First-century Judea was a pit of asps for the Romans. Jews refused to bow to foreign overlords, no matter how powerful. Rome had struggled against Jewish rebellion since Pompey conquered Judea in 63 BCE. God’s law trumped Caesar’s, the Jews believed, and the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem was the center of the universe, not Rome. So powerful was their faith that several proclaimed themselves the Jewish messiah, who would usher in the Kingdom of God. One of these men was Jesus of Nazareth.1
Roman taxation was tantamount to slavery for the pious, and some Temple priests encouraged Jews to protest by not paying taxes. Tension reached a breaking point in 66 CE when the Roman procurator Florus ordered troops into the Temple, defiling it, to collect taxes owed from its treasury by force. Protests ignited across Jerusalem, and Jews openly mocked Florus by passing around a collection basket, as if Florus were poor. Rioters even attacked the Roman garrison, killing soldiers.
Florus reacted badly. The next day, he sent soldiers into Jerusalem to arrest city leaders, who were later whipped and crucified, even though many were Roman citizens. Outraged Jewish insurgents took up arms and overran the Roman garrison, who surrendered and were lynched. The pro-Roman king, Agrippa, fled for his life, while Judean rebels sprouted up everywhere, killing Roman sympathizers and cleansing the country of all Roman symbols.
Cestius Gallus watched the situation with alarm. He was the Roman legate in neighboring Syria and knew that if one province successfully revolted, others would follow. Soon, the entire empire could be in rebellion, and the Eternal City lacked the troops to suppress it. Better to quash dissent while it was still budding, and that’s what Gallus intended to do.
Gallus assembled an army of 30,000 to 36,000 troops, with the mighty Twelfth Legion at its core. The others were “auxiliary” troops, mercenaries and foreign allied armies. Legions were the backbone of the empire, and Rome brought its known world to heel with just twenty-seven of them. Each consisted of about 5,200 elite heavy infantry, recruited exclusively from Roman citizens and drilled to perfection. Legionnaires were both feared and lionized throughout the empire.
The Roman army cut through Judea like a gladius, massacring thousands of people and rebels alike. Town after town fell, until it arrived at Jerusalem. Its walls were too thick, its defenders too ensconced, and its food stores too deep for a quick victory. Time for reinforcements, Gallus thought, and he withdrew to the coast with the Twelfth Legion and some auxiliary troops, leaving the bulk of his army to besiege the holy city.
Rebel scouts stalked the Roman forces as they snaked through the desert ravines. Gallus thought nothing of it. Small groups of rebels posed no threat, especially since he traveled with the 12th Legion. In months of campaigning, all insurgents had succumbed to this juggernaut of Roman will.
The road narrowed in a mountain pass about twenty miles northwest of Jerusalem, at a place called Beth Horon. The army slowed and became tightly packed as it squeezed through the pass. A barrage of arrows dimmed the sky and swarmed the compressed army, killing many.
“Ad aciem! Pugna! Celeriter!” ordered the centurions. “Form battle lines! Fight! Quickly!”
“Rak chazak amats!” The ancient Hebrew battle cry echoed around the ravine, drowning out the commands. Tens of thousands of heavy Judean infantry streamed down the mountainside from hidden positions, ambushing the trapped Roman army on every side.
“Ad testudinem! Ad testudinem!” shouted the centurions. “Form the tortoise!” Cohorts of the 12th Legion hastily interlocked shields on all sides and above their heads, creating a shell of steel.
An avalanche of Judean spears rushed down the valley walls and overran the auxiliary troops’ hastily formed defensive lines. With nowhere to retreat, the survivors were pushed back and into the legion’s tortoise formation, breaking it up.
“Gladium stringe!” “Draw your sword!” In an instant, five thousand swords were unsheathed. “Repulsus!” “Drive them back!”
