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2018 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

1. What Are Paramilitary Operations?

verfasst von : Armin Krishnan

Erschienen in: Why Paramilitary Operations Fail

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The first chapter defines PMOs and distinguishes them from other, related activities such as special operations. The chapter explains the scope of the book in terms of the PMOs that are considered, namely only pro-insurgency PMOs that support rebel forces or guerrillas. The chapter discusses the motivations for undertaking PMOs and the challenge of measuring the success of PMOs. It is proposed that the ultimate measure of success is the battlefield victory or defeat of proxy forces. Furthermore, it is argued that the issue of ‘blowback’ should be also considered when judging the relative success of a PMO.

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Nächstes Kapitel A Short History of US Paramilitary Operations

The Church Committee report identified three different objectives of PMOs: (1) ‘subversion of a hostile government’; (2) ‘support to friendly governments’; and (3) ‘unconventional adjunct support to a larger war effort.’ See US Senate 1976, I:154–155.

See Lowenthal 2013, 237; Lowenthal does not specifically include cyber warfare in his typology, but Ransom Clark does. See Clark 2015, 9.

A recent example of embedding US personnel as fighters in paramilitary formations is Syria, where 300 US special operators were deployed in fall 2016 to train and advise Syrian opposition groups. They were also expected ‘to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence and capture [Islamic State] leaders.’ See Scarborough 2016.

JSOC is a branch of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which conducts both ‘white’ (acknowledged or official) operations such as training militaries of friendly states and ‘black’ (unacknowledged or officially denied) operations such as special reconnaissance or ‘kill or capture’ operations in countries where the US military is not officially present. See Kibbe 2007, 59–60.

The OSS included a Special Operations branch, which was conducting both paramilitary and commando type operations around the world. See Berger 1995.

William Blum has noted several instances where ‘the CIA was acting in direct military opposition to another arm of the US government’ such as Costa Rica in 1955 and Burma in 1970. See William Blum. 2004. Killing Hope: US Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 159 and footnote 26. A more recent example of competing CIA and Pentagon PMOs is Syria. See Bulos 2016.

It is not unusual that the US government supports paramilitary groups in the context of a counterinsurgency campaign as it has been done in South Vietnam in the Strategic Hamlet program. More recently, the CIA has sponsored militias or paramilitary groups in Afghanistan such as the Khost Protection Force (KPF) to fight the Taliban and the Haqqani as part of the ongoing US effort to stabilize the Afghan government. See Raghavan 2015.

It seems that a lot of US covert action has been outsourced to partner states since the late 1970s in which case it is hard to prove US involvement.

It remains highly controversial, but it has been stated in reputable literature that the US has sponsored paramilitary groups to carry out targeted killings of terrorists, insurgents, and drug lords, which is sometimes described as ‘death squad’ activity. Examples include US support to paramilitary groups in El Salvador in 1981, Reagan’s authorization to train and arm Lebanese ‘hitmen’ to go after Hezbollah in 1983, the CIA support to the vigilante groups Los Pepes that systematically killed members of the Medellin Cartel in the early 1990s, and more recently the Shia ‘wolf brigades’ supported by JSOC to systematically hunt down Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Important contributions to the limited academic literature on the history of US covert action includes: John Prados. 2006. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee; Stephen F. Knott. 1996. Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency. Oxford: Oxford University Press; James Callanan. 2010. Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations. London: J.B. Tauris & Co.; John Ranelagh. 1986. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA: From Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey . New York: Simon & Schuster.

John F. Kennedy stated to Allen Dulles in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs PMO: ‘Your successes are unheralded – your failures are trumpeted,’ indicating that public perceptions of covert operations are usually biased towards failure. See Dulles 2006, 39.

It has been widely acknowledged that both the coup in Iran in 1953 and the PMO in Guatemala in 1954 were driven by economic interests. Even in the most recent PMO in Syria, there were influential business and foreign interests involved. It is not just about a Saudi-Qatari-Turkish pipeline project that was at stake but also a project by Israeli company Genie Energy to develop gas on the Golan heights at the border to Syria, which remains legally a Syrian territory. Genie Energy has on its advisory board Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, James Woolsey, Larry Summers, and Bill Richardson, and it has major US investors, including Goldman Sachs.

Geraint Hughes suggests that PMOs can have coercive, disruptive, and transformative goals. A coercive goal could be to dissuade an opponent from taking certain action (e.g. sponsoring a terrorist group), and a disruptive goal could be to weaken an opponent so that the opponent’s actions are less effective. In here only transformative goals such as overthrowing a government are considered. Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy, 20–21. Other limited goals for a PMO could be to use a paramilitary group for intelligence collection or for testing operational concepts, as was the case in the early Cold War CIA PMOs.

