The Casualty Myth - U.S. worried about military casualties

Mr. Foreman is a writer for the New York Post.

Something is clearly wrong when our closest allies in the Kosovo war look askance at our unwillingness to risk any casualties at all (as opposed to unnecessary ones) and our apparent desire to minimize casualties even among the enemy. Some of the British pilots flying out of Italy-and bear in mind it's only the RAF who have, at the time of writing, engaged in any low-level attacks on Serbian ethnic-cleansing forces-dismiss the desultory NATO air campaign as "nancying around." They see the high-altitude, minimum-risk, low-intensity strategy of the first three weeks as effeminate and useless, bordering on the cowardly. And indeed a campaign largely limited to cruise-missile strikes on empty offices, and high-altitude air raids with laser-guided bombs (that happen to require perfect, cloudless weather), has had no discernible effect on the enemy's ability or willingness to continue the brutalizing of Kosovo.

Within our own armed forces, there are those who wonder if the military hasn't learned lessons from the traumatizing political fallout of the Vietnam War a little too well. A senior U.S. officer teaching at an American staff college cites with some bitterness the recent mission statement of the Army's European Command, which holds that its primary objective is "To Protect and Take Care of the Force." He points out that "force protection" has become "an obsession" in the post-Cold War military, one that is damaging on many levels. This obsession is a mindset associated with Gen. Colin Powell and the doctrine that bears his name.

The most obvious problem with an exaggerated concern for casualties is the way it limits our military options and forces a reliance on high- tech, stand-off technology. But excessive emphasis on force protection also damages military morale and is a major reason for some of the difficulty the Army, Air Force, and Navy are having with recruiting and re-enlistment. (It's instructive that the Marine Corps, the one branch of the armed forces whose powerful internal culture precludes the embrace of such a doctrine, has no trouble getting young people to join up.) Soldiers assigned to Haiti complained that they spent so much time and energy keeping out of harm's way, they were able to accomplish much less than they would have.

Of course, it's easy for armchair strategists to fire off bloodthirsty rhetoric, urging folk in uniform to kill and die from the safety of our libraries. But the crippling caution displayed by the military in the Kosovo war has no precedent in American history and represents a creeping cultural shift that is exacerbated by the inability of successive administrations to lead rather than follow public opinion when it comes to applying force.

Where did this fearful culture come from? There is nothing in 200-plus years of U.S. military history to suggest that Americans are anything but brave and dauntless in war. And U.S. servicemen are no less so today than they have ever been. Yet something has changed, as is made clear by that European Command objective and by NATO's terror of taking risks that would have been quite normal in any previous war. Strangely enough, when the draft was in place, we were far less careful about the prospect of casualties. Now every tyrant in the world thinks he knows that if you kill a couple hundred or even 20 American troops, the rest of them will run away. Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, and Slobodan Milosevic himself have all cited the Mogadishu debacle in 1993 or the evacuation from Beirut as the key to understanding American foreign and military policy. And the caution shown by the U.S.-led allies presently confronting the Serbian dictator-in addition to being strategically disastrous-only strengthens the impression that Americans can dish it out (or at least send cruise missiles against "infrastructure" that may hit the wrong target) but not take it.

All armed forces absorb some of the values of the mainstream society. So it's not surprising that elements within the military-especially the senior brass who spend their lives among the country's political and media elites-have assimilated and internalized some of the utopian ways of thinking that make the United States a society increasingly ill prepared to use force in a rational, effective way.

It is partly a technological utopianism-the faith that our dazzling, expensive weapons systems have transformed warfare into something clean and safe and easy. And it is partly a semantic utopianism: the conviction that military force can be used to convey delicate shades of meaning to an enemy. This last dates back to Vietnam, when we began to believe that our power was so great that it could be used sparingly for psychological or political effect. It has a special appeal to sophisticated, secure societies where the subtle interpretation of symbols is part of daily life.

There is also a humanitarian utopianism at work here: the mistaken belief that war can achieve a humane and just goal without using evil and destructive means-or at least using less horrible means than were previously thought necessary. Hence the bombing of office buildings after due warning. NATO's leaders seem to think that we can win this war by damaging the equipment and "degrading the infrastructure" of the enemy. As if, once deprived of their headquarters and maybe some of their tanks, the Serbian troops and paramilitaries will get bored of murdering Albanians and just go home. While slaughter itself should of course not be our aim, if we are serious about stopping this ethnic cleansing we have to make it obvious that wearing the uniform of the Yugoslav army is mortally dangerous, and that the only guarantee of survival is desertion.