Emerging information and communications technologies may indeed have a critical influence on certain elements of the U.S. national security decision-making process as it relates to the use of force. In so far as that process involves Congress, however, the new technologies are not likely to have a direct impact, though they could indirectly to the extent they influence public opinion. Unlike our highly capital-intensive armed forces, which are benefiting directly and immensely from such new technologies as digital transmission, advanced networking, fiber optics, and cellular communications, Congress is first and foremost a deliberative political body. This is especially true of the Senate, with its significant Constitutional role in the oversight of foreign policy. Congress, as it has since the founding of the Republic, is swayed by such non-technological influences as patriotism, money, organized lobbying, constituent opinion, and the search for political advantage.
Members of Congress and professional staff are already awash in information and the ability to communicate and analyze it evermore quickly; fiber optic cable has been installed in House and Senate office buildings; cellular phones are in common use; and every professional staff member has a television monitor which carries both C-SPAN channels and CNN. But the Constitutional responsibilities of Congress remain unchanged, and Congress will continue to do business according to established rules of procedure. Increased access to satellite communications may be revolutionizing the conduct of war, but such things as global positioning systems are irrelevant to what Congress is about.
Even such a not-so-new information and communication technology as continuous live television coverage of overseas violence and human suffering may not have the dramatic effect on either congressional or public opinion that has commonly been ascribed to it. The evidence is mixed, at best. Dramatic CNN footage of the misnomered "Highway of Death" (the flight of Iraqi forces out of Kuwait) clearly influenced the Bush administration’s decision to cease further coalition offensive operations against the Iraqis unilaterally. There is also little doubt that gut-wrenching pictures of starving children in Somalia contributed to initial public and congressional support for U.S. humanitarian intervention there in late 1992, and that the subsequent U.S. decision to vacate Somalia was driven significantly by pictures of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by jubilant Somali gunmen.
Before the Dayton Accords on Bosnia, however, no less dramatic and outrageous footage of events in Bosnia, however, has created little sentiment for U.S. military intervention there, even though the United States clearly had more important interests in the former Yugoslavia than it did in Somalia. Polls suggested that the American public sensed that Bosnia had quagmire written all over it, and congressional initiatives to lift the embargo of arms to Bosnia were essentially substitutes for any direct U.S. military action there, which the Defense Department opposed. Before Dayton, despite extensive media coverage, the Vietnam syndrome was alive and well in both the Pentagon and the country at large as regards Bosnia.
Nor did televised images of poverty and oppression in Haiti produce a groundswell of opinion for intervention in that country; the Clinton administration sent troops in the face of considerable congressional and public, if not Haitian, opposition. This is not to suggest that Congress will prove completely impervious to the influence of new information and communications technologies. Some of the technologies are likely to reinforce the continued increase in the relative power of professional staff on Capitol Hill. Over the past several decades, Congress has had to rely more and more on highly specialized professional committee staff (strongly reinforced by such congressional research and investigative arms as the General Accounting Office, Office of Technology Assessment, and the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service), not only to remain competitive with the Executive Branch in terms of reaching informed judgments on a host of complex issues, but also to permit members of Congress the time to devote to fundraising in an era of skyrocketing costs of running for office. If knowledge is power, then a professional staff made ever more knowledgeable—if not wiser—via ready access to more information will become ever more powerful vis-a-vis 535 members of Congress who with few exceptions will remain amateurs. It should be noted that this trend would be accelerated by increased rates of congressional turnover—which is the declared objective of those who favor arbitrary term limits.
Other trends likely to be enhanced by the new technologies are the decline in power and influence based on seniority and absolute deference to that seniority. Before the explosive growth of professional staffs beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was in fact a distinct correlation between seniority and knowledge. Committee chairmen like Richard Russell and Wilbur Mills represented decades of experience and devotion to the details of their respective committee responsibilities, and junior members stood in awe of such men. Much has happened since then. The tradition of deference has declined, and the rising authority of professional committee and members’ personal staff has provided opportunities for members without appreciable seniority to stake significant claims on one issue or another.
