The failure of light-footprint intervention to provide long-term stability

Today the RAND Corporation released Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge co-written by a team of researchers. The paper is pretty good on discussing the current security, economic, and political situation and challenges in Libya. However, the paper's discourse on the security situation, specifically through a "light-footprint strategy", has helped me get my brain around an issue I've been struggling to wrap my grey matter around because I don't think it addresses the nature of the conflict that lead to today's situation. To be exact (and with caveats not discussed here):

Light- to no-footprint intervention in support of rebel forces is not a long-term solution for stability.

The U.S. and other NATO involvement in Libya was essentially the provision of air support (with notable exceptions of on-the-ground SOF teams). There are a number of reasons for this approach, much of which is centered around domestic Western politics. But the provision of close and strategic air support to a motley crew of disparate and competitive armed groups is only asking for a disaster. Yes, this method helped bring about the end of the much despised Qaddafi regime, but it is certainly not helping bring about a lasting peace and stability. Much like our initial efforts in Afghanistan, failing to provide the forces necessary in the aftermath of the destruction of a regime creates an environment conducive to warlord-ism and the promise of many years of conflict.

Since the 1990s at least, conflict studies have proven time and again the value of well executed DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) and SSR (security sector reform) programs. Our failure to begin this in earnest in 2002 (or really up to at least 2005!) in Afghanistan and our failure to do it now in Libya is exacerbating the security situation where the internationally-recognized government has very limited control over its own territory. Did we expect that these militias, that we supported with weapons (in some cases) and effective air support, to simply integrate themselves into the state or to return to their peaceful lives in the interest of democracy and human rights? Our planning for both Libya and Afghanistan suggest that we did expect that even if it sounds profoundly stupid when stated this directly. But without adequate intervention forces (military, police, civil) on the ground to provide security and to direct and lead DDR and SSR efforts, your only other option is to hope that DDR and SSR happen on their own. Which, as near as I can tell, has never happened.

The purpose of this short post is not to lobby for boots on the ground in Libya, but on the contrary to caution those out there who think that we can simply help these rebel groups with air power. For example: here. If our actions in Libya did create a gratitude account with the Libyan people, great. But that does not translate to those warlords that wield power through their militias as often their fight will be with other militias as they strive for greater influence. Without boots on the ground, we are unlikely to be able to stop these violent struggles for power if we can't be there to broker the peace and help move it along.

As much as military analysts bemoan the general public's lack of understanding of the effort and violence of a no-fly zone, the longer peace is much harder to accomplish without large numbers of troops on the ground to provide stability after the regime falls. If we are not willing to put troops on the ground before or after our service as a rebel-force air force, then we should seriously contemplate refraining from intervening in the first place. Or at a minimum, not be surprised when our actions do not provide the stability for which we had hoped.  That is where I have issue with the RAND paper: it discusses the light-footprint as a problem in developing long-term stability, but it does not discuss the real nature of our initial intervention and how we have not yet succeeded in using it to accomplish long-term foreign policy objectives. Instead of looking merely at Libya today, we need to understand that this has not worked yet in accomplishing anything other than short-term objectives: removing the guys we don't like. We need to understand that this approach is the minimal-interventionist version of the Bush administration's failure to provide a Phase IV plan for Iraq. It has the exact same consequences and is based on the same weak planning assumptions. Just keep that in mind as debate about intervening in Syria continues and we consider possible courses of action.

A persuasive argument for COCOM consolidation

Nathan Freier is an extremely smart guy. I've thought so since first hearing him speak at Carlisle just over a year ago. He works at CSIS now that he's retired from the Army, and this week he wrote an excellent piece about the missed opportunity to make significant changes to the Unified Command Plan. Read the whole thing; his argument is very compelling.

I particularly enjoyed the closing paragraph, which hits on one of my (many) betes noirs:

Span of control is frequently an argument against merger as well. How, for example, is a single command going to manage engagement with all the countries of Europe and Africa combined? The response is as uncomfortable as it is necessary. As resources decline, larger COCOM AoRs [areas of responsibility] will ultimately demand greater discrimination about where and how limited means are applied. To secure core U.S. interests in a specific AoR, four-star commanders will increasingly need to allocate resources and effort according to consideration of what absolutely must and can be done with what’s on hand and not what could and might be done with additional time and money.

What Freier is describing here is, in my consistent refrain, the essence of strategy. It's also basically the opposite of how the military develops budgets and petitions for resources. Particularly now, as the operational demands of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars begin to decrease, the services are looking for combatant commanders to articulate a "demand signal" for forces to satisfy other missions, like security cooperation (or what Freier refers to with the fraught and awful term "building partner capacity"). If CCDRs are telling the services they need forces to meet their requirements (God, the Pentagon loves this word!), then the service chiefs can justify expensive force structure and personnel retention. Which means bigger budget asks, and so on and so on...

It's nice to imagine a world where combatant commanders set priorities and adjust their appetite to available forces and resources, but usually the nation is instead made to sacrifice its social unnecessaries to the "needs of the warfighter."

Ends, ways, and means in Libya (UPDATED)

The U.S. is currently at war in Libya, this time (as nearly always) at the head of an international coalition. In closing his remarks on the passage of UNSCR 1973 last Friday, which authorizes UN member states "to take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in Libya," President Obama assured the nation that "our goal is focused, our cause is just, and our coalition is strong." Rest assured: at least one of these things is true.

There's been a great deal of justifiable hand-wringing over the last several days about war aims, an issue that has only been further confused by the president's remarks on the subject. In the directive portion of the Security Council resolution, that august body variously demands, stresses, authorizes, recognizes, decides, calls upon, requests, requires, and urges various parties to take certain actions. I'm going to boil all of that down to the fundamentals. So here's what the resolution does:

1. Demands an immediate cease-fire and end to violence against civilians (presumably by the regime).

2. Demands that the regime meet the basic needs of its civilian population.

3. Authorizes member states to take action to enforce (1), including by arming rebel forces.

4. Establishes a ban on flights over Libyan territory, with certain exceptions, and without specific instructions as to how such a ban will be enforced, or by whom.

5. Authorizes member states to figure out (4) for themselves, and to take responsibility for enforcement.

6. Forbids the deployment of foreign occupation forces on Libyan territory.

7. Reinforces the provisions of a previous resolution (UNSCR 1970) that relate to an arms embargo, travel ban, and asset freeze on members of the Libyan regime.

As you can see, member states are pretty well left to their own devices when it comes to enforcement. That means that individual states like the U.S., or groupings of states operating as an international enforcement coalition, must translate these demands and requirements into desired endstates and military objectives. How might that look? Here's my run at it.

ENDSTATES:
1) Operations against civilians by the Libyan regime are halted (either voluntarily or by compulsion)
2) A no-fly zone over Libyan territory is created and enforced
3) Basic needs of the civilian population are met by the Libyan regime*
4) Humanitarian assistance is freely provided to affected populations

*The president elaborated this requirement by saying that "Qaddafi must... establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas."

These endstates are conditions that are not time-limited; they contain no measure of sustainability, so we must assume that to enact them initially will be considered an objective endpoint. By this standard, the UN-authorized operation would have achieved its purpose if each of these conditions were to be satisfied -- that is, if Libyan forces declared and honored a cease-fire; a no-fly zone were created; water, electricity, and gas were restored to the entire country; and humanitarian assistance reached those who have been impacted by violence. (The president added that "Qaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, [and] pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misrata and Zawiya;" presumably this is to ensure the protection of civilians, but if a cease-fire were to be declared and honored, withdrawal would seem redundant.)

MILITARY OBJECTIVES:
1a) Defeat, dislocate, and/or destroy those Libyan regime forces directly threatening the safety of civilians
1b) Defeat, dislocate, and/or destroy those Libyan regime forces that refuse to withdraw from the immediate vicinity of Benghazi, Ajdabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya
2a) Establish air supremacy over Libyan territory in order to prevent regime air assets from operating
2b) Defeat, dislocate, and/or destroy those Libyan regime air defenses that may threaten coalition forces enforcing a no-fly zone
3a) Coerce Libyan regime to restore supply of water, gas and electricity to civilian population
3b) Disrupt Libyan regime efforts to interrupt supply of water, gas and electricity to civilian population
4a) Defeat, dislocate, and/or destroy those Libyan regime forces presently positioned to disrupt the provision of humanitarian assistance to affected civilian populations
4b) Secure those airfields and port facilities, and supply routes deemed necessary to deliver humanitarian aid
4c) Execute delivery of humanitarian supplies as necessary in support of international humanitarian relief effort

To be clear, if all of these objectives are achieved, here's where we're at: Qaddafi regime retains power; those Libyan forces not postured to threaten civilian populations are left armed and operational; governance of rebel-controlled areas, including supply of water, gas, electricity, and other basic needs becomes the responsibility of opposition forces, and/or the international community, as the Libyan regime will no longer have access to this territory; a de-facto partition of Libyan territory without any plan or vision for how this partition is either formalized or resolved. This untenable reality is, of course, a policy and strategy problem, not a military one.