The Judeans and legionnaires smashed into one another, heavy infantry head on head. The combat was intense. The Judeans fought as if commanded by God, while the legionnaires battled for Roman honor, their religion. Numbers won out. In the end, the 12th Legion was annihilated, and their prized eagle standard, called an aquila, was taken as booty. In the empire’s thousand-year history, only a few aquila had ever been lost to enemy forces. Beth Horon was one of Rome’s worst defeats.
Now it became personal for Rome. The superpower dispatched its finest general, Vespasian, with an army of 60,000 troops—including three full legions—to crush Judea. It was the world’s most powerful army, bearing a grudge. The Romans quickly reconquered Galilee, collapsing the rebellion in the north. An estimated 100,000 Jews were killed or enslaved. Some were insurgents, most were not. It didn’t matter in the eyes of the Romans. Abetting rebellion was a capital offense, a lesson they wished to instill across the empire.
After systematically ridding the countryside of insurgents, Vespasian turned toward the heart of the insurgency: Jerusalem and the Jewish ideology that had fueled the rebellion. Vespasian was no effete like Florus, who had achieved his position through his wife’s connections. Vespasian was a self-made Roman general, the kind that built a millennial civilization. This is also why he was called back to Rome in the middle of the campaign to become emperor, ending a civil war that nearly drowned Rome in the Year of Four Emperors (69 CE).
Vespasian left his son Titus, himself a future emperor, to obliterate the Jewish insurgency. By this time, Jerusalem lay under supersiege. The Romans had built an earthen berm as high as Jerusalem’s famed stone walls, surrounding the city and sealing it off from the world. Nothing got in or out. Anyone caught in the vast dry moat was crucified on the berm, facing the city for all to see. The screams of agony lasted for days, followed by weeks of stench as the bodies rotted on the cross. Up to five hundred crucifixions took place a day.
Inside the walls, life was equally bad. A civil war broke out between two Jewish factions. One side was led by Ananus ben Ananus, a former high priest. Opposing him were the Zealots and Sicarii, fanatical religious terrorists. Unwilling to consider any opinion but their own, they seized the Temple by force and commanded the Jews obey them. Ananus’s militia surrounded it, creating a Jewish siege within the Roman one. Zealots used trickery to massacre Ananus, his followers, and many common people. Now in control, the extremists murdered anyone who spoke of surrender. Flavius Josephus, an eyewitness, described their rule as a reign of terror, one in which the fanatics executed dissenters using sham tribunals. The Zealots even destroyed the city’s food supply so that the people would be forced to fight against the Roman siege instead of negotiating peace. All it achieved was more starvation.2
The Sicarii were cloak-and-dagger assassins, predating the Islamic Hashishin (“Assassins”) and the Japanese ninjas by centuries. Like the Zealots, they were terrorists. They took their name from a thin curved dagger called a “sicae.” (Sicarii literally means “dagger men.”) At public gatherings, they would furtively stab victims and then blend back into the crowd, concealing their daggers under their cloaks while bewailing the murder alongside everyone else, then slip away. Their targets were Romans, Roman sympathizers, and Jews they thought apostate. They also raided Jewish villages like Ein Gedi, where they slaughtered seven hundred women and children during Passover.3 In later Latin, sicarius became synonymous for a murderer.
When the Romans finished constructing siege towers and battering rams, they smashed through Jerusalem’s city walls. The army spilled into Jerusalem, slaughtering all in their path and burning the city. Defenders made a last stand in the upper city but were overpowered. The five-hundred-year-old Second Temple—the symbol of Judaism—was desecrated, plundered, burned, and torn down stone by stone. When that was done, legionnaires turned their wrath to the Temple Mount, pushing its huge stones over the side, where they lie today at the foot of the Wailing Wall. Jews still mourn the destruction of the Temple. Once the fighting was over, the Romans killed the elderly and most military-age men, then sold the women and children into slavery. Tens of thousands were killed or enslaved that day, and Emperor Vespasian used the spoils from the Temple to pay for the Colosseum in Rome.
