted their nuclear program, as in the case of Israel’s strikes against Syria’s and Iraq’s nascent nuclear programs. Decisive action could have prevented genocide in Sudan or the proliferation of nuclear technology to Pakistan and North Korea. Many question if we have hesitated too long to act in Syria, against spreading Islamism in Africa or in closer conflicts such as the cartel wars in Mexico. However, U.S. interventions in the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya were swift, clearly defined and decisive.

At times over the last few decades it has been hard to answer the question of what America seeks to achieve in the world. Our overarching national security goal should be to secure American victory. It may seem a semantic point at first, but there is a major difference in thought between protecting America and its interests and pushing America and its interests forward. It is the difference between reaching acceptable compromises to live with our foes or defeating our opponents finally and decisively.

Many Western countries are guilty of drawing lines in the sand and when the line is crossed they just draw a new one. Israel has been drawing red lines regarding Iran’s nuclear program and stepping back every time. Some have recently argued the U.S. should draw a line alongside them. It arguably erodes credibility to characterise certain conditions as ‘unacceptable’ and then accept them. However, the important point is not that we should fight when our line is crossed, but that we should be more considered about when and where we draw them.

There is just as much danger in pushing your chips forward too early, or not pushing forward enough of them, as there is in hesitating too long. Iraq and Afghanistan are illustrations of this point. Iraq was a war commenced on false pretences which never had clearly defined goals and drew focus away from Afghanistan, a war which could have been won in the beginning but was allowed to drift into today’s stalemate. Both of these conflicts suffered from insufficient troop numbers, divided focus, and unclear goals.

It is for these reasons that America should be hesitant to draw red lines when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program now. We should not allow sabre rattling and rhetoric to draw us into a fight before we are ready or before it is necessary. The propaganda spiral moved America to war in Iraq with the argument we couldn’t afford to wait. Had we waited and asked more questions it may have become clear how unnecessary it was and how profligate it became. Once the propaganda cycle has begun in earnest, it becomes very hard to back away from the precipice. We should not be in a rush to reach this point of no return. It may pull us into a third conflict before we have ended or recovered from the other two.

And that would indeed be a great tragedy. A truly nuclear armed Iranian military presents a greater national security threat to the United States than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden ever did. If or when that point is reached, we should be rested and ready to devote our full strength and attention to confronting it. The spectre of a nuclear armed Iran is not just a straw man. Iran and the U.S. and its allies have been fighting proxy wars in the Middle East for 30 years. Iran is already directly and indirectly responsible for the death of thousands of Americans and our allies in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and in acts of terror elsewhere. Those who portray Iran as an innocent victim of U.S. or Western aggression simply defending itself or being made a target because they challenge our hegemony are wrong.

The truth is that Iran is much further from this point than often portrayed. There are disagreements as to the amount of fissile material Iran has and America and its allies have already scored big hits against their refinement capability using the embargo and the Stuxnet virus. But refinement is only a part of the process. Nuclear warheads require a delivery vehicle with a complex guidance capability — an intercontinental ballistic missile system. Though this technology is easier to master and obtain than nuclear technology on the market, it can be effectively curtailed by embargo. Iran has not had much success with its missile tests.

But waiting to act should not be understood as hesitancy to act decisively. It is a strategic pause we should take advantage of to plan and prepare to confront this threat when or if it becomes necessary. If the Iranian regime is indeed set upon obtaining nuclear weapons and draw indisputably closer to reaching that point, we will have to confront them decisively and eliminate the capability. They have not reached that point. We should use the period between now and then to take our troops out of combat elsewhere and prepare for this more necessary fight if it comes. If it comes, it may likely be a tougher fight than any we’ve faced in the Middle East yet and an opportunity to show we have learned from our strategic and planning mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is still the possibility it will not be necessary and a diplomatic solution may be reached. It should always remain preferable to us to confront and dissolve these conflicts without a fight. Taking the time to do so is not a sign of weakness, but of strategic caution and, in any case, gives us a strategic pause. We should not rush to failure. In any case, we have the upper hand in the conflict from the outset and should not be in a hurry. When tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of lives are in the balance, the nick of time will do. The time to militarily confront Iran may come. Now is not that time.

