The Limits of Soft Power

At the time of posting it, I had no considered response of my own to the JFCOM “100 Years” brief laid out below. As an old Cold Warrior, it’s just hard to get my head around a world in which US forces lack the ability to act in our own national interest abroad without asking permission.

While we can try to patrol a coastline of many thousand miles here at home, and even extend an arc around Hawaii and Alaska, a 200-ship Navy is just large enough to get itself in trouble playing an “away” game, and not nearly large enough to provide a routinely deployable stabilizing force. That blue water, over-the-horizon and in-shore presence was one that the world’s bad actors had to include in its geopolitical calculus. Now we fall back in upon ourselves, and wait to play the game at home.

Our long term interests abide: Security at home and abroad, the free exchange of goods and ideas. But we will lack the capacity to persistently protect those interests. Deterrence collapses as our balancing power declines, allies will seek  new accommodations with powers that have interests not our own. Nation states, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Things rush in. Weakness is provocative.

Too, the emphasis on “soft power” and coalition building so evident in the brief seems to me so very five years ago. Our cultural allies in Europe have become accustomed to relying on US military power to defend joint interests to such an extent that even when they have the will to engage abroad, they lack the capacity. If we cannot act against a perceived evil that threatens our national interest without building coalitions then we will not be able to act.

Soft power requires the forced-entry capability of hard power to serve as an enabler, and while hard power can attempt to transition to soft once conditions are set on the ground – the reverse is not true. With a finite industrial base, our capacity to rebuild hard power assets – especially in ships and aircraft – will take decades to reconstitute once it has been re-purposed or allowed to wither.

Iraq, thank God, is winding down, although the distant horizon there remains obscured. Afghanistan continues to fester. More forces may, or may not, make a difference. Soft power in theater is evidenced by helpful people from the military, State Department and even academia in provincial reconstruction teams.

The speaker answering the contractor question at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was a social scientist named Paula Loyd. Obviously serious, intelligent and dedicated, Loyd went to Afghanistan to be a part of the solution to that blasted land’s ongoing nightmare. Despite her misgivings about contractors.

On the 4th of November 2008, accompanied by coalition soldiers in the southern village of Chehel Gazni, 40 miles south of Kanduhar, Loyd strolled over to an Afghan man who was carrying a jug of fuel in order to chat with him. In an attempt to approach him on a human level, she asked about the price of gas. The Kanduhar native, Abdul Salam – “salam” means “peace”, by the way – doused Loyd with the kerosene and set her on fire. Burned over 60 percent of her body in the attack, Loyd succumbed to her injuries last Wednesday at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas.

In a kind of irony, Salam was knocked to the ground by a contractor named Don Ayala, and restrained. A few minutes later, Army medical personnel informed Ayala of the extent of Loyd’s injuries. Ayala then allegedly shot Salam in the head. He faces murder charges here at home.

Thus “soft power” and the Human Terrain project:

(The) program was conceived as way to use cultural understanding to find non-violent means for stablizing areas: Islamic radio broadcasts, to mollify Afghan mullahs, shame tactics to nudge out corrupt Iraqi cops. “In a counterinsurgency, your level of success is inversely proportional to the amount of lethal force that you expend,” lead social scientist Montgomery McFate told me earlier this year.

We can still destroy the forces of those that threaten us. We can even try to rebuild ancient civilizations in our own enlightened image. But if you mix black paint and white, the result is many different shades of gray.

How much of this can we take until we have become what we beheld?