Arms and influence

Friday cat blogging

I see your cute cat pictures, and raise you a video.

(OK, I admit, it's not much. I just got my new Flip video camera. So sue me.)

One more year to hard reality

Once the 2008 election is done, and the new president is past the honeymoon period, we'll finally get around to a realistic discussion of the Army's manpower and budget crisis. Once that day arrives, expect people in the press, think tanks, and politics who have been avoiding the topic to act as though they've been talking about it all along. You have my permission to slap any of them in the face.

US nuclear strategy: what's left?

[This is the last in a series of posts about US nuclear strategy. Here are links to the first, second, and third parts.]

What's a nuclear-armed superpower to do? Without an arms race with a rival superpower, the impetus for maintaining a bulging nuclear arsenal collapses. Actual use of nuclear weapons, even in the noble pursuit of counter-proliferation, seems like overkill. The Defense Department will have a hard time structuring US nuclear forces around an enemy that does not exist yet, and may never emerge. While the nuclear club might seem like a good way to scare non-nuclear countries into doing what the US government wants, the track record of compellence thus far is poor.

Why, then, does the United States need a large number of nuclear weapons? Why does it need to invest in upgrading to new technologies? Beyond the minimum arsenal needed to deter a few other nuclear powers--a fraction, perhaps, of what the US has today--why have any nuclear weapons at all?

Regional conflict: back to basics
The only convincing answer lies in the dynamics of regional conflicts. US theater strategy for a few key hotspots doesn't depend on nuclear options, but nuclear weapons might enlarge, to a small but significant extent, the number of choices available.

If the relationship between the two Koreas were ever to disintegrate again, if the United States felt obliged to intervene in a war between India and Pakistan, if tensions in the Middle East were to snap...You have to strain a bit to summon the sort of international relations specters that are credible enough to be frightening, but they do exist. In these situations, the threat of nuclear escalation might be necessary to steer the course of events away from awful destinations, as the US did in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Obviously, the United States needs to have the means to deliver on these threats for them to be credible at all.

Even in these scenarios, the United States doesn't need a huge nuclear arsenal, and certainly not one centered around ICBMs pointed at fixed targets. Nuclear-tipped missiles or bombs can reach regional targets more readily from ships and aircraft than silos in North Dakota. Seapower and airpower better control the tempo of threats. Ships and planes can approach a troubled region, and then withdraw. ICBMs only "send a message" when they're launched.

Not only has the script of nuclear threat changed, but so too has the setting. The motivation of the major actors--India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea--remains the same. However, there is no rival superpower waiting in the wings to swoop in at a dramatic moment to seize an advantage against the American protagonist. Regional conflicts are far less complex--and they're already complex enough to give diplomats and military planners headaches.

Advantage is not the same as benefit
The US nuclear arsenal has little precedent. It has the terror factor of Greek fire, but its potential for actual use is far less. It has the mobile hitting power of the Roman legions--but so do American conventional forces. It has the same ability to give the country with the edge in technology and numbers that the Maxim gun and the dreadnought very briefly gave Great Britain. On the other hand, nuclear weapons inspire more intense opposition to their proliferation than these earlier weapons, and the practical hurdles are far less.

Unfortunately, an unprecedented advantage in numbers and technology does not automatically translate into unprecedented benefits. Beyond arguments about the Reliable Replacement Weapon, the implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or the Iranian nuclear program, the same overarching question remains: beyond the minimum requirements of deterrence, what do nuclear weapons buy us? The answer remains the same: in the pursuit of national security, not much.

Man in the middle

Read this now. Marc Garlasco may be the model for building healthy connections the people on the inside, who fight wars, with people on the outside who criticize them.

The Pentagon Papers, without the secrecy

The Army's decision to bury a 2005 RAND Corporation study of the Iraq war misadventure is cause for outrage on many levels. One of them is the damage inflicted on the US Army itself.

