War Narratives and the American National Will in War

Jeffrey J. Kubiak

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137410146
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: European Politics

With the U.S. war in Afghanistan in its twelfth year, axioms regarding the American national will in war not being able to tolerate anything other than quick and costless adventures have been found useless in understanding why the U.S. continues to persist in that endeavor. This book answers complex questions about modern US intervention abroad.

CHAPTER 1

What Is the National Will?

Between 1965 and 1968 the U.S. escalated its involvement in the ongoing conflict in South Vietnam, attempting to defend the feeble republic from a Communist insurgency directed and resourced from Hanoi. Despite deploying more than 500,000 U.S. troops to that small country and administering an unprecedented battering of North Vietnam, the U.S. failed to push the Communists to their “breaking point” and could not assure the existence of a friendly government in Saigon.¹

Some attribute the U.S. loss in Vietnam to artificial political limits placed on the employment of the military² or to the military choosing the wrong strategy against a weaker enemy.³ The bigger truth is that the decision to leave Vietnam as a loser was a policy decision made not of military necessity, nor dictated by circumstances in the international environment, but because the U.S. had simply lost its political will to persevere. The U.S. was not militarily defeated in a traditional sense and had mobilized only a fraction of its material capacity to wage war in Vietnam. Nonetheless, after nearly three years of Americanization of the fighting in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson reversed U.S. policy in March 1968 in dramatic fashion when he announced that the U.S. would implement a partial bombing halt and pursue negotiations without the preconditions that had been a barrier to negotiations until that point.

In August 1992, President George H. W. Bush authorized the use of U.S. military forces to assist a United Nations (UN) effort to distribute aid in famine-stricken Somalia. By December of that year, President Bush felt it necessary to increase U.S. efforts, and he sent 25,000 U.S. military personnel, including a significant number of combat troops, to Somalia to operate the relief effort. After months of successfully securing the distribution of much-needed aid, President William Clinton, under intense domestic pressure, abruptly ordered U.S. troops home in the wake of an urban firefight between coalition forces and the forces of Somali warlords in Mogadishu on October 3–4, 1993, that left 18 U.S. Army Rangers dead. The U.S. essentially renounced its political objectives in Somalia, setting March 31, 1994, as the end date for U.S. military participation. By doing so, it inflicted a mortal wound on the UN nation-building mission there. Despite the billions of dollars the U.S. had already invested, a handful of casualties seemingly caused the country to lose its political will to persevere.

These stories are often told by U.S. adversaries to argue the feasibility of their defiance of the global hegemon. If the poor Communists of Vietnam or a few poorly armed warlords in Somalia can defeat the world’s only superpower, clearly the United States is only a paper tiger without the will to use its vast material superiority to achieve the objectives for which it would go to war. But this characterization is in sharp contrast with the U.S. war in Iraq. By November 2006, all indications were that the U.S. had lost its will to continue the war. With civil war brewing in Iraq, increased U.S. casualties, and a sense of hopelessness creeping into the domestic U.S. debate about the war, immense pressure was being put on the administration to end U.S. involvement there. But instead of looking for an opportunity to withdraw, President Bush announced a new strategy in January 2007 that included a surge of more than 20,000 fresh U.S. troops into Iraq.

U.S. material and battlefield supremacy are not irrelevant to the outcome of American wars, but the outcomes in Vietnam and Somalia suggest that trying to understand war outcomes by focusing on the balance of material factors alone is deficient. The above examples argue that political will is the central variable. The aim of this book is to generate a more thorough understanding of the American national will in war. Through such an examination, I hope to be able to answer these questions: What are the causes of rapid changes in U.S. policy that characterize the loss of political will in war? What variables shape the durability of the American national will in war? Under what conditions is the American national will vulnerable to collapse?

From a review of relevant literature, a more analytically refined definition of national will emerges: national will in war is the political sustainability of a U.S. policy that seeks to satisfy foreign policy objectives predominantly through the use of military force, a policy I label “war policy.” Instead of examining war policy as a series of discrete decisions made by the president and his administration, I instead have opted to examine it as an ongoing, dynamic process of policy making. An analysis using this approach provides more insight into both the proximate and underlying factors most responsible for generating large changes in war policy. Building on the policy analysis theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, and augmented by Jeffrey Legro’s constructivist theory of collective idea change, I have constructed a model of war policy stability and change. Central to this model is the functioning of a war narrative that is used to legitimate war policy. The narrative is a story, or compilation of partial stories, that constructs a crisis in such a way as to demonstrate the desirability and feasibility of using military force to achieve a political objective. Inherent in this narrative are definitions of the stakes and expectations regarding outcomes and costs. If the perception of the stakes changes or the expectations generated by the narrative are unmet or frustrated, the legitimacy of the war policy is compromised. War policy can change abruptly when, through the course of elite debate, the war narrative collapses and a new narrative that legitimizes a new policy consolidates and results in abandonment of the military enterprise.

This approach is decidedly focused on the structural pressures that bear on the agents active within the war-policy-making business. A review of relevant literature on war theory, war termination, state behavior, and public opinion highlights the utility of this approach. Each area of literature provides useful insights into how best to think about national will and generates for this project a pool of variables that must be considered. However, no scholarly work provides a complete picture of national will and the conditions under which it changes. What is lacking is both a useful framework for understanding how the relevant variables fit together and a useful understanding of the dynamics in war policy. In chapter 2 I build the theoretical foundation for this study by bringing together policy analysis and constructivist theories to generate a model that explains both the stability and the change of war policy.

