Failing up: the Michele Flournoy experience
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°57 | 27 November 2020
Situation
Michele Flournoy is reportedly still the likely Biden-Harris pick for Secretary of Defense. It’s also still the case that Flournoy should not be nominated due to her relationship with the war industry. Thankfully, resistance to her prospective appointment has gained attention in the media and in Congress (credit probably goes to sound advocacy efforts).
The problem is we can’t count on the incoming administration or the Senate (which approves cabinet nominations via simple majority) to call out the obvious conflict of interest at play here because they’re paid by the same corporations as Flournoy. Your average senator took in $63,592 in campaign cash from defense contractors from 2019-20, and no candidate received more war industry financing over this period than Joe Biden, hauling in $2,421,336 (data via Open Secrets).
Considering these conditions, what follows is a secondary argument (Flournoy’s legacy of failure), just in case the whole corruption thing doesn’t resonate with your senator. My intent here is to provide another tool with which to slow down and drag out the confirmation process in order to maximize the time that civil society can shed light on Flournoy’s conflict of interest.
The Flournoy experience
1. Expectations
After Obama won in 2008, Flournoy co-chaired his Pentagon transition team and joined the administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (running DOD’s policy office is a big deal) in 2009. By this time, public opinion had flipped on Iraq and was heading the same direction for the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan:
Flournoy believed she had the solution to Afghanistan in the form of a reformed counterinsurgency strategy, which is what her think tank, Center for a New American Security (CNAS), was known for. The Obama administration bought in, and put Flournoy among the people in charge of revising the US military’s plan in Afghanistan. Several others from CNAS ended up rolling into the Pentagon with her. The new counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy Flournoy championed got a lot of hype, even outside the Beltway. John Stewart had one of its key architects, John Nagl, on The Daily Show in 2007.
Its appeal was in its ‘population-centric’ approach; a turnabout from the ‘enemy-centric’ tactics that prioritized eliminating targets over civilian protection. This iteration would still carry out military activities, but it would emphasize patrols and development assistance in order to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Afghans — the logic here being that the existing heavy-handed approach to COIN was pissing Afghan civilians off to the extent that many ended up joining or otherwise supporting the insurgency (or at least not cooperating with the Americans).
2. Failure
The best way I could think of to succinctly convey just how badly Flournoy’s counterinsurgency strategy failed in Afghanistan was to look at fatalities from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Three reasons:
1. IEDs were (frequently) deployed in the context of the insurgency
2. IED incident rates indicate changes in the intensity of the insurgency
3. The intensity of the insurgency speaks to the effectiveness of US counterinsurgency overall
So basically if the frequency of IED attacks goes up, your counterinsurgency strategy isn’t working, it’s failing. Here’s how Flournoy’s COIN strategy played out:
*N.B.: Keep in mind she started in 2009 and was out of the Pentagon completely by 2012 (though Flournoy’s influence over Afghanistan policy started to be significantly reduced in July 2011, when the next Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who was not a fan of Flournoy’s COIN strategy, assumed office [hence why the pink box only includes 2009-11]).
^Source for data: icasualties.org
3. Refusal to learn
The number of US troops deployed to Afghanistan doubled between Bush’s last term and the end of Obama’s first. Flournoy endorsed Obama’s decision to send more troops because it supported her COIN strategy, which required an immense investment of personnel and resources to not only wage war but also ‘protect’ and ‘win over’ Afghan civilians by investing in a diet version of nation-building.
Although it was sold as a strategy rooted in erudition, at the end of the day Flournoy’s COIN strategy was just about finding a better way to wage war. And far as I can tell, at no point in its formulation or enactment or aftermath did Flournoy/anybody else from CNAS consider that US intervention itself could be what was fueling the insurgency.
But was the US’ military presence really part of the problem in Afghanistan? Sure looks that way. Here’s the same chart from before, except I added US troop levels (blue line, right vertical axis) to see whether the spike in the graph above (= spike in intensity of the insurgency) corresponded at all with more/fewer US forces on the ground:
^Troop deployment data via Congressional Research Service. Levels refer to 4th quarter totals in each year. Not sure why 2011 didn’t show up in the graph, but it was 98,200.
Conclusion
With Flournoy, you’ve got someone who has a major conflict of interest going on and, considering her current hawkishness, someone who didn’t learn anything from her (quite formidable) legacy of failure.
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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