Does the relative imperviousness of Congress to direct or significant influence by new information and communications technologies mean that the long-standing issue of congressional assertiveness in foreign policy, especially on issues involving the use of force, should be ignored? Certainly not! What some would call congressional "meddling" in the conduct of foreign policy has been a feature of the Washington political landscape for a quarter of a century, and an increase in congressional assertiveness is already underway and likely to continue for reasons that lie beyond the realm of technology.
It is important to remember that congressional activism in foreign policy is hardly a new phenomenon. During the inter-war period, an isolationist-dominated Congress blocked U.S. accession to the League of Nations Treaty and passed a series of Neutrality Acts and other legislation that severely hobbled presidential flexibility in dealing with the threat posed to the United States and other democracies by the rise of German and Japanese fascism. President Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to retain as much flexibility as possible, was compelled to engage in a number of circuitous initiatives, including what amounted to an undeclared naval war against German submarines in the North Atlantic.
To be sure, congressional docility characterized the first two decades of the Cold War: few in Congress questioned the integrity or wisdom of the Executive Branch when it came to making foreign policy, including decisions on war and peace. One is still struck by the virtual silence on Capitol Hill which greeted President Harry Truman’s momentous decision in June 1950 to commit U.S. troops to South Korea’s defense without bothering to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war. Failure to do so not only came back to haunt the Truman administration, but also established a disastrous precedent for Southeast Asia in the following decade. Indeed, the Johnson administration interpreted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, which after perfunctory debate passed the Senate with only two dissenting votes, as a functional substitute for a formal declaration of war.
Vietnam and Watergate, subsequently reinforced by the Iran-Contra Affair, sparked a resurrection of congressional activism against an "Imperial Presidency" which continues to this day. It is an activism rooted in a profound mistrust of the Executive Branch. With respect to the use of force, it is a largely negative activism that seeks to block or restrict the use of force on one ground or another. Examples of such congressional activism include the 1973 War Powers Act, the 1976 Clark Amendment (prohibiting any kind of U.S. assistance to Angola without congressional authorization), the 1993 Byrd Amendment (setting a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia), the 1994 Helms Amendment (requiring prior congressional authorization for any use of force in Haiti), and the 1994 Dole Amendment (mandating a unilateral U.S. termination of the United Nations arms embargo of Bosnia).
With respect to using force, the most distinct fault line in Congress lies along the issue of purpose. On the one side is a vocal minority which contends that traditional U.S. national security interests are no longer seriously threatened, and that the United States now enjoys the luxury of placing its military power in the service of promoting democracy, human rights, humanitarian relief, and other American values overseas. This minority, inspired in part by the Clinton administration’s initial embrace of such concepts as "assertive multilateralism" (on matters of war and peace) and "engagement and enlargement" (of market-based democracies), supports the use of force, when and where possible, to transform dictatorships into democracies, as in Haiti; to halt genocide, as in Bosnia; and to provide relief to the sick and starving, as in Somalia and Rwanda. It furthermore believes that the use of U.S. force overseas, to be legitimate, must be sanctioned by the United Nations, as indeed it was in the Persian Gulf in 1991, Somalia in 1992, and Haiti in 1994; it associates unsanctioned use of force with American "excesses" of the Cold War.