But what about those military objectives? Are they achievable with the ways and means at our disposal?

WAYS:
1) Coalition air and naval strikes against Libyan regime maneuver forces
2a) Persistent presence and monitoring of Libyan airspace by coalition air and electronic warfare assets
2b) Coalition air and naval strikes against Libyan air defense and command and control assets
3a) Coalition air and naval strikes and information operations against Libyan regime leadership
3b) Restoration of water, gas and electricity supplies by coalition ground forces and/or provisional governmental authority
3c) Coalition air and naval strikes against Libyan regime maneuver forces
4a) Coalition air and naval strikes against Libyan regime maneuver forces
4b) Airfield and port seizures by coalition airborne and special operations forces
4c) Movement of humanitarian aid by military transport and logistics assets
4d) Persistent coalition air and ground presence to secure lines of communication

Let's pause for a second before we move on to means. There are a few of these ways that directly contravene various provisions of the UNSCR, notably the prohibition on "foreign occupation forces" (read coalition ground forces) on Libyan territory. As such, the ways available to coalition military forces to effect objectives 3 and 4 are fundamentally non-viable. Without the use of coalition ground forces to directly restore or coerce the Libyan regime into restoring water, gas and electricity, or to allow the movement of humanitarian assistance into affected areas, the only way to accomplish these objectives is to hope the regime can be battered so fiercely as to accede to international will. (This seems -- to risk understatement -- unlikely at this point.) And to make things more difficult, the regime must be battered sufficiently to allow the imposition of the international community's will, but not so thoroughly as to render it incapable of delivering mandated public services.

But now what about the means available? This is the easy part.

MEANS:
1), 2) U.S. and other coalition air and naval assets in the Mediterranean Sea, Crete, Malta, Italy, other parts of continental Europe, and long-range assets from the U.S. and non-European forward staging areas
3), 4) [Not applicable as they would cause a violation of UNSCR: as above, plus coalition ground forces, transportation and logistics assets, and humanitarian relief assets from the international community]

What if the roadblocks went away? Well, that's where things get really messy. If you want to talk about the restoration of public services to the population, the wholesale removal of regime threat to any and all civilians on all parts of Libyan territory, etc., then see Iraq, Republic of, 2006 et seq.

As mentioned earlier, all this is made even more confusing by President Obama's response when asked if regime change was a goal of coalition military operations:

“It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference with the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera. “And we’ve got a wide range of tools in addition to our military effort to support that policy.” Mr. Obama cited economic sanctions, the freezing of assets and other measures to isolate the regime in Tripoli.

In case this doesn't make sense to you: the goal of coalition (including U.S.) military action in Libya is to enforce UNSCR 1973. An additional policy goal of the United States is the removal of Qaddafi from power, but at present the U.S. does not seek to effect that goal through the application of military force -- i.e. through the expansion of the ongoing military campaign. What the president doesn't speak to is U.S. policy post-Qaddafi: if we get what we presumably want and the despot goes, then what? What is our responsibility? What is our desired endstate? What assets and resources can and should we bring to bear to effect that endstate? We're left in the dark. I suppose we can cross that bridge when we come to it, right?

So to sum this all up, our "focused goal" is to enforce the provisions of a UNSC resolution that is in part unenforceable, and on the whole almost certainly unsustainable. Our follow-on plan is to transition whatever military effort remains (after initial operations achieve their objectives) to an international coalition of uncertain composition and under uncertain leadership, and then to use what other non-military means we have at our disposal to seek the non-coalition, non-military, U.S. policy objective of regime change in Libya. ("We are not going to use military means to go beyond a well-defined goal -- specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya.") And then: apres Qaddafi, le deluge... of win. (We hope.)

UPDATE: Here's ADM Locklear, commander of JTF Odyssey Dawn, speaking to the press yesterday:

I think our president was pretty clear when he laid out the construct in his POTUS [President of the United States] speech on 18 March of what his expectations were; one of those, that the regime forces of Gadhafi have to stop advancing on Benghazi; they have to pull back from Zawiyah, Ajdabiya, Misurata.  They have not done that.  Benghazi, we have -- we basically have forced him out of Benghazi.  In the other three places, they have not complied -- (audio break) -- direction from our president.

And so if I take a look at how I -- my mission here, I apply that type of standard to operations that are occurring.  If Colonel Gadhafi would meet that requirement, would have a cease-fire implemented; stop all attacks against citizens and withdraw from the places that we've told him to withdraw; establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas and allow humanitarian assistance, then the fighting would stop.  Our job would be over.

This seems to confirm the military objectives identified above, as well as my conclusions about when U.S. leadership feels the operation will be over.

A word on the inexorable eastward shift in the global military balance

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies released its annual Military Balance report yesterday to some fanfare in the British press. (And unless you want to spend ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT POUNDS to download the actual pdf, you'll have to depend on media reports and the Institute's own press release to summarize the contents.) In a representative example, Reuters' write-up is headlined "East-West military gap rapidly shrinking: report."

Western cuts and swiftly rising defense spending in emerging economies are redrawing the global strategic map, a leading think-tank said on Tuesday, with the danger of conflicts between states also rising.

In its annual Global Military Balance report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said the shift in economic power was already beginning to have a real military effect and closing any strategic gap.

"Western states' defense budgets are under pressure and their military procurement is constrained," said IISS director general John Chipman. "But in other regions -- notably Asia and the Middle East -- military spending and arms acquisitions are booming. There is persuasive evidence that a global redistribution of military power is under way."

The Drudge Report later tweeted the Reuters piece, but otherwise the report's release made barely a ripple in the American media. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, seeing as the Retuers headline alone seems such perfect fodder for the defense defenders.

What of it, then? Are you persuaded by Chipman's "persuasive evidence that a global redistribution of military power is under way"? If so, should we be worried?

Before we get to discussions of "military power," we ought to talk about the raw numbers: spending. Should we be spooked that western defense budgets are continuing their steady decline in most cases, while those of China and several other developing countries are increasing? Well, for one thing, we can't treat "the west and the rest" as differentiated, analytically meaningful groups. Most people are going to focus on China, and that's fair enough. But several of the other big spenders cited in the report -- India, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Colombia, and the GCC countries, for example -- are U.S. allies or partners. Furthermore, a significant share of the cash they're pouring into military modernization will end up in the coffers of western defense industries, helping to sustain the industrial base necessary to field equipment to the U.S. military in a relatively expeditious and cost-effective (meh, ok, not really) manner. We ought to keep some perspective on this when considering the "shifting East-West military gap."

As for China: we see a lot of talk about threatening annual growth in Chinese defense spending, with estimates ranging from sustained yearly increases of perhaps 7% to over 12%. I'd suggest this is only natural and concommitant with the broader growth of China's economy and national aspirations (particularly those associated with efforts to sustain the supply of natural resources helping to fuel that economic growth). But, dude, they're a developing country. Double-digit increases in growth are impressive, no doubt, whether you're talking about economic growth or budget growth. I'm hesitant to draw an imperfect parallel from another putatively communist country almost a century ago, but I'm going to do so anyway. You know where else I've seen double-digit economic growth over the course of a decade? During the first couple Soviet Five-Year Plans. They grew their economy by 12 or 13% a year through much of the 1930s. And you know where they were at the end of that? Still an economic midget compared to the U.S. Why? Because it's pretty simple to create growth by aggressively industrializing and modernizing a largely agrarian economy, one that was starting out on a pretty low rung of the ol' economic development ladder. The same is roughly true of modernizing a massive, reasonably unsophisticated "people's army" (especially as of 1989, when spending increases really jumped). Like I said, Soviet economic growth is an imperfect parallel for China's military spending, but I think there's a lesson here: you can throw a whole bunch of money at mud huts and show dramatic, impressive "growth," but I'll still take the city with the glass and steel skyscrapers chugging along at zero real growth.

But let's stipulate for a second that aggressive spending plans are significant to the discussion, and that we ought to care about tanks and planes and submarines. What exactly is military power, and how do the numbers figure in? Chipman doesn't give his own definition, but we can presume that any assessments based on a reading of what the press release calls "an increasingly detailed record of the numerical indicators of the military strength of an expanding number of states" will be necessarily quantitative in nature.

