Thursday, December 30, 2004

Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum!

No, not Izzy... I just finished reading Michael Mandelbaum's The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do and was pleasantly surprised. As a sports fan, particularly baseball, and as someone interested in the literature of "strategic culture," this title interested me. You see Mandelbaum is also a bit of a sports nut as well as a leading American analyst of foreign affairs. In this book, Mandelbaum surveys baseball, football, and basketball and compares them with American tendencies from the agrarian, industrial, and information ages. It reads a tad "pop sociology" in places, but all-in-all I thought he offered some useful insights.

I am working on something now that will illustrate American geostrategic culture using some sports analogies. When I complete that, I'll come back and lay out some more details. In the meantime, if you enjoy sports and foreign policy, Mandelbaum's book is time well spent.

Monday, December 27, 2004

Thinking Outside the Box, but Staying within the Circle

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson contend in the current issue of The National Interest that the task of assisting the government with contemplating, conceptualizing, and creating a new grand strategy for the global war on terrorism is too important to be left to academics or think tanks. Their advice is to establish a new Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC; eg. RAND, the Institute for Defense Analyses, the CNA Corporation, etc.) or draw together individuals from preexisting FFRDCs to work on these issues.
This recommendation would certainly make things much easier from the vantage point of producing classified research and allowing more open access to policymakers, but something about it seems limiting to me. (Although this may perhaps be because I work for a think tank....) Instead, I think we need to foster more public and private partnerships utilizing federal research and private philanthropic dollars to build a cadre of educated and informed citizens across ideological lines to be able to work to think, write, and advise about the global war on terrorism whether it be in academia, think tanks, the military, civilian agencies, or non-governmental organizations. This would not preclude the establishment of an FFRDC, I'd just hate to see the government or policymakers self-limit themselves to particular channels of analysis.

Non-Anonymous Prescriptions

Michael Scheuer (the artist formerly known as Anonymous) has a piece worth reading in today's Washington Times. He starts off by praising the Bush Administration for not taking Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff to task during the latter's recent visit to Washington, but then admonishes the Administration for relying too much upon surrogates, such as the Pakistanis, to achieve objectives for the Unites States. In particular:

So before Musharraf critics find their voices, it is worth recalling that America's dependence on Pakistan is part necessity and part Cold-War leftover. Necessity because of geography — Pakistan abuts Afghanistan — and leftover because we are asking Pakistan and many other countries to do our dirty work. The Cold War era was pre-eminently one in which America and the Soviet Union had others do their dirty work: We backed the Contras, Moscow backed the brothers Ortega; we backed the South Vietnamese, Moscow and Beijing backed the north; we supported Jonas Savimbi, the Afghan mujahedin and a collection of Cambodian groups, while Moscow backed their opponents. We committed money and political support, our surrogates contributed blood.

This arrangement suited the Cold War era because it keptnuclearswords sheathed. Today it is a recipe for disaster. The pressures and realities of the Cold War are gone, and with them the acceptedparametersin which armed conflict occurs. Cursed with an abject fear of losing the lives of U.S. soldiers, Washington since 1988 has continued to depend on others to do our dirty work. First, Iraqi Shias and U.N. sanctions were to defeat Saddam after we failed to finish the firstGulfwar (1991-2003); then the Saudis were going to capture bin Laden so we did not have to risk CIA officers (1998); and then Afghan warlords were going to capture bin Laden for us at Tora Bora (2001). Next, Hamid Karzai and the Northern Alliance were to win the war and install an Afghan democracy (2003-present); then Mr. Musharraf's Pakistan was going to capture bin Laden for us (2001-04); and, in the future, a rebuilt Iraqi army is to win the insurgency in Iraq (2003-?).

Simply put, the thinking that expects others to do our dirty — and very bloody — work should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If America is to win its worldwide battle with Islamist insurgents and terrorists, it will have to do its own dirty work whenever it has a chance to do so, even at the cost of heavier human casualties than we have suffered to date. This is not to say we do not need allies, for we surely do. What we need, however, is a consistently commonsense perspective that sees that no two nations have identical national interests; that no country will ever do all we want; and that to survive we must act with U.S. military and CIA assets whenever a chance arises, even if supporting intelligence is not perfect. This modus operandi will take a steady application of moral courage at a level unseen in Washington for 15 years.

In weighing the foregoing, readers might ask themselves two questions: 1) How can it be that Pakistan's military has suffered far more casualties than U.S. forces in the war on bin Laden?; and 2) Whatever happened to the "Major 2004 Afghan Spring Offensive" that the Pentagon's multi-starred general-bureaucrats leaked news of to the media back in January 2004? At least one answer to each question is that our governing elites are still desperate to find others to do our dirty work.

