Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (24 page)

“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” Powell wrote of that moment.

“The Pentagon,” wrote Soderberg, “dragged its feet developing
the military plans for Bosnia and raised numerous objections.… Senior military leaders were quick to point out that any such deployment would require a call-up of reserves, which would be politically unpopular, especially for a new president wanting to focus on domestic issues so early in his term.”

Meanwhile, some in the press were throwing down the gauntlet. “Nobody in Clinton’s administration has yet explained, simply and plainly, what America’s interests and objectives in the Balkans are,” the
Economist
editorialized. “[President Clinton] will have to do better than say that he has thought things over carefully. He will have to tell a puzzled people, with no great desire to put its children in harm’s way, why he is doing precisely that. It is, by a long way, the greatest test yet of whether he is up to the job.”

With his public approval ratings already sinking under the weight of policy fumbles like gays in the military and a failing health-care initiative, Clinton decided to take a pass on his Balkans test. In this game of chicken with the Pentagon and mouthpieces like McCain, Clinton blinked. Clinton managed to commit the US military to a fairly impotent “no-fly zone” operation, and applauded the UN-formed “safe zones” in the Balkans, but other than that he sat back and watched while Miloševic and Serb warlords continued to grind down the Croats and the Bosnians, and then taunt the West. The Serbs waved off calls for peace plans or other diplomatic overtures. “Bosnia never existed,” said one of Miloševic’s deputies, “and it will never.” The nastiest general in the Serbian Army, Ratko Mladic, who would kill seven thousand Muslim men and boys (civilians all) in Srebenica, warned that if the Americans and their allies ever did try to stop them, “they would leave their bones in Bosnia.… If [the West] bombs me, I’ll bomb London. There are Serbs in London. There are Serbs in Washington.”

Even with a villain like Mladic to help his case, President Clinton never really expended much effort on the politically costly task of convincing the American public of the need to arm the Bosnians or Croatians, or the need to unleash American air power on Miloševic and the Serbs, or the need to put US boots on the ground. Instead, he found a way to do something without the necessity of making any vigorous public argument for it, and without much involving his own balky Pentagon. Thank you, MPRI!

It happened like this: In 1994, a little more than a year into Clinton’s presidency, the Croatian minister of defense asked Washington if he might, in spite of the UN arms embargo, get some help—like, say, weapons or training or a leg up in gaining admission to NATO. The Pentagon referred the minister (a native Croatian with a successful Canadian pizza business; well-spoken and serious, he was) to an outfit down the road in Alexandria, Virginia, called Military Personnel Resources Incorporated. A few months later, MPRI signed a contract with the Croatian government—sanctioned in advance by the US Departments of Defense and State—called the Democratic Transition Assistance Program. By early 1995, a cadre of former US generals, including a former Army chief of staff and a former head of US Army, Europe, together with retired line officers and NCOs, began “training [Croatian] officers in basic leadership skills and an understanding of where they fit into a democratic society,” according to an MPRI spokesman. “We teach general management, training management. We teach how to do planning, programming, the budgeting process, which is new to them.”

By the time MPRI’s “democratic transition assistance” work in Croatia got under way, the Clinton administration had already given a tacit go-ahead to other countries (particularly Iran!) to arm the Bosnians too. For allowing the flow of arms to
Bosnia through its ports and across its airspace, the Croatians got a cut that added up to about 30 percent of the Iranian weapons shipments. While under the tutelage of MPRI, the Croats also bought a billion dollars’ worth of tanks and assault helicopters from the old Warsaw powers. And then they put them to good use.

In August 1995, about half a year after MPRI took up their instruction at the Petar Zrisnki Military Academy in Croatia, the Croats launched an offensive called Operation Storm. The objective was to take back a former Croatian region called Krajina, which the Serb Army had violently seized a few years earlier. Within a week, the Croat Army had routed the Serbs, surprising everyone in the Balkans, and the world. “The lightning five-pronged offensive, integrating air power, artillery and rapid infantry movements, and relying on intense maneuvers to unhinge Serbian command and control networks, bore many hallmarks of U.S. Army doctrine,” a reporter in Krajina wrote at the time. “It was a textbook operation,” said a British colonel in charge of UN troops in Krajina, “though not a [Yugoslav Army] textbook. Whoever wrote that plan of attack could have gone to any NATO staff college in North America or Western Europe and scored an A-plus.”

Suspicions for training up the Croatian Army into a lethal, Western-style fighting force naturally fell on MPRI, but the contract generals took pains to remind anybody who asked that the company was just there to provide “democratic transition assistance” and not to plan battles or game out wars. Clinton didn’t appear to care one way or another about MPRI’s actual role in Operation Storm. He was giddy with the result. “I was rooting for the Croatians,” the president wrote in his autobiography. “It was the first defeat for the Serbs in four years, and it changed both the balance of power on the ground and the psychology of
all the parties. One Western diplomat in Croatia was quoted as saying, ‘There was almost a signal of support from Washington. The Americans have been spoiling for a chance to hit the Serbs, and they are using Croatia as their proxy to do the deed for them.’ ” Clinton apparently agreed with the diplomat’s assessment enough to quote him, and proudly.

