Restraint in the Use of Force

The danger of excessive force to military objectives is the most important of all lessons learned in legitimacy. Wherever excessive force has caused collateral damage or injury to innocent civilians the legitimacy of US military forces has been called into question.

Strategic restraint was a lesson learned in Vietnam. Painful experience there taught that the lack of restraint (or excessive force) can result in the loss of the public support required for military and political legitimacy, both at home and in the area of operations. A corollary lesson learned was that military victory achieved through superior military force can be irrelevant to political legitimacy.

'You know you never defeated us on the battlefield', said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. 'That may be so', he replied, 'but it is also irrelevant',¹⁰

The Weinberger Doctrine and PDD 25 confirm that combat force should be the military measure of last resort in peacetime, but that does not mean that all military capabilities should be a last resort in peacetime - that is, unless all military capabilities are combat forces.

While combat must remain the primary purpose of US military forces, it is not the only military capability. Combat support and service support forces provide the primary capabilities needed for non-combat operations other than war. If combat forces were the only military option there would be considerable danger that military force would be used inappropriately.

Non-combat operations other than war can extend US power beyond the limits of diplomacy but short of combat; they do not involve the US in a win-lose situation any more than other forms of foreign assistance.

Colonel Harry Summers has pointed out the danger of confusing operations other than war with warfighting. He argued that the 1968 version of FM 100-5 degraded US combat capabilities in Vietnam by confusing counter-insurgency and warfighting doctrine. Counterinsurgency was the Vietnam era equivalent of operations other than war, and represented a dramatic change in doctrine from the 1954 version of FM 100-5:

This change... stated that 'the fundamental purpose of US forces is to preserve, restore, or create an environment of order or stability within which the instrumentalities of government can function effectively under a code of laws'. We had come a long way from the pre-Vietnam war doctrine that called for 'the defeat of an enemy by application of military power directly or indirectly against the armed forces which support his political structure'.¹¹

Colonel Summers cited General Fred C. Weyand on the limitations of combat force to achieve political legitimacy:

But there are fundamental limitations on American military power... the Congress and the American people will not permit their military to take total control of another nation's political, economic, and social institutions in order to completely orchestrate the war... The failure to communicate these capabilities and limitations resulted in the military being called upon to perform political, economic, and social tasks beyond its capability while at the same time it was limited in its authority to accomplish those military tasks of which it was capable.¹²

Though skeptical of counter-insurgency doctrine in the context of Vietnam, Colonel Summers grudgingly acknowledged that even in Vietnam nation assistance was an appropriate strategy until President Johnson escalated the US role to warfighting:

Where did we go wrong? It can be argued that from the French withdrawal in 1954 until President Diem's assassination in 1963, the American response was essentially correct.

Colonel Summers and General Weyand may not have intended to support the strategic value of operations other than war, but they do make a good case for combat force being the military measure of last resort in peacetime. Neither argues against non-combat military capabilities; their point is that combat is the primary purpose of the armed forces and should not be denigrated by non-combat operations other than war.

Using their logic the US could and should have avoided the tragedy of Vietnam by reducing its commitments after 1963 rather than deploying combat forces. Until combat forces were introduced, Vietnam was not a win-lose proposition for the US; but when US combat forces became engaged it put America's prestige on the line, so that anything short of military victory was a defeat. Restraint at the strategic level requires that combat forces be the last resort; non-combat operations other than war can further US security objectives without the risk of a military defeat.

Issues of restraint and military legitimacy arose again following US interventions in Grenada (Urgent Fury) in 1983 and Panama (Just Cause) in 1989, with contrasting results. In Grenada military force was restrained and collateral damages minimal; there was widespread public support for the intervention and long-term political objectives have since been achieved. The same cannot be said for Panama. The short but violent combat phase was perceived as a success in the US, but the success of the civil-military operation which followed, Promote Liberty, remains in doubt; the 1994 elections restored Noriega's political party to power.

One study concluded that a lack of restraint jeopardized political objectives and legitimacy in Panama:

There is little dispute that General Thurman, CINCSOUTH, and his planners concentrated on winning the war and paid insufficient attention to what might be required to win the peace afterward.

Many Panamanians apparently agreed that Just Cause was a misnomer, and that excessive force was used to achieve the stated political objectives. This was reflected in a 1990 poll published in the Panamanian newspaper La Prenza which indicated that most felt the problems caused by the intervention outweighed its benefits. The president of the Panamanian Bar Association, Jose Alberto Alverez, may have captured the public sentiment:

Of Bush's objectives, only one was really achieved - getting rid of Manuel Noriega... (and) they could've captured him without an invasion, without destroying the country.¹⁵

Desert Storm followed Just Cause, and was even more destructive. But there was a critical distinction between the two: in Just Cause the support of the Panamanians was needed to achieve US political objectives; in Desert Storm the support of Iraqi civilians who bore the brunt of the destruction was not a US political objective. The primary political objective in Desert Storm was to restore Kuwait to the Kuwaitis.

Desert Storm was a war, albeit a short one, with different standards of military legitimacy. Civilians in Baghdad were perceived as the enemy, little different from those in Germany and Japan in the Second World War. This distinction explains the contrasting standards of restraint and also explains why Saddam Hussein remains in power.

The abortive US raid in Mogadishu in October 1993 was the most recent error in strategic restraint. Remembering President Johnson, who vowed he would not be the first president to suffer defeat and continued to escalate US military force in Vietnam after 1965, President Clinton did not hesitate to cut his losses and bring the troops home.

Operational restraint involves the use or weaponry; its standards are reflected in ROE which restrict lethal force to the minimum required to achieve military and political objectives. For operations other than war the standard for restraint is normally self-defense. But even the most carefully drawn ROE cannot resolve all the ambiguities for combat forces in contemporary conflict when combatants cannot be distinguished from non-combatants.

This was illustrated by the frustrations of Lieutenant Caputo recounted in Chapter 1. The ambiguity of the Vietnam conflict made it difficult, if not impossible, to make a distinction between combatant and non-combatant - the distinction upon which the legitimate use of lethal force in wartime depends, and a distinction lacking in operations other than war. In the face of such ethical ambiguity the massacre of My Lai should have been no surprise; nor the erosion of public support required to sustain US involvement.

Operation Restore Hope conducted in Somalia from December 1992 to May 1993 was the next extended US operation involving combat forces. The Marine Corps and Army forces involved exercised commendable restraint in complying with ROE which limited force to self-defense, but there were several incidents of excessive force that underscored the danger of using combat forces in operations other than war.¹⁶

Operational restraint goes beyond ROE. Again, Vietnam provided timeless lessons learned in legitimacy: any hope of public support there was compromised by the abusive way American soldiers and their South Vietnamese counterparts treated the populace:

... 1]Jt was obvious to even the rosiest fantasts that we couldn't win this war by simple force of arms, that the real battle was for the trust and loyalty of the common man. We knew this, but our anger and tear kept getting the better of us.

Restraint is even more important to the legitimacy of domestic military operations than those overseas, as evidenced by the tragic incident at Kent State University on 4 May 1970, and the public outrage that followed. For reasons still unclear (subsequent FBI investigations indicated the troops were in no danger), soldiers of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students during an anti-war demonstration. Of thirteen students hit four were killed - one of them a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadet.

The lessons of Kent State were not lost on members of the California National Guard who were activated during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Under stressful conditions they scrupulously complied with ROE which severely limited their use of lethal force. Of only 19 rounds fired during several weeks on duty, 18 were recovered. One person was killed, but clearly in self-defense.¹⁸