Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 68

It's high time to dump the Confederate names tarring the honor of our Army

By "Soldiers Diary"


Best Defense guest columnist

It's 2014 and we still have Army bases named in honor of generals who
fought for the Confederacy.  It's
ridiculous, absurd, and time that these bases be renamed.

Jamie Malanowski last year wrote a fantastic op-ed for the New York Times titled "Misplaced
Honor."  He detailed the numerous Army bases, mostly in the South, that are named after generals
who fought for the South and were responsible for the deaths of tens of
thousands of Americans.  These bases
include Fort Lee, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg, to name but a few.

As we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the U.S. Army should take a
hard look at the names of Army installations across the United States and
rename those installations.

It would be fitting to change Fort Bragg to Fort Gavin, the first
commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and World War II hero.  Fort Hood could be renamed Fort Patton, Fort
Rucker could be renamed Fort Marshall, and you could even rename Fort Lee, Fort
Calrissian.  It sounds ridiculous at
first, but not after taking into consideration the fact that Lando is not
responsible for more American soldiers' deaths than were Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan combined. Nor did he lead a force in order to preserve a slavery-based
economy.

We can still honor the soldiers who fought for the South, and monuments
on the battlefields like Gettysburg are still appropriate.  However, in 2014, having bases named after
the leadership of the Confederacy is just a bit outdated.  I do not speak for African-American soldiers,
but I wonder if anyone has ever asked them if they feel it is appropriate.

This is not all the Army and the other services should do to advance in
to the 21st century.  Other forms of
absurdity continue that the military should take a stand against.  A start would be to end support such as
providing a color guard for professional football games that involve the team
from Washington D.C.  Call a spade a
spade, recognize that the term "Redskin" is a derogatory
term, and end support for that football team until Dan "Chainsaw" Snyder also realizes
it is 2014.

"Soldiers Diary"
is an active-duty Army officer. This article represents his own views, which do
not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, or Dan
Snyder .

The Future of War (IV): What should replace the current authorization of force?

By the Future
of War team, New America Foundation


Best Defense office of the future

A pivot point for serious consideration of some of the issues
discussed so far in this series was provided by President Obama's speech at the National Defense
University in Washington in May, which was designed to lay the political
groundwork to wind down America's longest war: the war that began on 9/11. The
most significant aspect of the speech was the president's case that the
"perpetual wartime footing" and "boundless war on terror"
that has permeated so much of American life since 9/11 should come to an end.
Obama argued that the time has come to redefine the kind of conflict in which
the United States is engaged, saying, "We must define the nature and scope
of this struggle, or else it will define us." This is why the president
focused his speech on a discussion of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of
Military Force (AUMF)
that Congress passed days after 9/11 and that gave George W. Bush the authority
to go to war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies.

Few,
if any, in Congress who initially voted for the AUMF understood at the time that
they were voting for a virtual blank check that has provided the legal basis
for more than a decade of war. It is a war that has expanded in recent years to
other countries in the Middle East and Africa, such as Yemen and Somalia.

Some
argue that when U.S. combat troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan in
December 2014, the nation will no longer be at war, and the 2001AUMF should be
repealed -- or be deemed to have effectively expired. Others argue that the end
of the conflict in Afghanistan will not mark the end of U.S. efforts to use
military force against terrorists in other parts of the globe, and that we need
some sort of new AUMF to structure (and constrain) such future uses of force.

But what, if anything, should the United States replace the 2001
AUMF with?  There are a host of
nitty-gritty policy questions we can help address:

Both of the Special Operations raids against al Qaeda members
and allies in Libya and Somalia in early October were conducted under the AUMF.
How does one get congressional buy-in for a new legal framework that might
constrain such raids?




What should the United States do about the 40 or so prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay who are deemed "too dangerous to release," but are not
chargeable with a crime, and who would theoretically have to be released if the
present AUMF expired?




And how exactly would the end of the present AUMF affect the CIA
drone program, which is somewhat dependent on those authorities? 

