Max Boot is gonna learn us all up about Somalia! (UPDATED)

LULZ.

It is hard to believe anyone could be outraged by the U.S. government paying for contractors to train the Somalian armed forces. Those armed forces are the only thing standing in the way of a complete takeover of the country by the Shahab, the Taliban-like militia which has close links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There is absolutely no appetite in Washington for sending any troops into Somalia, beyond perhaps an occasional Special Operations raid; everyone remembers all too vividly the Black Hawk Down disaster of 1993. So how do we stop the Shahab? The CIA has an active presence there. But that’s not enough. We also need to provide arms and training to the Somali government troops, and because we’re not willing to send even U.S. trainers, that job has been contracted out indirectly to a security company called Bancroft Global Development, based in Washington.

1. No one is "paying for contractors to train the Somalian armed forces." Somalia can barely be said to have armed forces. We're paying to train Ugandan and Burundian soldiers who operate as peacekeepers under the auspices of AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia.

2. I know you've been talking about the Iranian threat for a while, but I don't think Somalia's going to be taken over by intermediate-range ballistic missiles. More likely what you meant is Shabab, Somalia's AQ-linked militia. Shabab, not Shahab. (Dude, you wrote it three times. Don't tell me it's a typo.)

3. Don't you think it's a little strange to say that Americans lack the appetite for U.S. military action in Somalia -- with the exception of SOF raids -- because of troubling memories of the "Black Hawk Down" incident? Uh, all those Rangers and Delta guys were killed during a special operations raid.

4. This may be a news flash to you, but "we're not willing to send even U.S. trainers" almost anywhere (assuming you mean uniformed American servicemen) with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan, in large part because of the massive manpower requirements of those wars. The bulk of U.S.-provided military training in partner nations is performed by contractors like DynCorp and MPRI (and innumerable subs); sometimes it's contracted through the State Department (as with putative peacekeeping training in Africa), and sometimes it's executed by DoD through foreign military sales.

5. Let's repeat this one to make sure you've got it: this isn't about training and equipping Somali military forces, but African peacekeepers deployed in Somalia. Maybe try reading and understanding next time.

(All of that said, I kind of agree with Boot that the Times article makes a mountain out of a molehill. It conflates peacekeeper training with mercenary military operations by highlighting the role of some European soldier of fortune that could've been an extra in "Blood Diamond," and intimates that U.S.-contracted PSCs are taking direct action against the Shabab in order to fill the gaps in what's described as a poorly-directed, "piecemeal" policy toward Somalia. Dude, this Rouget guy is not the "face of the American campaign against militants in Somalia," unlikely or otherwise. He's just a guy doing a job. The only "American campaign against militants in Somalia" is being waged by intelligence officers, drones, and the occasional special operator.)

UPDATE at 1555 ET 12 AUG: I threw this post together in about 90 seconds after reading Boot's piece yesterday afternoon, largely because I wanted to embarrass him before his mistakes were quickly noticed and surreptitiously corrected. It came as a small surprise when I checked back repeatedly today and noticed that the original post remained unchanged. That is, until some time in the last hour (h/t to @slowfalling on Twitter, who noticed and brought it to my attention); changes are in bold, and I've supplied the original language in brackets.

It is hard to believe anyone could be outraged by the U.S. government paying for contractors to train the African Union peacekeepers trying to keep Somalia from totally spinning out of control [orig.: the Somalian armed forces]. Those armed forces are the only thing standing in the way of a complete takeover of the country by the Shabab [orig.: the Shahab], the Taliban-like militia which has close links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There is absolutely no appetite in Washington for sending any troops into Somalia, beyond perhaps an occasional Special Operations raid; everyone remembers all too vividly the Black Hawk Down disaster of 1993. So how do we stop the Shabab [orig.: the Shahab]? The CIA has an active presence there. But that’s not enough. We also need to provide arms and training to African Union peacekeepers, and because we’re not willing to send even U.S. trainers, that job has been contracted out indirectly to a security company called Bancroft Global Development, based in Washington.

On a scale of 1-10, how surprised are you that neither Commentary nor Boot saw fit to make note of the corrections? -6 or so?

UPDATE 2: At Jeremy Scahill's suggestion, I feel it's my responsibility to retract all negative statements about Max Boot's expertise in the cultural and military dynamics of the Horn of Africa. I should also note that the errors in Boot's original post were merely spatio-temporal as opposed to factual, and that we could sort all these little disagreements out rather simply if we'd just send 100,000 U.S. troops to my office to conduct a fully-resourced Gulliver-centric counterinsurgency campaign en route to Mogadishu.

