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Plenty of books have beaten up on the Bush administration's military and diplomatic strategies. But Fred Kaplan's Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power* may be the most broad-based assault yet. In it, Kaplan hammers on everything from the White House's faith in military technological superiority to its holier**-than-thou approach to negotiating (or not). **Kaplan, who writes Slate's "War Stories" column, also explores the roots of many of these beliefs. And that's where we start this Q&A -- this first of many, I hope, with leading authors on national security. *
__Danger Room: __To outsiders, the idea of of a lighter, quicker, better-networked military seemed to appear out of nowhere around the turn of the century. But the idea was decades in the making. Who first began to propose this idea of a
"transformed" military? And how did it finally make its way to the leadership of the Pentagon?
Fred Kaplan: After the Cold War ended, Andrew Marshall, who was (and still is) director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net
Assessment, speculated that these high-tech systems -- super-accurate bombs, drones, and so forth -- could be useful against enemies that were remote from U.S. bases and that, therefore, we couldn’t attack with large, heavy armies. Marshall had a vast network of acolytes and admirers all over Washington. Some of those acolytes formalized his ideas in the report of a panel in the late
1990s called Transforming Defense. One of the leaders on that panel, Richard Armitage, practically transcribed whole chunks of the report in a speech that presidential candidate George W. Bush gave in 1999 at The Citadel.
Around this same time, Donald Rumsfeld chaired a small panel formed to discuss a book that a former associate of his named James Wade had written called Shock and Awe, which dealt with some of these same ideas. Rumsfeld was looking for big new ideas, and, between the Wade panel and Bush’s speech, he saw that transformation was it. When Bush interviewed him for the job of
Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld knew what to say. Soon after he took office, Rumsfeld asked Andy Marshall to write a paper on a new defense strategy for the post-Cold War era, and so, the connections came full circle.
__DR: __Many of these "transformational" weapons have long histories, too, right? There were "smart bombs" before the Gulf War, and drones before Afghanistan fight.
Kaplan: Sort-of-smart bombs — mainly laser-guided — have been around for a long time. They first met with some success toward the end of the Vietnam War. But the ones we know today were first conceived in the mid-1970s, mainly in an influential paper written for DARPA by the military strategist Albert Wohlstetter, a colleague of Marshall's. The concern then was that the Soviet Union might be able to win a quick war against NATO. The DARPA paper spelled out a system of super-accurate, long-range munitions that, combined with reconnaissance drones and computerized command-control networks, that might destroy Soviet armor and depots—on the front lines and in the rear areas—thus slowing the attack. Wohlstetter even speculated that these bombs might be guided by signals from GPS satellites, at a time when GPS was still in early R&D.
__DR: __Why were these ideas so appealing to folks like Donald
Rumsfeld? And how much did they impact the planning for Iraq and
Afghanistan, really?
Kaplan: Rumsfeld shared this geo-strategic vision. In the post-Cold War world, where we would have fewer troops and fewer allies, where threats would emerge from remote areas, he saw the weapons and tactics of transformation as the way that the U.S. would remain preeminent and continue to project power over the next several decades. The planning for Afghanistan—which looked like transformation (small units of special-ops forces and Afghan insurgents, combined with smart bombs)—was in fact almost completely improvised and came as much out of the CIA as the Pentagon. But to Rumsfeld’s mind, the quick victory in
Afghanistan redeemed the theory—and confirmed his suspicions that the
Army’s generals were wrong about everything. They’d been wrong that two armored divisions would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban.
Therefore, they were wrong that 300,000 troops would be needed to win in Iraq. So the theory played a huge role in his thinking and planning.
__DR: __The combination of these technologies and these ideas seem to work pretty well in the early Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. So why do you say that they helped "wreck American power?"
Kaplan: Rumsfeld was right, and the generals were wrong, when it came to the battlefield phase of the wars, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We didn’t need two divisions to overthrow the Taliban or 300,000 troops to beat the Iraqi army and topple Saddam Hussein. But Rumsfeld’s—and
Bush’s—mistake was thinking that those wars were over when the tyrants fell. In Afghanistan, the Taliban abandoned Kabul, but they fought on elsewhere. In fact, the most intense battle, Operation Anaconda, took place three months after that—by which time troops and other assets started moving on to Iraq—and, as we now know, they didn’t leave the country after that. In Iraq, blowing Saddam’s lid off Iraq didn’t unleash the geyser of freedom and democracy; it only uncovered, and brought back to life, seething sectarian tensions that had been in place for decades or centuries. The Bush people forgot Clausewitz’s dictum, “War is politics by other means.” That is to say, wars are fought for political objectives, and they’re not won until those objectives are won. To eliminate the Taliban, and to restore order to
Iraq, would take lots of old-fashioned boots on the ground; there was no way around it.
