10 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 do something. I was 22 and obviously knew nothing about the world beyond how to lead a platoon of tanks.
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 may have tilted the political leanings of the United States, 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).
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.
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.
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.
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Shadows of 2003
Once upon a time there was a country in the Middle East ruled by a Ba'athist dictator. This dictator used special intelligence units and his military against his own people, often using horrible weapons to suppress his subjects. This dictator's regime has in the past supported terrorist organizations and is thought to possess weapons of mass destruction. Pundits and academics clamor for the United States to take action. Don't worry, they say, their military is weak, untrained, under-equipped, and not loyal. Don't worry, they say, we have limited objectives and military intervention will be easy against this flaccid force. Don't worry, they say, we won't have to govern this country after we intervene, we'll let them sort that out. Democracy's hard but this will be easy.
This sounded wrong in 2003 when it was said by Neoconservatives. It sounds wrong today when said by liberal interventionists. It feels right to want to help the Syrian people as much as it felt right to help the Iraqi people. But we have to actually be capable of helping them and so far the pro-interventionists are making about as valid an argument that intervention might work as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al did in 2003, even if the current scenario lacks cooked intelligence to give the casus belli. The military concepts are equally bad. And here's why after a quick primer on military planning.
In the Army (I don't know the exact terms in the other services), military planning is focused on objectives. These objectives in high-intensity warfare are usually enemy-focused. But even if they are not enemy-focused, the enemy will play a big role in the ability of the friendly force to achieve its objectives. Therefore the most important assumptions are done through intelligence analysis where intel officers create what are called the enemy's Most Likely Course of Action (MLCOA) and Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCOA). These are the most important assumptions in any military plan. The first, MLCOA is the best-guess assumption on what the enemy is actually going to do. This is derived from the best intelligence available and analysis and extrapolation of known capabilities versus friendly capabilities. Gaps in intelligence require assumptions, but the assumptions must assume some level of difficulty to friendly forces and cannot be assume away. MDCOA is an assumption on what the enemy could do that would be most dangerous to friendly forces or their objectives. This is not the most likely event to occur, but it's in the realm of possible. Simply stated, your military plan of operations is based upon your MLCOA assumption, but a branch or decision point is in hand in case the MDCOA becomes reality (in some cases the decision point may be to disengage from contact because the price isn't worth the benefit of meeting the objective). Briefly: plan for MLCOA, know what you'll do if the enemy executes the MDCOA.
This gets at why I have not yet heard a viable military option for intervention in Syria. The greatest proponents of intervention, Shadi Hamid and Anne-Marie Slaughter to name just two as an example (and two I very greatly admire on everything except their military operational planning skills), have laid out their ideas for what a U.S.-lead coalition could do militarily to slow and/or stop the killing of civilians in Syria (as well as break the Hezbollah-Iran connection and maybe stop Syria's WMD programs). But their "plans" are based on the Syrian military executing the Least Dangerous Course of Action (LDCOA: see here) with regard to friend forces. They, and they are by no means alone in doing this, have assumed away the Syrian military to the point that they seem to consider a nominally 300,000-man force as negligible. That is exactly what the Bush Administration Pentagon did and what CENTCOM did under their leadership with regard to Iraq. Assumed away the enemy forces. And we see how well that worked out. You cannot plan military operations based on the LDCOA. It must be based off of the MLCOA at a minimum and I don't think the Syrian military is just going to walk away from the field. That may have generally happened in Libya, but it's very rare and unlikely. Also, they cannot assume away a post-conflict environment potentially devoid of government. We did that in Iraq, too. I think you get the point.
There are a couple of reasons this matter and isn't a mere matter of opinion on the fighting capabilities of the Syrian military. Firstly, by committing forces to fight for American interests we would need to ensure the military plan is viable and established upon a solid set of assumptions. Current intervention proposals simply are not. Their assumptions are based on hearsay or intuition, not analysis, that the Syrian military isn't a serious fighting force. It is almost word-for-word the nonsense I heard in the Kuwaiti desert in March 2003. And I have yet to see any evidence that they will not react, potentially with effect, against any intervention. Without such evidence you must assume that they will be capable of reacting with some effect. Second, any proposal that puts American lives and resources on the table requires some assessment of what point is the intervention worth doing. That's what the MDCOA would provide in this type of situation. How much is it worth intervening? Assad using WMD against his people or against us? What if the civil war expands significantly and the death toll mounts higher and fast than if we had not intervened? Are 10 years in Syria potentially conducting population-centric counterinsurgency worth our doing something, anything now? These cannot be assumed away. They need to be addressed through thorough and dispassionate analysis to determine if they're possible and what the United States would do if they occurred.
These pundits may feel they do not need to convince me on the merits of intervening in Syria and may think this a matter of disagreement. But this is the lowest level of rigor the military will apply to any plan they come up with. If you are so ready to commit foreign troops into harms way because you feel it's the right thing for America and her allies to do, the least you can do is apply the same level of rigor to propose military options. I'm not asking for synchronization matrices. I'm asking for a thorough and rigorous analysis of the MLCOA and MDCOA if we intervened in whatever way you envisioned. If you keep spouting this LDCOA-assumption malarkey, I and many others who possess understanding on the use of force will continue to compare your plans with those of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Franks, even if we agree with the sentiment that drives you to want to execute these plans. Yes, a lot of people are dying. But intervening might cause more deaths. I can't tell because your assumptions are, in a word, useless.
This sounded wrong in 2003 when it was said by Neoconservatives. It sounds wrong today when said by liberal interventionists. It feels right to want to help the Syrian people as much as it felt right to help the Iraqi people. But we have to actually be capable of helping them and so far the pro-interventionists are making about as valid an argument that intervention might work as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al did in 2003, even if the current scenario lacks cooked intelligence to give the casus belli. The military concepts are equally bad. And here's why after a quick primer on military planning.
In the Army (I don't know the exact terms in the other services), military planning is focused on objectives. These objectives in high-intensity warfare are usually enemy-focused. But even if they are not enemy-focused, the enemy will play a big role in the ability of the friendly force to achieve its objectives. Therefore the most important assumptions are done through intelligence analysis where intel officers create what are called the enemy's Most Likely Course of Action (MLCOA) and Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCOA). These are the most important assumptions in any military plan. The first, MLCOA is the best-guess assumption on what the enemy is actually going to do. This is derived from the best intelligence available and analysis and extrapolation of known capabilities versus friendly capabilities. Gaps in intelligence require assumptions, but the assumptions must assume some level of difficulty to friendly forces and cannot be assume away. MDCOA is an assumption on what the enemy could do that would be most dangerous to friendly forces or their objectives. This is not the most likely event to occur, but it's in the realm of possible. Simply stated, your military plan of operations is based upon your MLCOA assumption, but a branch or decision point is in hand in case the MDCOA becomes reality (in some cases the decision point may be to disengage from contact because the price isn't worth the benefit of meeting the objective). Briefly: plan for MLCOA, know what you'll do if the enemy executes the MDCOA.
This gets at why I have not yet heard a viable military option for intervention in Syria. The greatest proponents of intervention, Shadi Hamid and Anne-Marie Slaughter to name just two as an example (and two I very greatly admire on everything except their military operational planning skills), have laid out their ideas for what a U.S.-lead coalition could do militarily to slow and/or stop the killing of civilians in Syria (as well as break the Hezbollah-Iran connection and maybe stop Syria's WMD programs). But their "plans" are based on the Syrian military executing the Least Dangerous Course of Action (LDCOA: see here) with regard to friend forces. They, and they are by no means alone in doing this, have assumed away the Syrian military to the point that they seem to consider a nominally 300,000-man force as negligible. That is exactly what the Bush Administration Pentagon did and what CENTCOM did under their leadership with regard to Iraq. Assumed away the enemy forces. And we see how well that worked out. You cannot plan military operations based on the LDCOA. It must be based off of the MLCOA at a minimum and I don't think the Syrian military is just going to walk away from the field. That may have generally happened in Libya, but it's very rare and unlikely. Also, they cannot assume away a post-conflict environment potentially devoid of government. We did that in Iraq, too. I think you get the point.
There are a couple of reasons this matter and isn't a mere matter of opinion on the fighting capabilities of the Syrian military. Firstly, by committing forces to fight for American interests we would need to ensure the military plan is viable and established upon a solid set of assumptions. Current intervention proposals simply are not. Their assumptions are based on hearsay or intuition, not analysis, that the Syrian military isn't a serious fighting force. It is almost word-for-word the nonsense I heard in the Kuwaiti desert in March 2003. And I have yet to see any evidence that they will not react, potentially with effect, against any intervention. Without such evidence you must assume that they will be capable of reacting with some effect. Second, any proposal that puts American lives and resources on the table requires some assessment of what point is the intervention worth doing. That's what the MDCOA would provide in this type of situation. How much is it worth intervening? Assad using WMD against his people or against us? What if the civil war expands significantly and the death toll mounts higher and fast than if we had not intervened? Are 10 years in Syria potentially conducting population-centric counterinsurgency worth our doing something, anything now? These cannot be assumed away. They need to be addressed through thorough and dispassionate analysis to determine if they're possible and what the United States would do if they occurred.
These pundits may feel they do not need to convince me on the merits of intervening in Syria and may think this a matter of disagreement. But this is the lowest level of rigor the military will apply to any plan they come up with. If you are so ready to commit foreign troops into harms way because you feel it's the right thing for America and her allies to do, the least you can do is apply the same level of rigor to propose military options. I'm not asking for synchronization matrices. I'm asking for a thorough and rigorous analysis of the MLCOA and MDCOA if we intervened in whatever way you envisioned. If you keep spouting this LDCOA-assumption malarkey, I and many others who possess understanding on the use of force will continue to compare your plans with those of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Franks, even if we agree with the sentiment that drives you to want to execute these plans. Yes, a lot of people are dying. But intervening might cause more deaths. I can't tell because your assumptions are, in a word, useless.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Happy Birthday Preemption!
The season of college graduations is most likely just over by now. I was in New York the other week during Columbia University's celebrations, which was fun hearing the waves of cheering as schools finished their ceremonies within minutes of each from one part of the campus to the next. Graduates and their parents beaming as the former chatted into a cell phone to coordinate post-graduation festivities. I didn't catch who the speakers were at any of the ceremonies, but one held later that week made the news. The speech given was nice if only a more eloquent (less?) version of Oh, the Places You'll Go! And yet it seems that as far as commencement speakers go, it really wasn't that bad. It seems to me that many of these young folks will fondly remember (or not remember as the case may be) the day they symbolically transitioned into real adults and probably not much more.
