Banner with links P S U dot E D U home

Menu:



Share this page Share This Page

From Vietnam to 9/11
John P. Murtha with John Plashal

Chapter 11: Reflecting on the Past/Looking to the Future

I have been very fortunate in being able to combine my military experience with my service in Congress to help develop a more effective fighting force for our country. Over the years in which I have observed U.S. forces deployed in combat and in peacekeeping missions, I have learned many lessons. So have our government and our military. However, although there have been some stunning successes, often administrations have tended to underestimate or misinterpret these lessons when they formulated and executed policy.

The Importance of Intelligence
When I was an intelligence officer in Vietnam, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Wolf gave me a plaque bearing the words "Victory is knowing your enemy." I cannot stress enough the importance of those words. The United States’ intelligence arsenal is vast. Its satellites provide photographic, signal, voice, weather, and location information to our forces; intelligence aircraft provide photo surveillance, electronic surveillance, and signals intelligence; specialists in almost any country you can name analyze the data; HUMINT and other programs supplement these efforts. In addition, tactical military intelligence systems provide massive amounts of information on the locations of enemy troop concentrations and their communications. The United States' civilian and military intelligence infrastructure dwarfs that of any other country in the world.

In all the crises I have witnessed, the common thread has been the importance of intelligence. The intelligence challenges have ranged from the macro to the micro. In Vietnam, would China intervene if the bombing of North Vietnam was escalated? Where were the Viet Cong's tunnels? In Lebanon, which of the intelligence reports of a threatened terrorist attack against our troops was credible? In Panama, where had General Noriega gone in the aftermath of our intervention? In the Persian Gulf, how effective would the Iraqi forces be? In Somalia, where was Aideed? In Afghanistan, where was Osama bin Laden? What is the status of Iraq's effort to build weapons of mass destruction?

Robert M. Gates, then director of the CIA, stated in December 1992:

In reality it is the daily collection and analysis of millions of bits ofinformation that consume nearly all of our resources and fuel thedecision-making process. Who is killing whom in Bosnia? How longare the runways in Somalia? Where are the 30,000 nuclear warheadsin Russia and who controls them? How far along is Libya's chemicalweapons plant? To whom is North Korea selling its missiles? . . .What are the frequencies of Iranian radars? These and thousands ofother questions pour in to us twenty-four hours a day from policymakers, the military, and the Congress-all three with insatiable appetitesfor information.

I have been greatly concerned about the deployment of American forces to countries that are so peripheral to our national interests that we have very little intelligence about them. Vernon Loeb wrote in the Washington Post about the CIA contingent in Somalia. Garret Jones, "a former Miami police detective, . . . had just finished a year's study at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., where he'd written a paper on UN peacekeeping missions' need for a dedicated structure for analyzing intelligence. Three other temporary station chiefs had already rotated in and out of Somalia, and Jones was the only candidate left back at Langley who wanted to go and knew anything about Africa." Jones's aide in Mogadishu, John Spinelli, had arrived just a week before Jones, having been torn from a plum assignment in the CIA's Rome station. He knew nothing about Africa, but he spoke Italian, and the Italians in the UN peacekeeping force weren't getting along with their American counterparts. When Spinelli took Jones to the CIA station, the new chief's jaw dropped: It consisted of two windblown rooms in the vandalized former residence of the U.S. ambassador. Only one room had a door. Spinelli told him they had no business being in the middle of this war zone, trying to meet secretly with agents in a city where they couldn't drive down the street without getting shot at.

Over the decades the capabilities and effectiveness of our national intelligence programs have fluctuated. Accurate and timely intelligence is the ultimate force multiplier—that is, the key to using our military effectively. A robust and effective intelligence capability is absolutely central to our national security posture.

In 1993 I offered an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that set up and funded a National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC). Over the years I had noticed the lack of cooperation and policy coordination among the proliferation of agencies involved in the effort to counter illegal drug trafficking. It is a simple fact of life that bureaucracies are so turf-conscious that they frequently fail to share information with each other even if they have the same goals. NDIC brought together officials from all of the agencies involved and has streamlined the antidrug intelligence effort.

