Armchair Generalist

Gone Fission

The following posts represent only my personal views prior to May 2, 2011. Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied below are solely those of the author and do not represent the official policy of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the State Department, or any other agency of the Federal government.

Okay, One Last Thought

Just could not resist, one last parting shot. Democrats - not frakkin' anti-war hippies any more. Now maybe we can start thinking about bringing our troops home and rebuilding our military.

This Is Not the End

After six and a half years and with great regret, I must announce the shuttering of "Armchair Generalist." I have accepted a government civilian job with the Department of Homeland Security and will be moving out of the DC metro area in the near future. Unfortunately, the drive to reduce the number of evil contractors in the Defense Department have resulted in the termination of my contract, and I do need a paycheck for just a few more years. My future employer has rules in place that do not allow government civilians to voice opinions that might be misconstrued as government policy or as unfiltered criticism of said policy. So this will be my last post for a while. I will keep this blog up for a little while longer, if just to use the blogroll, but it will not be active (barring any last-minute offers of employment by a major think tank or news organization... ha ha).

I do think that our discussions on improving US national strategy needs to continue. I am learning through bitter experience that a change in political parties in the White House does not necessarily mean an improvement in national security strategy or its employment. The process by which our government develops and implements national security is desperately flawed, and as long as the National Security Staff operates as a short-term crisis group, without any long-term vision, it won't get better. I do understand better the need to discuss national security in terms of realism versus idealism, rather than Dems versus Repubs (thanks to Prof Walt). It's given me an interesting point of reference to examine the execution of military strategy across the globe.

On the WMD side, I also hope that discussions continue on how we can better develop and implement strategies that more effectively address US and international interests. Our discussions are dominated by nuclear weapons advocates and arms control analysts, without much thoughtful discourse by anyone else, and that includes the State Department, DOD, and USSTRATCOM all the way down to the Service staff offices. It's discouraging, but the lack of leadership and vision in this area has severely limited any real progress in the past decade. There is little to no intelligent dialogue on important counterproliferation issues, it's all about "global strike", missile defense, and nonproliferation, and that's a shame.

Our DOD Chem-Bio Defense Program is sorely out of balance and is wallowing in high seas. As a colleague remarked to me, "It's still NBC to the senior leadership - No Body Cares." There's a staggering inability to articulate basic passive defense policy issues and acquisition strategy in the DOD, and confusing the issue with homeland security, toxic industrial chemicals, and emerging infectious diseases has not helped. Our DOD chemical demilitarization program has been a fascinating case of public policy. The Army's main office, using incineration to dispose of 90% of the stockpile, continues to move rapidly toward completing its charter, spending maybe $25-30 billion total. Meanwhile, the ACWA project office, using neutralization to address the remaining 10% of the stockpile, has not started any operations and will breach the Nunn-McCurdy Act again, driving potential costs for the neutralization effort over $10 billion. But nobody cares.

Of course, the only thing I have to cheer me up is that there is so much opportunity for improvements in how the Department of Homeland Security addresses the threat of domestic CBRN incidents. That is to say, it shouldn't mirror DOD's approach just because DOD has a certain set of equipment and history of responding to battlefield WMD threats. And maybe someday, the Department of Justice and FBI will come to realize that their Title 18 definition of WMD really doesn't make any sense at all. One can dream.

I have very much enjoyed the opportunities to discuss national security issues and other topics with the members of the blogosphere community who have stopped by. I hope to continue visiting your excellent blogs in the future and to discuss these issues further. You be careful out there.

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

(J.R.R. Tolkien, LOtR)

Casual Fridays

I have finally finished David Hoffman's "The Dead Hand" - a long read at 480+ pages. Of course, I got sidetracked by "The Hunger Games." This book wasn't what I expected at first. "The Dead Hand" refers to a partially automated process put in place by the Soviet Union to launch its nuclear missiles in the event that an American nuclear strike had disabled or killed all of the Soviet leadership. For a less technological nation, it had a distinctly methodological way of developing strategic forces for employment.

