Small Wars Journal

What They Did Last Summer

Fri, 11/06/2015 - 12:08pm

What They Did Last Summer by Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club.

… But covert capabilities came at a high price.  The fact of their political invisibility simultaneously removed the urgency of victory and made it possible for the first time in the history of elected governments to decouple war from strategy.  Hafetz wrote that it now seemed possible to manage threats, not to defeat them.  In fact the words “defeat” and “victory” vanished from lexicon.

… The new methods meant that war, which was once a supreme crisis governed by constitutional limitations, was converted almost at stroke into something routine.  Converted into intelligence operations in fact, accountable only to the president and expandable at will…

Read on.