The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military

by Dana Priest

Walk with America's generals, grunts, and Green Berets through the maze of unconventional wars and unsettled peace. Four-star generals who lead the military during wartime reign like proconsuls abroad in peacetime. Secretive Green Berets trained to hunt down terrorists are assigned to seduce ruthless authoritarian regimes. Pimply young soldiers taught to seize airstrips instead play mayor, detective, and social worker in a gung-ho but ill-fated attempt to rebuild a nation after the fighting stops.

The Mission is a boots-on-the-ground account of America's growing dependence on our military to manage world affairs, describing a clash of culture and purpose through the eyes of soldiers and officers themselves. With unparalleled access to all levels of the military, Dana Priest traveled to eighteen countries―including Uzbekistan, Colombia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan―talking to generals, admirals, Special Forces A-teams, and infantry troops. Blending Ernie Pyle's worm's-eye view with David Halberstam's altitude, this book documents an historic and thought-provoking trend, one even more significant in the aftermath of September 11 as the country turns to its warriors to solve the complex international challenges ahead. 34 maps and illustrations

Genres: History, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, Political Science, Journalism, War, Military History

432 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2003

About the author

Dana Priest is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. She has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service for "The Other Walter Reed" and the 2006 Pulitzer for beat reporting for her work on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations overseas. She is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Priest looks at the CinCs, the Commanders in Chief of the different military global regions for the USA. She describes how they are called upon to perform diplomatic as well as military work. She profiles four of them, Zinni, Wesley Clark, Admiral Dennis Blair and Charles Wilhelm. She also give plenty of ink to others, including Hugh Shelton and William Cohen. The role of Donald Rumsfeld is paramount as well. Priest’s description of events in the Balkans was quite interesting. This is the best part of the book in my humble opinion.

Overall, it was interesting, particularly when looking at how the CincS have had to become more political. One can read elsewhere details about how they deal with military matters.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dana Priest is a really excellent, Pulitzer prizewinning reporter (for the Washington Post), but not a very good book writer. The chapters in this book seem to be cobbled together from past reporting, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but she (and her editors) didn't do a very neat job of it. You feel discombobulated going from one section to the next.

She also needs to be banned from using adjectives. I don't particularly mind that Anthony Zinni's hands are referred to as "cantaloupes," actually it's pretty evocative. I'm sure we've all known large men with hands like that. But did she really mean to write "gracious, snow-capped mountains?" When was the last time you saw a gracious mountain? In a scene where a Kosovar Albanian family is being evicted from their Serb-owned squatter digs, the mother is described as a large, brawny woman but, incongruously, wearing "pretty, peach lipstick."

And someone please tell Priest that "quipped" means "joked", not said, explained, uttered, muttered, complained, etc. Priest writes, "How can you have an army of 1.5 million, and 50,000 deployed, and it's nearly broke?" Shalikashvili quipped in an interview. "There's something that's crazy." Then she has Wesley Clark joking, "Our level of resources doesn't match our level of national interest," quipped Clark [watching from the sidelines as the situation in Afghanistan unfolded:]. Surely everyone in the room was slapping their thighs with the hilarity of that quip.

The book is also filled with typos. Writers! Editors! Please do your jobs.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very quick read, but nothing of much substance. Many of the books I've read cite this, so I thought it might be cool.

Ms. Priest makes her whole argument in the first chapter, and the rest is just disconnected anecdotes, with little analysis of the various stories. For example, the book starts off talking about the proconsular role of the US Combatant Commanders (formerly known as CINCs until Rummie outlawed the term for everyone except George W.) but then inexplicably switches to various lengthy accounts of soldiers on the ground all around the world, culminating in an extensive -- but superficial -- depiction of the peacekeeping mission in the Balkans (and a long discussion of Frank Ronghi's rape of a young Albanian girl). Ms. Priest seems to alternately praise and blame the military for the current emphasis on the use of military force over diplomacy in US foreign policy, but neglects the issue of how this situation came about (why doesn't the State Department get the funding that DOD gets? why do civilians trust the military to solve all of their problems, and not their fellow civilian leaders & foreign service personnel?). Ms. Priest also spends an inordinate amount of time commenting on what various highranking military officers are wearing and the trappings of their office (Wesley Clark wears Burberry blazers, but Anthony Zinni likes Hawaiian shirts) as if this provides some deep insight into their psyches, and then glosses over substantive issues such as the apparent willingness of military officials to circumvent the law as they try to accomplish their missions. The book ends abruptly without a real conclusion. Ms. Priest also needed a better editor -- the book is full of typographical errors. I suspect this book was rushed into print.

