I tried to take off my DC defense wonk hat when I saw The Hurt Locker. I sat down in front of the TV determined to just enjoy the story about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team at work in Iraq.
But I couldn't.
I know that this movie has been criticized by those who have served in the military. But beyond tactical accuracy and beyond its pure entertainment value, this film is significant. Its popularity is important. It is a story of change -- and its policy implications might determine our national security strategy for a generation. IEDs are our future, along with other forms of broadly distributed access to violence. Smart personnel working together are the solution. The question for the rest of us is whether or not our elected leaders will confront these sorts of threats with new ideas, new policies, and new spending priorities.
I once heard a lecture where a warrior was described as someone who goes away from the tribe, has a dramatic experience -- and then comes back to tell a story of change.
Thousands of Americans have been deployed to fight America's battles over the past twenty years. The end of the Cold War in 1991 was a seminal moment that went strangely unremarked in American domestic politics and policymaking. Indeed, we still fund a national security strategy that is better prepared to take on Napoleon than Bin Laden. Yet our military -- and our non-uniformed public servants -- have been out there in the world rehearsing lessons for the rest of the us this entire time.
How will we hear their story? This question is vital. Our president continually puts forward a soaring vision -- where the US has a new and different presence in the world. It should follow that today's security policies must move beyond the belief in threat containment and toward actions that bring us credible influence. Many who serve can corroborate this vision with their own personal experiences. Check out any number of military blogs. Our uniformed personnel are helping organize entire communities around peaceful activities. They know that, in today's battles, the more people you kill, the faster you lose. Today power is less about dominance and more about the ability to influence change.
How do we translate this into a new national security strategy? Our Marines are building resilient communities -- this is the same principle needed for all kinds of modern threats, from Afghanistan to climate change to economic calamity: at the end of the day, these problems can't be solved by people in uniform. And our priorities are insane. We still spend upwards of $20 billion a year maintaining a nuclear weapons complex. Nuclear weapons were built for an era when we were all planning to die together. It was a doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction. Now that even the military agrees that we're all planning to live together, shouldn't we change our priorities?
Last fall, I attended the Army's big annual Expo. It was a beauty pageant for the defense industry. I walked the aisles looking for items that related to today's people-centered security needs. Amidst the tonnage of weapons systems, laser beam demos and dancing ladies in dirndls bearing pretzels (Oktoberfest), I found one vendor in a far-away corner selling IED detection devices. And it was a non-American company.
While I watched The Hurt Locker, I kept thinking of that Expo hall. The 2011 defense budget is now above 700 billion dollars. While I support a strong military, I have a nagging feeling that this onslaught of dollars just puts off our day of reckoning. We're still not making the hard choices that will shift our strategy away from coercion and toward persuasion, away from punishment and toward participation, away from containment and toward credibility. Putting the vast majority of the nation's discretionary dollars in the defense budget is not going to get us there. That's for sure.
Like in the movie, ideologically crazed or murderously pissed off people use whatever they can to wreak vengeance: car radios, cell phones, children. They will also put explosives in their pants on a flight to Detroit. These kinds of threats, ultimately, can't be contained by military might or machines. Like our protagonists James, Sanborn, and Eldridge, threats must be defeated by individuals relying on lessons learned, on patience and creative problem solving. How does this translate to a national strategy? Well, for starters we'll require far more subtle and persuasive ways to engage, prevent and build community. These are the stories our warriors can tell us. Hundreds and thousands of them.
Follow Lorelei Kelly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/loreleikelly
Attila Honey
Instead of counting our losses and admitting our error we just plod on as if these wars should be equated with doing something great, when they are not. Obviously our government learned NOTHING from the fiasco in Vietnam. People need to open their eyes and see that only the big corporate arms manufacturers and contractors are benefitting from these wars! The peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq don't want us in their countries, so the only viable solution is to GET THE HELL OUT!
It is time that the Military/Industrial Complex was brought to heel and the money being wasted be used for constructive purposes like rebuilding America's infrastructure and taking care of the REAL needs of the average American.
I do agree that we need to spend less and spend it smarter.
Thank you for taking the time to write this article. I really like it!
ECS
Policymakers should take lessons from a completely innacurate portrayal of war?
What "LESSONS" do you want them to draw from the film again?
"IMAGE" is everything?
substance is nothing?
And no amount of zealotry drivel will obfuscate that fact. We have run roughshod, over autonomous countries shoving our values down their throats, with the same sort of self righteousness you post your messages, waving the flag saying this is for their own good.
They need to embrace democracy, and they need education to do so, not a gun trained on their houses and children. Its not a military solution thats required.
You seem like the type who would punch a television set for not working.
The observation that at the Army Expo,there was a compete absence and silence of an American response to the dangers of IEDs tells us more than all the reports in Washington and their contained security agencies.
Our Military Commanders, the ones who spend the money so badly needed for social programs, are living in the past, not only fighting a cold war that is as extinct as dinosaurs, but who continue to oppose gay men and women serving openly, while still allowing them to kill and die with their dirty secrets.
Why do we do this with movies today? It's beyond stupid. A movie is just a movie--it is a work of art, weather high or low quality, usually fictional and always the product of the filmmaker(s) own imagination or personal worldview. Is anyone really stupid enough to allow a filmmaker's product to shape their opinions about anything? That is scary.
Our military and defense policy is still largely geared towards dealing with a HIC (high intensity conflict), force on force type of campagin. What we need to trasnsistion our defense structure to is one that focuses more on a COIN (couter insurgency) fight. By its very nature a COIN fight has a lot of nation building aspects to it. Neither a COIN fight or Nation building or things our military or this naiton like to do after our experainces in Vietnam and Somilia. Until we reshift or defense policy to face a more COIN fight as opposed to a HIC fight we will continue to waste billions on unneeded systems and training.
We have two reasons for the "waste" on antiguated strategies. The first is that in the back of many of our minds we see the potential for major force-on-force conflicts, perhaps in a country backed or invaded by Russia or China. If we downsized, and as a result were not a deterrent to such a hostile action and could not respond to it, who would then look the fool?
The second reason for waste is the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in the early 50's. Its big, it has lots of sway in the military, corporations, and elected officials. It will be tough to break them, but the growth of our information society makes it easier to identify and raise awareness of waste and misguided initiatives. We have to keep asking questions and demanding reductions in military spending. How many of us in the business world over the last ten years have been asked to do more with less budget and fewer employees? Most of us, and it forces you to improve focus and prioritize.
However, what keeps responsible defense thinkers, both military and civilian, awake at night is the different scale of consequences between mistakes made in the business world and the military. In business, if we get it wrong, there can be a lot of pain ... witness the fallout from the bankers' recent debacle ... but the Republic will survive. With the military, however, the consequences of wrong guesses ... in foregone capabilities, failure to recognize and pursue transformative technologies, misapplication of resources, inadequate resources, etc., ... can be quick and existential. Ask France in 1940. But if the U.S. were to go under in some future conflict, there would be no U.S. or Soviet Union to save our bacon, as we did jointly for the French.
Getting it right is made more difficult by service chiefs who lobby for their pet programs over what's best for the common defense, 1960's-spauned Democrat politicians who never saw a defense program they didn't want to cut ... unless it put jobs and dollars into their districts, and Republican politicians who never saw a defense program they didn't want to privatize so they can direct the dollars to their business cronies.