However, the Jewish insurgency was not dead. A thousand Sicarii terrorists escaped through hidden underground tunnels and sewers, and made their way to Masada, the ancient world’s most impregnable fortress. Located on the edge of the Dead Sea, Masada was built on a 1,500-foot mesa reminiscent of an island of stone in the Grand Canyon. A few narrow paths carved out of the cliff face were the only way up the mountain, which were easy to defend with a small force. The Sicarii surprised the Roman garrison occupying Masada, killing all seven hundred of them, and took over the mountain fortress. It had enough stores to feed the Sicarii and their families for years. They would wait out the war and begin their rebellion anew once the Roman army left Judea. Or so they thought.
Who would attempt to conquer Masada but the Romans? General Silva arrived with the 10th Legion and fifteen thousand Jewish slaves from Jerusalem, and methodically set to work building seven fortified camps and a berm, surrounding Masada on all sides. Then, unimaginably, Roman engineers began to build an earthen ramp from the desert floor to the top of the mountain. It took a year to construct the giant ramp using hand tools. They also created a multi-storied siege tower with a battering ram. Somehow, in a colossal engineering feat, they hoisted it up the ramp until it scaled Masada’s fortress walls. It broke through in a single day.
What happened next has become legend in Jewish culture. With nowhere to run, the Sicarii watched their impending doom in glacial slow motion, until the fateful day their fortress wall fell. The Romans returned to their camps for the night, perhaps reasoning that slaughter is easier with a good night’s sleep. Inside the fortress, the Sicarii men gathered outside the synagogue to listen to their leader, Eleazar ben Yair. He motioned them to gather closer, so all could hear.
“Long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but only God,” Eleazar said. “Now the time has come that bids us prove our determination by our deeds. . . . Let us die before we become slaves under our enemies, and let us go out of the world, together with our children and our wives, in a state of freedom.”4
These words steeled their hearts for the end. Some men sobbed, but the thought of their wives being gang-raped by soldiers while their children were taken away for a lifetime of slavery in service to pagan gods was too much. When Elazar finished speaking, all swore they would not be taken alive.
Rather than fight to the death, they opted for mass suicide. Since suicide is prohibited in Judaism, the men killed their wives and children first, then gathered in the bathhouse. Each wrote his name on a shard of pottery and threw it into a pot. They took turns drawing a name, then killing the man listed until only one remained, who either committed suicide or was killed by a woman. When the Romans stormed up the ramp the next morning, they found 960 bodies. Only two women and five children were found alive.
After this, the Romans had no more problems in Judea for decades. The First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE) is an example of a successful counterinsurgency, or “COIN.” Winning hearts and minds, which is how the West conceives of COIN today, is irrelevant. The Romans made a desert and called it peace, to paraphrase the ancient historian Tacitus. Bloody determination and strategic patience eradicated the roots of insurgency and won the war. It is not fair, just, or moral. But it is effective. This is what successful COIN requires, and anything less simply prolongs the fight, as demonstrated by the failure of modern COIN in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like all forms of armed conflict, COIN isn’t for the kindhearted. “War is hell,” explained General Sherman during the American Civil War. Sherman’s March to the Sea was a “scorched earth” strategy that proved decisive for the Union’s victory.5
In 2009, I sat in an overflow room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, listening to General David Petraeus explain how the only solution for the failing war in Afghanistan was a “comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy,” modeled after the one that had allegedly won Iraq.
Petraeus’s speech came at the annual meeting of the Center for a New American Security, a DC-based think tank that had become a locus of COIN thinking. The four-star general was at the peak of his power; he was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2009 and lauded by both Democrats and Republicans for saving Iraq. His thick PowerPoint presentation spoke of securing and serving the population, understanding local circumstances, separating irreconcilables from reconcilables, and living among the people.
