Professionalized Violence

Many of the entries that follow in this thread are previews of a greater work which I have set myself to. I do not claim to be any noteworthy scholar, or a profound theorist on complex socio-political problems. I am no Samuel Huntingon, no Francis Fukuyama, no Robert Kaplan or David Halberstam. This work is a result of my profound respect and admiration for the former of that group, and his seminal work “The Soldier and The State,” first published in 1957.

The world for which Huntington wrote that work was, to oversimplify, different from the world we live in today. That is the nature of global affairs: what is timely and novel today becomes history by this evening’s breaking news. Tomorrow is so far in the future that forecast and prognostication is folly – we’re going to be half-right and half-wildly off the mark no matter what we predict as policy experts.

If the last decade of global and domestic events has shown us anything, it is that we are dreadfully incapable of predicting outcomes. That the speed of events which transpire at the policy level move incredibly fast, and ponderously unadapted. But that which constitutes trust between a nation’s people and its institutions also remains laborious and slow affair; those pillars of a law-abiding and free society remain sacrosanct.

Huntington’s work proved to be one of, arguably, the most profound and insightful analyses of a heretofore unexplored topic in public discourse. Even the treatises on grand warfighting theory seldom incorporate the concept of the relationship between the soldier and the state itself. Instead, those grand works featured in the academic publishing mediums of august institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and Harvard seek to examine the minutiae of polity decision-making, resource allocation, technological revolution, ecological and environmental components and their influence on the state’s war machine.

Only Huntington, however, sought to codify the unique and delicate relationship between those who professionalized violence – a key concept which we struggle to accept in this modern, comfort-driven society – and those who dictate its use as our elected leaders (and the appointed aids who help shape their policies).

I have no particular political bent in writing this work. I am not registered for either side of the American uniparty that has come to dominate our political system. My critiques and commendations that follow are academic, with the explicit intent of being ruthless and objective against all sides. This is to omit any political spectrum leaning, as doing so undermines the credibility of any criticism. Even if such analysis is accurate and valid from along the spectrum, personal inclination obscures the truth.

I write this work from a perspective that is both soft-spoken and poorly represented in political commentary: the warfighter veteran with an explicit interest in, and commitment to, history and storytelling. There is an inherent qualifier to note here: there is no shortage of veteran-turned-storytellers, who record stories via podcast and memoir of their own and others’ experiences. The difference lies in the intent of the material as it is captured. The podcast phenomenon has proven to be a volatile, boom-or-bust path to fame (or notoriety), some fortune, and certainly, influence on public narrative. But the unfortunate truth is that, inevitably, subjective narratives shape those captured stories, and therein such captured events cease to be historical record and instead, they become punditry.

This work is not punditry. In my attempt to honor and remind modern readers of the genius of Samuel Huntington’s great work. I aim to record in harsh and unfiltered prose, the changes of our modern world and the impact those changes have had on the civil-military dynamic. Further, I aim to summarize in useful detail the necessary adaptations to that dynamic to strengthen and solidify that pillar against erosion. The relationship between a state and its professionals of violence (a term to be ad nauseum here, prepare yourself), is sacred. Sacred relationship is another term I will use on repeat to emphasize its centrality to the work.

Prior to this work, I spent nearly seven years recording, compiling, and writing four separate historical volumes on America’s longest war. The first, Visual Friendlies, Tally Target, was a trilogy which focused on a very narrow perspective of the Global War on Terror; that perspective being the recollections and experiences of the men who controlled close air support from the front lines of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond over the course of twenty years. This small group of specialists would be formally known as Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTAC), or more broadly referred to as Forward Air Controllers (FAC). My credibility to write such an ambitious and nuanced work stems from my time in the Air Force as one of those forward air controllers. I deployed many times, called in many airstrikes, and spent time in those three sovereign states fighting in a war against an ideology, that being violent extremism. Following the completion of Visual Friendlies, I was privileged with the opportunity to write an official history for the U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command (AFSOC), titled Silent Professionals. The work cataloged the evolution of the command’s Special Tactics enterprise, the Air Force’s most elite special operators. That work, a single, behemoth tome nearly equal to my first trilogy, similarly followed the GWOT timeline, and captured the unbelievable heroism of those men and women who were the very first to enter the Afghan theater in October 2001, and were among the very last to leave in August 2021, capturing as much as possible in between. I’ll note, humbly, that I spent the preponderance of my own Air Force career as a JTAC in the Special Tactics enterprise. (As of this writing, Visual Friendlies Vol. iii and Silent Professionals both have an expected release timeframe of Summer 2027).

I don’t intend to laud myself or make an appeal to authority argument to justify this work by including the above paragraph in preface. I provide this context for one simple reason: the commentary in this project is indeed influenced by my own experience as a warfighter, whose formative years were shaped by the experience of the Global War on Terror. I could have stayed in service far longer than I did, but chose, after the diverse experiences I endured while in uniform, to extrapolate those lessons learned and experiences into policy discourse with one aim: accountability for the American body politic and its methods of leading our warfighting forces.

