4th Quarter 2014 Volume 5, No. 4

Editorial

Rémy M. Mauduit

Articles

Help Yourself

Recent Trends in African Peacekeeping in Africa

Nikolas Emmanuel, PhD

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play

Communication — Engage Early, Engage Often

Lt Col Aaron D. Burgstein, USAF

Deconstructing Global Fault Lines

Aaron G. Sander

Tasawar Baig, PhD

Did You Say, “Central African Republic”?

Henri Boré

Essay

Dodging Gaugamela

Three Ways in Which We Invite Catastrophe — and How to Stop Doing So

Maj David Blair, USAF

Season’s greetings!

This issue of Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie opens with the lead article “Help Yourself: Recent Trends in African Peacekeeping in Africa” by Dr. Nikolas Emmanuel, a professor at the University of Copenhagen. The article addresses significant challenges confronting African states at the forefront of conflict management on the continent. As the author has remarked elsewhere, the “overall objective is to arrive at a better understanding of the critical African actors that are increasingly being pushed to the forefront to undertake peacekeeping on the continent.”

In “You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play: Communication—Engage Early, Engage Often,” Lt Col Aaron D. Burgstein, US Air Force, emphasizes the role of offensive communication in modern warfare.

“Deconstructing Global Fault Lines” by Dr. Tasawar Baig and Aaron G. Sander takes us into the “world of politics . . . in transition” through the fissures along those lines of division from Europe to South Asia.

Henri Boré’s article “Did You Say, ‘Central African Republic’?” comments on the reality of conditions in many African countries today. He takes issue with oversimplifications as to the causes of conflict on the continent, such as a religious divide between Christians and Muslims.

As usual, it is a feast to read anything by Dr. David Blair, a major in the US Air Force. His article “Dodging Gaugamela: Three Ways in Which We Invite Catastrophe—and How to Stop Doing So” is an exciting travel through time and history, allowing readers to learn many lessons along the way.

With this issue, we celebrate ASPJ–A&F’s ninth anniversary. We also wish you all the best for the New Year.

Rémy M. Mauduit, Editor

Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Help Yourself

Recent Trends in African Peacekeeping in Africa

Nikolas Emmanuel, PhD*

In recent years, the international community has asked a small number of African subregional hegemonic states to put into place regional and subregional security infrastructures.1 However, these African security organizations are not being pulled together in response either to interstate conflict or an external threat, both of which are frequently the primary motivations for forming regional security complexes.2 Instead, some African states are trying to counteract externalities from domestic threats emanating from civil wars and state crises in neighboring countries, primarily in their subregions. The interventions by Ethiopia or Kenya across their borders into Somalia illustrate this point. Security efforts in Africa are primarily driven by such spillover effects (e.g., refugees, insurgent groups, illegal commerce, etc.).3 As Edmond Keller clearly indicates, “domestic insecurity in one state has a high potential to have a destabilizing effect in neighboring states.”4 The African states that intervene do so frequently in reaction to these externalities. Yet, the capacity to respond is not evenly distributed in Africa south of the Sahara.5 Some states are more capable than others.

This article argues that an “African solution” to the problems of civil wars and state crises on the continent has crystallized around a small handful of subregional hegemonic powers. Multilateral peacekeeping in Africa is an excellent indicator of state strength and capacity. Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Uganda, to name several key actors, all have militaries capable of undertaking the deployment of troops around their subregions and, in some cases, beyond. The international community would like these stronger states to form the backbone of conflict-management efforts in the region and send their troops as part of an African security infrastructure. In return, these emerging subregional hegemons gain international legitimacy and respect as well as foreign economic and military assistance, along with pay and training for their armed forces. Furthermore, and understandably, these benefits actually serve to reinforce and enhance the material standing and hegemonic status of these pivotal states. At the root of these reactions, however, is the realization that Africans are being asked with greater frequency to help themselves in security matters.

Donald Rothchild points out that in regard to Africa, the “relatively better-functioning states are increasingly viewing some type of self-help as essential to reduce threats from violence.”6 Regardless of the French or United Nations (UN) interventions on the continent, Rothchild’s observation remains highly relevant. This is why we currently see a number of the relatively stronger subregional hegemons spearheading interventions into Africa’s civil conflicts. They are the most willing and the most able to construct some sort of subregional and regional security infrastructure. Francis Deng provides a more detailed analysis of this reality:

Regions generally are organized around certain states that have the power and position potentially to play the role of hegemon or act as a pole around which the security or insecurity of other states revolves. The “core state” in each regional constellation possesses key assets in the form of geographical position, military, economic, political and diplomatic resources, and recognition as a regional leader. A large and powerful state inevitably compels its neighbors to shape their security policies, and to conceive of conflict management, with reference to itself.7

Yet, for all of their potential, most of the critical state actors in Africa simply need the financial and operational capabilities to respond meaningfully to armed conflict across the region. Consequently, this article addresses two important questions:

1. What are the advantages and drawbacks of relying on African troops as

peacekeepers in Africa?

2. Who are the subregional hegemons, and how much are they contributing to

the construction of a security infrastructure in Africa?

State Crises and Civil Conflicts in Africa

It became apparent early in the post–Cold War period that a growing trend of intrastate conflicts was emerging in Africa. Since 1989 a large number of states have experienced significant crises in sub-Saharan Africa, and the international response has been mixed. Indeed, a significant number of these state crises underwent external military intervention organized by a wide variety of international actors including the UN, the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community, the United States, France, and the European Union, along with a number of unilateral missions by African states such as Angola.8 As of 2013, at least 10 severe state crises were ongoing in Africa (table 1).

Table1. Ongoing African state crises / civil conflicts

Ongoing Crisis

Start Date

Military Intervention?

Central African Republic

Mar. 2003

Yes

Chad

Oct. 2005

Congo-Kinshasa

Mar. 1992

Yes

Ethiopia

Jan. 2007

Mali

Mar. 2012

Yes

Nigeria

Jan. 2006

Somalia

May 1988

Yes

South Sudan

Jul. 2012

Yes

Sudan

Jul. 1983

Yes

Sudan (Darfur)

Feb. 2003

Yes

Source: “Major Episodes of Political Violence, 1946–2013,” Center for Systemic Peace, http://www.systemicpeace.org/warlist

.htm; and “Opérations en cours,” Réseau de recherché sur les opérations de paix (ROP), Université de Montréal, accessed 2 September 2014, http://www.operationspaix.net/operations-en-cours.html.

Seven of these 10 conflicts have some sort of multilateral organization sending troops to secure or keep the peace. Interestingly, African troops are strongly contributing to all of these peacekeeping operations (PKO).

Chapter 8 of the UN Charter is an important element of arguments for the regionalization of peacekeeping and peacemaking in Africa. Clearly, Articles 52 and 53 of the charter envision an important place for regional organizations in settling disputes. Chapter 8 also lays out legal groundwork for subcontracting the enforcement of peace under the authority of the UN Security Council. This idea has been used extensively in Africa since the early 1990s.

In building a case for this shift, former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s report An Agenda for Peace points out that the UN should more frequently rely upon regional security arrangements to relieve its increasingly heavy peacekeeping burden after the Cold War.9 After this general statement, French president François Mitterrand echoed a similar sentiment in November 1994 (oddly enough, only a few months after the Rwandan genocide and the highly controversial Opération Turquoise) when he openly called for African states “to resolve their conflicts themselves and organise their own security.”10 By 1995, after the debacles in Somalia and Rwanda, the report Improving Preparedness for Conflict Prevention and Peace-keeping in Africa allowed Boutros-Ghali to be even more specific about the importance of regional organizations in the activities of the UN on the continent:

The founders of the United Nations, in Chapter VIII of the Charter of the United Nations, envisaged an important role for regional organizations in the maintenance of international peace and security. It is increasingly apparent that the United Nations cannot address every potential and actual conflict troubling the world. Regional or subregional organizations sometimes have a comparative advantage in taking the lead role in the prevention and settlement of conflicts and to assist the United Nations in containing them.11

No other region has experienced such a massive shift towards this method for peacekeeping. As Jonah Victor notes, “since the end of the Cold War, Sub-Saharan Africa states have dramatically increased their participation in international peacekeeping operations in Africa.”12 Most prominently, the Nigerian-led Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) intervention into the Liberian civil war in August of 1990 represented an important turning point in the construction of an African response to conflict on the continent. Since then, the vast majority of multilateral military interventions in sub-Saharan Africa have been undertaken with a significant number of African troops. Frequently these actions have occurred under African command and increasingly under the auspices of an African organization. As Paul Williams indicates, “African governments bear the primary responsibility” for dealing with and responding to the various conflicts on the continent.13 It may make some sense to increase Africans’ participation in activities such as peacekeeping on their own continent because it builds a sense of ownership and responsibility. Despite the advantages to such an arrangement, one must consider some important drawbacks as well.

Advantages and Disadvantages of

Using African Troops in African Conflicts

The deployment of African troops in PKOs in the region has some significant pluses over the use of extracontinental armed forces.14 Three reasons stand out: cultural and geographic proximity, the lower cost of responding, and the clear national interest in stabilizing one’s neighborhood and reducing the impact of externalities. First, subregional forces may have a better understanding of the conflicts in their own backyards. These actors enjoy a crucial advantage in that they often have direct superior knowledge of the cultures they are dealing with and the prevailing norms, as well as acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. This closeness “provide[s] them with a better understanding of [a conflict’s] . . . dynamics, key players, and context-specific management and resolution options.”15 Thus, subregional forces may be better received and accepted in nearby conflict zones. Yet, this is not always the case. The current crisis in the Central African Republic shows that bordering states such as Chad risk becoming too closely linked with the actors in a given conflict, undermining their impartiality. Second, geographic proximity should facilitate a much more rapid and less expensive response. Subregional troops operating in neighboring countries do not need to be ferried across the planet. This advantage should lower operational costs considerably. Third, it makes sense that the leaders of states in the immediate vicinity of a civil war would view ending violence and restoring a functioning state as part of their direct national interest. Extraregional states are not as directly affected by the externalities of civil wars outside their own neighborhoods. Therefore, regional interveners should make a stronger commitment to remain in a neighboring country because it is in their national interest to do so.

Furthermore, being an active participant in PKOs in Africa and elsewhere could enhance national prestige in the eyes of the international community and increase the participating state’s leverage in regard to donors. The fact that troop-contributing states appear to be upright international citizens, offering a critical public good, might also give them a larger voice than they would otherwise have. Perhaps this role could boost their clout in decision-making structures in international bodies such as the UN. Furthermore, participation in such problematic places as Somalia gives intervening states like Uganda some sway over international donors. This influence over foreign-aid donors became evident when Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni recently announced that he would end the participation of his country’s armed forces in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) after a UN panel of experts indicated that Uganda was supplying weapons to the M23 rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).16 Kampala expects special treatment in return for deploying significant numbers of Ugandan troops in Somalia.

Nonetheless, relying on African troops to intervene in civil conflicts on the continent presents other clear disadvantages. Perhaps most importantly, for all of their potential, the Africanization of PKOs leads to two fundamental problems: using the armed forces of states that lack military and economic capacity, and risking legitimacy and impartiality—witness the Chadian deployment as part of the current AU International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA).17

By far, the most obvious drawback to the use of African troops in peacekeeping on the continent or anywhere else is their overall lack of resources. Many African states simply cannot afford to fund their own military interventions abroad. Because of these financial constraints, armed forces in the region cannot commit meaningfully to conflict management and resolution through military means without significant outside assistance.18

African armed forces are severely constrained in the critical areas of training, sustained deployment, intelligence, transportation, and logistics, significantly undermining the autonomy of African states and multilateral organizations to mount PKOs on their own. Rather, they are forced to rely on financial and military aid from the international community. However, as John Prendergast notes, “the big money problem is that the Americans and the Europeans promised over the last decade that as long as the Africans deployed in these kinds of situations, we would pay for the soldiers and equip them. And we haven’t done it.”19

What motivates a state to participate in a PKO? It is hard to argue that neighbors will always be objective, neutral, and impartial. Mixed motives and realist state interests can potentially overwhelm more altruistic, liberal desires to lend a helping hand in one’s neighborhood and to strengthen the overall international state system.20 Furthermore, geographical and cultural proximities might not always contribute to an intervention and legitimize an intervener’s behavior. As already indicated, the fact that a state is in the neighborhood does not mean that it is helping out in a benevolent manner. In fact, being from the neighborhood can become a significant drawback since local problems may directly involve the intervening neighbor. At times, subregional forces can make a bad situation worse. Note four clear examples from recent history: Ethiopia, Angola, Rwanda, and Nigeria.

Ethiopia’s unilateral military incursion into Somalia, which began in 2006 to depose the Union of Islamic Courts, demonstrates that even actors with relatively large armed forces and international (i.e., United States) support can get bogged down by legitimacy problems. During its military interventions in Congo-Brazzaville in 1997, the DRC, or more recently in Guinea-Bissau, Angola acted unilaterally, normally taking military action outside any international, regional, or subregional infrastructure. Its unilateral behavior can undermine the perceived legitimacy of any action that Luanda takes. Rwanda is another very strong military powerhouse emerging in the region. Over the past decade, Kigali has repeatedly contributed to multilateral PKOs across Africa. Rwanda has been a critical linchpin in the current hybrid AU/UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID). However, at the same time, President Paul Kagame’s military forces have undermined stability in Central Africa by consistently arming and intervening on behalf of various militia groups in the neighboring DRC. As Danielle Beswick points out, while Rwanda is contributing to “African solutions” in Darfur, it is also significantly adding to “Africa problems” in the DRC.21 This situation only underlines the problems of legitimacy and impartiality that local, neighboring states can run into when intervening militarily in their own region. Even internationally backed multilateral interventions can be dominated by a single state aiming to protect its own national interest.22 Nigeria’s lead in the intervention in Liberia as a part of ECOMOG comes to mind as a relatively successful subregional operation generally looked upon with respect by the international community. However, Nigeria was not impartial in Liberia. 23 The Nigerian military took sides and even directly armed rebel groups opposed to Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia.24 Furthermore, Nigeria’s intervention in Sierra Leone actually took place some three months before formal ECOWAS authorization.25 Such unilateral action set a negative precedent for future peacekeeping missions.

Empirical Trends:

Subregional Hegemons and African Peacekeeping

After examining the pluses and minuses of using African forces in multilateral PKOs in Africa, one should look at the empirical realities and identify the states that are actually participating and doing the heavy lifting in their respective subregions. Table 2 details the current 10 PKOs involving troop deployments on the African continent and reveals the key African players involved in peacekeeping there.

Table 2. Current multilateral peacekeeping missions in sub-Saharan Africa (February 2014)

Operation Name (International Organization)

Beginning of Current Mission

Leading African Troop

Contributors

Total Troop Deployment

Central African Republic

MISCA (AU)

Jun. 2013

Republic of Congo (864), Rwanda (850), Burundi (850), Chad (792)

4,595

DRC

MONUSCO (UN)

Jul. 2010

South Africa (1,296), Tanzania (1,257), Malawi (854)

19,558

Côte d’Ivoire

UNOCI (UN)

Apr. 2004

Niger (871), Senegal (496), Togo (469)

7,957

Guinea-Bissau

ECOMIB (ECOWAS)

Apr. 2012

Nigeria (160), Burkina Faso (140)

300

Liberia

UNMIL (UN)

Sep. 2003

Nigeria (1,463), Ghana (709)

5,749

Mali

MINUSMA (UN)

Apr. 2013

Chad (1,142), Togo (939), Niger (865), Burkina Faso (863)

6,137

Somalia

AMISOM (AU)

Jan. 2007

Uganda (6,223), Burundi (5,432), Kenya (4,652)

18,117

South Sudan

UNMISS (UN)

Jul. 2011

Rwanda (1,001), Kenya (700), Rwanda (156)

7,327

Sudan (Abyei)

UNISFA (UN)

Jun. 2012

Ethiopia (3,925)

3,955

Sudan (Darfur)

UNAMID (UN/AU)

Jul. 2007

Rwanda (3,234), Ethiopia (2,551), Nigeria (2,536)

14,354

Source: “Opérations en cours,” Réseau de recherché sur les opérations de paix (ROP), Université de Montréal, accessed 2 September 2014, http://www.operationspaix.net/operations-en-cours.html.

MISCA - International Support Mission to the Central African Republic

MONUSCO - United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

UNOCI - United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire

ECOMIB - ECOWAS Mission in Guinea-Bissau

UNMIL - United Nations Mission in Liberia

MINUSMA - United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali

AMISOM - African Union Mission in Somalia

UNMISS - United Nations Mission in South Sudan

UNISFA - United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei

UNAMID - AU/UN Mission in Darfur

Nine states currently stand out, deploying more than 1,000 troops as peacekeepers in a single multilateral operation (Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda). Three of these states (Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ethiopia) deploy 1,000 or more peacekeepers in two operations while Uganda and Burundi have maintained over 5,000 troops each in the AMISOM mission in Somalia. (Remarkably, this has been done for the past several years with no help from the international community.) This group of peacekeeping, troop-contributing countries represents the principal hegemonic states in Africa. They are regular participants in multilateral military interventions on the continent, and the international community presently turns to them to help deal with some of the toughest trouble spots. In return, their actions are supported, and they are rewarded.

Interestingly, distinct patterns in organizational responsibility can be derived from the nine multilateral military interventions currently active in Africa (table 3). There is a great deal of diversity in the organizational framework of the various missions. However, it is wrong to state, as Hikaru Yamashita points out, that “operational collaboration is a mission-to-mission cooperation in a specific conflict situation; as such, it is essentially ad hoc.”26 As we can see in table 3, although each of the current peacekeeping missions in Africa represents a unique situation, there are at least four reoccurring patterns. However, these arrangements are not ad hoc; neither do they simply involve a quick deployment of African regional or subregional forces that are then transformed into blue helmets.

Table 3. Patterns in current peacekeeping operations in Africa

Mission Type

Mission

Name

Organizer

Target State

Key African Intervener(s)

Pattern 1

UN Mission

MONUSCO

UN

DRC

South Africa,

Tanzania

UNMISS

UN

South Sudan

Rwanda

UNISFA

UN

Sudan (Abyei)

Ethiopia

Pattern 2

Transfer Mission

UNOCI

ECOWAS -> UN

Côte d’Ivoire

Niger

UNMIL

ECOWAS -> UN

Liberia

Nigeria

MINUSMA

ECOWAS -> AU -> UN

Mali

Chad, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso

MISCA

CEEAC -> AU

Central African Republic

Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Chad

Pattern 3

Hybrid Mission

UNAMID

AU/UN

Sudan (Darfur)

Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria

Pattern 4

Regional/Subregional

Mission

AMISOM

AU

Somalia

Uganda, Kenya, Burundi

ECOMIB

ECOWAS

Guinea-Bissau

Nigeria, Burkina Faso

Source: “Opérations en cours,” Réseau de recherché sur les opérations de paix (ROP), Université de Montréal, accessed 2 September 2014, http://www.operationspaix.net/operations-en-cours.html.

CEEAC - Economic Community of Central African States

First, three of the 10 interventions—MONUSCO (in the DRC), UNMISS (in South Sudan), and UNISFA (in the contested Abyei region)—are strictly UN PKOs. They originated as such and did not involve a transfer of authority from any other subregional or regional African organization. Interestingly, though, we see several key aspiring African hegemons among the chief suppliers of troops: South Africa in MONUSCO, Rwanda in UNMISS, and Ethiopia in UNISFA. However, one of these deployments stands out. Ethiopia is playing a substantial role by serving in the Abyei area, a flash point on the border between Sudan and South Sudan. There, Addis Ababa currently has committed more than 3,000 of its own troops to defend this crucial mission. Ethiopia is UNISFA’s biggest contributor by far, with over 99 percent of the troops (3,925 of 3,955).27

Furthermore, four PKOs in Africa have seen a transfer of operational control from a subregional body to AU or UN control. They include UNOCI (in the Côte d’Ivoire), UNMIL (in Liberia), MINUSMA (in Mali), and MISCA (in the Central African Republic). Interestingly, three of these four transfer missions have been between the West African body ECOWAS and the UN. This is not surprising since ECOWAS has significant experience in PKOs in the subregion, beginning in August 1990 with the deployment during the Liberian civil war.

The third pattern that one can derive from the current multilateral military interventions in Africa is the hybrid mission between the UN and AU in the Sudanese region of Darfur. This operation began as a purely AU mission because decisive action by the UN Security Council became bogged down by obstructive vetoes from China and Russia, considerably slowing action by the international community. Interestingly, three African states—Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria—have been major contributors of armed personnel to this operation and have sought to stop the Sudanese government and its various militia proxies from perpetrating genocide against the people of Darfur.

The fourth and final pattern includes the examples of AMISOM and ECOMIB—purely regional or subregional missions. ECOMIB is a rather small, limited operation, but AMISOM is currently the second largest deployment of troops in Africa, just behind the UN MONUSCO operation in the DRC. Some perhaps unexpected African actors contribute the bulk of AMISOM’s forces. Although it may be understandable that Kenya has become actively involved in AMISOM, the direct interests and motivations of Uganda and Burundi are less clear. In reality, these two countries have been, by far, the most significant contributors of peacekeeping troops in Somalia over the past several years. They have also received rather significant support from the international community for their commitment to the AMISOM mission.

Out of the patterns in the various multilateral military interventions in Africa today, we see the emergence of a number of “subregional hegemons.”28 Clearly, the unequal distribution of power among the nations of Africa is expressed clearly in troop commitment levels for PKOs.29 These African hegemons are states that have a primacy of power in regard to the nations around them. They have the structural power that allows them to play a central role in their subregional or even the greater African regional system.30 These subregional hegemons possess disproportionate military and economic power as well as influence relative to that of other states in their neighborhood.

Based on their peacekeeping deployments, nine African states are notable: Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Many of these countries with significant peacekeeping commitments indicate an active, emerging, or aspiring hegemon. Yet, while it is easy to point to South Africa and Nigeria as natural leaders in Africa because of their disproportionate military and economic power and influence, a number of additional emerging hegemonic powers are playing important roles in their respective subregions and beyond.31 Table 4 compares these key African actors.

Table 4. Profiles of subregional hegemons

Military

Expenditure (current

millions of

US dollars) (SIPRI)- 2012

Total Armed Forces

(thousands) (WDI)-2012

GNI / per Capita (current international dollars) (WDI)- 2012

GNI @ PPP (current international dollars in billions) (WDI)-2012

Population (millions) (WDI)-2012

Burundi

59

51

550

5.4

9.8

Chad

242

35

1,620

20.1

12.4

Ethiopia

381

138

1,110

101.5

91.7

Kenya

798

29

1,730

74.4

43.2

Nigeria

2,327

162

2,400

404.8

168.8

Rwanda

80

35

1,320

15.1

11.5

South Africa

4,470

62

10,780

563.3

52.3

Tanzania

319

28

1,560

72.4

47.8

Uganda

288

47

1,300

47.1

36.3

Subgroup

Average

996

65

2,486

144.9

52.6

Sub-Saharan African

Average

545

39

2,240

42.6

19

Source: “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database,” SIPRI, 2012, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/milex_database; and “World Development Indicators,” World Bank, 2012, http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators.SIPRI - Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

WDI - World Development Indicator (World Bank)

GNI - gross national income

PPP - purchasing power parity

Fascinatingly, the key subregional hegemonic nations share some commonalities. Yet, at the same time, one finds some interesting differences among the members of group. According to the literature, the African states most likely to deploy substantial numbers of peacekeepers typically have large populations, are poor, and have big militaries.32 The descriptive statistics in table 4, however, indicate that this is only partially true. First, African peacekeepers are predominantly from countries with large populations, at least by African standards (six of nine are above the African average). Second, the emergent hegemons sending peacekeeping troops have economies more than three times as great as the African average although the data in the table is somewhat skewed by the relatively substantial economies of Nigeria and South Africa. That is to say, five of the nine states in table 4 have armed forces bigger than the African average. Interestingly, besides South Africa and Nigeria, the other key peacekeepers on the continent are well below the 2012 World Bank World Development Indicator average of $2,240 per capita gross national income (in current international dollars at purchasing power parity). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, about half of the emergent African hegemons that send peacekeepers in any significant number have larger-than-average armies while only three of nine spend above the 2012 African average on their militaries. Interestingly, the descriptive statistics in table 4 contradict the generalizations of Jonah Victor.33 Some interveners are poor, but some are not. Several, like Nigeria and Ethiopia, have large populations, but others, such as Burundi, Chad, and Rwanda, do not. This group is much more heterogeneous than many people expect. Such a compelling point needs to be explored in future research.

