Full Spectrum Dominance

Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror

Maria Ryan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781503610668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played out across multiple fronts beyond the Middle East. Maria Ryan explores how secondary fronts in the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa, Georgia, and the Caspian Sea Basin became key test sites for developing what the Department of Defense called "full spectrum dominance": mastery across the entire range of possible conflict, from conventional through irregular warfare.

Full Spectrum Dominance is the first sustained historical examination of the secondary fronts in the war on terror. It explores whether irregular warfare has been effective in creating global stability or if new terrorist groups have emerged in response to the intervention. As the U.S. military, Department of Defense, White House, and State Department have increasingly turned to irregular capabilities and objectives, understanding the underlying causes as well as the effects of the quest for full spectrum dominance become ever more important. The development of irregular strategies has left a deeply ambiguous and concerning global legacy.

1

9/11 and the Early Seeds of Irregular Warfare

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States was the largest single aggregation of power in the world.¹ It had the largest economy, spent over 40 percent of the global defense budget, and had almost seven hundred military bases on every continent. It enjoyed unrivaled political, economic, and cultural influence.² It was a historically unprecedented position. Before 1945, the United States had been one of several major powers in the world. During the Cold War, US primacy was contested by another (arguably lesser) superpower, the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world’s sole superpower for the first time. Some commentators, admirers and critics alike, labeled it an “empire,” for although it no longer had colonies, the United States enjoyed unparalleled and, arguably, unprecedented influence and reach.³ Its military establishment was so vast that it could fight and win two major regional conflicts simultaneously, conduct smaller constabulary duties, and maintain its vast network of military bases.⁴ Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed it was America’s “unipolar moment”: an era with a “single pole of power” that could exercise decisive influence in any region of the world.⁵

When the United States was attacked by a transnational terrorist network on September 11, 2001, its conventional military power was irrelevant. The superpower could do nothing to defend itself against a series of horrific asymmetric attacks that killed over three thousand people in three separate locations in just over an hour. America’s conventional military dominance was immaterial against a nonstate opponent that used irregular methods and exploited asymmetries of power to its advantage. The al-Qaeda terrorists had targeted the United States’ Achilles’ heel: it was hyperprepared for one type of adversary—a conventional state-based threat—but unprepared for anything else. In an era when globalization was, to some extent, eroding state power, creating complex webs of interdependence, and empowering transnational nonstate actors in new ways, the US government had focused primarily on its preferred method of warfare, the one at which it excelled: traditional interstate conflict between two conventional adversaries. On 9/11, the global superpower appeared remarkably vulnerable.

Although the US military had not ignored nontraditional threats entirely during the 1990s, it had played only a peripheral role in defense planning. While the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997 invoked the goal of “full spectrum dominance,” the first time the phrase was used, the spectrum was described in purely conventional terms: “from deterring an adversary’s aggression or coercion in crisis and conducting concurrent smaller-scale contingency operations, to fighting and winning major theater wars.”⁶ Although the military had developed new doctrine on what it referred to as “Military Operations Other Than War,” which included “low-intensity” tasks such as peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and noncombatant evacuation, these activities were viewed only as marginal components of traditional military operations, not as a different category of warfare.⁷ Throughout the decade, the main focus was on fighting and winning two major conventional regional conflicts, notably Iraq and North Korea, with overlapping time frames.⁸ The most significant strategic innovation in this period concerned the application of high-technology to conventional weapons systems—the concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which exploited new communications technologies to link advanced conventional weapons systems together and to sources that could gather information about the battle space, thus creating joint operations between the different military services.⁹ Innovation in this period was largely directed toward building on existing strengths in major conventional warfare. However, dominance of the conventional battle space meant it would make little sense for an adversary to challenge the United States in this way.¹⁰ Steven Metz and James Kievit called this the “band-width problem”: the US military was overprepared for one type of warfare—conventional—but barely prepared at all for any other.¹¹

Rumsfeld (and Bush) in Office: The Early Months

Given his political coming of age and governmental service during the Cold War, Donald Rumsfeld was an unlikely champion of what would become known as Irregular Warfare (IW) during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, but it was he who led the process by which the Pentagon eventually elevated IW to a status on a par with conventional war. George W. Bush had not given any indication during the 2000 presidential campaign that America’s lack of IW capability was a particular concern; instead, he focused on exploiting the RMA. In a speech at the Citadel in South Carolina in September 1999, Bush called for the use of advanced technology to make America’s conventional forces more “agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require[ing] a minimum of logistical support.” He also promised to earmark at least 20 percent of the military’s procurement budget for “acquisition programs that propel America generations ahead in military technology.”¹² In the presidential debates, he ruled out military involvement in nation building: “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.”¹³

In February 2001, according to Rumsfeld, the president gave him “explicit guidance” to make the military “lethal, light, and mobile”¹⁴—classic RMA parlance. In his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in January 2001, Rumsfeld had already “asked for their thoughts on what ‘transforming’ could mean for the Department [of Defense].”¹⁵ Although he was interested in the RMA, Rumsfeld had some critical distance from it too: “I had not written on the issue of defense transformation, nor did I consider myself in the circle of national security experts who had promoted the idea throughout the 1990s,” he later wrote.¹⁶ His own understanding of transformation was broader than just the exploitation of technology:

The key to transforming the Department, as I saw it, was through encouraging its civilian and military leaders to be more forward-looking, and to think freely, not conventionally. In my view, transformation hinged more on leadership and organization than it did on technology. Precision-guided weapons and microchips were important, but so was a culture that promoted human innovation and creativity.¹⁷

