Defending U.S. interests

Marching Orders
How Canada abandoned peacekeeping – and why the UN needs us now more than ever

Defending U.S. interests

The political fallout from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks only served to cement trends that were already under way within Canada’s Department of National Defence.

DND’s strategic analysts, perhaps watching the oft-repeated footage of the towers collapsing and the Pentagon on fire, quickly drafted an epilogue to their Strategic Assessment 2001.18 The predictions made by those analysts were chilling, not just in what they foresaw, but also in their accuracy.

The authors predicted that transnational terrorism would likely be regarded as the primary threat to international security, observing that the balance between the notion of “human security” and traditional concepts of security would shift in the direction of defending national territory and populations, and away from championing human rights and eradicating poverty.

They said that calls for military, diplomatic and other support from Washington would be regarded as a test of loyalty. The analysts boldly suggested that the international system would be reordered into “allies” and “enemies” in the fight against terror: “Countries that try to adopt a neutral stance will find themselves under pressure to take sides . . . . States will be regarded as allies not on the basis of verbal statements of support but in terms of a demonstrable, tangible commitment to fight terrorism,” they wrote.

The report predicted that the reordering of the international security agenda would likely lead to calls to bolster national defences and change force structures to provide military capabilities suited to the war against terrorism. The authors also suggested that human rights and civil liberties would be circumscribed in order to provide enhanced security.

In the United States, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the post-9/11 period to put in place wide-ranging plans to “transform” what he felt was a defence structure mired in Cold War thinking into a modernized fighting force that used fewer troops and high technology to defend U.S. global interests.

Along with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld created the U.S. Department of Force Transformation, which was entrusted with the task of promoting a new approach to the development and application of military power. In 2003, the department’s first director, the late Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (ret.), described his, Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s vision of the new role the Pentagon would play:

We see the emergence of a new globalization, with new rule sets. There is chafing between the old rule sets and the new, which is bound to happen in any period of transition. . . .

If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense. On the other hand, if you are a participating member of globalization, we have the opportunity to make common cause against those nefarious activities, those unfortunate things that tend to flow from the gap.19

At the root of Rumsfeld’s vision for military transformation is the use of new, exotic weaponry and a reduced emphasis on soldiers. This is the approach the Bush administration took with the invasion of Iraq, where Rumsfeld ignored his own military leadership and invaded with a small force backed by the latest high-tech weaponry. This policy was successful in quickly conquering Iraq, but the lack of sufficient troop numbers, according to Pentagon experts, left a security vacuum that has proven to be disastrous for the over-confident and under-prepared military. Now U.S. forces are immersed in a brutal civil war that has claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. troops, in the worst quagmire since Vietnam.

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