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Front and Center
07/01/2006


On Policing the Frontiers of Freedom

By Brig. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege, U.S. Army retired

We Americans and our usual allies will be warring and policing on the new 21st-century frontiers of freedom for the foreseeable future. Often we will be doing both in the same place. A survey of the strategic problems U.S. forces have faced since the dawn of the 21st century, arguably beginning with Urgent Fury in Grenada, would uncover only two commonalities. One could describe them as “messes” or “wicked problems.” The literature of policy planners dealing with urban, ecological and social programs define such problems, their usual sort, as ill-structured, even problematic to define. Invariably they beg for a solution even though no clear solution, with wide consensus, is readily apparent. One could also describe these wicked problems as wicked social problems because they seem lodged in a complex social ecology. Solving them always requires restoring a bargain in which the people provide support and soldiers and marines provide a safe environment, not only for the people, but for the nonmilitary actors who really have the expertise and means to deal with the root social causes.

Much of the discussion of how to cope with such problems is about how the leaders of those soldiers and marines, and military overhead structures, can compensate for the non- military problem solvers who are absent because the environment is not safe. While this is an important issue, it is the subject of a different article. A more important issue is how soldiers and marines provide the safe environment at the real root of local popular support when security forces collapse or are overwhelmed. The first step in answering that question is to realize that we make war on an enemy, and we police a problem. When we need to make war, we ought to make war wholeheartedly, and when we need to police a problem, we ought to do that wholeheartedly as well. Applying this principle and understanding the difference is of tremendous importance.

The article “War with Implacable Foes,” (May) outlined the enduring and fundamental logic of war. In that article I said, “Statesmen should know that the logic of war may be significantly different from the logic of peaceful political intercourse, and that policing and warring are two very different things.” The very fundamental difference has been stated, but there are overlapping commonalities, and a very different enduring fundamental logic. This article primarily addresses those.

Twenty-first-century soldiers will need to be proficient in both warring and policing. The flexible and smart soldiers and sergeants the U.S. Army has in the field today are ample evidence that the same units can do both equally well, provided they are well-trained and led, and know how to think differently in the novel situations they keep finding themselves in today. There is no real need for specialized soldiers and units. The impracticality of that idea is not addressed here, but the nature of the wicked problems they will encounter will often favor units that can readily switch from a warring to a policing mentality and back again even in the same tactical action.

U.S. forces are currently combining warring and policing in various locations throughout the world. While the logic outlined in “War with Implacable Foes” may apply to one group in a particular situation, the policing approach may be more useful for attaining political policy aims with other violent groups. While the best intuitively understand the difference and can show the way for the rest, real success will come only when all leaders and soldiers, as well as statesmen and generals, understand the logic of policing on the rough 21st-century frontiers, whether we find these in the wake of major combat operations to change a regime, in scattered pockets of failed governance on “the Pentagon’s New Map” or at home during major disasters.

U.S. doctrine does not provide much advice on the important question of the crucial difference between these approaches and how they relate. Discussions of operations on these rough frontiers say far too little about the M in the acronym DIME (referring to the diplomatic, informational, military and economic instruments that nations bring to bear in such crises).

The successful suppression of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by the British and its transformation into a political movement that has forsworn the use of violence is a successful example of policing as a strategic alternative to warring. It is also a good illustration of the elegantly simple logic of the policing approach. While the IRA certainly employed a warring logic during the conflict, Great Britain did not dignify the conflict as war. Instead, they insisted that the fundamental right of sovereign states is to monopolize the use of force. Internal and transnational stateless groups did not possess that right. They treated IRA violence, although politically motivated, as criminal behavior in all respects, and very consistently. In fact they treated all warring social factions neutrally. While they treated all acts of violence as crimes, they invited any and all disaffected groups to participate in the political mainstream. A great many arrests were made, and the system of justice sorted out the criminal from the innocent. There were missteps along the way, and it occupied a large portion of the British Army for a very long time. When the level of violence subsided enough, the government offered terms including political inclusion and legitimacy in exchange for disarmament. Violations will inevitably occur, but they will be addressed through the police and the established legal system.

