tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87550350510214147802024-03-05T19:18:35.171-05:00Ink SpotsInk Spots is a blog dedicated to the discussion of security issues across the spectrum of conflict and around the world. Our contributors are security professionals with interests and expertise ranging from counterinsurgency, stability operations, and post-conflict environments to national security strategy, security cooperation, and materiel acquisition. We hope this site will be a forum for discussion on both the issues of the day and broader, long-term developments in the security sphere.Lilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18373158801523577733noreply@blogger.comBlogger744125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-48571196382458114762013-05-28T12:35:00.003-04:002013-05-28T12:35:38.304-04:00GapsFarmers - Food Eaters<br />
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Bankers-Investors<br />
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Doctors-Patients<br />
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Energy Industry-Energy Consumers<br />
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Congressmen-Constituents<br />
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Retailers-Consumers<br />
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Diplomats-Citizens<br />
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Hollywood-Movie Goers<br />
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The fact of the matter is that many professionals, trade organizations, low-density occupations, etc. are all fairly removed -- geographically, intellectually, or mentally -- from the people they support. I don't understand the nuances of agricultural policies even though they probably affect me in many ways. I don't understand all of the regulations and decisions that bankers make that affect our entire economy. I don't live next door to diplomats, I don't know what they do every day, and they make decisions for our nation. Congressmen aren't usually like the rest of us and we don't have much contact with them either in spite of the major decisions they make for us every day. Frankly, I haven't heard a lot of complaints about this. There are divides between "the people" and nearly every group that ensures our society maintains itself and almost all of us are okay with this. We don't have the energy or time to really wade into the details of these policies to force ourselves and our ideas into these groups.<br />
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Which is why I often scoff at the Chicken Littles of the civil-military divide. To describe the gap between the military and the rest of the country as a crisis is just plain silly. No valid arguments have been put forward that show that this gap is worsening or has any worse effects than any of the gaps I listed above. To include the last one in many cases. Thoughts to the contrary, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/opinion/americans-and-their-military-drifting-apart.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0">particularly of this form</a> (which I won't waste any time dissecting because it really is that terrible), are exercises in egotistical scare-mongering. So next time someone warns about our civ-mil crisis, ask them where the food they ate today came from and what was in it. Ask them when was the last time they had the influence to reduce risk in financial markets. Ask them when they last wrote to their representative to get them to vote for what's right instead of the party line. Yes, the military is as world apart. But this country is full of figurative gated communities along with the real ones. Until we expect our citizens to become experts on essentially ever major category of public policy (something that is not only impossible, but also probably unwise), we should stop beating the drum that our category of public policy is what will undo the Nation and then use the those threats to substantiate the abridgment of our fellow citizens' freedoms.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-47892981146864502572013-05-24T13:35:00.000-04:002013-05-24T13:35:06.169-04:00The leadership enigma and sexual assault in the militaryLeadership's problem is that it is an enigma. We know it exists, but what it is and how to teach it is as clear as Turner's London. We have a hard time describing what it is but we know when someone has it. It is the reason for an organization's successes, the cure-all to its ills, and the scapegoat for its faults. We prefer to empower people with leadership at the lowest level possible and yet invariably hold the highest levels of leadership accountable when the lower levels screw things up. Likewise, when institutions go awry higher-ups often blame the lower-downs (?) for their lack of leadership. You have all seen this in the military and civilian worlds, first hand and in the press. What are we supposed to make of leadership from all of this?<br />
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Within the military and its circles, including armchair strategists, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been prime examples of poor strategic leadership (mostly) and excellent tactical leadership (also mostly). Some of this is undoubtedly true. But many go further. There has been a call for pushing more power to lower leaders: company commanders, platoon leaders, squad leaders. Corporals, the lowest leadership rank in the Army, is now a strategic billet. And yet our generals are glorified tacticians. We need to let these junior guys do what the they think works, in the best traditions of Auftragstaktik, and even let them screw up a bit. The most serious impediment to our Army is that senior leaders -- battalion, brigade, division, corps, and higher commanders -- are standing in the way of the guy on the ground from doing his or her job through the senior leader's micromanagement inspired by his own career interests. You all know the tired, old saying: lead, follow, or get out of the way. We want our NCOs and company grades to lead, the Joes to follow, and everyone else to get the hell out of their way. Or so the argument goes.<br />
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But now we have a crisis in the force. Sexual assault, harassment, and rape is entirely too high for an organization that succeeds through its values, such as loyalty, duty, and the oft-maligned honor. No humans should do these things to other humans. Ever. These crimes become even more egregious when they are committed within an institution that demands mutual trust among its people. The stakes of war are too high for this trust not exist. And yet sexual crimes erode that trust in ways that no other offenses do, which is why it doesn't matter that sexual misconduct incidence in the military is lower than it is in the civilian world. The harm is greater in the military. We all know that eradicating sexual misconduct is impossible, but surely we can significantly reduce it through two supporting ways: policy and leadership.<br />
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So here we come back to that word: leadership. Leadership, particularly at the highest levels, has been blamed for this rash of crimes. This blame is partially right and partially wrong. Once you leave company command, you really don't get to know your people outside of your commanders two (or three) levels down and your staff. There are just too many people. General Odierno can't personally stop a Sergeant First Class at West Point from filming female cadets in the shower. He doesn't know this E7 and he has hundreds of thousands of people to look after. At the field and general grade levels, leadership is exercised principally in three ways: example, policy, and 'command'. We have a problem when lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals are harassing, assaulting, and raping. I don't expect SSG Snuffy looks and BG Sinclair and thinks to himself, "General Jeff is doing it so it must be okay." But SSG Snuffy looks at Sinclair, Roberts, or any of the other higher ranking perpetrators -- of which there are too, too many -- and thinks to himself that his Army's leadership is broken and he loses faith in the institution. What sort of system allows predators to climb its ranks? In this way, the few very bad apples are becoming a failure of leadership from the perspective of leadership as exemplar.<br />
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Leadership through good policy is a bit harder to grasp. Biannual anti-sexual assault/harassment briefings are good policy in theory, but anyone who has sat through them know how utterly ineffectual they are. As everyone knows this, they question why they are made to sit through them. It reeks of leaders mandating briefings to cover their own fourth points of contact and be seen as doing something. I don't have the answer to the formal education element to the sexual crime problem in the military (I'll leave that to the experts), but the current system is a failure and that does reflect on the leaders who implement it. The other major element of policy has been with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, specifically that generals and admirals have the authority to set aside sentences. This has been done recently in the trial and conviction of field-grade officer in the Air Force and this too smells bad. The perception is that senior leaders are taking care of senior leaders. With no equivalent in the civilian judicial process, it is curious that this policy remains in military law. Even more curious is that some generals came out in support of the policy in spite of its negative effect on the institution. While many have said they support its removal from the UCMJ, the policy's use and its support has been another senior leader failure.<br />
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Command is harder yet to hold accountable. It's having the legal authority (what separates it from the broader category of 'leadership') to tell folks to do things and it's being responsible when they don't do those things. This is where a lot of people, predominantly in my observations those who have not served, place the blame. Generals command the Army. The Army has a problem. Generals are to blame for that problem. This reasoning is not wrong, but it is not the whole story. Yes, Generals Odierno, Dempsey, Casey and Schoomaker bear some responsibility for this crisis because it happened on their watch. That is the burden of command. The question is: what are they supposed to do about it? Frankly, being a good example and instituting effective policy is their primary recourse. Lower commanders, field grades and division commanders, can exert their command influence here by crushing people who violate their unit's and comrades' trust. "Zero defect" is a dirty term in the Army, but it may be time to resurrect it.<br />
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Senior leaders do have culpability for the existence of sexual crimes in the force. There are things, roughly outlined above, that they could do to help improve things. But they alone cannot fix the problem. The only way to get to a Force Zero, if you will, is to exert leadership and responsibility in the two groups that are usually immune from public scrutiny: low-level leaders and individuals. NCOs and company-grade officers clamor for authority and now is their time to really grasp it instead of the typical tongue-wagging about it. I'm amazed that these crimes occur in units and no one seems to know about it. The way to change the culture is for junior leaders to really (I mean <i>really</i>) know their people. To know what makes them tic, what they do off of duty, their opinion of women. They can show true leadership by not permitting misogynistic talk in the office or prohibiting pornography in the platoon area.* A good junior leader has his/her finger on his/her unit's pulse and should know when things are about to go bad or when they already have. The other group is the obvious source of the problem: individuals. Some people are who they are and too many are just bad at being people, that is why Force Zero isn't very realistic. This could crisis could vanish over night if people just acted like people towards each other. To say nothing of people in uniform acting according to the values espoused in that uniform.<br />
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The intent of this post is to ensure we, the American public, aren't having knee-jerk reactions about this very serious problem. Yes, senior leaders have responsibility for it happening and for fixing it in the terms I have outlined here. And yes, individual culprits should get the lion's share of the blame as they're the jerks doing this stuff. But it's time we give our junior leaders the responsibilities commensurate with the authorities they say they deserve (and that I argue they've generally had). You want to run your unit lieutenant or captain without meddlesome superiors? Then do it. These problems are on you. If you couldn't tell you had a problem in your unit after something blew up, then you were part of the problem. Tactics won't win wars, but stemming the tide of sexual crimes in the military starts at the platoon. This is a strategic problem that you can mostly fix merely by being there, understanding your charges, and understanding when you need to take action. When the seniors set a good example and provide good policies while juniors take charge of their units and their people, we'll have a better sense of what leadership should look like in the military instead of the finger pointing and soap-boxing we endure today.<br />
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*One of my greatest failures as a platoon leader was allowing my platoon sergeant to post nude pictures on the walls of his tank. Other than the flash fire hazard, it was quite embarrassing when we gave a couple of nice female nurses a tour of a tank and his was the only one not locked at the time. They were rightfully uncomfortable through what should have been something cool for them and I was mortified.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-46455626579482865072013-03-19T11:29:00.000-04:002013-03-19T11:29:56.062-04:0010 Years After10 years ago I was in the western desert of Kuwait, a tank platoon leader unsure if I would have to lead my men to war or not. I fully supported going to war at the time. I didn't much care about weapons of mass destruction, beyond their possibly being used against me, and democratization is a lofty goal. But these weren't the reasons I wanted to go to war. The most important reason I thought we should go to war was because I realized my quickest route home was through Baghdad, which sounded better than more months whiling away in the desert. The second reason I wanted to go to war was because that's what I thought soldiers should do. We had a plan, we had rehearsed it, and my platoon was very, very good. I went to West Point in an era where there were generations of officers, outside of the few who fought in Desert Storm or Panama, were never able to use the skills they trained their entire lives for. I didn't want to be one of those old guys regaling my loved ones with harrowing tales of that time in the Whale Gap at the National Training Center. I wanted to <i>do something</i>. I was 22 and obviously knew nothing about the world beyond how to lead a platoon of tanks.<br />
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We should never have gone to war with Iraq. The intelligence that was used to substantiate a massive war was so shoddy that I wouldn't have used it to substantiate a platoon-sized raid. And of course we know now that I was fabricated purely to start the war. As horrifying as that is, I don't believe Iraq was the greatest blunder the U.S. has made since World War II. I think escalating Vietnam still holds that title. The Iraq War <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-08/opinions/37551784_1_iraq-war-iraq-veteran-republicans">may have tilted</a> the <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-gops-vietnam-212/">political leanings of the United States</a>, but it has not fundamentally changed our social fabric in the way that Vietnam did. For the Iraqis, our invasion was probably the worst thing to have happen to them since World War II. What this war wrought on them is unconscionable. That we lost 3,542 U.S. servicemembers, with another approximately 32,000 wounded, is horrifying. Even more horrifying are the 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis that are estimated to have been killed because of the war, to say nothing of the millions who were displaced from their homes and the rending of the Iraq's social fabric (although some of that was good, such as the enfranchisement of the Shia and Kurds).<br />
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These statistics speak not only to the folly of having started the war, but also to the incompetence of those charged with executing it. At least through the end of 2005 and probably longer, the Iraq War was a tidal wave of arrogance and stupidity. In April 2003, when civilians were looting government facilities, the order came down to let them have at it. This criminality was the "exuberance of democracy". The next month when the order came down to disband the security forces and expel the Ba'ath Party from government it took all of about 4 hours for the first attack to occur on a convoy on Airport Road. No one was seriously hurt, but that was all about to change. In June my unit moved to Balad, a hotbed of former regime acolytes, where we patrolled in unarmored HMMWVs, taking the doors off so we could hang our legs out the sides and face our pitiful body armor to any potential blasts. While there we conducted cordons so the 4th Infantry Division could run their sweeping operations, making matters worse by rounding up military-aged males in the interest of security. In 2005, my unit was in eastern Baghdad where we ignored the Sadrists for almost a year. Our predecessors had a hard fight against them in 2004 and our command wanted none of that. By doing nothing we gave the Sadrists 12 months to refit and rearm so that units in 2006 had a harder time than 1st Cavalry Division did in 2004 and further inflamed the civil war. This is just skimming the top of the nonsense I witnessed personally that did nothing but hurt the Iraqis we were trying to "liberate" and the soldiers and marines doing the liberating.<br />
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By the time I was stop-lossed for the surge in 2007 I was adamantly against the war. I thought the surge just another foolish move in a long series of foolish moves and that we should have ended the war instead. During my last 13 months in Iraq during this surge, I came around to believing it was the best way to turn around a terrible situation. The Iraqis did most of the hard work with The Awakening and the Sadrist cease-fire, but it took the infusion of more soldiers into the battle space and the increased killing of our most extreme enemies to solidify the gains made by the Iraqis. This is not to say that the surge made up for our past blunders or that it led to our winning the war. It was merely the best option from an assortment of really bad options. As a case in point, before we had Sons of Iraq in our brigade battle space we had 35 to 40 "negative events" - a euphemism for attacks on coalition forces or reports of attacks on civilians - per day. The day after we secured our battle space with an additional battalion and a contingent of Sons of Iraq we averaged 2 negative events per day. The decrease in violence, brought about by many factors including the use of more violence, was remarkable. So while Iraq is still quite violent and nearly none of the major political disputes have been settled, we did some things right in an attempt to correct the mistakes we made. Unfortunately it wasn't quite enough to make up for that biggest mistake and it's possible it could have been for naught.<br />
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My feelings about this war are complicated. On the one hand, in spite of my initial and self-centered support for it, this war should never have happened. The people who worked so hard to create it should never have remained in office after the next election and should have been shamed from public life forever. Invading Iraq was certainly one of the worst things this country has done in the past 70 years. On the other hand I was a soldier responsible for and to other soldiers. I was oblivious to political machinations, concerned only with battle drills, gunnery skills, and medical proficiency. I was concerned with the welfare of my men and accomplishing our missions that were such a small part of the whole of our endeavors in Iraq. During nearly 3 years on the ground I witnessed some of the most inspiring acts of heroism, sacrifice, service, and humanity, so lacking in my life now. Of course we should never have been put in the position to commit and witness these acts in the first place. I am embarrassed for our country for having done this to ourselves and the Iraqis. Yet I am not only not ashamed for having taken part in this war, I'm proud of doing so. It has done more than anything else in making me who I am today. In spite of this retrospective I greet this 10th anniversary of the war with some ambivalence and a bit of distance. I'll probably skip all of these "10 lessons" articles that are being passed around and not revisit my papers and videos on the war. Instead I'll raise a glass to the soldiers I fought with and those we lost and leave it at that.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-54237735393907959232013-02-28T23:47:00.002-05:002013-02-28T23:47:30.439-05:00Comments and ReviewsJust a couple of quick notes. First, I want to apologize for the addition of captcha to the comments. We have been inundated with spam lately. I thought that the filters had been getting it, but just now had to go through to delete over 100 published spam comments. Hopefully this fixes the problem and we won't have to turn off comments altogether. If things go well for a while, we'll take a look at turning it off or finding a better solution. Recommendations on this are welcome. So sorry for the pain in having to verify your comments and for dealing with our spam problem. There's a special place in hell for the people that design those programs.<br />
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Second, a quick note on posts. As you most likely noticed, Gulliver and I have cut back significantly in recent months. I can't speak for Gully, but I thought you should know that at least through the spring, my posts will probably be exclusively book reviews. Unless, of course, the blogging spirit moves me. I hope to have one on Max Boot's <i>I<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Armies-History-Guerrilla-Warfare/dp/0871404249">nvisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present</a></i> completed in the next couple of weeks. I've had some difficultly in determining how to frame the review for this one, but I think I've finally cracked it. After that I'll review Andrew Polsky's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Victories-American-Presidency-War/dp/0199860939/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362112473&sr=1-1&keywords=Elusive+Victories%3A+The+American+Presidency+At+War">Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War</a></i>. I'm not entirely sure what comes after that. Oxford University Press just released their spring catalog that contained a couple of promising volumes for this venue. Otherwise I am open to recommendations and requests from publishers, authors, and our readers. The point is that posting will be sparse, but that posts are also in the pipeline.<br />
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Thank you for your patience on both of these issues.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-88277098383603145052013-01-29T14:07:00.001-05:002013-01-29T14:08:37.176-05:00A Revolution in Insurgent Military Affairs? Neville Bolt's The Violent Image<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Violent-Image-Propaganda-Revolutionaries/dp/0231703163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359306543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+violent+image"><span style="color: blue;">The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New
Revolutionaries</span></a></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">By Neville Bolt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Columbia University
Press<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In <i>The Violent
Image</i> <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/teachingfellows/bolt.aspx"><span style="color: blue;">Neville Bolt</span></a>, a Teaching Fellow at Kings College
London and a former BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and CBC Canada producer-director, sets
out to redefine the Propaganda of the Deed (POTD) from its 19th Century roots
and make it applicable to today's insurgents and terrorists (he uses these terms somewhat interchangeably, arguing that many terrorist groups, such as al Qaida, are global insurgencies). Bolt defines the
original POTD as such: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Initially the deed was an act of political
violence aimed against state targets with the objective of goading the state
into overreacting and using excessive force, thus losing its legitimacy in the
eyes of the population, and securing revolution. (24)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">He contrasts this first
concept with today's POTD: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">POTD is an act of political violence aimed
against state targets with the objective of creating a media event capable of
energising populations to bring about state revolution or social
transformation. (24)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bolt posits that this
change in the insurgent's utility of violence has developed from acts that were
primarily kinetic and symbolic to acts that are in reality strategic
communications tools beyond their physical, tactical utility. There are five
reasons for this development: globalization, mass migration and urbanization,
the Digital Revolution, virtual social networks mapping onto traditional social
networks, and the movement of politics into the media. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The book is title <i>The
Violent Image</i> because Bolt stresses the importance of images, stills
over video, as a means to trigger emotions that change collective and collected
memories such that are necessary to rewrite social understanding of political
history. Pictures, he says, are more emotive than words, are conveniently
ambiguous that they allow for different interpretations by different audiences,
and cut across language barriers. There exists an 'Archipelago of Memories' (it
seems his dissertation adviser <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insurgent-Archipelago-Columbia-Hurst/dp/0231701160"><span style="color: blue;">was John Mackinlay after all</span></a>) within societies
that links memories and narratives. Actors with political primacy within
societies have controlled the means of narrative, primarily through state-owned
or -controlled media, and therefore have controlled the collective memory of
the society. Insurgents attempt to provide an alternative narrative to create
new memories sympathetic to their cause. Attempts that have been significantly
facilitated by the digital revolution where media (narratives) are no longer
one-to-many and are now many-to-many. Violent images are crucial to breaking
down existing memories:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Insurgents connect these acts of violence in the
minds of individuals and groups, to carefully crafted memories of grievance.