Although a number of scholars and think tanks are looking at what
should come after the AUMF, much of this work is being done in a conceptual
vacuum. While the "Future of War" project will engage on the AUMF and related
immediate policy questions, our recommendations on these issues will be
grounded in our broader study of how warfare and the state are changing.

The Future of
War project is led by Peter Bergen, director of national security
studies at the New America Foundation, and the author of several books. This series was drafted by him and the
team's other members: Rosa Brooks, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sascha Meinrath,
and Tom Ricks.  

The Gates files (IV): Boy, does he hate attending those international conferences

Gates on the annual Munich Security Conference: "incredibly
tedious."




Gates on NATO meetings: "excruciatingly boring."




The Conference of Defense Ministers of
the Americas: "boring beyond words, and little ever results." 




(And even more to come)

Hey Tom, I'm finding this blog a bit boring lately, with too many similar points of view on the same damn subjects

By " A Reader Becoming Less Faithful"


Best Defense guest
columnist

Why? It is the same topics each
time. My point about challenging the paradigm is that it would not be just
challenging the left/right paradigms, it should challenge both.

For instance, we talk of
leadership in the ranks, but would it be out of line to have someone actually
come out and document the correlation between the GOs who talk a big game once
in retirement, but refused to speak up while on AD?




On the topic of suicide,
why are we not questioning how so many people with so many pre-enlistment
issues actually get in the military and why the go there in the first place?
(Over 50 percent of all military suicides are by folks who never deployed to
anywhere.)




On retirement, there
have been some interesting takes, but none that factor in the collateral
problems that go with a military career into that "benefits" package.




On the UCMJ, I have
never seen an article from anyone (right or left) explaining why it is so
important in certain areas, yet I have seen articles bemoan the suicides of
folks who were harassed due to falling asleep on watch in a combat zone.




On the female topics,
no one and I mean no one has addressed how much women have been accommodated in
terms of quotas, standards, set asides, frat, pregnancy, etc...




On Gitmo? Has anyone
explained the Geneva Conventions and written on why, how, and where they are
needed and how they could and should apply to the POWs? No, we only get stories
that Gitmo is wrong, that they should be charged as criminals, etc...even in
the right-wing pages you mostly only see them calling for blood, no mention of
how the Geneva should be applied and why then it would be wrong to let those
folks go.

I guess what I am saying
is that with the talent pool you have available, the blog has the ability to be
a lightning rod that questions the CW and should be able to bring realistic
questions and answers, but at times be honest that there may not be one.

Heck Tom, your pet peeve
on procurement and O&M, there has to be someone who can attack it in a
manner to make folks understand that just cutting it is not the answer and that
massive reform is needed, but usually all the authors do is say "cut the
budget" thinking that the military will react like a private business, but
it can't since it is not a private business. I bet if people knew that 800k of
the folks in the O&M budget are civilians they would gasp! Sorry for the
rant, the blog is awesome, you have been seriously kind enough to even engage
us and I really do think you are one of the few journalists who actually gives
a shit.

I think I am just
searching for a blog that is not afraid to step on those third rails, but do so
in a way that forces others to look as well.

"A.R.B.L. Faithful" is
an active-duty servicemember.

The Future of War (III): Some questions for consideration in light of the changes

By the Future
of War team, New America Foundation


Best Defense office of the future

Law,
institutions, and political organizations always lag behind changing
technologies. While no one can predict with any certainty precisely how evolving
technologies will change the future shape of law and political structures, New
America's "Future of War" project will map out the key conceptual and legal
questions that we need to grapple with as we move forward.

Changing technologies are
simultaneously increasing and decreasing state power; how will these
countervailing trends change the nature of state power vis à vis other states
and non-state actors?




