Dennis E. Showalter |
Review of Derek Leebaert,
To Dare and To Conquer: Special
Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles to
Al Qaeda. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. Pp. ix,
673. ISBN 0316143847. |
“Special operations” in their modern sense grew
out of World War II, matured during the “savage wars of peace” waged
after 1945, and became the stuff of headlines in Vietnam. The
emergence of “asymmetric warfare” in the last stages of the Cold War
resulted in the metastasizing of special operations forces
throughout the world. Governments seek to meet the new challenge in
ways both cost-effective and sparing of the sentimentality that
increasingly passes for morality in the era of 24-hour media. Armed
forces seek to maintain or enhance their internal positions by
developing special operations capacities. In the U.S., Army Special
Forces and Navy Seals are being jostled for place by a Marine Corps
willing to suspend its historic insistence that being a Marine is
itself an elite status, and by an Air Force whose Special Operations
Command is acquiring a formidable ground combat capacity.
This is an ideal background for Derek Leebaert’s
path-breaking effort to establish for special operations a root
structure going back to the beginnings of organized war. Professor
of Government at Georgetown and frequent consultant and commentator
on security issues, Leebaert is best known for The Fifty-Year
Wound,[1]
his eloquent presentation of the Cold War’s hidden costs to America.
The present work develops an even more provocative thesis. Leebaert
deploys a body of evidence unusual alike in breadth and depth to
support the proposition that special operations have not only
achieved particular victories, but have brought down entire
political systems by finding and exploiting the hairline cracks and
hidden weaknesses in conventional security systems.
Special operations are protean. While usually
smaller in scale than their main-force counterparts, they are
defined not by size, but by what Winston Churchill called the
“Commando idea”: guile combined with courage and imagination (24).
Nor does a special operation involve a single dramatic blow. On the
contrary, they can continue for years. Special operations may find
their best chances for success in speed and shock. Or they can
involve patient waiting. Special operations can be mounted from
outside or seek support from local allies.
Special operations depend on surprise and
finesse. Here Leebaert’s metaphor is the humble seesaw. A heavy
person on one end can be moved by placing someone even heavier on
the other—the usual playground pattern. Or the fulcrum can be so
adjusted that even a lightweight can elevate the bruiser across from
him. Leverage, in other words, is the essence of special
warfare—leverage usually obtained by careful planning, extraordinary
risks, and exceptional temperaments.
Special forces are seldom conducted in a vacuum. Leebaert does not deny the relevance, indeed the importance, of
traditional military forces in special war’s success. Time and
again, however, special operations will have general consequences
far exceeding the original scope of the operation: consequences,
Leebaert argues, of the unorthodox thinking and behavior that
underlie successful special warfare.
Such a broad template requires a corresponding
spectrum of supporting evidence. Though Leebaert concentrates on the
West, he draws on examples ranging from the semi-mythical world of the
Trojan War to the descent on Afghanistan in 2001. His
chronologically organized format is strongly anecdotal and highly
colorful. Readers can open the book almost anywhere and find a
page-turning narrative of war-making outside the matrix. Sometimes
the examples are obvious: the low-intensity operations against the
British from the Canadian frontier to King’s Mountain during the
American Revolution; the Middle Eastern campaigns of Lawrence of
Arabia; the contributions of Merrill’s Marauders and the British
Chindits to victory in the China-Burma-India theater of World War
II. Other case studies are imaginative. The conquests of Mexico and
Peru are presented as classic special operations—“lightning strikes”
carried out by “tiny, flexible, focused—and absurdly
confident—forces” (149) that changed the history of two continents.
The eighteenth century is accurately described as a period when
unconventional operations by “sharp and self-reliant outfits” (251)
began challenging the dominant paradigms of mass and method. The
U.S. Army during the Mexican War employed a broad spectrum of
special operations techniques, from the use of new technical
capacities like highly mobile field artillery to the employment of
local bandits as agents and auxiliaries.
Leebaert is also particularly successful in
developing the unconventional aspects of such general conflicts as
the Napoleonic Wars. He highlights the expansion of “special tasks”
like kidnapping and assassination in the wake of the French
Revolution. He demonstrates the contributions of technology to the
special operations aspects of the nineteenth century’s wars of
imperialism—particularly their contribution to sustaining high
quality, relatively small, forces in uncongenial environments as
opposed to committing large numbers and seeing them eroded by
disease and privation.
Inevitably, a work with this kind of approach
scatters neologisms on almost every page. Some are provocative. The
medieval world’s “small-unit killers” like Muslim Assassins and
Anglo-Scots border reivers, motivated by the subjective factors of
religion and honor, do stand comparison with contemporary groups.
Others are questionable. Presenting Alcibiades as applying special
operations first to the defeat of Athens, then to Sparta, during the
Peloponnesian War juxtaposes the fifth century BCE and the twentieth
century CE and strains both time frames beyond their limits. Some
are amusing, like the characterization of seventeenth-century
buccaneers practicing “naval special warfare” featuring small-craft,
brown-water operations prefiguring today’s SEALS and SBS. And other
neologisms are misleading. In neither their Imperial Roman nor their
early modern versions can marines be described as special operations
forces in Leebaert’s sense of the term. And, in passing, the French in fact paid careful attention to the ethnic origins of recruits
for the Foreign Legion during the First Indochina War, in an effort
to prevent its domination by Germans, Nazis or otherwise (502).
This sort of academic nitpicking, however, is
inappropriate. Leebaert is not seeking to write a narrative history of
special warfare. His intention is to present special operations in
a broad historical context and to establish the criteria for their
success through a broad spectrum of examples serving almost as
archetypes. His rationale becomes apparent in the work’s final
chapters. Here he moves from a broad-stroke approach to specific
critiques of U.S. special operations. He describes initial
reluctance to engage in the field during the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations, followed by an enduring tendency to see special
operations as an all-purpose, low-cost, minimum-visibility solution
to the complex, often contradictory, security problems of a
superpower confronting thermonuclear war, guerrilla campaigns, and
now terrorism.
Special warfare as depicted in the body of the
book is not a panacea. Nor is it a random process. It depends heavily
upon planning and focus: the ability to exploit as policy
opportunities won in the field. Jurisdictional disputes can be
fatal. Leebaert is particularly critical in that context of the CIA,
which he sees as seeking to control special operations despite its
massive shortcomings in its own primary responsibility of securing
and disseminating accurate intelligence. Even apart from the Langley
influence, American special operations have been characterized in
both military and political contexts by an ongoing struggle for
control, accompanied by corresponding efforts to deny
responsibility for failures and—as Afghanistan and Iraq
suggest—increasingly for incomplete successes as well.
To Dare and To Conquer raises a still
deeper question. Special operations, for all their glamour, are by
their nature ruthless—indeed, one quality feeds the other in popular
imagination. Leebaert’s indictment of the “fantasy vision” that
special forces can compensate for policy failures and poor
decision making can be balanced by consideration of the “dirty
hands problem.” Might the often unpleasant realities of special
operations encourage de facto, perhaps de jure, American
abandonment, on both moral and pragmatic grounds, of an approach to
war-making whose disproportionate efficacy has been so eloquently
described in these pages, but which the nation finds difficult to
apply and control?
Colorado College
dshowalter@coloradocollege.edu
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