Dirty Wars: A Review, Part 3: Lawfare, or “Operational Preparation of the Battlespace”

Law exacerbates and enables war. For the most part it provides a code or system for legitimizing state violence. At least, this is the case with US Special Forces operating around the globe. It’s partly misleading to characterize their activities as “illegal”. For the most part they operate within an opaque set of rules and regulations. That’s why an overly legalistic critique of the war on terror can miss the point. Drone wars, assassinations, night raids, extraordinary rendition…whatever the “dark side” activity you chose, at one time it was on the books (and still probably is). Opaque, shadowy, and vague…no doubt. But somewhere in the halls of Congress there is a presidential finding or military executive order that authorized it. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s legal in an international context—but domestically the U.S. war machine was nearly always “lawyered up”.

Let’s start with the difference between covert action and clandestine operations. They’re not the same.

Covert action is a doctrinal and legal term that refers to an activity whose sponsorship is secret and deniable. According to Title 50 of the US Code, a covert action is: “An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly”. It requires a presidential finding and for the White House to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This must occur before the proposed activity, unless there are extraordinary circumstances. This law came into force to prevent “Bay of Pigs” or “Iran-Contra”-type scandals.

 Clandestine operations are different because the sponsor is not concealed—only the integrity of the mission is. Crucially, they do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the clandestine operation to Congress. This is because such operations are defined as “Traditional Military Activities” and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight controls.  As Scahill explains, “Under US law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the US role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged”(p.92).

The consequence of this legal distinction is enormous. Rumsfeld and Cheney were at war against the planet earth—the world was a battlefield, and therefore hostilities were anticipated “everywhere”, necessitating dozens if not hundreds of potential “Traditional Military Activities”.

More specifically, these types of clandestine operations are known as Advance Force Operations (AFOs), which are “military operations conducted by forces which precede the main elements into the area of operations to prepare for follow-on operations”. Unlike CIA operations, such as drone strikes in Pakistan, AFOs can be carried out with minimal external oversight for a long period of time.

Then there’s the distinction between Title 50 (CIA) and Title 10 (military) authorities. Under Rumsfeld and President Bush, the National Command Authority (NCA) frequently used Title 50 authorities for organizations other than the CIA by delegating military assets to CIA operations, as with JSOC, in order to get around international law or to supersede Congress’ ability to declare war. This is known as “sheep dipping”. But it still meant the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed.  As already explained, Title 10 operations conducted in “Preparing the Battlespace” had even fewer congressional reporting requirements. With the 2001 Congressional AUMF (authorizing the President to use military force against al-Qaeda and its affiliates) in hand, the NCA could direct military operations anywhere in the world without having to classify them as covert actions.

Legalizing JSOC

Key documents for the staging of a borderless battlespace:

• 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (US Congress)]
• 2004 Al Qaeda Network Execute Order (Donald Rumsfeld)
• 2009 Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order (David Patreaus)

Cheney and Rumsfeld were key architects in lawyering up the war on terror. They exploited a legal grey area as part of their desire to create an uncountable force capable of killing and capturing within minutes and hours, rather than days and weeks. They wanted Special Ops to start hitting globally, and parsed out JSOC from the military’s chain of command, the Special Operations Command. Rumsfeld signed an executive order on September 16, 2003 that established JSOC as the principal counter-terrorist force of the U.S., and this document contained a preauthorized list of 15 countries where counter-terrorist action might be taken. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a newly established, freestanding command, would be the lead combatant commander. Rumsfeld pushed Bush to add language into National Security Presidential Directive-38 (classified in 2004) that would codify SOCOM’s global role in finding, fixing, and finishing off terrorist suspects across the globe, far away from any declared battlefield.

Also in 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a secret order that would streamline JSOC’s ability to conduct operations and hit targets outside of the stated battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, known as the Al Qaeda Network Execute Order, or AQN ExOrd. This allowed for JSOC operations anywhere in the world. It reportedly named 15-20 countries where al-Qaeda operatives were known to be operating. The CIA put up some resistance, seeing it as another encroachment on its mandate as the lead agency tracking al Qaeda after 9/11. Special Ops were also inserted into US embassies under the cover of Military Liaison Elements (MLE), which drew the ire of the beleaguered State Department. Furthermore, Stephen Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, issued new guidelines that asserted the right of Special Ops forces to conduct clandestine HUMINT operations before alerting Congress. As Scahill writes, “Combined with the Copper Green program, this effectively meant that JSOC was free to act as a spy agency and a kill/capture force rolled into one” (p.171). At the end of 2004, Donald Rumsfeld penned a classified memo to his top advisors (including Cambone and Douglas Feith). He wrote that he was concerned the phrase “preparation of the battlespace” may be outdated. Today, Rumsfeld declared, “the entire world is the battlespace”.