Furthermore, corresponding with their relatively high levels of military spending and big armed forces, three African hegemons are prominent: Ethiopia in East Africa / Horn of Africa, Nigeria in West Africa, and South Africa in Southern Africa. Understandably, these three key actors seem the most capable of sending their troops as peacekeepers into conflicts on the continent. Furthermore, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa have some of the most substantial economies in Africa south of the Sahara. This economic capacity also permits them to be active in various multilateral military interventions in Africa, sometimes several at the same time. Most intriguingly, though, three relatively smaller (in terms of economy and population, at least) African Great Lakes states of Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda are also some of the most active participants in peacekeeping on the continent. These contradictions again suggest that a varied group of actors is interested in playing important roles in building African security infrastructures.

Conclusion

Participation in PKOs not only reveals the relatively stronger states but also actively facilitates their ascendance. This role of the international community in the rise of these nations also needs further exploration. The major powers (besides France, perhaps) in the international community do not want to commit their own armed forces in any overt way, but they do play an active role in training and supplying those African states that do intervene. The African subregional hegemons “like a sheriff . . . must demonstrate capacity and political will to gather a posse in defense of mutual regional security interests.”34 Once they do so, the funding flows in. Increasingly, the international community has tried to bolster the response capacity of these emerging African subregional hegemonic states. To build their capabilities, extra-African actors in the international community have assisted by financing interventions in Africa and enhancing the capacity of local actors to intervene. However, although a number of foreign-aid programs exist to help facilitate interventions by these African subregional hegemons into various crises on the continent, the burden of trying to resolve a number of the planet’s most intractable conflicts remains on some of the poorest states in the world.

Notes

1. Regional refers to all of Africa south of the Sahara. Subregional refers to Africa’s subregions—West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southern Africa. See Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

2. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post–Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

3. Buzan and Wæver, Regions and Powers, 247.

4. Edmond J. Keller, “Rethinking African Regional Security,” in Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World, ed. David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 299.

5. This article refers to this region as Africa.

6. Donald Rothchild, “The Effects of State Crisis on African Interstate Relations (and Comparisons with Post-Soviet Eurasia),” in Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective, ed. Mark R. Beissinger and Crawford Young (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), 207.

7. Francis M. Deng et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996), 133–34.

8. Here, the term intervention refers to a coercive intrusion into the internal affairs of a state by an external third party designed to restore order (i.e., some semblance of security) in the target state. These actions utilize the armed forces of the outside state or group of states to primarily protect at-risk populations against wide-scale human suffering or death, as well as to help reestablish the central government.

9. An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping, Report of the Secretary-General, UN Document A/47/277 and S/24111, 17 June 1992, par. 64, http://www.unrol.org/files/A_47_277.pdf.

10. Quoted in Benedikt F. Franke, “In Defense of Regional Peace Operations in Africa,” Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 2011, 1, http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/files/2011/04/a185.pdf.

11. Improving Preparedness for Conflict Prevention and Peace-Keeping in Africa, Report of the Secretary-General, UN Document A/50/711 and S/1995/911, 1 November 1995, par. 4, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/docs/50/plenary/a50-711.htm.

12. Jonah Victor, “African Peacekeeping in Africa: Warlord Politics, Defense Economics, and State Legitimacy,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (March 2010): 217.

13. Paul D. Williams, “Keeping the Peace in Africa: Why ‘African’ Solutions Are Not Enough,” Ethics and International Affairs 22, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 310.

14. Garth Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990’s and Beyond (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993).

15. Kristiana Powell, The African Union’s Emerging Peace and Security Regime: Opportunities and Challenges for Delivering on “the Responsibility to Protect,” ISS Monograph Series, no. 119 (Ottawa: North-South Institute, May 2005), 16, http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/The%20African%20Union’s%20Emerging%20Peace%20and%20Security%20Regime.pdf.

16. “Uganda Fury at Congo Claims: Somalia Operation Reviewed,” BBC, 25 October 2012, http://www

.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20081847.

17. Herbert Howe, “Lessons of Liberia: ECOMOG and Regional Peacekeeping,” International Security 21, no. 3 (Winter 1996/97): 145–76.

18. Monica Juma and Aida Mengistu, The Infrastructure of Peace in Africa: Assessing the Peacebuilding Capacity of African Institutions (New York: International Peace Academy, September 2002), http://www

.peacekeepingbestpractices.unlb.org/PBPS/Library/The%20Infrastructure%20of%20Peace%20in%20Africa.pdf.

19. Quoted in Colum Lynch, “African Union Force Low on Money, Supplies and Morale,” Washington Post, 13 May 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/12/AR2007051201567

.html.

20. Chris Alden and Mills Soko, “South Africa’s Economic Relations with Africa: Hegemony and Its Discontents,” Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 3 (September 2005): 368.

21. Danielle Beswick, “Peacekeeping, Regime Security and ‘African Solutions to African Problems’: Exploring Motivations for Rwanda’s Involvement in Darfur,” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 5 (2010): 751.

22. Gerry Cleaver and Simon Massey, “DRC: Africa’s Scramble for Africa,” in African Interventionist States, ed. Oliver Furley and Roy May (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2001), 193–210; and Sandra Maclean, “New Regionalism and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Networks of Plunder and Networks for Peace,” in New Regionalism in Africa, ed. J. Andrew Grant and Fredrik Söderbaum (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2003), 110–24.

23. Eric G. Berman and Katie E. Sams, Peacekeeping in Africa: Capabilities and Culpabilities (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2000), 113–17.

24. Christopher Tuck, “‘Every Car or Moving Object Gone’: The ECOMOG Intervention in Liberia,” African Studies Quarterly 4, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–16, http://asq.africa.ufl.edu/files/ASQ-Vol-4-Issue-1

-Tuck.pdf.

25. Berman and Sams, Peacekeeping in Africa, 113–17; and Franke, “In Defense of Regional Peace Operations in Africa.”

26. Hikaru Yamashita, “Peacekeeping Cooperation between the United Nations and Regional Organisations,” Review of International Studies 38, no. 1 (January 2012): 167.

27. “Opérations en cours,” Réseau de recherché sur les opérations de paix (ROP), Université de Montréal, accessed 2 September 2014, http://www.operationspaix.net/operations-en-cours.html.

28. Nikolas G. Emmanuel, “Self-Help and Africa’s Collapsed States: The Critical Role of Subregional Hegemons,” Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie 3, no. 2 (2nd Quarter 2012): 76–96.

29. Bereng Mtimkulu, “The African Union and Peace Support Operations,” Conflict Trends, no. 4 (2005): 34–36.

30. In a material and ideational sense, the hegemonic role depends upon the actor’s capability. This article focuses on the material aspects of power although a country’s capacity to lead is also derived from its ability to act with legitimacy in the eyes of the community.

31. Adekeye Adebajo and Christopher Landsberg, “South Africa and Nigeria as Regional Hegemons,” in From Cape to Congo: Southern Africa’s Evolving Security Challenges, ed. Mwesiga Baregu and Christopher Landsberg (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 172.

32. Victor, “African Peacekeeping in Africa,” 226–27; James H. Lebovic, “Uniting for Peace? Democracies and United Nations Peace Operations after the Cold War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (December 2004): 910–36; and Andreas Anderson, “Democracies and UN Peacekeeping Operations, 1990–1996,” International Peacekeeping 7, no. 2 (2000): 1–22.

33. Victor, “African Peacekeeping in Africa.”

34. Adebajo and Landsberg, “South Africa and Nigeria as Regional Hegemons,” 174.

*The author is an assistant professor at the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Resolution of International Conflict. Professor Emmanuel holds a BA in political science from the University of California–San Diego; an MPhil in political science and African studies from the Institut d’Études Politiques and the Centre d’Études d’Afrique Noire in Bordeaux, France; and a PhD in political science from the University of California–Davis. His research is in the area of international relations and comparative politics with an emphasis on the use of soft intervention strategies to facilitate changes in the behavior of various state and nonstate actors in Africa and beyond.

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play

Communication—Engage Early, Engage Often

Lt Col Aaron D. Burgstein, USAF*

The Maginot Line, the legendary series of defenses built after World War One by the French to thwart any German invasion plan, seemed like a good idea at the time. That war had been characterized by trench fighting and static lines of defense that killed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of soldiers on both sides. During World War Two, enemies—in this case the Germans—would hurl themselves futilely against the Maginot Line’s impregnable series of fortifications. Meanwhile, the French Army would have time to mobilize and strike a decisive counterblow. This plan of “genius” was an utter failure. Daring, speed, combined arms, and a well-thought-out plan of attack flanked and defeated the Maginot Line—negating the expensive, static, and ultimately worthless fortification.

Like kinetic warfare, communication should be an offensive tool, not a static line of defense. By seizing the initiative, employing the combined-arms approach of visual information (VI) (photo and broadcast), print, social media, and nontraditional forms of communication, an organization can attack in depth, using multiple paths to produce nonkinetic results, prepping and shaping the battlefield to attain the desired effect. An organization that gains early control of the information battlespace can shape not only that domain but also many others and increase the odds of mission accomplishment.

The Importance of Communication

It is not possible to communicate nothing. As pointed out by Cliff Gilmore, a Marine Corps public affairs strategist, “everything one does communicates something to somebody, somewhere.”1 Gilmore postulates three truths of communicating. First, no one can lead without communicating. Second, not communicating is impossible. Third, people cannot communicate without influencing those in the communication process.2 But why is communication important?

Strategist Colin Gray said that “war and peace is really a mind game.”3 This insightful comment explains why one must communicate before, during, and after conflict. According to Carl von Clausewitz, war is “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”4 Essentially, it comes down to making people do what one wants them to do—by destroying the enemy’s power of resistance, which Clausewitz defined as “the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will” (emphasis in original).5

The will of the people is the essence of warfare. Convincing the enemy that his fight is hopeless and that he would be better off agreeing to his opponent’s demands or conforming to his ideals will result in victory. In other words, one can overcome the enemy psychologically. Indeed, Clausewitz declared that “psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.”6 As has often been argued—and to paraphrase Rear Adm Alfred Thayer Mahan—lesser soldiers with good weapons can often be beaten by better / more highly motivated soldiers with lesser weapons.7

Communication is also an important way of motivating forces. Soldiers involved in a mission they believe in tend to be more mission- and service-focused. Max Boot notes that Army reenlistment rates during the Bosnia and Kosovo operations were the highest the Army had seen in years.8 Psychological reinforcement helps make those forces stronger. A powerful army without the will to carry out its operations is almost useless. That same army, with moral and psychological strength behind it, can achieve great things.

Further complicating matters is the existence of multiple communication fronts, even battlefields. Different publics require different approaches. What works well with one may have the opposite effect on another. The trick lies in breaking the code of communicating effectively. For something so “normal” and important as communicating, it’s easy to run the gamut of communication success—or failure.

The Good

The Berlin airlift offers one of the best examples of a good communication effort on multiple levels. During the early stages of that effort, Air Force leaders recognized the value of public relations, making sure to include writers and reporters in the action. Gen William Tunner described the situation as “terrific public relations potential. . . . This is the greatest opportunity we have ever had.”9 Although Tunner may have been speaking specifically about air transport, his comment applied equally to the US policy of supporting West Berlin against communist action. The airlift, with all of its attendant publicity, was “a disaster for Joseph Stalin and his foreign policies by providing graphic evidence of Soviet ruthlessness and inhumanity.”10 More importantly, it helped swing American public opinion towards an alliance with Western European nations—something not assured before the blockade and hugely successful airlift.11

As the airlift gathered acclaim for its humanity and international cooperation, the concurrent B-29 deployment to Europe proved equally important. The thinking was that the deployment of these theoretically nuclear-capable bombers would show the Soviets “that the West meant business.”12 Roger G. Miller observes that it represented a serious demonstration of American commitment, showing the United States’ dedication to the defense of Western Europe.13 That these planes were not actually the nuclear-capable version is immaterial because the bulk of the world’s population—perhaps even the majority of Soviet leaders—did not know this. The deployment provides a good example of communicating with the adversary. In the late 1940s, there was no stronger message than the atomic bomb, so the public movement of B-29s would certainly attract attention.

The Bad

On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying before Congress, made the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. At that time, Secretary Powell fully believed in the evidence he presented and argued for war with Iraq. This scenario became an example of an initially effective communication engagement that turned bad and damaged US credibility. During the invasion and subsequent occupation, the fact that no such weapons were found undermined both the United States’ justification for the invasion and international/coalition support; it also harmed Powell’s personal reputation, casting doubt on his integrity.14 Powell was devastated: “I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record.”15 Building a coalition with inaccurate facts is a poor course of action.

The Ugly

The creation and announcement of Africa Command present a good example of an ugly communication effort. On 6 February 2007, the White House publicized the command’s appearance in “a two-line . . . announcement that said everything and nothing.”16 Dr. J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center and a member of Africa Command’s Senior Advisory Group from its inception, had his first inkling that something was amiss in the communication arena when African defense attachés began asking him for information. Rather than brief any of them, the United States had informed only attachés of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Africans eventually received a briefing—about 10 days later—but this failure to communicate had already proven a “costly mistake.”17

Even worse was the dearth of information about the new command. Rather than having access to readily available answers (e.g., from public affairs guidance), African leaders and newspapers were left to their own devices in terms of gathering information about Africa Command. From the onset, an obvious lack of communication jeopardized the mission to create peace and stability. “No one was authorized to speak about the command,” said Pham. “So even the simple questions weren’t answered. This created an aura of mistrust that exists to this day.”18

The “Hunker Down” or “Maginot” Method of Communication

Today’s commanders understand that reactive public affairs provides no real added value toward the accomplishment of our missions. In order to be effective in our operations, we need the ability for our communications to be proactive or as we call it, “effects-based communication.”

—Lt Gen William B. Caldwell IV

Former spokesperson, Multi-National Force–Iraq

Sometimes the reactive mode is appropriate—even called for. In those cases, the standard “response to query” format supplies a pre-thought-out series of possible questions and answers for use if needed (e.g., before announcing a major operation or significant change to an organization). This tool is ready when the questions begin and offers to individuals speaking for the organization a preapproved set of guidelines and key points upon which to base their answers.

Generally, classified information is not pushed to either the public or the media. In most cases, people understand this policy. Even though the actual classified information cannot—and should not—be released, one can still confirm the obvious and provide an answer.

What are the downsides to adopting a reactive course of action? For one, by doing so, one is also playing catch-up by default. Instead of leading with statements, thoughts, and positions, thereby establishing the narrative, a reactive team constantly responds to whatever the “adversary” says or does. If the Taliban declare that US forces have killed innocents, then America finds itself in a constant state of denial, trying to prove its innocence. Put more succinctly, “If you don’t define the narrative, someone else will.”19 News cycles are dynamic and powerful. Whoever releases information first “scoops” the competition, forcing the less ambitious organization into a reactive posture of always struggling to defend itself and respond to what is said about it instead of expressing its own messages.

Just as importantly, such a defensive posture can easily diminish an organization’s credibility. Instead of discussing all of the good things it does, it must use most of its energy, efforts, and communication to counter negative statements. By constantly playing catch-up and letting the opponent lead, the organization discusses negative aspects in the bulk of its messages, both incoming and outgoing, and further harms its reputation.

In its battles with Israel, Hamas recognizes the latter as the stronger military power and designs its strategy accordingly. If it cannot win a conflict militarily, then it wants to have the upper hand in terms of its portrayal.20 Thus, both Hamas and Israel strive to get their messages out first. By seizing the high ground in communication through quickly releasing information and communicating to its audiences, an organization automatically puts its adversary on the defensive.

Seizing the Offensive

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

—Thucydides

Communication works for those who work at it.

—John Powell, film score composer

Communication should be an intrinsic part of the battle plan, traceable to a leader’s lines of operations. Engaging during mission analysis provides enough lead time to plan in parallel and synchronize key leadership-engagement opportunities through the media, broadcast release, and so forth. Too often, public affairs is relegated to an annex and added as an afterthought after all the planning is completed. That approach will not win a communication engagement and can prove detrimental to the overall plan as the organization struggles to play catch-up. Rather, communication must be part of the plan from conception through realization—but how?

Like reactive communication and the Maginot Line, the proactive method is akin to World War One’s famed blitzkrieg, which so handily defeated those static lines. Although the combined-arms approach is indeed a vital part of a proactive communication plan, it is much more than that. The blitzkrieg, also known as “lightning war,” was fast and of short duration. Such tactics may work in some instances, but they are not the basis for a solid, comprehensive communication strategy, which must take a long-term approach.

Who makes a proactive communication strategy work? According to journalist Willy Stern, “General and flag officers must empower subordinate officers.”21 If senior leaders aren’t talking, then junior leaders have no example to follow—to actually get out and talk to both their own people and their adversaries. Thus, it is crucial that senior leaders set the stage by communicating—often. They then serve as role models to the subordinates who won’t feel as threatened by communicating. Nor will they worry about being in front of their leaders if those individuals lead from the front. Moreover, senior leadership must empower those junior leaders to communicate rather than follow a zero-defect mentality. Allowing these leaders to take a little risk encourages them, and others, to communicate.22

As Gen David Petraeus, former commander of the International Security Assistance Force, outlined in his counterinsurgency guidance, the vital nature of communication demands that one do it correctly:

Be first with the truth. Beat the insurgents and malignant actors to the headlines. Preempt rumors. Get accurate information to the chain of command, to Afghan leaders, to the people, and to the press as soon as possible. Integrity is critical to this fight. Avoid spinning, and don’t try to “dress up” an ugly situation. Acknowledge setbacks and failure, including civilian casualties, and then state how we’ll respond and what we’ve learned.23

Openness and honesty are only part of the equation. Communication needs to be timely, accurate, and truthful. But how do modern communicators carry out their mission?

Make It Strategic

“You want a strategic, well thought out plan, where everything reinforces everything else.”24 To be truly strategic, one should plan in advance and persuade international partners to cooperate and help spread the narrative. Franklin D. Kramer, former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, recommends answering five questions to start the plan: (1) What’s the message? (2) Who are the audiences? (3) Who are the communicators? (4) What are the channels to communicate? (5) What is the desired end state?25 Though great tools for planning a communication strategy, these questions need modification for today’s and tomorrow’s environment. Moreover, these steps are linear but planned in such a way that they become mutually reinforcing. Rather than figuring out the messages first, one should begin by defining the end state or intent of the project.

What Is the Intent and/or End State?

Normally, the communication intent or end state is based upon supporting the operational goal. The entire team must determine the best way to match the operational and communication goals to attain synergy; otherwise, people will be communicating just to hear themselves speak. As part of designing the overall battle plan, one should identify the desired end state and factor it into the communication plan. The plan needs to include an operational goal linked with the communication goal, a method of communicating, and—just as importantly—a public with whom to engage.

What’s the Message?

Now that one knows what to talk about, the next question should address the messages that help further that aim. What is the communicator trying to convey? What is the goal of the operation supported by this communication? However, it’s more than just what to say. It’s with whom to communicate and how best to do so.

Who Are the Publics?

The term public is used here instead of audience, which receives information. Communicating seeks to engage in a dialogue with various publics. Importantly, this step determines with whom to communicate—something not as easy as it may seem. It is simple to pick “US military” or “adversary X” as a group, but one must keep in mind that multiple publics almost always exist. The fact that a message is directed at one does not imply that others won’t receive it. For the purposes of basic planning, however, the key publics must be identified and prioritized. Who is the message intended to reach?

Who Are the Communicators?

Once the publics are defined, the next—and equally crucial—step involves determining the spokespeople. One must not limit them to the standard US public affairs types but seek out who can and will make the greatest impact. Who has the most legitimacy? If, for example, the United States wants to communicate with a host nation’s people, then why use American spokespeople if the local leadership is ready, willing, and able to communicate more effectively?

What Are the Channels to Communicate?

Just how will the message be conveyed? By means of television, radio, social media? It’s not enough to say, “We’ll tell them.” One must identify a method of communication.

It is also important to consider whether to communicate in multiple languages. One can gain much by ensuring that messages to foreign nationals are conveyed in local languages and terms as opposed to a tongue that they may not understand. At this point, the combined-arms approach, discussed later in this article, comes in. Moreover, this is why it is vital to know what the goals and messages are. By coordinating these elements, one can work them together to best take advantage of the strengths of each communication medium. But what are these mediums? What weapons systems does the communicator have at his or her disposal?

Plan for Formal Assessments

Although not included with the five questions above, assessing how a communication effort is or is not progressing represents an essential part of any operation. Recurring assessments of communication plans allow commanders to determine if they have produced the intended effects. Moreover, they provide valuable feedback regarding the target publics and changes in behavior or attitude. Finally, assessments are worthless unless one learns from them and adapts. By assessing an operation and then adjusting, based on lessons learned, one can make the next round of communication efforts much more effective.

Using the Combined-Arms Approach to Attack in Depth

As discussed earlier, the method of communication represents one of the key elements to identify and then use. Today, more than ever, the United States is fortunate enough to have a vast network of communication tools at its disposal. No longer are communicators restricted to press conferences and releases. A truly savvy communicator can draw upon the power of combining public affairs assets in a synergistic manner to bring about truly powerful results. The combined-arms approach blends VI, print, social media, and nontraditional methods to create an in-depth effort to communicate with varied publics around the world.

US Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT) serves as a prime example. It runs a multifaceted communication shop out of its combined air operations center in Southwest Asia. The command’s public affairs office (AFCENT/PA), led by Lt Col Sean McKenna at the time of this writing, communicates the Air Force and coalition story, but “the methods and audiences vary widely. Thus, each communication element must be keenly aware of the intended target of each AFCENT/PA product and understand how best to reach that particular audience. Consequently, most of our internal products (video, photos, and print stories produced by AFCENT/PA) are repackaged and direct-marketed to (largely stateside) media interested in the focus of the story.”26

Visual Information (Photo/Video/Broadcast)

A picture is worth a thousand words.

VI, used by the military to tell the story of its operations, has been around as long as humans have captured the moment in drawings and paintings or even sewing and weaving. Modern VI traces its roots to photographs of the American Civil War. Today, the military fields a large, highly skilled force of photographers and broadcasters in a network that spans the globe. Using still photography and video to document both combat and humanitarian operations, these teams are essential to narrating in the visual medium. If the audience has only a minute, conveying the message with a photo or a 30-second video clip is much easier than doing so by almost any other means.

Take for example the US response to the recent disaster in Haiti. A large VI team deployed both to Haiti and to bases that supported operations. In this deployed role, team members captured images of relief efforts, heroism at all levels, and international cooperation—releasing them not only to the public but also, and more importantly, to the media. In one memorable case, Air Force broadcasters shot video of C-17s dropping food supplies to the Haitians, copying these images to DVDs and distributing them to various news agencies deployed to Haiti. This footage led the CBS Evening News that night, appearing online and in print form in multiple publications—including Time Magazine’s special Haiti edition—telling the story to an audience potentially numbering in the millions.27 Nevertheless, VI does not stand alone. Photographers and broadcasters can and do work in close conjunction with print journalists.