[insert pithy, non-profane post title here]

I don't like to scream profanity into cyberspace via post titles, which are embedded in the URL, so I'm just going to bump it down into the body text.

Max Boot: Are you fucking kidding me?

To head off the dangers that may come with “catastrophic success,” it is important for the coalition to plan now for stabilizing a post-Qaddafi Libya. If policymakers haven’t already done so, they ought to consult The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building put out by Jim Dobbins, Seth Jones, and their colleagues at RAND. In particular look at page 39, which lists “peak military levels for peace enforcement” in a variety of conflicts from 1945 Germany to 2003 Iraq. Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.

What does that mean for Libya—a country that, according to the CIA Factbook, has a population of 6.6 million? If the aim is to replicate the Bosnia/Kosovo experience then 330,000 peacekeepers would be called for. If Iraq is the model, 94,000 peacekeepers would be needed.

Of course, as with all such metrics, these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances. In Libya there are a number of factors that suggest lesser levels of risk, including the fact that the eastern portion of the country around Benghazi has been relatively peaceful and stable under rebel control. So perhaps even 94,000 peacekeepers won’t be needed. But it is likely that a need substantial if smaller force will still be required, and it is imperative for NATO policymakers to begin planning for such a deployment. As part of that planning process, they need to shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent. Otherwise they risk shock and opposition among publics that have not been prepared for yet another deployment.

For ten minutes after I read this post, I could do nothing but stare blankly at the screen.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The political and public will to secure, stabilize, state-build, or otherwise involve U.S. forces and resources in a post-conflict scenario in Libya simply does not exist. A significant majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement even at current levels: when asked last week "do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by using military force in Libya now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Libya now?", only 33% of those polled approved of the enterprise. (See question 31.) There's no small irony in Boot's exhortation to policymakers to "shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent," considering the way Boot himself is manifestly incapable of offering a persuasive rationale to his own audience.

Beyond that, Boot's analysis of force requirements is so stupid it practically drools. One can only assume that the RAND state-building study is cited and linked as a sort of bluff; surely Boot knows that his foolishness will be revealed if the reader takes time to examine it even cursorily. "In particular look at page 39," we're told, where a chart compares the peak troops-to-inhabitants ratio for Germany and Japan in 1945 with six peace enforcement missions from the post-Cold War period. Here's Max:

Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.

Yes, force levels do help to explain the success of peace enforcement and stability operations. Dobbins et al. agree: "High levels of forces have generally tended to correlate with high levels of security and order and low levels of casualties." But they don't completely explain outcomes: just look at Japan, where post-conflict violence was nonexistent with a ratio of only five occupying troops to every 1,000 people -- the same as violent Somalia in 1992.

It is, of course, intuitive to assume that high force levels are conducive to low violence. But the sample size of the RAND study is troubling, as is the lack of consideration given to a number of other qualitative differences between the various campaigns. The wars against Germany and Japan, for example, ended with the surrender of each country's high military command, to the evident relief of populations that had been battered by years of total war. The Bosnian war had a similarly settled conclusion, with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (acting by proxy for Bosnian Serbs) agreeing to the Dayton Accords alongside the Bosnian and Croatian national leaderships. The Kosovo conflict, on the other hand, ended with the withdrawal of Serbian forces from the province and the entry of KFOR peacekeepers, who were joyously received by Kosovar Albanians. (In this sense, it can hardly be classed as "peace enforcement.") And the Iraq war, of course, merely shifted from conventional to irregular war in 2003, the year the data was reported; the government in Baghdad had collapsed, the armed forces scattered, and the anti-coalition resistance taken up by sectarian militias and loyalist irregulars.

What this brief exploration should show is that a great many variables related to conflict termination can impact the level of violence in the peace enforcement or stability operations phase, and troop levels are not uniquely determinative. Boot seems to acknowledge this when he writes that "these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances." But he goes on to conclude that the risk of post-Qaddafi violence in Libya is likely even lower than in any of the scenarios mooted above, and that a stabilizing occupation could perhaps be effected with an even lower force ratio than Iraq in 2003 (which, contrary to Boot's assertion, is not "on the low end of force levels," but rather just above the median in a set of eight cases). Of course, there's a serious problem with this line of reasoning: if the post-war situation in Iraq were reproduced in Libya this year, that would be a totally unacceptable result for the United States and the international community! The force levels in 2003 Iraq didn't come close to assuring stability!