Will
they drive changes in how states interact with one another? On the one hand,
wealthy and powerful states -- in particular, the United States -- now have
unprecedented means of exercising power. Massive surveillance power,
space-based weapons systems, and so on remain within the sole province of
powerful states. Even drones are primarily tools of powerful states, since only
those states have the anti-aircraft capabilities to prevent incursions by
"foreign" drones and the broad-based intelligence capabilities that permit
drones to target specific individuals. On the other hand, individuals and
non-state organizations can confound state power in new ways, both through the
use of sophisticated cyber tools and through the dispersed and decentralized
use of simple, low-tech weapons such as IEDs, which are difficult to track and
control.




As technologies of
violence and control change, so do the concepts of "war" and "peace." Does
"armed conflict" versus "unarmed conflict" still make sense as a distinguishing
category? Should we seek to develop rules governing the "state use of force
across national borders"?




If we retain existing
constructs of war and peace, how do we define these? In the "war" against al Qaeda
and its allies, "the battlefield" is potentially anywhere on the globe and "the
enemy" is not another army but a loosely associated group of individuals of
varying nationalities. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were armed conflicts,
but as a legal matter, is the United States in an "armed conflict" with
suspected violent extremists living in Bosnia, or with militant leaders in
Pakistan's tribal regions? Are we in an armed conflict with suspected al Qaeda
"associates" in Somalia? Is a U.S. drone strike in
Somalia a lawful strike against an enemy combatant in an armed conflict, or the
illegal, immoral murder of a human being in a foreign country (and a possible
violation of sovereignty and the United Nations Charter to boot)?




How do we decide who is a
combatant in this new kind of armed conflict, which is not fought by uniformed armies? How do we
define "direct participation in hostilities" when any "hostilities" might be
months or even many years in the future, and might involve anything from the
destruction of a privately owned power plant to an internet denial-of-service
attack? If we're truly in a "war," it's surely
reasonable to consider an al Qaeda operative with bombs strapped to his chest a
combatant who can be targeted or killed. But what about an al Qaeda financial
supporter, or a propagandist who sets up web sites urging violent jihad? Are
the drivers, bodyguards, servants, and wives of al Qaeda leaders combatants?
Would a Somali tribal militant whose operations are wholly confined to Somalia
be considered a combatant if he belongs to an organization that is loosely
affiliated with al Qaeda?




How do we protect
human rights and human dignity in this murky world? If we can't figure out
whether or not there's a war -- or where the war is located, or who's a
combatant in that war and who's a civilian -- we have no way of deciding
whether, where, or to whom the law of war applies. But if we can't figure out
what law applies, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital
decisions a democracy can make, such as: When can lethal force be used inside
the borders of a foreign country? Who can be imprisoned, for how long, and with
what degree, if any, of due process? What matters can the courts decide and
what matters should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When is government
action and administrative procedure guarded by national security interests and
when must government decisions and their basis be submitted to public scrutiny?
And ultimately: Who lives, and who dies?




How does the migration of war
into the cyber domain complicate these questions? Just as the law lags far behind
advances in drone technology, so too the law has
little to say about cyberwar, particularly in determining when and if a cyberattack
is an "act of war." (Similarly, despite the increasing militarization of
space, space law is only in its infancy.) There has
been some discussion about these issues at the Pentagon, but very little in the
public space. But it's important to consider, for instance, whether a
large-scale Stuxnet-like attack on U.S. infrastructure would be an act of war
or not. Would it depend on whether the attack was unleashed by a state, an
organization, or an individual? How would one define "combatants" and civilians
in a cyberconflict?




What does civilian control of
the military mean in the context of these rapidly changing technologies? Consider cyber: There are
reports of a confrontation three years ago between the Obama White House and
the Pentagon over the issue of the pre-authorization of responses to a cyberattack.
The Pentagon argument was that it simply couldn't wait for the White House to
review the situation and decide to act. The White House ultimately responded
that the Pentagon would have to wait for the president to get involved, just as
it does with nuclear weapons. This exchange illustrates some of the new
questions being raised as warfare evolves that are not being answered in a sufficiently
coherent way.