Dana Priest writes very well. No matter the subject in this book -- whether its CINCs, Special Forces, or peacekeeping -- she captures your attention. She knows how to tell a story, and write colorful vignettes of the people in it. (Whether they're accurate or not, I have no idea, but they are fun to read.)
Unfortunately, Priest wants her collection of well-written reports to mean something, and it is here -- whenever she moves from narrative to analysis -- that her book runs aground. Her main notion seems sound enough: that the U.S. military is too often in the front lines of diplomacy and peacekeeping, both because it is so strong and the U.S. diplomatic corps is so weak. This condition, she claims, attenuates both the U.S. military and U.S. diplomacy.

But Priest's details do not support her thesis. In one chapter she writes about the confrontation between the new U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Robert Gelbard, and the U.S. military commander of the forces in the Pacific, Dennis Blair, on what policy the U.S. should take with Indonesia's military over human rights abuses in East Timor. Gelbard wants to cut off military-to-military contacts while Blair wants to maintain them. Despite his lack of nominal authority over U.S. policy in Indonesia, Blair's view wins out.

Priest thinks this is an example of how the U.S. military is able to overpower U.S. diplomacy because of the military's greater funding. But is it? In her summary of events, Priest makes clear Blair did not so much overpower Gelbard as outmaneuver him. Blair had to push the matter up to the National Security Council in Washington before it was finally decided in his favor. That kind of bureaucratic infighting is both common and acceptable to the policy-making process. One hardly needs to be well-funded to excel at it.

Priest also recounts the sad tale of the rape and murder of a Kosovar girl by a U.S. military "peacekeeper". It is one of the centerpieces of her account in the last third of the book showing the ineffectiveness of the U.S. military at handling peacekeeping duties in Kosovo. At times she seems to suggest that U.S. troops should just be out killing things rather than trying to keep the peace. In this section, she even gives an anecdote of some U.S. troops in Kosovo who, while driving their tank through traffic, lose their patience, and demand to be given immediate passage through a red light.

Priest seems too easily offended to imagine what the situation might have been like without U.S. troops on the ground in Kosovo. Unable to successfully carry out their mission of protecting the minority Serbs in Kosovo from reprisal attacks, the troops' presence at least gave some orderliness to what would have certainly been much worse if they had not been there. And it's very difficult to come up with a plausible scenario where U.S. diplomats would have been more successful at completing the near impossible mission the troops were given.

An isolated rape case and some impatient troopers at a traffic stop shouldn't be emblematic of U.S. military peacekeeping efforts. It's unfortunate that Priest doesn't show a better appreciation of how difficult these missions are, and the unlikelihood that U.S. diplomats - even when armed with cash and executive support - would be any better at solving them.

I quote from page 230: "Meanwhile, since January 1998, seven intelligence analysts at the 'Joint Intelligence Center Pacific' (JIC), the world largest military-intelligence center, in a windowless concrete building near (US Pacific Command CINC, Admiral Dennis) Blair's headquarters in Hawaii, had tracked the movements of Indonesian military and militia forces in East Timor and Indonesia. The Indonesia desk in the JIC had grown from one to nine persons and maintained a round-the-clock 'crisis action' mode. Over the preceding year, the analysts had received a tenfold increase in imagery and a fivefold increase in electronic collection. It was actually too much to process."

Priest blows the name of the institution she's describing. It's the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific, or JICPAC (now Joint Intelligence Operations Center, Pacific, or JIOC-PAC). Second, the "Indonesia desk" implies a single person monitoring this country. That was never the case, as a team of at least five analysts had always been assigned to maritime Southeast Asia. Suharto's 1998 fall had ramped up both Pacific Command's and JICPAC's attention to Indonesia, and the scheduled elections of mid-1999 and following East Timor referendum were anticipated months in advance, with commensurate analytical adjustments and assignments.

All in all, Priest's book feels disjointed and this is probably by necessity. She worked long and hard on an interesting book about America's new place in the world in the late 1990s. When 9/11 took place, instead of turning it into a history book she tried to keep it up to date and ended up with a disjointed, somewhat confused book.

If you must read it, borrow it from the library.

[Robert Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating time capsule. It was likely a book the author was already writing, and I'd wager a more critical one, before the attacks on September 11th. But then those attacks happened, and she had to publish a book on the US military, in those moments between September 2001 and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when questioning "the troops" and their leaders was even more unthinkable than it is today. So the book ends up being very informative, but in my opinion leaves some solid critiques on the table. There is a lot of information in this book, but it is held together by the stories of four "Commanders-in Chief" of the US's Unified Combatant Commands in the late 1990s.

