InterAgency Journal

Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)

The Simons Center
for Ethical Leadership and
Interagency Cooperation

The Lewis and Clark Center

100 Stimson Ave., Suite 1149

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027

Ph: 913-651-0624 •Fax: 913-651-4519

Email: office@TheSimonsCenter.org

www.TheSimonsCenter.org

PUBLISHER

Roderick M. Cox

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Robert R. Ulin

MANAGING EDITOR

John J. Nelson

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Elizabeth Ditsch

Paige Cox

Sarah Gerges

DESIGN/PRODUCTION

Mark H. Wiggins

MHW Public Relations and Communications

DIGITAL CONVERSION

Allen Press, Inc.

Lawrence, Kansas

Copyright 2022, CGSC Foundation, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the CGSC Foundation, Inc.

FEATURES

The Complexities of American Foreign Policy: The Case for Diplomatic Experience and Education

Justin Kidd

Undercover Operations in the U.S. to Counter Terrorism and National Security Threats

Tyne Truong

Fixing a Hole: Contemporary Security Issues in Africa

Zachary Hadley

Understanding the Budgets of the Sino-U.S. Naval Arms Race

James Landreth

Operation Citadel: Enabling the Interagency Approach

Michael W. Parrott

The Fallacy of a Marketing Approach Applied to Interagency Influence Efforts

Ian J. Courter

WORTH NOTING

BOOK REVIEW

SIMONS CENTER EDITORIAL BOARD

David A. Anderson, DBA

Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Maj. Gen. Allen W. Batschelet, U.S. Army, Ret.

Col. Adrian T. Bogart III, U.S. Army

William J. Davis, Jr.

Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

G. Michael Denning

Director, Kansas University Graduate Military Programs

William G. Eckhardt

Teaching Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law

Ralph M. Erwin

Senior Geospatial Intelligence Officer, National Geospatial Agency Liaison to U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

Howard M. Hensel, Ph.D.

Professor, U.S. Air Force Air War College

Gary R. Hobin

Assistant Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Col. Bart Howard, U.S. Army, Ret.

Lt. Col. George Kristopher Hughes, U.S. Army

U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Gene Kamena

Chair, Department of Leadership and Warfighting, U.S. Air Force Air War College

Jack D. Kem, Ph.D.

Associate Dean of Academics, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Brig. Gen. Wendell C. King, Ph.D., U.S Army, Ret.

Maj. Gen. Eugene J. LeBoeuf, U.S. Army, Ph.D.

Commanding General, 79th Theater Sustainment Command

Steven M. Leonard

Program Director, MS-Business and Organizational Leadership, Kansas University

James B. Martin, Ph.D.

Dean of Academics, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Gustav A. Otto, Ph.D.

Defense Intelligence Agency

William T. Pugh

Assistant Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

James H. Willbanks, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Mark R. Wilcox

Assistant Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Donald P. Wright, Ph.D.

Deputy Director, Army University Press

From the Editor-in-Chief

In the February 2020 edition of the InterAgency Journal, the CGSC Foundation optimistically proclaimed that “2020 will be an impressive year,” and while we were not wrong, the year was impressive in very different ways than we imagined. When the pandemic struck, we had to rework and even shelve some of the “exciting new programs” planned for our 15th anniversary year. With the cancelling of Foundation in-person events, closing the office, and working remotely for months, the Simons Center suspended the publication of the InterAgency Journal.

Despite the closures during 2020, the CGSC Foundation and the Simons Center continued to move forward. While the Foundation awarded its first scholarships to four promising young minds in April 2020, the Simons Center was re-organized to include in its title, Ethical Leadership, an indispensable component of interagency cooperation. At the same time, the Simons Center also assumed the responsibility to reengage the alumni of the National Security Roundtable (NSRT), a CGSC Foundation program that invites civilian business leaders to the College to learn about various aspects of national security affairs. To further engage the interagency community, the Simons Center’s Arter-Rowland National Security Forum conducted several virtual programs in 2020. With the lifting of COVID restrictions, two in-person events were conducted in 2021 – one in Des Moines, Iowa and the other in Kansas City, Missouri.

Now in 2022, Arter-Rowland National Security Forum members are participating in luncheons, symposia, and special events to engage in meaningful dialogue with subject matter experts on topics relevant to national security. In addition, the Simons Center launched a new Fellows Program designed to create a community of practice for individuals, scholars, and practitioners interested in interagency cooperation. The redesign of the Simons Center’s website saw the launching of the “Bull Simons Ops Center Podcast” with interviews of service members who participated in key military events of historical importance.

With this issue, we are excited to be once again publishing the Interagency Journal. In response to how readers are consuming information and with respect to cost considerations, we will publish the Interagency Journal semi-annually in an online format only. During our publishing hiatus, we received several superb articles and book reviews. Although some submissions were originally written and received by the Simons Center as early as 2020, the analysis and findings therein remain relevant and insightful.

Thank-you for reading this issue of the InterAgency Journal. At the Simons Center we are always looking for ways to enhance interagency discourse. We welcome your feedback and likewise welcome submissions of original materials for publication. I invite you to visit our website to for the latest publications, podcasts, videos of our events, and interagency news. – RRU

The Complexities of American Foreign Policy:

The Case for Diplomatic Experience and Education

by Justin Kidd

When it comes to selecting their ambassadors, historically, U.S. Presidents have chosen non-career political appointees as their representatives 35 percent of the time.[1] This practice has met with criticism, mainly the argument that the President’s desire to have their own people in place runs counter to the need for ambassadors with the experience necessary to conduct foreign policy abroad. However, the real problem of preparing and educating the next generation of diplomats may reside in the Department of State itself.

As the personal envoy and representative of the President to a foreign government, the ambassador enjoys a high level of responsibility and trust. Not only are ambassadors the personal representative of the President, they also act as the eyes and ears on the ground, capable of influencing policy due to their intimate knowledge of their assigned country. Ambassador Robert R. Bowie believes ambassadors play the primary role as the main source of intimate understanding of the local issues, politics, economics, and social issues of their assigned country.[2] Bowie goes on to say the ambassador is the most likely person to have not only the latest information, but also the context. The ambassador should be able to provide an assessment of what is going on, and recommend a course of action to meet the objectives of U.S. strategy.[3] The complexities of the foreign policy environment require that American diplomats be as well trained and educated as possible.

The Ambassador Has Many Responsibilities

The statutory duties of an ambassador are described in 22 U.S. Code 3927, as well as in the letter each president gives to Ambassadors before they depart for their assigned country. Ambassadors have full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all government executive branch employees in that country, with the exception of personnel under United States military command. Second, ambassadors shall be kept fully and currently informed with respect to all activities and operations of the executive branch agencies within that country, and shall ensure that all government employees in that country comply fully with all the applicable directives of the chief of mission.[4] Ambassadors also receive a letter of instruction from the President detailing their additional special duties or tasks. A letter of instruction is also sent to the heads of all executive branch agencies informing them of their requirement to support the new ambassador.[5]

Dr. Justin Kidd is an assistant professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College School of Advanced Military Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Security Studies with Kansas State University, and his dissertation area of study was diplomacy and ambassador performance. Kidd has completed courses with the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford, England, and the Refugee Law Project Transitional Justice program, Kampala, Uganda.

...35 percent of selected ambassadors are political appointees with little or no diplomatic or regional experience.

The tradition of providing a presidential letter of instruction to new ambassadors dates to President Eisenhower.[6] Historians have noted these letters have changed little over time, as they are general in nature and reinforce the roles and responsibilities of ambassadors. The letters also detail the authorities ambassadors have for the successful execution of the foreign policy mission as the president’s personal representative. A 2008 example letter from President Obama is indicative of the nature of the responsibilities. The letter states “you have full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all U.S. Executive Branch employees in (assigned country), regardless of their employment categories or location.” The letter goes on to state, “you have full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all Department of Defense personnel on official duty in (assigned country) except those under the command of a U.S. area military commander.”[7]

Ambassadors today face a range of challenges including weapons of mass destruction, trade and commerce expansion, piracy of intellectual property rights, terrorism, trafficking in drugs and persons, environmental pollution, regional ethnic and religious conflicts, refugee displacements, human rights violations, and an increasingly global economy that cannot be managed unilaterally by even a global power.[8]

The Patronage System

Because of the challenges of global diplomacy, one would expect a high level of Foreign Service expertise and experience in those persons selected to be Ambassadors.[9] However, that is not always the case.[10] As previously stated, 35 percent of selected ambassadors are political appointees with little or no diplomatic or regional experience.[11] Although this patronage system has been the norm since the earliest of presidential administrations, it has come under increasing scrutiny and discussion by foreign policy and diplomacy experts.

There has been continuing discussion on the practice of Presidents appointing non-career diplomats as part of a spoils system that dated back to the 1950s. Although historically the numbers of political ambassadors remain in the 30 to 35 percent range, that number had been creeping steadily upwards. Organizations such as the American Foreign Service Association have long advocated for strict limits on non-career diplomats, and much like Ambassadors Ronald Neumann and Thomas Pickering, have developed a list of recommended skills and qualifications that seek to curtail the practice of selecting unqualified candidates.

According to Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report, the American Foreign Service Association called attention to the appointments of non-career ambassadors to positions of important diplomatic posts abroad.[12] Bedard noted that although they believe non-career ambassadors are accomplished in their professional non-diplomatic fields, their appointments should be the exception, and not the excepted as they have become. Over a three-decade period, over 85 percent of ambassadorial appointments to major European countries and Japan, and nearly 60 percent of appointments to a wider group of emerging global powers (such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have been political appointees.[13]

In June 2008, Ambassadors Neumann and Pickering from the American Academy of Diplomacy sent a letter to presidential candidates Senators Barack Obama and John McCain requesting their support for reform of the selection process for ambassadors. While acknowledging that historically more than one-third of all ambassadors are political appointees, Neumann and Pickering recommended the number of politically appointed ambassadors be limited to no more than 10 percent.[14] Others have argued the role of an ambassador has increased in complexity, as ambassadors now have the responsibility to coordinate activities with all the agencies assigned to their country’s embassy. The average medium-size embassy can easily include more than 30 different agencies, each owing their allegiance to a headquarters back in Washington.[15]

Neumann and Pickering also recommended a list of qualities an ambassador should possess whether they are a career foreign service officer or political appointee.[16] Among these qualities were integrity, experience in their assigned country, ability to speak the local language, an understanding of American history and the democratic process, and demonstrated skills as a leader and team builder.[17]

Other Considerations

Compounding the complexities of the international arena are the challenges of the Washington, D.C. bureaucratic arena. Good to great ambassadors must understand the bureaucratic policy making apparatus within the U.S. government in order to explain the decision-making peculiarities to foreign officials. Ambassador Raymond Seitz is not alone in his belief that this education is not easy to get due to the fragmented way Washington is structured for decision making.[18] This seems to support the choice of a career foreign service officer who has dealt with this fragmented decision making apparatus, or an appointee who has dealt on the national or strategic level with Washington decision making.

Neumann and Pickering recommended the number of politically appointed ambassadors be limited to no more than 10 percent.

Ambassadors are supported by embassy staffs of various skills and experiences. As long as inexperienced ambassadors are assigned to a country with a fully manned and experienced embassy staff, there should not be any problems.[19] This proposal postulates that problems arise when the country to which the inexperienced ambassador is assigned is not fully manned with experienced personnel. In this situation, the experience level of the ambassador becomes critical.[20]

There are detractors that do not believe that even with appropriate resources the State Department can adequately perform their role in diplomacy. Kori Schake is one such detractor who believes that it takes more than an embassy and a staff to conduct U.S. foreign policy. She notes that even outside think tanks, like the Stimson Center, do not believe the State Department is capable of equipping their diplomats with the skills necessary to conduct twenty-first century diplomacy.[21]

Part of the problem may be the limited education offered to both Foreign Service Officers and political appointees. Schake notes the State Department does not invest in the education necessary to help diplomats be more successful.[22] This may be partly due to the lack of empirical research to allow for greater understanding of what helps ambassadors to succeed. Part of this is an absence of measurable standards to assess against. The second problem is the almost total lack of diplomatic training offered and available for political appointees.

Much like how the U.S. military grows their officers and non-commissioned officers through education and experiences, the Department of State provides similar opportunities. However, there are significant differences in the type and length of training that prepares an ambassador for their responsibilities. The course that all new ambassadors attend at the State Departments’ Foreign Service Institute is two weeks long. In this short period, new ambassadors are taught a handful of the essential skills they need to be successful at their new post. For non-career ambassadors, this training cannot take place with the Department until their confirmation hearing with the U.S. Senate has been completed. This minimal period to prepare an ambassador would make performance assessment and measurable standards seemingly more important.

...the State Department can be stifled in their ability to change, tethered to the status quo, and more interested in self-protection than introspection.

However, this lack of experience or education does not relieve the Department of State, or ambassadors, from providing foreign policy recommendations to the president. Most presidents do not come into office with much foreign policy experience.[23] If anything, the president’s lack of foreign policy experience makes it even more important for ambassadors to provide relevant and timely information. Morton Halperin, et al., notes that the president faces so many issues each day that they tend to practice a form of “uncommitted thinking.”[24] In the face of contradicting or intractable problems, the president may yield to emotion or a gut feeling when making decisions, thus a logical emotional decision based on the last conversation may be the result. Halperin, et al., observes that presidents are pressured from all sides by special interest actors, and at times respond to those that are the strongest.[25] These pressures often come from inside the administration. Knowledgeable, qualified, expert opinion is thus critical to a president trying to make foreign policy decisions. Yet the president may be served by a Department of State that does not value education or change.

A Preference for the Status Quo

As even internal studies admit, the Department of State has not responded well to the various challenges it faces in providing timely and informed advice to the president and senior decision makers. In fact, the Department of State has proven highly resistant to change.[26] Sam Sarkesian, et al., observed that the State Department can be stifled in their ability to change, tethered to the status quo, and more interested in self-protection than introspection.[27] According to some, this has produced bureaucratic inertia and burdensome procedures that allow little room for initiative and innovation. The danger of such stasis should be apparent given the important role that ambassadors play for U.S. foreign policy.

For years criticism has been directed toward the Department of State for not growing and changing with the times. This is not to say there have not been changes over the years. When former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, became the Secretary of State, he instituted several changes designed to invigorate and educate senior leaders.[28] Powell involved senior executives from not only the Department of State, but also other key federal agencies involved in the national security process and called it the Senior Seminar. This type of initiative is what Albert Vicere writes about in The Strategic Leadership Imperative.[29] In order to develop high performing organizations, leaders have to be willing to adapt the organization to the marketplace. Leaders should consistently seek ways to meet the needs of their customers. Vicere notes that all organizations go through periods of change, and for institutional resistance to change this fact must be recognized. What slows and shapes this change is the strength of the dominant subculture. In his article “The Issue of Competence in the Department of State,” John Harr calls the Department of State “the Ottoman Empire of Federal Government,” and concludes that Andrew Scott is correct in his assessment about Foreign Service Officers being the dominant subculture that is highly resistant to change.[30]

This lack of emphasis on training and education has had an undesirable effect on the experience level of assigned Foreign Service Officers, which has been noticed by other researchers. Some have observed that the lack of experience in Foreign Service Officers has created a cadre of diplomats that are new to the business of diplomacy, who are required to learn on the job, with a lack of senior mentors to guide them. Part of this is due to the overall lack of formal diplomatic training. However, it has also been noted that there is a serious lack of true expertness in the department, and that the Foreign Service Officers’ experiences in various posts around the world are too short for them to become area specialists in any true definition of the word.

Career officers may know the practices of diplomatic and consular work, but, with few exceptions, they can hardly claim to be experts in either the regions they support or in the larger politics of international relations. James McCamy and Alessandro Corradini found that in order to become an area specialists, a term of five years in one region is assumed to be reasonable, although only 15 percent of Foreign Service Officers had spent more than five years in any region.[31] This led them to state that most Foreign Service Officers have acquired the basic skills of routine embassy administrative work such as report writing, but not the knowledge that comes with prolonged study of an area or topic.

The Danger of Clientitis

This lack of expertness is not coincidental to Hannah Gurman, who believes the success or failure of a country’s foreign policy is based on the dependability and reliability of its diplomatic reports.[32] Although some State Department supporters say the structure of each region is supported by a strong regional bureau with experienced personnel, Ambassador Marc Grossman notes that “While regional bureaus can most quickly bring the art of what is possible to the table and galvanize embassy action, they also suffer the most ‘clientitis,’ the tendency to be overly concerned with another country’s sensitivities.”[33] This tendency to overlook a country’s liabilities is exacerbated when combined with inexperienced Foreign Service Officers.

...regional bureaus...suffer the most ‘clientitis,’ the tendency to be overly concerned with another country’s sensitivities.

The lack of true expertness can allow the phenomenon of clientitis to affect the regional bureau’s supporting multiple embassies in a region. The Near East bureau is an example of an elitist culture that sought to ensure the state of Israel would not be allowed to form. The climate of the bureau was one of comparable social attitudes regarding the Arab countries in their region.[34] This over-reliance on the experience of the Near East bureau allowed this group to plot extensively against the formation of the State of Israel, while seeming to support the executive branch’s desires. Elihu Bergman noted that the culture of the bureau was something of a brotherhood, and combined with their Arabism outlook, sought to protect their clients. In the prevailing corporate culture of the Near East Asia bureau, this uniformity of outlook was not surprising.[35]

Clientitis has led to other more detrimental outcomes. In Nicaragua in 1978, events were spinning out of control for the government of Anastasio Somoza. Although the United States had supported Somoza for many years with both economic and military aid, diplomatic personnel failed to understand the strength of the opposition to Somoza’s rule. After a popular anti-government activist was assassinated by government forces at a critical point in the relationship, the U.S. seemed hesitant, unable to choose between a commitment to human rights or the desire for political continuity in Central America, and the fear of creating another Cuba.[36]

This indecision can be traced to a sense of clientitis and lack of expertness on the ground and led to a decision to cut off military aid to the Somoza regime, while at the same time congratulating him on his improved human rights record. The Somoza government would fall to rebel forces within a year. Strategic Survey notes that “During Somoza’s final years, U.S. policy had been hesitant and dilatory: first assuming that Somoza could weather the storm…and finally realizing too late, that he would in fact be toppled.”[37] The same problem would blind the ambassador and the State Department to the fragile state the government of Iran was in.

President Jimmy Carter had spent the New Year holiday with the Shah of Iran in 1979, and during a New Year’s Eve toast proclaimed the Peacock Throne would last another hundred years. The government of Iran would be swept away by opposition forces within one year. “Oblivious to the mounting evidence of mismanagement and corruption, successive U.S. governments had failed to impress upon the Shah the need for reform and the decentralization of authority.”[38] The State Department and the President were taken utterly by surprise, both at the fall of the Iranian government, and the speed at which it happened. Gurman’s comment on the success or failure of a country’s foreign policy depending on the accuracy of the diplomats reporting brings a new level of importance when governments friendly to the United States begin to fall.[39]

The discussion about the selection and use of political appointees over career Foreign Service Officers has dominated much of the conversation concerning the selection of ambassadors. While diplomacy is seen as primarily a human endeavor, it is apparent there are other issues that may directly impact the education and training of effective diplomats. While the use of political appointees will probably never be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, it does seem that the Department of State could take some steps to improve the education and training of all their diplomats. IAJ

Notes

1 McCamy and Corradini, p. 1067-1082; Ellsworth Bunker, “Introduction,” The Modern Ambassador: The Challenge and the Search, ed. Martin F. Herz. (Washington: Georgetown, 1983) p. 1-3; Heclo, p. 37-56; Morton H. Halperin, Priscilla A. Clapp, and Arnold Kanter. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006); Harry W. Kopp, and Charles A. Gillespie. 2011. Career Diplomacy: Life And Work In The Us Foreign Service, 2d ed. (Washington: Georgetown, 2011).