Print

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.

—T. E. Lawrence

Like VI, print has existed for as long as people have recorded events. Present-day commanders have a variety of means to communicate via print. The best known are newspapers—from the local base paper to the New York Times or the Times of India.

The most effective part of print communication is that it allows the writer to delve into more detail than in other mediums. The inclusion of greater background, depth, and content about any subject can prove especially useful in describing complicated situations or, just as usefully, working in conjunction with VI to offer a more comprehensive narrative.

True, portraying events by means of traditional print, such as newspapers or magazines, isn’t nearly as fast as the visual realm. Many print publications are produced daily, which of course leads to lags in communicating news. However, that liability is offset by the fact that (1) print’s detail can more than make up for slight delays and (2) with the rise of the Internet, print has gone online and become much more timely, competing with the 24-hour televised news cycle.

Social Media

I never realized that when I signed up for my Facebook account that I was signing up to finish Mubarak.

—Hisham Kassem

Egyptian journalist and publisher

In late 2012, Air Force staff sergeants Chris Pyles and Bradley Sisson, broadcasters working at the Defense Media Activity, created a new social media news program designed to “change the way the military communicates with its audiences.”28 Their social-media-only show, though still under development, has garnered much complimentary feedback in its limited run. Intended to deliver news of interest in a humorous manner and to combat the traditional “passive” method of receiving information by engaging the audience, the show makes for an interactive and engaging experience—a key attribute in today’s communication environment, in which more than half of the US population gets its news from the Internet.29 Furthermore, nearly one-third of Americans younger than 30 depend upon social media for news.30 Additionally, for those concerned about the humorous aspects of a news program, one must note that even as far back as 2009, nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18–29 got their news from satirical sources such as the Daily Show or even Saturday Night Live.31

As Sergeant Sisson observes, “everyone has opinions and thoughts, so why not listen to them, talk to them? We are at an adolescent stage of social media communication, and things will change very quickly in the next couple of years on how audience members consume and interact with their information.”32 A recent poll by George Washington University found that during the 2012 election, nearly two-thirds of voters believed that social media was at least on par with, if not of a higher quality than, traditional media outlets. The numbers were even higher for those under 25 years of age.33

But social media entails more than simply engaging with the American public. It has a wartime mission as well. Recently, Yahoo! News ran a story about a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces who is running a “virtual smackdown” against Hamas by using Facebook and Twitter.34 His team’s mission is to employ social media to fight the war of worldwide public perception, responding to Hamas posts, countering their claims, and showing the world the other side of the story. Doing so is vital, for as Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, points out, “Hamas . . . has a media strategy. Its purpose is to portray Israel’s unparalleled efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza as indiscriminate firing at women and children, to pervert Israel’s rightful acts of self-defense into war crimes.”35

Nontraditional

I come here for a simple reason, on behalf of the president and myself, to say thank you. Thank you not only for saving thousands of lives. Thank you for making America look as good as we are.

—Vice President Joseph Biden, after the tsunami in Japan

We’re putting the band back together.

—Jake Blues

Many nontraditional methods of communication are already in place, ranging from humanitarian operations to teaming with foreign militaries to military bands. One of the more innovative programs under way—the Navy’s Africa Partnership Station, which began in 2007—seeks to “bring partnerships into action through cooperation among many different nations and organizations.”36 Perhaps not considered a “communication” effort, communication is nevertheless occurring through this partnership, which permits the United States to engage with African publics in a personal manner.

Also not generally perceived as such, visits by hospital ships to remote parts of the world, as well as full-scale responses to disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and nuclear incidents, are other communication events. Providing relief while at the same time engaging with multiple publics offers a prime opportunity to communicate—and, even more importantly, a chance to ensure that actions match words.

Often neglected in discussions of communication is the important role of military bands both at home station and deployed. In US Central Command, the Air Force Band “functions as an element of soft power in support of the US national security strategy, leveraging its unique access and reach to interact with audiences where a traditional U.S. military presence would be much more difficult to achieve.”37 These uses of the band, whether directed towards military morale and civilian education or utilized in a more general soft power role, can pay huge dividends.

In Central Command’s area of responsibility, military communicators worked with US embassies to schedule and even fund

targeted engagements in the communities. This happened on several occasions, including several Fourth of July weekend performances in two strategic, and rarely visited, CENTCOM priority nations—Egypt and Jordan. Force protection concerns were mitigated in coordination with US Embassy recommendations, and the AFCENT Band performed as an “American Band” in civilian clothing, using only the band name without specific reference to AFCENT. This allowed the band to positively represent the United States and help expand upon the . . . mission and US outreach efforts even where a military presence might be less acceptable. In this way, the band’s performances created a cross-cultural bridge despite language barriers while accounting for security concerns—key in supporting the widest range of areas and countries of interest.38

Online Considerations

The cyber world combines all of these aspects. Whatever the communication element used to engage with a public initially, there exists the very real possibility that it could go viral and become a subject of interest to people all over the world. Once released, these products can explode into online discussions that can multiply their original communication effects, reaching out to many publics at the same time. This prospect requires that a proactive communication team actively monitor the social media battlespace and engage when needed—not in a duplicitous manner to steer the conversation but as legitimate representatives correcting the record. Maintaining credibility is key in any social media engagement.

For example, a communication team could post a print story to a blog or upload photos to a website. Then, as more people begin to read and view, online discussions take place. Either through ignorance or malfeasance, people could then post and attempt to steer the dialogue away from or counter to the communication team’s objectives. Others might also attempt to take their messages viral, spreading their countermessages. A proactive team watches for these events, engages and steers the conversations back on track, or at least presents its views instead of letting others take control of the narrative. “Fire and forget” is not a good option in the online world.

Multiple Paths to Reach the Desired Result

You talk the talk. Do you walk the walk?

—Animal Mother, Full Metal Jacket

Of course, all of these areas have their strengths and weaknesses. That’s why the combined-arms approach to communication is so important. By using a combination of any or all of these communication tools, one can transmit messages to a variety of publics in a myriad of ways, thereby increasing the likelihood of their reception.

The first of two keys to this eventuality lies in ensuring that these efforts are coordinated. The actions of each element of the communication plan must back up the others: “What the Public Affairs office is saying, the J5 is planning and the J3 is doing.”39 By combining the various elements, engagement with multiple publics across a wide range of venues is not only likely but possible.

Second, and in many cases more importantly, one’s actions must back up one’s words. If not, the communication effort not only is wasted but also could actually result in a loss of credibility. One of the best examples of actions not matching either words or the truth involves former Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf during Operation Iraqi Freedom. On numerous occasions, his claims about Iraqi resistance and US forces’ lack of progress were grossly inaccurate—in one case even going so far as saying that the Iraqis were beating back the Americans, who were committing suicide by the hundreds, and that no Americans were in Baghdad. Meanwhile, reporters and television crews could clearly see two American tanks behind him. Because his words did not match Iraq’s actions, he lost credibility and became a source of amusement, sparking multiple websites and comedians devoted to following and humorously reporting his claims. Meanwhile, this situation could not have helped the public’s perception of the regime’s legitimacy.40

Why Do This / Make the Effort?

We need to tell the factual story—good and bad—before others seed the media with disinformation and distortion, as they most certainly will continue to do. Our people in the field need to tell our story—only commanders can ensure the media get to the story alongside the troops.

—Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld

The pen is mightier than the sword.

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Communication happens. There is no changing that fact. One makes the effort of creating and executing a proactive communication strategy in order to influence and direct conversations with audiences. This issue is not intrinsic to the military.

Domino’s Pizza did just that in a recent advertising campaign. Realizing that the public viewed its pizza as a quickly delivered but not overly tasty meal, Domino’s went on the offensive. Instead of hunkering down and just “dealing” with the issue—and the possibility of losing money and customers—the company opened a dialogue with the public by launching a “campaign acknowledging that their pizza quality suffered and putting the fans in front of the charge to fix it.”41 This is a classic example of engaging with members of the public, involving them, and turning a potential negative into a positive.

What does Domino’s have to do with the military and its communication goals? Everything. Just as engaging with the public is fundamental to the continued success of a for-profit enterprise, so is engagement—communication—key to military operations. Communication is vital leading up to, during, and supporting those operations—all aspects. Sharon Hobson, a Canadian defense reporter, commented that the Canadian Navy is doing itself a disservice by its lack of communication, even as it embarks on an expensive new shipbuilding plan: “How is the Navy going to help people understand why this kind of expenditure is necessary in a time of economic restraint?”42 Communicating its messages is in the best interest of any organization.

As Kenneth Allard notes in his book Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War,

This was the practical side of “information operations,” the understanding that information had become so fundamental to warfare that to neglect it like a toddler left unattended beside a busy highway was to guarantee that disaster had also not been left to chance. Instead what the Soviets had once called “active measures” were called for, not just to “spin” a story but to shape the larger environment where the whole yarn would be received, believed, and acted upon.43

Clausewitz said that “military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life.”44 He goes on to discuss the three elements that comprise the trinity of war: the people, the commander and army, and the government. Although the three must work together, it is people with “the passions that are to be kindled in war” that can be manipulated.45

Another common saying is that the enemy gets a vote. Keeping that in mind, why not influence that vote? As mentioned above, war is a mind game; if one can convince the adversary to choose a course of action more in line with one’s own plan, then all the better.

Willy Stern asserts that “every first-rate commander knows how to cultivate the media, and use the press to his (or her) advantage.”46 Conversely, the inability of a commander or the professional communicator to value and cultivate that relationship can easily lead to ceding the battlefield to the adversary. Unfortunately, the United States has a culture of playing it safe regarding communication, often with negative results: “Al Queda [sic] is very sophisticated at telling its story. The American military is not.”47 Finally, as defense writer Otto Kreisher observes, “People are more than willing to point out your failures. Why not take every opportunity to highlight your success?”48

Conclusion

When you fight an action . . . in our modern media world, you are fighting it on television! It is an extraordinary thing.

—Former prime minister Tony Blair

I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.

—Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

You can’t win the media battle if you don’t play.

—Willy Stern

The United States possesses vast military might. However, to be successful in its endeavors, it must also synchronize the timeliness of explanations of its actions—from budget plans to coalition operations of all shapes and sizes. This is especially true in military combat operations. As former governor Mitt Romney said during one presidential debate in 2012, “We can’t kill our way out of this mess.”49 Today’s environment requires a more nuanced approach in order to build support and further one’s aims.

No longer can the United States afford to hunker down in a defensive stance when it comes to communicating. Today’s environment demands a proactive communication effort—be it for combat operations, humanitarian relief, or informing the American public. Moreover, the goal of communicating is to engage in a dialogue; it’s not a one-way deal. One doesn’t talk at an audience; rather, one talks with publics.

Keeping this in mind, creating and using a strategic communication plan can make the United States’ efforts much more effective on multiple levels. Using communication as an offensive tool rather than a defense countermeasure, while employing the combined-arms approach, will enable the United States to better meet its objectives and further its narrative with multiple publics—not only prepping the battlefield but also continuing support throughout the operation and well after. In the immortal words of Star Trek’s Capt Jean-Luc Picard, “Engage!”

Notes

1. Lt Col Cliff W. Gilmore, “Breaking Down the Opaque Stovepipes: A Change-Leadership Framework for DoD Communication,” Information Operations Journal 2, no. 4 (December 2010): 16.

2. Lt Col Cliff W. Gilmore and Richard R. Osial, “The Fourth Estate Is Dead, Long Live the Fourth Estate: A New Military Mindset for a Rapidly Evolving Communication Environment,” Public Relations Review 38, no. 2 (June 2012): 208.

3. Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 96.

4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75.

5. Ibid., 77.

6. Ibid., 127.

7. Quoted in Gray, Fighting Talk, 96.

8. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 342.

9. Roger G. Miller, To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 193.

10. Ibid., 187.

11. Ibid., 187–88.

12. Ibid., 46.

13. Ibid.

14. Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 294–96.

15. “Colin Powell on Iraq, Race, and Hurricane Relief, ” ABC News, 8 September 2005, http://abcnews.go.com/2020

/Politics/story?id=1105979.

16. Dr. J. Peter Pham (Atlantic Council of the United States, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center), interview by the author, 12 December 2012.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Michele Flournoy (former undersecretary of defense for policy), interview by the author, 10 January 2013.

20. Michael Oren, “Falling for Hamas’s Media Manipulation,” Washington Post, 28 November 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/falling-for-hamass-media-manipulation/2012/11/28/4d7b9498-39a1-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html.

21. Willy Stern, “How David Petraeus Mastered the Media,” Forbes, 19 November 2012, http://www.forbes.com

/sites/randalllane/2012/11/19/how-david-petraeus-mastered-the-media/.

22. Bill Caldwell, “Changing the Organizational Culture,” Small Wars Journal Blog, 3 February 2008, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/changing-the-organizational-culture-updated.

23. Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 60.

24. Flournoy, interview.

25. Franklin D. Kramer (former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs), interview by the author, 18 December 2012.

26. Lt Col Sean McKenna (director, US Air Forces Central Command / Public Affairs), interview by the author, 16 December 2012.

27. Capt Sheila Johnston (former assistant director of operations, 1st Combat Camera Squadron), interview by the author, 13 January 2012.

28. SSgt Bradley Sisson (Air Force broadcaster, Defense Media Activity), interview by the author, 6 December 2012.

29. Andrew Beaujon, “Pew: Half of Americans Get News Digitally, Topping Newspapers, Radio,” Poynter Institute, 27 September 2012, http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/189819/pew-tv-viewing-habit-grays-as-digital-news-consumption-tops-print-radio/.

30. Jeff Sonderman, “One-Third of Adults under 30 Get News on Social Networks Now,” Poynter Institute, 27 September 2012, http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/189776/one-third-of-adults-under-30-get-news-on-social-networks-now/.

31. David Bauder, “Young Get News from Comedy Central,” CBS News, 11 February 2009, http://www

.cbsnews.com/2100-207_162-603270.html.

32. Sisson, interview.

33. Byron Tau, “Survey: Users Trust Social Media as News Source,” Politico, 17 January 2013, http://www.politico

.com//story/2013/01/survey-users-trust-social-media-as-news-source-86321.html.

34. Claudine Zap, “Israel’s Social Media War Run by 26 Year Old,” Lookout, 21 November 2012, http://news.yahoo

.com/blogs/lookout/israel-social-media-war-run-26-old-201813409.html.

35. Oren, “Falling for Hamas’s Media Manipulation.”

36. “About Africa Partnership Station,” Commander, US Naval Forces Africa, accessed 16 March 2013, http://www

.c6f.navy.mil/about%20us.html.

37. McKenna, interview.

38. Ibid.

39. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, to commanders of the combatant commands, memorandum, 28 November 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_documents/121206_brooksmemo

.pdf.pdf.

40. “Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Face of Iraqi Government,” CNN, 8 April 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003

/WORLD/meast/04/08/sprj.irq.sahaf.profile.reut/.

41. Leslie Poston, “Shining Examples of Social Media Crisis Management,” Salesforce Marketing Cloud (blog), 21 September 2012, http://www.radian6.com/blog/2012/09/shining-examples-of-excellent-social-media-crisis-management/.

42. Quoted in David Pugliese, “Navy Public Affairs Up Ship Creek without an Explanation,” Ottawa Citizen, 18 February 2013, http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2013/02/18/navy-public-affairs-up-ship-creek-without-an-explanation/.

43. Kenneth Allard, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War (New York: US Naval Institute Press, 2006), 75.

44. Clausewitz, On War, 137.

45. Ibid., 89.

46. Stern, “How David Petraeus Mastered the Media.”

47. Ibid.

48. Otto Kreisher (defense and air and space writer), interview by the author, 20 February 2013.

49. Julian Pecquet, “Romney: ‘We Can’t Kill Our Way Out of This Mess’ in the Middle East,” Global Affairs: The Hill’s International Relations Blog, 23 October 2012, http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/middle-east-north-africa/263423-romney-we-cant-kill-ourselves-out-of-this-mess-in-the-middle-east.

*The author is the director of public affairs, Headquarters US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii. He develops, conducts, and monitors all command public affairs programs for PACAF and all subordinate public affairs offices in the Pacific region. Additionally, he develops and implements media relations, community relations, and internal information policy for the PACAF commander and formulates communication strategies to positively affect US Air Force and command issues. Lieutenant Colonel Burgstein has held a variety of positions at the wing, major command, and Air Staff levels, and commanded the 1st Combat Camera Squadron at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina. He spent a year in the Education with Industry Program at the Hill and Knowlton company in New York and was selected as the strategic communications adviser to the secretary of the Air Force. Prior to his current assignment, Lieutenant Colonel Burgstein was a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, DC. He holds a BA from Ursinus College, an MA from the Navy War College, and an MAAS from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

Deconstructing Global Fault Lines

Aaron G. Sander*

Tasawar Baig, PhD

World politics is in transition, and by and large the trend is toward globalization. This pattern of global diffusion has been accelerated at both the regional and international levels. Movements across borders, reflected in trade, migration, investment, and organizations, have softened the traditional identities so long harbored within a state’s boundaries, and with globalization have come general development and gains. Although we live in this era of incredible globalization, pockets remain that present barriers, if not stubbornness, to assimilation at the subregional level.

In fact, areas around the world such as Central and South Asia, South and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Maghreb, and Central Africa have encountered difficulties. Their problem with integrating globalization aside, these subregions’ troubles and conflicts stem from deeper issues. As people, through states and empires, have sought greater influence in their surrounding territories, inevitably they have encountered indigenous obstacles, if not outside competition. Oftentimes the latter has characterized root instability along the Eurasian rim.

Great powers from both the continental and maritime worlds have encountered each other time and again along this zone, a fact that points to a systemic issue of competition that keeps these pivotal subregions in a perpetual state of instability due to designs of harnessing these gateways for their own unilateral purposes.1 Saul Cohen describes a similar belt of territory extending from Europe through the greater Middle East and on through Asia. His view of an almost dyadic competition between land and maritime powers pits their converging areas of influence into a fractious belt of unstable polities—shatterbelts along the convergence zone. (Shatterbelts are “strategically oriented regions that are both deeply divided internally and caught up in the competition between Great Powers of the geostrategic realms.”)2

Empirical results prove that the fragile states of the shatterbelts are associated with great-power intervention and that these subregions tend to have a lengthy history of geopolitical fissures and persistent instability that create formidable challenges to growth and development.3 As Cohen describes this belt, the convergence zone is rather competitive in character, as a buffer between distinct regions. It seems that when competition reaches a stalemate, chances are that a portion of this real estate will devolve into a shatterbelt. Alternatively, given the right conditions, areas along the zone of convergence could progress to a gateway across the zone, linking substantial resources on either side. Consequently, this article explores the possibility of bringing stable development to these subregions.

With history and potential in mind, a change in course is necessary since these fragile subregions cannot maintain their present course with any expectation of successful diffusion through the international community alone. Rather than competing over this territory with force, the local actors have reached a stage where, if even through desperation, they might take matters into their own hands. This cooperation may be described as initially existing among fewer actors at the state and transnational levels but more so where the benefits of investment and development may be felt across the fault lines. In order for polities along the convergence zone to escape history, so to speak, they must endeavor to increase cooperation and development more through increased partnerships at the subregional level—to mend their common region through locally sustained interdependences. On this matter of increased interdependence with regard to shatterbelt states, David Reilly has found that an increase in trade has a mitigating effect on instability and a pacifying effect on high-risk states.4

Admittedly, this notion is not original. It is parallel to that of the European Community. Its project of Europe’s transcendence from its conflicted history to regional integration is based on the liberal functionalism of David Mitrany: “That political unity amongst states depended upon the links at lower mostly economic levels.”5 From the minds of its planners, the European Union (EU) would have a “bottom-up” approach in order to establish a more cohesive link. From here, the European Economic Community evolved into the merchant powerhouse of today’s EU. The successive harnessing of European economic power, sector by sector, simply worked. It is impressive to think upon the totality of Europe’s rebound. Sunk as a continent between the two world wars, Europe as a union today boasts the highest gross domestic product as well as the highest percentages of world trade and foreign direct investment of all global players.6 Without a doubt, as a union, Europe’s presence is noticed.

We do not argue that any other region could replicate the same degree of the EU’s success. However, a precedent has been set. The lower links of functional integration create a sound footing on which to foster cooperation and communication. One should note that although increased integration is the goal, it would not need to progress to the elusive political union sought by the EU.7 In fact, one may argue that in keeping cooperation primarily at the level of joint ventures and investments, the consortium’s simple technical nature may aid its focus on efficient subregional development and stable integration within the globalized world. Indeed, such a view could potentially lead to a locally sustained gateway between regions.

With this in mind, we hope to build upon the literature of fragile states within unstable regions and show that one should place less emphasis on what outside interests and the international community can do for these trouble spots than on how they should be sustained through local interdependencies. Thus, this article addresses two case studies: the Curzon Line through Central and Eastern Europe and the Durand Line on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, both of which were forged in the competition between great powers.

Curzon’s Line in the East

The Curzon Line is an effective representation of the divide long endured between Central and Eastern Europe, a milestone in recent history. One could begin with the Jireček Line across the Balkans of the previous millennia because it speaks to the duration of difference between the East and West. However, the Curzon Line of 1919, which reestablished a sovereign Poland’s borders with the Soviet Union, remains the boundary between the Western influence of the EU along with the United States and that of Russia. Speaking of greater interdependence across this “line” can be discouraging in that it tends to be associated with Russian and Soviet imperial policy.8 Therefore, any consolidation across it may then be associated with a possible neo-Russian return to Soviet times. Alternatively, Russia could see the line as a Western attempt at further encroachment toward its borders. One should note at the outset that any meaningful convergence across this divide would have to avoid these perceptions.

It is true that Russia’s origins stem from the territory lying just east of the Curzon Line in present-day Belarus and Ukraine and that it maintained this presence for centuries. Russians have not been the sole proprietor of this territory, however. Central Europeans have also extended their influence into the realm as Russian influence has waned. For four centuries, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth held territory well past Riga, Minsk, and Kiev, even into modern Russia. Not until Peter and then Catherine the Great did Ruthenian lands return to the Russians up to the Curzon Line via the Polish partitions of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, this stretch of territory from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea has been a site of competing powers since time immemorial. We seek to highlight this pattern of systemic conflict with our case studies and recommend a means of diffusion.

Halford Mackinder wrote about this systemic pattern as early as a decade prior to the Great War, warning that Central Eastern Europe (CEE) would be the pivot upon which a power could stake its claim to the remainder of Eurasia. Whoever controls this beltway, he believed, would have carte blanche access throughout Europe and into the vastness of Eurasia.9 His theoretical warning, by and large, has been heeded—that is to say, successful opposition has made domination of this thruway, with enough capacity to launch past it, impossible. Yet, the attempts to do so or to maintain the bulwarks have left the region a perpetual “crush zone.”10 Stuck between competing powers on either side, this zone is characterized by James Fairgrieve as one “with sufficient individuality to withstand absorptions, but unable or unwilling to unite with others to form any larger whole, they remain in the unsatisfactory position of buffer states, precariously independent politically, and more surely dependent economically.”11 To compare, whereas Mackinder warned of the subregion’s absorption leading to cross-continental domination, Fairgrieve believed in its stubborn unlikelihood. As has been the case, policy has called for maintaining the subregion as a divided buffer.