This became the Petraeus Doctrine: winning hearts and minds is the only pathway to victory when fighting unconventional wars. The general and his entourage, nicknamed the COINistas, called it population-centric, or “pop-centric,” COIN, and they promised it would win Afghanistan. The audience applauded and cheered. People always like good news.
Petraeus was the great savior of Iraq and Afghanistan, until they blew up. People think that saving the population wins the war, but this rarely works. War is too complex for such facile sentiments, which is why the United States lost in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Petraeus and pop-centric COIN remain mainstream strategic ideas, which poses a dangerous problem. Why? Because we have created new myths about strategy that will persist for years despite their obvious failings, and we will make bad decisions about intervening in future wars based on these myths.
Years earlier, Petraeus was my brigade commander in the 82nd Airborne. Back then, in the early 1990s, he was just a colonel and I a lieutenant. I remember one night we conducted a “mass attack” in which two thousand paratroopers descended onto a mock enemy airfield in the middle of Fort Bragg at night. Our mission: capture the airfield. After we cleared the enemy, I happened to run into Colonel Petraeus on the battlefield, a gaunt figure and an exercise nut.
He asked me how my platoon had performed, and I told him. Then we had an erudite conversation about the future of war, surrounded by smoke in the purple dawn twilight. It was surreal.
“Future wars will not be conventional,” Petraeus said. “We’re not going to be fighting states, or people who fight like us.”
“Who, then?”
“Guerillas, drug thugs, and others who want to depose lawful governments. In a word, insurgents.”
“Like Vietnam?” I said. “That didn’t end well for us.”
We discussed why, then he said, “You should leave the army and get a PhD.”
“Why?” I asked, crestfallen. At that point, I still wanted an army career.
“Because counterinsurgency is the future, and the military isn’t ready for it. But people need to be. Study it and strengthen your mind.”
So I did. My battalion commander, a young Stan McChrystal, even wrote my recommendation for Harvard. Ironically, I learned that counterinsurgency rarely works. As T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) explains, armies are like potted plants: strong but immobile. They are rooted to fortresses, and when they move, it’s a crawl. Meanwhile, guerillas are like vapor, invisible and everywhere. They come and go as they please and are too clever to be caught in open battle with an army, which would obliterate them. Better to be vapor. You can’t hit vapor, and that’s their defense.6
But insurgencies are more than guerillas. They are armed social movements that want to topple governments. Insurgents dream of leading their people into revolution, as Lenin and Mao did. Ideology is their weapon of choice, as they strive to win over the people’s “hearts and minds,” a term dating back to the American Revolution, another insurgency.7 Insurgents’ mission is to convince the population that the current regime is despotic and illegitimate, worthy of overthrow. The more the regime’s forces crush the insurgents, the more they prove the insurgents’ cause to the people. Hence, conventional war strategies guarantee defeat.
The COINistas get some things right. They espouse ditching conventional warfare when facing an insurgency. Instead, they argue, beat the insurgents at their own game, and start your own armed social movement to compete with theirs. You win by capturing more hearts and minds, not battlefield victories. “Military action is secondary to the political one,” argues David Galula, a seminal COIN strategist and a French army officer.8 Many of the big ideas in the United States’ much-hyped Counterinsurgency Manual in 2006 were filched from Galula’s writings from the early 1960s.
In those writings, Galula lays out an eight-step strategy to win. It comes down to this: isolate the people from the insurgents, keep the area secure, earn the population’s trust so they tell you where the insurgents are hiding, and then mop up the insurgents. “Mop up” is despot’s jargon for “kill or imprison for life.” It’s a clear-hold-build campaign, which the United States adopted in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Galula’s strategy also involves rigging elections, controlling the media, neutralizing political opponents, and replacing (disappearing?) elected officials who don’t agree with you. It’s very Putin. Petraeus didn’t do this, at least not all of it, and instead chose nation-building. That didn’t end well.
