Future Defense Visions

An Attack on Iran is Pearl Harbor Redux

2012-02-08T05:47:00.000-08:00

When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, they did so on the basis of assumptions that were all false.

First, the Japanese assumed that Americans who were in the majority opposed to war with Germany and Italy would decline to mobilize and fight the Japanese. Given the passage of the military draft by on only one vote in 1939, the Japanese also assumed the American population had no stomach for a war. Second, the Japanese assumed the strike on American naval forces in Pearl Harbor would not only devastate the United States’ ability to retaliate for at least a year or more, the Japanese also assumed American military industrial production would take years to construct a fleet capable of reaching Japan. Finally, the Japanese assumed they and their forces were morally superior to American forces.

The rest of the story is too well known to repeat here, but the absence of realistic thinking led the Japanese to commit national suicide. How could Japanese leaders have been so misguided in their assumptions? The answer is: It’s easy. When national military strategy fails to answer the questions of purpose, method and end-state, military power becomes an engine of destruction not just for its intended enemies; but for its supporting society and economy too!

If the United States attacks Iran or supports Israel’s attack on Iran, do Americans run a similar risk? The answer is yes.

Regardless of how great or how small the military commitment is, national leaders must always measure what the United States might gain by what the United States might lose. After all, the object in conflict and crisis is the same as in wrestling; to throw the opponent by weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance without risking self-exhaustion. What militates against this line of reasoning is the delusion of limitless national power and the unhealthy condition of American national narcissism that thrives on it.

Today, the same voices that advocated war with Iraq on specious grounds are urging an attack on Iran. They are doing so without serious consideration of the steps required to both contain and end the conflict that an American or American-supported Israeli attack would precipitate. Had anyone in the Bush White House stopped to seriously examine what outcome (end-state) it was they wanted to achieve with military power (purpose) and what military capabilities (method) were really at their disposal to do so, it is doubtful they would have reached the decisions they did. We don’t need to repeat this folly in Iran or anywhere else, particularly at a time when American economic recovery hangs by a delicate thread.

Like the Bush Administration’s decision to intervene with large-scale conventional forces in Iraq, the argument for military action against Iran rests on the delusion that the United States can control the outcome. This kind of wish-based ideology made retreat from inflexible and irrational policy pronouncements on Iraq and Afghanistan nearly impossible when they no longer made sense. In the event Iran is supported by other great powers in its determination to survive the American or American-supported Israeli assault, the strategic consequences for American interests around the world could be profoundly negative.

Don’t waste a drawdown

2012-02-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

As budgets shrink, let’s rethink how we organize, train and equip the Army

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8817152

BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR

In 1950, there were 563,000 soldiers on active duty in the U.S. Army — yet, as General of the Army Omar Bradley put it, “It was an Army that could not fight its way out of a paper bag.”

In the five years following the end of World War II, the Army’s four-star generals had transformed a mighty weapon into a light constabulary force on wheels, designed for occupation duty in Japan and Germany and not much more.

As the U.S. withdraws from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fiscal pressures are certain to exact a toll on the Army’s end strength. Yet there is no need to repeat the mistakes of the mid-20th century.

In fact, the size of a military institution’s budget may well stand in inverse proportion to the original thinking it creates. A smaller budget that cannot buy everything can be exploited to engage in the unconstrained thinking that creates new fighting power. Corporate thinking — the kind that dominates today’s Army — emphasizes the value of numbers, but how armed forces organize, train and equip makes a far greater difference to the outcome than the quantity of troops.

After World War I, the German Army was reduced to 100,000 men, a fraction of its historic strength. Knowing that Germany could not afford to field large, expensive armies, and preferring in any case to avoid another destructive war of attrition, the German General Staff turned to new ideas: new combat formations based on new technology, new leadership and new tactics.

Further east, another giant military was downsizing in the face of economic pressure. In 1923, Lenin demobilized most of the 5 million men in the Red Army, leaving a standing professional force of 600,000 men to defend one-sixth of the world’s land mass. Forced to think unconventionally, the leadership of the Red Army produced a vision of future war centered on aircraft and armored forces that eventually rescued the Soviet state from destruction in 1943-45.

Both Soviet and German military leaders zeroed in on the central importance of J.F.C. Fuller’s observation: “The fighting power of an army lies in its organization for combat.”

Today’s U.S. Army needs to do the same, focusing on the creation, maintenance and expansion of new fighting power in three ways.

First, maximize ready, available combat forces within the limits of current resources and adopt mission-focused capability packages as the building blocks of the Army’s tactical organization for combat.

Second, streamline the institutional Army to support deployable combat power and eliminate wasteful and redundant overhead.

Third, integrate operational Army command and control across service lines and harmonize Army rotational readiness with air and naval forces.

Finding the right mix of ready, deployable high-performance combat forces that emphasize mobility, survivability and lethality (not mass) for integrated “all arms” operations is vital. Today, accurate, devastating strikes from the air, land or sea using precision-guided conventional or nuclear weapons are enabled by manned or unmanned persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and near-real-time targeting. In practically every strategic setting, “strike” is both the existential threat to and pivotal enabler for all surface forces, whether land- or sea-based. Contemporary air and naval forces also can allow ground forces to economize, to concentrate ground combat forces only when and where they are needed while denying the opposing force the ability to mass against them.

However, air and naval forces alone cannot seize or secure objectives of operational or strategic importance on land to either the enemy or the U.S. Precision strikes from the air and sea can incapacitate enemy command and control, but the confusion and paralysis thus engendered is always temporary unless ground forces exploit the strikes quickly and decisively.

The challenge is to organize ground forces to conduct operations that magnify and exploit the striking power of the joint force. This means the Army must provide high-performance combat forces that emphasize mobility, survivability and lethality (not mass) for joint, integrated, “all arms” operations. These formations must be self-contained, survivable, mobile combat formations (mission-focused capability packages) organized around maneuver, strike, ISR and sustainment. In addition, these combat formations must be able to perform nonlinear and dispersed, mobile operations in a much more lethal battle space than anything seen since 2001.

As I argued in “Breaking the Phalanx” and “Transformation under Fire,” the Army needs conceptual road maps that eliminate brigades and divisions. In their place will rise combat maneuver groups (CMGs) of roughly 5,000 to 6,000 troops commanded by brigadier generals with lieutenant colonels in the key staff positions. CMGs are meant to plug directly into joint force headquarters without deploying the additional layers of single-service command and control provided by large, ponderous division and corps headquarters. This organizational paradigm remains the most attractive and promising way to integrate combat forces within a multiservice framework of maneuver, strike, ISR and sustainment operations.

Historically, the Army has had plenty of success with this force design. Examples include Brig. Gen. Bruce Clark’s brilliant command of Combat Command B, 7th Armored Division, at St. Vith in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, Col. Paul Freeman’s command of the 23rd Regimental Combat Team at Chip Yong Ni in Korea in 1951 and Col. John Hort’s composite command in the battle for Sadr City in Iraq in 2008.

SHAPING EFFECTIVE FORCES

What should these capability-based force packages look like? Light infantry? Mobile armored forces, theater missile defense forces or ground-based strike forces? Should they include multiple rocket launchers and unmanned combat aircraft along with communications and robust logistics elements to perform in austere theaters on short notice?

Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the recently retired Army vice chief of staff, provided the answer when he returned from service in Iraq: “While many contributing factors helped shape the battle space (air interdiction, close-air support, artillery), ultimately war demands closure with the enemy force within the minimum safe distance of artillery. Our armored systems enabled us to close with and destroy the heavily armed and fanatically determined enemy force often within urban terrain with impunity.”

Tracked mobile armored firepower in a range of variants is the foundation for a survivable, ground combat force in modern warfare. In joint warfare, mobile armored forces provide the capability to initiate decisive offensive operations with a credible maneuver force against any enemy, conventional or irregular. Why? Regardless of how good the individual rifleman’s training and equipment may be, machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades compel him to halt and take cover. When these conditions of symmetry apply, the light infantry turns to the radio for help from Air Force and Navy air power, artillery and, as seen throughout the Iraq occupation, tanks. And in a fight with a capable enemy with air defenses, air power — manned or unmanned — cannot be everywhere to compensate for a lack of combat power on the ground.

Unlike light infantry, mobile armored forces can take hits and continue to advance, bypassing or punching through all types of resistance. Effective at joint operational maneuver, they can encircle and destroy sub-national or irregular groups, shatter opposing conventional forces and hold nation-states hostage to American political demands. Properly employed, mobile armored forces can reinforce the striking power of air and naval forces and signal escalation dominance to the enemy (conventional or irregular) by shifting rapidly between dispersion and concentration.

More important, we may look at areas where the U.S. has tangible strategic interests in an effort to predict where future operations may arise. From the Sea of Japan to the South China Sea, the Baltic to the Red Sea or the Caribbean Basin, there is no demand for large numbers of light infantrymen. In fact, light infantry is plentiful in all the states that border these bodies of water. What these states lack are the matchless capabilities the Army can provide: effective mobile command and control, mobile armored firepower, layered, integrated theater missile defense, sophisticated combat engineering and logistics.

BEYOND COMBAT FORCES

At the same time, reorienting the institutional Army to the post-Iraq and Afghan environment demands a new command structure designed to train it, prepare it and launch it for either joint expeditionary warfare or homeland defense. Today, Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is responsible for both the training and design of the force, but it has little or no impact on the readiness of Army combat forces to deploy and fight. Meanwhile, Army Materiel Command is expected to develop weapons and equipment on the basis of requirements developed at TRADOC. Lastly, Army Forces Command exerts little or no influence over the training concepts developed at TRADOC, but it must nevertheless ensure the readiness of the force.

In an information-age environment where technology is racing ahead at breakneck speed, thinking about warfare should not be separated from the process of technology development. It makes sense to link readiness and training in one headquarters while combining materiel development with force design, education and doctrinal development in another. This action would reduce three four-star headquarters to two. It’s long overdue in the unending fight for more combat capability and less overhead.

Across industry, the impact of change in technology and markets follows a similar track: New organizational models that comprise fewer layers emerge as industries consolidate to attain faster decision processes, greater use of teams and more educated employees to solve problems autonomously. Today, an operational force design with fewer echelons of command and control and a faster decision cycle can employ joint, integrated capabilities with ground maneuver elements to provide the coverage needed to exploit the joint potential in the Air Force and Navy ISR and strike capabilities, as well as advanced aviation and ground combat platforms.

Without unity of command, unity of action is impossible. Having fought for their very existence against the German Wehrmacht, the most sophisticated armed force of its time, no group of military leaders understood this point more thoroughly than the Soviet High Command. The most strategically important offensive of World War II, Operation Bagration, showcased the importance of unified command of all air, land and sea-based forces. “All arms” operations derive inspiration from the Soviet experience because Soviet command structures integrated functional capabilities — maneuver, strike, ISR, sustainment — across service lines inside a seamless, unified command-and-control operational framework.

All previous efforts to create permanent joint force headquarters designed to command and control forces from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have failed. However, reductions in defense spending can be exploited to change this condition, provided the Army’s senior leadership will step forward with a plan of its own to field and test a joint force headquarters.

Corporate thinking means repaving old roads instead of blazing new trails into the future, sending the Army down the same path with fewer and fewer resources. Put another way, it would be a serious mistake to go to war in the future “with the Army we have” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld opted to do in 2003. It is time to stop investing scarce funding and resources in land warfare systems that assume the only future threats are from heavy machine guns, grenades and mines.

The clock is ticking. Too few of those in uniform hear it. Few politicians ever do. The risk of interstate regional war is currently low — a condition history suggests won’t last. We cannot predict when the next major war will occur or whom we will fight. I’d like it to be 25 years away, but it might be 15. It might be five or even fewer. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that who wins and who loses in war usually has a great deal to do with decisions in the five to 15 years leading up to the wartime collision. It is in the years before a major conflict begins that a victorious military establishment develops a war-winning “formula” combining technology and human potential within a conceptual framework so overwhelmingly advantageous that no amount of individual or small-unit bravery can overcome it. Now is the ideal time for the Army along with the rest of the joint force to put aside corporate thinking and focus on these formulas.

Wake Up: America Can't Afford Its Military

2011-12-27T17:48:00.000-08:00

AOL Defense

December 27, 2011

By Doug Macgregor

Through the last year the defense industries and their supporters in Congress worked overtime to ensure the federal government kept the armed forces in a perpetual procurement cycle. Inside the Pentagon, the generals and admirals who lead the defense bureaucracies worked to minimize procurement costs. This was not altruistic behavior. It's the only way to protect the armed forces' outdated force structures from more debilitating cuts; cuts that threaten the single service way of warfare along with the bloated overhead of flag officer headquarters.

Meanwhile, public pronouncements from the office of the Secretary of Defense on cost savings initiatives or about imminent strategic disaster if defense spending is reduced fell flat. In fact, everything in 2011 related to defense, from the controversial F-35 program to the multi-billion dollar contracting fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, looked like window dressing designed to buy more time for an anachronistic, insolvent defense establishment.

It's no secret what's required in 2012 and beyond: an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum utilization of increasingly constrained resources. More specifically, a serious audit of the U.S. Department of Defense, along with a national reset where the roles of politicians, bureaucrats and four stars are recast as servants, not masters, of the national interest. Unfortunately, inside the Beltway where accountability is a dirty word, political and military leaders are free to conflate their personal and bureaucratic interests with the national interest.

As a result, there is still no willingness to comprehend or, at least, admit the truth: America's current national security posture is fiscally unsustainable. Today, the United States' national debt is so large it will swallow almost any legislation the President and Congress agree to pass. It is only a question of time before the U.S. government is compelled to make drastic cuts in federal spending.

Despite this reality, like the politicians in both parties, the four Chiefs of Service are desperate to save the military status quo from significant reductions in defense spending, a policy stance that could easily lead to a serious degradation of American military power after the 2012 election. In the midst of America's fiscal crisis, Congress is equally inept. The best Congress could do in this legislative season to was announce its intention to add yet another four-star (this time from the National Guard) to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; an action comparable to adding a fifth wheel to a car that's already got four flats.

Instead of adding more generals to an already top-heavy force, America's ignominious withdrawal from Iraq should help sober up politicians of all stripes and parties. It should impart the timeless strategic lesson that the use of American military power, even against weak opponents with no navy, no army, no air force and no air defenses -- can have costly, unintended strategic consequences. Today, Iran, not the United States, is the dominant power inside Iraq and Americans are beginning to understand why.

Iranian interests prevailed in Baghdad because Tehran's agents of influence wore an indigenous face while America's agents wore foreign uniforms and carried guns. Regardless of whatever the US decides to do, Iran will remain the dominant actor in Iraq so long as it maintains even the thinnest veil of concealment behind the façade of the Maliki government and its successors.

While these unassailable facts are ignored inside the Beltway, "Main Street" is figuring things out. According to a recent CBS poll 77 percent of the American electorate approves of President Obama's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. Two in three Americans say the Iraq war was not worth the cost, and only 15% of Americans support military intervention to stop Iran's nuclear program.

More important, nearly one-half of American voters now think the United States can make major cuts in defense spending without placing the country in danger. They see no risk in cutting way back on what America spends to defend other countries. The old notion that the United States should maintain expensive military bases in foreign countries, just to ensure troublesome foreigners do not get "out of hand," is rapidly losing support.

Conventional wisdom says American society's broader consciousness is shaped by the forces of hype and publicity, and national defense is often subject to it, but the recent polling data suggest a different explanation. Americans are focused on economics, not national defense. Perhaps, the American electorate perceives the Federal Reserve is running out of ammunition to restart America's stalled recovery?

Perhaps, Americans are concerned the collapse of the Eurozone will eventually lead to a serious financial crisis in the United States, wiping out the savings of many millions of Americans? Or, perhaps Americans are worried the sudden termination of "free services" in America's largest cities would lead to a surge in poverty and violence, putting American society on a collision course with itself. It's hard to tell.

What we can say is that Americans are signing up for President Eisenhower's philosophy in the aftermath of the Korean War. He insisted the nation deserved both "solvency and security" in national defense. Like Eisenhower, Americans seem to understand the nation's vital strategic interests are only secure when the United States' scientific-industrial base is productive and our society prospers. Predictably, there is also a growing recognition that the million dollars a year it costs to keep one American soldier or Marine on station in Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. Army and other federal agencies could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism and illegal immigration washing in from Mexico and Latin America.

Looking forward into 2012, American voters seem to understand what many of the men running for President do not: Given America's fragile economic health, 2012 is no time for uninformed decisions regarding the use of force. The deficit Americans worry most about is not fiscal; it's a national deficit of integrity and reason.

Col (ret) Douglas Macgregor, a member of AOL Defense's Board of Contributors, is a decorated Army veteran and author of important books on military reform and strategy including, Breaking the Phalanx (Praeger, 1997), and Transformation under Fire (Praeger, 2003). He is executive vice president at Burke-Macgregor Group, LLC, in Reston, Va.

Thoughts on Force Design in an Era of Shrinking Defense Budgets

2011-10-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

By Douglas A. MacGregor

ABSTRACT
No force design can guarantee success, but an agile design may reduce risk and maximize options across today’s range of security needs. Smaller force packages that can be adapted to fluid situations will court disaster less than large, costly installations in fixed locations such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in this age of proliferating WMD. A maneuver-strike-sustainment complex is outlined that will reduce expense and at the same time be the foundation of a unified view of warfare that is missing at present. The new vision will lead to strategic power that will endure even in the face of the WMD threat that makes current force configurations so dangerous.

Force design is an essential tool in the hands of national political and military leaders to counter uncertainty in conflict or crisis. An agile force design can both create options and reduce risk should events take unexpected turns. No force design or national military strategy can address or eliminate all uncertainties, but an agile force design that provides national and allied political and military leaders with the means to comprehensively direct military power can dramatically reduce risk across the range of alternative future national security needs.

In recent remarks to the Corps of Cadets at West Point, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates implied the need for fundamental change in force design when he insisted that "any future defense secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,' as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it."¹ When Secretary Gates's remarks are viewed in the context of reduced Federal spending on defense, they reinforce the criticality of developing the right force design to ensure policymakers avoid shortsighted solutions that sacrifice critical current and future capabilities on the altar of near-term economy.

Put differently, today, the greater Middle East, Africa, and Southwest Asia are at the center of U.S. and allied security concerns. Tomorrow, far more serious military challenges to U.S. and allied security may emanate from Northeast Asia, Central Asia, and Latin America. In contrast to the recent past, these crises are likely to involve interstate conflicts for regional power and influence that overlap with the competition for energy, water, food, mineral resources, and the wealth these create.²

This article argues that American political and military leaders have an opportunity to expand the Nation's range of strategic options while reducing costs by finally breaking with the industrial age paradigm of warfare. The United States can do this by building a 21^st-century scalable "Lego-like" force design, one structured and equipped for dispersed mobile warfare inside an integrated maneuver-strike-intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR)-sustainment complex that combines the Nation's ground maneuver forces with strike, ISR, and sustainment capabilities from all of the Services. To construct this new force design, America's political and military leaders should take the following steps:

recognize that current and future strategic environments require changes in U.S. and allied force development strategies
devise a new operational concept for the Armed Forces appropriate to current and future strategic environments
within the fiscal means available, reorganize existing U.S. forces into a more efficient and integrative force design under regional unified commands to execute the new operational concept
use the resulting annualized savings—between $100 billion and $150 billion³—in manpower and resources both to pay down the national debt and to reorient our investment in military power to support the development of future military capabilities and new operational concepts.

The trendlines are unambiguous: military establishments that integrate functions and capabilities across Service lines, and, in the allied context, across national lines, while simultaneously eliminating unneeded overhead not only are less expensive to operate and maintain,⁴ but they also are likely to be far more lethal. If adopted, the recommendations outlined in this article will create the foundation for an enduring American strategic military advantage at a point in time when the United States must economize on defense—saving hundreds of billions of dollars in the years ahead.

Understanding What Is Changing

At the heart of all national military strategy is the desire to increase the state's capacity for independent action. Independent people and organizations enjoy greater latitude for action at a time and place of their choosing. The same is true for the United States and its allies. However, to craft a force development strategy to achieve this goal, America's political and military leaders must understand what is changing in military affairs.

First, military power is no longer based on the mass mobilization of the manpower and resources of the entire state. Conscript armed forces, the norm in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, are gradually being replaced with professional military establishments inundated with technology.

Second, precision effects (kinetic and nonkinetic) using a vast array of strike forces enabled by the rapid and timely dissemination of information through networked ISR capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in the character of warfare. For example, a military contest on the model of Kursk in July 1943—a battle that involved nearly 940,000 attacking German forces and 1.5 million defending Soviet forces in a geographical area the size of England—would result in catastrophic losses for the defending side. Today, any ground combat force that immobilizes itself in prepared defenses on this World War II model would be identified, targeted, and annihilated from a distance.

Third, integrative command structures and new organizations for combat are essential features of this shift. Aircraft and ships involved in strike operations, both manned and unmanned, have excellent sensors that can be linked to other elements of the fighting force to support the translation of collected information into actionable intelligence. As a result, ISR and strike are mission areas that cut across all domains (land, sea, air, and space). In addition, ISR and strike capabilities now have the capacity to influence not only tactical strike and maneuver operations, but also the operational and strategic conduct of warfighting operations.

Fourth, the conditions shaping dispersed mobile warfare do not eliminate the close fight in ground combat operations whether these operations involve interstate or subnational conflicts. Nor do they eliminate uncertainty, surprise, or confusion from warfare. Regardless of how well new technologies are networked, they cannot provide perfect situational awareness or perfect information. Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen will never know everything that happens inside their battlespace, and what they do learn will often be of fleeting value. Commanders must still think and act on short notice with incomplete information within the framework of a known operational intent.

Mines, rocket-propelled grenades, machineguns, mortars, chemical agents, barbed wire, and air defense systems are still effective against ground forces, even in this era of precision strikes. Mobile armored firepower inside the ground maneuver force will be more important than ever given the speed with which information must be assimilated, synthesized, and delivered in time to be exploited. A ground force that cannot take hits and keep fighting will collapse quickly. Networked information systems cannot replace killing power or organic survivability in the form of armored forces, especially in close combat. Ground maneuver forces (light, medium, or heavy) that cannot rapidly disperse to avoid presenting lucrative targets to the opposing force risk destruction.

Fifth, surprise in warfare is still attainable. Countermeasures in many forms including cyber warfare ensure the fog of war will persist. Many nation-states are acutely sensitive to these trends, and they are preparing to fight under these conditions in the future.⁵ The more advanced scientific-industrial powers are building a large, diverse, and reliable range of conventional ballistic missiles for deep precision strikes designed to operate within terrestrial- and space-based sensor networks.⁶

Smaller powers with competent armed forces but less sophisticated technology are adapting to these changing conditions as well. For instance, the Yugoslav army adjusted with considerable success to cope with U.S. and Allied striking power during the Kosovo crisis. Thousands of small, mobile elements, skillfully concealed in rough terrain and aided by marginal weather conditions, were difficult to target from high altitudes. Overhead surveillance turned out to be more limited and more susceptible to deception than anticipated. In the absence of an attacking North Atlantic Treaty Organization ground force, the Yugoslav ground forces were never compelled to mass or concentrate.⁷

All of these points suggest an enormous strategic advantage will accrue to military establishments with an integrated military command structure and the right force design to orchestrate military capabilities across Service lines in the conduct of decisive operations. As the global experience in the private sector demonstrates, fewer but smarter people with intelligent technology can accomplish more than masses of troops with the brute force tools of the past.⁸

Defining a New Concept

Form defines warfare more than numbers or technology. The interaction of technology with organizational paradigms creates powerful new military capabilities. Embracing new technology is important, but it should not be done indiscriminately, out of fear of being left behind. Technology should be chosen for integration on the basis of what it can do today, as well as its potential for future development. It is therefore vital to establish the form that warfare will take, then, to determine the right joint operational concept and the appropriate force design to exploit technology.

Ubiquitous strike capabilities and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), nuclear or nonnuclear, now make the concentration of large land, naval, or air forces dangerous. As a result, dispersed mobile warfare—a condition that elevates tactical dispersion to the operational level of war—is replacing warfare on the World War II model of defined continuous fronts as the dominant form of combat. Moreover, in dispersed mobile warfare, integrated "all-arms" warfare is the overarching joint operational concept for warfighting operations.

All-arms operations integrate the functional capabilities of maneuver, strike, ISR, and sustainment across Service lines inside a seamless unified command and control (C²) operational framework. In fact, success in contemporary and future warfare on land, at sea, or in the air demands the ability to maneuver from a dispersed configuration, concentrating effects and, for brief periods, ground combat forces at decisive points in time and space when conditions demand it.

Clearly, the most favorable conditions on land exist when ground forces operate within the framework of an integrated network of maneuver-strike-ISR-sustainment functions, hereafter referred to as the complex. Within the complex, attacking ground forces compel opposing enemy forces to mass in response or else risk defeat in detail.

To effectively and economically defend U.S. and allied interests in the 21^st century, forces should be organized to operate inside this complex to ensure responsive and accelerated decision cycles at all levels. Precision strikes from the air and sea can incapacitate enemy command and control, but the confusion and paralysis thus engendered are always temporary. Without the experience of warfare, people (including those in uniform) forget that the enemy is a reactive system.

Future adversaries, regardless of national identity, will work hard and rapidly to restore communication connections. They will also seek other ways to communicate that are less vulnerable to strikes and discover ways to preserve operational coherence without being detected. Over time, future nation-state and nonstate opponents should be expected to recover from the initial disruption that strikes cause.

It is essential, then, to destroy the opponent before recovery, which is why ground combat forces with tactical mobility, devastating firepower, and effective armored protection must be tightly integrated within the complex. Achieving this outcome requires the establishment of an integrated military command structure designed to employ dispersed and distributed combat elements as capability-based forces from all of the Services inside the complex.

Reorganizing Forces

Because the simplest tasks in war are difficult, complex command arrangements involving fragmented authority must be avoided. How information is used during conflict or crisis reflects the structures of the information flow, as well as the thinking and mentality of the people who use the information. The two influence one another and are inextricably intertwined.

World War II battles in which the Soviet Union was involved were generally decided in favor of the Soviet Union in part because its leadership organized and employed its armed forces under a unified military command structure that compelled integration of core service capabilities under a single operational commander. But the Soviet leadership wasable to maximize combat power (land, sea, and air) where it was needed and economize where it was not needed. The branches of the Soviet armed forces were thoroughly subordinated to the Stavka (General Headquarters) and its subordinate command echelons—front and army—ensuring uncontested unity of action on the strategic and operational levels of war.⁹

It is also fair to characterize the Soviet command and control structure that triumphed in World War II as a highly centralized, top-down, ground force–dominated, attrition-based, mechanized/industrial one that squandered human life and resources on a scale beyond Western comprehension. However, regardless of the profound cultural differences that separated the United States and Europe from the Soviet Union, these are virtuous military outcomes worthy of emulation by U.S. and allied forces.

In the West, neither the Germans nor Western Allies created similar arrangements. For the Americans and British, Sir Winston Churchill's complaint that the "chiefs of staff system leads to weak or faltering decisions—or rather indecision"¹⁰ went unheeded. In the United States, the Service chiefs together with policymakers in Washington set out to institutionalize the way that the United States fought World War II in the 1947 National Security Act. Subsequent legislative attempts to reduce the excessive bureaucratic power of the separate Services to fund and equip themselves independently, as well as the influence of single-Service warfare doctrine and organizations, have been limited in terms of how operations are conducted, as well as in terms of staggering American defense costs.¹¹

The point is unambiguous. For reasons of cost, as well as survivability and lethality, less overhead and more combat power at the lowest level are organizing imperatives in 21^st-century dispersed mobile warfare. Part of the solution is to implement a new integrated operational military command structure designed to conduct U.S. and American-led allied operations at home and abroad.

Establishing the Construct

In the United States, Armed Forces operational decisionmaking in other-than-ground-maneuver headquarters was generally focused on supporting operations, not on determining their course.¹² Today, this Army-centric approach with its roots in World War II is no longer relevant. The degree of capability integration required in dispersed mobile warfare cannot be achieved inside restrictive, hierarchical, single-Service Cold War command systems suffering from information overload and too many levels of command.

On land, simply breaking existing corps and divisional structures into smaller pieces will not change the industrial age warfighting paradigm, reduce or eliminate echelons of unneeded C², or advance integrative, seamless jointness on the operational level. Geographically dispersed land-, air-, and sea-based forces require a high level of command coherence through technologically and intellectually shared battlespace awareness. This condition dictates the requirement for integrative command structures on the operational level that magnify the larger fighting power of the integrated joint force.

The proliferation of WMD and related strike weapons now compels the transfer and integration of capabilities once found only at the Army division and Marine Corps/Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) levels, or only in the naval and air forces down to lower command echelons (see figure). These new command echelons must also be tightly integrated with the war-winning ISR and strike capabilities found in all of the Services. In this sense, ISR must be viewed as the key integrating function for warfighting and operational design, planning, and execution.

U.S. forces are in a position to integrate current Marine Corps/MEF and division C² into a joint C² structure such as the notional joint task force (JTF) command. This operational-level headquarters is designed to orchestrate the effects that will compel the internal collapse of an opponent through maneuver and strike without reliance on destructive time- and resource-consuming attrition warfare or mass armies.

Combining strike and maneuver into a single joint operation inside a JTF command is the core of operational art. Striking the enemy throughout the entire depth of operational deployment simultaneously and, at the same time, introducing rapid, mobile, mutually supporting air and ground forces through the disrupted force to fight a series of actions for which the enemy is not prepared is the essence of this form of warfare. These conditions are no less applicable to the defeat of loosely organized guerrilla forces operating in complex or urban terrain.¹³ The mission to implement this operational concept in the information age falls to the lieutenant general or vice admiral in JTF command headquarters.

Battlefields have been emptying for the last 50 years in response to new and more lethal weapons technologies. Supporting these dispersed forces will not be easy. For these reasons, a two-star flag officer focused exclusively on sustainment functions is a deputy commander for sustainment inside the JTF command structure.

With the expansion of strike and information assets, it is critical to supply the JTF commander with deputies and staffs committed to employ the full complement of ground, air, electronic, and information operations capabilities. The emergence of a deputy commander for ISR marks a shift from the World War II/Cold War mindset that treats ISR as a supporting function to a new understanding that, in the 21^st century, ISR integrated with strike and maneuver operations can be both operationally and strategically decisive.¹⁴

One major general within the JTF leads the close combat forces deployed to the conflict area. The deputy commander for maneuver directs the operations of the ground maneuver elements in ways similar to what division or MEF commanders do today. He brings an appreciation of the critical role that positional advantage plays in the calculus of war to the planning and execution of operations.

Another major general or rear admiral (upper half) commands strike operations. With the emergence of U.S. and allied strike complexes inside the regional unified commands, the links from deputy commander for strike to ground combat formations, as well as to the strike assets in all the Services, are pivotal.¹⁵ With his links to strike coordination officers in every ground maneuver force and across the Services, he is simultaneously the critical connection to air and naval strike capabilities. The evolution from deployable teams to liaison officers to permanent party experts was a key element in increasing the effectiveness of space capabilities as geographic theater commanders gained more influence over space requirements and integration.¹⁶ Strike capabilities should be employed by similar officers with specialized expertise. In this capacity, the deputy commander for strike can exploit capabilities residing in all Service strike and maneuver forces to support maneuver and suppress or defeat enemy air defenses as well as enemy missile attacks.