Today marks 10 years since my own graduation from college. I, too, had a president speak, but this president's speech told us exactly where we would go and not in terms of platitudes. Just 9 months after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush used my class' graduation from West Point to declare his doctrine of preemption. Granted, our nation was already at war in Afghanistan, but that was a small war we all thought would be over by the time we reported to our units (ah, youth!). But as a few of my classmates lightly dozed through the speech, it was not lost on me that he was telling us that he was sending us to Iraq. I had a flashback to a cocktail party a couple of months earlier when a very senior Army officer told me to prepare to go to Iraq - and this was in March 2002. I should have listened closer instead of lightly guffawing through my "Yes, sir." It would have prepared me for the first of June, 2002, when President Bush used a day that was supposed to celebrate the achievement of surviving the United States Military Academy, our commissioning to second lieutenant, a number of classmates' weddings, and the future in general and instead clouded our horizons with foretold war.
Part of me was grateful. Not about the war, but about the warning. If he had given that speech elsewhere I may have missed it and his point entirely. But instead I knew I had to focus my preparations and did not necessarily have much to time get ready. Which was in retrospect was one of the wisest things I've ever done: 6 months and a few weeks later (only 3 weeks after signing into my first unit) I was in the Kuwaiti desert preparing my platoon for war. A war which occurred 2 months after I got to Kuwait. The rest, they say, is history. And frankly, it's been a very busy 10 years since I sat through that speech.
While I feel some nostalgia for the days spent at my Rockbound Highland Home on June 1sts, I mainly feel awe in how much that day actually changed my life and not symbolical way. It was one of the most important speeches given in the past 10 years and one that affected the lives of millions of people - myself and the rest of us there that day very intimately. The question is, 10 years on, does the United States believe preemption is still a valid justification for war? I hope not. There aren't many things you want dead by their 10th birthday, but preemption is one of them.
Today marks 10 years since my own graduation from college. I, too, had a president speak, but this president's speech told us exactly where we would go and not in terms of platitudes. Just 9 months after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush used my class' graduation from West Point to declare his doctrine of preemption. Granted, our nation was already at war in Afghanistan, but that was a small war we all thought would be over by the time we reported to our units (ah, youth!). But as a few of my classmates lightly dozed through the speech, it was not lost on me that he was telling us that he was sending us to Iraq. I had a flashback to a cocktail party a couple of months earlier when a very senior Army officer told me to prepare to go to Iraq - and this was in March 2002. I should have listened closer instead of lightly guffawing through my "Yes, sir." It would have prepared me for the first of June, 2002, when President Bush used a day that was supposed to celebrate the achievement of surviving the United States Military Academy, our commissioning to second lieutenant, a number of classmates' weddings, and the future in general and instead clouded our horizons with foretold war.
Part of me was grateful. Not about the war, but about the warning. If he had given that speech elsewhere I may have missed it and his point entirely. But instead I knew I had to focus my preparations and did not necessarily have much to time get ready. Which was in retrospect was one of the wisest things I've ever done: 6 months and a few weeks later (only 3 weeks after signing into my first unit) I was in the Kuwaiti desert preparing my platoon for war. A war which occurred 2 months after I got to Kuwait. The rest, they say, is history. And frankly, it's been a very busy 10 years since I sat through that speech.
While I feel some nostalgia for the days spent at my Rockbound Highland Home on June 1sts, I mainly feel awe in how much that day actually changed my life and not symbolical way. It was one of the most important speeches given in the past 10 years and one that affected the lives of millions of people - myself and the rest of us there that day very intimately. The question is, 10 years on, does the United States believe preemption is still a valid justification for war? I hope not. There aren't many things you want dead by their 10th birthday, but preemption is one of them.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
NATO was not in Iraq! WaPo edition (Updated-2)
Annie Gowen reporting in the Washington Post today on the clash between protesters and police at the NATO summit in Chicago:
These veterans are using their status as such to influence policy. It's a shame they apparently know squat about the conflicts they are protesting that they don't know where the medals they are making such a big deal about are from or who even awarded them. It's a bigger shame that news agencies are eating this crap hook, line, and sinker without doing due diligence to even superficially analyze if these veterans have an inkling about anything, other than war really, really sucks.
Washington Post: if even you can't figure out that NATO had no significant role in Iraq, that NATO does not have a war on terror campaign, and that NATO could not possibly issue medals for a war it isn't waging for combat duty in a country it isn't operational, then we're all screwed. Do your job. Report the news, check the facts. And if people are doing or saying something stupid, then call them out for it. Otherwise, it seems you know FA more about this than these numbskulls playing you for the attention you're giving them.
UPDATE: I have seen comments elsewhere about the NATO Training Mission - Iraq and that maybe this guy and the other were part of that. First, it was a tiny mission. I can't pull the exact numbers right now because NATO's website is down, but it was a very small mission and if there were any Americans as part of it, it wasn't more than a handful. ]
Second, and pay attention here, Army Regulation 600-8-22, the Army's awards Bible, does not authorize the NATO Medal for service in Iraq. Because the award is for having served under direct command or operational control of in direct service of the listed NATO operations. Iraq isn't one of those. No U.S. servicemember should have a NATO Medal for service in Iraq, even if they worked for NTM-I at Camp Rustamiyah.
UPDATE 2: If you click the link to the article you can see that the line quoted above has changed and now says that Stach is going to return a U.S. medal for his service. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Thank you Ms. Gowen and editors for making the correction. And you're welcome America for the victory of truth I have won for you today.
Mark Stach, 40, a veteran from Dixon, Ill., filled his canteen as he readied for the march to return the NATO war-on-terror medal he received while serving in Iraq in the Army National Guard in 2004 and 2005.I talked about this last week. NATO did not have any operational role in the war in Iraq. NATO did not issue a single medal for Iraq (again, maybe except outside of the very small role they had in the military academy at Camp Rustamiyah). As far I as I can tell, NATO has no war on terror. Ergo, an Army National Guard vet who served in Iraq could not possibly have a "NATO war-on-terror medal" to return. It's one thing for an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune to make such nonsensical statements. It's another thing entirely for the Washington Post to report such a thing as fact in a news story.
These veterans are using their status as such to influence policy. It's a shame they apparently know squat about the conflicts they are protesting that they don't know where the medals they are making such a big deal about are from or who even awarded them. It's a bigger shame that news agencies are eating this crap hook, line, and sinker without doing due diligence to even superficially analyze if these veterans have an inkling about anything, other than war really, really sucks.
Washington Post: if even you can't figure out that NATO had no significant role in Iraq, that NATO does not have a war on terror campaign, and that NATO could not possibly issue medals for a war it isn't waging for combat duty in a country it isn't operational, then we're all screwed. Do your job. Report the news, check the facts. And if people are doing or saying something stupid, then call them out for it. Otherwise, it seems you know FA more about this than these numbskulls playing you for the attention you're giving them.
UPDATE: I have seen comments elsewhere about the NATO Training Mission - Iraq and that maybe this guy and the other were part of that. First, it was a tiny mission. I can't pull the exact numbers right now because NATO's website is down, but it was a very small mission and if there were any Americans as part of it, it wasn't more than a handful. ]
Second, and pay attention here, Army Regulation 600-8-22, the Army's awards Bible, does not authorize the NATO Medal for service in Iraq. Because the award is for having served under direct command or operational control of in direct service of the listed NATO operations. Iraq isn't one of those. No U.S. servicemember should have a NATO Medal for service in Iraq, even if they worked for NTM-I at Camp Rustamiyah.
UPDATE 2: If you click the link to the article you can see that the line quoted above has changed and now says that Stach is going to return a U.S. medal for his service. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Thank you Ms. Gowen and editors for making the correction. And you're welcome America for the victory of truth I have won for you today.
Monday, May 14, 2012
A rant on the substitution of "veteran" for expertise
"I would love to give my medals directly to a NATO official," said Broseus, 28. "I don't feel like I earned them in a just manner. I felt I was more of an occupier In Iraq than anything else, and I want them to know how that feels."So was Iraq veteran Greg Broseus quoted by Dawn Turner Trice in the Chicago Tribune. Yes, you read that correctly. An Iraq veteran who is opposed to military interventions wishes to protest against the war in Afghanistan by returning his medals earned in Iraq to a NATO official.
This post is not about returning medals as a form of anti-war protest or protesters, veterans even, against the war. I may not chose the same courses of action, but have at it. As a veteran, I served ostensibly to defend the rights of our citizens to generally do as they please. This post is about veterans and the media.
Broseus, the focal point of the Trice's column, was a HMMWV gunner in 2005 from the Ohio National Guard. I think it's safe to assume that Broseus was a Specialist or Sergeant in such a position, give or take a rank. It's not that I expect every Spec-4 in the Army to know the theater campaign plan and all of the key players of that plan, but how does a soldier not know who he works for? How does he not know that NATO was entirely uninvolved with warfighting in Iraq?* These are things you might want to double-check before doing an interview on your protest.
Mr. Broseus, you can't return medals to someone who didn't give them to you in the first place. I get that you're upset at being activated (let's not touch the subject of duty today...) and that you oppose war. But for heaven's sake, make your protest meaningful. Because most vets who read that piece are going to think you're an idiot for "returning" your medals to NATO when it was the U.S. Army that awarded them to you in the first place and that NATO was never in a position to award you medals for Iraq. If you want to return them in protest, do it smartly or the quality of your protest is cheapened. Because as things stand right now, I thank you for your service but I don't think you have the knowledge base to comment on national security policy in a way that should be influential based on your status as a veteran.
I understand this is a lengthy rant on a minor incident, but it was a minor incident that was indicative of something that's been bothering me for a while. I am tired of veterans using their veteran status to give validity to their pet causes when this status does not in actuality provide that validity. This is true for both anti- and pro-war types or any number of other issues surround the military. Your opinions are your opinions and they may be shaped by your experience as a veteran. How could serving not shape your opinions on the world?
But we have to understand that there is no uniform veteran experience or thought process. A former HMMWV gunner has every right to comment on whether we go to or remain at war. However, unless s/he adequately frames his pro/anti-war argument in a way that shows how his HMMWV gunning enlightened his thinking, then I put his opinion in the same category as the general public's and measure it by the quality of the reasoning. This problem is not limited to lower-enlisted veterans and is in fact more egregiously perpetrated by former officers. Generals who specialize in logistics have lots of standing to opine on logistics. But I really don't want to hear you talk about strategy or operations. Stay in your lane. Wearing a uniform once does not give you the standing to talk about all topics military. Nor does your rank.
