Armchair Generalist

Casual Fridays

I don't have any Lady Gaga songs on my iPod, but the visual image of Christopher Walken and Cartman singing with her is pretty damn funny.

WMDs Are Never The Answer

Einfach Toll!

In which I get to use the very little German I remember from high school...

Queen of Idiot America

I sincerely wanted to resist any comment on Sarah Palin and her book tour (sponsored in part by Faux News), but I just have to say, now I recognize that her fan base really does like the fact that she is just like them - completely devoid of any ability to understand public issues or the politics that drive them. Yep, just like them, except for the big disparity in income and that she's successfully cashed in on her looks to get ahead. As Andrew Sullivan notes, "She is the Carrie Prejean of politics; and like the Ailes-tested fembots on Fox News."

Ah well. Her 15 minutes will fade, along with her prom queen looks.

How Many More for Afghanistan?

Spencer Ackerman has done a yeoman's job digging into the details as to whether the 40-44,000 troop estimate by Gen. McChrystal is even realistic to consider, when one counts the number of troops still in Iraq and Gen. Odierno's glacially slow deployment out of that country, the number of troops who have just returned from Iraq or Afghanistan (or Kosovo or the Phillipines or Egypt or any number of other deployments), numbers of troops assigned in Germany and S. Korea, and the number of troops that are left available. It's a pretty close thing.

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

There will undoubtably be a Marine regiment or two included in the mix, but (for all the noise and thunder) the Marines are a small part of the overall "boots on the ground" needed by McChrystal's projection. You can't count on increases from NATO - the Brits may throw another 500 troops into the mix, Germany just announced that its troops would stay another year but didn't commit to increases, and Canada's counting on next year being its last. I sincerely doubt that the other countries are going to do anything different. And I am sure not going to count onany sudden near-term increase of professionalism or competency in the Afgan army.

So my question is this: Did McChrystal select, and the Joint Chiefs endorse, a 40-44,000 troop increase in Afghanistan because it was the right number, or because it was in fact the upper limit of available active duty troops (assuming that the White House will not ask Congress to authorize the call up of more Reserves and National Guard units)? The authorized increase in troops that Congress allowed a few years ago isn't going to kick in enough replacements to really count in any significant way. As I and others have noted, increasing the US troop strength to 102,000 or so still is going to be insufficient to be successful in securing Afghanistan in any time less than several years. If this is the upper limit, that there will be no other active troops available in brigade-size units, then we're really limiting our strategic options to "influence" anyone else in the world.

This is probably a good indication of why the White House is really trying to understand what the options are and what the implications are. As Mark Grimsley notes, there is a general consensus that there is no need for a quick decision in a military sense, given that the situation is stable - AQ is contained, the Taliban aren't about to take Kabul, and our troops aren't on the edge of re-directing the Taliban's growth any time soon.

The real division of opinion is about whether completion of the strategic review is time urgent in a political sense.  Does the length of the review reflect deliberation or vacillation, strength or weakness?  Where people come down on this essentially reflects their opinion of Obama. 

Which is why the Republicans are already set to take cheap shots at the White House no matter what the decision is, and despite any rationale for the final direction that President Obama identifies. I can understand Obama's focus on the economy and on health care - these domestic issues capture the attention of the public and he needs the political capital from the presidential election that is running out.  But now we're finally in that point in time where Obama will have to announce his final decision. There's a lot riding on this decision, and I hope that Obama has the sense to identify his exit strategy and timeframe as justification for that decision.

Winning Afghanistan - Just Like Winning Vietnam

Rob Farley points to a Small Wars Journal article by COL Gian Gentile, where he proposes a "better understanding of the Vietnam War." Gentile is concerned that the COINdanistas are using the Vietnam conflict as an excuse to say "if they let us fight the way we want, then we would have won." Says Gentile:

The United States lost the war in Vietnam not because it didn’t get Coin, or screwed up at the tactical level of war, but because it failed at Strategy.  As the Chinese philosopher of War Sun Tzu most eloquently stated a long time ago but still rings true today; “strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory,” but “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”  In Vietnam because the United States failed at strategy and because the Vietnamese communist enemy wanted victory more, there was nothing but noise.  It is within that greater context of Sun Tzu’s noise that these flawed histories of Vietnam (for example Sorley’s A Better War; Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam; and Nagl’s, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) operate and flourish. 

