Charles W. King

President Trump has recently transferred responsibility for the number of American troops deployed to Afghanistan to the Pentagon, precipitating a likely increase in the number of American soldiers there. This dismays those who would like to see the United States draw down its presence in Afghanistan, which has cost the US a tremendous amount of blood and treasure since the invasion in 2001, but it is worth examining why American commanders in both Afghanistan and Iraq have been so insistent on the need for large deployments of American troops to those conflicts.

Historically, the United States has relied on quality instead of quantity as for its armed forces. The US Navy was founded on the backbone of six innovative and expensive frigates. Even during World War Two when the US instituted conscription American GIs had more training than their Allied counterparts and vastly more tons of war materiel per soldier than any other belligerent. Supplying American soldiers with excellent training and inexhaustible supplies of rations, rifles, tanks, destroyers, and planes increased the combat effectiveness American forces many times over. This contrasts with the Soviet Red Army during the early years of the war, which possessed legions of able fighting men, but scant resources with which to equip them. Since World War Two the US has only increased the amount of investment, in training and materiel, per soldier. It is estimated to cost nearly $10 million to train an American Special Forces soldier.

At first glance the quality of each American soldier is the obvious reason why American commanders constantly requested more of them during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are, after all, limits on the effect a single soldier can have, regardless of how much training and equipment they have. However this ignores the nature of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without front lines and traditional engagements they had less in common with like World War Two, the Korean War, or even Vietnam than they did with peacekeeping operations. The most successful peacekeeping operations in American history are the NATO operations in the Balkans in the 1990’s. They also have the highest ratio of troops to population of any peacekeeping operation.

Different of military operations have different requirements and increase or decrease the effect of different factors. Covert infiltrations are best performed by small groups of highly trained soldiers with extensive surveillance support. Fighting the Soviet Union in Europe would have required a great deal of anti-armor capabilities. Peacekeeping requires boots on the ground. This is because peacekeeping has more in common with policing than it does soldiering much of the time. American police chiefs have long understood that an increased visible presence reduces crime, while not necessarily affecting the arrest rate. This is because this visible presence has a deterrent effect. The same is true in peacekeeping operations. The more peacekeepers there are, the more deterrent value they have, and the less they have to engage in combat actions.

This is borne out not only by NATO operations in the Balkans, but also in the effects of past surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. The question American policy-makers are asking should not be whether or not to deploy more troops. More troops will increase the likelihood of achieving strategic objectives and reduce the rate of casualties. The question should be whether the United States is willing to spend the blood and treasure required to achieve the results it desires.

Charles W. King

The United States is the world’s leading exporter of arms, more than the next two largest exporters, Italy and Germany, combined. The United State exported more than a billion dollars’ worth of small arms in 2013 according to the Small Arms Survey, a non-governmental organization supported by a group of western nations. The export of arms, from pistols and rifles to military aircraft and advanced technical systems represent not just an economic boon for the United States that incentivizes the continued growth of its arms industry, but a strategic asset for its foreign policy. Just as the United States controls the export of advanced technologies that it does not want its rivals or pariah states to possess (particularly nuclear and missile technology), it uses arms export agreements to bolster its allies and as an incentive.

The two most famous American arms export schemes are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program during World War Two and the Iran-Contra Scandal that rocked the administration of Ronal Reagan. Between 1941 and 1945 the United States exported $667 billion in 2017 dollars to its allies under Lend-Lease. Iran-Contra circumvented American law to fund the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua with the proceeds of arms sales to the Islamic Republic of Iran, primarily missiles and also illegal. While these two programs differ greatly in scope, publicity, and legality they were both intended to provide material support to allies—long standing or of convenience—engaged in conflicts the outcome of which the respective administration felt it had a vested interest in. Today the supplying of arms to belligerents is highly controversial, and when doing so policy-makers must weigh the potential benefits of tipping the scale in a conflict, with the fallout, both domestic and diplomatic, of doing so.