Better writers than I have captured the experiences of the GWOT generation and their work has made for much more entertaining prose. But my first two literary undertakings uncovered something profound which, I believe, was heretofore uncaptured in any summary analysis of that long war: the warfighters knew that the grand strategy (whatever it was), was fundamentally flawed. It lacked the ways and means to achieve any grandiose end state. It had no end state, which was the inherent flaw to any grand strategy. It failed to account for, or understand, that American political objectives were incompatible with the societal arenas in which the GWOT took place. The tribalism of Afghanistan was fundamentally incapable of assimilating export Jeffersonian democracy, and only after a decade did the notion of “Afghan-good enough” even emerge as an operational moniker. That strategic shift too was under supported, poorly contrived, and doomed to fail.

In Iraq, fundamentally flawed reasoning drove the fateful and errant decision to invade, when in late 2002, Afghanistan was on the verge of total pacification and wholesale defeat of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and abundant hope had in fact swept across Afghanistan and its people. My investigations and research show that, no sooner had the Taliban been routed and Al Qaeda been handed an overwhelming blow than American military planners had already begun husbanding forces for Iraq in mid-2002. How different could American foreign policy and grand strategy, indeed, its world presence be now, had Afghanistan, nearly thirty years later, emerged as a stable, peaceful, prosperous reprisal of the nations America had defeated in World War II and Korea? Imagine the promise of a stalwart ally in Afghanistan, able to balance power with Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan, had America stayed the course in Afghanistan without its wayward foray into the Levant? Afghanistan would not have been a copy and paste of Americanism in Central Asia, but much like Germany, Japan, and South Korea, it certainly could have forged its own path to legitimacy and stability had American warfighting success been successfully exploited, and a long-term security plan been applied to the state of affairs. Afghanistan gets many comparisons to our wayward expedition to Vietnam, but those are short-sighted and inadequately founded. Afghanistan was its own beast, and could have been its own success, had military planners and grand strategy scholars recognized the pivotal moment that America had reached in the aftermath of September 11th and the ensuing (legitimate and credible) invasion of Afghanistan. It would have taken a generation to assist Kabul in rebuilding Afghanistan into a stable bastion of self-determination, but because of the abuse of the sacred relationship between the American polity and the military, we’ll never know what could have been.

It was not to be. Following a thunder run to Baghdad and the overthrow of the Hussein regime, American transitional powers dismantled what remained of the Iraqi state, failing to grasp that, again, an ancient culture and society was not compatible with the liberalized democratic ideals upon which American was built and evolved in its own unique way. The ensuing years featured sectarian violence, poor decisions, surges, contractions, casual handover of security responsibilities, withdrawals, then a return of American forces when a particularly violent brand of extremism – one born in the heart of one of the war’s greatest controversies – arose to destabilize the Levant.

Combined, Afghanistan and Iraq showcased the tragedy of inept strategy, ineffectual military stewardship, and the deterioration of the sacred relationship between policy makers and violence professionals. The American military and its coalition partners who closely partook in these affairs had every technical, logistical, and scale advantage. However, the legitimacy of the endeavor was undermined by failed political process. While I set out to write, in total, four books on America’s elite special operators and their use of air power as the pivotal tool of the post-9/11 wars, that strategy dissertation would emerge in this final finding: that no amount of tactical prowess, technological primacy, wholesale commitment to service and country by its warfighters, could overcome the ineptitude of the policy process.

The original theory that serves as the source code for this work is one that I call “The Ghost of GWOT.” In 2023, I wrote an article with that same title for the Modern War Institute at West Point, pointing to the generational nature of societal fatigue which informed a complex of problems affecting American military recruiting numbers. The social malaise of the post-9/11 wars has often, irreverently been compared to that of the Vietnam War, which again, is low-hanging fruit and lazy comparative analysis. These were two vastly different epochs in American social, geopolitical, and strategic history. Vietnam was stigmatized by the Cold War abroad, while the civil rights movement began to finally force America to face its own cultural shortcomings domestically. Afghanistan (the lone enduring facet of the post-9/11 wars) was the perpetual backdrop to a changing world where great powers re-asserted themselves in the internet age and indeed, social energy shifted, albeit as a more nationalist rebuke to a globalized society writ large. Returning to the “Ghost of GWOT” theory, these changing global norms impacted a tired generation of Americans – because indeed, sons and daughters of Afghanistan invasion veterans would serve in Afghanistan itself two decades later – failed to see the viability of military service after two decades of watching blood and treasure being spent in the graveyard of empires.