The fundamental reason soldiers and marines are involved in policing is to redress the imbalance of violent force potential between civilian law enforcers and trouble-makers and reclaim the monopoly on the use of force so essential in the fundamental social contract between a sovereign power and its citizens—support for governance and its laws in exchange for freedom from the tyranny of local violence. The violence in Northern Ireland had exceeded the capacity of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. When the sovereign fails to safeguard its citizens, citizens organize to meet their own needs, as Catholic and Protestant factions did. The need for policing in Kabul, Afghanistan, and all of Iraq came from a different source; the Taliban and Baathist police simply vanished with the regimes, leaving a security vacuum. In towns and cities, communities and neighborhoods band together. Local militias form. In urban ghettos, street gangs might fill that need, robbing from some, giving support and safety to others. In the countryside people revert to family and traditional tribal ties and systems of justice. Ethnic and religious differences widen. Internal or external violent political movements gain a foothold by leveraging either and both sides of the fundamental security-for-support contract. This is predictable social behavior. The solution, of course, is to wean people from the makeshift systems of safety they have reverted to in the absence of the normal safeguards of developed nation-states, and bring them to accept the guarantees of and give their support to what to them is a “foreign” security regime, even when it is Louisiana National Guard members in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

How politicians define the problem of a nonstate adversary is an important strategic decision. Not all violent groups have political agendas, and of those that do, some can be tolerated, and even those that might sound dangerous may not represent foes that are truly implacable. Being able to define the problem in terms other than war is a privilege reserved to the strong, and such decisions are profoundly political. Politicians often think their constituents would rather commit to necessary action if they label it war. They forget that, in war, closure only comes when the enemy accepts defeat, and the war continues until he does. Words like defeat and victory often get in the way of good enough solutions. There are some advantages to defining the adversary as a problem rather than as the enemy.

For instance, policing outcomes tend to be more predictable. Warring outcomes are inherently unpredictable for these fundamental reasons. In “War with Implacable Foes,” I noted,

Violence begets violence. It enflames passions on both sides and tends toward escalation. While it is true that ‘peaceful’ policies and actions can also enflame passions, violent acts do so significantly more rapidly and effectively. In the domain of war, causal chain reactions are much more rapid and tend to be explosive compared to peaceful intercourse. And while decision makers attempt to apply reasoned judgment to their decisions and actions, passions kindled by violence cloud reason, original aims are transformed by new influences, and chance intervenes to introduce unintended consequences.

While policing with military forces incurs some of the same escalatory and behavioral risks, done properly, such approaches avoid some of the sources of unpredictability. When the application of violence is disciplined but firm and controlled, and the political rhetoric is more muted, causal chain reactions are less explosive, decisions on both sides tend to be more rational and the interventions of chance are more apt to be mitigated. It may be necessary to inflict short-term pain for long-term gain toward social safety, such as the strategic hamlet program for Chinese “squatters” established by Gen. Sr. Gerald Templer in the earlier British policing success in Malaya, or instituting curfews and other constraints on civilian movements, as is often necessary today. The key to success is to develop in all military personnel a flexible mentality that shifts as appropriate between the credo of the Hippocratic Oath, “When in doubt, first do no harm,” and the “When in doubt, do something!” hair-trigger imperative for success in combat. In the January-February 2006 issue of Military Review, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus also speaks directly to this point when he says, “A question we developed over time and used to ask before the conduct of operations [is] ‘Will this operation … take more bad guys off the street than it creates by the way it is conducted?’ If the answer to that question was, ‘No,’ then we took a very hard look at the operation before proceeding.”

Some American commanders today, as was my experience in Vietnam, tend to feel at a loss when not “doing something.” In many cases “doing nothing” but getting your bearings and sensing the mere impact of your outfit’s imperial and seemingly ubiquitous presence is enough. Gen. Petraeus also emphasizes that in operations such as those in Iraq “a leader’s most important task is to set the right tone.” By this he means appropriately balancing kinetic operations such as raids, with developing relationships with local citizens and helping establish local governance.

When statesmen choose to police, they decide when the problem has been reduced to acceptable dimensions. War implies an ending when the adversary yields overtly. Policing with military forces implies an ending when civil authorities can contain the danger of violence through normal processes—civil police, courts and prisons. The conflict in Northern Ireland ended with a decision by the British government. It was not the IRA who said, “We have lost, we want peace.” In fact, what the IRA thought about winning or losing was not material. The important question was, were the IRA ready for a transformation from violent action (warring) to pursuing their political agenda through normal political processes, and could they demonstrate good will? When the policing side and not the warring one decides the closure criterion and the timing, the outcome is more predictable.