2 Robert V. Keeley, First Line of Defense: Ambassadors, Embassies, and American Interests Abroad (Washington, D.C.: American Academy of Diplomacy, 2000).

3 Ibid.

4 Martin F. Herz, ed., The Modern Ambassador: The Challenge and the Search (Georgetown University: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1983) p. 180.

5 Herz; Keeley; Hannah Gurman, The Dissent Papers: The Voices Of Diplomats In The Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

6 Gurman, The Dissent Papers: The Voices Of Diplomats In The Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

7 “Sample Letter of Instruction,” Department of State, accessed February 12, 2022, https://careers.state.gov/survey/DOS%20Authorities/Content/HTMs/Documents/Sample%20Letter%20of%20Instruction.pdf.

8 Keeley; Marc Grossman, “The State Department: Culture as Interagency Destiny.” The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth, eds. Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2011) p. 79-96; Gurman.

9 Grossman, p. 79-96; Brandon Grove, Behind Embassy Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Sam C. Sarkesian, John Allen Williams, and Stephen J. Cimbala. 2007. U.S. National Security: Policymakers, Processes and Politics, 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2005).

10 James L. McCamy and Alessandro Corradini. “The People of the State Department and Foreign Service.” American Political Science Review, No. 48 (December 1954), p. 1067-1082; Hugh Heclo, “The In-And-Outer System: A Critical Assessment.” Political Science Quarterly, No. 103 (Spring 1988), p. 37-56; Martha Foschi, “Double Standards For Competence: Theory And Research.” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26, (2000), p. 21-42; Gurman.

11 McCamy and Corradini, p. 1067-1082; Bunker, p. 1-3; Heclo, p. 37-56; Halperin, Clapp, and Kanter; Kopp, and Gillespie.

12 Paul Bedard. 2010. “Obama Rewards Campaign Donors with Ambassador Jobs.” U.S. News and World Report, June 30, 2010.

13 Ibid.

14 Ronald E. Neumann and Thomas R. Pickering. 2008. “American Academy of Diplomacy Urges Presidential Candidates to Support High Qualifications for Ambassadors”. June 26, 2008. http://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/media/AAD_Announces_Amb_Qualifications_6_2008.pdf (May 14, 2015).

15 Jeffrey Cohen, “On The Tenure Of Appointed Political Executives: The American Cabinet, 1952-1984.” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, no 3 (1986), p. 507-516; Heclo, p. 37-56; Neumann and Pickering; Gurman; Ralph Nader. 2013. “Militarizing the State Department.” Counterpunch (February 2013), p. 8-10. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/militarizing-the-state-department (May 14, 2015).

16 Neumann and Pickering.

17 McCamy and Corradini, p. 1067-1082; Anne E. Sartori, Deterrence by Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Neumann and Pickering; Gurman.

18 Keeley; Charles Mathias, “Politics or Merit.” The Modern Ambassador: The Challenge and the Search, ed. Martin F. Herz. (Washington: Georgetown, 1983), p. 110-114; Sartori.

19 Heclo, p. 37-56; Brandon Grove, Behind Embassy Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Kopp and Gillespie.

20 Keeley; Sartori.

21 Kori Schake, “A Robust State Department.” September 2, 2011. http://www.hoover.org/research/robust-state-department.html (May 14, 2015).

22 Ibid.

23 David G. Adler and Larry N. George, eds., The Constitution and the Conduct of American Foreign Policy (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996).

24 Morton H. Halperin, Priscilla A. Clapp, and Arnold Kanter, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006).

25 Ibid.

26 Schake.

27 Sam C. Sarkesian, John Allen Williams, and Stephen J. Cimbala, U.S. National Security: Policymakers, Processes and Politics, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2007).

28 Grossman, p. 79-96.

29 Albert A. Vicere, “The Strategic Leadership Imperative.” Human Resource Planning (February 1992).

30 John E. Harr, “The Issue of Competence in the Department of State.” International Studies Quarterly 14:1 (March 1970), p. 95-101; Andrew M. Scott, “The Department Of State: Formal Organization And Informal Culture.” International Studies Quarterly 13:1 (March 1969), p. 1-18.

31 McCamy and Corradini, p. 1067-1082.

32 Gurman, p. 199.

33 Grossman, p. 79-96.

34 Elihu Bergman, “Unexpected Recognition: Some Observations on the Failure of a Last-Gasp Campaign in the U.S. State Department to Abort a Jewish State.” Modern Judaism 19 (May 2 1999), p. 166.

35 Ibid., p. 146.

36 “Strategic Survey 1979,” The International Institute for Strategic Studies, (Spring 1980), p. 109.

37 Ibid., p. 108.

38 Ibid., p. 54.

39 Gurman, p. 199.

Undercover Operations

in the U.S. to Counter Terrorism and National Security Threats

by Tyne Truong

To effectively thwart various national security threats, such as transnational criminal organizations and terrorism, the U.S. must adopt a robust, cohesive, and coordinated national Undercover Operations (OPS) strategy at the Federal, state, and local levels. This paper asserts that the establishment of Undercover OPS by all Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) of said jurisdictional levels ensures that the most effective prosecution can be formulated for any given criminal or terrorist group, regardless of jurisdiction. A national undercover OPS strategy adopted by Federal, state, and local LEAs would also allow substantive law enforcement information to be transparently and timely accessible to all LEAs at all jurisdictions, so that actionable intelligence information can be operationalized to support the mutually inclusive goals of intelligence-gathering and successful prosecutions. Thus, a U.S. national strategy of coordinated and targeted Undercover OPS, to include all LEAs of all jurisdictions being able to fully access all Undercover OPS databases that provide valuable Undercover OPS-gleaned “probable cause” fact patterns of criminal activities would support that particular LEA’s affidavits for arrest, search, seizure, and electronic surveillance warrants. Such a cohesive Undercover OPS infrastructure ensures that U.S. national power is fully realized and efficiently resourced amongst all jurisdictional LEAs, effectively thwarting national security threats and terrorism.

Background

In 1983, Senator Charles McCurdy Mathias, Jr. sponsored and introduced Senate Bill 804 (S. 804), also known as the Undercover Operations Act, to the U.S. Senate to allow the U.S. Attorney General to give Department of Justice LEAs, such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the authority to carry out Undercover OPS.[1] This bill subsequently set guidelines and established considerations for undercover operations for various U.S. federal law enforcement agencies to follow, such as a) starting, continuing, and ending Undercover OPS, b) Undercover OPS standards; and (c) the role, authorities, and make-up of the Undercover OPS Undercover Review Committee.[2] S. 804 also set forth limitations on Undercover OPS, established standards for how subjects of investigation were targeted, and transferred the tort liability from government agents to the Federal government for negligence committed by said agents during Undercover OPS.[3]

Mr. Tyne Truong is a retired Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations Directorate where he led national security, counterterrorism, and export control missions at the enterprise and regional levels. He is one of Security Magazine’s 2020 “Most Influential People in Security,” holds a Master’s degree in Leadership from the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, and is a Homeland Defense Fellow Distinguished Scholar at the National Defense University, College of International Security Affairs.

...a properly vetted and registered confidential informant may also be deemed as a Undercover employee and/or a government agent...

What are Undercover OPS? Before we go further, the following key Undercover OPS terms and their meaning shall be defined as per the Attorney General’s guidelines for FBI Undercover OPS[4] and for purposes of the following analyses, will also apply to other Federal, state, and local LEAs employing Undercover OPS. Undercover activities are any investigative activity in which an LEA employee or another Federal, state, or local LEA working with the lead LEA (i.e., a task force officer[5] - a state/local LEA officer granted limited Federal arrest, search, seizure authorities), uses an assumed name or cover identity. Undercover OPS are an investigation involving a series of related Undercover activities by an Undercover employee over a period of time, usually the timeframe of a given investigation. A Undercover employee is any LEA employee or employee of another Federal, state, or local law enforcement agency working under the direction and control of the lead LEA in a particular investigation, whose relationship with that lead LEA is concealed from third parties in the course of an investigative operation by the maintenance of a cover or alias identity.[6] Based on the experience of the author of this paper as a criminal investigator and which has been defined by prosecuting U.S. Attorneys and state/local District Attorneys, a properly vetted and registered confidential informant may also be deemed as a Undercover employee and/or a government agent within this definition. A confidential informant can be a transnational criminal organization or terrorist organization member who is providing information to the U.S. government unbeknownst to the subjects of investigation of that organization.[7] “Proprietary” means a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or other business entity operated on a commercial basis, which is owned, controlled, or operated wholly or in part on behalf of the lead LEA, and whose relationship with that lead LEA is concealed from third parties.

With these definitions established and to reiterate the thesis of this paper, if all U.S. LEAs, regardless of jurisdiction, created certified Undercover OPS programs to gather evidence and intelligence on identified transnational criminal organizations, terrorist organizations, and their top-tier leadership, the U.S. government would effectively be exercising its national power by leveraging Undercover OPS as a powerful intelligence and evidence gathering tool of that national power. Intelligence information is the window into the criminal/terrorist organization’s illicit activities that once gleaned from Undercover OPS methodology, allows the U.S. government and specifically, LEAs, to puppeteer targeted covert (i.e., undercover meetings) or overt (i.e., search warrants) operational events to obtain prosecutable evidence. Undercover OPS is just one investigative technique that LEAs could use to gather prosecutable evidence, but unlike obtaining information from individuals subject to arrest by say, responding to a criminal incident that has already occurred (i.e., interviewing occupants of a narcotics-laden vehicle that has been detained entering the U.S. from Mexico at a land border), LEAs would not have to rely on being reactive to a given event to obtain prosecutable evidence, but would now have a powerful proactive tool to obtain said evidence and choose the timing of either overt or covert investigative activity.

To obtain prosecutable evidence from subjects of investigation, an LEA could now use Undercover employees to conduct Undercover activities and perform Undercover OPS by, for example, running a proprietary business to establish the Undercover operation’s bona fides with said subjects. The power of Undercover OPS is further magnified when one takes into account the sheer interconnectedness of persons, places, things, and other evidence employed by a criminal/terrorist group to advance their objectives that Undercover OPS methodology would reveal, particularly when Undercover employees are ferreting out this information from subjects of the targeted transnational criminal organization. When said evidence is developed, shared, and analyzed from the local level all the way up to the state and Federal levels in a national Undercover OPS framework, a local LEA’s Undercover OPS purchase of street-level quantities of drugs (distribution-side) could be, for example, tied to the larger supply-side, international source country’s command and control elements, which is the purview of federal LEAs. However, the sheer numbers of Undercover OPS being run by various U.S. LEAs at the various jurisdictions at this time, often without timely deconfliction or coordination, can make Undercover OPS not only ineffective as an overarching instrument of U.S. national power, but at the operational and prosecutorial level, extremely dangerous when LEAs targeting a criminal group draw weapons against subjects of investigation who may be Undercover employees of another LEA.[8]

When discussing the prosecution of investigative subjects via evidence obtained from Undercover OPS, one has to discuss the concept of “entrapment.”

Analysis

Prosecuting Undercover OPS Cases and Entrapment

When discussing the prosecution of investigative subjects via evidence obtained from Undercover OPS, one has to discuss the concept of “entrapment.” This is particularly important when trying to prove the validity of Undercover OPS as an instrument of U.S. national power to counter criminal and terrorist threats. One must first conceptualize LEA Undercover OPS as being one part of a two-part team, the other part being the prosecuting entity, i.e., the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who prosecutes the Undercover OPS-obtained evidence in a particular investigation. Although the following example refers to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the analysis extends to all prosecutorial entities, such as a local jurisdiction’s District Attorney’s Office or State Attorney General’s Office.

A U.S. Attorney’s Office is headed by a U.S. Attorney and staffed by a number of Assistant U.S. Attorneys who serve as the U.S. federal government’s principal litigators under the direction of the United States Attorney General.[9] Since there are 93 United States Attorneys and their respective Assistant U.S. Attorneys stationed throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands,[10] these prosecutorial resources further enhance LEA Undercover OPS from a national perspective, via the direction and counsel they provide LEAs to ensure a solid prosecution. For purposes of this discussion, U.S. Attorneys conduct trial work in which the United States is a party, as authorized under Title 28, Section 547 of the United States Code and as such: 1) prosecute criminal cases brought by the Federal Government and 2) prosecute and defend civil cases in which the United States is a party.[11] Throughout the life of any given Undercover OPS investigation, regardless of jurisdiction, LEAs must work with their prosecuting attorney in a robust, transparent, collaborative manner to thwart a criminal defense’s arguments to have the government’s case against their client dismissed. Without this collaboration, a given Undercover OPS investigation and the budgetary and time allocations invested in it may be wasted by a successful defense of entrapment, for example.

LEAs must work with their prosecuting attorney in a robust, transparent, collaborative manner to thwart a criminal defense’s arguments to have the government’s case against their client dismissed.

As defined by the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s criminal resource manual 645: entrapment is a defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that “Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.”[12] Jacobson v. United States, 503 U.S. 540, 548 (1992). A valid entrapment defense has two related elements: (1) government inducement of the crime, and (2) the defendant’s lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. Mathews v. United States, 485 U.S. 58, 63 (1988). Of the two elements, predisposition is by far the more important.[13] Even if inducement has been shown, a finding of predisposition is fatal to an entrapment defense. The predisposition inquiry focuses upon whether the defendant “was an unwary innocent or, instead, an unwary criminal who readily availed himself of the opportunity to perpetrate the crime.” Mathews, 485 U.S. at 63. Thus, predisposition should not be confused with intent or mens rea: a person may have the requisite intent to commit the crime yet be entrapped. Also, predisposition may exist even in the absence of prior criminal involvement: “the ready commission of the criminal act,” such as where a defendant promptly accepts an undercover agent’s offer of an opportunity to buy or sell drugs, may itself establish predisposition. Jacobson, 503 U.S. at 550.[14]

Based on the aforementioned entrapment analysis, the U.S. Attorney’s Office can thwart the defense’s ability to assert entrapment of an indicted subject of investigation since the LEA’s Undercover OP can show, often multiple times via multiple recorded undercover meetings, that the subject was predisposed to committing the criminal act, whether that act was provided by the government or not. Herein again illustrates the power of Undercover OPS as an instrument of national power: if the government always proves in a court of law that a criminal/terrorist subject was predisposed to committing the crimes with which he’s charged and those crimes were revealed because of the LEA’s deployment of the Undercover OPS upon the subject, then the pervasive use of Undercover OPS at all jurisdictional levels would enhance the prolificity of successful prosecutions against those criminals/terrorists subjected to said Undercover OPS. That the entrapment defense rarely succeeds in court is a testament to an Undercover OPS’ ability to determine, over time, the predisposition of a subject of investigation via a number of recorded undercover meetings discussing, planning, and strategizing illicit activities. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at an appearance in 2014, “I challenge you to find one of those cases in which the defendant has been acquitted asserting that (entrapment) defense,” when referring to prosecutors having a perfect record in defeating entrapment claims by defense attorneys in terrorism cases, the area in which the FBI has used Undercover OPS most aggressively.[15]

Intelligence Information, Discovery and Parallel Construction

As part of the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism that defines the elements of U.S. national power via diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement (DIMEFIL),[16] how can DIMEFIL’s Information, Military, Intelligence and law enforcement elements be effectively realized to specifically support various LEA operations, such as Undercover OPS? How do domestic LEAs obtain and use information from the intelligence community to thwart a given national security/terrorist threat, without jeopardizing the methods/tradecraft employed by that intelligence agency via the U.S. judicial system’s “discovery” process? Can the “Intelligence” piece of DIMEFIL coexist effectively with the “Legal” aspect of DIMEFIL, specifically when we are talking about the LEA’s use of intelligence information to obtain evidence for prosecutions at the state, local or Federal level?

In the U.S. justice system relating to prosecutions of criminals/terrorists, defendants of a charged crime are entitled to “discovery” information, to include exculpatory information that may exonerate the defendant. Discovery is a formal process of exchanging information between the prosecutor and the defense attorney about such things as witnesses and the evidence that will be presented at trial. Discovery lets the prosecutor and defense know before a trial starts as to what evidence will be presented and is designed to prevent “trial by ambush,” where one side doesn’t learn of the other side’s evidence or witnesses until the trial itself, when there’s no time to obtain counter-evidence.[17] Basically, think of discovery as the defense and the prosecution knowing everything about the evidence that will be presented by the opposing side, to include what type of evidence is being presented, how that evidence was obtained and whether that evidence was obtained legally. All LEA tools to obtain evidence, such as Undercover OPS, will be subject to discovery.

All LEA tools to obtain evidence, such as Undercover OPS, will be subject to discovery.

Since discovery is a mandatory process for all prosecutorial entities in the U.S. judicial system, regardless of whether it’s a Federal, state, or local jurisdiction, what are the implications of discovery to LEAs obtaining information from the intelligence community and operationalizing that information in a Undercover OPS capacity to obtain prosecutable evidence in the U.S.? If LEAs use intelligence community-derived information to effect arrests, indictments, seizures, and other law enforcement actions against a criminal/terrorist organization, will discovery jeopardize the sources (i.e., Undercover agents, confidential informants) and methods employed by the intelligence agency that provided the originating information? This last question is particularly important, since the intelligence community may invariably be using Undercover OPS methodologies of its own that are not subject to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, like U.S. LEAs are bound to. Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure governs how U.S. district and trial courts conduct federal criminal prosecutions in the U.S.

In the aftermath of 9/11 and according to a Congressional Research Service Report for Congress titled, “Sharing Law Enforcement and Intelligence Information: The Congressional Role,” U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ failure to share information with one another subsequently led to Congress enacting legislation that removed barriers to information sharing between said agencies and mandated exchanges of information relating to terrorist threats.[18] Congress wanted to change the way the law enforcement and intelligence agencies were communicating information to one another and it wanted to address the pre-9/11 statutory barriers that had prevented such information sharing based on ensuring that the U.S. government was prevented from spying on U.S. citizens. These pre-9/11 statutes created a “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement that prevented transparent, timely, and robust information exchange. It is asserted herein that for a national Undercover OPS program to be most effective and for LEAs to have the most complete picture possible of a given criminal/terrorist organization, that LEA must be able to use intelligence community-derived information, with caveats. As needed during the discovery process, LEAs in concert with their prosecutors must exercise discretion as to whether prosecuting a particular subject is in the best interests of an investigation, or to the government in general, especially if ongoing international, intelligence community Undercover OPS are being conducted outside of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and which may be jeopardized upon discovery.

