Armchair Generalist

Casual Fridays

My favorite Muppets character...

Why Army Missed Hasan

Obama Endorses Land Mines

In a very small AP article going around, it's been noted that the Obama administration has decided not to join the Ottawa Treaty on Land Mines, continuing the Bush administration's refusal to sign up (along with more than 35 other countries, including China, Iran, North and South Korea, Poland, Russia, Pakistan, India, Egypt and Israel). In effect, every country who is nervous about its neighbor... except for the US govt, who's worried about everyone else.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said yesterday that the administration recently completed a review and decided not to change the Bush-era policy. “We decided that our land mine policy remains in effect,’’ he said.
-------------
Stephen Goose, the director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, said he was surprised by the announcement and called it disappointing. He said that his group had been pushing the administration to conduct a review of its policy but that the administration had given no indication that one was underway.

“If one was already completed, it was not very extensive,’’ he said.

He shouldn't have been surprised. There's little difference between the liberal hawks and the conservative hawks on this issue. It's pretty simple - potential adversaries of the United States have anti-personnel mines, our military doctrine includes the use of anti-personnel mines, and we're expected to fight against larger numbers of enemy forces. I hate to be in agreement with the Heritage Foundation, but the answer isn't giving up land mines, it's making better land mines that minimize "collateral damage." And they're also good for home security...

Lois: Excuse us. We’re having a small problem with home security.
Peter: Do you guys have those round metal things that you bury in the ground, and when you step on them, they explode?
Sales Clerk: Land mines?
Lois and Peter: Land mines!
Peter: It was land mines.
Sales Clerk: Aisle 4.

I'm sure this will be a slow day for blog-surfing, but I wanted to get this post up for timeliness of the topic. Big football day today, go have fun.

Blogger Buddies

David Axe is starring on "Russia Today" and talking about Afghanistan. He looks better on video than Spencer Ackerman or Andrew Exum, but it frightens me that Russia is running a propaganda television show with US newspersons on YouTube.

Speaking of Andrew, he's taking some time off of daily blogging, claiming he doesn't need the heat from psycho trolls out there. I think (and others perhaps) that he's recognizing the challenges in casual blogging and trying to do professional defense consulting at the same time. It's a shame, because he was good at casual blogging and not so good at the professional consulting - yet. The young Jedi hasn't matured.

Former milblogger Phil Carter, who wrote the well-regarded "Intel-Dump," has left the Obama administration after only seven months. He has told Noah Shactman at the Danger Room that it is in fact it is the desire for more family time - not just a cover story.

Sedlitz89 over at MilPub has led a great discussion over military terms and views of war in relation to an AFJ article by William F. Owen. I don't agree with the article (explanation later), but the comments discussion is great.

"Defense and the National Interest" to close up its shop, featuring 4GW and John Boyd commentaries? NOOOOOOOO!!!!! This must not happen.

Giving Thanks

 

Time-Lapse Favs from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

Thankful for sunrises.

Thankful that I'm not President Obama.

That IS the Policy Question

Rick "Ozzie" Nelson at CSIS gets it:

Some analysts said Obama was right to discuss an eventual Afghan military drawdown, especially in light of doubts among Democrats in Congress who could pre-empt him by voting to deny funds for the war effort.

But they stressed this should be seen in context of the long-term Western effort to stabilize the country.

"As the White House moves to the conclusions of their review, I think they have to set those conclusions into the context of the broader game plan," one Western diplomat said.

"It is really important, not just in terms of domestic political considerations but also to make the strategy work in Afghanistan, that we are clear about the changing and evolving nature of Western involvement there."

But others said Obama's talk of an end game could signal a refocusing of U.S. priorities in the conflict: smashing al Qaeda rather than a full reimagining of the Afghan state.

"Are we there to stabilize Afghanistan to turn it into a democracy, or are we there to get al Qaeda, push back the Taliban and then turn it all back to the Afghans? That's the policy question," said Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, an Afghanistan analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Also see his commentary at DoD Buzz, where he suggests that a troop increase will worsen the situation rather than stabilize it.

I Want New Nukes!

Gen. Kevin "Chilly" Chilton, commander of USSTRATCOM, is still voicing his concern that the US government needs to retain its ability to make new nukes in the DOE national labs. And the best way to retain that expertise? Build new nukes, of course...

Of particular concern, Chilton said, is the deterioration of the nation’s nuclear laboratories, which he called “decrepit.” These laboratories must be modernized in order to attract and retain the scientists needed to sustain a weapons program, he said.