Soothing and beguiling words, no matter how artfully uttered, will not compensate for rough handling and oppressive behavior. Actions speak louder than words and in a universal language. For combat operations, as well as routine security patrolling, Gen. Petraeus’ article emphasizes the imperative of ensuring disciplined and ethical behavior to avoid mistreatment of detainees and manhandling of citizens. “It is hard to imagine a tougher environment than that in some of the areas of Iraq. Frustrations, anger and resentment can run high in such situations. That recognition underscores, again, the importance of commanders at every level working hard to set the tone right and to communicate it throughout their units.”

Gifts, promises and soothing messages will be interpreted in the light of the daily actions of the policing force. This is in accordance with an immutable law of “first things first” that governs these operations. If the route to a new school or market is through a checkpoint manned by disrespectful foreigners, the gifts mean far less than the effort it took to produce them. If detentions appear unjust, courts rule arbitrarily and prison officials extort, no amount of development money for new water towers, power generators and warm blankets will compensate. Rough handling and oppressive behavior can be at the hands of others and blame for it can still be laid against the policing authorities because a security force may appear capable but in fact is spread too thin. Errors of omission can be as bad as errors of commission. A common scenario in Vietnam too often plays out today. An overstretched outfit concentrates its security patrolling in village A. The incidences of violence against the population recede after a time. The unit moves its operations to village B. In a few days the new water tower in village A is destroyed by “outsiders,” and a cooperative village leader is decapitated. Safety is not a part-time expectation. Once people commit to their side of the bargain, they expect a full-time commitment by the other side. A broken trust in such vital matters is not easily restored.

The basis for calculating requirements can be more accurate, if not precise; but, even under the best of conditions, as the Northern Ireland case demonstrates, successful policing requires a wholehearted national effort, a great deal of time and a sufficiency of trained manpower. While the numbers are discouragingly large, James T. Quinlivan, director of the Rand Arroyo Center in Santa Monica, Calif., had studied the problem well enough and long enough by 1995 to provide a sound basis for calculating the manpower requirements for “restoring order and stability within a state or region where competent civil authority has ceased to function.” He published those findings in the Winter 1995-96 issue of Parameters: U.S. Army War College Quarterly in an article entitled “Force Requirements in Stability Operations.” He concluded that:

[To] create an environment orderly enough that most routine civil functions could be carried out ... the number of troops required is determined by the size of populations. … From the start, practitioners of counterinsurgency have been clear in stating that the number of soldiers required to counter guerrillas has had very little to do with the number of guerrillas. ... Conversely, a ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency campaign places the focus on the people, the military consequences of which are requirements for population control measures and local security of the population from insurgents, and cutting off any support the population might provide to them are essential to the campaign. Consequently, in any stability operation it is almost certain that the force devoted to establishing order will be both larger in numerical terms than the forces dedicated to field combat and more aligned to political aspects of a ‘hearts-and-minds’ concept of operations.

His security force numbers include all local police, paramilitary and military committed to the security effort.

The numbers, naturally, are lowest in a generally ordered and peaceful society. The average security force requirement in the United States on an orderly peaceful day is between two and three state, county and local police officers per thousand. This number apparently excludes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This demonstrates the basic requirement in even a peaceful, developed society with mature institutions.

When this yardstick is applied to the population of 25 million in Iraq, this would be a 75,000 person “peacetime” requirement. We know that the equivalent numbers of security forces on duty daily in pre-war Iraq was greater than that. On the day the Baathist regime’s police and full security apparatus walked off the job as the regime fell, crime and lawlessness exploded. Had it been possible to devote 75,000 coalition soldiers and marines to nothing but security duties in April and May of 2003, they would not have been nearly sufficient to contain it, much less attend to the foreign agitators flowing into the country.

In Quinlivan’s study, requirements increase with disorder. For instance, in the 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, a force ration of 6.6 troops per thousand was required to stave off an incipient civil war, separate protagonists and assure stability throughout the capital city and much, but not all, of the country. The border of the Dominican Republic was far easier to secure than those of Iraq or Afghanistan. That level of effort would translate to a security force requirement of 165,000 in Iraq. The disorder in the Dominican Republic, however, was nothing like that in Iraq. The citizenry was not as well-armed, and weapons’ stores and improvised explosive device material were not widely distributed and readily available to anyone with a need or a cause.

