Armchair Generalist

Deep Thoughts

General David Petraeus is offering military commentary in the commercial breaks of AMC tonight. Isn't there a war going on somewhere? Watching "Heartbreak Ridge" now - a classic.

In Remembrance

Also see this interactive CNN display on our Iraq/Afghanistan war deaths.

Idiot Conservative Pundits

I'm irritated at "Great Satan's Girlfriend" for tricking me into clicking on a link that took me to Daniel Goure's post about how the United States isn't ready to fight the second Korean War because Obama weakened the military too far with his constant addition of funds and support to warfighting in the Middle East. We'll probably win the fight, Goure posits, but only at great cost.

North Korea is perhaps the quintessential hybrid threat that defense analysts today speak so much about. Its capabilities range from nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, millions of infantrymen, hundreds of aircraft (virtually all obsolete but most in working order) and a special operations command of over 100,000. In the last Korean War, northern forces engaged in guerrilla activities throughout the peninsula. This time, Pyongyang might even resort to terrorist attacks in the United States or along the supply lines from the U.S. homeland to the war zone. This kind of war would be a test of the U.S. military’s ability to deal with a so-called hybrid threat.

If Pyongyang chooses to use nuclear weapons, the Obama Administration’s newly-formulated doctrine on nuclear use would receive its first test. It is not clear what kind of punishment the United States could or should inflict on the North if that regime chooses to employ nuclear weapons against us or our allies. We may well wish that the Obama Administration had not truncated deployment of the National Missile Defense system.

Goure is an idiot. Really? A hybrid threat, just because nK has some special forces? I don't think Dr. Goure understands the concept at all. Perhaps he needs to study Israeli operations in Lebanon and Gaza some more. This idea that nK is going to send terrorists into the domestic United States borders on a cheap paperback fiction novel, let alone this idea that it's going to use nukes. Its missiles can barely clear Japan! How in hell's name are they going to range the homeland?

Goure believes that the US Army and Marine Corps need two full years of rest and refit before they're ready to take on combat operations in a second Korean War. I somehow doubt that any field grade military officer with any moderate intelligence will agree with him. And if the ground forces are a little weakened, well I guess it's a good thing that the Navy and Air Force have a strategy for engaging adversarial forces in the Pacific. And why is it that both pundits and news journalists always mention the 28,500 US troops in theater but somehow neglect to mention the half million active duty Republic of Korea ground forces?

Despite all the reports of saber rattling, I don't think nK is coming over the line (and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here). Their leadership knows that it would mean the end of the regime, that China doesn't have its back and S. Korea isn't unprepared. But don't go to the Lexington Institute for any analysis. They don't have a clue.

Many Dems - Not Smart on National Security Either

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) shows the kind of spirit and initiative required to drum some sense into the debate about how long Pres. Obama intends to keep our troops in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there aren't many Democratic politicians willing to stand with him in an election year. Listen to what he says - he's not anti-war, he understands the need for a military and that there is a time and place to use military force. But spending our soldiers' blood and our nation's treasure against unclear objectives and without clear progress toward achievable objectives just isn't wise.

As the war in Afghanistan surpasses the Vietnam war in length and cost, maybe the Dems will find their courage after the mid-terms.

Casual Fridays

I remember hearing this story two years ago - there was this dumb lieutenant writing a milblog about his adventures in Iraq. Like other soldiers who wrote milblogs, higher command didn't like one particular post where he sounded off about how life sucked, and told him to cut it out. He continued journaling though, and now he has a book based on his experience. On the surface, it looks like another "hey I was a platoon leader in Iraq, my guys were great, the Iraqis were strange, the enemy was always there, and then I went home." He smirks a lot and expresses his hate of Powerpoint often. But this book presents more than that. 

Matt Gallagher is LT G, a cavalry officer in charge of a scout platoon in 2-14 CAV, 25th Infantry Division. During his milbogging, he used fake names to talk about his NCOs and troops - SFC Big Country, SSG Bulldog, and Private Hot Wheels, for instance. He also uses these names throughout the book, which threw me off a bit, especially when he uses photographs of his soldiers and identifies them all in the acknowledgements in the back of the book. But I guess that's how he makes the connection between the milblog and the book.