Honest warriors are better warriors
The impressive performance of the US Army depends on a lot more than just cutting-edge technology. The US military in general has a tradition of scalding self-criticism that takes many forms. For example, officers are responsible for writing after action reports (AARs) that depict recent military operations in the most brutally honest terms possible. If an AAR about a clear-and-secure operation in Karbala omits important details, soldiers in a similar engagement won't have the chance to learn from past successes and failures. Given that there isn't a clear, neat boundary between the last operation in Karbala and the next one, the soldiers you may be short-changing may be bunking right next to you.

Since AARs provide insight into an officer's character and skills, they play an important role in personnel decisions. The quality of the personnel, far more than the technology, is the key to the US Army's success.

Let's play a semantic game: instead of calling the RAND report a study, let's call it an after action report. The importance of the study in organizational learning might make a little more sense, using that language. Without AARs, soldiers don't change their behavior as much as they need to. Without a government-wide AAR, the big bureaucracies involved in the Iraq war displayed much the same inertia.

Falling back on old habits
According to The New York Times, the RAND study criticized practically every organization involved in the Iraq invasion and occupation. That wide dragnet became the study's death warrant, since it blamed too many highly-placed officials, in and out of uniform, for the war's mistakes. While the study was never secret, the Army just decided not to publish it. The bogus rationale is highly transparent:

“The RAND study simply did not deliver a product that could have assisted the Army in paving a clear way ahead; it lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army,” he said.

Of course, "future planning by the U.S. Army" for any conflict like Iraq will involve many agencies beyond the Army itself. There's no way to compartmentalize counterinsurgency in the military. The State Department leans on governments to make changes that will steal political appeal away from the insurgents. Intelligence agencies collect information that might have military implications. Aid organizations, inside and outside the government, contribute resources and expertise needed to rebuild the country.

These parallel efforts do not separately, magically turn into a unified counterinsurgency strategy. Only by overcoming the natural centrifugal tendency among military and civilian bureaucracies does the US government have a prayer of succeeding at counterinsurgency.

Of course, the Army might decide, as it did after the Vietnam War, to avoid these conflicts. Fool the US military once into fighting a messy, unpopular war that doesn't fit the Army's conventional military mold, shame on the civilians. Fool them twice, and shame on the military. Fool them three times...Career military officers undoubtedly prefer not to finish that sentence.

Taking this war, and the next one, seriously
Public criticism of the war effort would have helped the Army, not hurt it, in two important ways. First, publishing the study would have indicated that the Iraq war was important enough to take seriously. A serious effort is founded on trust--in the public, that it will continue to support an important war, despite early mistakes; in the military and other parts of the government, for rectifying those mistakes.

Second, publication of the study would have indicated that this type of war is going to happen again, and worth handling better next time. Unlike the Vietnam War, the Iraq War could be the jolt to make "little wars" an important, expected part of the military's repertoire. The military would not, next time, stand as alone as it did this time: other agencies would be expected to play their parts better, and in concert with the military. Never again would officers be digging around for 30 year-old books about guerrilla warfare. Never again would civilian officials in the mold of the Coalition Provisional Authority be working in one universe, and the US military in another.

Treat the RAND study as an AAR on a grand scale, and you will see it immediately in a different light. Anyone who really cares about the US Army would have demanded its publication, however bad it made a Rumsfeld or a Rice look.

R.I.P., Rep. Tom Lantos

We bid a sad farewell to Tom Lantos (D-CA). I live in Lantos' district, but I already had a lot of respect for him long before I moved to the Bay Area.

Lantos will be very, very hard to replace. The generation that experienced Nazi occupation and the Holocaust first-hand had a lot to offer the rest of us. Having fought in the Hungarian Resistance, Lantos could articulate the importance of politics, in just a few words, far better than most politicians in a hundred. That's only a small example, but in the midst of a campaign season, it's worth remembering.

We will miss him. This news article and this Wikipedia page give a small taste of his contributions.