As we have seen in the investigations and revelations of the events leading up to September 11, the failure to connect the dots was at least partly attributable to the lack of coordination among the many agencies and departments involved in the intelligence component of the antiterrorism effort.

Criteria for Deployment of U.S. Forces
The vast majority of Americans agree that the United States should maintain a strong international military presence and be willing to use its military power when appropriate. As Joseph S. Nye Jr. wrote: "Polls show that the American people are neither isolationist nor eager to serve as the world's police." It is distressing to contemplate the number of conflicts and atrocities around the world. As the undisputed world leader, the United States will increasingly be called upon to intervene militarily in a wide variety of situations. So we must be extremely cautious about when, where, and for what purpose we deploy our troops.

In the last two decades the most successful U.S. military interventions have been those in which a clear national security issue was involved and decisive force was used to attain our objectives. The classic example is the Persian Gulf War. A nation important to the United States and NATO had been invaded and stability in a key region of the world with vital economic resources was threatened. The United States and its allies reacted decisively. Congress authorized military action and the American people overwhelmingly supported it. So did the Kuwaitis. In the intervention in Panama, the key factors were the long historical ties between our two countries, the strategic importance of the Panama Canal, the stealing of the election by Noriega and his cronies, and the mistreatment of American citizens by Noriega's troops. Again the United States acted decisively. Ninety percent of the Panamanian people supported U.S. intervention. In Afghanistan our national security was clearly jeopardized by the Taliban's provision of a safe haven for bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist organization. A massive bombing campaign combined with effective ground attacks by our Afghan allies and American Special Forces rapidly defeated the major Taliban contingents. Once again, the vast majority of Afghans supported our efforts; they had had enough of the oppressive policies of the medieval-like Taliban regime.

Conversely, when U.S. military interventions have failed, the vital national security interests of the United States were not involved and we did not act decisively. In Lebanon our troops were in an untenable geographic position and our force was not large enough to carry out the mission effectively. In Somalia a well-meaning humanitarian intervention ended in failure because we interjected ourselves into a civil war. I am not arguing that we should have acted decisively with a larger military force in either case. As I have explained, I opposed the intervention in Somalia from the day the decision to intervene was made.

When the decision was made to deploy the United Nations troops in a peacemaking role in Bosnia, the initial insertion of those forces was tepid and they did not end the violence. After the Dayton Accords were signed, however, a large force was deployed, including a significant American contingent. Those troops made it clear that if they were fired upon, they would react massively and decisively; they would adhere to the doctrine of disproportionate response. Here again the Powell doctrine worked. Relative peace ensued.

In the air war in Serbia and Kosovo, the initial limited air attacks escalated steadily to massive and prolonged bombing. Once again a weak military response had to be intensified. In the end the NATO forces had to issue a credible threat of massive invasion by ground forces and the people had to revolt en masse before success was achieved.

Our military forces have frequently been deployed for short periods to deliver food and other supplies after a natural disaster. Such humanitarian missions are laudable, but they have to be chosen very carefully. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has written:

For a humanitarian intervention to be wise and ethical, it must be attempted only if the odds are excellent that it will make a bad situation better and not worse. Intervening to stop Russia from killing tens of thousands of innocent Chechens, for instance, would have risked a major-power war between nuclear-weapon states with the potential to kill far more people than the intervention could have saved. Invading North Korea to bring food to its starving people would probably precipitate all-out war on the peninsula, quite possibly killing as many civilians in Seoul (to say nothing of soldiers on both sides of the war) as the food aid would save in North Korea. Entering into the Angolan civil war would force us to choose sides between our former anti-Communist associate Jonas Savimbi, a maniacal killer who has violated two major peace accords, and the corrupt dos Santos government.