But pop-centric COIN gets the big things wrong. COINistas are fond of saying that COIN is a fight for legitimacy because this wins hearts and minds. However, they are pretty dumb when it comes to what “legitimacy” comprises. When considering Iraq or Afghanistan, they mistakenly assume legitimacy is just like it is back home in the West. This is imbecilic. In a democracy, legitimacy is conferred by the people’s consent to be governed—hence the importance of elections. People owe their obedience to the government in exchange for social services like security, justice, education, and health care. If the population is dissatisfied, it can fire the government and elect new leaders. Political scientists call this dynamic the “social contract” between ruler and ruled.
COINistas think you can forge a new social contract in failed states if you provide people with better social services, literally building a nation out of dust. One COINista even called it “armed social work” (which angered social workers everywhere).9 As a result, the United States blew billions in Iraq and Afghanistan building schools, roads, hospitals—a state. But this never succeeds because—spoiler alert—populations are not bribable. Individuals can be bribed, but not communities. It turns out that people will take your stuff but not your ideology. Would Americans become Communists if China built them new schools and hospitals? Heck no. Yet this is the logic of COINistas.
Imposing a Western concept of legitimacy in Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake. In the world of intelligence analysis, this gaffe is called “mirroring,” and it’s a cardinal sin. It assumes other populations think the same way as we do, but foreign societies do not mirror our own. This would seem obvious, but not to the COIN crowd. Legitimacy in societies like Iraq and Afghanistan is not conferred by a democratic social contract but rather by political Islam. Piety to god and observance of sharia law matters most, which is what al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban are selling. Pop-centric COIN was doomed to fail because of this blunder.
COIN’s imperialist origin is another reason why it flopped so spectacularly. COIN was never meant to build democracies—it was designed to enslave people. Early COIN theorists like David Galula, Roger Trinquier, C. E. Callwell, and others were European colonialists. Their goal was to impose a colonial regime, not to create independent states. Galula wasn’t interested in transforming Algeria or Indochina into democracies. He wanted to reestablish the French colonial grip over locals who sought their freedom, and he devised COIN to achieve this. Rigging elections, manipulating the press, ordering extrajudicial killings, and engaging in other activities anathema to democracy were acceptable techniques because the places in question were just colonies. Trinquier advocated torture and brutality. Imperial powers establish colonies mainly to extract wealth, making COIN the wrong model for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you begin on the wrong foot, you will continue to trip on the path ahead.
The biggest problem with COIN is that it ignores history. Insurgency scholarship generally disregards the huge number of insurgencies that fail and are consigned to the dustbin of history as flopped revolutions, rebellions, or just plain crimes. Mostly, insurgencies are flattened by government forces. It is interesting to contemplate how the weak win wars so long as one keeps in mind that most of the time they don’t. Here are three COIN strategies that can succeed—if you can stomach them. None triumphed by winning hearts and minds.
The first is the “drain the swamp” strategy, and it’s what the Romans did to Judea. Clausewitz liked this one, and he thought of peasants-in-arms as rabble to be put down like obstreperous curs.10 But Clausewitz had a point, and this is usually what happens in history. The biggest challenge is finding insurgents to kill. Before Mao was supremo of China, he was a lowly insurgent and always on the run. He used to say: “The guerrilla must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea.”11 This means guerillas must blend in with the local population to survive, as the Sicarii did. One solution is to drain the sea or swamp, exposing the fish so you can kill them. Usually this means blasting the population until the insurgency is dead, collateral damage be damned.
Coercion has worked for many. During the Vietnam War, the US Army Green Berets had a saying: “If you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” In 1999, Russia crushed the Chechen revolt by laying siege to Grozny, the Chechen capital, and pummeling it to dust. The United Nations declared Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth. Sri Lanka ended its twenty-six-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers after trying everything else first. In 2009, the Sri Lankan government decided to push the Tigers into the sea, and that’s where they remain. Perhaps it’s only genocide if you fail. Even terrorists use this strategy. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban built their kingdoms with coercion.