The (Camouflage) Things They Carried

This article originally appeared in Small Wars Journal on 23 October 2012.

Those who never served in the military would find it hard to believe the degree to which a soldier’s appearance is regulated. Army Regulation 670-1 governs the wear and appearance of the Army uniform and is constantly revised. But it goes far beyond just uniforms. It covers shaving, haircuts, and hairstyles, fingernail polish, length, and cleanliness, tattoos, piercings, dental work, and even extends to appearance off duty. AR 670-1 is the reason you won’t find soldiers with their hands in their pockets. Admittedly, this degree of micromanagement is one of many reasons I decided not to make the Army my career and left after nine years. I followed regulations like a professional soldier, but after I came back from combat each time I found it increasingly difficult to care about trivia like what color gym bag I could or couldn’t carry or enforce it on others. These regulations naturally extend to the camouflage fatigues soldiers wear into battle.

After years of testing and developing new colors and patterns, the Army decided in 2005 to adopt a new all-purpose field uniform, the Army Combat Uniform (ACU), of pixelated grey hues. The decision was met with a great deal of skepticism among troops and veterans. The first day I wore the pixels an old Army retiree told me, “You look like a truck hit you with a mud puddle.” Many leaders in the field complained that the new pattern didn’t blend in with vegetation at all. Delays in fielding and replacing equipment and uniforms in Woodland or Desert camouflage led to units deploying with a confusing mixture of uniforms, wearing a grey pixel uniform with a Desert ballistic vest and Woodland ammunition pouches. My Sergeant Major remarked at the time, “We look like a ragtag circus.”

The blend of pixelated colors is officially dubbed ‘urban grey ’, ‘desert sand’, and ‘foliage green’ arranged in a digital pattern. The grey pixels were selected in an effort to find an all-purpose uniform fit for any terrain. Though predominantly grey in appearance, when viewed in a woodline at a distance the colors appear green when combined with the shadows in vegetation and differing intensities of sunlight. The grey and khaki colors also compare with shades of grey and brown in urban terrain. In testing, the pattern was referred to as ‘urban track.’ The khaki color also melds with brown rock or sand. The shades also compare with the skyline when silhouetted against the horizon. It has been claimed that this relates to the historically-informed military tactic that attacks often take place in the grey of early dawn. These are the arguments made in its favor.

The new uniform came with changes other than the camouflage pattern. They allow units to automatically reorder replacement uniforms for deployed soldiers after a field-life of six months – a great logistical improvement. In early 2003, many Army units, including my own, deployed to Iraq with only two sets of so-called desert camouflage uniforms, or DCUs, because they couldn’t be produced and fielded fast enough to meet the demand. They were also quickly and poorly sewn and didn’t stand up well to the effects of daily combat. Our uniforms would be ringed in white salt stains from sweating profusely in the heat. We had to constantly wash them in buckets by hand like old washerwomen and hang them out to dry like a back-alley laundry. Some of the desert uniforms were threadbare and almost white in color, not to mention all the oil, dirt, and bloodstains picked up from daily combat, when we returned from Iraq in 2004. We were all issued new DCUs to fly home from Kuwait in. On the plane, we all felt like we were being prettied up for the public. Things improved once the procurement and supply system caught up, but not fast enough for troops in Iraq with ripped pants or cut-up tops. But, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remarked when pressed on Army equipment shortages at the time, to much consternation, “You go to war with the Army you have, not with the one you want.”

In the end, after $5 billion worth of testing and fielding the uniform to every American soldier and eight years of discussion and complaints from leaders in the field, the Army has decided to nix the grey all-purpose pixels in the coming years. The Natick Army Soldier Center in Massachusetts, the organization charged with developing Army camouflage, says they have a replacement for the pixels, what some have come to call an expensive mistake. Officials at Natick have claimed that the original decision to go with the pattern was rushed and influenced by politics among top Army leaders, not based on a complete, full assessment by field and scientific testing. But one question lingers: Is all this costly concern about camouflage as relevant as it once was to future combat for the Army?

