Arms and influence

Vulnerable rear areas now safe

Well, whaddaya know. A recent study chaired by four retired American officer finds that gays and lesbians do not hurt cohesion in their units. The rebuttal, according to this Army Times article, consists of the circular argument, "Because we think gays might hurt unit cohesion, we frown upon them serving in the US military, which is a nudge-nudge wink-wink way of saying that discrimination against gays is OK, because it might hurt unit cohesion."

You'd think that someone whose job is to train and lead people to do extraordinarily difficult things, such as advancing under fire, might be able to rise to the challenge of saying, "Knock off the faggot jokes already. The guy you're scared might covet your ass is more likely to save it some day soon."

Have you ever been experienced?

[Before the brouhaha over Wesley Clark's recent comments started, I had planned on posting something about military experience and presidential leadership. I guess it's even more overdue that I thought.]

For the next several months, we're going to hear a lot of debate over how much personal military experience matters when making presidential decisions about foreign policy and national security. Already, it's clear that the typical discussion in the mainstream media makes a lot of incorrect assumptions, so I thought I'd add some perspective.

Certainly, being in combat does teach you important lessons. For example, every infantryman learns quickly exactly how boring the time leading up to a battle can be, and how terrifying it is when it starts. The average ground-pounder also sees how confusing battle can be. The unluck soldiers also learn how quickly a battle can unravel because of bad information, poor training, or weak leadership.

Leaving aside any existential lessons about life and death, do you really learn anything that is relevant to the job of President of the United States? Yes, to a limited degree. You certainly get an appreciation for how difficult the "management of violence" is. The obvious conclusion is to be conservative in your expectations of what soldiers can do, when chance and violence intersect.

Military experience provides lessons about the means of warfare. It doesn't necessarily teach you anything useful about its ends. There are exceptions. Soldiers who have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan may have learned something about how counterinsurgency  is the ultimate expression of the adage, "All politics is local." Someone stationed at NATO headquarters may absorb by osmosis many of the important dynamics of alliance politics. However, these are hardly all the experiences you might wish someone to have before becoming the commander-in-chief.

In fact, many people go through their military careers being dumb about warfare. Here are a few quick examples from the American military experience:

• Mark Clark, the general whose unimaginative, prickly leadership style helped turn the Italian campaign in a slow, bloody crawl up the peninsula.
• William Westmoreland, who vainly tried to treat the Vietnam War as the sort of conflict Americans preferred to fight, instead of the type it really was.
• George McClellan, who had bursts of inspiration at the theater level of strategy, only to fumble these plans when handling the operational and tactical specifics.
• John C.H. Lee, who as the general responsible for supply and logistics in the European theater of WWII, whose laxity and ineptitide almost single-handedly set the war effort back several months (and many thousands of lives).

And we're just getting started with the generals. If you keep going down the chain of command, you'll find countless officers and enlisted men who "saw the elephant" but didn't understand what they were seeing.

While you might prefer your presidential candidates to have served in the military, service is no guarantee of good leadership. For example, while many historians have overlooked Grant's virtues as a general, there's little disagreement that he was a mediocre president.

We also have to be careful not to confuse gratitude with praise. We may be grateful that someone served in the US military. That is not the same as saying that they were good at the military profession, or that they will excel in a different role related to the waging of war.

A poem for warriors

I have a big pile of writing to do for work, so I might not get to posting much today. Therefore, I'll give you this great live video of Steve Earle performing "Warrior." It lacks the electric guitar of the studio version, but it loses none of its emotional punch. In fact, the quieter approach has its own advantages.

A bad week for the USAF

On top of the resignations of the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force, here's a video of a recent B-2 crash.

General outrage

At first, I was skeptical about Glenn Greenwald's post describing the "general in your pocket" controversy. If you want to get people to feel outraged, focus on Iraq, not Guantanamo Bay. The "independent" retired military commentariat that wasn't so independent was giving its thumbs up to a great deal more destruction in Iraq than Guantanamo Bay. Plus, Americans die in Iraq, but not on the tip of Cuba.

(I really hate having to make these sorts of comparisons at all. Which unjustified, self-destructive policy is worse? Anyway, onwards.)

However, Greenwald's target seems to be the media more than the generals themselves. Therefore, the willingness to swallow what the retired officers were saying about Guantanamo Bay is no worse or better than any of their claims about Iraq or Afghanistan. It's the gullibility and cowardice of the media that's the real topic of Greenwald's post.

I'll add one tiny detail to Greenwald's already detailed analysis: you'll note that, in spite of watching only one interrogation, Shepperd implies that he observed multiple interrogations.

Small is beautiful...but still small

For years, I've been skeptical about the preponderance of "big ticket items" in the US military budget, such as carriers and main battle tanks. Sure, the United States needs some of them...But how many, really? Especially when they contributed very little to the "little wars" the US was actually fighting? With the end of the Cold War, the justification collapsed even further.

Still, there are limits. William Lind cross the line in this recent post (and thanks to The Strategist for the pointer). In the 1990s, the "peace dividend" sparked a discussion about shrinking the military budget. Now, the catalyst is the ailments of the American economy. Lind's recommends grand strategic adjustments to this new situation:

First, adopt a defensive rather than an offensive grand strategy. America followed a defensive grand strategy through most of her history. We only went to war if someone attacked us. That defensive grand strategy kept defense costs down and allowed our economy to prosper. We do not have to be party to every quarrel in the world.

Unfortunately, the days of "we'll keep the sword sheathed unless we're attacked" are long over...If they ever existed in the first place. I'll assume for the moment that Lind is describing the United States before Pearl Harbor--before WWII made Americans into energetic internationalists.

