Why A President Romney Would Continue Obama's Covert War

Yours truly spent 20 minutes on C-SPAN this morning trying to reconcile the almost irreconcilable: how does an administration justify and explain a new form of war--one that you can be assured a President Romney would continue -- when such a war is uniformly covert and its details are necessarily classified? Our constitutional system requires a full explanation to the American public, yet exposure will very likely jeopardize the success of these tactics.

And make no mistake: These are no longer simply tactics conducted on the side against what remains of al Qaeda. This is the way America conducts war today, a whole new kind of warfare that, as National Journal first revealed a year ago, is a logical response to the overextension of U.S. military power under the last administration. It is almost certain to be with us for years to come, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. So how do we talk about it?  

President Obama has landed himself in the middle of this quandary this week, with both senior Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., head of the Intelliigence Committee, and Republicans such as Rep. Mike Rogers, who runs the House intel panel, calling for investigations into a series of media leaks that have revealed startling details about the administration's covert war, including its sponsorship of the Stuxnet computer virus and the drone "kill list" administered by Obama personally. 

Were the leaks politically motivated? Certainly there's a prima facie case for that, given that this administration has aggressively prosecuted other leaks and seems rather cavalier about pursuing these latest ones. There's no question that Obama's campaign strategy is to portray himself as a strong commander in chief, and he's got no better argument than his covert successes.
At the same time it is likely that these revelations, particularly about the U.S. role in cyberwarfare, will provoke other countries, especially China and Russia, to step up their own programs, heralding a new dangerous age of cyber-tactics that has Congress up in arms, and quite legitimately.

But these fears may be somewhat exaggerated. As the redoubtable David Sanger of the New York Times has written, Stuxnet was pursued in part to keep the Israelis from launching air strikes against Iran--and it may have worked. And in an article this week, "In Praise of Cyberwarfare," I suggest that:


"If there were certain restraints in place between major powers such as the U.S., China and Russia --for example, a cyber-risks reduction center, complete with early warning systems --that lessened the likelihood of accidental war, then growing cyber-capabilities could actually reduce the overall risk of war between major states in the long run. The reason is an updated version of MAD thinking, albeit without the scorched-earth, World War III aspect. In a hypothetical moment of tension between Washington and Beijing, would China be as likely to attack U.S. carriers in the South China Sea, for example, if it suspected that the U.S. could disrupt its GPS targeting? Conversely, would Washington be as ready to attack if it feared that China might shut down its satellites?


The threshold for pushing the button would be higher."