Preparing the population is not simply about reinforcing ideology. It is about
fracturing state and media memories - the <i>status quo ante</i> -
and rooting violence in freshly constructed narratives, spawning a new
revolutionary memory. (54)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To this point, Bolt
provides an interesting history of Irish insurgent groups from 1798 until the
present day where each new movement, whether nationalist, republican, Catholic,
or socialist, has used propaganda to tie their group and cause to the earliest
Irish insurgents. By drawing on more than a hundred years (at least for the
most recent groups) these organizations created a memory of long-suffered
grievance, even if their own objectives had little to anything in common with
their predecessors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Insurgents, indeed any
actor who uses propaganda, have the difficulty of speaking to many different
audiences: fighters, local societies, diaspora societies, friendly governments,
enemy governments, enemy fighters, etc. While the ambiguity of violent images
allows them to use one image to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously, it
is imperative the that narrative of their values remain unambiguous. This is
something Western governments know all too well. There cannot be too big a gap
between what you do and what you say. Insurgents use POTD, both minor and
spectacular:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Minor events should resonate with each other,
while spectaculars provide focal points that act as beacons within the
landscape of revolutionary violence. (151)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Spectacular events in
particular create fleeting points in time and space that provide the insurgent
the capability to leverage their narratives while established media narratives
waste the moment attempting to understand the "why" of the attacks
through self-reflection. These are precious moments in building societal
memories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bolt provides two
important lessons from all of this. First is that while the technologies that
allow insurgents to propagate their narratives are not in themselves
revolutionary, the changes in insurgent behavior of leveraging the technologies to disperse their narratives is, namely by the speed of dissemination (event to propaganda) and through many-to-many engagements. The second important lesson that Bolt draws is that insurgent organizations are increasingly, rightly in his opinion, using this new concept of POTD, leveraging the digital revolution, as a strategic operating concept that not only describes their military operations, but more significantly drives military operations so that tactical activities are determined by narrative and strategies of breaking down and building new memories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The Violent Image </i>is a <i>tour de force</i> on the utility of violence for insurgent propaganda. Bolt lays out a coherent and engaging explanation of how and why insurgents and terrorists use violence towards political objectives. His arguments is straightforward and informative, if academically written, and we are better off having this work. Much ink has been spilled on the narrative aspects of insurgency and counterinsurgency, much of it useful, some of it not. Bolt's story is useful as it should help us understand the interaction of war and narrative better, even if it provides little in the way of recommendations to combat insurgent efforts to build new societal memories (which, of course, was not his intent; this is not a knock against the book). </span><br />
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I certainly agree with Bolt that the POTD is and should be a operating concept that drives insurgent strategies (the term 'strategic operating concept' being an oxymoron in American military parlance). However, my initial reaction to this book was to question whether this is evolutionary or revolutionary. What Bolt proposes is the story of a Revolution in Military Affairs with regard to insurgent warfare. A Revolution in Insurgent Military Affairs, a RIMA if you will. The contrast is important. The study of war and its revolutions have focused almost solely upon great powers and conventional tactics and strategies. Discussions of the role of guerrilla warfare in this context center on how evolutions and revolutions in counterinsurgent forces enable those forces to better fight against insurgencies. The fact of the matter is that we do not have an academic reckoning of insurgencies such as we have for Western militaries. Our understanding of insurgencies has not progressed much past hit and run tactics, blending with the populations, the population is their target, and other such statements. These are not terribly useful in analyzing Bolt's thesis that his new POTD definition is revolutionary. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
To continue this line of analysis, POTD as a RIMA, we should examine what is meant by a Revolution in Military Affairs. A perfectly good definition was provided by Peter Singer in his Wired for War:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">RMAs typically involve the introduction of a new technology or organization, which in turn creates a whole new model of fighting and winning wars. A new weapon is introduced that makes obsolete all the previous best weapons, such as what armored, steam-powered warships did to wooden, wind-powered warships. (Singer, 181)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no question that the digital revolution brought about new technologies that have affected warfare. Indeed, insurgent groups have even reorganized themselves to better leverage these technologies. But are these actions revolutionary with regard to insurgent warfare? Have they created a "whole new model of fighting and winning wars"? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Insurgents have use propaganda as long as we have been recording such things. Even Clausewitz himself acknowledges that the insurrectionist's center of gravity is popular support (we'll ignore for the moment that he still then proscribes the destruction of the enemy force as essential). During his lengthy discourse on Irish insurgencies, Bolt writes at length about their leveraging propaganda. The connection of violence to propaganda has been the hallmark of terrorist groups for at least a century, and likely before that, either to generate grievance from heavy-handed governments or to demonstrate their group's military competence.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
I believe that an element of skepticism of the revolutionary aspect of Bolt's thesis is his definition of the POTD from a century ago. He links the violent act to government overreaction; a judo throw that causes widespread outrage that creates social transformation. But what are these events other than media events? How were insurgents able to spread public outrage? In the case of Ireland it was through pamphlets and underground newspapers. I would argue that insurgent intents and the mechanisms to bring their objectives to reality have not fundamentally changed since, merely the speed and reach of messaging. Indeed, speed and reach provided by digital means are necessary to counteract global migrations that would in earlier times have been local audiences to insurgent groups. Audiences that had been well within the effective range of a well written and illustrated newsletter. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
There are numerous ways to analyze this excellent book and as a military thinker and writer I chose to approach it as a second track of military affairs. I do not find what Bolt describes as creating a whole new way of fighting and winning wars. Propaganda, rooted in violent imagery to evoke emotions that break down and recreate societal memories of grievance, has benefited from the digital revolution in an evolutionary manner, not revolutionary. It is not a RIMA, even if it may drive more 'traditional' forces towards their own RMAs to combat the POTD. That said, this type of analysis would be well served by more in-depth study of insurgencies over time, such as we have for Western militaries.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The point of evolutionary or revolutionary advancement does not degrade this book in any way. It is exceptionally informative in describing how and why our current and potential adversaries use violence beyond tactical gains and into symbolic strategic gains by way of propaganda. Any student of modern warfare, insurgency, and terrorism would do themselves well by reading and keeping <i>The Violent Image</i> handy and I congratulate Dr Bolt for creating this significant work. </span></div>
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Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-38871727315492215322013-01-15T00:51:00.002-05:002013-01-15T00:51:24.663-05:00Apropos of nothing...Excerpted from a <i>Wall Street Journal </i>editorial, 10 January 1963, entitled "War Without Will":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And perhaps we should all realize that there are certain things the U.S., for all its military power, cannot do. One is to reshape the nature of people of radically different traditions and values.</blockquote>
Quoted in David M. Toczek's 2001 book, <i>The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam </i>(p. 122 of the 2007 paperback edition).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-65845961121640543292012-12-23T23:12:00.002-05:002012-12-23T23:12:33.975-05:00I love booksDuring my third tour in Iraq, as a staff officer, I spent the preponderance of my non-working time reading. It was an ideal situation to read if only because there was not much else to do. In my first tour, where we invaded Iraq and moved around quite a bit, with a deplorable mail delivery system, I read whatever I could get my hands on. My second tour in 2005 was more stable, with regard to location stability, and I read quite a bit. But it was really in this last tour that spanned from early 2007 until mid-2008 that I really became a voracious reader based on opportunity and intellectual growth that yearned for more.<br />
<br />
I had been a reader from my earliest days, but school seemed to take up much of my reading time until adulthood. My mother works for the public library in my hometown in eastern Pennsylvania, forcing me to spend much of my time among many and varied volumes. In this last tour of note, she was assigned the task of ensuring I had plenty to read (my father, bless him, was tasked with keeping my humidor stocked). I sent my mother lists before and during deployment and received in return large boxes of books, through our markedly improved post. Initially, my reading interests were varied. Already well steeped in the books of my profession - Clausewitz's <i>On War</i>, Jomini's <i>The Art of War</i>, works by Galula and Tranquier, and a seemingly infinite suite of Army doctrine - I took interest in the books of the war of which I was a participant. Michael Gordon's <i>Cobra II</i> and particularly Tom Ricks' <i>Fiasco</i> became influential in my thinking of the war and how I addressed my small part of it. Possibly because of this mono-topical study or possibly in spite of it, I felt I needed to widen my reading (and beyond my exhaustive collection of Hemingway that dominated my fiction shelves).<br />
<br />
In my first major package of books of that deployment (thanks, Mum!), I received the last Harry Potter, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kateb, Dickens, Hobbes, Thucydides, Dante, de Tocqueville, Hiaasen, Adam Smith, Arendt, Huxley, Bryson, Isaacson's biography of Einstein, a few non-fiction adventure books (I recommend from these <i>Rounding the Horn</i> by Dallas Murphy and <i>The Last Expedition</i> by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson), and most prominently Joyce's <i>Ulysses.</i> These were the books I felt necessary to begin a study of the human condition beyond war (except the adventure books, which were wisely the purview of my mother, and the Harry Potter, which I <i>merely</i> enjoyed). Except for the Joyce, which I read every day and still took the entire deployment to finish, this was 6 months of reading material. When this package of knowledge was delivered to me during duty in my brigade's operations center south of Baghdad, another captain on the staff expressed to me, "I <i>love</i> books!" Meanly, I thought, "Of course you do; who doesn't?" At the time, I thought it a stupid thing to say.<br />
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In retrospect, I disagree with my moderately younger self and declare that I, too, love books. It is not obvious. Not everyone does. And while I may love books in a different way than our maligned captain (my <i>agape</i> vice her <i>philia</i>, if you will excuse both the probably unnecessary distinction and probable blasphemy), her sentiment is one which I have come to embrace entirely and tirelessly. I do not just love reading, I love books. I love to hold a book in my hands, to feel the binding and the paper, to smell the ink. I love the plates and pictures. I love the font and the layout of the pages, even if they include irregularities (such as my nth-hand copy of Joyce's <i>Dubliners</i>, where the printing is partially smudged throughout the middle third). I suspect that many of you do as well, the military scholar being a peculiar subset of the bibliophile that tends towards bookishness and book collecting, even if said collecting extends beyond the typical cast of characters that have contributed to the art of war and warfare. My personal interactions indicate that you are a well-read and erudite community that reads compulsively on topics for which we are paid to read and topics for which we enjoy and topics we read because we believe that it makes us a better person.<br />
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Which is why I am writing this non-security specific post on books to recommend to you two book I have read this year on the topic of book collecting: Jacques Bonnet's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Phantoms-Bookshelves-Jacques-Bonnet/dp/1590207599">Phantoms on the Bookshelves</a></i> and Alberto Manguel's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Library-at-Night-Alberto-Manguel/dp/0300151306">The Library at Night</a></i>. What I love about these books and what I predict you will as well, is that Bonnet and Manguel provide a quasi-philosophy to the condition present in so many of our community that <i>requires</i> us to not just read, but to amass those books we read. To have them on hand. To organize them according to our whims. To thumb through them and scribble in their margins. To place markers in them for quick reference in the future. To display them proudly in the most intimate corners of our homes and offices like the trophies of big game hunters.<br />
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<i>Phantoms</i> and <i>The Library</i> provide intellectual rigor to these habits, nay, necessities. Bonnet and Manguel elegantly provide reason to our need to have books and have them just so. Both men are men of letters and consumers of primarily fiction books, but they both show their desire for philosophy and sciences to help them contemplate and understand the world that underpins their fiction. They explore why we collect books, why read: mainly to understand our world. A world in which our existence is so limited and so short that we cannot possibly experience it all. We therefore attempt to experience it through the experiences of others. Books provide this surrogate experience in a very personal and intimate way. Both books explore how our intimate curiosities drive the nature of our own libraries and how the books we collect in our libraries drive the nature of our curiosities. That our libraries are ourselves by other means.<br />
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We have written a number of times on these pages on the topic of books, mainly in the vein of reading lists and reviews. Some of these posts have been our most popular posts, indicative of your interest in reading. Even for a profession that values reading (of course, by Huntington's constructs all professions inherently value reading), this post is a bit off the beaten path. But I suspect that many of you who do read these books, or have, will be as touched by them as I was. If only to help you grasp how and why you habitually buy and love these rectangular cuboids of pulped wood waste upon which the human condition itself is imprinted.<br />
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As we move into a new year, Ink Spots may move in a more focused direction. I believe that my interactions here will be dominated by book reviews more so than discussions of the day. This is partially due to time available (these books aren't going to read themselves) and partially to what it is that I wish to gain out of this experience. My next post, in 2013, will most likely be a review of Neville Bolt's <i>The Violent Image</i>, a book that is so far excellent, topical for this audience, and timely. Until and beyond then, I hope that you have wonderful things to read. I also hope that you have a very Merry Christmas (if that's your thing) and a very Happy New Year. We here at Ink Spots look forward to talking with you in 2013.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-16296034662024169462012-12-10T12:51:00.001-05:002012-12-10T12:51:51.730-05:00GeneralsBefore getting to the meat of this post I should make two statements. First, is that I neither like nor dislike General Petraeus. I do not think he was as successful and great as many say he was nor do I think he was merely a PR expert who fooled us all into thinking he did something. I think the right answer is somewhere in between. He didn't win the Iraq War, but he did some things that allowed to take advantage of the situation (principally enforcing unity of effort and command that had been sorely lacking under previous commanders). The second caveat is that I have not read Tom Ricks' new book <i>The Generals</i>. While I have read Tom's articles on the book, I have not and will not read the book for the simple reason that I do not think that I could give it a fair review. <a href="http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-years-resolution.html">I did write this after all</a>. So any comments after this that talk about Ricks are made exclusively on his blogging and articles on the topic, not on his book, which I hope contains a lot more detail than its shorter versions.<br />
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Now that that is out of the way, let us turn to Dexter Filkins' new <i>New Yorker</i> piece, "<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/12/17/121217crat_atlarge_filkins?currentPage=all">General Principles: How good was David Petraeus?</a>" This is an unserious piece that plants Filkins firmly on Team Petraeus in the way that Stephen Colbert asks "Is he the best or is he the best ever?" To set up the answer to that question, Filkins spends some time on modern generals:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In wars without front lines, American generals tend to stay inside fortified bases, where they plan missions and brief political leaders via secure video teleconferences. Their credentials are measured as much by their graduate degrees as by the medals on their dress uniforms. <i>They are, for the most part, deeply conventional men, who rose to the top of the military hierarchy by following orders and suppressing subversive thoughts.</i></blockquote>
Emphasis mine. The first couple of sentences very clearly show that Filkins does not actually understand the general officer corps in any way. Have we had generals who never left their compounds? I am sure there have been a few, but they are the exception not the rule. Filkins portrays them as out of touch by misstating what most generals, and almost all general officer commanders, do: battlefield circulation. This is not the same as living in a patrol base with host nation security forces, but that is not what generals get paid to do. Similarly, general officer credentials are not measured by medals (this is, frankly, stupid - most generals have almost the exact same medals) or graduate degrees. They are measured by the commands they had (and essential staff positions) and how well they did in those commands (the bar for "how well" may be disputed), but certainly not by medals. Graduate degrees are part of the calculus, but like everything else takes a back seat to command performance.<br />
<br />