Thus, using The Military Balance, it is possible to make time-series comparisons over many years of states’ defence spending, military personnel numbers, and equipment holdings. But it is entirely valid to ask how much this tells us about real military capabilities: the ability of states to deter potential adversaries and, if necessary, to deploy and use military force effectively.

The IISS already includes substantial qualitative analysis in The Military Balance, in order to strengthen its utility to those assessing military capability. For example, for many air forces we indicate the number of flying hours per operational pilot. We include a table showing selected major military exercises and training activities. We provide extensive narrative surveys for each region, which among other things highlight national efforts to develop military capability.

We recognise, though, that The Military Balance could more systematically take account of a fuller range of factors contributing to contemporary national military capabilities. Specifically, we plan in future editions to assess key states’ capacities in areas such as logistics and combat support, C4ISR, training, joint-service operations, and interoperability with allies. In that light, we expect to increase country-specific narrative capability assessment significantly from next year onwards. At the same time, we are reconsidering the categories of equipment that we list in the context of their contribution to military capability.

This is a very important qualifying statement, and it's heartening to see the report's authors acknowledging its qualitative limitations. In the acquisition and materiel world, people have a habit of using the word "capability" to refer to a piece of gear. It's easy to forget that a weapon system only translates into a warfighting capability when that piece of gear is nested into a comprehensive framework for its employment, one that takes into account training, doctrine, organization, and so on. (This is what the U.S. DoD refers to as the DOTMLPF construct (pronounced "DOT-muhl-pee-eff"; yes, seriously) -- for Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and education, Personnel, and Facilities.). To put this another way, if you give two different organizations the same piece of kit, they won't necessarily be able to employ the same capability.

Why this digression? Because I think it's important when you're looking at a bunch of whiz-bang charts showing numbers of big hull ships and armored vehicles and fighter/bombers to remember that existence in the arsenal does not equal fightability. So while we can certainly say that there's a global redistribution of military spending, we should be careful not to draw unsupported conclusions about relative military power.

Let's take a gander at what I think might be the most interesting feature of the materials that were publically released (for FREE, that is) by IISS yesterday: a graphic comparing U.S. aircraft assets with those of our NATO allies.

Take a look for yourself, but let me highlight some numbers I think are significant:

Total number of heavy transport aircraft: U.S. 285; European NATO allies 16.
Total number of tankers and multi-role tanker/transport aircraft: U.S. 538; Europeans 72.
Total number of heavy transport helicopters: U.S. 632; Europeans 205.
Total number of medium transport helicopters: U.S. 2090; Europeans 633.

That's 18 times as many heavy transports, seven times as many tankers, and three and a half times as many medium and heavy lift helos. Whether you're talking about inter- or intra-theater, operational or tactical transport, the U.S. is still absolutely essential to NATO. You can obviously do a bunch of analysis with just these few numbers and draw a lot of conclusions about strategy, policy, and spending -- the Europeans don't spend enough; the Europeans are too dependent on U.S. lift assets and this highlights a flaw in both concepts and procurement strategy; the U.S. has made a good/bad decision in making itself indispensable to NATO efforts to conduct out-of-area operations; etc. -- but one thing you cannot do is take a chart like this, change the row names to "country A" and "country B" to avoid all the geopolitics inherent in this kind of hypothetical, and then assume that country A is going to kick country B's ass in a war because it's got more of X and Y.

Which brings us back to relative military power: from a strategic planning perspective, comparative measures aren't particularly useful. We should more appropriately be asking "what is X country's capability to perform this particular mission?" Frankly, it doesn't matter one damn bit whether China achieves parity in global military power with the U.S. next year, ten years from now, in a century, or never. What does matter is when Chinese capabilities begin to meaningfully impinge upon the USG's ability to accomplish its desired ends in a particular theater, the most important of which, of course, is probably Northeast Asia/the Western Pacific. You could argue that this is already happening, and that the pace at which this is happening is accelerating. That's a much more important piece of analysis than simply projecting that Chinese defense spending will match the U.S. budget in real terms within a certain number of years.

Hopefully that's some food for thought. (Wish I didn't have to chip in three Benjamins to get more to chew on!)

Does the 2011 National Military Strategy fail to satisfy the requirements of U.S. law?

As you may have noticed, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff released the 2011 update to the National Military Strategy a week ago today. I've seen it asserted that the Chairman is required to review the strategy every two years, but only required to publish a new one when changes are necessary; I can't locate that provision in the law, but I might be missing something. (I've been going through Title 10 over the last couple of days. Don't ask. 10 U.S.C. Sec. 153 (d): "Not later than February 15 of each even-numbered year, the Chairman shall submit to the [Congressional defense committees] a report containing the results of a comprehensive examination of the national military strategy.") In any event, this is the first NMS to be published since 2004.

I sat down and read the NMS the morning it came out, and I'll admit that I wasn't terribly impressed. But I didn't write about it, because frankly there's just been too much going on. And that may be exactly what the Chairman and the SECDEF were hoping: that everyone would be too busy to really look at the thing. Not only does it suffer from many of the same failings as the National Security Strategy (namely: failure to actually be a strategy), but it seems to me that it fails to satisfy the statutory requirements that bear on the CJCS. So I'm going to go through the bit of the U.S. Code that specifies what "each report on the examination of the national military strategy" must include and just take a quick glance at whether or not that happened. You with me?

(A) Delineation of a national military strategy consistent with [the NSS, the QDR, and the SECDEF's required reports]

Ok, yes, we have a document called "the National Military Strategy." I'll let lawyers decide whether its not actually being a strategy is a violation of the spirit of the statute, but we'll give them a pass on this one.

(B) A description of the strategic environment and the opportunities and challenges that affect United States national interests and United States national security.

There is definitely a section entitled "Strategic Environment" (section II, page 2). Let's ignore the fact that it's merely a restatement of the same specious vagaries about "demographic trends," "nonstate actors," "weapons of mass destruction," "global commons," etc. that appear in every "strategy" or operating concept published by the Department; we'll give 'em two for two so far.

(C) A description of the regional threats to United States national interests and United States national security.

This wholly absent from the document. Threats are simply not discussed outside such vague assertions as "states with weak, failing, and corrupt governments will incresingly be used as a safe haven for an expanding array of non-state actors that breed conflict and endanger stability" -- and that's in the "strategic environment" section. The NMS does deal with several geographic regions individually in the section detailing the third "National Military Objective," to strengthen international and regional security. But this bit lays out U.S. goals and priorities in each of the regions, not "a description of regional threats."

(D) A description of the international threats posed by terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and asymmetric challenges to United States national security.

Again, there is no description of these threats, but merely an assertion of them as a feature of the "strategic environment." The word "asymmetric" is used only once in the document, in the context of desired U.S. space capabilities: "Joint Forces will... maintain symmetric and asymmetric capabilities to deter adversaries [in space]," which doesn't even make any damn sense. (What is an "asymmetric capability"? Here I feel compelled to paraphrase Conrad Crane and note that there are only two types of warfare: asymmetric and stupid. But asymmetric capabilities? Can anyone give me an example?)

(E) Identification of United States national military objectives and the relationship of those objectives to the strategic environment, regional, and international threats.

As noted above, the NMS does identify four "National Military Objectives": 1) Counter violent extremism; 2) Deter and defeat aggression; 3) Strengthen international and regional security; and 4) Shape the future force. It's not clear to me that the document identifies or explains "the relationship of those objectives to the strategic environment, regional, and international threats," seeing as threats are basically not identified at all, but this provision of the law could probably have been written more clearly.

(F) Identification of the strategy, underlying concepts, and component elements that contribute to the achievement of United States national military objectives.

This is what the entire middle section of the document is meant to accomplish, but it's a pretty poor show. I don't see a lot about underlying concepts (except "leadership") or component elements, or really much of anything beyond "this is what we want to do" without a whole lot of detail on the "how."

(G) Assessment of the capabilities and adequacy of United States forces (including both active and reserve components) to successfully execute the national military strategy.

If I've never read a National Military Strategy in my life and I'm trying to imagine what it should look like from reading the law, this is the section I'm going to focus on. Strategy -- as we've discussed many times -- is about means, ways, and ends. Objectives, of course, are the ends. Concepts of operation and force employment are the ways. Capabilities and resources are the means. You work backwards from what you need to accomplish (ends), figure out the mechanisms through which those things are accomplished (ways), and then identify and budget for the necessary tools (means). So yeah, an assessment of the adequacy of your capabilities is pretty freakin' important to understanding the risk you accept when implementing a particular strategy. More on that in a second.