The pre-WWII United States was hardly pacific. The embargo on Japan that triggered the Pearl Harbor raid might not have been a military action, but it was hardly isolationist. The US objected to Japanese imperialism in China and Korea--hardly a policy based strictly on direct threats to the United States. In fact, it was a preface of American internationalism to come. The United States was worried about markets and resources in East Asia; the "special relationship" made it easier for the United States to respond to Japanese moves against these markets and resources.

Decades earlier, the United States had sent expeditionary forces to China. During the Boxer Rebellion, the United States fought alongside Europeans and Japanese to maintain their collective grip on China. And China was hardly the only place where the United States was willing to send its armed forces. While Americans might not have been part of the race for Africa, they did defend their great power supremacy in the Western Hemisphere from both external and internal threats. Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Panama...While these might not have been major wars, they were hardly defensive.

Therefore, WWII wasn't the first time that Americans were willing to use force to defend interests outside the territorial United States. American isolationism slowed down the grand strategic logic that led countries like Britain to see their interests threatened in every corner of the world (if we're worried about India, we have to be worried about Afghanistan...). However, the pull persisted, in spite of recessions and depressions.

Second, scrap virtually all the big ticket weapons programs such as new fighter-bombers, more Aegis ships, and the Army’s Rube Goldbergian Future Combat System. They are irrelevant to where war is going.

No argument here, as long as there's an actual review, not a stampede. The US still needs to project power in a lot of places, if not everywhere. If some new weapons systems or upgrades to existing ones can help, let's still pursue them.

Third, as we cut, preserve combat units. That means, above all, Army and Marine Corps infantry battalions. Cut the vast superstructure above those battalions, but keep the battalions. Infantry battalions are what we need most for Fourth Generation wars, which we should do our utmost to avoid but which we will sometimes be drawn into, even with a defensive grand strategy.

This may be the bitterest pill of all for the services to swallow. The Air Force and Navy would have to accept the primacy of ground forces. The Army would have to reform its structure and culture even further from the centrality of the divisional organization. Giving up a new weapons might be annoying; changing the way the Army operates will be agonizing.

In the Navy, keep the submarines. Submarines are today’s and tomorrow’s capital ships, and geography dictates we must remain a maritime power. Keep the carriers, too, though there is little need to build more of them. Carriers are big, empty boxes, which can carry many things besides aircraft. Mothball most of the cruisers and destroyers. Build lots of small, cheap ships useful for controlling coastal and inland waters, and create strategically mobile and sustainable “packages” of such ships. Being able to control waters around and within stateless regions can be important in 4GW.

Now we're in the outskirts of Cloud Cuckoo-land. Submarines can't handle all the missions that missile-armed surface ships or carrier-based aircraft perform. Sure, we might be fighting more little wars than big ones, but we do need, on occasion, to fight something like Operation DESERT STORM, threaten to use air and missile strikes to achieve foreign policy goals. Plus, a littoral navy that Lind is describing can't deploy across the globe--they're littoral.

I'm all for reducing the overall size of the Navy, but a Navy of submarines and modernized PT boats couldn't handle all the critical missions.

Fighter-bombers are largely useless in Fourth Generation wars, where their main role is to create collateral damage that benefits our enemies. Keep the air transport squadrons and the A-10s, and move them all to the Air National Guard, which flies and maintains aircraft as well as or better than the regular Air Force at a fraction of the cost. Reduce the regular Air Force to strategic nuclear forces and a training base.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to downtown Cloud Cuckoo-Land. Not every war the United States will fight will be a counterinsurgency war. People killed by American bombs in a conventional war might still appear on the evening news, often as a tool of "fourth generation war" used against us. But is this an argument for not fighting conventional wars, in which bombers and fighter-bombers play an important role?

If I have to shoot down enemy fighters, or deliver a "bunker-busting" payload against a highly reinforced enemy HQ, I'd rather not depend on A-10s, thank you. And if we're giving the A-10s to someone, why not the Army, to improve close air support coordination and better protect their budget?

There's a lot of merit in some of Lind's recommendations, and we've had decades of inattention to the real needs of fighting wars that were smaller and wholly unlike the hypothetical NATO/Warsaw Pact clash over Central Europe. However, you can go too far in the other direction.

That's what she said

Via Armchair Generalist, White House spokesmodel Dana Perino explains why women don't know nothin' about deployin' no carrier battlegroups:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

Also on the list of things Ms. Perino has not learned, by osmosis or otherwise: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dear Lady, at the risk of offending your tender sensibilities, may we proffer an observation. It is our fondest hope that our words cause only the mildest distress, no worse than the quiver of a leaf gently caressed by a spring breeze.

You are a dumbass, in a string of dumbasses whom this Administration has hired, who don't have the good sense or civic duty to recognize how woefully underqualified you are for your job.

Fleet in being and nothingness

Defense and Freedom points out the startlingly high rate of naval expansion in Asia compared to the rest of the world. Is this a problem?

I agree with most of what Sven has to say. Here's where I part company with him:

Conclusion; The capability to easily overturn naval power balances exists in East Asia (including Japan and Taiwan) - they were just kind enough not to use it (and were our friends for decades). But now the PRC is on the rise also in shipbuilding - and might not be so kind in 20, 30 or 40 years if we piss them off.

