Arms and influence

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.

You can call me Al

After writing that last post, I realized that, if the press is having trouble keeping Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Iraq straight, they might be having other problems distinguishing between things that have similar names. Perhaps we can help.

Question #1
Shown here are (1) an actual bear, and (2) the Chicago Bears. Show these pictures to a journalist--maybe someone you know, perhaps a member of your own family--to see if that member of the Fourth Estate can tell the difference.

Question #2
If they experience trouble, immediate attention may be required. Take the test to stage two, in which the journalist must tell the difference between (1) Prince Charles, monarch-in-waiting of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and (2) the cast of the sitcom Charles in Charge.

Question #3
Perhaps these examples don't hit close enough to home. Therefore, the acid test asks the journalist to distinguish among (1) a wolf, (2) the German blitzkrieg in World War II, and (3) Wolf Blitzer. This challenge is especially tricky, since it presents 50% more choices than the previous tests.

The painful truth
If the journalist fails any of these tests, you know for sure that he or she will have no chance whatsoever of telling the difference between (1) Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and (2) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Ansar al-Islam and founder of Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, a.k.a. "Al Qaeda in Iraq."

The journalists with this problem are suffering from a substantial handicap. After years of trying and failing, it's clear that they are being asked to do a job for which they are functionally crippled.

These journalists deserve our pity--and our help. "Lazy Reporter's Brain" is, like Turrett's Syndrome or chronic flatulence, no laughing matter.

We can only hope that, soon, we will find a cure. Until that happy day arrives, just be careful when the journalist you know says, "I hear Wolf is going to be at that dinner party--I can't wait to go!"

They're all Qaeda

What will it take to end the obnoxious behavior of DoD briefers who refer to every Iraqi insurgent group as Al Qaeda? And what will stop the press from compounding the problem? Here's the lead from an article on CNN's web site:

A major movement of Iraqi forces gathered on Sunday in Mosul as a prelude to a planned offensive against Islamic fighters loyal to al Qaeda, an Iraqi government spokesman said.

No, you dunderheads, they offensive is targeting Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is not the same as Al Qaeda. How many years does it take to learn the difference? Long ago, the press should have insisted on using some version of the former's full name, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, instead of confusing it with the latter, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Call them Tanzim, if you need a shorter version. Just don't use Al Qaeda.

There's no reason to play along with the misleading agitprop of both the group founded by Zarqawi, who wanted to steal some marketing from the real Al Qaeda, and American officials, who want to market the Iraq war as somehow related to 9/11. For shame.

US nuclear strategy: an enemy, to be named

[I'm picking up where i left off with the posts on nuclear strategy--or lack thereof--that I started a couple of weeks ago. Click here and here for the first two posts.]

During some public discussions of US nuclear strategy, you'll hear US officials justify the maintenance and modernization of the American nuclear arsenal, based on fears of a future enemy. Clearly, we don't have a great power or superpower competitor that matches the bad old Soviet Union...But who knows what the future will bring?

Nasty surprises
While that might sound like a thin, alarmist rational for expensive, dangerous weapons, American officials have a point. It's not cheap, easy, or quick to rebuild a nuclear arsenal. The entire "supply chain," from the manufacture of the weapons through their testing and deployment, is an expensive, time-consuming process. Without the retention of some nuclear threat, a new rival could surprise us in two ways, new intentions or capabilities:

• A country already armed with nuclear weapons might suddenly turn them on us. Russia, of course, is the country that is most capable of delivering this kind of grand strategic surprise.
• A country with modest or no nuclear capabilities might suddenly acquire weapons that could be used against US targets. For example, China's energetic modernization program might conclude with a sizeable number of  nuclear-tipped missiles that could strike American cities. Iran might develop nuclear warheads delivered by courier, not missile.

A quick aside: you can see the risk the United States has taken in neglecting the program of locking down and eliminating Russian nuclear weapons that started after the end of the Cold War. Once the Bush Administration lost interest, the risk that Russia might pull either kind of surprise--a change in intentions, or an increase in capabilities--increased substantially.

The hidden elephant
If you think that the "placeholder enemy" rationale doesn't have a prayer of flying with the American public, think again. From WWI to today, American voters has had practically no awareness of the size or nature of the US government's chemical and biological weapons programs. How many Americans today know that, in 1993, the US government agreed to the destruction of all chemical weapons by 2012? Who, outside a small group of specialists in this area, knows how much progress the US government has made?

The obvious question, of course, is why the US government was developing and storing tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas in the first place. Against whom were we going to use chemical weapons? During the Cold War, you might imagine a temporary deployment of chemical weapons to stall a Soviet assault into Western Europe. However, if the situation ever got that bad, a far more horrible nuclear exchange might be in the offing anyway. After the Cold War, who would be the target of 31,000 metric tons of chemical weapons? And how many Americans knew their government had them?