Rob suggests that General Petraeus would have never succeeded in pushing COIN during Vietnam because the strategy as well as the tactics were faulty, and that the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union precluded any discussion of diminishing the military's conventional power. It's a pretty good theory. 

Of additional interest is Rob's suggestion that General Petraeus's obsessive physical fitness behavior is deliberately at such a high level because he had to convince the promotion boards that his egg-headed behavior shouldn't be used to hold him back from promotion from field grade to general officer. I think he's right on target with that, too. Throw General McChrystal into that mix as well. 

Afghanistan Corruption - Out of Control

So let's talk about this great government in Kabul that we're trying to prop up with the billions of dollars from the US treasury. First we can talk about the mansions in Kabul, where simple government officials making a few hundred dollars a month live like princes.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Afghans have a name for the huge, gaudy mansions that have sprung up in Kabul's wealthy Sherpur neighborhood since 2001. They call them "poppy palaces."
 -------------
 Cronyism, graft and the flourishing drug trade have destroyed public confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai and contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban by driving disaffected Afghans to side with insurgents and protecting an important source of their funding.

Then there's the recent Transparency International study that placed Afghanistan next to last in the world in the list of corrupt nations (Somalia beat Afghanistan out for the most corrupt nation). Oh, and here's a neat story - an Afghan minister who accepted a $30 million payment to give favors in a massive mining project. He makes Rep. Jefferson (D-LA) look like an amateur. 

In the case of the minister of mines, there is a "high degree of certainty," the U.S. official said, that the alleged payment to Mohammad Ibrahim Adel was made in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, within a month of December 2007, when the state-run China Metallurgical Group Corp. received the contract for a $2.9 billion project to extract copper from the Aynak deposit in Logar province. Aynak is considered one of the largest unexploited copper deposits in the world.

The selection of the Chinese firm, known as MCC, has angered some Afghan and American officials who worked on the bidding process with Adel. They say he was biased toward the company and did not give a fair hearing to the proposals of Western firms. 

But don't worry, because President Karzai - you know, the guy who won based on a corrupted election process - is going to clean everything up with a new anti-corruption unit. Count on it. That will set the stage for a massive troop surge by the United States to secure the country - because the Afghani army isn't capable of doing anything. Tell me how this is a recipe for success... 

Professionals Discuss Logistics

Paul McLeary points out a little problem with the Afghan army - they never developed logistics and combat service support units for their combat brigades.

Most troublesome for the ability of the ANA to operate independently of NATO forces is the issue of logistics. At its core, logistics is a function of not planning, Formica said, and when it comes to Afghan forces, “typically at most levels they don’t plan well, they’re more spontaneous.” While the ANA has a system for resupply in place, Formica says that “we want to force that system to work. We’ve asked the mentors along the chain to work with them at each level to try to force it to work. The reality on the ground is when you get ready to go do an op, if they don’t have it and we can give it to them we give it to them so we can go do the op. But it would be a lot worse to just sit on the FOB and not do ops.”

This is something I heard from the American mentors on the ground during my embed in September, and they weren’t happy about it. The ANA regularly will not think through what they might need—water, ammunition, etc.—for a long mission, because they know their American mentors will simply give it to them if they need it. After several months of this, the Embedded Training Team for the 2/1 Kandak in Khost decided to practice some tough love, and if the Afghans don’t bring enough water, they would simply refuse to give them theirs, trying and hammer home the lesson that planning for a mission is just as important as leaving the gate and executing it. The Team had some success with the method, and after a while the ANA started to bring their own supplies on missions. Still, their overall planning for missions was lackluster, but with the 2/1 Kandak at least, it was slowly getting better. 

