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For the employment of military forces in our nation’s interest, an informal contract exists between the civilian authorities who provide political and strategic direction to the forces to be employed, and the professional military establishment that helps its civilian masters decide what is to be done, and then undertakes the further strategic direction of those forces and carries out their operational and tactical direction.
In 1992 and 1993—in the Balkans, Somalia, and Haiti— both the civilian and the military components of America’s political/military establishment bungled their parts in that informal contract. This happened for two reasons. First, the United States was in a presidential campaign, the content of which distorted objective decision making—and the outcome of which brought into authority an inexperienced and naive team for political/strategic direction. The second ingredient for failure was a military establishment that either lacked insight or, having it, evidently sought to accommodate its civilian masters and accordingly failed to stand its ground.
Military insight at the seat of government has suffered from an over-implementation of the 1986 Goldwater- Nichols Act, which gave great responsibility and commensurate great authority over the employment of forces to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders in chief (CinCs) of the several regional combatant commands—and diminished substantially the roles of the chiefs of the armed services in force employment.
Before Goldwater-Nichols the five members of the JCS met regularly twice a week, with an agenda—more often when crises arose. Their three-star “operations deputies” routinely met three times a week. Through the summer of 1993 such meetings continued to be “scheduled,” but were often cancelled. Important actions on matters like Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti were dealt with by the Joint Staffs Director of Operations directly with the JCS Chairman too often without substantive contributions from the service chiefs or their operations deputies.
When in December 1989 JCS Chairman Colin Powell was considering the plan of the CinC, U.S. Southern Command, for Operation Just Cause in Panama, he gathered the entire JCS in his quarters at Fort Myer to review the plan in detail; each member had his opportunity for input. In contrast, as General Powell considered the plan of the CinC, U.S. Central Command, for the humanitarian relief operation in Somalia, he called no such meeting. Operation Restore Hope was the product of the Joint Staff’s Director of Operations (whose boss was General Powell), the Central Command CinC, and the joint task force commander in the field—all general officers of the U.S. Marine Corps. Neither the respective service chiefs nor their operations deputies made formal input.
The situation in Somalia called for a plan resembling
that of 1989’s Just Cause—namely the swift, simultaneous, and overwhelming application of multidimensional force that would go directly and decisively to the enemy’s center of gravity, defined as the main source of his power. In Somalia that center of gravity was the weapons in the hands of the clan and sub-clan leaders. Stunning these leaders with multiple entries, a proper scheme would have placed an airborne Ranger regiment on the ground at Kismayu at the same time the Marines went ashore in Mogadishu. With a thorough intelligence survey beforehand, a consummate intelligence and special operations effort in execution, and swift maneuver of all forces, the joint task force commander would have kept the clans off balance while going for their weaponry and taking away their ability to interfere with famine relief.
But because fighting, hence casualties, would result, presidential guidance would not permit the troops to go seriously after the clans’ weaponry. The joint task force’s limited objective—relieve the famine—and its deliberate entry and measured sequential execution once ashore met the overriding imperative: no casualties.
For Somalia’s Phase I that was the wrong plan. The truth is that any commitment to possible fighting can bring casualties, but that well-trained troops skillfully employed with precision, speed, and mass suffer least and that great results can come with small losses. Commanders are as sensitive as anyone to losses in battle, but the good ones know that tiptoeing about the battlefield to avoid casualties is an almost certain recipe both for incurring them and for failing in the mission.
President Bush was perhaps disingenuous when in December 1992 he said that the Somalia objectives were “to open the supply routes, to get the food moving, and to prepare the way for a United Nations peacekeeping force to keep it moving” (emphasis added). Peacekeeping (as in Cyprus) calls for lightly armed troops, which many U.N. members can provide. Failing to go after the clans’ weaponry virtually ensured that Phase II would be peace enforcing, which calls for the deployment of heavier forces. And, as in the Gulf War and later operations in Iraq, for effectiveness and minimum casualties the U.N. must rely on the United States for the nucleus and basic direction of peace enforcing forces.
But the new U.S. policy team preferred that the United Nations direct multinational operations in which U.S- troops were involved. In March’s U.N. Security Council resolution, it placed the U.N. Secretary General in charge of Somalia’s Phase II, and defined that phase’s objectives as “the consolidation, expansion, and maintenance of a secure environment throughout Somalia... [and] political reconciliation through broad participation by all sectors of Somali society.” But, in a scene ridden with heavily armed clans, one does not create a “secure environment” without using peace-enforcing force.
While it can be argued that a U.S. commitment to nation-building in Somalia was ill-advised and would ultimately lose public support, by January it should have been evident that such an operation would be peace enforcing-
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that the multinational force should effectively be under U.S. control; and that a U.N. resolution for Phase II should read like those of the Gulf War, allowing the United States to run the show and putting the Secretary General an the sidelines because he is unsuited for an operation of that scale.
