"You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people!"

Questions of Obama’s proclivity for realism were raised in the New York Times, amongst others well before Obama okayed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Today we’re told that he gave the State of The Union speech while neglecting to mention that he’d just ordered a commando raid in Somalia that wound up killing 9 pirates. President Obama, the man elected on a platform of “Hope”, the great left(ish) liberal dream, the man awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for being elected, has turned out to be something of a foreign policy enigma. At least, he falls far short of the anti-thesis of George W. Bush, which many of his supporters had probably hoped he’d be. What is the core understanding of Obama’s foreign policy? Not his rhetoric, but the things that he actually does. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that he is a realist in the post-state era. When dealing with the great affairs of politics amongst nations, his record is far from clear. When it comes to the little people: individuals who do things that America considers threatening, it is not so murky. Obama’s “Shadow War” doctrine is pretty simple in this regard: if you threaten us, we will hurt you, and we won’t make much of a fuss about it, either.

On Obama’s watch, the ethical, legal, social and political restraints on killing individuals have dropped to the point that it’s okay to launch a drone strike if you think you might hit a terrorist. George W. Bush might have invaded two countries, Obama seems to consider that persistent lethal force is okay, anywhere. That is, as long as you don’t have state backing. Obama’s played an incredibly cautious hand with the big beasts of the international system: states. The closest he’s come to flexing muscles was Libya, and there he was content to put about 2/5ths of the cash in, compared to US leadership in Afghanistan, which is still haeomorraging money. When it comes to the terrorists, militants and pirates, he’s okay with killing them, but he doesn’t talk about it all that much, and even then, only really in passing.

What strikes me about this is that it is, in essence, the realist critique of liberal theories of international relation: your talk, your speech, your laws, they’re all okay and fine, but when it comes down to it, the gloves come off. How Obama has approached supposedly weak states such as Yemen, Syria and Iran is supposedly indicative of a liberal foreign policy – respect for international law, sabre-rattling in the august institution of the UN and so on and so forth. I think that any real critique of Obama’s foreign policy should include the fact that people who are pretty much defenceless (well, unless someone figures out a cheap way of protecting against 24 hour surveillance and JDAMs) are getting killed on the presumption that they might pose a threat in future, or that their very existence is a threat. Whereas George W. Bush may have contorted international law past breaking point before tilting at WMD windmills, Obama seems wholly content with ignoring it. How? Because in these affairs he is the anti-thesis of the neo-conservative. See the SOTU speech for details: “For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.” In fairness, he already did the slayed-the-dragon speech, but the fact that the death of OBL barely warrants a footnote in the summation of a year is interesting. In case you’re wondering, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki doesn’t even warrant a mention.

I write all the above not because I think the policies are necessarily wrong, or that Obama is a bad president, and so on and so forth. Rather, the conduct of Obama’s foreign policy reminds me of an adult stepping on ants whilst on the way to work – there are more important things to worry about.  Obama is a man of big (some say too big) ideas, and the US has a hell of a lot on its plate (global financial armageddon, China, the usual laundry list). I used to consider the silence that surrounds the targeted killing program somewhat deafening, but now I think of it in a slightly different sense. After all, when the world is falling down, will anyone really miss a few self-proclaimed terrorists? Obama seems to have astutely guessed that these men-without-country are vulnerable, in that their own territorial sovereigns will offer them up for dead (Yemen), as long as not too much of a fuss is made (and in Pakistan’s case, they get to complain about it loud enough for domestic constituents to hear). Rather than proclaim these people so evil as to warrant special measures, Obama’s foreign policy appears to reduce them to the point of unimportance, past the point, incidentally, where the administration cares whether stepping on them might violate some legal principle or other. As long as no-one kicks up a fuss, and the Supreme Court refuses jurisdiction, the results are left to speak for themselves. After all, who’s going to call America to account over a couple of hundred people? Russia? China? I’m sure both are quite glad that America is coming around to their way of slicing Gordian knots in two.

Surprisingly tough question, posed by a friend hard at work on her research proposal. I thought I’d crowd source an answer from learned readers here. But first, here’s what I suggested:

Conventional warfare isn’t just about capabilities employed – that is, industrially manufactured, technologically advanced equipment, deployed by recognisably military organisations. Rather it is a society’s way of fighting that encompasses the doctrinal thinking, the organisational structures, the rules of engagement, and even the appropriate goals of violence. What makes it ‘conventional’ is just that it adheres to the dominant conventions of the time.

Of course, all this changes through time as the societies and conventions involved in generating ‘conventional’ approaches to war evolve. Thus, the conventional forces of Napoleon look radically different from the ‘conventional’ forces of France today.

Such an evolution in conventional war might include changes in permissible conduct – For example – why were chemical weapons seen as conventional in the context of WW1, but not now? Why could you flatten Dresden in 1945, but not now?

They might also involve changes in force structure – Why use conscripts as part of a conventional military in Vietnam, but not now? What about the use of private contractors? Is outsourcing violence like that ‘conventional’, or does it profoundly change the relationship between the state/society and those who enact its violence?

And it might also involve changes in concepts, as for example on attritional force v manoeuvre, where the ‘conventional’ approach of British strategic thought (and American, from the early 1980s onwards, if not before) was to substitute manoeuvre and shock action for firepower.

Such conceptual changes might include the actors against whom force is used – ‘conventional’ warfare is sometimes supposed to involve armies fighting armies. Allied forces in WW2 would figure in many people’s definition of ‘conventional’ armed forces – but they put most of their resources in the European theatre into the strategic bombing of the enemy’s civilian morale and war-production capability, not the destruction of his main force.

All these variations, which are profound, are sometimes subsumed within a blanket definition of ‘conventional’ warfare. So, what we understand by ‘conventional’ as a heuristic is a particular approach to warfighting that Russell Weighley describes in his American Way of War – which captures some of the elements one might instinctively think of as ‘conventional’: state centric, firepower intensive, industrialised, focused on armies as the enemy centre of gravity, regularised and regulated. But even that covers a multitude of approaches to warfighting, and neglects a great deal of variation, even within individual societies in a particular period.

It might just be that ‘conventional’ warfighting is simply a good way of making a polemical point in favour of one’s own view of appropriate strategy. Conventional warfare is stale, attritional and inappropriate to the challenges of the modern era. Or conventional warfare is neglected at our peril, given skill fade in critical branches, like artillery and armour.

With all that in mind, does it still make sense to talk about ‘conventional’ war?

Drafting this response to my friend, by the way, distracted me from reading about the size of the clitoris and the aggressive tendencies of female spotted hyenas. Which is, perhaps, a story for another day.