How can we prevent
interstate conflict in a world in which norms of state sovereignty are changing
and eroding? Both human rights norms and security concerns have challenged
traditional understandings of state sovereignty, which is increasingly viewed
as a privilege earned by states that "follow the rules" and potentially waived
by those that do not. In many ways, the shift away from absolutist conceptions
of state sovereignty has been a positive development from a human rights perspective.
But with the U.N. Security Council politicized and often paralyzed, powerful
states -- such as the United States -- have increasingly taken it upon
themselves to determine when it is appropriate to use force inside the borders
of another state, a practice that jeopardizes the already fragile post World
War II collective security bargain.

In
addition to grappling with such large-scale conceptual questions, New America's
"Future of War" project will engage with current policy debates that relate to
these broader questions.

The Future of
War project is led by Peter Bergen, director of national security
studies at the New America Foundation, and the author of several books. This series was drafted by him and the
team's other members: Rosa Brooks, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sascha Meinrath,
and Tom Ricks.

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: A Fitting Farewell for Kaiser, Plymouth, MA Police Dog

By Rebecca Frankel


Best Defense Chief
Canine Correspondent

On May 29, 2013, one
of the handlers in the Plymouth Police Working Dog
Foundation posted news that his canine partner, Kaiser, a two-and-a-half year old
German Shepherd had been diagnosed with kidney disease. Kaiser had "battled this disease
with vigor and toughness," the likes of which his handler Plymouth Police patrolman Jamie
Lebretton had never seen before. But alas "the disease has taken the upper hand
forcing him out of his craft and ultimately out of this world." It was a gut-wrenching choice for Lebretton, but he decided that his
dog was suffering undeservedly and two days later they would be putting Kaiser
to sleep.

The notices (and the story) that then unfolded on the stream
of this Facebook page were as personally raw as they were moving to read, even
though this happened more than six months ago.

On May 31, 2013:

K9 Kaiser

End of Watch

5/31/13

1213 hrs

Then sometime later that day, Lebretton posted this message:

"RIP my boy. I could not have asked
for a better partner or friend. May you rest easy and wait for me at that
sacred bridge. I will be there my friend. I will be there. I will never forget
you or our accomplishments. You made me a better person, a better handler, and
a better cop. Till we meet again kai. I love you and will miss you daily.

...And to my boys and blue. Never in my career have i
ever been so proud. You out did yourselves today. I could not have asked for a
better send off. Kaiser truly was part of
the department and loved being a police dog. My fellow K-9 handlers, you are a
cut above and showed everyone what being a handler is all about...our pups. I
thank each of you and you have my respect forever.

...Lastly, to all of you who sent
your regards over the past few days...I thank you. I read every single post and
listened to every message. Kaiser served you well and the streets of Plymouth
were safer when he was on patrol. The compassion was overwhelming and i am
humbled at the support from perfect strangers."

Lebretton's humble thanks perhaps bely the true range the
impact Kaiser's parting had made. By June 1, 2013, the department posted that
they had received condolences from: "the great people
of Plymouth, MA ... throughout the USA and even Ireland, Afghanistan, Brazil,
Norway, UK, Canada, Russia, Bosnia, and even the outreaches of Australia." Animal
Planet Romania even posted a message about Kaiser on their Facebook page.

More stirring than these posts
was the photo (the lede image here) of the final sendoff this police department
gave Kaiser as he and Lebretton took their final steps together. We
"like" these posts; we share these stories because they're touching and because
we care about these men, their dogs, and their service. But this photo shows us
in one single moment (or frame) what these dogs mean to their fellow officers.

I don't consider it a stretch to include police dogs in our war-dog
posts. They may not be in a "combat zone" or part of a branch in the U.S.
military, but the working dog community is an inclusive one -- it's not overstating
the kinship to say that they're all part of the same family.

RIP Kaiser.

The Gates files (III): Fights with the Air Force, DOD personnel officials, the VFW

Gates came to believe that
extending the tours of soldiers in Iraq carried a huge cost. "I believe those
long tours significantly aggravated post-traumatic stress and contributed to a
growing number of suicides." (This made me wonder if there has been a study
looking to see if there is a correlation between Army suicides and the duration of tours. I asked around with
some smart guys and couldn't find any.)