Didn't we just go through this with the Iraqi army? Did no one consider that there just might be the same need for the Afghan army? Or is it that all of our US Army advisors are amateurs who never considered the need to form logistics units for the Afghans? Ridiculous.

William Kristol is a Huge Asshat

Now I am probably not telling you anything new in this title, but when I saw this op-ed by William Kristol in his Weekly Standard magazine (hat tip to Matt Y), I just suddenly got this pounding headache and resulting furious reaction.

In areas where policies are still being debated--in foreign policy in particular--conservatives need to keep urging Obama to do the right thing. We are disgusted with Obama's irresoluteness on Afghanistan. But we continue to urge that he side with the experienced military leaders he's been fortunate to inherit against the second-guessing of political hacks (and of failed ex-generals turned political hacks). We conservatives want American soldiers to win wars, American interests to prevail, and American principles to flourish. We want the bad guys to lose. We're happy to work with President Obama to defeat them--and we only wish he shared our clarity and urgency about accomplishing that task.

That is to say, Obama should only listen to active duty generals like Petraus (USCENTCOM), Odierno (Iraq), and McChrystal (Afghanistan), not "failed ex-generals turned political hacks" such as former generals Karl Eikenberry (US Ambassador to Afghanistan) and James Jones (National Security Advisor). The latter have, of course, counseled caution before engaging deeper into Afghanistan. To be more specific, the Republican political line seems to be "yeah, we always do what our generals tell us to do - so long as their statements support indefinitely continuing the wars in the Middle East." What a ridiculous little man he is.

As far as Kristol's other statement - he wants American soldiers to win wars and American interests to prevail - I really want to haul back and punch him hard in the stomach. If you cared one iota about the American soldier, you slime, you base villain, you would have been pestering the CheneyBush administration as to its inability to put adequate numbers of American troops into Iraq and Afghanistan and its refusal to grow the military force to the numbers required for a long post-war occupation. Now we have military families breaking up, military suicide rates going ever upward, promotions for any officer with a pulse, military modernization programs on hold because of mounting operational costs, and a trillion-dollar bill that was never adequately planned for largely due to the CheneyBush administration's inability to close the deal after eight years of continued combat.

You clearly have no respect for the American soldier or for American interests. In fact, if you were working directly against the American soldier and American interests, you could not be doing a better job. You piece of shit.

"WMDs" in Australia

Australian government officials announced the discovery of a World War 2-era cache of mustard-filled 105-mm artillery shells last week. It's causing a bit of a stir, but then again, it's just mustard agent and they're not leaking. Still, a bit of historical interest here as to where they came from and how they are going to be disposed of.

THE Defence Department yesterday ducked questions about a deadly cache of mustard gas discovered at a former United States’ military depot near Columboola between Chinchilla and Miles.
---------
A spokesman said 144 unexploded shells, some containing the deadly mustard gas agent Mustard H, were found during a survey commissioned by coal mining company Syntech Resources Pty Ltd a few months ago.

“Defence technicians attended to the items and using specialist equipment were able to confirm that at least three of these munitions contained a Mustard agent,” the spokesman said.

“The munitions are securely and safely stored and are not a hazard in their current state.”

The UN inspectors are on the way to check it out - we can't have the Aussies threatening New Zealand with chemical weapons, now can we? The US Army's Chemical Materials Agency will probably be on its way as well with a transportable explosives ordnance chamber to dismantle the shells. Funny how those old chemical weapons keep popping up in southeast Asia.

I Want a New Drug

Story in the Washington Post yesterday talks about a new anthrax drug, intended for treatment after exposure to the disease. Only problem is that the FDA is taking its own sweet time in approving the drug. But that hasn't stopped the DHHS from ordering a few thousand doses from Human Genome Sciences, just in case of the massive bioterrorist incident that everyone is expecting any day now.