The Science of Camouflage Uniforms


The dead man knows that camouflage is all in the mind./ He has seen in the human need for shape the undoing of shape./ He has witnessed the displacement of up-and-down, across and slantwise./ He has curled the straight lines and unbent the curves, he has split the wishbone and painted outside the lines./ The dead man has undone the map by which to get there./ It is not what the dead man looks like, but what he no longer resembles.

-Marvin Bell, from More About the Dead Man in Camouflage

As science has progressed, so has the study and use of camouflage. In layman’s terms, the job of a camouflage pattern is to break up the familiar outline of the head, shoulders, torso, and legs of the human body while standing or crouching. Uniforms of various colors help soldiers blend in with terrain colors. Desert and wooded patterns mimic the shapes of features of the terrain and shadows in addition to their colors. Pixels, rather than focusing on color or shape, rely on the confusion they create in human eyesight. From further distances, the pixels become just blotchy patches of color.

So why grey? American armies do have some traditional connections with grey. Cadets at West Point, members of ‘The Long Grey Line’, have worn grey since its founding. The army of the Republic of Texas wore grey uniforms, as did the Confederacy. German armies wore ‘field gray’ from the turn of the century up until the early Cold War period. Though green is the first color that comes to mind when one thinks of the Army, grey also has a place. Politics and economics, as always, had their effect on the decision as well.

Indeed, the decision to go grey didn’t come from Natick. In fact, testing consistently rated the current grey as the worst among four competitors, one of which was MultiCam. The call to go with a pattern that did not contain strong shades of green or black was questioned from the beginning. This has led many to ask who and why the decision was made and what considerations it was based on. No answers seem to be forthcoming. In another possible change, Natick has also developed four different terrain-specific patterns for desert, snow, and urban environments to possibly be issued in the future as well. The Army will now repeat the cost and time of fielding a new uniform again by around 2014.

The new all-purpose uniforms have greatly improved utility from previous uniforms, the basic design of which hadn’t changed much since WWII. The material is a lighter mix of cotton and nylon. The old uniform tops had four pockets on the torso, all of which were covered over while wearing a ballistic vest. The new uniform tops eliminate the waist pockets and move them to the shoulders where they aren’t covered under the vest. The tops are shorter to allow better ventilation. New tops made specifically to be worn under the ballistic vest feature torsos made of moisture wicking material. The pants have two new pockets below the knees in addition to the usual cargo pockets. Buttons were eliminated in favor of Velcro, zippers, and drawstrings. Rank and insignia are velcroed or pinned to the uniform rather than sewn on.

To the cheers or jeers of many, the ACU doesn’t require ironing and the ‘rough side out’ leather boots don’t require polishing. This provided for quite a wave in Army culture. When I joined the U.S. Army in 1999, I wore the standard Woodland camouflage fatigues. As an eager young soldier I starched and pressed my uniform every day with creases so sharp you could cut bread with them. I polished my boots to a shine so high you could see your soul in it. Some soldiers used to soak their uniforms in buckets of starch and iron them until they could stand up on their own. Others used hair dryers to melt and re-melt their boot polish. A few used floor wax. Many would turn their uniforms in to the cleaners every week to be pressed. Some even bought their own industry-grade machines. Every Monday morning at 9:00 am there was a showdown to see which platoon had the sharpest looking troopers.

The elimination of the old traditions of pressed and starched uniforms and spit-shined boots has generated much discussion. After I came home from Iraq the first time in 2004, a pressed uniform and shined boots just weren’t that important to me anymore. Other things seemed more important, such as teaching soldiers who hadn’t been to Iraq yet skills that would help them fight there. I found it increasingly hard to care about trivia such as what color gym bag I could carry while in uniform, much less enforce it on others. Many were sad to see the press-and-shine Army go. They felt it built esprit de corps and showed discipline and commitment. Some were not sad, however. Soldiers had easily spent around a thousand dollars annually on uniform maintenance. Some leaders were too easily impressed by a ‘squared away’ uniform over a soldier’s actual ability to do their job at war. Many of my former colleagues privately felt leaders should be focused on fighting wars, not looking good in garrison. These arguments will never die.