First of all, according to the chart in Sven's post, two American allies, South Korea and Japan, are outpacing the PRC in ship construction. To the extent that represents two major allies in the Pacific assuming a larger part of the burden of keeping the sea lanes open, great. After 60 years, there's no sign that Japan is suddenly going to have another imperialist seizure any time soon, so we'd be alarmist in the extreme to be afraid of a reasonable expansion of the Japanese navy.

Second, the PRC doesn't necessarily want or need to continue expanding (or "modernizing," to use the more polite term) at the same rate. Chinese naval strategy is more about sea denial than sea control; the former is always a lot cheaper than the latter. We can start worrying when the Chinese start investing heavily in sealift capability, signaling obvious designs on Taiwan.

Third, we're just talking about numbers of ships here. Technology plays a much larger role in naval and air warfare than in ground warfare. As long as the US maintains its technical edge in all three parts of the USN, subs, ships, and aircraft, increases in numbers are far less alarming than they might first appear.

The big question to ask is, how can the PRC afford to invest heavily in sea power? Sadly, the United States is helping to pay for all these new ships. Before 2001, the amount of American debt that the Chinese held was the source of a lot of leverage and potential economic power. US policy towards the PRC has been, for decades, best to use that economic leverage right back at them, by staying economically and politically engaged with the Chinese regime.

After 2001, cut-and-spend Republicans ballooned the debt, making it harder to manage this relationship. Meanwhile, the decline of the dollar reduces a key American advantage in the global economy. Last year, the US trade deficit with China was $162 billion. Bye-bye, leverage. The burden of federal debt makes any quick build-up of the USN far less likely, and certainly more expensive in the long run, if, in 20 years we "piss off" the PRC.

Worried about China? Take a long, skeptical look at the war in Iraq.

DoD budget: duck and cover

The Army is asking for roughly half of the next Pentagon budget. Report now to your bunkers. That is all.

The Army certainly has necessity (reality?) on its side. Ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, but also to handle commitments in South Korea and other parts of the world, continue consuming personnel and equipment at a fierce rate. Future conflicts are likely to demand a larger percentage of ground forces than next-generation fighters or destroyers.

Still, the other services are going to mount fierce opposition to this proposal. The old Pentagon, in which each service got roughly equivalent pieces of the pie, is far from dead. Just check out the last Quadrennial Review, for starters. Sure, we need carrier battle groups AND air wings AND a big nuclear arsenal AND Marine expeditionary forces AND space defenses AND AND AND...You never know, right?

It's hard to argue with the Army, however, as long as the United States remains in Iraq. Maybe the Air Force and Navy will turn into some of the strongest advocates against withdrawal from Iraq.

The benefits of manual labor

Normally, when the Army publishes a new field manual, it's no excuse to stop the presses. The new operations manual, FM 3-0, is the exception.

The old: must-read, but not a lot to digest
Army field manuals are dry reading. If you're a rifle platoon leader, here are the standard formations and maneuvers to assault a fixed position. If you're new to the artillery, here's what acronyms like TOT and FFO mean.

The manuals are also pretty vague, providing, at best, the rough outlines of what each job demands. Doctrine isn't supposed to be a straitjacket, forcing people to act in highly detailed, almost robotic ways. The US Army tries to breed people who can take orders, act without hesitation, but also think on their feet.

Traditionally, the manuals have said little about the larger strategic and political context. That omission is understandable, if you believe that military operations are separate from political decisions and outcomes. In fact, the conventional warfare mindset, which has guided the Army through most of its history, sees warfare as the derivative of politics. That's Clausewitzian in only a limited sense, but appropriate for a country which has kept the military strictly subordinate to the civilian since the days of Washington and the Continental Congress.

Meanwhile, warfare has evolved into a tangle of political and military action. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have some of the tightest connection between politics and violence. However, carrier battle groups deployed to the Persian Gulf to "send a message" are also part of a parallel political and military effort, as much as the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the Army's discomfort with counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, special operations, and other highly politicized military operations led to doctrinal ghettoization. In the 1980s, the Department of Defense stuffed operations as different as peacekeeping (dampening conflict) and "proinsurgency" (training and equipping insurgents to escalate conflict) into the same doctrinal pigeonhole, "low intensity conflict" (LIC). Specialized Army manuals covered LIC and its subcomponents, almost ensuring that 99% of  Army officers  wouldn't read them.

The manuals, therefore, reflected the great irony of the US Army, and the American military in general. The war for which the Army prepared the most, a NATO/Warsaw Pact version of Ragnarok in Central Europe, didn't happen--and given the superpower balance of terror, was highly unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, the real shooting wars in which the US Army was either directly or indirectly involved--for example, the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua--were the sorts of conflicts the Army tried to avoid talking about.

The new: now with more mental nutrition
That backstory makes reading the newly released FM 3-0 a bit of a shock. It takes efforts to explain the forces generating conflict, instead of leaving them a distant political vision on the far, far side of the battlefield. The first chapter of FM 3-0, "The Operational Environment," discusses everything from globalization to urbanization in a decent level of detail, with even some thoughtful, interesting passages that are alien to Army field manuals. Here's an example:

1-3. Technology will be another double-edged sword. Often, innovations that improve the quality of life and livelihood are also used by adversaries to destroy those lives. It would seem as though technology is an asymmetric advantage of developed nations. They have greater access to research facilities to develop and innovate. Technology also gives nations access to the industrial base. These nations can then mass-produce advanced products and widely distribute them at relatively low costs. The low cost of products, their userfriendly design, and their availability in a global economy makes advanced technology accessible to unstable states as well as extremist organizations. The revolution and proliferation of benefits derived from integrating multidisciplinary nano- and bio-technologies and smart materials potentially promises to improve living conditions. However, these products will not always be available at the pace and in the quantities necessary to make them and their benefits as universally available as desired. This disparity can create another source of friction between the haves and have-nots. Moreover, the proliferation, falling costs, and availability of technologically advanced products—especially expanded information technologies using mobile networks and expanded use of wireless and global fiber-optic networks—enable nonstate adversaries to acquire them.

