Coercion, Survival, and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States
Colonel Phil Haun, U.S. Air Force. Stanford University Press, 2015. 271 pp. Index. Notes. Append. $65.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Jason Chiodi, U.S. Navy
In regards to Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” the Navy and Marine Corps have been the United States’ “stick” for over 150 years, since the days of “gunboat diplomacy.” In more recent times, air power and cruise missiles have been added to the quiver and have often been the first option for policymakers. While the use of strategic air power has been examined several times exhaustively on a grander scale in documents such as the post–World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (1945), the Gulf War Air Power Survey (1993) and books such as Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell University Press, 1996), less attention has been paid to coercion as a national-security strategy. Possibly because of the perception of past successes, coercion’s efficacy is rarely seriously questioned. Thus it might come as a surprise to many readers that when systematically examined, it turns out it is not really as successful a strategy as one might think—particularly in the asymmetric context.
U.S. Air Force Colonel Phil Haun, now a professor of aerospace studies and commander of the Air Force ROTC detachment at Yale University, first began to question how well coercion worked after spending harrowing hours dodging Serbian surface-to-air missiles in the cockpit of his A-10 Thunderbolt II as part of the U.S. attempt to pressure Slobodan Milosevic to give up Serbia’s claims to Kosovo in 1999. Later, as a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began to seriously examine the effectiveness of coercion as a foreign-policy strategy. Coercion, Survival, and War represents the fruit of his 16-year odyssey.
The book examines 30 post–World War II conflicts in which the United States opposed a weaker power (asymmetric conflicts). Haun finds that in 23 of them, U.S. decision makers chose coercive strategies over other alternatives. Most disturbingly, he finds that in 12 of those 23 cases, coercion failed, meaning that the United States either resorted to the use of military force or conceded its original foreign-policy goal. Seeking to understand why coercion fails—and even more important, why U.S. decision makers continue to choose it despite it failing frequently—posits a complex theoretical model that attempts to takes into account dozens of different factors. In the latter part of the book, Haun applies this model to three in-depth case studies: the U.S. conflicts with Iraq, Serbia, and Libya.
This book will be of great interest to serious students of national-security strategy, as it discusses an aspect of security studies that has not been sufficiently examined. Given that the book is a reformulation of Haun’s doctoral dissertation, it contains a heavy dose of political-science theory in the first three chapters, but the three in-depth case study vignettes concerning the United States’ lengthy conflicts with Iraq, Serbia, and Libya (Chapters 4–6) are fascinating and would be of great interest to any reader. Haun’s careful documentation and analysis reveal important lessons about these conflicts. In addition to the highly useful vignettes, the most important offering Haun has for policymakers are the limitations of what can reasonably be achieved as a result of a coercive strategy (i.e., not regime change or anything that would threaten the stability of a regime).
The conclusions of Coercion, Survival, and War bear important implications for U.S. leaders. Namely, that while American decision makers will almost certainly continue to elect a coercive strategy as an alternative to or as a prelude to brute force, they should understand that in an asymmetric context, this strategy will likely fail approximately half the time. Using Haun’s conclusions, the United States must consider tailoring its policy demands of weak powers and most importantly, be transparent to its own people about the likely success of coercive strategies. In the current context of the post–Arab Spring Middle East, U.S. policy experts would be well served to take these implications to heart.
Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima
Alexander Rose. New York: Random House, 2015. 480 pp. Maps. Biblio. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Colonel John C. McKay, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Combat, in contrast to conflict or war, is known only through actual participation. Regardless of the level and sophistication of preparation, initiation and personal involvement defies all previously lived experience. John Keegan’s The Face of Battle is commonly accepted as the modern lodestar of this sort of history. Keegan deals predominantly with English soldiers’ experiences at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Alexander Rose’s Men at War has done something similar, depicting American soldiers at the battles of Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima—battles he calls “iconic.” Both Keegan and Rose forthrightly state that they never served in uniform, much less saw combat.
The latter certainly does not preclude either author from speculating authoritatively on what it’s like to be in battle. Rose, a historian and the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (Bantam, 2006), plausibly accomplishes this—to a point. He has drawn on a trove of primary sources and writes clearly and concisely. But can a reader divine the inherent essence of combat from this book, or merely a synopsis of what it might be like? Herein lies the dilemma of such works: the challenge to the noncombatant writer to convincingly interpret the experience of combat absent personal exposure. Not that this detracts from the usefulness of the genre—Stephen Crane never saw active service, yet The Red Badge of Courage effectively renders the interplay of emotional and psychological stress of man and combat.
Moreover, there is a dearth of authors with combat experience who can meaningfully and intellectually give personal verisimilitude to the subject. Thus works such as Keegan’s and Rose’s, along with another excellent work of the sort such as Denis Winter’s Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (Allen Lane, 1978), have built-in limitations. Rose concedes as much, saying, “I remain stumped.” The serious student of combat is well served in reading Ambrose Bierce (whom Rose appropriately cites twice), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Guy Chapman, Paul Fussell, and Leo Tolstoy’s description of the battle of Borodino in War and Peace—admittedly a novel, but one that vividly describes the abject messiness of war. All five authors had been combatants. Ultimately the answer to the age-old question of what the engaged combatant feels and thinks remains obtuse except in the experience and minds of those who have borne witness.