Despite some points of approval, Army leaders in the field continued to voice concerns about the effectiveness of the pixel pattern. I wore both types of uniform between 1999 and 2008. I also wore them in combat in Iraq from 2003 to 2006. From my personal experience, the woodland and desert patterns were more effective. I remember wearing the grey pixels on night missions in the city and palm groves of Baghdad. We were often the only grey objects in the terrain. The pixel grey doesn’t work as effectively as the terrain-specific patterns. The success or failure of a mission and soldiers’ lives often depend upon stealth or concealment and it is easily understood why one would rather have a pattern made specifically for the environment over one that is all-purpose. Many soldiers and veterans would agree, though some may find the new pixel pattern effective enough. It does cost more money, time, and effort to produce and issue terrain-specific camouflage uniforms and gear before a deployment. An all-purpose uniform would be an answer. It would indeed be more cost effective to have such a uniform in an era of Pentagon spending cuts. But that doesn’t make it effective in combat.

The problem with grading the effectiveness of camouflage patterns comes with finding the proper method to conduct the analysis. Scientific methods rely on the mechanics of how human eyes and electronic sighting devices work, but this may produce a different result than sticking guys in the woods and trying to find them. The pixels are designed to confuse human sight. A person scanning or seeing the pixels only peripherally will not pick up on them as easily. The pixels supposedly also have a blurring effect on electronic night vision sighting devices as well. However, the field method of testing is closer to the reality of the battlefield and fits with the Army’s ‘train as you fight’ mantra.

In any case, the science of sight would appear to have won out with the grey pixel pattern. This also seems to be in keeping with the current trend toward a tech-heavy, ‘transformational’ Army. However, the Army’s mandated adoption in 2010 of a different brown and green non-pixel pattern called ‘MultiCam’ for troops deployed to Afghanistan recognized that there are shortcomings with the all-purpose grey pixels. This uniform again consists of green, brown, and tan blotches of a solid, non-pixelated type. This change came only after Congress passed H.R. 2346 sponsored by now-deceased Korean War veteran Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) who received many complaints from noncommissioned officers.

The Evolution of Camouflage

It is ironic that something designed not to be seen is so instantly recognizable. U.S. Army uniforms remind us of our history, an ever-present visage during our national holidays. There are the blue and grey coats of early America; the brown of WWI; olive drab of WWII and Korea; ‘tigerstripe’ of Vietnam; Woodland of the Cold War and Balkans; ‘Chocolate Chip’ of the Gulf War; the desert pattern of the Iraq War; and the grey pixels and ‘MultiCam’ of Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army’s uniforms have evolved over several centuries along with the conflicts they have fought in, even as the need for camouflage has remained an important constant for the military in the modern era. The twentieth century saw the end of pitched battles between armies in colorful and often heavy wool uniforms arrayed on opposing sides of a large field. America’s first army under George Washington had no official uniform. The Continental Congress ordered Minutemen to dye their clothing brown, but most didn’t have the time or means to do so. As the American experience at Valley Forge showed, they were at times lucky to have coats or shoes at all. The original thirteen colonies fielded their own small organized militias and their uniform styles were as varied as the states they served. Though some were brown, green, or red, those who had uniforms most often wore different types of heavy blue coats with shiny brass buttons, largely similar to that famously adopted by General Washington himself.

Already colorful European uniforms were often augmented with different colored trims to designate the type or function of military units. British Dragoons, a type of light cavalry, wore green rather than red. The type of headgear soldiers wore also informed which and what type of unit they were with. Grenadiers, infantry sometimes armed with grenades and often the biggest and strongest of troops, wore miters, tall pointed hats with a flat front. Mounted cavalry wore light metal or leather helmets with fur or feather plumes. The infantry wore cocked hats. An informed observer of the time would know instantly from looking at a soldier their unit, function, and rank.

The American colonials largely lacked the funds and time to develop and implement such a system during the revolution. Americans often improvised rank insignias by pinning white or blue bands to their arms or hats. Today this tradition is carried on in the U.S. Army with each branch having designated signature colors. For example, infantry is light blue, cavalry and armor are yellow, and artillery is red. Today’s Army rank insignia for noncommissioned officers, known as chevrons, also carries on the tradition.