What sets Gallagher's book above other "I was there" Iraq war books is that he doesn't try to preach about what went well and what didn't work. He joined the Army in 2005 and deployed to the desert in 2008, leaving the Army after his one tour. He wasn't interested in a career in the military, and that's okay. That frees him, I think, to talk more about the experience of working with his troops, working with his superiors, and working with the Iraqis during the fifteen months in theater. And what makes it sing is his very eloquent writing that really allows you to identify with his troops, the Iraqis, and the long monotony punctuated by moments of extreme terror.

His initial responsibility was to conduct security patrols in a small village north of Baghdad. Being that this was post-surge, things had settled down but there were still insurgents trying their best to disrupt the fragile civil society. So his troop spends its time talking to the sheiks, working the area, trying to keep it clear of IEDs, just doing the time. His leadership pushed hard for him to commit to an Army career, but when he demonstrated that he wasn't interested, that led to the problems of blogging about it. He refers to Major Moe, Lieutenant Colonel Larry, and Sergeant Major Curley as the sources of his woes, and let's be honest, those of us with prior military time have all had our run-ins with Moes, Larrys, and Curleys. Not all field grades are like that, but there are always those few individuals in your career who made it hard for you to enjoy doing your job.

After about ten months, he gets transferred to a post in 1-27 Infantry Regiment, who's running stability operations near Sadr City in a more populated area. No longer tied to a troop unit, he's working in the operations center, coordinating the patrols, but gets the opportunity to go outside the wire on a few patrols. His experiences with private military contractors, interpreters, and Iraqi military leaders continues to color the narrative with vivid details. He doesn't get political at all - at one point, he does talk about the day after the November 2008 election.

As President-elect Barack Obama strode to the podoum in Chicago to give his election day victory speech, four soldiers and I watched on television from JSS Istalquaal's common area with the light initiates of dawn piercing the glass of the small window in the corner. One of the soldiers, a young black NCO who sat on the couch in front of me, spoke for all of us and to no one in particular at the same time. "Holy shit," he said. "I can't believe this is actually happening."

When the outcome of the election had become clear a few hours earlier, most of the politicially inclined on our JSS called it a night, but a few diehards and I stayed up to watch the victory speech in Grant Park. Such a choice had little to do with my own politics and more to do with the knowledge that history had been made, and since I couldn't participate in it, witnessing it would suffice. Further, we all understood the potency of this moment, as it directly related to our professions as military men: The so-called forever wars we fought in would now actually have an ending.

This book is very much in the spirit of Colby Buzzell's "My War," with the same wry views of military life and a strong ability to connect the reader to a first-person account of the war. It's not going to tell you whether the military is doing the right thing in Iraq, whether Iraq will recover from this "post-conflict" operation, or guide any other platoon leader on what to do and not do in Iraq. It does connect you with the soldiers, though, and brings home the point that, whether you approve of the military operations in the Middle East or not, the boys are all right.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was given this book at no cost by the publisher.

In The Loop - Brilliant

Malcolm Tucker is now my personal fuckin' hero. I really have to get this film.

And when you read about how BP is running operations down in Louisiana, then see this film for the explanation on how it's come to this.

It's The Trend

COIN Symposium Recap

If you've been unaware of the US Army's COIN Symposium at Fort Leavenworth, but want to know what all the hubbub was about, you need to check out the recaps at Travels with Shiloh. Here's a summary of the recaps:

• Recap 1: General overview
• Recap 2: Soviet COIN experience in Afghanistan
• Recap 3: Gentile Strikes Back
• Recap 3.5: "Courageous Restraint"
• Recap 4: The Big Picture
• Recap 4.5: Iago's Comments
• Recap 5: British COIN Perspectives
• Recap 6: Canadian COIN Perspectives
• Recap 7: Marine Corps and COIN
• Recap 8: Support the Tribes or the Central Govt?

You now have your weekend reading assignment. Enjoy.

Repubs - Not Serious About National Security

So after everyone on both sides of the aisle agreed that Liz Cheney's attack on military and civilian lawyers representing Gitmo detainees was pretty despicable, we all thought that the issue was settled. But it seems that some enterprising Republican political staffers are busy inserting language into the defense authorization bill that appears intended to discourage lawyers from representing the detainees. Steve Vladeck reports:

Buried in the depths of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2011(H.R. 5136) is the latest salvo in the war on lawyers. In particular, section 1037 of the Act [page 403 of the PDF], titled "Inspector General Investigation of the Conduct and Practices of Lawyers Representing Individuals Detained at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," instructs the Department of Defense IG to "conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers" who represent clients at Guantánamo and report back to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees within 90 days.

