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Are there any institutional features that increase the likelihood of a significant component of military and covert intervention in US foreign policy?

There are three institutional factors to discuss – the proliferation of US military bases abroad, US training of foreign militaries and pressure from the defense industry.

The US maintains a large number of military bases around the world. This makes it faster and cheaper to deploy troops whether for small-scale covert operations, or, if the bases are large, also for larger and overt interventions. In addition there are the pressures from defence industry lobbies who would stand to gain contracts from any intervention. If a given problem can be addressed both through military/covert intervention and through other means, these institutions serve to systematically make the former means more attractive for the decision makers in Y.

The US institution of training foreign militaries creates a channel of support for the relevant militaries through arms and intelligence. Such support can be a harmful sort of intervention in itself if the foreign military is repressive of the domestic population. The institution of training sometimes also allows the US to influence a foreign military to carry out US foreign policy by proxy, bypassing any domestic US compunction about the intervention.

The Defense Dept reports that in September 2001, there were 725 US military installations on foreign soil (Department of Defense 2002). According to Defense Dept reports, just before the September 11 2001 attacks, over a quarter of a million US military personnel were deployed overseas, in 153 countries (Johnson 2004: 154ff). These are the officially disclosed numbers. In addition, there exist bases that are undisclosed or secret, either because public knowledge that an installation is American would be politically embarrassing for the host government or for other reasons[1].

The presence of overseas bases in geo-politically strategic regions of the world potentially reduces the cost of at least small scale interventions abroad as personnel and equipment may not need to be moved from the US to the target region. The bases also provide personnel with an official reason for their presence in a region. This official reason can be the cover for covert operations. Thus, once a decision is made to militarily or politically interfere in a foreign country, the large number of bases stationed overseas may reduce the cost of an intervention or make a covert intervention easier to disguise.

Pressure from defense industry lobbies to prefer an interventionist alternative to a more diplomatic one may make itself felt informally through the close ties between the governmental defense establishment and the industry.

The US relies increasingly on its armed forces and intelligence agencies to deal with foreign policy issues at the expense of diplomatic resources. The general strategy has been to build close ties between the US military and the local military in a given region and thus open a channel of influence. Programs of military training and education, security assistance and foreign military sales have formed a part of this strategy. A distinct feature of this approach (as compared to official diplomatic relations) is that Defense Dept related agencies are better able to operate covertly and to engage with unstable foreign powers without public scrutiny.

Within the US military, Unified Combatant Commands (UCCs) are joint military commands composed of forces from more than one service (such as the army and the air force). There are six UCCs in charge of six broad regions of the world, carving up all inhabited continents. The commanders in charge of each region, called combatant commanders, are four star generals or admirals and report only to the Secretary of Defense and the President. They oversee such matters as arms sales, military bases, intelligence and special operations among others. These commanders have considerable impact on foreign policy in their region and often have more impact than US ambassadors operating in the region. One major type of influence is in the cultivation of close relations with local military organizations, often in the form of training missions by US Special Forces of the local military. These close relations serve as a conduit for arms sales, allow the possibility of US spying, and act as a channel of influence upon the local armies to carry out policies favored by the US Defence Dept (Johnson 2004: 124).

The growing influence of the Defense Dept in foreign policy, exhibited for instance in the significant powers available to the regional UCCs, makes it more likely that at least a part of the US foreign policy position in relation to a country will be in the form of military intervention (Stratfor 2001). At times this will be because of explicit policy decisions in the US executive branch to deal with a perceived crisis not by diplomacy but instead by intervention in the form of arming of local military and paramilitary forces or influencing local militaries to enact US foreign policy by proxies or by other covert operations.

However, even in the ordinary course of events and in the absence of any perceived crisis, arms sales and US training of foreign militaries can be a potentially harmful form of US military and political intervention abroad. For example, such training may support (in effect, if not by intent) the military of a repressive government against the wishes of the repressed population by supplying it with arms, training and techniques to keep rebellious populations under control (Lumpe 2002: 16). The interest of the combatant commanders or of the Defense Dept in maintaining cooperative relations with the local military may trump any concern about the human rights record of the local military or the level of domestic popular support for the government even if the latter sorts of concerns have been raised by the State Dept or by Congress (Lumpe 2002: 24-5). For some indication of the breadth of such influence, note that US special operations forces alone (leaving aside regular military forces) train foreign troops in around 150 countries annually (Lumpe 2002: 1).

Here is an example. In 1991, Indonesian troops trained by the US and supplied by US weapons massacred hundreds in East Timor. This led Congress to cut all funding for Indonesia under the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). However, the Defense Dept secretly continued its military relations with Indonesia by initiating a new program – the Joint Combined Exchange Training program (JCET).The program purported to give US Special Forces training in foreign languages and familiarity with the local military, but in fact allowed 36 training exercises with the Indonesian special forces between 1992 and 1998 (Johnson 2004: 137-8). The US Special Forces trained their counterparts in urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance, sniper marksmanship and psychological operations (Biddle 2002).

References:

Biddle, Kurt; 2002; “US training of Indonesian armed forces”; US foreign military training; Lumpe, Lora (ed); p19

Department of Defense (USA); 2002; Base Structure Report: a summary of DoD’s real property inventory; accessed at http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/basestructure2002.pdf on 10 May 2009

Johnson, Chalmers; 2004; The sorrows of empire; Verso; London

Lumpe, Lora; 2002; US foreign military training: global reach, global power and oversight issues; Foreign Policy in Focus (accessed at http://www.fpif.org/pdf/papers/SRmiltrain.pdf on 10 May 2009)

Stratfor (Stratfor Global Intelligence Update); 2001; “Foreign policy and the U.S. military: what are dangers of playing ‘cops of the world’ role?”; the paper is available by subscription at www.stratfor.com and can also be accessed legally and without subscription at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23554