Under the Obama administration, the 2009 ExOrd signed by David Patreaus was a continuation of the 2004 AQN ExOrd. This new order further emboldened JSOC, and allowed them to operate in denied areas without bureaucratic and legal obstacles. In September, Patreaus signed a seven-page secret order authorizing small teams of Special Operations Forces to conduct clandestine operations off the stated battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The directive was known as a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force (JUWTF) Execute Order – and “served as a permission slip of sorts for US military Special operations teams to conduct clandestine actions without the president’s direct approval for each operation” (p. 282). As Scahill adds “Patreaus 2009 ‘ExOrd’ continued and solidified the Bush-era justification for expanding covert wars under President Obama” (p. 2820.

The 2009 ExOrd made it clear that the US military, not just the CIA, was able to conduct such secret operations. It also authorized intelligence gathering by American troops, foreign business people, academics, and a host of others. It was a huge widening of the net. And it was perfectly legal.

Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare – published

It’s great to see that a paper I started close to two years ago in August 2011 has finally been published online in the journal Geopolitics.

Since I first wrote that paper (a little too hastily!) after obtaining my PhD and starting at Glasgow as a postdoc, much of my own thinking and analysis has shifted somewhat, particularly when it comes to  understanding the historical roots of unmanned aircraft and the enduring legacies of imperialism. The analysis also leans quite heavily on the importance of the CIA to the drone wars, as JSOC wasn’t on my radar back then in the same way it is now.

Still, I consider it the publication I’m most proud of – particularly as it marked a shift in my own thinking and direction as an academic.

Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the CIA’s drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa’ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House’s presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland.

Available online here, with a pre-corrected version without figures here.

Dirty Wars: A Review, Part 2: The Rise of JSOC

Dirty Wars: A Review, Part 2: The Rise of JSOC

Scahill’s book is first and foremost a book about the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Critics of America’s dirty wars usually focus on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And there’s lots of sound reasons to do this: the drone wars in Pakistan’s tribal areas are run by the Counterterrorism Center at the Agency, and executed by the Special Activities Division (SAD). But in focusing on the CIA, the far more geographically expansive program run by the U.S. military’s secretive JSOC is skipped over.

As covered in my previous entry, at the start of the Bush presidency in 2001, a “turf war” between the CIA and the military broke out over who would control the dark side of the war on terror. On 9/11, the CIA’s in-house paramilitary capabilities were limited to around six to seven hundred covert operatives. So the Agency relied heavily on “sheep dipping” Special Forces, which numbered more than 10,000 for special missions. “Rumsfeld saw the lending of US Special Ops Forces to the CIA as creating a problematic, obstructionist middle man whose operations could be lawyered to death. He wanted America’s premier direct-action forces to be unrestrained and unaccountable to anyone except him, Cheney, and the President” (p.59).

And so, neoconservatives Rumsfeld and Cheney were determined to make the U.S. military more like the CIA—a paramilitary force capable of running its own spying operations and lethal raids. In JSOC, they found a highly specialized unit that would, within a matter of years, become the President’s “secret army”. As Scahill writes, “Rumsfeld believed that JSOC had been underutilized, and he intended to transform it from the tip of the spear of a new global killing campaign to the spear itself” (p.55). And under Rumsfeld, JSOC would be yanked out of the military chain of command and report to just a handful of executives in Bush’s cabinet. Often this created friction with Secretary of State Colin Powell and more established military leaders.