The impetus behind the uniforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely identification. Any school kid in America knows the British wore red. The French and Russians often wore blue or white. There was also an element of pride and flash in the uniforms, as Dukes and Counts often paid to maintain their own regiments and wanted them to look sharp. Some of them paraded them about like their own real toy soldiers. They ideally used colors that stood out well in the fog of battle and were easily distinguished from the enemy. These bright uniforms may seem silly today, but they were worn in a time where there were no electronic communications to relay to commanders what was happening on the battlefield.

The brightly colored uniforms allowed generals to look across the field and see where their troops were holding, failing, or advancing. It was not the kind of warfare where anyone took cover when battle was joined, even amid artillery shelling. Armies rarely dug or constructed bunkers or breastworks unless under siege. Imagine Napoleon and Lord Wellington looking across the smoke-filled battlefield with their field glasses. They knew only what they could see or messengers could relay to them. Their staff officers had to track changes in the battle with pieces on a map. Their uniforms were hot, heavy, and uncomfortable, but they served an important function. Military uniforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were made to be seen.

But even in the era of bright, conspicuous uniforms, the need for concealment was sometimes recognized. Sharpshooters in the Napoleonic Wars were outfitted with green uniforms so they could advance within rifle range to kill individual officers to interrupt lines of authority without being discovered. Some American sharpshooter detachments of the Civil War adopted green uniforms and similar tactics as well. European armies of the 1840’s serving in the jungle and desert climes of Asia and Africa found that khaki uniforms were cooler and allowed for better concealment than their scarlet jackets in the field. Despite its proven use, camouflage was widely viewed with scorn in high military circles as being unprofessional and cowardly until the turn of the twentieth century.

The U.S. Army of the nineteenth century largely did away with the big hats, wigs, and ornamental elements of the military uniforms of the past century as time wore on, though they still retained mostly blue uniforms of thick wool with shiny metal buttons. The army of the independent Republic of Texas adopted grey uniforms. The Confederacy also chose grey to distinguish their soldiers from the federal blues in the Civil War. It was still generally the kind of warfare where units lined up and marched forward into musket or cannon fire with deadly result, as skirmishes such as Pickett’s Charge show. None of the uniforms were very functional, especially in the climate of the American south and west. During the battle for Atlanta in the summer of 1864, hundreds of soldiers on both sides suffered from exhaustion and heat stroke in their wool uniforms under the Georgia sun. Soldiers suffered similar problems in the wars against Mexico and the Native Americans on the Great Plains and in southwestern deserts.

The turn of the twentieth century brought with it the idea that uniforms should be made for utility and concealment. Previous U.S. Army uniforms didn’t take the climate or terrain much into account, other than perhaps to mercifully adjust the wear or weight of their material for summer. In 1902 the U.S. Army, following the British lead from their experiences in colonial Africa and India, adopted the khaki uniform, known as ‘drab.’ In the following years, almost every western military ditched the traditional bright colors and adopted uniform colors that aided concealment in shades of khaki, brown, or grey. At the outbreak of WWI, only the French Army maintained colorful uniforms of blue coats and red trousers.

Grinding trench warfare and the development of machine guns, tanks and warplanes quickly changed things. WWI was a much different war from any ever fought before, enveloping the whole of the continent of Europe and sapping the strength of the workforces and economies of entire countries. Everything came to a standstill. This was war to determine the fate of many nations, a much more serious affair. In 1915 the previously-resistant French military was the first to build a Section de Camouflage, comprised mostly of Parisian artists, devoted to developing military camouflage. America opened the New York Camouflage Society, which performed a similar function, and other European militaries followed suit with their own efforts.

For the first time, military uniforms were not meant to be seen. The U.S. Army changed from brown ‘drab’ to the green ‘olive drab’ in the interwar period. The M-1943 olive drab uniform is what most Americans picture when they think of G.I. Joe serving in WWII. WWII marked the first war where climate and concealment were given primary consideration in developing uniforms. The M-1943 wool uniform and its successors were designed with the cold, wet, and verdant climates of Europe in mind. Uniforms made of tightly-woven cotton ‘Byrd cloth’ were designed for service in the tropics to stop mosquito, flea, and leach bites and allowed for better cooling than wool. However, these uniforms took longer to make and field and there was an acute shortage of them. Some old soldiers found it hard to shed military formality completely in favor of utility. General George S. Patton famously insisted that officers under his command still wear their ties into combat.