The combatant commands go back to the 1947 reorganization of the US military and defense agencies. But the author convincingly argues that it was in the 1990s, as US public and presidential interest drifted away from foreign policy, that these "CINCs" accumulated a lot more power, and attained their current status as US imperial viceroys. The "CINCSs" have since lost their commander-in-chief titles to a whim of Donald Rumsfeld, and I have seen a few arguments that 9-11 somehow made them weaker, but I don't really buy it.

The Commanders (no longer in chief) of CENTCOM have ended up as two of the past three secretaries of defense. SOUTHCOM has gone from barely surviving the 1970s to a vital player in intimidating Latin American boogie men like Maduro of Venezuela and Ortega of Nicaragua. AFRICOM does whatever it wants with little Congressional oversight or even media interest. The newly re-christened INDOPACOM has experienced the first decade of what looks to be a century of generous outlays to intimidate China, and EUCOM, the commander of which doubles as the head of NATO, has just been catapulted back into relevance and piles of money by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Priest's book is a valuable resource, because it documents a more innocent time, when US generals were first realizing how much leeway they had in peacetime. Priest documents how even back in the 1990s, the Commanders flew around like heads of state, with entourages, and multiple aircraft at their disposal, while US ambassadors flew commercial. The profiles of the men in question are valuable, and the blow by blows of long forgotten scandals are gold. The account of Indonesia's massacres in East Timor, from the perspective of a befuddled US admiral whose main goal is to improve relationships with the Indonesian military is fascinating.

The long forgotten politics of these questions makes this book an invaluable time capsule. But, and I could be projecting here, I feel like the politics of the book itself are a time capsule in a less admirable way. There are some pretty obvious conclusions to be drawn from the East Timor experience, and some other anecdotes in the book, that don't get drawn. Is it because you couldn't publish a book critical of US policy in 2003? I don't know.

But in 2022 we do have a very firm answer to a question that resonates through the book. Most of what these commands were doing in the 1990s, and the majority of what they do today is train foreign militaries. Priest asks a few times, whether it's worth it to do this. Can the militaries learn from the US military to be respecters of human rights, and how to be more professional and democratic? Or are they just going to use US weapons and tactics to be more violent and disruptive? Priest leaves it as an open question. In 2022, after watching a swathe of previously stable ( if not happy ) African governments fall to cadres of US trained military figures, I think we can say we have a pretty damn conclusive answer. I suspect Priest could have given that answer in 2003 as well, but couldn't publish it.

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

_The Mission_ by Dana Priest is an interesting and through-provoking look at American foreign policy and the military's role in devising and implementing it.

Since the end of the Cold War, "the Mission" for the American military has been to take the lead in managing world affairs, to fill in the tremendous gap left by civilian agencies. With little public debate or even awareness, the military "simply filled a vacuum left by an indecisive White House, an atrophied State Department, and a distracted Congress." Whether turned to by policymakers or on its own initiative, the military has taken the lead abroad to fix problems, even those that are at their root ultimately political and economic in nature.

In the first third of the book, Priest detailed how this state of affairs came to be. Part of the reason is the lack of resources of the civilian agencies that are supposed to be prominent in foreign affairs. Congress slashed the State Department budget 20% in the 1970s and 1980s, closing over 30 embassies and consulates and laying off 22% of the department's employees. Other organizations, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps suffer from similarly reduced budgets.

In contrast, the Department of Defense has more resources and personnel than any other foreign-focused government agency. Most prominent in this area are the leaders of the U.S. military's regionally-focused unified commands, the regional commanders-in-chief or CinCs (pronounced "sinks"). The Defense Department divided the globe into five regional commands, each with its own regional CinC (Southern Command, which is basically Latin America, European Command, which is Europe, Turkey, and most of Africa and the former Soviet Union, Central Command, which is the Horn of Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and the states of former Soviet Central Asia, Pacific Command, which is the rest of Asia and the nations of the Pacific, and Northern Command, which is North America). Each regional CinC has a budget twice that or more than that of the Cold War era, averaging $380 million dollars a year, lavish compared to that of civilian agencies. Additionally, each CinC has a dedicated long-distance aircraft, a number of helicopters, and access to in-flight refueling (only the Secretary of State has a dedicated aircraft, all other diplomats either fly commercially or hitch a ride on military aircraft). Each CinC has a much greater staff than other diplomats and civilian officials; compare the overworked staff of Foreign Service officers in an embassy, each likely with more than one task to perform, to the dedicated entourage that accompanies each CinC in the field along with the scores of admirals, generals, majors, captains, and colonels that he or she can deploy on diplomatic missions.

Additionally, CinCs are not as prone to the turf battles civilian agencies engage in on foreign policy matters as they are stationed abroad and generally don't become embroiled in Washington insider politics. Also, changes in the Defense Department in years past have increased their relative power and importance at the expense of the once dominant uniform service chiefs, the CinCs replacing them as war planners and reducing these individuals instead to basically administrators at home.