If the US government can hide capabilities in plain sight, so too can it continue to develop war plans that don't make sense in light of the current world situation. Between the World Wars, American military strategists developed the "Rainbow plans," designed to respond to practically any threat from beyond American's borders. While War Plan Black, aimed at thwarting German aggression, in hindsight seems like justiifed caution,  how much sense did the premise of War Plan Red, a major war against Great Britain, make? War Plan Red envisioned a war across the US-Canadian border, with the possibility (as described in War Plan Emerald) of supporting an uprising in Ireland.

The real obstacle
In other words, the US government can maintain all sorts of plans and capabilities without the knowledge or assent of the American electorate. The biggest obstacle today, however, is cost.

Since 2001, the strains on the military budget aren't confined to the Army and the Marines. For example, the Navy's next-generation destroyer, code-named DDX, faced opposition based on justification (why this weapons program, instead of something that might help the wars we're actually fighting?) and cost ($2.6 billion for the first two destroyers).

However weird it might seem to be buying destroyers while improvised roadside bombs continue to kill American soldiers, the chance that these destroyers might be used, in actual war or just a show of force, is much higher than the use of nuclear weapons. While we might still be living in the waking dream where funding for the Iraq war (approximately $2 billion per week) appears from thin air, we're soon going to wake up to some hard budgetary realities. (Perhaps, conveniently, right after the 2008 election.) Nuclear weapons programs are going to face some minor public scrutiny, and even tougher resistance from within the US government itself.

Who knows, there may be some future, nuclear-armed enemy worth our concern. However, we won't have the luxury of such concerns, as long as the US military continues to bleed in Iraq, and the US economy begins to sputter.

Purge, reconcile, repeat

Another sign that Iraqi politics isn't going to stay nasty for the foreseeable future: a "reconciliation" law that is so confusingly written that it gives anyone implementing it broad discretion over which Ba'athists to get jobs, and which don't. Some formert Ba'athists are likely to lose the jobs they hold; others may or may not be hired. Given the collapse of Iraqi's economy, getting a job, any job, can be a matter of life or death.

Among other bad effects of this law, it can only add to the already swollen ranks of emigres and refugees.

The real counterinsurgency era

It's easy to lose track of why John F. Kennedy was a beloved president. Often caricatured for his skirt-chasing, or derided for failures like the Bay of Pigs, the current generation often overlooks his accomplishments, or takes them for granted. However, it's worth looking at Kennedy's personal crusade to make counterinsurgency a national priority to see what could have happened after the 9/11 attacks, but didn't.

Let me say, in advance, that this big topic can't really be covered adequately in a blog posting. I'm going to allude to important events during Kennedy's tenure; to really understand them, you should read about them in more depth. At the end, I'll give a few book recommendations.

The Kennedy strategy
Kennedy took office with the firm belief that the USSR and the PRC were exploiting what Khrushchev termed "wars of national liberation" for their own benefit. While scholars have been debating ever since how well the Soviets and Chinese could manipulate these movements in their favor, it was a threat that Kennedy  decided to address. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may have been Cold War priorities, but they were also humanitarian ones. As he said in one line of his inaugural address that resonated powerfully with the American public:

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Since the political and economic defects of other societies led to the kinds of violence that threatened American interests and challenged American ideals, the changes Kennedy set into motion were not purely military, though there was an important military dimension:

• The push for revised military doctrines aimed directly at defeating guerrilla movements.
• The expansion of American special operations forces, seen as important players in counterinsurgency campaigns.
• The creation of economic and technical aid organizations, such as the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, and the Alliance for Progress, designed to address the societal problems that generated political violence.
• Overt and covert participation in wars against Communist forces, such as the secret war in Laos.

Failures and successes
Kennedy's broad campaign met with, at best, mixed success. The US military resisted the doctrinal reforms, and the special operations forces remained marginalized. (It wasn't until the late 1980s that they received the kind of support Kennedy had envisioned, and only because an impatient Congress forced the Pentagon to make important reforms to the SOF command structure and budget.) Some counterinsurgency campaigns, such as Laos, were failures. Military and intelligence aid often went to authoritarian governments who jailed, tortured, and murdered their political opponents (not just Communists).

However, there were successes. While the impact of foreign aid is hard to measure, it expanded good will. As a result, the United States could become an energetic participant in many internal and regional struggles without sacrificing its reputation. A generation of US military officers understood what Kennedy thought should happen, felt the resistance of the services to these changes, and experienced first-hand the disastrous results. While the US lost the Vietnam War, the Vietnam-era military and intelligence professionals were ready to do better a generation later, if needed and given the chance.

One of the Kennedy-era accomplishments accidentally helped counterterrorism, but it was an important step forward nonetheless. The Kennedy Administration's decision to turn the FBI's efforts against organized crime gave it vital experience identifying, infiltrating, and dismantling secretive, disciplined, and violent organizations. Had the FBI remained focused on suspected American Communists, it would not have the skills needed to combat terrorism domestically as it does today.