As reported in recent days, Hamas this week announced a shift in its ‘emphasis from armed struggle to non-violent resistance‘. This development ties in to the discussion prompted by the last KoW post that dealt with the Israel-Palestinian conflict. One question discussed then was the level of threat posed to Israel by the groups and states surrounding it.

Obviously Hamas’ declaration will inform this debate. Since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006 there has been speculation that the group, now with formal power, would moderate its aims and tone down its rhetoric. After all, Hamas emerged as a radical splinter from a more moderate movement; who is to say it cannot evolve in the opposite direction. But is this what is happening?

Clearly, it will depend on who you ask: much like everything else in the Middle East, or in politics in general, Hamas’ announcement of a shift away from violence will be interpreted differently depending on pre-existing convictions and party lines. For example, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has already warned that ‘No one in the international community should have illusions as to Hamas… This is a movement that is terrorist to the core’.

What Regev and other concerned analysts base themselves on is of course Hamas’ rhetoric about destroying Israel and its actions oriented toward that goal. Treating these two aspects separately, the violence has lately tailed off, though it is uncertain whether this reflects reduced capability or an actual change of heart. Regardless, Hamas’ previous violence against Israel would not in itself preclude more constructive engagement in the future – after all, PLO followed this very path.

It is really in the rhetoric where Hamas has boxed itself into a corner, on three counts. First, its conciliatory statements clash with several other declarations, such as the pledge during Hamas’ anniversary celebration this very month, that ‘armed struggle’ is the ‘strategic choice for liberating Palestinian land from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea’. It is difficult to see comments such as these as anything but a declaration of endless and existential war against Israel.

Second, there is of course the infamous Covenant, a 1988 document released by Hamas upon its creation and which is deeply anti-Semitic (almost ludicrously so – it blames Jews for, inter alia, the ‘French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there’). Unless Hamas somehow renounce their covenant, or it somehow comes to be viewed as irrelevant to its actual political goals, any type of rapprochement between Israel and Hamas looks highly unlikely.

Third, and as Glenn E. Robinson explains in his cogently argued chapter ‘Hamas as a Social Movement’ (in Quintan Wiktorowicz’ book Islamic Activism), Hamas has long framed its struggle as a combination of direct action and patience (or sabr) – both are used toward the end of defeating Israel. Meir Litvak picks up on this too, pointing to Hamas’ pragmatic use of hudna (or short-term ceasefires) as a means of regaining strength during times of weakness and continuing the armed struggle by other means. What both authors suggest is that when Hamas appears conciliatory, it is in fact being deceptive. Thus, the recent prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier, does not indicate an ability to negotiate with Hamas, but its pragmatic use of non-violent means to make its violent campaign more effective. And the same, so the argument goes, applies to Hamas’ apparent renunciation of violence.

This analysis may very well be correct, but the problem is that it is also self-fulfilling. The reason Hamas frames concessions or passivity as part of sabr or hudna is so that it can present even weakness and accommodation as part of the bigger struggle (‘it’s all part of the plan’). Thus, the group can maintain its hard-core credentials whether it decides to attack or lay low. But because this combination of struggle and patience can justify any activity on the part of the group, it is also largely meaningless – at least in terms of understanding the group’s behaviour.

Indeed, referring to these frames when analysing Hamas’ behaviour can only lead to one conclusion – the one arrived at by Regev above. If we dismiss every instance of moderation or conciliation as examples of hudna or sabr, the inevitable conclusion is that engagement of any type is self-defeating. But this is also an argument that is impossible to disprove, at least within its own logic.

This is not to say that Hamas’ rhetoric of moderation is sincere. Maybe this is a short-term ploy to amass strength during a time of weakness. But what we need is an analytical lens that does not ineluctably lead us to this conclusion. Better to welcome Hamas’ apparent shift from violence, take it at face value, seek to derive as much advantage from it as possible, all while – of course – keeping up our guard. Look out for fresh opportunities rather than repeat tired bromides: will this shift split Hamas, are there intra-group dynamics that can be seized upon, even exploited?

Whatever Hamas’ intentions, there is a long way to go before we can start thinking of negotiations like those between PLO and Israel. One giant stumbling block will be Hamas’ covenant and anti-Semitic rhetoric, which make permanent conciliation all but impossible. But rather than have these challenges obscure possible opportunities, let’s find opportunities to deal with the challenges.

(Note: This is the write up of a paper I gave at a workshop in Berlin organised by Humboldt University’s Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Department of War Studies, King’s College London)

The drone war in the Pakistan borderlands cops a lot of flak. Some see it as illegal, others immoral, or it is a violation of state sovereignty or entirely counter-productive. It is a war within a war, and in blunt realist terms: “it works”, al-Qaeda’s number three position now comes with a short life-span as a condition of the job. Such blunt realism doesn’t lend itself kindly to ethical questions, and though there are many defenders of the drone strikes, I haven’t heard or read many people defending them on ethical grounds. The point is, however, that these strikes are legitimated as a temporary measure, something to be done until al-Qaeda is dead. This article is an argument against the “realist” legitimation, but argues that it is possible to construct a defence of sorts, a way of legitimising such methods in the long term. This defence, however, also argues that the way America conducts these strikes at present is mostly illegitimate. Legitimacy is a key aspect of contemporary war, at the very least from “our” perspective (Western states, their armed forces and their populations). We like to think that what we do is morally, and ethically, right, and we layer our warfighting methods with layers of legal accountability. For every accusation of war crimes committed by western forces, such as the notorious “kill team”, there are probably ten infantrymen bristling at “overly restrictive” rules of engagement. Furthermore, such gross breaches are considered exceptional: they lie “outside” the way we fight, and are therefore illegitimate.
My interest in all this came about because I’m currently wrestling with the idea of containing non-state actors. It is an argument that Patrick Porter advanced quite well in 2009, and others have also been advocating it in bits and pieces on and off over the last decade. In a nutshell, my thoughts are that, absent a method of eliminating al-Qaeda or criminal networks, states should be working to contain them. For al-Qaeda, this means something like disrupting the network to the point that they can’t organise another plot on the scale of 9/11. It means putting pressure on the network so that their ability to transfer the technical skills required to build bombs is restricted. It does, however, mean that one accepts that a 7/7 scale plot, another Madrid, or another Mumbai is likely to occur. In essence, states should seek to reduce the threat of terrorism to that of local, relatively untrained, amateurs. There are a host of reasons why I believe it is very difficult to reduce the threat below this level, without significant political accommodation, but most of these relate to my ideas of freedom and the relationship between the citizen and the state, arguing these points here would cause the entire article to sprawl! To this end, I’m currently pegging the operationalisation of such a strategy on the intellectual coat-hanger of “network management” – identifying the effects that operations have on the network structures of networked non-state actors, and whether they are suitable/sustainable for long term, open-ended application. A key component of this is legitimacy.

