America's warlords: up close with the U.S. military regional commanders who run the world

Washington Monthly, March, 2003 by James Fallows

THE MISSION: America's Military in the Twenty-First Century by Dana Priest Norton & Co., $26.95

WHEN PEOPLE SPOKE OF AN American "empire" in the 1990s, they mainly used the term as a metaphor. The Soviet Union was gone; formerly communist economies from Vietnam to Romania were competing to attract U.S. investors; American music, movies, and computer programs were being pumped out around the world. Ambitious young people decided that they needed to learn English--even, sacre bleu, the ambitious young people of France. Old Europe's sense of being left behind by resurgent America gave the most serious spur to continental unification since World War II. And even though U.S. troops were chronically involved in regional wars and peacekeeping operations, the real foundation of American dominance seemed to be its "soft power"--the impact of its world-leading universities, its dominant pop culture, its revived high-tech industries, its booming employment rolls, its open-market ideology, and its continued ability to attract and use talent from around the world.

One surprising implication of Dana Priest's The Mission is that even in the 1990s the foundations of empire were "harder" than they seemed. This is a loosely structured but fascinating and important book. While it draws few conclusions of its own, it provides vivid evidence about the contradictory effects of America's unmatched military power. On the one hand, there really is an empire, held together by expeditionary forces working in scores of countries around the world. On the other hand, there is also such a thing as imperial overstretch. Priest's accounts of the consequences of past military victories--in the Balkans, in Latin America, in the Middle East during the first Gulf War, and against the Soviet Union during the long Cold War--suggest the list of challenges the United States will face after a military victory in Iraq.

The organizing principle of the book--at least the one it starts out with--is the underappreciated idea that the real power in the military no longer lies with the chiefs of staff in the Pentagon. Instead it is wielded most dramatically by the regional commanders in chief (CinC) in the field. Priest--who has covered several wars and many years' worth of defense policy for The Washington Post--suggests at the beginning of the book that she will tell me story of the modern military through the story of these CinCs, pronounced "sinks."

The CinCs are in charge of all U.S. forces in a particular area. There are five regional CinCs, who divide up the world this way: The CinC in charge of the European command, who is also the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, handles Europe, all of Russia, most of Africa, plus Turkey and Israel. The Central Command covers the new republics of Central Asia, all of the Middle East except Israel, and a troubled swath of Africa from Kenya to Egypt. The Pacific Command runs from India eastward through Asia to Hawaii. The Southern Command covers 32 nations of Latin America. A fifth region, the Northern Command, was created last year and covers the American "homeland" plus Mexico and Canada.

Priest calls these CinCs "proconsuls to the [American] empire," and she emphasizes how independent, influential, and important they have become. (The military has a variety of other "Commands" headed by CinCs, like the Special Operations Command, but Priest stresses that the regional CinCs are the ones with real power.) The rise of the CinCs began with the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols military reform act in 1986. The act was designed to correct the excesses of inter-service rivalry, and among other effects it gave regional CinCs sweeping authority over all the services operating in their geographic theater. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, in the Pentagon, has no influence over the Army or Air Force and is officially part of the Navy. But when Anthony Zinni, a-Marine Corps general, was CinC for the Central Command, he could issue direct orders to the generals and admirals from all services in his region.

The secretary of state is the only American diplomat with an airplane always at his disposal. (Lesser state department officials must fly commercial or ask for space-available on military, transports.) By contrast, Priest says, "the Pentagon gives each regional CinC a long-distance aircraft and a fleet of helicopters for short flights. In-flight refuelers are available for very long trips. Some CinCs travel with an entourage of up to 35 officers and senior non-commissioned officers" A CinC lives in a "private palatial residence, guarded twenty-four hours a day by electronic shields and small armies of security guards" Apart from the individual power of a CinC, a strategic perspective based on regional commands subtly influences American policy, Priest says:

"Like the European colonialists who divided up Asia and Africa, the Defense Department draws and redraws the CinCdoms every two years ... Which command a country ends up in determines the prism through which the United States views its relations. When the states of Central Asia first won their independence from the Soviet Union ... [they] fell within U.S. European Command, where the focus was on getting them to look toward Europe and away from Mother Russia ... When the biannual review gave the Islamic states of South and Central Asia to Central Command, it signified a recognition by the president and the secretary of defense that Islamic fundamentalists and the terrorist cells they bred posed a new threat"