Attempting to decide the winner in conflicts is not the only way that the United States uses arms exports to affect geopolitics. Bolstering the capabilities of allies and even competitors during peacetime can also be of strategic value. Sometimes it is possible to provide support with a direct American military presence, as the deployment of the US Army to West Germany did during the Cold War, and American AWACS Radar and Tanker planes did to the intervention in Libya in 2011. This is not always the case. In 1979 it would not have been possible to deploy American troops to the border between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. After recognizing the Sino-Soviet split American administrations sought to improve the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to fight their Soviet counter-parts, particularly against Soviet tanks. Even with the normalization of diplomatic relations between the US and China in 1979, this was a complicated task to accomplish. Eventually, the Carter Administration received the legislative approval it needed to let the PLA manufacture American designed anti-armor weapons in China under license, direct sales would have been politically impossible.

There is a third strategic use for arms exports that the US actively engages in; incentive and subsidy. The US government subsidizes the Iron Dome missile shield deployed in Israel, much of the money transferred to Israel as military aid comes right back to the United States as payments to US defense companies. This is not only good for the defense sector, but it encourages firms to perform research and development on certain kinds of technologies, like Iron Dome, that the US government wants to encourage but may not have a direct use for at the time.

The United States will remain the world largest exporter of arms for the foreseeable future. Arms sales are an important sector of the American economy. Arms export deals influence manufacturing and the development of advanced electronics and other technologies. They also provide considerable, if controversial, strategic options for American foreign policy. While picking winners may be the most obvious use, policy-makers should remember the utility of enhancing the capabilities of nations with similar interests during peacetime as a preventative measure.

Further Reading

Irene Pavesi, "Trade Update 2016: Transfers and Transparency," Small Arms Survey, (Geneva, Switzerland: Small Arms Survey, 2016).

Charles W. King

The continuing prevalence of improvised explosive devices and suicide bombing attacks in the twenty-first century has prompted the public, pundits, and policy-makers to ask, ‘why?’. This is an important question, but it is so broad that it is problematic. When people ask about the ‘why?’ of terrorism, particularly suicide terrorism the answers typically focus on why an individual would commit an act of suicide terrorism, their psychology, and place in their society. Understanding who is vulnerable to recruiter’s messages can help to counter them. This is an incomplete answer to ‘why?’ Policy-makers need to ask not only why an individual commits an act of suicide terrorism, but why non-state actors continue to use these particularly heinous methods.

Suicide terrorism and IEDs have a strategic utility that is second only to the precision-guided munitions of the US Air Force and its NATO allies. Since their debut on the world stage in the first Gulf War in 1991 the US has relied upon precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles to be able to destroy specific targets without risk to American personnel and with minimal collateral damage. These weapons are not without controversy of their own, but they demonstrate the continued utility to air power. The deployment of long range precision-guided munitions from airplanes and ships remains one of the US’s preferred methods of intervention in the twenty-first century. Guided bombs and cruise missiles are dramatic, do not expose the US to significant risk of commitment, and are politically cheap.

IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs provide this kind of strategic utility to non-state actors. Gillio Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers makes the analogy precisely.  When confronted by a French journalist Ben M’Hidi of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale replies, “Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.” The ability to select targets, for the US Air Force or non-state actors, increases the political and strategic impact of the use of violence. Minimizing the risk of operations and maximizing their political impact is not a new principle, it is central to the theories of use of political violence espoused by Clausewitz and Machiavelli. Western policy-makers should not be surprised that non-state actors have internalized the importance of these principles and have found ways to achieve them without access to advanced technology and billions of defense spending.

Precision-guided munitions are smart, but not as smart as human beings. ‘Smart’ weapons minimize risk to the force using them in exchange for a high financial cost, $1.87 million per Tomahawk cruise missile in 2017. Suicide bombs represent the opposite end of the precision-guided munitions spectrum, a minimum of financial cost and an acceptance of not only of risk but sacrifice. Describing the use of IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs as ‘barbaric’ or ‘irrational’ denies the strategic utility of these methods and fails to comprehend that the groups using them may be desperate but they are not irrational. They have political objectives and are using the most effective methods available to them. To describe them as anything less is a grave underestimation, and serious strategic failure.

Further Reading

Gillio Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, (Algeria/Italy: 1966).

Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, (New York, NY: Verso, 2007).

Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, (New York, NY: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006).