As set forth in the bill, the lawyers subject to such an investigation are military or civilian lawyers for whom there is “reasonable suspicion” to believe that they have:

(A) interfered with the operations of the Department of Defense at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, relating to [non-citizens detained at Guantánamo];

(B) violated any applicable policy of the Department;

(C) violated any law within the exclusive investigative jurisdiction of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense; or

(D) generated any material risk to a member of the Armed Forces of the United States

Under the provision, the IG is required both to report on such conduct and to "identify any actions taken by the Department to address any [such] conduct or practice.”
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Even if this provision doesn’t directly constrain the ability of Guantánamo lawyers to advocate on behalf of their clients, the serious chilling effect that it will likely have, especially at the margins, seems to raise the same concerns identified by the Velazquez Court. Moreover, what is at stake is not merely the First Amendment rights of the lawyers, or the habeas corpus rights of the detainees. As Velazquez suggested, it is the separation of powers itself that is implicated when Congress so directly interferes with constitutionally-protected legal representation. This is not to say that such language wouldn’t survive constitutional challenge, but that, at the very least, it is deeply troubling legally, as well as practically.

I'd really be interested to know what horse's ass inserted this language into the defense authorization bill. Is it too much to ask that we limit language in the defense authorization bill to pertinent military issues? If anything, this ought to strengthen the argument that the Gitmo detainees ought to be tried in civilian courts, where Congress (and in particular, Republican politicians) can't direct the military to reduce the civil rights of these detainees any more than they already have. This is just unsat. Hat tip to Satyam Khanna.

FBI Misuses WMD Term - Again

In a US District court in Dallas, Texas, Hosam Smadi plead guilty to the charge of attempting to use a "weapon of mass destruction" in a sting operation that culminated last September in his parking a fake truck bomb in the garage of a Dallas skyscraper. Thing is, the bomb wasn't functional, let alone a "WMD."

Hosam Smadi parked a sport-utility vehicle in the garage beneath a Dallas skyscraper, activated a timer connected to what he thought was a bomb and used a cell phone to try remotely detonating the explosive he had spent months working to obtain.

Smadi, 19, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, had hoped the bomb would bring down the 60-story building, kill thousands of office workers and create financial havoc.

Instead, he was arrested, having been supplied with a fake truck bomb by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaida operatives.
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When questioned by the judge, Smadi acknowledged leaving what he thought was a truck bomb in a garage beneath the 60-story Fountain Place building in September.

In his signed statement, Smadi said he parked the truck, activated a timer connected to the decoy, then rode away with an undercover agent and waited to watch the explosion.

The FBI said it had been monitoring Smadi after discovering him on an extremist website last year. Investigators said he acted alone and wasn't affiliated with any terrorist organizations.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said Smadi came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2007, but overstayed the time he was allowed to be in the country.

Okay, I'm all for proactive law enforcement, but this is ridiculous. A young guy with depression issues comes into the country, his visa expires, and the best idea that the FBI agents have is to set him up as a Muslim terrorist with explosives that don't work so that they can nab him on a WMD charge and throw him in prison for 30 years. Why didn't they just deport him when they found him in Dallas with an expired visa? If he wasn't connected to any terrorist group and had no prior record, does he deserve a 30-year sentence? This is not justice, it's just stupid.

If there wasn't any active explosive, how in the world does the FBI get away with calling this an "attempted use of a WMD" ? I just don't get it. Something needs to change here.

Wasting Assets

The Obama administration continues to follow the Bush 43 administration's path on national security issues, to the chagrin of progressive defense analysts. There's three recent news events that seem to prove this out. First there's the issue of putting US troops in Poland along with a Patriot air defense unit that isn't really protecting anything.

A contingent of U.S. soldiers has accompanied the air-defense system to an installation at Morag, which stands 37 miles from the Kaliningrad region in Russia. The soldiers are expected to provide training to Polish military personnel on using the Patriot system.
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The battery is expected to remain in Poland for one-month periods four times per year, along with about 150 U.S. soldiers, Reuters reported.

Deployments would continue for two years, AP reported.

What an incredibly dumb deal. I'm not so worried about the Russian government attitude against this capability, but rather that the Obama administration thinks it has to honor this commitment to the Polish government. It's a bribe to make them feel better about hosting a theater missile defense system eight years from now. Does this really make sense? and talking about making little sense, how about sending 1200 National Guardsmen to the south border?