Rumsfeld also realized that conventional military superiority alone did not immunize America from security threats. In his memoir, he recalled that he had “often noted that the United States then [in 2001] faced no peers with respect to conventional forces—armies, navies, and air forces—and, as a result, future threats would likely lie elsewhere.”¹⁸ Like many other critics of the RMA, Rumsfeld realized that even unassailable conventional dominance was not, in Tim Benbow’s phrase, “a magic bullet” because it could not neutralize every type of potential adversary and, arguably, even provided incentives for an opponent to adopt asymmetric tactics.¹⁹ “I saw preparing for the inevitability of surprise as a key element in the development of a defense strategy,” Rumsfeld said.²⁰

Even in the pre-9/11 months, Rumsfeld encouraged the Department of Defense (DoD) to consider the impact of contemporary globalization on the security environment and what this meant for US defense strategies and capabilities. The Guidance and Terms of Reference (which determined the focus of the review and shaped its outcome) for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that Rumsfeld presented to Congress in June 2001 called for the review to consider US vulnerabilities in an age of “open borders and open societ[ies].”²¹ Rumsfeld questioned whether it was still appropriate to maintain a posture based on fighting two nearly simultaneous major theater wars and said that the QDR team would be looking at possible alternatives.²² One notable change would be the incorporation of “capabilities-based” planning models for long-term challenges. Since the Cold War, when the most likely security threat to the United States, the Soviet Union, was well known, the Pentagon had relied on “threat-based” planning models, meaning that force posture would be dictated by the most likely threat. Now, however, threats were more difficult to identify and might not be recognizable in conventional terms. “Contending with uncertainty must be a centerpiece of US defense planning” said the terms of reference.²³ Accordingly, Rumsfeld wanted the military to develop “a portfolio of key military capabilities [emphasis added]” that would enable it to confront a spectrum of threats rather than planning for only one particular type of conventional adversary.²⁴ In July Rumsfeld penned a note-to-self with a line he planned to offer the next time he was called to testify in Congress (though in the end, he never had a chance to use it): “I do not want to be sitting before this panel in a modern day version of a Pearl Harbor post-mortem as to who didn’t do what, when, where, and why. None of us would want to be back here going through that agony.”²⁵

The ensuing QDR report released in late September 2001—but written primarily before 9/11—reflected and expanded on these themes in striking ways. The report acknowledged that a planning system that focused primarily on conventional threats was out of date because the nature of armed conflict was changing “in ways that render military forces and doctrines of great powers obsolescent.”²⁶ In a globalized world “it is not enough to plan for large conventional wars in distant theaters. Instead, the United States must identify the capabilities required to deter and defeat adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives.” This would be facilitated by the switch to capabilities-based planning, which would “den[y] asymmetric advantages to adversaries.”²⁷ The construct of two major regional wars, which had dominated defense planning since 1992, was being modified: the Pentagon was “not abandoning planning for two conflicts to planning for less than two . . . [but] changing the concept altogether by planning for victory across the spectrum of possible conflict.”²⁸ This spectrum was no longer defined purely in conventional terms: in the future, the United States was likely to be challenged “by adversaries who possess a wide range of capabilities, including asymmetric approaches to warfare.”²⁹ It must prepare to defeat “any adversaries, including states or non-state actors” and respond to “a variety of potential scenarios in addition to cross-border invasion.”³⁰ This was far from being an articulation or endorsement of irregular warfare, but it did show that the Pentagon was beginning to think about nontraditional security threats in a slightly different way. It was clear that for Rumsfeld at least, the military did not have the capabilities required to dominate the whole spectrum of conflict, despite its embrace of the RMA over the past decade.

The content of the QDR was very much a reflection of Rumsfeld’s priorities. A report on the QDR process written by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and based on discussions with officials from the DoD repeatedly noted the “top-down leadership for the [QDR] process.” The secretary of defense and other key officials “actively participated in planning and implementing the 2001 QDR,” even attending a five-day meeting to discuss threats, capabilities, and force structure.³¹ Moreover, “The Secretary was directly involved in reviewing and revising drafts of the QDR report. One high-ranking OSD official stated that he had not seen as much interaction among the senior leadership in any of the three prior defense planning studies he had participated in. The broad consensus of officials we spoke with across DOD is that the QDR report represents the Secretary’s thinking and vision.”³²

Writing in 2005, Ryan Henry, then Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, claimed that the 2001 QDR process “began with a degree of humility. As Secretary Rumsfeld insisted from the first, the future is uncertain. We can’t predict it. We have to be ready for asymmetric attacks, and we can’t know how or where they will happen.” As a result, “In the course of the 2001 QDR—even before 9/11—the Department came to the conviction that even with limited resources, it had to have effective capabilities across a very broad spectrum.”³³

On September 11, 2001, a fortnight or so before the release of the QDR, Rumsfeld attended a breakfast meeting with nine members of the Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. 9/11 and the Early Seeds of Irregular Warfare
• 2. The Philippines and the War on Terror in Southeast Asia
• 3. The War on Terror in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 4. Terrorism and the “Great Game” in Georgia and the Caspian Basin
• 5. Irregular Warfare at the Pentagon, 2004–2008
• 6. State, USAID, and the Interagency Mobilization
• 7. Irregular Warfare with Restraint: The Obama Years
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index