Both the East and West chose to split the region, leaving the fringe as a buffer of the bipolar world—from the rebirth of Poland following the First World War to the bitter tension laid across it and neighboring states following the Second World War. As such, it remained within its traditional fragile state, seemingly forever stuck in history. The result is a belt across Europe, its own subregion, which has developed separately with regard to its cultural, economic, and political character. As Friedrich Ratzel writes, the region is “not a border between two states but between two worlds.”12 It would continue to be felt as much after the Second World War as all the while west of this buffer, “free” Europe was undertaking a substantial experiment—interdependence. Times have changed, indeed, since Europe is not the same—not entirely.

“Partnership” with the East?

Europe today, as a region and in comparison to others in the world, is unique. While conflict percolates and occurs elsewhere, Europe has been able to shed the baggage of interstate rivalry. Instead, the states of the EU have endeavored to work toward mutual development. With the divide above in mind, only with the autonomy gained in the 1990s could the European community, born in the west, extend the prospects of partnership with its immediate east. Yet, as much as the EU has grown, it still suffers from an internal divide between Old and New Europe.13 This constitutes another fissure on the mend within the EU, along the Oder-Neisse, with its own multilevel divide between Western and Central European states.14

Accordingly, while Western European Union (WEU) states in Old Europe seem to have progressed from nations’ “state of nature,” CEE states in New Europe are in transition.15 For them, conflicts within the EU represent not a “return of history” but a reminder that it has not yet left.16 After all, the WEU states have been the engine of the EU’s growth; as such, its center of gravity leans westward.17 For example, it is the “tendency among some of the key actors, specifically France and Germany, to present their particular interests as European interests in general, without first discussing them with the other EU members and without trying to determine the common European interest on the basis of this discussion.”18 Consequently, membership in the EU is a process of vertical Europeanization rather than the “partnered” union implied by the rhetoric.19

This has resulted in expectations less satisfied by grouped members.20 As this case study attempts to argue, the “lower links” of David Mitrany and others worked wonders in the aggregate but did not perform well for all across the board—least of all the newest members in the east and those to which the EU attempts to reach out further east. European integration has taken a different path since its founding. Expansion for and into CEE states, as well as prospects for states across the Curzon Line, has been politically driven from the top down, and its related policies have apparently lost touch with the “partnership” with those it has reached out to in the east.21 Eastern European (EE) states, for example, are hardly treated as equals, and their prospective costs of membership are high. Regarding costs, it appears that EU aid has been quite high—not in quantity invested but apparent waste. Support tools for Eastern Partnership countries across the Curzon have no common themes; that is, monies are spent on a multitude of programs that have little value-added development when combined.22 Further, their prospects for achieving a robust economy following accession would be highly doubtful if CEE member states are any indication.

Most recently, the EU’s Eurozone project has faced increasing pressure from the global recession and has given cause regarding whether its membership is worth the expense. Hungary has argued on grounds of national sovereignty that it will not join the Eurozone in tightening fiscal policy.23 By itself, Hungary is significant enough to create ripples within the EU’s Eurozone although the situation could potentially snowball if other members along the eastern periphery join the resistance to center-led austerity measures. However, austerity is not the underlying force that drives a wedge between the EU center and its periphery.

As George Friedman sums up, “The structure of the EU itself is faulty” insofar as a band of developing states along the EU periphery should have a positive balance of investment and trade within the EU.24 However, this is not the case. The original estimation of benefits was overstated when presented with a free-trade zone dominated by a center-led, export-dependent economy.25 Moreover, it seems that this was the intended structure designed within the union’s expansion. CE(E) wage and industrial advantage presented more of a threat than possible opportunity to actors within the WEU. Wade Jacoby writes that “management efforts allowed [WEU] . . . actors to exploit investment opportunities in CE(E) but without exposing [WEU] . . . economies to large increases in migration or trade pressure in sectors where CE(E) had comparative advantage.”26 This, then, shifted inherent potential growth to one based on foreign direct investment so that WEU firms are securely emplaced in CEE and essentially control much of their leading export industries.27 The result has been low growth in locally owned export-manufacturing capabilities, particularly high-tech industries.28

Because EE states would also likely face this vertical Europeanization in CEE, along with its lopsided trade flow, CEE and EE states share some commonalities with regard to economic and social development. States along the Curzon Line need only be willing to engage in focused partnerships that satisfy their mutual interests, along with representative leadership. The obvious candidate for this role is not a single state but the Visegrad Group, composed of Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Hungary. Together with others along the line, a “zone of small nations” may converge in order to establish beneficial terms of economic and developmental interdependence heretofore unrealized within the EU.29

Intermarium Potential

Partnership across this (former) divide could come to resemble more of a concert of interests within Europe. The notion that subregional cooperation can be more efficient, “lead[ing] to less fragmentation . . . [and] . . . encouraging pooling and sharing of capabilities,” is supported by the union’s principle of “subsidiarity.”30 Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union states that “in light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level . . . the Union does not take action (except in the areas that fall within its exclusive competence).”31 At the risk of being repetitive, Europe itself has yet been able to completely and competently address the breadth of its economic stability and the desired inclusive development in both Central and Eastern Europe.

The clear delineation between that which is retained at the level of nation-state versus the region, as understood within subsidiarity (that authority should be decentralized to the smallest entity capable of addressing the matter effectively), thus leaves room to interpret a relationship of progression toward these ends, where subregional cooperation may provide a stepping-stone. In other words, the functional argument for acceptance of a regional entity above the nation-state has rested on its ability to facilitate a service better than an individual state could provide alone. Otherwise, the member states would elect to resolve matters themselves. Establishing joint developmental programs that benefit CEE and EE states first, followed by others to the West and East, can further bridge this fissure. This integrative approach, yielding more functional cooperation within their economies while avoiding politics, would greatly benefit the prospects of establishing greater autonomous growth across the Curzon Line (as much as is permitted).

Recommendations for Local Diffusion

As has been established, EU tools for integrating the Central European states as well as those in Eastern Europe are ineffective because they have not addressed the issues of development important either for them or for the proper mending of this fissure along the Curzon Line.32 CEE and EE states are interested in capitalizing on their own comparative advantage, and the task for the Visegrad partnership is to cultivate their shared capabilities. Economically, support for small and medium-sized enterprise development would be a step in the right direction, focused on common desired themes at the local level.33 Both the concentration on linking local firms and focused efforts in key industries could be sufficient in beginning to bridge the divide.

Deconstructing the Curzon Line in the construction of partnerships could come to resemble clusters of interrelated firms.34 The latter could then later spill over into other industries and onto other levels of cooperation.35 In this manner, greater energies put into the high-tech sector would capitalize on the joint competitive advantage that these states share within the subregion.36 Other technical areas, such as transport, logistics, and tourism, have already been identified as achieving success in cross-border integration with EE states more easily than, say, the energy sector.37 Even though this is most certainly the case, were the situation to become ripe for such a venture, local cross-border initiatives in energy also show much promise. For example, both Poland and Lithuania continue cooperating on shale gas exploration.38 Expanding this cooperation to Ukraine would greatly enhance economic development as well as energy diversification.39 However, any discussion on energy will inevitably, and unavoidably, involve the interests of other neighbors (e.g., Russia, as a major provider of energy resources, and Europe, as a major consumer). Here, one must remember that both East and West have the opportunity to use this “burgeoning” bridge across Curzon symmetrically rather than asymmetrically—an issue with which the rest of Europe would eventually need to come to terms.40

Durand’s Line for the West

The Durand Line (originally the Indo-Afghan border) is a long and porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan—the product of great-game rivalry between imperial Britain and Russia. Unsurprisingly, great-power rivalries over strategic interests have resulted in the creation of frontiers and boundaries for old and new societies. According to Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, “When the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another,” the ideal choice is to resolve it on the frontiers.41 Therefore, “frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations.”42 Throughout history, great-power struggles over a clash of interests vindicate their engagements in surgical partitions and the geopolitical mapping of the world. Imperial expansions and the strategic management of geostrategic regions are some reasons for this geopolitical remapping. In the past, regions that include Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Eastern Europe have remained the pivotal part of great-power confrontations “on the chessboard of Imperial diplomacy.”43

In a highly globalized world, the geopolitics of the Middle East, South Asia, and its extension to Central Asia seems to be replacing the old notion of great-game rivalry between great powers with a new great-game phenomenon yet to be played at multiple levels. Geopolitics explains the “relation of international political power to the geographical setting.”44 Hence, historically beyond the Durand Line, “Afghanistan was not a frontier, or barrier for a frontier, but actually the centre of great empires” to engage for dominance and secure their vital interest.45 In retrospect, as a center of great empires (powers), Afghanistan and its neighboring region faced a wide range of domestic instability and endless violent feuds within and beyond their frontiers. The reasons for a violent past run deeper than the tribal issues, Pashtun and non-Pashtun autonomy of diverse ethnic groups, and dynasty problems within the region. Rather, imperial designs have deliberately made and maintained a buffer zone.

A Historical Glimpse of the Durand Line—Past, Present, and Future

Afghanistan has remained a center of great empires that includes the sway of Alexander the Great, Persian dynasties, Afghan dynasties themselves, Mongols (later, Mughals), British, Russians, and the influence of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Lately, one has seen the influence of neighboring states added to great-power involvement in Afghanistan. The historical strategic buffer of Afghanistan and “the Afghan trap” also prove to be the quagmire or “graveyard of empires,” resulting from imperial overstretch toward its center.46 Lord Curzon, later the governor-general of India, expressed the geostrategic importance of the region: “Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia—to many these names breathe only a sense of utter remoteness or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me I confess, they are the pieces of a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.”47 He would shortly be very much involved in this game.

The Durand Line agreement was a “razor’s edge” frontier formed between Afghanistan and then British India in November 1893.48 The sharp-edged frontier did prevent major confrontations between powers, but it badly affected the region’s political development and split the tribal clans across the border.49 Earlier, when British India noticed Russian mobility in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan, British forces attempted to transform Afghanistan into a neutral and friendly buffer state. But the attempt failed as a result of the first Anglo-Afghan war in 1839–42. The Afghans’ guerilla warfare tactics led to the massacre of thousands of British troops during an agreed-upon retreat of the latter. Russian annexation of Central Asia’s khanates of Kokand and Bukhara, however, prompted another military adventure between British and Russians into Afghanistan.50

Between 1873 and 1887, British and Russian imperial diplomacy reached some border agreements over Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asian states. In the meantime, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, claimant for the throne, succeeded as a new Afghan amir after the second Anglo-Afghan war (1878–80) with the help of British support.51 With the new appointment, he dispelled a British attempt to create Herat and Kandahar as new states, which could further impede Russians from reaching the British frontiers.52 In addition, British negotiations with Afghanistan regarding border and security measures concluded with the drawing of an international border that suited the imperial powers at the expense of the local populations.53 The negotiations carried out between Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the king of Afghanistan, and Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, leader of the British mission, concluded the much-disputed Durand agreement. The primary objective of Durand was to divide the Pashtuns into two geographical units, making it easier to control the regime in Afghanistan and bridle any Pashtun resistance or aggression. More significantly, this action would create a shield to defend against any Russian aggression.54 In fact, a recent history of Afghanistan indicates that the Afghan amir signed the Durand Line agreement under imperial pressure. Nevertheless, the amir astutely consolidated his powers and built the first Afghan army, which helped the king regain his authority over weak links of his dominion.55

In fact, later amirs and kings of Afghanistan either endorsed the agreement or sustained the status quo. For instance, Amir Habibullah Khan agreed to respect the arrangements between his father, Amir Abdur Rahman, and the British government during the Treaty of the Mole in 1905. Although the third Anglo-Afghan war of 1919 was a setback to relations between Afghanistan and the British government, it gave a tactical victory to the latter since the new Treaty of Rawalpindi of 1919 reaffirmed the Durand Line as the political boundary between them.56 Besides, before the third Anglo-Afghan war, Afghanistan had become an independent buffer state with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Apparently, this convention bridled the intensity of the great-power struggle, the great game, played at the cost of South and Central Asia.57

In 1947 the decolonization process changed the original shape of the Indo-Afghan border as a result of the birth of India and Pakistan. Speaking in the United Nations General Assembly when Pakistan sought membership as a new sovereign state, Afghan diplomat Hosyan Aziz noted that “we cannot recognize the North West Frontier [now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] as part of Pakistan so long as people of the North West Frontier have not been given an opportunity free from any kind of influence, I repeat, free from any kind of influence to determine for themselves whether they wish to be independent or to become part of Pakistan.”58 Later, when the issue of Durand’s legality was referred to the British House of Commons, it also “officially reconfirmed their original position of 1893 on the Durand Line as the legal border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”59 It would not continue without protest, though.

For almost the first 30 years of Pakistan’s independence, Afghanistan strongly backed Pashtunistan or Pashtun autonomy.60 Afghanistan believed it had a due right to support the Pashtun cause, “a remnant of Western colonialism.”61 Especially under King Zahir Shah’s reign, his prime minister, Sardar Muhammad Daoud Khan (the king’s first cousin), gave great momentum to the Pashtunistan movement during 1953–63.62 In 1960 and 1961, the infiltration of thousands of Afghan soldiers into Pakistan’s tribal areas called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) further proved the assertiveness of Afghanistan on the Pashtun issue.63 However, the pro-Pakistan tribal Pashtuns and local forces repelled these infiltrations each time.64 Pakistan quickly noticed that the FATA’s tribal people could be a better shield against any irredentist move.

When Daoud became president of Afghanistan in 1973 after deposing King Zahir Shah, he facilitated the occasional meeting of anti-Pakistani Pashtun leaders and the naming of “Pashtunistan Square” in Kabul.65 Further, the new regime under Daoud provided sanctuary to Baloch tribesmen from Marri and Mengal who were leading insurgencies in Balochistan, an area spanning western Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as eastern portions of Iran. Pakistan had just lost its eastern-wing (Bangladesh) after war in 1971 against India and a domestic uprising. Therefore, for obvious reasons, “Islamabad was hyper-sensitive to (any further) territorial encroachments.”66 In retaliation, Pakistan’s first intervention in Afghanistan started in 1973 by “terrorist bombing in Kabul and Jalalabad.”67 Moreover, Z. A. Bhutto’s government started to provide shelter and support to Afghan dissidents of Ghilzai Pashtuns, many of whom became key leading figures during the mujahedin action against the Soviet Union.68 These were crucial years for Pakistan as it began to consolidate its power, establish its institutions, and determine a political direction toward its nation-building process.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan utilized India’s centric policy to assert influence and counterbalance each other. Afghanistan quickly aligned with India, Pakistan’s archrival in South Asia. Both India and Pakistan have fought four wars, coupled with frequent border clashes. Pakistan’s first conflict with India in 1948 over Kashmir brought Afghanistan and India closer together while Pakistan quickly aligned with China to balance India, reflecting the old strategic policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Cautious in the first years of its independence, Pakistan concentrated on its eastern border. Afghanistan criticized Pakistan’s claim for plebiscite over the Kashmir issue, asserting that Pakistan denied any plebiscite for Pashtuns in the early days.69

Except for the Taliban, most of Afghanistan’s regimes were supported by India, even the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Accordingly, on a diplomatic front inside the United Nations, India provided a cover to Kabul to raise its voice for self-determination of the Pashtun as a counterbalance to Pakistan’s push for its Kashmir cause.70 Later, India gradually softened its diplomatic stance although Pakistan would still allege that India persistently supported irredentists in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. Remarks by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then the Indian minister for external affairs, however, clarify his country’s softening: “The existing Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan should be respected by the new Afghan Government. If there was any difference on the subject it should be settled through negotiations.”71

The last decade of the Cold War repeated the legacy of foreign interventions in Afghanistan when the “geostrategic and geopolitical domains were breached by external major powers or their surrogates.”72 Once again the Durand Line played a key role in determining the final outcome of Soviet intervention. Thinking that the British exit from the subcontinent had created a vacuum, the Soviet Union sought to fill it and maintain its historic frontier influence in the region. Over the years, the Soviets aligned with Afghan regimes and supported the Pashtunistan issue as well. Their involvement did not bear fruit, and in the end the Afghan-Soviet war became a farewell for them.

During the entire decade of Afghan-Soviet war from December 1979 to February 1989, billions of dollars and weapons funneled across the Durand Line region to counter the communist regime and Soviet forces. Apart from bringing thousands of foreign religious fighters into this region, the conflict saw training camps and religious schools (madrassas) established, the Durand Line was piled with arms and ammunition, and an estimate indicated that Afghanistan became the fifth-largest arms importer during 1986–90.73 Unfortunately, no effort was made to deweaponize the border zone at the end of the war.

Pakistan benefited directly from the conflict both economically and strategically. Economically, its annual foreign aid during 1976–79 was around $900 million, which rose to an average of $2 billion a year.74 Strategically, Pakistan gained in two aspects. First, the irredentist problem involving the Pashtuns diffused as a consequence of their transformation into a new religious and pro-Pakistani identity. The Pashtun nationalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s gradually died during the Afghan-Soviet war.75 It is important to note that the construction of religious identity was not possible without the support of Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states, who joined the Afghan war against the Soviets. In addition, the Iranian revolution of 1979 had already jostled Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries with the fear of similar movements in their states. Therefore, this transforming of a new religious identity also checked any possible spillover of Iranian revolutionary influence into Afghanistan. That later became visible through a sharp divide between Pashtun and non-Pashtun areas during the Afghan civil war and sectarian clashes in Pakistan.76

Second, given the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, the latter believed that Afghanistan balanced India’s nuclear power by offering strategic depth, which has become a mirage in recent years.77 According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, after the Cold War Pakistan’s “primary interest is to gain geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan—and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan—and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea.”78 To attain the primary interest, Pakistan hoped to install a friendly government in Kabul through supporting groups whose identity was based more on Islamic ideology than Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, it momentarily subdued irredentist demand for Pashtunistan.79 However, Pakistan would not realize until the traumatic events of 9/11 that its Cold War policies were the makings of another monster. Following the terrorist attacks, President Hamid Karzai’s government replaced the Taliban regime, and Pakistan and Afghanistan embarked on another episode of distrust and blame games. On the one hand, President Karzai supports the issue of Pashtuns in Pakistan as part of traditional politics, reiterating in June 2008 that Afghanistan has the right and duty to “defend itself and defend their brothers, sisters and sons on the other side [in Pakistan].”80 On the other hand, he faces domestic pressure from his non-Pashtun alliance, who suffered bitterly during civil war and the Taliban regime.

Mending the Fault Line: Challenges and Opportunities

Developing interdependence would ease many problems between Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the British left, both India and Pakistan inherited the entire railroad infrastructure. Afghanistan and Pakistan, immediate neighbors, should develop a mutual understanding to expand railroad networks deep into Afghanistan to improve transportation. Both countries would gain immensely from this one project. Besides, Pakistan also could have offered assistance in nonpolitical areas like health, education, sports, and telecommunications. The two countries have a common interest in mining, trade corridors, gas pipelines, and even security, but political differences and deadlocks have hampered positive initiatives such as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline (also known as the peace pipeline). Furthermore, each country is rich in minerals, and proper training of the workforce as well as technological partnering can harness such resources for economic gain. To date, though, there have been few efforts to reduce mistrust.

The Socioeconomic Way Out: Most Likely to Mend

The functional ways of integration primarily rely on socioeconomic dimensions to facilitate bottom-up solutions, which would help viable integration. Mending the fault line economically is more favorable and in the interest of both countries. Trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased dramatically from $170 million in 2000–2001 to $2,508.7 million in 2010–11, including illicit trade along the porous border. Under the arrangement of transit and trade, more than $2 billion worth of goods are smuggled into Pakistan. Such activity affects the domestic production and import of goods in Pakistan. Despite Afghanistan’s great demand for food, officially only 600,000 tons of wheat are exported to that country while more than 500,000 tons are smuggled in. For the most part, militants in the border region benefit from this illicit trade.81

Traditionally, many Afghan and Pakistani traders blame Kabul-Islamabad’s seasonal relationship as the main hurdle to smooth flows of goods into and out of Afghanistan. In October 2008, a formal (revised) agreement of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) was signed in Kabul that would allow Afghanistan’s trucks to carry goods to the Indo-Pakistan Wagah border and permit the use of Pakistani seaports for Afghan transit and trade. In return, Pakistani trucks would transit Afghan soil to reach Central Asian republics. For security reasons, Pakistan did not agree at this stage to allow Indian goods to go through the Wagah border to Afghanistan, but its recent decision to grant most-favored-nation status to India will potentially facilitate the border as a gateway for Central and South Asian trade. The two countries have also established the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Coordination Authority to supervise implementation of the APTTA, effective June 2011. Further, Pakistan provided $300 million for various projects in the post-9/11 reconstruction phase. The Torkham-Jalalabad dual highway, for example, is one of the megaprojects completed by Pakistan.82 Afghanistan and Pakistan are also looking into potential transit and trade routes through tribal areas (the shortest feasible routes in the future) that will develop those regions, curb illicit trade and militancy across tribal zones, and help revive the “silk routes” toward Central and East Asian markets. Working more on the economic side can produce good results for the two societies. Unfortunately, the border clashes of May 2013 between Afghan and Pakistani forces over construction of a border gate could complicate such endeavors.

Another core advocacy involves investing in education, particularly for women. The low literacy ratio of tribal areas is a dangerous sign and an impediment to transborder development of the two countries.83 Investing in education is significant because it provides a base for producing human and social capital as a means of sustaining tangible peace and socioeconomic growth. On this scale, it can build “the foundation for good citizenship, respect for self and others.”84 Education also helps establish a viable knowledge base for society, which supports the true essence of pluralistic norms, self-actualization, and the harnessing of talent to gain greater benefits. In 2009 Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission announced 1,000 scholarships for Afghan students in various universities of Pakistan. In addition, in 2011 a 15-member delegation of Afghan professors visited the commission for the purpose of building linkages for research and training between the leading major universities in both countries. The countries will reap the positive and multilayer effects of these ventures in the years to come.

This study strongly recommends that both Afghanistan and Pakistan facilitate initiatives in the realm of economic growth, specifically through transit and trade agreements, and that these economic commitments should continue, regardless of politics and diplomatic rows. The same policy of facilitation and commitment needs to remain persistent in the fields of higher education and training of human capital. Educational programs should also be designed along the motives of cultural-exchange initiatives to promote better understanding between new generations of both sides. Furthermore, provisions of more avenues in sports activities would develop bonds across the border. In recent months, for example, the frequent visits of the Afghan Cricket Team have been a great initiative. In support, the Pakistan Hockey Federation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Afghanistan Hockey Federation that affirms Pakistan’s commitment to provide professional support to develop field hockey in Afghanistan and promises to involve Afghanistan’s team in Pakistani domestic competitions. Expanding areas of cooperation and scope in other popular sports of both countries will be significant and favorable for both societies.

Each country also needs to expand areas of cooperation to support the local cottage industry, which needs to be revived so that domestic women can become bread earners for their families. Moreover, women in these societies have always faced sociocultural limitations. Therefore, provisions of training schemes for women, microfinancing for domestic projects, and marketing of their products will generate a healthy outcome. During the last 30 years of conflict, women had to stay behind walls or flee as refugees with their families, resulting in the decay of local business. Reviving the local cottage industry will give life to inherited art, generate economic benefits, and stabilize networks across the border and beyond for marketing purposes.

Perhaps communications is the core phenomenon that has accelerated integration processes around the world. Like David Mitrany and Ernst B. Haas, who talked about functional ways of integration, Karl Deutsch also emphasized the increase in levels of communication—that such expansion will produce a higher level of integration and eventually will increase social mobility, followed by political development.85 Following the same patterns, communities across the Durand Line frontier can initiate joint media networking that specifically establishes a “tribal broadcast network.” The latter will offer an enabling environment to create spheres of socialization at least on a digital scale, reviving music and poetry as a force to bring societies closer together. Hence, people-to-people contact can bring a drastic change in perceptions of society and further thaw relations between Kabul and Islamabad.

