March 2, 2004

Studying the Method Behind Military Intervention

By Thomas Kohout

In a space of 19 months Col. Paul Hughes, senior military fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, went from being blown out of his office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, to pitching a tent for the night on the front lawn of one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces. It was long road for a soldier to have traveled in such a short space of time, one that eventually wound its way to Foggy Bottom where Hughes currently is serving as a visiting professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs.

Prior to his recent service with Presidential Envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer, Hughes served as the chief of the National Security Policy Division in the Department of the Army where he developed policy guidance in the areas of arms control, chemical and biological weapons defense, chemical weapons demilitarization, nuclear strategy, space operations, missile defense, information operations and emerging non-traditional security issues. He came to GW through a recommendation from Kimberley Thachuk, a colleague at the Institute for National Strategic Studies who now serves as a visiting professor in the GW’s Security Policy Studies Program teaching transnational issues.

Those credentials enable Hughes to transform his “Military Intervention” class from a dry oratory about legislative directives into salient dialogue about US foreign policy using concrete illustrations of policy decisions in action.

The course focuses on issues such as how the military plans and conducts its portion of humanitarian intervention, what the military calls “stability operations.” These operations can cover a wide variety of activities, from peace keeping and peace enforcement to disaster relief. Students learn not just the policy behind these activities, but also how one implements policy from a military perspective and how the military prepares itself to implement policy.

“These are the folks who, in 10 or 15 years are going to be sitting in the Eisenhower office building making decisions about US policy and applications of American power — whether it be military, economic, informational or diplomatic,” Hughes said. “They need to learn how to think at that level and what it means to think at that level.”

Perhaps the most pressing lesson Hughes tries to convey is that every decision made, sooner or later, translates into an action by an 18- or 19-year-old soldier.

“Every decision eventually gets down to that level and they need to understand that,” Hughes explained. “They cannot be cavalier about the kinds of decisions that they make because it does have life or death consequences eventually. That’s a heady topic for some of these folks. The better we can prepare them now the better off the country will be.”

Hughes also introduces the class to military theorists such as Carl von Clauswitz, Sun Tzu and B.H. Liddell Hart so students develop an understanding of the concepts and theories of war.

“I tend to be a Clausewitzian theorist,” said Hughes. “I think his discussion on the nature of war, and the idea that war is the continuation of policy by other means, is as relevant today as it was when it was written and it will be relevant in the future.”

The foray into the philosophy behind the application of military power, according to Hughes, is crucial to understanding what goes into the development of a policy decision.

Students also explore some of the experiences the US has had in terms of the application of military power in stability operations — the role of intelligence, command and control, the role of NGOs, how you work with other countries, how you measure your effectiveness.

Oftentimes the discussion goes beyond the intended bounds of the class. According to Hughes, students pepper him with questions such as how do you deal with measures of effectiveness, how do you deal with land mines and what to make of the uniform code of military justice?

“They have preconceptions and assumptions about what they know about the military,” explained Hughes. “What I try to do is validate it or correct their perspectives. When it comes to issues of policy, all I can do is explain the policies of the country. These are American citizens who have an interest in their military and they aren’t necessarily part of it, so they have a lot of questions about how we work.

“Hopefully by the end of the course students have a better understanding of why we are where we are, how we got there and that they have a broader perspective than just a narrow thing confined to eight square blocks in Washington, DC,” Hughes said.

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