Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (26 page)

The transformation of America’s spy service into a new, out-of-uniform (and 100 percent deniable) branch of the military is a big decision for us as a country, but for our new assassin corps—long saddled with the effete managerial identity of “the intelligence community”—it’s been like a shot of testosterone. They have trigger authority! They are the Assassins of the Air! “You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine,” an anonymous (they’re always anonymous) former intelligence official exclaimed to the
Washington Post
before thinking better of it. “Instead say, ‘one hell of an operational tool.’ ”

“We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” the CIA counterterrorism chief reportedly boasted. Flight suits or no, they have become a bona fide, full-fledged, and very busy US military resource, by another name. Those
Washington Post
reporters summed up their investigation of the secret drone war like this: “The CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn’t officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules.”

The CIA has always used force. The agency was only about kindergarten age when they arranged the overthrow of the government of Iran, for crying out loud. And then on to mining the harbors in Nicaragua! But the covert action mission of the CIA
has become something different now: the CIA is now a de facto branch of the military, with its own troops and its own robotic air force. President Obama chose for his second CIA director a man with no background whatsoever in civilian intelligence. No matter. Retired general David Petraeus had spent the previous four years running the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which apparently made him the perfect candidate for the job. Post-9/11, the CIA is a military force that wages war on America’s behalf. And it has the handy feature of being able to do so in places where we are not supposed to be at war. Having a secret military force with no visible chain of command, or recognizable rules of behavior or engagement, has become a most useful thing.

The secrecy extends to the CIA’s budget. In the ten years after the 9/11 attacks, the civilian spy budget doubled, but we taxpayers aren’t allowed to know what the various spy agencies are doing with our ever-more-generous contributions. We are told, after the fact, that the federal government spends around $55 billion a year on civilian intelligence (that’s not counting $27 billion for military intelligence), but what do we spend that on? Dunno. We’ve only been allowed to know the total dollar figure for the US intelligence so-called black budget since 2007. The idea that they’ll ever let us know its line items seems laughable; the 2007 press release noting with some resentment that the overall budget number would now be public also made clear that this was all we were getting: “Beyond the disclosure of the top-line figure, there will be no other disclosures.”

That attitude works for specific operations as well as it works for the overall enterprise. When pressed in 2009 by Pakistani reporters about “relentless” drone strikes in the Waziristans killing civilian bystanders, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demonstrated the political benefit of using the CIA as trigger
pullers. She just stonewalled. “I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”

The CIA is obligated to brief the handful of souls on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees about their actions, but the briefees are legally required to keep their traps shut about anything they hear inside the closed-door sessions in ultrasecure rooms S-407 and HVC-304. They can’t even share it with fellow senators or House members. This can sometimes lead to an almost comic pantomime of what oversight is supposed to be. In 2010, two senators on the Intelligence Committee decided they were so upset by something they’d been briefed on that they had to alert the public. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall did send up the alarm that they’d been briefed on something very disturbing; they just couldn’t say what it was. The press tried to report on their concerns, but it was difficult. The
New York Times
gamely described the senators’ worries about “some other kind of activity” and “some kind of unspecified domestic surveillance,” but they couldn’t explain further. “Unspecified” and “other” aren’t exactly the kinds of details that get the public’s heart pounding. Those senators may have been trying to ring alarm bells by going to the press, but those bells were pretty muffled. Our intel agencies are now well and truly integrated into how we wage war, but intel agencies don’t kowtow to lowly congressmen. You can know it, Mr. Wyden, but you can’t say a word. Sleep tight.

Of course, even that meager level of pseudo-sharing makes many a senior spook uncomfortable. So thank goodness for private contractors. Outfits like the She formerly known as Blackwater are not legally required to show up at HVC-304 and S-407 and tell how many Hellfire missiles they loaded on drones today, or where they did it. In 2011, the
New York Times
reported that private contractors accounted for about a quarter of the US

intelligence jobs. And if you don’t trust the
Times
, here’s what the director of national intelligence had to say in October of that year. The director wasn’t against lowering the number of contractors, but he insisted that private contractors would remain an integral and crucial part of our national spy game. “If all the contractors failed to come to work tomorrow,” he said, “the intelligence community would stop.”

Oh, and hey, if private contracts don’t provide sufficient insulation from public oversight, if the White House is queasy about turning over to Congress the civilian-to-bad-guy casualty-ratio algorithms used by the CIA and its for-profit civilian augmentees,
not a problem
! The executive branch has a work-around for that, too. For operations the White House deems too sensitive or too politically combustible for congressional ears, there is always Joint Special Operations Command.

JSOC was created out of the embarrassments of post-Vietnam military operations: the botched attempt to rescue the Iran hostages, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the unholy operational mess of the invasion of Grenada. We needed some elite badass soldiers in every branch, it was decided, whose various talents could be brought to bear, in concert, on difficult problems. JSOC has the use of elite, secretive units from all branches of the military, including the celebrated Navy SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and the Air Force’s Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC squads are sort of like Hasbro’s old Vietnam-era G.I. Joe Adventure Team come to life. (“Five rugged men with lifelike hair, outfitted for action, they’ll dare anything, and risk everything!”) Remember, the Adventure Team had the “flocked” hair, the beards, the Kung Fu Grip, the too-racy-for-regulation uniforms, the “Devil of the Deep” fantail watercraft, the “secret mission to Spy Island.” These were no
regular Joes. They were clearly not bound by convention. They made their own rules.