OK, maybe it's not exactly Alvin Toffler or Jared Diamond, but it is something that Army officers are supposed to read and digest.

Most books that include the words "operational art" fumble their description of what the operational level of strategy really is. Clausewitz, who is quoted liberally (and accurately) throughout FM 3-0, thought it was the most important facet of strategy to master, and the most difficult to understand.

To the credit of FM 3-0's authors, the new manual provides a top-notch description of the operational art. It includes helpful warnings about the pitfalls of operational-level strategy, such as this one:

6-4. A natural tension exists between the levels of war and echelons of command. This tension stems from different perspectives, requirements, and constraints associated with command at each level of war. Between the levels of war, the horizons for planning, preparation, and execution differ greatly.

And, hallelujah, the new FM 3-0 treats insurgency and terrorism as a normal part of modern warfare, and therefore a necessary part of the Army's mission. In fact, the first few pages of Chapter 2, "The Continuum of Operations," almost make general war--the sort of conventional interstate conflict the Army has traditionally preferred--the exception, not the norm.

Most official statements of Army doctrine struggle to find the right words to describe revolutionary warfare. It's refreshing, therefore, to read the following passage in FM 3-0, which neatly defines insurgency and puts it into operational context:

2-6. Joint doctrine defines an insurgency as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict (JP 1-02). It is a condition of politically motivated conflict involving significant intra- or interstate violence but usually short of large-scale operations by opposing conventional forces. Insurgencies often include widespread use of irregular forces and terrorist tactics. An insurgency may develop in the aftermath of general war or through degeneration of unstable peace. Insurgencies may also emerge on their own from chronic social or economic conditions. In addition, some conflicts, such as the Chinese Revolution, have escalated from protracted insurgencies into general wars. Intervention by a foreign power in an insurgency may increase the threat to regional stability.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? Revolutionary warfare isn't a set of tactics; instead, people with revolutionary ambitions pick the techniques, normally "asymmetric," that make the most sense at a particular point in time. "Terrorist tactics" are a means to an end--a far different view of than the normal stereotype of "terrorists," depicted as people obsessed with a particular method over a desired political outcome.

Breaking with tradition
FM 3-0 isn't perfect. For example, the first appendix lapses into some of the traditional language used to convey strategic principles (mass, maneuver, economy of force, etc.), which fits most comfortably with conventional, interstate conflicts. Napoleon might have seized the initiative at Austerlitz, by tricking the Austrians and Russians into thinking he had a weaker force than he really did. In a far different but no less important way, Hamas stole the initiative from Fatah during the second intifada through a combination of political mobilization and terror attacks. The next generation of Army officers need to understand how their  opponents might steal the initiative from them in ways that have nothing to do with the electronic battlefield or better close air support coordination.

Still, FM 3-0 is a big step forward in the history of Army doctrine. It would be startling if the hard lessons of the last several years had no part in this change of heart. However, it's important to remember that, all along, there have been people in the US military who had a better understanding of conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq than many of their superiors. FM 3-0 may be the result of giving them a chance to speak.

[For another view of FM 3-0, with critical comments about its treatment of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, click here.]

[A quick aside: FM 3-0 does not read like one of the "military transformationist" tracts of a few years ago. In other words, I wouldn't give Cebrowski, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. credit for the new, improved approach reflected in this manual. In fact, many elements of FM 3-0 run counter to the "transformationist" doctrines.]

SOFs not being drawn down

Worth noting in discussions of withdrawing troops from Iraq: US special operations forces  (SOFs) are not part of that reduction. In fact, their numbers may be increasing.

That's good news, if the mix of forces in Iraq tilts more in the direction of the SOFs. While unconventional warfare as waged by the SOFs is not necessarily the same thing as counterinsurgency, the SOFs have a better track record of understanding and contributing to counterinsurgency campaigns than many conventional units.

Unfortunately, US troop levels will not return to pre-escalation levels. The numbers will still be 8,000 soldiers higher than in January 2007. The strain on the Army and Marines remains, as does the strategic vacuum at the theater level.

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.

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.

Our fragile Department of Defense

Not only are the Army and Marines having a hard time retaining good people, but for different reasons, the entire Department of Defense is facing a potential brain drain, according to a GAO report:

In a letter sent to key members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees on Wednesday, GAO said the Pentagon was not prepared to meet several looming workforce challenges, especially considering half of its civilian personnel are eligible to retire in the next few years.

The GAO isn't predicting a stampede from the DoD. However, the risk of losing a large fraction of its most experienced employees is nothing to sneeze at, particularly during the difficult transitions that will occur in the next several years.

The DoD spokesperson who denied there was a problem gave a classic Sir Humphrey Appleby response: There are so many details to factor into this equation, you can't possibly conclude anything from these simplistic indicators.

"Our response to the congressional reporting requirement reflected a centralized enterprisewide strategic perspective, which was called for in the report," Bradshaw wrote. "Our plan is to include more compressive documents in our required March 2008 report."

On the Appleby scale, I'll give this 2 out of 5 Humphreys.

[Since it's almost the weekend, I'll end by sharing a classic Sir Humphrey moment.]