(H) Assessment of the capabilities, adequacy, and interoperability of regional allies of the United States and or other friendly nations to support United States forces in combat operations and other operations for extended periods of time.

Probably shouldn't shock us that there's no assessment of partner forces' ability to support U.S. operations when there's not even an assessment of U.S. capabilities.

(3)(A) As part of the assessment under this subsection, the Chairman, in conjunction with the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of the unified and specified commands, shall undertake an assessment of the nature and magnitude of the strategic and military risks associated with successfully executing the missions called for under the current National Military Strategy.

This is a separate subsection of the bit that pertains to the NMS; it's not something that is mandated for inclusion in the report, but a task the Chairman is expected to perform as a part of the broader review process. There's nothing that says he has to put the results of this assessment down on paper, but it sure would be nice to know, huh? Of course, in order to perform an assessment of strategic and military risk vis-a-vis the current strategy, you have to have a real strategy, right? You have to have clearly outlined missions, right? As should be pretty plain by now, that seems to be a bridge too far.

So what did we get? Well, we got plenty of meaningless boilerplate like "Leadership is how we exercise the full spectrum of power to defend our national interests and advance international security and stability." We got a restatement of a whole bunch of vague principles of national security and military force. We got a paean to the power of the interagency. We got a potentially meaningful hint that the outgoing Chairman sees a need to rebalance our military posture in favor of traditional missions and away from the sort of manpower-intensive land wars represented by current operations. But we didn't get real strategy. Here's how the document concludes:

This strategy is derived from a thorough assessment of the strategic environment and how to advance our national interests within it. It describes how the Joint Force will redefine America’s military leadership by enabling whole-of-nation approaches to address national security challenges. It calls for a broad portfolio of leadership approaches – facilitator, enabler, convener, and guarantor - to address problems that are truly international in nature. Our leadership approaches magnify the capabilities we possess, making them just as important to assuring favorable outcomes. Our ability to lead will determine how well we advance America’s interests through this strategic inflection point.

Um, right. So we use leadership to assure our interests. Which we advance to assure our leadership. Uh, and so on.

Congress should really be outraged about the whole thing. Presumably they enact laws for a reason, and they should either insist upon their satisfaction or take them off the books. Do I think this disappointingly shallow public-relations document represents the entirety of the U.S. military's efforts to think through global challenges, develop appropriate capabilities, and do the real scutwork of strategy development? No, I don't. But the weakness of this statutorily-mandated review is emblematic of a bigger, more meaningful failure in that regard, and the failure of Congress to perform due oversight helps to perpetuate that failure.

If you think Loren Thompson is a bad defense analyst, wait 'til you see what kind of financial planner he is!

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and you can tell times are desperate when you see a whole bunch of folks in DC talking about making dramatic cuts to the federal budget. There seems to be a sort of informal competition going on to see who can recommend the deepest, fastest, most un-implementable and politically unsustainable austerity measures. The panel commissioned by the president hasn't even voted on a final report yet, but everyone's already complaining about the direction suggested by the so-called chairman's mark. Jan Schakowsky, who is on the commission, has her own plan. And then there's the Rivlin-Domenici plan, issued by the Bipartisan Policy Center. All have undertaken the necessary work of figuring out how to bring national expenditures more closely in line with national revenues (balance them completely? Let's be serious!), and each of the proposals has now met with the totally inevitable response: Of COURSE we have to cut things, but you can't cut THAT!

It's fair to say that defense spending -- representing as it does more than half of the discretionary federal budget and approximately 20% of total outlays -- will not escape scrutiny. The Simpson-Bowles recommendations, for example, slash defense to the tune of $100 billion. Sarah Palin and Buck McKeon may disagree (and so too does the SECDEF), but most serious advocates of fiscal restraint recognize that any approach to budget-balancing that refuses to consider defense cuts is simply a waste of time. Several dozen national security experts made precisely this point last week, signing a letter to the fiscal commission's co-chairs (pdf) that argues that "the defense budget can bear significant reduction without compromising our essential security."

Granting defense a special dispensation puts at risk the entire deficit reduction effort. Defense spending today constitutes over 55 percent of discretionary spending and 23 percent of the federal budget. An exemption for defense not only undermines the broader call for fiscal responsibility, but also makes overall budget restraint much harder as a practical economic and political matter.

But defense spending has its own huge and powerful constituency, so it's fair to say that the defense cuts recommended by the various commissions and proposals are no less controversial than those recommendations related to Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements.

This is probably going to come as a shock to you, but Loren Thompson is "not here to defend the current level of defense spending." He sees which way the wind is blowing, just like the rest of us.

When the current decade began, the United States accounted for about a third of global economic output and a third of global military spending.

Today, it accounts for a quarter of global economic output and nearly half of global military spending.

Obviously, the growing gap between these two measures of U.S. power is unsustainable: five percent of the world's population cannot continue funding 50 percent of military outlays while only generating 25 percent of economic output.

Of COURSE we have to cut things...

However, what I want to do in my remarks is explain the consequences of some of the weapons cuts that are being proposed.

...but you can't cut THAT!

Thompson, who is a paid consultant for the defense industry, has a stake in preserving high-dollar materiel programs at the cost of personnel or operations accounts. So you'll have to forgive my yawn when I see him making a speech to the CATO Institute -- as libertarians, already predisposed to any proposal that would limit or even prevent altogether ill-advised, adventurist operations and close expensive bases abroad -- built on the premise that while defense cuts may be necessary, they certainly shouldn't come at the cost of expensive, underperforming, behind-schedule weapon systems. But that yawn turned into a painful guffaw (it sounded like this: LOLOLOLOLOLOL) when I saw Thompson's hilarious rationale, which can be boiled down to these three fundamentals:

1. SUNK COSTS!
2. Not only are you cutting a weapon system, but you're cutting ALL THE THINGS THAT WEAPON SYSTEM CAN DO!
3. Now you're going to have to spend a bunch of money building and buying something else to do all the things that you can't do because you cut the old system!

Here's how he actually phrased it in his remarks at CATO, just so you don't think I'm misrepresenting:

But there are consequences to killing weapons that tend to be overlooked in budget-cutting exercises...

-- First, you squander the money that has been spent to date on the programs.
-- Second, you deprive warfighters of capabilities the weapons would have delivered.
-- Third, you have to compensate for the lost capabilities by purchasing something else.

When these realities are factored into plans for terminating this or that weapon, the budgetary and human costs of cutting sometimes end up dwarfing any projected savings.

Thompson uses the rest of the speech to give details about four specific programs that could face the chopping block -- the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Osprey, the Joint Tactical Radio System, and the Virginia-class attack submarine -- while coming back to his three fundamentals, but the whole thing mostly relies on an appeal that wasn't outlined in his introduction: the vague but pointed threat that U.S. servicemen will almost certainly die if we fail to continue funding these programs. Want some examples? I knew you did!

On EFV, Thompson charitably grants that the program "is in the cross-hairs of just about every deficit-reduction panel proposing weapons cuts... with good reason, because EFV's [sic] cost over $10 million each and have suffered reliability problems in testing." But he goes on to say that EFV brings "much more speed, range, firepower, and protection" than the AAAVs that currently comprise the Marine Corps' amphibious tractor fleet. "The Marines have been waiting decades to replace their aged vehicles," Thompson said, "and during that time they have become sitting ducks for precision-guided munitions." He's mostly right about this, but the next sentence is total nonsense:

The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle would solve almost all the problems with the current amphibs, turning the sea from an obstacle into a maneuver space and enabling Marines to come ashore at the places where they are least likely to incur casualties.

Um, no. EFV would similarly be a "sitting duck for PGMs," and nothing about the system's design or manufacture will prevent that. The Navy-Marine Corps team's future littoral power-projection concept won't be based on a Mach 1, stealth amphibious tractor that can survive hits from land-based precision-guided missiles or direct counterfire against coastal defenses from 100 miles away; even if it was, the EFV doesn't offer these capabilities. The new vehicle is undoubtedly a step forward from the aging AAV, but it's not a game-changer -- it does exactly nothing to "[turn] the sea from an obstacle into a maneuver space," and the act of "enabling Marines to come ashore at the places where they are least likely to incur casualties" is far more likely to be accomplished through the development of evolved theater entry and littoral maneuver concepts than by a materiel magic bullet. On top of all that, the EFV is too expensive, doesn't offer significantly more protection than the AAV in a modern threat environment dominated by IEDs (don't ask me, ask the GAO! [pdf]), and doesn't actually meet the space and weight specifications that are a requirement of the system! Yes, AAAVs are old, and yes, we almost certainly need to maintain the capability to get Marines from ship to shore. But to suggest that EFV is the only way to do this, or the best way to do this, or that cancelling the program is tantamount to "wasting the lives of many Marines because they had to go to shore in deathtraps" is just ludicrously disingenuous. The amphib fleet can be sustained until such time as a new, more affordable solution can be found, and the reality of our complete and total disinterest in replicating a Tarawa-style forcible entry/opposed landing means that we're not actually ceding any plausible amphibious landing capability as a result.