David Fromkin provides a perspective on the intervention in Somalia that applies far beyond that particular crisis:

One lesson of Somalia was that there is no such thing as a purely humanitarian intervention. A military intervention in a foreign country, unless undertaken at the request of its government, is political. It occurs because the United States, believing that the other country isn't being ruled properly, acts to overthrow the local leadership; but of course that obliges America to take over the government itself. . . . Somalia should have taught Americans that invading, occupying and administering a foreign country may not be as easy as it looks at first. Above all, the lesson of Somalia was that, even in the absence of enemy great powers . . . , America is not completely free to make the world do as Americans wish.

In June 2000 the New York Times Magazine quoted Richard Holbrooke, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as saying that he disagreed with Henry Kissinger's view that "you don't get in these things unless your chance of success is 85 to 90 percent." He could understand that view during the Cold War, Holbrooke said, when "any setback to the United States was a gain for the Soviet Union, but in the post-Cold War world, where the United States is the single leader and great things are expected of us, we should try even if our chances of success are less than 50 percent."

I have known Richard Holbrooke for many years. He is a dynamic and courageous man. However, I disagree with him on this issue. First of all, we must remember that although we are the world's largest military power, the size of our military has shrunk dramatically since the end of the Cold War. While peacekeeping missions may not involve a large number of troops by wartime standards, those numbers are far from negligible. The United States had 6,000 troops in Bosnia and 4,000 in Kosovo. Those 10,000 military personnel were overwhelmingly from one branch—the Army. Troops sent on peacekeeping missions serve in six-month rotations, so we are talking about 20,000 personnel a year from one of the services. Add those involved in training and supporting those troops and you are talking about a fairly significant number. A related problem is that the nature of the peacekeeping mission inevitably causes a short-term decline in the fighting capability of the deployed units. In February 2001 the Third Infantry Division, which had units deployed on a peacekeeping mission in the Balkans, was downgraded "to the Army's second-lowest rating for wartime readiness, effectively removing it from its traditional role: standing by to defend the nation." Granted, that downgrade was temporary, only until the division could resume its training for its traditional role, but any decline in warreadiness is troubling, and it becomes more so when the same U.S. military units are deployed for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions time after time.

If serious consideration is being given to sending American troops to a country whose importance to our national security is not clear, it is especially important for policy makers to ascertain the relative strength of our interests and those of our adversaries. Nina Serafino of the Congressional Research Service wrote: "Some situations may not be winnable with limited force because the opponent has a much greater interest in the outcome than the intervening parties, and thus is willing to sustain greater costs and to cede only in the face of a crushing defeat. Once committed to an intervention in such circumstances, the intervening party is faced with a Hobson's choice: to bear much higher costs than originally anticipated, or to withdraw."

As our policy evolved in Somalia, for example, Aideed and his clan had a much greater interest in the outcome of events than we did. The average American was concerned about the suffering and hunger in Somalia but couldn't have cared less about who the clan leaders were.

I think the greatest danger of military deployments to countries of minimal interest to the United States' security is the loss of credibility if we suffer setbacks and have to withdraw. We risk being seen as an unreliable ally by nations that are important to our national security. And the case for military intervention for humanitarian missions loses its strength in comparison with the enormous effort we must commit to fighting terrorism.

These are the major criteria I would apply to the deployment of U.S.
troops:

The Quality of America's Armed Forces
It is absolutely essential to retain high-quality personnel in our armed forces. Over the years the quality of personnel has fluctuated. After the great performance of U.S. troops in the 1990s, we tend to forget that in the late 1970s and early 1980s the quality of many of our personnel was a problem, morale was low, and there was a significant drug problem. When I made an inspection trip to the Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1979, a drill instructor said, "Congressman, I hate to tell you this, but if there was a war, I don't believe these guys would fight." I passed his comment along to the Marine commandant.

