How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

Tales from the Pentagon

Rosa Brooks

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781476777887
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"A dynamic work of reportage" ( The New York Times ) written "with clarity and...wit" ( The New York Times Book Review ) about what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased. Once, war was a temporary state of affairs. Today, America's wars are everywhere and forever: our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Military personnel now analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.In this "ambitious and astute" ( The Washington Post ) work, Rosa Brooks "provides a masterful analysis" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) of this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and married to an Army Green Beret. By turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration of history, anthropology, and law, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything is an "illuminating" ( The New York Times ), "eloquent" ( The Boston Globe ), "courageous" ( US News & World Report ), and "essential" ( The Dallas Morning News ) examination of the role of the military today. Above all, it is a rallying cry, for Brooks issues an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war disappear, we undermine both America's founding values and the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos.

PART I

Tremors

A Window of Opportunity

One ordinary day in 2010, I sat in an anonymous Pentagon conference room with a dozen other people, listening as briefers from the military’s Special Operations Command went over plans for an impending strike against a terrorist operative. Sending in special operations forces would be too risky, they said; we would therefore most likely strike the target using missiles fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle.

I can’t tell you the region or the identity of the target. During my twenty-six months working at the Defense Department, I signed dozens of papers promising to keep the secret stuff secret, and unlike Edward Snowden, I have no desire to give out classified information—or live life as a fugitive. But I think I can say that the target was a youngish man, probably not more than thirty. I dutifully studied the small photo displayed on the briefing slides. It showed an ordinary face, the kind you might see on any street in Sana’a or Karachi—or New York or London. But this, the briefers assured us, was no ordinary young man; there was solid evidence (not detailed) of his involvement in numerous terror plots (exhaustively detailed).

For months, they explained, we had been unable to track the target, but he had finally made one of those mistakes even hardened terrorists seem apt to make, like calling his mother on his cell phone, or arranging by email to meet an old friend in a café, or allowing his picture to be included in an otherwise innocuous Facebook post. One of our intelligence agencies had noticed the slip. (“Nice!” someone murmured from the back of the room.) The target was currently occupying a house in a populated area, but as soon as a window of opportunity opened up, the briefers promised—as soon as the target moved to an isolated location, reducing the danger to any innocent bystanders—we would strike.

We all nodded gravely. Of course. What was there to say? We were at war with al Qaeda and its far-flung “associated forces,” and this man was an enemy combatant and a lawful target.

A day or two later, I was home eating dinner—spaghetti and meatballs, my six-year-old daughter’s favorite—when I got a phone call from a colleague. “You know that thing we were discussing?” he asked. “That window? It opened up a few hours ago.”

It was an open line, and he couldn’t say much. But I knew what he meant. The previous day, the young man whose photo I had studied was alive; now he was dead.

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said. “You can fill me in tomorrow.” And I went back to dinner with the kids.

That night, I dreamed about death: someone I loved, murdered. I woke up panicky and sweating.

War’s Tentacles

I knew already that I was part of a vast, bureaucratic death-dealing enterprise. Although I pulled no triggers and signed no military orders, I, like every single man and woman working at the Pentagon, was part of a machine that sent people off each day to kill and die. Each morning, I thumbed through the latest reports of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with intelligence reports of terrorists, insurgents, and Taliban fighters killed or presumed dead. All this sobered and saddened me, but rarely disturbed my sleep.

Somehow, though, my mind had snagged on that distant, impersonal drone strike, far from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It took me several more years to fully understand why. But even at the time, I sensed something disturbing: all our fine new technologies and fine new legal theories were blurring the boundaries of “war,” causing it to spread and ooze into everyday life. That young terror suspect we killed in that 2010 strike wore no uniform and was part of no state’s army; he carried no weapons, and he lived in a country with which the United States was not at war. From the outside, at least, he looked more or less like everyone else. But as he drove along an empty desert road one afternoon, someone sitting thousands of miles away entered a command into a computer, and death rained down on him from the sky.

I assumed then, and I assume now, that the intelligence information leading to that strike was developed in good faith. But what if we got it wrong? What if we got the wrong young man, or had the wrong information about the right young man?

Wars kill innocent civilians all the time. The U.S. war in Iraq killed at least sixty-six thousand Iraqi civilians, and perhaps ten times that many, while the war in Afghanistan is estimated to have killed another twenty thousand civilians.¹ For the most part, we accept some number of unintended civilian deaths as a tragic but inevitable by-product of war.