The focus of this piece is the effect that a switch from an end state of threat elimination to threat containment has on the legitimacy of the methods which are employed to target these networks. A great many actions were effectively legitimised, by both states and their populations, as well as the bureaucracies of states, in the aftermath of 9/11. The running thread of this legitimacy was the “state of exception” that existed after this event. In a nutshell: “We’re freedom loving, liberal democracies, we don’t want to do this, but we have to, but we promise to only do it for as long as we need to, and then get back to business as usual”. There were many arguments over the outputs of this exceptionality: Guantanamo, extra-ordinary rendition, waterboarding and torture, pre-emptive war and so on. Again, to include all the above would cause a sprawl, but they’re worth noting, particularly since some (torture) are things that I don’t consider could ever be justified. One type of action that I’m particularly interested in is drone strikes. In the state of exception, these work, while the people living on the other end might consider them illegitimate, particularly the civilians killed in the process. President Obama considers them okay, to the extent that he’s expanded their use considerably over the course of his presidency.

The problem with containment is that the actions undertaken because of such a strategy cannot be considered exceptional. Though it is possible to achieve some sort of distance from temporary activities, the timescale and permanence implied by containment means that activities conducted in its pursuit define a state and its society. They become normalised, and that normalisation becomes an identity. I think this is particularly important in international terms, because the US hasn’t quite got to grips with the implications of normalising lethal trans-border strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles. Remember that Israeli “targeted killing” was decried by the US before 9/11 as illegitimate. One wonders what the Middle East would look like if all the different states (and non state actors) therein got their mitts on rapidly proliferating drone technologies and considered it entirely normal and okay to start killing people across pesky international sovereign borders.
Fumbling through all the above, and thinking of all the implications of just war theory, I stumbled across “signature strikes”, which are, prima facie, almost indefensible on moral grounds. Essentially, bombs are dropped on the heads of people who aren’t known to be terrorists, or militants, but who act like them. Given the principles of non-combatant immunity, this couldn’t possibly be defended in the just war tradition, right? There are obvious problems with the application of just war theory to the drone strikes in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and further afield. The first being the question of whether it even counts as a war. Personally, I’m inclined to see drone strikes as an act of war, though not one directed at a particular state. Clausewitz might not have had al-Qaeda in mind, but his work still applies. The terms used to describe these strikes, such as “targeted killing” and so on are not warlike, but these are acts of war. They are organised acts of violence intended to compel an opponent to fulfil America’s political will. It may not be 19th century warfare, but it is still an act of war.

So what charges might we level at the perpetrators of these drone strikes? For the purposes of this piece, I am going to focus on signature strikes. This might seem unfair. America does target and kill known terrorists. But it seems to me that the murkier moral waters of signature strikes are more important. If these can be justified, then the relatively “safe” concept of dropping a bomb on a known terrorist’s head is probably defensible by extension. Conversely, a just war defence of strikes on known terrorists would not necessarily be applicable to signature strikes. Again, this is the examination of these strikes in the just war tradition, as interesting as the legal quandaries Obama entangled himself in by killing Anwar al-Alwaki (as well as the ones that he skipped out on by not capturing him) are, and as important as they are, for the sake of brevity, I’m restricting myself to just war theory.

Therefore, in the just war tradition:

The case for the prosecution

Signature strikes violate both traditions of just wars, and are indefensible except by recourse to arguments of pure power. Though international society lacks the means and will to prevent America from conducting these strikes, that we must accept them does not justify them. In order to construct this argument, we will demonstrate that they are a completely illegitimate tool, and therefore indefensible according to the principles of jus in bello (for the non-just war theorists, justice in war, principles of the tradition governing the conduct of war).

One of the key principles in just warfare is the division between combatants and non-combatants. In particular, non-combatants have immunity from conflict. We will admit that there are a number of instances in which belligerents can kill civilians, and it not constitute a crime. The primary one of these is double-effect. We understand that war can no longer be completely separated from the civilian world, and that citizens may be situated next to military targets. In this instance we accept that some civilians may die in a legitimate strike on a military target, as long as those deaths are proportional. We would not accept the destruction of a civilian hospital because it happens to be situated next to an army checkpoint, but we may be persuaded of the legitimacy of civilian deaths that occur from an attack on a military airfield. We will even grant the defence the idea that factory workers, while at work in a munitions factory, are legitimate targets, though not while they sleep in their beds at night. Therefore people aiding and abetting terrorists and militants could be legitimately killed while helping them, but at the same time, the execution of those running Hawala networks which allow terrorists to finance their operations are illegitimate. Indeed, we will even gift the defence the fact that terrorists and militants may be considered legitimate military targets, because this (debated) point will not help them in the slightest.

Given the very generous ethical berth we have given the defence, it is clear that signature strikes are still materially unjust. The principle of targeting is that a military unit must be targeted. Whereas we might accept that an identified terrorist can be targeted, and those nearby may be killed in the explosion, we cannot accept the same with signature strikes. By definition, these strikes target those that the Americans think display the same pattern of action as terrorists. We’re going to put our “acceptance” cap on and accept that they are telling us the truth, because the precise nature of these “signatures” is classified. Even so, they do not know who they are targeting. They may be able to examine the debris after the fact, or monitor conversations between terrorists in the aftermath, but at the exact point of pressing the button or pulling the trigger, they do not know who they are killing. And I am afraid our “acceptance” cap does not extend to the figures provided for the low number of civilian casualties, which have been derided. Post facto justification is morally indefensible, particularly where civilians may die. The just war tradition demands (yes, demands), that acts which may result in civilian death are proportional. In order to gain the protection of double-effect, the target must be identified, and must be thought to be worth the deaths of the proportional number of civilians. In the absence of this identification, the death of a single civilian would constitute a war crime.