Does LEAs’ use of “parallel construction” solve the discovery problem when it comes to using intelligence information to advance a domestic Undercover OPS investigation? According to an open source Reuters article, parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began.[19] As such, it can be inferred that parallel construction was created to address discovery issues of intelligence community-derived information that was used by law enforcement to initiate an investigation that led to an arrest, indictment, and prosecution of a criminal/terrorist. According to the same Reuters article, some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.[20]

Conclusions

A cohesive Undercover OPS infrastructure that local, state, and Federal LEAs create and maintain ensures that U.S. national power is fully realized and efficiently resourced amongst these LEAs, thus minimizing national security threats and terrorism. Although issues of entrapment, discovery, and translating intelligence community-sourced information into prosecutable evidence in U.S. court all challenge Undercover OPS, these challenges are outweighed by its benefits. These benefits include allowing LEAs to (1) proactively control the timing of overt and covert law enforcement activities to obtain evidence, (2) creatively construct the undercover operational circumstances, businesses, assets, etc. to establish bona fides with a hard-to-infiltrate criminal/terrorist organization, and (3) leverage these undercover operational circumstances and infrastructure at-will with intelligence community-derived information to exploit transnational criminal organizations and terrorists anywhere in the world, for the ultimate goal of successful prosecutions. Positing that electronic surveillance, such as Title III wiretaps or PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management)[21] programs, represents a more effective tool than Undercover OPS to minimize national security threats and terrorism is untenable because information obtained from electronic surveillance and operationalized by LEAs requires the officer to be reactive to the electronic surveillance information, whereas Undercover OPS is premised completely on proactive methodology; electronic surveillance is “wait and see” whereas Undercover OPS is “see and do.” Additionally, because every eavesdropping warrant is required to have a statement as to other investigative techniques (i.e., Undercover OPS) used prior to the submission of the wiretap according to 18 USC § 2518(1)(c),[22] because the statement must include why these investigative techniques (Undercover OPS) tried have failed, or why they reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried, or are too dangerous,[23] and because defense litigation involving electronic surveillance wiretaps may originate from LEAs not having exhausted these investigative techniques, these reasons effectively make Undercover OPS a prong that must be fulfilled anyway prior to an electronic surveillance eavesdropping warrant being authorized by a court. However, employing electronic surveillance and intelligence information with Undercover OPS methodology and conventional investigative techniques forms a comprehensive strategy to fully realizing U.S. national power to thwart national security and terrorist threats to the Homeland. IAJ

Notes

1 S.804 - Undercover Operations Act of 1983, 98th Congress (1983-1984)

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Undercover and Sensitive Operations Unit, Attorney General’s Guidelines on FBI Undercover Operations, Revised 11/13/92.

5 “DEA / DEA Programs, State & Local Task Forces”. 2017. Dea.Gov. <https://www.dea.gov/ops/taskforces.shtml>.

6 Undercover and Sensitive Operations Unit, Attorney General’s Guidelines on FBI Undercover Operations, Revised 11/13/92.

7 “Special Report”. 2017. Oig.Justice.Gov. <https://oig.justice.gov/special/0509/chapter3.htm>.

8 Lichtblau, E. and Arkin, W.M. (2014, November 16). More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations. New York Times. p. A1.

9 “Mission | USAO | Department of Justice”. 2017. Justice.Gov. <https://www.justice.gov/usao/mission>.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 “645. Entrapment—Elements | USAM | Department of Justice”. 2017. Justice.Gov. <https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-645-entrapment-elements>.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Lichtblau, E. and Arkin, W.M. (2014, November 16). More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations. New York Times. p. A1.

16 McDonnell, John P. National Strategic Planning: Linking DIMEFIL/PMESII to a Theory of Victory. No. JFSC-25789. National Defense University Norfolk VA Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2009, p. 11.

17 “How Courts Work | Public Education”. 2017. Americanbar.Org. <https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resources/law_related_education_network/how_courts_work/discovery.html>.

18 Best Jr, Richard A. “Sharing law enforcement and intelligence information: The congressional role.” (2007).

19 “Exclusive: U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans”. 2017. U.S. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s-directs-agents-to-cover-up-program-used-toinvestigate-americans-idUSBRE97409R20130805>.

20 Ibid.

21 PRISM is a system the National Security Agency uses to gain access to the private communications of users of nine popular Internet services, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others. It is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 2008 (“Here’s Everything We Know About PRISM to Date”. 2017. Washington Post. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/?utm_term=.c3f9a96ffc24>).

22 See 18 USC § 2518(1)(c).

23 Ibid.

Fixing a Hole:

Contemporary Security Issues in Africa

by Zachary Hadley

In the twenty-first century, complex and dynamic challenges within Africa are often borderless. With the ability to scale exponentially, localized conflicts can quickly destabilize regions. Since the early 2000s, scholarly efforts to explicate transnational challenges has led to a growing body of literature dedicated to the African continent. While promising, the corpora of secondary literatures often lack conceptual rigor and depth—requiring students, researchers, and scholars to thread coherent narratives across diverse sets of government records, media reports, and firsthand accounts.

Contemporary Security Issues in Africa by William A. Taylor attempts to fill this void by serving as a primer for students, researchers, and policymakers on Sub-Saharan Africa. Spanning three decades across 16 case studies, the work aims to “Explore the nexus of culture, politics and security at the national, regional and international level.”[1] Taylor contends that this is necessary to parse out the roots of the continent’s growing relevance in global affairs. To accomplish this goal in a 241-page volume requires a Herculean effort. The resulting contribution is promising in terms of both scope and depth.

Within a framework of eight broad categories, the case studies explore state fragility, ethnoreligious conflict, food insecurity, violent extremism, maritime piracy, and extreme poverty as the primary drivers of regional insecurity. Methodologically, the research design is perhaps constrained by the lack of a structured case comparison. As a result, the work does not clearly advance a central thesis. A disciplined case selection could anchor the empirical evidence to an implicit assumption that addressing Africa’s transnational threats are crucial to international security.

Absent a baseline conceptual model, readers are required to infer regional implications from myriad facts, figures, and timelines. They must also assume that the evidence presented is most germane to the case studies at hand. The upshot is that the results do not support a set of conditions valid across contingent cases. How do historical facts inform solutions to future challenges? Emerging transnational threats require new models, focused on enabling the African Union, regional economic communities, and foreign partners to circumvent pitfalls on the path to cooperation.[2]

Captain Zachary D. Hadley, U.S. Army, Retired, currently serves as the 21st Theater Sustainment Command (TSC) liaison officer at U.S. Army Southern European Task Force Africa in Vicenza, Italy. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the American Graduate School in Paris and co-founder of the nonprofit research center, American Center for Strategic and International Affairs in New York. His research focuses on security studies and African politics.

Domestic threats can emerge from outside immediate regions.

Categorical Imperatives: Defining Transnational Security

Since Aristotle’s Organon, humankind has systematized observable phenomena in order to make sense of the physical world. To accomplish this task, we employ concepts—tools to apprehend the world around us. Facts distilled through concepts provide meaning. To define transnationalism, we must categorize its features. In a literal sense, transnational threats emerge in one territory and spill over into another. However, recent technological advancements provide new pathways to contagion across multiple spectrums including cyber, financial, trade, and environmental sectors. Domestic threats can emerge from outside immediate regions. It is worth considering global institutions, foreign state, and non-state actors, which also foment regional unrest.

Recognizing that a degree of simplification is always necessary, any research project must address the key metric of measure validity. Broad categorization can obscure meaningful distinctions across cases. An explanation for framing the case studies against these eight categories would be beneficial. A canvas of relevant literature highlights tenuous political alliances, ethno-religious violence, weak institutions, and socio-economic conditions as key factors of insecurity. Domestic, regional, and geopolitical dimensions are all equally plausible. Yet, competing explanations are unreconciled.

The Case Studies

The introductory cases explore “ungoverned spaces” within the Central African Republic and Mali as primary drivers of insecurity. Defined as “…the absence of central government control over a region and its people and challenges to the state’s authority by one or more groups,”[3] the concept of ungoverned spaces provides a thread traceable throughout subsequent chapters.

State fragility is a source through which “neighborhood effects” flow. Yet, a survey of relevant literature reveals a lack of consensus on the definition, making measurement difficult. Political violence and a lack of basic services are two common features of fragile states.[4] In the absence of credible institutions, ungoverned spaces become sanctuaries for transnational threats. Economic development, credible security, and political stability are essential to asserting state authority.[5] Yet, the first case studies frame instability in terms of political corruption only.

In 1991, Mali successfully transitioned to a democracy following the end of the Traoré regime. The country soon became a major recipient of foreign aid from international organizations and bilateral partners. Since the late 1990s, Mali received an estimated $1.8 billion in U.S. foreign aid alone. Yet, the inflow of aid papered over what were fundamentally weak and decentralized institutions incapable of responding to crises. In 2012, Mali experienced a renewed Tuareg rebellion in the north and a successful military coup in the capital of Bamako. By 2013, a growing insurgency fueled by elements of Al-Qaeda in Maghreb and Ansar Dine effectively controlled its remote northern regions. Figure 1 compares Mali and the Central African Republic’s corruption scores to their regional neighbors.

The results suggest that the levels of corruption in both Mali and the Central African Republic track the median values for their respective regional economic communities. Accounting for outliers including Rwanda and Ghana, which have made significant strides in promoting government transparency, the majority of Central and West African states remain mired in corruption. Clearly then, corruption alone cannot account for the dramatic reversal in Mali’s fortunes. Equally plausible, a vicious circle of poor governance, moribund economies and weak security apparatus were key factors in undermining security across the Sahel region. Although corruption can undermine public trust in domestic institutions and fracture national unity, greater context is required. A tendency to focus on corruption perhaps belies the multiple challenges facing Mali and the Central African Republic.

Figure 1. Sub-Saharan Africa Corruption Perceptions.
Comparison of Mali and the Central African Republic with regional member states, 2005-2015.

The absence of discussion on growing Russian involvement in the Central African Republic is a missed opportunity to anchor regional challenges to international security. At the recent 2019 Russia-Africa Summit, Central African President Faustin-Archange Touadéra requested that the Russian government “intervene” politically to overturn international arms embargos on the country.[6] Between 2014 and 2018, Africa received 17 percent of all major Russian weapon exports—second only to Asia. Evidence of private military contractors across Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates a significant renewal of Russian strategic interests in the region. Russia will seek to leverage its economic and political ties in the absence of sustained Western engagement.

The United States must encourage good governance and accountability while strengthening regional security institutions. Sub-Saharan Africa represents one of the few regions where new opportunities for partnerships and cooperation are still possible. At the same time, the United States must find ways to impose costs on its near-peer competitors while mitigating collateral damage to its African partners. The balancing act will become a defining challenge for the United States during the next global power competition. Relationships still matter.

A case study on the Lord’s Resistance Army highlights the ethno-religious dimension to security. What began as a Ugandan rebel group in the 1990s soon metastasized into a violent extremist organization responsible for widespread human rights violations throughout the Great Lakes region.[7] Curiously, however, the case studies do not anchor ethno-religious conflict to the early discussion of corruption and state fragility. Examples abound where political leaders have exploited the patchwork of ethnic and religious demographics for ballot-box advantages with predictably violent outcomes. The complex interplay of socio-economic and tribal dimensions within the Great Lakes region provides fertile ground for insecurity. Can we extrapolate the case study insights to other regions?

Defined by food availability, access, stability and utilization, food insecurity affects the lives of nearly 257 million individuals within Africa.

The work turns towards a discussion of the “resource curse” theory, which argues that developing states with significant natural resources are often plagued by instability and corruption. In particular, the work highlights predatory lending and resource extraction in Angola. As foreign direct investment lags, China’s willingness to provide loans and investment has proven difficult for many African states to resist. However, the growing perception that such deals represent significant debt traps for African states may present an opportunity for investment alternatives. The United States can display the flag without a military uniform.

Case studies on Malawi and Ethiopia explore linkages between food insecurity, poverty and conflict. Defined by food availability, access, stability and utilization, food insecurity affects the lives of nearly 257 million individuals within Africa.[8] Despite years of improvement, recent declines in annual food production have been exacerbated by climate change and poverty. Malawi’s population growth rate is double that of its food production, requiring significant levels of importation—particularly during the dry season. Its urban-rural divide further affects economic development due to the lack of infrastructure, basic social services and employment opportunities in many rural communities.[9]

The relationship between food security, poverty, and conflict is well-represented within security studies literature, if poorly tested. Until recently, the lack of empirical evidence and concerns for endogeneity have made it difficult to establish causal relationships. For example, we have observed conditions where food insecurity has triggered social unrest in Malawi.[10] Conversely, conflict has also fueled food insecurity in Ethiopia.[11] A vicious circle of food insecurity, poverty, and conflict emerges. Across the case studies, bi-directional relationships between socio-economic conditions create durable challenges to regional security. A theoretical framework to unpack the underlying linkages remains absent.

Implications for International Security

The final chapters highlight geopolitical implications for Africa in terms of the emerging multipolar system. The work contends that U.S. interests grew in earnest upon the creation of U.S. Africa Command in 2007. In effect, this has led to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Africa. “The United States has amplified relations with Africa over the past three decades, most visibly with the creation in 2007 of U.S. Africa Command.”[12]

Although U.S. military presence has increased during the past two decades, it is unclear if this has unbalanced U.S. foreign policy. Traditionally, foreign policy is thought to derive its power from a trifecta of statecraft tools including diplomacy, persuasion, and coercive force.[13] How can we test the militarization claim? An expedient approach might look for evidence of “mission creep” where Department of Defense security assistance has duplicated State Department efforts. Figure 2 compares U.S. security assistance within Sub-Saharan Africa since 2005.

Figure 2. U.S. Security Assistance in Africa.
Comparison of Department of State and Department of Defense funding obligations FY2005-18.

Although the methodology employed is only exploratory, the data highlights meaningful trends. A cursory inspection of U.S. security assistance funding suggests that the militarization of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis U.S. Africa Command is likely specious. As evidenced by recent peacekeeping missions in Sudan and Somalia, State Department funding has traditionally outweighed other forms of security assistance to Africa. We observe that Department of Defense funding obligations increased following the establishment of U.S. Africa Command, but overall security assistance levels remained between $150 and $250 million annually. Regardless, it is difficult to parse evidence of “mission creep” through funding and appropriations alone.

The Global Train and Equip program, which helps foreign partners strengthen their security capacity, accounted for approximately $768 million of reported Department of Defense obligations to Sub-Saharan Africa from 2010 to 2018. Compared to U.S. economic assistance, which obligated $11.4 billion in 2018 alone, U.S. Africa Command provides an economy of force footprint with potential long-term strategic advantages in terms of the global power competition. Further analysis of military deployments, interagency coordination, and funding authorities is warranted.[14] I have included a link to my replication code and data sets in the end notes.[15]

The focus on U.S. security assistance provides a clear contrast to China’s economic engagement with Africa. Sino-Africa relations are “one of the most critical developments in international affairs” during the past decade.[16] Sino-African relations have varied according to economic conditions within each region during the past three decades. Seeking to improve its terms of trade, China balances its needs for raw materials with the export of surplus labor and commodities to African markets. Financial and economic linkages are conditions based—but not according to democratic norms or mores. Business first and politics later still holds mostly true. Whereas the United States has often conditioned aid on democratic commitments, China leverages its economic power to extract natural resources for trade and investment.

China’s strategic objective to upend the existing global order will require broad African political support to achieve in international organizations.

During the past two decades, China has become a top peacekeeping contributor to United Nations peacekeeping operations with 80 percent of its troops deployed to Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite escalating violence towards peacekeepers in South Sudan and Mali, China continues to bolster its boots-on-ground presence within Africa. Between 2014 and 2019, Chinese peacekeeping contributions averaged more than 2,500 uniformed personnel annually. As of 2019, China is the second largest contributor to the United Nations peacekeeping budget (15.2 percent)—second only to the United States (27.8 percent).[17]

China’s strategic interests in the Gulf of Aden led to the establishment of its first naval base in Djibouti in 2017. As an entry point to East Africa, the base supports China’s power projection and soft power diplomacy goals.[18] However, strengthening its military ties may force compromises on its traditional preference for ideological neutrality in Africa. China’s strategic objective to upend the existing global order will require broad African political support to achieve in international organizations. The center of gravity for the maritime expansion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to the Mediterranean lies through East Africa.[19]

Notably absent from the preceding canvas is a discussion of the roles of the United Nations, the African Union, and the regional economic communities. In 2016, the African Union published the African Peace and Security Architecture 2016 Roadmap. It was the first attempt by the regional body to define a strategic vision for addressing Africa’s peace and security challenges. It provides measurable objectives to meet its ambitious targets laid out in Agenda 2063. Likewise, regional efforts to address insecurity have led to recent deployments in Mali, the Central African Republic and Somalia. The African Union’s Continental Early Warning System, operationalized in 2009, has made incremental progress towards increasing collaboration among member states, international organizations, and nongovernment organizations to prevent future conflict. However, policy harmonization, political will, and resource constraints remain significant impediments to future progress.

Fixing a Hole: Final Thoughts

The work correctly identifies many of Africa’s regional security challenges. However, the tacit assumption that the symptoms are causal leaves the substratum of political, socioeconomic, and institutional variables intact. The reality is more complicated. A transnational security model that provides a conceptual framework to untangle these complexities is required. Future scholarly contributions must take up that effort.

The work offers a broad overview of emerging security challenges on the African continent, but does not explore the causal linkages between them. This is not without value, but the potential market will remain niche. While students may reap benefits from a one-source encyclopedia as such compiled, it is likely that researchers require a more robust theoretical framework for exploring the underlying issues. Regardless, the author’s effort to address a clear gap in the African security literature is both admirable and critically required.

Where there are challenges, there are opportunities. U.S. foreign policy requires a whole-of-government approach to integrate agency efforts in the promotion of good governance, regional security, and economic investment. International and regional partnerships that leverage comparative advantages limit the duplication of efforts. Targeted security assistance will support the implementation of the African Union’s strategic security objectives. U.S. interagency efforts that promote policy harmonization and subsidiarity at the member state, regional, and institutional levels provide purpose and direction. Bridging the gap between political will and action is key. “African solutions to African problems” are achievable, if at present, aspirational. IAJ

Notes:

1 William Taylor, Contemporary Security Issues in Africa, Praeger Security International, Santa Barbara, 2018, p. 16.

2 Zachary Hadley, African Spaghetti Bowl: Assessing State Rationales in African Peacekeeping Operations, 1999-2016, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 2018.

3 Taylor, Contemporary Security Issues, p. 34.

4 Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, “Fragile States and Development Policy,” Journal of the European Economic Association Vol. 9, No. 3, 2011, pp. 371-398.

5 Samir Elhawary, Marta Foresti, and Sara Pantuliano, “Development, Security and Transitions in Fragile States,” Meeting Series Report, Overseas Development Institute, 2010.

6 “Central African Republic asks Russia to ‘intervene’ on UN arms embargo,” The Defense Post, October 23, 2019, <https://thedefensepost.com/2019/10/23/central-african-republic-arms-embargo-russiasummit>.

7 Kevin Dunn, “Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army,” Review of African Political Economy Vol. 31, No. 99, 2004, pp. 139-142.

