War, Peace, Networks

Chapter Three: War, Peace, Networks In which The Seventh Sense reaches towards the questions of war and peace and power that will flavor our lives, like it or not. 1. One afternoon in the fall of 2009 I received an unexpected call from the Pentagon. The US was, then, nearly a decade into the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. Each, in its own way, possessed a strange and shifting character, the sort of dim premonition of a greater violence that has always most unnerved warriors and politicians. The old soldier’s saying — Fear chaos as much as the enemy - seemed to animate, constantly, the progress of these two fights. Once, before I gave a speech to an audience of newly promoted one-star generals in 2010, a four-star general pulled me aside fora moment. He explained that I’d be speaking to a crowd of officers who had come of age pacing the murderous streets of these wars, watching soldiers under their command killed by an often invisible enemy. “You have to remember that these men have been seared, seared, by a decade of combat,” he said. The best American military minds had tried, with characteristically direct and relentless energy, to box the wildness of these wars. In books and papers and thousands of patrols, through millions of hours of language training, and endless risky nights, they had tried. It never quite seemed to work. There would never be a durable sense of mastery. The wars, which appeared a certain and unfairly tilted fight to American victory at the beginning, had run longer than any in the nation’s history. They were engines of chaos and fear. The American Marine Corps General Victor Krulak once observed, “The war you prepare for is rarely the war you get,” and you could find this phrase whistling through the years of American combat after 9/1135. One of the lessons of both Iraq and Afghanistan - and of the post-World Trade Center wars generally - was that the Pentagon and the fighting services had been unready for what they faced. Soldiers had arrived in Baghdad with forest-colored uniforms, thin-skinned transport, tank- led battle plans - all wrong and mostly dangerous. The most feared weapons system of the era told you something of the tone of the new millennium’s wars: $50 to $100 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Hidden smashups of dynamite, duct tape, cellphone detonators and as much stubbly, impaling iron as could be found. They were impossible to deter. Rapidly deadly. The IED threat, one officer later reflected, “is a contemporary example of conventional militaries being confronted with a tactical surprise with operational—if not strategic—implications.” 3° Like so much in 35 The American Marine Corps General: Victor Krulak, “A New Kind of War”, in First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps (Bluejacket Press, 1984) 179 36 The IED threat: Andrew Smith, “Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq, 2003-09: A Case of Operational Surprise and Institutional Response” Letort Papers (Carlisle, PA: Army War College April, 2011) 9 35 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018267