Force, Power, Strategy

Skillsets for a second American Century

The first American Century was almost an accident. The second we will have to do on purpose.

When we entered the Great War of 1914-1989 we were already the strongest economy in the world, and all the other combatants were exhausted. By the end of WWII, with all other combatants in ruins, our economic and military force so was overwhelming that efficiency hardly mattered. We build 151 aircraft carriers during the war!

Strategic subtlety was hardly required. We always knew whom to fight, even after we swapped out Germany for the USSR halfway through. All we had to do was win.

This time round, to stay on top against far more impressive rivals we will need to hone the greatest of all strategic skills: turning force into power.

The power-to-force multiple

The great Edward Luttwak, in his The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, proposed a distinction between power and force. Force among nations is not unlike force in physics. Force is the ability to compel some well-defined outcome: remove enemy soldiers from a hill; destroy Carthage; achieve air supremacy in Europe; obliterate Hiroshima.

In war as in physics, if Object X is hit by stronger Force Y,  Object X moves.

Power is different. It is the ability of a nation to influence the behavior of others: neutrals, enemies, allies, or rivals. Because the opposite party itself must be persuaded to change its behavior—even unconditional surrender is a choice—power exists only within a relationship

Power depends partly on perception. The school yard bully has power because I fear him. He likely gained that power through prior use of force, but he does not need to use force every time.

Force is an input; power is an output. Nations that can bring force to bear can gain power.  But force is expensive. It is consumed when it is employed: soldiers are killed or wounded, economies devastated, resources ravaged.

Power, because it is grounded in perceptions and relationships, can be self-reinforcing: cow one potential enemy and others may back down. Power is never absolute: even a compliant opposing party rarely follows the protagonist’s script to the letter. Power evokes a reaction, but the reaction is not wholly predictable

The ideal of strategy is to expend the least force to gain the power necessary for national goals. Power should be a multiple of force exceeding 1.0.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, US foreign policy has had an exhaustingly poor power-to-force multiple including 30 years of spectacularly inefficient and ineffective conflict in the Middle East. We are dramatically weaker there than in 1990, and weaker around the world because of our humiliating defeats. 

This came about not because we were too “interventionist” but because we used force in unproductive, even counterproductive ways.

The gang who couldn’t shoot straight

In 1990 we had one important enemy in the middle east, Iran. Against Iran our best weapon was Iraq, which we helped arm so that it could fight our enemy. Iraq did this with great success from 1980 through 1989 killing roughly half a million of our enemies. Iran embraced Russia and China, getting arms and money.  By 1990 the regional line-up was Iran, Russia, and China vs. Iraq and us.

At which point we went to war with…Iraq. We won, but left Saddam in place, giving us two blood enemies in the region.  In 2002 we did it again, this time on false rumors that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. We then dismantled the Iraqi army that had fought our real enemy for a decade.

While we were destroying our ally, Iran took a breather. It rebuilt its armed forces; pushed forward its own very real nuclear program and asserted dominance over Iraq and the region as it does so to this day.  

By fighting Iraq we became powerless to check Iran. After 30 years of fighting the wrong people it became politically impossible for us to fight the right people.

We spent force but lost power.

This happened because we acted not from strategy but ideology, an ideology that proclaimed, without evidence, that we could create, a consensual, law-like international order. In the manner of ideologies, this entirely aspirational notion had little grounding in experience. The belief defines the facts rather than the other way round.

Ideology creates inefficiency because it deprives us of information.

Necessary to a law-like international order is the rule that had us fighting the wrong enemy in the Middle East. A fundamental principle of such an order is that sovereignty must always be respected by other sovereigns unless one sovereign exits the rule of law by using force against another.

Even as this principle obliged us to go to war on behalf of Kuwait’s sovereignty, it forbade us from crossing into Iraq and toppling the Saddam regime. The gangsters who dominate the UN take sovereignty very seriously.

In effect the law-like international order committed us to the idea that all nations have a right to exist, even such unlikely nations as Kuwait. This is a foolish and dangerous idea.

No right to sovereignty

Nations must earn the right to exist, by being willing and able to do what nations do. Sovereignty is premised on the ability to maintain order against internal enemies and territorial integrity against external enemies. This standard arises because other nations must be able to hold some entity responsible for attacks against them. If a nation falls into disorder so that bandits—or terrorists—can use it as a home base against others, its sovereignty is forfeit.  Aggrieved nations may then cross the border and put matters to rights.

This was the principle the younger Bush rightly invoked to invade Afghanistan.

Few nations are capable of preserving their sovereignty solely by force of their own arms. They must take other steps, such as allying with the powerful, or paying them tribute. 

A nation that can do none of these things should, in defense of its own people, surrender its sovereignty and seek a merger under favorable terms, trading sovereignty for security, as the thirteen colonies did to form the United States. 

Kuwait was always an unlikely sovereign: too much oil wealth, too few people to defend it, a government lacking moral authority to rally those few.  The regime never mitigated these problems, never built either a serious army nor a network of militarily capable allies. A long-time Soviet ally, Kuwait refused the US a military base as late as 1987, just three years before Iraq invaded.