One reason he
cancelled parts of the ballistic missile defense program: They "simply couldn't
pass the giggle test."




PowerPoint was
"the bane of my existence
in Pentagon meetings." But he didn't ban them, as other senior officials have
done. (And they also said, send me the slides ahead of time and I will read
them -- but I won't sit in the dark while you read them to me.)




Why he was
skeptical of the Air Force's bid to control drone capacity: "The Air Force was
grasping for absolute control of a capability for which it had little
enthusiasm in the first place."




He came to loathe
the office of the Pentagon's undersecretary for personnel and readiness.
"Virtually every issue I wanted to tackle ... encountered active opposition,
passive resistance or just plain bureaucratic obduracy from P&R."




The VFW and the
American Legion were major pains. "The organization were focused on doing
everything possible to advantage veterans, so much so that those still on
active duty seemed to be of secondary importance."




The problem with
generals: "In war, boldness, adaptability, creativity, sometimes ignoring the
rules, risk taking, and ruthlessness are essential for success. These are not
characteristics that will get an officer very far in peacetime."




(And still more to
come...)

Rangers are NOT leading the way

By Col. Ellen Haring, U.S. Army
Reserve


Best Defense guest columnist

January 24, 2014 marks the one-year anniversary of the
elimination of the military's official policy that kept women from accessing
nearly a quarter of a million military jobs. So, what has changed for military
women in the past year? Not a lot. The military services and Special Operations
Command were given three years to open up all positions or to request, by
exception, to keep some positions closed. So far, no requests have been made to
keep any positions closed, but few positions have actually been opened.

On July 2, 2013, a 7th Infantry Division (ID) operations
order encouraged soldiers to apply for the Army's Ranger School. According to
the order that went to all soldiers in a subordinate intelligence brigade at
Joint Base Lewis-McCord, the unit is looking to "increase Soldier leadership
skills across the Brigade". There is one catch to this leadership opportunity. Women
still need not apply.

According to the Army's Ranger training brigade website,
Rangers are soldiers who are highly trained in the principles of leadership and
individual combat skills. "Graduates return to their units to pass on these
skills." The website outlines the physical and mental qualifications required
to attend this leadership course. Ranger School accepts servicemen from all
services and all specialties. The single qualifying distinction is that all men
are eligible but not one woman is eligible regardless of her mental and
physical qualifications. Male chaplains and doctors attend Ranger School but
women fighter pilots, military police, artillery, and engineer soldiers are
excluded.

When Army leaders are asked why women are excluded from
Ranger School, the answer is that Ranger School is a sourcing mechanism for the
Ranger Regiment and Ranger billets and since women aren't assigned to these
positions they don't need to attend Ranger School. This is a grossly
disingenuous answer and is refuted by the evidence. Even before the combat
exclusion policy that prohibited women from serving in combat units was lifted,
Ranger School was widely understood to be a leadership course and many men who
undertake the course have no intention of joining the Ranger Regiment and are
never assigned to a Ranger billet. The soldiers that the 7th ID intelligence
brigade was recruiting were not headed to a Ranger unit. They were expected to
return to their intelligence brigade and use their newly acquired skills to
improve their units.

Furthermore, Ranger School completion becomes a performance
evaluation discriminator in the minds of many operational commanders. As a
member of a chaplain's promotion board recently observed, chaplains who wear
the storied Ranger tab are consistently rated higher than their non-Ranger qualified
peers. Ranger School may make these chaplains better leaders or it may simply
be that they are perceived to be better leaders as a result of being Ranger
qualified. Regardless of the reason, women who are never afforded the
opportunity to attend Ranger School are at a disadvantage when compared to
their Ranger-qualified peers.

