who blogs at Dirigo Blue and Kennebec Blues.
A New York Times article titled "Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces" was duly reported yesterday but there has been a dearth of online debate and comment on the proposal. The request came from Admiral McRaven who:
“…wants the authority to quickly move his units to potential hot spots without going through the standard Pentagon process governing overseas deployments. Historically, the deployment of American forces overseas began with a request from a global combatant commander that was processed through the military’s Joint Staff and placed before the defense secretary for approval, in a cautious and deliberate process.”
This proposal raises flags about transparent processes using full military command caution, the role of deliberation and consultation, and especially civilian control of the military having absolute primacy in the larger picture of our foreign policy.
We have become more and more prone in the last decade to accept expedient shortcuts whipped on by a sense of urgency over cautious deliberation tempered by careful evaluations of long-term outcomes of urgent priorities. The first approach is radical change that creates less certain outcomes while the latter considers the results of change as key factors.
Perhaps with more cautious deliberation we would have less intrusion in our civil liberties from the misguided Patriot Act and would not be executing United States citizens abroad without trial using drone weapons. While the counterclaim is that fast and nimble is absolutely needed in the never ending War on Terror, that point has never been proven as superior in outcome to what might be a more holistic enduring approach to answering the global forces that underpin terrorism.
In the long run it is also the slippery slope that we must contend with when changes unlikely to be reversed and likely to become permanent become our new present policy. What we need to realize is that no matter how understated or innocuous or servant to reasonable urgency change seems, it is not the new present paradigm that may be of most concern but the successor change possible in the next created paradigm because we have moved the unthinkable of today to the thinkable of tomorrow.
In a world where mining citizen data for clues about terror today, mining it for unpatriotic impulses reframed as traitorous tomorrow becomes more possible versus how society might view a direct leap from no data mining to full invasion of digital privacy to discover unpatriotic traitors. The same can be said for drones being able to deliver extrajudicial death sentences from above in Asia today as a basis for launching an “effective” weapon tomorrow to assist in border “security” in North America tomorrow. A slope’s slipperiness is a great enabler of downhill movement and contributor to misleading rationalization.
So we ought to be asking very pointedly what this concession to the mind of a military leader might lead to in the long run if we allow an ostensibly small ability to act without outside deliberation in deploying highly skilled squads that can execute rapid destructive, deadly, and disruptive actions to take place. Would the new norm create a worldview in which the next terror event within our borders, allow internal shadowy deployment of these forces? Would that successor paradigm create a worldview where limited marshal law decisions without civilian consultation under certain conditions would become thinkable? And under that perhaps not too distant then present paradigm, what might be the next steps on the slippery slope we do not imagine today?
Careful deliberation is hard work, due process takes much time, and imagining logical long term outcomes requires overcoming impulsive urgency but considerate caution tends to yield better decisions and allow us to stay true to our core societal and political structure values that will not reduce civil liberty.
“You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away.” - Paul Simon