In addition to these JTF "force employment" headquarters, two sets of future resource pooling or management headquarters could be formed to provide capabilities across the various theaters of operations to the combatant commanders, as well as to the JTF commands. These functionally based commands would include:

Theater Strike and Missile Defense Command
Theater ISR Command
Theater Maneuver Command
Theater Sustainment Command.

Two sets of these resource management headquarters would be capable of managing the force and asset management tasks on a global basis.

These JTF commands would exist in sufficient quantity to command and employ U.S. and allied forces on land, at sea, or in the air. All forces would be designed as mission capability packages organized for employment under one-star commanders. American air and naval forces routinely assemble forces organized around ISR, strike, sustainment, and maneuver tailored to specific missions. Sometimes these are composite wings or surface action groups. However, ground forces have only recently begun to think in terms of mission-focused capability packages. Movement toward harmonization—and away from Cold War notions of C² synchronization—has been critical to this outcome. Increasingly, the sort of intelligence that Soldiers and Marines need is fleeting, and traditional Army and Marine command structures that cannot jump on this intelligence and exploit it have been compelled to change thinking and behavior.¹⁷

What emerges from the experience of the last 9 years is the growing recognition inside the Army (and, more recently, inside the Marines with the standup of a large, independent Marine brigade battle group in Afghanistan) that a new self-contained combat formation is needed¹⁸—one smaller than a division, but larger than a standard brigade, a formation capable of limited independent action that eliminates unnecessary command levels and drives jointness to a much lower level.¹⁹

All of these points suggest that in land warfare, the next logical step in force design is a 5,000- to 6,000-man formation called a Combat Maneuver Group (CMG). The CMG combines the command element, fighting power, and support element into a stand-alone, mission-focused capability package. The CMG is commanded by a brigadier general with a robust staff, including a deputy commander and a chief of staff, both of whom are colonels.

The CMG drives the joint command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C⁴ISR) plugs to lower levels, compressing the tactical and operational levels to the point where maneuver and strike are integrated at a much lower level than is currently possible. Maneuver, strike, ISR and sustainment formations become clusters of joint combat power that have the capacity for operations on land reminiscent of the way ships operate at sea. Translated into terms that Soldiers and Marines understand, the new force design must offer the following features:

ready on call, quickly deployable, and employable by joint force commanders
adaptable for a range of operations
easily integrated and networked within the joint force
supportable despite distance and dispersion
survivable against any adversary
trained with the other Service components so that they are capable of "integrated joint warfighting" on short notice.

In the new C² organization modeled on the JTF command structure, there is a Strike Coordinator. These coordinators supplant existing fire support officers in the ground forces and become specialists in all the Services with joint training to qualify them to direct strike operations on behalf of ground combat groups or similar mission-focused capability packages from the air and sea. They are designed to be an extension of the strike structure into every land, naval, or air formation.²⁰

The end result of this process is a module of combat power that can deploy in smaller configurations below 5,000 to 6,000—of 2,500, 1,100, and 500—or with augmentation from allies or other combat groups for small-scale operations. They can also deploy with other modules (ISR, strike, sustainment) for larger contingencies. However, they do not require augmentation from higher echelons to be joint interoperable. With joint C⁴ISR, these formations become building blocks that are federated to create larger forces as required.

Transforming all Service forces into mission-focused force packages that can be assembled into larger joint operational forces is essential if maneuver, strike, ISR, and sustainment capabilities are to be effectively integrated to pose more complex threats to new enemies. In practice, this scheme for military power depends on evolving integrated, joint systems and a technical architecture (a set of building codes) for successful aggregation.

There are many benefits to this approach. Eliminating some of the career gates on the Service ladder changes career patterns, allowing more time for lieutenant colonels and colonels (as well as naval equivalent ranks) to become educated and qualified for joint operations—something current Service career patterns obstruct. Reorganizing ground maneuver forces into 5,000- to 6,000-man combat formations under brigadier generals provides a larger, ready, deployable, joint combat force of Soldiers.

Another benefit is the appointment of a brigadier general to command on the tactical level. Here, the historical record is illuminating. Accompanying the first infantrymen ashore on June 6, 1944, was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, the only American general officer who arrived with the first wave of troops on D-Day. When Roosevelt realized that the initial assault force had landed 2,000 yards south of where they should have on Utah Beach, Roosevelt adjusted the plan, telling the company commanders precisely where they were and directed their movement inland along new routes. The result was rapid penetration, in a few hours, by American infantry several miles inland that Army intelligence analysts predicted would take several days.

On Omaha Beach, where there was no general officer present, the situation was far more confused and more costly in terms of American dead. The proposed model for Force Employment within the New Operational Concept will similarly improve the effectiveness of American tactical operations and their efficient integration into operations designed to support national strategic objectives.

Reorienting Modernization

The compression of reduced C² overhead while combining existing single-Service echelons into a flatter, multi-Service integrative C² structure will definitely contribute to long-term cost savings. The point is to reduce the bloated C²overhead, a legacy of the Cold War, while maximizing ready and deployable combat power. Combining the implementation of the integrative command resource management structures inside the regional maneuver-strike-ISR-sustainment complexes with the compression of today's six regional unified commands (U.S. European, Central, Pacific, Southern, Northern, and Africa Commands) into four (potentially U.S. Pacific, Atlantic, Northern, and Southern Commands) would accomplish both objectives: increasing capability while achieving annualized savings in current defense spending of at least $100 billion.

Implementing the Navy's rotational readiness model across American (and potentially allied) forces would also result in additional efficiencies, while simultaneously improving unity of effort and rationalizing the training, modernization, deployment, and reconstitution of U.S. and allied forces. Rotating U.S. forces through four readiness training, deployment, recovery, and reconstitution phases of 6 to 9 months each guarantees a larger portion of the current U.S. joint force is ready to fight on short notice than is the case today. The importance of making routine deployments more predictable, ensuring regular periods of rest for American troops, cannot be overstated.

The cost savings involved in reducing unneeded wear and tear on equipment and people should now be self-evident, but these savings do not entirely address the probable savings in manpower and equipment. For instance, sea control is no longer a mission that demands a large surface fleet on the World War II model. America's nuclear submarine fleet augmented with fewer surface combatants employing long-range sensors, manned and unmanned aircraft, communications, and missiles can dominate the world's oceans, ensuring the United States and its allies control access to the maritime domain that supports 91 percent of the world's commerce.

Annualized savings resulting from change associated with the maneuver-strike-ISR-sustainment complexes in the various regional unified commands would also run into the tens of billions of dollars as combatant commanders and Service chiefs restructure the conduct of overseas presence missions and determine those overseas facilities they no longer deem operationally useful. The method used to identify and capture these savings is a detailed blueprint for change in a Force Design Roadmap. For every capability gap identified, selected equipment sets and supporting jobs will be identified for elimination to liberate resources for investment to close those gaps.

Closing Thoughts

To leverage uncertainty and judiciously select from the warfighting concepts and technologies of the present to field new innovative organizations and capabilities for the future within the fiscal constraints imposed by economic stringency, the United States should chart a new course into the future. As implied at the beginning of this article, change in military affairs is inevitable. Bill Gates stated it best, warning that when waves of change appear, "You can duck under the wave, stand fast against the wave or, better yet, surf the wave." Put another way, the faster you can accurately assess a situation, make "good enough" decisions on what to do about it, and act decisively to deal with it, the more competitive you become.²¹

The time has come to begin reorganizing the manpower and capabilities inside the Nation's Armed Forces within an integrated, joint operational framework to provide a larger pool of ready, deployable fighting forces on rotational readiness. Building maneuver-strike-ISR-sustainment complexes inside the regional unified commands is a way to create the foundation for enduring American military power on a global level at a time when the Nation's public debt—if honestly calculated to include $7 trillion of additional deficit spending through 2015—will approach $18 trillion.²²

Enduring strategic power is vital in a world where the proliferation of WMD makes future operations from large, expensive fixed installations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan extremely dangerous. Instead, land, naval, and air forces must mobilize organic combat power that is disproportionate to their size and numbers inside an integrated framework. The future points toward smaller but more lethal force packages designed for missions of limited duration and scope, not mass armies created for territorial conquest and occupation. In this sense, the implementation of integrated all-arms operations within the maneuver-strike-sustainment complex outlined here not only promises to save money in national defense, but also provides the basis for a coherent, unified view of warfare that is missing from today's Armed Forces.

Note

Quoted by Colin Clark, "The Gates Doctrine: Avoid Big Land Wars," DoDBuzz.com, February 27, 2011.
Miriam Elder, "President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region," Reuters, September 17, 2008.
"Debt, Deficits and Defense: A Way Forward," Report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force, June 11, 2010, 16.
Scott Gebicke and Samuel Magid, Lessons from Around the World: Benchmarking Performance in Defense, McKinsey on Government (Pittsburgh: McKinsey & Company, Spring 2010), 12–13.
John Depres, Lilita Dzirkals, and Barton Whaley, "The Timely Lessons of History: The Manchurian Model for Soviet Strategy," Report Prepared for the Assistant Secretary of Defense and Director of the Office of Net Assessment, R–1825–NA (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, July 1976). Translated Soviet after action reviews identify tracked armored fighting vehicles as the only equipment capable of operating and surviving in Manchuria's diverse desert, mountain, swamp, and forested terrain. The Soviets point to tanks as having been the decisive weapon platform in all of Manchuria.
For instance, the Chinese counter U.S. military strength in "asymmetric" ways. Instead of trying to match U.S. Air Force deep strike capabilities, they are building a large, diverse, and reliable range of conventional ballistic missiles for deep precision strike. Instead of trying to match the U.S. ability to develop and operate advanced aircraft, they are investing in technologies or entire aircraft and adapt them to their own needs, and complement them with similarly obtained advanced surface-to-air missiles. Instead of trying to match U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, they are building long-range conventionally armed ballistic missile systems designed to attack those carriers and are deploying a network of sensor systems to target them.
Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO's Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Project Air Force, 2001), 242–248.
Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), 77.
Michael Deane, Ilana Kass, and Andrew Porth, "The Soviet Command Structure in Force Design," Strategic Review(Spring 1984), 64–65. Notice, however, that fronts (equivalent in size to American armies) were also fully joint commands. When the Soviet Union's 40^th Army deployed to Afghanistan in 1979, it did so as part of a joint task force (JTF) structure that was fully joint. On the other hand, jointness stopped at the JTF level, which caused serious problems on the tactical level.
Sir Winston Churchill, quoted by Steven F. Hayward, Churchill on Leadership (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing Forum, 1997), 40.
Nathan Hodge, "Pentagon Looks to Save $100 Billion Over Five Years," TheWall Street Journal, June 3, 2010, A11.
For instance, during Operation Desert Storm, divisions had organic military intelligence (Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence) battalions and signal battalions, while Third Army had a military intelligence brigade and a signal brigade. An example of a parallel external headquarters is U.S. Air Forces Central (CENTAF), the Air Force component of U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) during Operation Desert Storm. CENTAF was responsible for integrating the offensive air function throughout USCENTCOM headquarters.
Nancy A. Youssef, "Pentagon Rethinking Value of Major Counterinsurgencies," McClatchy Newspapers, May 13, 2010.
David A. Deptula and R. Greg Brown, "A House Divided: The Indivisibility of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance," Air Power Journal (December 2008), 21.
Richard Hart Sinnreich, "Air-Ground Integration Requires More Than Patchwork," Lawton (OK) Constitution, October 6, 2002, 1.
Keth W. Balts, "Intell, Satellites + Remotely Piloted Aircraft," Air and Space Power Journal (Fall 2010), 19. Balts writes, "While this evolution occurred at the junior-officer level, a similar one occurred at the senior level, although it lagged the junior-level process by several years. Senior space officers served as liaison officers, deployed, and then eventually became permanent members of theater headquarters as directors of space forces, positions created to facilitate coordination, integration, and staffing activities in support of space-integration efforts for the combined force air component commander."
"Deptula: ISR Surge Will Overwhelm Military's Ability to Process Intel," Inside the Air Force, October 23, 2009, 5.
Jason Sherman, "Army Plans ‘Comprehensive' Review of How to Modify Brigade Design," Inside Defense.com, October 26, 2010.
Richard E. Simpkin, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-first Century Warfare, (London: Brassey's, 1985), 290.
Clearly, the Air Force will need to be convinced that these new strike coordinators know how aircraft, manned or unmanned, fly, how they fight, how they are at risk if misused, what aircraft can and cannot do, and how to use them with minimal fratricide/collateral damage risk. In addition, the Army will need to be convinced that the strike coordinator knows artillery, rockets, mortars, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles, what they can and cannot do, what tools are available, and how to use them with minimal fratricide/collateral damage risk.
Robert L. Cantrell, Outpacing the Competition: Patent-based Business Strategy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 260–261.
David Stockman, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse," The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2010.

About the Author

Colonel Douglas A. Macgregor, USA (Ret.), is the Executive Vice President at Burke-Macgregor Group, LLC.

The Limits of the Surge: Petraeus' Legacy in Afghanistan

2011-08-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

Monday, Aug. 08, 2011

By John Wendle / Kabul

Cars are backed up for a quarter mile on the road leading to the bridge over the Arghandab River in Kandahar province as people head home after a Friday spent picnicking on the riverbanks. But just last year, this area was the scene of some of the war's heaviest fighting as troops moved in to take territory during the surge.

The influx of troops, requested by General Stanley McChrystal, approved by President Barack Obama and overseen by General David Petraeus, brought stability to some areas in the south. And that is part of the narrative Petraeus, who has given up command of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to become head of the CIA, wants as his legacy. But the surge — and other initiatives of the general — have not been the unalloyed successes they have been made out to be. Indeed, the downing of a U.S. CH-47 Chinook helicopter in Wardak province on Saturday, resulting in the single deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan, shows how fragile the situation is. The chopper may have been brought down by a lucky hit, a well-aimed blast from a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade — David's slingshot felling Goliath, with the U.S. on the wrong side of the story. (See the tightened rules enacted by General Petraeus.)

"The surge has not worked, despite all the statistics doled out, which I think very often are selective," says Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. Others acknowledge some progress, but in general, the consensus is that the surge has failed as a general strategy. "There have been improvements in the military situation in the south. But what about the military situation in the east and the north and across the border in Pakistan? Those areas are unraveling. If you look from two years ago to now, the situation has deteriorated," says a foreign analyst working in Afghanistan who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.

In part, the surge has failed because the U.S. civilian side, under U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, was never brought to the table. "Petraeus came at a time when the policy here was in crisis, in large part because the players were unclear on the boundaries of the chain of command, and he did nothing to change that element of the relationship with the White House," says another foreign analyst working in Afghanistan.

Because Petraeus' "inner circle pretty much disregarded the civilian side," says Mike Capstick, a retired colonel in the Canadian army and analyst with experience in Afghanistan, the interlocking mantra of counterinsurgency — "clear, hold, build" — could not be carried through to completion.

"The surge cleared quite a few districts. They did 'clear and hold,' but they were not able to do the transfer, 'build' part," says the first analyst. "So, you'd give Petraeus good marks on managing the surge and, from a military point of view, 'clear, hold.' But 'transfer, build' has not been really successful. It is really a civilian-surge point and the civilian surge never really showed up." (See the rise and fall of Stanley McChrystal.)

Douglas Macgregor, a retired U.S. Army colonel who is a leading critic of counterinsurgency theory and who attended West Point with McChrystal, says, "These observations directly and obviously contradict the popular counterinsurgency mantra of 'protect the population and rally the people to their government.' In truth, Petraeus and his generals moved in the opposite direction."

Other issues have dogged Petraeus as well, chief among them the creation of viable Afghan army and police forces that would theoretically allow the Afghan government to take over security from foreign forces. Though numbers have increased, attrition rates remain extremely high and a lack of qualified noncommissioned officers means leadership remains absent. "Over the past one or two years, there has been a major effort to expand the army and police. But while there has been an increase in numbers, quality will take some time," says Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan Interior Minister and now a professor the National Defense University in the U.S.

Macgregor has more criticism. "Petraeus and his staff frequently complained about the shortage of NATO trainers by at least 900 men," he says. "This continued after the arrival of an additional 40,000 troops. However, the truth is this: Petraeus is responsible for the shortfall. He could have committed an additional 10,000 troops to the NATO training mission had he wanted to do so. In the view of many officers on the ground in Afghanistan, using the general-purpose troops in this way would have provided a greater return on investment than the way the 40,000 were employed. The International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] and the NATO mission were short 900 trainers because Petraeus chose not to utilize the troops at his disposal in support of that mission," says Macgregor.

Another issue has been continued night raids and air strikes — tactics that have enraged both Afghan civilians and Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and that have left hundreds dead. "Despite his acumen of American politics, Petraeus has been, by and large, completely tone-deaf in how he's dealt with the Afghans, and that has created distance," Joshua Foust, a prolific blogger on registan.net and fellow at the American Security Project, tells TIME.

At the same time, in a place as complex as Afghanistan, even success can breed failure. A number of analysts over the past months have warned that the elimination of "mid-level Taliban commanders" — part of ISAF's strategy — could have second- and third-order effects. Besides speculation that older, more moderate leaders would be replaced by younger, hard-line elements, Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network says, the surge has "closed off the opportunity for dialogue with the Taliban. In 2008-2009 there was a clear tendency within the Taliban, a readiness to explore talks. And that's just been destroyed by the surge."

Interestingly, some believe that the perception of Petraeus having had many successes during the war in Iraq — such as the surge there and the Sunni Awakening movement — has played a part in his continued problems in Afghanistan. "It may have taken Petraeus time to understand that Afghanistan is not Iraq and that it is, in fact, a hell of a lot more complicated," Capstick tells TIME. "For the first few months after he arrived, almost every member of his new team in ISAF headquarters would drop the phrase, 'in Iraq we ... ' into conversations — a recipe for disaster in Afghanistan."

In the end, although Petraeus' time was more positive than Ambassador Eikenberry's, the general may have been more successful at advancing his career than at bringing the war to a successful conclusion. Now, with President Obama talking about a shift from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism in Afghanistan and with Petraeus heading the CIA, the general may again be calling the shots there. But this could have benefits. "Petraeus' experience in Afghanistan may finally get the CIA out of their dependency on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI]," says Capstick. "The CIA-ISI relationship has been a disaster since the Soviet occupation and has been a major obstacle to the rise of secular, modernist Afghan leaders to positions of power."

Find this article at:

www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087064,00.html

Response to crisis shows deepening ties, Seoul's new ambassador says

2011-07-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

The Japanese-Korean Alliance is becoming more and more inevitable with each passing day. An American withdrawal of its ground force from the ROK will accelerate this process dramatically.

Doug

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110712a7.html

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

By ALEX MARTIN
Staff writer

Cooperation between Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of the Tohoku triple disaster proved that ties between the two nations have never been stronger, Seoul's new envoy to Tokyo said Monday.

Speaking at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo, South Korean Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak Soo, who assumed the post last month, said it was becoming increasingly important in the shifting landscape of East Asia for the two neighbors to further strengthen their partnership.

Shin, who visited hard-hit Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures less than a week after he was appointed to the new post on June 12, said the largest-ever amount of donations were collected in South Korea for disaster victims.

He also said officials from South Korean consular offices across Japan were also dispatched to the consulate in Sendai to help with relief efforts.

"The governments and people of South Korea and Japan have confirmed through the recent disaster the two nations' close ties," said Shin, who was stationed in Japan in the late-1980s as first secretary at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo.

"Coming back to Japan after 22 years, I am amazed with the Korean boom that is taking Japan by storm," he said, referring to the massive inflow of South Korean TV dramas and popular music into Japan, adding that such cultural exchanges have helped deepen understanding between the two neighbors.

Shin said that while only 10,000 people annually traveled between Japan and South Korea back in 1965, when diplomatic ties between the two nations were established, that number has ballooned, with roughly 5.5 million people making their way over the border last year.

"We need to expand this number to 10 million as soon as possible," he said.

Shin also said that it was important that Japan and South Korea resume and conclude talks regarding a free-trade agreement.

Serious negotiations on an FTA first began in December 2003, but were suspended in November 2004.

"I believe that a general consensus regarding the necessity of an FTA has already been formed," he said.

And with a rapidly growing China and North Korea's nuclear threat changing the region's landscape, Shin stressed the importance of Japan and South Korea deepening their strategic cooperation "in order to establish a peaceful and prosperous East Asia."

Two Articles of Interest

2011-06-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the first article below, China is anxious to do what the US can no longer afford to do -- prop up the Euro and the EU. In addition, the Chinese need to invest their cash reserves somewhere after largely pulling out of the US sovereign debt market. That said China is actually interested in buying technology from Europe’s high-tech firms (particularly, Germany, UK, Switzerland and Sweden) in an effort to obtain what they cannot steal or buy from the US.

However, China’s intervention will change nothing. Greece is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Portugal and other southern and Eastern EUrozone members are also on the brink of financial failure -- their economies have been developed on the basis of unlimited credit subsidized by northern and Western Europe, vastly bloated government ministries, heavily subsidized agriculture and "white elephant" industries producing uncompetitive products, along with cradle-to-grave social security and medical care regardless of citizenship or employment. Europe has all of the problems the US has without the unfortunate American habit of overspending on hegemonic military adventures in places that don’t count. Still, European Social democracy is not fiscally sustainable. I suspect it must decline into socialist authoritarianism with democratic trappings or straightforward fascism where this evolution has already carried Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia.

It is also entertaining to see signs in English carried by the Greeks that declare their Prime Minister, “Goldman Sachs Employee of the Year.” As others in this discussion have pointed out, a Greek default, if properly structured and managed by the French and German Banks may turn out to be the best solution for Greece, but it’s very much open to question whether such an event can actually be managed in the political, as well as, financial sense. Throughout history as seen in France in the decades leading up to the revolution and Europe after WW II, these events tend to gather strength, then, run out of control.

The now seems likely that Europe is on the verge of making a sharp political and economic turn to the right. It is too soon to tell what this turn will mean, but it’s obvious that “more of the same” in economic terms is nearing its end. Bernanke’s “deer in the headlights” performance at the last press conference may work here, but it is not something the German-speaking peoples or their neighbors in the Netherlands and Scandinavia will tolerate. And hardship in any form is something Europe’s Latins and Greeks utterly reject.

In this connection, see the article that describes what may or may not be the case – the German Bundesbank is printing Marks as a contingency plan. I am unable to confirm the efficacy of this article’s claim, but my contacts in Germany and Austria confirm the widespread public sentiment for a restoration of German and Austrian sovereignty along with control of their own borders and migrant labor. Germany and Austria’s contemporary political leaders are viewed as transitional figures at best.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2008484/China-Well-spend-billions-prop-stricken-euro.html

China: We'll spend billions to prop up the stricken euro

China has vowed to increase its support of the eurozone after pledging to spend billions of pounds propping up the single currency.

Premier Wen Jiabao said it will keep buying government bonds – the debts of stricken European nations.

In a boost for Greece ahead of a pivotal vote on greater austerity cuts tomorrow, Mr Wen said Europe could count on his ‘unremitting’ support.

However, according to billionaire speculator George Soros, the debt crisis has pushed the eurozone to the ‘verge of an economic collapse’.

It was all but ‘inevitable’ that at least one stricken member will have to exit the euro because of massive debts, the hedge fund tycoon warned.

Mr Soros said the EU had to come up with a ‘plan B’ to avert a catastrophe.

‘Fundamental flaws’ in the design of the currency union would leave crippled nations with no choice but to withdraw, he added.

Mr Soros warned: ‘The euro had no provision for correction. There was no arrangement for any country leaving the euro.’

In a devastating critique of the European response to the Greek crisis, Mr Soros accused political leaders of being in denial about the need for far-reaching reforms to avert the disintegration of the euro.

He said: ‘We are on the verge of an economic collapse which starts, let’s say, in Greece but could easily spread.’

His warning came just days after Bank of England’s Governor, Mervyn King, branded European attempts to shore up Greece as a ‘mess’.

Huge demonstrations are once again expected in Athens as the government there makes a final attempt to approve almost £25billion of cuts which are a condition of the latest bailout.

If the Greek parliament does not pass the austerity budget tomorrow, the nation will receive no more support and is likely to run out of money by the middle of next month.

But the turmoil engulfing the region has not diminished China’s desire to buy up more European debt. China has foreign reserves of around £2trillion and is the largest creditor to the United States.

At the start of a three-day visit to Britain yesterday, Mr Wen said: ‘China is a long-term investor in Europe’s sovereign debt market. In recent years, we have increased by quite a big margin our holdings of government bonds. We will consistently continue to support Europe and the euro.’ Mr Wen, who will meet Prime Minister David Cameron today, flew into Birmingham Airport for a trip intended to boost China’s commercial, economic and political links with Britain. Business deals worth up to £1billion are expected to be announced during his visit.

As a lover of Shakespeare’s plays, the Chinese leader started with a tour of the house where the playwright was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

He was escorted by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who said: ‘We want to have a broad-based relationship with China which encompasses political, economic and social dialogue.

‘But this visit is saying it’s not just about jobs, it’s about a broader cultural relationship which is the best possible way to make sure we understand each other and avoid the kind of misunderstanding that so can bedevil relationships, as has happened in the past.’

As human rights protestors demonstrated outside, Mr Wen also visited the MG car plant at Longbridge, which is owned by China’s Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation.

The visit coincided with the launch of a new car, the British-designed MG6 Magnette, which will be assembled in the UK using parts from China.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/255228/Mark-set-for-comeback-as-German-euro-crisis-deepens

MARK ‘SET FOR COMEBACK’ AS GERMAN EURO CRISIS DEEPENS

By Martyn Brown

ALMOST three-quarters of Germans doubt that the euro has a future, a poll reveals.
They also believe rescue attempts are futile as billions more euros will be paid to bail out Greece.
A poll by German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, found 71 per cent had “doubt,” “no trust” or thought there is “no future” for the euro. Only 19 per cent expressed “confidence” in it. Sixty eight per cent said they did not think the emergency bail-out of Greece would work.

A separate poll last week showed more than half of Germans thought that Greece should be thrown out of the euro. Rumors are also rife in Germany that Deutsche Mark bank notes are being printed again in preparation for ditching the euro.

It is said Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, has been ordered to print marks as part of contingency plans to leave Europe’s single currency.

The Bundesbank has been ordered to print marks

This would be an extraordinary step for Germany and would deepen the growing divide between Europe’s leading states.

Since its introduction in 1999, the euro has had a tough time trying to win over a skeptical German public, who saw the mark – one of the world’s most stable currencies – as a symbol of post-war prosperity, second only to the US dollar as the reserve option for investors.

Chancellor Angela Merkel now faces her biggest crisis. The opposition is speculating her government may fall as Germans become more vocal in their opposition to bailing out Greece.

AFCEA

2011-06-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

US BREATHES LIFE INTO A NEW COLD WAR

2011-06-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

By M K Bhadrakumar

There might have been a difference of opinion between the classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus and British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley regarding the circumstances of the release of the Titan god Prometheus from captivity: whether it followed reconciliation with Jupiter, as the classicist thought, or a rebellion, as the romantic insisted. In either case, Prometheus was "unbound".

The exact circumstances of the endgame in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain a moot point, but the outcome is certain to be that the United States, which like Prometheus was chained to a mountain where he was daily punished by Jupiter's eagle and underwent immense suffering, is being "released" to normal life.

For Prometheus, it came as an existential moment and when Hercules came to unbind him, he was so relieved at the freedom "long desired/And long delayed" that he pledged to his love that they "will sit and talk of time and change/As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged".

The United States, too, is re-emerging "unchanged". There is a flurry of activity as if making up for lost time - "unilateralist" military intervention in Libya; deployment of a F-16 squadron in Poland; establishment of military bases in Romania; resuscitation of the George W Bush era plans for deployment of a US missile defense system in Central Europe; revival of the entente cordiale among "new Europeans"; threatened "humanitarian intervention" in Syria; renewed talk of military action against Iran; a push for a long-term military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan; revving up of the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into Central Asia; violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan; the threat of "regime change" in Sri Lanka; and last weekend the announcement of the deployment of light combat ships in Singapore.

All this has happened within a 100-day period. It was almost inevitable that the Caspian great game would be revived, too. After the unexplained hibernation in the period since the exit of the Bush presidency in the beginning of 2009, Richard Morningstar, the US's special envoy for Eurasian energy, has returned to the arena.

If his testimony at the hearing conducted by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs last week had one single message, it was that the US's Eurasian energy strategy remained "unchanged" in its core agenda, namely, to challenge Russia's potential to use its vast reserves as an energy exporter to re-emerge as a big power on the world stage.

Cold War rhetoric surfaces

The geopolitical agenda of the US's Eurasian energy strategy was spelt out with characteristic bluntness at the same congressional hearing by noted Russia expert Ariel Cohen. There may be nothing strikingly new, arguably, in Cohen's thesis about Russia's "expansionist agenda" reflected in its energy policies, but nonetheless it merits reiteration by way of providing the backdrop to Morningstar's testimony. He was constrained by the norms of diplomatic practice to hold back on direct criticism of Russia, with which the Barack Obama administration is engaged in a "reset" at the moment:

· The Kremlin views energy as a tool to pursue an assertive foreign policy.

· Europe's level of dependence on Russia for energy is unacceptably high.

· Russia's attempts to exclude the US from Central Asian and Caspian energy markets.

· Russia is using energy to "re-engage" India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

· Russia forces neighboring countries to direct their energy exports via its pipeline system.

· The absence of a "rule of law" blocks Western companies' entry into Russia's energy sector.

· Russia remains disinterested in developing energy ties with the US.

Cohen candidly spelt out the geopolitics. One, European demand for energy is projected to grow further and it could lead to greater dependence on energy from Russia, which has serious implications for Moscow's ties with Europe.

The point is, the US apprehends that Moscow will exploit the growing energy ties to stabilize its relationship with the countries of Western Europe, and that could weaken the spirit of Euro-Atlanticism and incrementally loosen the US's trans-Atlantic leadership.

Two, Germany has taken a strategic decision to abandon nuclear energy and to instead increase its energy imports from Russia. From the US viewpoint, steadily growing Russo-German ties have not only a historical resonance of great significance for European security but they could eventually weaken European unity and the underpinnings of NATO itself, which the US commands as its principal instrument for the pursuit of its global strategies.

Three, Russia is aspiring to graduate from the role of energy exporter to Europe to participation in the continent's energy distribution system and retail trade as well. Europe may eventually "face tough choices between the cost and stability of their energy supply, and siding with the US on key issues".

Conversely, Cohen anticipates, "As oil prices rise, it is safe to expect Russia's cockiness to return." What is this "cockiness" about? In geopolitical terms, it means a more assertive Russia in global politics. Cohen mentioned India more than once as a worrisome prospect for the US.

Chalk circles in South Asia

In essence, countries like India, where the US hopes to become entrenched as a strategic partner, may choose to be autonomous or "non-aligned" if Russia succeeds in developing stronger energy ties with them. With regard to India, in particular, the implications are far-reaching since the US's Asia-Pacific strategy and its containment policy toward China would become seriously debilitated if New Delhi opted out.

