The Rise of the Shadow Warriors

Jennifer D. Kibbe

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004

Summary:  U.S. special forces are enjoying unprecedented fame--and not just thanks to their exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wants to use them for secret antiterror missions around the globe. But that could endanger all Americans in uniform and let the Pentagon run covert operations without proper oversight. Congress must ensure that someone guards the guardians.

Jennifer Kibbe is an Olin Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

AFTER IRAQ

The recent war in Iraq was, among other things, a powerful advertisement for the effectiveness of the United States' storied special operations forces. Americans are just now learning what role these commandos played in the conflict, but already it has emerged that, during the early days of the fighting, they managed to secure crucial airfields in western Iraq, protect the country's oil fields from saboteurs (fewer than 10 Iraqi oil fields were ignited, compared to the more than 700 Kuwaiti fields that were set ablaze in 1991), and, most famously, rescue Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital.

Yet these achievements, although impressive, do not fully explain the unprecedented prominence currently enjoyed by special operations forces within the U.S. military. True, such troops may have been well suited to the kind of missions they were given in Iraq. But they also happen to fit precisely into the model of a leaner, more flexible military that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is fighting to create at the Pentagon. And Rumsfeld has made no secret of his plans to thrust special forces into the lead role in the war on terrorism, by using them for covert operations around the globe.

The special forces' success in Iraq has also obscured a more ominous consequence of their newfound popularity: that expanding their role in the way Rumsfeld intends could be very dangerous for U.S. foreign policy. Thanks to the vagueness of U.S. law governing covert action, using the military for such operations is -- at least under one interpretation of the law -- much easier than using the CIA. And this facility seems to appeal to Rumsfeld. It also means, however, that the Defense Department (at least according to its interpretation of the law) can conduct covert operations abroad without local governments' permission and with little or no congressional oversight or recourse. If Rumsfeld gets his way, administration hawks may soon start using special forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington's hit list -- without the sort of crucial public debate that preceded the war in Iraq.

COVERT CONTROVERSY

"Covert action" is defined by U.S. law as activity meant "to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly." Covert actions are thus distinct from clandestine missions: whereas the term "clandestine" refers to the secrecy of the operation itself, "covert" refers to the secrecy of its sponsor; the action itself may or may not be secret. An operation conducted secretly in order to preserve tactical surprise, but then acknowledged by U.S. officials after the fact, would not be considered covert.

Covert operations are thus rooted in the notion of deniability. But deniability, although it can be very useful, is also highly problematic for democracies, since deniable policies by definition lack the kind of accountability democracy requires. Because covert operations are hidden from the public, neither the thinking behind such missions nor their consequences can be publicly debated. Yet the sorts of operations that tend to be conducted covertly -- namely, those that are risky or otherwise problematic -- are the very ones that would benefit the most from open discussion. When they are conducted secretly instead, the results can be embarrassing -- or worse, as with the Bay of Pigs or the capture of a CIA pilot helping rebels in Indonesia in 1958. Deniability can also be used to mask an abuse of government power, such as when the director of central intelligence (DCI), William Casey, and the National Security Council's Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the Iran-contra operation out of the White House in the early 1980s.

In addition, covert action can have dangerous repercussions outside the country. Such operations require sending U.S. agents into foreign countries without the permission of local governments. If the agents' identities are discovered, this can cause enormous policy problems for Washington, whether the local government is an ally or an enemy. The target country could become less willing to cooperate with the United States or could attempt reprisals of a similar nature.

More broadly, covert actions undermine Washington's reputation and credibility in the international community. The Bush administration has denounced other governments for infringing on the sovereignty of third parties: in mid-2002, for example, when Russian attack helicopters and fighter planes chased Chechen rebels over the Georgian border without first getting Tbilisi's permission, a senior U.S. official complained that Moscow "can't just violate [Georgians'] sovereignty. You have to work with them." For the United States to turn around and do the same thing in a different country would set a troubling precedent, undermining Washington's trustworthiness and its supposed commitment to the inviolability of national borders.