An Outsider's View Inside the Pentagon's War Machine

“How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything” Rosa Brooks. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

The Pentagon has become a symbol of America’s military, but also somewhat of an enigma, even to those in the military. The mission of the Pentagon once seemed rather simple – to ensure the defense of the nation and to fight its wars to protect national interests abroad.  But that was before the Pentagon became synonymous with war, and the military became everything, says author Rosa Brooks.  

Presently, the Pentagon is charged with supervising government agencies and activities within the national military establishment the Pentagon has evolved into a “Super Walmart with everything under one roof.”

Dr. Brooks, who teaches international law and national security at Georgetown University Law Center, describes her first experience at the Pentagon as “going to work at the Death Star,” with endless corridors and concentric rings, symbolic of the government bureaucracy struggling to find its way in a more complex world following the events of 9/11.  As a political appointee under the Obama Administration, Brooks describes an experience that was at first aspirational, working for Michèle Flournoy seemed a dream job to influence this overwhelming and vast bureaucracy in a positive way.  Her duties ranged from giving legal advice to operations against Somali pirates to the detention of global terrorists, to contributing legal counsel to the “death-dealing enterprise” of targeted drone strikes, which would give her nightmares.  The Pentagon’s vast bureaucracy and the increasingly blurry line between war and peace would become the impetus for this book.

Taking the reader on an incredible journey into her 26 months at the Pentagon, Brooks counsels us on the convoluted and complicated legal questions regarding the business of war, but she refrains from prescribing a detailed solution.  There are no condescending policy dictates or solutions in this book.  Instead, the reader is armed with the information to draw his or her own conclusions about how America conducts war, and how American citizens should think about the strategic, legal, and philosophical consequences of modern warfare.

On the subject of universal human rights, I asked Brooks about the August 18^th issue of New York Review of Books, in which U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power argues that our national interests be increasingly affected not only by what happens between sovereigns, but also how individual people are treated within sovereigns. “The way governments treat their own citizens matters,” Ambassador Power writes:

However, current U.S. drone policy enables American military and intelligence officials to unilaterally target “enemy fighters” without the consent, acknowledgment or, sometimes, even awareness of their home countries’ government leaders.

Rosa Brooks

Photo Credit: Jody McKitrick

In response, Brooks argues that the human rights debate creates its own set of issues.  Human rights matter more than states, and at a certain point, the privileges of sovereignty are waived to protect the populace.  The prevailing argument in support of drone strikes tracks along similar lines: the privileges of sovereignty in Yemen, Somalia or Libya, for example, may be waived in order for America to protect its populace from violent extremists in those countries.  In the absence of a sturdy international system to regulate such strikes, the United States has become a global vigilante in pursuit of ambiguously defined “terrorists” or “enemy combatants” across the world.  While police officers are guided by criminal procedure and constitutional law principles, the U.S. drone program is acting without such guidelines.

Taking the discussion to a broader level, Brooks suggests in her book that someday America will develop the laws, policies, and institutions for a world in which war and peace are no longer discrete concepts. She writes:

If we live in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, it is partly because far too many top decision makers have spent the last fifteen years playing the game of law, instead of the game of life.

In the post-9/11 era, Brooks explains that the conversation about military options has been too legalistic.  Lawyers tend to focus on what the law allows us to do rather than what we should be doing.  How do we even define war for the age of “global war on terrorism”?  We have created a legal framework that is very permissive to U.S. action, but it is a framework that would not be permissible in peacetime.  Our over-dependence on legal formalism has distracted from undeveloped policy objectives and a reactive national security strategy.

Speaking of strategy, law, and international order, I asked Brooks about the challenges of maintaining the post-WWII international order and whether she felt it necessary for the United States to serve as the “world’s policeman,” or judge, jury, and executioner as she mentions in the book.  Brooks agreed that the world does indeed need a world policeman, but that no single nation can independently compel other nations to behave a certain way, in the cyber domain, on a climate change initiative, or in guaranteeing civil liberties equal to those enjoyed by American citizens   The United States must act to ensure that foreign nations conform to international norms, but the United States should never act unilaterally.The lack of strategic clarity and vision by the United States poses significant challenges in today’s ever-changing threat environment.  I asked what advice she might have for the next commander-in-chief.  Based on her experiences at the Pentagon in a wide array of roles, Brooks reminds us that what the United States does today sets a precedent of acceptable international behavior for many decades to come.

The lack of strategic clarity and vision by the United States poses significant challenges in today’s ever-changing threat environment.  I asked what advice she might have for the next commander-in-chief.  Based on her experiences at the Pentagon in a wide array of roles, Brooks reminds us that what the United States does today sets a precedent of acceptable international behavior for many decades to come.

Brooks’s detailed, illustrative prose makes the reader feel as though she is inside “the world’s largest office building,” giving a sense of the enormity and vastness as well as the weight of what has become an overwhelming bureaucracy. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in national security policy, strategy, or how America wages war in the 21st-century.

David Craig is the editor for RealClearDefense.