Win,
Lose, or Draw
U.S.
Special Operations Command Details Dismal U.S. Military Record
by
Nick Turse
Winning: it’s written into the
DNA of the U.S.A. After all, what’s more American than
football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous (if purloined) maxim:
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”?
Americans expect to be number one.
First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the
United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take
that, world
public opinion, and your choice of Germany!) Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even
further, touting America
as “the greatest country that has ever been created.”
Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country
that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning
America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness.
He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual
winning overload. “We're going to win so much,”
he told supporters.
“You're going to get tired of winning. You’re going
to say, ‘Please, Mr. President... don't win so much’…
And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great
again... We're gonna keep winning.’”
As Trump well knows, Americans take
winning very seriously. Look no further than the U.S. gold
medal count at the recent Rio Olympics: 46. The next highest total?
Great Britain’s 27, almost 20 fewer than those of the
country whose upstart rebels bested them in the eighteenth century,
the nation’s ur-victory. The young United States then
beat
back the Brits in the early 1800s, and twice bailed them out in
victorious world wars during the twentieth century.
In the intervening years, the U.S.
built up a gaudy military record -- slaughtering
native tribes,
punishing
Mexico, pummeling
Spain -- but the best was
yet to come. “Our troops are the finest fighting force in
the history of the world,” boasted
President Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union
address. In this he echoed his predecessor, George W. Bush,
who, in May 2001, declared
that “America today has the finest [military] the world has
ever seen.”
In the years between those two moments of high-flown
rhetoric, the United States military fought in nine conflicts,
according to a 2015 briefing produced by U.S. Special Operations
Command (SOCOM), the umbrella organization for America’s most
elite forces including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets. The
record of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world,
according to SOCOM: zero wins, two losses, and seven ties.
This dismal record is catalogued in a
briefing slide produced by SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate
last September and obtained by TomDispatch
via the Freedom of Information Act. “A Century of War and
Gray Zone Challenges” -- a timeline of conflicts ranked as
wins, losses, and ties -- examines the last 100 years of America’s
wars and interventions.
“Gray zone” is an
increasingly popular term of the trade for operations conducted
somewhere on the continuum between
war and peace. “Traditional war is the paradigm,”
the briefing slide asserts. “Gray zone conflict is the
norm.”
While he finds a great deal to fault
in SOCOM’s analysis, retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, a
professor of history and international relations at Boston
University, believes its assessment of post-9/11 conflicts “is
quite accurate.” Although American politicians like
Hillary Clinton regularly insist that the U.S. possesses “the
greatest military” on the planet, they avoid addressing the
question of what the country’s armed interventions have
actually accomplished when it comes to policy goals -- the true
measure of success in war. “We have not shown an ability
to achieve our stated political aims in a conclusive way at an
acceptable cost,” Bacevich says. “That’s
simply a fact.”
“A
Century of War and Gray Zone Challenges” -- A September 2015
briefing slide produced by the Intelligence Directorate of U.S.
Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
CLICK
TO ENLARGE
The Greatest Journeyman
Military in History?
Twelve wins and nine losses. In
baseball, it’s the annual record of a journeyman pitcher like
Bill
Caudill of the Seattle Mariners in 1982, Dave
LaPoint of the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1983, or Norm
Charlton of the Cincinnati Reds in 1990, to mention just three
examples. It’s certainly not the record of an ace.
Likewise, 12 victories and nine losses is a
far-from-dazzling stat when it comes to warfare, especially for a
nation that prides itself on its martial prowess. But
that was the SOCOM Intelligence Directorate’s assessment of the
last century of American war: 12 and 9 with a mind-boggling 43
“ties.”
Among those 64 conflicts, the command counts just five
full-fledged wars in which the U.S. has come up with three wins
(World War I, World War II, and Desert Storm), one loss (Vietnam),
and one tie (Korea). In the gray zone -- what SOCOM calls “the
norm” when it comes to conflict -- the record is far bleaker,
the barest of winning percentages at 9 victories, 8 losses, and 42
draws.
“If you accept the terms of analysis, that things
can be reduced to win, loss, and tie, then this record is not very
good,” Bacevich says. “While there aren’t
many losses -- according to how they code -- there’s a hell of
a lot of ties, which would beg the question of why, based on these
criteria, U.S. policy has seemingly been so ineffective.”
The
assessments of, and in some instances the very inclusion of, numerous
operations, missions, and interventions by SOCOM are dubious.