This isn't a book about weapon systems. Although the subtitle is "The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy," there is surprisingly little discussion of the development of the weapons themselves. That's not to say that there isn't any - the majority of the book is about nuclear weapons, and there is talk about some of the larger and more well-known missiles. But most of the talk is between Reagan and Gorbachev (and later, Bush and Yeltsin) recounting their thoughts and fears in approaching arms control talks. This is more a story of the 1980s-1990s arms control talks, not the arms race itself.

Hoffman relies on the two leaders' memoirs and their advisors' notes for the narrative. It's strange in a way that fear drove them toward each other. Reagan was freaked out by a fictional depiction of nuclear war in "The Day After." Gorbachev was upset about Chernobyl and wanted to reign in the military in a time of economic crisis. There is little to no discussion about the actual military strategy or the military point of view regarding nuclear weapons. There's no talk about the US chemical or biological offensive programs - our biological weapons program stopped in 1972, but the chemical weapons program continued until 1991. The Soviets continued their chemical and biological offensive programs through the 1970s and 1980s, even as they denied their existence.

Of course you get to hear about Sverdlovsk anthrax incident in 1979. Ken Alibek's story of his involvement in the biological program is repeated in here, as is a short summary of Vil Mirzayanov and his work on novichok nerve agents. They are not new stories, but Hoffman skillfully weaves them into the overall narrative. A newer story is how Andy Weber, then an arms control analyst and now an assistant secretary of defense, negotiated with Kazakhstan officials to get 600 kilos of highly-enriched uranium out of the country in 1994. Weber also gets involved in examining the former Soviet biological weapons factories in that nation.

 This is a well-researched and well-written book. I would have preferred more talk about the weapon systems and about the US chemical weapons program, but there was already too much information in this book. Little disappointed with the ending and the dire warning about biological weapons as the "new" strategic threat. It's very dense but readable, and packed with footnotes. Lots and lots of talks between people - the success to arms control seems to be personal relationships. Definitely worth a read for the enthusiastic arms control analyst.

Star Wars - the Foreign Film Version

"New" Presidential Appointees

The defense community is buzzing now that the announcement of Leon Panetta to become the next Secretary of Defense (yes, at last, a Democratic president is choosing a Democrat for SecDef, amazing). And most likely, the intel community is going to be talking about having all-star General David Petraeus as its next director (but you won't hear them, they're too covert). Spencer Ackerman has some thoughts here at the Danger Room, here's Jason Fritz at InkSpots with some good analysis, or you can rely on the MSM coverage.

I don't have that much to say about the issue. People note that there are more qualified individuals out there to head the Defense Department and CIA, and they'd be right. But this isn't about hiring the most qualified persons, it's about ensuring that the president's near-term objectives are addressed by stable hands that the president trusts. That means he's not going to go outside for new individuals who might be hung out by partisan debates during the nomination process.

There are those who will suggest that Obama put Petraeus in a government position in order to sideline any ambitions by the general for a 2012 presidential run. These people tend to ignore Petraeus' insistence that he's not really interested in politics as much as the Republicans are interested in a celebrity status retired general running for their ticket. There are others who will suggest that Petraeus will shape up and reform the intelligence community to provide more accurate, timely, and "actionable" intelligence on terrorism, while Panetta will reform the defense community to actually field defense systems on time and transform into a modern 21st century fighting force. These people tend to ignore the unchanging bureaucracy and processes that meticulously grind down any new leadership trends or notions of reform until those leaders move on, beaten down by the system.

No, I think there is a much simpler answer to this uninspiring selection of leaders. Obama does want to clean up the GWB administration's mess in the Middle East during his second term. To do that, he needs to be able to work with Congress on an executable strategy that slowly downsizes our military efforts overseas while increasing the emphasis on spycraft and international cooperation in current conflicts. Panetta can be trusted to skillfully manage the DoD bureaucrats while also getting cooperation from the Congressional committees that might block the administration's objectives. Meanwhile, Petraeus has the experience with counter-terrorism and the intel community to have the credibility to show that the Democratic-led administration isn't a soft, liberal bunch of war-hating hippies.