Now let us turn to the sentence I italicized. Filkins state quite clearly that generals become such because they are sheep. I ask: where is your support for this statement? As evidence, Filkins provides the data point that in "recent years, eighty-four per cent of the Army's majors have been promoted to lieutenant colonel -- hardly a fine filter." I know, you're all wondering what that has to do with general officer accessions. In short: nothing. While it is hard to find accurate numbers, it seems that there are about 20,000 active duty majors and about 10,000 active duty lieutenant colonels in the Army. The Department of Defense requires, by regulation, that at least 70% of majors eligible for promotion are selected for lieutenant colonel. Because the Army needs that many lieutenant colonels. And that has nothing to do with promotion to general officer, of whom the Army has 230 authorized (for reference, active duty combat arms branch promote more officers to lieutenant colonel in one year than the total number of generals). This data point is only useful in order to say that this alleged great purging of talent and brilliance is not happening at the 15-17 year mark of officer careers.<br />
<br />
So that is not evidence (obviously). Like Ricks, Filkins trots out General Tommy Franks and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez as examples of the GO corps' mediocrity. (He also hits on General J.D. Thurman for not pronouncing Prime Minister Maliki's name correctly in 2006 - a data point so asinine to not warrant much rebuttal. If we promoted generals based on their linguistic skills we would have a smaller bench than we do now.) The problem with this approach is that neither writer has shown that officers more capable from these two retirees' cohorts were not selected for general in spite of this non-selected officers' superior capabilities. This is quite simple: if you want to say the generals we have (or have had) are mediocre, then you need to show how the not-mediocre officers were passed over for promotion and why. There is not, of course, much data to support that kind of analysis, but it is the logical discussion that needs to be had.<br />
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We can lament the fact that Franks and Sanchez were both promoted to general officers. But who were they competing with? Where are all of these brilliant go-getters who were passed over? What Ricks (again, in shorter form) and Filkins fail to address is the dearth of quality officer candidates from the early- to mid-1970s. Matriculation to ROTC and West Point from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s was not the best crop of candidate officers this nation has seen. There were years where West Point nearly did not fill all of its slots. West Point also suffered the <a href="http://www.west-point.org/publications/aba_article.html">worst ethics scandal in its history in 1976</a>. What year groups were Franks and Sanchez? 1971 and 1973 respectively. General George Casey, another favorite beating horse of the general officer corps, was from the 1970 cohort. While there were some very fine officers commissioned in this era, I would suggest that these gentlemen were actually representative of the some of the best officers eligible for general rank. Smart guys did generally did not want to go to Vietnam. Or to an organization as broken as the U.S. Army after Vietnam. <br />
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But the most glaring hole in this discussion is Petraeus himself. If he is as good as Ricks and Filkins like to think, how did he become such a high-ranking general? There are two logical answers: 1) Petraeus is a sheep like every other general or 2) Ricks' and Filkins' thesis is incorrect. There is a third possibility that an exception was made for him, but that there might be exceptions runs against the "mediocre generals" meme and cause us to wonder why there are not more exceptions. If we look at Petraeus, we see a man who earned a PhD at Princeton University and who helped codify population-centric counterinsurgency into Army doctrine. But we also see a man who served as an aide to <i>four</i> generals (talk about back-slapping to get ahead...) and who tried to implement his counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan and failed. I suspect if we put our personal biases aside, we would see that Petraeus, while quite smart, is really about as good his cohort (and certainly better than Franks and Sanchez who were unequivocal duds). Which are probably the best the Army could provide based on when these men joined.<br />
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Filkins' piece is full of bad history and illogical statements in order to puff up his hero. And while he is wrong about Petraeus, he is also wrong about generals in, well, general. Petraeus made it to the top by being as good as he could while also doing all the networking he could, like anyone with ambition in an organization. But it is false logic and intellectually dishonest to parade Franks and Sanchez as the model general officer before giving us Petraeus as the savior of the Army. The quality of officers should be distributed normally. Petraeus, Franks and Sanchez may very well be in the tails, but I doubt they are so distinct from the bulk of the quality of their cohorts, such as Generals Ray Odierno, Lloyd Austin, and Martin Dempsey (also from this generation of officers). Odierno is an especially applicable example of my point here. In 2003 and 2004 he reflected the Army he served and yet was able to adapt to the changing situation in Iraq as the operational commander during the Surge. Possibly a more impressive feat than what Petraeus', but it remains that the line between "good" and "bad" generals is a very fine line indeed.<br />
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Our generals are by no means perfect, but it is a lie to say they got where they are because they purposefully did not rock the boat. Competition to succeed is very intense. And yet we must remember that, particularly at the highest levels, generals are ultimately selected by the civilian leaders of DoD and the White House. Don't like Tommy Franks? Then ask Secretary Rumsfeld why he did not fire him - only he and the President had the power to do so. I also do not worry about the future of the Army generals. I think that the generals we have had and have today are just fine and reflect the Army they have grown up in. And that includes having studs and duds where delineating between the two is often difficult. Like every organization. I also firmly believe that Petraeus' fall <a href="http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/20/what_lessons_will_the_army_take_away_from_petraeus_my_fear_is_the_wrong_ones">is not the death-knell</a> for a quality general officer corps. I think that the generals from cohorts of the 1970s have been below average from other cohorts (even if the individual generals are probably as high of quality compared to the cohorts who were not selected for general), we will see a significant increase in quality from cohorts of the 1980s and 1990s. Officers who served as battalion and brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the officers who understand the nuances and challenges of modern warfare. I assure you that mediocrity is not something that can be attributed to this group of fine officers.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-66539582673650937522012-12-05T15:19:00.001-05:002012-12-05T15:19:25.696-05:00Our definition of war is pretty good as it isLt Col Jill Long, an Air Force officer and student at the Army War College, wrote <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/what-is-war-a-new-point-of-view">"What is War? A New Point of View"</a> that was published at the Small Wars Journal. In this piece, Long attempts to redefine war beyond our current understanding based in dictionaries and Clausewitz. She finds the existing definitions limited and finds an expanded is necessary because of today's "global society" and its resulting "[t]errorism and violent aggression by non-state actors." Because of this, she posits that war is a spectrum beyond mere violence and rather a spectrum of states between peace and unrestricted armed conflict. She proposes a new definition: "War is the coherent execution of all means to bring about sufficient adherence to a nation's will in the international (global) arena; resulting in armed conflict only when all other means fail." This problematic and maximalist view of war and the reasoning behind the need for a change in our understanding of war requires some discussion.<br />
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This discussion, like any that attempts to define war, begins with Clausewitz (the dictionary definitions that Long provides are irrelevant here as they are not used by strategists and have limited meaning to us). It would be helpful to read Clausewitz's definition of war in total from Book One, Chapter 1 (from the Howard/Paret translation of <i>On War</i> even though I generally prefer the Graham translation - I seem to be in the minority on this point, so Howard/Paret it is):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I shall not begin by expounding a pedantic, literary definition of war, but go straight to the heart of the matter, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries to through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his <i>immediate</i> aim is to <i>throw</i> his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.<br /><i>War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.</i><br />Force, to counter opposing force, equips itself with the inventions of art and science. Attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it. Force -- that is, physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law -- is thus the <i>means</i> of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its <i>object</i>. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare. That aim takes the place of the object, discarding it as something not actually part of war itself.</blockquote>
Italics are in the original. Parenthetical comments aside (to be addressed in a moment), Clausewitz is quite clear on what war is: the use of force (I would probably use the term violence instead) as a means to achieve some political objective (from the discussion later in Chapter 1) that is the coherent statement of a group's will. One can infer that Clausewitz intends that acts of violence by political groups are war and that other non-violent acts by political groups are not war. Naturally for a treatise titled <i>On War</i>, Clausewitz provides almost no discussion of this latter set of actions, but based on comments throughout the rest of the book it seems he intends that political groups are at peace if they are not at war. But he does not expressly define peace as such.<br />
<br />
Long says this is too limiting to modern war. War is, rather, "all means to bring about sufficient adherence to a nation's will." What would normally, but not doctrinally, be conceived as a spectrum from peace (if such a thing truly exists) to competition to conflict (non-violent) to war is, per Long's construct, really spectrum of war. She explicitly states that "world peace" (I am not sure why she included the descriptor "world" here) is an element of war, as are all political interactions up to and including "unrestricted armed conflict" (another phrase I am unsure of, but assume equates to total war). This is an extreme view of the state of human interactions to suggest that even when we are at peace we are at war. More importantly, this worldview is unhelpful in understanding war if war consists of every form of political activity. It is so comprehensive as to require specialization into the study of the many facets of war as to bring us right back to where we are today in understanding war. Further, what becomes of the study of warfare? Is the wielding of economic influence now to be considered an element of warfare? While economics can be corollary or complimentary to the conduct of war, it is by no means warfare itself. Philosophically, this combative worldview, if widely accepted, could only darken man's approach to political interactions - the last thing that should happen to the already stark interactions. For these reasons alone Long's definition should be abandoned.<br />
<br />
Long fails to adequately describe how the world has changed or how the "Global Era" plays into this. She states that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 have changed how we should perceive the world. It seems that the she believes that that day should have awakened Americans to the threat of non-state actors. Long also states that "'interconnected systems of trade, finance, information, and security' demand a larger perspective when considering the engagement of imposing national will on others." Both of these points are stated in defiance of history. Globalists enjoy selling the greatness and threats of our "interconnected systems" in the modern day, but that presumes that the world is newly interconnected. We know this is not true. Interconnection in today's world may be faster and easier, but it is not new. States and other political groups have interacted over the elements listed for millennia - look only to the period of global colonization to see how long we as humans have been at this. Long does not describe how today's globalization is unique and why that changes how we define war.<br />
<br />
The issue of state versus non-state actors, as pertains to the definition of war, is a silly discussion. The idea that this new "globalization" has resulted in the rise of non-state actors is also historically inaccurate and is <i>prima facie</i> absurd. Civil wars have raged as long as long as humans have fought wars (indeed, civil war comprise a significant proportion of the wars humans have fought). Who are these wars supposed to have been fought by if not by non-state actors? Insurgencies and terrorism are also not new to the 21st Century (or even the Common Era) and it would take a peculiar interpretation of history to argue otherwise.<br />
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It is important to note that in his definition, Clausewitz does not describe war as act of force <i>between states</i>. War is engaged between enemies as the means to achieve political objectives. Of course, political objectives are not the sole purview of states as many non-state groups have exhibited and Mao so logically codified. This is not to say that Clausewitz did not intend his definition and the rest of the book to discuss war between states in the best traditions of the post-Westphalian world. He clearly speaks of states throughout the book, as indicated in the parenthetical comment in his definition of war (I did say I would return to that point). But this does not limit <i>On War</i> solely to war between states as mean scholars have, most prominently historian John Keegan and strategist Martin van Creveld to name a couple. It does not take that large of a leap of thought to read <i>On War</i> and understand that states can be any organized political group, that princes can be any leaders of those political groups, and armies can be the armed elements of those political groups. A literalist reading of Clausewitz would be as unwise as a literalist reading of Plato or Aristotle and saying their writings do not apply to the modern world because we are no longer city-states. A non-literalist exegesis of <i>On War</i> easily provides for the incorporation of non-state war into Clausewitz's thesis. As a last point on non-state actors, Long indicates that these offspring of globalization are driving this need for a new definition of war and yet her new definition specifies that means required are to bring about "sufficient adherence to a nation's will." This suggests that only nations have wills or that the means of war could only be used to achieve national wills. Ergo, only nations can be at war. I suspect that non-state actors would like to know how to label their activities if "war" is closed to them.<br />
<br />
The world and the nature of the interactions of its politically organized inhabitants have not changed so much in the past 11 years as to require a new definition and view of war. Lt Col Long's proposal is at the same time both too inclusive and too restrictive and is based on this perceived change in human activity. To call activities beyond the use of force towards political ends threatens to create the view of a Hobbesian international order. The world is bleak enough without calling all state activities "war," nor is it helpful in understanding what war actually is. I assume that Long intended to broaden the focus of state activities to combat terrorism to include activities not traditionally within the purview of war, i.e., the combat. The problem with this intention is that it attributes to war activities that, while possibly conducted in support of war, are intellectually, scholastically, and philosophically outside of war. Activities we engaged in, in support of war and as elements of other means, long before 9/11. As such, Lt Col Long's proposed definition does not help us understand war or how to wage it and that Clausewitz's definition continues to serve us well.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-8127199355056125272012-11-20T14:20:00.003-05:002012-11-20T14:20:53.316-05:00Honor, ethics, and the UCMJI've been waiting for things to calm down a bit before commenting on GEN Petraeus's resignation. We're not quite there yet, but I think there is an important element of this discussion not being had. I don't necessarily see his affair as the catalyst to review his record as a commander in Iraq and Afghanistan (mixed results), debate the legitimacy and wisdom of counterinsurgency as propagated by him (a very complicated answer), or the demise of the general officer corps in general (we'll be okay). The first will be debated by historians for decade to come, the second is an on-going discussion that has nothing to do with extra-marital affairs, and the latter is yet to be seen once the officers commissioned in the 1970s are retired (I'll save my different-generations-of-generals lecture for another time).<br />
<br />
There are a couple of issues directly related to the affair itself. There have been some who have suggested that GEN Petraeus should not have resigned as the Director of Central Intelligence over his affair. Tom Ricks has been among the most vocal of this group, arguing that GEN Petraeus's actions had nothing to do with competency and that his decisions were about personal ethics. This has been countered in the main with the argument that cleared officials who have affairs are prime targets for blackmail, therefore becoming a risk to national security. There is a lot of merit to this, but it doesn't exact scratch Tom's itch and frankly, I don't find this plausible (in the specific case of GEN Petraeus). Yet, I feel strongly that resigning was exactly what GEN Petraeus should have done and for the reason he said he did: it was the honorable thing to do.<br />
<br />
After graduating from West Point in 1974, GEN Petraeus served in the Army for over 37 years. All of those years he was subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in which adultery is a crime under Article 134. For many of those years, GEN Petraeus served as a commander, including almost every year as a general from 1999 until his retirement in 2011. As such, GEN Petraeus not only was required to uphold military law, he was an enforcer of those laws as a courts martial convening authority. I wonder how many courts martial he convened, or discharges he signed, that included adultery charges. After 37 years of living by the standards set in UCMJ, continuing to serve in high office after having violated one of the articles himself would be hypocrisy of the first order. He violated the ethics of the institution he spent nearly all of his life serving, ethics which he was a standard-bearer and enforcer. In military service, ethics are a significant part professional competency and you cannot dissociate the two. The only honorable thing left for him to do was to resign.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-84239572520916441722012-11-11T11:45:00.001-05:002012-11-11T11:45:01.010-05:00Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64040000/jpg/_64040981_mosaic_grave624.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64040000/jpg/_64040981_mosaic_grave624.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">To all who serve, and all who sacrifice - thank you.</span>MKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09101668944584403261noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-10311544488079599872012-11-01T09:35:00.000-04:002012-11-01T12:30:16.880-04:00The rank hypocrisy of veterans on OPSECI've written on these pages before about questioning the expertise of anyone claiming to have expertise and that arguments should be weighed as they stand. Most recently, <a href="http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2012/10/stay-in-your-lane-iava-and-cmr-edition.html">I hit on IAVA</a> for talking about civ-mil relations in a way that exceeded their understanding of it. But that sin is much less than those of groups who intentionally mislead the public through their own hypocrisy. Specifically, political veterans from the very right on OPSEC.<br />