There are a good many reasons to believe the precise opposite of what Boot asserts -- to believe that the risk of violence in Libya is much, much higher than in Japan or Somalia or Kosovo. Many Libyans have already insisted that a Western troop presence in the country would be unacceptable to them, even during a phase of the conflict when the outcome is still uncertain. If Libyans are unwelcoming of American combat power that could aid in Qaddafi's demise, how much more likely are they to resist a foreign presence once the dictator is gone? As Boot has clearly noticed -- he reminds us early in the piece that "Libya has been a major recruiting center for Al Qaeda" -- Arab North Africans in authoritarian countries are solidly within the target demographic of America's most committed foe; should we expect that AQAM will be unable to rouse resistance fighters to the anti-crusader cause in an Arab country with weak borders, surrounded by other Arab countries with weak borders and populations presumably susceptible to the bin-Ladenist pitch? We should instead pretend that post-conflict conditions in Libya will be less like the disaster of post-Saddam Iraq and more like Kosovo, where occupying forces had come to the aid of a weaker ethno-religious faction after the expulsion of an aggressive, invading army?

In the end, we can't know whether Libya would violently oppose a Western occupation (even one that Boot would surely proclaim as salutary to the cause of Arab freedom). Steven Goode, summarizing the findings of a study on force levels by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, adverted to just this point.

Another caveat of the work is that the analysis cannot predict the violence level before a conflict starts. Many insurgencies simmer at a low level for years before becoming serious enough to provoke a significant reaction from the government. In contrast, the Soviet Union faced intense resistance immediately upon invading Afghanistan, with more than 4,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers killed every year of the conflict (or more than 250 fatalities per million Afghan residents). Policy-makers contemplating intervening in other nations should remember that not only can invasions lead to insurgencies; they can also lead almost immediately to levels of violence more than three times that currently [in the winter of 2009-10] seen in Afghanistan after eight years of war.

All of which by way of saying what almost everyone except for Max Boot seems to have learned by now: this kind of thing isn't as simple as you think it is. (Or more succinctly: STFU.)

Max Boot is still not making the argument for a larger land force

Forget grand strategy and all that. There are a couple of significant problems with this newest Max Boot column where he responds to critics of his Weekly Standard article that I commented on the other day.

Let's start near the top. "Regarding the first point: critics say that Bush and his civilian and military officials decided to send a small force to Afghanistan and then Iraq not because of force constraints but because the were wedded to the ideology of the "small footprint." There is a great deal of merit in this assertion." Great deal of merit?? I've yet to see a single piece of evidence to suggest anything but that being the case. I ask Mr. Boot to provide any, because I've never seen it. Every book, article, or primary source I've seen on the subject stated explicitly that a small footprint was decided on as a matter of principle and had nothing to do with troops available. I'll agree that force sizing was part of the calculus later in the Iraq conflict, after the insurgency grew, but for a couple years, I'd still argue it was barely a "major" part of the calculus. No one was interested in an escalation for political reasons (remember that whole "we're not in the middle of an insurgency" business?) - as well as principles. At the time, Afghanistan was going swimmingly with practically no footprint. No one was terribly sure what was going wrong in Iraq that it couldn't follow that model.

The second major problem I have with his post is in the last paragraph. "Indeed, even as we were winning in Iraq, we were losing in Afghanistan, because we didn't have enough troops to adequately garrison both countries." He goes on to state that Bush and Clinton force planners that we'd have such large commitments. Let's get past the heavily weighted term "garrison" and move on to what this logic does mean for force planners. How big of a country should the United States be prepared to "garrison"? For what purposes? We had 500K active duty troops available (not including the USMC) for Iraq and Afghanistan to "garrison" two fairly large countries with populations totaling just over 50 million people. Mr. Boot specifically listed Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan as countries the President should assure us that we won't have to commit troops to. Populations? 26 million, 10 million, and 180 million people respectively. If Mr. Boot feels we should have maintained a force size of 700K to "garrison" 50 million people and that the U.S. should maintain whatever capability necessary to do the same to other problem nations, then by that logic we'll need an army of roughly 3 million active duty soldiers. Yeah, that won't adversely effect our economy.

This last bit was a bit tongue in cheek. I'd like to think that Mr. Boot wouldn't think an army of that magnitude would be reasonable (I could be wrong though). But this "who knows what we'll have to occupy" is terrible reasoning, especially as there is no real political, strategic, or operation reasoning that would dictate the necessity to "garrison" these and other places. To say nothing of the Albright logic (we have a huge military so let's do something with it) that could put the U.S. in strategically ill-advised positions again. And finally, as I mentioned the other day, neither of these articles mentions the size and role of the National Guard or Reserves in case of national emergencies. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good rule of thumb: if you don't think your operation is so vital to the nation that you don't think the the Guard or Reserve should be deployed for it, then you shouldn't be there at all.