The Bush presidency
How does Bush compare against Kennedy? There is no unifying vision, with its doctrinal and organizational corollaries, that compares to Kennedy's "twilight struggle." While Kennedy may have lost temporarily some political capital because of the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, he quickly recovered and maintained it through other actions. Unlike Bush, alliances were not strained, and the perception of the United States in the world did not steadily decline. While the Vietnam War was, ultimately, a grand failure, at the very least the United States was actually fighting the right enemy. Among the manifold failures in the Iraq war, the overarching, cataclysmic mistake was that, when the US invaded in 2003, there was no connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'athists. In the 1960s, the wiretapping of Americans, as execrable as it was, occurred at nothing like the scale that exists today, and certainly not with the intiation and encouragement of the President. Organizations that Kennedy created, such as AID and the Peace Corps, continue working effectively through today. In contrast, Bush's one organizational reform, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, is an embarrassment, botched in execution, and not even Bush's idea in the first place. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between the counterinsurgency era of the 1960s and the counterterrorism era today is the lack of a Presidential legacy. Kennedy inspired a generation, from Peace Corps workers to US Special Forces captains. Bush will leave behind no great organizational or doctrinal reforms, and not even any inspiring rhetoric to compare to the Kennedy inaugural speech. Compared to Kennedy's mixed legacy, during much more time in office, Bush has achieved much less.

Recommended reading
Here are a few books on various topics discussed in this post:

• Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era
• Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam
• Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America

Won't you be my special informant friend?

When you do something in a panic, you do it badly.

As always, take this Washington Post story with a grain of salt. It's hard to tell, from one short account, whether Mohammed Mansour Jabarah was a really good liar, or his jailers really wanted to believe in his cooperation.

The gullibility of FBI agents, or the guile of someone with serious Al Qaeda connections, may not be the most revealing part of the story. Instead, the year US officials took Jabarah into custody, 2002, is telling. That's when American military and intelligence forces in Afghanistan were vacuuming up a dubious collection of "enemy combatants," to be dumped at Guantanamo Bay for the indefinite future. Most of those jailed were no threat to the United States, not being part of Al Qaeda or the Taliban at all. However, given the climate of the times, US officials clearly thought it was better to err--massively, inhumanely err--on the side of "caution."

Meanwhile, someone willing to talk, like Jabarah, got special attention, got rock star treatment, by comparison. Unfortunately, while he was enjoying life in a minimum security facility and glad-handing his captors, he was also collecting home-made weapons and planning to kill his new-found FBI friends.

Mull that over for a moment: while innocent captives in Guantanamo Bay couldn't even speak to a lawyer, a nasty piece of work like Jebarah gets a dangerous degree of special treatment. That's how the United States kicked off the "War on Terror." Six years later, Guantanamo Bay is still in business.

Airpower is for airheads

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.

So says The Washington Post a few days ago, in a credulous article about US counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq. By now, all Americans should be aware that close air support has, at best, a minor role in counterinsurgency. Insurgents don't normally make themselves easy-to-find targets. Even when you locate them, they're unlikely to be found in large numbers, huddled together in easy-to-bomb clumps. And, of course, there's the continued problem of political backlash from bombing suspected guerrilla locations, since bystanders often lose the property, their limbs, or their lives during the attack.

A five-fold increase in air-to-ground attacks is not, therefore, a sign of progress. It's a sign of desperation, the only measure that the US military has--particularly given the pressure for results in the recent escalation.

Since the insurgent groups are not complete morons, they have taken countermeasures, after years of fighting, to blunt US airpower. Not every group is as smart as every other group, but in general, you won't find them marching around the Iraqi countryside in large groups, waiting to be annihilated.

Any weapons caches or bomb factories are also dispersed enough so that no single attack, or even a series of attacks, will completely eliminate them. Even if the attacks are the result of better intelligence, is bombing a safehouse used by the Army of the Mahdi or Al Qaeda in Iraq (these groups have names, by the way) the best way to get rid of them? Or even start a clear-and-secure operation against them?

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University who studies the Iraq war, said airstrikes rose in 2007 because of a combination of increased U.S. operations and a realization that air power can have a strong psychological effect on the enemy.

"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."

Apparently, we are fighting a war against insurgents who don't read the newspapers, or are too stupid to draw conclusions about the staying power of the United States. Therefore, no amount of "announcing our presence to the adversary" matters if the guerrillas conclude they can out-wait the United States and the Iraqi government.

If, instead of "announcing our presence," the air strikes are intended to knock some Sunni and Shi'ite insurgent groups temporarily off-balance, while Iraqi forces assume larger operational responsibility, why not just say it? More corporate PR-ish announcements merely corrode trust between the US government and the electorate that much further.

Training day(s)

I'm at newbie job training the next couple of days, so I won't be posting much. Don't worry, I'll be back soon.

The Syrian mystery deepens

What was the Syrian site that the Israelis bombed? And why are the Syrians rebuilding it?