Opposite the supporters of value-motivated interventions stand those who believe that the United States should not use force except in defense of such traditional vital interests as protecting U.S. territory and American lives, preserving access to vital resources overseas, and maintaining balances of power in Europe and East Asia. They question the utility of military power as a means of promoting democracy and other American values abroad, and believe that investment in value-driven interventions like Somalia and Haiti degrades preparations for dealing with threats to truly vital interests, like another war on the Korean peninsula or another Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. They contend that the United States, especially in an era of rapidly shrinking defense resources, should be extremely careful about assuming new defense obligations, especially ones peripheral to core U.S. security interests. Bob Dole has written that, "American lives should not be risked—and lost—in places like Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda with marginal or no American interests at stake. Such actions will make it more difficult to convince American mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to battle when vital interests are at stake. The American people will not tolerate American casualties for irresponsible internationalism."1
nlike proponents of value-driven uses of force, many "traditionalists" are also hostile to the United Nations as an instrument for the conduct of peace operations, and do not believe that U.N. approval is necessary to legitimize a U.S. decision to use force. Again, Senator Dole: "[The Clinton] administration has displayed a basic discomfort with American military power—unless that power is exercised pursuant to United Nations authorization. In Haiti, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine has been replaced with the [Morton] Halperin Doctrine—unilateral action only after multilateral approval. An unfortunate precedent has been set in seeking prior United Nations support for what an American president proclaimed was in America’s interests—interests that should not be second-guessed, modified, or subject to the approval of international organizations."2
The majority of congressional opinion on the use of force falls somewhere in between the two positions just outlined. Most interventions themselves are propelled by some combination of interest and value motives. Even Desert Storm, which clearly would not have been undertaken on behalf of an oil-less Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and against an Iraq having no nuclear or ballistic missile ambitions, was motivated in part by a desire to relieve the human tragedy of Kuwait and to bring down an exceptionally brutal regime. Conversely, the desire to restore democracy in Haiti did not completely eclipse the goal of staunching the uncontrolled flow of Haitian refugees to the United States.
Moreover, confusion, contradiction, and simple political posturing are as commonplace in the Congress on this issue as they are on most other issues. Party attitudes on the degree to which Congress can and should regulate presidential foreign policy initiatives vary widely depending on which party occupies the White House. For example, prominent Republicans who in 1990 argued that President Bush did not need congressional approval to initiate hostilities against Iraq—that UN authorization alone was sufficient— subsequently reversed position when it came to such Clinton administration initiatives as the dispatch of U.S. forces to Haiti. For another example, prominent Democrats who in 1983 condemned the U.S. use of force in Grenada as a violation of that country’s sovereignty have applauded the Clinton administration’s invasion of Haiti.
Many who wish to employ U.S. military power on behalf of humanitarian relief and who believe the issue is a simple matter of resolve and logistics fail to recognize that most humanitarian crises in the world today have political rather than natural origins, and therefore that intervention of the most benign intention risks being drawn into someone else’s civil war. "The task of alleviating suffering inevitably involves political consequences when suffering has political causes," observes Michael Mandelbaum. "War was the cause of the breakdown of order in northern Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. Stopping a war requires settling the questions—political questions —over which it is being fought. As a result, in each case the noble humanitarian purpose of feeding people inevitably became caught up in the poisonous tangle of local politics."3
Many who find political legitimacy in UN resolutions do not grasp that the United Nations is constitutionally incapable of effectively employing force in circumstances involving war or the imminent risk of war. Again, Mandelbaum: "The UN can no more conduct military operations on a large scale on its own than a trade association of hospitals can perform heart surgery."4
Many who caution against assuming peripheral overseas defense commitments blithely endorse NATO’s rapid extension of membership to east European states, thus commiting the United States to defending new territory never regarded as vital to U.S. security. (The Republicans’ "Contract with America" called for the early admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.) Many who rail against the United Nations seem to forget that the United States is the dominant power in that organization, and can exercize its veto power as a Permanent Member of the Security Council in the post-Cold War era as forcefully as did the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And many who decry the alleged evils of multilateral applications of force, including the bugaboo of placing U.S. troops under foreign command, ignore the fact that the United States in this century has almost always fought in the presence of militarily and politically indispensible allies, and in many cases has placed its forces under foreign command.
As confusing, contradictory, and politically motivated as congressional attitudes appear to be on many foreign policy issues in the post-Cold War era, attitudes on the use of force are shaped by several factors that are likely to be abiding features of the foreseeable domestic political landscape. And while several of these factors may be influenced by emerging information and communication technologies, none appears driven by these technologies.
