The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
by Dana Priest
PublicAffairs

It's exceedingly rare for a 400-page book to have a single, all-telling money quote, but that's exactly what a reader will find on page 187 of Dana Priest's "The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military." Discussing Special Forces training missions in Africa, Priest writes

Soldiers routinely swapped stories about dining with the country's top general or scrambling for a coat and tie for the ambassador's reception. Capt. James Spivey, one of the U.S. company commanders in Nigeria, met with the king of Swaziland. He felt honored, he said, but also a little out of his depth. The king told him, "I'd really like to meet your ambassador," Spivey recalled.

It's Priest's thesis in a nutshell: In the wake of declining State Department funding and in the face of increased international peacekeeping duties, the American military has evolved into a guiding force, rather than simply a tool, of our country's foreign policy. At the same time this role, because it has evolved so gradually, is surprisingly under-appreciated by the civilian government. As a result, internecine conflicts and policy backfires of a whole new type present an unrecognized threat to the implementation of our overall policy objectives; at the same time, the flexibility and resources that the military brings to foreign policy represent a potentially fruitful future for American diplomacy.

In dissecting the ways the military has grown into its role, Priest singles out the military's regional command structure as the new front lines of American foreign policy: four military leaders, each overseeing all operations within a given part of the globe, whose unmatched resources and free rein make them virtually modern-day proconsuls (the four foreign commands are Southern, European, Central and Pacific). Each commander-in-chief (or CinC) has at his disposal an enormous planning budget, a staff of thousands, a personal jet and the ability to dispense humanitarian aid, Special Forces training units and military equipment to American allies. Priest credits Southern Command CinC Charles Wilhelm with greatly strengthening ties to a wary Nicaragua by dispensing first emergency aid after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, then later making personal visits and finally scheduling joint training missions with the country's military.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CinC of Central Command (which oversees the Horn of Africa, much of the Middle East and Central Asia), epitomized the extent to which CinCs have become informal ambassadors-at-large. Though representing the United States, Zinni's role was largely unscripted, and he made the most of it. He kept himself in constant personal contact with the region's leaders, helping them get better aid packages and dispensing training missions as carrots to keep them in America's good graces. And in turn it was to Zinni, not the ambassadors, to whom regional leaders often turned when they had issues with the United States.

"The Mission" is a sprawling book, jumping among all the commands and interviewing everyone from a long list of CinCs to sergeants in the field. Priest, who gathered her information during four years as a reporter for the Washington Post, includes lengthy anecdotes about people like Wesley Clark and Dennis Blair — and if anything critical can be said about the book, it is that Priest often goes so far in rolling out the colorful details that her thesis at times gets lost in the shuffle.

But this is also a good thing: Given the potential for dry wonkishness inherent in a book on military policy, Priest keeps things amazingly light. Like a good reporter, she lets the facts speak for themselves, especially in the latter sections of the book, when her thesis has been well-covered and all that is left is to provide examples. In fact, the last third of "The Mission" is practically a book in itself. Priest follows a series of US soldiers taking part in the NATO's KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, and she uses their struggles to implement civil reforms and contain ethnic violence as a vivid example of the sort of diplomacy that the military finds itself undertaking.

At one point a lieutenant colonel is reprimanded for failing to contain a mob of angry Serbs; the lieutenant colonel, aghast, wonders how he ever found himself — a soldier — playing police officer in a country with such little significance to American national interests. His story is the flipside of Zinni's globetrotting, and it raises the question of how effective the military can be, ultimately, at a job it was never intended to do. Nevertheless, as Priest is quick to note, there's no one else able to do it.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)