Chapters 3 through 5 apply the model developed in chapter 2 to three case studies. These case studies examine the following wars over the noted time periods: Vietnam 1965–1968, Somalia 1992–93, and Iraq 2003–2008. By examining the development and evolution of the war narrative and competing narratives, the case studies provide valuable insight into the complex relationship between the innumerable variables that can shape the stability and change of war policy. The analysis in chapter 6 coalesces the insights from the case studies into a set of propositions regarding the American national will in war. The utility of these propositions is then demonstrated through an examination of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Finally, in chapter 7, I more fully explore the implications of these propositions for policy makers, strategists, and war planners contemplating war today and in the future.

Before September 11, 2001, conventional wisdom regarding the American national will was that America would quickly lose its political will for and quit a military venture should it start costing U.S. lives and not have a satisfactory and near-term exit strategy.⁴ Since then, the U.S. has been at war continuously and, as of this writing, has suffered more than 6,800 military deaths. While this is a fraction of the deaths in Vietnam, it is far more than the number of casualties purported to have caused the U.S. to cut and run in Somalia. The old axioms have not seemingly been useful in understanding the American national will.

How Should We Think about National Will?

A useful starting point for understanding national will can be developed from the work of German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and one of his most famous dictums: that war is politics by other means. Scholars of Clausewitz’s work often argue over his varying uses of the German word politik. On occasion he clearly meant what in English translates to “politics,” and on other occasions he meant “policy.” To distinguish between these two meanings and to understand that Clausewitz used the word both ways is important. Politics implies a struggle between two or more actors, whereas policy is the unilateral behavior of any individual actor. War is political intercourse between two or more parties, while the behavior of an individual party within that political struggle is policy. For the remainder of the book, I will refer to war as the violent struggle between actors and to war policy as the pursuit of political objectives by an individual actor through the instrument of physical, organized military force.

War policy, then, has two fundamental components: the political objective, or “ends,” and military force, or “means.” In any war, the political objective can be somewhat sweeping, ambiguous, or vague. Even if the objective is stated clearly, such as “unconditional surrender,” how to operationalize it is not always clear. More routinely, the policy objective is not stated clearly and has to be inferred from a range of policy statements from top policy makers. This creates even more ambiguity; in many cases it is difficult to label only one political objective since policy makers seem to be seeking a range of political outcomes. Additionally, the political objective can sometimes exhibit incremental or minor changes over time as a result of changes in the political context or military conditions. These minor changes in objective do not necessarily indicate a loss of political will, even if they represent a change in war policy.

War policy is policy under which the political objective(s) is pursued through primarily military means. In most cases, policy ends are pursued using a variety of means, including the range of the state’s diplomatic and economic power resources. War policy changes when either the political objective being sought changes substantially or military means no longer play the central role in its achievement. This is not to be confused with changes in strategy. Strategy refers to the ways in which the ends and means of war policy are connected. Strategy in war can change, sometimes substantially, without reflecting a change in policy. For instance, the change from a search-and-destroy strategy to one that centers on counterinsurgency principles of securing the population does not, by itself, constitute a policy change. For my purposes here, unless either the ends or means of policy change substantially, war policy is considered stable.

An analysis of the U.S. war policy during the Korean War can clarify this understanding. In June 1950, the U.S. objective was to “squarely” meet the challenge presented by Communist aggression on the Korean peninsula and repel the attack by North Korean Communists on the Republic of Korea.⁵ This was understood at the time to mean pushing the North Korean forces back across the 38th parallel (status quo antebellum). In early September 1950, U.S. war policy changed to include seeking to create circumstances that would allow for the reunification of the Korean peninsula. Aiming to exploit the initiative that UN forces had achieved after the landing at Inchon, President Harry Truman instructed his theater commander, General Douglas MacArthur, to conduct operations north of the 38th parallel in an attempt to achieve the collapse and surrender of North Korean forces.⁶ This would set the stage for the UN-supervised formation of a government for all of Korea, as was the desire of the UN General Assembly after World War II. This change in policy was to be pursued only insofar as it did not threaten to cause a general war with either the Soviet Union or Communist China.

When the UN forces met main-unit Chinese forces in North Korea in November 1950, the new war policy became moot and was quickly abandoned by the administration, reverting back to its previous aims of status quo antebellum. Dramatic-maneuver warfare continued until a military stalemate occurred in the vicinity of the 38th parallel. Fighting continued as negotiations for a ceasefire began in July 1951. By January 1952, both parties had agreed to all major issues except that of prisoners of war (POWs). In February 1952, President Truman essentially initiated a new war policy by adding to the UN negotiating position the political objective of voluntary prisoner repatriation instead of an all-for-all prisoner exchange as was customary. The U.S. sustained this war policy for another 17 months, essentially over this one remaining objective.⁷ Once the POW issue was resolved and the armistice signed, military force was no longer needed, and the war policy was terminated in favor of a largely diplomatic effort to secure U.S. objectives on the Korean peninsula. Note that even after the armistice was signed in July 1953, U.S. military forces remained—and remain to this day—in Korea. However, for the purposes of this book, the U.S. policy toward Korea is no longer considered war policy because the means used for achieving U.S. objectives in Korea are not primarily the use of military force.

With this und...