The first is a preoccupation with domestic social and economic challenges—and concomitant aversion to involvement in any foreign crisis that might divert national resources away from their resolution. Foreign policy issues rarely dominate public and congressional concerns in peacetime; however, the present degree of preoccupation with national problems is unprecedented since the beginning of the Cold War, and is likely to remain so absent the emergence of another hostile world power capable of challenging U.S. interests on a global scale. While new information and communication technologies may make us more aware of distant events and connect U.S. financial markets more closely to overseas financial markets, they are not likely in the foreseeable future to overturn the preeminence of domestic social and economic challenges in congressional eyes.
The second factor is a strong preference for conventional forces and a concomitant aversion to injecting U.S. military power into situations where the effects of such traditional U.S. advantages as firepower and tactical mobility cannot be fully maximized. This preference mirrors Pentagon attitudes, and means a strong reluctance to intervene in places like Bosnia and Somalia, but a willingness, if necessary, to take on opponents like Iraq and North Korea, and to take lesser punitive military action against such pariah states for specific misdeeds. Congressional criticism of the Clinton administration’s 1993 "Bottom-Up Review" of U.S. military requirements centered almost exclusively on the significant disparities between postulated requirements, and the current and planned resources to fulfill those requirements. Few questioned the realism of those requirements, which call for forces sufficient to wage two large-scale conventional wars simultaneously, with a North Korean invasion of South Korea and an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province serving as the basis for U.S. force planning. So while emerging information and communication technologies will undoubtedly enhance our ability to fight, it is not clear how these technologies might alter congressional positions on defense issues per se.
A third factor is an aversion to purely or predominantly value-driven uses of force, which by definition presume the absence of compelling or even modest national security interests. Support can be expected for such operations as the evacuation of endangered Western citizens in Third World countries (e.g., evacuation of American and European nationals from Algeria) and the provision of relief supplies in the wake of natural disasters and in other circumstances not involving significant risk of entanglement in local civil conflict (e.g., the Rwandan refugee relief operations of 1994). But a solid majority in both Houses of Congress can be expected to oppose, though perhaps not at the cost of crippling presidential flexibility in the middle of a crisis, interventions aimed at recreating failed states as viable societies (e.g., Haiti) and interventions likely to entangle the United States in local civil conflicts (e.g., Lebanon and Somalia). Emerging information and communication technologies are not likely to change this congressional calculus of what is in the American interest.
A fourth factor influencing congressional opinion on matters of war and peace is a widespread appreciation, born of the lessons of Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm as well as of Pentagon insistence, is that force, when used, should be ample to accomplish the task at hand in a timely fashion as well as command broad public support (or at a minimum a benign indifference). Meeting these and other desireable prerequisites for using force, such as having clearly defined political and military objectives and an effective means of measuring progress toward their accomplishment, may not always be possible, particularly in cases where the enemy has taken the initiative against established U.S. defense commitments. Sufficient resources and political support would seem imperative, however, when an administration is contemplating military action it is not obligated by treaty or other prior commitment to undertake, and even more so in circumstances where there are no apparent compelling U.S. security interests at stake. The shallowness of public and congressional support for U.S. intervention in Somalia was revealed by how few American dead and wounded it took to drive the United States out of that country; and arguably it has been the unexpected absence of American casualties in Haiti that has prevented a collapse of what little real support our intervention there has commanded.
This brings us to the fifth factor, which is the first which may indeed be significantly influenced by emerging information and communication technologies: public and congressional hyper-sensitivity to casualties, which may have been reinforced by Desert Storm’s implication that even large-scale conventional warfare can henceforth be waged on the very cheap in terms of lives lost. Much has been written on this subject. Some observers have concluded that this hyper-sensitivity, which has come to include enemy civilian as well as American military dead and wounded, has effectively self-deterred the United States from using force in all cases other than self-defense and exceptional situations like that afforded the West by the strategically incompetent Saddam Hussein.5
This hyper-sensitivity is a relatively new phenomenon, and has often been attributed to the emergence of television’s ability to project the death and destruction of combat into American living rooms. However, one should not move too rapidly to such a conclusion. During the opening stages of the Vietnam War, as casualties began to mount, the American public supported increased U.S. involvement in combat. Indeed, in the case of Vietnam, the primary source of that war’s unpopularity through the Tet Offensive was the widespread conviction that the government was not prosecuting the war vigorously enough.6
In recent years, however, both the public and Congress displayed a disposition to abruptly abandon interventions in the face of even a small number of casualties, as in Somalia, and it is difficult to deny that the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from that unfortunate country was at least in part linked to televised scenes of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. However, we must remember that the withdrawal from Somalia was an executive decision. We can only speculate on what Congress might have done if the executive branch had not acted, but in this case, it was clearly the executive branch, not Congress, that in a policy sense responded to the media’s message first. This is likely to be the case in the future as well.