This is an important discussion to be having. During the run-up to the 2004 Presidential Election here in the States much was made about the reliance upon proxies at Tora Bora. I have said before in print that the U.S. should rely more upon its own organic punitive strike capabilities, but a case such as Pakistan raises questions. For instance, is it better to use only U.S. means to achieve presumably, but not necessarily, better tactical/operational/strategic outcomes on the ground in Pakistan, but in doing so massively de-stabilize Musharaff's leadership in Peshawar? Or, is it better to have a partner who is willing to show political courage in the face of massive domestic opposition, but have to deal with sub-optimized tactical/operational/strategic performance as a tradeoff? When one factors in Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons, the possibility of a major theatre war with New Delhi, and the fragility of Karzai's hold on the reigns of government in Kabul, my thinking tends towards favoring sub-optimized performance from a genuine partner.
The global war on terrorism ensures that there is, and will continue to be, plenty of "dirty work" to go around. Depending on U.S. strategic interests there will certainly be times when we must do the dirty work ourselves, other times when our interests dictate that we farm it out, and still other times where we divide the tasks between ourselves and others.



Saturday, December 25, 2004

E Ticket Ride in Fantasyland

If you're going to go for a ride in fantasyland, you might as well go big.

Tom Ricks has a piece in the Washington Post today which I sort of like to think of as a Very Special Christmas Edition of "What Were You Morons Thinking?" In truth, there's not much new here. It's just another voice telling us what we've heard before:

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.
The difference, as Ricks notes is:

Similar criticisms have been made before, but until now they have not been stated so authoritatively and publicly by a military insider positioned to be familiar with top-secret planning. During the period in question, from April to June 2003, Wilson was a researcher for the Army's Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group. Then, from July 2003 to March 2004, he was the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division, which was stationed in northern Iraq.
It is only a matter of time before some General makes a comment to the effect of, "Well, Major Wilson's paper is interesting, and it's a good effort by one of our brightest junior officers, but it reflects his youth and inexperience." What is interesting here is that Williams was the Chief Planner for the 101st. Presumably he knows what came in his plans shop from higher. When we start seeing rebuttals, it would do well to keep in mind that at least one other division had a similar experience:

3ID (M) transitioned into Phase IV SASO with no plan from higher headquarters. There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring the judicial system was operational. In retrospect, perhaps division planners should have been instructed to identify and address these issues earlier, given the likelihood that higher would not provide such information.
Why?

General: Pentagon Fretted About Postwar Planning
USA Today, November 6, 2003, Pg. 12

The Bush administration put off much of the planning for the aftermath of a war in Iraq out of concern that such planning could precipitate war, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress.

"We did not want to have planning for the postwar make the war inevitable," Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace told the House of Representatives' Armed Services Committee.



Not just a river in Eqypt

Denial, according to Tony Cordesman of CSIS, is also a method of Counter Insurgency Warfare.

As late as July 2004, the Administration’s senior spokesmen still seemed to live in a fantasyland in terms of their public announcements, perception of the growing Iraqi hostility to the use of Coalition forces, and the size of the threat. They were still talking about a core insurgent force of only 5,000, when many Coalition experts on the ground in Iraq saw the core as at least 12,000-16,000.

Such US estimates of the core structure of the Iraqi insurgency also understated the problem, even if the figures had been accurate. From the start, there were many part-time insurgents and criminals who worked with insurgents. In some areas, volunteers could be quickly recruited and trained, both for street fighting and terrorist and sabotage missions. As in most insurgencies, “sympathizers” within the Iraqi government and Iraqi forces, as well as the Iraqis working for the Coalition, media, and NGOs, often provided excellent human intelligence without violently taking part in the insurgency. Saboteurs can readily operate within the government and every aspect of the Iraqi economy.

The piece is not long – 23 pages – but it’s worth reading. Or rather, I think it’s worth reading because it corresponds nicely to my own way of thinking about the situation and I feed on that sort of self-affirmation. It’s fun to compare Cordesman here:

These Ba’ath groups are not generally “former regime loyalists,” but rather Sunni nationalists involved in a struggle for current power.

To the Wall Street Journal editorial board in “The Enemy in Plain View" here:

"[The killing of the election workers in Baghdad] ought to put to rest the canard that what we are facing in Iraq is some kind of "nationalist" uprising opposed to U.S. occupation. The genuine Iraqi patriots are those risking their lives to rebuild their country and prepare for elections. They are being threatened, and murdered, by members and allies of the old regime who want to restore Sunni Baathist political domination. Or to put it more bluntly, we haven't yet defeated Saddam Hussein's regime."

Talk about fantasyland. Does this sort of thing explain these poll results?