These assignments do not reflect the best-qualified individuals who were available to lead and/or transform the DoD and CIA, stuck in the twen-cen as they are, but they are the best-qualified individuals to achieve the president's immediate objectives of drawing down in the Middle East and to ensure that he has a good stump platform for his second term ambitions. I think when you hear the nominations for the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and (eventually) Secretary of State, the same pattern will emerge.

Keeping Smallpox Alive

Interesting op-ed by DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the NYT on why the United States isn't likely to destroy its small cache of smallpox virus anytime soon.

We fully agree that these samples should — and eventually will — be destroyed. However, we also recognize that the timing of this destruction will determine whether we continue to live with the risk of the disease re-emerging through deliberate misuse of the virus by others.

Those who advocate immediate destruction would have us believe that another smallpox outbreak is unthinkable. They want us to believe that there is no need to ensure the global community is adequately prepared to deal with an outbreak and that the only risk comes from maintaining the highly secured samples. For these reasons, they argue that the World Health Assembly should set an immediate date for destruction.

It should not. Although keeping the samples may carry a miniscule risk, both the United States and Russia believe the dangers of destroying them now are far greater.
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We have more work to do before these safe and highly effective vaccines and antiviral treatments are fully developed and approved for use. Once they are ready, we intend to share the fruits of this research with the world. Destroying the virus now is merely a symbolic act that would slow our progress and could even stop it completely, leaving the world vulnerable.

Destruction of the last securely stored viruses is an irrevocable action that should occur only when the global community has eliminated the threat of smallpox once and for all. To do any less keeps future generations at risk from the re-emergence of one of the deadliest diseases humanity has ever known. Until this research is complete, we cannot afford to take that risk.

Hey, whatever you have to tell yourself. I don't agree that there is a substantive risk of any nation other than Russia or the United States might re-engineer smallpox from its genetic code in a laboratory. But who knows? I don't fully appreciate the state-of-the-art in biotech, it moves too quickly. But I also don't agree with the peaceniks who think that a world free from smallpox is only a step away, idealy through the destruction of the remaining samples that (ostensibly) are only in secured labs in the United States and Russia.

Keep the virus around as insurance against the unknown. It's not going anywhere, and it doesn't cost much to maintain. What could go wrong?

But Of Course It's a Biothreat

I stopped watching "The Event" because I just couldn't stand the bad acting and the poorly written and (deliberately?) confusing plot. But I understand that "The Event" has introduced the threat of an engineered biological organism that will kill billions!! in an attempt by the Outsiders to prepare the Earth for the arrival of their fellows who are traveling through space. I should have expected it, because every action drama today seems to want to bring in the WMD threat sooner or later. And with all the hysteria over "pandemic flu," biothreats are perfect to get a little "gasp" out of the audience. From a post at io9:

I know epidemics are cliche, but somehow they always bring on the terror. Especially in the hands of a ruthless strategist like Sophia. I loved the opening scenes of the episode, successfully delivering that much-needed X-Files/Fringe feeling, with the autopsy and outbreak of our deadly disease.

My glee was a bit undermined when we learned that the Ebola-like megadisease that Sophia plans to use is actually just the Spanish Flu that killed a bunch of people in 1918 and 1919. First of all, Spanish Flu is just like regular flu - it's much deadlier, but it wouldn't kill you in an instant with gross boils and crap the way this disease did. Second, even before flu vaccines, the Spanish Flu killed only 50 million people. I thought Sophia was aiming to kill at least 2 billion? These days a Spanish Flu outbreak would be terrifying for sure (it's why people were so worried about H1N1 last year, because Spanish was a mutation of that virus). But there's no way it would do the damage Sophia is after.