<br />
I don't think I need to go into a lot of detail - most of you know the background. This past summer the right end of the veteran (and non-veteran) blogosphere blew up with allegations against the President (and his administration) of leaking classified information about the SEAL raid to kill bin Laden for political gain. They didn't just get frothy-mouthed about this issue (of which they had some standing before they lost their reasoning faculties), they got active with at least one Super PAC started by a former Navy SEAL <a href="http://www.opsecteam.org/">dedicated to OPSEC alone</a>.<br />
<br />
Fast forward a few months and the change in their position on OPSEC is so radical that it makes my head spin. Take the milblog This Ain't Hell - a staunchly conservative, veteran group blog that I occasionally visit for their amusing (if too serious) "stolen valor" posts. In primary contributor Jonn Lilyea's 11 June 2012 post, "<a href="http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=30355">Sanger defends Administration leaks</a>", Lilyea says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How about we let our secrets remain that way until whichever war we're fighting ends, so we don't intentionally get mired in the morass that the media made of this last war with their "open debate". ... And how about someone put a muzzle on the leaks out of the Obama Administration and let them debate the issues instead of smokescreening their failures.</blockquote>
Pretty straightforward position: secrets are secrets and should stay that way while the secrets affect current operations. But when it comes to Benghazi the tone changes. Lilyea posits today, <a href="http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=32662">in a post that quotes a report drawn from an "uncovered" Secret cable</a>, "Who knows what other information they're sitting on today that will blow up in our faces and cost more American lives later." Again, this classified cable that affects current operations coming to light isn't an OPSEC violation, it's "uncovered". Blatant, reeking hypocrisy.<br />
<br />
The previously-mentioned Special Ops OPSEC Super PAC does not even hide their hypocrisy on OPSEC. <a href="http://www.opsecteam.org/news9.html">In a press release</a> from 17 October 2012, the OPSEC president said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
President Obama wanted credit after our military killed bin Laden. Highly classified secrets were leaked, endangering real heroes and their families. But when terrorists killed SEALs and diplomats in Libya, this administration does not tell the truth about what happened.</blockquote>
In summation, this Super PAC was started because the President leaked classified info about something he shouldn't have leaked because it relates to ongoing operations. But the President is at fault because he doesn't leak classified info that relates to ongoing operations. Don't think about it too long or it will hurt your brain.<br />
<br />
This hypocrisy isn't limited to fringe blogs (admittedly with more hits than this humble blog, but I'd rather be thoughtful than popular) or fringe political groups. A fringe blogger at a mainstream newspaper, Jennifer Rubin, supports hitting the President on the bin Laden leaks <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-is-a-sitting-duck-on-leaks-and-vets/2012/07/26/gJQAPTmVBX_blog.html">in a July post</a>, positively quoting Governor Romney at the VFW, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obamas-libya-stonewalling-isnt-working/2012/10/31/ab946652-235a-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html#pagebreak">before accusing the President of "stonewalling" yesterday</a> for not disclosing information that is rightly classified. I'm less concerned about Rubin as she's a pure political hack, but the point is that pure political hacks are taking their cues from veterans-cum-hacks because of the latters' perceived expertise.<br />
<br />
These veterans and their hypocrisy is irritating at the least and dangerous at the worst. Because our veteran population is so small and our national defense so complicated, the general public looks to those few veterans who speak up to help explain how varied aspects of our national defense work. But the most vocal veterans on the issue of OPSEC, at least in volume, has been those who bathe in the fetid waters of hypocrisy. Their domestic political concerns are skewing how they present defense issues to the public, causing them to mislead the American public into believing the President is wrong for both leaking classified information and for not leaking classified information. And the American people don't know to juxtapose these two issues and see the hypocrisy of it all, even if there was some substance to the crux of their original position (minus the whole "Obama is a traitor" nonsense).<br />
<br />
Obviously free-thinking people should always examine any argument for fallacies or validity, but too often we allow related experience to substitute for expertise. As my IAVA post made clear, being a veteran in and of itself does not make a veteran an expert on anything beyond his or her own experiences. Keep that in mind as you read through political discourse in the waning days of the presidential campaign.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-3881683490214317102012-10-29T14:46:00.001-04:002012-10-29T14:46:06.948-04:00The failure of light-footprint intervention to provide long-term stabilityToday the RAND Corporation released <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR129/RAND_RR129.pdf">Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge</a> co-written by a team of researchers. The paper is pretty good on discussing the current security, economic, and political situation and challenges in Libya. However, the paper's discourse on the security situation, specifically through a "light-footprint strategy", has helped me get my brain around an issue I've been struggling to wrap my grey matter around because I don't think it addresses the nature of the conflict that lead to today's situation. To be exact (and with caveats not discussed here):<br />
<br />
Light- to no-footprint intervention in support of rebel forces is not a long-term solution for stability.<br />
<br />
The U.S. and other NATO involvement in Libya was essentially the provision of air support (with notable exceptions of on-the-ground SOF teams). There are a number of reasons for this approach, much of which is centered around domestic Western politics. But the provision of close and strategic air support to a motley crew of disparate and competitive armed groups is only asking for a disaster. Yes, this method helped bring about the end of the much despised Qaddafi regime, but it is certainly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/world/africa/libyan-government-struggles-to-rein-in-powerful-militias.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">not helping bring about a lasting peace and stability</a>. Much like our initial efforts in Afghanistan, failing to provide the forces necessary in the aftermath of the destruction of a regime creates an environment conducive to warlord-ism and the promise of many years of conflict.<br />
<br />
Since the 1990s at least, conflict studies have proven time and again the value of well executed DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) and SSR (security sector reform) programs. Our failure to begin this in earnest in 2002 (or really up to at least 2005!) in Afghanistan and our failure to do it now in Libya is exacerbating the security situation where the internationally-recognized government has very limited control over its own territory. Did we expect that these militias, that we supported with weapons (in some cases) and effective air support, to simply integrate themselves into the state or to return to their peaceful lives in the interest of democracy and human rights? Our planning for both Libya and Afghanistan suggest that we did expect that even if it sounds profoundly stupid when stated this directly. But without adequate intervention forces (military, police, civil) on the ground to provide security and to direct and lead DDR and SSR efforts, your only other option is to hope that DDR and SSR happen on their own. Which, as near as I can tell, has never happened.<br />
<br />
The purpose of this short post is not to lobby for boots on the ground in Libya, but on the contrary to caution those out there who think that we can simply help these rebel groups with air power. For example: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/intervening-in-syria-the-right-way/2012/10/25/d09a1076-1eb6-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html">here</a>. If our actions in Libya did create a gratitude account with the Libyan people, great. But that does not translate to those warlords that wield power through their militias as often their fight will be with other militias as they strive for greater influence. Without boots on the ground, we are unlikely to be able to stop these violent struggles for power if we can't be there to broker the peace and help move it along.<br />
<br />
As much as military analysts bemoan the general public's lack of understanding of the effort and violence of a no-fly zone, the longer peace is much harder to accomplish without large numbers of troops on the ground to provide stability after the regime falls. If we are not willing to put troops on the ground before or after our service as a rebel-force air force, then we should seriously contemplate refraining from intervening in the first place. Or at a minimum, not be surprised when our actions do not provide the stability for which we had hoped. That is where I have issue with the RAND paper: it discusses the light-footprint as a problem in developing long-term stability, but it does not discuss the real nature of our initial intervention and how we have not yet succeeded in using it to accomplish long-term foreign policy objectives. Instead of looking merely at Libya today, we need to understand that this has not worked yet in accomplishing anything other than short-term objectives: removing the guys we don't like. We need to understand that this approach is the minimal-interventionist version of the Bush administration's failure to provide a Phase IV plan for Iraq. It has the exact same consequences and is based on the same weak planning assumptions. Just keep that in mind as debate about intervening in Syria continues and we consider possible courses of action.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-80269747972669962112012-10-08T14:32:00.000-04:002012-10-08T20:48:43.202-04:00Antony Beevor's "The Second World War": Strategic analysis and myth-busting<br />
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In the
acknowledgements to his latest history, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-World-Antony-Beevor/dp/0316023744/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349720936&sr=8-1&keywords=beevor">TheSecond World War</a></i>, Antony Beevor says that he wrote this comprehensive tome
on one of the biggest events in human history because he wanted to fill in the gaps
to his own knowledge of the topic. But, he says, “above all it is an attempt to
understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and
indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres
of war.” In this, Beevor succeeds where no other historian I have read has.
Weighing in at 833 pages (with notes), Beevor deftly describes and analyzes the
political and military strategic events, people, and decisions that started,
fought, and ended World War II. Potentially more importantly, he debunks one
myth after another surrounding this war. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Geographically
and politically, the European and Pacific Theaters were fairly cordoned off
from each other, outside of the involvement of the United States and the
British, but not entirely. Beevor pulls the thread to examine how the Soviet
victory at Khalkhin Gol in eastern Mongolia in the summer of 1939 ensured that
the Soviets stayed out of the eastern war (Beevor is not, of course, the only
historian to make this important point) and how that affected both theaters. As
he pulls the thread further, the interactions of east and west, Axis and
Allies, become more acute. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have almost no
strategic interaction (there are a handful of exceptions), but their actions on
three or four fronts each create a strategic graph theory problem of biblical
proportions for the Allies. As a big-picture example, the United States did not
just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced
resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese
Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an
invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy,
strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of
locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the
war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war
world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists,
colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually
win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in
this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with
which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result
is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux
moving at the speed of a tank. Beevor is at his best in this work when he
examines these interdependencies of these fronts, the Allies’ force structure
to address them, and the inter- and intra-national political
considerations. For students of
strategy, this alone makes <i>The Second
World War</i> worth reading. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Beevor is
equally as good at myth-busting the saintliness of the war’s heroes, the
competence of its tragic warriors, and the general sense that it was, in fact,
a “good war.” Almost none of the major players of the war get a pass (more on
an exception below). Montgomery was “egotistic, ambitious and ruthless,
possessing a boundless self-confidence which occasionally bordered on the
fatuous.” MacArthur receives even harsher treatment that includes accusations
of gross corruption. Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Patton, Brooke, Bradley,
Stalin, Zhukov, Clark, Stillwell, Halsey, et al, are all described by their
weaknesses and mistakes as much as they are by their strengths and failures.
The sheer volume of egomania among these great captains significantly exceeded
their capabilities, as Beevor explicitly demonstrates. That is not to suggest
that these were not extraordinary men in extraordinary times - on the contrary.
But none of these men were as idyllically competent as many histories would
have us believe. The Axis powers are given the same treatment, if not more with
rightful criticism focused on their general inhumanity. As a young Armor
officer undergoing basic maneuver traing, a number of German officers were still
considered gods of mechanized warfare: Rommel, Peiper, Guderian, von Rundstedt,
etc. Further analysis, as done in this book, shows that these men were not
nearly as good as I was taught. And those that were actually tactically or
operationally superior, such as Peiper, were so ruthless with their own men and
civilians that their tactics should hardly be extolled, never mind exemplified,
by modern Western armies. It is well past time to end this infatuation with German
maneuver exceptionalism as it never really existed. (As an aside, my experience
has been that those who believe in this exceptionalism also believe,
incorrectly in my opinion, in Israeli maneuver exceptionalism. The sooner we
end these fantasies, the better for the education of the coming generations of
maneuver leaders.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Before I
return to the myth-busting of the “good war” trope, I would be remiss if did
not discuss this book’s shortcomings, of which I found two. Anyone who has read
extensively on World War II, a population I consider myself a part of despite
my just now revisiting the topic after many years, has a pet rock about this
war: some issue or topic, preferably obscure and contrarian, which is used by
its holder to judge all writing and analysis of World War II. I have one of these and his name was Major General
Philippe Leclerc who commanded the French 2d Armored Division. Although Leclerc was a competent and brave
commander, he had absolutely no regard for the Allied chain of command or unity
of effort. He had a reputation for ignoring his orders and doing whatever he
pleased for the glory of France and/or himself. There was an obscure incident that
occurred in August 1944 towards the very end of Operation OVERLORD during the attempt
to trap hundreds of thousands of Germans in the Falaise Pocket. The battle to
close the gap and encircle the German forces inside the pocket was hard fought
and in the end a victory for the Allies. But at least one Panzer corps (and
most likely more) escaped. There were three reasons: Montgomery’s inability to
drive his forces south fast or hard enough, Bradley’s indecision, and Leclerc
disobeying orders. The really long-story-short is that Leclerc was so excited
to end the battle so that he could turn south and spearhead the liberation of
Paris that he exceeded his divisional boundary in the Foret d’Ecouves. This
caused a massive traffic jam with the U.S. 5th Armored Division and provided
the German Army defenders time and space to establish a defensive line that
allowed more German forces to escape encirclement (see page 416 at <a href="http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_17.htm">this link</a>).
I find Leclerc’s actions unconscionable. In a book that aims to break down the
many cults of personality surrounding the key characters of this conflict,
Beevor misses this opportunity and gives Leclerc a pass. I will grant the
author some forgiveness in that if he picked on the foibles of every division
commander in the war (even if this particular one was a prominent player) then
this book would expand to be many volumes.
But this is my pet rock and I am miffed that Leclerc’s egomania likely
led to the deaths of many soldiers and Beevor did not take a written hammer to
him for it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Some readers
will complain that the Pacific Theater receives short shrift in this book. Many
of the battles are not detailed, but that is true of most battles in both
theaters. This book was not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the
fighting, but rather of the strategic decisions and actions that comprised the
whole of the war. Tactics are rarely
discussed anywhere unless they are needed for the larger analysis, such as in
Stalingrad where the type of fighting played a role in the Red Army’s ferocity
in the outbreak that in turn had a number of strategic implications through the
end of the war. So yes, Midway gets all of two pages, but that is all that
particular battle warrants when not examining the tactical situation of the
battle that was irrelevant to strategy in the Pacific. Rest assured that the
major strategic concerns of the Pacific are addressed in detail as well as
relevant tactical analysis.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
No, the
second major issue with this book, besides some redundancies, is sloppiness in editing. There are too many
sentences that do not make sense because of various errors. Thankfully the
errors do not create ambiguity and thus confusion, but they are irritating and
interrupt the flow of the book. They also increase in number near the end. It
is a rather large book so some errors are expected, but the publisher would do
well to give it another scrub before a second printing. Related to this is the
index, which is a mess. For example, there you will find in order: Cholitz,
Chungking, Chou, Ciano. There is the obvious problem that Chou should precede
Chungking, but more importantly is that “Churchill” is not to be found between “Chungking”
and “Ciano”. Winston Churchill is not in
the index. That is a major mistake if I have ever seen one. <o:p></o:p></div>
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These
problems are overwhelmed by this book’s positive contribution to the study of
World War II and military history and strategy in general. Beevor attacks the “good
war” campaign and stops it dead in its tracks. The incomprehensible costs of
this war should cause anyone about to describe it as “good” to pause. Indeed,
fascist and imperialist aggressors and mass murderers were defeated and there
is no denying that was a good thing. However, the Western Allies were hardly
angels themselves if potentially lesser devils. Atrocities on the ground in the
Pacific and western European fronts are detailed and are comparatively benign.