But somehow this one death seemed different. It wasn’t merely that we didn’t know for sure if the young man was a civilian or a combatant—certainty is often elusive in the fog of war—we didn’t even know for sure what the word “combatant” could possibly mean in the context of today’s shadowy conflicts. When it comes to terrorism, no one is quite sure who constitutes an “enemy,” who counts as a “civilian,” when isolated threats or attacks count as “war,” and whether modern wars can be said to have boundaries in either time or space. If the United States could reach down from the heavens and kill this one particular man out of millions of others in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, what would keep any of us safe? Could war’s tentacles reach into every place on earth?

• • •

During the time I spent at the Pentagon, I was mostly too busy to think about these uncomfortable questions. As a senior advisor to Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, one of the Pentagon’s highest-ranking civilian officials (and at the time the highest-ranking civilian woman in Pentagon history), I found myself quickly immersed in nearly every major defense policy issue.

It was an exhausting, inspiring, terrifying, and endlessly fascinating twenty-six months: I watched General David Petraeus argue about Pakistan with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and slid down in my seat as Holbrooke launched into one of his infamous tantrums, bellowing at two hapless young officers who had outlined a less-than-impressive strategic communication plan for Pakistan. In a windowless basement conference room, I sat behind the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as he outlined counterpiracy options for the Horn of Africa. Traveling with Flournoy in Afghanistan, I gazed out through the tiny slitlike windows of our IED-resistant vehicle at endless fields of opium poppies, and watched Afghan Special Forces commandos stage mock hostage rescue raids.

Back in Washington, I sat in on discussions of raids and strikes. I spent hours briefing congressional staff on controversial Pentagon “information operations” programs, and more hours trying to make sense of Defense Department programs intended to promote the “rule of law.” I got a coveted intelligence community “blue badge,” enabling me to pass freely into the sacred precincts of the CIA and other agencies—and though I wasn’t nearly important enough to get face time with the president, I did manage to shake hands with Bo, the president’s dog, when I encountered him one day outside the White House Situation Room. (This is the only thing I did in those two years that truly impressed my children.)

I watched nighttime flight operations from the bridge of an aircraft carrier as it pitched in post-hurricane seas, experienced the electrifying jolt of a catapult launch off the carrier’s deck, and took helicopter rides from the Pentagon to a secret military bunker built beneath a mountain. (Yes, these Cold War relics still exist—and they’re every bit as weird as you’d expect, complete with underwater reservoirs, nuclear power plants, and a Holiday Inn–style bedroom suite for the secretary of defense.) I flew down to Guantánamo on a military jet with several members of Congress: at the detention center, looking on through one-way glass, I watched as a notorious terrorist exercised on a StairMaster machine, climbing, climbing, climbing—and going nowhere.

Those two years were strange, almost surreal in their intensity. For me—a law professor and journalist brought up in a family of left-wing antiwar activists—working at the Pentagon was like conducting anthropological fieldwork in some exotic and unpredictable foreign tribe. The Pentagon was a world rich in mystery, full of arcane and bewildering new rituals and symbols. There was a complex code written in the ribbons and bits of metal adorning the uniforms of military personnel, for instance—and woe betide the fool who failed to understand the difference between a Navy captain and an Army captain. There was literally a new language to be learned: for several muddled months, I assumed that the constant references I heard to the “DOTMLPF Spectrum” (pronounced dot-mil P F) had something to do with websites or the military’s Internet domain; in fact, the acronym stood for “Doctrine, Organization, Training, Matériel, Leadership & Education, Personnel, and Facilities.”

Month by month, I learned to “speak DoD” as a second language. By the time I left the Pentagon, I could pontificate knowledgeably about OPSEC and MILDEC (operations security and military deception), wax eloquent about the importance of “shaping the battlespace” during “Phase Zero Operations,” and explain the difference between a D-FAC (the dining facility) and an MRAP (a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle).

Like a total-immersion language course, my work at the Pentagon occupied every corner of my mind. For most of my first year, I dreamed about work every night. Aside from that one post-drone-strike nightmare, my dreams were tediously mundane: as I slept, my exhausted mind kept right on drafting memos and congressional testimony, designing PowerPoint slides, and trying to remember the difference between Navy and Marine Corps uniforms.

