We should welcome Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s order on Thursday to return elements of the 82nd Airborne Division from Washington, D.C., to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Had those forces been deployed onto D.C. streets, the consequences for the city and civilian-military relations might have been catastrophic.
Combat infantry units are not designed for policing, riot control, or the provision of support to civil authorities. These units, especially airborne ones such as the 82nd, are designed to kill the enemy with speed and efficiency. And they are very, very, very good at it.
As the Army teaches its soldiers, “The primary mission of the infantry battalion is to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver. Its purpose is to destroy or capture him.” Don’t ask an infantryman what his mission is and expect him to say, “Apply force on a steadily escalating scale commensurate with the need for ongoing diplomatic intercourse.”
This should be considered in light of Esper’s comments this week on the possible need to “dominate the battlespace.” That rhetoric attracted much controversy. But as the veteran airborne infantry officer later pointed out, such language is central to how the military conceives of its deployed mission sets. Pertaining to combat-related operations, U.S. military doctrine is defined by the Clausewitzian understanding of war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” In turn, its prerequisite for mission efficacy against a violently contesting force is outmatching force — or domination.
The energetic pursuit of the enemy’s collapsed will is inculcated in all U.S. Army and Marine Corps platoon commanders.
Indeed, it is celebrated. As an 82nd Airborne officer explained in 2015, “[Domination] is controlled aggression to overwhelm the enemy and destroy his morale. Our infantry band of brothers needs to embrace the idea of seeking not only to win against the enemy but also to remove its ability to reemerge. The enemy is more likely to regroup if it feels that victory is even possible. However, when the opponent’s will and resources are depleted, any notion of a rematch becomes a distant fiction.”
Add this military philosophy to the human ingredient of young men who are trained to be highly aggressive in closing with the enemy, and you’re not left with the ingredients for proportionate civilian policing. This, I suspect, is why former Defense Secretary and Marine Gen. Jim Mattis felt compelled to break with his prior rule and speak out against the deployment of soldiers to American cities.
Mattis and Esper know that while these soldiers would crush the rioters, achieving tactical success, they would likely only fuel the grievances driving the protests over George Floyd’s death — thus translating tactical success into grave strategic failure. Put simply, images of predominantly white soldiers dominating young, generally black, men or teenagers would not help bring the country together — especially when the government would then be obliged to provide legal protection to the young soldiers it had deployed into operational duty.
As we’ve seen over the past two nights, there is a better way to address rioting. That’s with the maximal deployment of highly mobile police units and a focus on arresting ringleaders. Save the 82nd Airborne for defeating a Russian blitzkrieg.