The vast preponderance of the blame for this sorry column rests with the columnist. I think Mr. Broseus feels very strongly about his opinion that seems to have been significantly shaped by his experience as a HMMWV gunner. I hope that his protest helps him deal with his experiences. But Trice should know better than to flaunt Broseus' veteran-ness as a reason to give his anti-war stance and ability to classify the war in Afghanistan as "occupation" any validity because he is a veteran. Shame on you and your newspaper for not at least commenting on it.
The bottom line to this is that our news sources should be more responsible in how they use and sell veteran commentary to ensure that when adding the gravitas of "veteran" to said commentary it is appropriately used. I don't have much faith of this occurring. So maybe the answer is that veterans should only comment on things as veterans if their military experience gave them special and expert opinion on the topic. Of course, that's not going to happen either, is it? It's up to you, readers, to understand the font of expertise and the quality of argument and reasoning. Good luck.
*Yes, I am aware that NATO has been funding and manning slots at the Iraq military school at Camp Rustamiyah. But that's not warfighting.
Monday, April 9, 2012
The real threat of hybrid conflict
Talk to ten different military analysts about the meaning of the term "hybrid war," and you'll probably get 20 different answers. Some folks like to talk about hybrid threats, others about hybrid warfare; some talk up hybrid adversaries, and still others worry about hybrid conflict. Usually what they're getting at falls into the grey area between irregular warfare conducted by poorly-armed non-state militants and the purportedly more traditional, "conventional" conflict waged by high-tech, capital-intensive state militaries. In the hybrid future, we're told, irregular adversaries will employ high-tech weapons while sophisticated state enemies are likely to adopt guerilla-style tactics—avoiding American strengths while maximizing their own.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
The driver of the hybrid threat, for Johnson, is the spread of long-range weapons: anti-tank guided missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons (called "man-portable air defense systems," or MANPADS), even relatively unsophisticated long-range rockets like those used by Hezbollah in 2006. When Israeli airstrikes alone couldn't find and destroy the well-hidden rocket launchers, Israel sent in ground troops, only to be bloodied by unexpectedly fierce resistance.Here we see the bankruptcy of the hybrid idea as a tactical construct laid bare: what's just been described as "the driver of the hybrid threat" is in fact the driver of nearly all tactical adaptation over the last century or so: the problem of the offensive in the face of overwhelming firepower—increasing weapons range and rate of fire, the deepening of the battlefield, and the consequent limitations on tactical and operational maneuver.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
So how can the US prepare for hybrid threats? In part by going back to the future, said Johnson, whose books include a history of how the US learned to use tanks and airpower in World War II. "It is a problem that can't be solved by a single service," he said. The Air Force and Army today work together more closely than ever before in providing air support to ground troops in Afghanistan, but air-ground cooperation has gotten good in past conflicts as well, only to break down post-war when bureaucratic and budgetary battles between the services start to matter more. Hybrid threats will impose serious limits on helicopter operations – as the Soviets found out in Afghanistan after the CIA provided the mujahideen with Stinger missiles – so support from higher, faster, and harder-to-hit fixed-wing aircraft will be essential. Conversely, the Air Force will need the ground troops to root out hybrid enemies from their hiding places, he argued, just as the Israeli Air Force proved unable to spot Hezbollah's rocket launchers from overhead. "Ground maneuver is the only thing that will make him visible because he's hiding from everything overhead," said Johnson.The challenge of so-called hybrid war is that it's reminded us of the need to consider these two questions together: firepower and maneuver, attack and defense, target identification and force protection. The excerpt above is like a billboard for Biddle's modern system (miraculously, Johnson doesn't cite Military Power in his recent study, though he does take lessons from a recent monograph Biddle co-authored about the Lebanon war): artillery and air power are used in close combination with ground forces to pin down the enemy, force him to keep his head down and allow friendly ground forces to maneuver on his position. But how to separate him from the population, to force him to come out and fight? Well-trained infantry must be capable of meeting the enemy in his sanctuaries – whether forests or mountains or urban areas – to identify, isolate, and fix him for destruction. These are the fundamentals of combined-arms land warfare, as useful for Americans in 2018 as for Germans in 1918.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
strong states select themselves into armed conflicts only when their pre-war estimate of the cost of attaining their political objectives through the use of force falls below the threshold of their tolerance for costs. The more the actual costs of victory exceed a state's prewar expectations, the greater the risk that it will be pushed beyond its cost-tolerance threshold and forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces before it attains its war aims. (497)She goes on to make a compelling case about the difference between wars of coercion and wars of destruction, but that's less germane to our point here. What I'm getting at is this: because we don't expect irregular adversaries to fight in conventional ways and with conventional weapons, we're not prepared for the sort of casualties that are normally associated even with wildly successful conventional ground combat. (This expectation is exaggerated yet further by the experiences of Desert Storm and OIF I, when U.S. forces inflicted historically unprecedented casualty ratios on conventional enemies due to a remarkable confluence of American technological edge, extraordinarily poor Iraqi force employment, and good fortune. Our recent opponents have been irregulars who mostly lack the capacity to engage our forces using the modern system and regulars who proved unwilling or incapable of doing so.) In short, we have forgotten that land warfare has significant costs in men and materiel, even when waged successfully.
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Police development: you're doing it wrong
I can't remember who tweeted a link to this excellent report on ANP development (speak up and be recognized!), but if you're interested in police development it is a must read. A product of the Peace Research Institute - Frankfort, the authors (Cornelius Friesendorf and Jorg Krempel) titled the work Militarized versus Civilian Policing: Problems of Reforming the Afghan National Police, looked at best practices in building a civilian police force and the German and US involvement in Afghanistan with the ANP.
The paper dives into a lot of the nitty-gritty of the ANP development program dating back to 2002 and it's worth a read. (I wish it had been translated when I wrote this paper that touched on some of these issues this past spring.) But I want to focus in on some of the conclusions and attempt to draw them into bigger thoughts beyond Afghanistan. They cite numerous issues of donors not effectively supporting the ANP development, recruiting problems, training problems, corruption problems, and so on and so forth. All important.
But what's important in this paper is that they look very closely at the intersection of police and military responsibilities and point how horribly wrong we've been delineating responsibilities between the ANA and ANP. Due to a number of factors - lack of a democratic policing tradition in the years running up to 2001, the use of military forces to train the nascent ANP, and operational needs - ISAF is building a paramilitary force not a police force. While the first of these factors can be overcome in my opinion (Kosovo provides a pretty example of making an adequate police force essentially from scratch), I think the latter two are catastrophic to police development programs if not done correctly. And we're not doing it correctly.
In brief, if a military force trains a police force, that police force is much more likely to look like a military force than a police force. Just as in Iraq, the ANP are formed into military structures (unless that's changed recently), they carry military-grade weapons (including RPGs on occasion), and they have little interest in the tedium of enforcing the law. Simply put, if you train your police with the military, you end up with police who can't police and are an under-trained and under-equipped military force. What you end up with is a force that exacerbates conflict instead of quelling it that primarily acts as a strong-arm of local factions or even national entities (such as in Iraq where the INP became the MoI's private Army). Historical studies have shown that military training of police forces nearly invariably result in this scenario and we need to stop doing it. Of course, that would require building capabilities and/or capacities in our civilian agencies such as ICITAP, OPDAT, USAID, or even INL. Something that seems unlikely given Congress's fetishization of military power over civilian power. Alas.
However, this pales in comparison to the operational necessities that drive police development away from policing and towards military operations. When conducting police development in countries embroiled in an intra-state war, priority is given to the operational needs to defeat the state's enemies, not to stemming crime. The U.S. and other donors have been building the ANP into a counterinsurgency force in their own right to "thicken the lines" as the old Iraq saw went. Community police simply wouldn't be able to defend themselves against any quasi-military insurgency. As they would be among the first targets of the insurgency, police being among the most visible realizations of a state's power, they would simply be slaughtered. This would then require precious military resources to be pulled from finding bad guys and instead guard the police. It's a lose-lose situation for any operational commander. So we've taken the middle path: forget policing and build a quasi-military police force. A force that, again, stinks at policing and stinks at military operations.
This is an offhand synopsis and analysis of the paper I linked to, but it distills to the fundamental flaws of our attempts to build a police force in Afghanistan. Because of the myriad problems underlying our efforts and our militarization of the ANP (because of the two factors discussed here), we're failing Afghanistan by not fielding an effective police force now and virtually ensuring that the ANP cannot transition into a true police force. Friesendorf and Krempel put it much more eloquently, but that's the basis of their conclusion. Nice, huh?
So what do we do about it? Our boys from Frankfurt call for reforms to the program and to ensure that those in ISAF who are assisting in driving the ANP strategy are police experts and not military officers (they don't say it, but an MP is not a policeman, so no, not even an MP should be doing this). Concur entirely. I don't know what else we can do for the ANP at this point. But the lesson we need to draw from Afghanistan and Iraq is that in conflict countries maybe we shouldn't do police development at all until violence reaches levels where they can operate as police and not as soldiers. Police development in the early stages of the war should focus on the ministries responsible and a cadre of officers who are provided with long and intensive training who don't actually do any policing until a violence threshold is met. At that point, DDR programs could help staff the police force around this framework of cadre who can then instill a proper police culture throughout the force and train their policemen to be policemen. Instead of throwing billions of dollars at sub-par police who also are sub-par counterinsurgents as well as conflict drivers, maybe we shouldn't do any of that until the environment is safe enough for an actual community police force to operate.
Unlikely, but maybe in the next war.
Friday, December 23, 2011
"The more things change...": Statecraft and Malice Aforethought Edition
Let's flash back to America near the turn of the century, shall we?
The ellipses above mark where I omitted Admiral Dewey's name in George Kennan's analysis of the fleet action at Manila Bay and subsequent dispatch of an expeditionary army to the Philippines in 1898. Among the "strategically placed persons" were both Dewey and Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy and aspiring imperialist.
What should we conclude from this episode?
[Kennan's words are reproduced from American Diplomacy, a book adaptation of several lectures he gave in 1950. The quotes are from pages 14 and 12, respectively.]