And the defence:

The core of the prosecution’s case lies in certainty, that we can be certain that an individual is a combatant or a civilian. This is, however, false. In war, one can never be certain, but we allow for combatants to take actions in times of war that we do not accept outside it. Since the prosecution raises this issue specifically, let’s look at possibly the simplest case of killing, that of a soldier armed with a rifle. That soldier, when looking down the sights, sees a target that he (because, statistically speaking, it probably is a “he”) considers to be an enemy combatant. He pulls the trigger, and the target drops. Irrespective of whether that target is found to be a combatant or a civilian, he has not committed a war crime. True, if it turns out that he has killed a civilian, he has done something wrong, but this is war, we legitimise him pulling the trigger if he honestly believes that he is shooting at an enemy combatant. But the soldier can never truly know, particularly at the fringes of his ability to acquire information about a target, that the person he is shooting is, or is not, an enemy combatant. In contemporary warfare, we can only recognise combatants by their patterns of action. If they happen to be holding a rifle, or sitting on a mortar, this is a very good identification, however, we perceive this because we’re not used to armed civilian populations. In the countries in which we fight, possession of rifles might not indicate that the possessor is a combatant. What we rely on is the judgement of our soldiers. We train them excessively in the use of force, we restrict their capability to exercise such judgement with rules of engagement so as to eliminate the “grey areas” as best as possible in which they may end up killing civilians. But all this cannot entirely eliminate the possibility of such deaths occurring. Our moral legitimation of these people is that they are trained to use force, they are restricted in the use of force and they are responsible for the use of force. In all cases, the judgement over the use of force, the decision, is either the individual soldier’s, or his commanding officer. Therefore, in war, we cannot absolutely know whether our target is military or civilian, but we tend towards restricting ourselves if the target could be civilian. But this ambiguity is not present. We do this repeatedly. We know it works, we have killed two thirds the people we’re after in this way.

Identity, knowledge and warfare

The basic problem in this is identity, moreover, knowledge of identity. How does one know who is who? Returning to Clausewitz, he said you can’t. Well, more specifically, he said that uncertainty was an integral part of war. It was, however, easier when people were bunched up into formations and prodded towards a field of battle in something resembling a uniform to identify who was who. Even in this relatively simple case, we’re relying on a number of key identifying markers to discriminate soldiers from civilians: location, uniform, weapon and so on. Such markers no longer exist, or are no longer indicative of an active combatant. So when we consider it thus, the emphasis in justice and legitimation relies upon intent. It relies upon a question asked of the combatant at the point of the trigger pull: Do you honestly believe that you are going to kill an enemy combatant, and that any civilian casualties incurred as a result of your actions are going to be proportional?

If the question is framed in this manner, then I believe there is a case for the legitimacy of these strikes. The problem is that any evidence that could conclusively prove or disprove this is likely to remain in a black box for quite a while. We can’t know what they use as criteria for the “signatures” that induce attacks. We can hope that it is something more than “driving an SUV around North Waziristan”, but there is no way of knowing. But I’d argue that this isn’t as important. There are things that we do know about the campaign, firstly that it is a repeated process. We know that they find out afterwards, which means that they have the means to monitor the effects of what they’re doing. I like to think that means that they are also improving their targeting methods, but that’s just me.

The big problem I have, the one that I consider de-legitimises the whole endeavour, as currently employed, is the lack of responsibility and accountability for when things go wrong. Because they will go wrong. Despite the US Govt claiming drone strikes now almost civilian casualty-free, when we go to war, innocent people will die. That’s one of the things about war which should serve as a moral tripwire to the decision: are you willing to kill innocent people over this? In our societies, we are. We’re willing to send young people off around the world armed to the teeth with instructions not to kill civilians, but understanding that they probably will by accident at some point along the line. Drones strikes appear to be no different in this regard. But we have ways of dealing with that. Specifically, the institution that we charge with the application of legitimate force on our behalf has means and methods of dealing with civilian casualties. After action reporting, military police, courts martial, chain of command, and so on. The example of the soldier above does not, in our way of war, stop at the trigger pull. If that civilian is dead, there will probably be some form of reparations. There will be the soldier’s report going up the chain of command. If the soldier was felt to have acted irresponsibly, he might be penalised. Importantly, if he did so, his commanding officer might also be penalised, and so on. We consider the way we fight to be legitimate because it incorporates layer upon layer of responsibility and accountability. Of course, there are detractors, there are people who point out that the armed services have an innate wish to close ranks, to protect their own and give them the benefit of the doubt. Personally I’m minded to think that it would be very hard to form an armed force of any decent capability with the proviso that if any member ever commits an error, they will be thrown to the wolves, or the Guardian’s comment section, whichever is worse.

However at the end of the day, all the above discussion on responsibility stems from a simple action in warfare, a soldier pulling a trigger. Contemporary warfare doesn’t work like that. As a thought experiment, consider the role of information transfer and decision in forming responsibility among the following for a kill: a sniper team, an artillery piece and its spotter, a helicopter gunner being fed information from networked sources.

Now, the sniper team is possibly the second simplest case of responsibility. In a nutshell, a two-man team share any responsibility for the trigger pull. While the spotter might not actively kill the target, he is responsible for transferring information to his rifle-holding team member, without which the kill would not take place. Either can decide that the shot is no good. In this case even though the spotter does not pull the trigger, he is held equally responsible. This contrasts with the artillery unit and spotter. In this instance, the artillery unit does not have a decision. Unless the officer in command of the artillery unit knows that they will be firing on civilians, they are essentially unable to know what it is that they’re firing at. In this instance, the person calling in the artillery strike bears the responsibility for its effects. Of course, if the artillery shells fall short and so on, then such responsibility blurs, but for the purposes of this thought experiment, consider that they don’t. Moving to our last thought experiment, consider the position of a helicopter gunner who is told via multiple sources that he is firing upon enemy combatants. This is closer to how we fight, particularly in networked warfare. This gunner assimilates the identity of his target from a number of different sources. If a single one of these is wrong, if they perhaps place the target on the wrong street, or if he is hearing “They are five blocks north of us” from a unit who subsequently mis-communicates their location, or other SNAFU, then the gunner might end up targeting and killing the wrong person, maybe even a civilian. Here, we encounter a problem, in that it is hard to define responsibility. Does the responsibility lie with the gunner? Well, no, since he is ultimately unable to identify ground units, particularly un-uniformed insurgents and so on. The gunner’s world view is constructed from the information given to him, and if that information is wrong, he cannot be held to account. Unlike the example of the single soldier, the gunner did not discern this information himself, it was provided to him. So the responsibility lies with the people providing the information. Here is where we enter very dangerous territory, because the information provided to the gunner comes from multiple sources, it might not even be directly provided to the gunner for the purposes of targeting insurgents. Therefore, we cannot assign direct responsibility to people putting information into the system. This creates a curious twilight world of responsibility in which the people responsible for both the information transfer, and the decision to pull the trigger, cannot be held directly responsible for its outcome. If the whole networked warfare trend continues (it will), this will likely happen more often.