A sixth factor influencing congressional attitudes on the use of force is a suspicion of multilateral frameworks for doing so, especially the United Nations. This too is not likely to change because of emerging information and communication technologies. Some of this suspicion is valid, and some of it is not. Much of it is motivated by the United Nations’ feckless pre-Dayton performance in Bosnia and reckless performance in Somalia, by a distaste for so-called "peace operations" in general, and by strong opposition to placing U.S. troops under foreign command. To be sure, though the United Nations can provide effective genuine peacekeeping services, it is a demonstrably poor instrument for the conduct of even humanitarian relief-oriented military operations in places like Bosnia and Somalia where there is little peace to keep. In contrast, the multilateral NATO framework, with its integrated military command and decades of force-planning experience, is a true warfighting organization, though its ability to conduct effective military operations outside alliance territory requires a political consensus that is difficult to obtain, as NATO’s original reluctance to become involved in Bosnia showed.
Last, but by no means least, congressional attitudes toward using force will be significantly influenced by military opinion that recently has become more forcefully and openly expressed than at any time during this century. For better or for worse, the influence of military advice on decisions made by civilians has steadily grown since the end the the Vietnam War, which, along with such other politically disastrous uses of force as the Lebanese misadventure of 1983-84, eroded military confidence in the capacity of civilian authority to employ force wisely. With this erosion of confidence has come an increasing outspokenness that has reflected the military establishment’s congenital reluctance to use force, but greater willingness, once force is used, to raise the level of violence. (Traditionally, civilian authority has been quicker to resort to force but more hesitant to escalate.) Indeed, it was U.S. intervention in Lebanon, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense unanimously opposed, that prompted Caspar Weinberger to publicly proclaim six major political and military tests that should be applied when weighing the use of U.S. combat forces abroad:
In the real world, of course, few uses of force can satisfy all of these criteria, and Congress is certainly not in a position to compel their satisfaction on the part of the Executive Branch, short of rarely summoned courage to employ the power of the purse to stop U.S. participation in unpopular wars. However, in cases where there is evident division between military and civilian authorities within the Executive Branch, and these are usually situations where the latter are pressing for a resort to force, or having resorted to force, for restraint on escalation, Congress may be expected to side with military opinion.
To sum up, then, in the Information Age, congressional attitudes on matters of war and peace are being shaped by a number of factors, some of them new, but those factors are predictably political rather than technological—as befits an organization whose business is politics. Emerging information and communication technologies may well have an impact on the overall national security decision-making process, and they will clearly have an impact on our capabilities to conduct warfare, but when it comes to Congress’ role in the national security decision-making process, it is difficult to argue that they will have much of an impact at all.
1. Bob Dole, "Shaping America’s Future," Foreign Policy (Spring 1995), p. 41.
2. Ibid., p. 39.
3. Michael Mandelbaum, "The Reluctance to Intervene," Foreign Policy (Summer 1994), p. 4.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. See, for example, Stanley R. Sloan, The United States and the Use of Force in the Post-Cold War World: Toward Self-Deterrence? CRS Report for the Congress 94-581-S (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress: Congressional Resarch Service, July 20, 1994).
6. See Benjamin C. Schwarz, Casualties, Public Opinion and U.S. Military Intervention (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1994), pp. ix-xi.
7. Caspar W. Weinberger, "The Uses of Military Power," Defense ‘85 (January 1985), pp. 2-11.