He also said that since the U.S. no longer tests nuclear weapons, the nation must continue to invest in an aggressive stockpile management program to ensure that existing weapons remain reliable and safe.

Chilton warned that the community of nuclear experts has become dangerously small and the military has failed to replenish the talent pool since the 1980s and 1990s.

“We have skipped a generation,” he said. “We’ve got to do something about that.”

Unfortunately for Gen. Chilton's argument, the JASON Defense Advisory Group is saying that there really is no need for a replacement for the current nuclear warheads. At the same time, the group also agrees with Chilton that the failure to maintain expertise in the labs is a problem.

All options for extending the life of the nuclear weapons stockpile rely on the continuing maintenance and renewal of expertise … The study team is concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance, and degradation of the work environment.

There ought to be a middle ground here, where young and aspiring nuclear engineers could spend a few years at the lab, researching the work and exploring the aspects of nuclear weapons. Maybe it will be more like a government subsidy, but it would be more worthy than most of the agricultural subsidies.  

Debating the "Freedom Agenda"

In which Andrew Bacevich schools David Frum on strategic defense policy issues. David Frum asks Dr. Bacevich how he would advise Obama (just around 11 minutes in):

What I would say is, Mr. President, you need to stop having meetings about Afghanistan. You need to start having meetings in which your national security team will help you identify what are the core principles that are informing US strategy that will deal with the problem of jihadism. And Mr. President, if you indeed give into this impulse to obsess about Afghanistan, ... then your administration will continue to have no strategy. You'll have a "Long War,"  so-called, he certainly going to run for re-election based on his record in Afghanistan, assuming that he does some variant of the options that are on the table, but he won't have a strategy. And I think that that's a tragedy, for the United States of America, at this stage of the game, to not have a strategy.

From his lips to Obama's ears. Highly recommended.

UK Examines Motives for Iraq War

Ray in the UK sends this short BBC article, which says that the UK government is going to delve into that nebulous mess about why it was so motivated to plunge into Iraq with its partner, the United States. Was the intelligence on WMD solid? Only time will tell.

The UK government's claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction is being probed by the official inquiry into the war.

On its second day of hearings in London, the Iraq inquiry is questioning former senior Foreign Office staff Tim Dowse and William Ehrman.

They will discuss the intelligence available to ministers on Iraq's weapons prior to the US-led invasion.

The inquiry is not expected to report its full findings until 2011.

The reasons for going to war in Iraq - including the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be used within 45 minutes of an order being given - are a long-standing source of controversy.

The above photo is from a 2003 meeting in the British Parliament, where Blair stated that they couldn't question the war's justness. "The future is for us to make in a way that will stand the judgment of history," he said.That judgment is still coming, I think. 

And please, don't deluge me with the usual "well, we all know the intel said it was there, everyone agreed" responses. It's not like this is a new topic. One can only hope for some honesty out of the hearings, some acknowledgment that it was in fact the policy makers who said "well, the intel isn't persuasive enough to overthrow the Iraqi government, but what the hell, let's go in anyway." That kind of honesty wasn't apparent in the US Senate intelligence committee's first report (2004) on the US intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq. That report basically dumped the blame all on the people who wrote the NIEs. There is also part 2 (the INC connection) and part 3 (postwar Iraq findings).

We had to wait until Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) was no longer the chair before we got into the "phase 2" reports in 2007, which are much more honest. There are also the following reports on activities in DOug Feith's office and on how badly the Bush administration officials had twisted the intel in their public statements. That's what led Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV) to say this in 2008:

"It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.   Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.  

 “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence.  But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

I'm not sure that we've had our moment to recognize the "reasons for going to war in Iraq" but at least the official inquiries have been made, the air has been somewhat cleared. Our American attention span is so fleeting, I'm not sure that a majority of the population either cares or understands the difference between bad intel and bad policy judgments. It's all about getting out of Iraq now, isn't it? Who cares why we went into Iraq in the first place, other than the tens of thousands of military personnel's families who have seen their loved ones injured or killed, and the millions who know that the bill for paying for that flawed operation is going to eventually come out of their pockets?

Palin Supporters Just Believe

Honestly, on what planet are these people living?

UPDATE: And it's Palin's commentary on the military and national security issues - such as this one - that really steams me, considering that she has a kid in the military. But hey, not the first time she's used her kids as props.  She obviously got her tips from the CheneyBush team, where it was standard protocol to use the troops as backgrounds for vague statements about "winning the War on Terror," while simultaneously executing really bad defense policy decisions like not resourcing Afghanistan for several years and trying to use planeloads of money as a replacement for operational strategy in Iraq. What a despicable person. And that's the last I intend to say about Palin and her book tour.

