In America we do not seem to mind getting involved in foreign wars just so long as they do not cost trillions or involve large scale US ground troops.
So what all methods does the US have to influence the direction of a war without these things. Or is the list almost endless?
This post isn’t really about whether getting involved in country X is a good idea or not, I’m more wondering what all tools does the US have to get involved without large numbers of ground troops or spending large sums.
No fly zones
Sending soldiers and other personnel to train local insurgents
Giving money and weapons to insurgents (or the government, depending on which side the US is supporting)
Missiles and bombs
Using special forces to attack strategic targets
Diplomatic pressure
Freezing assets
Sharing intelligence and satellite data with one side
The B-2 seems to be the ideal tool. Puts no more than 2 lives at risk per bomber, can strike the vast majority of places in the world, and can probably tip the balance of a war by itself if used enough and effectively. And although expensive to fly, almost nothing compared to the cost of a major deployment of ground forces, associated logistics, etc.
In essence, it is almost endless, since there are various degrees the US can use in all the things you listed. Missiles and bombs? Well, we could do something small scale (for us) like the recent Syrian airbase attack. Or, we could have scaled that up in degrees from there ranging from simply using more tomahawks to air strike packages to coordination with allies to boots on the ground to nukes I suppose. There is a huge range of options available just in this one category…as well as a huge range of potential targets. And American President has VERY scary range of options wrt military action…a range no other country has.
Then there are the diplomatic pressures. Again, it’s pretty huge since the US is trading partners with a host of countries which we could also potentially put pressure on. Then there is the dollar, which we control, and all the fiscal pressures we can use. Practically limitless in scale, ranging from very light to ridiculously heavy and everywhere in-between. Of course we also have black-ops options, cyber options, heck even soft power options. Everything you listed there has hundreds or even thousands of possible variants, and there are a ton you didn’t mention.
The US is seriously scary in what it can do, especially if you look at it from a non-Americans perspective. That is why it’s pretty crucial we don’t elect a complete fucking idiot to the office of President, as the President of the US just has a ridiculously high potential to unleash all of that on whoever pisses him or her off.
Political will is often the biggest obstacle, but to answer your question, the USA could use an EMP ( Electric Magnetic Pulse ) attack to fry an electrical and computer grid, and turn off all satellite communications to a nation that does not have satellites in space, which is most of them.
Such as threat could make a dictator think twice. Cross us an you lose your electric power, computers and TV.
There is also sonic weaponry that can produce an extreme noise capable of causing fatalities in an area, but such a weapon is highly fearful and would be viewed as unethical.
If such weapons were spread out a few hundred meters, people would flea and fear. You would not need to occupy an area with ground troops.
" These weapons produce both psychological and physical effects. They include highly directional devices which can transmit painful audible sound into an individual’s ear at great distances and infrasonic generators which can shoot acoustic projectiles hundreds of meters causing a blunt impact upon a target. "
" Infrasonic generators can cause negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, or depression, as well as biological symptoms like nausea, vomiting, organ damage, burns, or death—depending on the frequency and power level. Most of these weapons function between the frequency range of about 1 Hz to 30 kHz. These frequencies occur within the following waves: Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) 1 Hz to 30 Hz, Super Low Frequency (SLF) 30 Hz to 300 Hz, Ultra Low Frequency (ULF) 300 Hz to 3 kHz, and Very Low Frequency (VLF) 3 kHz to 30 kHz.1 "
In addition to freezing assets there are other things we can do in the economic / regulatory realm that aren’t directly military.
We can effectively lock the country out of (most of) the world’s banking system. We can lock them out of (most of) the world’s economy. We can blockade their ports or their internet or their airports.
Recognize that for any of these modalities up to an including a no-shit invasion there are more players involved than just the US and whoever we’re pissed at. There are all our allies, all their allies, everybody whose country happens to abut our adversary, and all the alphabet soup groups from the UN through e.g. NATO all they way on down to ICANN.
Everybody else gets to put at least a pinky on the Oija puck. Some of these players get to put a whole fist in there.
There would be huge law of armed conflict issues with using such a weapon (particularly since one of the ways to achieve this effect could involve detonating a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere). The use of such a weapon on a medium to large scale, covering one or more cities let alone the majority of a particular country, would be grossly disproportionate to any military advantage gained, would not be able to distinguish military targets from civilian ones, and would cause an incredible amount of unnecessary suffering for civilians. Hospitals and medical clinics, dams, or anything else that requires electricity would be damaged and have their capabilities severely reduced if not taken offline altogether.
Basically history has shown all these techniques rarely work. Particularly the training and arming local proxies option, which is the by far the most common technique:
We can send in John McCain. Whenever he visits with one rebel leader or another, it always seems to mean things will go well for them. Be sure that he is photographed next to a table of battle worn men as they have breakfast. That seems to be key.
Agree that a nuclear exo-atmospheric EMP attack would be bad. Mostly because there’s no good understanding of how far the effects will reach.
Trying to EMP Evilania back into the 1800s and inadvertently doing the same to a large swath of Europe or Russia would be … problematic.
OTOH there’s been a lot of research on local-scale EMP weapons. I suspect that’s what you’re thinking of.
IMO they don’t have the bite we really need to do much to even a small adversary on a national scale.
The severe consequences for national scale EMP attacks are mostly from the years- or decades-long time to repair the damage. A small country (or one that’s mostly poor and/or rural) has proportionally less vulnerable infrastructure and the rest of the world is proportionally better positioned to come to its rescue after a wide-scale EMP event.
The issue w EMP vis-a-vis the USA is that we’re “too big to fix”; If we got thoroughly zapped there isn’t enough productive capacity nor skilled labor on the planet to restart our modern society before abject chaos and mass starvation set in.