The USAF's real enemy

On the heels of this morning's post about US nuclear strategy, in which I mentioned how upcoming budget battles will be a bigger problem than public opinion, here's a great post I read this afternoon from Armchair Generalist, pointing back to Tom Ricks' blog post on the Washington Post. The real enemy of the US Air Force, the keeper of the keys (dual keys, actually) of the strategic nuclear arsenal, is...Drum roll...The other services!

The PowerPoint slides you'll see need to be enshrined in the Museum of the Stupid and Shortsighted. Amazing.

The upper classes go AWOL

During this presidential campaign, voters will hear much about the divergent economic realities between "the rich" and "the middle class." Yet there is another partition in America that is less visible, but no less troubling. The great divide between the civilian and military communities leaves the nation and its electorate ill-equipped to make informed judgments about military and international affairs.

That's the conclusion of former US Marine Peter Gudmundsson. Click here for more.

In "the good war," World War II, children of the American upper class fought. Celebrities served in the military. Today...Not so much. Geez, at least the Roman senators, who were often military amateurs hungry for plunder, still risked their own lives when they commanded the legions.

[Thanks to Mountain Runner for the pointer.]

US nuclear strategy: compellence

Cheryl of Whirled View kindly indicated that continued posts on the future of US nuclear strategy from national security bloggers were still welcome. Therefore, I'll throw in a couple of my own observations on this topic, starting with a few words about compellence.

In a widely-cited Harvard Business Review article, Michael Porter pointed out that strategy includes explicit choices about what you don't do. While not everything in Porter's article applies equally to corporations and governments, that statement certainly does. When the choice involves nuclear weapons, the consequences of what you do and don't do are, of course, potentially cataclysmic.

Early questions about compellence
For the first two or three decades that the United States possessed a nuclear arsenal, American nuclear strategists tried to figure out whether these fearsome weapons could be used not just for deterrence, but compellence. In less academic terms, you might summarize the question as, "Hey, if we have nuclear weapons, and lots of other countries don't, can't we use the nuclear threat to bully them?" Surprisingly, the answer appears to be, "No."

Thomas Schelling, whose landmark book Arms and Influence is the inspiration for the name of this blog, was one of many strategists who approached this question in the abstract. Sometimes, the tools of inquiry were analogies, such as Schelling's famous metaphor of the game of chicken. At other times, the tools were more quantitative, such as the complex mathematical projections of missiles, megatons, and mass casualties, to think as objectively and precisely as possible about, as Herman Kahn called it, "the unthinkable."

The analysts at the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department engaged in this research found many ways to deter a Soviet nuclear attack. They did not, however, find any sure-fire ways to use the US nuclear arsenal to blackmail the Soviets, Chinese, or even the many countries that lacked nuclear weapons of their own into taking actions they might otherwise resist. In other words, nuclear weapons could stop the other superpower from doing something; it was much, much harder to devise techniques to compel other governments to acquiesce to American wishes.

History belies theory
Historical experience also indicated that compellence was, perhaps, a pipe dream. The United States chose not to use nuclear weapons against the North Koreans and North Vietnamese. Just as importantly, the US did not make serious, consistent threats of nuclear attack, if these two adversaries did not halt their aggression against their southern neighbors. In other Cold War confrontations in which the other side lacked nuclear weapons--for example, the Arab-Israeli wars--US leaders largely kept the nuclear threat in its sheath.

The exceptions looked more like deterrence, but on a smaller scale. For example, the US went to a high degree of nuclear alert in 1973 to make it clear to the USSR that any Soviet military intervention in the Yom Kippur war. The Eisenhower gave the People's Republic of China a clear glimpse of the American nuclear threat during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. Again, the goal was more deterrence--stopping the Chinese from expanding the conflict beyond the two disputed islands to Taiwan--and less compellence.

Why did compellence turn out to be a mirage? Only part of the answer depended on the unique balance of power mechanics of the Cold War. Both superpowers were wary of nuclear threats, for fear that the other superpower might get involved in the conflict, raising both the stakes and unpredictability of any conflict. The WWI-like escalation spiral, from regional crisis to global war, haunted both theorists and practitioners of nuclear diplomacy.

Credibility
However, the fear of escalation was hardly the only reason why compellence practically disappeared from US national security policy. The credibility of the threat was questionable whenever US cities were not directly at stake. Just as Hitler once wondered, "Who would die for Danzig?" American leaders asked, "Who would believe us if we threatened nuclear attack over the Soviet repression of Hungarian independence?"

The credibility of nuclear threats is always the most valuable part of having a nuclear arsenal. Otherwise, nuclear weapons are only useful by actually using them, which is the worst of all possible scenarios. Compellence, on the other hand, degrades the currency of US nuclear threats, since the stakes are far lower for the United States than the "nightmare scenario" of classic deterrence.

Humiliation
The psychology of international relations creates additional obstacles to successful compellence. Deterrence normally stops actions that have not been started at all. The other side loses practically nothing for backing down, since nothing has happened. In many situations, such as the Clinton Administration's threats against North Korea, no one outside the two governments involved might be aware that a crisis has been happening at all.

The threat, in these less dire circumstances, is not credible because no one believes that US leaders are either immoral or irrational enough to unleash mass carnage. That, too, is an important part of the credibility of US power and influence.

Compellence, on the other hand, often requires the embarrassment or humiliation of the other side. Not only do the scenarios often start with public statements or actions (for example, "Disarm immediately, or else"), but the adversary may want to publicize US nuclear threats, to make its cause more sympathetic in the face of American bullying.