I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time picking apart the specifics of Thompson's other arguments, but suffice it to say that for the most part they're similarly specious, tendentious, and either misinformed or insincere.

"[W]hen you see a budget panel suggest killing" the programs he highlighted, Thompson said, "it's a reasonable conclusion that they either don't understand the program or they don't understand the nation's global security requirements." One might easily say the same thing about Loren Thompson: he doesn't understand the failings of the programs that he uncritically justifies, and he doesn't understand that his conception of the nation's global security requirements is neither universal nor uncontroversial. Not all previously appropriated money has been well-spent, and some of it must be written off as a waste. Not all "capabilities" that ought to have been delivered by ongoing programs or fielded systems constitute real "requirements," and some of them can be undercapitalized or abandoned altogether without grave risk to our national security. (We'll leave aside for a second the reality that many of these weapon systems DO NOT effectively deliver the capability they're meant to, and that those that DO deliver capability often fail to do so within the cost and schedule parameters the government has deemed appropriate.) And finally, those systems that are abandoned will not always need to be replaced; as the nation reconsiders the difference between what can be done and what must be done, it's fair to assume we'll give different answers to the question of what can be bought versus what must be bought.

Secretary Gates may criticize the Simpson-Bowles recommendations as an exercise in "math, not strategy," and he's right. But he's at least interested in engaging in a review of systems and programs in line with strategy so as to develop a budget that is sane, justifiable, and efficient. If you're in Loren Thompson's camp, you have to accept the argument that the government has made no bad decisions, has wasted no money or effort, has a bulletproof rationale for each and every acquisition decision it has ever made, and has correlated those acquisition and procurement decisions to an overall strategic concept that most effectively advances and protects American security interests in a rapidly changing and unpredictable threat environment. I don't have that kind of faith. Then again, my livelihood doesn't depend on it.

John Nagl is a really smart guy, but this is just goofy excuse-making

Josh Rogin got his hands on an advance copy (pdf) of the Final Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, the group of bipartisan defense experts charged by Congress with Monday-morning quarterbacking DoD's work in writing the official QDR. The panel was composed of a whole bunch of big names in the field, including Stephen Hadley, William Perry, Richard Armitage, Jack Keane, Eric Edelman, John Lehman, Jim Talent, and John Nagl.

The report is broadly critical of the QDR, which puts Nagl in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the work of his colleagues while not being too rough on the woman who founded the think tank where he's now president, former CNAS pooh-bah and current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. This is even harder than eating soup with a knife!

Nagl ... told The Cable in an interview that his panel's report doesn't necessarily contradict Flournoy's document.

"The QDR was a very good product and did a good job of focusing on the wars we're in, but was unable to focus on the far out, which is was congressionally mandated to do. Plus the panel could look at things that were outside the Department of Defense," he said. "We also have the luxury of thinking deeper and seeing some troubling trends."

Who else thinks that saying you're "unable" to do something that's required by law is a tolerable excuse? I mean, seriously, that's your excuse? They were unable to do what Congress has mandated they do because there was some other stuff going on? Can you imagine trying that one at work (or on the IRS)?

Ok, so the panel had some luxuries, like not fighting a war at the same time as trying to accomplish its goal. (The Defense Department also has something like a squillion more people to devote to the task than the QDR Independent Panel, but whatever.) And I know how hard it is to develop a massive document like this, especially one that's consensus-built. But there is really no excuse for failing to do what's directed.

Oh, wait. Yes there is.

One of the problems with the QDR was that it came out before President Obama's National Security Strategy and therefore couldn't be properly aligned with the overall vision, Nagl said. "The entire process is not as tightly organized as we would like to see it and it doesn't cascade down from the top as we'd like it to."

Yeah. That is a problem.

As I've told you before, the way we formulate national strategy is all kinds of effed up right now. The QDR should really be informed by a National Military Strategy that's nested within a National Defense Strategy that's nested within a National Security Strategy, all of which should coherently articulate American interests, strategic objectives, means, choices, and associated risk. But let's be clear: the QDR is not a strategy, per se; it's a strategic review. The QDR is overlaid on the various strategies, articulating how the various tools of national power housed in DoD will be applied to threats and strategic challenges. The NSS hadn't yet been published when the QDR came down the pike, and that's a problem. (Of course, the NSS sucks so badly that it wouldn't have helped to produce a better QDR anyway, so I've always found the bleating on that note to be sort of silly.)

All of this is a long way of saying that I agree with the Independent Panel report's general conclusions about the shortcomings of the QDR, as outlined in the introduction:

The initial Bottom-up Review [the QDR's predecessor] was considered a success. Of course there was much debate about the conclusions, but Congress thought the process was worthwhile and mandated that it be repeated every four years. Unfortunately, once the idea became statutory, it became part of the bureaucratic routine. The natural tendency of bureaucracy is to plan short term, operate from the top down, think within existing parameters, and affirm the correctness of existing plans and programs of record.That is exactly what happened to the QDR process. Instead of unconstrained, long term analysis by planners who were encouraged to challenge preexisting thinking, the QDRs became explanations and justifications, often with marginal changes, of established decisions and plans.

I'm not going to get into the specific recommendations made by the panel in the sections of the report that amount to a re-do of the QDR (but suffice it to say that it's definitely informed by the now-published NSS, and amounts to something like "more of EVERYTHING, wwwhhhheeeeee!!!!"). But the fact of the matter is that the QDR needs to be focused on the big picture, on strategic evolution, and on reconceptualizing the way that the nation's military tools can be applied to the task of achieving our strategic goals -- not our intermediate operational objectives. I didn't hate the document as much as some people did, but the Independent Panel got this part right.

Part of being a thoughtful commentator is knowing who to listen to

Tom Ricks seems to think it gives him credibility to post basically everything he gets from a .mil email account. Today he features commentary on "the stoopiding of the Army" from a "reserve captain at the Pentagon," whose 1,000-or-so word diatribe is posted essentially without comment. My favorite part is the closing, where he thanks our intrepid correspondent for "bring[ing] these issues to life," but there's really a lot more to talk about than just that.

First off, I'm a little bit stunned that this dude seems to think he's just stumbled across the key questions facing Army training, education, and personnel management. People have been talking about this extensively and intensively in various fora for the last eight years, for sure, and perhaps in slightly more circumscribed circles for a lot longer than that.

Schmedlap hits on some of the key criticisms in his comment at Ricks' blog, but I wanted to elaborate on a few more. So let's start at the start:

If the National Security Strategy outlined the need to win 2 conventional wars and stabilize 2 failed states, we could organize appropriately. We could identify our two nearest competitors for conventional conflict, China and Russia, and organize our conventional forces to deal with them and then we could identify the two closest potential failed states, Pakistan and Somalia, for example, and organize our unconventional, i.e. USSOCOM, properly in order to deal with those simultaneous Stability Operations. However, there needs to be a clear capability addressed for our future. What exactly does our country expect us to do in the future based on the major threats? It is time to recognize that our military is also needed for Stability Operations because failed states have been the major threat since World War II. It doesn't have to be conventional vs. unconventional/irregular. It can be both.

Personally, I believe that we need two separate organizations (conventional and unconventional) to deal with INTERstate wars and INTRAstate wars. Our mission has never included the need to resolve INTRAstate wars, i.e. failed states w/insurgencies. If that was the case and we were using the time-testing formula for peacekeepers /counterinsurgents per capita (50:1), we would need 180K troops to occupy and stabilize Somalia and around 3.6 million troops to occupy and stabilize Pakistan, for example. That would increase our military 10-fold (given the amount of troops we would need to conduct two conventional wars simultaneously and occupy those two countries as well), but would adequately reflect what the country wanted us to do.

See, that is the problem. If the military had the 560,000 SOF troops it would need to occupy Afghanistan (based on 28million pop.) and the 620,000 SOF troops needed to
occupy Iraq (based on 31million pop.), we wouldn't be in the predicament we are in today in either of those countries. An insurgency would never have been able to build, foreign direct investment could have come sooner, and international support would have been flowing into both of these countries.

