Reprinted from The Realist Review.
Large, conventional wars break old structures and change the world around them. They shatter societies and individuals in a tempest of carnage and displacement. Even if the outcome is not decisive, as it often is not, the impact on social stability always is. This is not to say that war is always undesirable, or that it cannot sometimes shake up a complacent order and force through a new order, because these events do happen in history. However, there is always a costly societal danger that more often than not introduces unexpected and sometimes devastating changes, even in times of victory. The war will always come home. Even, and sometimes especially, in times where the public believes war is a distant danger. For it is then that the disconnect between those who fight wars and those at home who remain aloof of them can most aggressively manifest. Policymakers who concoct justifications for small wars of choice are always embarking on a dark crusade for the societies they lead.
In the present Gaza War, an organization known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation employs a network of former intelligence and military veterans, many from the Global War on Terror, to explicitly support Israeli military operations under the guise of humanitarianism. This network is made up of people who dream of exporting an apocalyptic religious war both at home and abroad. Additionally, recent revelations about the organized crime networks set up on U.S. soil by ex-special forces operators have shown that even the smallest scale and most targeted operations of the War on Terror can bring massive backwash effects to the communities even in supposed peace time. This type of thinking, spawned from seemingly distant conflicts, is hardly an outlier. It is part of a pattern where the shadow wars of the past leach into and distort the policy priorities of the present. This is worth considering as we contemplate the possibility of another intervention in perhaps Venezuela or wherever else where political leadership promises minimal cost.
On New Year’s 2025, two separate domestic terrorist attacks rocked the United States. One, an Islamist-styled car ramming in New Orleans, and another, a politically heterodox targeting of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. The motivations appear unconnected but the backgrounds of the perpetrators are not, as both were U.S. military veterans. This pattern is apparent in other past domestic terrorist attacks such as those perpetrated by Christopher Dorner in 2013 and, most famously, the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. The trend has not gone unnoticed, and begs the question of the social alienation experienced by those who serve in deployment of a global empire and the dissociation they feel from society upon returning to a place that often lives in denial that it exists on a permanent, if shadowy, war footing.
Armed conflict’s power to shape societies in unconventional ways means that big wars are often viewed as something uncanny, horrifying, and romantic. Be it through the writings of a figure like Ernst Junger, or perhaps a backdrop to bring heightened stakes to a fictitious setting, these colossal and undeniable struggles have a habit of becoming the dominant archetype of discussion when it comes to trials of both individuals and societies. But what happens when the war does not unfold with much public drama and media coverage? What happens when it remains out of sight and mind, unfolding in the background with little to no public input? Is the effect just as dramatic if less obvious? I would contend that the answer is yes. All wars, even ‘quiet’ ones, fundamentally alter human societies. The key difference is that the shadow wars, the unacknowledged struggles, can have a more insidious effect specifically because their civic impact is less apparent and more deniable. The policy choices made in their pursuit are far less scrutinized, and the forces they represent are much less likely to be seen as they are gradually rolled out. It is a frequent occurrence that the dress rehearsal for many odious trends often first arise in smaller and less dramatic conflicts. Away from breathless coverage of battles and generals, shadow conflicts offer the perfect opportunity to observe what trends may be coming to civil society’s future under the security state.
History is replete with such examples. The Indian Wars of the latter 19th Century saw the United States effectively deny open warfare by adopting the rhetoric of paternalism and internal pacification as it effectively conducted genocidal removal and confinement campaigns against the tribes of the Great Plains. The British would introduce the concentration camp in the Second Boer War. The German campaign of extermination of the Herrero people in colonial Namibia now looks like a precursor to a later obsession with ethnic cleansing, then still decades in the future. Centuries of low-level colonial warfare between first Spanish authorities and later their Chilean successors against the Mapuche people would stain ethnic relations in the southern cone of South America to this day. All of these conflicts and many others like them would have major impacts on their participating societies, leaving all of them changed in often quite detrimental ways for the average citizen. When it came to involving the great powers, the frequency of such seemingly smaller wars would only increase in what we now call ‘The Postwar Era’.