8 Martin-Shields, Charles and Wolfgang Stojetz, “Food security and conflict: Empirical challenges and future opportunities for research and policy making on food security and conflict,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO Agricultural Development Economic Working Paper 18-04, 2018.

9 Richard Mussa and Winford Henderson Masanjala, “A Dangerous Divide: The State of Inequality in Malawi,” Oxfam International, 2015.

10 Lamek Masina, “Malawi Drought Sparks Mob Violence, Accusations of Witchcraft,” Voice of America, February 7, 2018, <https://www.voanews.com/africa/malawi-drought-sparks-mob-violenceaccusations-witchcraft>.

11 Celine Fitzgerald, “Conflict is now the main cause of famine,” The Irish Times, August 15, 2017, <https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/conflict-is-now-the-main-cause-of-famine-1.3187528>.

12 Taylor, Contemporary Security Issues, p. 141.

13 Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Public Affairs; New Ed edition, 2004.

14 Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray, Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy? Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2014.

15 Zachary Hadley, “Replication Data for: Fixing a Hole: Contemporary Security Issues in Africa,” <https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/T0W5IM>, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:t9jNiIvNLYScDaPHqe8dnQ== [fileUNF].

16 Taylor, Contemporary Security Issues, p. 147.

17 United Nations, A/73/350/Add.1, Implementation of General Assembly resolutions 55/235 and 55/236, Report of the Secretary-General, New York, 2018.

18 China-Africa: High Time for a common integrated African policy on China, Proceedings report of a symposium held by the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD), Johannesburg, South Africa, 2017.

19 David Dollar, “Global China: Understanding China’s Belt and road Infrastructure Projects in Africa,” The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 2019.

Understanding the Budgets of the

Sino-U.S. Naval Arms Race

by James Landreth

In Destined for War, Graham Allison traces multiple historical episodes of a rising military power threatening to shift the balance of power away from the incumbent hegemon. Most of these historical cases ended in major conflict, a phenomenon regularly referred to as “Thucydides Trap.” In his Thucydidean analysis, Allison compares China’s current rise and ambition in the Western Pacific to the U.S., the dominant naval power in the Pacific since the end of World War II. Despite soothing rhetoric promoting their desire for a peaceful rise, China’s military buildup and rate of technological development continue to shock the global community and unsettle regional neighbors. Beginning with the 2012 “Pivot to Asia” and increasing with the Trump and Biden administration’s focus on Great Power Competition, the U.S. national security enterprise has increasingly focused its efforts to ensure U.S. dominance in a contest with China.

Despite China’s stated ambition, growing capabilities, and aggression in the South China Sea, many analysts focus on ineffective metrics that distort the view of the Sino-U.S. balance of power and relative war making potential. “Total defense spending” is the most frequently cited—yet most deceitful—metric when it comes to assessing the balance of power between the U.S. and China (2018: U.S. $649 billion; CN $250 billion).[1] While performing an exact comparison of U.S. and Chinese defense spending is impossible due to classification issues and the lack of Chinese transparency on federal spending, a “defense purchasing power parity” analysis of shipbuilding provides a meaningful benchmark and a more valuable metric than merely top line budget numbers. Also, a historical analysis of twentieth century naval arms races enhances the defense purchasing power parity analysis by revealing the importance of belligerents’ geographic proximity to the battlespace, quantitative ratios, and total lifecycle costs. The lessons learned from history, combined with an improved understanding of defense purchasing power parity, provide security analysts and policy makers with a better understanding of relative military spending between the U.S. and China, which enables more prudent use of the U.S. instruments of national power. Such a fusion of effort will be essential to expertly wield the increasingly agile and integrated instruments of power necessary for establishing and maintaining maritime superiority in the Great Power Competition.

Lieutenant Commander James Landreth is a U.S. Navy submarine officer. He holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy (B.S.) and the University of South Carolina (M.Eng.), and completed Joint Professional Military Education at the U.S. Naval War College. Landreth is a Joint Qualified Officer and publishes frequently on interagency and defense matters.

Twentieth Century Naval Arms Races

Anglo-German naval build up prior to World War I

Beginning with the Naval Defense Act of 1899, Britain established the “two-power standard,” which required the Royal Navy to match the strength of the next two largest fleets combined.[2] When Imperial Germany commenced its naval buildup prior to World War I, the increasing number of hulls and naval tonnage required an aggressive response from the Royal Navy. Though the German naval buildup directly triggered the British response, the prevailing pre-war opinion stated that the English and German economies shared so many financial interests that an Anglo-German conflict was unthinkable.

Many compare the Anglo-German naval buildup amidst deep economic ties to the current Sino-U.S. contest. While the analogy provides value, key differences in this episode inform the defense purchasing power parity study. Germany and Britain both bordered the North Sea, which proved to be the battleground for many of their naval contests. Because of their proximity, the British and German navies needed quantitatively equivalent fleets comprised of similar ships. In comparison, in order for the U.S. to defend treaty commitments in the Western Pacific, the U.S. Navy must operate at the end of extended supply lines with capital ships and logistics transport vessels capable of crossing the Pacific. Conversely, because most realistic conflict scenarios occur in the Western Pacific, the Chinese may compensate for their fewer number of inferior capital ships with a staggering number of anti-ship missiles, littoral naval ships, their suspiciously well-armed Coast Guard vessels, and maritime militias.[3] Additionally, China may allot a greater portion of her naval combatants to such a contest without abandoning key interests elsewhere in the globe. Meanwhile, the U.S. would begrudgingly spare any capital ships dedicated to the deterrence of Russia, Iran, or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

Washington Conference limitation of U.S., British, and Japanese fleets prior to World War II

In the interwar period, the Washington Conference throttled the potential for a naval arms race between the U.S., British, and Japanese fleets by defining specific ratios of capital ships and naval tonnage.[4] The obsession with the relative quantity of ships provided a baseline for negotiation and transparency between potential belligerents, but the focus on quantity also had drawbacks. Mainly, at the onset of hostilities, these ratios lost their value since all signatories to the Washington Conference abandoned prior commitments. Since the U.S., British, and Japanese fleets all possessed accomplished mariners, the decisive role of the U.S.’s overwhelming shipyard production capacity exposes the most salient kernel of the World War II case study.

...in order for the U.S. to defend treaty commitments in the Western Pacific, the U.S. Navy must operate at the end of extended supply lines...

While the U.S. and China lack any naval arms limitation agreement, both countries maintain well publicized ship building plans. Despite the dramatic growth in cost and complexity of capital ships since the World War II period, potential output of hulls and tonnage will remain decisive in future conflicts. Though U.S. shipyards maintain a qualitative edge at producing and maintaining capital ships such as nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, they will be in strict competition with China, the world’s largest shipbuilding nation and most prolific low-cost manufacturer.[5]

...in 2017 the U.S. spent 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, compared to China’s 1.9 percent.

The Cold War Submarine Buildup

At the peak of the Cold War, the oceans crawled with 130 U.S. and 260 Soviet submarines.[6] While the U.S. maintained a qualitative edge in key metrics over Soviet designs, the sheer quantity of Soviet submarines provided a value of its own. Submarines provide an excellent measure of a nation’s technical aptitude for high end competition, but the life cycle sustainment costs associated with a large naval buildup require long term investment. According to the Department of Defense, fully 60 percent of the total life cycle costs of submarines occur in the operations and sustainment (O&S) period.[7] Today, Russia’s large fleet of poorly maintained Cold War-era submarines provide a living reminder of how an unsustainable buildup of ships can weigh like an albatross around one’s neck.

According to the World Bank, in 2017 the U.S. spent 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, compared to China’s 1.9 percent.[8] While the U.S.’s decades of experience building and maintaining capital ships provide the corporate knowledge necessary to build relatively accurate budgets, its growing national debt, regular deficits, and trade imbalance limit its potential for economic mobilization.[9] China’s naval buildup and ambitious future plans reveal its intent to spend dramatically more on defense in real terms as well as a percentage of gross domestic product. Despite a lack of experience maintaining or deploying capital ships, China possesses some inherent advantages. Objectively, China’s relatively lower defense spending provides it with greater room for growth in terms of the percentage of gross domestic product. Additionally, China’s closed and opaque system of government, tight social control over its population, and high level of nationalism suggest China’s high potential to mobilize political will for economic hardship in support of a conflict with the U.S.

Defense Purchasing Power Parity

While history shapes our understanding of some of the aspects of today’s Sino-U.S. naval arms race, concrete differences exist in the variables that comprise the top line defense budgets of the U.S. and China.

Cost of personnel

In his fiscal year 2019 budget hearing for the U.S. Army, General Mark A. Milley noted U.S. military personnel received much higher compensation relative to near peer adversaries. While direct comparison of personnel costs are difficult, a comparison of U.S. median household income ($56,516 per year) and an estimate of the average Chinese salary ($12,224) provide a 4.6:1 ratio for labor costs.[10] Personnel payment and benefits for military personnel alone account for 39 percent of the fiscal year 2019 budget, and the 4.6:1 labor cost significantly impacts other major categories of defense spending like O&S and research and development (R&D) that bear significant labor costs. Assuming labor accounts for a similar fraction (39 percent) of the O&S and R&D budget line items, the 4.6:1 ratio overshadows another 21 percent of total defense spending.[11] Normalizing labor costs associated with military personnel, O&S, and R&D with the 4.6:1 ratio, the U.S. and China defense purchasing power parity drops from 649:250 to 344:250.

Global Commitments

The U.S. 2018 National Defense Strategy lists Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and violent extremist organizations as opposing forces the U.S. must be prepared to counter. Each of these require sophisticated capabilities and task-shared assets (e.g., capital ships, satellites, cyber resources). In addition to these deterrence missions, the U.S. is actively restoring material readiness after two decades of engagement in kinetic conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. While Congress has appropriated additional funding for overseas contingency operations, the regular use of military equipment in harsh environments increases O&S costs and reduces the planned service life of the equipment. Since the 2018 National Defense Strategy advertised the need to defeat aggression by a major power, deter opportunistic aggression elsewhere, and disrupt imminent terrorist threats, it is certain that comparing top line budget numbers provides limited value in projecting the level of investment the U.S. is making to deter a military contest with China.[12] Even if the U.S. generously concentrated 70 percent of future years’ budgets towards conflict scenarios in the Western Pacific, the defense purchasing power parity drops to 241:250 in China’s favor.

Chinese asymmetric approach yields high returns on investment

As the world witnessed the results of direct competition with the combat power of the U.S. and its allies in Desert Storm and other post-Cold War military activities, near peer adversaries elected to pursue asymmetric approaches for countering the U.S. Navy instead of preparing for a future Mahanian fleet engagement, such as occurred in the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf. Over the past decade, China’s implementation of its asymmetric anti-access area denial capability demonstrates a defense strategy tailored to counter the U.S. fleet.

China’s investment in less expensive yet effective asymmetric capabilities—frequently referred to as assassin’s mace technologies— erode the bravado of the U.S. Navy’s order of battle and the relative size of topline budget estimates. The available design information on the mobile launched Dong Feng-21D “carrier killer” and the YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missile reveal China customized its offensive weapons to counter costly U.S. carrier strike groups.[13] Additionally, large numbers of diesel electric submarines, the Undersea Great Wall, and space based “Project Guanlan” demonstrate but a few of the Chinese proportionally lower cost investments to deter U.S. Navy submarines. While doubtful that any one of these technologies deliver a decisive advantage over U.S. Navy systems and employment strategies, the sheer quantity of the buildup notably alters the calculus for traditional scenarios such as those conceivable under the Taiwan Relations Act or the U.S.-Japan Defense Treaty.[14]

...China’s implementation of its asymmetric anti-access area denial capability demonstrates a defense strategy tailored to counter the U.S. fleet.

The Great Power Competition Will Require All Instruments of National Power

While the U.S. Navy will remain the lead agency for establishing and maintaining maritime superiority at sea, all instruments of national power will be necessary in order for U.S. military action and broader U.S. policy to be effective in the Great Power Competition. The U.S. Navy and broader national security enterprise must advise on meaningful methods of diplomatic, informational, and economic engagement to aid in the military’s effort to establish and maintain maritime supremacy.

Diplomatic

In proportion to their defense buildup, China’s diplomatic engagement has become exceedingly robust. China’s expert combination of “legal warfare” and willingness to act decisively enabled repeat successes in establishing fait accomplis on the ground. China’s excessive maritime claims and land reclamation activities in the South China Sea provide the most prominent use of legal warfare. Additionally, China’s establishment of air defense identification zones in the South China Sea and East China Sea violated international norms, but quick action and a comprehensive legal campaign allowed implementation before the international community could meaningfully protest. In any future conflict with China, the U.S. must be prepared for legal warfare.

...China’s leaders possess an incredibly steerable and agile information operations capability.

While the U.S.’s leadership of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and a myriad of other institutions accompany more bilateral and multilateral security partnerships than any other country, China’s robust diplomatic campaign and investment over the past two decades has yielded remarkable dividends. As examples, Beijing’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, and Belt and Road Initiative intentionally offer alternatives to U.S.-led diplomatic cooperatives. Thus, while China maintains veto power as a permanent member on the United Nations Security Council, its hands are free within its own initiatives. To counter China diplomatically, the U.S. diplomatic corps must be prepared to articulate how the U.S. Sea Services’ control of the maritime domain has enabled the globalized and interconnected world of the twenty-first century. Further, the diplomatic corps must challenge other political leaders to imagine a world where U.S. values for open access to markets are replaced by a mercantilist power.

Informational

The suspected number of personnel employed by China’s propaganda arm dwarfs the dedicated information operations divisions of the U.S. Additionally, the Chinese social credit system coopts the efforts of the majority of Chinese citizens in any information campaign. Combined with the state’s total control of the internet and media, China’s leaders possess an incredibly steerable and agile information operations capability. While reaching the Chinese public will be difficult due to the Great Firewall, the U.S. should ensure it is prepared to engage the countries within the global community that maintain access to open internet and free media sources. In shaping operations prior to or during any conflict, the U.S. should be ready to declassify intelligence on Chinese activities when doing so would not compromise U.S. sources or methods. For example, in December 2017 the U.S. released satellite imagery of a Chinese oil tanker performing a ship-to-ship transfer with a North Korean at sea, violating United Nations sanctions. Additionally, thanks to open source and de-classified information, P.W. Singer’s LikeWar documents numerous examples of Russian and Chinese organizations focused on weaponization of social media.[15]

Military

The U.S. must maintain its current plans for naval expansion, but reduce its excessive use of military equipment. For example, excessive use of USS Harry S. Truman prompted the U.S. Navy to consider early retirement after only 21 years of its estimated 50-year lifespan. While this controversial decision had well-reasoned arguments on both sides, if the carrier had been used less during the past decades’ campaigns to counter violent extremist organizations, then the carrier’s lifespan would have been preserved for high-end competitions. Additionally, the U.S. Navy must look for non-linear ways to increase the war making potential of each hull, especially through the use of unmanned undersea vehicles.

The U.S. must work with partner nations in the region according to their ability. Allies like Japan must maximize the utility of naval assets such as the Izumo-class aircraft carrier. Additionally, planners must find ways for less developed nations to contribute to hypothetical conflict scenarios. Most importantly, the U.S. must ensure it maintains the ability to conduct joint exercises and promote interoperability with partner nations. Ensuring the long-term viability of joint exercises will require coordination with the U.S. diplomatic corps to counter the Chinese efforts to establish a “Code of Conduct” for joint drills in the South China Sea. The U.S., Australia, Japan, and India should work to counter China’s clear intent to veto countries from conducting joint training with countries of their choosing.[16]

Economic

The military and intelligence communities must improve their interagency coordination efforts with traditionally non-defense-oriented institutions. For example, consistent with the recent Executive Order, when the intelligence community proves that certain countries or companies sell intentionally compromised dual use equipment, then the U.S. should respond with domestic import bans and widely publicize these vulnerabilities to the international community.[17] Additionally, the Department of Defense’s role in the oversight of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. should be sufficient to counter any malign attempts to exfiltrate data on sensitive U.S. technologies.[18] Lastly, the U.S. Navy should ensure security planning exercises incorporate liaison officers from the Department of Treasury and Central Bankers to prepare for an event where a major power attempts to dump U.S. treasuries in order to weaken U.S. resolve or war making potential.

Conclusion

Since the end of the Cold War, the absence of a near peer competitor and increasing domestic political pressures have allowed the U.S. to become inwardly focused. In the midst of this period, comparatively large top line defense spending has provided a false sense of security to political leaders who prioritize the U.S. domestic agenda. In the absence of an existential threat to the U.S. or its allies, many assumed that spending the most money on defense translated into unrivaled capability across all domains.

Neither the U.S. nor China wish to fall into Thucydides’s Trap. However, China’s aggressive military buildup directly and specifically challenges the U.S.’s ability to establish and maintain maritime supremacy in the Western Pacific, which poses existential threats to U.S. treaty allies and security partners in the region. A robust ability to support the U.S.’s allies and partners as well as assure free access to the maritime commons underpins the international order and globalized trade. History teaches a great deal about the abilities, limitations and consequences of Great Power Competition naval buildups. However, to win in today’s Great Power Competition, the U.S. Navy and broader national security enterprise must also understand the reality of defense purchasing power parity in the Sino-U.S. comparison. Because of the significant Chinese advantage in defense purchasing power parity, the U.S. will have to continue its naval buildup while improving its ability to integrate maritime power projection capabilities with the other elements of national power in order to deliver the full potential of the U.S. to the Great Power Competition. While the U.S. still retains the military advantage, leaders of the Sea Services must promote bipartisan awareness of the evolving military situation. Promotion of meaningful metrics such as defense purchasing power parity will help mobilize the will of political leaders to take appropriate action against external threats and develop achievable policy objectives in the Pacific. IAJ

Notes

1 Aaron Mehta, “Here’s How Much Global Military Spending Rose in 2018”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://www.defensenews.com/global/2019/04/28/heres-how-much-global-military-spending-rose-in-2018.

2 Carl Cavanagh Hodge, Encyclopedia of the Age of Imperialism, 1800-1914. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2008. p. 549.

3 Rand Corporation, “An Interactive Look at the US-China Military Scorecard”, Santa Monica, CA, 2015, https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html.

4 “Arms Control and Disarmament – Between the World Wars, 1919-1939”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/A-D/Arms-Control-and-Disarmament-Between-the-worldwars-1919-1939.html.

5 “Largest Shipbuilding Nations Based on Gross Tonnage 2017”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263895/shipbuilding-nations-worldwide-by-cgt.

6 “In Cold War the USSR Outnumbered US Subs Two to One but that Was Okay”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/in-cold-war-the-ussr-outnumbered-us-subs-two-to-one-butthat-was-okay.html.

7 Department of Defense, “Operating and Support Cost-Estimating Guide”, Washington, D.C., March 2014, https://www.cape.osd.mil/files/OS_Guide_v9_March_2014.pdf.

8 “Military Expenditure (% of GDP)”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ms.mil.xpnd.gd.zs.

9 Rick Berger and MacKenzie Eaglen, “Hard Choice and Strategic Insolvency: Where the National Defense Strategy Falls Short”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/hard-choicesand-strategic-insolvency-where-the-national-defense-strategy-falls-short.