The Political Way Out: Less Likely to Mend

Most regions across the world have entered the twenty-first century with broader-scale integration and partnerships with major economies, but South Asia carries a burden of history and geography. Consequently, it would seem to make the least effort to learn from other successful examples of integration. Before Afghanistan can achieve sustainable, long-term economic activity, it must become self-reliant and free of any “necessary” foreign or external interference.86 Similarly, the Pakistani establishment understands the limitations of using religious ideology to subjugate ethnic identities. Again, the 1971 war had already nullified the religious dimension in favor of ethnonationalism, and Pakistan’s compromising policies on the Kashmir issue show some flexibility in traditional policy.87

On political grounds, there are only two ways to move past the Durand Line: (1) Afghanistan’s formal acceptance of the Durand Line as the legal border with Pakistan, and (2) Pakistan’s incorporation of the FATA region into its political and legal structure with complete abolishment of the British Frontier Crimes Regulation policy.88 Doing so would stop both sides’ interference in each other’s domestic affairs. However, it is quite an impossible option to realize at this stage of history. In retrospect, informal interaction and coordination have occurred among various interest groups, tribesmen, traders, and nomads travelling across the border. Most recently, networks have been established between madrassa (religious) schools. After 9/11, Pakistan initiated a madrassa reform project to redesign religious schools’ curricula, bringing them more in line with those of the national schools by introducing math, science, computer literacy, and additional subjects to their students. Although reforms have been slow, with greater effort and participation, a nontraditional, established network of madrassas across the Durand border can become a terrific transforming factor for the two countries. Madrassas can serve as platforms for technical education as well.

At the moment, the core issue for both Afghanistan and Pakistan concerns dealing with terrorism and ensuring the security of the general population. In order to solve the problem, reference is made in connection to strategic policies of two countries and terrorist safe havens in tribal areas. In the past, governments on both sides of Durand encouraged arming local militias (the Arbakees in Afghanistan and the Lashkars in Pakistan) with the consent and consultation of tribal alliances through the jirga (the tribal grand assembly) to protect the community against terrorists and to coordinate between militias and regular state forces to launch selected operations against their hideouts. The lack of trust between Kabul and Islamabad inhibits the expansion of any level of coordination between jirgas to discuss the matter.

In the future, solutions to many of these problems will still lie in providing a higher level of interdependency among tribal networks through resetting the lost traditional tribal balance and then creating spheres of socialization; thus, the process can help establish norms and regulations. First, tribes across the Durand Line hardly accept it as a boundary since it has never been a barrier to mobility even though they respect the existence of the two countries. It is natural that when a border is quite porous and no strict state laws are implemented, provision of an easy-passage corridor for mobility is always practical. Second, across the line, family kinship offers another way of staying connected. Third, most skilled laborers, traders, and even visitors without proper travel documents have crossed the Durand border for generations.89 The bond across the line is so strong that Pakistani society has “always felt the repercussions of the tumultuous events in Afghanistan.”90 Similarly, significant events on the Pakistani side have ripple effects across the border. The two countries need to officiate these informal networks and convert challenges into opportunities.

As a matter of fact, economic and strategic interests converge for regional and extraregional states at the Durand Line and its surrounding region. The area has an immense but latent amount of potential to drive regional and global economic growth, acting as an energy corridor to regional powers like India and China as well as providing trade corridors between East and West—a “New Silk Road” revival.91

Conclusion

These two case studies help show that subregions across Eurasia’s fault lines can become stabler and better integrated within their own regions as well as better partners in the world of globalization. The means to do so lies in constructing locally clustered social and economic interdependencies. Clustered, interrelated industries, for example, would finance economic growth and act as a positive incentive for its continuation. Cross-border social programs would provide a supportive foundation, and as the subregions become sounder or merely serve as a way of underwriting long-term legitimacy, local stakeholders would necessarily allow for outside participation.

Indeed, as mentioned earlier, major powers might be hesitant or even apprehensive at the outset of fault-line deconstruction; however, it is very important that both great powers and local stakeholder states not repeat the mistakes of history. The replacement of space so long dependent or subjected with that which is stabler and more independent presents a learning curve that history would suggest is quite long. But as increasing subregional cooperation begins to yield benefits, it stands to reason that in short order, influential states would become more willing to take part in limited and balanced partnerships across the diminishing divide.

A central goal would call for meeting local mending or deconstruction with consultancy instead of intervention. That is, major powers would need to reduce direct interference but maintain a role of consultation, with technical and financial assistance, in return for a moderate part of the profit and sustainment of global peace. Aid would have to be limited so that decision making and ownership remain at the subregional (local) level and the available balance so that no major regional actor is excluded from equal opportunity. The success of this breadth can create a favorable “win set” for all participants toward international diffusion.

In this manner, one can view the Curzon and Durand Lines as amenable to their own mending. Locally controlled investment and development in key areas may eventually serve as a desirable gateway of commerce and activity between greater regions. The resources—and will—have been forever present. Competition must be set aside to allow the space that mending needs to take shape.

Notes

1. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (April 1904): 421–37.

2. Saul Bernard Cohen, Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 33–44.

3. Paul R. Hensel and Paul F. Diehl, “Testing Empirical Propositions about Shatterbelts, 1945–1976” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association–Midwest, East Lansing, MI, 20–21 November 1992); and Monty G. Marshall and Benjamin R. Cole, Global Report 2009: Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility (Fairfax, VA: Center for Systemic Peace, Center for Global Policy, George Mason University, December 2009), http://www.systemicpeace.org/vlibrary/GlobalReport2009.pdf. This includes the potential for long-term adherence to democratic norms. See William Easterly, Shanker Satyanath and Daniel Berger, Superpower Interventions and Consequences for Democracy: An Empirical Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2008), http://repository.essex.ac.uk/6040/1/ColdWarNBER.pdf; and Jack A. Goldstone et al., “A Global Forecasting Model of Political Instability” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 4 September 2005).

4. David Reilly, “Shatterbelts and Conflict Behaviour: The Effect of Globalisation on ‘High Risk’ States,” Geopolitics 5, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 48–77.

5. Quoted in David Armstrong, Lorna Lloyd, and John Redmond, From Versailles to Maastricht: International Organization in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 140.

6. CIA World Factbook, 2011, accessed 15 October 2011, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the

-world-factbook/index.html. Gross domestic product was measured in purchasing power parity; percentages of world trade measured the sum of exports and imports as a percentage of world trade; foreign direct investment was measured in “stock of direct foreign investment—at home.”

7. Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe (London: Stevens, 1958), chap. 1; and Alex Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz, “European Integration and Supranational Governance,” Journal of European Public Policy 4, issue 3 (September 1997): 297–317.

8. Janusz Bugajski, Expanding Eurasia: Russia’s European Ambitions (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008).

9. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” 436. Later, in 1919, Mackinder more clearly outlined his famous dictum of Eastern Europe’s pivotal location in his book Democratic Ideals and Reality (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1942), 106.

10. John O’Loughlin, “Ordering the ‘Crush Zone’: Geopolitical Games in Post–Cold War Eastern Europe,” in Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Changing World Political Map, ed. Nurit Kliot and David Newman (Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), 47.

11. James Fairgrieve, Geography and World Power (London: University of London Press, 1927), 330.

12. John O’Loughlin, “Geopolitical Visions of Central Europe,” in Europe between Political Geography and Geopolitics, ed. Marco Antonsich, Vladimir Kolossov, and M. Paola Pagnini (Rome: Societa Geografica Italiana, 2001), 5, http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/pec/johno/pub/trieste.pdf.

13. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between those in Europe that did not support US actions in Iraq (Old) and those that did (New). See “Outrage at ‘Old Europe’ Remarks,” BBC News, 23 January 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2687403.stm. For the most part, this divide was also referred to geographically as the Old West and the New East, and we see an increasing push for the New Europe in CEE to become more independent. See, for example, Celestine Bohlen, “Rumsfeld’s ‘New Europe’ Must Drop U.S. Crutch,” Bloomberg, 12 October 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aiPybKs.aeWQ.

14. This internal EU divide, however, is not as severe as that represented between Eastern Europe and the Western-driven EU.

15. David A. Lake, “Escape from the State of Nature: Authority and Hierarchy in World Politics,” International Security 32, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 47–79.

16. Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

17. In fact, the WEU has been the economic engine throughout Europe through modern history.

18. Zdenek Kriz, “Comparison of Czech and European Security Strategies,” in “Easternization” of Europe’s Security Policy, ed. Tomas Valasek and Olga Gyarfasova (Bratislava: Institute for Public Affairs, 2004), 39. Admittedly, he is writing on the topic of European security; nevertheless, it is an example of the general opinion between Old and New Europe.

19. Ekaterina Turkina and Evgeny Postnikov, “Cross-Border Inter-firm Networks in the European Union’s Eastern Neighborhood: Integration via Organizational Learning,” Journal of Common Market Studies 50, no. 4 (July 2012): 632–52; and Elena A. Korosteleva, “Change or Continuity: Is the Eastern Partnership an Adequate Tool for the European Neighborhood?,” International Relations 25, no. 2 (22 June 2011): 243–62.

20. Hanns Maull, “A Small Power?,” Survival 53, no. 2 (March 2011): 177–87.

21. Korosteleva, “Change or Continuity,” 243–62.

22. Piotr Kazmierkiewicz, ENPI’s Performance in Eastern Partnership States: Lessons from the Current Perspective for the New Budget (Warsaw: Institute of Public Affairs and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2013).

23. “Hungary: National Sovereignty an Issue with New Eurozone Agreement—PM,” Strategic Forecasting, 9 December 2011.

24. “Agenda: With George Friedman on the Visegrad Group,” Strategic Forecasting, 20 May 2011, http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110520-agenda-george-friedman-visegrad-group-1.

25. George Friedman, “Europe, the International System and a Generational Shift,” Strategic Forecasting, 8 November 2011, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20111107-europe-international-system-and-generational-shift.

26. Wade Jacoby, “Managing Globalization by Managing Central and Eastern Europe: The EU’s Backyard as Threat and Opportunity,” Journal of European Public Policy 17, no. 3 (April 2010): 425.

27. Jan Drahokoupil, “The Rise of the Comprador Service Sector: The Politics of State Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe,” Polish Sociological Review 2, issue 162 (2008): 175–89.

28. Peter Havlik et al., The European Rim Countries—Challenges and Opportunities for EU Competitiveness, Policy Notes and Reports, no. 9 (Vienna: Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, October 2012), 9–10, 34.

29. Milan Hodza, “The Future of Central Europe,” International Affairs 14, no. 4 (July–August 1935): 514–30; and Tadayuki Hayashi and Hiroshi Fukuda, Regions in Central and Eastern Europe, Past and Present (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007).

30. Pierre Hougardy, “Permanent Structured Cooperation,” in The Lisbon Treaty and ESDP: Transformation and Integration, ed. Sven Biscop and Franco Algieri (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press, 2008), 12.

31. “Subsidiarity,” Summaries of EU Legislation, accessed 1 May 2014, http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/glossary/subsidiarity_en.htm.

32. Korosteleva, “Change or Continuity,” 243–62.

33. Kazmierkiewicz, ENPI’s Performance in Eastern Partnership States, 11–13. See also Kinga Dudzinska and Elzbieta Kaca, “The Eastern Partnership under the Lithuanian Presidency: Time for the EU to Keep an Eye on Eastern Europe,” Polish Institute of International Affairs Bulletin 93, no. 426 (28 September 2012), https://www.pism.pl/files/?id_plik=11580.

34. M. E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Free Press, 1990).

35. Ernst B. Haas, “International Integration: The European and the Universal Process,” International Organization 15, no. 3 (1961): 366–92.

36. Drahokoupil, “Rise of the Comprador Service Sector,” 177.

37. Turkina and Postnikov, “Cross-Border Inter-firm Networks,” 638–39.

38. “When Polish and Lithuanian Interests Align,” Lithuania Tribune, 15 February 2013, http://www

.lithuaniatribune.com/29619/when-polish-and-lithuanian-interests-align-201329619/.

39. Przemek Skwirczynski, “As the EU Falters a New ‘Empire’ Could Rise in Eastern Europe,” Commentator, 7 September 2012, http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1624/as_the_eu_falters_a_new_empire_could_rise_in_eastern_europe/page/2.

40. Havlik et al., “European Rim Countries,” 22. Not the least of which have to come from Europe’s acceptance of Russian participation. Further, the WEU would need to embrace openness rather than protectionism with regard to any shift in comparative advantage for the subregion.

41. Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, Frontiers (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1908), 5.

42. Ibid., 7.

43. Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), 326.

44. Saul Bernard Cohen, Geography and Politics in a Divided World (New York: Random House, 1963), 24.

45. A. G. Constable, “Afghanistan: The Present Seat of War, and the Relations of That Country to England and Russia,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 11 (1879): 51.

46. William Maley, “Afghanistan and Its Region,” in The Future of Afghanistan, ed. J Alexander Thier (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009), 83, http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/foa.pdf. See also Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 35; and Nathaniel Fick, “Defining Victory: Assessing Military Efforts and Measuring Outcomes in Afghanistan,” in American Interests in South Asia: Building a Grand Strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, ed. Nicholas Burns and Jonathon Price (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2011), 60.

47. Hon. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 1 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), 3–4.

48. S. Fida Yunas, ed., The Durand Line Border Agreement, 1893 (Peshawar: Area Study Center, University of Peshawar, 2003), 34–36 (draft of the Durand Line Agreement).

49. Some 15 major tribes are cited in Dr. Azmat Hayat Khan’s work, which includes both Pashtun and non-Pashtun tribes residing along the Durand Line—namely, (1) Wakhi, (2) Nuristan or Kaferistan or Kalash, (3) Mushawani, (4) Salarzai, (5) Mamund, (6) Mohmands, (7) Shinwaris, (8) Afridi, (9) Mangals, (10) Wazir, (11) Sulaiman Khel, (12) Kakars, (13) Achakzai, (14) Barech, and (15) Baluch and Brahuis. See more in Khan, The Durand Line: Its Geo-Strategic Importance (Peshawar: Area Study Center, University of Peshawar and the Hanns Seidel Foundation, 2000), 38–41.

50. Alexander Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. Throughout history, great powers tried to create a neutral or friendly buffer zone, but the facts proved that any military escalation of either side resulted in a “breakdown of cooperation” between powers. See more in Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 142–45.

51. Afghan amir Abdur Rahman is also known as the “Iron Amir.” According to Ahmed Rashid, he used British subsidies to establish the first standing army and bureaucracy. Employing brutal methods that were closely copied by the Taliban (against the Northern Alliance), he suppressed 40 revolts by the Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks, thus ending their autonomy and bringing them under the control of Kabul. He changed the demographic ratio by placing Pashtun famers and settlers in non-Pashtun areas to weaken the opposition. See more in Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin, 2008), 8.

52. Satinder Kumar Lambah, The Durand Line, Policy Paper Series (New Delhi: Aspen Institute India, 2011), 7–8.

53. Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty, “The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan,” in South Asia in World Politics, ed. Devin T. Hagerty (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 115.

54. Ijaz Khan, Pashtuns in the Crossfire: Pashtun Politics in the Shadow of “War against Terrorism,” Brief no. 19 (Bradford: Pakistan Security Research Unit, 5 September 2007), 4, https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/psru

/briefings/archive/Brief19finalised3.pdf.

55. In response to the Durand agreement, the Afghan amir notes in his own diary that “I had made a kingdom of Afghanistan, which before had been divided into so many independent States ruled over by separate chiefs; and how I had extended my dominions, which, at the time of my accession, were no more than the city of Kabul and Jallalabad, together with a few other places.... At the time when I was occupied in breaking down the feudal system of Afghanistan and moulding the country into a strong consolidated Kingdom, I was not unaware nor neglectful of the necessity of defining my boundaries with the neighbouring countries. I well knew that it was necessary to mark out the boundary lines between my dominions and those of my neighbours, for the safety and protection of my Kingdom, and for purpose of putting a check on their advances and getting rid of misunderstandings and disputes.” Abd al-Rahmān Khān, The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, vol. 2, ed. Mir Munshi and Sultan Mahomed Khan (London: John Murray, 1900), 145–46.

56. Yunas, Durand Line Border Agreement, 1893, 4–6.

57. Ellsworth Huntington, “The Anglo-Russian Agreement as to Tibet, Afghanistan, and Persia,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 39, no. 11 (1907): 655–58; and Khan, Durand Line, xiii.

58. Cited in Khan, Durand Line, 187. See also Victoria Schofield, Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2003), 245.

59. Brad L. Brasseur, Recognizing the Durand Line: A Way Forward for Afghanistan and Pakistan? (New York: EastWest Institute, 2011), 7, http://www.ewi.info/sites/default/files/ideas-files/durandline.pdf.

60. Stanley Wolpert, Roots of Confrontation in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 107.

61. Khan, Durand Line, 190.

62. Riaz Mohammad Khan, Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism, and Resistence to Modernity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 165.

63. FATA is Pakistan’s Pashtun-majority area. It is 27,220 square kilometers (km) in size and shares a 600 km border with Afghanistan. With a predominantly Pashtun population of 3.17 million, according to the 1998 census, it has seven administrative agencies: (1) Bajaur, (2) Khyber, (3) Kurram, (4) Mohmand, (5) Orakzai, (6) South Waziristan, and (7) North Waziristan. See International Crisis Group, Pakistan’s Tribal Areas: Appeasing the Militants, Asia Report no. 125 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 11 December 2006), http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/pakistan/125-pakistans-tribal-areas-appeasing-the-militants.aspx

64. Julian Schofield, “Diversionary Wars: Pashtun Unrest and the Sources of the Pakistan-Afghan Confrontation,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 17, no. 1 (2011): 42.

65. Khan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, 165.

66. Schofield, “Diversionary Wars,” 43.

67. Ibid.

68. Khan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, 165.

69. Khan, Durand Line, 190.

70. Rasul Bakhsh Rais, Recovering the Frontier State: War, Ethnicity, and State in Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 200; and Schofield, “Diversionary Wars,” 42.

71. Lambah, Durand Line, 24.

72. Saul B. Cohen, “Asymmetrical States and Global Geopolitical Equilibrium,” SAIS Review 4, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 1984): 196.

73. Barnett R. Rubin, “Afghanistan in 1993: Abandoned but Surviving,” Asian Survey 34, no. 2 (February 1994): 185.

74. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133.

75. Peter R. Lavoy, “Pakistan’s Foreign Relations,” in South Asia in World Politics, ed. Devin T. Hagerty (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 66.

76. Rubin, “Afghanistan in 1993,” 187.

77. Eqbal Ahmed, “A Mirage Mis-Named Strategic Depth,” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 392 (27 August–2 September 1998).

78. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostragic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 139.

79. Kulwant Kaur, Pak-Afghanistan Relations (New Delhi: Deep & Deep, 1985), 8–77; Yunas Samad, A Nation in Turmoil: Nationalism and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1937–1958 (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 114; and Maya Chadda, “International Dimension of Ethnic Conflict,” in Hagerty, South Asia in World Politics, 195.

80. Carlotta Gall, “Karzai Threatens to Send Soldiers into Pakistan,” New York Times, 16 June 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/world/asia/16afghan.html?_r=0.

81. Khan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, 172–73.

82. Ibid., 174.

83. Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (New York: Viking, 2012), 39.

84. Mohamed C. Kamanda, “The Role of Higher Education in Developing and Sustaining Peace in Sierra Leone,” in When War Ends: Building Peace in Divided Communities, ed. David J. Francis (Burlington and Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 157.

85. David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966); Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); and Karl W. Deutsch, Political Community at the International Level: Problems of Definition and Measurement (Garden City, NY: Archon Books, 1970 [c. 1954]).

86. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 47.

87. Schofield, “Diversionary Wars,” 46.

88. Marvin G. Weinbaum and Haseeb Humayoon, “The Intertwined Destinies of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” in Thier, Future of Afghanistan, 95.

89. Tom Rogers, “Two Dimensions of a National Crisis: Population Growth and Refugees in Pakistan,” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 4 (1992): 753.

90. Imran Khan, Pakistan: A Personal History (London: Batnam Press, 2011), 72.

91. Jeffrey Mankoff, The United States and Central Asia after 2014, Report of the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2013), 19–24, http://csis.org/files/publication/130122_Mankoff_USCentralAsia_Web.pdf.

*A PhD candidate studying US foreign policy and security in the Graduate Program in International Studies at Old Dominion University, Aaron Sander holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Kennan Institute within the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, DC. His research interests include Eurasia and its peripheral subregions.

Tasawar Baig completed his PhD in International Studies in the Graduate Program in International Studies at Old Dominion University under a Fulbright Doctoral Scholarship. He holds a full-time position as an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations, Karakoram International University, Gilgit, Pakistan. Mr. Baig holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Karachi and a master’s degree in Asian Studies with specialization in South Asia from the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include ethnonationalism, geopolitics, fragile states, interdependence, transnationalism, and comparative politics.

Did You Say, “Central African Republic”?

Henri Boré*

Africa has dramatically changed for the better over the past 10 years. Democratic processes, good governance, and economic development are making their way into many countries. Still, part of the continent is shaken by traditional ethnic polarization, widespread corruption, lack of education, poverty, and social inequalities: “These areas intersect and are frequently manipulated by politicians.”1 They often foster brutal violence and bloody regime change. Indeed, the 2013 conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) unveils a picture already witnessed in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo (fig. 1), Côte d’Ivoire, and Libya, to name a few—specifically, that picture reflects centuries of mistrust between ethnic or tribal communities, as well as social fracture and poverty that affect a large portion of the population.2

Figure 1. Former twentieth-century French Equatorial Africa.

(Courtesy of the author.)

In December 2013, the country fell into political chaos and violence. Violations of basic human rights by uncontrolled militias and warlord-led armed groups who seek personal gain have triggered a major humanitarian crisis. In that kind of chaos, US Marines alongside their European allies and African partners are often asked to support security and stability operations as well as international humanitarian aid. The first question that planners and operators always want answered is, “What’s going on?” CAR is no exception.

The following overview outlines the primary long-term factors of the CAR crisis of 2013. These factors can also serve as indicators for the way ahead as it relates to security and humanitarian operations. Although the situation on the ground in CAR today is the direct result of near-term chaotic events, many long-term issues underlie the latter. The overt and visible causes of the conflict are known: bad governance, poverty, social fracture, endemic corruption, and the overall absence of experienced political leadership. This situation is merely the tip of the iceberg, though. Under the surface lie three long-standing, complex, and intertwined cultural factors that contribute to the instability in CAR:

1. A ghost nation born from an artificial geographical construct.

2. A sham state plagued by the curse of an ancestral ethnic divide.

3. The shadow of neighboring Chad, the longtime “best friend, worst enemy” of

CAR.

A Ghost Nation

Unable to overcome the consequences of its geography, CAR has been a ghost nation since its independence from France in 1960. From a geographic standpoint, CAR represents a heterogeneous entity. The area is in fact divided into two main entities tied to diverse regional, ethnic influences. The northwest and northeast dry-savannah plateau and highlands are natural connectors to southern Chadian and eastern Sudanese features. In the more equatorial south, the distinct rain forest along the Ubangui River basin ties the area to the geography of the Congo basin and to some extent to the northern Cameroon highlands in the west.3 These natural geographical features foster two crucial cultural elements that have in fact undermined the entire nation-building process of CAR since its independence.

First, for centuries the natural relief has delineated diverse, specific ethnic cultures; lifestyles; and economic activities linked to land ownership. Consequently, geography has fostered internal, ethnic-based political and social conflicts between the southerners, often labeled the river group, and the northerners, also called the savannah or highlands group (fig. 2). Herein lies one of the long-term roots of the 2013 conflict and its subsequent religious violence between Christian and Muslim communities. Undoubtedly, the physical geography has prevented the newly independent country from becoming a united nation.