Sorry - I'm a pandemic geek. My point is that the disease was cool, but I wish they'd just made it some scary mutant mega-SARS or something. My knowledge of reality got in the way of my enjoyment of mass death fantasies.
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As soon as they shut up and dive into the Russian ship where all the Spanish Flu autopsies happened, things get awesome again. Turns out somebody (I guess Sophia, but maybe another group?) has been doing these hush-hush autopsies and now everybody on board has died of something that looks NOTHING LIKE SPANISH FLU. OK, OK, sorry, I will stop complaining about that.

It's so cliche for story-writers in action dramas (film and television) to introduce the plot device of a chemical or biological agent that is SO TERRIBLE that it will wipe out humanity if the perpetrators are not caught within the timeframe of the movie/television season. And while I understand the need for a plot device that is entertaining but not necessarily realistic, I can't help feeling that our national leadership - let alone the general populace - has their fears magnified that the extraordinarily small possibility that such a biothreat event could actually happen, and they ignore the many potential measures that would reduce such an incident to being manageable. Because any preparations for response would cost money, but rhetoric is free.

So we get the ridiculous reports like this one that Very Serious People use to make dramatic statements like "it's not a question of if, but when" bioterrorists or nuclear terrorists hold cities for ransom. Pheh.

Egyptian Activism

 

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Gigi Ibrahim
www.thedailyshow.com
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Gigi Ibrahim helped Egypt rise up against Hosni Mubarak after taking a class at the American University in Cairo. Amazing story. We really could use a better, less hypocritical foreign policy approach to Egypt.

From Glenn Greenwald:

[O]ngoing U.S. actions in that part of the world do little other than sustain -- and even intensify -- anti-U.S. sentiments. That makes democracy the least desirable form of government in those countries from the perspective of the U.S. Government (and it's why I was so skeptical of the claim that we were intervening in Libya for humanitarian reasons and, now, to help bring about regime change and democracy there: real democracy is generally the exact opposite of what the U.S. wants in that region).

Glenn is often to the left of my views, but I will agree with him on this point - the bullshit you hear (from both sides of the aisle) about the United States' desire to promote freedom and democracy has never translated to any genuine desire to improve the lot of the Middle East. It was more engendered to promote stability in the leadership, which has remained stagnant as virtual dictatorships for 30+ years in most of the nations. The Arab public knows it, our leadership knows it, their leadership knows it. So now the "Arab Awakening" happens, and not only does our leadership not have a proper policy in place to work the issue, they're surprised when the Arab street resents US "leadership" in the area.

Defense Spending Primer

Let me highly recommend this post at Secure Nation for anyone who is interested in understanding the basics of defense spending. It's a good starting point for the layperson. I also like the author's point about the fabled defense acquisition wall chart:

The DoD’s guide to understanding the Defense Acquisition process recently won the honor of being crowned the “Pentagon’s Craziest Powerpoint Slide”.  The title is actually a misnomer, as that poster is meant to be mounted on a wall, which is why most acquisition types refer to it simply as “the wall chart”.  The wall chart gives some perspective on why understanding Defense acquisition can be so challenging.  Secretary Gates is widely respected for trying to reform Defense Acquisition, but then again, all of his predecessors since Donald Rumsfeld (the first time) have tried their hands at reform as well.  Here’s hoping he succeeds in clearing things up.

EXACTLY. I like this guy. He makes sense.

Marines Get Down

Mr. X, Meet Mr. Y

People are buzzing about a monograph written by a Navy captain and Marine Corps colonel proposing a new approach to a national security strategy. The article is posted on the Small War Journal with a link to the publication at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, with an introduction by Ann-Marie Slaughter, former State Dept employee under the Obama administration and Princeton University professor.