10 Kenneth Rapoza, “China Wage Levels Equal to or Surpass Parts of Europe”, accessed on May 20, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/16/china-wage-levels-equal-to-or-surpass-parts-ofeurope/#5be4aa353e7f.

11 Department of Defense, “Defense Budget Overview”, Washington, D.C., February 2018, https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2019/FY2019_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf.

12 Department of Defense, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America”, Washington D.C., https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf.

13 Robert Haddick, “China’s Most Dangerous Missile (So Far)”, accessed May 20, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2014/07/chinas-most-dangerous-missile-so-far.

14 David Hambling, “What You Need to Know About the South China Sea, the World’s Next Hot Spot”, accessed on May 20, 2019, https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26538657/south-chinasea-weapons.

15 P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, New York, NY, 2018. P. 53.

16 Oki Nagai and Tsuyoshi Nagasawa, “China Lobbies ASEAN for Joint Military Drills without the US”, accessed on May 20, 2019, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/China-lobbies-ASEAN-for-joint-military-drills-without-US.

17 The White House, “Message to the Congress on Security the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain”, accessed on May 20, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/message-congress-securing-information-communications-technology-services-supplychain.

18 Justin T. Gellerson, “In New Slap at China, US Expands Power to Block Foreign Investments”, accessed on May 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/business/us-china-investment-cfius.html.

Operation Citadel:

Enabling the Interagency Approach

by Michael W. Parrott

Today’s complex world and tomorrow’s unpredictable future implores governments to develop agile, adaptive, and resilient strategic security strategies, doctrine, organizations, and personnel capable of responding to multifaceted threats. Complex problems, often referred to as “wicked problems” are unpredictable and can never fully be understood.[1] The breadth, scope, and interconnectedness of a wicked problem to other problems exacerbate the ability to apply reductionist solutions designed for complicated quandary. As transregional and transnational threat networks (T3N) continue to grow in power and stature across the globe, the threat to the U.S. Homeland increases. T3N activities in the Western Hemisphere, are non-linear complex problems, which span the spectrum from peace to war. The military, interagency, and bureaucratic communities must learn to appreciate the context and complexities involving T3N; to effectively mitigate risks to the homeland. In an effort to counter-T3N, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) conducts “Operation Citadel;” a multi-year, interagency surge effort to bolster law enforcement, customs, and immigration enforcement capabilities of partnering nations, that also supports HSI international and domestic investigations. This essay argues that Citadel serves as an exemplary and innovative approach that counters T3N and associated activities within the Western Hemisphere. Citadel capitalizes on collaborative networks, information sharing, training, and targeted enforcement efforts by joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational (JIIM) partners.

Background

Operation Citadel, is an HSI led, JIIM collaborative surge initiative focused on identifying, disrupting, and dismantling T3N, associated enablers, and the pathways associated with movement of illicit commodities and resources throughout the globe.[2] The operation’s emphasis is concentrated against terrorists, transnational criminal organizations (TCO), drug trafficking organizations (DTO), and their respective support networks that directly threaten the U.S. homeland. Citadel is a proven and effective counter-T3N initiative as evidenced by its multi-faceted approach which includes: networking, information sharing, training, and targeted enforcement activities. The operation truly embodies a defense-in-depth approach, enabling proactive partner nation and interagency led operations, actions, and/or investments (OAI) geared towards achieving judicial end-states against T3N.

Chief Warrant Officer Three Michael W. Parrott serves as a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Technician. He holds a Masters in Strategic Security Studies from National Defense University and a BA in Homeland Security with a concentration in Terrorism Studies from American Military University. His assignments include a myriad of tactical to strategic level assignments within the Special Operations, Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Intelligence communities.

In 2011, the executive branch took an important step in fighting transnational crime when enacted its Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime (TOC Strategy).[3] This strategy complements the current National Security Strategy as well as other national strategies and plans as they relate to the trafficking of persons, money laundering, and other transnational crimes that affect the U.S. By focusing on the international criminal network rather than individual crimes, the TOC Strategy builds, balances, and integrates the tools of American power to combat TCOs and related threats to national security with collaboration from international partners.

In 2014, DHS enacted the Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan to remediate the vulnerabilities at America’s borders and address an “unprecedented spike in illegal migration into South Texas” which was echoed by both the Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan and the 2016 DHS National Preparedness Report (NPR).[4] On 20 November 2014, in furtherance of the Department-wide Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan , former Secretary Johnson commissioned three pilot Joint Task Forces (JTFs): East (JTF-E), West (JTF-W), and Investigations (JTF-I) as a means to enhance the Department’s unity of effort in securing the nation’s southern border and approaches.[5] The three JTFs are responsible for establishing operational priorities and synchronizing capabilities in order to achieve SBAC objectives. JTFs East and West are geographically focused task forces that concentrate on the southern land and maritime borders of the U.S. and the approaches to our border—including all of Central and South America and the Caribbean. JTF-I, a functional task force, was established to improve the investigative functions within the Department in furtherance of the Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan by supporting priority criminal investigations initiated by HSI offices domestically and abroad. As a result of this effort, “JTF-I created and implemented Homeland Criminal Organization Target (HOMECORT)—the DHS-wide process for identifying and prioritizing the top criminal networks affecting homeland security.”[6] Since its inception over twenty separate HOMECORT networks have been targeted which has generated over a thousand criminal investigations.[7]

In 2011, the executive branch took an important step in fighting transnational crime when enacted its Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime...

Subsequently, ICE/HSI implemented the Illicit Pathways Attack Strategy (IPAS) in response to the Executive Branch’s TOC Strategy, the Administration’s goals, and DHS’s Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan. The IPAS was developed by ICE to leverage their expansive authorities, resources, and partnerships to disrupt and dismantle TOC as far away from U.S. borders as possible; a combination of the current (defense-in-depth) and former (defense forward) approaches to protecting the homeland. The strategy focuses on high risk human smuggling and illicit financial transactions.[8] The “IPAS is built around core principles, including: 1) Working with counterparts to investigate, identify, disrupt, and dismantle TOC prior to their illicit activities reaching the U.S. borders, 2) Prioritizing networks and pathways posing the greatest threats, 3) Maintaining robust interagency engagement, and 4) Coordinating a regional approach that leverages foreign partners.”[9] HSI, in support of the Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign Plan , IPAS, and Department’s objectives, coordinates the dozens of investigations and operations targeting each HOMECORT case. The ultimate goal of a HOMECORT investigation is the complete dismantlement of the criminal network that is the subject of the investigation.

In June 2013, HSI, under the auspices of the IPAS and in conjunction with international partners, Departments of Defense (DoD) and State (DoS), and DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) initiated the inaugural multiagency/nation collaborative surge initiative titled “Operation Citadel.” The 2013–2015 Citadel executive summaries are:[10]

2013

Citadel-13 targeted both the conventional and non-conventional pathways exploited by TCOs, DTOs, and terrorist support networks to smuggle narcotics, people, weapons, and contraband through the Central American (CENTAM) corridor and in/out of the United States. Citadel-13 activities included the training and capacity building of the Transnational Criminal Investigative Units (TCIUs), the development of intelligence, and the providing of international investigative support to prioritized HSI long-term domestic criminal investigations.[11] Investigative activities incorporated: surveillance, checkpoint operations, judicial wires, undercover operations, and port operations that resulted in significant enhancements to HSI criminal investigations, as well as the disruption of TOCs operating in CENTAM.

2014

In September 2014, HSI re-instituted the multi-agency collaborative surge initiative dubbed Citadel-14. The operation focused on the continued investigative and analytical identification of the criminal proceeds gained by T3N that threaten the homeland, by using intelligence-driven criminal investigative work with international law enforcement partners in CENTAM and Caribbean regions. Citadel-14 saw HSI collaborate with TCIUs, CBP, and DoD to expand the discovery of criminal networks; to prioritize the targeting of criminals associated with domestic and international HSI investigations; the development of investigative intelligence generated by partner nation TCIUs; the exploitation of criminal intelligence obtained from domestic and international port seizures and checkpoint operations; and the support of law enforcement operations resulting in the apprehension of key TCO leaders who were identified and indicted based on previous year’s efforts. Additionally HSI conducted partner nation training and capacity building in the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Guatemala.

2015

In 2015, Citadel-15 saw HSI, CBP, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) deploy special agents, analysts, and officers to Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to conduct partner nation capacity building and training coupled with real-time intelligence, interdiction, and investigative operations at international seaports, airports, land borders, and other locations. These operational and intelligence efforts successfully supported ongoing domestic (HSI) investigations – including JTF-I, Extra-territorial Criminal Travel (ECT), and the Department of Justice (DoJ) Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) cases – that dismantled large-scale TCOs and resulted in unprecedented coordination in conducting regional operations among partner nations and with HSI. This coordination extended to Panamanian prosecution efforts as well. These efforts also were critical to developing the intelligence picture of transnational criminal activity in the overall region. HSI Mexico and Mexican law enforcement authorities also participated in the operation. In total, Citadel-15 resulted in 210 criminal arrests, the rescue of 51 unaccompanied minors, seizure of $2,078,988 from illicit currency movements, 2,133 biometric enrollments, and the initiation of 68 further criminal investigations. Crucial to the success of this ninety-day investigative operation was the interagency support provided by CBP, DEA, DoJ, DoD, DoS, U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and the TCIUs of HSI’s international partners.

2016 and Beyond

Similar to previous years, HSI, in conjunction with JIIM partners conducted Citadel 2016 and 2017 respectively. Citadel-16 net a significant increase in rescued unaccompanied minors, captured illicit goods, detentions, deportations, investigations, and overall disruption of illicit activities as compared to previous years. This can be attributed to two things: renewed energy from DoD in support of the operation, and a subsequent extension from 90 to 179 days in the execution phase. Citadel-16 also illuminated the complexity of the illicit human smuggling pathways, actors, and associated networks, and the limitations of U.S. and Partner Nation policies, laws, and enforcement.

Illegal migration and the subset Special Interest Aliens can be categorized as a wicked problem due to the breadth, interconnectedness, scope, complexity, and lack of discernible solutions. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in an effort to aid DHS and its components understand the complexities of this problem hosted a Special Interest Aliens Senior Leader Seminar to highlight, share, and address the study’s findings with interagency and inter-governmental partners. The intended outcomes of the Senior Leader Seminar included identification of the lead federal agency for the Special Interest Aliens problem-set, define terms of reference and common framework, and propose U.S. policy changes. Vignettes were used to educate U.S. government leaders and policymakers on the current threat and vulnerabilities within the nation’s defenses. The Senior Leader Seminar’s six conclusions spurred the development of a bi-annual Theater Special Operations Command/Geographic Combatant Command sponsored JIIM Western Hemisphere forum, operational approach framework, and Community of Action’s six initiatives.[12] The Western Hemisphere forum’s six initiatives nest with DHS’s Special Interest Aliens Joint Action Group’s three strategic goals, five capacity building effort categories, and the USSOCOM host Special Interest Aliens Senior Leader Seminar’s six conclusions; in addition to Citadel’s enforcement efforts. Furthermore, a collaborative whitepaper was published by HSI, Joint Terrorism Task Force Miami, and Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) that highlighted how Special Interest Aliens exploited U.S. immigration, refugee, and asylum laws.[13] The National Counter Terrorism Center reacted immediately, enacting implementation of national security database checks for all Special Immigrant Visa applications with the authorization to block the processing of application(s) containing derogatory information.[14]

Citadel-16 net a significant increase in rescued unaccompanied minors, captured illicit goods, detentions, deportations, investigations, and overall disruption of illicit activities as compared to previous years.

In 2017, Citadel-17 continued targeting the mechanisms used to move humans, illicit funds and contraband around the globe, with enforcement activities performed in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. Participating agencies’ collaborative efforts achieved significant successes in Latin America and the Caribbean through programs that bolstered the law enforcement, customs, and immigration enforcement capabilities of international partners. The scope of the operation incorporated training and capacity building through real-time cross-border operations with partner nation HSI Transnational Criminal Investigative Units. Citadel-17’s ninety-day enforcement efforts netted quantitative and qualitative successes against aforementioned threat networks and activities.[15] Citadel-17’s specific results included: 714 foreign officers trained, eight unaccompanied minors rescued, seizures of $250,232 from illicit currency movements, 2,005 biometric enrollments, the initiation of 33 criminal investigations, 219 criminal arrests, nine convictions, and publication of 135 Intelligence Information Reports.[16] Of note, Citadel-17’s efforts doubled the number of foreign officers trained, in comparison to Citadel-16. Additionally, participating U.S. government organizations provided vital resources to enhance foreign partner’s investigative capabilities to counter-T3N. HSI was able to expand its domestic and international investigations well beyond U.S. borders, which increased targeting effectiveness efforts directed at disrupting illicit actors, networks, and pathways. Subsequently, in June 2017, the National Intelligence Management Council directed DHS, DEA, and FBI lead the creation of a joint Intelligence Community (IC) and Law Enforcement report focused on TCOs and their subsidiaries’ penetration into the U.S. per a tasking by the National Security Council (NSC).[17] The report highlights opportunities for networking and information sharing across the U.S. government concerning TCO threats to national security.

In 2017, Citadel-17 continued targeting the mechanisms used to move humans, illicit funds and contraband around the globe...

Networking and Information Sharing

Citadel capitalizes upon collaborative forums, targeted conferences, and strong working relationships with domestic and foreign agencies. U.S. government leaders continue to recognize the power of informal networks and build “team of teams” constructs to increase collaboration amongst JIIM partners, in order to tackle complex problems and unstable environments.[18] HSI routinely leverages their liaison officers within DoD’s combatant commands to network and secure vital resource support necessary for the successful execution of Citadel.

From 2016 through the present, a resurgent effort by USSOUTHCOM in concert with USNORTHCOM, USSOCOM, and respective Component Commands saw significant wherewithal provided to Citadel in conjunction with interagency partners; a truly whole of government approach to counter-T3N. USSOCOM leveraged its expansive Special Operations Support Team (SOST) network to rally additional capital for Citadel amongst U.S. government partners.[19] SOSTs are members of USSOCOM’s Interagency Partnership Program (IAPP). According to its mission statement, “the IAPP advances TSOC [Theater Special Operations Command] and other USSOCOM Component priorities with the interagency and other National Capital Region (NCR) based partners, through a robust SOST network, in order to achieve CDRUSSOCOM objectives.”[20] Similarly, Admiral Kurt W. Tidd reinforced his commitment to this effort by incorporating Citadel into the USSOUTHCOM 2017-2027 Theater Strategy. He emphasized the paramount need for Joint Forces to “understand the security environment, cultivate friendly networks of allies and partners, and undertake all activities as part of a comprehensively joint effort spanning” across JIIM elements.[21] Citadel was highlighted in USSOUTHCOM’s latest theater strategy as a way to achieve effects by strengthening and supporting JIIM networks.[22] USSOUTHCOM also instituted organizational change, creating the Network Engagement Team to enable interoperability to more effectively operationalize the Joint Force in support of interagency/partner nation judicial end-states. Further inertia occurred when National Geographic aired an eight-part series on 19 January 2018. The series “Chain of Command” featured USSOUTHCOM and SOCSOUTH’s mission within Latin America to counter violent extremism and Citadel’s efforts to “curb human smuggling and other transnational criminal activities in Central and South America.”[23]

SOCSOUTH’s involvement in Citadel over the past five years epitomizes the steadfast commitment to be the mutually supportive and interoperable partner of choice in the region. In 2013, contributions in support of Citadel-13 incorporated the deployment of Special Operations Force’s intelligence and operations integrators, analysis, information sharing, training for HSI’s partnered forces, and biometrics support. This level, quality, and depth of support ensured interoperability, facilitated mutual trust and confidence amongst participating interagency partners. This contributed to significant impacts to T3N and illicit activities within Central America and the U.S. homeland. During 2014-2015 the command’s support to Citadel was limited due resource limitations.

In 2016, SOCSOUTH spearheaded support to Citadel to improve on previous years’ involvement, the command spearheaded DoD’s renewed support to Citadel; appointing an operations and intelligence integrator to lead the TSOC’s efforts. SOCSOUTH’s operations and intelligence integrator networked across the Special Operations Force enterprise, garnered resources, support, and enabled information-intelligence sharing amongst partaking U.S. government partners. The integrator’s efforts netted multi-Combatant Command, TSOC, Component, and task forces’ involvement in Citadel’s counter-T3N OAI. These efforts paved the way for multiple DoD elements to contribute and support future Citadel iterations.

SOCSOUTH’s involvement in Citadel over the past five years epitomizes the steadfast commitment to be the mutually supportive and interoperable partner of choice in the region.

Training

HSI bolstered host nation law enforcement, customs, and immigration enforcement capabilities prior/during Citadel iterations via a variety of training venues. To gain the requisite resources and support, HSI -International Operations’ Assistant Director Raymond Villanueva testified before a House of Representative’s Committee on Homeland Security that, “Partnering with TCIUs (Transnational Criminal Investigative Units) enables ICE to promote direct action via information sharing and investigative leads while respecting the sovereignty of the host country and cultivating international partnerships.”[24] Transnational Criminal Investigative Units are comprised of foreign law enforcement officials, customs officers, immigration officers, and prosecutors who receive ICE training and undergo a strict vetting process to ensure that shared information and operational activities are not compromised. Aligned with the President’s Strategy in Combating Transnational Organized Crime, Transnational Criminal Investigative Units identify targets, collect evidence, share intelligence, and facilitate the prosecution of TCOs both in-country and in the U.S. These efforts, which often occur thousands of miles from the U.S. borders, essentially act as an outer layer of security for the U.S. The Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit program is a stellar example of how HSI and participating partner nation vetted forces’ successful combined multinational efforts to identify, disrupt, and dismantle T3N throughout the Western Hemisphere has improved regional security.

Information gathered via BITMAP is shared across all identity intelligence databases used by the U.S. government and Allies...

The HSI initiative BITMAP (Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program) enabled host nation, “law enforcement officers [to] collect and share biometric and biographic data on [over 2,005] special interest individuals [in 2017] to identify potential threat actors in or transiting through participating countries.”[25] The BITMAP program enables partner-country law enforcement officers the opportunity and capability to collect and share biometric and biographic data on special interest individuals in order to identify potential threat actors in or transiting through participating countries.[26] Information gathered via BITMAP is shared across all identity intelligence databases used by the U.S. government and Allies in order to enable U.S. law enforcement and IC actions; while simultaneously enabling DHS to share information back with host nation officials concerning enrolled individuals.[27] Identity intelligence actions increased collaboration amongst interagency/DoD partners, directly contributed positive effects against global human smuggling networks which move Special Interest Aliens, and support counterterrorism OAI in the Western Hemisphere and in overseas conflict zones. “Through this process, ICE/HSI is able to track movement towards the U.S., take joint action with partner nations along the route, and deter human smuggling through South and Central America and Caribbean.”[28] BITMAP was identified in the 2016 DHS Appropriations Bill as a critical effort to collect biometric data concerning, “Special Interest Aliens, violent criminals, fugitives, and confirmed or suspected terrorists encountered within illicit pathways.”[29] In 2018, the BITMAP program was permanently established by House Resolution 6439 “to address and reduce national security, border security, and terrorist threats before such threats reach the international border of the United States.”[30] The program uses portable biometric collection devices to obtain forensic-quality fingerprints, latent fingerprints, iris images, photos, and other biometric data. Currently BITMAP is deployed in fourteen separate countries, with two additional countries planned in the near-term.[31] Biometric collection in addition to other identity intelligence activities deny adversaries anonymity; allowing intelligence and security agencies to positively identify individuals and deny them entry into the homeland further away from U.S. borders.