Actually, the requirements for security forces increases geometrically and not arithmetically as disorder and levels of violence increase. For instance, the successful British Northern Ireland and Malayan emergency cases required ratios of not 6.6 but 20 per thousand, and that ratio of forces endured for nearly 25 years in Northern Ireland and about one half that time in Malaya. That translates to a 500,000 total security force requirement in Iraq. Interestingly, Gen. Eric Shinseki’s famous estimate of November 2002 was too conservative by several hundreds of thousands. The estimate of Gen. Anthony Zinni’s planners was closer.

These numbers represent the better circumstances of a developed Northern Ireland and an efficient Ulster constabulary working with British soldiers who became very familiar with and very good at their jobs. Quinlivan mentions several other pertinent factors that could justify larger estimates. Older successful cases, such as those in Malaya, occurred when more of the population lived in the countryside. Recently, not only have populations in the most troubled parts of the world exploded, but rural people have rushed to the cities to create much-more-difficult-to-police, disorganized slums, where most people don’t even have addresses. “As we discovered in Somalia, these aggregations of people, in flimsy but densely packed shelters, clustered in areas without designed road access, are extremely difficult to patrol or control.” Whereas in the past, when cities “were centers of stability on the fringe of disordered interiors, such cities are now more likely to be the center of disorder.”

The problem of numbers in the capital city or principal entry port presents an intervening power with a situation quite different from that of a traditional insurgency. Unless the capital city is quickly brought under both control and visible order, the credibility—local and globally—of the intervention as a force for stability drains away together with whatever political legitimacy the intervention possessed. Therefore, establishing control over the large populations of such cities must be a major objective at the start of any operation, from which the conclusion is that any intervention force must have large numbers at the outset of operations.

These are conditions U.S. and allied soldiers are encountering now. Our willingness to take on large and wicked policing problems has to be weighed against what we know success requires. Some will say, “Surely we can make do with fewer soldiers in this modern age.” In “War with Implacable Foes,” I addressed the recently unappreciated need for soldiers as a closure mechanism in fighting.

“Our willingness to conserve boots on the ground by replacing soldiers and marines with high technology standoff fighting solutions, as we did in Kosovo, Afghanistan and also in Iraq, implies a willingness to gamble with the outcome. The psychology of causing any determined opponent to quit is more complex than we sometimes appreciate.”

While the profession’s ability to justify the old force ratios has been shaken by combat experiences since 1991, the logic of the underlying mathematics still has some validity, and a credible new calculus has to be inscribed in revised doctrine. Otherwise, Gen. Shinseki’s dilemma will recur again and again. In the short run, I left the mathematical argument for the article on policing because I knew Quinlivan’s logic remains sound even today.

The reason military professionals have not been forced to come to grips with this overall calculus has much to do with the way the services had set out to learn about the future since the fall of the Soviet Union. They initially set out to solve how to use new technologies to solve familiar counteraggression problems. So-called regime change scenarios did not appear until after September 11, 2001. Earlier scenarios described the invasion of allies to which the United States reacted. The strategic guidance for those scenarios was also familiar: restore the territory of the invaded ally. Under such circumstances the ally was seen primarily responsible for restoring order and governance in recovered territory. It was not the concern of the U.S. services.

There was another contributing factor. The futuristic studies of the Army, at least during my experience from 1993 through 2001, never seriously questioned whether the ally would be able to cope. The emphasis was to learn about the problems of reacting to such crises from a continent away, gaining access, overcoming defenses and defeating the aggressor’s invading military. Even in 2002, when both the Army and the Air Force studied similar regime change problems in their Title 10 wargames, they both emphasized the difficulties of beginning rather than finishing such wars. In March 2003, Army Magazine published an article in which I raised the following question: “Are we in danger of underestimating the difficulty of concluding high stakes campaigns promptly?” Of course we now know the answer.