Nuclear power, but no leverage
The end of the Cold War, therefore, has not improved the opportunities for nuclear compellence. No modern-day John Foster Dulles will find an updated version of the "massive retaliation" doctrine any more successful than it was in the 1950s.

Rest in peace, Andrew Olmsted

Milblogger Andrew Olmsted died last week. Click here to read his self-obituary; click here to read a memorial article at the Rocky Mountain News.

Godspeed, Major Olmsted. You will be missed. And to quote from your farewell post:

If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them.

Thank you for your dedication to the cause of democracy, here and abroad.

The American way of war

In the most recent issue of Small Wars Journal, Thomas Odom argues that a set of cultural attitudes or preferences shape American military doctrine. It's always valuable to examine your own unstated assumptions about the world, particularly in matters of life and death, but I'm not 100% sure about Odom's list. Therefore, I'll open it up to discussion in the comments section: what do you think of this list?

• Preference for Firepower Over Manpower
• Preference for Offense Over Defense
• Preference for Technologically Complex Over Simple
• Preference for Speedy Resolution Over Extended Operations
• Preference for Destruction Over Defeat of Our Enemies

What do you think: Is this accurate? (As accurate as these broad-brush characterizations can be.) Is there anything uniquely American about this set of predilictions?

Three doors down, down, down

While waiting for Charlie Wilson's War (good movie, by the way) to start, we also saw the latest National Guard recruitment video. I've seen two such videos, and they both really rankled me. First, the producers of the video need to be honest about what National Guard service entails: the probability of fighting in Iraq is higher than that of providing disaster relief. (Of course, that's a problem in itself, if another natural disaster occurs.) Second, is paying a B-grade band like Three Doors Down to do a high-gloss video as good a use of scarce funds as, say, providing the Guard units in theater with better equipment?

The army of none

The holiday season is the perfect time to release painfully bad news, since most media outlets won't be paying much attention. One such story, from the 12/20/07 edition of Government Executive (and missed in the New York Times and the Washington Post), is the budget shortfall for the US Army, which is paying the highest cost of the services for the continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To meet its current commitments, and prepare for any other contingencies, the Army needs to expand, always the costliest line item in its budget. At the same time that it is struggling to recruit and retain personnel, so the per capita cost, including new incentives, is steadily rising. Nevertheless, the overall quality of of the people in the Army is continuing to degrade, so the return on investment isn't what it used to be. The Army's estimated cost for this expansion, $70.2 billion for 74,200 personnel, is hardly realistic.

Every year, the services grumble that they don't have enough money for equipment upgrades. Sometimes, those complaints aren't justified: for the missions the US military faces, many older systems have been good enough. In Operation DESERT STORM, both aged B-52 bombers and state-of-the-art F-117 stealth aircraft played important roles; however, the F-117 wasn't needed for every mission.

In this case, however, the Army's complaints about upgrades are definitely justified. For example, part of the "upgrade" includes equipment that National Guard units should have had when they were deployed to Iraq, but didn't.

Another key improvement, the upgrade to the Army's helicopter fleet, can sharpen the Army's fighting edge in Iraq and Afghanistan, while blunting some of the political difficulties in these conflicts. (And, to be fair, these improvements are important for other future conflicts.) For example, upgrading the OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter, or replacing it with its next generation equivalent, may improve battlefield intelligence. Finishing the task of replacing the weapons and detection gear on the Apache attack helicopter would increase the likelihood of finding and hitting targets small targets, in spite of dust or darkness.

As long as the Army continues to fight in Iraq's and Afghanistan's populated areas, the accuracy of information and firepower can't be underestimated. Unfortunately, the total price tag is high, approximately $60 billion. While the Army might stagger these costs, or postpone indefinitely improvements to equipment in theaters of operations where combat isn't happening, some fraction of that $60 billion is necessary.

Of course, the alternative is to cut American losses and disengage from Iraq, since that war imposes huge manpower and equipment costs. If the United States is going to stay in Iraq, however, these costs must be paid. The Army can't continue bleeding past the point where it can't effectively fight in Iraq, and it's not ready to fight the next war somewhere else.

Root and executive branch

Armchair Generalist draws our attention to the minor melee over the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. The Board was created to be a semi-official advisory panel of national security sages who advise the Secretary of Defense. In theory, it gives the sort of detached, balanced perspective that decision-makers need, in much the same capacity that Lyndon Johnson's "Wise Men" about Vietnam and other matters.

During George W. Bush's first term, the Defense Policy Board, under the chairmanship of Richard Perle, was one of the pulpits from which the neoconservatives made their policy pitches. While supposedly beyond politics, the Board, and other bodies like it, are often just as subject to political forces as any other part of the federal government. In fact, one might make the argument that, the more an organization like the Defense Policy Board proclaims its independence from party politics, the easier it is for interest groups to manipulate its members. How dare you suggest that Henry Kissinger and Newt Gingrich have axes to grind!

In truth, you can be too cynical about these sorts of institutions. After all, for decades, people from Republican and Democratic circles have compared notes, across party lines, about their experiences in national security posts. Top Cabinet officials do need neutral advice, and it would be better to try fixing the DPB than just discarding it altogether.

That's why arguments over whether the new chairman, John Hamre, is conservative enough for the post, are worse than pointless: they're poisonous. The whole country needs to discard the Red versus Blue, hawks versus doves, stay-the-coursers versus cut-and-runners nonsense, faux divisions that serve party over nation.