Women attend and graduate from the challenging Air Assault
and Airborne courses. Some go on to become High Altitude, Low Opening (HALO)
parachute jump masters. Women become Pathfinders where they are dropped into
remote locations and navigate through harsh terrain to establish day and night
landing zones to facilitate follow-on forces. In recent years, women became
Sappers after completing the grueling month-long Sapper course. Sappers are
soldiers who are trained in navigation and demolition techniques and are often
inserted behind enemy lines. These are tough schools and the Army has managed
to include women in all of them with no degradation of standards.

It has been one year since the combat exclusion policy was
lifted but women are still excluded from Ranger School. This should have been
one of the easy openings. Ranger School has long had well defined entry and
graduation requirements. There is no need to either validate or establish
non-existent standards. Standards already exist. Just open the school and let
women compete on an equal footing with men. Opening Ranger School now will give
women the opportunity to prove that they are soldiers capable of any test. It
will put to bed any lingering doubts about whether or not women can serve in
the combat arms. If women can graduate from Ranger school, then surely they can
capably serve in combat units.

Ellen Haring in a West
Point graduate and a colonel in the Army Reserve. She is a senior fellow at
Women in International Security.

What says revolutionary Maoism better than a pure gold statue of the guy?

The
Chinese press revealed that last year, when police raided the house of Chinese
Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan, they seized tons of luxury goods, including an expensive
wine cellar and a pure gold statue of Mao Zedong.

The Future of War (II): As the nature of war changes, the familiar dividing lines of our world are blurring across the board

By the Future of War team, New America Foundation


Best
Defense office of the future

Changes in the nature of warfare profoundly shape both the manner
in which the state is organized and the law itself. An obvious example of this
is how the adoption of gunpowder warfare and the emergence of small standing
armies helped to produce the absolute monarchies of the 16th and 17th
centuries. In turn, the levee en masse -- the mass mobilization of
conscripts -- by Napoleon's revolutionary armies helped spell the beginning of
the end for those monarchies. The
need to raise and maintain ever-larger armies also required the creation of the
apparatus of the modern state such as a census, universal taxation, and basic
education.

Today, we are at another major inflection point, one in which technology is reshaping the way wars
are fought. The future
of warfare will be shaped by the role of ever-smaller drones; robots on the
battlefield; offensive cyber war capabilities; extraordinary surveillance
capabilities, both on the battlefield and of particular individuals; greater
reliance on Special Operations Forces operating in non-conventional conflicts;
the militarization of space, and a Moore's Law in biotechnology that has
important implications for bio-weaponry.

Consider a few examples:

The Manufacture of Life: Scientists can now manufacture living
organisms, including new viruses. These breakthroughs are useful to scientists
but also, potentially, to terrorists or unscrupulous states.




Drones: Drones allow us to assassinate individuals a world away by remote
control and they are proliferating in unexpected ways. Already, the brief
monopoly that the United States, Britain, and Israel have had on armed drones
has evaporated. China
took the United States by surprise in 2010 when it unveiled 25 drone models at
an air show, some of which were outfitted with the capability to fire missiles.
This year, the Chinese disclosed that they had planned to assassinate a
notorious drug lord hiding in a remote part of Burma with an armed drone but
opted to capture him instead.

Just as
the U.S. government justifies its CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen with
the argument that it is at war with terrorists such as al Qaeda and its
affiliates, one could imagine that China might strike Chinese Uighur
separatists in exile in Afghanistan with drones under the same rubric.
Similarly, Iran, which claims to have armed drones, might attack Iranian
Baluchi nationalists along its border with Pakistan.

Yet the
Pentagon, with characteristic short-term thinking that focuses too much on
"readiness" and not enough on "preparedness," seems lately to be shying away
from fully embracing drones, cutting spending on them while continuing to
devote billions of dollars to manned warplanes.