Figure 2. Major ethnic ensembles in the Central African Republic. (Courtesy of the author.)

Second, the country is an artificial construct born during the French colonial era on the eve of the twentieth century. CAR’s borders are artificial, not originally drawn by France to delineate those of a future sovereign country. In fact, they were intended only as colonial administrative limits designed to improve control of the vast territory of French Equatorial Africa (half the size of the United States) that encompassed what is now Gabon, Congo Brazzaville, Chad, and CAR (see fig. 1). In this colonial structure, Chad and CAR zones were part of one subadministrative entity (about one-third the size of the United States): the Ubangui-Chari province named after the main rivers—the Ubangui in CAR and the Chari in Chad.

When the Ubangui portion of this territory gained its independence in 1960, the new state, CAR, adopted the former Ubangui-Chari colonial administrative limits as its new sovereign borders. Tragically, in so doing, the newly independent political leadership undermined the future of its own nation-building process. Because the French-colonial territorial lines were designed only as administrative limits of a larger region, their transformation into smaller national borders (CAR is about the size of Texas) has forced ethnic communities to live together although they had no common identity, let alone a shared national feeling. Moreover, the artificial nature of these borders, combined with the aforementioned natural geographic features of the region, has kept the cultural influences of Chad and Congo alive and well. After 50 years, CAR is still trying to develop a mature national feeling. The country has made progress although not enough to change the perception that it is a ghost nation.

A Sham State

Ethnicity has been the main driver of continuous political and social strife for more than 50 years. Therefore, CAR is often described as a “phantom state” that has chaotically survived since its independence.4 Indeed, for many historians, the ancestral ethnic divide between the Ubangui River populations in the south and the savannah northerners is unlikely to shift overnight.

For nearly a half century, successive military and civilian heads of state have taken CAR on a road to perdition. All of them, from the self-crowned Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa in 1965 to presidents David Dacko (1979), André Kolingba (1981), Angé-Felix Patassé (1993), François Bozizé (2003), and Michel Djotodia (2013), have been unable to establish effective political structures and processes that could have controlled the manipulation of cultural, social, and political divisions between the people from the Ubangui River in the south and those from the savannah in the north. President Catherine Samba-Panza, elected in 2014, faces the same challenge. Worse at times, disputes within one ethnic community and an odd alliance of convenience with rival ethnic groups contributed even more to plunging the country into a state of permanent tribal rebellion, military mutinies, and civil wars. In short, in CAR, “it’s the tribes, stupid!” to quote Robert Kaplan, commenting on the situation in Iraq.5

In 1981 General Kolingba, a Yakoma from the southern river group, takes power through a military coup that overthrows President Dacko, himself a southerner. In 2003 President Bozizé, a Gbaya from the southwest, ousts president Patassé, a Sara northerner, even though these two had made an alliance in 1993 in order to overthrow Kolingba the southerner. In 2013 Bozizé is overthrown by a coup led by Djotodia and his coalition of northerners, the Seleka, which means alliance in the traditional Sango language.

As experts have observed, CAR “has become virtually a phantom state, lacking any meaningful institutional capacity at least since the fall of Emperor Bokassa in 1979.”6 The ancestral sociocultural divide between the black African Ubangui River people of the south and the black Sudano nomads from the northern savannah will likely continue to shape any process developed to restore security, political stability, and economic development in CAR.7

Despite all this, democratic structures do exist in CAR. Most of the presidents who took power through a military coup were later elected in national plebiscites. Most of the time however, allegations of massive fraud, corruption, widespread patronage, and nepotism stained almost every democratic election and institution. Consequently, the practice of democracy as it is understood in Western culture has turned into a charade and the state into a sham. It will take time and charismatic leadership to turn the tide.

For many Africa experts, another set of democratic elections may simply pave the way to another conflict. As Kaplan has also said about other places in the world, quelling anarchy “will require building on tribal loyalties—not imposing democracy from the top down.”8 Indeed, the concept of one man, one vote—a founding principle of Western democracies—often brings to power a single ethnic group due to the powerful loyalty of family and traditional lineages. Democratic elections in Mali, for instance, have always brought to power a Bambara leadership since this ethnic community represents 80 percent of the electorate. The other ethnic communities have been left with one alternative: get along or secede. For the past 50 years, many Tuaregs of northern Mali have chosen to secede. When the opposite situation occurs—that is, when one minority ethnic community controls 80 percent of the population from another ethnic group—then democracy often fosters a recurrent civil war, as seen in Burundi from 1970 to 2005. Experts have labeled this scenario the ethno-arithmetic democracy of Africa.9 CAR is no exception to this phenomenon. Religious violence, for example, is just one visible element of “the shadow theater of ethnicity.”10

The heavy weight of the ethnic divide between the river and the savannah groups explains why ethnic rivalries take precedence over religious dynamics. When more than 400 civilians were killed in two days of violence on 8 and 9 December 2013 in Bossangoa in the northwest (fig. 2), some observers quickly interpreted the massacre as a change in the nature of the conflict in CAR toward a bloody religious drift between Christians and Muslims. Others, with a longer cultural perspective, provided a different insight.11 The attack was in fact the northerners’ response to ethnic killing conducted by southerners during the bush war from 2005 to 2007 in the same northwest area. The southerner-led CAR army and particularly the Presidential Guard—essentially a southern unit serving President Bozizé, a southerner himself—conducted brutal operations in the north. Hundreds of civilians were executed point blank, and their homes were burned. Some 100,000 northerners were displaced.

Marine advisers familiar with sub-Saharan Africa are aware of the common saying in many cultures from Rwanda to Congo, CAR, and Côte d’Ivoire: “We forgive; we don’t forget.” As for CAR, the river people and the savannah people do not seem ready to forget centuries of mutual mistrust, animosity, and killings. Over the 54 years since independence, southerners have controlled the country for 44 years, from 1960 to 1993 and from 2003 to 2014. It will take another Nelson Mandela to change the dynamic and build a successful unification process. In CAR such a charismatic icon is needed, but he or she has yet to emerge.

Therefore, on such critical issues, it is paramount to separate the short-term explanation of a crisis—that is, the tip of the iceberg—from the long-term roots that usually hide under the surface. Taking into account this major ethnic factor are the planning and execution of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration operations to restore security and support humanitarian assistance disaster relief (HADR) for the purpose of helping some 400,000 displaced populations and security cooperation (SC) programs rebuild the national armed forces in CAR.

Chad: The Region’s Long-Standing Best Friend

and Worst Enemy of the Central African Republic

Chad has been a constant and active player in the region, especially in neighboring CAR. Chadian national forces (fig. 3) deployed to CAR as early as 1997 as part of the first African multinational force (MISAB) that intervened with heavy French military support to restore peace and stability in the war-torn capital city of Bangui.12 Over the past 17 years, Chadian soldiers have conducted several operations in CAR. CAR is in fact in the strategic backyard of Chad. For a variety of reasons, domestic instability in Bangui can easily pave the way to a brutal regime change some 1,000 miles away in N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad. Therefore, the internal political stability of Chad and that of CAR have intertwined for a half century.

Figure 3. Chadian soldiers, Chad, 2008. (Courtesy of the author.)

From a Chadian strategic standpoint, CAR is a key security piece on its southern flank because of the common ethnic makeup between southern Chad and northern CAR populations. Thus, Chad’s troubled history has been tied to CAR for the past 50 years. Ties can even be traced earlier in the 1800s when the Arabo nomads from today’s northern Chad used to raid what is now CAR to capture slaves for their clans or trade them with the Arabo-Mediterranean kingdoms in present-day Libya and Egypt.13 According to historians, this Arabo slave trade that lasted for many centuries “involved at least as many victims as the Atlantic slave trade” run by the Europeans.14

The Arabo slave trade may no longer exist in Central Africa, but the modern histories of Chad and CAR continue to collide for another reason. The border between the two countries is inhabited with the same Sara ethnic group, a black African community essentially consisting of Christian farmers. CAR and Chadian Saras support each other in all matters—even in politics. Culturally and politically, the Chadian Saras, for instance, have been traditionally hostile to the Arabo-nomad clans of northern Chad, who have ruled the country since 1980. In CAR the Saras often align themselves with other northerners such as the Banda, Ranga, and Gula against the political dominancy of the southern river group in Bangui.

Consequently, over the past 30 years the governments of Chad and CAR have had in common the fact that they saw the Sara community and their allied ethnic groups as a threat to domestic stability. Chad has actively supported the access to power of southerners in CAR. Each time the CAR government fell under their control, the southerners—the Yakoma and Gbaya—made an alliance of convenience with Chad to undermine the power of the Sara group and its northern political allies.

Chadian Interference: A Mix of Hard and Soft Power

When Chad gained its independence in 1960, France empowered the Sara. The subsequent civil war that shook Chad for 20 years brought back to power the northern Arabo-nomad clans. For a decade, the Sara kept fighting back, either through conducting armed insurgencies or by capitalizing on rivalries among the northern clans.15 In this realm, the Chadian Sara insurgents were always backed by their Sara brothers who inhabit northern CAR. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, the Sara community of northern CAR provided permanent rear bases and safe haven to a Chadian Sara insurgency fighting the Chadian northern-led governments, including President Idriss Déby’s Zaghawa clan regime since 1990.

Déby actively helped set the domestic political stage in CAR to undermine the Sara stronghold on his southern border. For instance, he decisively backed General Bozizé’s coup in 2003. Chadian forces also backed Bozizé’s heavy military operations in the northern provinces of CAR between 2005 and 2006. President Bozizé took advantage of the situation to brutally crush the political opposition presented by his northern savannah group. In 2012 Chadian forces intervened once again in northern CAR to support Bozizé’s forces against the northerners and their Seleka armed coalition. President Déby was also interested in conducting counterinsurgency operations in the area against his own nephew, Timane Erdimi, who tried to align himself with the Saras and Sudanese mercenaries of the Seleka to regain momentum after his failed attempt to overthrow his uncle in N’Djamena in 2008. The point in all this is that for all these years, Chad—in particular under President Déby—has been actively interfering in CAR’s internal politics in supporting the river southern ethnic group.

When good relationships between Chadian northerners and CAR southerners take a negative turn, the former always win. Chad the best friend becomes the worst enemy of CAR. The 2013 crisis in CAR is a case in point. It was no secret that President Déby lost confidence in President Bozizé’s ability to establish and sustain long-term political stability in CAR—that is, to control his northern provinces. For many observers, Déby paved the way to the military success of the Seleka coalition in 2013 by ending his support of Bozizé. Political gambit or not from the astute Chadian president, the short-term effect of his decision has been to return to the northern Saras the power they had from 1993 to 2003. Whether or not President Michel Djotodia would fit in the Chadian strategic plans remained unknown in December 2013. President Déby himself brought the answer one month later when he orchestrated Djotodia’s exile to Benin at the summit of the regional Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) held in the Chadian capital city of N’Djamena on 11 January 2014.

Chad also uses soft power to strengthen its influence in CAR. Personal networks and third-party mediators work extensively behind the scenes everywhere in Africa.16 The mediation of the president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is often critical in the peace process in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. In CAR the long-standing personal relationship between President Déby and President Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazza) is no secret. Déby’s forces decisively supported the military coup that brought Nguesso to power in Brazzaville in 1997. President Nguesso also symbolizes the traditional cultural ties that geography has naturally set between Congo and the southerner river group of CAR as mentioned earlier. Therefore, in light of the traditional African consensus through third-party mediation, Nguesso represents a powerful ally of President Déby in the conflict-resolution process in CAR. In October 2013, the 10 nations of ECCAS met in N’Djamena to address the security issues in CAR at the request of President Déby, who is also the current chairman of ECCAS.

In other words, from US Africa Command’s strategic and operational perspective, Chad and Congo-Brazza are key African players to take into account and associate with for two reasons: (1) to effectively plan and conduct any potential support to SC and HADR operations to help CAR get back on its feet, and (2) to set the conditions for long-term stability in the country and in the region. It is no coincidence that a Congolese general officer, Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko, took command of the entire African Union Force in CAR (MISCA) in 2013, bringing with him 500 Congolese soldiers—a significant number for the army. On the ground, Chadian and Congolese tactical courses of action also tend to support each other regardless what other nations may intend to do.

Conclusion

Marines understand that just about any foreign environment is “a cultural iceberg, with what we initially understand as merely the visible tip.”17 The 2013 crisis in CAR is a perfect case in point. The recent chaotic events are a combination of near-term strife and long-term factors. It is essential to understand what is most readily visible, but it is equally important to know the long-term cultural issues that underlie these events. As they framed the 2013 problem, planners uncovered three paramount factors that have dramatically contributed to long-term instability.

First, geography plays a key role in preventing the country from becoming a united nation and a modern state since this ethnic divide remains alive and well in modern times. In other words, to borrow the delightful title of anthropologist James D. Faubion’s review article, “Kinship Is Dead. Long Live Kinship.”18 Second, although the conflict appears to be simply a religious divide between Christians and Muslims, it has broader roots in the ancestral ethnic rivalry between the southern black river group and the northern-savannah Arabo communities. Third, geography and history are strategic force multipliers that have consolidated the influences of neighboring Chad and Congo-Brazzaville on the CAR national leadership over the past 30 years.

The overt and visible causes of a conflict are often the tip of the iceberg. The cultural reading of long-term issues provides planners with a more realistic understanding of the factors of instability. In so doing, they can better articulate effective courses of action. CAR is no exception. Difficult political and military decisions are yet to be made as a means of effectively tackling the 2013 crisis. Decision makers must take account of what lies beneath.

Notes

1. Dorina Bekoe, “Trends in Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” United States Institute of Peace, 10 March 2010, http://www.usip.org/publications/trends-in-electoral-violence-in-sub-saharan-africa.

2. Edem Kodjo, Lettre Ouverte à l’Afrique Cinquantenaire (Paris: Continents Noirs, NRF Gallimard, 2010), 21, 27.

3. Eric Nguyen, Géopolitique de l’Afrique (Paris: Studyrama Perspectives, 2010), 172.

4. International Crisis Group, Central African Republic: Anatomy of a Phantom State, Africa Report no. 136 (Nairobi/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 13 December 2007), http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media

/Files/africa/central-africa/central-african-republic/Central%20African%20Republic%20Anatomy%20of%20a%20Phantom%20State.pdf.

5. Robert D. Kaplan, “It’s the Tribes, Stupid!,” Atlantic, 21 November 2007, http://www.theatlantic.com

/magazine/archive/2007/11/its-the-tribes-stupid/306496/.

6. International Crisis Group, Central African Republic, [3].

7. Bernard Lugan, “Centrafrique, Ces Cycles Ethniques qui Expliquent l’Instabilité,” Afrique Réelle 38 (February 2013), http://bernardlugan.blogspot.com/p/lafrique-reelle.html.

8. Kaplan, “It’s the Tribes, Stupid!”

9. Bernard Lugan, Histoire de l’Afrique (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), 854.

10. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa, the Politics of the Belly, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 41.

11. Laeila Adjovi, “Central African Republic ‘Descending into Chaos,’ ” BBC News, 26 November 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25095471.

12. “Background,” Central African Republic—MINURCA [United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic], accessed 28 August 2014, http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/minurcaB.htm.

13. For an in-depth study of the Arabo trade slave in the Sahel, see Jean Chapelle, Nomades Noirs du Sahara (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982).

14. April A. Gordon and Donald L. Gordon, eds., Understanding Contemporary Africa, 5th ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 2013), 48.

15. Bernard Lugan, Atlas Historique de l’Afrique des Origines à nos Jours (Paris: Rocher, 2001), 197.

16. USMC Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, Working with African Militaries: Operational Culture Field Guide for Advisors and Trainers (Quantico, VA: USMC Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, 2011), 8.

17. Ibid., 29.

18. James D. Faubion, “Kinship Is Dead. Long Live Kinship. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 1 (January 1996): 67–91.

*The author is the Africa desk officer at the US Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning. He also worked as a consultant on Africa programs for the African Center for Strategic Studies and the US Department of State, serving many years in Africa as a French Marine adviser embedded with African forces in West Africa and Central Africa, including Chad and the Central African Republic. Mr. Boré holds an MA in defense and international studies from the French War College in Paris.

Dodging Gaugamela

Three Ways in Which We Invite Catastrophe—and How to Stop Doing So

Maj David Blair, USAF*

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.

––Will Durant

Caesar and Christ

One of the great ironies of world history is that nations which lack an enemy capable of defeating them often take on the task themselves. They are typically quite successful, for they know their adversary very well. We excel as our own nemeses. In Professor Durant’s seminal work, he describes the fall of Rome as a result of the decadence made possible through its victories. In this is the true irony: Rome’s victory itself paved the way for that city-state’s defeat.1

In their book Unrestricted Warfare, Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui apply this rule to us.2 Recognizing our dominance, they develop a number of strategies to turn our strength into a liability. One of their leading contenders is, “Give the Americans something to throw money at, and they’ll spend themselves to death,” a strategy that the sociopolitical fascists in al-Qaeda attempted to employ remarkably well.3 It is far easier to keep aircraft out of the sky by indirectly inducing cracks in wing spars and wing boxes than to pluck them out of the sky with fragile and expensive surface-to-air-missile systems.4 And it’s far easier to reduce the number of Americans en masse every Friday in retirement ceremonies and separations than to assault them in a well-defended forward operating base.5

Qiao and Wang’s argument goes something like this: Americans love their luxuries. The ultimate luxury in warfare is zero casualties. Therefore, the Americans will spend prohibitive amounts of resources to achieve zero casualties. So, if you can keep one or two wars simmering at all times, then America’s military will unsustainably consume its materiel and its people outside combat, bureaucratizing itself to death. It wouldn’t be the first time that strategy has worked, of course. I’m not quite sure how many Roman soldiers it took to get one outside the wire, but, like us, their inefficiency and overextension created a market for a Visigothic Blackwater. (As later Goths would instruct them, subcontracting out your security isn’t the smartest idea.)

The bad news is that we all make the same mistakes; we all seem to find our way back to the same well-worn ruts. The invincible Roman legions are overcome by manpower, retention, and morale problems, just as the invincible Spartan Phalanx before them. The Spanish Admiralty, bureaucratized and overcentralized by decades of losing treasure galleons to the privateer Francis Drake, finds its war galleons broken upon Gibraltar by the admiral Francis Drake. The French emperor is undone at the freezing waters of the Berezina to the sound of Marshal Kutuzov’s cannons and Tchaikovsky’s bells, a victim of his own unwillingness to listen to a well-reasoned no.

The good news, on the other hand, is that we all make the same mistakes. There is nothing new under the sun; it is exceedingly unlikely that we will invent a new error. Therefore, let us ask the Ghosts of Empire Past to show us the errors of their ways so that we don’t make them ourselves: Darius from Gaugamela, epitome of centralized control and centralized execution; the admirals of the Spanish Armada and their one-mistake Spanish Navy; and the Caesar’s commanders, choosing quantity over quality and hardware over humans. The following is a distillation of lessons learned from the distant past, offered in the hope that we will not add our name to the roll call of eclipsed empires, at least in my lifetime or that of my children.

If You Don’t Learn from Failure in Small,

Manageable Chunks, You’ll Learn All at Once

with Interest—Most Likely When It’s Too Late

A one-mistake air force is hardly historically unprecedented. Unfortunately, the one-mistake Soviet military was not exactly known for its brilliant strategists; neither was the one-mistake pre-Armada Spanish Navy known for its tactical innovators. A one-mistake military would send George Washington packing long before he made rank, along with a few other minor figures such as Napoleon, Alexander, Hannibal, and Temujin (better known as Genghis Khan). Occasionally a Zhukov or Gorshkov will survive, but he succeeds despite the system—not because of it.

In US Air Force colonel John Boyd’s masterwork “Destruction and Creation,” the great airpower architect argues that organizational learning is as much a function of well-directed failure as well-directed success.6 During Boyd’s time, the Air Force set out on the “Zero Defects” iteration of the perennial campaign for perfection in metrics, demanding that units become “100% for zero defects.” Seeing in the campaign the death of innovation and adaptation, in a variation on a theme, Boyd and his compatriots declared themselves “100% against zero defects.”7 In his later work, the late colonel describes adaptation as two opposing pistons—one the destruction of old frameworks and the other the creation of new ones, both working in concert to propel an organization along the all-important observe-orient-decide-act loop.8 Boyd’s model implies that an organization which makes no room for the destruction of old frameworks—one that does not allow for the possibility of imperfection—will stall just as quickly as an engine firing on one cylinder. Entropy is messy, but without it there can be no motion.

The problem with a one-mistake military is that it is remarkably brittle. Consider the Spanish Navy right before it was shattered upon Gibraltar. Spanish captains ruled the seas for a century, so perfection is expected from them. It makes sense, in a way: if you have the best galleons and the most galleons, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to win any given engagement. So that becomes the standard—no longer excellence but omnipotence. Of course, attributes of divinity are difficult metrics to live up to, and a couple things begin to happen. First, since taking responsibility for a choice that didn’t turn out perfectly is suicide in a one-mistake system, officers devise a way whereby nobody has to take responsibility for anything—committees. Decisions involve enough people so that if it doesn’t happen to work out, the question “Why?” is readily answered with ambidextrous finger-pointing. Second, since the consequences of failure are necessarily greater for those without enough rank to insulate themselves, decisions migrate higher and higher up the chain of command, and tactical commanders become more and more disempowered. Much like the condottieri, bloated with impossibly heavy armor, the Spanish Navy was perfectly insulated from internal risk and completely vulnerable to a lighter, more maneuverable adversary actually capable of making decisions.9 It was ripe for the plucking, and Queen Elizabeth was in a plucking mood—and the rest was history. You get one chance at the Spanish Armada, and if you bungle it, you have to deal with Napoleon’s fool of a brother on your throne a few centuries later.

The problem isn’t failure—it’s how you deal with failure. Be it Zero Defects, Total Quality Management, or Six Sigma, it is simply unrealistic to expect a perfectly optimized war.10 Precision in fixed, predictable processes is certainly a virtue. That said, war is fought in the great Prussian’s fog, and tools that deal well with complexity are primary. We aren’t making Toyotas, and the other side fights to win. As comfortable as it would be to throw Jomini’s rules into a multiple regression, Clausewitz’s “fog of war” always seems to find a way to botch things up. If you don’t have the creativity, flexibility, and initiative to deal with that chaos, then no half-baked management textbook or computer program will allow you to defy 5,000 years of military history.

There are, of course, different kinds of failures, and in order to deal with failure, you need to differentiate among them. First, and most inexcusably, are failures by choice. Choosing to be negligent, choosing not to plan, and choosing not to learn are all failures by choice. The only purpose of these failures, as the demotivational poster states, is to serve as a warning to others. These should not be tolerated. Second are failures by chance. Even a perfect missile shot in the heart of the weapon engagement zone misses sometimes.11 That’s why it’s called a probability of kill—because it’s a probability.12 Even if you play the odds perfectly, sometimes you draw a 22. These are simply the cost of doing business—a function of the fog of war. Lastly, and most usefully, are failures by concept. We will explore these presently.

Typically, defeat is a better teacher than victory. Unfortunately, defeat in combat is typically fatal. This is the point of exercises and war games: if you discover all your “failures by concept” in a nonlethal environment, you’ll still be around to learn from them. If you can give a pilot his historically most dangerous first 10 combat sorties at a Red Flag exercise, he will have an opportunity to get his newbie mistakes out of his system before he actually goes over land in a war zone. If we made no mistakes, then Red Flag and the US Army’s analogous National Training Center would be expensive irrelevancies; their ability to induce failure and expose weaknesses makes them so valuable.