But the strategic bombing campaign conducted against civilians on both sides of
the war with no tangible military objectives should be viewed through a realist
lens. If the Allies had lost the war, its leaders would have been tried for war
crimes. And these crimes pale in comparison not only with Nazi and Japanese
atrocities, but also with Soviet atrocities and later Chinese crimes. Beevor is
also quite harsh on the Western leaders for acquiescing to Stalin on Eastern
Europe, saying that they sold out half of Europe to save the other half. He is
not wrong in this. It is important to note that Beevor does not suggest that
World War II was an unjust war, he in fact says that is (from the Allied perspective,
naturally), but rather that we should remove our rosy glasses on the West’s activities
during the war and understand analysis of the war and its events for what they
are and why “good” is not a descriptor of this war. He describes the war as “so
rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the
corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of
commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and
unpredictable compassion.” Indeed this is true. Beevor’s account of it sets a
high bar of scholarship and unprejudiced perspective for such study. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-26612022348439361842012-09-25T23:58:00.002-04:002012-09-26T02:04:49.906-04:00Military reading lists, take 1,000,000<span style="font-family: inherit;">On Monday, John Arquilla published a <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/24/guerrilla_lit_101?page=full">critique</a> of the U.S. Military Academy's "top ten military classics" <span style="line-height: 115%;">–</span> content and title both sourced to <a href="http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/09/19/reading_lists_the_west_point_history_dept_selects_its_top_10_military_classics">Tom Ricks</a> <span style="line-height: 115%;">–</span> in which he proposed a "supplement" to the West Point list covering "the unequal struggles that have seen guerrillas, bandits, and commandos waging 'wars of the knife' against empires and nations." Arquilla's piece ran under the ridiculous and desultory sub-hed "Ten books that are better than <i>The Art of War</i>."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
As I <a href="http://storify.com/the_boy/gulliver-on-military-curricula?utm_content=storify-pingback&awesm=sfy.co_g9hL&utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter">mentioned on Twitter</a>* this afternoon, the West Point list is unimpeachable. The books that comprise it are so canonical as to be easily identifiable by just the name of the author: Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, Corbett, Mahan, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Delbr<span style="line-height: 18px;">ück, </span>du Picq, Douhet<span style="line-height: 115%;">. They are the very definition of "military classics," spanning thousands of years of the best thinking on strategic theory, the relationship between war and politics, and human factors in war.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 115%;">The only inclusions that are even remotely controversial are the two I've listed last: Ardant du Picq's <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7294/pg7294.html">Battle Studies</a> </i>is widely misunderstood and unfairly blamed for the <i>offensive </i></span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><i>à</i></span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><i> l'outrance </i>and the horrors of the First World War, while Giulio Douhet's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Command-Air-Giulio-Douhet/dp/0817356088">The Command of the Air</a> </i>is rather more fairly criticized as the discredited theoretical foundation for strategic bombing</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">—</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">the paradoxically-titled, empirically barren, and almost wholly speculative warfighting doctrine in which bombing civilians produces decisive strategic effect. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 115%;">But du Picq was (with Clausewitz) among the first modern military analysts to grapple with the reality that war and battle are fundamentally human endeavors, and to try to develop doctrinal concepts that were based solidly on a consideration of the fighting man's morale, mindset, and natural aversion to danger. (In this way he anticipated the later work of men like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Men-Against-Fire-Problem-Command/dp/0806132809/ref=la_B001ITYAUI_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348631354&sr=1-1">S.L.A. Marshall</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/On-Killing-Psychological-Learning-Society/dp/0316330116">Dave Grossman</a>.) The real du Picq is almost unrecognizable in Arquilla's caricature:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">For a more operationally oriented study of land battles, West Point chose Ardant du Picq's <i>Battle Studies</i>. This is a curious choice. Col. du Picq was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, but his belief that good morale could overcome concentrated firepower animated French strategic thought up to and during World War I</span><span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">with near-catastrophic results.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">This seems almost certainly to be an example of judging a book by its cover, as <i>Battle Studies </i>is hardly an "operationally oriented study of land battles." (It's instructive to note that a better translation of the title, <i>Etudes sur le combat</i>, would be something more like "studies on fighting" or "studies in combat"; the book is most definitely not a catalog of battles.) While historical cases are obviously included, the volume is far more accurately read as a meditation on the influence of changing technology and the evolving character of warfare on the army's raw materials: the men who fight and die. The very first paragraph of the book reads like this:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Battle is the final objective of armies and man is the fundamental instrument in battle. Nothing can be wisely prescribed in an army</span><span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">its personnel, organization, discipline and tactics, things which are connected like the fingers of a hand</span><span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">without exact knowledge of the fundamental instrument, man, and his state of mind, his morale, at the instant of combat.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">And what of du Picq's juxtaposition of the ancient combatant's mindset with the soldier of his own era?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But let us look at man himself in ancient combat and in modern. In ancient combat:<span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span>I am strong, apt, vigorous, trained, full of calmness, presence of mind; I have good offensive and defensive weapons and trustworthy companions of long standing. They do not let me be overwhelmed without aiding me. I with them, they with me, we are invincible, even invulnerable. We have fought twenty battles and not one of us remained on the field. It is necessary to support each other in time; we see it clearly; we are quick to replace ourselves, to put a fresh combatant in front of a fatigued adversary. We are the legions of Marius, fifty thousand who have held out against the furious avalanches of the Cimbri. We have killed one hundred and forty thousand, taken prisoner sixty thousand, while losing but two or three hundred of our inexperienced soldiers. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To-day, as strong, firm, trained, and courageous as I am, I can never say: I shall return. I have no longer to do with men, whom I do not fear, I have to do with fate in the form of iron and lead. Death is in the air, invisible and blind, whispering, whistling. As brave, good, trustworthy, and devoted as my companions may be, they do not shield me. Only,<span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span>and this is abstract and less immediately intelligible to all than the material support of ancient combat,<span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span>only I imagine that the more numerous we are who run a dangerous risk, the greater is the chance for each to escape therefrom.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Does this man sound like one who believed that "good morale could overcome concentrated firepower"</span><span style="line-height: 21px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 18px;">this man who argued that "to insure success in the rude test of conflict, it is not sufficient to have a mass composed of valiant men," but that those men must have "good arms" and "methods of fighting suitable to these arms and those of the enemy and which do not overtax the physical and moral forces of man"? Arquilla's evident unfamiliarity with this text underlines its case for inclusion. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">More than anything else, though, du Picq's importance can be best summed up by Michael Howard's poignant observation: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">La solidarit</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">é</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> n'</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">à</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> plus la sanction d'une surveillance mutuelle: that has been the problem of morale on the battlefield ever since (<i>MMS</i>, p. 513)</span><span style="line-height: 18px;">.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The French is a direct quotation from <i>Etudes</i>: "cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation." Dispersion </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">– </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">necessary for survival in the face of fearsome modern weapons </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">–</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> challenges a man's courage, and cohesion through confidence in mutual support is the only way to bolster it. Howard, writing in 1984, recognized the endurance of this challenge.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Douhet is yet more controversial, largely because he is more well-known. The original airpower theorist is easy to criticize. He wrote at a time when the air weapon was novel, when some believed effective countermeasures in three-dimensional space were an impossibility. We should also remember how his contemporaries had been chastened by the destruction of the Great War, and it was widely held that mass armies, modern weapons, and restricted mobility had rendered landpower incapable of strategic decision. Douhet's theory of war </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">–</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> which made no distinction between combatant and civilian and held that overwhelming firepower concentrated on the sources of the enemy's moral and material power could achieve rapid, decisive effects </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">–</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> seems both more plausible and more moral through the lens of 1921. Indeed, David MacIsaac reminds us that Douhet's significance "resides less in his originality than in his being the first to pull together, in one place and in a structured order, ideas widely shared at the time" (<i>MMS</i>, p. 631).</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But efficacy aside, the lasting influence of Douhet's ideas is enough to merit his inclusion among the "classics." The consensus view may hold that strategic bombing is theoretically implausible and empirically fraudulent, but the original airpower theorists have at the very least an extremely prominent thumbprint on the history of Air Force doctrine and concepts. While the U.S. air arm eventually moved away from Douhetian bomber-centric doctrine and toward the "anything that flies" conception of airpower elaborated by Billy Mitchell (<i>MMS, </i>p. 635), strategic bombing shares with modern concepts like rapid decisive operations and "strategic paralysis" an interest in identifying and targeting "critical nodes" on which the enemy's entire war effort rests:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps because they found it impossible to envisage bomber fleets of the size implied by Douhet, some of the instructors [at the Army Air Corps Tactical School] began to wonder whether it might be possible, through careful, scientific study of a nation's industry, to single out particular targets whose destruction would of itself bring to a halt an entire industry or series of industries. If a number of such 'bottleneck' targets could be identified and destroyed, it might be possible, with a relatively small force, to bring an enemy's war production to a halt with almost surgical precision, thereby rendering the enemy incapable of further resistance (<i>MMS</i>, p. 634).</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">One need only reference the ideas of Liddell Hart, Fuller, Leonhard, Boyd, Rumsfeld, Naveh, et al to see why such plainly fantastical thinking is still noteworthy in the modern day. Whether Douhet was right or wrong </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">–</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> and I do feel quite certain that he was wrong </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">–</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"> the unfortunate lasting influence of his ideas about strategic directness through the indirect application of violence means those ideas simply cannot be willfully ignored. </span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Having dutifully defended the inclusion of two "classics" Arquilla did not directly attack, I'll reveal the ultimate irony of his complaint that the USMA list is unduly focused on "the 'horizontal' dynamic of clashes of roughly equal great powers armed with the most advanced weapons" (as if this sounds quite like what Corbett was concerned with, or Sun Tzu or Clausewitz!): <i>he didn't look at the whole list</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That's right, the "Top Ten Military Classics" are the first ten volumes listed... on the <a href="http://www.usma.edu/history/SiteAssets/SitePages/Navigation%20Bar/OPRG%20Top%20100%202011.doc">Officer's Professional Reading Guide </a><i><a href="http://www.usma.edu/history/SiteAssets/SitePages/Navigation%20Bar/OPRG%20Top%20100%202011.doc">Top 100</a> </i>(auto-downloading .doc)<i> </i>issued by the West Point history department. Among the remaining 90 we find Asprey on guerillas, Galula on counterinsurgency, Linn on the pacification of the Phillipines, Bowden on Somalia, Bellavia and Fick and Junger on the post-9/11 wars, Herrington on the Vietcong and Moore and Galloway on the NVA, Grimsley on the Union Army and Southern civilians and Royster on Sherman and Sheridan. And Bernard Fall, Alistair Horne, Lester Grau, and Dexter Filkins. And Larteguy. And Marlantes. And O'Brien. </span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And some dude named Mao...?</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Oh yeah, and even <a href="http://nation.time.com/2011/08/29/in-defense-of-once-an-eagle/">Anton sodding Myrer</a>.)</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">*Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/the_boy">Kelsey Atherton</a> for collecting those tweets and creating the Storify page I've linked above.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-49284063376332123482012-09-24T15:37:00.000-04:002012-09-24T15:37:01.674-04:00Afghanistan strategy three-ferI haven't been writing much on anything other than veterans issues lately and for good reason. This has been the result of my increasing interest in the problems facing veterans and the policies that attempt to address those problems. But this increasing interest also coincides with an interesting turn in dialogue on conflict these past few months where writing has generally dug existing positional trenches deeper instead of progressing the conversation, such as with Syria.<br />
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That said, with the official end of the surge in Afghanistan last week, a few interesting pieces about that war were published in the past week that you should be aware of. I'll add some commentary at the end of this post, but these three are interesting in that they all address significant flaws with our strategy in Afghanistan from different perspectives.<br />
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<b>Frances Brown: <i>The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local Governance</i></b><br />
<a href="http://www.usip.org/files/resources/SR316.pdf">This USIP report</a> (linked to by Josh Foust) is an excellent and erudite review of our local governance efforts in Afghanistan since 2009. Importantly, this review is analyzed through the context of the strategy put forth by the Obama administration in late 2009 which elucidated as its goal "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." Brown, who has extensive experience in-country, goes on to quote the "Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan" which states that to "promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government" is essential to the strategy of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda. More on that later, but even if were to assume that this is the case we screwed up implementation of the governance plan.<br />
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I've written before about the importance of assumptions during planning. Brown lays out three assumptions that were, in her words, unrealistic with regard to local governance:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Governance and development timelines would mirror security progress;</li>
<li>Bottom-up progress would be reinforced by top-down progress; and</li>
<li>"Lack of government" as the problem to be addressed.</li>
</ol>
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She picks each of these assumptions apart point by point to the extent that you wonder how it's possible anyone created these assumptions in the first place. The hints of derision throughout the paper also makes it quite readable (I especially recommend the paragraph on Marjah on page 6 as an example). Brown ends the paper with three recommendations:</div>
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<ul>
<li>Exert leverage to impact select systemic, rather than tactical-level, problems.</li>
<li>In a resource-constrained era, prioritize assistance to a few key efforts.</li>
<li>All the usual Afghanistan governance recommendations still apply. </li>
</ul>
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There are plenty of details beneath the lists. If you're curious as to why our local governance efforts haven't worked in Afghanistan, I highly recommend you read this paper in its entirety. </div>
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<b>Jonathan Rue: <i>Auditing the US surge in Afghanistan</i></b></div>
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Rue, who hangs his hat at Gunpowder & Lead, had this piece <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/24/auditing-us-surge-afghanistan">published in The Guardian</a>. Rue is an exceptional military analyst and always worth reading - especially for a Marine (I kid!). After discussing events over the past couple of weeks, of note the attack on Camp Bastion, he states that it's difficult to measure success in Afghanistan. On one hand, U.S. forces have achieved gains at the tactical level. On the other hand, those gains haven't affected our strategic ends. This is the same problem we faced when we left Iraq: superiority on the battlefield was ineffectual towards our goals. As Rue notes towards the end of his piece, this is the same problem we had in Vietnam as well. He doesn't talk much about why this is the case (it is the Guardian after all), but his quoting of SECDEF Panetta is indicative of a government that still does not understand insurgency or counterinsurgency even after 10 years of war:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta claimed the latest attacks were merely the "last gasp" of a weakend Taliban. If the aforementioned actions are the hallmark of a dying insurgency, I'd hate to think what actions characterize on on the ascendency.</blockquote>
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Indeed. Rue is also right that maybe the best news about the surge of troops is that it's over and they're now home. </div>
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<b>COL Gian Gentile: <i>War: Sometimes there is a substitute for victory</i></b></div>
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<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=286002&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=59f1a">In the Jerusalem Post</a>, Gentile picks apart the famous (at least to West Pointers) MacAurthur quote: "There is no substitute for victory." He notes that sometimes "winning" wars isn't worth the cost required to do so. Gentile is well known for his anti-counterinsurgency (of the nation-building sort) writing and he uses this piece to take a swipe at the current strategy. He notes, much as Brown and Rue have, that while trying to defeat a decentralized terrorist organization the United States has set as its goal the building of a nation-state in Afghanistan, an approach that has not worked thus far. He says:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Today in Afghanistan the effect of the American military's embrace of and belief in the efficacy of armed nation building, with its never ending stream of statements of progress, has obscured the vast amount of blood and treasure invested in a military methodology that has not produced results. Yet still we hear the calls to try harder, stay a bit longer, and keep the faith that it will all turn out right, because in war there is, as they say, no substitute for victory.</blockquote>