Interestingly, Cohen brings in Syria in this context. He claimed that Russia was "seeking to re-engage in a centuries-old balance of power in the Middle East" and Syria - like India in the Asia-Pacific - is pivotal, which is the reason why Moscow is rebuilding naval bases in Tartus and Ladakiye and is "supplying modern weapons" to it - like it does with India.

Four, Russia is fostering the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an exclusive preserve to keep out the US, especially in the grouping's energy club. The SCO comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The US is getting frantic that the SCO is gearing up to admit India and Pakistan as full members and Afghanistan as an observer. So far, the US had banked on the reservations of Russia and China over the SCO membership claims of Pakistan and India respectively, but the rethink in Moscow and Beijing on this score has set alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Moscow is outflanking the US by rapidly building up ties with Pakistan. A crucial vector in this accelerating relationship is energy cooperation. Moscow has begun discussing with Pakistan the nuts and bolts of its participation in the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline project.

The countries are restoring their air links; they have held two summit-level meetings within a year; and begun closely coordinating their approach to the stabilization of Afghanistan (which is integral to the execution of TAPI). Incidentally, Russia's special representative on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov (the Kremlin's ace hand on Afghanistan) visited Islamabad last week for in-depth consultations.

The thrust of the Russian approach is to augment Pakistan's strategic autonomy so that it can withstand Washington's bullying. And Moscow estimates that Pakistan is keen to reciprocate. As a prominent South Asian scholar in Moscow, Andrey Volodin, wrote last week, "[Pakistan President] Asif Zardari's visit to Russia has shown that Pakistan is actively diversifying its foreign economic ties and foreign policy. This attitude is welcomed by Pakistan's main all-weather ally, China, which is pursuing a policy of 'soft reverse containment' of America in Asia, including Pakistan."

No more a Turkmen pipedream

Thus, the Russian-Chinese initiative to induct Pakistan and India as full SCO members holds out the prospect of dealing a devastating blow to the US's strategy to get "embedded" in Asia. The underpinning of a regional energy grid tapping into Turkmenistan's energy reserves gives a profound character to the matrix.

The fact is that the US all along paid lip-service to the TAPI, but its real interest has been in the so-called Southern Corridor for transporting Turkmen energy to Western Europe so that Russian dominance of the European market would be whittled down.

Russia is killing two birds with one stone. By diverting Turkmen gas to the huge energy guzzlers of South Asia - India is potentially one of the world's two or three biggest consumers of energy in the coming decades - Moscow is on the one hand undercutting the US's Eurasian energy strategy to evacuate the gas to Europe, while at the same time retaining its pre-eminent footing on the European energy market from being challenged by the Turkmen gas.

The big question mark on TAPI has been all along two-fold. First, there was doubt regarding Turkmenistan's energy reserves. However, the confirmation by British auditor Gaffney, Cline & Associates last week that Turkmenistan is sitting on the world's second-largest gas field - South Yolatan - completely changes the scenario. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai made an air dash to Ashgabat as soon as he heard the news.) The vast South Yolatan field covers an area of about 3,500 square kilometers - bigger than the country of Luxembourg - and as a top executive of the British auditor put it, "The South Yolatan field is so big that it can sustain several developments in parallel."

In short, Turkmenistan has the proven capacity to meet the energy requirements of China, India and Pakistan for many decades to come, and would still be left with a surplus for exports

to Russia. The prospect is shocking for US strategy if the so-called "SCO energy club", which is an idea that then-Russian president Vladimir Putin floated in 2005 a little ahead of time that is finally coming to fruition.

Thus, the robust Russian and Chinese diplomacy on Pakistan to encourage a paradigm shift in its Afghan policy; the growing US impatience over Pakistan's "recalcitrance"; the SCO's keenness to get involved in the stabilization of Afghanistan; the US's insistence that it must have direct dealings with the Taliban rather than through an "Afghan-led" peace process; Washington's push to establish a long-term military presence in Afghanistan; Russia's and China's hurry to get India and Pakistan on board as SCO members; the US's overtures to India with a partnership that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described last week in a speech in Singapore at a regional gathering of defense ministers (including from China, Russia and India) as the "indispensable pillar of stability in South Asia and beyond"; Gates' affirmation of US commitment to a "robust" and "enhanced" military presence in Asia, especially in the Malacca Straits - all these have a hugely important "energy dimension", too.

Cohen is a Russia expert, but he mentioned Central Asia more than once in this testimony and pointedly brought to the notice of US congressmen that Russia was attempting to "push the US out of Central Asia, and successfully limited US participation in new Caspian energy projects, excluding it from the SCO's energy club".

Containing the energy superpower

Ambassador Morningstar in his congressional testimony kept up the diplomatic decorum and neatly sidestepped the geopolitics, sticking to a detailed presentation of the US's Eurasian energy strategy, which he projected as a mix of continuity from the George W Bush era but imbued with new realities. The principal vectors of the US strategy can be identified in the following terms:

· The US's intention to be deeply involved in Europe's energy security is never in doubt since "Europe is our partner on any number of global issues from Afghanistan to Libya to the Middle East, from human rights to free trade.

· The US will work for Europe's "diverse energy mix" both in terms of its sources of supply and transportation routes as well as the type of energy - " diversity of suppliers, diversity of transportation routes and diversity of consumers, together with a focus on alternative technologies, and renewable and other clean energy technologies, and increased energy efficiency". (The US is entering the European market as a big exporter of shale gas, which competes with Russia's natural gas.)

· The US's aim is to encourage Europe to develop a "balanced and diverse energy strategy with multiple energy sources with multiple routes to market". (Read reduce the dependence on Russia which is supplying one-third of Europe's energy needs currently).

· The US will encourage and help Central Asian and Caspian countries to "find new routes to the market". (Read bypassing Russian territory and pipelines).

· The US will push for the energy sector to be privatized, and to this end, will "create the political framework" in the post-Soviet space within which "businesses and commercial projects can thrive".

· The Obama administration's commitment to the so-called Southern Corridor - to bring natural gas to Europe via Turkey from the Caspian and "potentially other sources beyond Europe's southeastern frontiers" - is no less than that of the previous US administrations of Bill Clinton and Bush. The US will actively promote the three separate European pipeline consortia - the Nabucco, ITGI and TPA groups - and is "confident that a commercially viable Southern Corridor will be realized. The investment decisions to make that possible should occur by the end of this year."

· Washington pays particular attention to promoting Turkmenistan as a major supplier of gas for Europe via the Southern Corridor.

· The US will pitch for the integration of the Baltic states into the European energy market so they do not remain vulnerable to Russian supplies and/or political pressure.

· The US will challenge Russia's efforts to get a monopoly hold over Ukraine's energy sector.

· Europe should develop a single market for energy so that the kind of bilateral relationships that are developing between Germany and Russia or Italy and Russia or France and Russia do not happen.

· Europe should have more focus on shale gas development, which can be a substitute for Russian gas.

· Europe should take initiatives for "unbundling the distribution and supply functions of energy firms" so that Russia's leviathan company Gazprom's efforts to penetrate downstream activities can be stalled.

It's the Eurasian heartland, stupid

The US's Eurasian energy strategy almost entirely aims at “containing” Russia's pre-eminent role as Europe's energy supplier and its vast influence over the Central Asian and Caspian energy-producing countries. Cohen spoke of a future role for NATO as provider of security for the non-Russian pipelines, but unsurprisingly, Morningstar didn't visit the controversial idea, which was first mooted by the Bush administration. What is of utmost interest is that Morningstar didn't say a word about the feasibility of Turkmenistan or the Central Asian region providing energy for the South Asian region, although US diplomats traveling to Delhi unfailingly profess a keen interest in TAPI. What emerges is that the US's one hundred percent focus is on Europe's energy security - how supplies can be developed from the Caspian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern regions for Europe - and it pays lip-service to the TAPI.

Clearly, the SCO summit meeting scheduled to be held in Kazakhstan next week becomes an historic occasion for the geopolitics of energy. The US congressional hearing in Washington last week was well-timed. The US apprehends a paradigm shift in the Asian power dynamic. The odds are heavily stacked against the US insofar as Russia and China are recrafting their South Asia polices that aim at harmonizing their ties with Pakistan and India respectively within the umbrella of the SCO.

A leading Chinese scholar, Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University, stated at a recent seminar of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, a branch of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences:

“If we can establish relations with neighboring countries like what we are doing with members of the SCO, we will also succeed in moving fast. The establishment of SCO in the 1990s was widely recognized as one of China's most successful diplomatic moves. The purpose of establishing the SCO is to challenge the American strategic intention of extending its military breach to Central Asia.”

It destroyed America's intention of making Central Asia its sphere of military influence. With the SCO, China's relations with countries in the region have been greatly improved. In order to establish SCO-style relations with surrounding countries, China must ... establish all-weather strategic partnerships with them. Or it will be impossible for China to have more and better friendly international relationships than America. Indeed, the Afghan endgame is inspiring the several tracks in the geopolitics of Eurasia and Central Asia and South Asia, some running tracks, some dormant, some visible, some others nor so visible, to begin to converge. But the focal point is Eurasia.

Indeed, Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947), the great British geographer and scholar-diplomat, who is considered one of the founding fathers of the esoteric subjects of geopolitics and geo-strategy, based his famous Heartland Theory on the ida that Eurasia remains the heartland of international politics. Curiously, when Prometheus had his liver eaten out daily by Jupiter's eagle - only to be regenerated at night - he was also chained to a rock in the Caucasus.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

COMMENT FROM DOUG MACGREGOR:

Though I don’t buy into everything this man asserts, his message should be heard. It sets the stage for the future and the kinds of conflicts we are likely to witness. In addition, we Americans cannot dominate Central Asia nor should we try. To do so is to involve ourselves in a competition we cannot win, as well as in wars we don’t need to fight.

Americans are constrained for reasons of economy to peripheral operations. In essence, “Inchon yes, Yalu no!” The point is our long-term strategic influence depends more on our economic productivity and our resulting ability to influence events through friendly states that share our strategic interests than on our military power.

Here is an example of how this strategic thinking works. In 1879, Disraeli and Bismarck cooperated to end Russia’s War with Turkey. Bismarck told the Russian Foreign Minister, Gorchakov that Germany had no real interest in who controlled the Dardanelles and, thus, declined to join Russia’s war with Turkey. Britain, of course did have such an interest and Bismarck knew it. Britain’s Army was of little strategic concern to the Russians. However, Disraeli and Bismarck agreed that without access to the German credit markets and technology, Russia could not hope to triumph in a lengthy war with Britain given Britain’s ability to blockade Russian ports with the Royal Navy. The outcome was a negotiated settlement that ended the destructive war and left the Dardanelles in Turkish hands. The Germans extricated the Russians from a war they did not need to fight and the British avoided a conflict with the Russians over control of the straits. Ultimately, everyone benefited including Turkey. Germany’s Army, the most powerful in the world, did not fire a shot.

In today’s world, this sort of thinking should shape our interaction with the great powers competing for resources and regional power on the Eurasian Continent. In the end, such thinking promises to reduce the destructiveness and duration of conflicts despite the absence of lofty, moralizing rhetoric so popular with the Liberal interventionist Left and the NEOCONs.

Doug Macgregor

Careerism and Psychopathy in the US Military

2011-05-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

Weekend Edition

April 29 - May 1, 2011

"Glibness, Superficial Charm, Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, Deceitful, Cunning, Manipulative, Lacks Remorse, Callous, Lacks Empathy, Does Not Accept Responsibility for Own Actions, and Impulsiveness ... "

By G. I. WILSON, USMC Ret.

This essay attempts to make it easier for you to identify the quality and character of military officers and civilian bureaucrats, to increase your awareness and recognition of careerism and its consequences. As Americans, we all must exercise more care and caution in our appraisal of our senior military officers and the Washington “suits” that exert dominating influence on the cost of defense and the conduct of American national security policy.

The Department of Defense (DOD) that I have observed all too closely for over three decades is an overgrown bureaucracy committed to standing still for, if not actively promoting, poorly conceived policy agendas and hardware programs funded and supported by Congress. Coupled to that is the task of attracting the blind loyalty of senior military and civilian actors on the Washington, D.C. stage. For the careerists in America’s national security apparatus, it is all about awarding contracts and personal advancement, not winning wars.

Careerists serve for all the wrong reasons. They weaken national defense, rob the military of its warrior ethos and drive away the very highly principled mavericks that we need to reverse the decay. This can only be remedied by rekindling the time honored principles of military service (i.e. duty, honor, country) among both officers and civilians.

What Is Careerism?

In the DOD today, standard bureaucratic behavior is focused on conniving with politically focused congressional advocates and their counterparts in industry and think tanks to advance selected hardware and policy agendas. Once the careerist generals, admirals, colonels and captains exit active military service, they perpetuate their inside baseball by re-materializing as government appointees, political candidates, DOD contractor shills, so-called Pentagon “mentors,” and network talking heads. All are raking in money, peddling influence, exerting pressure for vested interests, all the while collecting retired pay, healthcare, commissary privileges and more at taxpayer expense.

For example, Gen. Jim Jones, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., occupied a big chair in the White House as the president’s national security advisor. Adm. Joe Sestak, U.S. Navy, ret., went to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives seeking promotion to the U.S. Senate. Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, U.S. Army, ret., is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Many others dot the boards of the big defense contractors. As author Bob Woodward points out in The War Within, many of the uniform-to-suits careerists made themselves cozy with political circles in Washington, D.C. in ways and to a degree that did not exist before 2001. As for the senior careerists in the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy, there is a similar variation of take-this-job-and-flip-it among public, academic and private sector positions. While it’s distasteful observing this in civilian quarters, it is the “self-fixation” of our top military leadership that this author finds most disturbing.

What is wrong with retired officers populating civilian government offices, industry and politics?

Author Edward N. Luttwak explains that it means a lifelong path of political correctness, playing it safe, making only decisions that create no waves, or – better yet – waves that promote the selected agenda. Worst of all, careerists leverage the bureaucracies in DOD and Congress to dilute any personal accountability and responsibility - the very essence of careerism. Luttwak warns "If careerism becomes the general attitude, the very basis of leadership is destroyed." That era of pseudo-leadership is upon us.

Careerism is also artfully described by Robert Coram and Col. John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force. The careerist’s singular aspiration is “the desire to be, rather than the desire to do. It is the desire to have rank, rather than use it; the pursuit of promotion without a clear sense of what to do with a higher rank once one has attained it."

The etiology of careerism stems from a shift in the basic values within the officer corps as described by Samuel P. Huntington in his classic work The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Huntington contends the most important feature that distinguishes military personnel from all others is the view that the military is truly a “higher calling” in the service of one's country.

Today, this is no longer the case. Morris Janowitz observed in The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait:

“Those who see the military profession as a calling or a unique profession are outnumbered by a greater concentration of individuals for whom the military is just another job . . . . For a sizable majority - about 20 percent, or about one out of every five - no motive [for joining the military] could be discerned, except that the military was a job.”

Maj. Michael L. Mosier posits in “Getting a Grip on Careerism” in Airpower Journal how military sociologists theorize that the idea of a higher calling has diminished as institutional values deteriorate. While institutional values deteriorate, careerists exhibit traits of psychopathy replacing the higher calling with ambitions of personal gain and unaccountability.

Babiak and Hare’s Snakes in Suits, a book about psychopaths in the workplace, may seem foreign when juxtaposed with national security, but is instructive in the recognition of character traits the careerists exhibit and the wreckage they leave behind. (The writer is not suggesting that all careerists are psychopaths; however, the behavior of both has much in common.)

Consider the behavior of psychopaths described by Babiak and Hare: Glibness, superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, deceitful, cunning, manipulative, lacks remorse, callous, lacks empathy, does not accept responsibility for own actions, and impulsiveness. Look for these behavioral markers in careerists and what psychologists call the “paradox of power.”

Jonah Lehrer writes about the “paradox of power” in The Wall Street Journal,contending that the very traits that help leaders accumulate power and influence in the first place (being polite, honest, outgoing) all but disappear once power and authority are achieved. Positive leadership traits are replaced with impulsiveness, recklessness and rudeness. Lehrer further notes that authority coupled with the power paradox leads to flawed cognitive processes that in turn “distort the ability to evaluate information and make complex decisions.”

As one who has worked in and around the Pentagon bureaucracy for a few decades, other characteristics come to mind. In addition to placing one’s self in a position of accelerating personal gain, careerists also collect accoutrements of rank and position, perks and lists of biographical achievements, defined as positions, ranks and titles held. It is not about what they achieved but rather the positions and titles they held.

It is appalling that so many senior officers think that the military is all about getting promoted and accumulating as many signs of rank and status as possible, completed with a host of perks. What is lost on careerists is that they are getting the opportunity to actually do things that most people only dream of, or get to see just in the movies.

They are so prevalent because bureaucracies are in effect designed by and for careerists propagated by reams of regulations and layers of superfluous commands. Bureaucracies give careerists a place “to be somebody” rather than an opportunity to do something. They are promoted because of a zero defect record of playing it safe, making no controversial decisions and requiring others to do the same.

Recognizing Careerists

Careerists in both uniforms and suits thrive on hardware programs. It is not a matter of whether a weapon system works but whether it survives. One might point to the failed programs like the A-12 bomber or the Sgt. York “DIVAD” gun which saw billions wasted before they were cancelled. But look more skeptically at the programs that survive, even prosper, that are irrelevant to the wars we fight, double in cost (or more), are delivered years late and break promise after promise for performance.

Even for the so-called successful programs, the improved performance is never commensurate with the increase in cost. What manager among the orchards of low hanging fruit of Pentagon procurement fiascos has been held accountable? What senior DOD acquisition “Czar” has not found himself a huge pay raise from industry upon retirement? Congress and DOD often reward poor program performance and cost escalation. In 2010, Defense Secretary Gates replaced the general in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter program, but the action was a remarkable exception, and nothing fundamental to the program’s problems was changed.

The careerists are not interested in fostering people and ideas or developing good personnel and education programs. The rewards are in hardware issues, not people issues - except that one human factor does predominate: self.

The Washington Post wrote a review of Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S. Army, who was relieved of command in Europe in 2000 shortly after the ineffectual military campaign he commanded against Serbia in 1999. (Not long thereafter he immersed himself in presidential campaign politics.) The article revealed much about the man’s careerism and its characteristics. The reporter for TheWashington Post explains with details the animus against Clark: His leadership was “undercut by his relentless need to be front and center, to always make it all about him winning -- rather than the mission."

Clark’s deep infatuation with the word “I,” which runs through the veins of all careerists, was evident in his own explanation to the reporter:

“How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if everybody didn't like me? It's impossible," he said. "Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that? . . . Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked? . . . I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out. . . . A lot of people love me."

If Clark blames himself at all for the abrupt ending of his career after 34 years in the Army, he has never let on. More than one friend has quoted him, when trying to comprehend his forced retirement, as saying plaintively, "But we won the war...”

Without question Clark, like most careerists, has little love for subordinates, peers and others whom he sees as impediments to his career. The Postreported “In an institution filled with ambitious men, some viewed Clark as over the top, someone who would do or say anything to get ahead -- and get his way.”

Placing self above the interests of one’s military service, DOD, and even national security is de rigueur. The Taipei Times of Sept. 9, 2010, wrote of retired U.S. Navy Adm. William Owens the following:

“Retired US Admiral William Owens — the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wants to end arms sales to Taiwan — is now aiding an effort by China’s Huawei Technologies to supply equipment to Sprint Nextel and operate in the US.
“A team of eight US senators has written to the administration of US President Barack Obama warning that the move by Huawei could ‘undermine US national security.’
“A national carrier in the US servicing 41.8 million customers at the end of the second quarter, Sprint Nextel is also a supplier to the Pentagon and US law enforcement agencies.”

And later,

“‘If our electronics are compromised, we are cooked,’ [China expert Arthur] Waldron said in his e-mail sent to a wide circle of China watchers.
‘Who is to say that subsystems bought from China will not have back doors and hidden links to their suppliers? We would be mad to think otherwise. The Chinese are not stupid,’ he wrote.”

Recognizing the Silence of Careerism

The same careerist system rewards those who ignore hardware but promote, or fail to stand up against, gigantic policy mistakes. Ambassador Paul Bremmer, who was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom, insisted on the disbanding of the Iraqi army in May 2003. This put an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 Iraqi soldiers out of work, and available to help foment the violence that followed.

Many serving officers and retirees are not forgetting that when senior commanding generals of America’s expeditionary ground forces assembled in Baghdad in May 2003 to hear Ambassador Bremer announce the decision to dismantle the Iraqi state, army and police and occupy much of Arab Iraq with U.S. and British forces, not a single general officer raised any objection.

It is impossible to know whether the refusal of general officers commanding American forces in the field to implement such a misguided and disastrous policy would have allowed American forces to avoid the expensive occupation of Iraq. Speaking out or retiring immediately certainly would have given officials in the government an opportunity to consider places a thousand times more important than Diyala or al-Anbar, starting with the United States itself.”

The apologists for this behavior deceptively ascribed their ruthless climb of the Pentagon ladder as an artifact of doing the right thing. But it is actually a lack of professionalism and an abandonment of the principles of military service. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan provide the most painful recent examples. They have severely tested and frequently compromised the U.S. officer corps’ traditional values of duty, honor and country. This is obvious in the selective careerist- and agenda-ridden assertions to portray a false picture of events to the American public about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Recent examples from every level of command are:

Americans were told Iraq was invaded to locate and destroy weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
Americans were told former National Football League star Army Ranger Sgt. Pat Tillman died fighting the enemy. It was a lie.
Americans were told Army Spc. Jessica Lynch fired her M16 rifle until she ran out of bullets and was captured. It was a lie.
Americans were told repeatedly the rebellion against our military presence in Iraq was defeated and "security was improving.” It was protracted lying punctuated by a daily diet of exploding bombs and mutilated bodies until massive cash payments to the Sunni Arab opponents bought cooperation.
Despite numerous classified and unclassified accounts of brutality meted out to prisoners of war and the civilian population by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan - reports that describe the chain of command as aware of the abuses but routinely ignoring or covering them up - not a single general officer was called to account.
In 2010, Americans are told Iraq is a “democracy,” when in reality, Iraq is mired in corruption and violence, its oil is in Chinese hands, and Iran, not the United States influences Iraq’s political destiny.

One can go on, especially now about Afghanistan, but surely the point is made: as the American people are told the conjured tales of the policy advocates, the senior military command stays silent; in fact, some assist, even fabricate, deceptive rationalization further underwriting deafening silence.

Effects

President Eisenhower’s worst nightmare described in his January 1961 farewell address has become fulfilled. Today’s consolidated defense industries have become inseparable from the government and hold political careers in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives at risk if sufficient tax dollars are not committed to the industries’ expensive defense products. That the politicians succumb, holding their political well-being above the merits of any weapons debate, is the very definition of careerism. Unless and until the politicians realize their political fate hinges on a broader perspective, their votes on defense issues will be driven by their narrowly perceived short-term interest, mostly “pork” and campaign contributions.

The “revolving door” enriches civilian executives in the defense industry, and its supporting consulting businesses, for periodic service in the Department of Defense, and it rewards retired generals and admirals for their access to the men and women they left behind in the Pentagon and not coincidentally promoted to flag rank. Rewards are particularly plentiful for the three- and four-star officers who supported and defended expensive defense programs even when the usefulness of the programs was doubted inside their own service bureaucracies, among other places.

Consequently, it’s no surprise that federal auditors, poring over the Defense Department's conflicting financial statements, missing data and accounting discrepancies, are unable to provide an accurate accounting of the Defense Department’s books. According to a July 8, 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office, the generals in U.S. Central Command and Washington, D.C. lost $1.2 billion worth of war materiel shipped to Iraq for the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power. More recently, a congressional staff report found aid to Afghanistan ending up in the hands of the Taliban. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if poor senior leadership did not result in the loss of American life in uniform, undermine American strategic interests abroad, drain the United States Treasury of its tax dollars, and erode the economic well-being of the American people the nation’s flag officers are sworn to defend.

Perhaps, the lack of accountability explains why supposedly objective, retired military officers retained as analysts by national television networks have little incentive to jeopardize their lucrative contracts with the political and industrial elites by telling the American people the hard facts about events in Iraq or Afghanistan? Nurturing the Pentagon money flow and the domestic political environment that supports it while influencing their chosen successors—often their former aides—to keep the money spigots open profoundly changes the message the retired generals and colonels send to the listening audience.

These behaviors help reinforce the myth that only generals and admirals can or should formulate the fundamental principles governing the application of American military power, or even military doctrine. Today, this myth has transformed the president, as well as members of the House and the Senate, into doormats for the four-stars. Secretary of Defense Gates and the Army and Marine Corps four-stars in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) currently wield more influence over U.S. defense and foreign policy than any senator or congressman, and almost no one in the mainstream media is willing to challenge anything they say or do.

Renewed enthusiasm in the four-star ranks for pursuit of the presidency is surely also related to these trends. It’s no secret that a four-star general who transforms himself into a political figure while still in uniform with the aid of political allies in the press and Congress can be so powerful the president may be reluctant to publicly oppose him. After all, members of Congress are always willing to cultivate outspoken four-star generals for narrow partisan advantage. Gen. David Petraeus, the current CENTCOM commander, [and nominated last week by President Obama to be the next director of the CIA] is the latest in the succession of Army four-stars (including former NATO Commanders Alexander Haig and Wesley Clark) who clearly harbors, despite denials, aspirations to be president.

It is against this backdrop of tumultuous change in civil-military relations since Eisenhower left office that officers coming to Washington, D.C. for the first time - in many instances from arduous duty as company, battalion or brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan - must be viewed. These are the officers that members of Congress and their staffs are likely to meet, and it is from their ranks that will spring the next generation of flag officers. Understanding what makes these officers tick is the real challenge.

Understanding Military Officers

It’s impossible to talk about officers in the armed forces without some mention of demographics. As in the past, the overwhelming majority of officers (roughly 75 per cent) are of European ancestry. However, regardless of their ethnic origin, American officers are more likely to be from high-income families and they are on average better educated than most American citizens. This demographic profile is consistent with historic data in all, but one way. Today’s officers are more religious than their predecessors were 20 or 30 years ago, and they’ve grown up inside a military bureaucracy that differs in important ways from the Reagan-era armed forces.

There are other factors as well. Today, the new paradigm of warfare (counterinsurgency) creates bureaucratic power bases and careerists that derive their relevance from the currently accepted view of war. Few, if any, military officers rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War by arguing for an institutional doctrine that addressed the complexities of limited wars. Today, just about no one will rise through the ranks by raising issues about the U.S. armed forces’ ironically new exclusive strategic focus on counterinsurgency. The overemphasis on counterinsurgency must be countered by candid debate and coming to grips with fourth generation warfare - the legacy of failed states and hybrid threats.

The tendency inside the peacetime military to advance officers who tell the boss what he wants to hear is well known; being candid is not career enhancing. This chronic lack of professional candor is now a pervasive facet of political correctness and careerism that supports a new doctrinal orthodoxy inside DOD. That new orthodoxy is a doctrine based in part on a popular journalistic narrative that is deeply flawed but coincides with the careeristmodus operandi of going along to get along. In practice, the advocates of this doctrinal orthodoxy are not telling U.S. ground forces to adapt to future strategic conditions and global hybrid threats. They are instead telling American forces to train and equip almost exclusively for future unwanted occupations inside the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, the officers advocating doctrinal orthodoxy and persistent warfare inside the Islamic world are as career-minded and oppressive as those who maintained the fiction that Operation Desert Storm validated warmed over “Blitzkrieg theory” in the form of air-land battle doctrine in 1991. The use of the term “counterinsurgency” to describe conflicts inside the Muslim world creates the illusion the United States has “discovered” a military solution to societal misery. This assertion is untrue, and officers who’ve served for years in places where no sane American would voluntarily spend two minutes will make these points in private if asked.

Many officers today think America’s national security demands armed forces organized around the capability to fight enemies with the capability to fight back - enemies that look like our own conventional forces and are not optimized for counterinsurgency, or even split down the middle that try to do both. A major with two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan summed up the problem that weighs heavily on the minds of many officers in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines:

“If we were to fight against someone who was capable and at least marginally equipped, we could, for the first time since the Korean War or World War II, find ourselves fighting on someone else's time schedule and initiative. No one in the force today knows what it is to fight on someone else's clock. If we were hit and hit hard during a build-up, if we faced a capable anti-air threat that knocked a few aircraft, manned or unmanned, out of the sky, against a naval threat that could actually threaten our surface combatants in coastal waters, or that had a ground force that could give battle and launch surprise attacks of their own, our collective psyche's would be shocked, and our forces paralyzed.”

In sum, our armed forces today are tasked to fight occupational wars they cannot win and they are unprepared for the enemies we claim to be best suited for. That the voices you can faintly hear expressing concern about this (and the assertion that it is not a hardware acquisition question – i.e. a money-making issue) come from the middle of and beneath the officer corps shows how vacant the careerist minds at the top have become.

The Officer Corps in the Balance

In years past, it was easy to identify officers who spent their time checking with superiors or peers concerning whether or not to act. These types seldom pursued what was right. They were simply “staying in their lane,” as the saying goes. Officers with the moral courage to take a stand on the grounds that it was in the interest of the American people, even when it might contradict the service’s bureaucratic guidelines, were not easy to find, but not uncommon. Today, officers with these attributes still exist, but they are very hard to find. Officers who do so now must be extremely clever, as well as extraordinarily courageous. The erosion that caused this change is an important change that outsiders, including journalists and Hill staffers, must grasp and appreciate.

Officers’ disenchantment with the nation’s focus on hostile occupations and armed nation-building is matched by a growing lack of confidence in, and recognition of careerism among, the field-grade officers, i.e., colonels and generals, but also those senior enlisted who have opted for careerism - aping their officers.

My personal experience and recent surveys indicate that junior officers in the U.S. Army (and Marine Corps) feel a lot of dissatisfaction with the quality of senior leadership. This “disconnect” between junior officers, and their commanders, has been around for more than a decade. It's gotten worse with a war on, because, unlike past wars, there has not been widespread removal of battalion and brigade commanders who did not perform well. In World War II and Korea, it was common for commanders who did not deliver, to be replaced. With a war going on now and junior officers facing life and death situations because their commanders were not being aggressive or innovative enough, many have been leaving the service.

Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, U.S. Army, returned in 2009 from two months in Iraq where he interviewed young Army officers for a research project. His observation reinforces the comments above: "There is enormous pride among young officers in their units and in each other, but I see strong evidence that they are rapidly losing faith in the Army and the country's political leadership." Careerism and political correctness in all the services may be taking a much greater toll (although a somewhat different one) on our personnel than the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concluding Thoughts

The U.S. military is not led by a Centurion or Spartan class of hardened professionals. Perhaps it should be. The leadership of the armed forces looks bleak, save for a very few. The outliers among senior officers are those who are willing to take unpopular positions for the troops' or nation's benefit (not for their own benefit and career enhancement) on politically charged issues. For example, Generals Conway and Amos articulate opposition inside the Marine Corps to the repeal of the “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” policy regarding gay and lesbian service members (DADT), reflecting a sentiment in the Corps’ ranks. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with DADT, is not the issue. The point is Generals Conway and Amos have the moral courage to state their position as unpopular as it may be in some politically correct circles. This writer submits too many, unlike these generals, would rather go along to get along.