Shortly after that I conducted a surprise inspection at the Marine Corps headquarters in Virginia. I found the morale abysmal. Marines were selling blankets and other government gear to get money for drugs. Soon the Marine Corps downsized by a total of 10,000 troops, removing the least qualified. After a zero-tolerance drug policy was instituted, the quality of our forces improved significantly. I believe our highest priority should be the recruitment and retention of high-quality personnel in all the services.

Many people simply do not realize how many personnel are needed to conduct military operations. It would seem that the proliferation of high-tech weapons would reduce the number of personnel required, but that is not the case.

During the early days of the Persian Gulf War, we all marveled at the pictures on our TV screens of the smart bombs dropped down the airshaft of the Iraqi Air Defense Headquarters and on other Iraqi military facilities. Those missions seemed to involve only a handful of pilots and aircraft.
What we did not see was the massive support required for success:

In addition to the personnel directly involved in those operations, a vast array of other personnel labored in support roles around the world:

An analogous situation is the aircraft carrier task force group whose awesome capabilities played such a central role in the war in Afghanistan. The actual size of an aircraft carrier task force varies with the purpose and scope of its mission. Typically there are about 8,000 sailors in a task force—5,000 on the carrier and 3,000 on the escort ships. These "floating airfields" enable the United States to deploy a great military asset to distant corners of the globe.

An aircraft carrier typically has about 120 planes: 60 combat aircraft and 60 aircraft to serve such functions as jamming the enemy’s radar emissions, performing reconnaissance, bringing provisions to the task force, and rescuing downed pilots. Many highly skilled personnel are required to keep these aircraft operational. The ship's communications centers and their navigation and radar systems must be staffed twenty-four hours a day. All of the thousands of sailors in a carrier task force, from jet pilots to cooks, fulfill roles required for the successful missions of the 60 combat aircraft on the carrier.

A global network of ground stations is processing information from satellites and other sources to provide information to the carrier task force. A typical U.S. manufacturing company operates 40 hours a week—8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Many of our national defense programs providing nonstop information to our military around the world must operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—168 hours a week. When vacation time and holidays are factored in, the national security operations for receiving, processing, and disseminating this information need almost five shifts to carry out their duties.

Also, a large percentage of the thousands of sailors in a task force have spouses and children at bases back in the States, requiring personnel to provide medical care, housing, and other services. Those bases have other personnel to maintain their infrastructure. The ports and harbors where the carrier task force is based must be dredged. When the carrier task force returns to its home port, the planes must be repaired and upgraded and the ships must undergo maintenance and occasional complete overhauls. Thus, although the actual number of naval attack aircraft in one carrier task force is about 60, tens of thousands of support personnel are needed to enable the pilots to carry out their missions successfully. We must not lose sight of the sheer size and complexity of the effort involved in having these capabilities always available to carry out America's national security objectives.

Airpower
Since its first use in warfare, airpower has had a significant impact on the outcome of numerous battles and wars. Air attacks played the central role in achieving NATO's goals in Serbia. Airpower, ranging from B-52 bomber attacks against large troop concentrations and supply nodes to F-4 fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, and C-130 gunships for close air support, was essential to our effort in Vietnam. The air attacks against Libya ordered by President Reagan ended state-sponsored terrorism by that country. In the Persian Gulf War, weeks of the most intensive bombing since World War II inflicted extensive damage to Saddam Hussein's defense infrastructure and significantly weakened the Iraqi forces in Kuwait before the allied ground invasion. And in Afghanistan, the use of smart bombs and laser guidance by ground forces to pinpoint targets and the introduction of UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicles) armed with Hellfire missiles helped bring an extraordinary victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. Indeed, writes Karl Mueller, there have been "revolutionary advances in munitions guidance, aircraft sensors, flight simulators, and battle management, together with more evolutionary developments in airframe, engine, and other technologies." Despite these stunning advances and successes, I believe America must not become overconfident of the ability of airpower to resolve complex foreign policy crises.