And we can only say that it looks very much as though, in this case, the action of the United States government had been determined primarily on the basis of a very able and quiet intrigue by a few strategically placed persons in Washington, an intrigue which received absolution, forgiveness, and a sort of a public blessing by virtue of war hysteria—of the fact that … victory was so thrilling and pleasing to the American public—but which, had its results been otherwise, might well have found its ending in the rigors of a severe and extremely unpleasant congressional investigation.Ok, you've found me out. The turn of which century?, you perceptively ask. It's obvious we're not talking about the close of the twentieth, of course; the very suggestion of a modern Congress investigating the executive for a foreign policy failure is risible.
The ellipses above mark where I omitted Admiral Dewey's name in George Kennan's analysis of the fleet action at Manila Bay and subsequent dispatch of an expeditionary army to the Philippines in 1898. Among the "strategically placed persons" were both Dewey and Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy and aspiring imperialist.
What should we conclude from this episode?
For its part, Congress seemed incapable of analyzing a presidential proposal and protecting its institutional powers. The decision to go to war cast a dark shadow over the health of U.S. political institutions and the celebrated system of democratic debate and checks and balances.
The dismal performances of the executive and legislative branches raise disturbing questions about the capacity and desire of the United States to function as a republican form of government.That's all? Oh, wait, sorry: that's Louis Fisher's verdict, in a 2003 Political Science Quarterly article (pdf), on the embarrassing show put on by the White House and Congress in the run-up to the Iraq war. Sorry for that distracting and totally irrelevant non-sequitur! Let's get back to Dewey at Manila.
Thus our government, to the accompaniment of great congressional and popular acclaim, inaugurated hostilities against another country in a situation of which it can only be said that the possibilities of a settlement by measures short of war had been by no means exhausted.Why do you hate freedom, Kennan, you disgusting peacenik?
[Kennan's words are reproduced from American Diplomacy, a book adaptation of several lectures he gave in 1950. The quotes are from pages 14 and 12, respectively.]
Thursday, December 22, 2011
The Principles of War have not changed, Pt II: the Surge edition
There are a number of now-accepted bromides about COIN generally and the Iraq Surge specifically that I've begun to question. There are a whole host of the pro-COIN types that have been, in my mind, disproven rather adequately. But there are some of the anti-COIN type that I'm beginning to question as well. I'll get to these in later posts, but I want to address a set that has been on mind and coined by Tom Ricks: the Surge succeeded militarily, but failed politically.
I used to think that statement was crap. Our objectives were by nature political, so what difference does it make if military gains were made. Iraq must have been a strategic failure. I can't possibly suggest that Iraq has been a success, but I think a more nuanced view is required from a U.S. perspective. I started down this thought-path after seeing this comment from COL Gian Gentile:
By saying that there can be no black and white, simple answers of yes and no with regard to the Surge you burry ourselves in a never ending discussion about its tactics and methods. But from the angle of strategy, it is clear that the Surge achieved no appreciable gains. If you have any doubt just read what Iraqis are saying about it and the last 8 plus years of war there.Gian is an officer and thinker that I respect greatly, but I couldn't disagree more. Few things in this world are black and white - I am not the type of person who thinks that most anything falls into dichotomous categories. I also disagree with the idea that the Surge achieved no appreciable gains, even if the Iraqis disagree.
The fact of the matter is that from the perspective of U.S. interests, it doesn't much matter what the Iraqis think about this. Would we, from a policy perspective, have liked Iraq to become a Western-style democracy instead of what the past week is portending? Absolutely. But back in 2007 I suggest we would have settled for something much less. Specifically: the ability to disengage from this ill-advised war with some semblance of success without our tail between our legs, as it were. I don't remember it verbatim, but our military objective from the Surge (I was the planner for the fifth brigade deployed to support it) was to create the conditions to provide the Government of Iraq the breathing room necessary to find a political solution to the conflict.
There is no doubt that there is no viable political solution currently on the table to end the conflict. But can any of the Surge naysayers state emphatically that they were provided with breathing room to find and end to the fighting? Iraqis may not necessarily be better off now than they were in early 2003. But that is not the pertinent issue. The decision to execute the Surge is dissociated from the decision to invade Iraq in the first place. Of course they're in a worse place than they were. At the risk of understatement, it's been a bloody war. Especially for the Iraqi populace and that's a damned tragedy. The question pertaining to the Surge is: are Iraqis better off now than they were in late 2006 and early 2007? I would hazard that the answer is an emphatic yes.
What makes this all very complicated are the ubiquitous questions of causation and correlation. Many factors occurred between January 10, 2007 and the summer of 2008: realization of a nationwide Sunni uprising against AQI begun before the Surge, purging of Sunnis from Baghdad during that capital's barricaded segregation prior to the Surge, war-weariness amongst all factions, better border controls, to name a few. I do not believe that the addition of 25,000 troops to the war was the key to turning the tide, but I don't believe it was inconsequential either. But not necessarily for the reasons that Surge champions argue.
The reality is that addition of these 5 brigade combat teams was in itself a part of the relative pacification of Iraq (please note I said relative pacification - more on that to follow), not some vaporous notion of the application of COIN principles codified in FM 3-24. I will say that between my tour in 2005 and return to Iraq in May 2007 there were significant changes driven from GEN Petraeus: better intel coordination, better use and coordination of SOF units, more USG civilians and funds available. But these were peripheral changes in my mind. For whatever roll these additional troops played in providing the requisite "breathing room", it wasn't due to changes in doctrine or better use of the troops available. It comes back to the Principles of War that the U.S. Army has used for at least decades (for a full listing please see Appendix A to FM 3-0 (Operations)).
It comes down to the principle of mass in this case. From a COIN perspective and its (erroneous) counterinsurgent-to-population ratio the 25K extra troops couldn't make a difference. And it didn't from that perspective. But used in accordance with another principle of economy of force, the U.S. was able to achieve mass in the most militarily contested areas of Iraq: Baghdad proper and the areas surrounding the city from which car bombs were made and trafficked into the city. It wasn't the building of hospitals or canals or the establishment of impotent local councils that made this infusion of warfighting capability useful, it was the application of this force in time and space to dominate the situation. It was the use of these forces to set up these concrete cordons between factions that aided in stemming the violence within Baghdad, concurrent with the other more significant actions outside of the U.S. listed above. But equally important was what happened to stop the mass vehicle bombings of civilians in the much-maligned "belts" around Baghdad. Achieving mass to the south and west of the city - which fortified the disillusioned Sunnis' position - helped defeat AQI and prevent their ability to launch attacks against the capital and thus retard the cycle of violence so prevalent until then. We are all slaves to our own experiences, but we had a hell of a time (and so did Baghdad) until we were able to achieve mass in our battlespace in Arab Jabour and physically defeat AQI. Look at the statistics - already on a downward trend - between January and March 2008 and tell me that a difference wasn't made in the areas south of and within Baghdad.
So no, it wasn't COIN tactics that made the Surge useful to trends already occurring within Iraq in 2007. The Surge was useful because it allowed the coalition to mass on those areas the enemy used to catalyze the cycle of violence as well as their safe havens. But at this point, many of you will point out that Iraq is a less than a success. Car bombs are exploding all over Baghdad this week and the PM has issued a warrant for the arrest of the VP. Frankly, that just doesn't matter to the United States.
Again, you shouldn't examine the Surge through the lens of 2003. You need to look at it through the lens of 2006/7 when we were caught in a costly civil war and were attacked by virtually all sides. Of which there were many. The military objective of the time was to provide this so-called "breathing room" for the Iraqis to sort things out. It simply doesn't matter that they haven't sorted things out in a way we approve of. From a military perspective, breathing room was provided and in that way we did succeed during the Surge even if there were political failures. But the objective of Iraqi democracy exceeded our national ability to affect that change. We could only assist in providing the environment to gain a political solution through military means, not the political solution itself. These military successes throughout Iraq, with significantly lowered violence, gave us the political ability to say we've done our bit and that any other failures were Iraqi failures. What more could we have done?
It may be a correlative relationship strategically, but violence in Iraq decreased precipitously from the beginning of the Surge until its end and that cannot be argued. In my AO at least, it was quite causational (which I can discuss at length at request). But not because of some magical application of COIN principles. It was because, consciously or not, the U.S. military applied the tried and true principles of war to extricate itself from a foolishly-begun war with at least a semblance of having done its best at applying the untried principle of the Pottery Barn Rule. Not through mere coercion or indebting the Iraqis with gratitude to us did we play a part in fantastically lowering violence in Iraq, it was through applying mass and economy of force.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Who needs bipartisanship when we've got pervasive groupthink?
Les Gelb has a not-very-interesting article in the newest issue of The National Interest entitled "We Bow to the God Bipartisanship." In it, he derides what he views as the tendency to overrate the value of bipartisan support to presidents' ability to carry out their foreign policy preferences. "[B]ipartisan backing at home has too often been purchased at the price of good policy abroad," Gelb tells us.
This is a curious assertion, especially since Gelb spends much of the next 3,000 words supplying historical evidence for precisely the opposite point of view: presidents have in large part ignored domestic criticism and succeeded in enacting policies that ranged from the grievously wounding to the mildly successful.
The only real support Gelb provides for his thesis statement comes in the form of fact-free assertion about the Obama administration's purportedly craven pursuit of popular policies "where it has little faith its efforts will succeed," as in the case of Iran, North Korea, Middle East peace, and Afghanistan. To which I can only muster a disinterested and disbelieving "meh."
All of this is more than a little galling coming from the man who perhaps more than any other represents the embodiment of the American foreign policy commentariat's uncritical pro-executive consensus -- and this at his own word. On the subject of the Iraq war, here's Gelb's unashamed explanation:
This is a curious assertion, especially since Gelb spends much of the next 3,000 words supplying historical evidence for precisely the opposite point of view: presidents have in large part ignored domestic criticism and succeeded in enacting policies that ranged from the grievously wounding to the mildly successful.
The only real support Gelb provides for his thesis statement comes in the form of fact-free assertion about the Obama administration's purportedly craven pursuit of popular policies "where it has little faith its efforts will succeed," as in the case of Iran, North Korea, Middle East peace, and Afghanistan. To which I can only muster a disinterested and disbelieving "meh."
All of this is more than a little galling coming from the man who perhaps more than any other represents the embodiment of the American foreign policy commentariat's uncritical pro-executive consensus -- and this at his own word. On the subject of the Iraq war, here's Gelb's unashamed explanation:
My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.