Homeland Security officials said that the troops would provide support to law enforcement officers already working along the border by helping observe and monitor traffic between official crossing points, and would help analyze trafficking patterns in hopes of intercepting illegal drug shipments. They performed similar tasks in an earlier deployment along the border from 2006 to 2008, when they also assisted with road and fence construction. The troops have not been involved directly in intercepting border crossers.

I don't agree with Col Pat Lang that there are going to be issues with border interceptions and posse comitatus - as the NYT article noted, the US government did this before. I'm betting the legal issues have been worked out. But how much good will 1200 troops do on a 2000 mile border? Mind you, I don't agree with Sen. John McCain's request for 6000 troops and the Republican's demand for $2 billion in funds to pay for it. The point ought to be made that adding National Guard troops to the border for a temporary period didn't solve the problem before - it's not going to do it now either. 

Today's Washington Post shows VP Joe Biden promising that the drawdown in Iraq will continue - but stop at 50,000 "advisors," while ramp-ups of US civilian assistance will continue. I'm unsure how this is a change from the Bush 43 strategy, as bad as that was. And Afghanistan continues to be a mess where Obama wants to dig in deeper, instead of critically assessing whether the increased use of US combat forces against an Afghani insurgency that controls large amounts of the country is really going to work. Michael Cohen asks, where's the change?

The US government keep using band-aids to incrementally address systemic problems, and then we're surprised that the band-aids didn't fix them permanently. Even worse, is there no one in the Obama administration's National Security Council that can't figure this out? "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." Figure it out, people.

Living With Less Nukes

Prof Walt nods approvingly at a NYT op-ed by two Air Force civilians who believe that the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal could be reduced to 311 nuclear weapons and still acheive strategic deterrence objectives. Sez Walt:

Actually, I think that number might still be too large, because you only need a very small handful of nuclear weapons (e.g., maybe a dozen?) to inflict a level of damage that no political leader could tolerate. As former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy famously wrote:

A decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable."

American policymakers clearly understand the compelling logic of minimum deterrence, or else they wouldn't be so worried when states like North Korea or (maybe) Iran seek to join the nuclear club. U.S. leaders recognize that even a handful of nuclear weapons in the hands of a hostile country constrains what we can do to that country (which is of course why some states want to get them in the first place). But if a very small number of weapons can induce such sobriety on our part, why exactly do we need thousands, especially when our conventional forces are already far stronger than any other country on the planet?

Of course, the fact that deterrence isn't sensitive to the actual number of weapons also implies that having more weapons than we need isn't that dangerous, provided that you are very, very certain that you won't lose one, that your large arsenal won't encourage others with less reliable security arrangements to build up, and provided you have lots of money to pay for an arsenal you don't really need. But since I like saving money, would prefer that other states either didn't get nuclear weapons or kept their own arsenals small (and therefore easy to guard), and believe that decreasing the number of warheads in the world is an important step in improving overall nuclear security, I think Schaub and Forsythe's article should be taken seriously.

Although I greatly admire Walt's realistic foreign policy analysis, I think he really misses the boat here and is unwisely influenced by the "Global Zero" crowd's mentality. The one point where the two authors of the NYT op-ed fail is where they have analytically determined an "adequate" capability to attack and destroy an adversary's nuclear weapons and related command-and-control facilities. That's one model of nuclear deterrence we call "counterforce," which is acceptable. But no one likes being merely "adequate." We want "robust."

I would take the 311 number and instantly double it, just because you don't know if an adversarial nation will, in the near future, have a missile defense capability or some kind of defense that takes out the one nuke you sent toward a particular target. You need some level of assurance that at least one nuke of the few you send will, in fact, hit the target. Then you need to be concerned with the possibility that a major nation, like Russia or China (forget about the punk players, Iran and N. Korea), who might launch a surprise attack that knocks out a good portion of your nuclear weapons. In that case, double the size again. Now we're in that range of 1000-1200 nuclear weapon systems, which is pretty close to the new START number of 1550.

Yeah, that's some loose and fast calculations, but do you really think the logic is that much different in The Building? They determine a number and then build the case for it. We all do that. But seriously, I doubt that the number of active nuclear weapons is really going to drop much further than 1550, certainly not below a thousand. Politics will prevent this from happening, fear of an unknown future will prevent leaders from making bold decisions. But please, let's not keep repeating that ridiculous mantra that this topic is "unthinkable."