For the moment, U.S. military culture and the essence of conducting warfare within clearly defined Constitutional and sensible strategic parameters are insidiously perverted by domestic political interests, political correctness and political constituencies inside the senior ranks of America's military establishment fused to the generals' and admirals' unabashed careerism.

The questions members of Congress and journalists should ask are the questions on the minds of many officers in the armed forces regarding these issues: Are the four-star generals and admirals merely military "caretakers" for the assigned mission without taking moral or professional responsibility for the assignment to which American military power is committed? Are conflicts with Islamic groups that have no armies, no air defenses and no air forces yet another avenue for generals, admirals and colonels to pursue selfish ends?

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling writes about the failure to resist utterly stupid and self-defeating policies conceived in Washington, D.C. Yingling contends that this failure is not the result of “individual failures, but rather a crisis of an entire institution.” America’s generals and admirals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war, yet they advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.

Meanwhile America's generals, colonels, admirals and captains blinded by the illusion of bureaucratic power, mimic the behaviors of the politicians, managers and policy advocates. Individuals preoccupied with their own internal goals are blind to what is happening around them: “Being in a position of power makes people feel they can do no wrong.” As a result of this intoxication with power, careerists unwittingly (and wittingly) underwrite a defense-industrial-congressional complex where the primary purpose is awarding contracts and shoveling power, perks and money in disparate forms, rather than winning wars.

How do we fix this? Part of the answer is military reform ushered in by drastic budget cuts to hardware programs Col. Michael Wyly, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., who is held in high respect, seeks a culture where a warrior class of "mavericks" is accepted and those who place themselves above the time-honored principles of military service (duty, honor, country) find themselves on the outside looking in. Wyly observes of the consummate Pentagon maverick, Col. John Boyd :

“Yet it is unfortunate that we have to think of him as a maverick. He should have been the norm: an independent thinker who did his own research on a daily basis and espoused his views regardless of convention because he had the courage to do so. Courage is a virtue. In the military profession, courage tops the list of virtues required and demanded. My experiences in combat demonstrated that you can't have the physical kind of courage without the moral kind. Officers with Boyd's degree of moral courage need to be the norm, not the mavericks. Another way of putting it is that we all need to have the courage to be mavericks when institutional thought stagnates. But we have a responsibility not to let it stagnate.”

G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) has deployed on multiple combat tours with the Marines; he holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York - Albany and a master’s degree from Webster University. He teaches criminal justice at the college level and is a graduate student in forensic psychology currently doing an internship with University of California, San Diego’s Department of Psychiatry. This essay is one of the contributions to The Pentagon Labyrinth: Ten Short Essays to Help You Through It, edited by Winslow T. Wheeler and published bythe Center for Defense Information / World Security Institute and accessible, with footnotes, athttp://dnipogo.org/labyrinth/

http://counterpunch.org/wilson04292011.html

A Radical Plan for Cutting the Defense Budget and Reconfiguring the U.S. Military

2011-04-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Total savings: $279.5 billion.

BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
APRIL 26, 2011

In the spirit of spending wisely, here is my plan to reconfigure the military for the demands and threats of the 21st-century world and, in doing so, dramatically cut the Pentagon budget:

Estimated annualized savings resulting from withdrawals from overseas garrisons and restructuring the United States' forward military presence: $239 billion.

The place to start reducing defense spending is with U.S. overseas commitments, which are vast.

Today, there are more than 317,000 active-duty U.S. military personnel stationed or deployed overseas. In the Central Command theater of operations, encompassing Iraq and Afghanistan, there are approximately 180,000 active-component personnel as well as over 45,000 reservists. Approximately 150,000 active-component U.S. military personnel are officially assigned to Europe and Asia. And some estimates note that there are two civilians and supporting contractors for each service member in certain locations.

The United States long stayed secure without this kind of sprawling imperial apparatus. But as the Cold War drew to a close, instead of adjusting force structure and spending to a strategic environment newly friendly to U.S. and allied interests, the U.S. military began a dramatic expansion of its overseas presence into areas where, historically, it had been episodic at best. America's Cold War commitments, meanwhile, continued without interruption. After expelling the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. military was directed to stay in the Persian Gulf and build massive facilities. And following the 9/11 attacks, the global war on terror resulted in major new Army and Air Force installations from Europe to Central Asia.

Why does America need all these facilities? The original Cold War goal of protecting European and Asian societies from communist threats and internal subversion has long ago been met, and many overseas U.S. bases are now redundant. What better time than now, when the United States faces fiscal calamity but few real military threats, to judiciously sort those that are truly needed from those the Pentagon can live without? It's time to declare victory and go home.

Of course, the United States often has multiple aims in mind when it stations troops overseas. U.S. politicians tend to think of forward-presence forces as "critical enablers" -- soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who train with the host country and others. But another, usually unstated reason for their presence is that allies want to ensure the United States automatically becomes a co-belligerent in any future regional conflict, something that made sense when America's allies confronted an existential threat from the Soviet Union, but not today. Future conflicts won't look like those of the Cold War.

U.S. troops remained ashore in Europe and Asia long past the point when it was clear that a military presence was a needless drain on American resources. Today, new technology and a different mix of forces enables a lighter, less intrusive footprint. For instance, area control is no longer a mission that demands a large surface fleet on the World War II model. The U.S. nuclear submarine fleet augmented with fewer surface combatants employing long-range sensors, manned and unmanned aircraft, communications, and missiles can dominate the world's oceans, ensuring the United States and its allies control access to the maritime domain that supports 91 percent of the world's commerce.

In the Islamic world, the U.S.-led interventions were and remain speculative investments with questionable returns on taxpayers' investments. For the moment, operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently over Libya, have resulted in less and less funding available to reorganize and replace obsolescent, unsustainable, or worn-out Cold War-era forces designed for aerospace, maritime superiority, and ground combat -- one more reason to end or drastically reduce U.S. involvement in those conflicts as soon as possible.

Fortunately, as U.S. ground forces withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the appeal of the Islamists' anti-American recruiting pitch will dramatically weaken, de-escalating the conflict. International cooperation combined with effective police action, border defenses, and immigration control is a far more economical way to prevent future large-scale terrorist action.

Estimated annualized savings from reorganizing the Army and Marine Corps: $18 billion

The changes in America's overseas commitments must of necessity involve reductions in force structure and personnel inside the country's general-purpose ground forces, currently bloated by the misguided and historically disproven counterinsurgency model. While U.S. ground forces withdraw over the next three years from their overseas garrisons, Congress should establish new end-strength ceilings for the combined active strength of the Army and Marine Corps: 600,000 active-duty service members (480,000 in the Army and 120,000 Marines).

As noted earlier, the proliferation of new strike weapons, conventional or nuclear, makes the massing of large ground forces extremely dangerous. Consequently, future ground combat forces must mobilize organic combat power that is disproportionate to their size and numbers and execute mobile, distributed, yet coherent joint operations. This description points toward Army and Marine ground forces designed for operations of limited duration and scope, forces that can be organized, trained, and equipped at far lower cost than mass armies created for long-term territorial occupation that beget second- and third-order budgetary effects we see in the current bloated "services and logistics" contracts, contracts that run into the billions of dollars over time.

Reductions in ground forces should also preserve and, where possible, increase the numbers of professional soldiers and Marines who can actually deploy and fight. This force transition must also be accompanied by an overall reduction in redundant or unnecessary overhead, support, and services force structure to increase the tooth-to-tail ratio and operational returns on military investments.

In a fiscally constrained environment, the country must re-examine the roles and missions of its land warfare services -- the Army and Marine Corps. Reorganizing the manpower and capabilities in these large forces within an integrated, joint operational framework to provide a larger pool of ready, deployable ground forces on rotational readiness that can perform a range of missions is essential.

Estimated annualized savings from reductions in naval surface forces and Marine fixed-wing aviation: $10 billion

Command of the sea, which today includes the air and space above the surface and the water beneath it, is still the precondition for the exercise of effective influence beyond U.S. borders. Fortunately, there is no other power in the world that is able, or likely to be able, in the next quarter-century to build a fleet that could seriously challenge U.S. naval supremacy. This includes China.

However, the Navy needs a different mix of capabilities than it had during the last years of the Cold War, a mix based on reconfigured strike platforms, new platforms, and manned and unmanned submersibles with an increasingly deep operational focus. Ideally, the mix should include fewer giant aircraft carriers and more flexible ships -- ships that are more easily sustained "forward" without the support of friendly, modern, deep-water harbors to improve operational agility and flexibility.

These points suggest Congress should direct the reduction of the Navy's surface fleet from 11 to eight carrier battle groups over a period of 36 months and rebalance their home porting in acknowledgement of national priorities in the Pacific Command and Central Command areas of responsibility. This action would include concurrent "right-sizing" of all associated combatants, supporting vessels, forward deployed naval forces, and shipyards, depots, and other support facilities, excluding submarines. Combatant commanders should be directed to re-evaluate "presence versus surge" naval requirements given improved long-range precision strike and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities of smart presence alternatives.

Simultaneously, the Department of the Navy should be directed to disband the 20-plus Marine Corps F-18 fighter jet and AV-8B Harrier jet squadrons. Retire all the AV-8Bs and the older F/A-18s, retaining the newer F/A-18C/Ds and EA-6Bs until replaced with Navy aircraft. Reassign the carrier Marines to naval air groups until the remaining Marine jets are retired; and require the Marine Corps to call on the Navy and Air Force for tactical fixed-wing air cover. Marine manned aviation should be limited to an appropriate number of V-22 Ospreys or rotor-driven aircraft within the new end-strength limits. This approach enables reorganization of the United States' three manned air forces -- the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps -- into two affordable air forces, one sea-based and one land-based.

Estimated annualized savings from eliminating the F-35B: $2.5 billion

Between 2003 and 2009, the U.S. Air Force cut 160 fighter/attack and 19 bombers from its active component. As a result of authorization bills in 2010, the Air Force will be required to retire about 300 older F-15, F-16, and A-10 aircraft without replacements until 2015. The cuts mandated as part of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will probably result in the loss of a few more bombers.

Further cuts in U.S. aerospace power would seem ill-advised given the need to rely on air power during America's withdrawal from its overseas commitments. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, however, bears serious re-examination. At an average $92 million per plane, the JSF is very expensive for the capabilities it promises versus the performance it has delivered to date.

In practical terms, the JSF is an investment issue. Will Congress flush $44 billion of investment down the drain when the U.S. Armed Forces stand to receive at least some number of aircraft that are more capable than the very old F-16s and early-model F/A-18s? On the other hand, scaling back the complexity and size of the total buy is very reasonable and still saves a great deal of money. One way is to eliminate the F-35B version of the JSF for the Marines, especially given the disbandment of the Marine Corps jet aircraft wings. The development of a naval unmanned deep-penetrating strike capability mitigates operational risk in this approach.

Estimated annualized savings from reducing the number of unified commands and single service headquarters: $1 billion

Withdrawal of most of U.S. garrison forces (particularly its ground forces) from overseas will necessitate the elimination of many military commands. It also offers opportunities for savings through a modification of the current Unified Command Plan and U.S. Code Title 10 to reduce the current number of regional and functional unified commands from six to four. U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command would remain, but Mexico would fall into Southern Command's area of responsibility. U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command should be reintegrated and relocated to the facilities formerly used by U.S. Joint Forces Command in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to be renamed U.S. Atlantic Command. Then, Central Command should be divided between Atlantic Command and Pacific Command by the end of fiscal 2012.

This approach would eliminate the four-star combatant command headquarters outside the United States and negate the flow-down justification of three-star and four-star single-service component commands aligned within, an action that is long overdue along with the deflation of the services' general officer/admiral rank structure. As Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn notes, each of these commands have become beset by "requirements creep" without regard to the cost of capability, a pernicious effect of having so many people "in charge," demanding staff, resources, and authorities commensurate with their rank, instead of what the country needs.

In response to these actions, Congress should reduce all flag ranks in the bureaucracy by one star effective immediately. Exceptions to this mandate would be limited to the chiefs of service, regional unified commanders, and commanders of functional commands. Combined with the reduction in command overhead, this will assist in eliminating redundant single-service bureaucratic overhead and administration (uniform and civilian), especially in the setting of requirements and management of acquisitions. Again, U.S. Code Title 10 must be modified through new legislation to prevent continued duplication and inefficiency created by competitive bureaucracies. Simplified command structures that emphasize responsibility and accountability are always the keys to success in crisis or conflict.

Estimated annualized savings from eliminating the Department of Homeland Security and restructuring national intelligence and the Army National Guard: $7 billion

Inside the United States, it's time to consider legislation eliminating the inefficient experiment that is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agencies combined under DHS at the time of its inception should return to their former departments, and its former national security responsibilities should shift to the Defense Department. Some may argue that this is not the role of the Pentagon. But the defense of the country includes land and sea borders -- and employing the armed forces to secure those borders from threats originating in the nexus between transnational criminal and violent extremist organizations is explicitly stated in the preamble and Article I of the U.S. Constitution's language of the "common defence." Defense of the country's borders should not be hampered by a misapplication of posse comitatus, the prohibition on armed forces conducting law enforcement.

It also makes sense to begin disestablishing most of the armed forces' duplications in separate intelligence services, transferring these capabilities to national intelligence agencies -- retaining only operationally unique and tactical intelligence within the branches of the armed forces. Intelligence and related "black" programs have exploded in costs post-9/11 with dubious returns on these investments.

In addition, new federal legislation should be considered that prohibits the Army and Air National Guard from mobilizing for deployment beyond the borders of the United States -- except in the event of a formal declaration of war. Once this legislation is on the books, the Army National Guard should discard most of its war-fighting equipment and convert its formations to a light, wheeled constabulary force designed for border security and domestic emergency/disaster relief inside the United States.

Estimated annualized savings from reducing political appointees and changing acquisition and military education: $2 billion

Other sources of potential savings in national defense exist and should be pursued. Given the current fiscal pressure, the Defense Department should consider affordable alternatives to meet threat requirements in the Air and Missile Defense portfolio. One option is to cancel the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS). The Affordable Near-Term Patriot solution is less than 10 percent of the projected $18 billion MEADS cost.

Congress should explore a one-third reduction in the number of political appointees to the Defense Department. In most cases, these appointees simply build larger bureaucratic empires underneath them to justify their activities. It would also help to disestablish service component acquisition executives, the individual service bureaucrats who buy equipment and services for the use of their respective services (Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps), and combine these staffs under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and legislatively abolish service-centric acquisition autonomy. It is disappointing how many times competing "service equities" are raised in arguments that end up trumping national strategic interests within the Pentagon. Fragmented acquisition authorities, granting a degree of autonomy to each service, are the principle enabler of this bad, inefficient behavior.

Finally, it is high time the armed forces consolidated the single-service war colleges into one integrated national defense college. At the same time, Congress should implement a merit-based selection system that requires examinations for entry, as well as graduation. Military education is expensive -- and officers should be held accountable for their performance in it. This action would also set the tone for a much-needed reform movement to hold officers accountable across a range of military activities. Joint professional military education should not be a "check the box" exercise or an opportunity to lower one's golf handicap. It should prepare future senior military leaders and weed out those who are intellectually and professionally incapable of meeting the challenge to perform.

Lean, Mean Fighting Machine

2011-04-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

How to slash the Pentagon budget? Declare victory and go home.

BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
APRIL 26, 2011

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said it best, "When waves of change appear, you can duck under the wave, stand fast against the wave, or, better yet, surf the wave." Today, the same tsunami-like wave of debt that threatens to sweep away American economic prosperity is headed for America's defense establishment. President Barack Obama signaled as much with his April 13 budget address, in which he warned: "Just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense."

Obama gave no specifics, promising instead to work with the Pentagon to "conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world." But given the poor track record such reviews have -- both Quadrennial Defense Reviews and Roles and Missions Commissions -- and Obama's failure to even address the need to reduce defense spending, the president's words don't deserve to be taken seriously at all. Meanwhile, the Republican failure to take on defense spending -- the 800-pound gorilla in the room -- means the political discourse that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his colleagues seek may degenerate into pointless shouting matches with Capitol Hill's Democrats.

But the message for Republicans and Democrats alike should be that cutting defense doesn't mean going defenseless. It means reducing America's commitments overseas -- the latter-day version of "imperial overstretch" -- and changing the way the United States thinks about warfare. There's a way to do this, one that will allow for deep spending cuts, but in a manner that will preserve and enhance the U.S. military's competitive advantages while improving American national security.

Dealing with defense is admittedly a huge challenge. If directly questioned, the military brass will insist that given the missions they are obligated to undertake (along with a host of classified war plans they could be ordered to execute), reduced spending will put the Armed Forces and by implication the American people at grave risk. Then there's the chorus: a host of defense think tanks inside the Beltway that point out that the opportunity costs associated with cuts in spending and force structure are either unknown or too high; that unless specific alternative military options or tradeoffs are identified up front, capability gaps will emerge with potentially serious consequences for U.S. national security. These arguments are not entirely without merit. But they hardly justify keeping defense spending at current levels.

For one thing, there is no existential military threat to the United States or to its vital strategic interests. The nuclear arsenals in Russia and China could be used against the United States and its forces, but Russian and Chinese leaders have no incentive to contemplate suicide in a nuclear confrontation with the United States. Russia's diminished million-man armed forces are hard-pressed to modernize, let alone secure their own country, which borders 14 other states. For all its rhetoric, Russia's military focus is on restive Muslim populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia, not on NATO.

As for China, its top concern is not military confrontation with the United States, but domestic growing pains, especially the potential for its 1.3 billion people to overwhelm the Communist Party's internal political structures. China's internal focus on modernization and stability militates against external aggression, and this condition is unlikely to change for a very long time. Despite China's ability to steal or buy sophisticated technology, the military establishment cannot quickly or easily translate these technologies into new capabilities, and Beijing knows it.

Other possible threats are even less threatening. The North Korean regime, the poster child for the failure of state socialism, is on the road to extinction. In recent months, China has taken steps to secure its border with North Korea to ensure that millions of starving Koreans cannot rush north into China when the inevitable collapse occurs. Iran is a long way from possessing a nuclear weapon it can deliver, and its general-purpose forces are incapable of action beyond Iran's borders. Lastly, the world's leading scientific-industrial states -- most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the leading English-speaking powers, Britain, Australia, and Canada -- are close U.S. allies. All of their economies can and do support powerful military establishments.

What about the possibility that U.S. forces will be needed once again in the broader Middle East? Events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other parts of the Islamic world demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. The complex cultural problems plaguing the region, from state failure to persistent social pathologies to trouble adapting to modernity, will not be solved through U.S. military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one U.S. soldier or Marine on station in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism, and illegal immigration washing in from Mexico and Latin America.

Future conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America will not be insurgencies directed at unwanted U.S. military occupations. They are more likely to resemble the Balkan wars of the early 20th century, except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with competition for energy, water, food, and mineral resources -- and the wealth they create. The United States can probably avoid involvement in these conflicts, but if its strategic interests compel intervention, America can do so with fewer, more potent ground forces than the ones it has today, capitalizing on its aerospace and naval supremacy.

Military strength is no longer based on the mass mobilization of the manpower and resources of the entire nation-state. Fewer, smarter soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines -- with intelligent technology -- can accomplish more than masses of troops with the brute-force tools of the past. Precision effects (kinetic and non-kinetic) utilizing a vast array of strike forces enabled by networked intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in the character of warfare. For example, today a military contest on the model of Kursk in July 1943, a battle that involved nearly 940,000 attacking German and Allied forces and 1.5 million defending Soviet forces in a geographical area the size of England, would result in catastrophic losses for the Soviet side. That's why those numbers you read about Chinese or Russian troops are less worrisome than they seem. Any future ground combat force that immobilizes itself in prepared defenses on the World War II model will be identified, targeted, and annihilated from a distance. Naval forces that concentrate large numbers of surface combatants risk similar losses in a future increasingly dominated by accurate strike weapons from various manned or unmanned platforms at sea and ashore.

What's needed now is more political courage, not more defense spending. It will fall to America's elected and appointed leaders to direct the Defense Department to aggressively accept more risk in reconciling defense expenditures with the country's urgent fiscal situation. Above all, members of Congress must have the fortitude to challenge the misguided hand-wringing inside the Beltway and put the country's long-term economic and defense interests ahead of winning the next election.

What is to be done?

Before turning to specific cuts, members of Congress should acknowledge that it is unacceptable to expend trillions of dollars for defense when the Defense Department cannot conduct an audit, let alone pass one. The only way to address this problem is to implement a statutory prohibition halting funding for defense beyond fiscal year 2014 until an audit is passed. If the Pentagon doesn't know where the money is going, how can American taxpayers feel confident that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely?

It's high time for something new. What follows here is a plan -- arguably, somewhat radical -- to finally spend wisely and reconfigure the military for the threats of the 21st century. The annualized savings presented here would reduce the current U.S. defense budget by almost 40 percent, some $279.5 billion. This isn't just an accounting exercise, however. What's needed is new strategic thinking, thinking that avoids direct U.S. military involvement in conflicts where the United States itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk.

As French sociologist Émile Durkheim said, "Society is above all the idea it forms of itself." For Americans who have lived in a world with only one true center of military, political, and economic gravity -- the United States -- changing how their country behaves inside the international system is not an easy task. The temptation to meddle in the affairs of others is huge, especially when the perceived risk-to-reward ratio is low.

Put in the language of tennis, the use of U.S. military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of "unforced errors." Far too often, national decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by rigorous risk assessment. Regardless of how great or small the military commitment, if success is ill-defined and the price of intervention is potentially excessive, then the use of force should be avoided.

America has waited too long to learn this hard lesson.

Obama and Eden, kindred connivers

2011-04-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

MACGREGOR: Obama and Eden, kindred connivers
President repeats British leader’s Mideast blunders 60 years later
By Col. Douglas Macgregor

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/31/obama-and-eden-kindred-connivers/

6:37 p.m., Thursday, March 31, 2011

In 1956, Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, saw Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a fascist riding a dangerous new wave of Arab nationalism. When Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal from its British and French owners, Eden was sure Nasser was an Arab Hitler and rejected any alternative to direct military action as “appeasement.” Guy Mollet, the French premier at the time, shared Eden’s opinion and joined with Britain and Israel in the attack on Egypt to remove Nasser.

When Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, of World War II fame, discovered Eden’s plan to intervene in Egypt, he asked Eden to explain his objective. Eden famously replied, “To knock Nasser off his perch!”

Montgomery scoffed, warning, “That’s not good enough.” He insisted that British and French military commanders needed more; they needed to know what the political aim was after Nasser was removed in order to plan the right kind of operation.

Ultimately, Eden, not Nasser, was removed from office. President Eisenhower, a lifelong opponent of European imperialism, withdrew American support for the intervention. Though Eisenhower shared Eden’s distrust of Nasser, he insisted that military means should be used only as a last resort. British and French forces withdrew. Not only was Eden’s reputation as a “man of peace” and a respected statesman destroyed, but Britain’s two centuries of predominance in the Middle East was ended.

As in Egypt 60 years ago, as in Vietnam and, more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little evidence of a coherent military strategy at work in Libya. Why?

To those advising President Obama, little Libya, with a population of less than 7 million on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast, not only looks like an easy target for American military power but also is the perfect laboratory for democratic experimentation. Put differently, remove the morally repugnant dictator - in this case Col. Moammar Gadhafi - and a new, more humane “social democracy” will emerge in Libya under Western tutelage - a new society devoid of poverty, scarcity, inequality, coercion and repression. This may be a wish-based strategy because it imagines a Libya with the cultural and economic foundations to embrace Western-style democracy. It is a Libya that does not exist, but its attraction to the president is real.

The neoconservatives harbor no such illusions. For them, the opportunity to intervene with American, British and French military power in a Muslim Arab country - one that borders Egypt, another troubled Muslim society with the potential to unravel the Camp David Accords - is too tempting to ignore. What unites Mr. Obama and the neocons, however, is the resolve to use U.S. armed forces as envisioned by the late Secretary of Defense Les Aspin: “to punish evildoers” at the whim of whoever sits in the White House and regardless of cost.

In London and Paris, more concrete interests may be at stake, including BP’s oil infrastructure and a desire to contain a crisis that otherwise might propel more unwanted Muslims in Europe’s direction. Whether direct military action is the best solution for Britain and France - the two powers most likely to commit ground troops in Libya - is, of course, very much open to debate. But it’s worth remembering in all three capitals - Washington, London and Paris - that the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Egypt in 1956, have all failed to deliver the promised strategic benefits.

Where Iraq is concerned, the American people will pay a heavy price for decades to come. In addition to financing American military operations in Iraq with a trillion dollars of borrowed money from China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, U.S. military power installed a Shiite Islamist, pro-Khomeini-type regime in Baghdad tied to Iran, an outcome that threatens the security of the entire Arabian Peninsula. In Afghanistan, the human, financial and strategic costs to American power and prestige continue to rise with the daily erosion of Pakistan’s fragile cohesion, involving dangerous implications for all of Central and Southwest Asia.

Military action is always a series of actions designed to induce the opponent to collapse, capitulate or negotiate. It’s too soon to know what the impact of events in Libya will be for President Obama. However, if the outcome he wanted was Col. Gadhafi’s removal, as he stated weeks ago when Libya’s civil war began, he should have asked what steps were required and whether they would actually work and then carefully measured what he and his country might gain against what he and his country might lose.

Today, Mr. Obama is on Eden’s path, and that is disastrous for the United States and its allies.

Col. Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, is executive vice president of Burke-Macgregor Group. His newest book is “Warrior’s Rage” (Naval Institute Press, 2009).

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC.

Thoughts on Losing Our Way

2011-03-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

Herbert sounds like a classic New Left socialist -- the evil capitalist warmongers are ensuring there are, few if any quality, good-paying jobs for liberal arts graduates. The military/IC and its perpetual wars of intervention are indeed a significant waste of money, but what's spent is still a small fraction of what is spent on social welfare, income redistribution, and health and education programs. While some of those services are very important, they are being produced or delivered very inefficiently. We spend more per capita on medicine and education than most of the world does on food, clothing, and shelter.

Maybe that is because even rich America can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year per student in our extremely inefficient, unresponsive, and un-competitive State-run primary and secondary schools, nor can afford to spend $50-100K to send a kid to college so they can "find themselves" or "self-actualize" in arts and letters from State-run or State-subsidized and -regulated universities. For that sort of money, they need to become lawyers, engineers or medical doctors.

There are plenty of decent paying jobs out there, but they're not for college grads -- they're for technical trade school grads -- "gray collar" jobs that everyone needs, but no one wants to do. There is a global glut of college educated people, and usually with the wrong sort of degrees -- it is a major cause of the upheavals in much of the 3rd world, where what are needed are productive farmers, civil engineers, entrepreneurs, production managers, transportation specialists, etc., not more lawyers, managers, heavy industrial engineers, professors, bureaucrats, or military officers, etc. They need more doctors, etc., but can't afford them because their societies don't produce enough and people can't earn enough no matter how hard they try.

www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html

March 25, 2011
Losing Our Way
By BOB HERBERT

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone. The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family. There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn't be, and didn't used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now. The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation's wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: "G.E.'s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether." Despite profits of $14.2 billion - $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States - General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times' David Kocieniewski reported, "Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."

G.E. is the nation's largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home. New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

Whither Army: A Frontline View

2011-03-14T23:18:00.001-07:00

DoDBuzz.com
March 14, 2011

By Colin Clark

The Army is trying to figure out how to take advantage of the coming period of retrenchment and restructuring. The presumptive Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey started the early stage of the discussion during Unified Quest, the annual Army war games designed to figure out what
to do down the road. There was talk of another battalion for each Army brigade and much worrying about just what constitutes a full spectrum force.

The 22,000 people brought in to cushion the Army for the Iraq and Afghan surges and help its troops recover from the grueling pace of the last decade will be vanishing. The fights in Afghanistan and Iraq will be waning for the U.S. over the next five years, raising the question of just how should the Army be structured to cope with the future. One of the most original thinkers on the issue of Army organization has been retired Col. Doug Macgregor. Knowing an opportunity when he sees it, Macgregor has been pushing his ideas within the Army and to senior Pentagon leaders.

But his reputation as a disruptive influence has often blunted the impact of Macgregor’s ideas, along with the Big Army’s deep and abiding reluctance to engage in major change, especially in time of war. (Of course, Army leaders have also resisted change in time of peace; just
look at the Clinton era.)

We got a glimpse at the internal Army debate from an email sent from a lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan, who said “the same forces of obstruction and unwillingness to make meaningful change that held sway then still do today.”

If the service had adopted Macgregor-style changes in organization and weapons, this officer says he thinks the Army “would have saved tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and had a significantly more capable
military.”

This officer wonders what it will take to get the Army to change as he and others believe it must to ensure the service can respond effectively and rapidly to the nation’s needs. “So on that inevitable day when we plunge off the cliff, once the wreckage has come to a halt and the pieces have settled from their tumult, those who survived will say, ‘you know, that Macgregor fellow seemed to have warned about this in the past. Had we followed his recommendations, maybe we wouldn’t have crashed and burned just now. Hmmm, maybe it would be a wonderful idea if we listened to him NOW and tried to rebuild on the ashes of the disastrous past…”

We hear senior OSD officials are considering proposals derived from Macgregor’s work as they struggle to rebuild the Army. More on this later this week.

Fix the Army, Now!

2011-03-03T18:13:00.001-08:00

Fix the Army, Now!

By Douglas Macgregor

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 11:59 am
Posted in Land, Policy

EDITOR:

Doug Macgregor is alternately revered, respected and ridiculed by his Army colleagues and senior Pentagon officials. Ever since then-Army Chief Dennis Reimer made his book, Breaking the Phalanx, required reading for the general officers corps, his ideas have stirred passions in the largest U.S. military service. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' West Point speech elicited strong reactions from Macgregor. In the following op-ed he calls on the next defense secretary to remake the Army in truth--and not just to give the idea lip service.

He calls his piece:

Generals: The Truth will set you free!

By Douglas Macgregor

Nowhere in the world does stating the obvious provoke more shock and alarm than inside the beltway in Washington, DC. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's recent speech at West Point is a case in point.

In what was an unambiguous reference to the commitment of large Army and Marine ground forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said, "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined." Do you think so?

Events in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Islamic World demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. These societies struggle with dysfunctional cultures and severe socio-economic problems that will not be solved through American military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting liberal democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one American Soldier or marine stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. Government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism and illegal immigration pouring in from Mexico and Latin America.
Gates did not stop there. He went on to say "the need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest." However, Gates suggested the future would not involve the employment of Army divisions warning the Army's generals they "must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements."

In 1997 I published a book, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Land Power in the 21st Century. In it, I advocated the dissolution of the Army's World War II industrial Age warfighting structure arguing instead for a new paradigm with a flatter command structure designed to tightly integrate Army ground forces with air and naval power. The design I set forth replaced conventional Army brigades and divisions with a new formation, the Combat Group; a permanently organized, all arms formation commanded by a brigadier general with the staff and the critical links to plan and execute decisive operations under a Joint Headquarters that replaced the WW II Corps and Army headquarters. I also implored the generals to harmonize readiness training and deployment schedules with the Navy, Air Force and Marines on the Navy's rotational readiness model to ease the burden on the individual soldier and to reduce the costs.