Similarly, U.S. Special Operations Forces/ DoD leverages Title 10 U.S.C. 284 authorities to support various U.S. government and/ or partner nation law enforcement agencies’ counterdrug and counter-TOC activities. Additionally, in accordance with Title 10 U.S. Code Sub-Section 333, DoD elements train and equip partner nation security forces for the purposes of building capacity to conduct specified operations.[32] USC 333 authorizes the Secretary of Defense, “to conduct or support a program or programs to provide training and equipment to the national security forces of one or more foreign countries for the purpose of building the capacity of such forces to conduct.”[33] The range of operations authorized under this authority include: counterterrorism, counter-weapons of mass destruction, counter-DTO, counter-TOC, maritime and border security, military intelligence, and “operations or activities that contribute to an international coalition operation that is determined by the Secretary to be in the national interest of the U.S.”[34] A recent example of Title 10 support was the March 2018, USSOUTHCOM Forensic Exploitation and Analysis Center and Biometric Subject Matter Expert Exchange with Honduran Law Enforcement, orchestrated by DHS/HSI. The Biometric Subject Matter Expert Exchange enabled DoD subject matter experts the opportunity to share best practices concerning the collection and processing of biometric and forensic evidence with Honduran law enforcement officials, that will aid in future cases and prosecutions of criminals and terrorists.

Targeted Enforcement

Citadel exemplifies a unified approach to surge against an identified threat and bring U.S. government, Allies, and host nation capabilities to bear in an efficient manner. Prior to Citadel’s develop, circa 2008, a Somali citizen Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane was detained in Texas and later sentenced for his ties to multiple African based terrorist groups, including al-Shabaab. He assisted facilitating other known-or-suspected terrorists to enter the U.S. illegally and was subsequently imprisoned for ten years beginning in 2011.[35] According to DHS’s website, “a ‘known terrorist’ is an individual who has been (a) arrested, charged by information, indicted for, or convicted of a crime related to terrorism and/or terrorist activities by U.S. Government or foreign government authorities; or (b) identified as a terrorist or a member of a terrorist organization pursuant to statute, Executive Order, or international legal obligation pursuant to a United Nations Security Council Resolution.”[36] Whereas, “a ‘suspected terrorist’ is an individual who is reasonably suspected to be engaging in, has engaged in, or intends to engage in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism and/or terrorist activities.”[37] Cases such as Dhakane and others led ICE to develop the IPAS strategy in 2011 and OAIs to counter the influx of known-or-suspected terrorists via the southern border and approaches.

Citadel exemplifies a unified approach to surge against an identified threat and bring U.S. government, Allies, and host nation capabilities to bear in an efficient manner.

In 2016, Citadel enabled the necessary surge personnel required for a mutually supportive ICE Operation titled “OPERATION MESOAMERICA”.[38] According to ICE Director Sarah R. Saldaña the operation is a reflection of multilateral commitment to identifying and dismantling criminal networks involved in the illicit movement of people… and demonstrates the commitment the international community has to operate as one in a united front against those involved in human smuggling.[39] MESOAMERICA was a 15-month multinational investigation that resulted in forty-one individuals linked to TCOs responsible for smuggling hundreds of individuals through South and Central America into the U.S. were arrested by foreign partners as part of Citadel.[40]

Similarly, in March 2017, Costa Rican authorities detained and subsequently deported a Somali citizen named Ibrahim Qoordheen, with alleged international terrorism ties shortly after entering the country from Panama; after leveraging ICE agents’ assistance.[41] During a House Oversight Committee briefing CBP officials testified to reports regarding an unspecified number of Islamist terrorist organization members were apprehended crossing America’s southern border.[42] As the crisis on the southern border continues, the risk to the Homeland persists.

Conclusion

Citadel embodies a unified JIIM approach to identify, disrupt, and dismantle T3Ns in the Western Hemisphere which are vital to U.S. security interests and protection of the homeland. The multifaceted methodology Citadel leverages a focused surge of U.S. government resources dedicated towards counter-T3N. Annual reevaluations in the form of after action reviews increased efficiency and effectiveness of future Citadel iterations. Despite after action reviews improvements, there is still a vital need for consistent operational planning and fiscal resources to be dedicated, budgeted, and forecasted to enable continued successes in counter-T3N and associated activities. Citadel’s incorporation of the Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit program is phenomenal. In an effort to be more mutually supportive and interoperable, recommend ICE/HSI capitalize on DoD and U.S. Special Operations Forces’ global presence and authorities (U.S.C. 284 and 333) to enable persistent engagement, professional development, and sustainment training beyond the Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit’s initial certification training. DoD elements have renewed support to Citadel and JIIM efforts to counter-T3N and enabling interagency/partner nation judicial end states; evident by the enormous successes BITMAP and identity intelligence activities continue to produce, while denying anonymity to T3N actors. Citadel will continue to be a driving force for change within the hemisphere. Failed implementation of mutually supportive and interoperable JIIM OAIs like Citadel, enable our adversaries to threaten national security, remain anonymous, and exploit illicit pathways and vulnerabilities within the southern approaches to the U.S. Homeland, and threaten national security. IAJ

Notes

1 John Camillus, “Strategy as a Wicked Problem,” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 5 (2008): 98-106, Rittel and Webber formally described the conceptual approach to “wicked problems” in a (1973) Policy Sciences article titled, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Wicked problems are difficult or impossible to solve social or cultural problems.

2 Janice Ayala, “Defeating a Sophisticated and Dangerous Adversary: Are the New Border Security Task Forces the Right Approach?” statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, (2017): 6, accessed March 24, 2019, <https://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/HM11/20170404/105716/HHRG-115-HM11-Wstate-AyalaJ-20170404.pdf>.

3 Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), “CITADEL 15 Report,” (2015): 1-2.

4 Jeh Johnson, “Southern Border and Approaches Campaign Memorandum,” (2014): 2, accessed March 21, 2019, <https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_southern_border_campaign_plan.pdf>.

5 Ibid, 2–3.

6 Raymond Villanueva, “Written Testimony of ICE HSI International Operations Assistant Director Raymond Villanueva for House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence hearing titled Combating Transnational Gangs Through Information Sharing,” January 18, 2018, 4, accessed March 3, 2019, <https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/01/18/written-testimony-ice-househomeland-security-subcommittee-counterterrorism-and>.

7 Ibid.

8 HSI, “CITADEL 15 Report,” 1–2.

9 Ibid, 2.

10 Ibid.

11 Villanueva, 7.

12 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Western Hemisphere Conference Summary,” 2017.

13 Homeland Security Investigations, “White Paper,” 2017.

14 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Special Immigrants.” (2011), accessed March 25, 2019, <https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/special-immigrants>.

15 HSI. “OP CITADEL-17 AAR EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.” (2017): 1-6.

16 Ibid.

17 Donald J. Trump, “Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking,” February 9, 2017, accessed March 3, 2019, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-executive-orderenforcing-federal-law-respect-transnational-criminal-organizations-preventing-international-trafficking>.

18 Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, (New York, New York: Portfolio, 2015), 84.

19 Currently there are 18 SOST locations: OGA, ODNI, NCTC, DOJ, DOS, DEA, DIA, DOE, DHS, CBP, HSI, USAID, FBI, Treasury, NGA, NSA, JIATF-NCR, ISR Ops (USDI).

20 U.S. Special Operations Command, “IAPP Mission Statement,” 2018.

21 Kurt W. Tidd, “USSOUTHCOM Theater Strategy 2017–2027,” April 2017, 2, accessed March 19, 2019, <https://www.southcom.mil/Portals/7/Documents/USSOUTHCOM_Theater_Strategy_Final.pdf?ver=2017-05-19-120652-483>.

22 Ibid, 8.

23 NATGEO, “Shoulder to Shoulder,” episode 3 of “Chain of Command” Season 1, January 22, 2019, accessed April 3, 2019, <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/ab25a819eb0987bce9301cfdb2b32d06>. “Chain of Command” is an eight-part series narrated by Chris Evans that offers unprecedented access to the U.S. military’s mission to combat violent extremism in hot spots like Iraq, Afghanistan, and West Africa as well as Latin America. The series also features HSI’s “Operation Citadel” and its partnership with USSOUTHCOM to curb human smuggling and other transnational criminal activities in Central and South America. The episode “Shoulder to Shoulder” highlights HSI’s efforts to combat transnational criminal organizations and their activities before they reach the United States.

24 Villanueva, 7.

25 DHS Science and Technology Directorate, “BITMAP,” 2017, accessed March 2, 2019, https://www.ice.gov/international-operations.

26 Ibid.

27 Villanueva, 7.

28 Ibid.

29 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, “House Resolution 3128 – Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2016,” July 21, 2015, 14, 114th Congress, accessed April 5, 2019, <https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/3128>.

30 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, “House Resolution 6439 – The Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program,” December 5, 2018, 115th Congress, accessed April 10, 2019, <https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr6439/BILLS-115hr6439rs.pdf>.

31 Villanueva, 7.

32 Cornell Law School, “10 U.S. Code § 333 - Foreign Security Forces: Authority to Build Capacity,” 2019, accessed April 10, 2019, <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/333>.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Joshua Gillin, “Terrorists From Groups Besides ISIS Crossing U.S.-Mexico Border, U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis Says,” Politifact, April 4, 2016, accessed April 27, 2019, <http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2016/apr/04/ron-desantis/terrorists-groups-besides-isis-crossing-us-mexico->.

36 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens,” January 7, 2019, accessed April 19, 2019, <https://www.dhs.gov/news/2019/01/07/mythfactknown-and-suspected-terroristsspecial-interest-aliens>.

37 Ibid.

38 Sarah Saldana, “Written Testimony of Director U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to U.S. House Representatives Committee on the Judiciary hearing titled Oversight of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” September 22, 2016, accessed March 17, 2019, 6, <https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160922/105348/HHRG-114-JU00-Wstate-SaldanaS-20160922.pdf>.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Enrique Pretel, “Costa Rica Detains Somali with Alleged Terrorism Links,” Reuters, March 23, 2017, accessed April 3, 2019, <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-costa-rica-suspect-idUSKBN16U2CP>.

42 Gillin, 2016.

The Fallacy of a Marketing Approach

Applied to Interagency Influence Efforts

by Ian J. Courter

Within the Department of Defense, and even within some circles of the Army Psychological Operations Branch, there is a prevalent view that military influence activities equate to marketing. Several published articles from prominent organizations have even gone so far as to advocate for marketing-based influence efforts as a means to affect the behavior of selected foreign groups.[1] However, statistical data conclusively show that as a potential operational model, reliance on a marketing model is severely flawed and generally unsuited for overseas U.S. government influence activities.

Marketing developed simply as a means of persuading potential customers to spend money to obtain a particular brand product or service. The American Marketing Association officially defines marketing as “… the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”[2] Ultimately, the goal in marketing is simply to elicit a specific, desired purchasing behavior.

Applying marketing techniques to behavior change has precedent. During World War II, U.S. government agencies coopted marketing firms to address specific issues, such as to minimize absenteeism among war production workers, increase enlistment in the armed forces, and increase support for rationing. The collaboration between government and marketers continued after the war to address other issues related to public safety, disease, crime, and education.

This article examines whether marketing has been an effective model for influence efforts in the context of a profound, enduring societal problem—the consumption of alcohol in conjunction with the operation of motor vehicles. The evidence demonstrates a marketing-based approach to behavior change fails to support reliable, effective influence efforts. The debate about employing a marketing-based approach has significant implications for attempts to influence foreign individuals and groups in support of U.S. interagency objectives across an array of issues.

Ian J. Courter is a former Army Psychological Operations soldier, with extensive experience working in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Murray State University with a focus on Soviet studies and a M.A. in Political Science from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale with emphasis on International Relations, Comparative Government, and Political Economy. He currently works at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The Behavioral Problem

Alcohol-impaired crash deaths are not the result of inclement weather, vehicle design flaws, or poor road conditions, but stem directly from an entirely preventable behavior—the offenders consume alcohol then drive motor vehicles while impaired. Impaired drivers frequently crash, resulting in tens of thousands of injuries and deaths every year and costing billions of dollars in medical expenses, lost productivity, and property damage.[3] In 2010, the most recent year the U.S. government compiled cost data, alcohol-impaired crashes cost more than $44 billion (over $52.4 billion in 2020 dollars).[4] In terms of lives lost, in 2018, there were 10,511 fatalities in the U.S. resulting from alcohol-impaired driving.[5] Furthermore, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics, in 2019 there were 1,024,508 arrests nationwide for driving under the influence.[6] Finally, analysis of the data indicates those more than 1 million arrests are only a tiny percentage of the people who actually drank and drove in 2019—those arrested were only the impaired drivers caught by law enforcement.

To combat the problem, the U.S. government and various non-governmental organizations have spent millions of dollars for public awareness campaigns. The Ad Council,[7] a nongovernmental organization, contributed one of the best-known slogans “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” According to the Ad Council, during 2005-2011, the organization successfully solicited media outlets to donate free time and space for public service announcements valued at $367 million.[8]

As for government entities, in 2020, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), part of the Department of Transportation, released more than $297 million for impaired driving grants, high visibility enforcement grants, and related programs. Of the money the NHTSA spent, many millions of dollars funded marketing-style “public information and educational” campaigns intended to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol impaired driving and to discourage people from driving under the influence.[9]

Alcohol-impaired driving is pervasive throughout all fifty states. Nationwide, in 2016 there were 2,177,000 total crash injuries with 37,461 fatalities, of which 10,996 were attributed to alcohol impairment.[10] Table 1 (page 66) depicts motor vehicle crashes, injuries, total deaths, and alcohol-impaired crash deaths for 2010-2018, showing that since 2011 the recent trend has been yearly increases in total crashes and injuries.

To combat the problem, the U.S. government and various nongovernmental organizations have spent millions of dollars for public awareness campaigns.

As Table 1 depicts, the number of total crashes is trending higher with accompanying increases in crash injuries. The increase in overall crashes may be partially attributable to more vehicles on the roads (273,602,100 vehicles registered in 2018 versus 242,060,545 vehicles in 2010, for an increase of 31,541,555 vehicles, or 13 percent).[12] The numbers also show a similar increase in the number of total crash injuries.

Table 2 (page 67) provides more specific statistics for the years 2000-2018 that shows the total fatalities compared to alcohol-impaired fatalities. Of the total fatalities in 2018, 10,511 (28.8 percent) were due to alcohol impairment.[13] Based on NHTSA data, between 2002 and 2018, on average, nearly one-third of vehicle crash fatalities resulted from alcohol impairment.[14] That percentage has remained stable for the period in question (average 30.5 percent). Furthermore, when NHTSA statistics are converted into chart form, an overall pattern for the annual automobile crash deaths emerges. Table 2 shows that the trend line for total fatalities declines steeper than for alcohol-impaired fatalities. The steeper decline in total fatalities versus alcohol-impaired fatalities suggests other factors are responsible for lower crash death rates and challenges assertions that marketing–style awareness campaigns have helped achieve the intended effect of decreasing alcohol-impaired crash deaths.

Table 1. Total motor vehicle crash statistics, 2010-2018.[11]

Another data set to examine in determining the effectiveness of marketing in behavior change derives from law enforcement. The FBI publishes yearly crime statistics. Among the categories the FBI tracks is the number of driving under the influence (DUI) arrests, which has the same standard as the NHTSA classification for alcohol-impaired driving (blood alcohol concentration of ≥.08 grams per deciliter). Table 3 (page 68) provides specific yearly numbers for DUI arrests as well as depicting them in a graph, and shows the number of arrests has fallen significantly since at least 2000.

Table 2. U.S. vehicle fatalities 2000-2017.[15]

The annual totals of DUI arrests do not portray the complete story, as they only depict a small number of actual offenders. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2010 alone, adults drank and drove more than 112,000,000 times nationwide.[17] The sheer number of estimated incidents seems implausible, but wide acceptance of overall CDC statistical accuracy supports the probable validity of these particular statistics.

Table 3. FBI annual national estimates for DUI arrests.[16]

Table 4 (page 69) illustrates the CDC reported numbers for eleven different years. However, according to the FBI, in 2010 there were 1,412,223 people arrested for driving under the influence.[18] These two figures are official estimates of their respective U.S. government agencies and, if even reasonably accurate, show that in 2010 only about 1.3 percent of impaired driving incidents resulted in a DUI arrest. This finding demonstrates that alcohol-impaired driving is pervasive, and that citing decreases in alcohol-related fatalities as a measure of effectiveness for marketing campaigns is inaccurate, as the estimated number of alcohol-impaired driving occurrences has remained relatively steady at well over 100 million per year.

Possible Alternative Answers for Decreased Deaths

Proponents for marketing-style approaches to combat alcohol-impaired driving focus on numbers of deaths, specifically any decrease as a measure of success. The issue is an error in attribution. A more complete picture of the effects of any countermeasures addressing drinking and driving should cover the probable number of alcohol-impaired incidents, the number of DUI arrests, and alcohol-impaired driver collisions. This change would likely show more people are simply surviving vehicle crashes that would have resulted in fatalities in the past, which bears absolutely no relationship to supposed decreases in incidents of the behavior resulting from a marketing approach to combat the problem. As the current data stands, decreases in the overall vehicle collision deaths over time supports an argument that other factors are affecting survival rates.

When determining causality for a change in any given issue, event, or other occurrence, there is seldom a single reason. It is the same for decreases in vehicle crash deaths, whether those incidents involve alcohol or not. The following examples provide reasonable explanations for the overall decreases in fatalities:

•Automobile design—During an accident, impact absorbing crumple zones and collapsible steering columns deflect some of the kinetic energy around the passengers, decreasing injuries or the severity of injuries, and increasing overall chances of survival.

•Safety features—Anti-lock brakes, collision avoidance systems, passive restraint systems (airbags, mandatory since 1998), and other equipment automatically engage, reducing or preventing skid/loss of control, restraining passengers, and otherwise removing some of the human factors leading up to a crash.

•Cellular phones—Cell phone networks now reach into some of the most rural areas, allowing for rapid accident reporting and decreasing emergency service response time.

•Medical care—Better treatment techniques and technological advances have led to better outcomes for individuals injuries in collisions and other vehicle accidents.

•Medical evacuation—Greater availability of high-speed airlift increases the chances even the most severely injured crash victims can survive.[20]

•Increased enforcement—Law enforcement measures, such as primary offense seat belt laws and sobriety check-points, substantially help increase safety on the roads.

