The Blob Needs a Mirror Test

The popularization of the term the Blob to describe the national security community in Washington, D.C., might end up being one of the few long-lasting legacies of the Obama Administration. Brought to light in an interview with Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, the term accurately conveys the self-perpetuating amoeba of establishment cognitive capture this entity has become. The strength of this cognitive capture is such that, even in the midst of multiple, overlapping, and cascading strategic failures, the Blob continues to push the same policies, suggest a little more effort is needed, and demand others “do something,” always to the same failed ends. It is time the Blob was forced to engage in a badly needed mirror test.

The blame for the strategic failure of the wars of 9/11 is bipartisan, endemic, and structural at both the societal and institutional levels. As Stephen Walt noted,

The failure is wholly bipartisan, beginning under Republican George W. Bush and continuing with Democrat Barack Obama. It is simultaneously a failure of U.S. military leadership, the intelligence services, diplomats, aid agencies, and the broader multinational effort that was supposed to deliver success. One could toss in most of the foreign-policy punditocracy, whose members occasionally raised doubts about the war but for the most part proved unwilling to admit that what the United States and its allies were trying to do was neither working nor worth the effort.

British advisor in Iraq, Emma Sky, echoed this when she wrote, “[t]he Iraq war and its outcomes affected few Americans. There is little willingness to really reflect on or take responsibility for what happened there.” And so, nothing changes. The Blob, nor the American people, have been forced to confront the cost and consequences of their own failures.

Much—if not all—of the Blob’s “work” can be parsed into four broad categories: Policy Fantasies; Execution Fantasies; Capacity Fantasies; and Mindless Verbiage. Ironically for those who claim expertise in strategy, the examples for each category take no account of the others. 

Policy Fantasies

Reports and recommendations that take no account of how they will be executed, whether they are, or have ever been, effective when implemented, are those best described as policy fantasies. They are merely an ideologically-driven narrative list of desires, wants, and beliefs about how the U.S. should engage with the world. Brookings’ Building “Situations of Strength,” CNAS’ Extending American Power, and CATOs’ Our Foreign Policy Choices, are examples of this. How these outlined policies will be executed, are competitive against enemies, and how much they cost are never scrutinized beyond the superficial.

Execution Fantasies

While CSBA should be credited working for through possible outlines of the U.S. military’s force structure with its fellow think tanks more thoroughly than any previous document offered by any of them, How Much Enough, assumes executable effectiveness in each case. No consideration is given to whether the forces available can achieve the goals set for them. This makes it an executable fantasy. The only variable is numbers and dollars. As victory has yet to be obtained in any war of the wars of 9/11, executable effectiveness should be a key variable in any assessment.

Capacity Fantasies

The Trump Administrations’ America First budget blueprint, Senator John McCain’s Restoring American Power report, and the Heritage Foundation’s immense analysis, Index of US Military Strength all demand a significant funding boost for the U.S. military to prepare for two regional contingencies. However, not only do these analyses suffer from the same policy and executable fantasies of those above, but they do it simultaneously, leaving their only purpose to be the astrategic demand for more money, known as a capacity fantasy.

Mindless Verbiage

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s A Better Way and the three paragraphs from the Democratic Party are the sum all three fantasies. Stripped of any analysis, assessment, or scrutiny, the mindless verbiage that the political parties assume passes for grand strategic thought is the inevitable outcome of how deep the Blobs’ devolution is. Once turned into talking points and disseminated into the public consciousness, the failures of the Blob become endemic across society. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.

Donald Trump and his cohort smashed their way into the Oval Office using low-brow anti-elite messaging. His pronouncements that his election will lead to continual “winning” in the same manner as America “supposedly” used to do was key to his appeal. His complaint that “America doesn’t win wars anymore” is well taken, it does not; fundamental change should be a common desire in response.

However, multiple ironies are at play. Trump rode to victory displaying the societal reasons America loses wars in the first place: a worldview built on a Team America-esque inability to see beyond universalized Manichean political motivations, ignoring local factors in favor of grand pronouncements of national self-righteousness, and the belief that military power solves all problems. The inability to see these fantasies—because they are a denial of evidence-based propositions—as a key cause of failure exists because the Blob has continued to repeatedly offer the same fantasies that led to these failures in the first place and suffer no consequence for it, but ever-greater paychecks.

In response to the overwhelming failure of elites throughout the past decade and a half to fix these clear institutional barriers to victory, the electorate turned in exasperation to the personification of the societal reasons America loses wars. Donald Trump is the consequence of the Blob, and America writ large, avoiding its own mirror test. By not admitting their part in the failures of the wars of 9/11 and working to nullify their causes, the Blob legitimizes attacks upon it.

Weston makes it clear that “[i]t is past time for this kind of shared reckoning. More of us beginning to act conscientiously, indeed responsibly, as citizens—engaged citizens—seeking to better understand and learn from these 9/11 Wars.”  Sadly, if multiple strategic failures have not caused a fundamental rethinking of American national security policy, execution, and capacity, the possibility remains low. After all, as Paul Yingling noted over a decade ago, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts wrote in the aftermath of Vietnam, the irony of the war was that the system worked; the Blob of that time—both civilian and military—got to maintain their power and position, create stabbed-in-the-back legends to justify their own failures, and avoid any cost or consequence of their failures. To justify their failures on the wars of 9/11, the Blob: 

… seems to have settled on the narrative that it won every tactical engagement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this view, failures of strategy and the challenges of nation-building proved the undoing of coalition counter-insurgency efforts in each conflict.

A narrative that is as false as when it was first offered after Vietnam. If the existence—and likely further strategic failure—of Trump finally prompts the necessary mirror test, as Weston says: “When we look into that mirror, let’s not turn away.” The wars of 9/11 caused enough harm, and left unchecked, could end up being precursors to global grand strategic failure. Thus, should the Blob, and elites in general, wish to regain the public’s trust, it should start a deep and uncomfortable assessment of its own actions during the wars of 9/11.

Michael C. Davies currently works for an international law firm. He spent five years at the U.S. National Defense University in Washington, DC conducting research on the lessons of the wars of 9/11. He has co-authored three books (one is forthcoming) on these wars and is a progenitor of the Human Domain doctrinal concept.