The second is the “export and relocate” strategy. During World War II, Stalin had a problem with uppity Chechens, who wanted to use the opportunity to break away from the Soviet Union. The Steel Man’s answer was Operation Lentl. The Red Army forcibly spread the Chechens across the USSR’s eleven time zones, so that they would be a minority in someone else’s homeland, extinguishing the Chechen insurgency. Of the 496,000 people who were deported, at least a quarter perished.
The third is the “import and dilute” strategy. Shortly after Mao took power, China annexed Tibet by claiming it had once belonged to “greater” China, even though Tibet has almost no native Han people. In 1950, China’s million-man army conquered the mountain kingdom in what it now calls the “peaceful liberation of Tibet.”12 Buddhist nuns were raped, unarmed monks slaughtered, and temples looted. In the years to follow, China imported millions of Han Chinese, making Tibetans a minority in their own homeland and easier to subdue. In 2006, China opened a bullet train into Tibet, literally accelerating the process. Operating at 16,627 feet, it’s the world’s highest speed train, and the Chinese had to order custom locomotives to operate in the thin air. Diluting the native population with your own smothers potential insurgencies.
The best way to kill insurgencies is to use all three strategies at once. Rome ruled for a millennium this way, and it’s how outnumbered European colonialists controlled rebellious territories. The United States conquered its western frontier using these techniques, to the humiliation of native American Indians. Morocco used this combination to occupy the disputed Western Sahara territory, relabeling it its “Southern Territories.” Many argue that Israel does the same with Palestinians today.
In the end, effective COIN is brutal and heartless—the opposite of Petraeus’s warm and fuzzy version. If the West were to undertake effective COIN, it would harken back to the nefarious days of colonialism. The alternative appears equally problematic. Terrorism and insurgencies have been on the rise since the end of the Cold War and have come to define war today. These forces of durable disorder are a genuine threat if left to fester. Western militaries and UN peacekeepers have proved inept at dealing with them.
Small changes are the enemies of big changes. The West needs a long-term presence in zones of disorder to prevent problems from becoming crises and crises from becoming conflicts. There is a solution, but it’s unorthodox. Conventional war fighters will detest it, but they are the enemy of change.
There is no substitute for boots on the ground. Troops are needed to root out the enemies in the shadows, where they breed, before they develop into full-blown insurgencies or mature into terrorists who can attack our homeland. This requires a long-term commitment to regions of disorder, but Western societies hate seeing their troops come home in body bags. “Bring the troops home!” is a common antiwar chant. Unpopular wars guarantee lost elections, so presidents and prime ministers try to keep troop numbers down. However, this is the worst strategy, because it deploys sufficient troops to get killed but not enough to win. How can the West maintain a long-term presence on the ground without risking its own troops?
Some think covert special operations forces can do the job, but they are not built or resourced for it. Their staying power is limited, their numbers too few, and the need for them too great. Even if we quadrupled their size, it wouldn’t change the essential fact that they are designed for quick-strike actions and not the enduring presence needed to quell brewing insurgencies. Others think air power is the answer, as was tried in the Balkans and Libya, but you cannot hold territory from the sky.
Western countries should create foreign legions. When people think of foreign legions, they think of French mercenaries. This stereotype is incorrect. The French Foreign Legion is a part of the French military, led by French officers, and equipped by the French government. It takes its orders exclusively from Paris, and it rewards its legionnaires with French citizenship. It’s a French army unit, except its enlisted ranks come from all over the world. It functions as a quick-response force, and an elite one at that, drawing largely from the veteran pool of other militaries worldwide. Even American vets have a hard time making the cut.13 With seven thousand legionaries, the unit can deploy deep forward in places like Africa or the Middle East to secure French national interests.