For a long time JSOC’s very existence was a closely guarded secret. The unit was formed in 1980s as response to the failed mission to rescue 53 American hostages held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, codenamed Operation Eagle Claw. After the failure, the White House and Pentagon stated they needed an “all-star” operations team that would have full-spectrum capabilities. Thus in JSOC was secretly created, within the confines of its parent organization the Special Operations Command. JSOC was unique because it reported directly to the President and circumvented virtually all other entities in military and government, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The organization was composed of Special Mission Units (SMUs) that would train for F³ missions (Find, Fix, Finish). JSOC would eventually command the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment and SEAL Team 6, which was later renamed the Naval Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU (this SMU would kill Osama bin Laden in 2011). In the early days of its existence its primary mission was to “train” other friendly special forces around the world. Yet at times the lines between combat and training were frequently blurred, particularly in the dirty wars of Latin America in the 1980s. Indeed, following the Iran-Contra scandal, the White House deployed Special Operations Forces sparingly. Rumsfeld wanted to change that of course, and aimed to take covert operations from the CIA and consolidate control for himself.

At the start of the George W. Bush administration, Special Forces already worked alongside the famed signals intelligence operation, the Intelligence Support Activity, also known as the “Activity” or “Gray Fox”. But Rumsfeld wanted Special Forces to have their own internal HUMINT (human intelligence) capabilities like the CIA. And so in April 2002, “Project Icon” was launched, and clandestine spying teams were deployed alongside Special Forces to “prepare the environment” in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. This program would become known as the Strategic Support Branch, or SSB, which would later pair up with the Activity in July 2002 when Bush signed it over to Special Operations Command by executive order. This gave Rumsfeld authority over a huge proportion of U.S. intelligence assets, and giving Special Forces a fully-fledged HUMINT capability. Officially, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency ran the SSB, but the person with the real power was neoconservative Stephen Cambone, an “ideologue” recruited by Rumsfeld. He would become a key player in organizing special operations and the globalizing killing machine. In 2003, Rumsfeld created a new position for Cambone, the “undersecretary of defense for intelligence”. It gave Cambone unprecedented authority as the DIA and NSA now had to report to him. Indeed, 85% of the nation’s intelligence budget would be under his control.

In mid-2002, Rumsfeld reorganized Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and JSOC. The SMUs that populated JSOC would no longer need to coordinate with conventional command authorities. And SOCOM was transformed from delivering soldiers and materials to regional commanders across the globe, to being an autonomous organization headquartered in Tampa, Florida. “Rumsfeld and Cheney were beginning to build up the infrastructure for waging an unaccountable war— and JSOC would be their prized weapon” (p. 101). Stanley McChrystal would head JSOC between September 2003 and June 2008, becoming Director of the Joint Staff in August 2008. In that influential role, along with David Patreaus, he would push the Obama administration to authorize the expansion of covert operations against al-Qaeda to a dozen countries throughout the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia. William McCraven took over from McChrystal in June 2008 and led JSOC until June 2011, when he took over Special Operations Command.

By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations Forces from 60 countries to 75. SOCOM had about 4,000 people deployed around the world besides Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the Obama administration, JSOC teams were deployed in Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including Baluchistan), and the Philippines – and sometimes these teams were even deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain.  JSOC teams were suspected of supporting the DEA in Columbia and Mexico.

This list of countries where Special Forces are deployed is really quite staggering. But as Scahill insists, “Although the Obama administration boasted that it had al Qaeda on the ropes, its global assassination program was becoming a recruitment device for the very forces the United States claimed to be destroying” (p. 355). This “blowback” is a theme I’ll explore later.

Next, in a section called “Lawfare”, I’ll be exploring in some depth the legal machinery that paved the way for the increase in clandestine activity under JSOC.

Footnote

See Derek Gregory’s recent post at Geographical Imaginations on critical reaction to Scahill’s companion film (which I have yet to see).

Dirty Wars: A Review, Part 1: The Rise of Neoconservatives

Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” is a masterpiece of independent journalism that explores the spread of U.S. paramilitary violence in the shadows. I have taken far too many notes (!) so thought I would share them here.

Starting from today I will cover several of the key insights and themes covered in the book, beginning with the rise of neoconservatism and its effects on U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the hands of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Part 1: The Rise of the Neoconservatives

 ”The world is a battlefield” was a mantra repeated over and over again by American neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration.  A handful of officials, armed with decades of lobbying and political organization, and led by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, would change the direction and shape of U.S. foreign policy. Under their guidance, assassination, enhanced interrogation, and Special Operations would move from the periphery of national policy to its beating heart.

Prior to the Bush years of 2001 to 2009, the Clinton administration was no angel of course—it pioneered extraordinary rendition and paved the legal foundations for targeted killings in the mid-1990s. Indeed, under Clinton more than 70 renditions were conducted. But according to Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism “czar”, government officials at this time were largely “risk averse”. There was a great concern about violating the long-standing ban on political assassinations institutionalized by the Ford administration in 1976 and later reinforced by Jimmy Carter.