The U.S. Army field uniform remained largely unchanged with only a few minor alterations until the 1980’s. When we think of the Korean War, we often picture men freezing in olive drab fatigues and coats huddled around fires wearing their pile caps. Grunts wore generally the same green uniform made of cotton in the jungles of Vietnam. The famous ‘tigerstripe’ camouflage uniform worn in the 1960’s by American advisors and special operations units in Vietnam was never officially authorized, though effective in the dense jungle. It also mimicked the uniforms worn by South Vietnamese soldiers and allowed U.S. troops to blend in with their counterparts as well as the terrain. Beginning in 1968, many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were issued uniforms in a new interlocking pattern called ‘ERDL’ which for the first time featured blotches of dark green, light green, brown, tan, and black. But the Army returned to solid olive drab uniforms following withdraw from Vietnam in 1973.

In 1981, the U.S. Army adopted the well-known cotton Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) featuring the M81 Woodland camouflage pattern, an enlarged version of the ERDL pattern from the end of Vietnam. This was the uniform soldiers wore during the late Cold War and in Grenada, Bosnia, and Kosovo. This was the first time that the Army adopted into force-wide use a uniform that not only mimicked the color, but also the shapes of the terrain. Natural vegetation includes many shades of green and brown and tan as well as black shadows and mimicking these shades and shapes breaks up the recognizable human outline.

Along with the BDUs and Woodland pattern, the Army adopted the Desert BDU (DBDU), a six color desert pattern comprised of shades of tan, brown, and light green with spots of black and white meant to compare with stones. The pattern was tested in seven different desert landscapes before adopting it. The 1991 Gulf War presented the Army with much different battlefield terrain than it had faced in major combat operations before and the nightly news was filled with pictures of Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf wearing the uniform, which the troops had dubbed ‘chocolate chips’ or ‘cookie dough camouflage.’ It was determined by war’s end that the DBDU was too dark and rocky a pattern for most of the world’s deserts and it was more costly to make than other alternative patterns. It was discontinued in 1992. Many Middle Eastern militaries continue to wear the pattern today.

The Army found itself fighting in desert terrain again in Somalia in 1993. Following the withdrawal of the DBDU after the Gulf War, the Army adopted the three-color Desert Camouflage Uniform (DCU), using shades of light tan, light brown, and lime green. It is often referred to as ‘café au lait’ or ‘coffee stain’ camouflage. This was the uniform worn by most troops in early Afghanistan and Iraq and remained the Army’s desert combat uniform until 2005 when the decision to adopt the new pixelated ACUs was made.

Is Camouflage Still Relevant?

A question that must be asked is if all these costly camouflage and uniform changes really are as relevant in modern and future combat. A large share of the fighting in Iraq took place in urban terrain in territory the enemy knew much better. All U.S. movements issued from large fortified camps and bases that were often watched from the outset by enemy observers. A force that rides around in armored Humvees and Abrams tanks accompanied by attack helicopters isn’t exactly hiding. In Afghanistan where the fighting is in much more rural, rocky, and remote terrain, the battle consists of trying to draw the enemy out of hiding among the local populace to be engaged. Pulling the enemy out of hiding is the only way to know they’re there. They usually know where our troops are well before we know where they are. The U.S. Army isn’t sneaking up on anyone anymore. Essentially, U.S. troops want to be attacked by their clandestine enemies so they can engage and destroy them.