Lessons on Obfuscation from Vietnam and Iraq
The Cold War was never officially a war, but it contained multitudes of armed conflicts, both official and unofficial, under its umbrella. The nuclear deterrent that dominated the bipolar system, as well as the global nature of the contest, were febrile grounds for an expansion of covert operations, proxy conflicts, and occasional undeniable outbursts of violence. Intelligence agencies were given immense leeway to conduct operations both at home and abroad, including everything from attempts to instill psychological manipulation onto small groups of people to toppling governments of entire countries. Insurgencies were supported and opposed in various locations with the help of the two great powers that dominated the age. Sometimes, the great powers would even switch which side they were backing in the middle of a conflict.
Vietnam was the catastrophe which brought what had been previously seething below the surface to the light of public scrutiny. Suddenly, the average American draftee was being fed into a high casualty counterinsurgency operation sold as a grand existential battle against global communism. The numbers of Americans involved and returning home to talk about their experiences would, however, blew the lid off of much of the mythology surrounding the operation. The Vietnam War had Cold War elements, of course, but it was primarily a civil war with regional elements where the power of nationalism and unity was the primary cause of the communist North- a dynamic not even realized by many U.S. policy planners at the time. This cause would eventually triumph despite the massive amounts of American power deployed against it, because it had the more motivated and disciplined side. This crisis of confidence brought on by the supposedly Cold War growing quite hot for the United States would introduce a level of skepticism towards the foreign policy establishment which had not previously existed since the aftermath of the First World War. The war’s conclusion would have happened much sooner, with far less losses, ecological devastation, and human suffering, were it not for United States intervention on behalf of South Vietnam.
It was made all the more obvious by the extent to which the public had been lied to, first about the intensity of the war, and then about the purpose of it. This sequence of events would in turn lead to the end of the draft, a temporary public turn away from reflexive interventionism, and a desire to ferret out conscious government duplicity about events such as Tonkin Gulf and the Pentagon Papers. This critical turn against blind faith in the defense establishment would culminate in the Church Committee investigations, which showed immense overreach by intelligence agencies that impacted the everyday life of American citizens. The shadow wars had led to a reckoning because one of them had spilled out into the light. The planning for more of these hidden operations did not cease, however, but merely refined itself. Subsequent operations in Central America, Afghanistan, and more overt military actions such as taken in Grenada, Panama, and Lebanon showed the machine was very much still active, if more cautious. Such is the reality of being a great power. Proxy conflicts are hardly abnormal after all. If the scale of them decreases, the deleterious effects should also decrease.
This more measured approach changed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The need for security was suddenly very real. The public acquiesced to a massive increase in internal surveillance, then an expansion of the military footprint abroad to combat a (supposedly) new menace. That this threat had already existed for decades, often with U.S. support as part of the late-stage Cold War project to undermine secular Middle Eastern governments as part of a greater anti-Soviet strategy, was conveniently overlooked. Al Qaeda and the Taliban both had once been fellow travelers. Now, with the Soviets gone, they felt themselves no longer beholden to tolerate the Americans. They themselves were as much strident believers in being an inevitable future teleology as the neoliberal western elite they despised, they decided to unleash their own war. One cannot help but wonder how many people in the U.S. intelligence services were overjoyed to have the specter of a global ideological threat rear its head again. There was certainly a corresponding outburst of support for militarism and securitization amongst the general public. But these little wars would also have big consequences, and most immediately this would become apparent in the Second Iraq War.
Despite a flood of contrary misinformation put out by government sources at the time, the Iraq War clearly had nothing to do with the ‘Global War on Terror’ or the ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein had a hostile relationship with Al Qaeda as well as that other American regional foe: Iran. Initially less obvious was the cooking of the books on weapons of mass destruction, whose false claims would only be debunked well into the war. Most journalists, easily bought off by free rides on military vehicles and photo ops with guns and soldiers, avoided asking too many critical questions until U.S. forces were thoroughly ensconced inside of Baghdad. Every aspect of the war was based on lies. There was no viable reconstruction plan. Kantian cosmopolitanism was supposed to be engendered by the overthrow of a dictator, and the reality that Iran would always be Iraq’s immediate neighbor apparently had not been given much consideration. The Bush Administration and its neoconservative ideology was exposed as the intellectually and strategically bankrupt fraud it had been from the start. The ‘small’ war of Iraq, while nowhere near as deadly for American servicemen as Vietnam had been, was extremely devastating to the country it supposedly liberated. It also set off aftershocks that would lead to a rise in Islamic terrorism across the region-literally the opposite outcome promised by the architects of the ‘War on Terror.’ This was obvious even to the media and political establishment that had championed the policies that once supported the war of choice, and led to a corresponding upsurge in anti-war sentiment. But this time, despite promises of hope and change to the contrary, the consequences for little wars gone wrong would be prevented from leading to any new Church Committees. The machine had grown savvy. The wars would become smaller and opaquer. But the consequences they unleashed would not scale down to match this reduced media presence. In some cases, they would even intensify.