Indeed, during the Clinton era, White House bureaucracy largely worked to slow down targeted killings, creating a great deal of institutional inertia. Coming out of the Reagan-Bush era, which was marred by the Iran-Contra scandal, Clinton put in place a series of checks and balances for lethal covert action: first a proposed covert action would be sent to the CIA and reviewed by the General Counsel, before being passed on to two separate CIA committees—the Covert Action Planning Group and the Covert Action Review Group. It would then go back to the General Counsel for a final legal review and sent to the White House. Once there it would be put before the Interagency Working Group of Covert Action. After a final review by the heads and deputies of the relevant agencies, the action would be presented to the president. Quite the paper chase.

The Architects

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney first worked together in the Nixon White House in 1969, when Rumsfeld hired the future vice-President as an aide. For decades they worked to grant the executive branch with unprecedented powers to wage secret wars and spy on U.S. citizens—in effect, paving the way for an “emperor-style” U.S. presidency. But this Roman Empire would not be built overnight. In the 1980s, Congress enacted a law that required the White House to report its spying activities to congress—something that infuriated the future Vice-President. As George H. W. Bush’s defense secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, Cheney “continued building his vision of a supremely powerful executive branch” (p.11).  At the center of their vision was a massive escalation in defense spending called the “Defense Planning Guidance” (1992).  This vision never saw the light of day, however, as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, buried the plan. But Cheney and Rumsfeld would only have to wait a decade to realize their plan.

After Bush’s 2001 inauguration, Rumsfeld and Cheney staffed the administration with leading neoconservatives, many of who were involved in the ultra nationalist “Project for the New American Century”. The first task of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was to wage a war against the Pentagon “bureaucracy” – an internal conflict that would later give rise to the “revolution in military affairs”. Meanwhile, Cheney would become the most powerful vice president in history.  And in concert with Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, these three figures began pressing for an attack on Iraq – as well as a global war in the shadows that involved rolling back American civil liberties.

The Bush Years

When Bush was sworn in, his administration indicated it would hold on to Clinton-era checks and balances. National Security Presidential Directive-1 (NSPD-1) signed on February 13, 2001, mirrored the Clinton bureaucratic system. But in March, Bush asked Condoleezza Rice to request the CIA to prepare authorities for covert action in Afghanistan. A new NSPD circulated in June was even more ambitious: a program built on far-reaching covert action that was eventually approved at a September 4, 2001 meeting of Bush administration “principals”. Yet there remained dissent and mixed opinion in the White House – although this doubt would be expunged as the Twin Towers crumbled, and Cheney and Rumsfeld sought to explore the attacks.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it is Congress, not the President, which has the right to declare war. This was recently codified in the 1973 War Powers  Resolution, which Cheney viewed as “unconstitutional”.

But in the days after 9/11 this piece of legislation was all-but-scrapped. On September 14, the House and Senate granted President Bush the Authorization for Use of Military Force. This was a kind of “blank check” that gave a large leeway to target any groups, including “persons” that the president deemed affiliated with 9/11 (thus giving the green light for assassinations and reversing decades of “risk averse” presidencies). And so an open-ended war against anybody was born: the Bush administration declared the world a battlefield. But it was the still-secret order signed a day earlier that was even more momentous: this classified presidential directive granted the CIA authority to capture and hold militants across the globe, and wiped out the roadblocks of congressional oversight and ended the practice of the president signing off on each lethal operation. And killing “terrorists”, according to Bush administration lawyers, did not count as assassination. A newly empowered CIA would be spearheaded by Cofer Black.

But Rumsfeld did not want the CIA to be the lead agency in charge of global defense, and wanted nothing to do with oversight and bureaucracy. Already, the invasion of Afghanistan was spearheaded by a CIA team under an operation codenamed “Jawbreaker”. It relied heavily on private contractors and Special Operations Forces.

Likewise, Cheney wanted to gut the interagency reviews of proposed lethal actions that were standard under Clinton. And so, a (pro-war) “War Council” was formed, led by David Addington, Cheney’s counsel and long-time advisor, to rubber stamp the legal justification for dirty war.