The mercenary mess

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is, quite literally, the picture of a man on the horns of a particularly painful dilemma. To fight the Iraq War without re-instituting the draft, the US government relies on "private security firms"--mercenaries, by another name. These guns-for-hire are not the sort of troops needed to fight a counterinsurgency war. On the contrary: mercenaries are often responsible for incidents that alienate average Iraqis, instead of convincing them that the government and its American backer are on their side. For example, last week, British security contractors fired on a taxi, injuring three Iraqis. The deeper the political crisis gets, the greater the need for troops in both defensive and offensive roles--and the pressure builds to hire private firms for the jobs that US soldiers might otherwise perform.

To some extent, privatization in the Defense Department is inevitable. From running the commissary to building software systems, the private sector has a role to play in supporting the US military, at home and in the field. The real problem, of course, is when the private sector has to fight.

The private sector might be appropriate for some combat roles, such as piloting drones. Even in these situations, it's worth asking whether the expertise needed for these tasks should be farmed out, instead of being kept in house.

Defenders of privatization might still argue that some role exists for private security as bodyguards. However, even in this limited capacity, mercenaries are the wrong tool for the job in Iraq. In a war with no front lines, in which the use of force might have grave political repercussions, anyone with a gun bears enormous responsibility. Nervous mercenaries with itchy trigger fingers are the worst possible troops for these situations.

To be fair, that is a caricature of the over 100 private security companies operated in Iraq. Certainly, the description fits many of the 180,000 civilian employees in Iraq, but not all of them. However, even the best among them--the most highly-trained, seasoned veterans of service in special operations forces units--don't necessarily fit the mission, either.

There's a big difference between the mission of counterinsurgency and the skills of special operations forces. While a SOF veteran who served in Colombia might have learned many skills relevant to the Iraq War, there's no assurance that they have all the necessary skills. Knowledge of the language and culture are critical. So, too, is an understanding of the difference between, say, fighting drug smugglers and guerrillas. Being a tough and smart commando does not necessarily make you a smart and tough guerrilla fighter.

Even if there were no war in Iraq, the Defense Department's dependence on private security firms would be a hard trend to reverse. It started before the Bush Administration took office in 2001. Rumsfeld's grand design for "military transformation," combined with the Iraq War, have made the situation vastly worse. Sadly, because the way the Administration has decided to fight this war, the US government feels dependent on the very people who often undermine the US mission in Iraq.

Refusing orders

The list of things I never thought I'd see keeps growing. For example, I never expected the National Park Service would be selling Creationist accounts of the Earth's origin at the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore. I also never expected that the state of US national security policy would sink so low that we'd be discussing whether it's a good idea for the military to refuse orders from the commander-in-chief.

Unfortunately, that's where we are. Fred Kaplan at Slate has a lot of important things to say about this topic. In the face of a possible military strike on Iran, American officers are pondering the question, When should we not follow orders?, like never before.

Well, not exactly never. During the early years of the Cold War, there was some concern that the generals and admirals might be hesitant about firing nuclear weapons in anger. The combination of unspeakably destructive weapons and a frightening balance of terror between the two superpowers was unprecedented, so it was natural to wonder what mere mortals, in or out of uniform, might do in the face of an apocalypse.

Today, this debate is occurring because, obviously, the Bush Administration bungled the war in Iraq, overstretched US armed forces, and, in spite of it all, now is making noises about attacking Iran. The Cold War uncertainties about whether we would actually launch a nuclear strike were unavoidable. Today's concerns about whether to execute orders to attack Iran, and what to do if you can't in good conscience do so, were eminently avoidable.

While Kaplan has some important things to say, I think he overlooks an important point: there already is an ethic of refusing or ignoring orders in the military. Not surprisingly, the circumstances have to be extreme and unusual. For example, commanders may issue orders that assume battlefield conditions that no longer exist. Their subordinates, in these cases, have to exercise their own judgment, since slavish adherence to orders can get people killed and lose the battle. At other times, subordinates have to sort through conflicting or vague orders. And, of course, as the US Uniform Code of Military Justice clearly states, a soldier must never follow unlawful orders. (Yet another reason to be absolutely clear about what the rules really condone, and why.)

However, the scenarios normally describe people lower in the chain of command. It's highly unusual for the top brass to face a situation in which they may not be able, in good conscience, to execute the President's orders. Luckily, that's the sort of Constitutional crisis that the United States has largely avoided, even when the existence of the country was at stake. George Washington felt obliged to follow the Constitutional Congress' directives, even when he felt they were militarily unwise, and the Congress had failed to adequately support the army in the field.

The exceptions--Nelson's famous "blind eye" at the Battle of Copenhagen, or MacArthur's clash with Truman over Korea--define the rule. In large part, that's because civilian leaders have learned the value of weighing decisions carefully, to avoid the possibility of a military rebellion. In return, civil-military relations have worked very well over the last several decades, to the benefit of the nation as a whole. Even when military opposition might have been justified, such as the "revolt of the admirals" over support for naval aviation during the late 1940s, the historical verdict has gone against the rebellious commanders.

Therefore, the President should not be putting the top military leadership into the position of contemplating how best to resist orders to attack Iran. It's not a question of taking a military gamble, in which the generals and admirals might be wrong. Any attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear program from the air or sea has no chance of success, and the United States certainly lacks the ground forces (or allies, for that matter) to expand the theater of operations from Iraq into Iran.

A lot more is at stake than the lives lost, or the political consequences of a failed military strike against Iran. Civil-military relations, something the founders of this country worried about from the first days of the American War of Independence, may also be a casualty.