Into the Shadows
Operation Odyssey Dawn, the NATO intervention in Libya, was sold as a humanitarian intervention under the doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’. There was an implication that rather than the bumbling oafs and ideologues of the Bush Administration, the real experts of the Obama Administration were now in the driver’s seat and ready to make the technocratic fantasies of Aaron Sorkin-tinged managerial class liberalism a reality. But having an explicitly human rights justified intervention would end up sabotaging the credibility of wars of choice every bit as much as Iraq. The humanitarian situation in Libya declined by multitudes and what once was Africa’s most developed country became a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Regime change wars were a fully bipartisan failure, and the D.C. establishment had to move them out of the spotlight and into the shadows. But they did not stop.
What followed was a succession of indirect military operations. French and U.S. troops intervened in Mali in order to push back ethnic and sectarian forces whose militancy was exacerbated by the state failure in neighboring Libya. Initial success in pushing back the advances of Islamist-allied Tuareg actors eventually became bogged down in the mountains and the foreign forces would withdraw years later. In 2024, the nation of Niger would even evict U.S. drone base operators from their country in a political dispute. While this sorry saga was playing out, U.S. operations in Somalia unfolded at a continuous clip. The Trump Administration pulled (official) U.S. forces out of that country, the Biden Administration quickly reinstated them. And it must not be forgotten that during all of this until the summer of 2021 the longest war in American history, the Afghanistan intervention, was running continuously. While the media came to ignore it until its final and dramatically tragic conclusion, and U.S. forces appeared to be taking a more hands off approach, the war was still occurring. It was, perhaps, the very forgotten nature of this conflict that made its seemingly sudden termination so shocking-even though anyone who had read The Afghanistan Papers would likely not have been anywhere nearly as surprised by this turn of events.
The most scandalous of these simmering shadow wars is Syria. Supposedly disavowing direct involvement, the United States opted for the largest and supposedly most expensive arming and equipping program in CIA history, Operation Timber Sycamore. Despite knowing that Islamists dominated the rebel movement, (and therefore it can be presumed knowing the dark intentions that these rebels held towards various minorities in the country) the Obama Administration decided to play a logistics coordinator for many forces that would later defect to Al Nusra (an Al Qaeda affiliate now known as Hayat Tahrir al Sham) and even ISIS. The war itself would greatly exacerbate the danger posed by ISIS not only in Syria but also in Iraq. After the famously hawkish Hillary Clinton promised to remove Assad from power, the eventually victorious Donald Trump promised de-escalation in Syria. In fact he did the opposite, bombing Syria based on questionable claims and ordering U.S. troops to occupy much of the agriculturally productive and oil rich parts of the country and further intensifying sanctions. This particular war’s many mutually hostile sides and complex web of ever-shifting alliances was, bizarrely, sold to the public of U.S. and allied countries as a cautionary tale of inaction with the assumption that western countries were somehow *not* involved and could only improve the situation if they intervened more. The surrealistic farce of all of this would culminate with the White Helmets, an ostensibly humanitarian international rescue agency based in Syria that was in fact operating solely in rebel-controlled territories and with long lasting links to British intelligence, winning an Oscar for best documentary in 2017. The government of Syria would eventually topple, in December of 2024, only to see the rise of this literal Al Qaeda franchise to the strongest faction in the ongoing tragedy. Veterans of fighting against Bin Laden and ISIS must wonder what it was all for.