Incentives, eh? Perhaps all this "bowing to the god bipartisanship" is more of a distasteful personal habit, one that's left our man with a bit of a guilty conscience.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Intervention and the presumed combat multiplier of popular uprising
In 1984, an American expert on Soviet military history wrote this in a chapter called "The Making of Soviet Strategy":
Tukhachevsky was perhaps the most famous of the so-called "Red Commanders"; a Bolshevik and a committed revolutionary, he vied for influence in the new army with the many rehabilitated imperial officers that Trotsky found it necessary to retain for the sake of military survival. The decision to press forward against the Polish capital was a strategic miscalculation heavily informed by ideological bias; success of the operation was dependent on an unlikely popular uprising that only a revolutionary internationalist could have any faith would happen. Sound familiar?
So: any guesses as to who that Sovietologist was? Ok, I shared this on Twitter yesterday, so some of you will already know: it was Condoleezza Rice. That, ladies and gents, is what we call irony.
The most important mistake [of the wars in the immediate post-revolutionary period] was made by the influential Tukhachevsky, who insisted in the later stages of the [Russo-Polish] war on launching an ill-conceived offensive against Warsaw. This could be relegated to the annals of Soviet military history were it not for the significant political statement Tukhachevsky sought to make with it--that "revolution" could be exported by bayonet. Arguing for an assault on Warsaw in spite of seriously overextended supply lines and insufficient reserves, he may have placed too much weight on the expectation that the working class would rise up to greet the Soviet forces.That's in Paret, page 652. The emphasis is added.
Tukhachevsky was perhaps the most famous of the so-called "Red Commanders"; a Bolshevik and a committed revolutionary, he vied for influence in the new army with the many rehabilitated imperial officers that Trotsky found it necessary to retain for the sake of military survival. The decision to press forward against the Polish capital was a strategic miscalculation heavily informed by ideological bias; success of the operation was dependent on an unlikely popular uprising that only a revolutionary internationalist could have any faith would happen. Sound familiar?
So: any guesses as to who that Sovietologist was? Ok, I shared this on Twitter yesterday, so some of you will already know: it was Condoleezza Rice. That, ladies and gents, is what we call irony.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Military medics: protected or not?
Gulliver's post yesterday on the definition of terrorism started a very interesting Twitter conversation about the delineation between terrorism targets and legitimate military targets. This led to the discussion of legitimacy of targeting military medical personnel. On the one hand, these personnel are protected under the Geneva Conventions and tradition among state combatants. On the other hand, they aid the war effort by getting combatants back into the fight and recently have been armed, ostensibly for self-defense given the increased disregard for their protected status in recent decades. Arming them tends to un-blur their status towards combatant, in my opinion, but I'm certainly not one deny them their right to defend themselves. As Petulant Skeptic noted last night, they are all soldiers first.
I'm not up on all of the literature on this topic, save the basics in the Geneva Conventions that I was taught many years ago. So what I'd thought I'd do is provide my perspective on how I saw medical personnel treated on both sides during the course of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
U.S. Medical Troops - Equipment and Markings
Being a brand new LT, I can only really speak about the forward medical personnel in my troop and Squadron Aid Station. I saw a Corps Support Hospital in Camp before we went to our tactical assembly areas, but not enough to comment on what happened to them once we launched over the berm. Anyway, the medical personnel in our squadron consisted of one platoon for the Aid Station, including a Medical Service Corps platoon leader, physician's assistant and a doctor (we were lucky to have a gynecologist for our battalion surgeon - but to be fair, he was a very good doc), who were equipped with light-skinned M998 HMMWVs, HMMWV ambulances (for transport and the nomenclature of which I don't know), M577s (for treatment), and M113s (for transport). We also had one section of medics in each of the ground troops (not sure what the air troops had) which were three medics in a M113. None of the medical vehicles had crew served weapons, and only the M577s and M113s were marked with red crosses. The personnel were not marked as a medical personnel in any way and carried a personnel weapon - usually rifles for the medics and pistols for the doc, PA, and PL. Other than their vehicle being marked, once the medics got off of their track, there was no way to discern them from other soldiers.
Iraq Medical Troops - Equipment and Markings
I didn't see a single Iraqi military medic or vehicle. Even in longer battles (which lasted up to four days), we never saw any Iraqi soldiers try to get to and help their buddies out. This isn't a condemnation on their bravery, it's just quite possible they didn't have any medical staff to do this. Or if they were like our medics and not marked, then we would have shot them at first site as a legitimate military target and not knowing what they were there for. We treated the Iraqis we could (I'm guessing follow-on units did more of this - we were often moving to fast to assess battle damage).
U.S. Policies on Engaging Military Medical Personnel/Equipment
The policy was we don't do that as signatories of the 1949 Conventions. If we identified injured Iraqis, Iraqi medical staff of personnel, we were not to engage them. As I mentioned above, we never had to test this theory. But here's where things became difficult: civilian ambulances. At first we left these along as civilian and therefore not targets - their medical status gave them extra protection. And then the Saddam Fedayeen started using them to pace out artillery distances and in a couple of cases as car bombs. As a leader, it was difficult to ensure the protected status of the Red Crescent when the soldiers were a little scared of them, but the policy was then to restrict their movement until their legitimacy could be verified. But they were protected from engagement.
Iraqi Army Policies on Engaging Military Medical Personnel/Equipment
Of course, we never saw the memos, but as far as the Republican Guard and Saddam Fedayeen were concerned as indicated by their actions, not only were medical vehicles legit targets in spite of their great big red crosses, they were preferred targets because they were light skinned and lightly armed. It was also a huge morale let down to see an ambulance get hit, because if there were any casualties, they'd have be taken out of fire by something needed in that fight. I should also note that once our soldiers were dismounted, I doubt the Iraqis could have discerned medical from combat arms soldiers, if they cared anyway.
Here's the big so what that I get from all of this. The U.S. will always consider military medical personnel and equipment as protected on the battlefield and will not willfully engage them. We belong to the gentlemen's club of war because we can afford to. The U.S. also understands that our adversaries will not be so "civilized" on this topic and will not afford our medical personnel and equipment protected status, if not actively find and target them. So we've armed our guys to defend themselves and let our combat arms guys do their best to protect them by force. It's not quite fair, but this is the case. So are military medical personnel protected? If you're the big kid on the block, they are because you can afford to make that discernment. If you're the underdog, everything is fair game - and there's a good argument of medical personnel as legitimate military targets. But to call attacks against military medical personnel, equipment, or facilities as "terrorism" would be a stretch from an active imagination.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Afghanization hurt by U.S. budgeting practices?
The newest edition of Armed Forces Journal contains a piece by the great Joe Collins on "Afghanization," the natural and inevitable transition to Afghan lead in security and governance operations as coalition forces draw down. "In the end," Collins writes, "the next phase of this war effort needs not an Afghan 'face,' but an Afghan essence." The article lays out a series of reasonable suggestions for making this transition successful -- challenging as that will be.
Collins notes that continued efforts to train and mentor Afghan security forces and national defense institutions will be vital to a meaningful and sustainable transition. But one paragraph in particular really jumped out at me for the apparent misunderstanding it's based upon:
Military aid is typically appropriated to the State Department and provided to partner governments as grant assistance to be used for the purchase of U.S. military equipment and training. The large-scale training and equipping efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in the creation of an unusual funding model and execution apparatus, in large part because of the significant U.S. troop presence in both countries. Security capacity-building funds for those states have been appropriated directly to Defense Department organizations in-country through ASFF and (in Iraq) ISFF; the U.S. training/transition commands in each country then use those funds to provide training and purchase equipment for the host nation.
This model makes some sense: it's consistent with the military's role as the USG lead for building security capacity in the host nation during combat operations, and it simplifies execution. It's also a bit misleading to suggest that capacity-building dollars aren't sufficiently "fenced" from combat operations funding, seeing as they are conceived, requested, considered, and appropriated under distinct headings (despite ending up with the same Department).
But there are a host of reasons that security assistance and other military aid should be dispersed by State in the peacetime "steady state," and both Congress and the White House seem cognizant of them. (An instructive example: the FY 2012 budget request is the first since the beginning of the war in Iraq to include military aid for that country in the form of State-managed Foreign Military Finance grants as opposed to ISFF. This is consistent with the "normalization" of U.S. security cooperation with Iraq in the wake of the withdrawal of the bulk of American combat forces. See specifically slides 8, 9, 26, and 33 in this pdf.) I am an extremely committed proponent of State's continuing responsibility for security assistance and other military aid. But take one look at what's happened with the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund during the budget battles of the last year if you want to see how difficult it will be to adequately resource the training and equipping of ANSF through State Department accounts.
Here's the bottom line: I agree with Collins that security capacity-building funds are essential to our departure from Afghanistan and should be privileged over funds for continued U.S. combat operations, but I fear that in the current fiscal and political climate, a move to channel those funds through the State Department will make them more vulnerable to cuts and have the opposite effect to what's intended.
Collins notes that continued efforts to train and mentor Afghan security forces and national defense institutions will be vital to a meaningful and sustainable transition. But one paragraph in particular really jumped out at me for the apparent misunderstanding it's based upon:
Throughout the process of transition, the U.S. must fence the resources devoted to the advisory and training units that are engaged in building the capacity of Afghan forces. It would be highly dysfunctional if the forces that are making the ANSF more capable have to compete with the shrinking combat forces for money. As we close in on December 2014, the worst of all worlds would be to take resources from those developing Afghan capacity to keep essential combat units in the fight. These drastic choices can be avoided if the Congress appropriates for the Defense and State departments the right amount of funds to keep the strategy in our exit strategy.Funds that support the development of the ANSF -- from tactical training to the provision of materiel to ministerial and institutional mentoring -- are currently requested and appropriated primarily through the DoD's Afghan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) in the Overseas Contingency Operations account. (See the first page of this SIGAR pdf for a few more details.) Collins surely knows this, but his choice of words may create some confusion for those who do not. He's right to suggest that separate Departmental appropriations would help keep capacity- and capability-building funds conceptually and legislatively distinct from the money that facilitates U.S. combat operations, but the presumption or suggestion that this is current SOP is incorrect.
Military aid is typically appropriated to the State Department and provided to partner governments as grant assistance to be used for the purchase of U.S. military equipment and training. The large-scale training and equipping efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in the creation of an unusual funding model and execution apparatus, in large part because of the significant U.S. troop presence in both countries. Security capacity-building funds for those states have been appropriated directly to Defense Department organizations in-country through ASFF and (in Iraq) ISFF; the U.S. training/transition commands in each country then use those funds to provide training and purchase equipment for the host nation.