Of course, the critical ingredient in all of this is the ability to learn from failure. Lacking this, a war game or training sortie becomes worse than worthless—strategic negative training is probably a good term for it. Remember that Admiral Yamamoto’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor was at least in part inspired by a US Navy exercise that simulated the same scenario. The war game turned out pretty much like the actual attack, but apparently the Admiralty of the time had more important things to attend to. Its enemies learned instead. According to the Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy, “The fact that Japan nearly duplicated this attack on Pearl on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, was no accident. Early in the 1950s [a US Navy admiral] . . . dined in Tokyo with a Japanese vice admiral who had participated in the planning. ‘He told me they had simply taken a page out of our own book!’ ”13

I wonder how many potential great-power competitors are applying innovative concepts from our military journals to themselves more effectively than we are to ourselves. Necessity may be the mother of innovation, but military necessity is usually the result of some sort of strategic conceptual failure and is typically revealed in casualties. It is far less painful to learn from red markers than from blood, but you have to make the choice to face failure honestly. Only then will you find the impetus to innovate solutions.

Used correctly, “failure by concept” is the engine that drives organizational adaptation. (If ignored, it is the mechanism that creates organizational collapse.) One of the most important functions in a market economy is business failure. When the horse-and-buggy-whip factory goes under, all of its workers are returned to the economy to be retrained for more useful occupations. The factory owner, most likely, licks his or her wounds and goes back to the drawing board. He or she may very well become the next innovator in transportation technology. This is failure by concept properly employed: resources are released from failed concepts, lessons learned are captured, and the incentive to innovate is renewed. Failure by concept is the crucible for your future innovators; it is the manure that fertilizes the next evolution of your organization. As such, it should be valued and learned from, not punished. This is the lesson of the Spanish Armada: you can’t give your people room to succeed without giving them room to fail. The trick is learning to do both well.

Using Metrics Unrelated to Strategy and Uncorrelated with Victory Will Lead to Defeat

It’s one thing to lose a gauge in your cockpit and another thing entirely to have it feed you false readings. Most dangerous is the faulty gauge seductively telling you exactly what you expect to see, leaving you in a world of hurt without a clue. Metrics are the gauges for your organization. Unfortunately, unlike most of our newer electronic gauges, they don’t have a built-in-test feature. You have to use the tried-and-true common sense built-in test.14 Does this statistic jive with my sense of the organization? Does it fit with what I’m hearing from my troops? Does it check with the big picture?

As the old saying goes, there are “lies, darn lies, and statistics.” The fact that you can quantify something doesn’t mean it has any bearing on the reality of a situation. Statistics is a very powerful language, but it is a method of describing truth—not the truth itself. Consider the revolution of effects-based operations and the simple realization that actions have consequences in reality. We must apply that revolution to the organization as a whole. Hundreds of incoherent metrics tied loosely to desired strategic effects won’t help us recover from this unusual attitude. Like a good navigator, we can get where we need to go only by starting at our goal and planning backwards, and the first step from national objectives to individual unit metrics is strategy.

Strategy is the groundwork and the glue for proper metrics, yet strategies must be formed holistically. This is one of the present ironies of our current air corps: we are inherently strategic, but we seem to have a difficult time formulating coherent strategy among our disparate tribes. We are inherently strategic simply because we are too expensive to be used economically for anything other than generating strategic effects. Compare the sticker price for a B-2 or an F-22 to that of a tank or a soldier, and we must answer the taxpayers as to what their premium is buying. Modern aircraft are near the price range of major naval surface combatants. A carrier battle group is undoubtedly strategic; therefore, we must be as well. But we cannot confuse hypothetical strategies that justify institutional preferences with strategies that actually deliver on the taxpayers’ investment. We must then consider how to deliver strategic impacts on complex real-world problems with our present and future tools as Airmen.

Strategic effects are simply a matter of properly sequencing tactical effects. Dropping a bomb on a building is a tactical act, but if that building happens to be a communications center, then the effects of that tactical engagement are almost entirely strategic. You didn’t just blow up a building; you turned the radios of all your adversary tank commanders into paperweights, which allows the friendly tank commander to destroy them much more easily. The tactical and the strategic are intrinsically connected, but airpower is unique in its ability to create geometric strategic effects from arithmetic tactical strikes. This is the revolution that inaugurated the rise of the fighter generals in the 1990s: you don’t need megatons of nuclear power to effect strategy; you just need to put chunks of conventional explosives at the right places in the right order. If Operation Desert Storm was the inauguration, then the “shock and awe” remix was the culmination. Perhaps, though, the opening phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom were both a masterpiece and a grand finale—an end of one way of war and the beginning of the next. Our adversaries seem to have grasped the new interplay between tactical strikes and strategic effects. As the saying goes, an improvised explosive device doesn’t go high-order until it hits the news. Consequently, we must ask how our adversaries made the leap to the new strategic high ground of communications warfare and cultural knowledge before we did.

Strategy is all about where you start. As an aviator-centric community, we seem to start with platforms; no self-respecting pilot doesn’t love his jet. From platforms, we derive tactics; we celebrate tactics in patches and in promotions far more than our sister services. Lastly, from tactics we derive strategy. Unfortunately, because we build up from platforms to strategy rather than down from strategy to platforms, our strategies seem to center on platform communities. Be it the long reign of Strategic Air Command or the recent to-do with the F-22, we have a very difficult time thinking outside our communities.15 This is a result of our inherent tension between subject-matter-expert-ship and leadership. A pilot must be good at flying an aircraft, yet an officer must be a leader, and these skills are not necessarily related. They may, at times, be in opposition: the subject-matter expert (SME) appropriately cares about his subfield and subcommunity above all else. The leader should value all of his subordinates’ skill sets equally, regardless of his or her own background. This dichotomy increases with rank—we promote people for being SMEs, and then we expect them to leave the SME behind and become leaders and strategists when they take command. As long as technical operators (including aviators) play a major role in the destiny of our service, this is a tension we all have to manage.

From time to time, however, we have managed it brilliantly. Boyd was just as exceptional both as a strategist and a Super Sabre driver. Bringing the world of the SME and that of the leader together, he dreamed up an entire generation of aircraft to match the next generation of warfare that he envisioned. In the same vein, John Warden understood the technology of modern warfare in detail yet had a strategic mind capable of harnessing the power of that technology for the entire US Air Force. In this fusion of technology and strategic leadership, in a very real sense, we found victory in the Cold War. Checkmate was better than the Russians at being the Russians, and since we knew both our enemy and ourselves, we achieved Sun Tzu’s ultimate prize—victory without fighting.16 Are we better than our enemies at being our enemies? Would their best strategies look banal compared to our best simulations?

How do we get there from here? Well, strategy is the key to good metrics, but strategists are the key to good strategy. So we must develop strategists. One way to do this—and by no means the only way—is to consider the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies a field-grade strategic equivalent to the company-grade, elite, SME-oriented Weapons Instructor Course. With this combination of the two, we could intentionally develop once again the kind of strategists who allowed us to win the Cold War—the kind of thinkers who could take the ideas of effects-based operations and apply them to the organization as a whole, fusing disparate and largely irrelevant metrics into an accurate and complete strategic picture. Moreover, integrating security scholarship into a more robust professional military education program, one that incentivizes critical thought and outside-the-box thinking, could carry the torch of analytical rigor to the whole service.

If You Choose to Game Your Metrics, Your Adversaries Might Just Game Them Too

A long time ago, in a Soviet Union far, far away, there was a man named Stakhanov. He was a one-in-a-million kind of guy—the best miner in the entire country, maybe the entire world. Apparently, he would regularly turn out 10 times his quota of coal, an amazing amount by anyone’s standards. This, of course, reflected well on him, and on his boss, and on his boss’s boss, and pretty soon they all found themselves promoted. Inevitably, the other bosses noticed, and they started looking for their own golden goose; some found one, and some made one. Pretty soon, Stakhanov copycats started popping up all over the place, at least on paper. The Soviet government, seeing a bunch of factories at 1,000 percent production, began asking the question “If they can do it, why can’t everyone?” And the outlier exception became the standard expectation. It was an unrealistic standard, but the Soviets were never known for their love of objectivity or accuracy. So if you’re a factory boss, your choice becomes simple: produce at 1,000 percent capacity or move to Siberia. Fortunately for them, there was an out. A command economy doesn’t register value in profit—only in metrics, and metrics are notoriously easy to game. If you’re a steel factory, steel is measured in length, so you make miles and miles of long, thin, and completely useless steel; if you’re a glass factory, glass is measured in surface area, so you make acres and acres of glass so thin that it shatters upon any attempt at storage. Eventually, the plant bosses and their bosses and their bosses all the way up colluded in the deception, but the fact remained that the emperor had no clothes. Much later, by way of the Strategic Defense Initiative program and a few other things, the whole charade collapsed under its own weight.17 Stakhanovism doesn’t work.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine adding up the sum total of “money saved” between every performance report we produce each year. Or the sum total of resources that people are responsible for. Or the number of people in the top 1 percent of the US Air Force. It’s the same paradox as Stakhanovism: if you don’t inflate performance to an absolutely ludicrous level, you are ensuring that you and your subordinates don’t get promoted and hence ensuring that those who do will be promoted in their stead and thus continuing the cycle.

There is more at stake here than integrity and our good name. You can game your metrics all you want, but at some point, reality shows up. The more you game your metrics, the more likely it is that reality will show up all at once. For the Soviets, it showed up as total economic collapse. For a military, especially one at war, the stakes are even higher. All warfare is deception—and it is the height of foolishness to give your enemy a head start in that fight through self-deception.

If I were playing the bad-guy side of this long war, I would set up a few franchises to keep one or two wars simmering at all times. Then I would sit back and watch our side spend itself to death, deploying people who don’t need to be deployed, flying sorties that don’t need to be flown, making our numbers look great so we can award ourselves combat medals for sending e-mails. At some point, “sustained maximum surge” ceases to be a contradiction in terms and becomes a necessity, and the good-guy side sacrifices the initiative and the clock. After that, it’s just a waiting game.

You have to fix it the same way you broke it. Metrics get decoupled from reality when they forget scarcity. Remember scarcity, and you will return to reality: frugality is the key to winning this long war. Spend resources and take strategic risks when the payoff is worth it; otherwise, make an equally strategic choice to preserve scarce resources (i.e., maximum surge is a strategic risk). We don’t need to make this one up from scratch; we implement risk-control measures on the operational level with operational risk management—perhaps we can inaugurate strategic risk management.18 One simple and critically important step involves rewarding commanders for choosing not to change things when change is not warranted and for choosing to say no when no is the right answer.

If Your People Become Just Numbers to You,

Then You’ll Become Just a Job to Them

It’s always the enemy you don’t see who kills you. Unfortunately, if you’re on top, that enemy is often yourself. Manpower, morale, and retention become the nemeses of the hegemon; all other enemies can be dismembered with surgical strikes or crushed under a centurion’s studded sandal, but the harder you fight, the more powerful these adversaries become. So it was with Rome.

Military historians call it the “victory disease.” Winning is addictive, and if you win enough, you begin to forget the terrible consequences of losing. Sometimes it works out. During the Great Game, the Russian Empire inherited five “-stans” simply by setting a few ambitious and victory-addicted generals loose in Central Asia.19 More often than not, though, it ends very poorly indeed. The two most obvious examples from the last century are Japan and Nazi Germany. By opening an unnecessary front with Stalin, Hitler casts away any real chance of victory; the hubris that grew from the slaughter at the Tsushima Strait ultimately proved the undoing of the Imperial Japanese Navy (despite the wiser urgings of Admiral Yamamoto). The disease, however, is not always seen in such stark terms.

Once you’ve run the board, the victory disease becomes much harder to detect. There is a difference between dominance and omnipotence, and forgetting that fact results in mission creep.20 Leaders begin to forget that objectives must be constrained by available resources. Since saying yes has worked out so well so far, saying no begins to mean “don’t promote me.” Squeezing blood out of a turnip becomes a way of life; there’s always a new “last big push,” and it’s never actually the last one: the last big push against Hannibal and the armies of Carthage, against the Macedonians, against Cleopatra and Mark Antony, against the Parthians, against the German insurgents, against the Judean rebels, and so on ad exhaustium. To paraphrase a contemporary quotation, it depends on what the meaning of last is. It took a toll: by the time Attila showed up at the Catalaunian Fields, the once-mighty empire found itself looking to erstwhile Germanic mercenaries for security. It’s pretty hard, though, to convince a fast-burner consul general to forgo his chance at rank and glory for the sake of difficult-to-quantify consequences in some far-off future.

The consequences of these choices show up subtly, at least at first. The numbers look good until right about the end, and it’s hard to quantify quality in the interim. The first thing you lose is your experience. The citizen-soldiers who’ve done their time feel no need to give more to some endless crusade of proconsular self-promotion that has little to do with their family’s safety. In one not-entirely-uniquely-Roman situation, while citizen-soldiers were off defending their country, the fields left fallow in their absence were purchased by rich real-estate developers at well-below market rates. When they returned home, they had no choice other than pay far more for fields equal to the ones that were once theirs.21 The ones who can leave start leaving. At this early point, though, replacing their numbers isn’t much of a problem.

The next thing you lose is just as subtle—your quality. Your experience voted with their feet heading out; now your would-be recruits start voting with their feet by not coming in. As the bond between commander and soldier is abraded by ambition and strained by the faceless demands of the institution, you lose the warrior spirit that drew together Leonidas’s 300, Alexander’s Companion Cavalry, David’s Mighty Men, and every other group worth naming. Unfortunately, if you drive away all the people willing to fight for the right reasons, you get the people willing to fight for the wrong reasons. Certainly, as US adversaries in this war clearly demonstrate, you can continue to recruit criminals and sociopaths for quite some time, but such as these are hardly a group you would want to entrust with your deadliest instruments of power. Alternately, you can outsource your security needs to mercenaries, but as the Romans discovered with the Goths, when you depend on mercenaries for your defense, they might renegotiate their contract against your will. Regardless, you cannot get the Guardians of Plato’s Republic unless you treat them like the precious resource they are, but you can still probably make your manpower metrics work—at least for a time.

The last thing you lose is just that—your numbers. By then, however, it’s far too late. Your experienced warriors left long ago to tend to their long-neglected families and farms, and your quality would-be warriors found honorable alternative professions where hard work is tied to rewards and competence is valued over politics. Eventually, you find yourself in a particularly sanguinary retelling of the childhood fable about the boy who cried wolf. And so, on a summer day near the town of Adrianople, with legions of Germanic cavalry bearing down on him, the Emperor Valens finds himself in the middle of the actual “last big push” only to discover that there’s nobody left. The brave warriors who defended the long-lost Republic are long gone, the military machine built on their backs has ground itself to bits in far-flung wars, and the dregs that were left are more than willing to switch sides in exchange for their share of the plunder. But I suspect that the numbers looked good right up to the end, along with the citations for their accompanying medals and promotions.

Machines (Including Bureaucratic Ones) Allow People to Win Wars, Not Vice Versa

The Soviet admiral Sergei Gorshkov once said that “quantity has a quality all of its own.” I offer a corollary: quantity has qualities all of its own, and some of them are bad. Mass is a quality that cuts both ways. The Indian warlord Pururava learned this quite directly at the hands of Alexander at the Hydaspes. The chieftain brought an overwhelming number of troops to counter the Macedonian invaders and along with them a number of devastating war elephants. Unfortunately for him, devastating was a scalar quantity—not a vector quantity. Backing the Indian force against a river, Alexander and his Companion Cavalry managed to panic the elephants, who proceeded to trample much of the assembled Indian force. The moral of the story: panicked decisions made by large, detached organisms typically result in fratricidal, full-deflection control movements. Perhaps we might conceive of manpower or acquisition bureaucracies as our own mammoths.

What is true for bureaucratic machines is true for technological machines. Secret weapons and cutting-edge technologies don’t do you any good without strategy. Alexander taught this lesson to Darius at Gaugamela, a battle that we will discuss at length later. The takeaway point right now is that technology is almost irrelevant when you don’t integrate it properly into a battle plan. Darius brought two cutting-edge secret weapons to Gaugamela—scythe-armed chariots and war elephants. Unfortunately for him, chariots were a poor match indeed for the defenses of the Macedonian phalanx, and the novelty of the elephants was lost on the unimpressed Macedonian troops, who found them as easily repulsed as horses by javelins. This is not to say that technology is unimportant—only that, in and of itself, it is not sufficient. German technology arguably outpaced the Allies through much of the Second World War, but much of their effort simply resulted in better prototypes for their soon-to-be Cold War adversaries.22

When technology is paired with strategy, it is quite effective, but machines cannot make strategy. The F-117 is an interesting Cold War novelty, but when paired with Warden’s Five Rings strategy, it is a tremendous force multiplier.23 Engineering and machines enabled a distinctively human strategy to succeed. The danger, especially for a service shaped by technophile aviators, is to see the aircraft as the end, in and of itself. We must remind ourselves that warfare is a solely human endeavor, fought by humans against other humans for human ends. Machines may be part of it, but they are not at the beginning and not at the end. Technology is not a silver bullet—merely a strategy enabler.

The historical story of David and Goliath is a tale of weapons technology, in a way. The Philistines, of which Goliath was one, were not a native Canaanite people group. Hailing from Mycenae, they were masters of advanced Greek weaponry. The Israelites, on the other hand, had inferior Canaanite weaponry, but they fortunately found a brilliant strategist in a shepherd boy. If bronze armor can’t beat an iron spear, then take metal out of the fight entirely by turning it into a ranged contest. A slinger, the missile troop of the ancient world, wins from distance—and he did. Technology comes from the Greek techne, the word for art—a practice of people that allows them to accomplish a task. Technology is both the people and the metal—the humans and the hardware synthesized for a mission.24 It is tempting but foolish to focus solely on the latter.

MiG Alley also speaks to the role of humans mastering hardware to master the battlespace. MiG-15s were slaughtered by Sabres simply because of better pilots (and a bit of hydraulics).25 What piece of equipment on an aircraft has a greater impact on mission accomplishment than the crew dogs themselves? People aren’t meat servos that allow technology to function; rather, technology is a tool to help warriors win wars. Perhaps a great special operations forces thinker said it best: humans are more important than hardware.

Talent Management Trumps Force Management: The Air Force Is a People Group, Not Just an Institution, and Shaping Culture Takes More Than a Spreadsheet

Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal Barca, Hasdrubal Barca. Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar. Gen Victor Krulak, Gen Charles Krulak. Leadership is oftentimes expressed in a generational legacy. The construction of a military genius is a generational project, as is the development of good soldiers and good leaders. These generations are not solely bloodlines—Saladin and Zhukov had little-to-no military upbringing but certainly had mentorship. In modern terms, many promising young people who could no doubt become excellent lawyers, doctors, and airline pilots choose to forgo that higher standard of living because of a mentor or parent’s legacy of service. Military families and mentors are a crucially important source for future warriors. If we expend that precious resource in the name of today’s fight, we’ll have little left for tomorrow’s fight. By the looks of the road ahead, we may need good warriors tomorrow even more than we need them today. Stated simply, if you expend the families and friendships of today’s warriors, you are borrowing against the future.

Regardless of your flavor of spirituality, your moral compass and spiritual bearings must come first. Then comes the most significant relationship in your life—your family. Lastly comes the entity that grants you the freedom to serve all of the above—your country. By defending your country, you ensure that you remain free to pursue a better world through your convictions and protect your family. So when you keep these three things in the right order, the math works out. Your best people will make sure that they keep these three things in the correct sequence in their lives; they fight well because they fight for the things they love—not vain ambition, careerism, or selfishness.

The problem comes when you start asking people to put these things in the wrong order: the math starts to fail. If you demand that people place country before family, then country starts becoming a threat to family. Some of your very best people will make that choice if you force them to choose. How many highly effective squadron commanders have we lost from the service when they turned down rank in order to put their marriages and their children first? How many remarkable service members in military-to-military marriages were forced to choose between children and a spouse’s career? What if we never forced these comrades to make these sorts of choices?

Another formulation is “duty, honor, country.”26 To whom is your first duty? Whom must you honor first? Your best people and most effective leaders get this right. We lose these people if we ask them to get it wrong. Leadership starts in the home, and if we value careerism over families, then we should not be surprised to find ourselves with careerists instead of leaders.

“To provide for the common defense.” Those were the words that made us, not “workers of the world unite” or “until the world is free” and certainly not “for the glory of Rome.” It’s a pretty conservative mission statement, almost boring really: keep the people safe. It is the people themselves who are the glory of America. The archetypal American military hero is not the career general, festooned with medals and rich in power, but the Second World War veteran, surrounded by grandchildren, with his Silver Star on the mantel next to the photo of his 101st Airborne buddies. We fight and we win so that we can return to safer homes. We figured out relatively early in our history that when we fight together, we fight more effectively. Barbary pirates are much better fought on the shores of Tripoli than on the decks of individual merchantmen, so to defend ourselves and our families, we defend our country. Therefore, we must ask how well our country will be defended if we do not protect the families of service members.

Stated simply, the health of military families and the freedom of service members to reconcile personal and professional goals are not just a retention problem for today; they are a recruiting problem for tomorrow. It will affect both quality and quantity as the warriors of the future are shaped in the personal time of the warriors of the present through mentorship and parenthood. This is not some ancillary morale issue to be parceled out to unit leadership and services squadrons; this is a critical strategic metric of long-term sustainability. Preservation of military families and friendships is deep logistics, just as essential as access to strategic minerals or geographic choke points. They must be guarded as such—the next generation of the military depends on it.

Fortunately, a military that accommodates for the spectrum of choices that make for strong families or mentors is also a military that accommodates the unique and diverse sort of talented individuals who don’t fit into cookie-cutter career trajectories. These sorts of individuals are whom we need to prevail in cyber and other ill-defined emerging fields of conflict—the sorts of people we want in these fights are those with great options and unique capabilities beyond the walls of the service. When pilots were faced with these options in the form of the airlines, we offered a huge bonus; the bonus for these uniquely talented people is optionality, not money. Therefore, retention metrics for Airmen with non-cookie-cutter, legitimate personal constraints are a good indicator of our ability to retain talent in general.

If You Disincentivize Decision Making,

You’ll Make Leaders Who Can’t Make a Decision

“You get the behaviors you incentivize.” This truism of organizational behavior raises one simple yet critically important question: what are we incentivizing? Of course, before we can answer, we must consider its antecedent: what should we incentivize? For that, we return to history.

“What shouldn’t we incentivize?” is in many ways an easier question. Let’s start there. For one glaring example of failure by design, we turn to the Soviet military of 1940, freshly gutted by Stalin’s purges. Conspicuously absent are the traits that make great commanders—leadership, initiative, command presence, and innovation. Unfortunately for countless would-be great commanders, initiative and innovation were heresy to the new people’s establishment; command presence and leadership made you a potential threat to Comrade Stalin, and either way the only thing you would go on to command was a pickax in Siberia. The path to success was never to be last and never to be first either. Safely ensconced in the gray middle, the powers that be would never see you as a threat to their power, and if you just survive long enough, you’ll get promoted simply by seniority. Mediocrity became a survival skill, and not surprisingly, the Soviet military establishment soon came to celebrate mediocrity. The incentive structures put in place by Stalin achieved their desired goal: the military could in no way pose a threat to him. Unfortunately for Russia, neither could it pose a threat to an invader. This fact was amply demonstrated in the opening phases of Operation Barbarossa, during which uniformed Soviet bureaucrats were trounced time and again by the tanks of the Third Reich.27 Fortunately for the Russians, a few actual commanders somehow survived the purges and went on to lead the Red Army to victory. Still, one has to wonder how many would-be Marshal Zhukovs were stuck counting trees in prison camps and how many lives could have been saved if these men had been given the commands they deserved.