In 2003, I extended this analysis in Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights, arguing for the employment of the Combat Groups outlined in Breaking the Phalanx under a joint integrative command structure that crossed service lines to drive critical warfighting capabilities to lower levels. Instead of organizing around its anachronistic branches, I urged the Army generals to reorganize the ground force around the functions of maneuver, strike, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics) to facilitate its integration with the capabilities in the air and naval services.

Gates, like his predecessors in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was well aware of these works, works widely supported inside the armed forces. But neither Cohen, Rumsfeld nor Gates did anything. Why?

The Army's active and retired four stars were certainly not interested in changing the Army. The politicians who were nominally in charge of overseeing the military were much more concerned about getting their share of the defense budget than in changing the way we organize to fight.

Sober analyses like the ones in my books were pushed aside in favor of purchasing new and ever more expensive silver bullet equipment like the Army's Crusader Artillery System or the Future Combat System (FCS) - systems designed to support vacuous programs like the Army After Next and the Objective Force - preferably for delivery in the indefinite future and heavily classified so their effectiveness could not be judged. Meanwhile, the number of professional combat Soldiers declined while the numbers of generals on active duty increased and the contractors got rich.

Hundreds of billions of dollars and years later the retired four stars who launched these flawed programs are wealthy men, but the Army is poor; stuck with huge inventories of broken equipment developed in the 1970s for use in the 1980s and armored trucks designed to chase men with rifles through alleys and valleys.

Churchill insisted Americans eventually do the right thing after they've done everything else. It's time for a new Secretary of Defense to do the right thing. It won't be easy, but the alternative is to risk a repetition of the bloody and cripplingly expensive debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran and the author of four books. His newest book is Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting published by Naval Institute Press.

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/03/02/fix-the-army-now/#ixzz1FTxEqAtV

So, Who Won the War in Iraq? Iran

2010-09-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

By Mohamad Bazzi

BEIRUT, Lebanon - In February 2003, as he marshaled the United States for war, President George W. Bush declared: "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."

Now, as the U.S. military concludes its combat role - which President Barack Obama will formally announce from the Oval Office on Tuesday - Iraq is indeed a dramatic example for the Middle East, but not in the ways that Bush and his administration envisioned. Iraq did not become a beacon of democracy, nor did it create a domino effect that toppled other dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Instead, the Iraq war has unleashed a new wave of sectarian hatred and upset the Persian Gulf's strategic balance, helping Iran consolidate its role as the dominant regional power.

The Bush administration argued that its goal was to protect U.S. interests and security in the long run. But the region is far more unstable and combustible than it was when U.S. forces began their march to Baghdad seven years ago. Throughout the Middle East, relations between Sunnis and Shiites are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis are worried about the regional ascendance of the Shiite-led regime in Iran; its nuclear program; its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership; and its meddling in other countries with large Shiite communities, especially Lebanon.

Iran is the biggest beneficiary of the American misadventure in Iraq. The U.S. ousted Tehran's sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shiite government for the first time in Iraq's modern history. As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq's Shiite factions.

Today's Middle East has been shaped by several proxy wars. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported Shiite militias. In Lebanon, an alliance between Washington and authoritarian Sunni Arab regimes - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries - backed a Sunni-led government against Hezbollah, a Shiite militia funded by Iran. And in the Palestinian territories, Iran and Syria supported the militant Hamas, while the U.S. and its Arab allies backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement.

In 2007, at the height of the insurgency and sectarian conflict in Iraq, I went to see Marwan Kabalan, a political scientist at Damascus University. He explained the regional dynamics better than anyone else. "Everyone is fighting battles through local proxies. It's like the Cold War," he told me. "All regimes in the Middle East recognize that America has lost the war in Iraq. They're all maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American defeat."

With U.S. influence waning and Iran ascendant, Iraq's other neighbors are still jockeying to gain a foothold with the new government in Baghdad. For example, Saudi Arabia's ruling Al-Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, but Iran is challenging that leadership right now. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran's potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shiite population concentrated in the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern Province. In Bahrain (another American ally in the Persian Gulf), the Shiite majority is chafing under Sunni rulers who also fear Iran's reach.

Even worse, the brutal war between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority unleashed sectarian hatreds that are difficult to contain. This blowback has been most keenly felt in Lebanon, a small country with a history of religious strife. During Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, the sectarian divide was between Muslims and Christians. This time, the conflict is mainly between Sunnis and Shiites - and it is fueled, in part, by the bloodbath in Iraq.

After Saddam was executed in December 2006, Sunnis saw the U.S. and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Although Saddam was once a dependable ally of the West, by the 1990s he was among the few Arab leaders who defied the United States and European powers. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering any replacement for it - other than sectarianism.

In 2007 and 2008, Lebanese Sunnis felt besieged as they watched news from Iraq of Shiite death squads executing Sunnis and driving them out of Baghdad neighborhoods. At the same time, Hezbollah was trying to topple the Sunni-led Lebanese government by staging street protests and a massive sit-in that paralyzed downtown Beirut. In January 2007, as they confronted Hezbollah supporters during a nationwide strike, groups of Sunnis waved posters of Saddam and chanted his name in front of TV cameras.

It was a rich contradiction: American-allied Sunnis in Lebanon carrying posters of Saddam, a dictator the U.S. had spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to depose. But it was also a declaration of war. Saddam, after all, killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq. Many Lebanese Shiites have relatives in Iraq, and the two communities have had close ties for centuries. Lebanon's political factions eventually compromised on a new government, but the underlying sectarian tensions are still in place, with everyone keeping a wary eye on Iraq.

As Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds argue over sharing power and the country's oil wealth, violence is on the rise yet again. The latest elections produced a deadlocked parliament in Baghdad that has not been able to agree on a new government. Far from becoming a model of freedom and religious coexistence, Iraq remains a powder keg that could ignite sectarian conflict across the Middle East.

Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Douglas Macgregor, PhD

www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100829/iraq-war-iran-US-military

Future U.S. Geostrategic Focus

2010-08-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

There will be plenty spirits of Iraq policy past, present and future crowding the dais tonight as the President announces a “successful” transition and “a promise kept” for the drawdown of American troops from Iraq.

There’s George W. and Dick Cheney and their ghoulish courtiers – Donald Rumsfeld and his number two Paul Wolfowitz, not to mention coalition provisional authority viceroy L. Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith, all who dragged the country into Iraq and then botched it irreparably.

Hovering close by are our military demigods, Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, gently plucking and pulling the strings of the president who is trying to convince the American people that Iraq is all but over, despite leaving 50,000 soldiers and a civilian force of at least 10,000 staff and heavily armed security contractors behind.

But the real phantasm casting a pall over the proceedings is an Iraqi one and he represents it all – the past, present and more importantly, the future of Iraq .Muqtada al Sadr, once dismissed by Washington neoconservatives as a desperate, washed-up five-cent firebrand, is now an Iranian-supported kingmaker who will not only help determine the next government and prime minister, but has threatened to activate the armed wing of his low-lying Mahdi Army, the Promised Day Brigade, if the American “occupier” doesn’t pack up and leave entirely.

The “Promised Day Brigade” will “prepare quietly to launch qualitative attacks against the occupiers ( U.S. forces) if they stay beyond 2011,” said Sadr spokesman Salah al-Obeidi, to the Associated Press, in May. “It will have a big role to play to drive them out of Iraq .”

Sadr is of course, an awkward subject for an administration attempting to project the best, most optimistic image in the rear-view. This was Bush’s war, and Obama seems eager to keep it that way, more so, to move on and to focus on his mess in Afghanistan. But he is having a hard time fully extricating – Odierno has already suggested scenarios in which the U.S combat mission might have to resume – and the fact that there is no government, and may not be any government without Sadr’s say-so, must be very difficult to stomach back in Washington.

Says writer Babak Dehghanpisheh, in his August Foreign Policy piece, “The King of Iraq“:

“The Sadrists … aren’t going anywhere – which puts Washington , among others, in a bind. Sadr’s supporters are more than just a political party. The cleric is clearly following the Hezbollah model, creating populist political movement backed by a battle-hardened militia. The language Sadr uses when discussing the U.S. presence in Iraq – resistance, occupation, martyrdom – could easily have been taken from a speech by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. All this has discouraged U.S. officials from holding talks with Sadr – something they’ve never done since 2003. It’s not exactly like Sadr has gone out of his way to open up a dialogue, either. In fact, Sadr and many of his top aides have made it clear that the Mahdi Army won’t disarm as long as there are American troops on Iraqi soil.”

From the start, the 37-year-old cleric, politician and militia leader has openly denounced the security agreement allowing for the gradual drawdown of troops by 2011. When the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was signed in 2008 by Bush and Sadr’s political rival, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Sadr promised blood in the streets unless the U.S left sooner.

“I repeat my call on the occupier to get out from the land of our beloved Iraq , without retaining bases or signing agreements,” said Sadr, who has been in religious training, and managing his political affairs from a safe perch in Iran for the last three years. “If they do stay, I urge the honorable resistance fighters … to direct their weapons exclusively against the occupier.” His words came a month after tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in Baghdad against the SOFA.

In a piece called “The Bad Boy of Iraqi Politics Returns,” Mohamad Bazzi points out how “Sadr’s political ascendance threatens to stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq,” which are particularly acute as a wave of violence, reportedly sparked by remaining al Qaeda factions in Iraq, have killed hundreds in the country over the last several weeks. While American leaders appear to downplay it, the fact that an anti-American Shia who once tested U.S military resolve in Najaf, Karbala , Basra and Baghdad , is gathering himself up for a big political victory and possibly, a future Shia revival, seems to be the silent ugly truth of Obama’s “successful” troop drawdown.

“Under the circumstances, (Sadr’s) power and influence inside Iraq ’s Shia community is both permanent and growing,” noted retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. “He is unlikely to lead the country, but he and his supporters will wield decisive influence.”

But We Thought He Was Dead!

Maybe not dead, but certainly defeated. A number of times – or at least it always seemed so. But he always comes back. Sadr is the son-in-law of a Shia martyr and the fourth son of the beloved Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was murdered in 1989 along with two of Sadr’s brothers, allegedly by Ba’athists working for dictator Saddam Hussein. Because Sadr’s father had sacrificed his life by remaining in Iraq rather than fleeing to Iran during Saddam’s dictatorship, his family name invokes great respect and authority among the Iraqi Shia to this day. Baghdad ’s Sadr City was later named for his martyrdom.

Muqtada al Sadr has only enhanced this influence and legitimacy among Sadrist Shia followers during the U.S war, for rebelling against and not consorting with “the occupier,” nor bending to the wills of Maliki or even Iran . Just last week, Sadr told his hosts in Iran that he will leave them and set up shop in Lebanon if they continue to exert pressure on him to join Maliki in a coalition government. The political situation has been in a stalemate since March when parties backed by Sadr and former prime minister Iyad Allawi won enough seats to break Maliki’s grip over the formation of the future government.

Sadr does not support, nor trust Maliki, after the Iraqi prime minister took up common cause with the Americans and helped lead a series of crackdowns on Sadrist strongholds, particularly Sadr City , in 2007 and 2008 as part of the infamous “Surge.” At the time, throughout several wobbly ceasefires and Sadr’s exile to Iran , his movement appeared doomed to the dustbin. Since then, Maliki’s forces have fully penetrated Sadr City , the remaining loyalist fighters seemingly melted away.

According to the Washington Post, Sadr froze the Mahdi Army’s activities in 2008 and “has since divided most of his men into two unarmed civic organizations called Mumahidoon, ‘those who pave the way,’ and Munasiroon, ‘the supporters,’ to provide services to the poor, protect mosques and study religion. The aforementioned Promised Day Brigade is the Mahdi’s only armed wing. Offshoots of the old army, referred to by the U.S military as “special groups,” operate independently, and often contrary, to Sadr’s leadership and goals.

But Muqtada’s influence among the Shia has always been second-guessed by American analysts. During a wave of Mahdi Army uprisings in 2004 in which Sadr’s forces briefly gained control of key Shia cities over American forces, neoconservative Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute called Sadr “a desperate man,” who wanted to “cash in on his family’s name,” and whose “support has hemorrhaged over the past several months.” A month later, Charles Krauthammer declared that Sadr’s militia, was “systematically taken down by the U.S military.”

Not quite – it turned out they had a few good fights left in them. Sadr, meanwhile, was not so disregarded by the Shia that he wasn’t able to influence the 2006 elections. Sadr-backed candidates won an impressive 30 seats in the election and helped to propel Maliki to the head of the government. Sadr’s political sway was only matched – and surpassed – in this way in March, when his candidates won 40 seats and a coveted place at the bargaining table.

“Sadr has once again shown greater political skill than the United States and his Iraqi rivals usually give him credit for,” wrote Mohamed Bazzi in July. Patrick Cockburn, author of Muqtada, told Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton recently that Sadr represented “the only grassroots movement in Iraq .”

As Cockburn explained in his book, while U.S media and government “demonizes and belittles” Sadr, his political – and physical – survival belies a strength that Americans may not be fully prepared to understand or ultimately overcome. “Muqtada and his followers are intensely religious and see themselves as following in the tradition of martyrdom in opposition to the tyranny established when Hussein and Abbas were killed by the Umayyads on the plains of Karbala fourteen hundred years ago,” writes Cockburn.

In other words, while the American lens might see Sadr as just another ambitious man seeking political control of Iraq, it may be missing the bigger picture, that Sadr is studying in Iran to become an ayatollah in the tradition of his family, perhaps seeking to become an authoritative, supreme religious leader who commands the politics and steers Iraq into a more purist Shia vision – one that has no place for the America’s own strategic vision for the Middle East.

The prospect for this should be what tickles the back of Obama’s neck as he takes to the podium this evening.

“The key point,” says Macgregor, “is we spent a trillion dollars, sacrificed and destroyed thousands of US lives and millions of Arab lives with the result that we changed nothing of significance inside Iraq .”

Douglas Macgregor, PhD

Response received from H. Mark R.

Dear Colonel Macgregor,

I am not a writer but your views on the HDNet show coincided so much with my deep down gut feelings that I decide to write my views.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I heard a speech by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, US Army retired, where he said “ America’s first concern should be prosperity because economic prosperity is the foundation of military power. We are not a great military power because we had genius generals. We are not a great military power because God necessarily selected us for this role. We are a great military power because of this economic engine that was constructed between the Civil War and World War I and then expanded as a result of World War II. That engine is in trouble.” Our number one concern, as taxpayers, should be economic prosperity.

Ask yourself the really tough question, was (is) Iraq worth it? Economists today say that the total cost of the Iraq war will total three (3) trillion dollars from the United States taxpayers. A number that is hard to comprehend. Was Iraq and taking down its leaders really worth 3 trillion dollars? Oh! I remember now; it was about those questionable weapons of mass destruction. How many problems of the United States could we have resolved with that amount of money? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, securing our borders, not increasing our national debt, education, roads and bridges, just to mention a few. I am talking about issues within our United States borders.

I support our Military; however, our leaders (the President, Congress, and Department of Defense) have let spending get out of hand. They are not asking the right questions. Today, the United States is spending 250 million A DAY in Afghanistan. According to experts, we could be there another 10 years. You do the math. How much is Afghanistan going to cost American taxpayers? What will we, the taxpayers, benefit from this Afghanistan expenditure? Will this help our economic prosperity?

What was the cost of Vietnam? What did that war cost in lives and dollars? Oh! I remember now, it was about that questionable Gulf of Tonkin issue. Did Vietnam help our economic prosperity?

Can anyone tell me how we get economic prosperity by spending trillions of dollars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? I understand the benefit to the military contractors like Halliburton and its subsidiaries, but what about main-street, the people like you and me?

The United States spends more on its military budget than the next 48 largest military budgets combined! Our military budget is about half of all the world's military budgets combined. Is this helping us achieve economic prosperity here in the United States? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? Opposition will say “safety.” Is spending trillions being “over there” really making the United States safer “over here?”

Colonel Douglas Macgregor states “If you take all of the tax revenues that we create every year in the United States, collectively they will pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s all. All other federal spending whether it is for the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy or Department of Defense comes from printed and borrowed money. Now my question and what every American citizen should ask is, “Is this sustainable?” I don’t think it is.”

I agree with Colonel Macgregor that it is not sustainable. Unless we stop spending our tax revenue for causes that do not make sense over the long run, we can say goodbye to economic prosperity and hello to bankruptcy.

Are we interested enough in democracy and this way of life to sit down and think things through on the really tough issues, to bring about real economic prosperity?

H. Mark R.

Four More Years Of War -- Just For Starters

2010-07-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

Four More Years Of War -- Just For Starters

First Posted: 07-30-10 09:30 AM | Updated: 07-30-10 10:33 AM

Dan Froomkin

froomkin@huffingtonpost.com

The ever-accumulating case against the war in Afghanistan was bolstered this week by WikiLeaks's dissemination of over 70,000 previously secret reports documenting in vivid and unvarnished detail the brutality and futility of the American mission there.

But even as the public's patience with the war in Afghanistan is growing shorter, the timeline for an American troop withdrawal appears to be growing longer.

There are increasingly clear signs that President Obama's vow to start withdrawing American troops less than a year from now will be fulfilled through a technicality if at all, and that the real timeline for significant troop withdrawal -- barring a change in course -- now extends at least to 2014, if not far beyond.

One signal was Vice President Joe Biden's offhand remark to ABC News earlier this month that the promised summer withdrawal "could be as few as a couple thousand troops" although "it could be more."

This from the administration's most prominent opponent of escalation, a man who had earlier said you could "bet on" a "whole lot of people moving out" in July 2011.

The uninspiring Senate testimony in mid-July from Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan , also raised red flags. Holbrooke repeatedly ducked questions about what the administration's desired "end state" is, and whether things are going along on schedule. He instead pointed senators toward a list of what he called "benchmarks."

But the document to which Holbrooke referred is in fact full of vague, sometimes entirely unmeasurable "milestones" that carry no deadlines and trigger no consequences.

"All of these benchmarks are designed to pacify onlookers on the Hill, help to justify our presence in the country, and set unrealistic goals that everyone knows are not going to be met," said retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a respected military strategist and author. "You're never going to achieve them. None of this is aimed at extricating American power and forces from anywhere."

So, asked for an exit strategy, the administration instead offered up guidelines for an endless occupation.

And then last week, in a nearly unnoticed development at an international conference in Kabul, world leaders including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed their "support for the President of Afghanistan's objective that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014."

That's right: The end of 2014.

"I was kind of struck that the 2014 didn't get more critical attention than it did," said Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA's top Middle East analysis and now a Georgetown University professor. "The war will have gone on 13 years at that point."

Pillar said he expected a strong public reaction along the lines of "Wait, what does that imply in terms of our troop presence? In terms of how fast or how slowly our withdrawal next year is going to go?" And: "Whoa, you mean it's going to be another four years from now... and even that's not total victory?"

And keep in mind that 2014 is the corrupt, ineffective Afghan President Hamid Karzai's best-case scenario. That's if all goes according to plan. And nothing in Afghanistan ever goes according to plan.

Indeed, the Guardian recently reported that plans made not so long ago to begin handing control of some provinces to Afghan security forces by the end of this year "have been quietly dropped."

The British paper also noted: "Gen. David Petraeus is said to be planning a campaign measured in years, not months."

The uselessness of the so-called "benchmarks" the administration is now citing, in a document entitled Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy, are particularly telling.

Some are specific -- but meaningless in the absence of a target date:

"That means you're going to create a national system in a place that has never been a nation-state?" asked Macgregor, the military strategist. "If you wait for that one, you will be in Afghanistan for about 200 years."

Some are delusional. For instance under the heading of reducing corruption:

Appointment of competent, reform-minded leaders of critical ministries... and also to key provincial and district positions in the South and East.

Macgregor grumbled to the Huffington Post: "If they find them there, they should recruit them and use them here first."

Some are naïve, delusional, unmeasurable and meaningless all at once.

Afghanistan's neighbors begin to shift their policies to reinforce increased cooperation, over time.

Macgregor sees the benchmarks not as reflecting a sincere attempt to describe a way out of Afghanistan . Rather he sees them as a witting or unwitting reflection of the neoconservative desire to keep the American military deployed in that region indefinitely. "They're designed to keep you in Afghanistan , because you're never going to achieve them," he said.

"If you wanted to pick a place that was a nightmare for every conceivable form of nation-building, Afghanistan would be it," Macgregor said. Only the people that live there can fix their problems, he said. "It's not going to happen as a result of military power."

It's worth noting that the benchmarks document itself apparently went through a pretty serious declawing process, sometime between last September, when the Foreign Policy website got hold of an early draft, and January, when the first version of the existing plan was first released.

For instance, gone from the new plan is this commitment:

By March 30, 2010 and on regular intervals thereafter, the interagency will draft an assessment of progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan . As a check and balance on the interagency, a separate assessment will also be produced by a Red Team, led by the National Intelligence Council."

In the earlier draft, but missing from the final version, are actually measurable metrics, such as "percent of population living in districts/areas under insurgent control" and "Afghan Government's institutions at the national, provincial, and local level, including ability to hold credible elections in 2009 and 2010" (already quite definitively resolved to the negative.)

The administration's aversion to real benchmarks is understandable, to a certain extent. So far, all accountability has got them is heartache.

Specifically, in audit report after audit report, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Arnold Fields, has exposed major problems not just in accomplishing key goals, but also in the administration's attempts at measuring them.

For instance, the successful development of Afghan security forces is, of course, central to Obama's strategy. But the SIGAR reported last month that the "Capability Milestone" rating system (CM) that has been the Pentagon's primary metric for measuring the development of Aghan forces had overstated their capabilities.

Among other problems the SIGAR found, top-rated Afghan units were not capable of what the Pentagon said they were, and the rating system didn't sufficiently account for such endemic problems as attrition, corruption, poor leadership, drug abuse, and illiteracy.

And then there's the single biggest problem with benchmarks: Their fundamental misuse by this administration, just like the last one. Benchmarks only really mean something if meeting them -- or failing to meet them -- has consequences.

But Obama, just like George W. Bush did with Iraq, refuses to say what message he will take from these assessments. If we meet the benchmarks, does that mean mission accomplished and we can leave? And more realistically, if we fail to meet the benchmarks, does that mean we have to try harder? Or does it mean that we finally acknowledge the futility of the enterprise and withdraw?

Ironically, it was then-senator Obama who, back in 2007, asked then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice the exact questions he won't answer today, namely: What if things don't go according to plan? What if the occupied country's government remains in shambles? What exactly are the benchmarks for success? And what are the consequences if they are not met? Is the United States really willing to walk away? (See my December column, Obama's Questions for Obama.)

But when it comes to the "or else" part of the benchmarks, Obama, just like Bush, is boxed in because he has declared this to be a war that we must win.

Meanwhile, however, Obama remains on the record as saying that his commitment to Afghanistan is not open-ended. "There's gotta be an exit strategy," he told CBS News last April. "There's gotta be a sense that this is not perpetual drift."

But perpetual drift is as good a description of what we're seeing today as any. And the longer the drift continues, the louder the voices of concern and dissent will get.

Already, there are signs that the political dynamic that has fueled our war efforts may be shifting. Since 9/11, continuing the war has generally been seen by politicians as synonymous with supporting the troops and keeping our nation secure. (It's the ultimate victory of the Neocons.) In reality, of course, they are not synonymous at all -- if anything, they are inimical. But with the Republican Party in lockstep behind the war effort, the Democratic leadership -- terrified of appearing weak -- has gone along enthusiastically.

Now, however, there are signs that some Republicans are joining forces with some Democrats in opposing the war.

So far, they are short of critical mass.

In a series of votes in the House on July 1, a measure to provide funds only for a withdrawal won 100 votes. A measure to create a timetable for withdrawal drew 162 votes of support.

And on Tuesday, 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans to oppose Obama's war supplemental in its entirety, resulting in a 308-114 vote.

With polls showing a distinct drop in support for the war, and opposition growing in Congress, Obama's options may soon become more limited.

"I think the political pressures back here are going to push the Obama administration into something more rapid than that 2014 implies," said Pillar.

WATCH Obama questions Condoleezza Rice about the Iraq benchmarks in 2003:

Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.

News Alert: Secret Archive Gives Grim View of Afghan War

2010-07-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

Hopefully, the revelations from these archives, especially about the inadequacy of the deployed forces, equipment, generalship and RoE in Afghanistan even with the "surge," and the perfidious duplicity of so-called "allies" and "partners" in Kabul and Islamabad, along with the acute lack of progress on most fronts, will make it clear that the US and NATO need to pack up their civilians and conventional forces and withdraw quickly, and totally shift to a punitive policy of seeking out and liquidating international Islamist terrorists and those harboring them inside and outside of the United States. The United States cannot afford to modernize, secularize, liberalize, democratize, or even enduringly stabilize Afghanistan , let alone, the Islamic World even if it was possible to do so and it is not. We should withdraw and let the centuries-old Great Game between India , Russia , and Iran play out without wasting American, British, French and other allied blood and treasure in a pointless military intervention.

A gradual pull-out will only lengthen the agony, increasing the cost in lives and resources without changing the ultimate outcome: persistent civil and cross border conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan . There is no point in delaying the inevitable withdrawal and the equally inevitable de facto division of Afghanistan along ethnic and cultural lines. The same holds true for pulling out of Iraq . Extending the time will not alter the strategic outcome.

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Sun, July 25, 2010 -- 5:27 PM ET
-----
Secret Archive Gives Grim View of Afghan War

A six-year archive of classified military documents to be
made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level
picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects
more grim than the official portrayal.

Read More:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html?emc=na

Seized sub quantum leap for narcos... and terrorists

2010-07-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Remember that most of the major narco-trafficantes also provide services-for-hire to Islamist extremists. A submarine like this one operated by Latino Drug Traffickers can carry many things including Chemical, Biological and Nuclear materials into American coastal waters along with the Muslim Terrorists to employ them.

The Muslim Terrorists who directly threaten the American people are not in Afghanistan or Iraq . They are operating right now from Central and South America against us, using our open borders and coastal waters to infiltrate into the US . Nothing we are doing in Afghanistan , Iraq , Somalia , Yemen or anywhere else in the Islamic World is securing the American people against the growing nexus of terrorism and criminality in the Caribbean Basin . Thanks, Doug Macgregor

DEA: Seized submarine quantum leap for narcos
FRANK BAJAK
From Associated Press
July 04, 2010 7:14 PM EDT

Flotilla Fallout

2010-06-18T02:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4668157&c=FEA&s=COM

Flotilla Fallout
Damage Done by Israel 's Raid Echoes in Region

By U.S. ARMY COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET.)
Published: 14 June 2010

No one predicted the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico , particularly after the largely accident-free drilling of thousands of off-shore oil wells. Neither could anyone have predicted that Israeli troops would kill Turkish civilians in Israel 's effort to block last week's humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza .
Yet these recent events are creating a proverbial sea change in the Middle East , one that signals the end of Israeli-Turkish security cooperation and friendship, the keystone in the region's American-sponsored security architecture since the end of World War II.

Washington's eyes are now justifiably riveted on Ankara where the sea change is well underway. The attack on the Turkish-flagged ship and the killing of Turkish citizens was an affront to Turkish national pride. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey 's prime minister and a devout Muslim, confronts the situation with the wholehearted support of an enraged Turkish population.

Turkey is the 13th-largest economy in the world. Its military establishment, the largest among European NATO members, is also well-equipped, disciplined and aggressively nationalistic. Turkey , not Iran , is the region's true superpower, a nation-state with the power to create a new Middle East.

The big unknown for Washington is what Erdogan will do next. Will Erdogan direct the Turkish military to escort the next humanitarian flotilla into Gaza ? How will the Turkish generals, who view themselves as the guardians of secularism inside Turkish society, react?

Surely, the Turkish generals who've cooperated closely with the American and Israeli military establishments are frantically searching for a way out of the crisis. Or, perhaps this thinking is wrong; perhaps this crisis has inadvertently forged a bond between Turkey 's Islamist prime minister and Turkey 's secular military leaders?

Terrible Timing

The crisis could not come at a worse time. Washington is betting heavily on the Turks to help stabilize Iraq as U.S. forces withdraw. Erdogan has worked hard to end the Kurdish-Turkish conflict, which has claimed 40,000 lives, even sanctioning the use of the Kurdish language in all Turkish broadcast media and political campaigns.

For Turkey , which tends to view Iraq 's Kurdistan Regional Government as indistinguishable from the violently anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party, better known as the PKK, this development has been nothing short of a miracle.

Once again, events in Gaza may put these arrangements at risk. Turks, secular or Islamist, never had much incentive to allow anti-Turkish Kurds to exploit 3 percent of the world's oil reserves in northern Iraq to bankroll regional aims and terrorism against Turkey.

Ankara and Tehran have reportedly discussed spheres of influence in Iraq when the United States leaves, giving Turkey control of Iraq 's northern (Kurdish) territory, as well as its enormous oil wealth, leaving Iran to control the central and southern Iraq through its Shiite Arab surrogates in Baghdad .

Now, Turkey and Iran may form substantive agreements that are antithetical to Washington 's interests.

Meanwhile, if a confrontation with the Turks over Gaza ensued, Turkish conventional military strength might lead Israel to threaten use of nuclear weapons against Turkey . If NATO, under pressure from Washington , refused to acknowledge Turkey 's protection under Article V of the NATO Charter (NATO's nuclear umbrella), then NATO would certainly dissolve and the Turks would likely turn to Russia , Iran or even China for support.

Ankara also could go nuclear much faster than Tehran , given the assistance of the Pakistani military establishment, the Turkish military's longtime strategic partner.

For the moment, things are unlikely to go this far, but no one in the United States or Israel should miss the long-term strategic impact of the American and Israeli military occupations of Iraq and Palestine . Both created radicalized groups and embittered Muslim populations scarred by the unwanted presence of foreign troops.

Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Palestine enabled Hizbollah and Hamas to emerge as viable political forces, while U.S. military occupation of Iraq expanded Iranian strategic power and influence.

Eventually, the United States will tire of pouring billions into contractors and making payoffs to Arabs and Afghans and withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan . But the Israelis contend with an insoluble security problem at their very gates. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's words, in Gaza and in the rest of the Palestinian territories, " Israel has a wolf by the ear, and Israel can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Whatever course Israel adopts in the months ahead, it must measure carefully what it might gain from maintaining the blockade by what it might lose, not just in Gaza , but from the Nile to the Black Sea .

---
U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor (Ret.) is a fellow at the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, Washington. His latest of four books is "Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting."

Surgin' Safari

2009-12-30T18:15:00.000-08:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald discovered long ago that people can be stroked with words. In Washington, DC everyone likes flattery; and when it comes to generals and politicians inside the beltway, a smart journalist lays it on with enthusiasm if he wants the access he needs to write stories that translate into money. As Jeff Huber points out, this sort of behavior has grave consequences for U.S. National Security. In the course of cultivating access, the truth, the very thing the vaunted Third Estate claims to seek is entirely lost.