This model makes some sense: it's consistent with the military's role as the USG lead for building security capacity in the host nation during combat operations, and it simplifies execution. It's also a bit misleading to suggest that capacity-building dollars aren't sufficiently "fenced" from combat operations funding, seeing as they are conceived, requested, considered, and appropriated under distinct headings (despite ending up with the same Department).
But there are a host of reasons that security assistance and other military aid should be dispersed by State in the peacetime "steady state," and both Congress and the White House seem cognizant of them. (An instructive example: the FY 2012 budget request is the first since the beginning of the war in Iraq to include military aid for that country in the form of State-managed Foreign Military Finance grants as opposed to ISFF. This is consistent with the "normalization" of U.S. security cooperation with Iraq in the wake of the withdrawal of the bulk of American combat forces. See specifically slides 8, 9, 26, and 33 in this pdf.) I am an extremely committed proponent of State's continuing responsibility for security assistance and other military aid. But take one look at what's happened with the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund during the budget battles of the last year if you want to see how difficult it will be to adequately resource the training and equipping of ANSF through State Department accounts.
Here's the bottom line: I agree with Collins that security capacity-building funds are essential to our departure from Afghanistan and should be privileged over funds for continued U.S. combat operations, but I fear that in the current fiscal and political climate, a move to channel those funds through the State Department will make them more vulnerable to cuts and have the opposite effect to what's intended.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Why not "Momentum III"?
Does anyone know who names campaign phases? Like what actual office in DOD assigns the official names? Because I'd never seen them before yesterday, when the Pentagon announced that new campaign stars were authorized for additional phases in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's part of the press release:
But Afghanistan... seriously? Consolidation I-III? Couldn't we do a better job with this? Like, for example:
The additional campaign phase and associated dates established for the [Iraq Campaign Medal] is:
• New Dawn - Sept. 1, 2010 through a date to be determined.
Six other phases, previously identified, include:
• Liberation of Iraq - March 19, 2003 to May 1, 2003.
• Transition of Iraq - May 2, 2003 to June 28, 2004.
• Iraqi Governance - June 29, 2004 to Dec. 15, 2005.
• National Resolution - Dec. 16, 2005 to Jan. 9, 2007.
• Iraqi Surge - Jan. 10, 2007 to Dec. 31, 2008.
• Iraqi Sovereignty - Jan. 1, 2009 to August 31, 2010
The additional campaign phase and associated dates established for the [Afghanistan Campaign Medal] is:
• Consolidation III - Dec. 1, 2009 through a date to be determined.
Three other phases, previously identified, include:The Iraq phase names make some sense, though I think "National Resolution" and "Iraqi Surge" are both a bit goofy. (Are we naming them as phases of the U.S. campaign, or based on host nation political transformation, or what? Seems like both.)
• Liberation of Afghanistan - Sept. 11, 2001 to Nov. 30, 2001
• Consolidation I - Dec. 1, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2006
• Consolidation II - Oct. 1, 2006 to Nov. 30, 2009
But Afghanistan... seriously? Consolidation I-III? Couldn't we do a better job with this? Like, for example:
- Bombing the Piss out of the Taliban - Sept. 11, 2001 to Nov. 30, 2001
- Escape from Tora Bora - Dec. 1, 2001 to Dec. 31, 2001
- General Indifference - Jan. 1, 2002 to March 18, 2003
- Economy of Force - March 19, 2003 to Nov. 30, 2009
- The Good War - Dec. 1, 2009 to June 21, 2011
- The Expensive, Disappearing War - June 22, 2011 through a date to be determined
Friday, February 25, 2011
Leon Wieseltier wants U.S. action on Libya, suggests it should be pretty clean and easy
Here's the good man on President Obama's well-founded reluctance to put an American face on the anti-Qaddafi movement by directly involving U.S. forces:
In case it matters, though, this is the same Leon Wieseltier that was a signatory of the infamous Project for a New American Century letter of September 20, 2001 -- the one that ran down a list of targets for the "global war on terror." The list included Iraq -- "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" -- which should come as no surprise; Wieseltier was also a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Presumably Leon Wieseltier "[did] not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention" to remove Saddam, either. I don't suppose the families of the 100,000+ people who perished during the "Liberation of Iraq" are particularly comforted that regional conflagration was avoided.
To be sure, there are conspiracy theorists in the region who are not in their right mind, and will hold such an anti-American view; but this anti-Americanism is not an empirical matter. They will hate us whatever we do. I do not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention.Well I don't know about you, but I feel relieved!
In case it matters, though, this is the same Leon Wieseltier that was a signatory of the infamous Project for a New American Century letter of September 20, 2001 -- the one that ran down a list of targets for the "global war on terror." The list included Iraq -- "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" -- which should come as no surprise; Wieseltier was also a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Presumably Leon Wieseltier "[did] not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention" to remove Saddam, either. I don't suppose the families of the 100,000+ people who perished during the "Liberation of Iraq" are particularly comforted that regional conflagration was avoided.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Are you coming up with some proposals for me to send around?
Yesterday afternoon, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic unearthed what is almost certainly the most awesome Rumsfeld "snowflake" of all time. (This got some play in Politico's "Morning Defense" today -- though in true traditional media fashion, it was unsourced; I guess it's possible Phil Ewing just stumbled over it on the same day -- so I assume a lot of people are picking up on it. To those of you who have seen this already: sorry. But not that sorry. This will never get old.) Here it is, reproduced in full:
If for some reason you can't read/see this, here's the text:
Mr. Secretary -- Really excellent work here. You pretty much nailed down all the important security issues of the day -- really prescient stuff. I like how you didn't just stick to the fundamental roles and missions of the Defense Department, but really conceptualized your mission in an aggressive, proactive way. Drop some coercive diplomacy on that ass! Solve the Pakistan problem! And shit, come up with a Korea policy while you're at it! You know what, though? You're probably not best qualified to do that, and you've got a lot of demands on your time. Just drop all that stuff off in Dougie's inbox. Hell, what are Number Twos for?
Seriously, what kind of balls does it take to release something like this on your own promotional website? Probably about the same enormous balls it takes to imagine that the Secretary of Defense (or the Under Secretary, really) should be the lead on solving foreign policy problems, I guess. It's no wonder Rumsfeld wasn't interested in spending a whole lot of time fiddling with stability operations in Iraq -- he had foreign policy to conduct!
April 7, 2003 11:46 AM
TO: Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Issues w/Various Countries
We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home. [Ed.: LULZ!]
We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.
And Korea doesn't seem to be going well.
Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?
Thanks.I wish I could say I'd never gotten similarly vague email "direction" at work, but I'd be lying. But come on now: I'm not the story here.
Mr. Secretary -- Really excellent work here. You pretty much nailed down all the important security issues of the day -- really prescient stuff. I like how you didn't just stick to the fundamental roles and missions of the Defense Department, but really conceptualized your mission in an aggressive, proactive way. Drop some coercive diplomacy on that ass! Solve the Pakistan problem! And shit, come up with a Korea policy while you're at it! You know what, though? You're probably not best qualified to do that, and you've got a lot of demands on your time. Just drop all that stuff off in Dougie's inbox. Hell, what are Number Twos for?
Seriously, what kind of balls does it take to release something like this on your own promotional website? Probably about the same enormous balls it takes to imagine that the Secretary of Defense (or the Under Secretary, really) should be the lead on solving foreign policy problems, I guess. It's no wonder Rumsfeld wasn't interested in spending a whole lot of time fiddling with stability operations in Iraq -- he had foreign policy to conduct!
Monday, February 7, 2011
COIN rhetoric versus reality
Over the last several weeks, I've been giving a lot of thought to a post that I've mentally titled "Rehabilitating Counterinsurgency." To this point the argument only exists in my head and a few scribbled notes (those notes do include a colorful chart!), but it's premised on the assertion that years of conceptual, rhetorical, and semantic laziness have brought us to a place where we no longer remember what counterinsurgency is, what it's supposed to be, and what its limits are. We'll see if I can flesh it all out this week, but in the meantime I want to highlight a phenomenon that's central to this subject: the disconnect between COIN rhetoric and COIN reality.
In reading Spencer Ackerman's Washingtonian profile of Michele Flournoy this morning, a line that was likely intended as a sort of boilerplate throwaway jumped out and really stuck with me. Spencer tries to summarize the inside-baseball of the "rise of the COINdinistas" with this quick and simple explanation:
Now look at this excerpt from a paper produced by the U.S. Air Force Academy's Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership about tactical adaptation in the 3rd ACR (pdf):
Operation Restore Rights and H.R. McMaster's broader Tal'Afar campaign are considered a huge success story for counterinsurgency, almost a proof of concept for the then yet-to-be-published doctrine. So how can it be that precisely the same tactic that facilitated this success is viewed in another context as an example of the very tactics that inflame an insurgency?
The answer is simple: COIN is -- and always has been -- about more than the love n' hugs tactics, the restrictive rules of engagement, the development aid and reconstruction projects that pundits and politicians have so enjoyed highlighting. It follows that simplistic explanations about the root causes of insurgency like the one Ackerman offers above are frequently specious and even dangerous. There can be a significant, substantive difference between tactics that prioritize population control and those that prioritize popular favor; when a choice is required between the two, we must be confident that the choice is informed by a demonstrable relationship between effects and mission accomplishment -- not simplistic bumper-sticker slogans like "the population is the prize."
One can fairly contend that population control measures and excessive violence in the early days of the Iraq war contributed to the recruitment of "accidental guerrillas;" I don't contest this. But it seems plausible to me -- and I'm no expert on this -- that insurgents were created not simply by the use of heavy-handed tactics, but because they were employed to no productive end. Perhaps if that concertina wire had helped U.S. troops to more effectively regulate levels of violence, those "accidental guerrillas" would have stayed home... or joined the ISF, like they presumably did in Tal'Afar. Maybe U.S. forces inflamed the insurgency in 2003 and 2004 because we didn't know what the hell we were trying to do in Iraq, not just because we were doing it badly. And maybe the very same things that constitute "doing it badly" when executed in a strategic vaccuum -- concertina wire, cordon-and-searches, kill-and-capture raids, use of intensive supporting fires -- can in fact be extraordinarily useful tactics when employed as part of a considered, cohesive, integrated campaign plan.