For a bit less malignant but equally catastrophic example of perverse incentives, we turn to King Darius of the Persians. Gaugamela is a more complex scenario, but I believe it fits our present dilemma much better. Persia was the unquestionably (until then) dominant power of the age, possessing the largest armies, the most advanced war-fighting technology, and the most involved command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) networks of the time.28 In the latter is the subtlety that ended in catastrophe: Darius’s military was the paradigm of centralized control and centralized execution. Subcommanders were promoted for their ability to carry out his orders precisely and unquestioningly. Initiative was not a quality that commended one to this career track; the safe path was simply to follow. So long as Darius was in a position to issue orders, this was hardly a problem; prior to Gaugamela, that position had not been in question. Ensconced in the center of the line with a commanding view of the battlefield, Darius’s retinue served as his combined air and space operations center, and his dispatch riders served as his Predator feeds.29 It typically worked out. Most adversaries were frozen in place simply by the overwhelming presence of the Persian army and then were dismembered in detail by that army’s detachments, directed personally by Darius himself.

Alexander, though, was not most adversaries; he didn’t follow the script. Outnumbered more than two-to-one, the young Macedonian king was supposed to adopt a defensive formation, cowed by the mere numbers of the Persians along with their cutting-edge war elephants. Instead, Alexander and his Companion Cavalry aim for the center of the Persian formation and charge right for Darius himself. Though facing impossible odds, the Greek horsemen manage to close with the Persian king. Fearing for his life, Darius abandons his mobile command center and flees, and in that moment the brittleness of the Persian army is exposed. Though still technologically and numerically superior, the entire Persian army goes lost link.30 With the hourglass icon still spinning on the screen, they are destroyed in detail for lack of leaders. With Darius racing off the battlefield, the Persian army shatters; whatever shrapnel remains simply melts away. The same C3I structure that allowed the empire to wield such a mass of forces became a millstone around its neck as a retreat turned into a rout. Persian commanders were trained to follow, not to lead, and without a command link to follow, they simply could not function. Decision making cannot be learned on the fly, and since all the decision makers were weeded out before they made rank, no one was left who could regain control of the situation and rally the Persian army. Thus, a seemingly inferior force shatters the greatest empire of its day and redirects the course of history. The Persia of Darius and Xerxes never recovers.

What should we learn from Darius’s downfall? For one, we see that sometimes you get what you ask for. Grab the reins out of the hands of your subordinates too often, and they’ll eventually quit fighting you to get them back. After you’ve told them to shut up and color enough times, they will default to waiting expectantly upon you for precise instruction. Use your strategy cell as a rubber stamp for conclusions you’ve already reached, and at some point they’ll cease to think strategically. An entity as large as his military (or ours) takes a very long time to recycle, and if you run it constantly on “override,” it will probably crash when you try to revert to normal operations.

Second, we see that during the building of networks, “What kind?” is at least as important a question as “How much?” It is easy to forget that during the Cold War, the Soviets were the masters of networking technology. As early as the 1960s, Soviet ships went to sea with “second captain” data links feeding them threats and tracks, all the while recommending doctrinally approved solutions.31 In much the same way, the Red Air Force’s Su-15 interceptor could be controlled through an entire engagement from the ground through weapons launch. Of course, nothing says networking like a Soviet integrated air defense system (IADS).32 Doubtless, the Soviets had a tremendous amount of connectivity. The problem is that they structured it along distinctively Soviet lines: top-down links for establishing and enforcing adherence to doctrine. Instead of a virtual liaison officer between war fighters, Soviet data links served as digital commissars breathing down the necks of commanders and operators. The fact that Darius would have been proud is fitting because both the Soviet-inspired (though French-built) Iraqi IADS and the Persian army shattered in much the same way. Never let your connectivity exceed your maturity. If you can’t sit on your hands while watching the Predator feed, you probably shouldn’t have access to it.

Lastly, Darius lost perspective of why he was there in the first place. Granted, the Persian Empire didn’t have “by the people, for the people” in any of its foundational documents; nonetheless, without the people of Persia, there would be no need for a king of Persia or an army of Persia. Soldiers and commanders fill different roles, but their jobs exist for the same purpose—to defend their people. Soldiers are not there for their commander; they are there to perform the mission, and the commander simply enables them to do so. Perhaps if Darius had remembered this, he would have built his command links accordingly. Rather than emphasizing rigid control, perhaps he could have built organic networks around shared situational awareness (SA). Then, perhaps, his whole military wouldn’t have become one big blue screen of death when he was taken out of the picture. When Darius decided that he was more important than the mission, he ensured that the mission couldn’t succeed without him—and, of course, it didn’t.

What, then, should we incentivize? First, we should use personnel policies to develop individual initiative and, second, networking technologies to build shared SA. Let’s start with networking technologies. The ever-present risk of increased connectivity is the migration of tactical decision making farther and farther up the chain of command. The live feed gives senior commanders the illusory perception of actually being present on the battlefield, which in turn brings them into competition with their subordinates in the actual battlespace. Unfortunately, the battlefield tactical commanders lose that competition, and unless the senior leader practices judicious restraint, they end up undermining the command of their subordinates. For those tactical commanders, an induced dissonance now exists between responsibility and authority. On the one hand, they are still held accountable for whatever happens as a result of their decisions; on the other, they receive those decisions by dictate (or at least by pressure) from staff officers interloping in their battlespace.

Fortunately for us, there is a simple countermeasure to this problem; even more fortunately, it comes right out of our doctrine: centralized control, decentralized execution. Here’s a very simple networking application of that principle: “resolution is inversely proportional to field of view.” If you want to watch the all-Iraq feed, you don’t get to watch the really cool hit going down on a building in grid-square X. If you’re watching that hit go down, you don’t get to look at everything else in-theater too. Horizontal shared SA is a nearly unmitigated asset. Tactical-level US Air Force operators must be able to access relevant data from tactical-level joint operators in real time. Vertical shared SA is a bit trickier. If a peer-level US Army commander tells you how to fly Army aircraft, it is relatively straightforward to respond in a respectful, cordial manner that preferably includes only a few swear words. If your commander’s commander’s commander tells you how to fly your aircraft, it is far more difficult to respond in a way that retains your initiative without ending your career. Accordingly, doctrinal provisions must defend our operators’ initiative against undue interference. Therefore, just as successful commanders have done for thousands of years, we must return to the wisdom of General Patton’s memorable words: “Don’t tell people how to do things; tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” One corollary: horizontal networking is almost always beneficial; vertical networking can easily become toxic.

Regarding the initiative issue, you get the organization you incentivize. What are we incentivizing? To answer this question, we turn to a very abbreviated version of game theory. You can quantify the consequences of most choices into relatively objective outcomes. Once you do so, you can generally predict what choices will be made with what frequency. Let’s hypothesize a game called “Getting Promoted.” For the sake of our game, we’ll say there are only three ways a choice can theoretically turn out—fantastically successful, status quo, or utter failure. Take as a given that making a choice involves a 50 percent chance of success, a 25 percent chance of achieving status quo, and a 25 percent chance of failure (repeating, of course.) On the other hand, not making a choice has a 100 percent chance of maintaining status quo. If you value success, then you’re going to promote your decision makers since they give you an even-money shot at it while your status quo bureaucrat guarantees that you’ll never see successful change.

However, we measure performance by way of performance reports. Say, entirely hypothetically, that those reports are inflated to such a degree that status quo looks like fantastic success. Fantastic success already looks like fantastic success, so it can’t really be further inflated; abject failure might be sweetened to status quo, but most likely it will still look like failure. Now, with our perception mitigated by the performance report, let’s take a look at our decision makers and our bureaucrats. The decision makers have a 75 percent chance of attaining either success or status quo, both of which now look like fantastic success and make them look like heroes. Unfortunately, they have a 25 percent chance of looking like failures because an actual decision involves risk and can fail. On the other hand, the bureaucrats’ 100 percent chance at status quo now makes them look like superheroes, and since they didn’t make a decision, they have a zero percent chance of looking like failures. It’s 75 percent versus 100 percent, so the bureaucrats win. Here’s the bottom line: unrealistic performance reports discourage risk taking and hence decision making.

The problem is that if some commanders rank their people realistically without an entire system overhaul, then they will ensure that their people never get promoted. Instead, those brought up under grade inflators will take their place, further exacerbating the problem. One possible solution may be Harvard Business School’s bidding system for competitive classes: commanders have a given number of points to allocate to their troops although they can trade points with other commanders between rating cycles if they happen to have a particularly good or bad crop of troops that term. I’m sure that better answers are out there, but the reality is that until we find a way to associate scarcity with performance reports, we will continue to discourage decision making.

If You Never Take No for an Answer, Then Your Advice Will Come Exclusively from Yes-Men

If you look at the bulk of military disasters, you’ll find a cadre of wise counselors (if they haven’t all been fired yet) shouting no at the top of their lungs prior to the point when the commander made the decision to press. Like performing a safety investigation on a mishap, the historical flight recorders tell of Cicero shouting, “This is stupid!” at Marcus Crassus prior to the calamitous battle of Carrhae. Unfortunately for Crassus, and for those under his command, ancient Rome didn’t have a two-challenge rule.33 The tape ends with the sound of Parthian mounted archers slaughtering the entire Roman force. I cannot imagine that the patent foolishness of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia or the similarly stupid and similarly unsuccessful Operation Barbarossa escaped the notice of their entire respective general staff. That said, given Stalin’s and Hitler’s treatment of dissent, it is unsurprising that their staffs kept their mouths shut.

Some moves are strategic gambles, but others are just plain stupid. Generally in the latter case, your troops know it (especially your senior noncommissioned officers). The common-sense-override button doesn’t work so well when you know you’re the one who’s going to have to pay the price. Custer provoking a battle at Little Bighorn despite being isolated and vastly outnumbered—not smart. Marching across a mile of open field into the center of the fortified Union line—not smart. Sacking an army of bored and hungry adolescents with no job skills other than using a Kalashnikov in an as-yet unsecured country—not smart. This isn’t rocket science—you don’t need better graphs and multiple regressions and analysts to figure these things out. You just need the humility to listen to your people and the maturity to admit when they’re right.

As a corollary, our techno-centric military has an understandable soft spot for engineers. Unfortunately, this sometimes brings operators to loggerheads with those same engineers. When an operator says, “This just doesn’t make sense,” he or she should be taken seriously. The distance between the acquisitions community and the operators must be reduced, and priority must be given to the needs of those on the tip of the spear, not to the desires of the contractors or the whims of the program office. Consider the tremendously successful A-1 Skyraider and the AC-47 Spooky. These stubborn, operator-centric aircraft were hardly on the cutting edge of aeronautical technology, but they were exceedingly good at what they did. On the other hand, the cutting-edge F-105 makes a fine display at the Air and Space Museum but was woefully inadequate against obsolescent MiG-17s in actual war.34 Notably, the first person to satisfactorily explain why (specific excess energy and energy-maneuvering theory) was not some PhD of aeronautical engineering but the fighter pilot John Boyd. Further, Boyd’s lightweight fighter (the F-16) revolutionized dogfighting with ultrapractical “hands on throttle and stick” technology, which was really nothing more than putting all the buttons in the right places.35 Operator’s intuition should never be discounted in the name of theory because the little practical things add up and make the difference in war.

Concluding the yes-men point, we note that another fighter pilot provides the perfect antidote—the “red cell.” Create a group whose sole job is to provide exceedingly well-thought-out “nos,” and when they run out of them, you know you have a good strategy. John Warden presided over just such an organization, and the results speak for themselves. By applying the principles that would later be articulated in Warden’s book The Air Campaign, Lt Gen Charles Horner was able to systematically and strategically dismember Iraq.36

It all goes back to Sun Tzu—know your enemy and know yourself. We were better than the Russians at knowing the Russians, at least on some levels, so we beat them. Have we become better than al-Qaeda at understanding al-Qaeda? Are we better at using soft power than are potential near-peer competitors? Until we can beat them at their own game in our war games, we will continue to struggle to defeat them strategically. We must shepherd and safeguard the resource of our strategists: we must go to them with questions, not with answers. When we can answer all of their questions, then we’ll have a strategy worth having.

If You Promote People for Trivial Things, You’ll Make a Force Obsessed with Trivialities

If decadence is the sign of a nation in decline, then a lack of seriousness about war fighting is the bellwether of a foundering military. The historical examples of this are both legion and tragic. Squabbling over petty rivalries with the enemies at the gates, Kiev finds itself unable to mount a defense against the Golden Horde of the Great Khan. The citizens of the city bear the brunt of their defenders’ failure, slaughtered wholesale as a lesson to any would-be resisters. In the same vein, changing the uniform of the defenders of Rome did little to stop the winged-helmet-wearing invaders, but at least the imperial armies died well dressed. The armies of the White Russians, their leaders obsessed with title, privilege, and proper schooling, were picked apart piecemeal by the forces of the Reds in a war that could have been won. Their defeat inaugurated a century of their countrymen’s self-inflicted slavery to a soulless machine government and the rise of one of the bloodiest regimes the world has ever known. You cannot expect to prevail over your enemies on the battlefield if the mission doesn’t prevail over trivia in your planning.

I remember a very experienced colonel from my old squadron, a “last of the breed” kind of guy who somehow survived the bureaucratic personnel machine. He recalls being counseled regarding his promotion recommendation form for major. “All I see here is a lot of combat time,” his senior rater commented. “Isn’t that what we’re here to do?” he replied. A military exists to fight and win wars. We are not some corporation, forever churning out widgets to maximize shareholder profits and finance executive salaries. We are our nation’s insurance policy, and the deductible for that policy is paid in our blood. Being able to deliver on that policy is primary. Everything else is secondary.

We highlight certain actions as worthy of emulations through costly signals such as recognition, decoration, and promotion. What messages, and are they consistent? Do these messages highlight performance and duty or reinforce extant power structures and “approved solution” career paths? Do we reinforce the fierce urgency of combat, in all of its technologically mediated forms, or do we accede to the stale demands of those whose cultural capital is built upon the status quo and cannot see a world beyond it, no matter what that world might bring to the fight? Our institutional messaging must obsess with simple combat effectiveness because that and that alone will accomplish our nation’s missions at the least cost of blood and treasure. Sentimental nostalgia for a war gone by and bureaucratic “administrivia” both have the same root—avoiding the tough work of change, and doing so slows us down in fighting this war and preparing for the next. We are measured by our ability to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic—and nothing else.

None of this is to discount the importance of force development, and certainly promotions are based on your ability to act in the next grade rather than performance in your current grade. That said, performance in your present grade is a pretty good predictor of performance in the next grade. Professional military education is critically important, but education is the key word here. It is a bad omen indeed when our fast burners haven’t heard of Belisarius but are quite fluent on the gamesmanship of the various wing-level measures of organizational effectiveness. The key here is returning to a mission focus—our mission is war fighting, and we need to determine the difference between arbitrary administrative gamesmanship and true education of professional warriors. All of our actions need be intimately tied to winning the war we’re in, preparing for the next war, and deterring the wars that we can’t afford to fight.

This may seem heavily biased toward operations, but I would contend that it is instead heavily biased toward missions—and appropriately so. The mission is the priority, and it’s not about who is on the tip of the spear but about how sharp we keep the spear together. That said, logisticians have proved the decisive factor in countless campaigns. I am certain that you cannot win a war without food services, and I am positive that you cannot win a contemporary war without public affairs troops. (In the words of T. E. Lawrence, the printing press is the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the modern commander.) “Who is on the pointy end of the spear?” is not the most useful question because this war and its successors have many fronts, and all of us will at one time or another find ourselves at the pointy end of one of those fights. The better question is, “What is my war, and how can I fight it better?” In this way, a maintenance troop fights a war by holding back the friction of war with his tool kit and denying the enemy mission kills due to broken aircraft. A public affairs officer counters al-Qaeda’s strategic communication-warfare campaign, ensuring that when high-value-target no. 314 goes down, he stays down. An acquisitions officer fights our future wars by making sure that we get every platform we possibly can from our shrinking pool of resources—and so on.

Rather than leave on a note of gloom and doom, permit me to conclude with one more one-liner: it’s not inevitable until it actually happens. Here’s the funny thing about the word inevitable: people generally use it only after the fact, as in, “It’s nobody’s fault because it was inevitable” or “Nobody could have changed it anyway.” Of course, this is not true; history is full of men and women who thwart the seemingly inevitable. Declines have become golden ages; renaissance is born in times of crisis and change. The difference between a decline and a renaissance is the willingness to address the deeper issues creating crisis. Until you can address the bedrock issues creating your problems, you’re just changing flap settings on a crashing jet. By addressing those issues with wisdom and courage, you can reignite the vigor and renew the fire of your people. If world history is a teacher, we’ll need that fire. As the old SEAL saying goes, “The only easy day was yesterday.” This may very well be true for our country. We need to be ready.

So what’s the answer? How, then, should we fight? Well, that answer is not in this article—I promise. If I might hazard a guess, I would say that the one big answer we need is really a summation of a bunch of common-sense small answers. I would be willing to wager that the three-striper turning wrenches on the flight line has one of those answers. I would also bet that the captain working in the intelligence shop has another one of those answers. And the tanker navigator. And the Viper driver. And the public affairs officer. And the Pave Hawk gunner. If this Predator-and-gunship guy might add one more common-sense small answer, however, I would point out that three things pretty much script everything else: how you spend money, how you promote people, and how you structure yourself. If you fix these three things, then everything else will fix itself in time. Fortunately, time is something we have—at least for the time being.

Notes

1. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 3, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944).

2. Col Qiao Liang and Col Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999) (text translated by Foreign Broadcast Information Service), http://www

.terrorism.com/documents/unrestricted.pdf.

3. Ibid.

4. Surface-to-air missiles are the Soviets’ preferred counterair weapons system.

5. A forward operating base is “an airfield used to support tactical operations without establishing full support facilities.” Joint Publication 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 8 November 2010 (amended through 16 July 2014), 102, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf.

6. John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation,” 3 September 1976, http://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION.pdf.

7. Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), 169–87.

8. The OODA loop is a dynamic model of adaptation that Boyd used to describe everything from dogfights to long-cycle strategy. More precisely, he employed James Clerk Maxwell’s concept of motion perpendicular to the plane of oscillation to describe adaptation, which is the same principle used in a reciprocating engine, where the resultant force is expressed perpendicular to the pistons. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation,” 1–8.

9. The condottieri were Italian mercenaries of the fifteenth century. Renowned for their skill in battle, at least initially, these mercenary armies displaced the professional armies of the Italian city-states. Since they were primarily employed in intramural wars against each other, when they did meet in combat, they wore excessive amounts of armor and deemed battles concluded after very few casualties (when they didn’t just conclude them beforehand with bribes). Consequently, when they met the French national army of Charles VIII, they were soundly defeated. See Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, [1974]).

10. Zero Defects, Total Quality Management, and Six Sigma are all management philosophies oriented largely toward engineering the errors out of systems. Zero Defects, the brainchild of Phil Crosby, dates back to the space program. (Note that the space program’s challenges were ones of mathematical precision, not Clausewitzian chaos and an enemy’s cunning.) Total Quality Management, of Toyota fame, was primarily an adaptation of Japanese organizational principles. Six Sigma, the latest incarnation of the philosophy, applies advanced statistics and quantification techniques toward the same goal of reducing deviation from a set standard.

11. The weapon engagement zone is a dynamic launch area that yields a favorable probability of kill against a target fitting specified parameters. A shot from the “heart of the zone” gives you the best chance, all else being equal, of hitting your target.

12. The probability of kill is a statistical measure of the likelihood that a given weapon will destroy its target.

13. Clark G. Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1991), 238.

14. The built-in-test feature allows a given piece of avionics to assess and report its own system health.

15. Strategic Air Command was the US Air Force’s deterrence-centric Cold War heavyweight command.

16. Checkmate is an Air Force strategy cell, most famous for John Warden and David Deptula’s Instant Thunder war plan during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

17. The Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as “Star Wars,” was a planned, layered defense against nuclear missiles. The program sparked an arms race that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union.

18. Operational risk management is a system for assessing and mitigating risk through analysis and controls.

19. During the Anglo-Russian Great Game for Central Asia, Russian generals made their names by conquering the cities of Bukhara, Khiva, Merv, Kokand, and Tashkent. Later, the territory would be divided into the territories that are today Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. See Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992).

20. Mission creep describes the increase of objectives without a concomitant increase in capabilities.

21. Base realignment and closure (BRAC) is a process meant to bring fairness and efficiency to the Department of Defense’s basing decisions. BRAC recommendations must be confirmed by the president and Congress, but once they do so, BRAC decisions become law. News of a closed base is typically received poorly by local communities, and well-connected ones have been known to reverse BRAC decisions through political maneuvering.

22. On a similar note, consider the disconnect between our acquisitions processes and Moore’s Law, which basically states that the doubling time on technology is about two years. In a globalized information economy, even civilian intellectual property rights are difficult to enforce, much less eagerly-sought-out defense technologies. Agility is the new information security: the only way to preserve your technological edge is to turn innovations into combat-ready designs faster than your adversary can. With decade-long Byzantine acquisitions pathways, we end up merely subsidizing everyone else’s research and development.

23. For the Five Rings strategy, see John A. Warden III, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat, rev. ed. (San Jose: toExcel, 1998).

24. See David A. Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor, updated ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

25. F-86 Sabre jets enjoyed a reported eight-to-one kill ratio against their nemeses, the MiG-15s. Kenneth P. Werrell, review of Sabres over MiG Alley: The F-86 and the Battle for Air Superiority in Korea, by Stephen Budiansky, Journal of Military History 70, no. 4 (October 2006): 1104–5.

26. “Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.” Douglas MacArthur.

27. Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941.

28. C3I is a common term for the implements of effective centralized command.

29. The combined air and space operations center is the senior operational C3I element of an air campaign.

30. “Lost link” is a flight profile for a remotely piloted aircraft. Having lost command link, the aircraft leaves its primary mission to return home and seek new instructions.

31. Norman Friedman, The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems, 1997–1998 (Annapolis: MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1997), 97–98.

32. An IADS is a layered defense of surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, and airborne interceptors, designed to prevent incursions from hostile aircraft.

33. In crew resource management, the two-challenge rule sets forth a guideline that upon noticing a potentially dangerous situation, the pilot not flying states the nature of the situation and challenges the flying pilot to address it. After doing so twice, if there is no response, that pilot is empowered to take the controls and resolve the situation himself or herself. Similarly, “this is stupid” is a key clause for breaking an error chain and should direct the aircraft commander to reassess the situation.

34. The Thud (F-105 Thunderchief) was known for performing poorly against older MiGs in dogfights over Vietnam. It had a tendency to bleed energy rapidly in turns, allowing the more agile MiGs to engage at guns range whereas the MiG’s heavier cannon armament outclassed that of the F-105. Energy-maneuvering theory, developed by Boyd, was the first effective mathematical means of quantifying the pilot’s intuitive preference for agility, and explained this mismatch perfectly. Coram, Boyd, 123–53.

35. “Hands on throttle and stick” is an ergonomic principle used to optimize the F-16’s pilot-aircraft interface.

36. Warden, Air Campaign.

* Major Dave Blair serves as an MQ-1B instructor pilot in Air Force Special Operations Command. Previously, he deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom as an AC-130U pilot, an operational planner, and a remotely piloted aircraft liaison. A graduate of the US Air Force Academy and the Harvard Kennedy School, he holds a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University, where he wrote on transnational criminal networks, social network analysis, and organizational optimization and disruption.

Table of Contents

00Contents-E

01Editorial-E

02Emmanuel-E

03Burgstein-E

04BaigSander-E

05Bore-E

06Blair-E