The drug is designed to help patients who have already become infected with anthrax. People exposed to the disease through inhalation may not realize they have become infected until it is too late for antibiotics alone to be effective. Raxibacumab, also known as ABthrax, is designed to target anthrax toxins after they are released into the body.

Even though raxibacumab has yet to receive final FDA approval, it already is bringing in revenue for HGS, thanks to U.S. government purchases of the drug for an emergency stockpile.

Moskowitz said that it is not unusual for the government to begin to accumulate a drug with this type of use before it is approved. "It doesn't necessarily require approval to be stockpiled," he said.

In the first half of 2009, the drug brought in $162.7 million for HGS. Under the terms of its deal with the government, the company would make an additional $10 million when the drug receives FDA approval.

In April, HGS delivered 20,000 doses of raxibacumab to the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile under a federal contract. HGS received a second order in July for 45,000 doses of the drug, to be delivered over three years.

Well I certainly hope it works. Under the current BioShield legislation, you can't sue the government or the company if the drug doesn't work or has some side effects when used in "emergency" situations. So, the five billion dollars that GW Bush committed for this program has encouraged drug development for exactly two biological warfare agents in five years. That means there are only ten or so BW agents to address. So no worries, huh? 

The Real "Breaker" Morant

Courtesy of Kings of War, I find the original source of the movie "Breaker Morant" is this book, Scapegoats of the Empire. The full text is available at the link. The movie is actually quite faithful to the screenplay, which surprises me for some reason. I thought the movie was more directed toward criticism of the Vietnam War, but I guess the Boer War had a similar story. The book is written by a colleague of Morant. Lieutenant Morant was an English gentleman who had moved to Australia, and he drove and broke horses, thus "Breaker" Morant. Interesting passage here about midway through the book:

The more civilised the foe we deal with the more chivalric the methods of warfare, and the brutal element is absent or rarely apparent. But when the civilised rules and customs of war are departed from by one side, reprisals follow from the other, and then the bad, the bitter, the revengeful side of war is seen. If in every war, especially guerilla war, officers and men who committed reprisals were to be brought up and tried as murderers, court-martials might be kept going all the year. Such might be the case in the present war, if all the reprisals, summary executions, slaughters, were dragged before formal courts, argued over by counsel and prosecutor as to points of law, and all the gruesome details exposed to the light of day.

We cannot judge such matters fairly unless we place ourselves amidst the same surroundings, and with the same provocations as obtained with the men whose actions are to be tried. What are our irregular troops for? To ride down, harry, and shoot the enemy, and I submit, if the latter deserve it, to adopt strong retaliatory measures. These irregular combatants of the army are really charged now with the bulk of the fighting, and if they are to be restrained and tied down by strict rules, such as might obtain were they fighting French or German soldiers instead of guerillas, then the sooner they are recalled from the field the better, or, at any rate, let definite instructions be issued for their guidance. Do not let them have indefinite, hazy instructions as to what they may do. Do not let us have officers reprimanded by their seniors for hampering the column with prisoners, and at another time, and another place, haul them up as murderers because they do the opposite. I fear there is a great deal of rather mawkish sentimentality about some of these Boer bands, who do so much to keep this prolonged war going in spite of the marvellously good treatment the British have extended towards their people, wives and children.

Maybe in addition to the books about the French military's actions in Algeria, our soldiers ought to consider the events taking place during the Boer War as well. 

Deep Thoughts

If you have an American flag flying in the background of your video, people will be entranced and ignore the blatant hypocrisy of your message. Really!

Evidence of 4GW

Peter at The Strategist has voiced some frustration at the discussions over fourth generation warfare - he doesn't think that there is any "there" there. So he's going to talk about it at his blog, try to figure things out. I like the idea, personally - I think it helps answer a lot of things as to how the nexus of military, technology, politics, and culture influence the style of warfighting. There's a good deal of debate on both sides, the conventional Clausewitzeans and the 4GW advocates (although I think even 4GW can be viewed to act along Clausewitz's principles).