Thankfully, hard-wired into the military structure is a solution to this particular Gordian knot, namely the chain of command. If we can’t find someone to blame, we can button hole the officer in command. Not exactly fair, but then that’s the responsibility of command: you have a duty to ensure that your subordinates don’t kill civilians, to the best of your ability. So, in the instance of the helicopter gunner, the officer in command, the one that told them to fly out and provide air support, is responsible. And herein lies the problem with signature strikes, and lots of other drone strikes: they’re done by civilians, not the military. I know practically nothing about the CIA’s operational methods, for a reason, because they are a civilian intelligence organisation. I cannot, and an American citizen could not, argue that the CIA’s chain of command works in the same way as the military’s. Intelligence organisations are one big black box that we are prevented from peering into. There is no way for us to know, one way or the other, where responsibility for killings lies within their organisational structure, nor is there any way for us to know how they handle things when operations go bad. I’m not arguing that this is particularly wrong, simply that we don’t know, and we don’t know for a good reason: it would jeopardise the purpose of the organisation itself. The military contains similar black boxes: special forces and intelligence. However, soldiers working in those fields are still soldiers. They might be very, very good soldiers, but they are still soldiers. Those military black boxes are integrated within a military command structure that takes responsibility seriously, and we, as casual observers, can see that. So even though we can’t “know” what goes on within, we can be pretty sure that soldiers don’t enter these zones of military operation and immediately cease to be, and act like, soldiers. Furthermore, since we liberal democracies are inherently suspicious of military forces, we retain all sorts of controls over their actions, one of which usually entails hauling senior officers in front of politicians and cameras and holding them to account. We can’t say the same about intelligence organisations. We can say that there are controls, the UK has the Joint Intelligence Committee and so on, but those underlying visible principles are not present. Though intelligence agencies go to great lengths to inform us of their legitimacy and accountability, the nature of their work is such that they could never prove it, whereas the military are visible enough that they can, to a certain degree. In this, I’m not arguing that intelligence agencies are unscrupulous or whatnot, simply that there is a limit to our knowledge: we cannot know, for certain, one way or the other. Having said that, investigative journalists have a good sideline in pulling them up on complicity in torture and so on. For that reason, that lack of public assurance of responsibility for the effects of killing, I’d consider the CIA pretty much indefensible and illegitimate as an organisation to conduct a widespread drone strike program.

The second reason as to why the military should be in control of the drone strike program is that of last resort. Going back to the black box of the CIA, whatever is written or fictionalised about them, we don’t know what other tools they have in the cupboard. With the military, we do. We know that the US military has at its fingertips special forces which it uses for capture/kill raids, like the one that got Osama Bin Laden earlier this year. While US strategy undoubtedly integrates the two within Obama’s “shadow wars”, parallel programs don’t exactly instil confidence that drone strikes are a last resort, much less signature strikes. The application of violence needs to be proportional in order to be justified, and, as argued above, the targeting needs to reduce the chances of civilian casualties to the lowest possible. Night raids on houses might be a considerable source of tension, as are cross-border insertions of troops, but they are preferable to dropping high explosives on a compound. However good drone cameras are right now, they’re no match for teams of highly trained soldiers. Maybe future advances in drones and camera technology will take us to some “uncanny valley”, but that point isn’t now, and it is in the present day that people are doing this.

Let us make no bones about it: a drone strike is the easy option. With a drone strike you don’t risk a single soldier’s life. Compared to inserting a team of special forces operatives via helicopter, a drone strike is relatively risk-free. Furthermore, if a drone does crash, then the political fallout is relatively limited. There’s no chance of someone from the US military being hauled up in front of cameras for the world to see. But legitimising them, indeed, choosing them, for this is utterly reprehensible, morally. In short, I’d call it a coward’s way out. If the people targeted in this manner are so important that they require targeting in this (dubious) manner, then they are also so important that they are worth risking the lives of American service personnel. If they’re not, then they’re not, and America has no business in dropping bombs on their heads. Of course, there are situations in which a drone strike is feasible, and a raid is not. With the American military, we can at least be sure that within a single command structure, a commander has the two options available, and if he takes the drone strike option, then he’s responsible. With the CIA, we can’t be sure. Furthermore, the very existence of a parallel program of lethal targeting presents the executive with a political dilemma in that a covert, civilian, drone strike program is seductive in its simplicity and limited liability. It is neater to short-circuit the social limitations on the application of force.

To return to the normalisation of violence, I wonder if America has truly thought through the ramifications of what it is normalising. There is considerable debate as to whether civilians are legally entitled to participate in such programs. But in keeping with this post, I’ll keep to the ethical side. In America, federal agents are legitimated in using violence, the DEA sends armed agents abroad to work alongside state forces. Making them active combatants, well, now that opens up a barrel of worms, doesn’t it? Since they’re killing people, they can only be classed as combatants under the laws of armed conflict etc. That makes them a legitimate military target. Since we’re dealing with bureaucracies here, that makes every CIA station and agent, worldwide, a legitimate military target. Since all those people are collecting information for an organisation that retains a lethal capability, any state could quite happily classify them as a legitimate military target. It would, after all, be hard to argue against. We like to think of ourselves as legitimate, and the other side as illegitimate (I’m hard pressed to think of a war in which both sides considered the other side legitimate). We have a way of warfighting which defines a division between combatant and civilian. As far as identifying those divisions, contemporary war presents problems, as far as assigning a person or organisation to those divisions, it doesn’t. Either you are a combatant, or legitimate military target, or you’re not. In the popular imagination, James Bond and other fictional spies who kill are fun, but institutionalising the capability to lethally target people has ramifications, and I don’t think America, or anyone else is prepared to accept those. Does America really want to herald a world order in which states are okay with civilian agencies deploying military vehicles and lethal force against non-state actors or one another? Is it prepared to accept its civilian agencies as legitimate military targets? This is important. Even though death is inevitably viewed in an asymmetric way (them killing us is illegitimate, us killing them is legitimate and totally justified), at the core of our ethical and legal principles of war is a certain equality: if you join the military and die in an act of war, you’re no different than your counterpart across the border. Even though it is not a nice thing to think about, in a war military bases are legitimate targets, the Pentagon is a legitimate target, and so on. If you sign up to work as a secretary at the Pentagon and a war kicks off, sorry, but you signed up. Did the secretaries and janitors at Langley sign up for the same exposure? If the intelligence network of the CIA becomes a legitimate military target, what about the people working at CIA offices and fronts worldwide?

