“The bill I was referring to, Madam Secretary, was the butcher’s bill.
The cost in American lives. Putting our people under the command of foreign officers is nothing short of a military disaster waiting to happen.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then turned and spoke softly to one of the aides flanking her. The man reached inside a briefcase and produced a manila folder. She accepted it, leafing through several pages inside before finding what she wanted. “Admiral, it seems to me that our current policy of supporting UN operations but maintaining separate and distinct lines of command and communication offers an even better opportunity for ‘military disaster,’ as you put it. You’ve seen this?”
She slid the paper across the table. Scott barely glanced at it and did not pick it up. “Of course, Madam Secretary.”
“Gentlemen,” Reed said, addressing the entire room. “Two days ago, as any of you who watch cable news is well aware by now, one of our Navy jets shot down a U.S. Army helicopter that was flying a UN mission. No one was killed, fortunately, but the incident has pointed up the flaws in interservice operations. There were breakdowns in communication up and down the entire chain of command. It seems that the naval personnel making the decisions in the carrier battle group had not been notified that Army helicopters were operating in the no-fly zone and had not received the computer codes that let their radars recognize those helicopters as friendly.
“The day before that, this same carrier group sank a Russian submarine, again by accident. At least fifteen Russian nationals were killed.
“Now, it seems to me that putting all of our forces under one command infrastructure would be the best possible way of avoiding unfortunate mistakes like these in the future. Placing our forces under UN command will simplify the lines of communications. It will simplify intelligence and ensure that our military forces know who is in the area and what they are doing.
“I must say, it also sets a worthwhile precedent for the future. If we start putting larger numbers of troops under UN authority, it would give the organization some real teeth. That would save the United States from more embarrassments like Somalia and Haiti.”
Magruder resisted the urge to speak up, to argue against what he saw as a blatant misuse of American military forces. His position was an unusual one. At the time of the Norwegian War he’d held the post of Director of Operations for the Joint Staff, but during that crisis and the Russian Civil War that followed it, the President had come to depend on him as a personal military adviser. Now he was attached to Admiral Scott’s personal staff, a position that gave him access to these high-level meetings but no real authority. Anything he said now would be viewed as a “Me, too” echo of Scott’s position.
Damn it, he wished the gold on his shoulder boards and jacket cuffs counted for something in this roomful of career politicians. For years globalists had been talking about increasing the authority of the United Nations and giving it control over larger and more powerful military units. They pointed to the organization’s complete helplessness during the Cold War era and to the fiascoes of the early days of the New World Order as good reasons to stiffen UN power and prestige with troops, equipment, and armaments controlled by the Security Council. They pointed out that UN attempts to engage in nation-building in Somalia in 1993 had been derailed by the U.S. decision to withdraw all ground troops from the nation after a firefight where American troops had been killed and their bodies dragged through the streets in front of TV cameras for all to see. And UN Haiti policy had never quite gelled because of vacillating American leadership.
But the thought of handing over a sizable portion of American military power to the United Nations was, for Magruder, a chilling one. If the UN could send Americans into Georgia… or the Crimea… how long would it be before they sent troops into Los Angeles to quell the next round of rioting? Or into American homes to search for handguns? Or to arrest American citizens for speaking out against this dark and twisted vision of the New World Order? …
Admiral Magruder had too fond a regard for the lessons of history to ignore the possibility ― no, the probability ― that such power, once granted, would grow, corrupt, and ultimately enslave.
Unfortunately, he and Scott were very much in the minority at this table.
“I’m not sure giving the UN more power is a very good idea,” Scott said, leaning forward in his chair and clasping his hands on the table before him. “In any event, this is a surrender of American sovereignty. We have never agreed to such a thing in our entire history. American forces have never been placed under the operational control of foreigners. The French tried it in World War I, and Montgomery wanted to try it in World War II, but in each case we did everything in our power to maintain control over our own people. The closest we ever came was in Somalia, and I’ll point out that it was the UN component there that got our people involved in that firefight that killed our boys… and then failed to support them when they got into trouble.”
“Admiral,” Heideman said, “I respect your views, but I cannot agree with them. We cannot live in the past any longer. National sovereignty is a nice, high-sounding phrase, but it’s soon going to be as antiquated as Communism. Look, you know how hard it is to get Congress or the public to back an intervention effort. Even when that intervention is in the national interest.”
“In other words, you intend to sidestep the Constitution by putting our troops under the UN,” Scott said bluntly.
Heideman flushed. “Stop twisting my words, Admiral. Troop commitment is a foreign policy decision. Executive Branch has the authority.”
“Except that Congress has the War Powers Act sitting there waiting for you, and you don’t want to force a confrontation on whether it’s legal for the Executive Branch to exercise the kind of authority you’re talking about.” Scott shook his head. “The simple fact is that UN intervention often has nothing whatsoever to do with our national interests.”
“It does in the Black Sea,” Waring said. “Right now the whole of the former Soviet Union is balanced on the thin edge of complete anarchy. Our presence in the Black Sea will serve to stabilize the area.”
Reed nodded. “My point exactly, Herb. I’ll also point out that intervention in this case helps our interests in the short term.”
Short-term interests, Magruder echoed in his mind. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
If the other people at the table were looking for disasters waiting to happen, they didn’t need to look beyond the current situation unfolding between Ukraine and the fragmenting Russian Federation. Magruder glanced at Roger Lloyd, the new director of the CIA. He’d already given his briefing on the geopolitical situation in that part of the world and did not look happy with the way the discussion was going.
And Magruder didn’t blame him one bit.
The vast expanse of rolling, fertile, black-earth prairies that was Ukraine had been one of the original founding states of the Soviet Union in 1922, but its people had never fully reconciled themselves to Russian domination. Ethnically, Ukrainians were not Russians; they remembered still with blood-soaked bitterness Stalin’s forced collectivization during the 1930s, a policy of genocide by starvation that may have killed as many as twenty million people. Glasnost had come slowly to Ukraine; long after Gorbachev came to power, the head of the Communist party there had been one of Brezhnev’s cronies, and the arrests, repressions, and police harassments had continued until his dismissal in 1989.