In reading Spencer Ackerman's Washingtonian profile of Michele Flournoy this morning, a line that was likely intended as a sort of boilerplate throwaway jumped out and really stuck with me. Spencer tries to summarize the inside-baseball of the "rise of the COINdinistas" with this quick and simple explanation:
But [the counterinsurgents] argued that American strategy in both wars was overly militarized and needlessly provocative, creating what CNAS nonresident fellow and Petraeus brain-truster David Kilcullen termed “accidental guerrillas”: new insurgents fighting the United States because of its early, heavy-handed tactics, such as encircling entire Iraqi villages with concertina wire.(I've added the emphasis in the last bit for reasons that should become obvious shortly.)
Now look at this excerpt from a paper produced by the U.S. Air Force Academy's Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership about tactical adaptation in the 3rd ACR (pdf):
The next challenge facing the 3d ACR was to isolate and kill or capture insurgents while minimizing civilian casualties. To this end, the 3d ACR built an earthen berm around the city [of Tal'Afar] to direct the flow of residents and those insurgents attempting to flee through one of only two checkpoints.(Again, the emphasis is mine.)
Operation Restore Rights and H.R. McMaster's broader Tal'Afar campaign are considered a huge success story for counterinsurgency, almost a proof of concept for the then yet-to-be-published doctrine. So how can it be that precisely the same tactic that facilitated this success is viewed in another context as an example of the very tactics that inflame an insurgency?
The answer is simple: COIN is -- and always has been -- about more than the love n' hugs tactics, the restrictive rules of engagement, the development aid and reconstruction projects that pundits and politicians have so enjoyed highlighting. It follows that simplistic explanations about the root causes of insurgency like the one Ackerman offers above are frequently specious and even dangerous. There can be a significant, substantive difference between tactics that prioritize population control and those that prioritize popular favor; when a choice is required between the two, we must be confident that the choice is informed by a demonstrable relationship between effects and mission accomplishment -- not simplistic bumper-sticker slogans like "the population is the prize."
One can fairly contend that population control measures and excessive violence in the early days of the Iraq war contributed to the recruitment of "accidental guerrillas;" I don't contest this. But it seems plausible to me -- and I'm no expert on this -- that insurgents were created not simply by the use of heavy-handed tactics, but because they were employed to no productive end. Perhaps if that concertina wire had helped U.S. troops to more effectively regulate levels of violence, those "accidental guerrillas" would have stayed home... or joined the ISF, like they presumably did in Tal'Afar. Maybe U.S. forces inflamed the insurgency in 2003 and 2004 because we didn't know what the hell we were trying to do in Iraq, not just because we were doing it badly. And maybe the very same things that constitute "doing it badly" when executed in a strategic vaccuum -- concertina wire, cordon-and-searches, kill-and-capture raids, use of intensive supporting fires -- can in fact be extraordinarily useful tactics when employed as part of a considered, cohesive, integrated campaign plan.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Friday quick-hits
There is a lot of stuff to talk about right now, and we've been largely absent from the conversation. Egypt is at the top of the list, of course. I'm reticent about engaging in the sort of sudden-expertism that's so prevalent in the blogosphere and on cable news, but there are certainly angles to this story that we can meaningfully weigh in on (for me it's American security assistance to Egypt and the broader U.S.-Egypt mil-to-mil relationship), and I hope to get to that in the near future. But for now I'm mostly focused on the immediate struggle against the Old Enemy (and late-afternoon drinks with some defense-blogging luminaries), so I just want to hit you with a few brief notes.
1. Read Jason's tank-wonk piece on what changing Army org structure means for armor culture and the future employment of tanks. Then read this excellent (if incidental) companion story in Aviation Week by Friend of Ink Spots Paul McLeary, Andy Nativi, and David Eshel: "Future of Main Battle Tank Looks Secure." Good contributions to the never-ending "Is Armor Dead?" debate.
2. Check out this review of the new Rumsfeld book by Bloomberg defense guy Tony Capaccio. Note this excerpt in particular:
3. And finally, the Most Disingenuous Quote of All Time award goes to the anonymous defense industry flack who told Politico's Jen DiMascio (re: foreign military sales to Egypt)
Hey, "national interest" can be a really complex mix of things, and it can include jobs and economic strength and industrial base health and a whole bunch of other stuff aside from military-strategic concerns. I get that. But it is just totally obscene for arms manufacturers to suggest that they only sell systems abroad "because [they're] told by the U.S. government it's in the U.S. national interest" -- with the further implication that they're not out ahead of the USG pimping their stuff as the best solution for everybody involved. Sure, the defense industry just fills orders as a public service, with the almost not-even-worth-mentioning side benefit that it helps to sustain their business and increase revenue. Bullshit.
And on that happy note, enjoy your weekend.
1. Read Jason's tank-wonk piece on what changing Army org structure means for armor culture and the future employment of tanks. Then read this excellent (if incidental) companion story in Aviation Week by Friend of Ink Spots Paul McLeary, Andy Nativi, and David Eshel: "Future of Main Battle Tank Looks Secure." Good contributions to the never-ending "Is Armor Dead?" debate.
2. Check out this review of the new Rumsfeld book by Bloomberg defense guy Tony Capaccio. Note this excerpt in particular:
“What was unique about Iraq was that the intelligence community reported near total confidence in their conclusions,” Rumsfeld writes. “Their assessments appeared to be unusually consistent.”Now get in the way-back machine and go read Eli Lake in The New Republic in September 2002. This is six months before the Iraq war started, remember. Money paragraph:
But this is all mere speculation, because there is no NIE for Iraq and there probably won't be one anytime soon. The reason for this omission is that the Iraq hawks running the Pentagon and staffing the office of the vice president long ago lost faith in the CIA analysis. So they set up their own network for analyzing and collecting intelligence regarding Iraq and have been presenting it to the president themselves. The result is that instead of Bush receiving one assessment of the facts on the ground, he has for months been receiving two--one (more cautious) from the CIA and the other (more optimistic) from the Iraq hawks. As one former CIA analyst says, "Not since Vietnam has there been as deep a divide over intelligence as to enemy capabilities as you are seeing now in Iraq." The administration's confusion on Iraq, in other words, goes even deeper than its critics understand. It's not just that different factions in the administration disagree about U.S. policy vis-a-vis Saddam. They disagree about the fundamental facts on which that policy should be based.The whole article is worth reading -- it's a thoughtful look at how the intersection of intelligence and policy is fraught with all sorts of problems of ideology, perception, and so on. Great, great work from someone I frequently butt heads with. Oh yeah, and Rumsfeld: face.
3. And finally, the Most Disingenuous Quote of All Time award goes to the anonymous defense industry flack who told Politico's Jen DiMascio (re: foreign military sales to Egypt)
“We do this because we are told by the U.S. government it’s in the U.S. national interest,” a defense industry official said, referring to U.S. sales abroad. “If at any time it stops becoming so, ... it’s not too hard to say we’d be on board with that.”Um, riiiiight. That's why there's no Lockheed guy in Baghdad lobbying MNF-I and the Iraqi MoD that the F-16 is the best solution to Iraq's air-defense needs, right? They're just siting at their desks in Bethesda waiting for an order to come in, then executing on USG requests to support the national interest? Sure.
Hey, "national interest" can be a really complex mix of things, and it can include jobs and economic strength and industrial base health and a whole bunch of other stuff aside from military-strategic concerns. I get that. But it is just totally obscene for arms manufacturers to suggest that they only sell systems abroad "because [they're] told by the U.S. government it's in the U.S. national interest" -- with the further implication that they're not out ahead of the USG pimping their stuff as the best solution for everybody involved. Sure, the defense industry just fills orders as a public service, with the almost not-even-worth-mentioning side benefit that it helps to sustain their business and increase revenue. Bullshit.
And on that happy note, enjoy your weekend.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
More mystifying speculation about the Republican congress and the defense budget
You're probably tired of this story already, but the defense media can't stop talking about how much/little things are going to change now that there's a new sherriff in town. Lots of coverage of industry folks saying "God, Mackenzie Eaglen was SO WRONG about Republican willingness and ability to protect topline growth." Lots of coverage of Buck McKeon's comments on how just 1% budget growth over inflation will impoverish modernization accounts (though very suggestion that he's going to do anything about it except bitch, and very little analysis of how the politics would work even if he wanted to).
In today's edition of Politico's "Morning Defense" newsletter, Philip Ewing reports on one industry consultant's takeaway from McKeon's brief remarks.
I find this argument curious, to say the least, for a number of reasons.
1. First of all, what does it mean to say there will be "a new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan [that] will force lawmakers and the DoD to face those continued costs, as well"? Will this "new emphasis" and its attendant costs (whatever those may be; I'm really not sure what he's trying to suggest) be more or less palatable to this new Congress than the $159.3 billion the White House requested earlier this year for Overseas Contingency Operations (pdf) -- that is, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) -- in fiscal 2011? And let's not forget the $33 billion supplemental to the FY10 budget, the one that was presented to Congress as necessary to the president's own "new emphasis" Afghanistan over the past year.
In short: If presumptive Chairman McKeon does "drive the conversation back to the wars," and does put "new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan," is McKeon going to "force lawmakers to consider [some] continued costs" beyond the better part of $200 billion that they were almost certainly already expecting to spend to fund the war?
2. Building on my first point, I find it impossible to believe that a former SASC staffer is unaware of medium- to long-term plans for U.S. security assistance to Iraq. Does Mr. Kiley really imagine that the Defense Department, the HAC-D and SAC-D, and the HASC and SASC have failed to consider ways in which the American contribution to Iraqi security can and must be sustained beyond such time as U.S. troops are withdrawn?
As early as the summer of 2009, GEN Odierno spoke to the press about assessing potential options to build Iraqi air defense capabilities as American operations in the country drew down. At his request, an Air Sovereignty Assessment Team spent time in country doing exactly that.
3. Acknowledging all of that, I suppose it's possible to look at U.S. statements to the effect that Iraq won't be capable of maintaining sovereignty of its own airspace before the departure of American ground troops and conclude that this means we'll need to retain a costly air defense presence in the region in the meantime. Could this be what Kiley means when Ewing writes that "Iraq will still need American air bases, equipment, thousands of airmen, jets – and billions of dollars" -- that we're not currently accounting for the operating costs of those U.S. personnel, aircraft, radars, and so on that we'll need to maintain in country/in the region? I suppose it's possible. In which case I'd suggest that a good bit of this air defense mission can probably be accomplished by carrier-based aircraft and possibly by planes hangared in Qatar, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the region. (Look, I'm not gonna BS you: I don't know a damn thing about USAF force posture in the CENTCOM AOR or anywhere else.) The big ask is going to be maintaining an air defense radar network, I'd expect, until such time as the Iraqis develop their own capability.
