My military colleagues reacted to the request with equal frustration: This guy was a fairly senior White House official, and he didn't understand why sensitive, expensive military assets couldn't instantly be moved from a war zone to foreign airspace with a simple phone call to a Pentagon acquaintance? If the president wanted to make this happen, he could call the defense secretary and direct him to have Centcom undertake such a move (though he'd be unlikely to do so without plenty of discussion at lower levels first), but the chain of command can't be accessed midway down and more or less at random. My military colleagues were insulted: How incredibly ignorant -- and arrogant! -- those White House people were.
Some months later, similar misunderstandings plagued interagency planning on Sudan. With a referendum on South Sudanese independence in the offing, officials at the White House and the State Department were concerned about a resurgence of ethnic violence in the wake of a pro-independence vote. The Defense Department was asked -- this time more formally, at the assistant secretary/deputy assistant secretary level -- to produce plans for preventing or responding to mass atrocities. "We need to give the president some options in case all hell breaks loose," explained White House officials.
Once again, the military response was to express polite frustration. What assumptions and constraints should guide planning? What kind of plans did they want? To respond to what kind of mass atrocities, against whom, and in what likely places? Respond for how long and through what means, and to what ultimate end? Peace in Sudan? Peace on Earth? Would this mean fighting Sudanese government forces on northern Sudanese soil? Going to war with a foreign (and Muslim) state? If so, it was hard to imagine the president signing off on such a thing -- we already had two ongoing wars -- and it was a foolish waste of scarce planning resources to plan for something that was never going to happen.
Or maybe the goals were narrower? Should we be planning to evacuate displaced people? Where to? Should we just focus on protecting a humanitarian corridor? Was the White House prepared to have boots on the ground, with the inevitable risk that events could easily spiral out of control if U.S. troops were attacked? Did they want planning for targeted strikes designed to degrade the military capacity of the bad guys, whoever they might be?
The ensuing back and forth was tense and occasionally broke out into open expressions of anger and mistrust. At best, White House staff members considered their military counterparts rigid, reductionist, and unimaginative. At worst, they were convinced that the Pentagon was just being difficult -- that the military "didn't care" about Sudan or about atrocity prevention and was determined to flout the president's wishes by stonewalling and foot-dragging at every turn instead of getting down to work.
The military representatives involved in the discussions were equally exasperated. What was wrong with these civilians? Didn't they know what they wanted? Were they too naive -- or uncaring -- to understand that the potential mobilization of thousands of people and millions of dollars of equipment required greater specificity in terms of assumptions, constraints, and desired end-states? Without that specificity, the range of possibilities was endless. The United States could use nuclear weapons against the Sudanese regime; we could withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan and shift them to Sudan; we could do nothing whatsoever; and we could do a great many things in between. But unless the president wanted to move into crisis-planning mode, ginning up serious plans for any of these options would require months, not days or weeks, and planning for all of them just wasn't realistic.
In a sense, it was a civil-military version of the chicken-and-egg problem. White House staff wanted to be able to give the president a sense of his options: In the event of mass atrocities, what was it realistic for him to consider doing? How complicated, time-consuming, risky, expensive, and effective would it be to protect a humanitarian corridor, as opposed to engaging in limited military strikes to degrade the capacity of those committing atrocities? Without help from military planners, White House staff couldn't properly advise the president. But without political and strategic direction from the White House (How much money are we willing to spend? How many troops are we willing to move? What tradeoffs are we willing to make in terms of other ongoing operations? What constitutes success?), military personnel couldn't properly advise their civilian counterparts.
Eventually, the issue got semi-resolved. The White House staff was forced to get more specific; the Pentagon was forced to let go of the elaborate planning process it preferred and cough up some back-of-the-envelope assessments. Fortunately for everyone, the feared genocide in Sudan hasn't happened (yet).
At the national level, however, the costs of the civilian-military gap are real, and high. Such mutual ignorance -- and such systematic cultural differences in how to think about problems and solutions -- leads frequently to misunderstanding, inefficient decision-making, and, too often, bad policy.
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