It would have been difficult last January for the two ad-
inistrations to agree that Phase II would be peace en- orcing and therefore must be under U.S. direction. But a candid assessment required that the JCS Chairman and his service chief colleagues so inform both Presidents in no uncertain terms, letting the chips fall where they may.
Unfortunately, the incoming President had little knowledge and less experience in operational military matters. His first initiative on the military scene—and his first encounter with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a group—had to do with a social issue, homosexuals in the military. After General Powell in soldierly fashion assured the President that the U.S. military, after making its own recommendations, was by tradition committed to doing what it was ordered to do on that issue he may have been reluctant to challenge another idea of the new President and his people—that placing American forces under U.N. control was the wave of the future.
When Phase I’s 28,000-man U.S. joint task force—re- orting to General Joseph P. Hoar in Florida—closed down n May 1993, a U.N. force under Turkish Lieutenant Gen- ral Cevic Bir, with U.S. Army Major General Thomas Montgomery his deputy, took over. Bir’s direction, which with the United States in charge should have continued under General Hoar, would be from Secretary General Boutros-Ghali in New York and his on-scene representative, retired U.S. Navy Admiral Jonathan Howe. Bir could call on a small U.S. quick-reaction combat force, but only Montgomery, who was also a subordinate of General Hoar in the U.S. chain of command, could order that force into action.
Compounding the command-and-control problem, when the United States later committed Ranger and special aviation units to Somalia for use in capturing Mohamed Far- rah Aidid, the direction of those forces was the task of an on-scene major general other than Montgomery; this general reported directly to the CinC, Special Operations Command, also in Tampa, creating a condition in which two U.S. CinCs were responsible for operations in Somalia, in addition to General Bir’s U.N. force. With this command lash-up, a major mishap was inevitable. On 3 October, 18 U.S. soldiers lost their lives. The President then decided to remove all American forces in less than six months.
As the Balkan crisis deepened in 1991 and 1992, the essential missing element was a judgment by the President of the United States that found unacceptable both the mostly Serb use of force to change borders in the region and the Serb-led inflaming of ancient hatreds, destruction of an existing multicultural society, and pursuit of “ethnic cleansing.” Also essential, following that judgment, would have been the President’s insistence, presidential campaign or not, that America’s NATO allies join the United States in using force to stop such criminal behavior. The President would propose that the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEur is an American) directly command the
effort responsive to the North Atlantic Council, acting in furtherance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
With such an insight, will, and approach, the President would instruct his military to prepare a plan that called for, at most, a very small U.S. force on the ground. The resulting plan’s objectives would be to unseat the Serb leader Milosovic from power, to deny Serbian materiel support to Karadzic, the Serb leader in Bosnia, to make Karadzic’s militia something the similarly armed Bosnian and Croat militias could handle, and in due time to bring about a condition in which a U.N. peacekeeping force could monitor a negotiated truce.
The plan would identify the Serb center of gravity, namely Milosovic’s hold on his people and army. The line of action would include a massive psyops effort aimed at the Serbian people and army, breaking Milosovic’s monopoly on information and making clear NATO’s willingness to use force. The major force to be used would be precision air attack on Milosovic’s air, his command and control, the bridges across the Drina, and the like. Such minimum NATO forces as were required on the ground would augment the U.N. forces already there, which would come under SACEur’s direction.
None of this was done. The military discussion in Washington focused unduly on the futility and danger of placing thousands of U.S. ground forces in the Balkans, an unnecessary prospect. The result was first inaction, then indecisiveness, then lack of credibility in the use of force—and the horrors continue.
In Haiti’s situation the Clinton team failed to appreciate that nation’s internal dynamics. Haiti’s center of gravity is the Haitian Army, which is simply a few thousand thugs armed with light weapons through which a wealthy elite exploits that country’s citizenry. A realistic review of the military options would show that the situation called for skillfully employed armed force of a special kind targeted on the specific center of gravity of that “army,” followed by a true program of nation building. The chosen plan, which was pursued against the forthright advice of responsible military professionals, was that an unarmed contingent of “engineers” and “instructors” would enter that country with the Haitian army’s permission. It was an ultimately pathetic scheme.
Sobering lessons can be drawn from all this . . .
> It is hard for military professionals to deal with amateurish political direction that does not understand the true situation or appreciate the respective parties’ roles in the informal contract.
> The military side of the informal contract calls for arriving at correct insights, then telling it like it is.
> With Goldwater-Nichols or anything else, there is no way to legislate insightful military judgments.
> Senior officers must not acquiesce in a vital judgment that they profoundly do not believe in.
> The law does not need change, but the way it is implemented does. One of the first moves of the new Chairman of the JCS, General John Shalikashvili, should be to bring the service chiefs and their operations deputies back into key matters of operational planning.
General Cushman’s “Somalia. Phase II . . . Phase III?” appeared in the November 1993 Proceedings.
Proceedings/January 1994