Today, we find ourselves in a very different strategic environment than that of the last half of the Twentieth Century.  The challenges and opportunities facing us are far more complex, multi-nodal, and interconnected than we could have imagined in 1950.  Rather than narrowly focus on near term risk and solutions for today’s strategic environment, we must recognize the need to take a longer view, a generational view, for the sustainability of our nation’s security and prosperity.  Innovation, flexibility, and resilience are critical characteristics to be cultivated if we are to maintain our competitive edge and leadership role in this century.   To accomplish this, we must take a hard look at our interagency structures, authorities, and funding proportionalities.  We must seek more flexibility in public / private partnerships and more fungibility across departments.  We must provide the means for the functional application of development, diplomacy, and defense rather than continuing to organizationally constrain these tools.  We need to pursue our priorities of education, security, and access to natural resources by adopting sustainability as an organizing concept for a national strategy.  This will require fundamental changes in policy, law, and organization.    

What this calls for is a National Prosperity and Security Act, the modern day equivalent of the National Security Act of 1947.  This National Prosperity and Security Act would: integrate policy across agencies and departments of the Federal government and provide for more effective public/private partnerships; increase the capacity of appropriate government departments and agencies; align Federal policies, taxation, research and development expenditures and regulations to coincide with the goals of sustainability; and, converge domestic and foreign policies toward a common purpose.  Above all, this Act would provide for policy changes that foster and support the innovation and entrepreneurialism of America that are essential to sustain our qualitative growth as a people and a nation.  We need a National Prosperity and Security Act and a clear plan for its application that can serve us as well in this strategic environment, as NSA 47 and NSC 68 served a generation before us. 

I am not sure what to think about this paper. As an admirer of Kennan, I don't appreciate the indirect comparison to his work in the twen-cen. It's a vision of national strategy, maybe I'm just not following its logic. It doesn't help, in my opinion, that Slaughter has to tell you what the strategy does in an executive summary, since it's so hard to follow the text. And I'm not a fan of Slaughter, a true liberal interventionist. Some call this paper "thought provoking." Others will say that there's nothing new here, it's a retread of other ideas. That's not to say it's not worth reading, but it's not going to parallel Kennan's article in its impact.

The one problem with this paper is that it isn't really focused on the military strategy role, despite its being written by two military officers. And I do admire the fact that they were able to look up above their system into the greater policy and strategy realm, but it's one thing to say, "hey, there's a better way to develop the nation's security." It's another to have it be implemented when there are no realists in this administration. Congress, in particular, isn't going to read or heed these recommendations, even thought its members really could use the advice.

Mark Safranski has an interesting "grand strategy" post up at ZenPundit. At the least, it reminds us that there have been a lot of voices on this topic, many of them much more well known and published. Food for thought.

Deep Thoughts

So I suppose NATO was attacking Qadaffi's military complex in Tripoli to "protect civilians"? 

Hi, mission creep. Good to see you again.

SkyNet Apocalypse Has Been Delayed

For those sci-fi geeks out there, you might have noticed that April 21, 2011, has come and gone without SkyNet triggering a global nuclear war. No doubt that the US military's late entry in standing up CyberCom has been a factor in that delay, but have no doubt, Judgement Day is coming.

At the Foreign Policy website, David Rothkopf suggests that SkyNet became operational over Libya with the president's approval to use HK Predator drones against the Libyan government. Tom Ricks wonders why it took so long to use drones against Libya to begin with.

In the Washington Post, Walter Pincus reviews drone use in war and ponders the "game-changing" nature of this technology.

Over at Armed Forces Journal, P.W. Singer laments the lack of appreciation that drones get by the Pentagon bureaucrats.

Last, Spencer Ackerman has found one of the unknowing SkyNet dupes who are going to give drones an artificial intelligence.

My only comment today is that this is all old news to science fiction enthusiasts.

Krauthammer Day

I didn't realize that we were going to make this a national holiday. Maybe we should... Quoth the Krauthammer eight years ago on 22 Apr:

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons [of mass destruction]. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Notes Matt Yglesias, "In a related development, Krauthammer continues to be employed as a major television commentator and newspaper columnist."

Don't forget to celebrate "Mission Accomplished Day" on May 1st.