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I think those calls are becoming few and far between at this point in the war. We have a plan of sorts to withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming years and I doubt that anything will derail that plan. Gentile focuses too much on the military ways that our generals have decided. In his oft-repeated attacks on armed nation building, he seems to focus in on this aspect of strategy formulation and not on the political determinations of ends and means. If we were to take the President's statement of ends literally (disrupt, dismantle, defeat al Qaeda), we could probably declare the war over and probably could have years ago (Gentile does say this). </div>
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<br /></div>
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Gentile is right in calling out military leadership for not correctly aligning ends-ways-means, but he gives the political leadership a pass for not controlling the military more effectively and exercising their constitutional and precedential prerogative. Is that not the lesson learned of the famous MacAurthur vs Truman conflict he uses to set his argument? Nits aside, Gentile has valid points that speak loudly on the failure of our strategy. </div>
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<b>Strategy, strategy, strategy</b></div>
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The recurring theme of these three works is that the United States has had a serious strategy problem in Afghanistan. We haven't aligned ends, ways and means and the assumptions we've used for that analysis was off to begin with. This is not how great powers plan for success, which becomes infinitely more difficult if we can't even define what success means. Policy-makers who should define ends and means have not done so. Military strategists and leadership have chosen ways that certainly do not align with the ends that have been stated and have not likely used the means available as effectively as possible. </div>
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Another important theme throughout is the equivalence of tactical and strategic success, a trap the United States has been prone to since at least Vietnam. I've argued here before that all strategies are in part a summation of tactics used to achieve strategic ends. But the "in part" is essential to understanding the connection between strategy and tactics. Tactical gains and successes do not create strategic successes and gains on their own. There are other variables that when added to tactical gains creates strategic success and we haven't yet identified what those are (and logically haven't figured out how to address them). A lesson seemingly lost in Afghanistan. </div>
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Anyway, go read these three excellent pieces by three very smart people about a ridiculously hard problem. It's definitely worth your time. </div>
Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-36979219714696318522012-09-20T13:05:00.001-04:002012-09-20T13:05:31.344-04:00The Senators who voted against the Veterans Jobs Corps ActLast week <a href="http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-veterans-jobs-corps-act-and-senate.html">I wrote about a handful of Senators</a> attempting to block the Veterans Jobs Corps Act of 2012 - a bill that would have put a lot of veterans to work and would also make it easier for future generations of veterans to transition to civilian life. When it came time to move this bill forward on the floor of the Senate 40 Republican Senators voted against doing so and have all but killed the bill. This bill isn't perfect, but with 9/11-era veterans experiencing unemployment 3 percentage points higher than the general population, mainly due to their service, this bill would have put a lot of them to work to help close that gap. It also contained measures to pay for the program. The Republicans have presented no reasoning why they don't support this bill beyond misunderstanding/representing the budgeting measure or complaining that the House won't pass it anyway so why bother. Way to take leadership. Of these 40 heroes, only 4 are up for reelection in November. Here's the whole list of Senators who voted against it (since it's not all that easy to get a permanent link at the Thomas Library):<br />
<br />
Alexander (TN)<br />
Ayotte (NH)<br />
Barrasso (WY) - up for reelection<br />
Blunt (MO)<br />
Boozman (AR)<br />
Burr (NC)<br />
Chambliss (GA)<br />
Coats (IN)<br />
Cochran (MS)<br />
Corker (TN) - up for reelection<br />
Cornyn (TX)<br />
Crapo (ID)<br />
DeMint (SC)<br />
Enzi (WY)<br />
Graham (SC)<br />
Grassley (IA)<br />
Hatch (UT) - up for reelection<br />
Hoeven (ND)<br />
Hutchinson (TX)<br />
Isakson (GA)<br />
Johanns (NE)<br />
Johnson (WI)<br />
Kyl (AZ)<br />
Lee (UT)<br />
Lugar (IN)<br />
McCain (AZ)<br />
McConnell (KY)<br />
Moran (KS)<br />
Paul (KY)<br />
Portman (OH)<br />
Risch (ID)<br />
Roberts (KS)<br />
Rubio (FL)<br />
Sessions (AL)<br />
Shelby (AL)<br />
Thune (SD)<br />
Toomey (PA)<br />
Vitter (LA)<br />
Wicker (MS) - up for reelection<br />
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How many of these Senators say they're serious about jobs and they're serious about veterans issues? At least now we know how they really feel about it.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-79357564184653606832012-09-14T00:21:00.000-04:002012-09-14T00:21:03.662-04:00The Veterans Jobs Corps Act and the Senate Republicans against itThe Department of Labor released August employment data late last week. Yet again, 9/11-era veterans have significantly higher rates of unemployment than the population at large - nearly 3 percentage point higher. Lauren Bailey at the VA has some <a href="http://www.blogs.va.gov/VAntage/7989/overall-veteran-unemployment-rate-continues-to-fall-post-911-veteran-unemployment-long-term-trend-still-downward/">good analysis at VAntage Point</a> on how the overall trend is positive, but employment prospects remain quite bleak for those recently separated from active duty. Congress has been mulling legislation to help the situation for some time now and is getting closer to passing a bill.<br />
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Enter <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c1124Hzjaf:e901:">Senate Bill 3457 </a>(Veterans Jobs Corps Act of 2012). This bill, introduced by Senator Bill Nelson, would establish a job corps for veterans that allows the VA to provide grants and contracts specifically for post-9/11 veterans in areas such as first responders and public land conservation. The bill would provide $1 billion over 5 years for this and includes taxes to pay for it (because of that whole Budget Control Act thing). This would obviously help chip away at the current and outrageous unemployment levels of this population. This bill contains a couple of other provisions to help veterans find jobs, but most importantly is that it will begin laying the groundwork to ease state certifications and licensing for veterans based on training and work experience from active duty service. This is an enormous problem where combat medics cannot be certified as EMTs because of onerous training and certification requirements that could be eased if the states and the Department of Defense just talked about it to make transition easier. Section 4 of this bill requires the states to provide information about this to the DoD if they want any veterans job money from the VA. This is a great step forward.<br />
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This bill should be a slam dunk. It helps veterans in need and it pays for the program. Now enter a couple of Senate Republicans, specifically Senators Jeff Sessions and Rand Paul, who are trying to hold this bill up. <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r112:3:./temp/~r1129bdk9N:e125319:">Sessions took to the Senate floor yesterday</a> to gripe about how this bill violates the Budget Control Act. He mentions that it's important legislation, but by God we can't afford it and that the additional revenue the bill purports to raise is really just funny math. We simply can't afford this $1 billion in additional expenditures. Unfortunately for Senator Sessions, the <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/S3457,paygo.pdf">Congressional Budget Office disagrees </a>about it being funny math and estimates that over 10 years this bill will actually reduce the national deficit by roughly $200 million. Some people have a hard time with facts and numbers.<br />
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Senator Paul seems to have a different problem altogether: that the U.S. is doling out cash to our enemies. He tried to add two amendments to the <i>Veterans Jobs Corps Act of 2012 </i>that would have cut U.S. aid to Libya, Egypt, and Pakistan. I very much understand that amendments like this happen all the time and that Franken-bills are how lots of laws are passed. Paul is willing to hold up aid to unemployed veterans because of a foreign policy issue that belongs somewhere else and is most likely more about scoring political points than making actual policy. This is unconscionable.<br />
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In all, 8 Senate Republicans voted against moving forward with this bill: Senators Blunt, Coburn, DeMint, Inhofe, Johnson (Wisconsin variety), Lee, Paul, and Sessions. They all say they care about veterans and that they care about jobs, but their actions today have proven otherwise. Of course there is some skepticism that the House would not pass this bill. But put simply: this bill should be passed. We have a specific American population that is hurting more than others and that hurt is originating from the fact that they were in their Nation's service. This bill helps compensate for some of that and sets the framework to help future veterans transition more easily than this generation.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-84574189686101500012012-08-29T10:16:00.000-04:002012-08-29T10:16:46.407-04:00The G.I. Bill and the veteran gap in CMR studiesA few weeks ago <a href="http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2012/08/stars-earn-stripes-bad-tv-worse-morality.html">I wrote a post</a> disdainful of a new reality show that I felt was taking advantage of America's current love affair with its veterans. That same week, friend-of-the-blog Andrew Exum wrote <a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12263/abu-muqawama-u-s-needs-perspective-not-pedestal-for-military">his weekly column at World Politics Review</a> on the unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship between the American people and its military. The crux of the problem, as Exum sees it, is that too many Americans engage in hero-worship with regard to its military instead of dispassionately examining the society's transactional responsibilities to an all-volunteer force. This is an important issue that should be addressed, but I think the answer should be different than the one Exum comes to.<br />
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Exum compares the war zone risks and compensation of soldiers to diplomats, aid workers, and civilian contractors (his conclusion is that all of these have the same risks, but the military enjoys much better compensation) before posing the following option on the nature of the military: is it a public service or is it a profession? The former would limit military compensation to that of similar public services such as police officers. The latter would limit compensation to a contractual situation more similar to the private sector, which by my interpretation means that benefits afforded the military but do not have a private sector equivalent are probably in excess of what the contract should entail. Obviously, the U.S. has come to a hybrid solution to this problem since the advent of the all-volunteer force. The question then is how to compensate the military under this solution. This is where I think there are some flaws in Exum's analysis of civil-military relations.<br />
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Fundamentally, military service is not like other public services in one significant way. Yes, other forms of public service entail risk to individuals' lives, limbs, and eyesight. However, the functional imperative of military service is to <i>inflict</i> violence upon our enemies and this is unique to the military (the functional utility of the military, i.e., SFA, HA/DR, etc, is not the same as its functional imperative). This is true of military service whether you're a cook or an infantryman - the latter may use force much more often but the cook is trained and expected to at times as well (in other words, I don't buy <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-didnt-deserve-my-combat-pay/2011/03/07/ABb6iqm_story.html">this load of nonsense</a> on two societies within the military). Police forces may be authorized to use force in the execution of their functional imperative (maintain law and order), but it is not their primary or most desired tool. USAID workers are exposed to the same (or at least similar) risks and traumas as soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, but society not only does not expect them to inflict risks and traumas upon others, society forbids them from doing so by law. This is not an insignificant difference in service as anyone who has had his enemy in his weapon's sights can tell you. So how do we compensate for this?<br />
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Before we begin to answer that question, we need to examine two more aspects of military service and civil-military relations. The first is the issue of professionalism and the two societies that do indeed bifurcate the military: officers and enlisted. For this, Samuel Huntington, in "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Soldier-State-Civil-Military-Relations/dp/0674817362/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346243968&sr=8-1&keywords=the+soldier+and+the+state">The Solider and the State</a>", a work that Exum himself called <a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12126/abu-muqawama-no-crisis-in-wartime-u-s-civil-military-relations">the canonical text on civil-military relations</a> (and he's right), uses the term "professional" in a sociological sense (not in the "I do this well for a paycheck" sense): a vocation that requires expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. In Huntington's construct officers are professionals and enlisted are not according to the definitions he provides (which are much more involved than standard dictionary definitions - please read this section of the book before berating me for being an officer snob). Enlisted personnel are more like skilled craftsmen. There is a lot of merit to this argument, particularly around <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justice">UCMJ authorities</a> and the different education systems for officers and NCOs (although NCOs have made a lot ground in the past couple of decades in this regard). This important distinction is manifest in combat duties: officers are responsible for the management of violence and enlisted personnel are responsible for the acts of violence. Of course officers often pull triggers and enlisted NCOs independently manage violence, but these acts are borne of necessity on the battlefield and not their inherent responsibilities within the organization. The point of this discussion is that while military service is different public service because of the responsibility to commit acts of violence, society only expects enlisted personnel to commit those acts of violence. This must be a factor in calculating compensation for this unique public service.<br />
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The final issue we need to examine here is civil-military relations as it relates to veterans. Frankly, there is no "The Veteran and the State" (although I'd love to take a stab at it - hint, hint publishers...) to guide how society interacts with its veterans because of their previous military service. "The Solider and the State" deals almost exclusively with the interactions of the civilian government (and in a couple of places civilian society) and the military's officer corps. It was also written before our modern, all-volunteer force. Yet as it remains the capstone doctrine of civil-military relations, Huntington is our only guide. We must infer civil-veteran relations based on our understanding of the nature of military service and how the military interacts with society. But that extrapolation can be difficult.<br />
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We have already established that the functional imperative of military forces is to exact violence on the country's behalf. We have an understanding of how civilian control, military expertise, and transactions between the two parties work in order to optimize military effectiveness for society. But we have no idea who owes what once these skilled craftsmen of violence are no longer in the military. Their very unique individual functional imperative for society no longer exists for them individually and their skills can translate very poorly to civilian society. Should society not be responsible for helping these men and women to essentially reprogram their functional imperative into an function that aids society in new ways? To reintroduce them into society where risks may exist, but the need to commit violent acts is not? Yes, they volunteered for this unique service, but military personnel cannot stay in service indefinitely (<a href="http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/02/army-tighter-up-or-out-rules-for-enlisteds-021311w/">up or out!</a>) or even until a natural retirement age in their 60s. Society does owe these men and women something to retrain them to again be useful to society.<br />
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The G.I. Bill is the most obvious example of reintroduction benefits for veterans. Alex Horton of the Department of Veterans affairs <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/lonely-men-on-campus-student-veterans-struggle-to-fit-in/261628/">wrote an excellent article this week</a> in <i>The Atlantic</i> about the challenges of going to college after being in an Army at war. Horton focuses his article on the differences between war veterans and the "traditional" students who comprise the majority of the university body. But when I read his piece I was struck by how similar these two seemingly disparate groups are. They are starting from different points in life with different challenges, but they are all forging their minds and identities in ways that will define (in part) who they are and what they will do with the rest of their lives. In other words, how they will be useful to society for the remainder of their professional, productive lives. College is a moderately safe environment to acclimate to American society, for both 18 year-old kids and 32 year-old combat veterans. After what we've asked these service men and women to do - to commit acts of violence on our behalf - providing the opportunity to reintegrate into society in this way is a small price to pay to erase their previous utility (which obviously has no place in civilian society - and we should note that erasing utility is not the same as not recognizing their previous service) and create new utility, even if these types of benefits should not be unlimited. I'd rather it happen on the taxpayer's dime in a university setting than on the streets of some city.<br />
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And yet the G.I. Bill is a benefit that Exum seems to think should not be given to military veterans because no other public servants have the same benefit. As discussed, different service merits different benefits. Should the G.I. Bill be more limited than it is now? Probably, but not based on whether the veteran is a general's kid or not. Instead it should be freely given to our enlisted veterans - those whose purpose to society was violence - in order to reintegrate them into society. Former officers probably do not need it as their societal function was not committing acts of violence. They also probably do not need the G.I. Bill because they all already have a bachelor's degree, have more tangible civilian skills, and are at a social level that often negates the need for this type of societal reintegration. The distinction is a bit academic of course, but we have little else from which to base our sense of fairness when determining the terms of compensation transactions.<br />
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With looming austerity all military benefits and compensation should be under scrutiny. Some benefits may decrease for future service members and veterans, remembering that our society has a contract with current members and veterans. When the public and our government examine these benefits in this understudied area of civil-military relations, they need to remember that military service is an unique form of public service that has no place in society after soldiers and Marines depart military service. They need to remember that the transactional costs and benefits are not just about fairness to the veteran, but the effects on society as a whole. Alex Horton and those he discusses in his article will most likely benefit personally from a G.I. Bill-funded degree. But society also benefits from paying for that degree because Alex Horton and his cohorts will probably be better integrated into society because of it. This is not about hero worship or praetorian guards. Veterans benefits are about taking care of individuals who fulfill a unique role in society and ensuring that they are able to provide new, useful roles to society.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-82518884596350201582012-08-13T12:49:00.002-04:002012-08-13T13:25:02.066-04:00Stars Earn Stripes: bad TV, worse morality UPDATEDThis is your fault America. When television producers were looking to cut costs and introduced low-budget fare to the public in the form of reality television, you gobbled it up. It did not matter how asinine or offensive the show was: Operation Repo, Jersey Shore, Undercover Boss, Toddlers and Tiaras. The dumber the better. Continuing this streak of crapulence, NBC is now subjecting us to <i><a href="http://www.nbc.com/stars-earn-stripes/about/">Stars Earn Stripes</a></i>, where eight celebrities, of varying quality, conduct dramatized military and law enforcement activities under the tutelage of former special operators and SWAT officers as well as today's least-liked graduate of Hudson High School for Boys (my alma mater), <a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/wes-clark/">retired General Wes Clark</a>.<br />