It’s time for an American Foreign Legion—and a British one, an Australian one, a Danish one, and any other country that wants to overcome threats before they arrive at their borders. Like the French model, the American Foreign Legion would be a part of the Department of Defense, except its enlisted ranks could be recruited globally—a huge pool. The United States would recruit, train, sustain, and command these troops in the long term. The legion’s units would be led by American officers and special forces teams, scaling their mission at a reasonable rate.
Loyalty would be ensured by welding legionnaires’ long-term interests to Washington’s. Like soldiers, legionnaires would sign multiyear enlistments and could make a career in service to America. Beyond a paycheck, the legion would also offer a pathway for citizenship. This is not a radical idea. For decades, the United States has offered earned citizenship through military service.14 The legion would serve as a beacon for men and women who want to opt in to the American way of life and are willing to earn it.
A foreign legion could provide the United States with long-term boots on the ground in places it needs them the most, solving a perennial strategic problem. The West’s aversion to troops returning in body bags would not be an issue, judging by the US public’s lack of interest in dead private military contractors or proxy militia members. The transition from US casualties to non-US ones would give the legion political freedom of maneuver to bash threats where they breed, and to take some risks doing so. Even better, once the legion eradicated a threat, it would remain in the region to prevent the threat from returning. This fixed posture would solve the problem of a US playbook limited to air strikes and the involvement of special operations forces, who can linger in a threat area only for hours or days at the most. The legion could stay for years.
The foreign legion would be designed to combat the forces of disorder, and it should be deployed into zones of chaos that are critical to us. For example, it could preemptively annihilate terrorists where they nest, hunt Iranian shadow forces like the Quds Force or Hezbollah, and kill Russia’s “little green men” (who supposedly do not exist, so who will miss them?). Base the legion inside threat incubators like Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Asking permission from these failed governments is pointless—they are countries in name only. Anyway, which government do you call first? These countries each have more than one. Let the legion carve out a space in a disordered world.
A foreign legion would solve other problems, too, such as that of unreliable proxy militias. Currently, Washington relies on indigenous militias, mustered in short order, to fight for American interests in zones of disorder. This has been a catastrophe. In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fought those armed by the CIA.15 At other times, militias have just handed over all their US weaponry and ammunition to terrorists.16 Congress approved $500 million to train and equip around five thousand anti-ISIS fighters but have “only four or five” to show for its efforts, according to the general in charge.17 There is no accountability for proxies, other than to end the relationship.
A foreign legion would also provide an essential boost to American troop numbers. The US military simply cannot find enough Americans willing to volunteer for service when at war. During the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Washington had to rely on contractors to fill the ranks, and most of them were not even American. For the first time in US military history, more contractors than troops were on the ground, and this situation created heaps of problems.18
Legionnaires should replace contractors and all the troubles associated with them. Training and vetting standards could be maintained in a transparent manner, unlike with barely vetted private military contractors (I know, I was in the industry). Legionnaires would be held accountable for their actions under military law, called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Contractors face minimal accountability. If they commit a crime, like murder, they get sent home with minimal—or no—punishment. An American foreign legion would end such impunity.
Paying for the legion would be easy. It would replace private military contractors and take their budget. In 2010, during the Iraq War, the Pentagon appropriated $366 billion for contracts—that’s five times the United Kingdom’s entire defense budget. Also, the amount of fraud, waste, and abuse among contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is Valhalla in scale.19 The legion would serve the US government first, with no shareholders to please. Additional funds could come out of the defense budget by cutting one F-35.
Unlike contemporary forces, the foreign legion would combine the punch of special operations forces with the staying power of a conventional military unit. Strategically, this would provide a lot of agility bang for the depth buck. It would give the United States a needed weapon in zones of disorder, and it would solve other problems, too, such as inept proxy militias, wily contractors, and American casualties.
A few may blanch at the idea of a foreign legion, but it is a Hobson’s choice. We either keep using the same failed strategies that waste lives, trillions of dollars, and national honor. Or we make a bold change. No one wants the former, so the choice should be obvious.