Kuwait’s best option to remain independent was tribute, a course taken by countless powers—weak and strong--throughout history. The Roman Empire at the peak of its power not infrequently paid off troublesome tribes when conquest was inconvenient. The Byzantine Empire, masters of the princely payoff, outlasted the Western Empire by a thousand years.

When the Iran-Iraq war halted in 1989, the demand for tribute finally came. Saddam wanted relief from some $14 billion Iraq had borrowed from Kuwait to support the war. His position was not unreasonable:  Iraq had spent much blood and treasure protecting the Sunni Arab world from Shiite Iran.   Kuwait, not being able to help militarily, should help financially.

Kuwait balked at the request for debt relief even as it was repeatedly violating OPEC restrictions on oil exports, contributing to a collapse in oil prices that cost Iraq billions more.  Saddam decided to take payment in kind. 

The attack was no surprise. Saddam had threatened action repeatedly for more than a year and massed 30,000 troops on the Kuwaiti border. The Kuwaitis had plenty of time to strike a deal. To refuse all concessions was irresponsible, especially as Saddam was unlikely to repay the loans anyway.

On obedience to the rule that all sovereigns must be respected, we destroyed a powerful ally to preserve a small, absurdly rich nation, that refused to pay a few billions for its survival. Kuwait stuck us with the tab and we let them do it.

In the event, Kuwait paid anyway: $32 billion to the US to help cover the cost of the war. Hiring the US army turned out to be more expensive than paying tribute to Saddam. No free lunch. But the price the US paid over the next three decades was vastly greater than $32 billion. When Iran gets nukes the price will be even higher.

Afghanistan and disgrace

Unlike the first Gulf War our response to 9/11 started off perfectly. The younger Bush’s speech outlining the US response was superb in its moral and legal clarity. The US would henceforth hold nations that harbored terrorists responsible for the terrorists’ acts.  Terror was no longer a police matter, but a matter of war against nations that succored our enemies. We invaded.

Initially the action was a model of strategic precision. We removed most of the top Taliban leaders from power, generally by killing them, thus providing their colleagues and the world with a powerful object lesson. The lesson delivered, it was time to leave, tossing the keys to the last Taliban leader standing with the promise that we would be back if they proved not to have learned their lesson.

Instead we embarked on a two-decade struggle to replace the Taliban with a government to our liking. Last year the Taliban drove us from Kabul in disgrace.

In The Grand Strategy, Luttwak explains Rome’s deft use of client states to secure the Empire’s borders. Well into the first century AD, Rome’s borders were not defended by the legions, which were typically stationed hundreds of miles to the interior. The borders were protected by a ring of client states, ruled by leaders backed by Rome in exchange for protecting Roman provinces from harassment by bandits or migrating tribes.

Only if a client king failed in his duty would the legions come. Traveling but 15 miles a day, they might take months to reach the client. Once they arrived, however, the offending king would inevitably be hastened on his way to the underworld. So feared were the legions that the king was often dispatched by his family before they arrived.

Ne hoc tibi fiat

With the failed ruler deposed, the legions did not linger. They tossed the keys to a promising replacement—brothers-in-law or cousins of the departed were common choices—and then marched away, with a final bit of advice hovering in the air: Ne hoc tibi fiat. (Don’t let this happen to you.)  Relieved of the costs of forward defense the legions were reserved for their best uses: conquest and deterrence. Rome gained great power for a minimum of force.

Terrorists make borders global. For us Afghanistan was a border war. But instead of being satisfied with deterrence, we accepted direct responsibility for the border including pacifying a country that has never been pacified.

Had we taken the ne hoc tibi fiat approach, it seems unlikely any Talibans to whom we tossed the keys would back terror against the US anytime soon. Even Gaddafi learned the original lesson of Afghanistan, suddenly discovering his real goal in life was to abandon Libya’s nuclear ambitions and become, in effect, a US client. Like true ideologues, we rejected that offer and helped overthrow him anyway.

Bipolar in Ukraine

In Ukraine we have acted as if power and force were equivalent. From the beginning we have limited our options to using more force or less. We would not go to war with Russia; we would impose sanctions and give arms to Ukraine. Outside those options we have been astonishingly passive, all too willing to let the chips fall where they may.

When we fail to distinguish between force and power we narrow our options and obscure our real objectives. We never asked “what course of action would be most likely to increase our power vis a vis the rest of the world, including our main rival China?”

As long as China is our main rival, we do not want Russia to be weak or to be an enemy. We have exposed Russia’s weakness and made it weaker yet. We have refused to recognize the reasons for her bitterness and made her more bitter still.

There were alternatives. If no nation has a natural right to exist certainly Ukraine had no natural right to Crimea which it gained on a whim of Krushchev’s in 1954. Long before 2014, instead of using force and losing power, we should have been using our power to multiply itself. Making it clear to Ukraine that we would not support them on Crimea and pushing them to give up their claim very likely would have worked.

With Crimea restored to Russia, the next obvious step would be to encourage both nations to join NATO, guaranteeing the security of both in the European theater. Freed from anxiety on the west, Russia could have looked to its eastern borders, focusing on any threat from China.

The US should neither retreat from the world nor abandon our hegemony. If we are to maintain our position, however, we must get better at trading force for power.