Calibrating Military Force between Nation-Building and Whack-a-Mole

Effective national security demands reasoning out how and when to use the military, which also requires knowing one's enemy.

In the Wall Street Journal’s “Al Qaeda Is Far From Defeated” (retrieved April 30, 2012 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304723304577369780858510366.html?KEYWORDS=seth+jones), Seth Jones stakes out the position that Al Qaeda is not only not dead but hardly even resting. He makes a compelling argument. But where the essay contrasts Director of National Intelligence James Clapper when citing the latter’s claim that Al Qaeda is largely a symbolic threat at this point, there is less support for Jones’ position than a casual reading suggests. Why? Clapper and Jones are both right.

To frame Clapper’s comment in a larger context, just because a terrorist organization is thwarted in directly carrying out its previously notorious strikes, this does not automatically eliminate its threat potential. Indeed national, even global, movements thrive on the symbolic as a unifying force and spur to action in the face of shifting odds. Were Christians in the Roman arena not sustained by their symbolic and otherwise futile opposition to an apparently indomitable, ruling adversary? History is full of instances where saints and rogues were once dismissed as inconsequential underdogs sustained only by a threadbare, symbolic remonstrance. And yet, some of them prevailed. Witness Gandhi and Walesa to epitomize civilized sabotage, or Castro and Khomeini to exemplify more cutthroat regime change. Before ascending to positions of consequence, any of these figures could have just as easily been dismissed as a fringe character offering only symbolic menace to the prevailing order.

America leads the world in advertising, social media creation, and sensory image manipulation – that is, in most of the instruments of hype that rage through the world like a pestilence. Unsurprisingly, we Americans exaggerate for effect. It heightens contrast and makes our choices easier. Small wonder then that, in political campaigns, nuance takes a backseat to demonizing the opposition while lionizing our own team and camp. So, in a nation that favors bold contrasts, the overpowering tendency is to cast every major decision and, soon, major policy options in extremes that define the endpoints of a pendulum’s arc as it swings from one position to its opposite.

How does this weakness for extremes apply when employing our military as instrument of diplomacy or weapon to fight terrorism? It manifests itself in endless oscillation between the kind of nation-building that our Iraq war represented and the whack-a-mole approach we used when initially subduing the Taliban and Al Qaeda when first taking the fight to Afghanistan.

Relative success of either option, in the long term, is something for future historians to gauge and analyze and dissect for microscopic examination or debate. Meanwhile, what do we do with the military under such circumstances, before all the results of this examination are in? We either try one option or the other. Over time, the American pattern is to try one option, then the other. And it seems to make little difference which we try first.

The more satisfying, at least on its surface, is the whack-a-mole alternative. Thanks to mature, competent special forces (e.g. Navy SEALs) backed by superior military technology (e.g. Predator drones and precision munitions), the U.S. commands an impressive capacity for obliterating identifiable villains. Thus, once riled, we like to strike back and to make it count.

Now there’s the rub: making it count. First, in today’s battle space, not all adversaries make themselves identifiable as state-supported actors operating within a precise geographical footprint for us to target. When they do oblige, to be sure, SEALs and drones alter enemy life expectancies and freedom of maneuver.

There is a second frustration with the whack-a-mole approach. Part of it traces to this “symbolic” residue. We invariably agonize over the possibility that whacking even our sworn adversaries may only treat the symptom while aggravating the disease. And this worry, in turn, paves the way for the urge to engage in nation-building.

Nation-building is broad in scope, hence less achievable than traditional military objectives like taking high ground or defending a castle from frontal attack. Nation-building takes colossal investments of people, time, and resources. It is no simple task to bring popular elections to a downtrodden population whose tribal history has only taught subjugation to one warlord until a stronger one takes his place. Such nation-building goals require foundational steps along the way, most of which lack a traditional military stamp, such as promotion of literacy, formulation of political coalitions, fostering of public communications, and development of infrastructure to support connectivity with the larger world that transcends the boundaries of tribe and village, feud and tradition. Meanwhile, this effort also requires active, ongoing thug suppression to keep gradual processes from being negated by rascals, profiteers, and whatever armed brutes and predators rage otherwise unchecked throughout the landscape in native guise.

The frustrations of nation-building are many, but two of the most chronically insoluble must surely be metrics and sustainability.

The metrics dilemma bedevils a military leader no less than it would any business executive. It is one thing to capture enemy ground or defeat an enemy brigade, quite another to safely declare that democratic institutions have finally taken root. So, how much nation-building is enough? How do we tell we are winning, let alone when we are done?

The sustainability dilemma is equally enervating. If the only apparent progress in nation-building remains indelibly linked to the presence of American troops, then how long do we stay to perform duties ranging from infrastructure support to thug suppression? Moreover, what kind of victory can we claim if conditions revert to Darwinian tribal hegemony as soon as our troops withdraw? To make matters worse, at what point in a long engagement do we create our own diminishing returns by overstaying our welcome? At some point, as Iraq and, to a lesser and more gradual extent, Okinawa have shown, any foreign military force grows unpopular over time. In Iraq, Americans went from welcome liberators to unwanted foreign occupiers. Invariably, if conditions deteriorate, few scapegoats rival a foreign occupying force to blame for everything that goes wrong. And it makes little difference whether our military acts with the same discipline and focus today as it did yesterday, at the outbreak of hostilities. Meanwhile, nation-building draws troops more and more into unfamiliar territory that most workers would regard as laboring outside of their skill, purview, or competence. Nor is it possible to reformat troops like hard drives, because they cannot forsake traditional military duties without risking their lives. On the one hand, nation-building requires them to extend fraternal assistance to strangers and the disadvantaged. On the other hand, survival requires them to dodge traps, improvised explosives, and gunfire directed at them by adversaries indistinguishable from the people the troops are trying to help.