Fall of the DOD Chem-Bio Defense Program

The June 2010 National Defense magazine (a product of the National Defense Industrial Association, a.k.a., the military-industrial complex) has a special focus on chem-bio defense topics. The DOD Chem-Bio Defense program is prominently featured in several of them:

• "To Counter WMD, US Reaching Out to International Partners"
• "DTRA Beefs Up Work Force with Newly-Minted PhDs"
• "Chem-Bio Defense Budgets Set To Increase In Coming Years"
• "How to Defend Against Still-Undefined Chem-Bio Attacks"

Now I'm usually happy when the small, introverted, usually ignored DOD CB Defense Program gets some press. It's an exceptional thing, given all the other defense topics that the military-industrial complex really cares about. I'm more depressed, though, by the "happy-happy" noises in the articles, as if what we are witnessing this year represented good things for the military. I don't expect the National Defense magazine to be critical of military programs, so let me point out a few things here. I'll stick with the juicy article about how the budget is going to "increase" over the next few years.

The Obama administration has made no secret of its support of chemical and biological defense programs.

We can argue that point. The Obama administration is interested in revitalizing nonproliferation activities and supporting things like missile defense and PSI. This is not indicative of any "support" to CB defense programs.

The Defense Department in its fiscal 2011 budget requested $1.5 billion for chem-bio defense programs — $370 million for procurement, $812 million for advanced development and $396 million for science and technology.

"That shows continued commitment to these programs,” said John Harvey, principal deputy for the assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Meanwhile, the Joint IED Defeat Organization is looking at $3.5 billion for 2011. That's because the Obama administration believes that the gravest security threat to America is the idea of terrorists bringing nuclear and biological weapons into the United States, right? "Continued commitment" - that can be translated as, "you guys are getting the same amount as last year, plus a small bump for NTA research and some loose change for the consq mgmt forces, and adjustments for inflation." That's hardly a vote of endorsement.

Chem-bio defense programs over the next five years are poised to grow from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has directed the department to rebalance its capabilities to support six key missions. One of the missions is countering weapons of mass destruction, Harvey noted.

That's not exactly true. The QDR buried countering WMD under a topic of "high-end assymetric threats"and within the countering WMD area, had a very tight focus on two particular topics within CB defense. One was developing defenses against non-traditional chemical agents, and the other was changing the make-up of consequence management forces. All the rest of the topics were really focused on other areas of countering WMD and homeland defense.

The goal is to fund activities that cover a wide range of needs, including prevention, attribution, response and consequence management, he said. “We’re trying to develop a systems analytic approach to managing risk and understanding whether the investments we’re making are the right investments. And two, whether there are things that we’re not doing that we should be doing,” said Harvey. “When we get our arms wrapped around this, I think we’ll have a better opportunity to understand how to target our investments and that’s what we’re going to be trying to do over the next year.”

There's been an ugly trend over the past few years. The services have representatives who work on the requirements for CB defense equipment, and these representatives have foolishly allowed the development of requirements that can't be achieved using current technology. So as a result, the people building the equipment have spent millions more to make increasingly complex and expensive CB defense systems, which takes years longer than predicted. So we've been actually getting less capability into the field, instead of more (not that this should surprise you, given the stories about the Army's FCS, the Air Force's F22 and F35, the Marine's EFV, the Navy's $11 Billion carriers, etc etc).

Now a new administration comes in, and it's determined to do things "different" than the last one. Within the DOD, it wants to ignore the past decade of troubled RDT&E and acquisition of CB defense equipment and its focus on developing "passive defense" and "consequence management" gear for current threats. Instead, the new team is going to fixate on future threats that don't exist, on developing "biosurveillance" capabilities, and on "prevention and attribution" requirements that aren't currently resourced by other agencies. And they've decided that the DOD CB Defense Program ought to pay for all this, which means even less chance that we'll see future capabilities fielded for chem-bio defense challenges.

Now, probably 80 percent of you readers don't follow the CB defense program and don't understand the issues here. There are those of you that do, but won't comment. There will be the military and industrial groups that don't really care, as long as they get the right words to put in their proposals to snare the federal funding.  But the real shame of it is that the military leaders responsible for fielding this capability to their forces aren't willing to competently analyze this defense issue, identify the real problems it has, and confront OSD and the White House with the evidence that they're really going into a bad direction. There are other, more important things to be concerned about in the $708 billion defense budget request than this small, insignificant line.