Central to Cheney’s “Dark Side” campaign would be presidential findings that would limit effective congressional oversight. According to the National Security Act of 1947, the president is required to issue a finding before undertaking a covert action – and that the covert action complies with U.S. law and the Constitution. The presidential finding signed by Bush on September 17, 2001 created a highly classified program codenamed “Greystone” (GST).

GST was the umbrella term for all classified activities, and in effect, pre-authorized a range of dark side activities, such as kidnap and assassination. Moreover, in the early stages of GST, the administration reduced the elite “Gang of Eight” members of Congress to just four – the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. They in turn were prohibited from discussing these briefing with anyone. In effect, then, the GST program had zero oversight. And infamously, on February 7 2002, Bush signed a directive that stated the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners.

Turf Wars between the CIA and Pentagon begin

By 2002 a “turf war” between the CIA and Pentagon for supremacy over the global U.S. fight against terrorism was exploding.

Rumsfeld was pressuring CIA analysts for Iraq intelligence. Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld were satisfied with the intelligence coming from the CIA or the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Ever more frustrated, Rumsfeld and Cheney began establishing their own private intelligence apparatus, run out of Douglas Feith’s office in the Pentagon. By mid-2002, Feith’s “shop” had become the Office of Special Plans, and the primary plan was of course to create a justification for an invasion of Iraq. This office would go well beyond CIA assessments of the relationship between Iraq, al Qaeda, and weapons of mass destruction. Relatedly, they pushed for new tactics to extract intelligence from detainees—and turned to the enhanced interrogation tactics located in the U.S.’ SERE manual.

U.S. Special Forces were then tapped to run a parallel intelligence program known as “Copper Green”.

Next: The Rise of JSOC

New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era

Mary Kaldor, 2012, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (3rd Edition), Cambridge: Polity Press

Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars invites us to consider the changing logics, practices, and geographies of violence. Since the seminal “new war” of Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, Kaldor argues that international violence has shifted from primarily state-oriented conflicts, involving a mass of soldiers and centralized “top-down” planning, to a series of hybrid or “low intensity” conflicts that involve private contractors, paramilitaries and illegal sponsors. Crucially, civilians are rational targets for such new wars, instead of being unintended “collateral damage”, and this is because new wars are driven by exclusive and often extreme forms of identity politics. Failure to recognize this shift, warns Kaldor, means that policy makers are bound to repeat mistakes of the past. In place of old war thinking, she proposes “humanitarian law enforcement” as a model for intervention in failed states across the globe.

The book begins by mapping the terrain of her central argument. During the last decades of the 20^th century in Africa and Eastern Europe, a new type of organized violence has developed in concert with globalization: one the blurs the distinctions between war and peace, is fuelled by organized crime, and leads to large-scale violations of human rights. Indeed, globalization is a key force to understanding Kaldor’s argument—it has connected the planet at the same time as it has resulted in myriad disconnections and alienations, leading to an emerging global class based on the ability to travel freely (and those that are left behind). With advances in technology and mobility, small-scale conflicts thus rapidly connect a variety of communities and supporters instantly.

The second contextual force that operates in Kaldor’s argument is political economy. Financial security is a key driver in shoring up the state’s authority, and by implication, its legitimate monopoly of state violence. Without this autonomy, a corrupt political oligarchy aggrandizes its position through illegal means, and a decaying social support system throws a mass of unemployed people into the arms of increasingly nationalist (or identitarian) causes.

In her words, “The new wars occur in situations in which state revenues decline because of the decline of the economy as well as the spread of criminality, corruption and inefficiency, violence is increasingly privatized both as a result of growing organized crime and the emergence of paramilitary groups, and political legitimacy is disappearing” (p.7). The result is a profound blurring of the roles of soldier and criminal. Territorially-based state sovereignty is therefore under threat if the new wars thesis holds. For Kaldor, a disintegrating monopoly of legitimate organized violence is eroded from “above” by the transnationalization of military force and the institutionalization of the “bloc” system, and “below” by the privatization of security in a whole manner of arenas.

There are three main characteristics of the “new wars”. (1) They are driven by exclusive forms of identity politics. (2) The conduct of warfare has changed: from territorially-based battles to politically-based manoeuvres that sew “hate and fear”. (3)  A globalized war economy that is decentralized and predatory, financed through crime, remittances, and raids.

Before discussing these in more detail, what exactly is an “old war?”