If the NSS required all that, then the NSS would be a cripplingly, uselessly ambitious document. I sympathize with what this guy is saying, but this ain't the right approach.

To assert that the GPF will be responsible for MCO contingencies and USSOCOM for stability operations is to demonstrate ignorance of pretty much every doctrinal development associated with SO over the last decade. Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission, according to DOD Instruction 3000.05. They are also hugely manpower-intensive. Why in the world would we imagine that the best way to cover these mission areas was with SEALs, Rangers, Special Forces, and so on... when we have a hell of a lot less of them than line infantry, or MPs, or tankers, or artillerymen, or whatever else?

So we're going to split our force into two forces: GPF for MCO, and SOF for SO. But the SO component has to be a lot larger, because we're going to apply a nebulous 1:50 counterinsurgent to civilian ratio. So now we're in the ridiculous position of advocating for about five times as many "special" troops as conventional ones. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And we'd need to increase the size of the military "tenfold," he tells us; shouldn't that call into question the advisability of the mission set we're settling on, seeing as that kind of expansion is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE?

Unfortunately for the Army, the 2nd camp holds the senior positions of power within TRADOC, FORSCOM and the ARSTAF. Hence, we have seen 0 Counter IED initiatives transferred from the OCO to the Base Budget and our HumanTerrain Teams, PRTs and Advise and Assist Brigades are all ad hoc. We have no new Officer Branches of Service. Where are the MOS and Branches that cover COIN, SFA, Stability Operations, C-IED, etc.? They are all being pulled from traditional Branches like Civil Affairs, Infantry and MP and taught these additional skills in 3-hour blocs of instruction, but as a SECONDARY skill set, not a PRIMARY skill set, while their primary skills sets (IN, MP) depreciate.

Now he's really going off the rails. We need new branches for Stability Operations? Why don't we then have separate branches for offensive and defensive operations? Why don't we have MOSes for pistol shooting and rifle shooting, or for foxhole-digging (shamelessly stolen from Schmedlap)?

AABs (more accurately, modular brigades augmented for security force assistance) are not "ad hoc"; they're not completely purpose-built, either, but they are trained and augmented specifically to perform a specific mission set. Despite whatever whinging I've done in the past about this, the Army has actually made a ton of progress on this front.

This is really reflective of a much bigger debate, the one the Schmedlap has been covering pretty extensively (and Madhu has been referring to extensively!) on his own blog: whether we ought to be building a force specifically to do certain things, or whether the focus should be on making sure they know how to do things. There's obviously always going to be a blend here, but purpose-building and task-orienting every individual and unit in the force is a really quick and easy way to guarantee a whole lot of inefficiency, waste, and unpreparedness.

1) What is our mission? Is it to fight two fronts with two nation-states and occupy/stabilize one/two failed states? Is it to win on two fronts and hold on a third. Just what is it that our country wants us to do. What our mission is will drastically change our organization.

Easy: to fight and win our nation's wars. The harder part is figuring out exactly how to train, equip, man, spend, orient, and so on to accomplish that mission. No one is gonna spoon-feed this to us. Imagine the entire range of possible missions, assign probabilities and risk to each of them, apply the available resources and figure out how to get it done. This is why we have planners (ahem).

2) Is our current structure with the Combatant Commands having no control over the training of the force coming to fight their fight correct? Should each Combatant Commander be tasked with training his/her own force to address the problem areas in their AORs?

Yes, it is, and no, they shouldn't. There may be plenty wrong with Goldwater-Nichols, and we might need to rework our national security structures in certain ways to be better prepared for future conflict. Scrapping the COCOMs and establishing what would amount to autonomous regional armies is not one of the things that ought to be on the list.

You want to come up with a way to make sure that we lose a war in South America, in the apparently unlikely circumstance that we should have to fight one? Let SOUTHCOM train its own dedicated units, and make sure there's no overlap with the dudes over in CENTCOM who have actually fought in wars. Decentralize your training and doctrine to ensure that there's no consistency at all in the Army. Break the ARFORGEN construct and make sure you enlist dudes for ten-year contracts, all to be spent OCONUS.

ARFORGEN is a good concept. The services are responsible for providing trained and ready forces to the Combatant Commanders, who are then responsible for effectively employing those forces in operations. What's wrong with this system, I wonder? Did we have trouble in Iraq because the 10th Mountain didn't spend all its time running around in the desert at NTC? I don't think so. Scrapping this construct and making the COCOMs responsible for force provision as well as force employment is a really, really terrible idea.

1) Why are officers not promoted the instant they receive a higher degree of civilian education? Why are they only promoted based on time-in-grade? During the Civil War, many Generals were in their 20s and 30s. Why is an officer not promoted based on merit, knowledge and intelligence?

Because degrees don't mean dick. It's really weird to say "you ought to get promoted as soon as you get an advanced degree!" and then in the same paragraph, contend that promotions should be merit-based. Credentials do not equal merit! How about making promotions performance-based? But then we'd have to come up with an objective and comprehensive means to effectively evaluate performance, and we're not doing so well at that one, either.

But in reality, promotion to O-4 and upwards is merit and performance based (if imperfect). We don't have a whole lot of freedom to screw around with automatic promotion to O-3, either. If you think the Army has captain- and major-retention problems now, start telling people that if they suck at their job they might be stuck as lieutenants for a decade!

2) Why are officers not required to have a specific degree as it pertains to their branch? My friend in the Infantry had a Chemistry degree. Go figure. Wouldn't an International Relations degree be better suited?

Probably because THIS DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL. I wonder if this dude's friend is a bad infantry officer because of his chemistry degree. WTF is reading Thucidydes going to teach a 21-year old infantry lieutenant about fire and movement, which is really what he needs to master to do his job well? It's almost difficult for me to believe that this guy is a serving officer when he writes stuff like this.

3) Why don't officers have continuous distance learning requirements so by the time they reach O-6 they have earned a PhD in something relevant? And the enlisted could have a Master's Degree by the time they are a SGM?

Meh. Do we really need a whole bunch of Dr. Colonels? As Gunslinger likes to say about his old brigade commander (who just made BG not that long ago), he's the man you want to kill people and break things. You want to run that guy out of the service because he didn't write a dissertation?

(I do want to pause for a second here to say that Ricks' comment on this point -- "Frankly, I think the last thing we need is sergeants major with master's degrees... That's officer stuff..." -- is, put simply, idiotic. But you didn't need me to tell you that, did you?)

4) Why are they not increasing the pay to attract the best and the brightest into the military officer and enlisted ranks? If you offered 150K right out of college and 40K enlisted, you would get the best and the brightest, yet we spend ridiculous amounts of money on contractors and technology and new weaponry. The bottom line is that we live or die based on the quality and quantity of our people. Period.

This is gonna go great with our five-million man Army and 3 trillion dollar defense budget!

Ricks says "I think this officer speaks much wisdom, but I do have quibbles with his specifics." Well I have quibbles with anyone who finds a whole lot of wisdom in that email. This is not serious stuff. Institutional reform, like strategy, is about matching objectives with resources. That means priorities, not a fire-hose approach to "what's wrong with the military." Then again, considering how far off most of these suggestions are, and how misguided the underlying analysis, I'm not sure even prioritization would help.

On Modifiers

There has been a lot of talk these days in Washington regarding the intersection of terrorism, drugs, governance, and criminal networks. You can pretty much put "narco-" in front of anything. And there's much ado about how terrorist networks are working with, or modelling themselves after, criminal networks. And there's also the new-ish "natural" or "environmental" security problem space. Okay. So what?

Let's be very clear here, violence used by any actor outside of the legitimate government (sure, that can be debated in some cases) is illegal in any country and the spilling of that violence over international boundaries creates problems towards violations of international law. Period. And while I'm ranting, nations fight each other for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's because their antagonists don't look like them and sometimes it's because of what happens to water sources when they flow downstream. Does the nature of conflict, outside of genocide, differ significantly because of the impetus of the conflict? And of course terrorist networks look like criminal networks - that's because they are criminal networks, albeit with political rather than monetary goals.

So why do we need to use modifiers for all of these types of problems? Is narco-violence any different than normal violence? To me the only difference is that drugs are involved. So how does that delineation change the government's response to the violence?

I may be way off on this, but it seems to me that we're trying to pigeon-hole all the various types of violations to the rule of law that we can. In some circles, it apparently helps model the violators. But I doubt the validity of that in a global sense. Is the Taliban a political insurgency, a narco-insurgency, or a terrorist organization? They seem to be a little bit of each and can't be compared 1 to 1 to Mao, the FARC, or al Qaeda. So what does the labeling give us?