Opinion is even more sharply divided over the outcome of elections. Seven in 10 Democrats and five in nine independents believe elections will not produce a stable government in Iraq, while more than two-thirds of Republicans believe they will.

But I distract myself. Anyhooo, that difference matters, because it then influences how you combat the insurgency. As I wrote elsewhere last week, discussing the pull out of the major U.S. contractor because they couldn’t manage the security challenge, a lot of people were focusing on the deteriorating security aspect to this piece. And very rightly so. The security challenge is a problem, no doubt. But how about the departure of these contractors? Is that a problem? Well, it is if you are like Cordesman and believe that we are facing an insurgency in Iraq that draws recruits from pools of disaffected Iraqis because as long as those Iraqis are without the basics and without jobs they’re going to be prime candidates to join the ranks of the insurgents.

If, however, like the WSJ, you see the Iraqi enemy as a finite number of die-hard Baathists, the last gasp of the Saddam Regime, then the pull out of contractors shouldn't present that much of a strategic problem. If that were the case, couldn't we just suspend reconstruction efforts and just focus on finishing killing leftovers from the regime, get that done with, and then return to reconstruction tasks? Wouldn't everything else naturally fall into place? (As an aside - you ever notice how estimates of enemy strength never seem to fall by anything near the estimated amount of enemy killed. Why is that?). Sure it might disappoint the Iraqis waiting for the water and power to be turned back on, but if this isn't a nationalist, or perhaps better "popular" uprising, then what's the strategic cost? I mean, it's not like your random non-regime-die-hard Iraqi would be inclined pick up arms, right? And then we could turn to reconstruction in a more peaceful environment and probably complete projects faster in the long run anyway.

But my money is on Cordesman's assessment.

Friday, December 24, 2004

Weekend Reading... Perhaps

In case anyone is bored over the holiday weekend, take a look at the most current issues of Military Review and Naval War College Review. You can also take a look at these other quality, free, full-text journals: Parameters, Joint Force Quarterly, Air & Space Power Journal, and the Australian Army Journal.


Thursday, December 23, 2004

Not-so-Pulp Fiction

Instead of giving an account of my favorite books of 2004 a la Anthony, I thought I'd try something a little different. Below is a list of some of my favorite works of fiction dealing with martial and/or security issues--broadly defined. Furthermore, I have teamed the books up to give "perspective clusters." This list is hardly all-inclusive and I welcome any suggections in the comments section below--and Cogs, the Flashman series is in my cart at Amazon, I just need to find the time!

Development and Security. The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick and A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe. Both of these works offer excellent perspectives about political instability and development. See also Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Multatuli.

Military Culture. Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer and Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield. Two quite amazing, but different, accounts of the military ethos and profession of arms.

Civil-Military Relations. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein and A Soldier's Duty: A Novel by Thomas E. Ricks. Read in tandem these books offer an interesting investigation of what constitutes proper civil-military relations and the place of the military in society.

General Interest. Owen Parry's (aka Ralph Peters) historical fiction novels are also quite exceptional. This series follows the exploits of Major Abel Jones, a Welsh immigrant formerly in the Queen's service, throughout the American Civil War. They are written more in the detective genre, so do not expect to be reading about battle after battle.

(Ralph's novels on contemporary and future military affairs are also quite good. While individual mileage may vary, my favorites are Twilight of Heroes and The Devil's Garden. The former book deals with counterdrug operations in South America and the latter deals with the geopolitics of oil in Azerbaijan.)





Monday, December 20, 2004

It Works in Practice, But Will it Work in Theory???

How well do the different schools of international relations (IR) theory do in telling us how the world works? Columbia University's Jack L. Snyder has an interesting article in the November/December 2004 issue of Foreign Policy that attacks this issue. The jist of his piece is that no matter what brand of IR theory one prefers, there are strengths and weaknesses inherent in them all that must be taken into account. This is an important discussion because theory, no matter how much it is dumped upon, always informs policy, even when the practitioner does not explicitly invoke theory. Theory is also important because as Samuel Huntington makes clear in The Soldier and the State (p. vii):

Understanding requires theory; theory requires abstraction; and abstraction requires the simplification and ordering of reality. No theory can explain all the facts…. Obviously, the real world is one of blends, irrationalities, and incongruities; actual personalities, institutions, and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories. Yet neat logical categories are necessary if man is to think profitably about the real world in which he lives and to derive from it lessons for broader application and use. He is forced to generalize about phenomena which never quite operate according to the laws of human reason.

James Kurth also had an interesting take on the state of international relations theory in the fall 1998 issue of The National Interest.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Blame only the civilians at DoD? Not so fast...