To conclude, Obama’s shadow wars might work. They might be killing al-Qaeda faster than they can organise. I doubt they’d truly eliminate al-Qaeda since repeated drone strikes offer no political solution to the conflict. In normalising these activities, they become an identity. I’m not actually arguing one way or the other on this point. Maybe people are okay with perpetual targeted/signature killings on their behalf, provided it is at a low level, at the fringes of the state system, and there’s no other option (some aren’t). I know some who would probably accept that, as distasteful as it is, over sending hundreds of thousands of troops abroad to refashion entire states. But as the era of counter-insurgency draws down to mixed results, and the sound of bombs in Baghdad, America will need to take a cold look at itself if this is the way it will be dealing with al-Qaeda in future.

Carl Prine had some not-so-kind words to say (5,500 of them) about my (1,500 word) article on Foreign Policy’s AFPAK Channel and about arguments he ascribes to me that I did not make.

I am going to address these issues point by point (in 1,400 words). I will address the arguments rather than the people making them in the hope they might extend the same courtesy to me and others in the future. It is important that we strive to have civil debate and discussion. Vitriol clouds otherwise reasonable arguments and entrenches people in their differences.

The core argument of my FP article was that we would be ill-advised to let our counter-insurgency capabilities and lessons wither because insurgency is not going to wither. While it is important to critically appraise the policy and strategic failures of the last decade, it is also important to learn the right lessons and maintain the right capabilities to deal with future irregular armed actors that challenge American interests. That is the discussion we must have, rather than keep rehashing the angry debates of the last decade that have produced more heat than light.

Neither Prine nor Major Mike Few have disagreed with that core argument either in Prine’s blog post or Major Few’s more level-headed response in FP.

Now, onto the angry debates of the last decade…

A) Service: Prine objects to my use of the word “served,” to describe my position with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS). When I worked for HTS, BAE Systems hired people into the training program. We then went through the U.S. Army hiring process while in training. Those of us who made that cut “transitioned” to become Department of the Army Civilians before we deployed.

I took the same oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution that Prine and Major Few did. And I put my life at risk in service of that oath. I worked as an Army employee in Helmand, Afghanistan, carrying a weapon, wearing ACUs, going on foot and vehicle patrols alongside soldiers, and I saw combat. I have seen first-hand the human costs of war. I certainly saw it as service to my country, but others may make up their own minds as to what is and is not “service” as they understand it.

B) Not a newbie:  Because Prine has not heard of me before and did not like my article, he called me “new to the field” and ill-read in an effort to discredit me. Let me set the record straight. I have been close to these issues for the last decade as a student, scholar, and most recently practitioner of sorts.

I was lucky enough to be introduced to the study of insurgency/revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency a decade ago by the great Sam C. Sarkesian (who sadly passed away this year) as a student at Loyola University Chicago, which is when I bought and first read the Small Wars Manual.

After a few years in DC, I went to London and received my MA from the King’s College War Studies Department where I was fortunate to engage with and learn from David Betz (who blogs here at KoW), John Mackinlay, Theo Farrell, and Michael Rainsborough, which is why I was amused when Prine suggested I familiarize myself with David’s and John’s work.

Contrary to Prine’s remarks, not only did I read John’s book, The Insurgent Archipelago, in draft and published form, but I am thanked in the acknowledgments. I had to read Callwell, Galula, Thompson, Kitson, Mao, Giap, Marighella, Debray, and several others in an excellent course run by David and John at King’s on the evolution of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

And as far as some of the other thinkers named at LoD, I drew heavily on Leites and Wolf in one of the studies I carried out for Task Force Helmand as an HTT Social Scientist. I adapted the report and presented it recently at the biennial conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, the world’s premiere organization for civil-military affairs. It is currently being adapted for publication. My other work has focused largely on Islamism and terrorism.

I won’t go through my own experience and familiarity with the other scholars on Prine’s extensive list. I don’t think I should have had to mention all of these people in my original article to avoid ridicule. Moreover, I had a word limit. Bloggers often don’t.

Equally relevant is my direct experience on the ground, in support of operations in Central Helmand Province, a very troubled place. And I do appreciate Prine’s kind words about a recent talk I gave last month on that troubled place (audio here).

Needless to say, I recognize COIN theory is not “new” as such. However, in 2006 and 2007 it was framed as “new thinking,” by many observers, officers, and scholars, including one of Prine’s favored scholars (who I also enjoy reading), Steven Metz.

C) Honest misunderstanding: Prine misunderstood what I wrote when I said Colonel Gian Gentile, COIN critic extraordinaire, “represents the first, second, and final strands of anti-counterinsurgency discontent” (I refer readers back to my article for the context). This is a fair mistake. I could have written it more clearly. I was referencing the prior paragraph where I presented “five inter-related drivers” of anti-COIN discontent.

Colonel Gentile’s critiques, which I have read for years with interest (if not always agreement), generally focus on the first, second, and last of these drivers. Prine disagrees with some of these – particularly the relevance of numbers (1) and (4).

D) Armor: I am also tweaked for noting that both Major Few and Colonel Gentile are armor officers, but not noting the same about LTC (ret.) Nagl. I did know Nagl’s branch and perhaps could have noted it, but Prine is reading way too much into this.

Major Few is not as public a figure as the other people mentioned in the article. I was providing background and one of the few things his Small Wars Journal bio states is that he is “an active duty armor officer.”

For the record, I saw armor used to great effect in Helmand by the US Marines, the Brits, and the Danes. I also served under and with some amazing British armor officers and had some fun riding around with armored cav units.

E) Defense Industry: I concede the points Prine makes in his 860+ words on contractors, costs, and the defense industry. His remarks bring context and perspective to the one sentence I devoted to the subject in my article.

F) Operations and Strategy: Prine states that when I draw on Theo Farrell’s “Campaign disconnect: operational progress and strategic obstacles in Afghanistan, 2009-2011″, I am proving my ignorance of military affairs. I disagree. One of the signal failures of our Afghanistan campaign is that despite substantial operational progress, we have not gotten much closer to what we could view as a victory. In other words, we have secured a lot of key populated rural valleys and district and provincial capitals and held them with the Afghan National Security Forces. But, as Farrell argues, there is an “operational-strategic disconnect” in our Afghan campaign.

G) We don’t disagree on much: Finally, Prine and Major Few make a mistake when reading my article. They overlook the central argument and focus on my critique of Few’s unfair and unkind words about the morality of those who have participated in or developed the ideas behind counter-insurgency, in the defense industry and think tank communities. One might even argue that he was demonizing them, which is what I stated in my much-maligned comment to his blog post. He mistook this observation for a personal attack on him (when actually, the subject of my remarks was his attack on third parties).

My FP article is not about Major Few, but this seems to have gotten lost in their responses. In fact, there is so little daylight between my own argument and Major Few’s in his response on FP.com, that I am having trouble figuring out where we disagree aside from the tone we prefer to use when we communicate with others on professional matters (no matter how personally we feel about them).

