The End of Power Read online

  Introducing Hypercompetition

  With the scattering of political power has come a blurring of lines among categories of political player: political parties (major and minor, mainstream and extreme), advocacy groups, press, voters. Elected officials and government offices now are likely to produce their own media material or communicate directly with voters online. Single-issue interest groups now throw up their own candidates rather than participating in the political process at arm’s length. With barriers to participation lower than they have ever been, the field of rivals has grown. An aspiring politician must consider alliances and anticipate attacks from a shape-shifting milieu of parties, activists, funders, opinion makers, citizen journalists, watchdogs, and advocates of all sorts.

  Empowering Individuals

  The expanding role for individuals—nonpoliticians, nonprofessionals—may be the most exciting and challenging effect of the political centrifuge. It results from the collapse of the organizational and cultural barriers that separated people in the profession of politics from those outside. The declining relevance of major political parties and the proliferation of direct, plug-and-play ways to jump into the political discourse have made those barriers obsolete. This development invokes the promise of direct democracy, on the model of the Athenian agora or Swiss canton meetings taken into the digital age. By the same token, it invites great disruption, and examples abound already of the ability of a malevolent individual or outside group to distract or stymie the political process.

  SO BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO, GERMANY’S Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer, Sweden’s Lena Hjelm-Wallén, and Chile’s Ricardo Lagos are not just complaining gratuitously from a position of power and privilege. The power of their lofty government jobs is indeed ebbing, and not to the benefit of a particular rival politician or organization that they can counter, buy off, or shut down. It is not leaching from their personalities or platforms in ways they could correct by changing policy stances or hiring new advisers. Rather, it is draining from their office—from the high positions of power and prestige that have always been, for a political career, the ultimate reward. Again, power is not just shifting. It is also decaying and, in some cases, evaporating.

  The political centrifuge challenges authoritarian regimes, rendering their enemies more elusive and throwing up new challengers and contenders. But its effects challenge democracies as well. To many advocates, democracy is a destination—and the decay of the power of authoritarian governments has helped push a great many countries toward that goal. But the effects of the decay do not stop there. The deep economic, technological, and cultural forces behind it empower a wide range of ideas and sentiments, not all of which are democratic in spirit. Regional separatism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant campaigns, and religious fundamentalisms all stand to benefit from the decay of power. The one common effect of the political centrifuge in every location is to complicate the political landscape and erase old patterns and habits. The one certainty is that it will continue to do so.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PENTAGONS VERSUS PIRATES

  The Decaying Power of Large Armies

  AL QAEDA SPENT ABOUT $500,000 TO PRODUCE 9/11, WHEREAS THE direct losses of that day’s destruction plus the costs of the American response to the attacks were $3.3 trillion. In other words, for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks, the United States spent $7 million.1 The costs of 9/11 equal one-fifth of the US national debt. In 2006, Hezbollah fired a precision-guided cruise missile at an Israeli ship during the Lebanon War. The missile struck, and almost sank, the Hanit (“Spear”), a corvette of the Israeli Navy equipped with missile defense systems. The cost of the Israeli ship was $260 million; the reported price of the missile, a mere $60,000.2 In 2011, Somali pirates imposed costs of between $6.6 billion and $6.9 billion on the world. They launched a record 237 attacks—up from 212 in 2010—despite ongoing patrols by a multinational fleet that included some of the most technologically advanced warships ever built.3

  Terrorists, insurgents, pirates, guerrillas, freedom fighters, and criminals are nothing new. But to adapt a Churchillian turn of phrase: never in the field of human conflict have so few had the potential to do so much damage to so many at so little cost. Thus, also in the realm of armed conflicts, the micropowers, while seldom winning, are making life harder for the megaplayers—the world’s large and expensive defense establishments.

  The growing ability of small, nimble combatant groups to advance their interests while inflicting significant damage on much larger, well-established military foes is one way in which the exercise of power through force has changed; another is the diminished ability and willingness of states with traditional militaries to make full use of the huge destructive powers they have at their command. While it is clear that today’s micropowers cannot go toe-to-toe with the world’s military powers, they are increasingly able to “deny” victory to the larger, more technologically advanced players in an asymmetric conflict—and that speaks to a fundamental change in how power operates.