4. When I read Kiley's suggestion that the "billions of dollars" that Iraq will still need for air defense is "a budgetary question that is not being addressed now," it seems more likely to me that he's saying we're going to have to pony up some cash to buy them airplanes. And I'm not going to say that that won't happen, or even that it's unlikely, but I want to present a few facts about the whole thing.
For one thing, the administration requested $2 billion for the Iraq Security Forces Fund in FY11 (pdf), and if the trend holds, about 20% of the money that gets appropriated will go to materiel (that accounts for both MoD and MoI equipment, in case you're wondering). So even after the Senate slashes that ISFF request in half as they did this year -- and the Washington Post editorial board just thinks that sucks, for the record -- we're still talking about $200 million in free cash money for the Iraqis to spend on gear.
Second of all, the Government Accountability Office wants everybody to know that the Iraqis are actually running a freaking budgetary surplus, you guys. And they've got some of that skrilla set aside for U.S. weapon systems, believe it or not.
Now what the hell does this have to do with airplanes?, you're wondering. Well, about that budget surplus... Earlier this year, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Joint Forces stated that investment priorities in the MoD would be shifting after years of budgetary bias toward the Iraqi army, and in the future, 70% of the defense budget would go to the air force. All of which is pretty good news if you're an air force that's trying to spend a few billion dollars on American F-16s, or if you're the patron that wants them to have those F-16s but doesn't want to drop a planeload of cash to satisfy the GoI's tab with Boeing. I don't actually know how much of the proposed F-16 deal will be financed with country funds versus U.S. assistance, but considering the Abrams buy and the spending shift, I think it's possible that this isn't going to require any additional (or at least any unexpected additional) cash in the U.S. defense budget.
So in the final analysis, is some purported "new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan" going to increase defense outlays, or place any unexpected additional strains on the budget? It just seems really unlikely to me, especially when we consider Congress' consistent annual complicity when the SECDEF comes over to the Hill and says "uh, hey dudes, we need some extra flow for this war, because we ran out. Or we just didn't really budget for it, I'm not sure. Or, uh, we want to place 'renewed emphasis' on things over there. Because, duh, obviously, it's really important -- it's a war. So, uh, can you help us out?"
Are there really "BIG BUDGETARY QUESTIONS" on the horizon "that [are] not being addressed now"? Nah.
Oh yeah, and P.S.: Mackenzie Eaglen's wrong.
In today's edition of Politico's "Morning Defense" newsletter, Philip Ewing reports on one industry consultant's takeaway from McKeon's brief remarks.
The message was clear: The new Congress will drive the conversation back to the wars, just as Obama’s planned pullout deadlines approach.
THAT MEANS BIG BUDGET QUESTIONS, said defense consultant Greg Kiley of Potomac Strategic Development, a former top SASC staffer. Even if the top line stays flat or grows, and big acquisition projects stay in the picture – both likely – a new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan will force lawmakers and the DoD to face those continued costs as well, he said.
One example: Iraq effectively doesn’t have an air force, and can’t control its own air space, Kiley told Morning Defense. The U.S. won’t just abandon it, so that means even after Obama’s 2011 withdrawal (if it happens), Iraq will still need American air bases, equipment, thousands of airmen, jets – and billions of dollars.
“As long as we’re still staying engaged, which we’re committed to, that’s a budgetary question that is not being addressed now,” Kiley said.
I find this argument curious, to say the least, for a number of reasons.
1. First of all, what does it mean to say there will be "a new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan [that] will force lawmakers and the DoD to face those continued costs, as well"? Will this "new emphasis" and its attendant costs (whatever those may be; I'm really not sure what he's trying to suggest) be more or less palatable to this new Congress than the $159.3 billion the White House requested earlier this year for Overseas Contingency Operations (pdf) -- that is, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) -- in fiscal 2011? And let's not forget the $33 billion supplemental to the FY10 budget, the one that was presented to Congress as necessary to the president's own "new emphasis" Afghanistan over the past year.
In short: If presumptive Chairman McKeon does "drive the conversation back to the wars," and does put "new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan," is McKeon going to "force lawmakers to consider [some] continued costs" beyond the better part of $200 billion that they were almost certainly already expecting to spend to fund the war?
2. Building on my first point, I find it impossible to believe that a former SASC staffer is unaware of medium- to long-term plans for U.S. security assistance to Iraq. Does Mr. Kiley really imagine that the Defense Department, the HAC-D and SAC-D, and the HASC and SASC have failed to consider ways in which the American contribution to Iraqi security can and must be sustained beyond such time as U.S. troops are withdrawn?
As early as the summer of 2009, GEN Odierno spoke to the press about assessing potential options to build Iraqi air defense capabilities as American operations in the country drew down. At his request, an Air Sovereignty Assessment Team spent time in country doing exactly that.
The team was dispatched by U.S. Air Force Central at the request of the Multi-National Forces-Iraq commanding general to determine how to best bridge the gap between U.S Air Force’s departure and Iraq achieving the organic capability and capacity to monitor, control, and if necessary defend its airspace.
During their visit to Iraq in early September [2009], the Air Sovereignty Assessment Team met with the Iraqi minister of defense, the deputy commander of the Iraqi Air Force, the Iraqi Air Force staff, and U.S. advisors attached to Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq Iraqi Training and Advisory Mission- Air Force.
“The goal is to make sure Iraq maintains sovereignty by bridging the gap after we leave,” said Lt. Col. Daniel E. Rauch, deputy advisor from ITAM-Air Force to the Iraqi air staff for planning. “The accelerated schedule of the Security Agreement creates a period of time when Iraq does not possess the foundational capability to ensure air sovereignty or defend against the perceived threat.”On top of that, the Iraqis have been talking about buying American F-16s for more than two years, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency formally notified Congress in September of this year of a proposed sale of 18 of the aircraft (pdf) -- a buy that could total as much as $4.2 billion when all is said and done.
3. Acknowledging all of that, I suppose it's possible to look at U.S. statements to the effect that Iraq won't be capable of maintaining sovereignty of its own airspace before the departure of American ground troops and conclude that this means we'll need to retain a costly air defense presence in the region in the meantime. Could this be what Kiley means when Ewing writes that "Iraq will still need American air bases, equipment, thousands of airmen, jets – and billions of dollars" -- that we're not currently accounting for the operating costs of those U.S. personnel, aircraft, radars, and so on that we'll need to maintain in country/in the region? I suppose it's possible. In which case I'd suggest that a good bit of this air defense mission can probably be accomplished by carrier-based aircraft and possibly by planes hangared in Qatar, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the region. (Look, I'm not gonna BS you: I don't know a damn thing about USAF force posture in the CENTCOM AOR or anywhere else.) The big ask is going to be maintaining an air defense radar network, I'd expect, until such time as the Iraqis develop their own capability.
4. When I read Kiley's suggestion that the "billions of dollars" that Iraq will still need for air defense is "a budgetary question that is not being addressed now," it seems more likely to me that he's saying we're going to have to pony up some cash to buy them airplanes. And I'm not going to say that that won't happen, or even that it's unlikely, but I want to present a few facts about the whole thing.
For one thing, the administration requested $2 billion for the Iraq Security Forces Fund in FY11 (pdf), and if the trend holds, about 20% of the money that gets appropriated will go to materiel (that accounts for both MoD and MoI equipment, in case you're wondering). So even after the Senate slashes that ISFF request in half as they did this year -- and the Washington Post editorial board just thinks that sucks, for the record -- we're still talking about $200 million in free cash money for the Iraqis to spend on gear.
Second of all, the Government Accountability Office wants everybody to know that the Iraqis are actually running a freaking budgetary surplus, you guys. And they've got some of that skrilla set aside for U.S. weapon systems, believe it or not.
Iraqi government data show that Iraq's security ministries--the Ministries of Defense and Interior--increased their spending from 2005 through 2009 and set aside about $5.5 billion for purchases through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program.One of the things they coughed up real Iraqi cash dinars for is tanks: in August, the GoI took delivery of the first 11 of a total of 140 M1A1s that it purchased from the U.S. (pdf), using its very own money. Another relevant detail here: the U.S. Congress has already passed a defense authorization bill (for FY09, if it matters) that included an expression of the strong legislative preference (and by this I mean "statutory requirement") that "the United States Government shall take actions to ensure that Iraq funds are used to pay the costs of the salaries, training, equipping, and sustainment of Iraqi Security Forces." We can all speculate that a Republican Congress wouldn't pass a bill with a similar provision, and that they'll listen to Odierno and Crocker, but let's just take a moment to reflect on the fact that this and the ISFF reduction are suggestive of a general sentiment that it's time for Iraq to pony up for its own defense.
Now what the hell does this have to do with airplanes?, you're wondering. Well, about that budget surplus... Earlier this year, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Joint Forces stated that investment priorities in the MoD would be shifting after years of budgetary bias toward the Iraqi army, and in the future, 70% of the defense budget would go to the air force. All of which is pretty good news if you're an air force that's trying to spend a few billion dollars on American F-16s, or if you're the patron that wants them to have those F-16s but doesn't want to drop a planeload of cash to satisfy the GoI's tab with Boeing. I don't actually know how much of the proposed F-16 deal will be financed with country funds versus U.S. assistance, but considering the Abrams buy and the spending shift, I think it's possible that this isn't going to require any additional (or at least any unexpected additional) cash in the U.S. defense budget.
So in the final analysis, is some purported "new emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan" going to increase defense outlays, or place any unexpected additional strains on the budget? It just seems really unlikely to me, especially when we consider Congress' consistent annual complicity when the SECDEF comes over to the Hill and says "uh, hey dudes, we need some extra flow for this war, because we ran out. Or we just didn't really budget for it, I'm not sure. Or, uh, we want to place 'renewed emphasis' on things over there. Because, duh, obviously, it's really important -- it's a war. So, uh, can you help us out?"
Are there really "BIG BUDGETARY QUESTIONS" on the horizon "that [are] not being addressed now"? Nah.
Oh yeah, and P.S.: Mackenzie Eaglen's wrong.
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