Moral waivers

Here's a chain of logic that should be easy to follow:

1. If you want to keep fighting the Iraq war, you need the sort of military that can understand political complexities, speak the language, and not abuse the locals.
2. Desperate for recruits, the US Army has increased the number of "moral waivers" for inductees found guilty of both misdemeanor and felony offenses.
3. Therefore, moral waivers undermine the Iraq war effort, instead of helping it.

Not to mention the damage done to the Army in general. The Defense Department needs to stop this policy now.

[Thanks to Armchair Generalist for the original link.]

Welcome home, warrior citizens

I’m a flag guy. Medieval banners hit some powerful aesthetic buttons with me. The sight of the flags of all nations flying outside the United Nations is just plain impressive. The regimental standards of Union regiments symbolize the noble cause for which they fought, the end of slavery and the preservation of the Union.

You may have noticed that there are few good flags nowadays. However, there’s one you might not have seen, but which symbolizes where we are as a country.

It’s the flag that the US Army gives soldiers returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The motto sums up where we are as a country. We honor the soldiers who have placed themselves in mortal peril on our behalf. We embrace them as fellow citizens given harrowing responsibilities, not hapless employees of a military bureaucracy. We understand their warrior ethos, which finds the proper balance of violence and restraint needed to execute the missions we collectively assign to them.

If I had any influence—and believe me, despite the blogging, I know I have practically none—I’d encourage people to start flying this flag outside their homes. Recognize what American soldiers have tried to accomplish, with the mission handed to them, and remind the rest of us that we’re responsible, as citizens, for bringing them home if the mission no longer makes any sense.

Flag stores sell this particular banner, by the way. I’m just saying.

A man of principle

The key to understanding the US military is principle. On the battlefield, soldiers have to do the right thing without thinking, doing crazy things like charging people shooting at you when your animal instincts might tell you to run away. Off the battlefield, soldiers also have to do the right thing, preparing for moments of unspeakable violence, and living with their consciences afterwards. Military professionals have to live by both a warrior’s and a citizen’s ethic; otherwise, they become divorced from the very people and institutions they have sworn to protect, often at the cost of their own lives.

No better illustration of principle in action is retired general Antonio Taguba, who addressed the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco tonight. Taguba had what on the surface should have been a relatively straightforward assignment: investigate abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison facility. As we all know, this investigation became anything but simple.

We know something of Taguba from news accounts, such as Seymour Hersh’s recent article in The New Yorker, which describe him as wading through a political, bureaucratic, and evidentiary morass in a determinedly straight line. After delivering his report, his career in the US military ended.

Yet, for a soldier like Taguba, there wasn’t an alternative. If you believe in the principles on which the US military is founded—principles codified into military law and procedure—following these precepts may cost you your life. Losing your career at the hands of lesser men is just as honorable and necessary an outcome.

Taguba out of uniform seems much like the descriptions of Taguba in uniform, just as direct and simple in his devotion to the principles on which he was raised. Asked for his opinions about Abu Ghraib, the Iraq war, and other misbegotten offspring of what was originally supposed to be a war against Al Qaeda, he gladly gave his point of view. I’ll have to paraphrase, so please refer to the transcripts or recordings of Taguba’s Commonwealth Club address for his exact wording.

• How high in the chain of command does responsibility for Abu Ghraib extend? “If a US Navy vessel runs aground, the captain assumes responsibility for the mistakes of his subordinates.”
• How well have top leaders responded? “Sgt. Joseph Darby [the whistleblower who gave the CD containing the now infamous photos from Abu Ghraib] found his integrity. I hope a day comes when the people at the top of the chain of command find theirs.”
• Could former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld not known about the abuses? Taguba described how, in the meeting the day before Rumsfeld’s appearance before Congress, he told Rumsfeld that he should look at the CD of photographs. However, he did not really need to do so, since it didn’t take the photos to know that something terrible was happening at Abu Ghraib.
• Is it necessary to bend the normal moral and legal rules to fight terrorists? “3,500 great Americans have died defending our core principles, and thousands more have been wounded. We can only honor their sacrifices by preserving these rules.”

At one point, Taguba became momentarily choked up as he described his respect for the junior officers who assisted with his organization. He later explained that, given the task of completing the investigation and report in a month, they had to make sure that the evidence and conclusions held up under scrutiny. “After all,” Taguba said, “we were going to be scrutinized.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask Taguba the question I had for him: How much debate was there over whether bending and breaking the rules—through, for example, the torture and indefinite detention of prisoners—was necessary to defeat terrorists. I think we have enough evidence from other sources to answer the question: Quite a lot within the US military; a lot less among senior civilian leaders in the executive branch. People who have not served in uniform were quick to order the US military to violate its own principles, without ever determining whether these violations were necessary in the first place.

Corruption isn’t mere graft; instead, it’s the systematic violation of the rules and ethos that govern an institution. Among other grievous wounds suffered in the last several years, the US military has been the target of systematic corruption—again, largely unnecessary, particularly in conflicts where rectitude is as powerful a weapon as any assault rifle, tank, or attack helicopter.

After his talk, I shook Taguba’s hand and said, “Thank you, sir, for your integrity and courage.” He seemed almost surprised at the compliment, even after receiving a standing two standing ovations from the audience for his talk. Given the principles on which the US military runs, that response should be no surprise.

Postscript: About those standing ovations…I wish we would rip down every stupid “Support Our Troops” magnet. People critical of the war don’t need to be berated. (How about a personal statement, "I Support the Troops," instead of an inappropriate command, "Support the Troops"?) The people applauding Taguba share his respect, admiration, and love for our armed forces. They just don't want to see them ground up and discarded.