ASPIDES: The ISAF of the Seas

I've seen this movie

I thought that over the years since I left The Continent the wounds of all the unfilled CJSOR lines had healed.

I thought all the fun cynicism of the half-decade I spent trying to help NATO work through the cobwebs of national caveats and Regional Commands fighting their own version of a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan…wait, we weren’t allowed to call it that, or was it counter-terrorism, or was it both…IDK…had worked its way out of my system.

I guess not, as I still grin at the jokes:

“Hey, you know that ISAF stands for?”

“International Security Assistance Force?”

“No. ‘I Saw Americans Fight’ or ‘I sit at FOBs.”

No, evidently, a decade and a half after leaving Kabul, it’s still sticking with me, fully triggered by this post on X.

Yes, yes, yes, I know. The EU is not NATO—but that does not matter.

So, here we have the same people with same worldview and mindset that gave us the alternative universes of Herat in Regional Command West and Mazar-i-Sharif Regional Command North. Now they are taking their non-winning formula of, “If bare minimums were not good enough, I wouldn’t be doing them.” to the Red Sea.

If I made an attempt to parody a description of a passive defeatist approach to maritime security in the face of piracy, I would be hard-pressed to do better than this.

To be fair, this approach is centuries old in Europe. Just look at the late 1700s and early 1800s response to the Barbary Pirates.

To understand why Europe is showing such a weak and supine response, review the “Will, Capacity, and Desire” construct from yesterday’s post.

As the U.S. military is doing the hard and very expensive kinetic work against the nest of pirates from the Houthi—a threat that impacts Europe an order of magnitude more than the U.S.— the power-bottoms in the always entertaining to watch European Union Military Committee are taking the least demanding Course of Action besides doing nothing, just defending passing ships while doing nothing against those attacking them. They are raising their shields against the arrows while pretending the archers don’t exist.

Piracy is not a force of nature. It exists in lawlessness enabled by weakness and timidity.

Don’t get me wrong, the escorting is important as long as the piratical Houthi are sending ordnance downrange…but it also rides on the back of the U.S. military’s ongoing attacks of the last few weeks, taking the fight ashore in line with what is required to deal with pirates as a few thousand years of experience has informed us must be done.

The U.S. is doing it because it must be done, and no one else will do it. The U.S. is not even the primary beneficiary of our own military action, a habit we are all too used to.

Is Europe also falling into a habit it’s all too used to? Another round of free-riding, opportunism, and simply the bare minimum of a mission they can get approved by their governments executed with the bare minimum of effort?

Outside HQ ISAF, looking at all the flags, we used to joke about this nation or that who you never saw outside the gate, but “just did enough” to get their flag on a pole.

Here we are again.

So, sure…the Europeans will sneer at the U.S. while benefiting from our action. They will be comforted by their media continuing to drum up anti-American feelings to distract them from their own government’s impotence.

At least for now, the U.S. will keep doing this, but this decades-long habit rests on a thin wire.

Americans’ will to continue to underwrite European security has worn very thin. “America First” does not mean, “American first in the fight.”

American capacity must move to the Pacific, even though today’s events are doing the opposite.

American desire to be the nation whose blood everyone thinks it is entitled to, is waning.

It does not have to be this way, but European actions only encourage our drift apart.