In the original thesis, I argued that the opening segment of the GWOT proffered the American body politic a line of credit, “social capital,” based on the unifying power of the September 11th crisis. That national emergency brought Americans together, spurred a call to service, and enabled the political machine to employ the war machine as a matter of course. The Iraq folly would stretch that social capital to its spending limit, only to become overborrowed as the years, surges, incoherent continuations, and casualty lists of American sons and daughters passed by.

Spending this social capital was not exclusive to one administration or political party. The George W. Bush White House was handed the tragic and terrible burden of the first crisis, and with it that opening line of American public credit, spending it in a rightful cause to invade Afghanistan to seek retribution for September 11th, followed by the Iraq detour. The Obama campaign ran on a pledge to end the war in Iraq, eventually keeping his promise near the end of his first term. But the drone wars phenomenon started by the Bush administration’s use of military power grew exponentially under Obama. Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign also ran on promises to end forever wars and avoid the mistakes of its predecessors, who were lambasted for their seeming lack of grand leader acumen and nose to strategic opportunities. The first Trump term saw more troops sent to Afghanistan, an expansion of the post-9/11 campaign to retake Iraq (originally a smaller scale operation begun under Obama) and defeat the Islamic State in Syria, more drone wars, and, like Obama, an eventual agreement at the end of his first term to finally depart Afghanistan.

While deployed in 2019, I was on a small special operations team in the Afghanistan hinterlands, when a visiting delegation of senior leaders arrived at our outstation. The principal of that group asked the team what direction the war should take as it appeared the end might be approaching. My Ranger counterparts offered various tactical solutions, as well as commentary on the need to alleviate restrictions in the rules of engagement (more on those later in this work) and holding neighboring actors (chiefly Pakistan) accountable for aiding and abetting our adversaries. My answer, as a then-international relations undergraduate student and having deployed to Afghanistan multiple times at that point (after having fought ISIS in Syria in 2017), was more deliberate: there were two off-ramps in the war in Afghanistan, and we [the United States] missed both of them. The first was when we had overthrown the Taliban and routed Al Qaeda early on, in which case, the Afghan people could have determined their own future, with our long-term assistance. The second missed off-ramp was on May 2, 2011, when the body of Osama Bin Laden was being brought back to Afghan soil by a daring group of other special operators, at which point, the American policy mandate of “mission accomplished” could have been presented to the American people, and a steady, deliberate withdrawal could have ensured, so that American strategic interests elsewhere could have been addressed. I closed my commentary by asserting that no good options remained, save a necessary withdrawal that was going to be uncertain, but messy. Now, knowing how the story ended, it seemed like I was prescient. I wasn’t. I was embittered by having spent my young adulthood in a war whose strategic objectives were things I could not grasp, where my sole motivation for deploying over and over again was to ensure my teammates came back in one piece and still breathing. That motive lever was largely all that remained across the preponderance of American personnel who lived entire second lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

The social capital had run out within American society, yet that card was still getting swiped by the American polity, an account negligently overdrawn. The Ghost of GWOT haunts far more than recruiting offices, as I originally wrote and theorized. Today, it haunts the sacred relationship between the triumvirate of the American people, the state, and the professionals of violence who safeguard it.

And so withered the sacred relationship between the military and the political hierarchy upon which American public faith and trust depends. Out of that transitional epoch of global events, America limped out of the post-9/11 wars into a world where its primacy is not merely vulnerable but doubted by the rest of the world. The sacred relationship of which Huntington’s work spoke was a key pillar in American legitimacy abroad. The post-9/11 wars cracked those foundations.

At the time of this writing, the United States has been engaged in Operation EPIC FURY, a war-not-war with Iran, over the span of nearly a year. At least a dozen servicemembers have died because of this action, although the exact numbers were in dispute as the Department of War was neither forthcoming about both the total number of deaths, their causes, and indeed the time and place of their deaths. Reporting explicit operational details of service members killed in action is standard practice, withholding the simple fact of their deaths, as well as total casualty numbers, is merely another mechanism of distrust between the public and the military it protects.

I consider myself no expert in political theory, nor do I rate myself highly as a historiographer. But I do adhere to one ethos: that the lessons learned by those who must carry out the policy decisions must ring louder and clearer with each passing year. These serve as the litmus test for legitimacy in the use of professional violence. These voices must be presented through the lens of history, not as commentary, but as feedback in a cycle of policy admission of error and redress for the future.

I am no Samuel Huntington; even my ego isn’t that inflated after years skirting through the policy wonk ecosystem. Like Huntington, however, I would argue that I do write through the prism of history. Whatever critiques that follow in this work, I purport to write them with history’s voice, my personal opinions carrying little weight. I wrote this book to remind Americans, civilian and servicemember alike, that those who are born and live in this great nation bear responsibility for holding our elected officials accountable to the people. That the military in which so much trust is placed must bear its burden of violence responsibly and ethically, and they must understand their charter as professionals of violence, not merely act to as ordered. Our failure to do so erodes this fundamental pillar of democracy.