  John Arquilla is one of the most respected thinkers in the field of modern warfare. He believes the world has entered “an era of perpetual irregular warfare.” He writes: “The great captains of traditional forms of conflict have little to tell us about this. Nor can the classical principles of war provide much help, in particular the notion of the sheer power of mass, which has lived on until now in the form of Colin Powell’s doctrine of ‘overwhelming force’ and other concepts like ‘shock and awe.’ Such ideas were already faltering at the time of the Vietnam War; today it is clear that attempts to retool them against insurgent and terrorist networks will prove just as problematic.”4

  When it comes to the display and use of power, military force represents the ultimate means. Whereas politics seeks to persuade, war—or the threat of war—aims to coerce. Military might, measured by the size of an army, along with its equipment and technical prowess, is the show-stopping stand-in for more complex ideas of power. Armed force is the blunt fact that remains when you strip away the niceties of diplomacy, cultural influence, and “soft power.” And when in doubt, according to the conventional wisdom, the balance of power tilts toward the fuller arsenal. As the journalist Damon Runyon put it (in another context), “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s how the smart money bets.”5 Or as Joseph Stalin once famously asked when told he should help Catholics in Russia in order to curry favor with the pope: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” (Upon hearing of Stalin’s question, Pope Pius XII sternly rebutted, “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven.”)6

  Even though World War II is almost seven decades behind us, and the arms race of the Cold War two decades gone, military planners are still betting on the doctrine of superior firepower. They continue to assume that a large and technologically advanced military is essential for security and might.

  Exhibit A is the United States. In 2012, its defense budget was over $700 billion,7 accounting for almost half the world’s military spending. Related expenses from other US agencies increased the total to about $1 trillion. America’s largest military rivals, China and Russia, accounted for only 8 percent and 5 percent of world military spending, respectively—even though their spending (especially that of China) is growing very rapidly. Relative to GDP, only about twenty-five countries, most of them in the Middle East, spent more on their military. Even with the cuts in defense spending that the United States is planning to make in the next decade, the expenditures will be enormous. By 2017, when the planned cuts take fuller effect, the US defense budget will still be six times what China now spends and more than the next ten countries combined.8 Under this slightly reduced budget, for example, the United States will still field eleven aircraft carriers and maintain all three legs of its nuclear triad (long-range bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and missile-carrying submarines).9

  Whenever the United
States has engaged in conventional war in the last two decades, its forces have easily triumphed. But these conventional wars have been few: just the first Gulf War, in 1991, and arguably the second, although the Iraqi military barely fought back. In 2008, US defense secretary Robert Gates observed that of all the many deployments of US forces over more than four decades, only one—the first Gulf War—was “a more or less traditional conventional conflict.” The others, from Grenada and Lebanon to Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, involved counter-insurgency, anti-terrorism, or political or humanitarian intervention rather than a sustained duel of command-and-control armies. That trend applies to the world at large. During the 1950s an average of six international conflicts were fought each year, compared to an average of less than one per year in the first decade of this millennium.10 And over the last 60 years, there has not been a single war between the major powers.11

  This doesn’t mean that wars are not being fought. Although the number of state-based armed conflicts around the world dropped by 40 percent between 1992 and 2003 (this includes not just wars between states but wars waged by states against nonstate groups), it has since increased.12 And following a decline since 2003, nonstate armed conflicts—defined by the Human Security Report Project as “the use of armed force between two organized groups, neither of which is the government of a state”—ticked sharply upward in 2008.

  Warfare today has assumed different forms, which large conventional military establishments are struggling to deal with. Consider these snapshots from the last decade:

  •Juz Ghoray, Afghanistan, October 2011: A US Marine on patrol finds an improvised explosive device buried near a ridge called Ugly Hill. While working to defuse it, he spots another, in the process moving and stepping on a third, which shatters his right leg—causing him to become one of the 240 US service members to lose a limb in 2011.13 He was lucky: 250 coalition troops lost their lives to improvised explosive devices that same year.

  •Mumbai, India, November 26–29, 2008: After hijacking an Indian fishing trawler, ten Pakistani gunmen arrive via sea and proceed to stage terror attacks across the city, killing 168 people and wounding more than 300 before they are themselves killed or apprehended.

  •Monterrey, Mexico, August 25, 2011: Gunmen from Los Zetas, Mexico’s most violent drug cartel, attack a casino, shooting patrons and then setting it afire. More than 50 people die in the carnage.

  •Northeast of Socotra Island, Yemen, February 7, 2012: Somali pirates attack and take over a Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier, and sail it back to the Somali coast—one of thirty-seven attacks, and the eleventh vessel to be taken hostage with its crew, since the beginning of the year.14

  •Washington, DC, May 2010: The US Chamber of Commerce discovers that Chinese hackers have had access to its computer network throughout the previous year, during which they pilfered member information and some of its employees’ e-mail logs and even controlled its building thermostats.15 This is just one of hundreds of such attacks on US government, military, and corporate targets launched by hackers from China and elsewhere, many of them with government connections.