What we imagine an old war originated in Europe somewhere between the 15^th and 18^th century alongside the evolution of the modern state. Clausewitz defined war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”. But in this particular case, the “wills” were lumbering nation states with soldiers as their sovereign protectors. For example, Napoleon introduced conscription, the levee en masse in 1793, and in 1794 he had 1,169,00 men under his control – the largest military force ever before created in Europe.  And so the notion of war as state activity, conducted between states, was firmly established towards the end of the eighteenth century. By this time it was possible to define the state with the following characteristic distinctions: public/private, internal/external, economic/political, civil/military, soldier/criminal, war/peace. All of which is to say that war was defined as a discrete event between nation states. In the 19^th century this discrete event would increase in size and scale dramatically, with an ever increasing need for “rational” organization. This would transition to the “total wars” of the twentieth century that mobilized national energies, wherein the public sphere incorporated the whole of society in the war machine, directed towards an “external enemy”.

Conversely, in new wars, the target is not an external enemy and the battlespace is fragmented.

Political goals of the new wars are claims to power based on identity. Labels (especially religion and ethnicity) are used as a basis for political claims based on fragments and inward looking communities, and located within the hollowed structure that the state once occupied. This has two main drivers: (1) a reaction to the growing impotence and declining legitimacy of the established political classes; (2) the insecurity associated with the process of globalization. Combined, this “is a recipe for new closed-in statelets with permanently contested borders dependent on continuing violence for survival” (p.91).

The political economy of war has similarly changed.

The war economy used to be centralized and autarchic, with a mass of people mobilized for the war effort. The new type of war economy is based upon decentralized states, fragmented financial sources, and low levels of (public) participation. Indeed, the continuation of war has a distinct economic logic, as opposed to a singularly geopolitical logic.  There are four key facets to this globalized war economy:

1. The privatization of military forces. The loss of control over the state’s monopoly of physical violence, as in so-called “failed states”, leads to a reduced ability to collect taxes and strengthen social cohesion. This leads to a concomitant privatization of violence: the most common forms are paramilitary groups, often autonomous armed men centered on an individual leader, which can be used as proxies by governments for extreme forms of violence. They rarely rely on heavy weapons, and lack the vertical command systems common with guerilla warfare.

2. Patterns of Violence. Revolutionary warfare, as articulated by Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara was designed to find ways around large-scale concentrations of conventional forces. The central objective was gaining and controlling territory through the support of local populations, rather than through capturing territory from enemy forces: “winning hearts and minds” so the guerrilla can operate “like a fish in the sea”. On the other hand, counter-insurgency seeks to “poison the sea” by deliberately targeting the population and civilian infrastructure. The new wars borrow from both revolutionary warfare and counter-insurgency. The result is a war based on controlling territory through fear, hatred, and humiliating the civilian population.

3. Financing. The erosion of the tax base leads to all kinds of “asset transfers” – i.e. the redistribution of existing assets to favour the fighting units (looting etc). New wars are also funded through external sources of funds, such as remittances, diaspora support, foreign governments, and humanitarian assistance. In short, the informalization of war is paralleled in the informalization of the economy. War provides a legitimization of various criminal forms of private aggrandizement, as the formal political economy withers. New wars are thus difficult to stop unless democratic negotiations take the underlying social and economic relations into account (instead of treating the various factions as proto-states).

4. Propensity to Spread. This new type of warfare is a predatory social condition with a propensity to spread and suck in regional actors, through displaced peoples, lost trade, the spillover of identity politics, and direct conflict.

The Future?

Kaldor ends her book by asking “So what is the future?” The implication of her argument is that it’s no longer possible to contain war geographically. Zones of war and zones of peace will continue to exist side by side in the same territorial space. She lists three scenarios:

The Clash of Civilizations (Samuel Huntington): “war on terror style” civilizational blocs, fault-line wars where different civilizations collide based on cultural norms (primarily religious).

The Coming Anarchy (Robert Kaplan): a decomposing polity has led to civil disorder on a global scale, and there is a “return to nature” and “Hobbesian chaos”.

Cosmopolitan Governance (Mary Kaldor): Kaldor proposes that we break with the assumption of territorially based political entities, and instead construct alliances of “islands of civility” and transnational institutions, underlined by cosmopolitan law enforcement that would fill the security vacuum inherent in contemporary peacekeeping.