Priest wrote that General Anthony Zinni of Central Command joked that he had become a "modern-day proconsul," a descendent of those who used to rule the outlying territories of the Roman Empire, bringing order and justice to the frontier.

About a third of the book detailed one of the key tools of the military in foreign policy, the U.S. Special Operations Forces. The "tool of default," sometimes more Peace Corps volunteer than soldier, even before September 11 they were deployed to 125 countries. Their presence is often the only agreed upon action among American policymakers, politicians hoping that Special Forces could forge strong, useful ties with foreign militaries, have a "rub-off effect," encouraging foreign militaries to become more professional, less corrupt, and more respectful of human rights, and also take the lead in such tasks as settling local political disputes, coordinating foreign aid, and even repairing water systems. Priest detailed Special Forces at work in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Colombia, and Indonesia (and also spent another third of the book showing the actions of one CinC, General Wesley Clark, and his regular troops in Kosovo).

Priest said that the prominent role of the military in foreign policy had both its good and bad points. She was complimentary of the military taking the lead in engaging with the states of the former Soviet Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, pushing for political reform in Kosovo, and fighting the drug war in Colombia. She was glad that such an effective agency was involved in foreign policy, given the lack of leadership and resources on the part of civilian agencies abroad, which severely disappointed her. However, she did have concerns. She implied that some CinCs tend to end up too closely identifying with the needs of some of the countries in their "CinCdom," whether it was Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or even China. She wondered to what extent military engagement can positively influence foreign military conduct and that if in fact it only allowed a corrupt and abusive military to simply become that much more efficient in prosecuting human rights abuses (as was the case with the Indonesian military's role in East Timor). Also, military engagement can send mixed signals or reward countries that are in violation of their citizen's human rights or otherwise acting contrary to American interests. The soldier on the ground, while the finest fighting man or woman in the world, is often not trained to solve political disputes, develop the economies of foreign countries, rebuild infrastructure, or engage in political reform, and she wondered if not some "more appropriate or nuanced engagement program" could be devised rather than having either special forces units deployed in small teams or groups of regular soldiers acting on their own initiative or with precious little guidance (as in Kosovo) trying to solve economic and political problems.

[Dennis Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military by Dana Priest is a useful book. I speed-read through most of it for a class in March or April, and decided to give a more thorough reading afterward. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't. This book was most useful in its opening third, interesting in its vignette forays, and then began to lose me in the last third. The Kosovo chapters seemed designed to make a political point, and - if anything - were somewhat distracting from the overall message of CinCs that the book started out with. Its not a bad book, but it is just a period piece. At the time, I actually remember pushing back on Paula's comments, thinking that a lot was still useful. Having read through the last chapters and the afterward, she was definitely spot on.

85/100

[CASPER HILEMAN · Rating 5 out of 5]

The interregnum between the Soviet Union and the Attacks of September 11th was a time of contraction and new purpose for the United States Military. Hard lessons, political meddling, and smaller budgets are the norm.

[Kai Palchikoff]

Four-star generals who lead the military during wartime reign like proconsuls abroad in peacetime. Secretive Green Berets trained to hunt down terrorists are assigned to seduce ruthless authoritarian regimes. Pimply young soldiers taught to seize airstrips instead play mayor, detective, and social worker in a gung-ho but ill-fated attempt to rebuild a nation after the fighting stops.The Mission is a boots-on-the-ground account of America's growing dependence on our military to manage world affairs, describing a clash of culture and purpose through the eyes of soldiers and officers themselves. With unparalleled access to all levels of the military, Dana Priest traveled to eighteen countries--including Uzbekistan, Colombia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan--talking to generals, admirals, Special Forces A-teams, and infantry troops. Blending Ernie Pyle's worm's-eye view with David Halberstam's altitude, this book documents an historic and thought-provoking trend, one even more significant in the aftermath of September 11 as the country turns to its warriors to solve the complex international challenges ahead.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started appreciating the writing of Dana Priest during my year of working at the Pentagon, which also was the year I started the Air War College curriculum. I wish this book had been published in time for me to use it as a resource in writing my Air War College paper. Even though it's now 7 years old, it's still very relevant and will help the reader gain a much better understanding of the role of combatant commanders--namely, the handful of 4-star flag officers in charge of the geographical, unified commands around the world. They're more powerful, in many instances, than ambassadors or the State Department. Their successors (Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, et. al.)continue to bear huge responsibilities with an inestimable impact on the course of history.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

decent read, and fun to go back to what the military was doing in the 90s...Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, however the book had a bad habit of bouncing back and forth from the Strategic level to the tactical.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book disabused me of what I thought I knew of the military. It was a good read through the first 170 pages. Damn library always wanting their books back.