A Tale of Two Quagmires

Gordon at Alternative Brain reads an on-line article about Bill Moyers and agrees:

The Nation talks about a show I watched last Friday evening of LBJ's taped phone conversations and Bill Moyers' commentary. Highly recommended as a history lesson. And a warning.

One point of the program, he explained, was to offer viewers "an insight into the mind of one president facing the choice of whether or not to send more and more American soldiers to fight in a far-away and strange place."

But another point was to offer Obama and his aides a caution that only a few wise and worldly senators provided Johnson back in the mid-1960s -- chief among them Oregon's Wayne Morse, about whom Johnson says on one of the tapes: "outside Morse, everybody I talk to says you got to go in..."

Moyers was not making crude or casual analogies.

"Granted," he explained early on, "Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan is not Vietnam and this is now, not then. But listen and you will hear echoes and refrains that resonate today."

Moyers:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on (my em). And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

Video here and transcript here.

Shorter: "You've got to get in or get out. Get in, you're gonna lose. Get out, you're a pussy."

It's kinda like losing a bet on a ball game and then losing it again on the replay. Stupid.

The man has a way with words... I liked it so much, had to reprint it in full.

Beating Up the Retired Generals - Again

The NY Times has joined Tom Ricks and the USA Today in sternly lecturing retired general officers and flag officers (GOFOs) on their ability to get paid as mentors to active duty officers in addition to pensions and often jobs on boards of directors or consulting firms. They call it shameful - I call it well-earned compensation for recognized service and ability. The NY Times editorial says:

There is nothing illegal about the double-dipping. But few people in Congress or elsewhere knew about it until now because there is no requirement to tell anyone, even the Pentagon. As Pentagon advisers, mentors are paid hundreds of dollars an hour for offering counsel to former colleagues on war games and other specialties. As defense contract consultants, they can make considerably more. It’s time to closely manage the retirees’ good deal, documented in a report by USA Today.

Okay, now all you NY Times editors, re-read what you typed there. "There is nothing illegal about the double-dipping." First of all, it's not double-dipping. The GOFOs get a pension based on more than 30 years of military life, moving from town to town, being separated from their families for extended periods. It's what they deserve. Now if a retired military person of any rank can get a job consulting for the government - as many of them do - it's during his/her retirement period. We call it a "second career." There is nothing illegal about telling active duty officers how they were successful in a given situation. You might not be able to tell that from the USA Today articles. The first one was actually pretty balanced - considering.

Marine Gen. James Mattis is the commander of Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command, which pays at least 34 senior mentors to train active-duty generals and admirals. He confirms that mentors who also work for defense clients may pick up information that benefits their private employer, but he believes that's the only way to ensure that top experts are teaching officers.

"If your concern is that we're exposing them to things that would allow them to have an advantage for their company, I doubt if that can be refuted," Mattis says. "I believe that's a reality. The only way to not have that would be to have either amateurs on their boards of directors, or amateurs in our thing."

Imposing "an assumption of distrust and firewalls," could sour retired generals on the mentoring program, Mattis says. "Ultimately it comes down to trust."

What a crime, that active duty officers might want some advice from very qualified and experienced professionals in their field. There's two arguments that the critics put forward. First that because these retired GOFOs are from the military, these people should be giving their knowledge and expertise for free - because the military is a noble, selfless duty to the nation. I think that's bunk. While you're in the military, sure, none of us are thinking "wow, some day we'll cash in on all the miserable conditions and hard work." We do it because we enjoy the challenge, we enjoy the company. 

The second argument is that, of those retired GOFOs who are mentors and are working for defense firms, obviously they are benefitting their firms through their continued contacts with the active duty officers who they mentor. Now the same critics who say that retired GOFOs ought to be noble about offering their services for free say that the same GOFOs can't be trusted to serve on a board of directors and mentor active duty officers. As the article notes ret General Zinni saying, the officers police themselves, and if they were soliciting business or trying to sell something to their contacts in the mentor program, they'd be tossed out of the office. It's not a large community, and everyone bumps into everyone else. 

But now Congress wants to jump in and police the situation. "There has to be some disclosure rules about potential conflict," says Sen. Jack Reed, (D-RI), a former Army ranger. Yeah... I'm going to listen to congresspersons talk about disclosure rules. How many former politicians and former administration officials float through the revolving door from federal service to lobbying firms? How quickly do they run back to their buddies in Congress, begging them to bend the legislation, put in a few lines for their clients? 