My point is that I firmly believe that these labels don't help with the analysis and planning for solutions to combat these types of illegalities. I think that some analysts and pundits will use the categorization to simplify the problem, as opposed to looking at each case in depth and building from there. While all criminality is not equal or similar, maybe we should de-scope the generalities and take a good, hard, long look at specific problems. I have no doubts that Neustadt and May would disapprove of the modifiers and rightly so.

Assume: Makes an...

Being a former Army guy, I'll admit that I don't read Proceedings all that often. But while tooling around their website looking for something else, I noticed this from the current edition. The authors don't put a whole of detail into these arguments, but I still can't see anything wrong with their assumptions, or at least their assumption adjustments.

There are many contested "facts" and assumptions about Afghanistan. But it seems to me that in the discourse surrounding the way ahead, a lot of pre-Iraq style assumptions are used. That is to say, the Least Dangerous Course of Action to simplify planning. Strategists cannot just assume away all of the difficult aspects of their campaign in order to create a palatable plan.

So please read and heed. I firmly believe that any plan that doesn't adequately address these planning assumptions is doomed to failure. And it seems to me the planners are going straight down that path.

The LDCOA and Strategic Planning

I am currently reading through CSBA's Regaining Strategic Competence (boy that Dr. K is a smart guy). I hope to do a longer analysis of it when I'm done, but thought it prudent to discuss some of the earlier points in it - especially as some of it has been bothering me for a while.

The premise of the monograph is to demonstrate America's waning ability to competently think about and plan strategy - and not because of Iraq alone (which might be proof enough). Additionally, while the authors believe that some organizational changes are required, the organization of the national security apparatus is not the core problem with our strategic deficiencies. It is more about process.

From a military standpoint, planning is a fairly set process in how it is done. I was not a strategic planner in the Army, but from the ones that I know, it isn't terribly different than planning at the operational or high-tactical level - from a process point of view. It is a balancing of your own resources and capabilities versus those of your adversary towards some desired endstate. Pretty straightforward, right?

It seems not. Krepinevich and Watts lay out a list of strategic performance pitfalls. While they all seem valid to me, two jump out immediately. Check out numbers 9 and 10. First, there are few people who have the natural acumen for strategy (which I hope to address later) and second is the failure to understand the adversary (which we'll talk about here).

In standard military planning, on top of templating the enemy (equipment and disposition), the intel planner should lay out two very specific things that are somewhere between extremely educated guesses and wild assed guesses: the enemy's Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCOA) and Most Likely Course of Action (MLCOA). The former is if everything went right for the enemy and is a worst-case scenario for your side. The latter is what the enemy is probably going to do. The command needs to be aware of the MDCOA and hopefully have branches of the plan to address it. But the plan should generally be built around the MLCOA. Simple, right?

Except lately, at the strategic level, we've completely ignored the MDCOA. I'm not sure why this is: optimism or ignorance I imagine. Had that analysis been done correctly, we probably wouldn't have gotten as mired in Iraq and Afghanistan as we are now because we would have had viable plans years ago. But it gets worse. That same optimism/ignorance has degraded the MLCOA so it doesn't even come close to reality. Iraq and Afghanistan (and arguably Kosovo before it) were plans based on the Least Dangerous Course of Action (LDCOA - my invention and not in FM 1-02 or whatever it's called these days) - that is if the enemy did everything you wanted it to so as to make quick work of your operation. Why wouldn't the enemy do everything in it's power to destroy itself in our interests?

Assuming (or really hoping) that things will get better or just betting that whatever you and your allies do, in a vacuum separated from the enemy's resources and capabilities, will bring about victory is just stupid. A platoon leader would be fired for doing that - why shouldn't a G/J staff? Or some of the NSC? Intellectual laziness, ideology, and just downright stupidity have no place in the framing and planning of the nation's strategy.

I would argue that most of the evidence I've seen thus far in the monograph is not new. Putting it all together to frame our ability (or lack of ability) to effectively plan at the strategic level is new. Please go read this paper - it is worth your time.

We've got our best man on it

John Donnelly does a good job for CQ (subscription only; the link I've provided is to the Early Bird, so it works if you're on a DOD server) of giving context on the development of the QDR, echoing many of the themes expressed by Andrew Krepinevich (in Foreign Affairs) and the Flournoy/Brimley team (in Proceedings). Here's my favorite snip:

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, and other war planners support Gates’ effort to overhaul the military’s two-conflict strategic doctrine. But they concede the effort is still a work in progress, with no clear picture of what the new strategy will be.

“What do you change it to?” Casey said. “That’s the hard part.”

Glad to know he's thought this one through. But seriously, Secretary Gates nails it here:

“I think we’re trying to capture not just . . . how many things — the numbers issues — but the diverse range of . . . challenges we may be called on to deal with at one time,” Flournoy said.

Gates echoed that view in a separate session with reporters last month: The rethinking of conventional two-war strategies, Gates explained, “derives from my view that the old way of looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as [another] discrete kind of warfare is an outdated concept.”

And not to worry, partisan hacks: Tom Donnelly of AEI keeps fighting the good fight for you guys, suggesting that any alleged strategic rethink is really just a ninja way of justifying defense budget cuts and leaving America at the mercy of the treacherous Chinese:

[He] argues that Gates is largely making a show of strategic rethinking to justify the reordering of the Pentagon budget he announced in April and other adjustments that are expected to fall in fiscal 2011. “They’ll produce a QDR that’s strategic lipstick on a budgetary pig,” he said.

In any event, a worthwhile read if you can access it (even if it is probably more informative for those who don't really follow this debate).

Wrongly re-interpreting Rumsfeld through McNamara

Amidst all the eulogizing of Robert McNamara this week, we find "Learning from McNamara" on the editorial page of yesterday's LA Times. It concludes with this sober recommendation:

McNamara, and Rumsfeld for that matter, demonstrate that even the best and the brightest can fail miserably when they ignore opposing voices or accept only the evidence that fits their preconceptions. That's something the current administration, which has yet to find a challenge it doesn't think it can meet with the application of a little brainpower, should keep in mind.

All of which I agree with, but let's look at how they got there.

Today, pundits like to claim that U.S. mistakes in prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are due to a failure to study history. Yet the architects of the Iraq war would be quick to point out that they learned the lessons of Vietnam all too well. It was former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, after all, who led an effort to rebuild the military into a leaner, more nimble force suited to modern insurgency warfare. Rumsfeld sent in overwhelming force to Iraq, with the intention of crushing resistance within weeks, because he wanted to avoid a grinding, years-long conflict like Vietnam.

Really? A "leaner, more nimble force" was part of Rumsfeld's plan for sure, but what progress did he make toward that goal? The Crusader program got cancelled, sure, and that's the example we always hear. But what else?

And was this really an effort to build a force "suited to modern insurgency warfare"? (Let's leave aside the fact that the U.S. military isn't likely to engage in "insurgency warfare" anytime soon, but rather counterinsurgency warfare. Don't want to nitpick!) Rumsfeld wanted to build a lighter, more mobile force in order to concentrate massive firepower at the enemy's center of gravity. To be clear, we're talking about massed enemy personnel and vehicle formations here, not guerilla fighters. The intent was to build a military that could win another Gulf War-style conflict, only faster, harder, and with even fewer casualties.

And yes, "he wanted to avoid a grinding, years-long conflict like Vietnam;" the way Rumsfeld and Co. meant to do this was to destroy the enemy's military forces and leave before insurgency could pose a challenge, not build a force more suited to the destruction of insurgent forces. Anyone who suggests otherwise has probably been fished in by Larry Di Rita's apologia.

As for having "sent in overwhelming force to Iraq, with the intention of crushing resistance within weeks," this clip highlights Rumsfeld's mistake just as it drives home the misimpression under which the Times editorialists are operating under. For one thing, the force that went to Iraq was only overwhelming when operating against a conventional army. The number of dismounted troops plainly did not meet the minimum threshold to combat an insurgency, nor was the force organized in the most effective manner to perform this mission.

The great error of Rumsfeld and his "tranformational" ilk was to imagine that the destruction of the enemy's military force would constitute victory, and to fail to appreciate that any "grinding, years-long conflict" would necessarily be fought in a manner that the U.S. military was not designed, trained, or equipped to fight most effectively.

