34. "Mission creep"

Once again, for those who remember, the contrast with World War II: "Your mission is to bring about unconditional surrender." The troops under you leap at the enemy's throat. In the Somali operation (Restore Hope), for which the expression was first used (by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post) the mission was to provide humanitarian relief to starving Somalis. Then to protect those providing the relief. Then to take out the warlord who was endangering them. Then to punish the warlord for fighting back and taking out some of our people. Then...but President Clinton called a halt to it and we left (Operation United Shield). The difference from WWII is as great as the difference in combat deaths: WWII 291,000; Somalia, 29.

Some of what Wikipedia tells us about the term, "that it often implies a certain disapproval of newly adopted goals by the user of the term" is certainly right, but some is plainly wrong. Mission creep is not undesirable "due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts"; it's undesirable due to each failure breeding more attempts to avoid failure, as the Somalia case shows.

Clinton's call was a tough one because he was bucking one of the forces fundamental in human nature, and especially strong, I think, in American nature: the drive to succeed. We hate failure. We don't like to admit failure. We don't like to see our President admit failure. In anything we've undertaken, large or small.

No wonder Presidents keep asking the Pentagon to dial things up a little. No wonder Secretaries of Defense hate it. Get one little, clean mission you think you can accomplish and, clink, there's another one, a little bigger, a little dirtier. With a lot of potential blame hanging on it. Secretary Gates knew the story well when he alerted senators to what preoccupied him in Libya: "mission creep."

It's a great expression, but there's one thing wrong with it. "Creep" fails to convey the actual distance covered. For President Johnson's ordering of the Marines to use their arms against the Viet Cong at Da Nang it suggested another small advance, an elbow forward. In reality it was a leap over the broadest chasm in the American psyche. Once our troops started battling enemy troops, once they were (in the public eye) no longer "advisers" or "trainers," we had undertaken a war and war was a thing we could only win or lose. It was us against them, by God, and when success didn't come it was hang in there, it was stand on the goal line, it was Valley Forge. Only summer soldiers and sunshine patriots bugged out.

On the combat side of that chasm familiar forces kicked in to keep us going forward. There was the debt to those who had died. Did they give their lives in vain? There were the promises to those we'd come to help. There was our worth as an ally. There was the credibility of our future threats. And there was, as always, the force of mounting reciprocal paybacks that Clausewitz makes a feature of every war.

Most of what President Johnson chose to do in Viet Nam fits the notion of a creep. Bomb the North from carriers far at sea. Pause. Bomb. Pause. Creep, creep. Raise the troop level, slowly, quietly, making sure you announce the change only in a noon release. Creep, creep, creep. Announcement of what the Marines were going to do, however, though it was framed like the others, was not a creep. There was no disguising it. It was "Up Guards, and at them!" Now we'll get those communist bastards.

"Creep" also fits what we then did, though it's far from what Hoagland had in mind: move further and further from reality. Everything lodged in the public mind about the evils of communism was now released, in increments of illusion. It was us against Marx. With guns. Do you know that that bastard was already only ninety miles away, in Cuba? The whole "soft-on" vocabulary kicked in. Hardness was shown in words. Symbolic stands became more important than real stands.

I think of the bumper sticker that appeared about that time: "Victory over communism, not co-existence." Can words ever put you further from the real world? An abstraction winning over an abstraction, and not in a graduate seminar but on the battlefield!

It's easy for us now, knowing that those were not really communist bastards (they were nationalist bastards), to see what our people needed then: better words, fitting better with reality. They needed "mission creep." Maybe a columnist using that expression then would have given the country a better idea of what was happening. Maybe a staff member could have given the others, given Johnson, a better idea.

But no expression fits reality perfectly. They would still need somebody, drawing on something in some vocabulary, to say, "OK, but here it's not a creep, it's a leap. Anybody have a word that'll get that across to the President?"