Can America still fight the ‘shadow’ war?

By THEODORE L. GATCHEL

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

Most modern wars have been fought in two very different ways. The first way is the obvious one in which armies, navies and air forces fight their enemy counterparts under relatively open conditions and according to rules that most nations have agreed to follow.

Much less obvious and usually officially denied is a war that goes by names such as the “shadow” war or the “dirty” war. During World War II, Winston Churchill referred to it as the “ungentlemanly” war.

The shadow war is largely a war without rules. Churchill understood that when he created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight the shadow war and directed it to “set Europe ablaze.” The man Churchill chose to lead the effort warned, “We must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labor agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.”

After observing the British employment of those and other similar methods, the United States created a counterpart of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In spite of that organization’s success, Americans were never as comfortable fighting the shadow war as were the British.

M.R.D. Foot, the author of the official British history of SOE operations in France, has compared American society during World War II unfavorably to that of Great Britain with respect to its ability to conduct the shadow war. In Foot’s opinion, the United States was a “wide open society” in which “the idea that anything ought to be kept secret for long did not readily enter most American minds.”

President Franklin Roosevelt faced the problem of keeping vital information about the shadow war secret after the FBI arrested eight German saboteurs who landed in the United States from submarines in June 1942. Although the arrests resulted largely from information provided by two of the German agents who turned themselves in, Roosevelt wanted to emphasize the prowess of the FBI in order to reassure the American public and also to convince the Nazis that any further sabotage missions would meet a similar end.

Civil War precedent

Had the saboteurs been tried by a civilian court, as some of Roosevelt’s advisers recommended, the full extent of America’s vulnerabilities would have been exposed to our enemies. To reduce the chance of that happening, Roosevelt fell back on a precedent established by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. He ordered that the saboteurs be tried in secrecy by military commissions.

The trials took place in Washington, and all eight were convicted of a variety of offenses. The two who turned themselves in were given prison sentences. The other six were executed within eight weeks of their having set foot on U.S. soil.

Although the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s actions, some jurists now question the constitutionality of the Supreme Court’s decision. Such criticism must be balanced, however, against the distinct possibility that the Germans would have sent more saboteurs if the truth about the initial eight had been revealed in open civilian trials.

Military forces, intelligence agencies and other parts of the U.S. government successfully fought the shadow war around the globe during World War II, but after the Allied victory much of the apparatus that made the fight possible was disbanded.

The CIA was created in 1947, but many Americans remained uncomfortable with such an organization and the methods it would use to fight the shadow war in the future. This discomfort became apparent during the Vietnam War.

During that war, the CIA and military-special-operations forces successfully fought a shadow war both inside South Vietnam and in Laos and Cambodia against North Vietnamese forces that the communist government in Hanoi claimed were not there.

Military establishment

U.S. Special Forces also fought a bureaucratic war against the mainstream military establishment that preferred to fight a conventional land war in the south and a strategic bombing war in the north.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. conventional forces have become so powerful that our enemies have learned not to fight them in the way that the laws of war were written to govern. For our current enemies, the shadow war has become the only war.

Americans, on the other hand, are still wrestling with how to fight such an enemy. In the process, every technique that has proven successful in the past — including harsh interrogation methods, warrantless surveillance, trying captured terrorists by military commissions and the assassination of terrorist leaders — has been challenged and impeded by critics of the war and their supporters in Congress and the courts.

One way to break this impasse would be to conduct a genuine debate on the pertinent issues during the current presidential campaign. The candidates should be asked to declare whether or not they are prepared to fight the shadow war, and voters should be warned about the likely consequences of electing a president who won’t.

The real question is not whether we can fight the shadow war, but whether we will.

X Retired Marine Col. Theodore L. Gatchel is a military historian and a professor of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.