Somewhere during this exhausting period, I also met the man who would become my husband and the beloved stepfather of my two young children. Joe, an Army Special Forces officer then serving on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, had a sharp, skeptical intelligence and a well-honed sense of absurdity—both necessary attributes for career Special Forces soldiers, most of whom have been almost continuously deployed since 9/11. Joe was no exception: he had put in his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the Philippines, North Africa, Korea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. Initially, some of his assumptions seemed as alien to me as those of any foreign tribe. But over time, he helped me gain a much deeper understanding of the new world in which I found myself temporarily resident.

Even so, it was only after I left the Pentagon that I could truly begin to make sense of what I had seen, heard, and learned. In fall 2011, I returned to my faculty position at Georgetown University Law Center, where I taught international and constitutional law. At first, this too was disorienting: I had finally gotten used to the Pentagon and its many subtribes, and it was tough to readjust to an ivory tower world where my students called me “Professor,” not “Ma’am,” and no one referred to the time as “2300 Zulu” or agreed to a request with a snappy “Roger that!” At the Pentagon, an organization with an annual budget in the hundreds of billions, decisions could have life or death consequences. At Georgetown, my faculty research budget didn’t even cover a new computer, and my most pressing problem was whether to give a borderline student a C or a more charitable B-minus.

But as my mind began slowly to reboot, I found myself thinking more and more about the same questions that had hovered just beneath the surface of my consciousness during my Pentagon years. In a world in which the push of a button can lead, within seconds, to the death of a specific man more than eight thousand miles away, is it possible to define “war” with any clarity? What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? And what is the military for, in a world in which future threats are as likely to come from computer hackers, terrorists, and other nonstate actors as from the armies of foreign states?

Most of all: As the boundaries around war and the military grow ever more blurry, will we all pay a price?

• • •

For most of recorded history, humans have sought to draw sharp lines between war and peace. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally “declared,” take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by elaborately uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations.

In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, including complex initiation rites preceding wars, the elaborate painting and costuming of warriors, and equally elaborate rituals to mark the end of conflicts and the reintegration of warriors into ordinary life.

Old Norse literature tells of the berserkers, who changed form and personality by donning the pelts of wolves or bears before going into battle (their wild brutality after shape-shifting gave us the modern word “berserk”).² Among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea, men prepared for war by following a severely restricted diet and abstaining from sex for months. Only when their bodies were fully “closed” could they go to war. When they returned from battle, writes anthropologist Mark Mosko, warriors had to observe a similar period of abstinence: if a couple “did happen to open their bodies sexually while [the man] still had traces of war sorcery on his skin, it would enter both their bodies and kill them.”³

In the American Southwest, Navajo warriors literally spoke a different dialect after setting out on raids, using what they called a “twisted language” with a special vocabulary. The Navajo also sought to carefully maintain the spatial boundaries between war and nonwar: “On the way home from a raid,” noted anthropologist D. W. Murray, “a symbolic line would be drawn in the desert, the men would line up facing the enemy country, and as they sang they all turned toward home and the common language was resumed.”⁴

We modern Americans are not all that different from the Old Norse or the Navajo. We think of “war” as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into the everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games, and we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. For the most part, we prefer to believe that both war and the military can be kept in tidy little boxes: war, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs, and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.

We’re wrong on both counts.

• • •

Two years before the September 11 terrorist attacks shattered American illusions of safety, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army published a slender little book called Unrestricted Warfare. Historically, wrote Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, “the three indispensable ‘hardware’ elements of any war” have been “soldiers, weapons and a battlefield.” This, they warned, will soon cease to be true: humans are now entering an era in which even these most basic hardware elements of war will be transformed beyond recognition.

In the wars of the coming decades, predicted Qiao and Wang, the “soldiers” will increasingly be computer hackers, financiers, terrorists, drug smugglers, and agents of private corporations as well as members of organized state militaries. Their “weapons” will range from “airplanes, cannons, poison gas, bombs [and] biochemical agents” to “computer viruses, net browsers, and financial derivative tools.” Warfare, they wrote, will soon “transcend all boundaries and limits. . . . The battlefield will be everywhere . . . [and] all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.”⁵

When Unrestricted Warfare was first published in 1999, its dystopian predictions received little attention in the United States outside a small circle of military and intelligence officials. Seen from the vantage point of today, however, the two Chinese officers look chillingly prescient: they saw clearly a future that was unimaginable to most Americans before 9/11.

Everyone is familiar with parts of this story. Our increasing global interconnectedness has created...