Cyber-siege: One potential technique in the new world of warfare is what New
America's Director of the Open Technology Institute Sascha Meinrath terms
"cyber-siege"
war. Presently, we conceptualize most hacking attacks as opportunistic, meaning
they concentrate on the softest identifiable targets. However, Meinrath
predicts that an enemy undermining the core functionality of our computer systems
could harm our increasingly tech-reliant society and that would then lead to a
more massive, far-reaching, and invasive cyberattack. The NSA's multi-year
strategy to undermine commercial encryption is just such a "cyber-siege" on
fundamental technological functionality. Meinrath believes we must assume that
other nation states and non-governmental forces are working along the same
lines. Is China, for instance, putting "backdoors" in hardware chipsets?

A cyber-siege
isn't won or lost based upon singular battles. Instead, we have to think about
how we're bolstering defenses writ large -- something that the United States is
not doing. Instead, the U.S. focus is disrupting small networks of
cyber-criminals. If the United States really wanted to protect the country and
the privacy of individuals from what's next, we'd be thinking in terms of
standardizing and "hardening" computer systems for everyday products (i.e.,
cars, appliances, home security systems, etc.); compartmentalizing data (to
prevent grabbing huge amounts of customer data at once); disclosing when
breaches occur (to acknowledge weaknesses and shore up defenses), and
protecting consumer data (whether health, banking, or social networking).

The scientific manufacture of life, the proliferation of drones,
and increasing opportunity of cyber-siege are just the tip of the iceberg. The
evolution of surveillance technologies, space weapons, and autonomous unmanned
systems of all sorts are also transforming warfare.

New technologies have also democratized mass violence, enabling
non-state actors to use and threaten lethal force on a scale previously
associated only with states. The 9/11 terrorist attacks shattered the
comfortable assumption that the United States faced only conventional state
adversaries. Since 9/11, the United States has fought conflicts of various
types against a variety of networks of non-traditional combatants, such as al Qaeda
and its allied groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

New America's "Future of War" project will not only look at how
wars will be fought but who will fight them -- and what rules will
govern the conduct of warfare.

Taken together, recent changes both in the technological drivers
of warfare and the enemies we face have erased the boundaries between what we
have traditionally regarded as "war" and "peace," military and civilian,
foreign and domestic, and national and international.

They have blurred the
lines between military law and
criminal law as the United States grapples with how to prosecute members of
al Qaeda who are part of a criminal enterprise that is also at war against the
United States and her allies.




They have blurred the
lines between military and civilian roles, such as the delivery of aid and
development. Consider the case of members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in
warzones such as Afghanistan where they are essentially armed social workers.




They have blurred the
lines between public and private. Private contractors now handle a
considerable number of military functions that would previously have been the
purview of government employees. This raises a thicket of thorny legal and
accountability questions: For instance, could a contractor involved in the CIA
drone program be charged with murder if a civilian is killed in a drone attack?




They have blurred the
lines between the military and the intelligence community. It is no longer
even a cause for much comment that the CIA has become something of a
paramilitary organization, which, even taking the most conservative estimates,
has killed around 3,000 people in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen under
President Obama alone.




They have blurred the
lines between domestic and foreign. The most well funded Pentagon spying
agency, the NSA, was set up to counter the threat posed by the nuclear-armed
Soviet Union. In part due to the near-impossibility of cleanly distinguishing
between "domestic" and "foreign" communications, the NSA has now collected the
telephone metadata of hundreds of millions of ordinary American citizens.




They have eroded
traditional conceptions of sovereignty. With more and more states
developing technologies that enable them to "reach inside" other states with
relatively little immediate risk (whether using drone technologies, space-based
surveillance systems or cyber tools), the nature and meaning of sovereignty is
being transformed.

And so on. As Charles Tilly observed, "War made the state, and
the state made war." If war is changing, then the state will change, and so will the
non-state organizations that increasingly challenge those states and the
international organizations that seek to channel state behavior. What these
changes will look like is hard to predict, but they are likely to be as
profound as the shift from the pre-Westphalian world to the modern world of
nation-states.

The Future of War project is led by Peter
Bergen, director of national security studies at the New America
Foundation, and the author of several
books. This series
was drafted by him and the team's other members: Rosa
Brooks, Anne-Marie
Slaughter, Sascha
Meinrath and Tom
Ricks.