Table 4. Annual self-reported alcohol-impaired driving episodes among U.S. adults, 1993-2014.[19]

Of all the factors listed above, U.S. government agency data strongly suggests increased enforcement is the single factor that most decreases incidents of alcohol impaired driving, which is a far different measure of effectiveness than citing changes in the number of alcohol-impaired crash deaths to support continued funding of marketing-style campaigns. For example, according to NHTSA data, seat belt use was higher in states where law enforcement can pull drivers over solely for not wearing a seat belt (primary offense) in comparison to states that do not have such laws. Seat belt use nationally has steadily increased from 70.7 percent in 2000 to 90.7 percent in 2019.[21] The direct effect on fatality rates is reported to be a reduction in the risk of front passenger death by 45 percent and moderate-to-critical injury by 50 percent.[22] The high number of wearers overall suggests more victims in the vehicles alcohol-impaired drivers hit have probably been wearing seat belts, which may account for a portion of the lower fatalities.

According to FBI crime estimates, between 2000 and 2019, U.S. law-enforcement agencies made approximately 25,751,560 arrests for alcohol impaired driving or an average of about 1,287,578 arrests per year in that period.[23] A primary means of catching and arresting impaired drivers is the use of sobriety check points. According to the CDC, sobriety checkpoints where law enforcement officers check drivers for alcohol impairment “...consistently reduce alcohol-related crashes, typically by 9 percent.” Furthermore, mandatory use of ignition interlocks for previous offenders that prevent vehicle operation by drivers having a blood alcohol concentration above a set limit are credited with a ±70 percent reduction in rearrests for the offense.[24] This can also be interpreted as a 70 percent reduction in the recidivism rate for people having been previously convicted of driving while alcohol-impaired. The CDC cites other effective means of preventing alcohol involved/impaired driving:

•Actively enforcing existing laws addressing alcohol usage.

•License revocation for intoxicated drivers.

•Health promotion campaigns to encourage economic, organizational, policy, and school/community action.

•Community-based approaches to alcohol control and DWI prevention.

•Require substance abuse assessment and treatment, if needed, for DWI offenders.

•Increased taxes per unit of alcohol.[25]

...there is no evidence from the government agencies’ data and recommendations supporting a conclusion that marketing campaigns have been effective in significantly reducing alcohol impaired driving and associated deaths.

A key point is that the majority of the recommendations are actions that directly address the behavior. Buried in the list is a reference to “health promotion campaigns,” which is an umbrella term that can also describe hygiene, smoking, cancer, and other awareness campaigns. Nowhere is there a specific mention of awareness or education campaigns to change behavior—the recommendations focus on specific actions, not messaging. Consequently, there is no evidence from the government agencies’ data and recommendations supporting a conclusion that marketing campaigns have been effective in significantly reducing alcohol impaired driving and associated deaths. However, there is strong statistical evidence such campaigns fail to appreciably affect behavior.

In 1968, the National Safety Council conducted a seat-belt use campaign that used over $51 million ($391.4 million in 2020 dollars) in donated public service media time, and was subsequently assessed a failure. However, a few years later a study found that mandatory seat belt laws with punitive fines significantly increased seat-belt use.[26] The study’s findings are likely one of the reasons for the proliferation of seat-belt laws among the fifty states in the 1980s and 1990s. In a similar manner, laws addressing alcohol impaired driving are far more effective at changing undesired behavior than messaging, as suggested in Department of Transportation HS 809 323. “All states and the District of Columbia now have 21-year-old minimum drinking age laws. NHTSA estimates that these laws have reduced traffic fatalities involving drivers 18 to 20 years old by 13 percent and have saved an estimated 20,043 lives since 1975.”[27]

Conclusion

Statistical data for the cited issue suggests a reliance on a marketing paradigm to influence human behavior will fail to obtain the desired change. If this conclusion is accurate, then application of the marketing model in an interagency context is detrimental to the effectiveness of U.S. government influence efforts—the use of a flawed approach will lead directly to a failure to achieve the desired behavior change. Analysis of the data indicates it is a combination of changes in laws, technological advances, and tougher enforcement which have been the overwhelming factors in lowering overall rates of alcohol-related crash deaths. Alcohol impaired vehicle crashes are a preventable behavioral problem on which marketing techniques have failed to have any significant effect. Taken a step further, the marketing model for behavior change has also likely failed to appreciably affect illicit drug use (such as opioids and methamphetamine), obesity rates, or suicide rates.

If a marketing-based approach fails to appreciably change domestic behavior issues, then it is an unreasonable expectation such an approach would succeed in changing behaviors that are culturally in-grained in foreign populations over centuries, such as sectarian conflict, blood feuds, human trafficking, and illicit drug cultivation. This examination of the marketing model suggests fundamental deficiencies that are detrimental to U.S. overseas influence efforts if it becomes the basis for operations. Instead, it is more likely that actions with psychological effects in conjunction with complementary influential messaging would be far more effective than a primary reliance on a marketing-based approach.

Finally, even if U.S. agencies did employ marketing as the primary influence tool in an operation, the need for extensive marketing and advertising expertise specific to the cultural context of the area of operations would require significant additional resources, or a substantial shifting of resources for external support. Those experts would have to come from local nationals or recent expatriates, as that expertise is simply not available within the Department of Defense and most other agencies.[28] IAJ

Notes

1 For one example, refer to: Helmus, Todd C., Christopher Paul, and Russell W. Glenn. Enlisting Madison Avenue: the Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation. RAND, 2007.

2 American Marketing Association. <https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx>.

3 CDC. 2014. Centers for Disease Control. <http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/Impaired_Driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html#prevention>.

4 NHTSA. Drunk Driving: Overview. 2018. Washington, D.C.: NHTSA. <https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving>; Inflation amount determined using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. <https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm>.

5 National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2019, December). Alcohol-impaired driving: 2018 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 812 864). Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

6 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports. <http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats>.

7 The Ad Council also partnered with ad agencies to create the iconic public service announcement figures Iron Eyes Cody (Keep America beautiful) and McGruff the Crime Dog (Crime prevention).

8 The Ad Council. Making a Difference: Drunk Driving Prevention. 2011. <https://www.adcouncil.org/campaign/buzzed-driving-prevention#print>. The Ad Council caveated claims of success by stating: “While the Ad Council cannot claim the campaign as the sole driver of these behaviors, it is likely that it played a role, due to the campaign’s vast reach and recognition among the target audience.” (Pg. 4)

9 NHTSA Announces Release of $562 Million in Highway Safety Grants. (February 13, 2020) <https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/highway-safety-program-grants-562-million>.

The $562 million included: $147.5 million for impaired driving countermeasures, to combat driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs; $41.5 million for state traffic safety information systems, to help states build databases related to crashes; and $2.1 million for impaired driving ignition interlock and 24/7 sobriety programs, to enact testing or monitoring of DUI for alcohol use.

10 National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2017, October). Alcohol-impaired driving: 2016 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 812 450). Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

11 National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Data. Traffic Safety Facts Annual Report Tables. <https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm>.

12 Federal Highway Administration statistics. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2018/mv1.cfm; Federal Highway Administration statistics. <https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/pdf/mv1.pdf>.

13 National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2020, June). State alcohol-impaired-driving estimates: 2018 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 812 917). National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Blincoe, L. J., Miller, T. R., Zaloshnja, E., & Lawrence, B. A. (2015, May). The economic and societal impact of motor vehicle crashes, 2010. (Revised) (Report No. DOT HS 812 013). Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The farther back in time, the more difficult it is to determine accurate numbers for alcohol related crashes. Widespread use of breathalyzers, blood tests, and other technologies is a fairly recent event. Estimates from 1982 indicated police were able to identify only 42 percent of drivers who had been drinking. It is likely that in the 1980s and early 1990s, police identified only about 50 percent of all legally intoxicated drivers. (Blincoe et al, pg. 154) While not explicitly stated, this last figure likely includes both drivers of crashed vehicles and drivers stopped at sobriety checkpoints.

14 2002 was the first year for the data switch from “alcohol related” to “alcohol impaired”, so for consistency, averages only run from that year to the present.

15 NHTSA official statistics. <http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA>.

16 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports. <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s>.

17 CDC. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), 1993–2014. <https://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/Impaired_Driving/impaired-drvfactsheet.html#prevention>.

18 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports. <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl29.xls>.

19 CDC. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), 1993–2014. <https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fmotorvehiclesafety%2Fimpaired_driving%2Fimpaired-drv_factsheet.html>.

20 According to the Association of Air Medical Services, there are about 400,000 rotary wing air medevac transports annually in the U.S. as well as an additional 150,000 fixed wing aircraft medevac. Thirty-three percent of the rotary wing medevacs (132,000) occur at the scene of the incident, to include auto collisions. <http://aams.org/member-services/fact-sheet-faqs>.

21 National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2020, April). Seat Belt Use in 2019 — Use Rates in the States and Territories (Traffic Safety Facts Crash•Stats. Report No. DOT HS 812 947). National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

22 Li, R., and Pickrell, T. M. (2018, April, revised). Seat belt use in 2017—Overall results. (Traffic Safety Facts Research Note. Report No. DOT HS 812 465). Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

23 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports. <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s>.

24 CDC. Impaired Driving: Get the Facts, 2018. <https://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/Impaired_Driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html#prevention>.

25 CDC. 2014. Centers for Disease Control. <https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fmotorvehiclesafety%2Fimpaired_driving%2Fimpaired-drv_factsheet.html>.

26 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “Safety Belt Ads Have ‘No Effect.’” Vol. 7, No. 11. Washington, D.C. June 12, 1972; Inflation amount determined using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. <https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm>.

27 NHTSA. DOT HS 809 323. Traffic Safety Facts: 2000. Washington: DOT. 2000.

28 Derived from discussion with subject matter expert Mr. Brad Virden (SGM Retired), former Psychological Operations planner and analyst.

The Bull Simons Ops Center Podcast covers the wide range of operations, from peacekeeping to low, mid, and high-intensity conflict that our Army has been a part of from Vietnam through the present day.

Each episode features the stories of military veterans told from their perspectives. Their first-hand accounts provide unique insights into key moments of history, presenting the challenges faced, solutions implemented, and lessons learned.

Visit the Bull Simons Ops Center Podcast webpage to listen to all the episodes below

https://thesimonscenter.org/podcasts

Episode 1: Introducing The Bull Simons Ops Center Podcast

Episode 2: Son Tay – The Most Dangerous Mission of the Vietnam War

Episode 3: Prosecuting The My Lai Tragedy

Episode 4: An Interview with Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Stan Cherrie

Worth Noting

Simons Center publishes 2021 Progress Report

The Simons Center has published its 2021 Progress Report to highlight its programs and activities accomplished in calendar year 2021.

Included in the 2021 Progress Report: the Arter-Rowland National Security Forum, the Bull Simons Ops Center Podcast, the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series, the Cold War Symposium, and the Distinguished Lecture Series.

The 2021 Progress Report can be found on the Simons Center’s website – thesimonscenter.org/news/simons-center-2021-progress-report.

- Simons Center

Fall 2021 Foundation News magazine available online

The CGSC Foundation published the fall 2021 edition of the Foundation News magazine in November. This edition of the Foundation News highlights the visit from Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster who delivered the Foundation’s Powell Lecture for academic year 2022 and also spoke at the Simons Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series. This edition also includes updates from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College commandant and deputy commandant, as well as school directors, and for the first time, an update from the dean of academics. Along with all these updates from the College, the CGSC Foundation is also proud to showcase some of its other activities since the spring edition. Last, the “In Memoriam” section is a weighty one. The CGSC Foundation honors the memories of the four great individuals included in this section. Read the Foundation News magazine online at www.cgscfoundation.org/no-29-fall-2021.

- CGSC Foundation

‘General and the Ambassador’ discuss U.S. Diplomats in Russia

In a recent episode of “The General and the Ambassador: A Conversation” podcast host Ambassador (Ret.) Deborah McCarthy discussed diplomacy in Russia with Ambassador Jon Huntsman and Admiral David Manero. McCarthy’s guests examine the effects of the large expulsion of U.S. diplomats from Russia during a period of heightened tensions, their ground game to advance U.S. interests in a hostile environment, Russia’s toolbox and offensive tactics, and U.S. actions to counter those tools and tactics.

Ambassador Jon Huntsman currently serves as Vice Chair of Ford Motor Company. Huntsman began his career in public service as a staff assistant to President Ronald Reagan, and has served each of the five U.S. presidents since then in critical roles around the world. Huntsman is the only American in history to have served as Chief of Mission in both China and Russia.

Retired Rear Admiral David Manero currently serves as the Senior Defense Official/Defense Attaché London. Manero was diplomatically expelled from the Russian Federation on his first flag assignment as Senior Defense Official/Defense Attaché Moscow. Previous assignments and overseas tours include the U.S. Naval Attaché Moscow.

Podcast producer and host Ambassador (retired) Deborah McCarthy was the 2018 DACOR Visiting Professor of Diplomacy for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “The General and the Ambassador: A Conversation” podcast promotes interagency cooperation and is produced by the American Academy of Diplomacy.

- Simons Center

Retired General, author, scholar presents at event in KC

The CGSC Foundation hosted a Simons Center Distinguished Lecture Series event on Sept. 7, 2021, at the Carriage Club in Kansas City, Mo. The special guest for the evening was retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster who served as the 26th assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

“Thanks to Col. Rod Cox for the opportunity to see so many great old friends, meet some new friends, and to be in really distinguished company,” said McMaster. “It’s distinguished company because all of you care about our nation and you care about those who are serving in uniform and supporting the CGSC Foundation.”

McMaster began his remarks commenting on his eagerness to serve the commander-in-chief as the national security advisor, but spent the bulk of his time speaking to what he called the “catastrophe” in Afghanistan and how it has its roots in misunderstanding, self-delusion and strategic incompetence and narcissism. He also spoke about its effects on Afghan and U.S citizens from a political and security perspective and what we all can do to begin to recover from this catastrophe and try to improve our competence and regain our confidence in who we are as a people.

After his comments describing the catastrophe in Afghanistan, McMaster shifted to talking about what we could all do to restore our confidence. He said the traumas of today are not unprecedented, citing events in the 1970s – the U.S. effort to leave and then recover from Vietnam, our civil rights struggles, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the oil crisis, economic struggles, so on. Pessimism pervaded the 70s and the United States appeared weak and in contrast, the Soviet Union appeared strong. Similarly, after recent traumas with a pandemic, a recession, social divisions laid bare by George Floyd’s murder and the violent aftermath, vitriolic partisan political divisions have all added to a narrative of American decline.

“I believe that restoring confidence in America’s democratic institutions and processes requires empathy,” said McMaster. “Lack of empathy for one another is rooted in ignorance…Ignorance of history, compounded by the abuse of history undermines our ability to work together to improve our nation and our society.”

“We can all do our part now to overcome our differences, reinforce the worn fabric of our society, and work together to strengthen our nation and the free world,” McMaster said. “To realize the vision of the motto that appears on the Great Seal of the republic –– E pluribus unum – Out of many, one. As the patriot and civil rights activist Rosa Parks observed, ‘We will fail only if we fail to try.’”

- Simons Center

‘Lessons Unlearned’ topic of Distinguished Lecture Series Event

The CGSC Foundation and its Simons Center hosted a Simons Center Distinguished Lecture Series dinner event on Nov. 18, 2021, at June’s Northland in Leavenworth, Kansas. The guest speaker for the evening was retired Col. Pat Proctor, a U.S. Army veteran of both the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars, with more than 25 years of service. Proctor provided the evening’s guests with a look into the message of his recent book, Lessons Unlearned: The U.S. Army’s Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Proctor walked the audience through low-intensity conflicts which began occurring after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the demise of the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Cold War. Through the lens of Army doctrine and despite the success of the Army in the first Gulf War, Proctor outlined the Army’s resistance to low-intensity conflict and what he termed as the Army’s refusal to institutionalize lessons learned in the 1990s in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

During his presentation Proctor was quick to point out that he was a part of the same institution he criticized in the book. He further explained during his brief and in the foreword of Lessons Unlearned that while he was critical of the Army’s senior leaders, he also well-understood and appreciated they always had the best interests of the Army and the nation at heart and that their service and dedication is beyond reproach. But, by understanding why and how the Army of the 1990s refused to prepare to fight low-intensity conflicts on the eve of the war on terror, it might be possible to halt the ever-accelerating march of today’s U.S. Army toward intentionally forgetting the hard-fought lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.

- Simons Center

Foundation Celebrates Opening of Frontier Army Museum Gift Shop operations with ribbon cutting ceremony

The Leavenworth/Lansing Area Chamber of Commerce and the CGSC Foundation conducted a ribbon cutting ceremony at Fort Leavenworth’s Frontier Army Museum on Dec. 8, 2021, signifying the CGSC Foundation’s opening of operations of the museum’s gift shop.

Brandon Johannes, president/CEO of the Leavenworth/Lansing Area Chamber of Commerce, led the ceremony along with the CGSC Foundation President/CEO Roderick M. Cox, Frontier Army Museum Curator Russell Ronspies and the Foundation’s Director of Operations Lora Morgan.

The CGSC Foundation actually began operating the gift shop Sept. 1, 2021. The Fort Leavenworth Historical Society previously managed the gift shop for several decades, but in 2021 made the business decision to cease operations.

“The Fort Leavenworth Historical Society and the museum leadership approached the Foundation to see if we might have interest in operating the museum’s gift shop,” said Cox. “After looking into the issues involved we felt it would be a great way to serve the community. We already operate a gift shop in the Lewis and Clark Center, so we have experience with the business.”

“A gift shop is part of the whole museum experience,” said Ronspies, the Frontier Army Museum Curator. “I know that when I visit a museum, I expect to stop in the store after my visit and purchase something that is a memory of that visit. I look forward to creating a whole new experience with the CGSC Foundation and hopefully one that will last many years.”

“I’ve known Frontier Army Museum Curator Russell Ronspies for several years,” Cox said. “We share the mutual goal of maintaining and improving the museum as a great place for Soldiers, families and the public to come and learn about Fort Leavenworth’s place in the nation’s history. Our operation of the gift shop will be focused on that idea.”

The Frontier Army Museum and the Museum Gift Shop hours are Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Persons interested in visiting the museum who do not possess a DoD-issued ID card or other approved gate pass should allow extra time to check-in at the Fort Leavenworth visitor center. Online shopping is also available on the CGSC Foundation’s online gift shop - giftshop.cgscfoundation.org.

- CGSC Foundation

Deputy to the Commanding General presents Interagency Brown-Bag Lecture

The fourth presentation of the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series for CGSC academic year 2022 was conducted Jan. 20, in the Arnold Conference Room of the Lewis and Clark Center on Fort Leavenworth.

Mr. Michael D. Formica, deputy to the commanding general, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, began his presentation with a discussion about Army Civilians as members of the Army Profession and a critical component of the Army’s People Strategy. After laying the background for the purpose of the Army Civilian Corps, he then shifted to explaining the origins, roles and responsibilities, as well as the selection process for members of the Senior Executive Service.

Formica was selected to the Senior Executive Service in 2010 and has served as the deputy to the commanding general, Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth since 2019. Previously he served as the director, U.S. Army Installation Management Command, Europe from 2015-2019, and as the assistant deputy chief of staff G-3/5/7 and deputy G-3 for training, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Eustis, from 2010-2015. Formica retired from the U.S. Army in 2009 as a colonel after 27 years of service with duties that included service as the chief of staff and director, Joint Training and Operations Directorate, Joint Forces Command, and as the commander 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, during Operation Iraqi Freedom II.

The InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series is co-hosted by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School and the CGSC Foundation’s Arthur D. Simons Center for the Study of Ethical Leadership and Interagency Cooperation. The CGSC Foundation has received support for all brown-bag lectures in academic year 2022 from First Command Financial Services in Leavenworth, Kansas.

- Simons Center

Simons Center conducts ‘Cold War Symposium’

From November 2021 through February 2022, the CGSC Foundation’s Simons Center conducted the “Cold War Symposium,” a three part series developed to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, to promote scholarship, and to recognize the contributions of those who participated in that global struggle, especially the United States and its allies in NATO.

The series kicked-off with a dinner event on Nov. 9, 2021, and was comprised of three virtual events that followed. “Part 1: Setting Stage for the End of the Cold War” was conducted Dec. 14, 2021; “Part 2: The Cold War Ends” was conducted Jan. 11, 2022; and the final presentation, “Part 3: Rebuilding the Alliance,” was conducted Feb. 8, 2022.

Now that the symposium is complete, Dr. Mark Wilcox, CGSC associate professor and one of the presenters during the symposium, will edit and publish a book, with chapters written by the panel experts who presented during the symposium.

Photos and video from each presentation of the symposium are available on the Simons Center website. – https://thesimonscenter.org/arnsf/final-virtual-presentation-of-the-cold-war-symposium-220208

- Simons Center

Global Supply Chain issues subject of recent Arter-Rowland National Security Forum

The CGSC Foundation’s Simons Center hosted an Arter-Rowland National Security Forum (ARNSF) luncheon event on Jan. 27, 2022, at the Carriage Club in downtown Kansas City.

In this presentation of the forum, Mr. Keith Prather, one of the founders and managing directors of Armada Corporate Intelligence, served as a panelist to discuss the impact supply chain vulnerabilities have on the Kansas City metropolitan area. Prather was joined on the panel by retired U.S. Army Col. Matthew Dimmick, former White House Advisor and National Security Professional.

With Kansas City as a key technology center as well as a hub for rail, highway, and intermodal transport, the dynamics of the global supply chain have profound effects on the metropolitan area. Prather and Dimmick discussed the current state of the supply chain, specific vulnerabilities, and its national security implications.

At the end of their presentations they conducted a lively question and answer period moderated by Simons Center Deputy Director John Nelson.

Simons Center Director Bob Ulin closed out the event thanking the panelists and the ARNSF members and their guests and outlining the schedule for future ARNSF events.

For all the news and latest information about the forum visit the Simons Center website. – https://thesimonscenter.org/arter-rowland-national-security-forum

- Simons Center

Arter-Rowland National Security Forum features presentation on virtual warfare

The CGSC Foundation’s Simons Center hosted an Arter-Rowland National Security Forum luncheon event on Feb. 24, 2022, at the Carriage Club in Kansas City.

Simons Center Director Bob Ulin welcomed the ARNSF members, some of whom also introduced their guests, and then introduced retired Col. Steve Banach who provided the forum with a presentation on virtual warfare.

Banach said that his presentation was focused on framing the problem. With the conduct of warfare and nation-state security transitioning from a tactical physical battle space to a strategic and unending global virtual war paradigm, the world is experiencing a new ubiquitous form of warfare with Russia and China as the United States’ greatest competitors. He outlined how the entity that controls the virtual domain and masters virtual war campaigning first, will indirectly achieve social control, and will win every war they engage in, at pennies on the dollar. Banach said the first issue we have is that the “great captains of war” have historically missed identifying new threats and wars. He said we have an opportunity to develop solutions that are favorable to the U.S., but we must act now.

After his presentation, Banach answered questions from the members who were especially charged up on the day that Russian forces had begun their invasion of Ukraine.

Ulin closed out the event and reviewed the schedule for future ARNSF events. Forum members and their guests gathered for a group photo as the luncheon adjourned.

Col. Steve Banach, U.S. Army, Ret., served 27 years in uniform, retiring in 2010. He is a Distinguished Member of the 75th Ranger Regiment. While commanding the 3rd Ranger Battalion, he led U.S. Army Rangers during a historic night combat parachute assault into Afghanistan on Oct. 19, 2001, as the “spearhead” for the Global War on Terror for the United States of America, after 9/11. Banach subsequently led U.S. Army Rangers in a second combat parachute assault into Al Anbar Province in western Iraq in 2003. He earned a Bronze Star Medal for valor in combat, and a Bronze Star Medal for service to the nation. He also earned two Bronze Combat Jumps Stars.

Banach later led the Information Warfare Design Planning Team for the U.S. Army Management Office – Cyber (DAMO–Cyber) in the Pentagon, and has produced numerous innovative virtual war publications, presentations and podcasts.

For all the news and latest information about the forum visit the Simons Center website. – https://thesimonscenter.org/arter-rowland-national-security-forum

- Simons Center

Book Review

All Hell Breaking Loose:
The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change

by Michael T. Klare

Metropolitan Books: New York, 2019, 304 pp.

Reviewed by Brig. Gen. W. Chris King, Ph.D., P.E., U.S. Army, Ret.

Dean Emeritus, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change is a well-researched and clearly written book concerning an important topic in strategic defense analysis, explaining how climate change is threatening U.S. National Defense. It is sometimes a confusing task for the Department of Defense (DoD) to recognize the emerging threats to U.S. national security, particularly when they are not related to fighting forces and existing conflicts. The knowns are easy, such as the growing power of China, the rise of terrorist threats around the globe, or proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Michael Klare addresses a futuristic threat to the security of the United States – climate change– which is much harder to interpret, but of no less a concern to our nation and the world. He has taken an interesting approach in establishing climate change as a national security threat to the United States. The author makes his case by examining the ongoing activities within the DoD to demonstrate the deep concern within the intelligence community, military strategic planners, and even combatant commanders for how climate change threatens peace and security on a global scale. He uses the products of our strategic planning process to show how global warming, sea level rise, extreme weather, water as a scarce resource, loss of snow and ice cover, and other climate change drivers are impacting human security today and into the future. The book does not enter into the climate denier debate. Like the rest of the world community, the author recognizes that that discussion contradicts all existing scientific information and climate changes already recorded. The data compiled by the author to establish the threat-risk scenario of climate change includes open source reports directly from the military services, the Global Combatant Commands threat assessments, the Joint Staff analyses, and findings from key independent research centers. He also looks at intelligence assessments published by our national intelligence organizations. All the data he references leads the author to the same conclusion – the dire impacts of climate change must be considered in our national security strategy and defense planning. There are numerous additional studies the author could have included, however, none of these would contradict the author’s findings that climate change is a major threat to our security.

All Hell Breaking Loose is not written as a scientific analysis of climate change, which may be a relief for many readers, because too many of those books have been written to impress other scientists. Rather, the author approaches the subject following the model applied in strategic security analysis where a risk assessment approach is used to rank threats based on probability of occurrence and magnitude of the consequences. For readers who not familiar with the impacts of climate change, this may make understanding some of the linkages between climate drivers and security more difficult. For readers who want a more basic understanding of the science behind the concept, this reviewer published an article in the InterAgency Journal (Vol. 9, No. 4, 2018), which provides more detail into how climate change impacts become security issues. That article also uses case studies to tie the issues to real world problems we are seeing today. Interestingly, both that article and this book independently concluded that the risk of loss fresh water resources within the Tibetan watershed, an area with 3.2+ billion people and four of the largest nuclear armed militaries in the world, represents one of the most dangerous future high level risk threats. It is this highest level of strategic security risk that the author refers to in his title as, “All Hell Breaking Loose.”

In seven chapters the author takes a staged risk/threat assessment approach to describe how the Pentagon has assessed the impacts of climate change on world security. He also shows the work being done within the DoD to address impacts to our Homeland Security, including the many climate induced risks posed to DoD facilities and operability of our forces. At the strategic level, the impacts of climate change causing the most damage are shown to include food shortages, water scarcity, loss of ice in the Arctic, the spread epidemic/pandemic disease, mass migrations of people evicted from their homes by climate change, and conflicts over dwindling resources. He completes his thesis by connecting these threats to the military/security responses that will be required in the interest of our National Security. He shows ever increasing demands on military forces for worldwide humanitarian response, crisis management, peace keeping and support to failing states. In Homeland Security, the author placed a special emphasis on how extreme weather events, particularly hurricanes which are a growing threat to our security. He used recent historical data to show how military forces are necessarily diverted from primary threats and military training to support an increasing number of major disasters such as the hurricanes hitting the U.S. and Puerto Rico in recent years. He did not try to look future scenarios based on current climate change research. “On Global Warming: A Center of Gravity Analysis of Atlantic Based Tropical Cyclones,” a masters thesis by Major Ian Kent prepared at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (available online from the College’s library, the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library), looks at the future of these storm events based on the best available climate science. Major Kent’s strategic analysis of the risks posed by future Atlantic hurricanes concluded that in the future this issue will be much more damaging to our national security than Michael Klare described, with damage costs going into the trillions and massive additional demands for military support. Klare presents a compelling discussion concerning how an Arctic region without sea ice presents never before considered perils on our northern border.

The last two chapters of the book describes, first, the risks climate change poses to military facilities and operations, and then discusses some of the actions the DoD is pursuing to go Green in response to climate change. He shows that several Navy and Air Force bases near the oceans are already being damaged by sea level rise and storm events. He found that the cost to mitigate these impacts is going to be enormous and even then some bases cannot be saved. The going green initiatives discussed are noted as a model of the smart way to do business. In one example, the author demonstrates that reducing operational use of fuel saves money and lives when deployed. Reducing energy at posts, camps, and stations is an ongoing mission of every service; it is smart business and contributing to climate change mitigation.

The only caution I would offer to anyone reading this book is to recognize that climate change as a national security threat is a whole of government issue. This book is generally written with a military centric view of the problem. The military can/must advise the civilian leaders appointed as secretaries of the services and defense, but the final authorities rest with those senior civilians. Further, consider that this is not a fight where the military is in the lead. The military is in support of the climate crisis conflict, but many/all other elements of our national power are requisite to defeat this adversary to peace and security. Otherwise, the result is as Michael Klare warns in his introduction, “the American military will lose its capacity to defend the nation”.

In summary, All Hell Breaking Loose is an excellent book that would be a valuable read for anyone interested in military planning or national security analysis. It is written in a non-military style where anyone (i.e., civilians) wanting to understand how climate change is impacting human security and peace would learn much from this book. IAJ

The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention,

by Rajan Menon

Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2016, 256 pp.

Reviewed by David Oakley

Assistant Professor, National Defense University

In 2005, the United Nations (UN) adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle that requires each individual state “to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.”[1] The document describes UN “collective action” to ensure states abide by this principle, but it does not prescribe military intervention as an enforcement tool; nor does the document forbid it. Although the UN document does not explicitly call for military action, many R2P supporters argue it is the responsibility of the international community to intervene, by force if necessary, if a country fails to protect its citizens.[2] Despite humanitarian interventionists’ enthusiasm for military force, there are questions regarding the effectiveness, limitations, and potential risk with embracing violence to end violence. Rajan Menon’s latest book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, challenges the activist zeal, while exploring the effectiveness, limitations, and potential risks of intervention. Although focused on humanitarian intervention, his book raises broader questions about the utility of force and the consequences of actions that every practitioner should consider.

Menon’s main point is that supporters of humanitarian intervention, fueled by “moral fervor” and “hubris,” push for military action to end human tragedies without acknowledging potential consequences or appreciating that intervention might result in greater human tragedies.[3] Menon is not arguing against the principle of human rights, nor trying to diminish the tragedy of genocide or other mass atrocities. He is merely challenging the idealism of humanitarian interventionists and their belief that intervention will lead to better conditions. This is an important question for any nation considering military force in an attempt to create a better future.

Menon’s book challenges two foundational principles of the interventionist argument—the existence of universal values and the belief that intervention leads to a better tomorrow. He eloquently questions the notion of universal values and highlights how western countries often subjectively decide when to defend these values. This subjective enforcement not only undermines the notion that there is clear agreement over what constitutes a humanitarian crisis, but also highlights how nations often embrace humanitarian intervention for self-interest and not high-minded principles. As he points out, what “is” and “is not” acceptable is usually influenced by broader national security interests. For example, the United States often ignores when key allies suppress dissent, but raise human rights concerns when non-allies employ similar tools of repression. This inconsistency, which every nation is guilty of, highlights not only the subjectivity of “universal values,” but how they are often ignored or embraced for political expediency.

More compelling than his challenge to universal values is Menon’s discussion on the efficacy of intervention. Even if one accepts the concept of universal values, embracing these values does not mean intervention will lead to a better tomorrow. As Menon points out, there are numerous examples of humanitarian intervention resulting in worse conditions. For example, it is hard to argue that the average Libyan is safer today than she was prior to the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Although Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, his overthrow, which was supported by humanitarian arguments, resulted in worse conditions for the Libyan population and helped further destabilize the region.[4] As Menon cogently argues, should not humanitarian interventionists be judged on whether their interventions actually create more humane conditions and not greater tragedies? It might not be palatable to see ruthless dictators like Gaddafi in power, but the interventionist remedy is often worse than the illness.

Menon does a fantastic job combining theory, legal concepts, and historical examples to make a compelling argument. For example, his discussion on the differing views of sovereignty and state legitimacy are particularly engaging and important. As Menon points out, “legalists and realists” often view international law as managing the behavior between states to limit inter-state conflict, while humanitarian interventionists believe the focus should be protecting the individual. By focusing on the individual, many humanitarian interventionists argue that international law and institutions should be more concerned with how states govern domestically.[5] These differing views affect how each side interprets the concept of sovereignty. The traditional “statist” view is that sovereignty “protect(s) the rights of states” to govern domestically without “external interference.” Basically, what they do within their borders is their responsibility and not subject to external intervention. The revised “interventionist view” believes that states have a moral obligation to protect their citizens, and if unable or unwilling, it is the international community’s responsibility to intervene.[6] These differing views do not merely shape good parlor debate, but have significant repercussions on when one believes intervention is acceptable, and more importantly, on what is the basis of international order.

The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention is a great read for anyone interested in the efficacy and limitations of military force in humanitarian interventions. Although focused on humanitarian intervention, Menon raises broader questions about the utility of force and the consequences of actions that every practitioner should consider. Grappling with these questions is particularly important after nineteen years of war, the expenditure of six trillion dollars, and the loss of so much life.[7] IAJ

Notes

1 https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_60_1.pdf

2 Rajan Menon, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 6.

3 Menon, p. 3.

4 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8314; Menon, 117-120.

5 Menon, p. 55.

6 Ibid, pp. 3-6.

7 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human; Despite the significant cost in treasure and blood, Afghanistan and Iraq remain in the top fifteen of the most “fragile states.” See https://fragilestatesindex.org/data.

The Perfect Weapon:
War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age,

by David E. Sanger

Crown Books, Random House Publishers: New York, 2018, 384 pp.

Reviewed by Col. Todd Schmidt, Ph.D.,

former Battalion Commander and Goodpaster Scholar in the Army Strategic Planning and Policy Program, School for Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

David Sanger is the national security correspondent for the New York Times, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a bestselling author, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a seasoned and experienced observer of “Washington’s swamp creatures” with which he comfortably cavorts. I met David at a Security Conference at the University of Kansas while he was on book tour, promoting this book. To a skeptical Midwesterner, he gives off an air of faux humility, while namedropping his prominent contacts and hinting at his inside-the-beltway status among Washington’s elites.

Taking the product of years of intrepid journalism, Sanger weaves together a fascinating book that captures the attention of civilian readership like a great spy novel. The Perfect Weapon provides an insightful and, at times, sensational peek and preview into cyber warfare—a revolution in military affairs that the world continues to explore, experiment, and endeavor to understand. Sanger’s dauntless investigation and research, at times pushing the envelope of revealing national security secrets, provides readers with an understanding of the strategic threats the U.S. faces in the domain of national security. He couples this with the unveiling of bipartisan failures of multiple presidential administrations intellectually ill-equipped to understand the profound environmental changes slowly engulfing and threatening the nation.

The temporal scope of the book covers the early 2000s to present-day. He provides background and description of U.S. cyberwars with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China. However, it is clear from the author’s focus, that he, and the American public, were not fully queued to the unconventional and asymmetric impact of the cyberwar phenomena until the 2016 Presidential Election of President Donald Trump. To fathom and explain President Trump’s election, Sanger spends several chapters catching himself and the reader up on the history of cyber war. With an historical foundation set, Sanger then rehashes the 2016 presidential campaign, election results, and the impactful role of U.S. adversaries in it. The implications of the historical narrative Sanger composes are that Trump’s election is the culminating consequence of failed leadership and policy that have over-estimated U.S. cyber capabilities and defenses and under-estimated the cyber capabilities and ambitions of U.S. adversaries.

Political beliefs, emotion, and opinion aside, Sanger’s book awakens readers to a complex, future operational environment in which several competing, dynamic threats collide. First, quoting General James Mattis, Sanger reveals that “America’s competitive edge has eroded in very domain of warfare” —America is strategically vulnerable. Second, “Cyber conflict remains in the gray area between war and peace,” a persistent, unending contest between great powers that threatens both full-scale war and existential consequences. Third, “deterrence,” once the policy domain of strategic, nuclear war theorists, now requires decision-makers and national security elites to think multi-dimensionally. Fourth, the rapid and revolutionary pace of competition, conflict, and change “outpaces the ability of politicians” and civilians to comprehend the threat; devise comprehensive, whole-of-government response; protect and pursue U.S. interests; and dominate in great power competition.

Sanger’s conclusions and recommendations are underwhelming. He is a part of the Washington elite that he aptly describes in his own work. However, he is able to both understand and sound the alarm that the current and future strategic and operational environments no longer afford or allow for the critical decision space needed for novice civilian, political leaders to adequately understand and make decisions in times of real crisis. Clear, timely, flexible options that are comprehensively understood by civilian decision makers and socialized in diplomatic and military consultation with allies are no longer achievable. In the view of senior military officers, anyone that understands the requirements of aggressive “great power” competition also knows that the U.S. lacks any viable civil-military framework that prioritizes civilian control. Civilians are perceived as being risk averse, irresponsible, and incapable of rapid decision-making and response in the gray zones of persistent great power competition that reside below the threshold of kinetic conflict.

Sanger’s recommendation is clear. The international community is seeing a revolution in military affairs with the development of advanced technologies that include unmanned aerial system capabilities, hypersonic vehicle technologies, cyber-based capabilities, autonomous weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and cloud-enabled capabilities that inform and drive rapid decision-making and initiative. Aggressive, great power competition in this environment requires development of new international legal frameworks of authority that provide for de-escalation and reliable deterrence.

Sanger also insinuates that when escalation continues and deterrence fails, domestic legal frameworks must allow for rapid response, as well as command, control, and accountability. Revolutionary change in military technologies and capabilities require requisite changes in the roles, responsibilities, and authorities of U.S. military elites. These organizational and process adaptations that challenge legacy civil-military command and control relationships may be disconcerting to students of historic civil-military relations. Regardless, competition and performance at the speed of relevance require it. IAJ

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