Abstract
The recrudescence of counterinsurgency warfare during the U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq is a familiar tale. The attempted transformation of conventional military might into the sort of sophisticated politico-military instrument that could deal with the complex challenge of armed political rebellion in both of those conflicts has since preoccupied countless scholars and military practitioners interested in the subject of irregular warfare. But if it is a familiar tale, it is also a well-worn one and an artificially narrow one at that. Distracted by these two major conflicts we have allowed the narratives of Iraq and Afghanistan to elide our understanding of the ways in which, at the hands of U.S. policymakers and their military and international collaborators, irregular warfare in all its multifarious guises came to characterize the American way of war across much of the globe in the two decades following the September 11 attacks.
Full Spectrum Dominance corrects this lacuna, and to impressive effect. Ryan has refocused attention away from the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq and turned our eyes instead to the Southern Philippines archipelago, the empty quarters of Mali and Niger, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Caspian basin. In so doing, she illustrates how the events of 9/11 turbocharged the Bush regime’s aspiration to supplement America’s dominance in its conventional and nuclear capabilities by achieving ‘full-spectrum dominance’ in all forms of warfare. By perceiving the defining strategic challenge of the era to be the threat of Islamic terrorism, by choosing to perceive that threat as being fostered and nourished by a succession of failing states and ‘ungoverned spaces’ across the developing world, and furthermore by spying the opportunity to simultaneously address ancillary concerns over matters of energy security in many of those same regions, the scene was set for U.S. policymakers to forge their country’s irregular warfare capabilities into a defining component of U.S. grand strategy for the duration of the Bush and Obama administrations.
Ryan illustrates how from late 2001 U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) flooded into a range of locations on the so-called ‘periphery’, their targeting of the global jihadist insurgency aided and abetted by local regimes spying the opportunity to extract valuable financial and military assistance from Washington for their own ends. The scene was now set for America’s irregular warfare practitioners to put their skills to the test. Advisory roles, train and assist missions, propaganda and information campaigns, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, drone assassinations; the full gamut of irregular warfare capabilities was unveiled in a variety of shadowy backwaters as ‘operators’ sought to craft the conditions that would undermine either the emergence of Islamic terror groups or deprive more established elements their freedom of operation.
Almost inevitably the seductive promises offered by this turn to irregular warfare remained largely illusory. In the southern Philippines, the conflation of the local Islamic extremist Abu Sayaf Group (ASG) with a broader Al-Qaeda-inspired global insurgency obscured the far more relevant and parochial explanation of a lengthy tradition of ethnic marginalization of the Muslim Bangsamoro people at the hands of the Philippine state. Such a misdiagnosis ensured that the lengthy and concerted U.S. military assistance effort to the Manila government had a little observable effect upon the ASG’s operational capacities. In Mali and Niger, various forms of capacity-building designed to pre-empt the emergence of Islamic militancy in that region proved a minimal impediment to both Al-Qaeda and indeed Islamic State’s subsequent ability to make ground there, while in Somalia attempts by the United States to use neighbouring Ethiopian proxies to undermine the dominant Islamic Courts Union’s (ICU) hold on power simply resulted in the emergence of a far more powerful, capable and unpleasant adversary in the form of Al-Qaeda allied Al Shabaab. In the Caspian basin, by contrast, the train-and-assist programme designed to aid the Georgian government’s offensive against Chechen militants in the Pankisi Gorge may have blended conveniently with pre-existing U.S. concerns over regional oil security, but it soon exposed the problematic implications of forging intimate military relations with a country that was viewed by a major strategic rival – Russia – with intense suspicion.
By way of forensic interrogation of the official sources Ryan lifts the lid on these previously little known missions (and others) and knits them together into a much broader whole; that of a concerted attempt, across the span of nearly two decades, to use irregular warfare capabilities to undermine and destroy a range of violent non-state actors that American policymakers perceived as comprising a pressing threat to vital U.S. interests. Those capabilities and doctrines were undoubtedly impressive. But when arrayed against the layered and highly specific complexities pertaining to these lesser-known fronts on ‘The War on Terror’, irregular warfare proved far less than the sum of its parts.