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I will not critique the show in the usual sense (the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-stars-stripes-20120813,0,4505940.story">L.A. Times</a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/on-stars-earn-stripes-fame-finds-a-foxhole/2012/08/12/047f9620-e309-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_story.html">Washington Post</a> have already done so), mainly because I refuse to watch this nonsense. There has been, however, push back against the show because many feel that it glamorizes war and treats it as sport instead of the serious, deadly business that it really is. From a petition making its rounds on Twitter today, the leftist <a href="http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6405">activist group RootsAction</a> wrote the following to NBC:<br />
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Your entertainment show "Stars Earn Stripes" treats war as sport. This does us all a disservice. We ask that you air an in-depth segment showing the reality of civilian victims of recent U.S. wars, on any program, any time in the coming months. </blockquote>
Their assertion is not incorrect - <i>Stars</i> does treat war as sport which is the greater of two disservices to the public (the other being the quality of the entertainment they provide). As a veteran who has seen war as closely as one can, I think that Todd Palin jumping from a helicopter is a far cry from earning stripes and can only be interpreted as the fetishization of war. (Aside: Where are all of you non-commissioned officers? I'm sure you did more than this nonsense to earn your stripes.) In spite of this, <i>Stars Earn Stripes</i> seems comparatively benign to other forms of war glorification. These eight has-beens may shoot weapons at static targets, but compared to <a href="http://www.callofduty.com/mw3/">modern</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Band%20of%20Brothers&page=1&rh=n%3A14220161%2Ck%3ABand%20of%20Brothers">video</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game)">games</a> where war is literally a sport, albeit digital, this show seems delightfully archaic.<br />
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This is not to give <i>Stars</i> or NBC pass. They are using war and America's current trust, nay, love of veterans and the military to make profit for themselves and their shareholders. I find this morally offensive. Yes, the winner of the show's competition gets $100,000 to donate to their veterans/law enforcement charity of choice. But how many dollars were spent producing this show? How much will ad revenue bring in? I suspect the profits of a prime-time show on NBC will exceed $100,000. Good on them for doing something for charity, but I think they could and should do a lot more. If NBC were to contribute all of their profits to veterans charity, and I strongly suggest that they do, this show would cease to be a morally reprehensible source of entertainment. It would merely be a reprehensible source of entertainment, which is exactly what you all seem to clamor for anyway.<br />
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<b>Update:</b> As I think about why this form of profit-making from war is so offensive to me, vice other forms such as video games or war movies, I think it has to do with the fact that this show is purely profit-driven. Realistic video games show war as it is: bloody and cruel. Whether gamers choose to acknowledge this lesson potentially learned is not the fault (or even design) of the games' makers. But the lesson is there. Likewise, movies involving war generally have some sort of political message: to support the troops or protest a particular war or war in general. <i>Stars Earn Stripes</i> has no political message, it has provides no lens through which to learn more about the horrors of war. It is about the military and what they do being totally awesome and profiting from providing that viewpoint. In other words, it provides no utility to society except for those few making a buck off of the worst experiences mankind must endure. That is what makes this show so morally reprehensible.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-60678281292904432972012-08-09T14:23:00.001-04:002012-08-09T14:23:07.033-04:00Ohio and military votes: towards a warrior caste and unbalanced civil-military relationsThe Ohio military voting issue that surfaced within the past week has raised some ugly politics and views. While reticent to wade into what is primarily a domestic political concern, this confrontation is pouring light into the dark corners of civil-military relations that we'll discuss shortly. But first a synopsis of the facts as they occurred.<br />
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Election Day in Ohio in 2004 was a disaster in that the state was obviously unprepared for the number of voters who came to vote. Some voting lasted until the early hours of the next morning and provisional ballots were improperly used, causing a significant number of them to be discounted. As a response (in part as well as for other reasons it seems), the State of Ohio opened up an early voting period for any voters in the days prior to Election Day in order to ease the burden on the big day and the potential for screw-ups (i.e., discounting valid votes). This option was used extensively since, particularly in the final three days before Election Day. However, this past year the Ohio House of Representatives passed a law that maintained early in-person voting rights in the final 3 days before Election Day only for Ohioans subject to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) - most of whom are military members and their families. This bill removed the right of all other Ohioans to vote early in person in the final 3 days running up to Election Day, cutting their early voting off on the Friday prior. To sum, every Ohioan had been able to vote early in person in the three days before Election Day until this year when the Ohio legislature changed the law so that only military personnel and their families could do this. <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/102033888/OFA-Complaint-as-Filed">The Obama campaign, and others, have sued</a> the State of Ohio to <i>reinstate</i> early in-person voting for all of Ohio, not just those subject to UOCAVA. Please read <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/04/no_the_obama_campaign_isn_t_trying_to_take_the_vote_away_from_soldiers.html">this</a>, <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/ohio-the-only-state-to-give-special-early-voting-preferences-to-military-voters/">this</a>, and <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/mitt-romney-completely-misrepresents-obama-lawsuit-over-ohio-early-voter-law/">this</a> for more perspective (thanks to Hayes Brown - @HayesBrown - for providing the Slate link to get this started for me).<br />
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The response from Mr. Obama's political opponents can be most kindly described as misrepresenting the Obama campaign's lawsuit. <a href="http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/08/memorandum-obama-america-ohio-lawsuit">The Romney campaign</a> has billed it as an attempt to suppress military votes - suggesting that the lawsuit was attempting to remove military members' ability to vote early instead of reinstating all Ohioans' ability to vote early. The Romney campaign is supported on this position by a number of influential military-affiliated organizations, including the Association of the U.S. Army. Their argument is petty politics and they're using smoke and mirrors to attack the Obama campaign. Fine. There is a lot of political football in this, but that does negate the fact that the Obama campaign is in no way suing to prevent extra time for military personnel from Ohio to vote. It also has absolutely nothing to do with mail-in absentee ballots from overseas. This is the bottom line and these facts are not (should not be, rather) in contention.<br />
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At this point you're probably asking yourself why I'm going on about this on a relatively apolitical security blog. If you move beyond the pandering, obfuscation, and outright lying that passes for political discourse, this issue has given the darkest and most extreme voices of CMR a drum to beat upon. <a href="http://www.facebook.com/notes/congressman-allen-west/as-a-combat-veteran-for-this-president-to-unleash-his-campaign-cronies-against-o/391265584259808">Congressman Allen West issued a statement</a> in which he doesn't propagate the Romney campaign lie of disenfranchising military, but instead avers that what the President is trying to do is offensive:<br />
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how dare this President compare the service, sacrifice, and commitment of those who Guard our liberties not as special and seek to compare them to everyone else.</blockquote>
Poor use of the English language aside, a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives is saying the law in Ohio should stand as it is because those that serve our nation in arms are better than everyone else and should be given an edge. You can't even <i>compare</i> those in uniform to the rest of society. It seems that Mr. West believes service members deserve more rights, more democracy than those who do not serve. Don't think this is a prevalent viewpoint among many Americans, especially those who have or are serving? Right-leaning blog <a href="http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=31412"><i>This Ain't Hell </i>covered the Ohio voting issue</a> along the same lines. <a href="http://www.usspringle.org/Veteran.htm">This poem</a>, ubiquitous among military/veteran Facebook pages and crappy PX art expos, explicitly states how much more important veterans are than other members of society. Or the old quote, too often <a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/">mis-attributed to George Orwell</a>:<br />
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People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.</blockquote>
Thank God for those rough men or the rest of you weenies would have a rough go of it. All of those policemen, firemen, engineers, architects, sewage maintenance types, water purifiers and others who contribute to our way of life should, in contrast, apparently keep me up all night. Still think I'm reading too much into this? The Stolen Valor Act was an attempt to criminalize a narrow band of lying to prevent people from pretending to be a decorated service member or veteran and that such lies somehow diminish the acts of valor that really occurred. <a href="http://www.blackfive.net/main/2010/08/stolen-valor-act-ruled-unconstitutional-by-9th-circuit.html">Read</a> <a href="http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=30614">commentary</a> on the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Act and tell me it doesn't reek of men and women offended that others deign to pretend they are in this elite and protected element of society (and then read the comments sections of those and similar posts). I ask: why was lying about having advanced degrees or sleeping with members of the opposite sex or about your personal wealth not also outlawed? The only conclusion I can come up with is that they aren't special like the military and therefore not worthy of special protection.<br />
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There are a number of reasons why the public treats current and former military members and family as special, including their very real sacrifices over the past 10 years of war and Vietnam guilt. Some of that is warranted. But this pernicious belief that these self-selecting members of society are better, beyond comparison to rest of the country, and thus deserving of greater helpings of democracy than the rest is anti-democratic and antithetical to any reasonable theories of civil-military relations necessary to keep our society safe. There is a reason they are called <i>service </i>members - their volunteering to serve our society does not grant them more rights and privileges. Some remediation is necessary to repair inequities created by their service (such as veterans' healthcare and jobs programs), but their rights as citizens are not impaired. Embracing acts that go beyond correcting inequalities and that instead promote the creation of a special caste of citizens with more rights is exactly the kind of attitude that could help foment a warrior caste that would in actuality upend the balance of civil-military relations. Huntington weeps and our country hurts for it.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-76022480965482350302012-08-02T22:06:00.003-04:002012-08-02T22:08:38.350-04:00Romney abroad: on culture, busts, and the categorical imperative of democracy<i style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">NOTE: I feel the need to introduce this post with a reiteration of the usual disclaimer. I'm not representing anyone else's views or analysis here but my own. I can't imagine why you would have assumed that I might be, but we don't normally veer into domestic politics and this post does so unabashedly. That said, I don't believe it's partisan, and I hope you'll evaluate the analysis as being up to the standards we typically uphold around here.</span></i><br />
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mitt Romney’s recent travels abroad have
caused a brief surge in commentary on the foreign policy and national security
aspects of the presidential campaign. In this general category I include the
re-animated flap over the Obama administration’s return to Britain of a
Churchill bust that once graced the Oval Office; the sundry criticisms of the
president for being “anti-Poland” in his Reset policy toward Russia; the
hilarious and incredible suggestion that there are such things as pro- and
anti-Israel camps among national politicians in America; and Governor Romney’s
controversial and unsubtle suggestion that Israelis are rich and Palestinians
poor because of something he failed to adequately explain but subsumed under
the heading of “culture.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s this last bit that has perhaps
spurred the most discussion, if only because the rest is such well-trod ground.
Social scientists and economic historians have criticized Romney’s claims in
the press, both for oversimplification and for genuine factual errors. None of
this will matter to potential voters, of course, who can’t be fussed to read
the books that political candidates variously satirize, lionize, or otherwise
caricature. By now we’re all very well acquainted with the fundamental reality
of politics, which is that people don’t care so much about the truth as what
their particular orthodoxy tells them is the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the “culture” comments – which are
viewed as a gaffe by the left, but will likely serve as the sort of happily
impolitic, plain-truth rallying cry so beloved by ignorant culture warriors of
every stripe – are interesting for the way they distill right-wing ideology
about ideas, circumstances, cause and effect in politics and history, and the
triumph of one people over another. Put another way, what Romney said is the
collectivized and nationalized version of basic conservative dogma: some people
have good ideas, good values, good habits, and good personal qualities, and
those people succeed in the world – including by getting rich – as a result. Be
better, work harder, think the right way, and you’ll have a better life—it’s
the foundation of the American Dream… isn’t it?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An admittedly amusing <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/07/mitt-romney-abroad">critical
blog post</a> on the Economist ignores the appeal of this thinking to a large
segment of Romney’s base (and arguably to an even broader segment of the
American electorate, including some voters who are currently undecided):</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">Comparing the income of the average Israeli to that of the average
Palestinian, as though their prospects at birth had been equivalent and their
fortunes today are largely the result of their own efforts and their
"culture", is gratuitously insulting and wreaks damage to American diplomacy.
Besides that, it's just wrong.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wrong or right, this should sound
familiar to those who have paid attention to other recent campaign
imbroglios—most notably the “you didn’t build that” spat. With its efforts to
paint the president as a socialist, a collectivist, an enemy of business, an
impediment to Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit, the Romney campaign is
catering to the sort of people who believe (against any and all evidence to the
contrary) that personal success is far more attributable to hard work and right-thinking
than to background, context, and circumstantial factors—including sheer good
luck. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The entire American political and
economic project is built around a shared commitment to this fantastical
aspiration: that we can create a society that is so free, so fair, so basically
egalitarian that the sole determinant of success and failure will be the
quality of one’s ideas and one’s willingness to work. Left and right disagree,
of course, about the various and competing merits of liberty and equality, and
about whether the modern United States offers a sufficiently level playing
field to permit pure freedom to fairly and effectively separate losers from
winners. The important role played by American political and economic
institutions and by the public goods that government has enabled are at the
core of the Obama speech from which “you didn’t build that” has been so
unceremoniously wrenched. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Romney understands this, of course, and
his paean to the Israelis’ superior “culture” surely was founded on respect not
simply for shared religious identity and classically liberal political ideals,
but for the policies through which culture (and <i>political</i> culture) is mediated into economically productive
activity. But he has a base to pander to, and that base includes a fair number
of people who really <i>do</i> believe what
Romney’s semantic imprecision made it look as though he actually meant: that
Israelis are rich because they’re mostly Jews, while Palestinians are poor
because they’re mostly Muslims.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I digress a bit here. What we’re
really dealing with is nothing more complicated than the most conservative
(both in the literal and politically-partisan senses of that word) of all
possible arguments: that the circumstances in which people and nations find
themselves are fair and just, that they are a product of history’s implicit
judgment (or fate’s, or God’s; Romney gave this one away in Israel when he
referred to the “hand of providence”), and that as a result they ought
generally to be left alone. What is is what ought to be. All is for the best in
this best of all possible worlds! Israel’s triumph and prosperity is a
validation of its goodness, to this strain of thought.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We needn’t look too far back in history
for similarly conservative justifications of the status quo, and at least one
bears in part an almost literally unbelievable similarity to Romney’s remarks
in Israel. In his <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Deceit-Britains-Foreign-Policy/dp/0099448394">critical
re-telling</a> of Britain’s history abroad, Mark Curtis <a href="http://markcurtis.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/the-mau-mau-war-in-kenya-1952-60/">recounts</a>
a 1946 speech by a colonial administrator in Kenya who noted that</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 18px;">“the greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in [British] hands… This land we have made is our land by right – by right of achievement.” He explained to the Africans that “their Africa has gone forever,” since they were now living in “a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.” The Governor added: “We appear to Africans as being immensely wealthy and nearly all of them are in fact very poor… </span><i style="line-height: 18px;">But these are social and economic differences and the problems of this country in that respect are social and economic and not political; nor are they to be solved by political devices</i><span style="line-height: 18px;">.” Britain was in Kenya “as of right, the product of historical events which reflect the greatest glory of our fathers and grandfathers.” [Emphasis mine.]</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One presumes that by characterizing
inequality as “social and economic and not political” in origin, the governor
meant to imply that social and economic change were a necessary precursor to
the political resolution of the imbalance, or even that political arrangements
were altogether irrelevant to it. (It takes no great imagination to see that
this was wildly disingenuous. Britons justified their Empire with the perverse
and thankfully obsolete rhetoric of the White Man’s Burden, but the practical administration
of the empire was intended to head off the sort of independent political
development that might threaten London’s essentially <a href="http://georgeorwellnovels.com/journalism/how-a-nation-is-exploited-the-british-empire-in-burma/">extractive
relationship</a> with the colonies, which were progressively liquidated as
their economic value came to be outweighed by the complications and costs of
their maintenance.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Israeli conservatives and their American
supporters view the matter of the Palestinian territories in a similar way: <i>stop complaining about “occupation” and fix
yourselves, as you’re the real cause of what’s wrong</i>. <i>Don’t tell us we’re responsible for your backwardness—look at how </i>we’ve
<i>succeeded! We can talk about rights once
you’ve built a properly liberal political culture and eliminated the extremist
populism our own policies and attitudes help to perpetuate. </i>And so it goes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s intended irony in the parallel I
draw between Romney’s attitude toward Palestinians and the British imperial
view of Kenyans, considering the unhinged ramblings of Dinesh D’Souza and Mike
Huckabee on the subject of President Obama’s alleged “anti-colonial ideology.”