Nevertheless, Men of War is purposeful and warrants consideration. Rose’s extensive research bears merit. The testimonials of opposing forces from Bunker Hill and Gettysburg are in English and rightfully cited. Primary Japanese testimonials from Iwo Jima—the few available—are cited from post-war translations. Transcribing from extensive sources, Rose does well in describing the inherent violence, chaos, deprivations, fear, “accident, initiative, chance, and other such intangibles as morale, background, culture, ideology, and experience” as well as giving examples of the ever-present gallows humor encountered in combat. Nor does he skimp on describing the macabre grotesqueries of combat. He implicitly conveys characteristics that are unique to American soldiers, warranted, as all combatants exhibit explicit characteristics of their respective societies. However, suggesting a lack of racial hatred on the part of U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima accords more with political correctness than reality. Rose’s claim that “Gettysburg was neither extraordinary nor even that ‘important’ in the grand scheme of the Civil War (the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, for instance, was of far greater import)” is a bit of a stretch. The fall of Vicksburg notwithstanding, a Confederate victory at Gettysburg would have had extraordinary and important consequences for the Union cause.
The experience of combat is uniquely individual, and Men of War can only approach it vicariously. It does not broach—much less allow for—original and critical insight into human sensitivities and sensibilities in combat, seemingly all-prevalent and propagandized relentlessly, but infrequently depicted with accuracy.
Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy?
Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray, eds. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 303 pp. Index. Notes. Illus. $54.95.
By Lieutenant John A. Gans Jr., U.S. Navy
Questions dominate Mission Creep, one of which is in the title. Many of the edited volume’s contributors assess and analyze the slow yet steady increase in the Defense Department’s role in the nation’s foreign policy. But it is a second, more important question that asks readers to think deeply about the nature and practice of American power: Does it matter?
Co-editor Gordon Adams, a professor at American University and a former defense budget official, coauthors one chapter and writes another two solo. Clearly the book’s spiritual leader, he believes the U.S. military has been tasked with a larger role (though his calling this both “militarization” and “mission creep” can confuse the casual reader). Aside from that, he takes great care: This is not a righteous warning about a potential military coup d’état, but a concerned inquiry into whether the increased weight of “military perspectives and priorities” will skew policymakers’ worldviews and national security policy itself.
As Adams and his co-editor, Shoon Murray, make clear, militarization is not new, nor has it escaped public examination. They attempt to provide the first “empirical study” of this trend and its impact. The resulting book is divided into three parts. The first aims to explain some of the perceived causes of militarization. Adams, in one of the solo chapters he wrote, suspects the superior unity of military organizations. Former State Department and White House official James Dobbins blames policymaker errors that first underestimated the military power necessary to win and stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, and then over-corrected by giving the military too many of what should have been civilian tasks. Derek Reveron, a professor at the Naval War College and a Navy Reserve officer, is less concerned than the volume’s editors, but he still argues that the military has been increasingly civilianized by its dedication to global cooperation instead of warfighting. And Charles Cushman, a leading scholar on Congress’ role in foreign policy, explains the congressional motives for favoring the military over civilian organizations.
The volume’s second part looks at a rag-tag collection of metrics to demonstrate increased militarization. Consultants and scholars Connie Veillette and G. William Anderson highlight the DOD’s increased role in development, particularly the role the military played in post-war Iraq. The Congressional Research Service’s Nina Serafino reviews the DOD’s increasing influence in security assistance programs, traditionally the purview of the State Department. Brian Carlson, a former member of the Foreign Service, documents the bureaucratic competition to be America’s voice between the State Department’s public diplomacy programs and the DOD’s strategic communications. Murray and former U.S. ambassador Anthony Quainton measure the increased diplomatic role of combatant commanders, especially compared to those of ambassadors. Scholar Sharon Weiner reviews how the media profile of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has expanded dramatically in recent decades. And scholar Jennifer Kibbe chronicles the expansion of the military’s special operations efforts, whose covert-nature limits civilian oversight.
In the third section, Edward Marks, a former senior Foreign Service officer, and Adams consider the implications of militarization. Another way of looking at any increase in the military’s role is to focus on the decrease in the civilian side of the nation’s foreign policy toolkit, driven in part by the “long-term underinvestment” in the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marks regrets State’s decline and argues it must be given a more substantial leadership role in Washington.
In the volume’s last essay, Adams asks whether any of this matters. He believes it might and predicts increased policy failure ineffectiveness and international “blowback.” A budget expert, of course, believes budget is destiny. But while America’s national security budget—even as bottomless as it has seemed—is zero-sum, its tool kit is not. In the hands of a master, an underfunded State Department can increase America’s political power regardless of the DOD’s budget. And that might be why, more than cutting the budget of the DOD, the book’s modest reform proposals aim to strengthen the State Department and other civilian agencies.
The questions at the center of Mission Creep—Is American foreign policy becoming militarized? Does it matter?—are what make this volume worthwhile. Not because they are answered conclusively, but for the manner with which they are discussed: free of judgment. These are the questions that voters, policymakers, and military officials should be asking. And because of their unbiased and research-driven approach, the contributors to Mission Creep give readers the capacity to not just ask these questions, but answer them for themselves.
Lieutenant Gans has a PhD in international relations and strategic studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He teaches at Johns Hopkins on American national security and the politics and process of U.S. foreign policy.