Armchair Generalist

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

 

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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.

McCain Goes to Libya

Oh, my mistake. I inadvertently placed this two-year-old video of Sen. John McCain and his Republican buddies (Senators Joseph Lieberman, Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham) going to stroke Qadaffi's - ah, ego - to get him to purchase US military systems for his country. I really like the little bow that McCain gives to Qadaffi. He must have had a stroke and forgotten this visit when he  recently traveled to Libya to tell the rag-tag Rebel Alliance how great they were, and how THEY should be getting America's weapons. Similarly, Sen. Lindsey Graham calls for increased NATO bombing of Tripoli on CNN's "State of the Union."

Assholes. Oh, but I forgot, it's the retired generals and admirals who are the problem in the defense industry...  at least I don't see them selling weapons to both sides of a conflict. Hat tip to Steve Benen.

Does Planning Interventions Make It Better?

Sarah Sewall of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and retired General Tony Zinni had an op-ed last week in which they argued for more planning for military interventions into "mass atrocities," saying that our current ad lib approach isn't cutting it. From the WaPo:

No one argues that planning for wars makes them more likely. Yet this seems to be the underlying reason for the military’s allergy to planning for civilian protection. U.S. armed forces should start treating civilian protection missions as seriously as they take wars. It’s only prudent to study mass-atrocity response operations, plan for them and, perhaps most important, conduct exercises with the civilian leaders who would make decisions about potential interventions.
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Lack of sustained professional military attention to civilian protection is a global problem. In 2005, the United Nations proclaimed an international “Responsibility to Protect” citizens from systematic slaughter by their governments, but it has done little to make its promise operational. U.N. peacekeeping forces are increasingly directed to “protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence,” often with little thought to how or even whether this is possible. International organizations, regional bodies and national militaries share this disregard for the practicalities of stopping mass atrocities — yet repeatedly try to do exactly that. Just this month, U.N. forces attacked forces loyal to the former president of Ivory Coast in the name of civilian protection.

I didn't expect this kind of an op-ed from Gen. Zinni. Sara Sewell on the other hand has this Clinton administration past that encourages liberal interventionism. She just thinks that it needs more civil-military cooperative planning, rather than just relying on the military to improvise through a mass atrocity into a peace-keeping incident (and probably back into nation-building). And while I understand her point, I think she is inherently not understanding the second- and third-order effects of her argument.

Yes, there definitely needs to be closer coordination between the civilian agencies involved in foreign policy and the military involved in executing operations.  If anything, Iraq and Afghanistan show the folly of letting a small group of civilians who are poorly trained lead the way, forcing the military to make up what isn't done. But on the other hand, assuming that humanitarian assistance and "mass atrocity" interventions are going to be more frequent, if the military starts planning - and more importantly, resourcing - for these missions, something else is going to slip. It's a zero-sum game, more or less.

If you want more hospital ships, that means less cruisers. If you want more global awareness through satellites on failing states, that means less coverage of Russia and China. If you want more UAVs, that means less F-35s and F-22s (yes, I know that's what Gates was doing). If you want more MRAPs, that means less funding for the next generation armored vehicle. By increasing the military's workload, you're making it less efficient in executing the job they're supposed to do - fight wars in support of defending US interests.

I've got a crazy idea. Gates has told Congress that we're neglecting diplomacy and economic levers of power, and that we need to fund those more than defense programs. Maybe we ought to listen to him. Maybe we need to refocus more energy on prevention using diplomacy, economy, and information instead of military power. It would be much more efficient and save a lot of more lives. But I suppose that makes too much sense for Congress to approve. It's hard to see the success of  preventing atrocities before they happen, while senators love getting pictures of them touring battlefields. I guess we're not going to see that change.

Ackward...

(From Courage to Resist) This morning President Obama met with 150 donors for his 2012 reelection campaign over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, California. However, the event turned interesting when nearly two dozen of his contributors pressed the president in song on the unjust confinement and tortuous treatment of alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army intelligence analyst PFC Bradley Manning. As the President spoke of the creative organizing that won him the 2008 election, over 10% of the attendees held up “Free Bradley Manning” signs and launched into a song entitled “Where’s our change?”

Also see this Atlantic Wire article by Adam Martin. Yes, PFC Manning may have done some bad things. But it would be really nice of the Obama administration to ensure he was treated decently prior to receiving a speedy trial, as are our rights as Americans. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish this administration from the last. Sometimes.

Portal 2 End Song

I agree with i09 - doesn't do better than the original Portal end song. But the sequel often disappoints like that.

Wash Post Hits All-Time Low

It's amazing to see how really low the WaPo editorial board can sink. Yesterday, Fred Hiatt's machine decided to worry that trimming back the US military from its past ten years of unparalleled growth will imperil us - from being able to attack North Korea and Iran. Because we only have a military the size of the rest of the free world combined today, and any cuts might imperil that dominancy.

