Every mission has a cost
When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
On this Thanksgiving weekend, our thoughts turn to the men and women of the armed services who are on deployment—at home and abroad. May your leaders be blessed with wisdom and integrity.
He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.
- CIA Director William Casey, referring to Panamanian dictator Noriega
When we research a military action for a novel, we have two go-to sources: war games and history.
War games
Military planners, think tanks and the like use structured role-playing scenarios to test out what might happen in a real-life conflict. Under varying initial conditions, each side gets to take turns and implement a strategy to “win.” (Yes, the air-quotes are intended as a commentary on the futility of war.)
In this century, there is no future conflict more gamed out than the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. When we wrote Counter Strike, our fictional version of this war scenario, we didn’t just make stuff up, we looked at these wargames. [OK, actually, we did make a lot of stuff up, but our point still stands.]
This article from Breaking Defense goes into detail about 22 different Taiwan-China scenarios that the Center for Strategic and International Studies has run in recent years. Any way you game out a Taiwan invasion, if the United States intervenes, it will be a “bloody mess” for both sides.
How bad could it get?
During the first two weeks of a conflict that played out during the game, the United States lost an aircraft carrier, 10 destroyers, half a dozen subs, and scores of aircraft, in addition to the deaths of thousands of American troops.
In other words, every bit as bad as we showed in Counter Strike.
The article also makes the point that the “US would prevail in defending Taiwan from China, but at a heavy cost that would leave it ill-prepared for new threats from Russia or Iran.”
That premise is baked into the Command and Control series. The United States and our allies are not up against a single enemy in the next global conflict. While Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, fill-in-the-blank country are not necessarily working together for the same nationalistic ends, they are all swimming in the same direction.
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
[Winston Churchill paraphrased from philosopher George Santayana.]
Our other source is history. We often cite Operation Ivy Bells as the template for the undersea cable tapping operation in Command and Control, for example.
There’s another operation in Command and Control that has gotten a ton of recent press and has historical roots: the ill-fated US invasion of Venezuela.
If you’re just tuning in, here’s the set-up for Command and Control.
The newly elected US President faces a series of regional crises popping up all over the globe. Iran, India-Pakistan, the Middle East, Venezuela…is any of this sounding familiar?
The new administration responds to the best of its ability. Our characters are human. They make some good calls, and they make some mistakes. (Venezuela, we should note, was a massive unforced error on the part of our fictional President.)
Still, the net effect is that the US military and diplomatic corps get distracted and stretched to the point of ineffectiveness.
What the new President fails to see--until it’s too late--is that he’s being played. The whole series of crises is a trap designed to weaken US power and influence when it is needed the most.
Wait… the US invaded Panama?
Most Americans don’t even recall that the US invaded Panama in December 1989 to depose drug kingpin/dictator Manuel Noriega.
[Side note: They also don’t remember that Noriega was largely put in place by the CIA. Hence the “bastard” quote at the top of the post.]
As this article, The Model for a US Military Intervention in Venezuela, points out, the initial conditions of the 1989 Panama crisis feel eerily similar to the Venezuela situation today.
President [GHW] Bush saw the situation as an opportunity to reassert American power abroad after the demoralizing experience of the Vietnam War. In Noriega, he saw an increasingly anti-American drug runner who threatened not only democracy in Panama, but the stability of the region.
Historically, this military intervention was considered a success--the fact that we don’t talk about it much supports that assertion—but why?
The mission was successful because it had a narrow, clear objective and the U.S. deployed overwhelming force to achieve it… American forces in Panama had an achievable goal — arrest Noriega and bring him back to the U.S. for trial. (emphasis added)
That model of overwhelming force and clear, attainable objectives was deployed by the same President Bush in 1991 during the first Gulf War.
President Bush set a clear, measurable goal—pushing Iraq out of Kuwait—and stuck with it, resisting the temptation to go to Baghdad as U.S. forces routed the Iraqi military.
But just because it worked then doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work always—especially when you don’t stick to the formula. The other President Bush tried to use the Panama model in Afghanistan and Iraq with less success.
After 9/11, Bush’s son, George W. Bush, dispatched American forces to the Middle East, specifically to Afghanistan and later Iraq. Yet, unlike his father, who had clear, narrow war aims, he embraced murkier goals that demanded larger, more longer-term military efforts. The result proved disastrous.
And that brings us back to Venezuela…
As we write this, one-seventh of the US Navy ships are deployed to the Caribbean, seemingly in support of a potential military operation in Venezuela. Combined with air and ground assets, that means the overwhelming force side of the equation is in place.
But what about the “clear, attainable objective” part?
In our novel Command and Control, our fictional President was in a similar state: heavy on military firepower, light on objectives. He chose to go ahead with the military operation, largely for domestic political reasons. (In our case, it was fulfilling a campaign promise.)
He paid a price…Well, not really, come to think of it.
The ones paying the price were the US servicemembers placed in harm’s way.
Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Veterans Day—check three boxes in one gift
Forget socks. Forget candles. Let’s take your gifting game to the next level.
This holiday, give a book signed by two authors, with an inscription personalized for the recipient.
You can’t buy that on Amazon.
We don’t have a fancy-schmancy store on our website, but you can still order signed books direct from us. Sure, it’s a little more work for both of us, but this juice is worth the squeeze.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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Keep up the great work, Navy Guys! I look forward to your insightful explanations of the current geopolitical situation and of course I always look forward to your next action novel.