But hey, read the National Defense articles, see the "happy-happy" thoughts, and be comforted that our national leadership cares so much about this very important topic area.

Inventor of Bazooka Dies

The Washington Post featured the obituary of Edward Uhl, who as an Army lieutenant, helped invent the US Army's bazooka during World War 2. This distinctive weapon system was called a "bazooka" after comedian Bob Burns' tubular instrument. 

One day, Mr. Uhl was stumbling through an old junkyard when he saw a metal tube about five feet long and had a brainstorm.

In an interview with Maryland Cracker Barrel magazine in 2007, Mr. Uhl remembered saying: "That's the answer! Put the tube on a soldier's shoulder with the rocket inside and away it goes."

He and Skinner added a shoulder stock and a hand grip. Mr. Uhl tested the weapon first by firing a round into the Potomac River while wearing a welder's helmet and mitts.

An Army official requested a live demonstration at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where Mr. Uhl and Skinner would fire at a tank 125 yards away, moving at 20 mph.

After six other antitank systems had a try -- all missing the tank or failing to fire -- it was Mr. Uhl's turn. It was a perfect shot.

"I hit the damned tank dead center," Mr. Uhl said.

Maybe you've already heard the story about the bazooka. I thought it was kind of inspirational. With all the high tech weapons development that goes on today, it's good to remember the basic innovative genius that could be applied, if given the freedom to do so.

Plum Real Estate

Are you looking for a nice, quiet island in the Northeast United States, previously used by a high-security laboratory and looking for new owners? Look no further than Plum Island, New York.

Since the infancy of the Cold War, Plum Island has been the site of an animal disease laboratory; access is limited to scientists, support personnel and, on rare occasions, invited guests. Because of its remote location a mile and half off the eastern tip of Long Island's north fork, it frequently has been the target of rife speculation about what really goes on there.

The general public could someday get access to the 840-acre pork chop-shaped oasis now that the federal government is moving its animal disease research functions to a new lab in Manhattan, Kan. With a "For Sale" sign about to go up at Plum Island, the General Services Administration is seeking community input on what should be done with the property. A hearing was held Wednesday in Connecticut and another is scheduled for Thursday on Long Island.
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 Before any discussions about development at Plum Island can proceed, officials must first determine the extent of any damage to the soil and water, environmentalist Adrienne Esposito said.

"Any time a government facility is cloaked in secrecy, you have to wonder about what went on," said Esposito, executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment. "The more you look, the more you find. This would be the first time a comprehensive examination of the island would be pursued."

U.S. Rep. Timothy Bishop, whose district includes Plum Island, is not convinced the move to Kansas is a good idea. He said in a letter to a House homeland security subcommittee this week that the sale of Plum Island could fetch $50 million to $80 million — not counting cleanup costs. Bishop said that would hardly cover the costs of building a new $650 million lab in Kansas.

"Before we cross a point of no return, I want everyone to open their eyes and look at what we're doing here," Bishop said. "Rather than pour hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars down a sinkhole in Kansas and open the Pandora's Box of decommissioning Plum Island, we should ... make use of existing facilities that continue to serve this nation well." 

I've said before and I'll say it again. Moving an infectious disease laboratory that specialized in animal and crop-related biological organisms from an island to the middle of the United States, in the center of the agricultural industry of the United States, is just insane and stupid. It's politics at its worst. And this administration is just going along with the previous administration's decision. But what are you going to do? Not like DHS is listening.

Chemical Weapons Aren't Important

The Obama administration has fixated on nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism as the top security threat to the United States. It's an unhealthy fixation, but certainly it's been a priority issue this year, as we've all seen. There's a strong desire to address biological terrorism (see "World at Risk," failure of common sense) and to "counter biological threats" that includes infectious diseases with a global impact, like the pandemic flu. But there's no respect for the chemical weapons that exist today or the ease by which nation-states or terrorists could develop chemical warfare agents. That's about the only conclusion one can make in the Obama administration's failure to nominate an ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

The State Department referred questions on the OPCW ambassador position to the National Security Council, where deputy spokesman Benjamin Chang said he could not predict whether it would be weeks or months before the White House formally nominated a permanent representative to the organization. The Obama administration is "actively seeking to fill the position of ambassador to the OPCW to ensure the U.S. maintains a strong leadership presence," Chang said.