Attack the retired GOFOs for their desire to continue working in the defense field? Give me a break. This is a baseless accusation and ridiculous to boot. Show me any evidence of retired GOFOs who are mentors and using that information to benefit their firms, where that firm wouldn't have had a shot at a government contract. Such evidence doesn't exist. And let's not pretend that this lack of transparency doesn't exist for other other advocates and pundits. Time to move past this sniping.

Guns and Butter

Travis Sharp from Nukes and Hazard points out this report from the Institute for Policy Studies that criticizes the Obama administration of not shifting the US security policy away from "business as usual." 

The Obama administration promised “a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.” The sixth yearly Report of the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2010 finds that the promise of resource shifting has not yet been kept. The needle tracking the overall balance of spending on offense (military forces), defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military foreign engagement) stayed stubbornly in place. In the FY 2010 request, like the one before it, 87% of the nation’s security resources were allocated to the tools of military force. This is true even excluding the appropriations for wars the country is currently fighting.

The Task Force on a Unified Security Budget — a project of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies — supports a shift in emphasis toward a different, less militarized approach to U.S. security policy. Expertise among the 18 members of the Task Force, drawn from academia, think tanks and nonpartisan organizations, includes military budgeting and strategy, homeland security, nonproliferation and development.

I like the chart that Travis shows within his post. It's a good visual for the discussion of "guns versus butter," especially considering the very high cost of defense programs these days.

DHS Fails On Rad Detectors - Again

Many of you may be aware that one of the main criticisms of the DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office is its inability to find radiological detectors that can unobtrusively monitor cargo and vehicles that might be concealing a large amount of shielded radioactive material - or a nuclear bomb - without significant false alarms and cost. One solution was to develop expensive radiological detectors using helium 3 - but the problem is, we're running out of quality helium.

Some government agencies, Mr. [Brad] Miller [D-NC] said, did anticipate a crisis, but the Homeland Security Department appears not to have gotten the message.

The department had planned a worldwide network using the new detectors, which were supposed to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers. The government wanted 1,300 to 1,400 machines, which cost $800,000 each, for use in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year.

At the White House, Steve Fetter, an assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the helium 3 problem was short-term because other technologies would be developed. But, he said, while the government had a large surplus of helium 3 at the end of the cold war, “people should have been aware that this was a one-time windfall and was not sustainable.”

The article references an expert who says that the United States and Russia produce 20,000 liters of helium 3 each year, but the demand is 65,000 liters each year. Oops. So we can pick between funding the DNDO's radiological detectors, which search every day for the radioactive materials and nuclear bombs that aren't being smuggled into the country, or we can support vital science and technology efforts that rely on helium 3 for their completion. It's not a hard choice. 

DHS's Mad Fascination with Dirty Bombs

There was a rumor going around about a year or two ago that the DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) was going away, that people were tired of its constant inability to do much more than scatter thousands of radiological detectors around the country and run up millions of dollars in operations costs without any real benefit. But no matter how many times the GAO points out that the DNDO program really is a losing proposition, the government seems to keep funding it. Because gods forbid if there were any criticism of Democrats cutting back on wasteful, poorly performing homeland security projects...

So onward we go, to find that DHS is going to start giving radiological detectors to TSA officials so that they can take long, peaceful bus and train rides across the country. This is no doubt an important investment in homeland security, because it's not a question of if...

"The nuclear, biological, chemical issue is now the most concerning and feared because of its mass-casualty possibilities," said a top federal official familiar with the initiative.

"This expands our capabilities to detect weapons of mass destruction, and it shows the direction we are heading nationally."

The small portable instruments detect radiological and biological particles emitted from materials that may be transported in baggage or personal belongings.

Rail systems in Spain, India and England have recently been targets of wildly bloody terror bombings that killed hundreds of people and wounded thousands of others.

Yes, this is impeccable logic. Since terrorists have been known to plant improvised explosive devices on trains in Europe and South Asia, we need to spend millions on putting rad detectors on trains and buses in the United States. Because... because... it shows that we're deterring those terrorists from doing something worse. Or something like that. More security theater for the uneducated masses, perhaps. Certainly it's not good policy when your preparations for the worst case scenario cause you to ignore more likely and more legitimate problems.

I think the NY Post journalist was a little confused (NY Post? what an impeccable source for news), because I don't know of any detectors that will identify "biological particles emitted from materials." Pretty sure it's just DNDO's hand-held rad monitors being used here. But wow, what an incredible waste of money and time. Still hoping that DHS Secretary Napolitano will do the right thing and take down this insane Maginot Line of rad detectors that are doing nothing but slowing down the influx of trade goods and materials.