The Exit Strategy Delusion

Gideon Rose

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1998

Summary:  Despite disagreements over troops in Bosnia, all sides want an exit strategy. That concept, however, dating back only to the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, has nothing to do with military requirements and everything to do with post-Cold War politics. Exit strategies harm a mission's chances of success, and had they been required the United States would not have defended the armistice after the Korean War, kept the peace on the Sinai Peninsula after Camp David, or undertaken NATO. The real question is not when American troops will be out, but why they are going in.

Gideon Rose is Deputy Director of National Security Studies and Olin Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director of the Council's Henry A. Kissinger Study Group on Exit Strategies and American Foreign Policy.

By emphasizing lockstep adherence to original plans and precise cost and time estimates, the idea of an exit strategy contributes to a false notion that military interventions are mechanical tasks like building a new kitchen, rather than strategic contests marked by friction and uncertainty. The military interventions under discussion these days may not resemble standard conventional wars, but the more ambitious ones are nevertheless marked by potentially hostile environments and the threat or use of force by all parties. In such situations it is absurd to bind U.S. forces to a fixed timetable or demand guaranteed outcomes as a precondition for action.

By emphasizing the public aspects of intervention planning, exit strategies elevate broad short-term popular approval above all else, including operational effectiveness. For most military interventions, to publicize whatever exit strategy one does have is to provide a how-to manual for any local actor seeking to play the spoiler. Trumpeting advance plans for withdrawal may ensure that the American public can control the actions of its government. But it does so at the expense of hampering the government's ability to respond flexibly to the situation that prompted the intervention in the first place.

THE LONG HAUL

Depending on the interests involved and the relative merits of other policy options, it sometimes makes sense to deploy troops when there is no realistic prospect of bringing them home soon. Two of many potential current examples are the deployments in the Persian Gulf and the Sinai Peninsula. In the Gulf, the United States maintains a large military presence in order to contain Iraq, enforce the post-Gulf War sanctions, and preserve stability in a region of vital interest. This commitment is very expensive, unpleasant for all of the American forces, and fatal for some, like those killed in the 1996 bombing of an American barracks in Saudi Arabia. When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has acted up, the United States has rushed still more troops to the region to make him back down, or struck at targets within his territory. Future Iraqi provocations might call for a truly serious military response, which would mean risking the lives of American aircrews and perhaps others.

Yet there is no exit strategy in the Gulf. Nobody knows how long the deployment will last. (A similar force has been in South Korea more than four decades.) Nevertheless, the deployment makes sense because the alternatives are worse. Diplomacy or economic sanctions by themselves, not backed up by credible military threats, will not keep Iraq contained. Trying to finish the job by eliminating Saddam seems attractive to some, but the United States has no idea how to do it at a reasonable cost. And eschewing responsibility for Gulf security by withdrawing U.S. forces would leave Saddam unconstrained and the weak, oil-rich states of the Gulf Cooperation Council vulnerable to their predatory neighbors.

Meanwhile, in the Sinai Peninsula, a few American troops help implement the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as part of the Multinational Force and Observers. They have been there since 1982, participating in a traditional peacekeeping mission separating two former enemies and policing the border between them. And they will likely stay there for years to come. Yet most agree that this mission makes a great deal of sense. There are few risks to these soldiers save sunstroke, and the deployment does not cost much, especially when compared with the benefits it provides to an important region where no new headaches are needed.

The point of these examples is not that American troops should regularly be sent abroad and left there, but rather that U.S. interventions need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. In Bosnia and elsewhere, the main factors to consider are the importance of U.S. interests and the relative merits and costs of different ways of advancing them. Such analysis is not made easier by a slogan that preempts it by definition.

REACHING THE END STATE

If the United States is not willing to stay for the long haul, a critical concern in intervention planning must be how to lock in success after a mission's initial operations are finished, which is what many exit strategy devotees have in mind. This should not really be thought of as "exiting," but as "transitioning." The latter term focuses attention not simply on how to bring U.S. troops home but on how to move smoothly from the intervention's final operations to what the military calls an "end state." As those in Congress who wanted to arm the Bosnian Muslims correctly argued, some kind of order must be left behind to prevent an intervention's accomplishments from fading away. Preparations for that order should be part of the original mission.

One reason transition planning has been neglected is that it is often devilishly complex, requiring a linkage between what Clausewitz called the "grammar" of military operations and the "logic" of political objectives. Another reason lies in the temperament of political leaders, who generally like to improvise and delay decisions until the last moment so as to retain maximum flexibility-ignoring the fact that postponing choices often generates more constraints. Still another reason for the neglect stems from policymakers' frequent overemphasis on the immediate negative possibilities of an intervention rather than the benefits over the longer term.