After four years of assuming Western impotence, if not outright approval, Miloševic finally felt the noose tightening. Within weeks of the Croat victory at Krajina, in the face of ever more energetic NATO air strikes, and with the prospect of facing a newly armed (American-trained and -supported) coalition of Bosnians and Croatians, the Serb leader knuckled under. He came to the negotiating table to sign a deal that ended his genocidal four-year rampage.

So it was soon after the peace accords were signed that those twenty thousand American peacekeepers—who would be joined by twenty thousand private citizens under contract to provide support services—arrived in Bosnia and Croatia as part of an international force to keep Miloševic and his Serbian military under heel. And did Clinton have a hard time selling that manpower commitment to the American people? He did not. He was helped greatly by—what else? Outsourcing. Clinton had only had to make a minimal call-up of Guard members and Reserves. “An Army planner told us they could have asked the national command authority to increase the force ceiling and reserve call-up authority,” according to a US government audit of the Bosnian operation. “However, because they had LOGCAP as an option, it was not necessary to seek these increases to meet support needs.”

It was also not necessary for a skittish and unsure president to put himself on the line seeking a real show of public support for
our
mission. And Congress didn’t take a stand one way or
the other. The president simply shipped American troops off to a possible war zone and both houses of Congress offered a mealy vote of almost-approval, expressing reservations about the president’s policy but agreeing to support “the men and women of the United States Armed Forces who are carrying out their missions in support of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina with professional excellence, dedicated patriotism and exemplary bravery.” The Clinton administration got this not-quite-approval approval largely because it assured Congress that the mission would be short and limited.

More than three years later, there were
still
thousands of American troops in Bosnia. And when Miloševic’s Serbian Army started menacing a new target in former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Clinton had a game plan at the ready. NATO started up another bombing campaign and the president prepared to deploy an entirely new contingent of US soldiers to keep the peace in yet another former Yugoslavian state. “How could the U.S. military find a way to provide the logistics for its forces, without calling up reserves or the National Guard, while at the same time helping to deal with the humanitarian crisis that the war had provoked?” asked Peter W. Singer in his book
Corporate Warriors
. “Simple: the U.S. military would pass the work on to someone else.… Instead of having to call up roughly 9,000 reservists, Brown & Root Services was hired.”

Cheney’s little “augmentation” program had proved a godsend to the Clinton administration. “It is often necessary to use LOGCAP in these missions,” noted the Government Accounting Office report on Bosnia in 1997, “because of the political sensitivity of activating guard and reserve forces.”

That political sensitivity is there for a reason. Mounting an overseas military operation should force a national gut-check about wars that presidents might otherwise rush us into. It
lessens the possibility of stranding our military in conflicts the country doesn’t support or, worse, doesn’t care about. Having a work-around for that political sensitivity must have felt like genius to those who wanted war without the hassle, but even in the short run, that work-around had clear unintended consequences. Not only was there little public debate about the merits of a major American deployment, there was also less pressure to bring the mission to a quick conclusion. American peacekeeping troops were in the Balkans for more than eight years, without the general public much noticing. Even at the time of the initial deployment, little more than a third of the country was closely following the story; only a fifth understood the details of the US contribution to the international peacekeeping force. The American public, according to a Pew Research Center poll, was much more interested in a recent blizzard and a weekend-long federal government shutdown. Eight years into the Balkan mission, the American public was even less engaged.

“Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait … U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu.…

“Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.” To infinity and beyond, in other words, with a pay-to-play pop-up army.

By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot—without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We’d gotten used to it.

By 2001, the ability of a president to start and wage military operations without (or even in spite of) Congress was established precedent.

By 2001, even the peacetime US military budget was well over half the size of all other military budgets in the world combined.

By 2001, the spirit of the Abrams Doctrine—that the disruption of civilian life is the price of admission for war—was pretty much kaput.

By 2001, we’d freed ourselves of all those hassles, all those restraints tying us down.

THE HOUBARA BUSTARD IS NOT A PARTICULARLY LARGE OR
regal bird. It looks a little like what you might get if you bred a common pheasant with an ostrich—like a miniature ostrich with a shorter neck and legs, or maybe a pheasant on steroids, with a stretched neck, sprinter’s legs, and a much more impressive wingspan. But the little fella has recently provided crucial assistance in making America’s war in Afghanistan (and its spillover in Pakistan) the longest-running military hot show in our nation’s history.

In May 2011, Pakistan got its nose out of joint when US Special Forces sprung a surprise mission on a compound in Abbottabad and offed the most infamous terrorist on the planet, without giving a heads-up to the host government. The Pakistani military and intelligence service found itself having to explain how the target, Osama bin Laden, could have been living in tranquility just a few miles down the road from Pakistan’s most important military academy, in a neighborhood crawling with current and retired military officers. Was Pakistani intelligence that incompetent, or were they protecting bin Laden? And then they had to explain
how a US strike force and its very big helicopters could fly into Abbottabad, spend nearly an hour on the ground, and then leave the country with bin Laden’s carcass in tow without being detected, let alone stopped.