[A-List] Seeking critiques

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Here are some snippets of an essay I've been crafting for a publication.
The actual essay is 18-pages/single-spaced.  It is not ready for prime
time, but I would be happy to send it along OFFLIST to those on this list
who might be willing to read it and get back to me with critiques and
questions.

Stan

Full-Spectrum Entropy: Special Operations in a Special Period

Stan Goff

July 1, 2002

In simultaneously making sense of a military career dominated by "special
operations" experience, attempting to integrate that experience with my
political activity as a marxist , and trying to understand the present
post-Nine Eleven conjuncture, I find myself reflecting a great deal on the
experience of Somalia, where I participated as a member of the ill-fated
Task Force Ranger in 1993.  That experience, and some of the conclusions
that might be drawn from it,  personally, tactically, strategically, and
geo-politically, can begin to tell us something about the indeterminate
declaration of war by the US petroligarchy that seized power in 2000
through a proto-fascist judicial fiat.

Task Force Ranger, now lionized by Colombia Pictures in the hugely
successful propaganda piece  Black Hawk Down, was emblematic of the state
of Special Operations and its context.  The actual debacle at Bakara, which
the film purports to describe, likewise, can instruct us about the current
military adventure in Afghanistan.

I recently reviewed a paper archived with the US Army Command and General
Staff College with the cumbersome title, Critical Analysis on the Defeat of
Task Force Ranger Subject: A Clausewitzian Critical Analysis on the
military defeat of Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu, Somalia during Operation
RESTORE HOPE.  It was authored by Major Clifford E. Day and Major Ralph P.
Millsap, Jr.  For brevity, I will hereafter refer to this paper as simply
"the Day Paper."

The Day Paper is accompanied by a disclaimer.  That disclaimer states that
the paper is not an official position taken by the Department of Defense,
which is interesting on its own merit.  The Department of Defense, as far
as I can tell, does not take "official positions" with regard to past
operations. However, the fact that it was authored by a student at the
Command and General Staff College (CGSC) and his faculty advisor, and that
it has been published by the United States Department of Defense as a pdf
file, indicates that, at least in its assumptions, it conforms to the same
analytical framework as existing military doctrine in the USA.  Students
and faculty at the CSGC are not in the habit of proposing doctrinal
heresies.

By identifying key elements of that doctrinal framework, we can identify
systemic weaknesses in US military doctrine in Afghanistan; weaknesses in
the military realm, and weaknesses that are reproduced out of the larger
political system within which this military is embedded, which ... <snip>

...(US/UN) forces, battened down in their fixed installations, remain a
static target, ceding the initiative to the more flexible, mobile, and
variable forces that surrounded them... with no such misplaced
sentimentality about the necessity to risk casualties.

The occupying forces in Somalia were destined to come to harm. Those in
Afghanistan will too. No one can predict how, but we can predict that it
will happen.

The key similarity between Afghanistan and Somalia is the lack of political
coherence and the existence of multiple, well-armed, potentially warring
factions. The Bush folks know that, and that's why they are making such a
vain and ridiculous effort to cobble something together as a government.
This is a tar baby for them, because once together, it is the American
military that will have to take ultimate responsibility for maintaining it.
The Turks and others are being brought in to take up the slack for now, but
the US will be back.  The bases have already been built.

And it will require a lot of maintenance.  The key difference is that the
US is conducting ground operations primarily in rural areas, where they
enjoy many tactical advantages.  In Somalia, they were concentrated in and
around the highly dangerous urban terrain of Mogadishu.  The other weakness
mentioned above was that of being stranded by the use of military options
being a last resort.  This too is a systemic weakness.

There is no guarantee that the tiny island of tranquillity in Kabul, where
US and allied forces maintain that tranquillity at great cost and effort,
will not become, as Mogadishu did, a final and near-apocalyptic point of
convergence at the end of a long series of internecine conflicts.

An indigenous force fighting a foreign invader or an existing state can use
a military action as a first course of action, as a catalyst, as the
centerpiece of its political struggle, because it is not fighting to retain
economic and political control, but to disrupt or prevent that control by
another force.  Military actions are intrinsically better at creating
instability than stability.

The US military is an instrument, and it is subordinated to a foreign
policy that is first and foremost about investments, ergo, stability.  The
fact that it is being used at all is generally an indicator that the US has
gotten itself economically and politically cornered.  Somalia was a
sideshow that came center stage for a few weeks, then receded again. The US
felt relatively secure politically and economically, and Somalia was an
anomaly.  But the US is now in the throes of a political crisis (masked for
the time being by the chauvinist fervor being whipped up around September
11th), a national recession that is sychronized with a global recession,
the collapse of Argentina foreshadowing a generalized Latin American
crisis, the slow implosion of Japan, trade war with Europe, and a rising
tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. Latent in these turbulent
and sullen winds is the potential for the "Perfect Storm."...<snip>

...against the Americans each day.  The Turkish Army, well known in Turkey
for their brutality, can be expected to handle it for a while with their
usual aplomb, further alienating and enraging the various factions
throughout Afghanistan.  Then the US will have to intercede again with
ground operations.

Who is caught in the middle?  Special Forces.  Caught between bombing and
rapport building.  Caught between the expectations of unconventional
fighters and the spit-and-polish regime.  Caught between the official
pronouncements about the war and their own intimate contact with the
realities of Afghanistan.  And caught between the imperative to show the
public some action and the utter incomprehensibility of the missions that
are being crafted, like the dangerous and ultimately pointless Operation
Anaconda.

Special Forces troops generally begin their military careers in pursuit of
some masculinist ideal.  They are often apolitical.  Few will go public
with their doubts or their feelings regarding what they do for a living.
It is, after all, a very prestigious job.  So many are capable of just
saying, this was a "goat fuck" (SF parlance for an irremediable situation),
and moving on with their lives.  But many are also intelligent, even
sensitive people, who bear the scars of cognitive dissonance.  Afghanistan
will be a lifelong burden for some of them, and it will not be surprising
when the first stories of dissent and disgust that come directly out of the
military there, some will certainly come from Special Forces operators.

When military planners evaluate the "enemy situation," they take five
material categories into account; size, location, composition, disposition,
and strength.  But included in that evaluation is a sixth category.
Morale.  It is something difficult to quantify and operationalize, as the
positivists would say.  And it doesn't correlate well with material
well-being.  I've seen a highly provisioned, well cared-for Special Forces
A-Detachment turn into moping adolescents, and I've seen troops in
protracted and gruelingly austere conditions imbued with a wild fighting
spirit.  Consider the conditions of the NLA in Vietnam or the Cuban
revolutionaries, whose morale seldom flagged.

Morale at home is also a factor, and as the de facto American rulers
continue to reconstruct the world by dint of arms, the economic costs, then
the social costs, will rekindle the political crisis that was temporarily
quenched by the Nine-Eleven outburst of chauvinism.  But the official story
is becoming more difficult to sustain each day.  It persists now only
because of the grandest of American appetites; denial.  Even that can't
last forever.  And when it does, this administration can add a legitimacy
crisis to their lengthening list of woes.  It may be this crisis, at the
end of the day, that is their undoing.

Legitimacy may be the key to power in the approaching conjuncture, as the
material benefits of imperialism to the working class of the metropoles are
liquidated in the counter-revolution from above...<snip>