Month: November 2010

Gavin Hewitt’s 1995 investigation for the BBC’s Panorama, re-broadcast on ABC’s 4 Corners (29th May 1995),  suggests Timothy McVeigh found his identity in a meshwork of military training manuals, gun culture and militia conspiracy theories. Hewitt documents how McVeigh grew up in the GE company town Pendleton, attended Starpoint High School, and graduated in the 1988 recession. McVeigh joined the First Infantry at Fort Riley, Kansas, read training manuals on the weekend, and was dubbed a “30 year man” with the goal to join the Special Operations Forces. In 1990 he went to the Gulf War in Charlie Company’s First Platoon and was angry that US forces did not go to Baghdad to capture Saddam Hussein. McVeigh returned and on his second day of training failed the psychological test for the Green Berets. He drifted, moved in with farmer Jim Nichols, and was introdicued to the Michigan Militia movement. Hewitt the documents the milita’s conspiracy theories about the United Nations and the ‘new world order’ as a reaction to globalisation, economic recession, and outsourcing/offshoring. The Michigan Militia planned an attack on Camp Grayling to recover Russian tanks that were used for training purposes. McVeigh later met the Montana Militia, and became personally galvanised by the FBI face-off with the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas on 19th April 1993. He listened to shortwave radio; Hewitt watches Linda Thompson‘s videos and examines the growth in the early 1990s of online groups and ‘how to’ manuals. Finally, Hewitt traces how McVeigh met Terry Nichols in Herington, Kansas, before hiring a Ryder truck and parking an amminium nitrate fertiliser and diesel fuel bomb outside the Alfred P. Murray Building in Oklahoma City on 19th April 1995.

Gautam, P.K. 2006. ‘Ways of Warfare and Strategic Culture’, Defense and Security Analysis, 25(1), 413-423.

Gautam locates his analysis in the debate between Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) and the more technological Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). He surveys the history and debates about British and American ‘ways of warfare’ and the initial fallout from the ‘shock and awe’ campaign of the 2003 Iraq War. In positing an Indian ‘way of warfare’ Gautam examines India’s 1962 border war with China, the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, and the 1999 face-off with Pakistan in the Kargil region. For Gautam, Indian culture and strategic thinking is often minimised by Westerners in contrast to the Chinese: Hindu cosmology, the caste system, colonialism, and force regimentation are blamed. Gautam includes an appendix on the Maratha as an historical study, and suggests further research could be done. He notes how current Indian strategists are looking to ‘second generation’ thinkers like Ken Booth and China’s Chanakya for guidance on the politico-military aspects. The debate about ‘ways of warfare’ often degenerates, Gautam believes, into positioning over who has the better system, rather than strategic context. Likewise, the juxtaposition of a renewed debate about strategic culture and the US experience of insurgents in the 2003 Iraq War illustrates the failure to use anthropology before a war begins to understand the host society’s culture and dynamics. Indian strategic thinkers will continue to ‘reconstruct’ the post-1947 experience of India’s military in war and counterinsurgency operations.

Stevenson, Charles A. 2006. Warriors and Politicians: US Civil-Military Relations Under Stress, Routledge, New York.

The US Constitution and Congressional powers frame the civilian control and oversight of the US military. Stevenson’s historical study spans the US Civil War to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars of the Bush administration, organised thematically around the three challenges of warfighting, rearmament, and transformation. His chapters on the Vietnam War and Robert McNamara frame the institutional and planning failures that would lead in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a reassessment of Special Operations Forces (SOF), the Soviet ‘way of war’ and counterinsurgency. McNamara’s planning, programming, budgeting system however transformed administrative processes in both the public sector and in defence procurement cycles. This in turn would lay the groundwork for Donald Rumsfeld’s stint as Secretary of Defense and his adoption of execution metrics. Stevenson’s chapter on the Goldwater-Nichols Act deftly captures the successful tactics used to ensure greater interagency cooperation and coordination. In closing, Stevenson considers and evaluates several descriptive models of civil-military relations, considers the strategies of innovators, and the dangers of politicisation. He develops different conclusions to Eliot A. Cohen and Samuel P. Huntington, and notes the work and criticisms of emerging ‘new institutionalist’ scholars like Michael Desch, Peter Feaver, Amy Zegart and Deborah Avant. For me, the literature on civil-military relations clarifies an important aspect of politico-military affairs which affects how counterterrorism policies are conceived, debated, and implemented — either as interstate diplomatic alliances, or as SOF-type engagements to pre-empt an attack or to “hunt the perpetrators” (Susan D. Moeller). Stevenson’s study thus provides an historical and analytical backdrop to how counterterrorism strategies were implemented from the Johnson to the current Obama administration.