"The United States is fully committed to the Chemical Weapons Convention and continues its support for the Organization on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," he said by e-mail. "We maintain an active delegation at the OPCW and continue to provide leadership at the OPCW through our State Department representatives."

The active delegation to the organization is now comprised of three or four people -- down from the eight staffers that served under Javits, the former envoy said. The deputy chief of mission, Janet Beik, is set to leave this summer with the remaining U.S. mission staff soon to be assigned duties elsewhere as well.

"By the end of June I think they are all gone," according to Javits, who added that if any continuity in mission operations was to be maintained, a new ambassador must be nominated and approved as soon as possible.

Now, "we just have people coming in on Sunday night [from Washington] before the meeting starts for the week," he said. "It’s an impossible handicap to really be able to martial a force."
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"I can only speculate as to why the administration has not moved more quickly," [Jonathan] Tucker said, adding that chemical weapons issues have generally not been a high priority for the Obama White House. "No one on NSC is focusing on this."

And that's the truly sad part of this. The US Senate committed to an international agreement (the Chemical Weapons Convention) to dispose of all its chemical weapons by 2012 (originally 2004, but it got extended - twice). It seems that none of the Very Serious People in the Senate really care about meeting this international obligation, allowing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) to basically run the effort.

We have a "WMD Czar," but all he cares about are non-existent nukes in Iran and North Korea. No one in the NSC really cares either. Chemical weapons are so twen-cen, so not the future threat. But they still are an official class of "weapons of mass destruction," and if we had senators and defense analysts who were serious about getting rid of these weapons, they would have done so by now. But sadly, they are not.  

Educating the Media

The Global Security Newswire does a great job of monitoring all the WMD-related news out there, but sometimes I am depressed by the lack of fact-checking that I see. They seem to rely more on the external news organizations to develop stories than is healthy. Note this article on the Army's continued battle with Colorado state officials in the attempt to dispose of the mustard munitions at Pueblo Chemical Depot.

The U.S. Defense Department, in settling a lawsuit filed by the state of Colorado, has agreed to increase its monitoring of chemical munitions stockpiled at the Pueblo Chemical Depot, the state announced yesterday (see GSN, April 27).

"The agreement includes the following additional monitoring procedures: monitoring the munitions at lower concentrations; monitoring for mustard agent releases outside the [storage] igloos; monitoring to verify the composition and concentration of the other hazardous waste constituents that may be contained in any releases that may occur," the Colorado Public Health and Environment Department said in a release.
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Colorado last summer filed a lawsuit demanding improved monitoring of the chemical warfare materials stored at Pueblo. Disposal operations for more than 2,600 tons of mustard agent stored in 94 igloos have yet to begin but are anticipated to be finished by 2017.

Now I have no issue with the general trend of the short article, that the Army (through OSD offices) is settling with Colorado state officials, even though the steps are ridiculously over-engineered. For some reason, the state officials want the military to introduce safety measures that were used at Anniston Army Depot, which had nerve agent-filled munitions in depots and in the disposal process. Big difference between volatile nerve agents and very viscous mustard agent. Colorado officials are stupid like that.

What I'm more annoyed by (and this may seem trivial) is that the GSN repeats the statement that "the entire stockpile is scheduled to be destroyed by 2017" from the Pueblo Chieftain. It is not. There is a congressional mandate to dispose of all chemical munitions by 2017, but the current schedule (based on the use of a neutralization technology) has operations just starting at Pueblo in 2017. Sen. Mitch McConnell would like to ignore the lack of science and engineering required to build and operate the neutralization facility, but the Army can't. The facility won't be done until 2020-2021 at best, under the current funding and schedule. The only way that Colorado could meet the 2017 deadline is to significantly accelerate construction and run a 24/7 disposal operation starting in 2014. It's a bit ambitious, it adds a couple hundred million dollars to the $8 billion bill for the two sites (Pueblo and Blue Grass), and I'm betting against it being successful.

If the Pueblo stockpile was moved to Tooele's chemical disposal facility and most of the Blue Grass stockpile was moved to the disposal facilities at Pine Bluff and Anniston (no one wants to move the M55 rockets at Blue Grass), the Army could easily meet the completion date of 2017. But that would require a change in congressional law that forbids transportation of stockpile munitions, and that won't happen, because the congressional delegations of Colorado and Kentucky want to milk the Army for federal funds for as long as they can. It's a really wonderful operation.