Anyway, there are probably good reasons for maintaining a large land force. Max Boot is not making any of them.

Effects of Grand Strategy without Grand Enemies on Budget Debates: GS/GE Part III

I'm going to just label this topic thread GS/GE (Grand Strategy / Grand Enemy) because I'm getting tired of typing it out. I had another post in this series planned in my head, but thanks to twitter I'm going to jump on a target of opportunity: budget debates without a grand enemy.

In short, these debates lack rigor. The budget aspect of grand strategy is essential as it limits a state's ability to react or project itself towards its interests. What else is the administration of government than this distribution of its assets? The defense sector likely among the largest and most critical (for both security and by the impact of it being among the largest). Sure, there are battles of ideas on defense budget issues in times of peace and war as well at times when there is a clear enemy and when there isn't. I'm sure the folks in the Pentagon are conducting rigorous analyses on the programs and monies under their control. But in the public sphere, this debate is becoming ludicrous.

In general, the disparate camps (with regard to defense budgets) could probably be classified as doves (we should spend less on defense, more on aid and domestic issues), "pragmatists" (what a strong defense, but understand that spending has to be limited at some point), and hawks (who would have a hard time ever finding a limit in order to have the strongest defense money could buy). While there are many bad arguments in each of these groups, I am going to pick on defense budget hawks today, and Max Boot in particular.

This afternoon, Mr. Boot linked via twitter to a column he wrote for The Weekly Standard Magazine. In it, he makes the following points:

1. The U.S. Army had a strength of 710,000 troops in 1991.
2. The U.S. Army has a strength of 566,000 today.
3. This reduction was a really bad idea and led to our not doing so well in Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. The Army intends to cut another approximately 50,000 active duty positions starting in 2015.
5. This is also a really bad idea and the President should provide explanation and assurances on what this bad decision for further cuts should happen.

Oh my. Firstly, I'm not terribly sure what on earth U.S. Army personnel strengths in 1991 have anything to do with our strength today. Those numbers were based on the strategic realities of 1991 (and the likelihood of a ground war in Europe - which we considered vital to our national interest). Secondly, point 3 is just ridiculous statement that is not just inaccurate, but not argued at all. Rumsfeld didn't use more troops in the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq because he felt that it should be done quickly with a small footprint as a matter of principle, not because there weren't enough forces. The reason both conflicts went/are going so badly is because of piss poor planning assumptions and intelligence, not active duty strength levels.

As for points 4 and 5, my question to Mr. Boot is: after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan draw down to minimal footprints, how many soldiers do we need? What would they all do? Mr. Boot asks for certainty and assurances on the assumptions used to substantiate the draw down and then states that such assurances cannot be given. I ask Mr. Boot for certainty and assurances that we'll need to intervene in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia in the foreseeable future that would substantiate, not only the maintenance of current personnel levels, but likely the return to 1991 levels. Oh right. Such assurances cannot be given. In fact, I'm more inclined to take assurances that we won't be trying to do regime change/governance and state building / general meddling with large numbers of boots on the ground any time soon without a really, really good reason. Mainly because we've been doing it for a while and it's taking a toll on the military and our country. If a war of necessity does arise, that's what the Reserves and National Guard are for - they don't get that drill pay to play soldier, they get it so they're ready when they're needed. If you account for them in possible deployable numbers, we're talking just under a million potential pairs of boots.

While this post is dragging on longer than intended, just one more points. Saying that defense spending is "only" 20% of the USG's budget is misleading, considering how much of the total budget is non-discretionary (social security, etc.). It's 50% of discretionary spending - half of the money the USG can spend on things it chooses to. And we're still spending half of the world's budget on defense. Half. How much would be enough?

The bottom line for me, here, is that Mr. Boot isn't making an argument that we need to stop making cuts or even increase spending. He's making the same type of non-arguments that his opponents (who support the cuts) are making. No one has any idea what type of threat the United States should be preparing for - we have no idea what or who our enemies are or will be. Not even an inkling of an idea. Yet, pundits are waxing poetically from all sides of the budget debate without laying out realistic strategic foundations that would justify such a budget (yes, I know, it was an article in a newspaper...). I'm picking on Mr. Boot today, probably unfairly as he certainly is not the only one on any side doing this. But I am adamant that I am not at all interested in any budgetary ideas based on preconceived political ideologies devoid of strategic substantiation. And no Mr. Boot and others, naming countries that just really piss us off sometimes is not a strategic substantiation - it does not make them grand enemies for which to build a grand strategy.