By 2001, JSOC had run occasional and secret and daring operations at real-life Spy Islands in the Persian Gulf, Panama, Kuwait, El Salvador, Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. But the George W. Bush White House was the first to realize the full potential of Special Ops. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney made them the equivalent of Reagan’s private-war-on-Nicaragua NSC—a thousand Ollie Norths (only more skilled and much more governable) at the ready. As Jeremy Scahill reported in
The Nation
at the end of 2009, “Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House.”

Unlike the Reagan White House, Team Bush didn’t wait around until after the fact to provide a justification for this move. The Bush lawyers (lots of them had worked for Meese) wrote up all the legal findings
before
the White House started sending Special Ops off with secret orders in their pockets. Essentially, the Bush administration claimed the Special Ops guys could do most anything they wanted in the War on Terror, anywhere the president chose to send them, and without telling anyone.

This is the sort of executive prerogative presidents in general appreciate, and President Obama has not been the exception to that rule. JSOC reportedly runs its own terrorist-targeting and drone-flying operations, with the help of contractors. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care,” an intelligence source told Scahill. “If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building,
thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality.… They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that.”

While America has been fighting two of its longest-ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.” Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life.

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter. Their great advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war. With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians’ control, the idea was for us to feel it—uncomfortably—every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us—of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it’s happening—war
making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

The war in Afghanistan was an all but foregone conclusion after 9/11. The Taliban overthrow was engineered by CIA operatives, Special Forces, and a smallish contingent of US troops. It took a few weeks, but then we decided we should stay on and save Afghanistan from itself. Starting the war in Iraq took deceit and trickery on the part of the Bush administration (and severe chickenshittery on the part of the Congress). But once we had both those wars under way, what’s more telling—what’s less about specific politicians and temporal politics and more about us as a country—is how freaking long it’s taken to end them. Regardless of the culpability of the Paul Wolfowitzes and Donald Rumsfelds and Dick Cheneys in starting the Iraq War, there’s a national culpability for the fact that we have, without any real debate or thought, settled into a way of waging war that ensures minimal political pushback.

No matter how long the troops slog through the muck, no matter how many deployments they endure, the American public can no longer really be touched by war. Need twenty thousand more soldiers for the surge in Iraq? Military commanders simply extended the combat tours from twelve months to fifteen, no guarantee about how long a rest you’d get between deployments—and this in spite of what the military bosses already knew about the toll on the minuscule slice of American society that would shoulder this burden. “We’ve done these mental-health assessment team studies for six years now—between nine and twelve [months] is where a lot of the stress problems really manifest themselves, where the family problems really manifest themselves,” former Army chief of staff George Casey said recently. “The human mind and body weren’t made to do repeated combat deployments without substantial time to
recover.” The suicide rate among active-duty servicemen doubled in the first five years of the Afghanistan War and then kept rising. In the past decade, the US Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan.

Civilian life has rolled on virtually uninterrupted. If you’re not in a military family, you’ve barely even felt it. The country has perfected the art of frictionless war. America’s wars thrum away like Muzak in the background here in the United States, kind of annoying when you tune in, but easy enough to tune out. Three years? Five? Ten? What’s the difference? And where are we fighting, anyway? We’re shooting missiles into Pakistan all the time. Does that count? Are we allowed to know?

In a statement on the House floor in February 2007, arguing against a reduction in US troop levels in Iraq, Congressman Phil Gingrey of Georgia said, “What indeed are we going to save our troops for? Working the rope lines at Fourth of July parades? Helping senior citizens across the street?” The rhetorical answer to his rhetorical question is of course that America should not save the troops for any such peaceable nonsense—they’re there to be used, in combat.

And not just the full-on active-duty military, mind you. We’d found a way to do smaller missions like Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia without reserve troops—even the Balkans, with some help from our friends at DynCorp and Halliburton. But the Iraq War (and the Iraq War at the same time as the Afghanistan War) was of a different magnitude. The administration had hoped it wouldn’t be. Bush’s war council had hopefully supposed that Iraq would be quick work. “It could last six days, six weeks,” Rumsfeld said the month before the invasion. “I doubt six months.” Yeah, no.

As the war dragged on, the initial Bush administration decision to leave the reserves at home became untenable. So they
deployed them—and how. In the third year of the war, at one point in 2005 more than half the soldiers in Iraq were from the National Guard. This was a first in American history, but it was a necessity. Thanks to the good old Abrams Doctrine, it remains true that we can’t do big wars with active-duty forces alone: two-thirds or more of our military’s transportation, engineer, medical, military police, and logistics corps is in the Reserves. But a funny thing about the Reserves now, and about the Abrams Doctrine: through ten years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the connection’s gone bad in the whole idea of the
citizen-soldier
. That hyphen’s doing way more work than it used to. The Guardsmen and reservists have been called to duty so often in the last ten years that it’s hard to distinguish between regular and reserve forces. Maybe our neighbors in the Guard and Reserves were having their lives turned upside down in the last ten years, maybe they were wounded and killed in staggering numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we got used to it.