Powerpoint Is A Good Thing (cont)

In reference to "the slide," Red Team Journal connects us to a blog post with a very good explanation on the value and utility of "casual loop diagrams." Let's listen in.

There are well documented conceptual problems with CLD notation. More importantly, it’s easy to make very bad CLDs. Just use lots of crossing lines (spaghetti), variable names with no sense of direction, neglect to label loop and link polarity, and mix in some clip art for good measure. (There’s some good advice on CLD notation here, but replace the S and O arrow polarity notation with + and -). As a practical matter, it’s been my experience that most causal loop diagrams leave a lot to the imagination, which you can easily discover by attempting to formalize one as a model. You’ll discover unstated parameters, aggregation questions, and other leaps of logic.

The Afghanistan diagram share’s many of those problems. It has the dreaded spaghetti topology. It doesn’t indicate loop polarities. Some variables are really concept areas of interest, rather than quantities that can vary. There’s no way to translate it directly to equations (however, the rumor mill has it that there is an underlying model).

Still, the Afghanistan diagram and other messy mind maps like it aren’t useless, as many NYT commenters asserted. First, it might be a good way to summarize the output of a brainstorming session. In that case, the goal is to surface as many relationships as possible up front. Detailed critique of each link or loop along the way tends to bog down such generative processes. If you don’t later drill into the details of the spaghetti to sort out the dynamics, you might remain as muddled as you were when you started, but that doesn’t make the spaghetti intrinsically useless.

Read the article. Enjoy it. Understand the liberating feeling of knowing that the conventional attitude that downplayed and disparaged the Afghan diagram was wrong.

Deep Thoughts

Tom Ricks notes a WSJ op-ed where Doug Feith, former head of OSD Policy and "stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet," suggests that the Global Zero initiative is bad.

But the question shouldn't be "why would anyone take Doug Feith's advice on nukes," the question should be "why would anyone take Doug Feith's advice on anything defense-related?" As Tom says in the comments, "I am wishing that his policy commentary license had been yanked for reckless endangerment of the nation."

Ignoring Israel's Nukes Just Got Harder

Given that this spring has had such a "nuclear weapons" theme, it becomes interesting to watch how carefully the US government ignores Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, its refusal to join the nations who have ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and its desire to get a nuclear energy deal like India. The excuse in the past has been, well, Israel's not a "proliferator" of nuclear weapons and related technology. Seems that's not the case anymore, as this UK Guardian news article notes.

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

As Rob Farley notes, this is kinda a big deal.  

We should also be clear that this isn’t what could be characterized as “good” proliferation, whatever that means. South Africa was obviously not a democracy in 1975; rather, it was a brutal, repressive police state that systematically crushed the freedom of the vast majority of its population. If you think that domestic repression has implications for foreign policy (realists don’t, but some do), then obviously it’s not ideal to sell nukes to this kind of state. Moreover, the same “what if the state collapses” concerns that apply to Iran apply to South Africa; there were ample concerns in the 1970s that freedom fightersdirty communist terrorists would overthrow the Pretoria regime, which would then have led to obvious “loose nuke” issues.

The larger issue is obviously this: Evidence that a chief proxy of the United States offered to sell actual, functioning nuclear warheads on actual, functioning ballistic missiles to an autocratic, unstable state somewhat undermines US “moral authority” to undertake anti-proliferation efforts in nuclear and ballistic missile technology.

And from the Federation of American Scientists, this historical note about how Israel "obtained" 200 pounds of weapon-grade uranium from the United States in 1965 might be of interest. To be clear, I don't care that Israel has nuclear weapons. I understand its desire to have a nuclear deterrent in the Middle East. But I don't understand the US government's continued position that it can blindly ignore Israel's nuclear weapons while attempting to negotiate within international forums on the same issue. The US government has no credibility in lecturing Iran or North Korea or Syria on their responsibilities to the international community as long as it ignores Israel's decision not to abide by the same rules and its past record of proliferation (in both nuclear and conventional arms traffic).

Either we're serious about nuclear proliferation or we're not. Making exceptions for friends (Israel, Pakistan, India) can't be allowed without losing all credibility to the rest of the world. But I suppose that's why politicians selectively apply policy decisions instead of practicing good policy analysis.

UPDATE: Despite the current storm of words over this allegation, it appears that this isn't a new charge.