But I hope this will change in the future when we inevitably encounter each other’s work.

Correction: The “new thinking” quote was in the forward to Metz’s report, written by Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., the director of the Strategic Studies Institute. Another of people framing modern COIN as somehow “new” can be found here.

_________________________________________

The views and opinions expressed here do not represent those of the Department of the Army, Training and Doctrine Command, or the Human Terrain System.

Normally this type of endorsement would be done with a quick hit on Twitter, but I thought Michael Cohen‘s article over at Foreign Policy was so ‘necessary’ (usually such a pretentious way of putting it) that it deserved to be flagged in its own post. It is not that he says anything particularly revolutionary, but rather that he says it at all – and that so few others have done the same.

Cohen assesses the disturbing implications of some of the recent statements by various GOP presidential candidates on the Israel-Palestine conflict. These statements are not just factually incorrect (that in itself is not wholly surprising) but borderline racist and certainly discordant with US policy and interests, at least as articulated by the last two or three administrations.

So why are these things said? Because the candidates (barring, seemingly, Ron Paul) are in race to appear the most sympathetic toward Israel and thus the most damning of Palestine. In this quest, accuracy and – even – decency go out the window.

I will ask you head over to Foreign Policy to read the article yourselves, but let me just add that it is surprising that these types of statements have not elicited more outrage in the normally very easily outraged media. It is strange that in a society that is normally so politically correct, where statements about ‘lipstick on pigs‘ or ‘fucking retarded‘ activists can stir a media frenzy, comments about ‘the Palestinians being terrorists‘ or the ‘West Bank being part of Israel‘ go mostly unnoticed. The main point for the media was Gingrich’s comment on the Palestinian people being an ‘invented people’ – hardly the most contentious statement of the evening (for so, of course, are most nationalities, not least Newt’s own).

Perhaps the silence relates to the emotion underlying the Israel-Palestine conflict and the tendency for those who participate to be lambasted by whatever party is feeling threatened (not entirely unlike the ongoing zero-sum conversation on counterinsurgency, in fact). Still, the fear of being attacked cannot prevent us from calling things by what they are, as Michael Cohen does in this important piece.

Finally, there are several sound reasons why the United States ought to distance itself from Israeli positions. For starters, providing an echo-chamber makes it very difficult to amass any credibility with the Palestinian political leadership, which will be important if the US wants to (as it must) play a part in breaking out of the current impasse. A few weeks ago, I attended a discussion between Yossi Beilin and Samieh al-Abid on this particular issue. It was a fascinating exchange, and Beilin made a very salient point on the danger of having no daylight between US and Israeli preferences for the region. With regard to a certain recently retired Special Advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, he notes that…

he thought that real friendship with Israel means to collaborate with Israeli prime ministers (whoever it is) and he created a situation whereby it was impossible for the Palestinians to know whether the ideas which stemmed from the [US] administration were our  ideas [Israel's] or theirs. So the suspicion was always that whatever an American president suggested was an Israeli suggestion. And this was one of the problems, especially in Camp David, when Arafat was sure that everything [the US] suggested was an Israeli idea – and by definition for him to accept an Israeli idea was not a preference.

The discussion was in fact fascinating for many reasons. For those of you with extremely good hearing or a lot of patience, you can catch a very poor-quality recording of it here and here.

Courtesy of USAID

Civil-military relations are a topic I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about. Fortunately, I’m in good company. Something that the media hasn’t picked up yet is the speech Dr Rajiv Shah, the USAID Administrator, delivered on the topic yesterday to the audience of cadets and civilian undergraduates from across the globe at the 63rd annual Student Conference on US Affiars. Shah’s speech was apropos, as one of the explicit goals of the conference is ‘to establish and enhance civil-military relationships and to broaden delegates’ contact with their contemporaries in an academic endeavor.’ Dr Shah’s opening anecdote caught my attention:

Three weeks ago, a young American travelled to southern Somalia to deliver a message. He visited a camp full of starving women and children-victims of the devastating drought and famine that has hit the region in the last few months-and brought several large sacks of donated grain with him.

Dressed in desert boots and an olive tunic, he spoke to the Somalis gathered there, in desperate need of assistance:

“We are following your situation on a daily basis,” he told them. “Though we are separated by thousands of kilometers, you are consistently in our thoughts and prayers…we sincerely relate to your suffering and affliction during these testing times.”

Behind him, the sacks of grain were piled high into a mound, along with crates of dates and milk, all meant for the desperate crowds gathered before him.

And written on each sack of grain was a message: “Charity relief for those affected by the drought. Al Qaeda campaign on behalf of the Martyr Bin Laden.”

The first thing I wondered after this part of the speech was ‘how did we learn about this incident’? After what happened to Anwar al-Awlaki, I wouldn’t want to be that American right now. But I digress…

That Dr Shah’s visit marked the first time a sitting USAID Administrator has visited West Point suggests there is still plenty of room for greater collaboration between the development world and the military, though the visit itself is progress. Yes, there are concerns about the ‘militarization’ of aid, but Shah argues that ‘the costs of conflict-developmental, economic, human-are too high to ignore’ and that cooperation is essential. Backing up the assertion, USAID recently issued a report, The Development Response to Violent Extremism and Insurgency, that could have as easily come from West Point’s own Combating Terrorism Center.

Watching the debate in America today about the relative merits of development assistance suggests a resurgent isolationism on the right, predicated on the idea that we could remain safe with two oceans as buffers from the chaos beyond our shores. I fail to see how it makes more sense to spend trillions on wars when billions in aid might do the trick. Personally, I’d rather see more go to USAID, not less, if it meant that my comrades in arms and I spent less time on business trips to to less than desirable locations.

In case you missed it, a couple of days ago the Afghan Analysts Network dropped a report on NATO night raids in Afghanistan that was picked up by a number of media sources, including The Guardian, who saw fit to turn it into pretty and informative graphics.

ISAF aren’t happy about that.

Among a number of sentences that read like the soundtrack to rattles being thrown out of prams, this one really took the biscuit:

“ISAF was never consulted in the preparation of this study, nor asked for data regarding operations.”

For the record, the study was looking at ISAF press releases because:

“ISAF actually releases a large amount of information about its activities in the form of press releases. These press releases range from two to fifteen per day. Although this data is not the complete picture (not all operations are written up as press releases), it offers insight into how ISAF sees its contribution to the war and presents a far more differentiated picture of the capture‐or‐kill raids than the released aggregate data on its own.”