The pre-9/11 U.S. Army I first joined was a much lighter force than today. Virtually none of its Humvees or trucks were armored; only tanks and other tracked vehicles were. The old flak vest was usually only worn to the grenade range. Soldiers on combat training maneuvers lived in foxholes they dug or tents in the woods and jumped locations every few days. This is in contrast to today’s Army, where all vehicles are armored, soldiers’ individual body armor makes them seem like the knights of old, and they live and operate from hardened, permanent posts and bases. During my first tour in Iraq in 2003, we wore less personal armor and I was able to, on a few occasions, sprint after bad guys down the streets of Baghdad. By my second trip to Baghdad in 2005, wearing virtually my own body weight in gear made this unlikely. The Army had to change and ‘turtle up’ out of necessity to protect troops and convoys from ambushes and IEDs on supply routes. The U.S. Army of today is not a nimble beast that moves stealthily; it is more like a rhinoceros that is a force to be reckoned with. When fighting like this, camouflage isn’t as important.

It can be argued that the U.S. Army is today fighting in a position more similar to those of the armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. America’s military leaves an enormous logistical footprint in every conflict it fights today, with the roads, seaports, and airports of countries like Germany, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, and Italy, among others, jammed with U.S. troops, contractors, supplies, and equipment. This all happens in plain sight. We don’t hide it and likely couldn’t if we tried. The U.S. military flies, drives, and floats into battle dressed in armor and essentially says, “Here I am; come out and fight.”

We are in some ways like the British Redcoats of old who stuck out in the fight like a sore thumb. Our enemy today knows they cannot stand up to those kinds of odds, so they hide amongst the locals and choose softer targets to attack. American colonials adopted much the same technique when facing the overwhelming superiority of the British military during our own revolution. It may perhaps be called cowardly by some, but it has been effective nonetheless. Ironically, military commanders of earlier centuries used to think camouflage was cowardly, too. Even the New York Times as late as 1917 called new idea of military camouflage “hocus pocus.” It is no wonder some make comparisons between America today and the empire of Great Britain then.

Special operations forces, especially Green Berets, often operate by speaking the language, living with, and training indigenous populations to fight for or alongside U.S. forces. They operated like this effectively among the Montagnard people in Vietnam, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds of northern Iraq, among others. To do this, they often shed their Army uniforms in favor of native dress and mannerisms, grew beards, carried local weaponry, and even took to horseback to gain the support and trust of local populations. This naturally attracted criticism from the rest of the Army, which has very strict uniform and appearance standards. Some regular Army units partially embraced it by encouraging soldiers to grow moustaches and let their hair grow a little longer than usual among Middle Eastern cultures that view facial hair as a sign of masculinity. These special operations units are among the most effective and successful in counterinsurgency operations. What we discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan is that wielding an AK-47, growing a beard, and learning to grin and bear ‘man kisses’ and male hand holding may be better camouflage than any uniform.

Their tactic is to camouflage themselves not with the colors or shapes of the terrain, but to camouflage themselves among the ‘human terrain.’ In doing so, they attract the respect and trust of peoples who have a natural mistrust of western outsiders, especially Americans. This idea of taking advantage of the ‘human terrain’ may be looked at as yet another revolution in camouflage. When the enemy camouflages and infiltrates himself among the rest of the population, it can be effective for U.S. forces to do the same. There is no real reason why other U.S. Army units could not adopt some of the same techniques, other than the large-scale institutional resistance by military purists who see such moves as ‘lax’ and unprofessional in appearance. However, the results speak for themselves.

Camouflage uniforms do remain important in many military scenarios. It is essential to downed pilots and special operators making ground infiltrations. It will always remain important to scouts and snipers in the field or when soldiers are separated from support when an operation begins to go bad and they have to pull back. These are scenarios in which concealment remains and will likely always be very important. One of camouflage’s earliest proponents, Sir Winston Churchill, became convinced of its utility after his escape from a prison camp during the Boer War in South Africa. He went on later to become First Lord of the Admiralty during WWI and, of course, Prime Minister during WWII. Churchill felt camouflage adds an "original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten."