  As these examples illustrate, the challenge for traditional military powers such as the United States is not just a new set of enemies but the transformation of warfare itself, driven in no small part by the darker side of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions. The IEDs that have become the weapon of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and myriad other sites of conflict rely not on plutonium or complex alloys but, rather, on household or agricultural ingredients and consumer goods manipulated and assembled into bombs designed by those who have benefited from the spread of education—both fruits of the More revolution. Like the pirates who use fiberglass skiffs, cheap AK-47s, and rocket-propelled grenades to hijack huge multimillion-dollar ships, the terrorists who attacked Mumbai drew on the ready availability of weapons and communication technologies—by-products of the More and Mobility revolutions that include the GPS that helped them navigate through Indian waters as well as the satellite phones, cellphones, and BlackBerries they relied on throughout the attacks to coordinate with one another, monitor the police, and transmit messages of their heinous deeds to the outside world. Thanks to the ease of travel and communication, even a lone terrorist can mount the kind of high-impact strike on a faraway target that once required bomber jets or missiles—think of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and “underwear bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab, both of whom almost succeeded in bringing down aircraft. By raising aspirations and expectations that are often cruelly unmet or easily distorted, the Mentality revolution has helped to recruit a pool of disaffected zealots, criminals, and would-be revolutionaries. And perhaps just as importantly, the lesson that a lone attacker or a small band of committed fighters can inflict severe damage on a major power has entered into the minds of millions of people and won’t be unlearned.

  These new capabilities do not demand the hierarchy and coordination that are the pride of the world’s great militaries. As barriers to involvement in conflict have fallen, the advantages that once constituted the might of big armies and secured their ability to deter attack have lost some of their relevance. After the initial display of “shock and awe,” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been the kinds of conflicts waged with massive artillery barrages, tank assaults, and supersonic dogfights, much less with the cold logic and calculated escalations of nuclear doctrine. Meanwhile, NATO forces have also had to learn how to fight in a different media environment—one in which their adversaries have been able to spread their message with greater ease through social media, and in which reporters, bloggers, and activists catalogue every allied casualty and ugly episode of collateral damage for presentation to a plugged-in and restless public.

  The transformation of conflict has spurred intense rethinking in defense ministries and war colleges, and driven attempts to adapt organization and doctrine. Both the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the principal guiding document of US military approach and budgeting, and the Defense Strategic Guidance released in January 2012 stress the growing importance of small and asymmetric conflicts with an eclectic range of antagonists;16 the latter document puts “Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare” at the top of the list of primary missions of the US Armed Forces.

  American military planners are also worried that advanced precision weapons that can shoot down planes, sink ships, or target a single moving car on a highway are becoming increasingly available not just to rivals such as China and adversaries such as North Korea but also to nonstate actors. Thomas Mahnken, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning and a professor at the Naval War College, has warned that “adversaries are acquiring precision-guided munitions, as well as the vital supporting capabilities needed to wage precision warfare with a minimum investment.”17 Drone technology, the pilotless vehicles that have revolutionized surveillance and the conduct of US operations against insurgents and terrorists, is being widely adopted and disseminated, raising the possibility of inexpensive mayhem for anyone willing to make a relatively small investment of a few thousand dollars.

  THE BIG RISE OF SMALL FORCES

  “A prince wishes to make war, and believing that God is on the side of big battalions, he doubles the number of his troops,” wrote Voltaire in the eighteenth century. But just as constant throughout history are examples of small armed forces that have successfully harassed, halted, and sometimes even defeated these large military machines.

  The battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. is an earlier case in point. Taking advantage of high ground and rugged terrain, a vastly outmanned Greek force held the Persian army at bay for three days, inflicting disproportionate losses on its enemies before eventually perishing in a heroic last stand. The Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae, but they did weaken the Persian force and ultimately repel the invasion. From David in the Bible to the Vietcong in the Vietnam War, history is replete with smaller and less-equipped antagonists holding their
ground and thwarting, if not militarily defeating, larger opponents.

  Among the modern pioneers in this method of warfare are Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh as well as Mao Zedong, whose guerrilla tactics in the Chinese civil war helped deliver China into communist rule. Differentiating guerrilla war from conventional war, Mao found the two to have opposite requirements with respect to size and coordination. “In guerrilla warfare,” Mao wrote, “small units acting independently play the principal role and there must be no excessive interference with their activities.” In traditional war, by contrast, “command is centralized. . . . All units and all supporting arms in all districts must coordinate to the highest degree.” In guerrilla war, that sort of command and control was “not only undesirable but impossible.”18