__DR: __You also count missile defense as one of those big, dangerous ideas that's undermined the country. Why?
Kaplan: Well, I don’t know if it’s undermined the country, but it has been a huge waste of money, and it’s encouraged certain presidents—not just Bush—to believe, for a while anyway, that they didn’t have to deal with the tough diplomacy of nuclear deterrence or disarmament; that we’d soon have a “silver bullet” that would circumvent all that, like magic. Bush came into power believing that we hadn’t pursued missile defense because of this strange arms-control theory called MAD—Mutual
Assured Destruction. He said, Let’s get rid of this 30-year-old theory and defend ourselves. What he didn’t realize was that the most outspoken critics of missile defense were not theorists; they were physicists and engineers, many of whom had worked on nuclear-weapons projects, some of whom had worked on ABM projects. And the basis of their criticism was that these systems simply wouldn’t work against an even half-clever foe that tried to get around them. That criticism remains valid today, and no technological leap is going to change that.
__DR: __You write that, for the last 50 years or so, there's been a cycle on missile defense: "the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain." But didn't the recent satellite shoot-down by an anti-missile break that cycle? Didn't it prove that there's at least some value to these systems?
Kaplan: Not really. There have been several carefully planned tests in which an interceptor has shot down an object traveling in space. The satellite shoot-down, in this sense, was no different (except that the satellite was much bigger, a much easier target, than a warhead would be). The shoot-down and various tests show that we might very well be able to shoot down* one* enemy warhead *if we know when it’s being launched, where it’s being launched from, if *we have interceptors within range to kill it in time, and *if *the enemy doesn’t engage in any countermeasures (such as releasing decoys as well as warheads from a ballistic missile). If there’s more than one missile fired, if there are decoys, if it’s fired from, say, a boat close to our shores, then all bets are off. Some argue that missile defense systems might have deterrent value simply because some rogue regime might think the systems work. But it is more likely, I think, that if a bad guy thinks we have an effective missile defense system, he will either fire off more missiles than he might otherwise have fired, to get a better chance of hitting something (and thus do more damage if the MD system ends up not working)—or he’ll look for an easier, cheaper way to do us damage: cruise missiles, depressed-trajectory launches, suitcase bombs, or the kinds of tactics used by the 9/11 terrorists.
__DR: __You also take the Bush administration to task for its belief that free societies -- democracies -- would naturally be friendlier to us, and hostile to terrorists. How come? I think a lot of us find the idea of squaring America's interests with its ideals pretty appealing.
And we don't much like the notion of supporting dictatorships, like
Saudi Arabia.
Kaplan: It is an appealing notion. And there is some evidence that highly developed
democracies tend not to go to war with one another. But there’s also a lot of evidence that emerging democracies are more war-prone than any other kind of regime. Bush and Condi Rice put their faith in the proposition that toppling dictators and holding free elections yield friendly, pro-Western democracies. But look at the results of the
Palestinian elections, which put Hamas in power. The elections in Iraq were little more than an ethnic census; they politicized, and thus hardened, sectarian divisions. Without democratic institutions, democratic processes are in many societies likely to produce governments hostile to us and to freedom as we understand the concept.
DR: 9/11 "changed everything," the cliche goes. But you say that's wrong -- and that "nearly all of America's blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from [this] single grand misconception." Are you saying the first attack on American soil didn't change much? It sure seems like things got scrambled, to me.
Kaplan: Certainly it changed much in our view of the world’s dangers; we suddenly realized we too are vulnerable. But what I mean in challenging this view is that the big picture—the nature of power, warfare, politics among nations, the motivations of human beings—hardly changed at all. How you amass power, the necessity of allies, what’s required to win wars (not just destroy targets)—these are fairly eternal ideas.
The view that 9/11 changed everything allowed many people—and not just
Bush & Co.—to think that they no longer had to follow the lessons of history or to look at the past for guidance on successful approaches to problems. That’s the old world, they would say; the new world is completely different. They thought they could create their own reality, but reality snapped back.
