The Rules of Engagement

When bombing began in Afghanistan last year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld retained the right to personally approve attacks on any and all “sensitive” targets. By the second day of bombing, approvals by Rumsfeld had proved unworkable, and authority over sensitive targets was handed down to the Florida-based commander in chief of the U.S. operation, Army Gen. Tommy Franks. In November, Franks got permission to delegate it a half-step further down--to a staff operations officer in Florida.

But at no time, even today, has the ostensible commander of the air war, who is based in Saudi Arabia, had the authority to attack the broad array of targets classified as “sensitive” without prior approval from Washington or Florida.

Welcome to the new age of micromanagement.

For many in the Bush administration, the Afghanistan war has been an unqualified success. But what’s happening now in upper reaches of the Pentagon gives new force to the old saying that you learn more from defeat than from victory.

When it comes to “lessons learned,” Operation Enduring Freedom may prove to have been a dangerous victory. That the war’s many-layered control system likely got in the way of a far more decisive outcome may be forgotten: What will be remembered is simply our quick routing of the Taliban.

Because of that victory, questions about micromanagement are apparently unwelcome at the top--despite the fact that most of the senior Taliban leadership, as well as the bulk of Al Qaeda forces, got away.

No one wants to hear about the cost of having battlefield decisions made on the other side of the world by busy officials who have no direct feel for what is happening. Complaints are dismissed as military petulance or--worse--as uniformed officers challenging civilian control.

If the issue of micromanagement is not addressed, however, the future cost could be high. The control system employed in the air war in Afghanistan will shape the system used next time. And carrying that system forward against a far more capable foe like Iraq could have a high price, both in reduced military effectiveness and in risk to American lives.

The situation is ripe with irony. Up to now, micromanagement of combat has been associated primarily with Vietnam, when President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, spent hours poring over maps to personally select targets for U.S. warplanes.

Republicans vowed to leave the fighting of subsequent wars to the professionals. The first President Bush did just that, developing a control system for the air war in Desert Storm that protected wider national interests but trusted uniformed military in the field to make targeting decisions.

What is happening today, as one senior officer put it, is “back to the future,” a return to the Vietnam-era distrust of military commanders and excessive involvement by Washington in daily decisions. His concerns about micromanagement were shared by a number of senior Defense Department and military officers interviewed for this piece.

The high degree of Washington oversight is reflected both in highly classified “rules of engagement” and in presidential directives governing Operation Enduring Freedom, some of which I have seen, while others have been read to me or described in detail by senior officials with access.

Part of the problem is that, with ultimate target approval lying half a world and many time zones away, numerous decisions on launching attacks got bogged down until it was too late. Also, with the CIA’s Predator reconnaissance drones sending real-time imagery to both the air command center in Saudi Arabia and to U.S. Central Command (CentCom) in Florida, time-consuming discussions back and forth were almost inevitable.

“The problem was that the CIA, Florida and CentCom all thought they were choking the chicken,” one exasperated officer said.

The Washington Post, for example, reported a case in which Air Force targeters had identified a column of Taliban reinforcements moving over open ground, but CentCom worried that the movement seemed so obvious it might be a trick. As the Rules of Engagement were written, that was enough to scuttle the attack.

Rules of engagement are formal documents that outline when, where, how, why and against whom force may be used. They also spell out restrictions on its use because of political, diplomatic or legal concerns.

These rules are some of the most closely held elements of any war, since knowing our rules of engagement can help an enemy. Some are so sensitive that they are only conveyed to a commander in person or by secure telephone.

U.S. forces generally operate under the so-called Standing Rules of Engagement, the basic directives first issued by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1994, and revised in January 2000. The standing rules state that all U.S. forces “will comply with the Law of War during ... armed conflict, no matter how the conflict may be characterized under international law.” In addition, further rules are promulgated for each theater, and even more specific ones are developed for individual operations.

A recent internal Pentagon memorandum dealing with the formulation of rules of engagement, for example, notes that attacks on certain targets or the use of particular weapons may be restricted “so as not to needlessly shame or antagonize the enemy, tilt allied or U.S. public opinion in a particular direction or escalate hostilities.”

In Afghanistan, according to senior officials, special rules of engagement were shaped by the administration’s desire to avoid giving the impression that the United States was attacking Islam as a whole. The rules also reflected concern that destruction of Afghan infrastructure could contribute to civilian suffering after the war.

No one I’ve interviewed questioned these concerns. Senior commanders understand that war can affect wider U.S. interests. And no one questioned the appropriateness of having civilian authorities make policy decisions.

What many senior officers do question is whether meeting these valid concerns required a cumbersome control system that impeded the military’s ability to achieve other U.S. goals--including greater damage to terrorists and their supporters.

In essence, senior warfare commanders feel that--based on their training and on lessons learned in conflicts from Vietnam through Desert Storm to the former Yugoslavia--they can be trusted to make decisions about “sensitive targets” on their own. That operational freedom, they argue, would have allowed U.S. forces to hit legitimate targets faster and with better results.

Instead, while the nominal commander of the air war was in Saudi Arabia--in close contact with the fast-changing situation in Afghanistan and with the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marine units delivering air power in the region--decisions had to wait upon officials thousands of miles away in Florida and Washington.

To understand how broad the “sensitive” target category was, consider the first special rules of engagement issued for Enduring Freedom. Called Serial 1 and issued by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 6, the day before the bombing began, these rules defined “sensitive” targets as “infrastructure,” including electrical power systems, roads and industry--ordinarily the primary targets in a war.

Sensitive targets also included any associated with Taliban leadership that might have “political implications.” Attacks on mosques were banned, even if they were being used for military purposes by the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

After a draft of these restrictions circulated in late September, the White House added the provision reserving final decisions on sensitive targets to Rumsfeld.

For many senior officers, all this is a reversion to the mistrust and micromanagement of Vietnam. The political and other concerns reflected in the rules were not necessarily different from those of the Clinton years. But many senior officers had expected better of the new Bush team.

Since Vietnam, these commanders pointed out, training on the laws of war has become a major element at every level of the armed forces. And over time, a system of centralized command for joint air operations has developed.

At the end of the Persian Gulf War, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf praised then-President George Bush for allowing the military to “fight this war exactly as it should have been fought.” If Gen. Franks made such a statement about the second President Bush, many of his most senior commanders would respond with rueful smiles.