Defense savings beyond those already achieved by Mr. Gates are certainly possible and even needed — though by and large they lie in areas that Congress has been unwilling to touch. As we pointed out in a recent editorial, military health care now costs as much as the war in Iraq, in part because military families — including working-age retirees — pay one-tenth as much for their health plans as do civilian federal workers. Pay raises for Pentagon civilians have outstripped those in the private sector in the past decade, and the workforce itself has swollen. Though Mr. Gates has succeeded in winning congressional approval for some big cuts in weapons systems, Congress continues to fund planes and equipment — including $8 billion in the new fiscal 2011 budget — that the Pentagon neither needs nor wants.

Even with significant trims in those areas, however, reaching Mr. Obama’s goal would probably require cuts in the size of the Army and Marines beyond the reduction of more than 40,000 troops already proposed by Mr. Gates. Defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution thinks it could require the elimination of more command structures and another round of base closures. What will then happen if the United States is forced into more conflicts like those of the past decade — if it must intervene to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon or respond to aggression by North Korea, for example?

Yes, the reason the DOD budget is so overbloated is because of cheap medical health care for military families, greedy government civilians with salaries they don't deserve, and Congress forcing extra costs into the budget. Has nothing to do with the overreach by the neocons/liberal interventionists trying to dominate the globe with military installations or an acquisition system that can't be reformed.

Jesus wept. It's supposed to be a Department of DEFENSE, Mr. Hiatt. It's not a War Department anymore. What kind of cold, unfeeling monsters took over the Washington Post? What the hell is wrong with them?

Obama's Out-of-Control Libya Adventure

Armed Predator drones?!? Really??

President Obama has given approval for two armed American Predator drones to operate over Libya, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The U.S. has flown armed drones in Libya for the past several weeks, but they have been used only for surveillance. They will now be used to strike Gadhafi's forces as part of the civilian protection mission.
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Gates, appearing at the Pentagon today with Marine Gen. James Cartwright, said these drones have the capability to fly lower than piloted AC-130 gunships and better identify targets of Gadhafi forces burrowed into urban areas with less threat of collateral damage. They're also able to stay on a target for much longer than a plan can, they can be in the air all day long.

And the mission creep goes on... What do you think, the ground troop reduction in Afghanistan over the summer and draw down in Iraq by the end of the year, they go straight to Libya now? 

UPDATE: David Ignatius says, "Not a good idea, Mr. President."

Cordesman's Weird Advice on Libya

I just don't get Tony Cordesman at times. Here he is mocking the short-term vision of the US, British, and French politicians relating to the fighting in Libya in an article he titles, "Will the Farce Stay With US?"

American connoisseurs of schadenfreude can take some comfort in the parallels between this course of action and the equally naïve and dangerous approach used by the Bush Administration in Iraq. After all, watching a French President,  a British Prime Minister, and a Democratic President of the US repeat the Bush Administration’s failure to plan for the decisive and lasting use of force, fail to plan for the civil side of military operations and to support stability operations, and focus on short term goals without a realistic plan for a successful strategic and post-conflict  outcome is not without irony and touches of black humor. And as for historians, the whole thing is yet another demonstration that they have the world’s easiest profession; all they have to do is wait for history to repeat itself.

And then he gets into his great recommendation - escalate the bombing campaign to a deliberate attrition operation in support of the Rebel Alliance. This is a better solution?

France, Britain, the US and other participating members of the Coalition need to shift to the kind of bombing campaign that targets and hunts down Qaddafi’s military and security forces in their bases and as they move – as long before they engage rebel forces as possible. Qaddafi, his extended family, and his key supporters need to be targeted for their attacks on Libyan civilians, even if they are collocated in civilian areas. They need to be confronted with the choice between exile or death, and bombing needs to be intense enough so it is clear to them that they must make a choice as soon as possible.

This kind of operation cannot be “surgical’ – if “surgical” now means minimizing bloodshed regardless of whether the patient dies. Hard, and sometimes brutal, choices need to be made between limited civilian casualties and collateral damage during the decisive use of force and an open-ended war of attrition that will produce far higher cumulative civilian casualties and collateral damage. The Coalition will also need to avoid the trap of blundering into some kind of ceasefire, where Qaddafi’s forces and unity will give him the advantage. This will be a “peace” that simply becomes a war of attrition and terror campaign by other means.

Really? You want to double down on the number of Muslims who are going to hate the West? Do you really think this is going to result in a stable state, short of a decade of occupying and rebuilding that country? Yeah, really a great idea, Tony - if you want to dramatically increase the amount of post-conflict pain after we "win" the war. Here's a crazy idea. Walk away. Make the rebels negotiate with Qadaffi or let them run to Egypt for shelter. The Cordesman solution is no solution to follow. 

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues its mission creep deeper into Libya with "nonlethal aid"... Yes, the Rebel Alliance will at least look better when they are fighting while wearing US military uniforms. They won't win any battles, though.