AntiWar.com
December 29, 2009

Another Surgin’ Safari

by Jeff Huber

Devotees of President Obama’s plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan hope to repeat the "success" of our surge in Iraq. That’s likely to prove easier to accomplish than even the most rabid Afghanistan surge proponent dares to hope.

The Iraq surge was already in motion in January 2007, when Bush and Cheney flipped off the Iraq Study Group and decided to escalate the war with David Petraeus, the "Teflon General," at the helm of the operation. A shameless self-promoter, "King David" created the illusion of a successful surge by lowering violence statistics through his usual method of operation: hand out weapons to the bad guys, bribe the bad guys not to use the weapons, and pretend to be shocked, shocked when the bad guys take the bribes and use the weapons anyway.

Petraeus’ personal stenographer, former journalist Thomas E. Ricks, admits that Petraeus misled Congress and the public into thinking he was trying to end the war when he was in fact laying "the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq."

Three years after the surge began, violence shows no signs of disappearing. Holiday attacks were especially brutal. Mosul Mayor Zuhair Muhsen al-Aaraji escaped an assassination attempt on Christmas Eve. (Mosul is the town Petraeus supposedly "tamed" during his first tour in Iraq. Within weeks after he left and the graft well ran dry, Mosul went up for grabs and has been a trouble spot ever since.)

Also on December 24, as the Shi’ite religious festival of Ashura approached, five attacks killed at least 19 people and wounded over 100. The Iraqi government was quick to blame al-Qaeda in Iraq, but I’ll bet you a shiny new Ohio quarter that the Sunni-based Awakening movement that Petraeus armed and funded had more than a little something to do with the attacks.

On Christmas Day, a roadside bomb killed six Shi’ites during a religious ceremony in Baghdad. In several parts of the country, fights broke out between Christians and Shi’ites over competing religious decorations.

Many Iraqi Christians were afraid to make any public celebration of Christmas. Midnight mass had to be observed in daylight. A bomb exploded near a historic Christian church in Mosul on December 23, killing two people and wounding five. Security around Christian churches was the heaviest it has been since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

On December 22, a series of coordinated car bombings killed 112 people in Baghdad. This was the third coordinated attack on Baghdad in four months; the bombs struck areas near justice buildings, a Finance Ministry office, and a police checkpoint, symbols of government authority all under tight security after the earlier bomb attacks.

On October 18, a roadside bombing and other attacks killed 10 U.S. troops, making it the deadliest day for American forces in 10 months. (We have, by the way, spent over $14 billion on programs to defeat roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices [IEDs] and have yet to find a solution. The Army’s Joint IED Defeat Organization [JEIDDO] rather symbolizes our entire war on terror: mind-numbing amounts of treasure poured down a rabbit hole to no avail.)

Iraqi security forces have proven unable to provide the security necessary to keep the peace. That should come as no surprise: the man in charge of training them in 2004 and 2005 was Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who, in that capacity, lost track of over 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols that without question found their way into the hands of militia groups. This happened while the staff at the U.S. Army War College was assembling the new field manual on counterinsurgency operations that Petraeus later took credit for writing, a myth that Ricks and other media sycophants helped propagate.

The best summary of the "success" of the Iraq surge came in the form of a July memorandum from Army Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Advisory Team, titled "It’s Time for the U.S. to Declare Victory and Go Home."

Reese describes the "ineffectiveness and corruption" of the Iraqi government as "the stuff of legend." The so-called anti-corruption initiative is merely a campaign tool for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki’s government is taking "no rational steps" to improve the country’s infrastructure or oil exploration. Sunni reconciliation is "at best at a standstill and probably going backwards." The Kurdish situation "continues to fester." Political violence and intimidation is "rampant."

There is no possibility of implanting a "professional military culture" in Iraq’s security forces. Corruption in the officer corps is "widespread." Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are "rampant." Laziness is "endemic." Lack of initiative is "legion." Iraq’s security force’s "near total ineffectiveness" prevents it from becoming self-sustaining.

Gen. Ray "Desert Ox" Odierno, Petraeus’ handpicked successor as overall commander in Iraq who Ricks laughably claims was the real brain behind the Iraq surge, calls Reese’s concerns mere "tactical issues."

Gen. Stan "The Man" McChrystal, whom Petraeus handpicked to command in Af-Pak, has been charged with leading a successful surge in that theater of operations. Given the corruption that exists in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the incompetence and corruption in their militaries, and the seemingly uncontrollable levels of violence in both countries, I’d say McChrystal is well on his way to surpassing the accomplishments of Petraeus and Odierno by a wide margin.

In fact, I see no reason why President Barack Obama shouldn’t fly aboard an aircraft carrier tomorrow and declare "mission accomplished" in Af-Pak.

It Won’t Work

2009-12-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/obamas-surge-strategy-in-afghanistan/

It Won’t Work

Douglas Macgregor is a retired Army colonel. He is author of “Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting.”

***************

President Obama may or may not realize that Generals Petraeus and McChrystal cannot fix Afghanistan. They cannot stabilize or control it. They cannot put a dent in the heroin trade, because we have nothing with which to replace it.

Adding more American troops to the Afghan morass merely diverts attention from the 120,000 U.S. troops languishing in Iraq.

Nor can the generals prevent Pakistan from moving ever closer to its nuclear showdown with India. What Petraeus and McChrystal can do is further entangle the United States, its resources and its forces in an unending war inside the ungovernable wasteland that lies between Iran and India.

For the political forces inside the Beltway desperate to keep the war going, adding 30,000 more American troops –- all we can realistically come up with at this point –- to the Afghan morass may be just enough to divert attention from the 120,000 United States troops still languishing in Iraq at the cost of billions we don’t have each month.

Mr. Obama must also know that widening the war inside Afghanistan to fight millions of Pashtun tribesmen is the equivalent of ending world hunger and poverty. It won’t work.

But it will help transform the Taliban’s fight with President Hamid Karzai’s corrupt narco-state into a Pashtun war of liberation against the unwanted American military presence that supports Mr. Karzai.

Still, pressing economic conditions at home combined with the realization that whenever the last American leaves Afghanistan it will look remarkably similar to the way it looked before our arrival may ultimately change Mr. Obama’s strategic calculus. However, until then, he will look a lot more like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, presidents who capitulated to the fear of seeming weak. Fortunately for Mr. Obama, his course in Afghanistan is not irreversible. Roughly 30,000 to 35,000 troops is not 300,000.

U.S. Army Drafts Some Specs for New Vehicles

2009-08-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

See the article below.

Funny, but General Vane argued just months ago how the MGV was definitely the answer to the 'lessons learned in Afghanistan' requirement (see his quote below in last February's Defense News). Now it's the son-of-FCS. Setting aside the inaccuracy of his claims about American armor and its value in AFPAK, it is both comical and sad to see how Chameleon-like this general is. There is obviously not the slightest bit of actual conviction behind his words, only whatever script he's handed. Whenever the wind changes direction so do the generals and that’s the real problem from acquisition to AFPAK. Doug

Michael A. Vane from February 2009 in Defense News: "Q. How is the Army adapting to the challenges of Afghanistan? A. One of the things that is not talked about very much is that we need to be an expeditionary force. When you think about going into Afghanistan with small units separated from their higher headquarters over a country much larger than Iraq, you ask how are you going to bring the network into small units? How are you going to get coms into small units? What the MGV [Manned-Ground Vehicle] brings is the network embedded in the platform. Instead of having to bring a whole bunch of stuff with you when you go to Afghanistan or someplace else, now you have the network embedded into the platforms, so you are bringing the infrastructure with you. Now, you can share a common picture from enclave to enclave. If you get away from the forward operating base in some of your heavier vehicles in Afghanistan, you are going to have a hard time operating. You will find that with MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles]. MGV brings you that tractability. The MGV is a lighter vehicle that can operate off-road. Right now, tanks, Bradleys and Paladins can't get there."

full article: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3958918

Defense News
August 10, 2009

U.S. Army Drafts Some Specs for New Vehicles

By KRIS OSBORN

The U.S. Army’s next armored vehicles may have V-hulls and tracks, and should definitely be better protected than the canceled Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicles, according to a draft paper that will shape the formal requirements for the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV).

The service plans to buy hundreds of GCVs over the next 10 to 20 years for use throughout the force. The first models are slated to be ready within five to seven years.

The paper, which details lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, codifies the decade long shift away from a vehicle mix focused on all-out war, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, part of Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va. “We need to look closer at the lessons of close-quarter combat and IEDs — the ability to attack our vehicles horizontally and from the top,” Vane said. Unlike the FCS vehicles, the new GCVs will likely not share a common chassis.

“There is a set of attributes that we want the ground combat vehicles to have,” Vane said. “Depending on the role or function, it may have a greater set or lesser set of that attribute. Rather than [sharing the] same chassis, they may need different levels of force protection lethality; some may need a different set of sensors.” The paper is the work of Fort Monroe-based Task Force 120, which was established to draft new vehicle requirements after FCS was canceled earlier this year. The group drew on input from soldiers, Marines, program engineers and key allies such as Britain, Germany and other NATO countries.

It will be presented to Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army chief of staff, the week of August 10, along with related papers.

The requirements are slated to be finished by September 7, and then to go for approval to Army and Pentagon decision-makers before Army developers begin sketching vehicle designs. The papers indicate that the new vehicles will likely:

■ Be heavier than the 27-ton FCS Manned Ground Vehicles, with more traditional armor.

■ Not have a common chassis.

■ Be built to carry more nonlethal weapons.

■ Accept new networking gear and armor as it arrives.

The GCV might have a V-shaped hull, even if it rolls on tracks.

“We have to be concerned about deployability, transportability and reliability. All of those will become important factors in determining whether they should be a V-shaped vehicle,” Vane said. “V-shaped hulls and flat-bottom hulls can achieve the level of protection desired, but there are a lot of other variables such as the weight of the vehicle, the wheel wells and final drives in the case of a tracked vehicle.”

Heavy Weapons

Army officials also are thinking about putting on the GCVs offensive weapons that once would have been reserved for heavier vehicles. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and more mobile 12-ton vehicles have created new possibilities, and one of the canceled 20-ton FCS vehicles was to carry a 120mm gun of the sort carried only on 50-ton Abrams tanks.

“We’ve seen some tremendous advances ... wheeled vehicles that can be more mobile than they were five or six years ago with a lot of weight,” Vane said.

The Army may configure more MRAPs as ambulances and command-and-control vehicles, allowing commanders to tailor forces to specific missions, Vane said.

One analyst said the Army is working hard to keep the money once slated for FCS secure for the new program. It totals $100 million for 2010, as a starting point.

“A lot of that shows after what they went through with FCS, they are open to anything right now,” said Dean Lockwood, a policy analyst with Forecast International, a Connecticut-based think tank. “They don’t want to make the same mistakes they made with FCS. They will do this incrementally and move through the next generation one thing at a time, because trying to do it all or nothing at once fell flat on its face.

“They will try to phase in new technologies as they become available,” he said. “That way, they are not overshooting in terms of technologies and budgets.” Lockwood said the Army may seek to emulate the rapid development approach of the MRAP. “They may be thinking in terms of a quick turnaround program.” he said. “They went from proposal to con tract in a matter of weeks - — rather than years, the way it used to be.”

Bacevich is Right!

2009-08-12T02:36:00.000-07:00

In 1991 the United States government was perfectly willing to stand by while the Shiite Arabs and Kurds rebelled, toppled Saddam Hussein, and formed whatever government they deemed appropriate. In 1991, no one in Washington thought a U.S. military occupation was either necessary or advisable to “oversee” the installation of a new Iraqi government. It is tragic, indeed, that the U.S. government did not reach the same conclusion in 2003.

The twelve years of containment, the 2003 combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the misguided attempt to establish a secular, Western-style democratic state in a region where it has no chance of surviving, and the Sunni Arab rebellion against the U.S. military presence cost the American people 36,000 battle casualties and a trillion dollars. The number of Muslim Arabs killed as a result of the U.S. military occupation is anyone’s guess. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been wounded, killed, or incarcerated. At least two million Iraqi Arabs now live in refugee camps in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Two million more are refugees inside Iraq. When U.S. forces leave Iraq, more fighting is expected as the various parties inside Iraq struggle to consolidate their respective political and economic power. Only Iran benefits from these conditions.

In the end, the US must "abandon Iraq to its fate." It has no other choice. Whether the US stays another 3 months, 18 months, or 18 years, the country will either become a Shi'ite Islamist dictatorship supported by Iran and, perhaps with Turkish Troops in Kurdistan, or it will break apart into ethno-religious warfare and become the natural battleground between Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and the Gulf Arabs, each backing one or more of the warring factions. Think of a larger, potentially oil-rich Lebanon and you have the future Iraq.

Now, please explain how sacrificing a 1,000 additional American lives to consolidate Maliki's grip on Baghdad plus paying the Sunni Arab rebels 25+million a month in hard cash can be termed a triumph in counter-insurgency? It is very hard to swallow the Neocon/Petraeus narrative that American military power has achieved anything of strategic value for the United States and the West in Iraq.

In fact, if we continue to stay and meddle inside Iraq, we will see our casualties rise again as Colonel Reese has warned; especially since we are no long paying the usual tribute to the Sunni leaders. Right now, Odierno is debating whether to restart the payments because the Maliki government has no intention of paying the Sunnis anything and there is real concern that if we do not, we will find new IEDs wherever we go.

Now to Afghanistan and the future of counter-insurgency in the land that time forgot.

According to the self-appointed experts on CoIn, the key to success in CoIn/SASO operations is learning/knowing the terrain, including "human terrain," and that is hard to do when only in country 6-9 months. Historically, such operations require long-term presence by people who really become comfortable living among the population, learning their culture & social structures, and at least some of their language. In this sense, Afghanistan is the worst of all COIN worlds.

If we use advanced technology to eliminate the few genuine terrorists with any ties to Islamists who want to attack the United States, we will inevitably kill the so-called non-combatants who are their logistics, intelligence, and general support personnel. If there are any survivors, they are great at sanitizing the victims and making even terrorists look like innocent non-combatants. If we go in close to positively and painstakingly identify individual insurgent/terrorists and kill them with small arms or, even better, capture them for interrogation, we will increase our own loss rates (because we've gone down to fight them at their level of warfare and on their turf) and, if we take prisoners, there are whole new opportunities to create "atrocities" (both real ones and propaganda ones).

The principle problem in Afghanistan is not AQ or the Taliban. It’s the disgruntled and backward Pashtun Tribes or about 43 million people who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are fed up with the corrupt regimes in Kabul and Islamabad. They don’t like us and they don’t like the AQ Arabs either, but they really hate Karzai and the Paki government. In fact, the drone strikes on Pakistan would not bother them in the least if we actually killed the AQ Arabs. Unfortunately, we don’t usually manage that.

More important, in a Soviet Army report prepared two years after the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan, the Soviet General Staff formulated a requirement for 600,000 troops just to control the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Then, they urged withdrawal instead saying that 600,000 troops would not permanently change anything in the country. Unfortunately, the Politburo wasted years reaching the same conclusion.

What we in the West have done in Iraq and Afghanistan is unknowingly illuminate the clash between modernity and antiquity. In Afghanistan it is more acute than Iraq, but it’s true for both places. We revel in moral principle when justifying our actions but in actuality we wreak nothing but havoc and destruction on a world we do not understand and have come to hate.

Our soldiers learn to detest and look down upon the native Muslim populations as inferior, while we impose our will in terms of government, and laws in the hopes of educating the ignorant and caring for the sick. In reality our efforts are always compromised by the resistance to our impositions, as well as our instinctive hatred for the backwardness of the Muslim peoples.

In this sense, Bacevich is absolutely right. There is nothing to win. All we in the West do is lose time, money, blood and resources. Meanwhile the backward culture subsists on persecution and its life is extended. We change nothing. In fact, we make strategic conditions for ourselves worse as we have in Iraq.

Bottom Line: Counterinsurgency practiced by Western Forces in Islamic and other Non-European regions is a dangerous and destructive illusion that provides comfort to confused Westerners obsessed with the “White Man’s Burden” and those who equate the deaths of Muslims anywhere with a good outcome.

Better we secure our borders, get control of immigration into the US – legal and illegal – save our money and limit our military operations in these regions to securing our trade and to punitive military expeditions when absolutely necessary. But we must stop wasting lives and money on these culturally dysfunctional societies. We cannot drag them through the renaissance, the reformation, the enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They will have to do these things themselves.

Thanks, Doug Macgregor

Commonweal
Volume CXXXVI, Number 14

The War We Can’t Win

Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power

Andrew J. Bacevich

History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators.

From time to time, in some moment of peril or anxiety, a statesman appears on the scene promising to eliminate tyranny, ensure the triumph of liberty, and achieve permanent peace. For a moment, the statesman achieves the status of prophet, one who in his own person seemingly embodies the essence of the American purpose. Then reality intrudes, exposing the promises as costly fantasies. The prophet’s followers abandon him. Mocked and reviled, he is eventually banished—perhaps to some gated community in Dallas.

Yet however brief his ascendancy, the discredited prophet leaves behind a legacy. Most obvious are the problems created and left unresolved, commitments made and left unfulfilled, debts accrued and left unpaid. Less obvious, but for that reason more important, are the changes in perception.

The prophet recasts our image of reality. Long after his departure, remnants of that image linger and retain their capacity to beguile: consider how the Wilsonian vision of the United States as crusader state called upon to redeem the world in World War I has periodically resurfaced despite Woodrow Wilson’s own manifest failure to make good on that expectation. The prophet declaims and departs. Yet traces of his testimony, however at odds with the facts, remain lodged in our consciousness.

So it is today with Afghanistan, the conflict that George W. Bush began, then ignored, and finally bequeathed to his successor. Barack Obama has embraced that conflict as “the war we must win.” Those who celebrated Bush’s militancy back in the intoxicating days when he was promising to rid the world of evil see Obama’s enthusiasm for pressing on in Afghanistan as a vindication of sorts. They are right to do so.

The misguided and mismanaged global war on terror reduced Bush’s presidency to ruin. The candidate whose run for high office derived its energy from an implicit promise to repudiate all that Bush had wrought now seems intent on salvaging something useful from that failed enterprise—even if that means putting his own presidency at risk. When it comes to Afghanistan, Obama may be singing in a different key, but to anyone with an ear for music—especially for military marches—the melody remains intact.

Candidate Obama once derided the notion that the United States is called upon to determine the fate of Iraq. President Obama expresses a willingness to expend untold billions—not to mention who knows how many lives—in order to determine the fate of Afghanistan. Liberals may have interpreted Obama’s campaign pledge to ramp up the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan as calculated to insulate himself from the charge of being a national-security wimp. Events have exposed that interpretation as incorrect. It turns out—apparently—that the president genuinely views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. national-security interest.

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place.

Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. Consumed with its ABC agenda—“anything but Clinton” was the Bush administration’s watchword in those days—the people at the top didn’t have their eye on the ball. So we let ourselves get sucker-punched. Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses.

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Of course, Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how Brits, Russians, or other foreigners have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until just recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around.

Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in late 2006 when President Bush announced his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy. Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues.

Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

Six-plus years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than forty-three hundred American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for an-other five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Given the embarrassing yet indisputable fact that this was an utterly needless war—no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad—to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere, is nothing short of obscene. The great unacknowledged lesson of Iraq is the one that the writer Norman Mailer identified decades ago: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.”

For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say, Mexico? In terms of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor—a major supplier of oil and drugs among other commodities deemed vital to the American way of life—out-ranks Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude.

If one believes that moral considerations rather than self-interest should inform foreign policy, Mexico still qualifies for priority attention. Consider the theft of California. Or consider more recently how the American appetite for illicit drugs and our liberal gun laws have corroded Mexican institutions and produced an epidemic of violence afflicting ordinary Mexicans. We owe these people, big-time.

Yet any politician calling for the commitment of sixty thousand U.S. troops to Mexico to secure those interests or acquit those moral obligations would be laughed out of Washington—and rightly so. Any pundit proposing that the United States assume responsibility for eliminating the corruption that is endemic in Mexican politics while establishing in Mexico City effective mechanisms of governance would have his license to pontificate revoked. Anyone suggesting that the United States possesses the wisdom and the wherewithal to solve the problem of Mexican drug trafficking, to endow Mexico with competent security forces, and to reform the Mexican school system (while protecting the rights of Mexican women) would be dismissed as a lunatic. Meanwhile, those who promote such programs for Afghanistan, ignoring questions of cost and ignoring as well the corruption and ineffectiveness that pervade our own institutions, are treated like sages.

The contrast between Washington’s preoccupation with Afghanistan and its relative indifference to Mexico testifies to the distortion of U.S. national security priorities induced by George W. Bush in his post-9/11 prophetic mode—distortions now being endorsed by Bush’s successor. It also testifies to a vast failure of imagination to which our governing classes have succumbed.

This failure of imagination makes it literally impossible for those who possess either authority or influence in Washington to consider the possibility (a) that the solution to America’s problems is to be found not out there—where “there” in this case is Central Asia-but here at home; (b) that the people out there, rather than requiring our ministrations, may well be capable of managing their own affairs relying on their own methods; and (c) that to disregard (a) and (b) is to open the door to great mischief and in all likelihood to perpetrate no small amount of evil. Needless to say, when mischief or evil does occur—when a stray American bomb kills a few dozen Afghan civilians, for instance—the costs of this failure of imagination are not borne by the people who inhabit the leafy neighborhoods of northwest Washington, who lunch at the Palm or the Metropolitan Club, and school their kids at Sidwell Friends.

So the answer to the question of the hour—What should the United States do about Afghanistan?—comes down to this: A sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach. As with Uruguay or Fiji or Estonia or other countries where U.S. interests are limited, the United States should undertake to secure those interests at the lowest cost possible.

What might this mean in practice? General Petraeus, now commanding United States Central Command, recently commented that “the mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and other transnational extremists,” in effect “to deny them safe havens in which they can plan and train for such attacks.”

The mission statement is a sound one. The current approach to accomplishing the mission is not sound and, indeed, qualifies as counterproductive. Note that denying Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan hasn’t required U.S. forces to occupy the frontier regions of that country. Similarly, denying Al Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan shouldn’t require military occupation by the United States and its allies.

It would be much better to let local authorities do the heavy lifting. Provided appropriate incentives, the tribal chiefs who actually run Afghanistan are best positioned to prevent terrorist networks from establishing a large-scale presence. As a backup, intensive surveillance complemented with precision punitive strikes (assuming we can manage to kill the right people) will suffice to disrupt Al Qaeda’s plans. Certainly, that approach offers a cheaper and more efficient alter-native to establishing a large-scale and long-term U.S. ground presence—which, as the U.S. campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, has the unintended effect of handing jihadists a recruiting tool that they are quick to exploit.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, all the talk—much of it emanating from neoconservative quarters—was about achieving a “decisive victory” over terror. The reality is that we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to. As long as we maintain adequate defenses, Al Qaeda operatives, hunkered down in their caves, pose no more than a modest threat. As for the Taliban, unless they manage to establish enclaves in places like New Jersey or Miami, the danger they pose to the United States falls several notches below the threat posed by Cuba, which is no threat at all.

As for the putatively existential challenge posed by Islamic radicalism, that project will prove ultimately to be a self-defeating one. What violent Islamists have on offer-a rejection of modernity that aims to restore the caliphate and unify the ummah [community]—doesn’t sell. In this regard, Iran—its nuclear aspirations the subject of much hand-wringing—offers considerable cause for hope. Much like the Castro revolution that once elicited so much angst in Washington, the Islamic revolution launched in 1979 has failed resoundingly. Observers once feared that the revolution inspired and led by the Ayatollah Khomeini would sweep across the Persian Gulf. In fact, it has accomplished precious little. Within Iran itself, the Islamic republic no longer represents the hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people, as the tens of thousands of protesters who recently filled the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities made evident. Here we see foretold the fate awaiting the revolutionary cause that Osama bin Laden purports to promote.

In short, time is on our side, not on the side of those who proclaim their intention of turning back the clock to the fifteenth century. The ethos of consumption and individual autonomy, privileging the here and now over the eternal, will conquer the Muslim world as surely as it is conquering East Asia and as surely as it has already conquered what was once known as Christendom. It’s the wreckage left in the wake of that conquest that demands our attention. If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: “Come home, America.” The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”

Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking—in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Leave Now, Not Later

2009-08-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

In a memo that has been made public by The Times, Col. Timothy Reese, a senior American military adviser in Baghdad, calls “for the U.S. to declare victory and go home.” He argues that Iraqi forces are competent enough to handle internal threats to their government, and that extending the American military presence in Iraq beyond 2010 could fuel a growing resentment. Indeed, Colonel Reese, an author of an official Army history of the Iraq war, suggests that U.S. troops be withdrawn by August 2010, 15 months ahead of schedule.

A spokeswoman for Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, said that the memo, which was written in early July, did not reflect the official stance of the U.S. military.

Although Colonel Reese’s stance might not be an official one, we asked some experts whether his view made sense.

Article

My response:

Colonel Reese is saying what most soldiers under the rank of three stars know and think is the right course of action — leave Iraq sooner, rather than later. Colonel Reese is sounding the alarm that if we do not take the opportunity to leave now, we are in for a new round of pointless violence directed at American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Iraq.

Large-scale American military occupations of non-Western societies to transform them into images of the West inevitably provoke resentment and breed violence; even when the U.S. pays $25 million a month in hard cash to the Sunni Arab insurgent forces not to fight.

Exporting democracy at gunpoint to Iraq has not only failed to create stability in the Middle East, it has made the United States and its allies less secure. Today, Iranian strategic influence trumps American strategic influence for good reason: Tehran’s agents of influence wear an indigenous face while America’s agents wear foreign uniforms and carry guns.

America’s decision to garrison Iraq was a serious strategic mistake. It’s time to reverse that mistake and, as Colonel Reese wisely argues, leave now, not later.

Response to: WISHFUL THINKING AND INDECISIVE WARS

2009-08-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

Peters is becoming increasingly shrill in his desperate call for the expenditure of more American blood and treasure in conflicts entirely unrelated to the smoking ovens of Auschwitz. Unwilling to see the ongoing conflicts for what they are - fools’ errands that inevitably become conflicts between modernity and antiquity – he extends the false “Neocon” analogy comparing the vital strategic interest that demanded we invade Europe on the morning of June 6, 1944 with the tragic and unnecessary occupation and suppression of Iraq and, now, Afghanistan.

Americans long ago walked away from these conflicts recognizing that the loss of American life in pursuit of the illusion that we can install puppet regimes to serve our interests while imposing the façade of liberal democracy on traditional Islamic societies is wasteful and counterproductive.

For Peters, however, one lie builds on the foundation of another in what can only be characterized as wishful thinking in the worst sense of the words.

America won a great strategic victory in 1991, so much so we subsequently expended billions on an elaborate containment plan for 12 years that achieved nothing of value in Iraq for us or Iraq’s people, but containing Saddam Hussein expanded our military presence in a region where our presence ashore was not and is not wanted. In 2007 we allegedly won another victory. This time it came in the form of the surge narrative. In reality, the series of events in 2007 that cost us more than a thousand good American lives in uniform and 25 million a month in bribes to the Sunni Arab “Insurgents” simply delivered Iraq into the hands of Tehran, once and for all.

Now, the latest fictional success story not only compels us to maintain over 100,000 troops on the ground in Iraq indefinitely, it helps to rationalize the further pointless expenditure of more American blood and treasure in the land that time forgot – Afghanistan; and all of this from the blood thirsty Peters, yet another uniformed bureaucrat who never killed anyone in combat, least of all an enemy of his country.

Journal of International Security Affairs

WISHFUL THINKING AND INDECISIVE WARS
by Ralph Peters

The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties hostile, civilian and our own continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.

Much has been made over the past two decades of the emergence of “asymmetric warfare,” in which the ill-equipped confront the superbly armed by changing the rules of the battlefield. Yet, such irregular warfare is not new; it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies, Islamist extremists, may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win.

There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles. We like the frisson (Latin/French: a sudden, passing sensation of excitement; a shudder of emotion; thrill) of feeling a little guilt, but resent all calls to action that require sacrifice.

Second, collective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. As someone born only seven years after the ovens of Auschwitz stopped smoking, I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today.

Third, ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.

Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decision makers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.

Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do. Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.

Last, but not least, history is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.

By 1965, we had already forgotten what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the degeneration of our historical sense has continued to accelerate since then. More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944, as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, prize-hunting reporters insist that our losses in Iraq have been catastrophic, while those in Afghanistan are unreasonably high.

We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.

One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you. Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence (often quite violent in its reality) only worked because his opponent was willing to play along. Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (or today’s) China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Effective non-violence is contractual. Where the contract does not exist, Gandhi dies.

Furthermore, our expectations of war’s results have become absurd. Even the best wars do not yield perfect aftermaths. World War II changed the planet for the better, yet left the eastern half of Europe under Stalin’s yoke and opened the door for the Maoist takeover in China. Should we then declare it a failure and not worth fighting? Our Civil War preserved the Union and abolished slavery - worthy results, surely. Still, it took over a century for equality of opportunity for minorities to gain a firm footing. Should Lincoln have let the Confederacy go with slavery untouched, rather than choosing to fight? Expecting Iraq, Afghanistan or the conflict of tomorrow to end quickly, cleanly and neatly belongs to the realm of childhood fantasy, not human reality. Even the most successful war yields imperfect results. An insistence on prompt, ideal outcomes as the measure of victory guarantees the perception of defeat.

Consider the current bemoaning of a perceived “lack of progress” and
“setbacks” in Afghanistan. A largely pre-medieval, ferociously xenophobic country that never enjoyed good government or a central power able to control all of its territory had become the hostage of a monstrous regime and a haven for terrorists. Today, Afghanistan has an elected government, feeble though it may be; for the first time in the region’s history, some of the local people welcome, and most tolerate, the presence of foreign troops; women are no longer stoned to death in sports stadiums for the edification of the masses; and the most inventive terrorists of our time have been driven into remote compounds and caves. We agonize (at least in the media) over the persistence of the Taliban, unwilling to recognize that the Taliban or a similar organization will always find a constituency in remote tribal valleys
and among fanatics. If we set ourselves the goal of wiping out the Taliban, we will fail. Given a realistic mission of thrusting the Islamists to the extreme margins of society over decades, however, we can effect meaningful change (much as the Ku Klux Klan, whose following once numbered in the millions across our nation, has been reduced to a tiny club of grumps). Even now, we have already won in terms of the crucial question: Is Afghanistan a better place today for most Afghans, for the world and for us than it was on September 10, 2001? Why must we talk ourselves into defeat?

We have the power to win any war. Victory remains possible in every conflict we face today or that looms on the horizon. But, for now, we are unwilling to accept that war not only is, but must be, hell. Sadly, our enemies do not share our scruples.

The Present Foe

The willful ignorance within the American intelligentsia and in Washington, D.C., does not stop with the mechanics and costs of warfare, but extends to a denial of the essential qualities of our most-determined enemies. While narco-guerrillas, tribal rebels or pirates may vex us, Islamist terrorists are opponents of a far more frightening quality. These fanatics do not yet pose an existential threat to the United States, but we must recognize the profound difference between secular groups fighting for power or wealth and men whose galvanizing dream is to destroy the West. When forced to assess the latter, we take the easy way out and focus on their current capabilities, although the key to understanding them is to study their ultimate goals no matter how absurd and unrealistic their ambitions may seem to us.