Bacevich, for example, questions its decision to include
pre-World War II U.S. military missions in China (a draw according to
the command). “I don’t know on what basis one would
say ‘China, 1912 to 1941’ qualifies as a tie,” he
adds, noting on the other hand that a good case could be made for
classifying two of SOCOM’S gray zone “ties” -- in
Haiti and Nicaragua -- during the same era as wins instead of draws
based on the achievement of policy aims alone.
It’s even harder to imagine why,
for example, limited assistance to Chad in its conflict with Libya
and indigenous rebels in 1983 or military assistance in evacuating
U.S. personnel from Albania in 1997 should make the list.
Meanwhile, America’s so-called longest
war, in Afghanistan, inexplicably ends in 2014 on SOCOM’S
timeline. (That was, of course, the year that the Obama
administration formally ended the “combat
mission” in that country, but it would assuredly be news to
the 8,400
troops, including special
operators, still conducting
missions there today.) Beyond that, for reasons
unexplained, SOCOM doesn’t even classify Afghanistan as a
“war.” Instead, it’s considered one of 59
gray-zone challenges, on a par with the 1948-1949 Berlin Airlift or
small-scale deployments to the restive Congo in the 1960s. No
less bizarre, the command categorizes America’s 2003-2011
occupation of Iraq in a similar fashion. “It deserves to
be in the same category as Korea and Vietnam,” says Bacevich,
the author of America's
War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.
Killing People and Breaking
Things
Can the post-9/11 U.S. military simultaneously be the
finest fighting force in history and unable to win wars or
quasi-wars? It may depend on our understanding of what exactly
the Department of Defense and its military services are meant to do.
While the 1789 act that established
its precursor, the Department of War, is sparse on details about its
raison d'être,
the very name suggests its purpose -- presumably preparing for,
fighting, and winning wars. The 1947
legislation creating its successor, the “National Military
Establishment” was similarly light on specifics concerning the
ultimate aims of the organization, as were the amendments
of 1949 that recast it as the Department
of Defense (DoD).
During a Republican primary debate
earlier this year, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee offered his
own definition. He asserted
that the “purpose of the military is to kill people and break
things.” Some in the armed forces took umbrage
at that, though the military has, in fact, done both to great effect
in a great
many places
for a very long
time. For its part, the DoD sees its purpose quite
differently: “The mission of the Department of Defense is
to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the
security of our country.”
If, in SOCOM’s accounting, the U.S. has engaged in
relatively few actual wars, don’t credit “deterrence.”
Instead, the command has done its best to simply redefine war out of
existence, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, in favor of those “gray
zone challenges.” If one accepts that quasi-wars are
actually war, then the Defense Department has done little to deter
conflict. The United States has, in fact, been involved in some
kind of military action -- by SOCOM’s definition -- in every
year since 1980.
Beyond its single sentence mission
statement, a DoD
directive delineating the “functions of the Department of
Defense and its major components” provides slightly more
details. The DoD, it states, “shall maintain and use
armed forces to:
a. Support and defend
the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign
and domestic.
b. Ensure, by timely and effective military action,
the security of the United States, its possessions, and areas vital
to its interest.
c. Uphold and advance the national policies and
interests of the United States.”
Since the Department of Defense came into existence, the
U.S. has -- as the SOCOM briefing slide notes -- carried out
deployments, interventions, and other undertakings in Lebanon (1958),
Congo (1964 and 1967), the Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia
(1975), Iran (1980), El Salvador (1980-1992), Grenada (1983), Chad
(1983), Libya (1986), the Persian Gulf (1987-1988), Honduras (1988),
Panama (1989), Somalia (1992-1995), Haiti (1994-1995), and Albania
(1997), among other countries.
You may have no memory of some (perhaps many) of these
interventions, no less a sense of why they occurred or their results
-- and that might be the most salient take-away from SOCOM’s
list. So many of these conflicts have, by now, disappeared into
the gray zone of American memory.
Were these operations targeting enemies which actually
posed a threat to the U.S. Constitution? Did ceaseless
operations across the globe actually ensure the safety and security
of the United States? Did they truly advance U.S. policy
interests and if so, how?
