Secrecy and Trust in Time of War
Summary
Concern is rising in some circles about whether America's enemies are being helped by discussions of U.S. war plans and strategies in Afghanistan. Secrecy is certainly essential to any war- fighting effort. But as was seen in Vietnam, too much secrecy can eventually destroy public trust in the government and undermine the war effort.
Analysis
Surprise is the single most powerful tool in warfare. The essence of surprise is secrecy. It would therefore seem to follow that secrecy is the foundation of warfare.
The willingness of a soldier to place himself between home and war's desolation is the precondition of all war. That willingness is rooted in trust: the trust of the soldier, his family and his community that his death, should it occur, will not be in vain.
Secrecy and trust are at the center of a nation's ability to wage war. They also always exist in deep tension. Secrecy is designed to confuse the enemy, but it is impossible to keep secrets from the enemy without also maintaining secrecy in the military and army.
This imposes a burden on both soldiers and citizens, who must on faith accept that those executing the war are withholding truths -- and even telling some lies -- in order to bring victory closer. That is a profound level of trust that is difficult to achieve and even harder to retain.
The use of secrecy is obvious, and so is its abuse. On the lowest level, secrecy can be used to cover up the incompetence of commanders at all levels. After the Battle of Midway, the Japanese went to extremes to keep the truth of the catastrophe from leaking out even though the Americans knew precisely what had happened. Secrecy in this case was being used not to confuse the enemy but to keep the Japanese public from knowing how badly the country's command had failed.
We have already had a very minor taste of what can be called the petty abuse of secrecy in Afghanistan. The first commando raids by U.S. Special Forces in Kandahar were represented initially as fairly successful. Later reports, particularly by Seymour Hirsch writing in the New Yorker, revealed without much contradiction from the Pentagon that the raids were in fact failures, causing some casualties on our side and achieving few of the objectives.
Now this by itself is a wholly trivial matter. The United States was hurled into this war fairly unprepared. It is deploying troops, many of whom have never been in combat, to unknown terrain against an unknown enemy. Failures are to be expected. In fact, they are altogether inevitable.
It will be many months before forces are acclimated to Afghanistan, and there will be a price to pay in lives and limbs. Hirsch's "revelations" are minor except that the Pentagon left it to someone like him to reveal things that it should have readily revealed earlier.
There was no possible justification for the secrecy. The mission was already over. The enemy knew what had happened because they were there. The only reason to keep the details under wraps was to keep the American public, and perhaps the armed forces, from having their confidence in U.S. forces shaken. But the very thing the Pentagon wanted to avoid -- unease in the American public -- is precisely what its decision engendered.
This points to deeper problems inherent in secrecy. Consider the "secret" bombing of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which were no secret to the communists. They knew they were being bombed, and they were pretty sure it was the Americans doing it. Why keep it a secret?
In that case, the United States had constraints placed on it by coalition partners who, while not contributing much to the war effort, were still in a position to demand that the United States not "widen" the war. The fact that the communists had already widened the war was irrelevant. Rather than facing coalition partners and Congress directly, the administration only furtively acted upon military necessity, as if the United States were ashamed of what it was doing. In the end, the government's sense of shame became universal.
The danger of coalition warfare is that partners will demand you not do things you absolutely have to do. This is acceptable if the coalition partner is carrying a major burden, but many partners in Afghanistan are doing little or nothing. They are there as window dressing: to show an indifferent world that the United States has global support.
But this window dressing is costly. The United States at times will refrain from doing what is necessary. In other cases, it will act in secret. Such secrecy not only will undermine trust but also will spread a sense of shame that will undermine confidence.
Keeping mistakes from the public is bad. Operating a war based on plausible deniability is worse. But the worst use of secrecy is one that tries to hide the broadest outlines of strategy from the public, because such outlines cannot be hidden.
During World War II, a conflict with extremely strict standards of secrecy, it was absolutely no mystery to anyone that the United States was engaged in a massive buildup in Great Britain and that the purpose of the buildup was an invasion of France along the channel coast.
There was no attempt to hide what could not have been hidden. Effort went into keeping the precise timing and location of the invasion quiet, but Hitler knew that if it wasn't going to be in Calais it would be in Normandy. Anyone who had a map would know this, too, and anyone who knew something about allied airborne capabilities, the requirements of amphibious warfare and so on would have a pretty good idea of some of the likely dates of an invasion.
The military made no attempt to hide the obvious and instead focused its "bodyguard of lies" around things that could genuinely be left in doubt. This had two consequences. First, it confused the Germans. Second, it built substantial confidence among the public that the military had a plan that was being executed.
Trust requires that the soldier or the public has confidence that its leaders have a plan. It is not enough merely to assert there is a plan, which is one of the things Vietnam showed. Over time, it became clear the military did not have anything more than an operational war plan. It knew how to force and win engagements, but it did not know how these various engagements would be turned into a military victory. Trust in the military eroded because there was no strategy for winning the war.
In Afghanistan, it is essential that the U.S. government and military articulate a winning strategy. No matter what such a plan entails, the broad outline of it cannot be kept from the public. And, regardless, it will not be a secret to the enemy.
One of the most insidious arguments in favor of gratuitous secrecy is the claim that the enemy would discover the U.S. military's plans. The Taliban has been fighting in Afghanistan much longer than the United States. They have fought against other Afghan groups. They have participated in the war against Russia. They understand their terrain, and they understand the principles of war. They also understand the potential axes of attack at least as well as Pentagon planners.
They know what forces the United States has deployed in Pakistan or Uzbekistan because they have sympathizers everywhere and have constructed a working intelligence service built around human intelligence. That means they know how many U.S. troops have deployed to the theater. They also know how far helicopters can fly and how they can be shot down.
Americans have a terrible and costly tendency to underestimate their enemies. They genuinely believe the plans they have devised would never occur to the enemy. Quite the opposite is true. Each of the war options the United States is now examining has already been carefully considered by the Taliban, which has contingency plans for dealing with them.
This does not mean they cannot be defeated. Germany was defeated in two wars despite superb planning and scenario building. But it does mean that, if you assume your enemy is not a blithering idiot, it is possible to discuss options publicly without giving away any advantage.
There is no question secrecy is essential to a war-fighting system. But so is trust. On multiple levels, secrecy can undermine trust. It can lead to covering up incompetence; it can lead to lying in order to keep allies or legislators happy; it can lead to a sense that the government and military leadership are clueless as to what they are doing. For a man or woman going into harm's way, all of this is dangerous.
High-level discussions of strategy do not give away secrets to a competent enemy. Rather, they build an understanding of war aims and options and what certain actions might mean. They allow the public, and the military itself, to measure progress and gauge the level of patience that will be required in the war. There was tremendous public discussion of strategy during World War II and very little during Vietnam. It is obvious which approach is better.
There are three principles, then, that ought to govern secrecy in this war:
1. The government should never deny a defeat or debacle that the enemy already knows about. Although there is short-term pain, the disclosure increases long-term credibility.
2. If the coalition (foreign or domestic) can be retained only by forcing the United States to engage in military operations it would be embarrassed to have publicly revealed, then the entire architecture of the war should be reconsidered.
3. A genuine strategy should be articulated and public discussion of it should be encouraged. If you cannot articulate a strategy because you don't have one, this is an excellent sign that you might not be ready for a war.
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