All of this brings us back to the situation now confronting Mr. Jones, General Clapper, and American policy for military deployments. Jones argues the folly of running out of the Middle East prematurely, which may be interpreted as a call for ongoing nation-building. America’s fatigue with the cost and uncertain return on investment for nation-building would appear to signal an unyielding swing of the pendulum into what has now become its unmistakable arc and endpoint. Back we go to whack-a-mole mode, where what magnifies the allure is a visible saving of resources as long as no actual whacking is in progress. So we wait, as needed, although Jones is right to raise an eyebrow at how transplanting expeditionary forces from Afghanistan or Iraq to Australia makes sense if, as seems to be the case, the moles most likely to qualify for whacking are more likely to emerge from the Near East than the Far East.

These pendulum-friendly strategies no longer constitute a problem so much as a predicament. They are institutionalized options almost capable of operating on autopilot. What distinguishes them from problems, as Richard Farson once proposed in his nonfiction Management of the Absurd, is that they are situations that demand a larger frame to appreciate deeper, predictable causes that require more than analytic thinking to handle. Indeed predicaments require interpretive thinking, of the kind that would discern this cyclical pattern of swinging from one military role to the next. Absent such interpretive thinking, one may only wonder if America’s use of the military in efforts to counter terrorism is destined to get worse before it gets better.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Harebrained Analysis and Expert Folly

The real problem with the scientific limits of analytical technique is not imperfection. Reputable analysts and proficient investigators acknowledge their limits. It is why mature professionals look for corroboration and prefer aggregating evidence from multiple sources instead of depending exclusively on a single, smoking-gun bit of proof. The latter is much too elusive in the real world, no matter how recurrent and dramatic its appearance in fictional crime drama.

No, the real problem is a system that inclines expert analysts to exaggerate certainty under oath, lending an air of infallibility to what should remain open to question in the absence of supporting evidence.

It does not help that this flaw may result from the best of motives. As Spencer Hsu’s Washington Post article points out (available at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/convicted-defendants-left-uninformed-of-forensic-flaws-found-by-justice-dept/2012/04/16/gIQAWTcgMT_story.html), microscopic hair analysis from an FBI laboratory was chronically, scientifically suspect yet decisive in leading to convictions of individuals subsequently exonerated by better DNA evidence. These cases involving hair analysis preceded today’s DNA matching techniques.

Hsu’s article strikes enough balance to arm FBI bashers and supporters alike. On the one hand, it cites deficient lab protocols and limited scientific reliability of microscopic hair analysis to conclusively put a given suspect at a crime scene. On the other hand, Hsu includes context and a reasoned explanation from an FBI source who averred that the Bureau was doing the best it could with the tools available at the time.

A larger question, also posed in the article, reflects more negatively on the legal profession than on law enforcement. Specifically, it appears that the FBI came forward with unflattering discoveries about flawed evidence, delivering this information to prosecuting attorneys who had won associated convictions. Some prosecutors acted on this information to initiate reviews of tainted convictions, or at least to advise defense attorneys involved in those cases of this recent turn of events. Others, however, kept the embarrassing information on closer hold, with the inevitable result that some people who appeared to be wrongfully convicted continued to serve prison time past a point where they could have been set free.

Lab protocols and questionable science will no doubt merit painstaking scrutiny in this aftermath. The more systemic folly in the eye of a security practitioner, however, is what appears to be an almost irresistible tendency for experts to magnify the infallibility of their expertise. Consider this example:

• An FBI expert testifying on a hair match that ultimately proved erroneous claimed that his hair matching had been unsuccessful only 8-10 times in thousands of cases that he had worked on over the course of 10 years.

• Another FBI scientist whose case ultimately proved flawed told jurors that he routinely relied on 15 characteristics in matching hair samples to an individual when, in reality, his lab notes revealed he had only measured 3 characteristics of the hair in this particular case.

The problem is two-fold. First, under a full head of steam, the expert exaggerates the validity of his or her expertise by offering dogmatic, convincing opinions in the guise of fact. Second, exaggerated claims of expert infallibility meet with insufficient challenge. Here it is the defense attorney and judge who must share responsibility for resulting injustice in convictions.

Under the circumstances, here follows a prescription for corrective actions on the part of the various principals.

EXPERT: Stick to the facts, and render them into plain language without argot or embroidery to suggest that your analytical tools yield infallible proof.

INVESTIGATOR: Resist the twin forces of confirmation bias and indolence. Corroborate. Investigate fully. Do your entire job, instead of relying solely on the expert to do it for you.

PROSECUTOR: Honor the ethics of your office and profession by not concealing exculpatory evidence. Do not manipulate juries with arcane but scientifically questionable data and testimony that should be open to fair scrutiny rather than presented as incontestable fact.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Do your homework in probing validity of evidence and in uncovering fallacies of one-sided pronouncements of experts. Do not let experts get away with inflated claims of success or validity. Probe behind the percentages and success rates. Ask for evidence backing such claims.

JUDGE: Keep the playing field level, compelling prosecution, defense, and expert witnesses to communicate in plain language. Do not let them slide into impenetrable jargon calculated to overwhelm juries and suggest infallibility that does not exist. Keep the burden for making evidence on the advocates, without allowing either side to offer up tomes of incomprehensible data that no mortal should have to decipher.

JURY: Beware the CSI effect, of the increasingly popular trend to make a case exclusively on impressive-looking or impressive-sounding techniques that are not explained to your satisfaction.

FOR ALL: Whether the analytical tool is hair, DNA evidence, or any other forensic advance, remember that a tool has its value and also its limitations. It should be a part of a complete investigation, not a substitute for a full body of evidence. Beware of any claim that over relies on a single tool.

-- Nick Catrantzos