The wars had continued unabated; there was just enough plausible deniability that they could be kept out of sight. But pretending something does not exist does not in fact abolish its reality. Geopolitics may be able to appear postmodern, but eventually the reality of action, reaction, and consequence will inevitably come roaring back. All that has been accomplished by the veneer of plausible deniability is a surreal sense of alienation, but as should be apparent to those who pay attention, the consequences of endless war were still unfolding unchecked.
Home Front Blowback of the Dark Crusade
In May of 2017 a young man by the name of Salman Abedi detonated a suicide bomb at a concert in the Manchester Arena in the United Kingdom. 22 people were killed and hundreds were injured. The suspect’s brother was arrested and convicted of being an accomplice. But then the story became even stranger. Both of the brothers had accompanied their father to Libya during the civil war that broke out in that country in 2011. Ramadan Abedi, the family patriarch, had been fighting in alliance with NATO forces against Gaddafi and his sons had enlisted in rebel militias. Questions remain to this day as to what extent British intelligence had contacts with the family, but it is likely that in the course of the war they received some kind of material aid from NATO countries. In 2014, Salman even evacuated from the country with the assistance of the British navy.
While the Manchester bomber might be the most dramatic example of this type of blowback, he is by no means the only example of the legacy of the War on Terror being a viscerally negative influence on the societies in which were involved in it. The late 2010s saw a spate of vehicular mass murder attacks inspired by ISIS-sympathetic ideology, perhaps the most famous of which was an October 2017 attack in Manhattan. These events came in the wake of a series of similarly motivated attacks by gunmen in Paris, Belgium, Boston, and Florida. The ‘War on Terror’, which had managed to keep kinetic combat operations abroad after 9/11 had come back full circle. If anything, the various military operations in the greater Middle East and Afghanistan had only inflamed the fires of rogue actors believing in imminent civilizational clashes. The world was less safe, not more. And even these terrible events were just the most noticeable results for the average citizen who paid for a global crusade that cost 8 trillion dollars.
That there will be generations paying off the debts of military adventurism far into the future goes without saying, but the continuous explosion of the Pentagon’s budget was not a one-off affair. Even now, when the War on Terror seems to finally be winding down, the military budget only increases continuously. It could be stated that this is the inevitable result of a pivot by the U.S. defense establishment to deal with a more assertive Russia and China and the great power rivalry that inevitably will ensue, but this must then beg the question: since conditions of multipolarity have been evident since the Great Recession of 2008, why did this pivot take so long and why has the United States and its allies not scaled back the fixation on counter-insurgency in light of these trends? A position of geopolitical overextension, in particular in the Middle East, which is far from the core great power competition areas of East Asia and Europe, is not actually a wise posture for a country worrying about peer to peer rivalry.
This brings us to the other aspect of the little wars and their big consequences-their inherent utility in supporting the political establishment. Much as George W Bush was able to wipe away doubts as to whether he won the 2000 election by appearing as a father figure for a new era of fear, so too have his bipartisan successors come to realize the benefits of keeping low intensity conflicts simmering for their own domestic political gain. Countering radical Islamic extremism could always be pivoted towards countering domestic extremism, as appears to be what is happening now, with the January 6th, 2021, Capitol Riots serving as the 9/11 style catalyst for a securitization push. Which political party is in the drivers’ seat may have changed, but little else has. And so the two-party system introduces a level of plausible deniability and performative opposition to a process that ultimately seeks to rally the populace behind politicians and intelligence agencies whose policies allowed such extremism to take hold in the minds of many in the first place.
Taken collectively, the symptoms of this process and its impact on the life of the average citizen remains undeniable. Such manifestations of the legacy of the little wars can be seen in the massive increase in police militarization that has swept the United States in the post 9/11 era. Policies that have led under-trained local police departments to have hand-off equipment from the army to operate in ways that turn American cities into theaters of urban combat with even less rules of engagement than would have been found among the soldiers deployed to Iraq. Those responsible for maintaining public safety can thus become threats to it. A problem further exacerbated by international connections with states like Israel, that run training programs for foreign police units which sell themselves as imparting wisdom learned from generations of counterinsurgency through militarized occupation. That fact that American police do not at present engage in counterinsurgency operations should lead to a questioning of what such policies are for.