I recently saw an article that contrasted Rumsfeld's vision with the Powell Doctrine, which calls for the application of overwhelming force with a clear objective and a developed exit strategy if U.S. troops are ever to be committed. Rumsfeld, it was suggested, wanted to go fast and light rather than sending in big numbers. This is a fair distinction, but at root the two men wanted the same thing: the scientific application of force to the enemy's decision points or center of gravity, the rapid destruction of the enemy's command and control and toppling of his leadership, and fundamentally, certain victory. You can't fault them for trying, but don't we all know better by now?

(An ironic addendum here is that this sort of scientific application of doctrine to war in the search of certain victory is exactly what the COIN set is accused of by Gian Gentile. I guess we never stop trying to figure out a way to make war easy.)

New additions to the Defense Policy Board (UPDATED)

Via SWJ: Secretary Gates today announced several new additions to the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. They include:

Gen. (Ret) Larry Welch, former Air Force chief of staff ; Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations; Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy; Robert Gallucci, former assistant secretary of state; Chuck Hagel, former senator from Nebraska; Robert D. Kaplan, Center for a New American Security; Andrew Krepinevich, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; Rudy deLeon, former deputy secretary of defense; John Nagl, Center for a New American Security; Sarah Sewall, Harvard University; Wendy Sherman, former special advisor to the President.

It's hard to miss the fact that a lot of these people are associated with CNAS, and there's a fairly heavy dose of COIN-centrism. Nagl is the president of CNAS and was on the writing team for FM 3-24; Danzig's on the board; Kaplan is a senior fellow; Sewall wrote the introduction to the popular University of Chicago edition of the COIN field manual; Krepinevich is a vocal advocate of a bifurcated ground force, with one part dedicated to high-intensity conventional conflict and the other to stability operations and advising; Biddle provides the COIN expertise at CFR; Sherman doesn't seem to have any official links to CNAS but recently moderated a panel at their conference (and her boss, Madeleine Albright, is on the board); etc etc etc.

We've already seen Michelle Flournoy end up as USD(P), Kurt Campbell was recently confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Colin Kahl, Vikram Singh, Shawn Brimley... When you see something like this, it's hard to deny the claims that CNAS is becoming Washington's "'it' think-tank." Or, as Spencer Ackerman calls it, "Obama's shadow Pentagon."

The DPB, according to its charter, "serve[s] the public interest by providing the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretary for Policy with independent, informed advice and opinion concerning major matters of defense policy. It will focus upon long-term, enduring issues central to strategic planning for the Department of Defense and will be responsible for research and analysis of topics, long or short range, addressed to it" by the Department's top three.

I, for one, am happy to see Krepinevich, Nagl, and Biddle (among others) playing a part in that conversation.

(For what it's worth, I just noticed that the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments -- of which Krepinevich is the president -- has had this on their website since June 16. Not sure what that's all about.)

UPDATE: CNAS just sent out a press release congratulating Nagl and Kaplan. We also learn that Sherman and Sewall are members of the CNAS Advisory Board (as opposed to the Board of Directors, on which Danzig serves).

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything

"Today, despite growing evidence that a wide array of U.S. military capabilities are depreciating in value, many remain reluctant to engage in the hard thinking necessary for anticipatory transformation -- preparing for emerging challenges by identifying new capabilities to offset or replace those that are progressively wasting."

This charge forms the core of a thoughtful and forward-looking article by Andrew Krepinevich in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. If it sounds familiar, it should -- Bob Gates has been saying basically the same thing for the last two years.

Much to the dismay of critics like Gian Gentile, Krepinevich remains one of the most influential voices in the American strategic debate, particularly on the subject of force structure. "The Pentagon's Wasting Assets" isn't comprehensive and it isn't perfect, but it's an essential exploration of the myriad ways that asymmetric threats challenge America's standing in the world and a primer on the sort of thinking required to combat those threats.

Perhaps the most significant (and frequent) error made by strategic planners is to assume that future threats must necessarily take the same shape as current ones, differing only in quantity or strength. That sort of thinking dominates both sides of the present debate about the most appropriate force structure for the future (and the attendant choices about spending): we're asked to decide between a force optimized for counterinsurgency and what was once called Low Intensity Conflict, or one built to confront conventional threats, armed and equipped for major combat operations (MCO) against some future great power challenger.

While American military planners consider how to best confront budgeting challenges and resource constraints to deliver the capabilities our political leadership needs, we have to be realistic about how much change is possible. Congressional opposition, competing power bases in the services, and disparate viewpoints about the nature of future threats all conspire to limit the scope of any possible Departmental transformation. Whatever we imagine to be the likely future threats to our national security, we have to appreciate that we're not starting with a blank slate: we have to get to the force we need in the future from the force we have now. And we need to do so while appreciating that our greatest concern may be neither "next-war-itis" or "last-war-itis," but rather the assumption that future war will closely approximate any past wars.

Krepinevich cuts through the COIN/MCO divide, looking at current U.S. force structure and power projection capabilities through the eyes of our adversaries: where are our weak points? How can the enemy work to limit and restrict what we can do now? By answering these questions, we're best able to determine what capabilities are necessary to maintain the influence we currently enjoy while building a long-term strategy for American engagement in the world as that supremacy inevitably wanes.

So what are these challenges? What are "the Pentagon's wasting assets"? First and foremost we'll need to understand the effect of what may in the future be substantially constrained access to the global commons. After the fall of the Soviet Union, "the United States' ability to project military power was effectively unconstrained." Economic dominance and the absence of peer competitors allowed for a proliferation of expeditionary missions throughout the 1990s.

Understanding that this freedom of movement is essential to the projection of American power, U.S. adversaries and competitors are developing a number of anti-access weapons and tactics in response.

China is working to combine Western technology with Eastern stratagems, aiming to be able to seize the initiative in the event of a conflict by exploiting the element of surprise. The Chinese approach would entail destroying or disrupting the U.S. military's communications networks and launching preemptive attacks, to the point where such attacks, or even the threat of such attacks, would raise the costs of U.S. action to prohibitive levels.

(As an aside, the Chinese call this suite of capabilities "assassin's mace," which I've just got to say is an extremely badass name.)

Krepinevich also highlights a favorite example among critics of DoD long-term planning: a war game called Millennium Challenge 2002.

[The war-gaming exercise] pitted the United States against an "unnamed Persian Gulf military" meant to be a stand-in for Iran. The outcome was disquieting: what many expected to be yet another demonstration of the United States' military might turned out to be anything but.

The "Iranian" forces, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, successfully countered the U.S. forces at every turn. The U.S. fleet that steamed into the Persian Gulf found itself subjected to a surprise attack by swarms of Iranian suicide vessels and antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs). Well over half the U.S. ships were sunk or otherwise put out of action in what would have been the United States' worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.

The conclusion? "[P]rojecting power into an area of vital interest to the United States using traditional forces and operational concepts will become increasingly difficult." These examples serve to capture the true essence of asymmetric warfare: turning the enemy's strengths into weaknesses.

Which brings us back to today: how do we ensure that our strengths remain strengths, and that our adversaries aren't able to force us to give away those capabilities too cheaply? This very struggle is playing out today in Afghanistan, where questions mount about the utility of air power. Taliban information operations (IO) have been extremely effective in demonizing coalition airstrikes, casting American forces as indifferent to civilian casualties while drawing attention away from the insurgents' own atrocities. "The inability to discern the presence of civilians and assess the potential collateral damage of those strikes is inconsistent with the U.S. government's objective of providing security and safety for the Afghan people," said a recent CENTCOM report. This is certainly true, but how do we make sure we don't abandon an extremely useful capability for the purpose of rhetorical consistency?

(On a related note: I am far from Charlie Dunlap's biggest fan, but he published a very good discussion of "lawfare" in the most recent issue of Joint Force Quarterly. Take a look.)

Krepinevich gives some suggestions (or, in his words, "modest proposals"; I couldn't fail to mention this Swiftian allusion) for how the Defense Department should invest in future capabilities, and he expresses support for the cancellation of the DDG-1000 and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) programs. His ideas are sensible, though they seem perhaps slightly out of place in a big-think piece like this one.

This scant criticism accompanies a slightly larger complaint: while noting that "before questions about how to adapt military capabilities to future requirements can be considered coherently, there must be a new strategic framework," Krepinevich mostly fails to provide us with one. He does suggest that the U.S. "must pursue a more modest strategy... one that reflects a better balance between goals and resources, features a reduced emphasis on wasting assets, and involves the vigorous identification, development, and exploitation of new areas of advantage." It's difficult to disagree with this assertion, and in future posts I'll try to elaborate my ideas for what shape such a grand strategy would take.