The Tactical Devours the Strategic in the Caribbean and Beyond
Time, Space, and Decision-making
We have all become instant experts on the law of armed conflict as we debate what Admiral Bradley should or shouldn’t have done in the Caribbean boat strike.
These actions demand scrutiny, although I am unprepared to pass judgment because combat operations are messy affairs with imperfect information and limited time (also, on this, I am NOT an expert). A feature of our over-connected age is that we are getting a close-up look at what war really is. It is ugly and horrible. In the long run, this is to the good, the more we see the reality of war, hopefully the more prudent we will be in its initiation.
But over-examination of the tactical obscures the more important questions:
Under what conditions is the president permitted to authorize the use of force? Over the past several decades, we have become extraordinarily permissive of presidents using military force with limited or non-existent congressional authorization or scrutiny. Congress attempted to roll-back presidential powers after Vietnam, with the War Powers Act, but this effort has not been successful. After 9/11 presidential use of force expanded dramatically in the war on terror under presidents Bush and Obama. Trump is not extending this use of force, but he is extending on decades of de facto presidential power.
Is sinking boats believed to be carrying drugs a useful means of reducing the drug trade? Assuming the use of force is authorized, is it (and particularly this approach) likely to be useful and effective in achieving our desired ends?
What are the second and third order consequences of using deadly force? Finally, even if this use of force is authorized and deemed an appropriate and effective policy, are there impacts beyond countering drug trafficking to consider? This is a vast space, with innumerable possible questions. A few of them might be:
What effects will this use of force have on our broader relations with Latin America?
What missions will the U.S. military have to forego or postpone because of the increase in assets deployed in the Western Hemisphere?
Will using force in maritime spaces that the U.S. considers its backyard lead China to increase its use of force in East and South China Seas?
These are not the policy discussions we are having because the tactical devours the strategic. There are many reasons for this. The tactical is usually exciting and can gain accolades (although if it goes poorly it can lead to harsh criticism.)
It is also because people understand the world through stories and dramatic action creates good stories. This gives political leaders perverse incentives to take dramatic action, even when it isn’t likely to have much effect. In my class at University of Maryland we have several simulation activities. In a recent simulation an airliner went down and there was evidence pointing to both Hezbollah and ISIS, but nothing confirming either organization as the attacker. The student playing president, after hearing arguments, decided to order airstrikes against ISIS on the theory that no one would criticize it and he had to do something.
Left of the Boom
This preference for immediate tactical action at the expense of strategy and policy exists across numerous domains.
Supporting a data analytics group at DHS I participated in meetings where everyone was excited about using data to more effectively deploy search and rescue assets. This is important. But I tried to highlight that we could use data analytics to improve disaster preparation and resilience, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Everyone readily agreed with me. But then it was back to the more exciting issue of deploying helicopters and rescue craft.
In my class, we discuss the Rwandan Genocide. The people who knew what was happening on the ground were unable to communicate its true scale to key decision-makers—while the decision-makers weren’t terribly interested in a problem in Africa. It is probable that a timely decision to deploy a relatively small contingent could have saved lives—hundreds of thousands of lives. But at the time the Clinton administration had just extracted itself from the mission in Somalia and was managing a crisis in Haiti. A third conflict involving a “black” country was not politically appealing.
We discuss the Clinton administration’s decision-making. But the point I raise with my class steps back from the immediate decisions. The UN peacekeeping force had been starved of resources. It had no intelligence capacity, most of its forces were poorly equipped Africans troops. If the UN peacekeeping force had been more robust, could it have prevented, or at least stymied, the violence? But UN resources were limited and Rwanda, at least outwardly, had been relatively peaceful and stable before the genocide. The challenge was to maintain sufficient UN forces so that the tragedy never happens.
Crises will always happen and being able to make tough decisions in the moment is important; leaders need to possess those skills. But preventing crises when possible is even better.
The term of art is “left of the boom.” The boom is the bad thing. Right of the boom is handling the aftermath. Left of the boom is before the incident happens, and if it works well, the bad thing never happens or is not that big of a deal. That is a good thing, but it doesn’t always make a good story.
Vice Presidents and the Tyranny of the Immediate
Top level leaders (like presidents) are inundated with the day-to-day—the tyranny of the immediate.
It is difficult for them to create time and space to get ahead of issues rather than just respond to them. Vice presidents, who rarely have onerous management duties, can. In the words of Amb. Chase Untermeyer, who had been executive assistant to Vice President George H.W. Bush:
Vice Presidents have no valuable commodity other than their time and how they spend their time or what trips they take, who they see, what speeches they give is the essence of a Vice Presidency.
The most important thing a vice president can do is help their president. VPs can reduce presidential burdens by using their time on fundraising and congressional relations. But they can also use their time and energy to provide the president different perspectives, a longer view, or a heads-up on emerging problems. Like the president, vice presidents are experienced politicians who can balance the politics and the policy.
As vice president, Joe Biden was instructed by President Obama to help him by asking the questions and saying the things that others wouldn’t: to be “the bastard at the family picnic.” Early in the administration Biden offered an alternative strategy to the military’s proposed surge in Afghanistan. This bought President Obama the time and space to consider his decision, rather than being pushed into the military’s preferred option.
There is no guarantee that vice presidents will always help presidents make better decisions. Cheney, rather than providing a “wait a minute” approach the way that Biden did, bolstered the president when additional questions should have been asked.
Good decisions are not made under extreme pressure: consider your own encounters with pushy salespeople, promising a deal that will expire very soon. In a well-run process, the National Security Advisor does this, but they too are often bogged down in the tyranny of the immediate. The vice president has time and with time can consider the bigger questions.