From the above list, according to SOCOM, only El
Salvador, Grenada, Libya, and Panama were “wins,” but
what, exactly, did America win? Did any of these quasi-wars
fully meet the Defense Department’s own criteria? What
about the Korean War (tie), the Bay of Pigs (loss), the Vietnam War
(loss), or the not-so-secret “secret war” in Laos
(loss)? And have any of SOCOM’s eight losses or ties in
the post-9/11 era accomplished the Defense Department’s stated
mission?
“I have killed people and broken
things in war, but, as a military officer, that was never the end.
There was a purpose, a reason, a goal,” wrote
Major Matt Cavanaugh, a U.S. Army strategist, in
response to Huckabee’s comment. He then drew attention to
the fact that “Joint
Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States”
asserts that “military power is integrated with other
instruments of national power to advance and defend U.S. values,
interests, and objectives.”
Did the wars in Vietnam or Laos defend those same
values? What about the war waged in Iraq by the “finest
fighting force” in world history?
In March 2003, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld laid out U.S aims for that conflict. “Our
goal is to defend the American people, and to eliminate Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people,”
he said,
before offering even more specific objectives, such as having U.S.
troops “search for, capture, [and] drive out terrorists who
have found safe harbor in Iraq.” Of course, the invasion
and occupation of Iraq would turn that country into a terrorist
magnet, leading to the ultimate
safe harbor; a terror caliphate extending over swaths of that
country and neighboring Syria. The elimination of Iraq's
weapons
of mass destruction would prove impossible
for obvious
reasons. The “liberation” of its people would
lead to the deaths of hundreds
of thousands; the forced displacement
of millions;
and a country divided along sectarian lines, where up to 50%
of its 33 million inhabitants may suffer from the effects of trauma
brought on by the last few decades of war. And what about the
defense of the American people? They certainly don’t feel
defended. According to recent polling, more Americans fear
terrorism today than just after 9/11. And the particular
threat Americans fear most? The terror
groupborn
and bred
in America’s Iraqi prison
camps: ISIS.
This record seems to matter little to the presidential
candidate who, as a senator, voted for the invasion of Iraq.
Regarding that war and other military missions, Hillary Clinton, as
Bacevich notes, continues to avoid asking the most obvious question:
“Is the use of the American military conclusively, and at
reasonable costs, achieving our political objectives?”
Trump’s perspective seems to
better fit SOCOM’s assessment when it comes to America’s
warfighting prowess in these years. “We don't win.
We can't beat ISIS. Can you imagine General Douglas MacArthur
or General Patton? Can [you] imagine they are spinning in their
grave right now when they see the way we fight,” he recently
told
FOX News’s Bill O’Reilly, invoking the names of those
military luminaries who both served in a “draw” in Mexico
in the 1910s and U.S. victories in World Wars I and II, and in the
case of MacArthur a stalemate in Korea as well.
Neither the Clinton nor Trump
campaigns responded to TomDispatch’s
requests for comment. SOCOM similarly failed to respond before
publication to questions about the conclusions to be drawn from its
timeline, but its figures alone -- especially regarding post-9/11
conflicts -- speak volumes.
“In order to evaluate our recent military history
and the gap between the rhetoric and the results,” says Andrew
Bacevich, “the angle of analysis must be one that acknowledges
our capacity to break things and kill people, indeed that
acknowledges that U.S. forces have performed brilliantly at breaking
things and killing people, whether it be breaking a building -- by
putting a precision missile through the window -- or breaking
countries by invading them and producing chaos as a consequence.”
SOCOM’s briefing slide seems to recognize this
fact. The U.S. has carried out a century of conflict, killing
people from Nicaragua and Haiti to Germany and Japan; battering
countries from the Koreas and Vietnams to Iraq and Afghanistan;
fighting on a constant basis since 1980. All that death and
devastation, however, led to few victories. Worse yet for the
armed forces, the win-loss record of this highly professionalized,
technologically sophisticated, and exceptionally well-funded military
has, since assuming the mantle of the finest fighting force in the
history of the world, plummeted precipitously, as SOCOM’s
Intelligence Directorate points out.
An American century of carnage and combat has yielded
many lessons learned, but not, it seems, the most important one when
it comes to military conflict. “We can kill people, we
can break things,” Bacevich observes, “but we don’t
accomplish our political goals.”
Nick Turse is the managing editor
of TomDispatch,
a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the
Intercept.
His book Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S.
Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa
recently received an American
Book Award. His latest book is Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South
Sudan. His website is
NickTurse.com.
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Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
Thanks to TomDispatch.com, where this article originally
appeared - without the Groucho comment.
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