The problem is religion. Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it. We are in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to. They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name. We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses. Setting aside the point that a devout believer can behave cynically in his mundane actions, our phony, one-dimensional analysis of al-Qaeda and its ilk has precious little to do with the nature of our enemies which we are desperate to deny and everything to do with us.

We have so oversold ourselves on the notion of respect for all religions (except, of course, Christianity and Judaism) that we insist that faith cannot be a cause of atrocious violence. The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away. U.S. intelligence agencies and government departments go to absurd lengths, even in classified analyses, to avoid such basic terms as “Islamist terrorist.” Well, if your enemy is a terrorist and he professes to be an Islamist, it may be wise to take him at his word.

A paralyzing problem “inside the Beltway” is that our ruling class has been educated out of religious fervor. Even officials and bureaucrats who attend a church or synagogue each week no longer comprehend the life-shaking power of revelation, the transformative ecstasy of glimpsing the divine, or the exonerating communalism of living faith. Emotional displays of belief make the functional agnostic or social atheist nervous; he or she reacts with elitist disdain. Thus we insist, for our own comfort, that our enemies do not really mean what they profess, that they are as devoid of a transcendental sense of the universe as we are.

History parades no end of killers-for-god in front of us. The procession has lasted at least five thousand years. At various times, each major faith
especially our inherently violent monotheist faiths has engaged in religious warfare and religious terrorism. When a struggling faith finds itself under the assault of a more powerful foreign belief system, it fights: Jews against Romans, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians and Jews. When faiths feel threatened, externally or internally, they fight as long as they retain critical mass. Today the Judeo-Christian/post-belief world occupies the dominant strategic position, as it has, increasingly, for the last five centuries, its rise coinciding with Islam’s long descent into cultural darkness and civilizational impotence. Behind all its entertaining bravado, Islam is fighting for its life, for validation.

Islam, in other words, is on the ropes, despite no end of nonsense heralding
“Eurabia” or other Muslim demographic conquests. If demography were all there was to it, China and India long since would have divided the world between them. Islam today is composed of over a billion essentially powerless human beings, many of them humiliated and furiously jealous. So Islam fights and will fight, within its meager-but-pesky capabilities. Operationally, it matters little that the failures of the Middle Eastern Islamic world are self-wrought, the disastrous results of the deterioration of a once-triumphant faith into a web of static cultures obsessed with behavior at the expense of achievement. The core world of Islam, stretching from Casablanca to the Hindu Kush, is not competitive in a single significant sphere of human endeavor (not even terrorism since, at present, we are terrorizing the terrorists). We are confronted with a historical anomaly, the public collapse of a once-great, still-proud civilization that, in the age of super-computers, cannot build a reliable automobile: enormous wealth has been squandered; human capital goes wasted; economies are dysfunctional; and the quality of life is barbaric. Those who once cowered at Islam’s greatness now rule the world. The roughly one-fifth of humanity that makes up the Muslim world lacks a single world-class university of its own. The resultant rage is immeasurable; jealousy may be the greatest unacknowledged strategic factor in the world today.

Embattled cultures dependably experience religious revivals: What does not work in this life will work in the next. All the deity in question asks is submission, sacrifice and action to validate faith. Unlike the terrorists of yesteryear, who sought to change the world and hoped to live to see it changed, today’s terrorists focus on god’s kingdom and regard death as a promotion. We struggle to explain suicide bombers in sociological terms, deciding that they are malleable and unhappy young people, psychologically vulnerable. But plenty of individuals in our own society are malleable, unhappy and unstable. Where are the Western atheist suicide bombers?

To make enduring progress against Islamist terrorists, we must begin by accepting that the terrorists are Islamists. And the use of the term
“Islamist,” rather than “Islamic,” is vital not for reasons of political correctness, but because it connotes a severe deviation from what remains, for now, mainstream Islam. We face enemies who celebrate death and who revel in bloodshed. Islamist terrorists have a closer kinship with the blood cults of the pre-Islamic Middle East or even with the Aztecs than they do with the ghazis who exploded out of the Arabian desert, ablaze with a new faith. At a time when we should be asking painful questions about why the belief persists that gods want human blood, we insist on downplaying religion’s power and insisting that our new enemies are much the same as the old ones. It is as if we sought to analyze Hitler’s Germany without mentioning Nazis.

We will not even accept that the struggle between Islam and the West never ceased. Even after Islam’s superpower status collapsed, the European imperial era was bloodied by countless Muslim insurrections, and even the Cold War was punctuated with Islamist revivals and calls for jihad. The difference down the centuries was that, until recently, the West understood that this was a survival struggle and did what had to be done (the myth that insurgents of any kind usually win has no historical basis). Unfortunately for our delicate sensibilities, the age-old lesson of religion-fueled rebellions is that they must be put down with unsparing bloodshed, as the fanatic’s god is not interested in compromise solutions. The leading rebels or terrorists must be killed. We, on the contrary, want to make them our friends.

The paradox is that our humane approach to warfare results in unnecessary bloodshed. Had we been ruthless in the use of our overwhelming power in the early days of conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the ultimate human toll on all sides would have been far lower. In warfare of every kind, there is an immutable law: If you are unwilling to pay the butcher’s bill up front, you will pay it with compound interest in the end. Iraq was not hard; we made it so. Likewise, had we not tried to do Afghanistan on the cheap, Osama bin Laden would be dead and al-Qaeda even weaker than it is today.

When the United States is forced to go to war-or decides to go to war-it must intend to win. That means that rather than setting civilian apparatchiks to calculate minimum force levels, we need to bring every possible resource to bear from the outset-an approach that saves blood and treasure in the long run. And we must stop obsessing about our minor sins. Warfare will never be clean, soldiers will always make mistakes, and rounds will always go astray, despite our conscientious safeguards and best intentions. Instead of agonizing over a fatal mistake made by a young Marine at a roadblock, we must return to the fundamental recognition that the greatest “war crime” the United States can commit is to lose.

Other Threats, New Dimensions

Within the defense community, another danger looms: the risk of preparing to re-fight the last war, or, in other words, assuming that our present struggles are the prototypes of our future ones. As someone who spent much of the 1990’s arguing that the U.S. armed forces needed to prepare for irregular warfare and urban combat, I now find myself required to remind my former peers in the military that we must remain reasonably prepared for traditional threats from states.

Yet another counter-historical assumption is that states have matured beyond
fighting wars with each other, and that everyone would have too much to lose, that the inter-connected nature of trade makes full-scale conventional wars impossible. That is precisely the view that educated Europeans held in the first decade of the twentieth century. Even the youngish Winston Churchill, a veteran of multiple colonial conflicts, believed that general war between civilized states had become unthinkable. It had not.

Bearing in mind that, while neither party desires war, we could find ourselves tumbling, à la 1914, into a conflict with China, we need to remember that the apparent threat of the moment is not necessarily the deadly menace of tomorrow. It may not be China that challenges us, after all, but the unexpected rise of a dormant power. The precedent is there: in 1929, Germany had a playground military limited to 100,000 men. Ten years later, a re-armed Germany had embarked on the most destructive campaign of aggression in history, its killing power and savagery exceeding that of the Mongols. Without militarizing our economy (or indulging our unscrupulous defense industry), we must carry out rational modernization efforts within our conventional forces even as we march through a series of special-operations-intensive fights for which there is no end in sight. We do not need to bankrupt ourselves to do so, but must accept an era of hard choices, asking ourselves not which weapons we would like to have, but which are truly necessary.

Still, even should we make perfect acquisition decisions (an unlikely prospect, given the power of lobbyists and public relations firms serving the defense industry), that would not guarantee us victory or even a solid initial performance in a future conventional war. As with the struggle to drive terrorists into remote corners, we are limited less by our military capabilities than by our determination to pretend that war can be made innocently.

Whether faced with conventional or unconventional threats, the same deadly impulse is at work in our government and among the think tank astrologers who serve as its courtiers: An insistence on constantly narrowing the parameters of what is permissible in warfare. We are attempting to impose ever sterner restrictions on the conduct of war even as our enemies, immediate and potential, are exploring every possible means of expanding their conduct of conflicts into new realms of total war.

What is stunning about the United States is the fragility of our system. To strategically immobilize our military, you have only to successfully attack one link in the chain, our satellites. Our homeland’s complex infrastructure offers ever-increasing opportunities for disruption to enemies well aware that they cannot defeat our military head-on, but who hope to wage total war asymmetrically, leapfrogging over our ships and armored divisions to make daily life so miserable for Americans that we would quit the fight. No matter that even the gravest attacks upon our homeland might, instead, re-arouse the killer spirit among Americans-our enemies view the home front as our weak flank.

From what we know of emerging Chinese and Russian war fighting doctrine, both from their writings and their actions against third parties, their concept of the future battlefield is all-inclusive, even as we, for our part, long to isolate combatants in a post-modern version of a medieval joust. As just a few minor examples, consider Russia’s and China‽ s use of cyber-attacks to punish and even paralyze other states. We are afraid to post dummy websites for information-warfare purposes, since we have talked ourselves into warfare-by-lawyers. Meanwhile, the Chinese routinely seek to infiltrate or attack Pentagon computer networks, while Russia paralyzed Estonia through a massive cyber-blitzkrieg just a couple of years ago. Our potential enemies
believe that anything that might lead to victory is permissible. We are afraid that we might get sued.

Yet, even the Chinese and Russians do not have an apocalyptic vision of warfare. They want to survive and they would be willing to let us survive, if only on their terms. But religion-driven terrorists care not for this world and its glories. If the right Islamist terrorists acquired a usable nuclear weapon, they would not hesitate to employ it (the most bewildering security analysts are those who minimize the danger should Iran acquire nuclear weapons). The most impassioned extremists among our enemies not only have no qualms about the mass extermination of unbelievers, but would be delighted to offer their god rivers of the blood of less-devout Muslims. Our fiercest enemies are in love with death.

For our part, we truly think that our enemies are kidding, that we can negotiate with them, after all, if only we could figure out which toys they really want. They pray to their god for help in cutting our throats, and we want to chat.

The Killers Without Guns

While the essence of warfare never changes-it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces in our desires or is exterminated-its topical manifestations evolve and its dimensions expand. Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.

While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions that lead many among the most privileged Westerners to attack their own civilization and those who defend it, we can acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that, to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers
who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion were any additional proof required that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.

Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza.

Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.

In closing, we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and
uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities also necessary for victory turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps.

We may wish reality to be otherwise, but we must deal with it as we find it. And the reality of warfare is that it is the organized endeavor at which human beings excel. Only our ability to develop and maintain cities approaches warfare in its complexity. There is simply nothing that human collectives do better (or with more enthusiasm) than fight each other. Whether we seek explanations for human bloodlust in Darwin, in our religious texts (do start with the Book of Joshua), or among the sociologists who have done irreparable damage to the poor, we finally must accept empirical reality: at least a small minority of humanity longs to harm others. The
violent, like the poor, will always be with us, and we must be willing to kill those who would kill others. At present, the American view of warfare has degenerated from science to a superstition in which we try to propitiate the gods with chants and dances. We need to regain a sense of the world’s reality.

Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking.

[Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a strategist, an author, a journalist who has reported from various war zones, and a lifelong traveler. He is the author of 24 books, including Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World and the forthcoming The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.]

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman Emperor, AD 161-180

ARMY TO COMPETE FCS ‘SPIN-OUT SETS’ BEYOND FIRST THREE BRIGADES

2009-07-02T17:58:00.000-07:00

Inside the Army - 7/6/2009

Negotiating first production contract with Boeing

ARMY TO COMPETE FCS ‘SPIN-OUT SETS’ BEYOND FIRST THREE BRIGADES

Future Combat Systems contractor Boeing will serve as the prime for only the first three brigades’ worth of FCS “spin-out” equipment, with the remaining sets to be subject to competition, according to senior Army officials.

While the Army works to terminate its contract with Boeing for the FCS manned ground vehicle program, the service is also redefining the company’s role in its future modernization efforts.

“Part of what we’re working together with Boeing right now is their role in relation with us as we restructure this program,” Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, military deputy to the Army acquisition executive, told reporters at a July 1 Pentagon briefing.

Boeing will remain the prime contractor for the FCS network development and for the first three brigade sets of spin-out capabilities, he said. The Army intends to field the first spin-out capability sets to seven infantry brigade combat teams.

“The next four brigades would be competitively awarded,” said Thompson.

Spin-out capabilities will include the Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System, Tactical and Urban Unattended Ground Sensors, the Class One Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Ground Soldier Ensemble, the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle and the Network Integration Kits.

“We will contract for those [first] systems through Boeing, but we will negotiate with Boeing what their relationship is beyond those first three spin-outs,” he added. Boeing has not yet signed a production contract for those first three equipment sets, but is currently negotiating one with the Army, service spokesman Paul Mehney told Inside the Army in a separate interview. The contract is intended to buy the first spin-out set and include an option to buy two more, he said. The Army has already awarded Boeing an $18.7 million contract for long lead items for the first set (ITA, June 1, p13).

Thompson told reporters last week that the Army’s negotiations with Boeing began before the Pentagon’s FCS acquisition decision memorandum was issued June 23. This allowed the Army to issue a stop-work order on the ground vehicles the day after the ADM was issued, he added.

“We had already prepared the battlefield, if you will, with Boeing,” he said. Boeing is now negotiating the termination of contracts with its subcontractors on the manned ground vehicles, according to Thompson.

The Army has also stopped work on the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon, one of the eight FCS MGVs, which is in its own acquisition category due to a congressional mandate.

“Because NLOS-C is so tied to the manned ground vehicle program, de facto, when you stop work on the manned ground vehicles, you have to stop work on the NLOS-C because it’s part and parcel of the manned ground vehicle program,” said Thompson.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime supporter of the NLOS-C, has frequently expressed his desire to retain the program or start a new cannon modernization program.

To help decide what’s next for NLOS-C, Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s acquisition executive, has sent letters to senior members of Congress on both the defense authorization and appropriations committees, according to Thompson.

“We need to work with the Congress to adjust the current law, because the current law says, ‘You’ve got to do the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon.’ And so that’s the discussion that OSD is going to have to lead with the Congress,” he added.

-- Kate Brannen

Army Picks the Wrong Future

2009-06-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Army Chief of Staff General George Casey is considering an increase in the number of light infantry brigades centered on the Stryker armored truck at the expense of armor – tanks and armored fighting vehicles. This approach would effectively transform the Army into a constabulary force useful only for policing weak, Third World peoples with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air defenses.

Retreating from reality in warfare is a bad idea and the generals know better. Increasing Stryker Brigades comes at a point in time when Americans are walking away from the exorbitant expense and frustration of "persistent warfare" in Iraq and, increasingly, Afghanistan. Future wars are far more likely to involve fights against serious opponents for regional power and influence, fights that overlap with the competition for energy, water, food, mineral resources and the wealth they create.

The West has been down this road before. The British Army adopted false assumptions about future warfare in the aftermath of World War 1 and took a similar road to the one General Casey advocates; a road that prepared the British Army for conflicts with weak, third world opponents. In the 1920s another war of decision on the scale of World War I seemed impossible if not improbable, but history teaches nothing is impossible when it comes to human conflict. Thanks to the wrong assumptions, Britain’s Army failed miserably in 1940 when it confronted a real enemy - the German Army.

Myopic visions of a light Army centered on the Stryker guarantee American soldiers will re-live the nightmare of 1950 when Army forces confronted a trained and capable enemy they did not expect to fight, an enemy with tanks and artillery at a point in time when our own troops on the ground had no tanks and little artillery. In time and at great cost in American lives, the constabulary Army of 1950 was transformed under fire by General Matt Ridgway into a force that could mount an effective defense, but the Army of 1950 never recovered to launch large-scale ground offensive operations against the Chinese.

No less preposterous is the claim that the Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle is a Cold War system, when it is far more modern than the Stryker. The Bradley was developed in the 1970s and fielded in the 1980s, but unlike the Stryker, the Bradley has been subjected to repeated and thorough modernization and mounts significant firepower. In contrast, the Stryker lacks significant firepower. It’s also an over-sized version of the block III the light armored vehicle (LAV), a platform originally designed in the late 1960s for use in amphibious operations.

When a 1967 a vehicle like the LAV, a vehicle designed to support no more than 15 tons is expanded in size and weight to carry more than 25 tons, transmissions, suspensions, tires and engines come under extreme stress. Heavy investment in end item replacement becomes unavoidable. In anticipation of the Stryker Brigade's arrival in Afghanistan, the Army generals are investing 130 million dollars in the construction of a contractor-run support base designed to sustain the expensive Stryker fleet. They know Afghanistan will involve much more damage from the terrain and the climate. The generals also know America's road bound forces in Iraq defeated the IED threat by paying the Sunni insurgents hard cash not to plant them. This solution is unlikely to work in Afghanistan.

What American forces will discover is what Canadian forces already know from experience in Afghanistan: Wheeled armor is unable to operate effectively off road. Only tracked armor provides the stability for automatic cannon and larger caliber guns along with the off-road mobility and the armored protection to close with the enemy and live.

What should worry American lawmakers most is that light wheeled constabulary forces ensure American ground forces remain as dependent on fixed bases and air strikes for survival in the future as they already are today in Iraq. American armor – the combination of mobility, protection and firepower - has been the decisive factor in every American battlefield victory from Normandy to Baghdad. Recent Israeli operations in Gaza and, less successful Israeli operations in South Lebanon both reinforce this lesson.

Reliving the Korean nightmare in some new form is unnecessary. But if the current misreading of the past and the future is not stopped a future disaster on the scale of 1950 will be inevitable.

by Douglas Macgregor

Iraq on brink of third great mistake

2009-05-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

Asia Times Online
May 8, 2009

Iraq on brink of third great mistake

By W Andrew Terrill

It is at least possible, if not likely, that different choices on two
key 2003 United States decisions would have allowed the US to withdraw
most of its troops from Iraq well before the present date. The two
decisions that are now widely understood to have been disastrous
mistakes are the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the decision to
pursue harsh punitive actions against vast numbers of former Ba'ath
party members beyond the leadership of Saddam's regime. Both decisions
alienated Iraq's Sunni Arabs and opened the door for a strong al-Qaeda
presence in Iraq.

Despite the remonstrations of the former chief administrator of the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), it is well understood that
abolishing the Iraqi military rather than issuing a selective,
voluntary recall was one of the worst mistakes of the war. Even former
president George W Bush, in a 2006 interview with journalist Robert
Draper, refused to defend this decision, asserting instead that
dissolving the army was contrary to the policy that he authorized.

De-Ba'athification, for its part, disproportionately punished the
leadership of Iraq's Sunni community as well as its professional class
by removing them from their jobs or nullifying their pensions. CPA
authorities and later the Iraqi De-Ba'athification Commission (which
was and is dominated by former exiles) treated a large number of
ordinary people as Iraq's victimizers while these people saw
themselves as victims.

The humiliated ex-Ba'athists usually responded to high-minded rhetoric
about the price for collaboration with assertions that if you had not
lived under Saddam Hussein's regime, you could not understand what it
was like for those who did. Pressures to submit and conform permeated
the Republic of Fear.

Now a third disastrous decision, this time made by Iraqi government
leaders and again directed primarily at Iraq's Sunni Arabs, seems
increasingly possible. This danger involves the strong possibility
that the Iraqi government will begin treating the mostly Sunni
paramilitary auxiliaries known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI) as potential
enemies and end government funding for these groups.

Various aspects of this approach (including a few, but not all of some
recent high-profile arrests) may be understandable since there appears
to be an effort by al-Qaeda and other anti-government forces to
penetrate and undermine these organizations (also known as Sahwa or
"Awakening" groups) by infiltrating their ranks.

There is, however, a more serious danger that Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki's government will take a broad-brush approach to this
problem and react with punitive measures directed at the organizations
or their leaderships as a whole. This sort of tactic will cause the
Sunni community to feel increasingly under siege, and it is even
possible that they will again choose the path of resistance and
insurgency.

Iraqi efforts to control al-Qaeda infiltration of the SOI are
important; but the danger of a government over-reaction is even more
serious. Moreover, whatever al-Qaeda penetration has already taken
place has probably done so primarily because of increasing Sunni fears
about the perceived indifference of the Maliki government to Sunni
concerns.

The emergence of the Sons of Iraq as a viable force of around
95,000-100,000 fighters resulted from an American initiative that was
part of the 2006-07 effort to turn the war around when the surge of US
troops took place. The Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government never liked
the initiative but tolerated it because of US insistence.

Many US critics of the program stated that the United States was
simply paying the insurgents to change sides. This statement was
narrowly true, but it is also an oversimplification since the
individuals who joined the SOI had often developed a strong hatred of
many al-Qaeda policies including seizing economic resources, imposing
a draconian version of "Islamic law" (including the breaking of hands
or fingers for smoking), and forced marriages of local women to
foreign al-Qaeda fighters.

Unsurprisingly, US skepticism about the SOI program declined rapidly
as a result of their members' ability to work well with US forces and
achieve significant military victories over al-Qaeda insurgents.

The force was never perceived as permanent, however, and the
government of Iraq was expected eventually to incorporate about 20% of
the militiamen into the Iraqi police and military. The other 80% were
to receive assistance in obtaining other jobs when the paramilitary
groups were no longer needed. The timeframe for this change was left
fuzzy.

The SOI functioned as a reliable US partner force, and its members
were paid by the United States until October 2008 when the Iraqis
assumed financial responsibility for about half of the SOI as part of
an ongoing process of expanding Iraqi government authority. On April
2, 2009, Iraq assumed full responsibility for the entire movement.

The 2008 decision to begin transferring responsibility for the SOI to
the Iraqi government was met with widespread unhappiness throughout
the movement. This concern was well-founded. One of the first acts of
the Iraqi government was to reduce the salaries of large numbers of
militiamen as they fell under its jurisdiction. To make matters worse,
pay is frequently in arrears, and efforts to correct this problem seem
nonexistent.

Some SOI members are believed to have been arrested for crimes
committed during the insurgency despite promises of amnesty if they
switched sides. More recently, confrontations between the SOI and the
government are on the upswing as various senior SOI leaders have been
arrested on a variety of charges, including terrorism. Some of these
arrests may be well-founded while others are extremely questionable.

One key arrested SOI leader has already been released by an Iraqi
judge who found no valid reason to hold him. Also, at the time of this
writing, the Iraqi budget process for the remainder of 2009 was still
incomplete, but the working draft did not yet include funding for the
SOI. This omission may be a deliberate move against the Sunnis or it
may be a function of Iraq's drastically decreased revenues. In either
case, starving the SOI is a serious mistake.

The cost of a full-scale rupture between the Iraqi government and the
SOI could be dramatic. In the worst case, many SOI members may see
their only viable option as returning to some version of an
anti-government insurgency. To do so, they would probably seek funding
and weapons from Sunni Arab governments and wealthy individuals,
including anti-Shi'ite radicals. The possible next insurgency may look
different from the last insurgency, but it will still be a disaster
for Iraq even without al-Qaeda leadership.

If al-Qaeda does receive a second chance to work with the Sunnis, its
leaders may also have learned from their previous mistakes and behave
towards the Iraqis in a much less arrogant and heavy-handed way.
Additionally, once the United States has removed the balance of its
troops from Iraq, some Sunni Arab governments might be increasingly
willing to allow their nationals to travel to Iraq to help defend
Iraq's Sunni community.

Currently, some of these governments are heavily (although not
completely) constrained by the fear that their nationals who travel to
Iraq will kill US soldiers and that they will be held responsible.

So what is to be done to prevent a steady cycle of decline in the
relations between the Iraqi government and the SOI? Unfortunately but
inevitably, the United States may have to reach into its own pockets
for a while to help fund programs to pay the SOI, as well as much
later efforts to transition them into alternative work.

We have simply come too far to let short-term Iraqi governmental
missteps and paralysis re-energize the insurgency, and such a
temporary effort will at least buy time for a political compromise to
be generated by the Iraqi political system. Support for the SOI costs
about US$25 million per month. This is not a small amount, but it is
certainly dwarfed by the $2 billion per week spent to manage Iraq in
the 2005-06 timeframe, before the United States and its Iraqi allies
were able to restore some measure of stability to Iraq.

Additionally, the United States must oppose efforts to disarm the SOI
until Iraq is more completely stabilized. These people declared war on
al-Qaeda and its allies in 2006. To disarm them under current
circumstances would be to impose a death sentence unless they managed
to beg al-Qaeda's forgiveness with future promises of services.
Neither of these outcomes is acceptable.

Furthermore, any legal actions against SOI leaders will have to meet
the highest standards of justice, and trials will have to be conducted
with the most intense levels of transparency for crimes committed that
are not covered under the previous amnesty. The United States must
strongly interest itself in individual cases involving arrested SOI
leaders and encourage international humanitarian organizations to do
the same.

Finally, it must be noted that problems between the government and the
SOI are only one set of difficulties that Iraqis must overcome. There
are still huge differences between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs, especially
over the status of the disputed city of Kirkuk. Iran's role in Iraq
remains a problem, and the current low profile of Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi
Army may not last forever.

Over two million Iraqi refugees in foreign countries and an equal
number of internally displaced persons will need help in being
resettled and playing a productive role in Iraq's future. Fearsome
organized crime organizations will also have to be destroyed. Yet, in
this entire mosaic of challenges, few problems are as frightening as a
Sunni-Shi'ite civil war, and the SOI controversy remains one of the
most sensitive Sunni-Shi'ite issues.

Unfortunately, the problems of Iraq can be more severe than the sum of
their parts. If problems between the government and the SOI are not
effectively managed, the chances of increasingly violent intercommunal
tensions will be increased. Even if full-scale civil war does not
result, such tensions will distract Iraqis from other major
difficulties while providing opportunities for terrorists and regional
troublemakers. Without careful attention to the problems of the SOI,
Iraq could slip back into chaos.

This is a problem that can be addressed by Iraqi inclusiveness toward
the Sunni Arabs (including the SOI in the Sunni areas) and US backing
for inclusive Iraqi policies. Failure to do so would betray not only
Iraqi Sunnis, but also all Iraqis seeking national stability as well
as the American and coalition soldiers who have sacrificed their lives
for the future of Iraq.

W Andrew Terrill, PhD, General Douglas MacArthur Research Professor of
National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War
College.

(The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department
of the Army, the Department of Defense or the US government. This
opinion piece is cleared for public release; distribution is
unlimited.)

(Reprinted with permission of the Strategic Studies Newsletter, US
Army War College.)

My Response:

The third mistake was the surge, not Maliki’s refusal to subsidize his enemies. The decision to subsidize the Sunni militias and extend our occupation is a disaster for the American people and the people of Iraq.

Of course, the rebuttal to this position is that Anbar province would have become an AQ terrorist state if we had wisely disengaged as recommended in 2005. Though the friction between AQ and the Sunni tribes started up early in the fall of 2004, it went unnoticed until late 05. Sadly, the sort of sloppy thinking that led to the surge and an extended occupation passes for serious analysis in the halls of the Pentagon further reinforcing the bad decisions the author refers to.

Now, it is the US military, not the Shiite Arab dictatorship that is poised to make yet another bad decision; the Neocon generals are lobbying to keep the US occupation in Iraq in perpetuity knowing our withdrawal and the resumption of conflict that must follow such a withdrawal will subject their claims for success to public scrutiny in a climate of extreme anger and hostility.

Can Gates Fix The Pentagon Procurement Mess?

2009-04-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

CongressDaily reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will announce major cuts to high-cost, high-profile weapons systems, perhaps as early as this week. But as important as which particular programs get the ax is whether Gates can cure the fundamental dysfunctions in Defense procurement. A reform bill on this subject is now moving through the Senate and House.

Why do so many weapons come in behind schedule and over budget? Can Gates and Congress change the weapons-buying system radically enough to make a difference when so many reformers before have failed? Is it enough to fix the process of how weapons are bought, or is radical change required in what kinds of weapons we buy? And can the technology-loving U.S. military, now fighting two low-tech insurgencies, learn to live within its means as budgets recede from their post-9/11 highs under the pressure of the recession and federal financial bailouts?

Update: Gates announced major cuts and reforms on Monday afternoon.

-- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., NationalJournal.com

My Response:

In the absence of any fundamentally new military strategy, you get confusion. Here is my quick assessment.

- FCS should go away, but since Gates may not think he can cancel it, he is restructuring it to satisfy BAE and GDLS needs to produce some armored vehicles. Unclear what the spin offs are he is talking about. Virtually all of the sensor technology and robots are already in use today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, no mention of reducing existing inventories of unneeded Army and Marine junk. No mention of rapid prototyping as an alternative to the current industrial age modernization system.

- Army and Marines are well on their way to a condition where nothing new replaces equipment designed in the 1970s for the next 20-30 years. Dumb.

- MRAPs are very limited in their utility. Again, if the enemy is a weakly armed guerilla in a backward country, they may be helpful in moving infantry around provided the enemy does not go off-road or operate beyond the range of rifles. The question is whether it makes sense to use conventional forces in places like Afghanistan or Iraq at all and why we should invest heavily in niche capabilities to support the wrong force for the wrong tactical mission?

- Unable to decide what we can or cannot afford let alone need in aircraft leads to a confused outcome with F- 22 and F – 35. Clearly, the F-35 may yet go away down the line due to affordability. Norwegians and Italians are already suffering sticker shock. Hard to understand why we should press ahead with the F-35 that is reportedly not ready in any way.

- ISR investments in Reaper and Predator are turning out to be vital to suppress, neutralize or destroy weak enemies in the Islamic World. May not work well against more capable enemies, but the investment is modest for what is viewed as a huge payoff (TF Odin).

- DDG 1000 is a disaster. Sounds like it may go to one demo ship and die after all.

- Too many aircraft carriers now and we don’t need any more: Single point failure problem now and in the future makes them hazardous like dreadnoughts of old. Should go down to 8 carriers now.

- LCS is prohibitively expensive, too expensive to sail into littoral waters and lose. If we are going to build more, they better be real cheap and smaller than what we are building now. No mention of the need for a common hull program with the Coast Guard that would produce 60 vessels in the 1500-2500 ton range, a range with far more utility in the realm of maritime security than what we are doing now.

- No mention of requirement for Navy nuclear attack subs. 4 of these shut down China in 36 hours. We have only 38 nuclear subs now and need far more attack boats to ensure our ability to impose the kind of conditions mentioned in Chinese waters anywhere. Compared to adding troops, it’s cheap. Unmanned Underwater Vehicles will help, but they are not a substitute for American submarine capability in a world where ASW is weak or nonexistent everywhere.

- Talk about acquisition reform sounds like a jobs program for government bureaucrats. How 20,000 more government bureaucrats will help an already complex and convoluted acquisition system is a question I cannot answer. In any case, bureaucrats cannot compensate for dumb ideas from Generals and Admirals. Need to address that problem up front. GEN (ret) Shinseki created FCS as a result of a data free/analysis free decision making process that is common in the armed forces' senior ranks.