So I wandered over to the Duck of Minerva and saw Charli Carpenter's post on tallying collateral damage in conflicts, and it rang a bell in my mind. She has some graphs at the site that you can look at.

So are unintentional civilian deaths trending up or down in absolute terms and / or as a percentage of all civilian deaths? This analysis suggests that collateral damage rather than war crimes now constitute the majority of civilian deaths worldwide, and that the total number of collateral damage deaths is 20 times higher than at the turn of the last century.

The ratio of collateral damage victims to war crimes victims has dramatically increased since the end of the Cold War. According to Downes' dataset, between 1823 and 1900, unintentional deaths constituted 17% of all deaths in war. Since 1990, that number has risen to 59%. 
 --------
 But if these numbers are anywhere close to correct (and I suspect if anything they are conservative) this analysis suggests an urgent need for a rethinking the laws of war designed to protect civilians. In the 1970s, when the Geneva Conventions were hashed out, governments' key concern was to protect civilians from intentional attack. War crimes are dropping in part because international laws against targeting civilians are working. Collateral damage is increasing in part because of the absence of such clear-cut rules. It's time for this to change. 

Here's my theory - the increase of collateral damage can be correlated with the rise of 4GW, because it is a fight between non-state actors and states, where the civilian populace is the venue for warfare. It used to be that the civilians were left out of warfare in 1 and 2GW, but increasingly were involved in 3GW (after 1900). As Charli notes, developing the "laws of war" to protect noncombatants has helped reduce war crimes, but nothing to stop collateral damage.

This is preliminary research, and the statistics need to be checked (in particular, the graph in Charli's post needs to show better resolution in the 1900-1944 period), but I'm kind of excited about this idea. It could represent evidence of the shift from 3GW to 4GW, following World War 2. Or not - but it's still interesting stuff.

Where Does Kilcullen Stand?

It's hard to figure out where David Kilcullen stands in reference to Afghanistan these days. This DoD Buzz post references a UK Guardian article where Kilcullen (quoted as a "key advisor to NATO forces") tries to tell the US government not to take the middle ground. The DoD Buzz post doesn't emphasize this, rather suggesting that Kilcullen is pushing for the troop escalation that General McChrystal wants. But I noticed this:

Kilcullen expressed concern that Obama might deny McChrystal the 40,000 extra troops and split the difference between the four options, the kind of fudge common in domestic politics.

"Time is running out for us to make a decision. We can either put in enough troops to control the environment or we can credibly communicate our intention to leave. Either could work. Splitting the difference is not the way to go," Kilcullen said.

"It feels to me that all these options are dangerously close to the middle ground and we have to consider whether the middle ground is a good place to be. The middle ground is a good place on domestic issues, but not on strategy. You either commit to D-Day and invade the continent or you get Suez. Half-measures end up with Suez. Do it or not do it."

I agree with him on this point, which is comparable to the decisions that LBJ had to make for Vietnam. The middle option seems safe, it's the smart political view, but in reality it doesn't do anything but extend the pain without achieving any forward progress. In the past, Kilcullen has admitted that counterinsurgency can be successful, but it costs a good deal of time, money, and people. I think he's carefully avoiding a strong view on Afghanistan, whether to stay or go, based on his client list. He does say that Obama can't afford to look at Afghanistan as a half-way house.

"That's not the situation we are in. As an analogy, you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending  firemen into harm's way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house. That is my analogy of where we are. Either of those approaches could potentially work."

Well, using Kilcullen's analogy, all I can say is "the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire - we don't need no water let the motherfucker burn. Burn motherfucker, burn." Or we could just continue to pay warlords for protection (who in turn pay the Taliban) along with the drug lords and Pakistan's ISI, and let's not forget the $1 million per added soldier deploying to Afghanistan. And then people wonder why we're spending so much and not achieving any progress - not that Congress minds wasting billions of dollars of tax money, as long as it's on military projects and not on health care. It's as if we're trying to buy our way out of Afghanistan instead of win.