The author of a crypto-racist, pseudo-Freudian volume in whose telling the
president’s position on everything from interior decoration to tax policy is
foreordained by his father’s incontrovertible foreignness may assert that “my
argument has nothing to do with the ‘birther’ claim,” but this is plainly
untrue. As Amy Davidson notes in an excellent <i>New Yorker </i>piece on the aforementioned <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/08/the-case-of-the-two-churchills.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true">statuary
controversy</a>, </span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 18px;">[T]he shadow behind Churchill’s bust is birtherism, or its less conspiracy-minded companion, the conviction that Obama is, by virtue of his heritage, alien and un-American. This notion was most blatantly expressed by Dinesh D’Souza. […] This is part of a larger story about how Obama is really an anti-colonialist socialist who doesn’t like countries like Britain or America. In this telling, all that Obama keeps hidden about himself is exposed because he just can’t stand to look Churchill in the eye.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Less conspiracy-minded” than a tale of
document forgery is the belief that the President of the United States, driven
by an un- and anti-American worldview, has repeatedly sought elective office in
order to purposefully enact policies that would hamstring and damage a country
that he secretly loathes? That even a writer unsympathetic to either narrative
should describe them in this way reveals an unhealthy focus on the forms of
criticism rather than their substance. To aver that the President is not
legally an American is considered out-of-bounds to all but the most ridiculous
figures in our political scene, yet it’s deemed acceptable and plausible for
others to suggest not simply that Obama’s policies are bad for America, but
that they are intentionally so!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A candidate for the presidency can’t say
this, of course, lest he be made to look like a raving lunatic. Or worse, he
may be accused of casting doubt on his opponent’s patriotism—and patriotism is
a subject with which the American electorate simply will not tolerate you
messing around. But he and his proxies and surrogates can insinuate as much,
and this is exactly what both Bust-Gate and Culture-Gate are all about: boiling
down complicated, ambiguous reality to proclaim an objective truth (Churchill
was an unvarnished American hero! Israelis are comparatively successful because
they think and act like Westerners!), framing that “truth” as an essentially
American consensus, and then insinuating that the president simply stands
outside this consensus. The message is this: Barack Obama does not share our
American values.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You’ll note that I began this essay by
referencing “the foreign policy and national security aspects of the campaign,”
rather than simply “foreign policy and national security.” That’s because all
of this has very little to do with other countries, or with advancing American interests,
or with ensuring the safety of our people, a truth that’s made obvious by
Romney’s adulation of foreign political figures (Churchill, Wałęsa, Netanyahu)
whose own countrymen tend to view them with considerably more ambivalence. (The
Republican often <a href="http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2011/06/tribute-labour-isnt-working-0">pays
homage</a> to Margaret Thatcher, which is risible when juxtaposed with his
wife’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9432696/Ann-Romney-popular-in-Wales-but-locals-would-vote-for-Barack-Obama.html">newfound
enthusiasm</a> about her Welsh heritage. The Iron Lady isn’t likely to have
many fans in Nantyffyllon.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Instead this talk of the special
relationship is about – like everything else in the campaign – manipulating the
feelings of U.S. voters by invoking code-words associated with the issues and
seeding doubts about your opponent, signaling that I’m One of You and the Other
Guy Isn’t. (This isn’t unique to Romney or to conservatives, as should be plain
to see: the president’s campaign is largely based on the thinly-veiled
assertion that his opponent is taking advantage of Regular People to further
enrich the small minority of People Like Him.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The code-words in foreign policy are
simple to discern: victory, patriotism, American exceptionalism, American
strength. Standing with the forces of freedom and democracy. Standing with
those who Share Our Values. Standing with Churchill and Israel. Accept each of
these elements wholeheartedly, without reservation or nuance, or be accused of
enthusiasm for their Manichean alternatives: Defeat. Betrayal. Self-hatred.
American weakness. Tyranny and terrorism. Appeasement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Must it be this way? Surely the
questions are not so simple, nor the answers so clear. Maybe D’Souza has done
us all a favor by invoking the president’s alleged “anti-colonial ideology”
instead of treating him as a “conventional liberal”; maybe we can pause and ask
<i>what exactly is so wrong with
anti-colonial ideology? </i>Are we only permitted to be anti-colonialists as
private citizens, or as white people? Was not Dwight Eisenhower an <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=T1NTOMsMx74C&lpg=PA65&ots=SJ8wLDwnkq&dq=eisenhower%20expressed%20his%20views%20on%20colonialism&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=eisenhower%20expressed%20his%20views%20on%20colonialism&f=false">anti-colonialist</a>?
Should we doubt the patriotism and integrity of that most eloquent <a href="http://orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph">critic of
empire</a> – a Serious Anti-Communist who wouldn’t be out of place on the list
of Romney heroes – George Orwell?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And what of Churchill? His committed
colonialism would surely find favor with D’Souza – in 1954 the prime minister
wrote to Eisenhower that he was “a bit skeptical about universal suffrage for
the Hottentots” – but he was far from uncomplicated. Does Romney name as “one
of [his] heroes” not just the man who warned of “an Iron Curtain [that] has
descended across Europe,” but the one who sat with Stalin and chopped up a continent
on a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Percentages_Agreement.png">slip
of paper</a>? What of the parliamentarian who introduced legislation creating a
minimum wage and offering unemployment insurance? What about the man who
supported eugenics, who wrote the prime minister in 1910 <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/12/british-eugenics-disabled">to
warn</a> that “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible
danger to the race”? Or the budgeteer who prioritized solvency over military
strength, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639122">championing adoption</a>
of the Ten-Year Rule, whereby the armed services took as an indefinite and
continuous planning assumption that no major war would occur in the upcoming
decade? Are <i>those </i>Churchills among
Romney’s heroes?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Such two-dimensional comic-book
likenesses as we find in Romney’s description of foreign countries and leaders
are not only inaccurate, they’re insulting. They lay bare a truth most thinking
people will already know, and one that is far more damaging to American
diplomacy than returned artwork: unless you can raise money, give money, or
vote, you are meaningless to a U.S. political candidate, and so your proud
history will be rendered in finger-paint to influence those who can. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why do we allow these caricatures to
dominate our politics? Why do even our very best indulge them, much as they do
the flag lapel pin and the simple-minded platitudes about Supporting the
Troops? Because they fear the consequences of trying and failing to broaden the
discourse, of trying to lead and being seen to lecture or pontificate or
condescend, of alienating voters by unreservedly embracing knowledge and nuance.
Because the greatest sin in our democracy is not to lie, but to lose.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The sad reality is that it doesn’t
matter a damn whether Mitt Romney is right or wrong about culture, or
Solidarity, or Churchill, or whether he tells Americans the truth about them or
just a pretty story. And the reason is doesn’t matter is even sadder: because
we’re stupid, and we’re easily manipulated, and because we don’t care.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-9793155718681956472012-08-02T13:41:00.001-04:002012-08-03T14:14:48.516-04:00L Paul Bremmer as exemplar UPDATEDSeriously. Any observer of the Iraq War should readily acknowledge the deleterious effect L. Paul Bremmer III had as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Specifically his de-Ba'athification policy and the wholesale firing of the regime's military and police. I was in Baghdad the days these were announced and they were not good days. Previously, we had enjoyed significant security in Baghdad (I couldn't say the same about the Iraqis unfortunately) and what seemed to be widespread support of the people. The day the Army was disbanded saw the first of many thousands of attacks on the route from Baghdad into the airport, a grenade attack on a HMMWV that burned the vehicle to the ground with no U.S. casualties. Attacks against Coalition Forces only grew from there and a good amount of the blame for that lies with Bremmer.<br />
<br />
T<a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/the_watercolor_paintings_of_paul_bremer">oday Foreign Policy reported that Ambassador Bremmer has retired to Vermont as of 2007 to spend his days painting <strike>watercolors</strike></a> oil on canvas*. From an artistic point of view, <a href="http://bremerenterprises.com/index.html">the paintings</a> are marginally interesting - not the best I've seen but certainly not worse than many of the so-called art I've seen for sale in recent months. The most important aspect of this is thus: a man who failed in his public service duties, failed on an astronomical scale, has removed himself public service and does not pundificate on public service matters. I have nothing but disdain for what this man did to Iraq, based purely on his political ideology, but I respect that he acknowledges his failure and does not attempt to repeat his past mistakes. How refreshingly rare. Good for you Mr. Bremmer.<br />
<br />
Here are some other people, to picture but a few, who should follow Mr. Bremmer's example and give serious thought to moving to rural corners of the United States to take up the production of mediocre arts and crafts instead of doubling down on decade-old mistakes. Our country would be better off without your thoughts on how to run it - you have already tried and failed.<br />
<br />
<img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRKq4rScgOYRx6lYxnVaOoHCK86gyUBdeAlFRCwAzLkFgftd-IEUA" width="160" /><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRusgcebGE5y0qWNdO31ZN9KZq1vNDMTJ6Qu3baxdi29mmLNUkIPA" width="160" /><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTc2dRw09sPD2ZyXzSOsCScPyDGQZMJuqk2jKG4fa_pD_DcO5B_" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTc2dRw09sPD2ZyXzSOsCScPyDGQZMJuqk2jKG4fa_pD_DcO5B_" width="160" /></a><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTqaxMkGzNakqFHUJAEIH5kbeTCq3A3rkO_2LoLNe9Q5phsyQ8e" width="159" /><img height="211" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQb7LqvmE5E0osJmnk91rao0ajrn7rHJT_JsNLl0ctLCzZTelYL" width="320" /><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhJOUtfujcwATmLypPJtR8anDqLSMtjj9lB04MkDbWfJsnn_Iv2Q" width="191" /><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRD7JEHa5efnZWzDiCcikVkxSMHZk7I5uW_4oOGE8kmHLvipAVK" width="160" /><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQniYPF1jWxvpdObhUM9k7zfqFao2uWcNFKcXKnIsiCfAi9z_8c_A" width="149" /><br />
<br />
<br />
* The FP piece said he was doing watercolors. A closer examination of Mr. Bremmer's website shows he paints primarily with oil on canvas.<br />
<br />
UPDATE: I may have jumped the gun here in praising Mr. Bremmer. Because <a href="http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/content/foreign-policy-experts-urge-president-obama-take-immediate-action-establish-safe-zones-syria">I came across this</a> today. Stick to painting Bremmer.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-34399122205870771582012-07-23T20:51:00.001-04:002012-07-23T20:51:56.214-04:00Military Police actually aren't like civilian police<a href="http://www.marines.mil/news/publications/Documents/MCWP%203-34.1%20Military%20Police%20in%20Support%20of%20the%20MAGTF.pdf">Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-34.1: Military Police in Support of the MAGTF</a> states:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The MP mission and capabilities include support for AT/FP operations, maneuver and mobility support operations, area security, law and order, and internment operations. </blockquote>
<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2018749493_marinecops23.html">So the United States Marine Corps has law enforcement battalions now</a> (or, rather, again). Three of<br />
them to be exact. The linked article talks about how <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Marines have been increasingly taking on the role of a street cop along with their combat duties over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have been in charge of training both countries' security forces. [...]<span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The war on terror has also taught troops the importance of learning how to gather intelligence, secure evidence and assist local authorities in building cases to take down criminal networks. Troops have gotten better at combing raid sites for clues to help them track insurgents.<span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They also have changed their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cellphone sellers and others. The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.</blockquote>
According to the commander of the 1st Battalion, a Major Jan Durham, "no group of Marines is better at that kind of work than the Corps' military police, who graduate from academies just like civilian cops". I am a huge fan of the Military Police (seriously), but let's not kid ourselves: they are not like "regular police". Their main wartime functions (and therefore training time) are spent on internment ops, force protection, and route and rear-area security in high intensity conflict. They have done a bunch of mentoring to host nation police forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Panama, etc. But they are not police. <br /><br />Their law enforcement functions are seriously limited to maintaining the peace and preventing crime, specifically around the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Federally-owned jurisdictions. Yes, they do have different authorities in different places, but this is rare. Traffic tickets and investigations, domestic disturbances, putting drunkards in the tank, and the occasional drug bust are all most MPs do on any regular basis - outside of the special investigative services such as CID or NCIS. I am sure that most MPs would love to do what civilian cops do, but that's just not their job as it's more important for them to prepare for and execute their wartime functions. But they do not gather intelligence, conduct community policing, or bring down criminal or terrorist networks. They are not the FBI. <br /><br />Even their use as mentors for host nation police forces has had problems historically. Because they do not deal with the issues civilian police do - and certainly not the issues police in current or post-conflict nations face - they have little they can provide to the host nation, outside of seasoned non-commissioned officers, warrants, and officers due to lack of experience (outside of internment operations). <br /><br />This is not to bag on MPs - they are a vital element of any task force. But let's recognize what they are: they are military police, not police who happen to be military. They are not going to be a quick reaction NCIS to solve terrorist or drug cartel crimes in far reaches of the globe. Particularly with only three battalions to go around. I think forming them into battalions is a great idea (and not just because the Army does it this way) - it gives commanders a greater force, with more flexibility, to address his military police objectives. Which are force protection, area security, maneuver support, some personnel protection, some tactical site exploitation, and a whole lot of internment ops. Three battalions of Marine police are not going to suffice as the world police force, in spite of what some of the article suggests.<br /><br />(And please ignore the Thompson quote at the end - I don't know what he thinks Marine MPs do differently than Marine grunts to contain threats. Escalation of force is escalation of force.)<br /><br />(Also, if you can identify the little piece of USMC doctrine I helped write on this topic, I'll buy you a drink or something - but not those of you who I told about it.)Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8755035051021414780.post-77808046306781501252012-07-20T12:58:00.002-04:002012-07-20T12:58:21.561-04:00Things, change, stay the same, etc.<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[A]n all-volunteer military is not expected to differ significantly from the present mixed force in its size, composition, and relations with civilian society. Its subordination to the nation's political leaders will change not at all. The belief that volunteers will be more aggressive, will have greater autonomy from the civilian leadership and will exploit international tensions to their own advantage springs, not from any rational evidence, but from an irrational fear of relying on the neglected mechanism of freedom to preserve and protect our nation. </blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white;">I have been reading through a few documents from the 1970s discussing the move from a mixed force of conscripts and volunteers to the all-volunteer force. It's fascinating that the discussion has not changed much since then. The quote above is from </span><i style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG265/images/webS0243.pdf">The Report of the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force</a></i><span style="background-color: white;">. I also recommend RAND's </span><i style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R1450.html">Military Manpower and the All-Volunteer Force</a></i><span style="background-color: white;">. </span><br />
<br />
In addition to little change in the discourse, I was struck by how much these documents talk about fairness. Today's debate focuses on the fairness to the "other 1%" who have borne the burden of war. I've never understood this from a service perspective (a war tax on the other hand...) since that 1% did volunteer to carry burden. But the 1970s debate focused their fairness on those induced into service for peacetime service - their service was not often necessary, was against their wishes, and was economically unsound to both the service and the draftees. I have the feeling that a lot of modern pro-draft voices would prefer that compelled service into the other 1% would come from the original 1% and aren't thinking about all of these other kids (from populations more likely to volunteer anyway) who get saddled with this unnecessary infringement upon their rights.<br />
<br />
Concerns of civil-military relations seem to not have changed much over time. Decades with a draft military did not abate those concerns (some of the biggest crises in CMR in our history occurred during these decades). If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend that you read these two publications.Jason Fritzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18335313679058470722noreply@blogger.com3