Repairing even highly modern Lichtenstein would be a toddle by comparison. Places like e.g. Syria consist of a few cities, some rural, and a lot of utterly uninhabited land. What would need fixing is smaller than the blotch on the map would seem to indicate. And it’d still be a tall order to deliver a couple thousand substation-scale EMP devices to fry most of their infrastructure.
True. But, comes at a cost. Using international financial and trade entities to further foreign policy goals undermines them and their reputation for neutrality. And encourages non-targeted countries, who worry they might end up targeted one day, into developing or supporting alternates. You see that happening already. The restrictions on Visa and MasterCard in sanctioned countries has encouraged more and more users to also carry China UnionPay. The use of SWIFT in sanctions against Iran has led for more and more calls for alternatives and many are being proposed. US control of IMF & World Bank and the perceived use of them as an instrument of policy has led to creation of other bodies like the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank.
The stick works best when it’s implied. Not so well when employed or brandished.
Agree completely. These things are all leaky. As I implied with my comment about the alphabet soup. IMF or SWIFT or whoever pushes back because although their governance may well be US-dominated, it’s not US-exclusive.
And at the next level in the perpetual tit-for-tat that’s international relations we get the compensating actions as you say. AIDB, etc.
In both military craft and statecraft there are lots of tactics and weapons that work better in the threat than they do in use. Many others are “use it *and *lose it.” IOW, it only works well once; subsequent uses are vastly less effective.
In all, a lot of US people seem to think of the world as if we’re a kindergarten teacher. IOW, that we’re surrounded by little critters dumber than us who accept that we are, and ought to be, acting as the one in charge of the classroom. And despite the kids’ tendency to mischief from time to time they ultimately accept that we know best so they (mostly) tag along willingly albeit noisily with lots of minor chaos and hijinks. And we know that they can’t effectively fight back against our authoritay or even effectively gang up against us.
It’s pretty darn obvious to anyone who thinks even a little bit or who has read any history at all that that’s utter fantasy. Doesn’t mean it’s not popular fantasy in the more jingoistic sections of our populace and, some years, our government.
For Syria it would be staggered strikes on all military targets over the course of a few weeks, destroying his airforce, command and control center, what not. Hen allow the rebels take territory from him.
Also we can take out Assad by sending special forces to capture and kill him and his family. We can do this without occupying Syria.
We have done targeted strikes over a long period of time without invading, take Libya in 2011 and Yugoslavia in 1999.
For Kosovo we bombed them till they decided letting a NATO force enter the day after the bombing campaign ended was the more acceptable option. We didn’t invade. We just bombed them till they let our troops across the border. Incidentally the US is still part of the KFOR peacekeeping mission. This summer will be the 18th anniversary of US ground involvement there.
Libya involved the use of small numbers of NATO troops on the ground. The US didn’t send any but UK, France, and Italy all sent small numbers of advisors in to advise the rebels. At the time I saw a slightly more detailed story at the time that made the UK troops sound suspiciously like an SAS team. (“We’re not in ground combat… but we sent some of the best trained special operators in the world to advise the rebels who are.” cough cough) US Special Operations has now been there for almost two years as of this summer as well. That’s technically a different mission - advising the government forces to deal with the chaotic security situation (especially Islamic State.) It’s related to the situation left behind by the air campaign, though. We just waited a couple years before quietly sending in ground troops to help with the clean up.
Libya was heavily air dominated but not entirely devoid of ground involvement. It avoided large ground involvement. For Kosovo the air campaign was really more of a shaping effort to enable the main effort on the ground. That main effort was not small and it was mostly conventional forces. Neither are really situations where air power was used alone or entirely sufficient to accomplish the mission.
The B-2 is hardly cost effective, all the missions start and end in the US meaning a vastly expensive fleet of refueling tankers have to be lined up along the way. They can’t be forward deployed because of the special air con hanger and super duper coatings needing to be deployed after every flight.
You’ll also notice they haven’t been used at all in the recent Iraq / Syria conflict, and it’s speculated that’s because they either don’t want Russia’s advanced radars in Syria to gather more info on the B-2, or partly because they’re afraid that Russia could actually target them. The US also only has 21 of them and they’re a billion dollars each. With half of them out of action being maintained at any given time on average you can’t do that much with a fleet of 10 B-2’s (especially remember you can’t hit targets at short notice, because they’re flying all the way from Missouri and back).
B2’s can be tracked by VHF RADARs pretty easily. While they would be immune to Fire Control RADARs (which cannot operate on the HF/VHF spectrum AFAIK) , if enemy VHF RADARs can track them, they can send up interceptors to take them down, so the US will have to have other assets in support, which means yeah not as inexpensive as thought.
Does using special forces to kill or capture leaders work?
In Somalia the US tried to get the leader of a tribe and kept failing.
Supposedly Israeli special forces had an opportunity to kill Saddam Hussein at a funeral but chose not to.
Special forces can kill generals and higher ups, but I don’t know if they are able to capture or kill actual leaders. Those people seem way too insulated.
There’s an Executive Order dating back to IIRC Kennedy or Johnson against assassinations of national leaders. Obviously that’s only a piece of rescindable paper, but it would be an issue.
I don’t doubt SF folks could get at least some leaders some times. Even for an easily accessible leader, say Angela Merkel to name a ridiculously implausible example, the hard part would be having any expectation of getting any of the team back again.
Somebody like Assad may well live exclusively in an underground bunker for months at a time. Getting him using a ground team, even a miraculously skilled one, ain’t gonna work.
Incidentally the US is still part of the KFOR peacekeeping mission. This summer will be the 18th anniversary of US ground involvement there.