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June 13, 2005

Secrets in a Time of War

There is a very, very frightening report in Time. It details the interrogation methods used on a particularly valuable detainee at Guantanamo. What is fightening is not the methods - which are mild by the standards of civil police work, never mind fighting terrorists - but that they were reported. (hat tip: Captain's Quarters for the link; I also heard this, in somewhat different terms, on NPR this morning)

One of the least recognized aspects of war among non-warriors is the role of chance and of accumulations of small events. We tend to focus, as do most histories, on big events, like the battle for Midway. But how many people realize that the reason we had our carriers off Midway, instead of Southwest of Pearl Harbor, was because someone had the bright idea of sending a fake message about a routine mechanical problem on Midway, to see if their hunch was right about a code-group's meaning in intercepted Japanese military signals? When the message was repeated along the Japanese military networks, the code group (AF) appeared in reference to where this supposed mechanical problem had occurred, and since we already knew from decyphered enemy messages that there were carriers heading to "AF", we sent our carriers to Midway to meet the enemy.

The protection of military secrets is vital to winning a war. If the enemy knows everything you have, where it is, what it can do, and what you plan to do with it, he can counter your force with his own, and knowledge multiplies his power tenfold. Let's say that the military is planning a raid in a particular neighborhood. If the terrorists holed up in that neighborhood know it, they can simply not be there when the troops come.

But what about this Time report? Well, every enemy combatant we capture from here on out will know about the tactics that we use, and will therefore be prepared to resist them. (The fact that even these mild interrogation techniques are already being decried as against American values is another post all of its own.) That means that we will no longer be able to get as much information out of newly-captured combatants. And since we cannot (for political reasons) ratchet up the stress of the techniques we use, the odds are that the well of information will dry up for those enemy we don't decide to send to countries that are less, um, sensitive in how they handle enemies.

So why does it matter, in the long run, if we don't get bits of information from the enemy, even though he's getting serious amounts and quality of information about what we have and how we operate? Well, it matters because of the second factor I mentioned above: the accumulation of small incidents.

There is an old story, of whose provenance I am unsure. A messenger had vital information about the enemy's movements, but because a blacksmith had failed to put the last nail in one of the messenger's horse's shoes, the shoe was thrown and the horse lamed. The messenger was unable to get to the King with the message, and thus the King was ignorant of the enemiy's movements, and was surrounded and defeated. Or consider Shakespeare's Richard III: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

As in Viet Nam, the US will not lose large battles in this war. (This is pretty amazing in general: the US is expected not only not to lose wars, but not to lose battles, and to do this under the most restrictive conditions ever imposed upon men in battle. And we do it.) We will have setbacks, yes, and these will be equated by the enemy and by the media with great defeats, and will be rhetorically amplified until many people believe that they are defeats. We hear every day a constant drumbeat of DOOM! DOOM! even while we are crushing the enemy abroad, blocking (so far) his attacks on us here in the US, and democratizing several countries in the process.

So if we will lose battles, we could still lose the war. As in Viet Nam, we can at any time snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The real battlefield in this war is the morale of the American people. The government's ability to impact this morale is limited: if the government were to start a service of optimistic press releases, what kind of coverage would it get in the rest of the media? So with the press daily beating down the US will to fight, it is up to non-traditional media like bloggers, and ultimately up to each individual American, to maintain this will.

But will is a fickle thing; it is subject to constant questioning. And it is the daily accumulation of car bombs deliberately planned to obtain the most coverage in the West; the deliberate, brutal filmed beheadings of innocents to demoralize the civilian population; the constant stories on all of our faults, no matter how trivial, combined with the utter indifference to and lack of reporting on our enemy's brutalities, no matter how outrageous - it is these events which batter at our will to fight.

Churchhill said that in war, the truth is surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. That is still true. The media seem to be intent on us losing this war. This seems to be more from ignorance of the consequences of their actions than from actual malice (in most cases), combined with a preference for attention and advertising to victory. This is not an excuse: people will still end up dead because of Time's actions, like Newsweek's actions before them, and sadly and undoubtedly like others to follow.

UPDATE: Wretchard covers the same Michael Yon post that I did, and ends with this observation:

In summary the situation can be described as follows. The Coalition is on the strategic offensive, probably inflicting a multiple kill-ratio on the enemy, capturing its leadership, improving its intelligence capacity and generating ever larger numbers of indigenous combat forces. It is basically ascendant in every measurable military category. On the other hand, the insurgents are counting on making America tire of of serial combat victories without apparent end in the belief that if they simply do not admit to loss they will eventually win -- not on the battlefield as Fester and Kos would have us believe -- but on the political front, as they always aimed to do.

Posted by jeff at June 13, 2005 10:27 AM

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Posted by: Morenuancedthanyou at June 13, 2005 4:55 PM