This was actually argued in a CIA paper relating to the support of Cuban saboteurs and insurgents in the early 1960s (Operation Mongoose). CIA, ‘A Reappraisal of Autonomous Operations,’ Secret Memo, 3 June 1964.

In a strange twist, Iran has moved to sue the US government for the 1953 coup after official documents confirming the CIA role in the coup had been released in 2013 with the objective to recover $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets. It seems that international legal action can be added as another form of blowback that the US government has to consider before it initiates covert action.

Abrahamian, Ervand. 2001. “The 1953 Coup in Iran.” Science & Society 65 (2):182–215.CrossRef

Berger, D.H. 1995. “The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of Operations Conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1949–1951.” Marine Corps Command and Staff College eds. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/berger.htm.

Best, Richard, and Feickert, Andrew. 2009. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) and CIA Paramilitary Operations: Issues for Congress.” Congressional Research Service, 3 August 2009.

Blum, William. 2000. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Monroe: Common Courage Press.

Bulos, Nabih. 2016. “In Syria, Militias Armed by the Pentagon Fight Those Armed by the CIA.” Los Angeles Times, 27 March.

Clark, J. Ransom. 2015. American Covert Operations: A Guide to the Issues. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books.

Daugherty, William J. 2004. Executive Secrets: Covert Action & the Presidency. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Davidson, Lawrence. 2009. Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.CrossRef

Dulles, Allen. 2006. The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World. Guilford: Lyons Press.

Gleijeses, Piero. 2016. “The CIA’s Paramilitary Operations During the Cold War: An Assessment.” Cold War History 16 (3): 291–306.CrossRef

Hicks, D. Bruce. 2005. “Lifting the Arms Embargo on the Bosnian Muslims: Secret Diplomacy or Covert Action?” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 18 (2): 246–261.CrossRef

Hoover Commission. 1954. “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.” 26 July.

Hughes, Geraint. 2014. My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1969. “The Defense Establishment: Vested Interests and the Public Interest.” In The Military-Industrial Complex and the United States Foreign Policy, edited by Omer L. Carey. Seattle: Washington State University Press.

Johnson, Chalmers. 2004. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Johnson, Loch K. 2012. “Intelligence Analysis and Planning for Paramilitary Operations.” Journal of National Security Law & Policy 5 (2012): 481–505.

Kibbe, Jennifer. 2007. “Covert Action and the Pentagon.” Intelligence and National Security 22 (1): 57–74.CrossRef

Lowenthal, Mark. 2013. Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

Mumford, Andrew. 2013. Proxy Warfare. Cambridge: Polity.

Pollack, Kenneth M. 2005. The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. New York: Random House.

Polmar, Norman, and Allen, Thomas B. 1997. ‘Blowback.’ In The Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: Random House.

Poznansky, Michael. 2015. “Stasis or Decay? Reconciling Covert War and the Democratic Peace.” International Studies Quarterly 59 (2015): 815–826.

Prouty, L. Fletcher. 2011. The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.

Raghavan, Sudarsan. 2015. “CIA Runs Shadow War with Afghan Militia Implicated in Civilian Killings.” New York Times, 3 December.

Riedel, Bruce. 2014. What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979–89. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Scarborough, Rowan. 2016. “US Special Operations Troops in Islamic State Fight Frustrated with Limited Role.” Washington Times, 11 September.

Stockwell, John. 1978. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story. New York: Norton & Co.

Treverton, Gregory. 1987. Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World. New York: Basic Books.

US DoD. 2008. “FM-305.130: Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare.” Department of the Army (September).

US DoD. 2014. “FM 3–18: Special Forces Operations.” Department of the Army (May).

US NSC. 1961. National Security Memorandum No. 57. 28 June.

US NSC. 1964. “A Reappraisal of Autonomous Operations.” National Security Council Memorandum. 3 June.

US Senate. 1976. “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views.” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 26 April.

US White House. 1981. Executive Order 12333. 4 December.

Wall, Andru. 2011. “Demystifying the Title 10-Title 50 Debate: Distinguishing Military Operations, Intelligence Activities & Covert Action.” Harvard National Security Journal 3 (2011): 85–142.

Titel: What Are Paramilitary Operations?
verfasst von: Armin Krishnan
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Why Paramilitary Operations Fail
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71630-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-71631-2

Copyright-Jahr: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71631-2_1