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has an essay in the latest Policy Review that will be controversial. His main argument:

The post-invasion phase of the Iraq mission has been the least well-planned American military mission since Somalia in 1993, if not Lebanon in 1983, and its consequences for the nation have been far worse than any set of military mistakes since Vietnam. The U.S. armed forces simply were not prepared for the core task that the United States needed to perform when it destroyed Iraq’s existing government — to provide security, always the first responsibility of any sovereign government or occupier.

The standard explanation for this lack of preparedness among most defense and foreign policy specialists, and the U.S. military as well, is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the rest of the Bush administration insisted on fighting the war with too few troops and too Polyannaish a view of what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. This explanation is largely right. Taken to an extreme, however, it is dangerously wrong. It blames the mistakes of one civilian leader of the Department of Defense, and one particular administration, for a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the field. Under these circumstances, planners and high-ranking officers of the U.S. armed forces were not fulfilling their responsibilities to the Constitution or their own brave fighting men and women by quietly and subserviently deferring to the civilian leadership. Congress might have been expected to do more as well, but in fact it did a considerable amount of work to highlight the issue of post-invasion planning — and in any case, it was not well positioned to critique or improve or even know the intricacies of war plans. On this issue, the country’s primary hope for an effective system of checks and balances on the mistakes of executive branch officials was the U.S. armed forces.

The broad argument of this essay is that the tragedy of Iraq — that one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern military history was followed almost immediately by one of the most incompetently planned occupations — holds a critical lesson for civil-military relations in the United States. The country’s Constitution makes the president commander in chief and requires military leaders to follow his orders. It does not, however, require them to remain mute when poor plans are being prepared. Nor does it require them to remain in uniform when they are asked to undertake actions they know to be unwise or ill-planned.

I think that O'Hanlon is right on the money here. Particularly in regards to the following:
It is of critical importance to the United States that civilians and military personnel share responsibilities. They must not pretend that their jobs can be neatly separated into two broad and distinct bins — high strategy, the primary province of civilians, and military operations, where the uniformed services possess the nation’s principal expertise. There are usually no clear red lines separating strategy from operations. Clausewitz depicted war as a continuation of policy by other means; Sun Tze wrote that the greatest form of military victory was the one that required the least battlefield action. What these observations have in common, from these two great yet very different military theorists, is a recognition that broad strategy and military operations are inherently intertwined.
This ties in closely with the Echevarria essay that I spoke about below, as well as with many other scholars such as the writings of Colin S. Gray.

Positive civil-military conflict, as advocated here by O'Hanlon, and also by scholars such as Sam C. Sarkesian, is essential for effective policy. This will solve only a portion of the problem, however. The U.S. military must also re-think its personnel and force structure assumptions such as the placement of 97% of the Civil Affairs units in the United States Army Reserve. What this means in practise is that with only 3% of the CA force structure in the active component (the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion) there is a very limited production of active duty civil affairs officers that can staff planning cells at the Combatant Commands, let alone work with front-line active duty manuever units. We should not underestimate how this feeds into limiting ourselves to "a way of battle" rather than achieving "a way of war."

Pan Sahel Initiative

Daniel Drezner had an interesting post yesterday about the sometimes forgotten, or at least less reported, Sahel front in the global war on terrorism. Since 2002 the U.S. has been involved with "foreign internal defense" training under the Pan Sahel Initiative. Under this program U.S. Army Special Forces and Marine units have been training selected units from the nations of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad, in the words of the Office of Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, "to protect borders, track movement of people, combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability."

As Drezner's post states, there are geostrategic consequences if the Sahel region were allowed to be used at will for training purposes by Al Qaeda or affiliate groups such as Algeria's Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC). The PSI nations share roughly 4425 miles of border to the north and east with the Maghreb (Western Sahara, Algeria, Libya) and Sudan and roughly 4654 miles of border to the south. To put this in some perspective, the driving distance from Boston to San Diego is “only” 3044 miles. Also, as this map shows, the nations of West Africa could serve as a tempting recruiting ground for Al Qaeda as it morphs and tranforms itself in order to counter or stay ahead of counterterrorism efforts.

I will continue to track this issue.


Tuesday, December 14, 2004

The American Way of Battle

For those interested in reading some background into why the United States has had such a hard time transitioning from the "major combat operations" phase (Phase III) to the politico-military operations phase (Phase IV) of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I highly recommend this monograph. Antulio Echeverria, the director of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, does an excellent job of showing how the United States does not have a "way of war," but rather a "way of battle." In other words, the U.S. military tends to focus too much on the military component of operations without fully placing such operations into a broader, holistic perspective. At 29 pages it is a quick, yet very informative read.