Since that time, the Army has studied the implications of the so-called Phase IV problem, and now is looking at irregular warfare in complex environments, but no study has asked the important troop-to-task questions, or the very important questions about the operational art of making the transition between warring and policing. For instance, when the security forces of the regime being changed disappear or join the resistance, is there an analogy to the “golden hour” in a medical crisis, when certain things done early pay inordinate dividends later? In other words, is there a “golden week?” If so, what are its priorities, and how should forces reorganize from warring with military forces to policing the unpredictable aftermath? Shifting from a force orientation to one oriented on the social mosaic is one obvious difference, and separating organic wholes should be avoided. Merely because a convenient boundary exists—the road that bisects the village—does not mean that two different company commanders should have to secure it along with other disconnected parts. What are some less obvious organizing principles today?

While the Northern Ireland case is a good illustration of the elegantly simple logic of the policing approach, it is a very special case. The devil is in the details. As Clausewitz said of war, every conflict is unique. It is chameleon-like in that its apparent features adapt to the conditions and forces in the greater environment and these affect its course and outcome. As of this writing, efforts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq are still works in progress. This is partly, of course, because not enough time has passed, and as elegantly simple as the logic of policing might be, generals and statesmen don’t always get it right, nor do they launch into policing as wholeheartedly as did the British in Northern Ireland and Malaya. After all, in both cases, they were the sovereign power, owned the turf, knew the people and had an intense, well-supported interest in seeing the matter handled well and expeditiously. So, what are the devilish details that will add to our problems and increase the difficulty?

One important feature of 21st-century conflicts will be contending with multiple violent (or potentially violent) political groups at once in most cases. The saying made famous by former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, “All politics is local,” applies to the challenges of policing the rough frontiers of freedom with their varied cultural, tribal and ethnic social mosaics. Programs will need to be tailor-made to many unique locales at once. It will be much more difficult to craft uniform policies from the top, and colonels, majors and captains will need to be much more savvy, and leaders higher in the chain will have to listen. The Cold War insurgencies of mass movements, strong hierarchies and rigid sponsor-client relationships had a very industrial age and any-color-as-long-as-it-is-black-Henry-Ford quality. There were economies of scale, and insurgents and counterinsurgents both organized to take advantage of that feature. Messages could be mass-produced. Audiences were far more homogeneous. Today local nuance matters much more than yesterday. People may speak the same language but be divided in religion as in the Balkans. They may be urban, but tribal affiliations still matter. They may be a jumble of ethnicities and religions as in Afghanistan. Shadowy transnational organizations are not linked hierarchically as much as in looser networks of cooperating groups, each funded differently, deriving unity from a simple appealing doctrine. Does it still make sense to give a company commander the authority to blow up a building in the village, while to craft the words of a leaflet requires authority from three layers higher?

Another additional challenge in current and future cases is that whereas the British were sovereign, our allies and we are, or will be, foreigners. Both the fundamental strategy and the most important aspects of its execution will not be determined solely by the intervening powers in the next regime change or regime restoration, unless they choose a bottom-up transfer of sovereignty approach as did the British in Malaya. They must operate in the name of the sovereign government. Foreigners can get in the way as much as they can help. They can distract, become the focus of warring factions and even unify opposition to the government. Worse yet, the government and the foreign forces could operate at cross purposes when they use conflicting warring and policing approaches against the same group, or we could do too much, not letting indigenous authorities come to grips with key difficulties until impatient politicians call the troops home.

This condition also has its advantages. It makes it possible to hand over the problem of final closure to the host government and its constitutional and legal institutions. Therefore, the measure of success becomes creating a condition for local national authorities to bring closure. What defines closure in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans? Is it “acceptable” levels of violence and “acceptably” good governance?

In addition to these difficulties, successful policing on the rough frontiers depends on far more than large numbers of coalition soldiers and marines mentally prepared, disciplined and well-trained in policing tactics. British police, courts and prisons were mature and sound institutions. In the many places policing approaches will often be applied—conquered territories and failed or failing states—the local police, courts and prisons are not yet effective. In fact, they may be corrupt. Policing depends on arrests that lead to prosecution, a just judgment and just consequences, that is, just in the eyes of the citizenry. This means that arrests could be meaningless or worse. The guilty could go free and the mistreated innocent could turn against the government. This adds a significant overhead burden before policing will produce results. In addition to this, the difficulty of building institutions of the entire security force structure required is more than building military units. Often there will be no sound institutional foundations on which to erect the new ones. Drawing once again from Gen. Petraeus’ article:

We initially focused primarily on developing combat units—Army and police battalions and brigade headquarters—as well as individual police. While those are what Iraq desperately needed to help in the achievement of security, for the long term there was also a critical need to help rebuild the institutions that support the units and police in the field—the ministries, the admin and logistics support units, the professional military education system, admin policies and procedures, and the training organization. In fact, lack of ministry capability and capacity can undermine the development of battalions, brigades, and divisions, if ministries, for example, do not pay the soldiers or police on time, use political rather than professional criteria in picking leaders or fail to pay contractors as required for services provided. This lesson underscored for us the importance of providing sufficient advisors and mentors to assist with the development of security ministries and their elements, just as we provided advisor teams with each battalion and each brigade and division headquarters.