- Adding more soldiers and Marines is a waste of money in a world where we absolutely don't want to intervene and occupy anything. Existing structures and organizations are bloated and wasteful; too much overhead and tail, too little teeth. You don't reinforce a failed structure with more troops. You reorganize, reform and extract more capability from the resources your retain. Then, you decide whether to expand or not. Current Army BCTs with the exception of the Stryker brigades are too small to operate without reinforcement as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. A complete overhaul, not an expansion is in order.

- The TBM changes make sense given the reality that until we have breakthroughs in directed energy, we cannot expect much from hit to kill technology.

- The ABL is a bust and should go away so it's being consigned to R&D. (Must fly la race track pattern directly over the launch site when the missile is launched and has 110 seconds of laser power based on a very volatile chemical mix. Targeting is still problematic. Then, it must land and refuel for many hours.)

P R E - P U B L I C A T I O N C O P Y

2009-04-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

Refusing Battle:
The Strategic Alternative to Persistent Warfare
Douglas Macgregor
Armed Forces Journal, April 2009 Edition

Despite the seriousness of the present economic crisis, the greatest danger to the future security of the United States is Washington’s inclination to impose political solutions with the use of American military power in many parts of the world where Washington’s solutions are both unneeded and unsustainable. President Obama must arrest this tendency by making pragmatic and methodical changes to the goals of American military strategy. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s military action has already produced disastrous consequences for U.S. national security interests; namely,
• The expansion of Iranian regional power in Iraq1 and the Middle East,2

• The alienation of Turkey,3 the Middle Eastern State with the most powerful military establishment in the region,

• The erosion of Pakistan’s fragile cohesion with dangerous implications for all of Central and Southwest Asia,4

• A more vulnerable Israeli State,5

• A global anti-American backlash,6 and,

• Declining American economic performance.7

The Bush legacy in foreign and defense policy presents President Obama with a stark choice: Will we continue to pursue global hegemony with the use of military power to control and shape development inside other peoples’ societies? Or, will we employ our military power to maintain our market-oriented English-speaking Republic, a Republic that upholds the rule of law, respects the cultures and traditions of people different from ourselves and trades freely with all nations, but protects its sovereignty, its commerce, its vital strategic interests and its citizens? This essay argues for the latter approach; a strategy of conflict avoidance designed to make the United States more secure without making the rest of the world less so.

For Americans who’ve lived in a world with only one true center of military, political and economic gravity – the United States – changing how America behaves inside the international system is not an easy task.8

Since 1991, PAmericans have become so accustomed to the frequent use of American military power against very weak opponents they seem to have lost their fear of even the smallest conflict’s unintended consequences.

But the 21st Century is no time for the leaders of the United States to make uninformed decisions regarding the use of force or to engage in desperate, endgame, roll-of-the dice gambles.9 Recent events in the Caucasus involving Russia and Georgia may simply be a foretaste of what is likely to happen during the 21st Century in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America where the ancient practice of encouraging one ethnic group to dominate others as a means of securing foreign imperial power is breeding new conflicts.10 These conflicts are likely to resemble the Balkan Wars of the early 20th Century, except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with the competition for energy, water, food, mineral resources and the wealth they create.11 In many states like Iran and Turkey, states with proud histories, huge populations under the age of 30 and appetites for more prominence in world affairs,12 the influx of wealth from the energy sector will also support much more potent militaries and, potentially, more aggressive foreign policies too.13

In this volatile setting, direct American military involvement in conflicts where the United States itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk should be avoided. Otherwise, American military involvement could cause 21st Century conflicts to spin out of control and confront Americans with regional alliances designed to contain American military power;14 alliances that but for American military intervention would not exist.15 It is vital the United States not repeat the mistakes of the British Empire in 1914: over-estimate its national power by involving itself in a self defeating regional war it does not need to fight and precipitate its own economic and military decline.

Avoiding this outcome demands new goals for American military power and a strategic framework that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method and end-state; a strategy in which American military action is short, sharp, decisive and rare. Such a strategy involves knowing when to fight and when to refuse battle.

On 24 June 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia – 74,000 strong – completed its crossing of the Potomac River and pushed northward into Pennsylvania toward the town of Gettysburg. However, six days later, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, arrived in front of Gettysburg he discovered to his dismay that a much larger and better equipped Union Army – 115,000 strong – confronted him in strong defenses on the high ground above the town. As an officer of engineers, Lee knew what this development meant for his army; his troops would have to attack uphill while the Union troops poured rifle and artillery fire into them.

Fortunately for Lee, his opponent opted to immobilize himself in defensive positions. The Army of Northern Virginia was not yet decisively engaged. Lee still had options. Lee could move his army away from Gettysburg placing it between the Union Army and Washington D.C., an action likely to draw the Union Army out of its strong defensive positions to attack and eliminate the danger Lee presented to Washington. Such a fight would occur on terms more favorable to Lee, increasing the likelihood of yet another Southern victory. A major Confederate victory on Northern territory would almost certainly have resulted in Lee’s occupation of Washington, DC; maybe even Southern Independence.

Flush with their victory at Chancellorsville seven weeks earlier, Lee and his troops were spoiling for a fight and they got the one they did not want or expect. After repeated charges and the loss of thousands of men, Lee retreated Southward over the Potomac without interference from the Union Army, but Lee lost a battle that cost the Confederacy the war.

Lee should have refused battle. Had he done so, he would have kept his army and its capabilities intact until he could achieve a position of advantage and with it more favorable conditions for the employment of his force.

When word reached Britain on 1 August 1914 of Germany’s mobilization for war, Winston Churchill recorded that of the Cabinet “At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel unless Great Britain was herself attacked, which was unlikely.”16 The members knew the English Channel and the massive Royal Navy made a German offensive against Britain not only unlikely, but impossible.

However, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, a man who spoke only English, seldom left England and was contemptuous of foreigners; reached a different conclusion. He believed moral obligations dictated British intervention to save her historic enemy, France, from defeat. While England’s drinking classes sang the jingoistic ballad made popular during the Boer War,17 “We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too,” Grey warned the House of Commons, “If France is beaten… and if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland and then Demark… the most awful responsibility is resting on the government in deciding what to do.”18

The argument was specious. Germany’s war aims had nothing to do with Britain or the states mentioned.19 It mattered not. Grey’s emotional appeal to patriotism, and fear worked.

When Field Marshal Sir Herbert Kitchener, the newly appointed British Minister of War told the cabinet its decision to go to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary meant the British Empire would have to maintain an army of millions, the war would last for at least three years and that it would be decided on the continent--not at sea; the cabinet ministers were astonished.20 For reasons that seem incredulous now, Britain’s political leaders including Sir Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, believed a war with Germany would be short, and that the Royal Navy--not the British and French armies, would decide its outcome in a great sea battle with the German surface fleet. The possibility that Britain’s very small, professional army could not sustain a war with Germany and Austria for more than a few months, that Germany would decline to fight on Britain’s terms (at sea) and that the war on land would consume Britain’s national wealth, did not seem to occur to most of the cabinet members until Kitchener made his presentation.21

How could the British leaders have been so misguided in their assumptions? The British interpreted the world that existed beyond Britain’s global imperial power structure in ways that flattered their self-image of limitless money and sea-based power.

Britain should have refused battle and sought strategic conditions more favorable to the effective use of Britain’s considerable, but still limited military and economic resources. Instead, Britain joined a regional conflict turning it into a world war; a war Britain, along with France and Russia would lose until the manpower and industrial might of the United States rescued them from defeat in 1918.

Britain’s human losses were staggering; one in sixteen British men between fifteen and fifty, or nearly 800,000 died. Paying for Britain’s victory in World War I led to a ten-fold increase in Britain’s national debt. Paying the interest alone consumed half of British government spending by the mid-1920s.22

Britain fought a war that cost the British people their national power, their standard of living, and, in less than twenty years-- their empire. Had anyone in London’s leadership stopped to seriously examine what outcome (end-state) it was they wanted to achieve with military power (purpose) and what military capabilities (method) were at their disposal to do so, it is doubtful they would have reached the decisions they did.

The lesson is a straightforward one: When national military strategy fails to answer the questions of purpose, method and end-state, military power becomes an engine of destruction not just for its intended enemies; but for its supporting society and economy too! Regardless of how great or how small the military commitment, if the price of victory is potentially excessive, then the use of force should be avoided. After all, the object in conflict and crisis is the same as in wrestling; to throw the opponent by weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance without risking self-exhaustion.23

This strategy served FDR well during the years leading up to and including World War II.24 FDR concluded it made no sense to challenge the German war machine on its own terms. That was a job FDR left to Stalin. Instead, FDR avoided German strength and moved his forces through North Africa and Italy waiting for the combined effect of massive Soviet offensives and Anglo-American bombing campaigns to weaken the Nazi grip on Europe to the point where France could be invaded. When American and allied forces stormed ashore at Normandy, the strategic outcome in Europe was effectively decided.

But even when conflict is forced upon the United States as it was in World War II or Korea in 1950, there are still opportunities to halt on-going, inconclusive military operations before they consume America’s military, economic and political reserves of strength. This was Eisenhower’s rationale for ending the Korean Conflict in 1953. Unfortunately, chief executives like Eisenhower are rarer than hens’ teeth.

Before committing to military action, political and military leaders must always measure what they might gain by what they might lose. Even when wars are won and the victorious military achieves total military domination of its opponent – the case in both Iraq and Afghanistan – the population of the “defeated” country may not submit to the victor’s demands, particularly if the victor insists on garrisoning his troops in the defeated population’s territory. If the foreign military presence provokes local hostility, (and it usually does), the result will be more fighting--not stability. These are all good reasons for the United States to end conflicts on terms the defeated party can accept and disengage U.S. forces; even when the terms may not meet all of America’s security needs. What militates against this line of reasoning is the delusion of limitless national power and the unhealthy condition of national narcissism that thrives on it.

The Johnson Administration’s decision to intervene with large scale conventional forces in Vietnam rested on this delusion. Even worse, LBJ subscribed to the idea that whatever military action the American government initiated, it was inherently justified on moral grounds, even if, as in the case of Vietnam, the military action turned out badly for the United States.25

Tragically, LBJ’s wish-based ideology made retreat from inflexible and irrational policy pronouncements impossible when they no longer made sense. Wish-based ideology is dangerous because it imagines a world that does not really exist; the kind of world described in 1992 by the late, Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, where the U.S. Armed Forces are employed to “punish evil doers,”26 or Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s idea that armed forces not engaged in fighting should export democracy at- gunpoint. Not only has this ideological thinking and behavior since 1991 failed to create stability around the world, it has made the United States and its allies less secure. Understanding why means leaving the 20th Century’s wars of ideology behind.

The United States and Europe spent most of the 20th Century coping with the forces of nationalism and social change unleashed by the French Revolution and Karl Marx's mock scientific theory of history as the systematic unfolding of a predictable, dialectical process. The Bolsheviks, later called communists, tried to unite the two in an attempt to perfect human society through force of arms at home and abroad.

Fascists were ideological opportunists who borrowed from the right and the left seeking to fuse together society’s classes inside mass movements of radical nationalism.27

The failed utopian projects resulting from both European ideologies turned the 20th Century world into a battlefield littered with the ruins of great civilizations. Communism and fascism exalted territorial conquest and occupation; a form of total warfare that pushes violence to its utmost limits and rejects the deliberate employment of military means to achieve anything less than the opponent’s complete annihilation – what Stalin and Hitler called “victory.”

Such war aims are not limited to changing the opponent’s policy stance to create the basis for a new, status quo all sides can support. The aim of total war is to replace the defeated government and its supporting society with ones subservient to the victor’s. It is the mentality that created the Warsaw Pact. This mindset is dangerous and incongruous with the strategic interests of the American people and the realities of the 21st Century. Political and military leaders who talk and think in these terms should be rejected. The disproportionate use of military force and the unlimited political aims it supports will not protect or safeguard American interests or the interests of our allies.

In the 21st Century, the “total victory” construct as it equates to the establishment of Western style governments and free market economies subservient to the United States is counterproductive. In the Middle East, as well as in most of Africa, Latin America and Asia “damage control,” not “total victory,” is the most realistic goal for U.S. national military strategy.

New Goals and New Directions

America’s experience since 2001 teaches the strategic lesson that in the 21st Century the use of American military power, even against Arab and Afghan opponents with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air defenses--can have costly, unintended strategic consequences.28 Put in the language of tennis, the use of American military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of “unforced errors.” Far too often, national decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by a rigorous application of the purpose/ method/end-state strategic framework.

Decision-making of this kind explains why Operation Iraqi Freedom never had a coherent strategic design. The capability to remove Saddam Hussein was enough to justify action in the minds of American leaders who assumed that whatever happened after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces American military and civilian contractor strength would muddle through and prevail. It’s also why U.S. forces were kept in Iraq long past the point when it was clear that the American military and contractor presence in Iraq was a needless drain on American military and economic resources.29

The superficial thinking informed by a fanciful view of American history and international relations that gave birth to the occupation of Iraq is not a prescription for American prosperity and security in the 21st Century.30 The recently annunciated military doctrine known as “persistent warfare,” is a case in point.

Persistent Warfare advocates the use of military power to change other peoples’ societies through American military occupation.31 It’s a dangerous reformulation of Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy for the bloody excesses of the French Revolution summed up in his slogan “until all men are free, no man is free.”32 Fortunately for the American people, President George Washington rejected Jefferson’s enthusiasm for an American alliance with Revolutionary France, an alliance that would have invited the destruction of the new United States. “Twenty years’ peace,” Washington argued in 1796, “combined with our remote situation would enable us in a just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth.”33

Washington understood the importance of making prudent choices in national military strategy at a time when the economic and political development of the United States was extremely fragile. Today, America’s economic woes along with the larger world’s unrelenting drive for prosperity34 creates the need for new choices in national military strategy. The most important choice President Obama must make is to reject future, unnecessary, large-scale, overt military interventions in favor of conflict avoidance; a strategy of refusing battle that advances democratic principles through shared prosperity--not unwanted military occupation.

This strategy does not change America’s policy stance on Islamist terrorism. The exportation of Islamist terrorism against the United States and its allies must remain a permanent red-line in U.S. national military strategy. Governments that knowingly harbor terrorist groups must reckon with the very high probability that they will be subject to attack. However, Long term, large-scale American military occupations even to ostensibly train indigenous forces to be mirror images of ourselves are unwise and should be avoided. Iranian interests gained prominence in Baghdad because Tehran’s agents of influence wear an indigenous face while America’s agents wear foreign uniforms and carry guns. And Iran will remain the dominant actor in Iraq so long as it maintains even the thinnest veil of concealment behind the façade of the Maliki government and its successors.35

As a declaratory goal of U.S. military strategy, conflict avoidance is not merely a restatement of deterrence or a new affirmation of collective security. It is a policy stance that stems from a decent regard for the interests of others; regardless of how strange and obtuse these interests may seem to Americans. It is an explicit recognition by Washington that no one in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Latin America wants American troops to police and govern their country, even if American troops are more capable, more honest, and provide better security than their own soldiers and police. The question for Americans is how to translate the goal of conflict avoidance into operational strategy – what the United States will do if it is not compelled to fight?

Conflict avoidance would appear to require action on several different levels. First, conflict avoidance requires that America continue to maintain the military power to make a direct assault on U.S. and allied security interests unthinkable and, then, pursue peaceful relations with the peoples of the world so the danger of war involving the world’s great military powers is reduced and contained. America already has a surplus of military power for this stated purpose.

American nuclear power is overwhelming and any state or sub-national group that contemplates the use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies understands that nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in general have "return addresses" on them with ominous consequences for the user. American conventional military power is no less impressive when it is employed within an integrated, joint framework that exploits capabilities across service lines.

What America lacks is an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum utilization of increasingly constrained resources.36 More specifically, the 1947 National Security Act reached block obsolescence years ago.

Second, conflict avoidance balances the need to make the United States secure against the danger of making the rest of the world less so. Instead of defining events around the world as tests of American military strength and national resolve, and rather than dissipating American military resources in remote places to pass these alleged tests,37 the United States should define its role in the world without feeling compelled to demonstrate its military power. Otherwise, the United States runs the risk that other states, not the United States, will dictate America’s strategic agenda.

Though as privately pro-British as his cousin President Theodore Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) had no intention of declaring war against Germany on behalf of another state including Britain. He would not make President Woodrow Wilson’s mistake and commit millions of Americans to an ideological crusade that promised no tangible strategic benefit to the American people. Put more bluntly, FDR would not commit political suicide for Winston Churchill.38

Between 1939 and 1942, FDR resisted Churchill’s considerable powers of persuasion, providing only the assistance Britain needed to survive and nothing more. When Hitler turned on the Soviet Union, Hitler’s closest ally until June 1941, FDR reasoned he could afford the time to build up American strength while the Nazis and Communists exhausted themselves in an ideological war of mutual destruction.

Even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR declared war only on Japan. FDR had no intention of declaring war on Germany if it could be avoided. It was Hitler who – in an essentially romantic gesture of solidarity with Japan unanimously opposed by the German General Staff – declared war on the United States.

In the Caucasus, a region where political structures are closer in character to the Mafia organizations of Al Capone than Jeffersonian democracy, it makes no sense for the United States and its European allies to extend security guarantees. Russia’s security interests in many of the states that border it are legitimately paramount. American interests in these regions shrink to insignificance next to Russia’s.

Whereas Russia’s proximity to Georgia and Ukraine ensure Russia’s ability to effectively and efficiently apply military power, the United States and its allies are no more able to guarantee Georgian or Ukrainian security than Britain could guarantee Poland’s security against Nazi and Soviet military intervention in 1939. In Eastern Ukraine beyond the Dnieper River and the Crimea where the population is unambiguously Russian in language, culture and ethnicity, it would be folly to think that a guarantee of NATO military assistance would be interpreted as anything, but a threat.

Third, when the United States confronts crises and conflicts, the U.S. armed forces should be committed on terms that favor the United States where the use of military power can achieve tangible strategic gains for the United States. As Sir Winston Churchill argued in 1909, “It would be very foolish to lose England in safeguarding Egypt. If we win the big battle in the decisive theater, we can put everything else straight afterwards. If we lose it, there will not be any afterwards.”39

American military interventions have routinely violated this line of reasoning. In Vietnam, American military assistance failed for many reasons, chiefly because the Saigon government was thoroughly corrupt, and indifferent to the security of its own people. All the military might at America’s disposal, whether or not the North Vietnamese military enjoyed sanctuaries in neighboring states, was never enough to rescue the incompetent South Vietnamese government from its eventual conquest by North Vietnamese communists.

America’s decision to garrison Iraq after its initial goals of removing Saddam Hussein and eliminating WMD were achieved, added little--if anything; of strategic value to American security, but the presence of so many conventional American forces did present America’s enemies in the Muslim World with an opportunity they would have otherwise missed:40 the chance to directly attack U.S. forces, damage American military prestige and exhaust American economic resources while strengthening their own.41 By the beginning of 2008, the most serious unanticipated outcome of this exposure was a monthly bill of twelve billion dollars42 to maintain U.S. forces in support of a Shiite dominated government in Baghdad that was and is effectively tied to Iran.43

Meanwhile, the United States military has become a cobelligerent for the various factions and peoples – Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Saudi, Sunni or Shiite Arabs – struggling for power inside Iraq.44 These realities explain why the Bush Administration is reluctant to remove large numbers of troops from Iraq; the current status quo is not merely fragile, it will not survive the withdrawal of U.S. military power.45

In consideration of what to do next about Afghanistan’s rapidly deteriorating situation, current discussions in Washington are dominated by people who advocate increasing force levels, and plunging these forces into Pakistan's tribal areas. Yet, a more sober analysis suggests the real problem with Afghanistan resides in Kabul, another corrupt and ineffective government unworthy of American military support.46 The key questions missing from discussions in Washington D.C. about Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 include: Where is the legitimate government that asked for help from the United States in defeating the internal armed challenge to the government's monopoly of control over the means of violence and political power? Legitimacy is not exclusively a function of elections.

Legitimacy is also defined by a government’s competence to win and hold power in ways that benefit American and allied interests.

Where are the organized indigenous forces defending the legitimate government that must conduct the operations? While U.S.-provided training, equipment, and advisors can significantly improve a partner state’s capabilities, there must already be an indigenous force to equip, indigenous fighters to train, and a senior leadership echelon to advise. And, the costs of long-term U.S. military assistance should be realistically assessed. Had any of these questions been raised and accurately addressed within the purpose/method/end state framework, it is doubtful American military action would have followed the course it did after 911.

Treating conflict avoidance as a declared strategic goal should give pause to those in Washington who think counterinsurgency is something American military forces should seek to conduct.47 For outside powers intervening in other peoples' countries as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, so called counterinsurgency has not been the success story presented to the American people. Making cash payments to buy cooperation from insurgent groups to conceal a failed policy of occupation is a temporary expedient to reduce U.S. casualties, not a permanent solution to secure stability.48

Conclusions

One of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers, Lord Salisbury told his colleagues in the House of Commons "the commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies."49 Salisbury’s words should resonate strongly with Americans today. America’s scientific-industrial base and the military power it supports give American policies and interest global influence, but the deliberate use of American military power to bring democracy to others in the world under conditions that never favored its success has actually weakened--not strengthened American influence and economic power.50

It is crucially important that choices among competing resource allocations in defense be illuminated by a much clearer perception of their likely strategic impact. Strategy and geopolitics always trump ideology and military action is not merely a feature of geopolitics and statecraft, it’s the employment of it.

The choices the next President makes among various military missions will ultimately decide what national military strategy America’s military executes.51 Of the many missions he must consider, open-ended missions to install democracy-at-gunpoint inside failed or backward societies along with unrealistic security guarantees to states and peoples of marginal strategic interest to the United States are missions America’s military establishment cannot and should not be asked to perform.

Today, the United States’ share of world gross national product (GNP) is roughly 32% of the world total, substantially less than its 49% share of just forty years ago. Yet the United States, like the British Empire one hundred years ago, continues to lead the world in the creation of wealth, technology and military power. And, thanks to American naval and aerospace supremacy, America retains the strategic advantage of striking when and where its government
dictates, much as Britain did before World War I.

But like Britain’s resources in 1914, American resources today are not unlimited. Years of easy tactical military victories over weak and incapable nation-state opponents in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq have created the illusion of limitless American military power. This illusion has assisted the Bush Administration and its generals in frustrating demands from Senators and Congressmen for accountability;52 allowing politicians and generals to define failure as success and to spend money without any enduring strategic framework relating military power to attainable strategic goals.53

The result is both an unnecessarily large defense budget of more than $700 billion dollars and military thinking that seeks to reinvigorate the economically disastrous policies of territorial imperialism. Unchecked, the combination of these misguided policies will increase the likelihood the United States follows the path of Britain’s decline in the 20th Century. Though Britain was not defeated militarily in World War I, Britain squandered its blood and treasure on a self-defeating war with Germany in 1914 along with a host of imperial experiments in the aftermath of World War I; all of which were, political, military and economic disasters for the British people. A strategy of refusing battle that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method and end-state in the conduct of military operations is the best way for the United States to avoid following in the footsteps of the British Empire into ruin.

Endnotes

1 The 2005 parliamentary elections were won by the most hard-line, pro-Tehran Shiite fundamentalist parties, who have ruled Iraq ever since. Iran has close relations with the ruling Islamic Da'wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose party was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982. Also see Patrick Cockburn, “Iraq: Violence Is Down – But Not Because of America's 'Surge.' If fewer US troops and Iraqis are being killed, it is only because the Shia community and Iran now dominate,” Independent.co.uk, 14 September 2008.

2 Marc Lynch, “Why U.S. strategy on Iran is crumbling,” Christian Science Monitor, 4 January 2008, page 1. Also see James Glanz and Alissa J. Rubin, “U.S. and Iran Find Common Ground in Iraq’s Shiite Conflict,” New York Times, 21 April 2008, page A2.

3 Yigal Schleifer, “Why Turks no longer love the US. Secretary Rice arrives Friday to defuse tensions over Kurdish rebels in Iraq.” The Christian Science Monitor, November 1, 2007.

4 Graham Allison, “After Musharraf, And Now The Deluge,” The Boston Globe, 22 February 2008, Opinion page. Rami G. Khouri, “A Legacy of Lies and Delusion,” Daily Star,, 10 Dec 2008, page 1. Also see, Arnaud de Borchgrave, “An existential crisis,” Washington Times.Com, 15 September 2008.

5 Ron Tira, “Breaking the Amoeba's Bones,” Strategic Assessment, Jaffee Center for Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, Autumn 2006. Yo'av Qeren, "From the Quagmire into the Pit," Ma'ariv, 28 July 2006. The Islamic Da'wa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called for all Muslim countries to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and to cease all public and behind-the scenes contacts with it. Large demonstrations have been staged against Israel in Mosul, Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala.

6 Daniel Dombey and Stephen Fidler, “US pays price in power for Iraq role,” The Financial Times, March 18 2008 19:19 March 18 2008 19:19. Also, see Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005), 25-29. Also, see Daniel Byman, “Al-Qaida at 20: From Obscurity to Infamy,” SLATE

Magazine, 11 August 2008, page 19.
7 Liz Rappaport and Justin Lahart, “Debt Reckoning: U.S. Receives a Margin Call,” Wall Street Journal, 15 March, 2008; Page A1. Also, see Jeannine Aversa, “Federal budget deficit swells in first 5 months of fiscal year as spending outpaces revenues,” Associated Press, 12 March 2008.

8 China is set to overtake the US next year as the world's largest producer of manufactured goods, four years earlier than expected, as a result of the rapidly weakening US economy. Peter Marsh, “China reverting to form as the world's workshop,” The Financial Times, 11 August 2008, page 17.

9 Farreed Zakaria, The Post-American World, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), page 43.

10 Mark Almond, “The West Would Be Wise to Stay Out. Plucky Little Georgia?” Counterpunch, August 9/ 10, 2008.

11 Miriam Elder, “President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region,” Reuters, posted 3:20PM BST 17 September 2008.

12 For an assessment, consult Omer Taspinar, Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey: Kemalist Identity in Transition, (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2004). Also, see Burak Ege Bekdil, “Turkey Finalizes Threat Paper,” DefenseNews.com, 3 April 2006.

13 Sudha Ramachandran, “Turkey offers oil pipe lifeline to India,” Asia Times Online Ltd., 27 February 2008.

14 Catherine Philp, “Nato plan for rapid-reaction force to counter Russian aggression,” Times on Line, 19 September 2008, posted 09:30 GMT.

15 Nicholas Kralev, “Russia Urged To Halt Arms To Iran, Syria: Moscow irked by Tel Aviv's Georgian sales,” The Washington Times, 10 September 2008, page 1.

16 Quoted by Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, (New York, NY: Doubleday Books, 1995), page 202.

17 Robert Lloyd George, David and Winston, How the Friendship Between Lloyd George and Churchill Changed the Course of History, (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2205), page 107.

12 Refusing Battle: The Strategic Alternative to Persistent Warfare P R E - P U B L I C A T I O N C O P Y

18 Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the coming of the Great War, (New York, NY: Random House, 1991), page 907.

19 Major General J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War 1789-1961, (New York, NY: Minerva Press, 1961), pages 153-154. For a contrarian view on pre-1914 Germany, see Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, pages 208-209. 20 David Fromkin, A Peace to end all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), page 83.

21 To his everlasting credit, Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resisted war with Germany until the last possible moment.

22 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and The Lessons For Global Power, (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002), page 320.

23 B. H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy, (New York, NY: Meridian Press, Second Revised Edition, 1967), page 24.

24 Norman Gelb, Ike and Monty: Generals at War (New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, In.1994), 330-331.

25 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1992), Pages 432-433.

26 Secretary of State Les Aspen, in response to a question concerning the use of America’s armed forces in the post-Cold War world. Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 1992.

27 William J. Bossenbrook, The German Mind, (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1961), page 425.

28 Tim Kilbride, “Coalition Completes Aerial Bomb Blitz of Al Qaeda Sanctuary,” American Forces Press Service, 22 January 2008.

29 Thomas H. Henriksen, "Security Lessons From the Israeli Trenches: A half-century of counterterrorism," Policy Review, No.

141, Hoover Institute, February-March 2007, pages 34-35.
30 Christopher J. Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), page 126. Coyne does an excellent job of dismantling the popular myth that the American military reshaped Japan and Germany in America’s image.

31 Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Petraeus Doctrine,” Atlantic, October 2008.

32 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2004), 347-248.

33 James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, George Washington, (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), page 86.

34 Peter Marsh, “China reverting to form as the world's workshop,” The Financial Times, 11 August 2008, page 17. China is set to overtake the US next year as the world's largest producer of manufactured goods, four years earlier than expected, as a result of the rapidly weakening US economy

35 Patrick Cockburn, “Who's Really Running Iraq?” CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, August 2/3, 2008.

36 David E. Johnson, Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of Ground Power and Air Power in the Post-Cold War Era, (Santa Monica: RAND, 2007).

37 Eric Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), page 274.

38 Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. Churchill, Roosevelt and the Birth of Pax Americana, (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), Page 15.

39 Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the coming of the Great War, (New York, NY: Random House, 1991), page 823.

40 Rich Lowry, “The Chiefs' Shame. Pentagon Bungling On Iraq,” New York Post, 15 September 2008, page 3A.

41 Charles J. Hanley, “American Airstrikes In Iraq Rise Above '06 Total,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 6 June 2007, page 3.

42 Paul B. Farrell, “America's Outrageous War Economy! Pentagon can't find $2.3 trillion, wasting trillions on 'national defense,” MarketWatch, 28 August 2008, page 13.

43 Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Iraq Takes Aim at U.S.-Tied Sunni Groups’ Leaders,” New York Times, 22 August 2008, page A3.

44 Amit R. Paley, “Strip of Iraq on the verge of Exploding. Kurds Extend Role Beyond Autonomous Borders, Angering Arabs,” Washington Post, 13 September 2008, page A3.

45 Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Iraq Takes Aim at U.S.-Tied Sunni Groups’ Leaders,” New York Times, 22 August 2008, page A3.P R E - P U B L I C A T I O N C O P Y

Refusing Battle: The Strategic Alternative to Persistent Warfare 13 P R P R E - P U B L I C A T I O N C O P YE - P U B L I C A T I O N C O P Y

46 Simon Jenkins, “Fall Back, Men, Afghanistan Is a Nasty War We Can Never Win,” London Sunday Times, 3 February 2008, page 1. Sarah Chayes, “The Other Front,” Washington Post, 14 December 2008, Outlook section, page B01.

47 Edward N. Luttwak, “Counter-insurgency as Military Malpractice,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, 33-40.

48 Sam Dagher, “Will 'Armloads' of US Cash Buy Tribal Loyalty? The US policy of paying Sunni Arab sheikhs for their allegiance could be risky,” The Christian Science Monitor, 8 November 2007, page 1. Also, see Lauren Frayer, “US accidentally kills 9 Iraqi civilians,” Associated Press, 3 February, 2008, 11:10 PM EST.

49 Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), page 56.

50 George Jahn, "Few things are as they seem in Tehran," Associated Press, 30 August 2008.

51 Robert Komer, “U.S. Defense Strategy,” in Joseph Kruzel’s American Defense Annual, (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), page III-9.

52 Jeff Zeleny, “Senate Leader Criticizes Performance of Joint Chiefs Leader,” New York Times, June 15, 2007.

53 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), page 54.