U.S. forces and our South Vietnam allies did not prevail in Vietnam, despite our overwhelming advantage in the air. The Soviets found in Afghanistan that their air superiority-indeed, their opponents had no air assets-could not prevent their defeat by sophisticated anti-air weaponry and a focused guerrilla force. In the Persian Gulf War, despite the enormous allied bombing effort, Kuwait was retaken by land forces in tanks and armored vehicles in a classic ground invasion. Of the total kills of Iraqi tanks during the Persian Gulf War, 21 percent were destroyed by air forces over forty-four days and 79 percent by ground forces over four days. The statistics for destroyed Iraqi artillery are similar—75 percent destroyed by ground forces and 24 percent by air attacks. In 1998, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched against the terrorist camps of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the suspected terrorist facility in Sudan did not achieve the intended objectives. In Serbia, despite the fact that 40 percent of America's air assets were used, along with a significant air contribution by our allies, and 23,000 bombs and missiles were launched, Milosevic backed down only after he was convinced that a massive intervention by NATO ground forces into Kosovo was imminent. For discussion purposes, let us assume, as many people have done, that it was the air war alone that caused Milosevic to back down. As John Keegan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It was the destruction of the Serb civilian infrastructure rather than the direct attack on the Third Army that eventually persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his troops."

Relying exclusively on airpower to stop atrocities in less developed countries is unlikely to be effective. Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon wrote:

In many of the worst civil and ethnic wars around the world there are few strategic and armored targets ripe for air attack. Coercive bombing is also unlikely to be of much use, since atrocities are often committed by militias or rebel forces that do not have clear dependencies or vulnerabilities that can be targeted by airpower. . . . A B-2 bomber simply is not a very effective instrument to stop genocide committed largely with machetes or machine guns. That task calls for ground troops—and usually more rather than less. And once troops are deployed, the aim must be to achieve the objective decisively in order to minimize risks to U.S. and allied forces. To do so requires decisive force, rather than gradual escalation. . . .

Far from heralding a new age of humanitarian intervention, the war in Kosovo highlights the difficulty of pursuing such a course. The single most important lesson of the conflict is that there is no cheap, easy way to prevent genocide or mass killing. Airpower alone will not generally determine what transpires on the ground. Only when paired with ground forces—and only if used decisively—can airpower be expected to work. That, of course, raises the cost of using force, making it more important that operations enjoy international legitimacy and that allies and others bear their full share of the burden.

Another cautionary note about overreliance on airpower: the United States must be careful when it decides the threshold for intervening militarily. We should not lower the threshold by thinking, "Since we're most likely to suffer only minimal casualties by using airpower, we should act." We must always strive to minimize our casualties, but making a policy decision to intervene with airpower alone could lead to the deployment of ground troops if our objectives are not attained through airpower alone. If the country is of such marginal national security interest to the United States that we would not consider deploying ground troops there otherwise, we should think long and carefully before we send in those aircraft.

Despite these reservations, I strongly support upgrading America's weaponry and combat support systems. In addition to the high-profile weapons procurement programs, the technological capabilities of tactical intelligence, communications, and other functions for application in the use of future weapon systems are being increased dramatically.

United Nations Military Deployments
In recent years the United States' military involvements have been in concert with the United Nations. With so many crises arising in countries outside of our traditional vital national security interests, it is logical that the United Nations has been the leader in developing the international community's response. My on-site inspections and observations, however, have given me serious reservations about the capability of the United Nations to carry out large-scale military missions effectively, as I told President Clinton in 1993. When a peacekeeping mission develops into a combat operation, it has crossed the line into territory for which the UN is unequipped. I recall Speaker Tom Foley saying, "Never shake your fist at someone first and then point your finger at them later." This is what the United Nations has done too often. Time after time the ambitious goals embodied in UN resolutions have outstripped the political will and capability of the United Nations to act decisively. (It must be admitted that these impractical resolutions have often been supported and even inspired by the United States.) In Somalia, as I noted earlier, the United States was scaling back its role significantly just as the UN, with the support of our government, was expanding its goals—a recipe for disaster.

