‘Welcome to Oslo’: When the U.S. Gets Rolled on its Landmines Exceptions, Will the Joint Chiefs Hold the (Red) Line(s)?

(Washington, D.C.): A U.S. delegation
led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State Eric Newsom has the unenviable task
of laboring through the holiday weekend
— and most of the next three weeks — in
Oslo, Norway. There they will be
subjected to the diplomatic equivalent of
drawing-and-quartering at the hands of
nations and non-governmental
organizations, led by the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), bent
on quickly completing an
unverifiable, unenforceable and
ineffective ban on anti-personnel
landmines (APLs).

The question is not whether
the outcome of the Oslo negotiations will
produce an accord to be signed in Ottawa
in December 1997 that is inconsistent
with the Clinton Administration’s own
negotiating instructions — and, more
importantly, with the Nation’s security
requirements as defined by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. After all, it
requires only a simple majority of the
countries present to vote down changes to
the draft treaty that President Clinton
has said he would seek. And the
ICRC, which is devoting millions of
dollars to the APL ban campaign, has
already issued what amount to
instructions to sympathetic nations’
negotiators that the U.S. changes are
to be rejected.

The Shape of Things to Come

As a result, the treaty is expected to
take the following form:

• It will ban basically any
  ordnance that is capable of
  having the effects of
  anti-personnel landmines by not
  differentiating between those
  weapons “primarily
  designed” to act as
  APLs and those that are not. This
  would have a profound and adverse
  effect on the U.S. ability to
  deploy and use an array of weapon
  systems (e.g., including
  submunitions, anti-armor mines,
  artillery, etc.) It could also
  translate into onerous and
  expensive obligations to clean up
  unexploded ordinance. It would
  certainly impede the sale or
  transfer of such weapons to
  allied and friendly states.
• The United States will not only
  be required to eliminate its
  entire inventory of
  free-standing,
  self-deactivating/self-destructing
  anti-personnel landmines
  (including those in the kits of
  special operations forces); it
  will also have to dismantle such
  short-duration APLs that
  are packaged together with
  anti-tank landmines.
  This will involve significant and
  unwarranted expenses. It will
  also reduce the effectiveness of
  anti-tank landmines by making it
  far easier to clear them.
• The United States may also be
  obliged to eliminate the
  long-duration (i.e.,
  non-self-deactivating/self-destructing)
  landmines it currently
  deploys only in the Korean
  demilitarized zone to
  help defeat or at least impede a
  North Korean invasion of the
  South. At a minimum, the Ottawa
  treaty will require the phasing
  out of such mines within a fixed
  period of time — whether
  alternatives capable of
  performing the mission have been
  discovered, or not.

Whither the Chiefs?

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have made
clear their view that such outcomes would
breach their “red lines” —
arrangements that are minimally
compatible with the requirements of U.S.
troops if they are to survive and prevail
on the battlefield. Apparently, the
Clinton Administration’s instructions to
Secretary Newsom and his team reflect the
Chiefs’ stance.

The question then arises: What
will happen when such red lines
are inevitably breached over the next few
weeks in Oslo? Even before it
has left Washington, some among the U.S.
delegation have displayed a tendency to
accommodate the sentiments of the
“abolitionists,” regardless of
whether doing so contravenes the Chiefs’
best professional military advice. The
pressure to do so in Norway, and in the
aftermath of the meetings there, will be
intense. In the final analysis, the
question of whether that pressure will be
resisted — if not by the Clinton
Administration, then by the U.S. Senate
which must approve ratification of any
landmine ban — will lie with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and other top military
commanders.

On 10 July 1997, all sixteen of the
Chiefs and the regional CINCs wrote the
Senate making clear their opposition to
bans that would prevent the use by the
U.S. military of
self-deactivating/self-destructing
landmines.

“Until the United States has
a capable replacement for
self-destructing APL, maximum
flexibility and war-fighting
capability for American combat
commanders must be preserved. The
lives of our sons and daughters
should be given the highest
priority when deciding whether or
not to ban unilaterally the use
of self-destructing APL.”⁽¹⁾

Unless they formally change that
position, it seems inconceivable that 67
Senators would put American troops at
risk by disregarding the professional
military’s judgment, even if President
Clinton ultimately decides to do so.

The Bottom Line

The stakes for the U.S. military are
extremely high. After all, the
abolitionists have already made clear
that they intend, after work on the
landmine ban is completed, to seek new
agreements leading to prohibitions on the
following weapon systems: anti-tank
mines, depleted uranium rounds,
small-caliber (so-called
“fragmenting”) ammunition,
fuel-air explosives, naval mines,
directed energy systems and nuclear
weapons.

If the Joint Chiefs of Staff
wish to avoid being disarmed in detail,
they must defend their present red lines
and, when those lines are breached, be
prepared to urge defeat of a defective
and dangerously precedential ban on
anti-personnel weapons.

– 30 –

1. For the full
text of this letter, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled Celestial
Navigation: Pentagon’s Extraordinary
’64-Star’ Letter Shows Why the U.S.
Cannot Agree to Ban All Landmines
(No. 97-D 97,
14 July 1997). Also see Many
of Nation’s Most Respected Military
Leaders Join Forces To Oppose Bans on Use
of Self-Destructing Landmines
(No. 97-P 101,
21 July 1997).