The point, therefore, was not to present a statistical analysis of the efficacy of NATO raids, which would probably be impossible due to operational security, but an analysis of what ISAF is saying, why they appear to be saying it and what that means about the conflict. They go on to make a few points about the apparent interchangeability of terms like “insurgent leader” and “insurgent facilitator”.

What is really interesting is that in the midst of their knee-jerk defence, ISAF says this:

“The published ISAF press releases used in preparing the AAN report were never intended to be an authoritative database of all ISAF operations conducted in Afghanistan, nor even a representative sample from which to draw scholarly conclusions.  Any analysis of complex combat operations based on press releases alone, which by definition are written to provide basic, factual information, inevitably will produce an overly simplistic, flawed and inaccurate product.”

Which begs the question: What, exactly, is the purpose of ISAF reports in the first place? Is ISAF seriously going on record to say that the data that they are making public cannot be relied upon? If analysts cannot build arguments out of the “basic, factual information” that ISAF is providing, why provide it at all? Personally, I thought the research methodology of “believing what ISAF says” to be rather erring on the side of NATO. Apparently not, according to ISAF. We should instead disbelieve in their own chain of public reporting as a method of gaining any understanding of the conflict whatsoever, since we couldn’t possibly understand the conflict from what they say. At least until the next positive press release, I imagine.

Here’s a question to which I can’t find an answer:

If John Doe, an average joe, serves five years in the US army, gets out, and then signs up doing “private security” for a further 5 years, who pays the bills if he develops Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder five or ten years down the line?

There’s been a lot of work done on outsourcing risk and so on in contemporary wars, but through some interesting research I’ve been working on at The Centre for Defence Studies I’ve become more interested in the “intangibles” that are hard to outsource. For instance, one might be able to outsource the provision of men with guns, but it is difficult to outsource the benefits of sovereignty that national soldiers inherently possess. One of these intangibles, I’d argue, is picking up the tab for people that are mentally harmed by their participation in conflicts. In the “good old days” of national wars, states would pay for things like the Veteran’s Administration (or in the British case, the NHS), this is a rather simple question. In a nutshell: you go to war, people die, people are hurt, and a percentage of them will have long-lasting mental health problems that surface either immediately, or at some point in the future. Note: I am talking about the “good old days” of taking care of soldiers, not the “bad old days” when their conditions were not recognised and/or they were shot for cowardice etc.

In contemporary wars, there are now significant numbers of American and British (and other states, but I’m less familiar with them, so I’m restricting this slightly) soldiers who no longer rotate out of the army and remain civilians. Instead, there are large numbers who go on to follow career paths in private security companies. Though these men (and women) no longer serve their country, technically, they are exposed to the same/similar environment as when they had a cap badge. Therein lies the rub.

National systems of care for veterans are predicated on the fact that it is, in a sense, our fault that they are harmed, and that they require treatment. Transferring the cost of physical injuries is a relatively easy process: in America, private companies have health insurance for their employees. Does the NHS pick up the tab for battle injuries that occur on company time? I don’t know. Is it stuck with the long term care costs for British civilians injured working as security contractors? I don’t know. What I can tell from open source material is that the bigger private security companies have people working on this and taking care of their people. However, it is, in any event, rather easy to figure out who is responsible for picking up the costs of a physical injury. The American, private insurance, model, means that if you step on a landmine in Marine uniform, the Veteran’s Administration pays, if you do so as a private contractor, your insurance, or the company’s insurance policy, picks up the cost.

But PTSD isn’t like a landmine. And that’s where things get rather tricky. Kings has a rather long running research hub, the Centre for Military Health Research. They had a report last year that placed the incidence of PTSD at around 4%. Returning to our John Doe example at the start of the thread, we know who pays if he loses a leg in the public and private military realm. However, PTSD doesn’t show up as easily. For example, if he acquires PTSD in the first five years, and this is noted, the state pays for his healthcare. But what if he picks it up in the second five years, who is responsible? If I was an insurance company in year six (assuming equal military service in terms of tour length and intensity), I might point out that he has only served a year, and that the five years spent in dangerous places for the US or UK government might be the actual reason that the soldier has PTSD. In that case, I’d be inclined to file legal proceedings to ensure that the state picks up the tab for his ongoing problems.

At the time when there are wars on, it might seem to some a little trite to be worrying about who pays for this. But I think that if the current trends of public/private partnership in warfighting continue, this will be an increasingly important question. Returning to John Doe, if, having served ten years in and out of war zones, he goes home and is relatively okay, but then a decade later develops PTSD symptoms or other mental health problems, who is going to pay for his treatment? By 2014 Afghanistan is going to have been a 13 year conflict. That means that there will be a sizeable contingent of men and women who fit into this category who will require treatment over the course of their lives. If John Doe went into Afghanistan in 2001, served ten years in various uniforms, and then developed long term mental health issues, he would, roughly speaking, require about 50 years of treatment if those symptoms persist to his deathbed. That is a big bill, and if I was the Veteran’s Administration, I would be wanting to offload as much of it onto private insurance companies, and vice versa.

Beyond the simple sharing of costs, there are other issues, for example, states and private companies have different levels of exposure to conflict zones, different attitudes to risk and so on. If a private company is considerably laxer in monitoring the mental health issues of its employees than states are, should they shoulder a greater burden if their employees develop problems? I’m sure in this instance states would say yes, and private companies would disagree. If there aren’t mechanisms in place to monitor these issues, their absence might end up costing one side or the other a lot of money. In short, taxpayers might foot the bill for private security companies that didn’t take precautions regarding their employees. That raises the prospect of a buried cost that might only become apparent once these people start developing problems further down the line. In short, do states need to take a closer look at post-service transitions and monitor ex-service personnel throughout their careers in conflict? Or can they come to some arrangement with the private security companies themselves?

The once close relationship between Turkey and Israel is increasingly… ‘strained’ is the descriptor used by the New York Times in ‘Diplomatic Strains Grow Between Turkey and Israel‘… but I feel this is perhaps too great an understatement. It’s worth a pause in your consideration of the otherwise hunky-dory state of the world to consider how explosive is the strategic configuration described in the last paragraph of the NYT article:

“No matter what anyone says about the continuation of their historical alliance, the relationship crossed the Rubicon — the red line,” said Cengiz Candar, a Turkish journalist and analyst. “Turkey now claims the leadership of the Arab world that Egypt once held, and therefore it is in competition with Iran. It is in a standoff with Israel in a display of power.”

Three big players in the Middle East, each with their own political and religious tradition, each in a state of internal political turmoil, and each vying with the other for preeminence through confrontational ‘displays of power’ (actually conducted by proxies which probably says something but I’m not sure what) against a fourth–Israel. How could we pour more gasoline on this pyre?