The New Generation of War

Defense expert Chet Richards on Lebanon, Iraq, and the future of the American military

Jesse Walker | July 20, 2006

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CR: But you raise a good point. Saddam was so weak, it didn't take very much to contain him. A tripline in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and that was about it. Turkey was more than capable of taking care of itself, and he already tried to attack Iran and that didn't work well. So basically, with just a little bit of stuff along his southern border, he was pretty well contained.

Reason: Did you oppose the war in 2003?

CR: Yeah, I thought it was a really dumb idea.

Reason: Five years after 9/11, what do you think is the most important legacy of the attacks?

CR: It was sort of a strategic bombing attack, by Osama and that group around him that we call "Al Qaeda" for the lack of a better name. It certainly had perturbations on our internal system—things like the USA PATRIOT Act and what appears to be the migration of political power to the executive branch.

The major change would probably be that near-term shift of power to the executive. But I'd have to qualify that by saying it hasn't been nearly as bad as I was afraid it was going to be. People predicted that we were going to suspend the Constitution, we'd suspend habeas corpus like we did during the Civil War, and the president would become an elected dictator. That, fortunately, didn't happen. Or at least hasn't happened yet.

Reason: Your book suggests a broad restructuring of the US military. In layman's terms, what would that entail?

CR: What we have right now is a military set up to fight large-scale state-versus-state war. So you have to ask, Who would we fight? If a country has nuclear weapons, you really can't have a large-scale conventional war. You can have military theater, but the fate of either side is not going to be decided purely through conventional weapons. And in any case, you probably aren't going to take the risk of trying to force another country to do what it really doesn't want to do if it has nukes. The India-Pakistan war came to a screeching halt as soon as India tested a nuclear device. The Arab-Israeli wars rode into history as soon as the Israelis made clear they had nuclear weapons.

What about the non-nuclear powers? Well, some of them are U.S. allies. Germany, Italy, Norway—looking down through the rest of human history, I guess you couldn't totally rule out a war with them, but in a world of limited resources you'd be hard put to spend billions and keep a big force just in case we fight a war with Italy someday.

So who's left? Brazil is an ally right now, but at some point it might have a Hugo Chavez type revolution. There's Hugo himself. There's Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. There's the junta in Myanmar. These guys all put together spend about three billion a year on defense. How much do we spend? 500 billion? There's something wrong with this picture.

We're spending half a trillion dollars, and when you look around, who's it going to defend us from? It didn't defend us from Al Qaeda. What are all these armored divisions doing out there, these mech divisions, all this other stuff that's basically left over from the Cold War and for that matter even World War II? I couldn't think of a good reason. So I think we should shrink the force down to match the threat. Keep a residual force, and get rid of the rest of that nonsense.

Then you ask what you need to fight non-state threats. And that's interesting, because it's not always clear when you're talking about non-state threats that you're talking about war. There's a lot of non-state threats—gangs, MS-13 for example—that are law enforcement problems. Armored divisions aren't going to help you much there.

So what about security threats that are a step up from that? Al Qaeda, or something like the FARC in Colombia if somehow we were to come into contact with them—if Mexico starts to go south, for example. Van Creveld said that basically, those are already private military organizations, and people who can afford it are already turning to other private military organizations to protect themselves from them.

If you look back through human history, this monopoly of force by the state, even in Europe, came along pretty recently. Privateers were legal up until the early 1900s. Up until then, much of the world's naval power was provided by private security companies.

Reason: We've still got that passage in the Constitution about letters of marque and reprisal.