A few years after the UN left Somalia, a UN contingent of fifty-one Dutch soldiers was captured by Serb forces in Bosnia. In response to their capture, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1004, which, as William Shawcross explains, demanded that the Bosnian Serbs "leave Srebrenica immediately. It demanded that all the parties respect the status of Srebrenica as a safe area. It demanded that the Bosnian Serbs release immediately all UN personnel they had detained. It demanded immediate access to Srebrenica for the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies. As the resolution was passed, General Mladic was still holding the Dutch peacekeepers captive. . . . The demands and the threats of the Security Council meant nothing."

Five years after that fiasco, in May 2000, Richard Holbrooke reflected on a new hostage-taking in the West African country of Sierra Leone: "I must say . . . that the sight of UN peacekeepers being taken hostage by murderous thugs in Sierra Leone five years to the week after UN peacekeepers were similarly taken hostage by murderous thugs in Bosnia is not only outrageous but sobering."

Passing tough-sounding resolutions that cannot or will not be carried out has a twofold effect. The hopes of the suffering parties are raised falsely; then, when the resolutions and tough rhetoric are not acted upon or ineffectively enforced, further UN pronouncements are not taken seriously.

The United Nations' inability to conduct military operations effectively and the United States' understandable reluctance to send ground forces on humanitarian missions to countries of minimal interest to its security presents a serious problem. A strong case can be made for the international community to intervene to stop violence and atrocities, but this is a moral issue, not a strategic one. I believe that U.S. military involvement in such situations (if it is required) should be limited to operations such as airlift, logistics, communications, tactical intelligence, and training. To the extent practicable, the ground forces for these UN operations should come from nations in the region and from developed countries whose foreign policy embraces the military intervention. Efforts must continue to be made to upgrade the UN's ability to conduct these missions.

Conclusion
Martin Wolf, paraphrasing the opening of Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, gave his perspective on the twentieth century: "It was the worst of centuries. It was the best of centuries. It was the age of progress; it was the age of madness. Never before has humanity made such leaps in knowledge and wealth. Never before has it suffered such cruelties and frailties." Those few sentences capture the irony of the last century. It saw unspeakable violence by human beings against human beings over 100 million deaths in warfare between nations, in civil conflicts, in atrocities committed by tyrants against their own people, and by ethnic and religious groups against each other. But that same century brought enormous increases in longevity, health, wealth, communications, and quality of life.

To ensure that the scourge of terrorism is defeated and the horrors of the twentieth century are not repeated, it is vital that the United States conducts a vigorous and engaged foreign policy, complemented by a superior military capability. Richard Hart Sinnreich wrote: "Historically, the most profound strategic transformations, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, have burst upon the world unheralded. Not one of America’s major military conflicts in this century was anticipated. As late as 1991, only two years after the Iron Curtain evaporated, America found itself at war in the Persian Gulf with an adversary that only months earlier had been considered a regional ally."

I believe the most important lesson of the twentieth century for America is that we can expect our national security to be challenged when our military is weak or when we are perceived as being irresolute. The meager capability of our armed forces before World War I and World War II and the precipitous downsizing of our defense budget after each war should be lesson enough. When America entered World War II in 1941 our army was seventeenth in the world in size. Within five years after the end of World War II, we were engaged in another major conflict in Korea. Once again we were unprepared. (As I noted earlier, when I joined the Marine Corps as a teenager during the Korean War, I had to wear my civilian clothes during my first two weeks in boot camp because no uniforms were available.) In the aftermath of the Vietnam War the quality of our military personnel declined significantly.

Although America will be the world's only superpower for years and decades to come, future generations should remember the words of Loren Thompson, who wrote: "History is strewn with the remains of great civilizations that lost the capacity to protect themselves from external challenges. The hard part for America, as for Rome, seems to be maintaining a sense of purpose when threats recede. Given enough time, Americans are masters of military mobilization and execution. Where they have proved wanting is in preserving their might during periods of peace."

Buy the Book

Epilogue

© 2003 The Penn State University