As the U.S. disengages militarily from Iraq and Afghanistan, new possible enemies and conflicts present new challenges. America is engaging other foes in the War on Terror largely from the air using drone strikes and giving financial aid and targeting intelligence to local governments in places like Yemen and Pakistan. The terrain we fight on and way we fight may be changing again. Future conflicts with possible foes in Asia may likely require greater control of the seas. Current Pentagon planning reflects this by making greater budget provisions for the Navy and Air Force. Other than Somali pirates, America hasn’t fought any sea battles since WWII. Conflict with China may involve greater naval engagements than the world has seen in seventy years. China seems to be attempting to put as much distance between itself and America and its allies as possible by pushing forward claims to disputed island chains. As was made clear in the Pacific in WWII, denying ‘island hopping’ and logistical and air bases is important to warfare in that theatre.

As camouflage technology has developed, methods to defeat camouflage have developed as well. A foe, such as China, equipped with modern military technology may have the capability to identify and engage targets in much the same way the U.S. military does, using thermal imaging and night vision capable devices and weaponry. America is continuing to develop its observer drone technology, including variants that will allow ground troops to carry and launch their own small drones to give instant feedback regarding the terrain and troops ahead. Such military technologies, among others, have been the target of directed espionage efforts by the Chinese and other governments. If the U.S. has the capability, it is a sure bet China will attempt to develop its own variant.

Last year China unveiled its own version of the stealth fighter with many reports claiming it is based on acquired U.S. technology. It is well known that Chinese operatives spent a lot of time acquiring pieces of an American stealth bomber that was mysteriously downed in Serbia in 1999. It is also known that operatives of China and other states attempted to buy parts of the advanced U.S. Army helicopter downed in the bin Laden raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011. These espionage efforts and the technological capabilities developed from them may render scientific and physical camouflage systems irrelevant by providing ways to defeat America’s technology or to use these technologies against us.

Despite our technological advances and military superiority in the air, and on the sea, there will never be a replacement for ‘boots on the ground’ as imagined by Hollywood. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and operations throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have shown that understanding the ‘human terrain’, gathering human intelligence, and winning hearts and minds is very important to modern asymmetric warfare. No computer or drone can replace a soldier in this regard. The Army’s ground troops are and always will be a vital, if not the most vital component of U.S. national security. As long as there are U.S. troops on the ground, they will have the need to be concealed by camouflage systems.

Testing and study of camouflage systems, whether scientific or physical, continues. The military is still looking at pixels, tiger stripes, layered blocks, 3D layering, and ‘fractals’-- roughly background shades and shapes seen naturally in terrain. Some of the technologies being developed sound like something out of a comic book. Laboratories are testing a cloth that has the capability to mimic exactly the background behind it as if it were a chameleon and make objects covered by it virtually disappear before one’s eyes. Projects to develop an ‘exoskeleton’ that gives soldiers greatly increased strength, stamina, and load bearing abilities look promising. Uniforms that use the human body’s electrostatic discharge and conductive properties may mean soldiers themselves will be used to recharge their electronic equipment and send communications signals in the future.

Government funded programs at agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and public-private funding partnerships with defense contractors and universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) continue to turn out exciting and innovative ideas that have application in the civilian world as much as to the Army. Despite its controversies and that it sometimes sounds like they’ve been playing too many video games, the U.S. Army remains focused on developing ‘soldier systems’: the idea that the uniforms and equipment should become as useful, intuitive, and integrated for the soldier wearing them as possible so they can win in combat. Camouflage, no matter the type, has become as important to warfare as bullets and bombs.

Picture General Washington’s Minutemen, shuffling around on watch in the snow of the frigid winter at Valley Forge, blowing their warm breaths into frozen hands, shouldering their own hunting muskets and clad in thin linen shirts, old leather breeches, and worn out shoes, thoughts of hearth and home and doubts about the coming spring campaign against the vastly superior British in the back of their minds. The aristocratic English generals and Lords of the Admiralty didn’t take these upstart colonial farmers and merchants seriously, much as they scoffed at the idea of camouflage. Change doesn’t come easy to military culture; it is often resisted. The U.S. Army’s recent uniform fiasco has shown changes may not always be for the better. But for better or worse, America’s Army has shown itself to be a greatly adaptable and resilient organization, a fact often reflected in Army uniforms. U.S. Army soldiers today are the best equipped and outfitted in the entire world’s history. The American fighting man has certainly come a long way from those hard days at Valley Forge. Pixels or no pixels, General Washington would have approved.