Additionally, a culture that is hostile towards whistleblowers (especially ones like Edward Snowden who come from intelligence backgrounds) has become more intertwined with a general trend towards the securitization of social media and public speech. This in turn makes it more difficult to criticize the launching of new wars, as to do so even from the rational position of the realism and restraint movement, opens one up to endless public attacks of being in league with extremists, foreign governments, and ideologies considered anti-American. Most mainstream journalists seem to be actively embracing this process in their attempts to gain more access to power and see off upstart rivals less amenable to the arrangement, further increasing the systemic entrenchment of the security state and making it more difficult to push back against its narrative.
With the coming of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in more recent times, the process of deniable interventionism of high cost not only continues but has expanded. The impacts of both of these conflicts have fueled radicalism at home as those seeking meaning apart from the debunked and globalized empire they dwell within have attached themselves as partisans to struggles far removed from any rooted concept of their own interests. Many of the concerns that currently exist about radicalization have yet to be fully understood when it comes to people with family in Israel/Palestine or foreign fighters who served with the Ukrainian Army. This latter group, often volunteers who had no prior connection to the country, fit the model of those who seek meaning in battle– a doomed quest that may not be ended upon their return home and seek more domestic grievances to settle.
Out of the Shadows
The origin point of these policies may have been in the shadow wars waged abroad, but the coordination, collusion, and tacit alliance between the Big Tech and the Intelligence Community—the memetic continuity from the War on Terror towards the censorious inclinations of a Silicon Valley in an increasingly obvious alliance with intelligence agencies—is now targeted at a domestic audience where it once was foreign-focused. This shows that unleashing the dogs of war, even if in a quantified and plausibly deniable way, can do immense damage to the society that makes that decision. This is not to make an idealistic call for a naive pacifism, but to understand that to truly calculate the costs of military interventionism one must be prepared for civil society blowback. Not simply of the more direct and obvious kind that comes in the form of dead and wounded soldiers and the psychological trauma felt by many veterans, but in societies increasingly prone to domestic destabilization, ruinous financial burdens, and an ever-increasing surveillance network honed by fine tuning abroad on people who lack the legal protections of citizens in the home country. One does not have to experience the war directly in combat to experience its effects as policy. And the more indirect a society’s relationship is with war, the harder it can be to detect its influence on the domestic realm before it is too late.
Important structural conversations about the damage done to civil society in the 21st Century alone by this rampant and seemingly ever-accelerating drive for mass securitization desperately need to occur. But it is undeniable that in order to reduce tensions at home it becomes important to first do so abroad. In particular when it comes to the ‘Forever Wars’ that the United States and its allies have been so fond of for decades. Such stealth interventions not only fuel yet more conflict, but also the conditions for said conflicts to slowly but surely change the society that launches them into something degraded, depleted, and enslaved to power. The international dimension of this process must come first and foremost with any honest reckoning of just how big the consequences of little wars can be.
The late author of horror and fantasy Karl Edward Wagner, who was prolific after the end of the Vietnam War, is today not known as an anti-war author. But it was Wagner who captured the danger of the divide between those who suffer from conflict and those who cause it. In his sword and sorcery novel, The Dark Crusade, the clashing ambitions of states and a mad religious prophet lead to a war that rages across multiple regions for years and leaves ruined cities and orphaned children and enslaved families in its wake. Despite many of the power players being key characters, the majority of the narrative is told through the perspective of those lower down on the social ladder, who see the impact of the destructive events around them. After doing what it takes to survive, the characters that do survive largely end up abandoning the struggles they were originally drawn into for exile and bitter disillusionment. But most tellingly, and here Wagner is channeling his personal views on Vietnam into the narrative, almost all of the architects of the carnage get away before they can be held accountable. The very states they spilled so much blood to build are not even fully collapsed before the leadership fled into the woods, their only legacy the ruin of others.
Such seems to be our own fate when you survey the realms of policy and media and see those who created our decline still either occupying fields of influence or living in comfortable retirement. The costs of their actions successfully transferred onto others with none of the benefits trickling down. It is a pattern we would do well to consider whenever someone tries to sell us on a new military intervention which is promised to be small and easy.
Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy; an expert in Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.
