How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks. Here, briefly but hopefully enough to whet the appetite of the interested reader, is its coverage:
Chapter 1: Piracy, its challenges to the military and the lawyer. Too bad there were no comparisons to the problems of piracy experienced by the Americans shortly after the Revolutionary War.
Chapter 2: Guantanamo Bay
Chapter 3: Can the military implement Rule of Law? Or is it just a bunch of heavily armed lawyers running around?
Chapter 4: Discusses what I would call mission creep, or what happens when your victory turns to ashes, and how the State Department is chronically underfunded and undermanned. This forces the military to take over functions that seem more appropriate to State, and sometimes their performance in these roles is wanting. PLUS: What happens when the Alaska National Guard fights a US Army tank battalion in combat.
Chapter 5: Are drones forces for evil or for good? The impact of drone warfare, both on the individuals involved and the US government, as DoD and intelligence agencies maneuver for best positions.
Chapter 6: Killer Robots and are they better at following the rules? The Milgram experiment. Non-fatal weapons and how they will improve the humaneness of warfare.
Chapter 7: The introduction of Regionally Aligned Forces (RAF) in the Army in reaction to the Iraq War, and the reactions to it from both inside and outside the Army: How does this work again? from Army personnel, They’re taking our jobs! from the State Dept, and This is all about instigating and extending war! from those who see the Army as causing wars, rather than responding.
Chapter 8: The composition of the US Armed Services – not necessarily conservative, well educated.
Chapter 9: The definition of war is a troubled area, as the lines definitions seek to draw are inevitably blurred by the creativity of the combatants. The rituals of war, from thousands of years ago to today, are explored, describing the transition of humans between peaceful and violent modes of existence as requiring ritual, cleansing, and sometimes reparations; that they exist today, even in the sometimes-rational United States, should perhaps be seen as inevitable.
Chapter 10: The historical development of the rules of war is given, from millennia ago to the infamous memos of John Yoo. Includes a contrast of the attitudes of military lawyers with those of civilian Bush Administration lawyers, and their concerns, well-founded as they turned out to be, when the American public was informed of the torture sessions of the Iraq War.
Chapter 11: The operation of International War Law: What happens when a crime occurs, but the perpetrator could either commit the crime or die? The tragedy of the rabidly nationalistic.
Chapter 12: The challenges of classifying aggression and attacks, such as the 9/11 attack, and why they’re important.
Chapter 13: The myth of the ‘international community’ is explored; the failed state and how the entire idea of a state is a nebulous concept.
Chapter 14: The human cost, as witnessed by Brooks, of intra-State wars is brought to the fore, and her helplessness. Then an exploration of the intervention of one State into the affairs of another: the Humane intervention, and the problems it brings for the legal community, once over lightly, such as the War on Terror: despite the legitimacy of Kofi Annan’s warning about States’ cruelty to their own citizens, interference in another State’s affairs is a heavy problem for lawyers to justify.
Chapter 15: The Military: a Recent Development. What is a Soldier, anyways? These days, weapons hardly get involved.
Chapter 16: An Age of Uncertainty, brought on by powerful computing/communication devices and medical technology, all of which conspires to make predictions concerning international security an occupation akin to economics’ predictions, a dismal practice to be certain.
Chapter 17: Is a drone strike self-defense or state-sanctioned murder? Is it war or just a terrorist organization being extinguished? Definitions of state (vs State) lead to conclusions as to the legality of extra-territorial actions, and an action is often justified – legal – only in the eyes of those that it immediately benefits, long-term consequences be-damned.
Chapter 18: The gap between what is said and what is done; can a country be unable to quell a terror threat against the United States, or are they compliant with it? And other conundrums of note.
Chapter 19: The mistrust between top civilian leadership and military leadership. The civilians want a single, all-purpose tool; the military would prefer to stick with what they know. This is the conundrum of a democracy in which rank amateurs can achieve high rank based solely on blather and even worse.
The final chapter: Overview and warning.
In essence, this is an informative and entertaining – gulp! – exploration of the hows and whys the American military is used for missions well outside of its primary expertise, why it often fails at those reluctant forays, and how it’s more or less at the mercy of provincial American leaders, all from the viewpoint of a lawyer specializing in international law.
I won’t generally recommend it, but it’s not a difficult read, Brooks doesn’t appear to have a hidden agenda, and if it crosses one of your paths of interest, give it a read. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