The advisers for the institutions add to the count of skilled manpower requirements, but the product of this work reduces foreign requirements as time passes. Other important institutional elements vital to the policing approach not mentioned above are the court and prison systems. Their vital role has been mentioned. Public safety rests on a three-legged stool, all of which must be sound.

Such difficulties add up. Statesmen and generals should not underestimate the challenges. And there is much yet to be learned.

While the logics of policing and warring overlap in some ways, they also diverge in ways that are crucial to success. Warring and policing each have comparative advantages under different conditions. They are distinct as oil and water, and sometimes so incompatible when combined that each tends to work against the advantages of the other, but they can also be combined synergistically, so that the weaknesses of one approach are covered by the strengths of the other and vice versa. The secret of synergism lies in understanding their differences and the relevant particulars of the situation.

In some respects the logic of warring and policing are alike. Success in both requires the coordinated action of two arms. The first is political-psychological. It is intended to influence decision makers and opinion leaders toward decisions favorable to desired outcomes. The second is the enforcing arm. It uses or threatens force to compel the desired outcome regardless of will.

The British strategic approach in Northern Ireland had a strong political-psychological arm aimed at IRA decision makers and at the population within which the IRA lived, moved and drew benefit either through neutral silence or active support. When we make war, we try to persuade our opponent to yield to our will, and we ask the population to take our side in the enemy’s defeat. When we police, we take but one side, the rule of law and the need to enforce it. The entire political-psychological message is that violence is the preserve of the sovereign power in exchange for security guarantees from political or criminal violence.

In Northern Ireland the British balanced the political-psychological arm with a strong, but very disciplined and controlled, enforcing arm that followed a different logic. In war the enforcing arm weakens, constrains, isolates or destroys the enemy’s ability to resist. It might combine severing allies, isolating the adversary from support, placing forces in new positions of advantage through physical maneuver, taking control of, disrupting or destroying vital facilities or functions and so on. In both cases, the actions of this arm have to resonate with the political-psychological messages or themes. Much effort and energy goes into a defensive stance that assures the population’s safety and protection of private and public property. Offensive actions are surgical. Violence is first a threat, and when applied it is controlled by a flexible mentality that shifts as appropriate between action and restraint. The lives of innocent foreign civilians are valued as much as those of soldiers and marines protecting them. Intelligence supports not only the necessary arrest of violators, but also the provision of evidence for trial. The aim is not only to deter criminal behavior, arrest and punish violators, but also to win the confidence of the population from alternative security providers. Sadly, there are no technological tricks to replace what large numbers of very savvy and skilled soldiers and marines have to do personally, face to face, on the rough frontiers of freedom.

Nation-states should exercise the privilege of the strong to chose either a warring or policing strategy, and to change from one to the other, as long as they know which they are doing, and follow that line of logic wholeheartedly. There is wisdom in not letting words like defeat and victory get in the way of good enough solutions. In the end there are some real advantages to defining the adversary as a problem. For one, the outcome and costs are more predictable. For another, the “good guys” decide what is “good enough.”

Finally, the purpose of military forces engaged in policing is not to solve the entire wicked problem. That is the responsibility of entire governments and coalitions of governments. It is to do one vitally important part that enables the rest of the work: underwriting the social contract between citizens and their government by shielding their lives and property; enforcing peaceful and lawful behavior on potentially hostile forces, warring factions or violent criminals; and enabling the normal function of civil governments under extraordinary circumstances. This is a business without magical shortcuts. Generals have to explain the particulars of the bill, but statesmen get what they pay for.



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BRIG. GEN. HUBA WASS DE CZEGE, USA Ret., a consultant for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command advanced warfighting experiments, was one of the principal developers of the Army’s AirLand Battle concept and the founder and first director of the School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.