Of course, one of my thoughts while reading this book is where to locate U.S. drone warfare in the picture? She describes the Rumsfeld-era “Revolution in Military Affairs” as a technologically advanced form of “old war” – and does an excellent job of showing how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were failures precisely because of “old war” thinking (and not humanitarian law enforcement that engaged with civil society).

Drone warfare is certainly composed of different military and state elements compared to the labour-intensive wars of the past: its kill chain links together White House officials with covert and clandestine operatives in the CIA and Special Operations. And so too is the logic of territory and sovereignty challenged and reworked in many different directions: targeted killings in Mogadishu, Sanaa, and Miranshah are asymmetrical conflicts that do not involve “boots on the ground” (at least not directly). But there is a fundamental unevenness to all of this. The U.S. “Homeland” is hardly fragmented and territorially inconsequential—just witness the rise of walls, barbed wire, and drones all along its borders with Mexico and Canada. Perhaps, then, Kaldor is right: drone warfare does not really bring anything new to the table—Empire is just Empire 2.0.

And yet, drone warfare does not seek to secure territory in the traditional geopolitical sense. Nor does it seek to win the “hearts and minds” of populations that are on the wrong side of Death TV. In this sense, it is very much in-line with a new wars modality. Extending this further, we might say that drone warfare (especially in Pakistan) has indeed worked to terrorize civilian populations in ways that are similar to the guerrilla-cum-counter-insurgencies that Kaldor ascribes to Serbian violence in Bosnia. While their (techno) materialities may be different, it is the “environment” that is captured and targeted in both instances—placating entire populations with “fear and hatred”.

And if recent history has taught us anything, nothing resembling “success” can emerge from this form of state violence. While I am uncertain, suspicious even, of “humanitarian law enforcement”, it is far better than the logic of “death as success” that reigns today, sewing decades of blowback in the shadows.

All said, Kaldor’s book is a must-read for grasping the broad historical and contemporary contours of state violence.

Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars” – first impressions

I’m about 100-pages into Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield”. I’m a big fan of his investigative journalism, and already the book is proving to be a real-eye opener – lifting the lid on the U.S.’ planet-wide killing machine.

So far, the biggest theme is the massive influence wielded by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz in Bush’s first administration. These three neoconservatives are often discussed in relation to the Iraq War – the intelligence “failures”, the military failures, the “reconstruction” failures, and the abuses of the executive branch.

But they were also architects of the ascendance of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Rumsfeld, in particular, personally saw to it that the military would have its own “CIA” – a force capable of full-spectrum kinetic operations, HUMINT, and assassinations from the sky. Previously JSOC was a kind of “training” organization that would send Special Forces to regional commanders. But it soon became, in essence, the President’s private army in the year after the attacks of 9/11.

Relatedly, Scahill exposes the legal “void” that JSOC operates in. Covert operations conducted by the CIA are overseen by Congressional Intelligence Committees and the Commander-in-Chief is required to sign off on a Presidential Finding prior to any such activity. Conversely, “clandestine” operations do not meet this legal threshold–or come anywhere close. In fact, so long as they count as “traditional military activities” directed towards an enemy or state that is “anticipated” to be the site of “future hostilities”, they remain more secret that covert CIA missions. The U.S. military has no legal obligation to report “specifics” to the administration, and the administration has no obligation to report military activities to Congress.

And when the world is a battlespace, “preparing the environment” through pre-emptive force can therefore take place anywhere.

With many celebrating President Obama’s “crossroads” speech last Thursday, where he announced (but did not really specify how) the drone program would switch from the CIA to the regular military, this should give us all pause for thought.

Anyway, the book is tough going. 100 pages is as far as I could get today.

What goes up, must come down (or crash)

In Pakistan, U.S. drones have reportedly killed the the deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Wali ur-Rehman.

Mr. Rehman already had a $5 million United States bounty on his head, and American officials accuse him both of organizing attacks on American troops in Afghanistan and playing a role in the 2009 attack on a C.I.A. base in the eastern part of the country that killed seven agency employees. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, would not confirm the strike during his briefing Wednesday afternoon, but he emphasized a long list of American accusations against Mr. Rehman.

Meanwhile, across the Arabian sea in Somali, the militant group al-Shabab claims to have shot down an American drone.

A US defence department official confirmed the incident but declined to say what kind of aircraft it was, what caused it to crash and whether it was carrying weapons.“I can confirm an RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) crashed in a remote area of the Somali coastline south of Mogadishu,” the official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity. “The incident is under investigation.”