Applying Marque and Reprisal to the Islamic State - Jeffersonian Model


There has a lot of discussion lately about the Islamic State (IS) and what exactly we should do about it. Most people are locked into the status quo: we either bomb from afar with no Congressional permission Clinton style, go in for a full invasion with only a brief statement of Congressional non-rejection and no declaration of war Bush style, or we do nothing at all. Clearly the first two are not options for a nation that obeys the Constitution, and the third, assuming that IS is a legitimate threat, is no option at all.

What people fail to account for, and the media is primarily responsible for this, is the Founders and Framers gave us a Constitutional means to deal with Non State Entities should they aggress against us, a means that not only works better and more efficiently than the traditional ground invasion and occupation, but it is also more effective, costs a fraction as much, and creates an order of magnitude less blowback.

I am talking about Marque and Reprisal. Now, you have probably been led to believe that M&R was simply the act of Congress shelling out bounties to third parties for named actors dead or alive. While that is sort of the basic idea, M&R is way more than that. People don't like the thought that with M&R our military would not be utilized. The US Navy and the US Marine Corps have it as one of their fundamental missions to support M&R, going back to before Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates at "the Shores of Tripoli."

So, the Islamic State is a legitimate threat, but there is no actual country to declare war on, what ever shall we do?

Deploy all possible intelligence assets America has to bear against the IS target. Identify the threat down to the last individual soul. Assign an initial value to each name, and count up how much it will cost to bounty out every one of them.

Go to Congress and obtain a letter of Marque, authorizing 10 Billion dollars in bounty plus 50 Million operating budget. While there, also obtain a letter of Reprisal, authorizing American forces on the ground to participate operational activities in support of privateers, and to capture their own targets.

Send in a full company of MARSOC Marines with a SOCOM HQ intelligence element and a senior officer with the power to hand out cash bounties along with his security element. Work actively to hand out bounties safely in exchange for prisoners (lesser awards for remains), and work actively to assist in the live capture of targets, or also capture targets on their own, as MARSOC teams.

Reduce the known list of IS operatives to zero in a short period of time, and then make it a point to let the fish go that were only caught up in it tangentially.

Because the people who are not actually operatives are cut loose as quickly as possible, we will get less resistance to people (who are not operatives) getting picked up, and the people who are actual operatives will identify themselves by going even deeper to ground, where they will sit until their jacked up bounties become too lucrative for someone to ignore.

You can bring every weapon to bear that a full heavy company of MARSOC Marines and their Navy (and potentially SOCOM) support elements can provide - which is a LOT - special forces operators can run around cleaning up the list like gangbusters while operating behind the confusing cloud of privateers so that the IS will never be able to get ahead of the US.

Run the ops exclusively person-to-person with the most elite warriors we can put together, fill the environment with privateers such that the American warriors can operate relatively unmolested, and reduce the enemy network to nothing quickly and quietly like the individuals composing the IS just get sucked into a black hole never to be heard from again.

You end up reducing the enemies’ entire network to nothing, quickly, with nearly zero collateral damage, and nearly zero motivation to blowback. Piracy, Terrorism, acts of the Nation against individuals and individual networks are why Marque and Reprisal were written in the first place. It is not exactly war, but it can be something like war. It is just a different way of using our massive military might to address the problem we currently face.

Trying to fight terrorism with conventional warfare, is akin to the Redcoats marching in massed formations while the Americans fired from behind trees, except now we are the Redcoats. Piracy and terrorism are not new things on this world, they have been around since before America was even colonized. Marque and Reprisal is not some fancy new-fangled idea, it was put into the Constitution from Day One specifically because it is the best solution to the kind of problem we now face.

So now there is talk on BOTH sides about going to Congress and getting another AUMF and launching Iraq War 3. The fact that Iraq Wars 1 and 2 didn't solve the problem is not a clue? Are we going to be right back here in another 10 years working up to Iraq War 4 because 3 didn't really do the job?

That's what happens when you use the wrong tool for the job. If you drive deck screws with a hammer, you deck is going to need repaired sooner than if you used a screw gun, or drove nails with your hammer instead. We keep using the 'wrong tool for the job' in addressing non-state terrorism and wondering why in never really works out right, and pretty much all the Hawkish voices out there want to use the same old hammer to drive the same old screws again.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but to go back and do again what we've done twice before is not going to solve the problem any more than it did the last two times.

But this is not all naysaying and empty criticism. I do know the solution, and I do know how to solve this problem quickly and efficiently. Do it with Marque and Reprisal. But not the cartoon version of M&R that America today has been fed, which is just some kind of Old-West style bounty system and nothing more, but the real and vital version of M&R as demonstrated by Thomas Jefferson in the Barbary War.

A company of SOCOM (in this case, for Constitutional reasons it would be MARSOC or SEAL; probably MARSOC since M&R missions would be more extended ground campaign than nightly amphibious assaults) can bring a level of devastation equivalent to a light regiment. Add an armored platoon and they can bring the destruction of a heavy regiment. But instead of running around destroying cities, they will wield every ounce of that power towards the surgical capture of named targets on an extensive list.

Our operators are already good enough. Throwing 10 Billion dollars around to whomever brings back named terrorist X, will 1) get some amount of your work done for you, and 2) provide an incredibly effective 'operating screen' behind which the MARSOC teams can operate with near impunity. While IS leadership is freaking out about Dog the Bounty Hunter raiding mid level safehouses, the Marines ghost in, capture the #2 guy in the org, and ghost out leaving everyone to wonder WTH just happened.

Marque and Reprisal, when used correctly, is not only hundreds of times more effective (and one-tenth of the cost) for this kind of problem than what we have been doing the last few times, it was also designed specifically for this kind of problem by the Framers who wrote the Constitution in the first place.

It's time to trust the Framers again. No more AUMF's. No more undeclared wars. No more trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer. Use the Constitutional tools of Marque and Reprisal, deploy an M&R element to each of the areas where the enemy operates (acquire host nation permission when possible, but acquire the permission of some nation to land without exception, even if it's a neighbor nation to the target.) Use M&R to surgically eradicate the entire IS network, and instead of hating us, the world will thank us for cutting out the cancer.

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