Westhawk

Westhawk merges with Small Wars Journal

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:55:00 +0000

After four years of writing on national security issues, Westhawk is ending its service at this site. Although this is the end of Westhawk, it is a new beginning for me at Small Wars Journal.

I have joined the team at Small Wars Journal as Managing Editor. I will continue to write at the Small Wars Journal Blog under my real name, Robert Haddick (click here for my biography). And I will continue to write “This Week at War” for Foreign Policy Magazine.

I am honored to join the management team at Small Wars Journal. Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle have already established one of the most influential sites concerning the research, analysis, and discussion of modern conflict. As Managing Editor, I will contribute essays on these issues. I will also work with Dave and Bill on the operational management of Small Wars Journal as it enters an exciting new era of its development.

I thank my loyal readers who have followed Westhawk. You can now find me, along with other great research and analysis, at Small Wars Journal.

'This Week at War' at Foreign Policy Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Click here to read this week's edition of my column.

Topics include:

1) Is the U.S. Army the slowest student in Afghanistan?

2) How to recover from failure.

I welcome your feedback in the comments.

JFCOM says more about ‘super squads’

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:39:00 +0000

In last week’s “This Week at War” column for Foreign Policy, I mentioned General James Mattis’s push for more capable and more autonomous small U.S. combat units (“Does it take a network to beat a network?”).

An AFPS article from yesterday, sourced from General Mattis’s Joint Forces Command, had more to say about “super squads” and their utility in hybrid warfare. Click here to read more.

No more Fallujahs?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Yesterday, I attended the annual conference of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, DC think-tank.

The main and overflow meeting rooms were packed to hear the morning keynote address by General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command. In addition to the Washington Post’s summary of General Petraeus’s remarks, I will add the following points:

1) Petraeus rejected a story from the New York Times that alleged that General Stanley McChrystal was assembling a personal staff “fusion cell” of 400 hand-picked officers. Petraeus said the true number was 30-40.

2) Petraeus had much praise for Pakistan’s operations in NWFP, but worried about the lingering refugee problem outside Swat.

3) Afghan security forces are slated to number 231,000 by 2012. Petraeus doubted whether this would be enough. And he questioned where the Afghan leadership was going to come from to lead and manage even this number, let alone a larger number called for by COIN troop-to-population rules of thumb.

4) Petraeus confirmed that the FBI was at Bagram and was reading Miranda rights to a “small number” of prisoners there “suspected of crimes.” He strongly denied that domestic police procedures were now SOP for U.S. military forces on operations in the field.

Most interesting for me was his description of the 2008 battle for Sadr City and how he compared it with Second Fallujah (November 2004). In the fight for Fallujah, Marines and soldiers cleared each structure in the city, many several times. The TTPs for Second Fallujah would have been recognizable to veterans of Stalingrad or Hue City.

The 2008 battle for Sadr City achieved the same outcome as Second Fallujah, physical control of the geography and population, but employed entirely different tactics, enabled by a much greater density of surveillance technology. Petraeus put up a slide that showed the dense layers of persistent overhead surveillance of Sadr City, from satellites to Global Hawk, ELINT aircraft, SOCOM drones, Predators, Shadows, and Apaches. Around and in the battlespace were more SIGINT, counter-battery radar, observation towers, scout-snipers, and undercover infiltrators inside some of the enemy cells.

All of this persistent surveillance allowed the U.S. commander to treat Sadr City as one large sniper shooting gallery, employing laser-guided bombs, Hellfire missiles, and real sniper teams. Rather than storming Sadr City house-to-house, the coalition commanders patiently observed, detected, tracked, and sorted out the various hostile cells and groups in Sadr City. After this overhead observation collected sufficient information, the cells were then bombed, rocketed, or sniped. Others fled after figuring out they may have only hours or minutes to live.

Most of these same technical assets were available and were used at Second Fallujah. But as Petraeus explained, by 2008 the quantity and quality available to commanders were magnitudes greater than in 2004. As important, by 2008, U.S. intelligence fusion and analysis procedures were refined in a way they were not in 2004.

During the Cold War, U.S. (and Soviet) military doctrine sought to avoid cities. Modern irregular warfare adversaries adapted to U.S. combat advantages by hiding in the cities among the population. U.S. infantry forces thus had to relearn many forms of urban operations. At the high-intensity end of this spectrum was Second Fallujah in 2004.

But the 2008 battle for Sadr City may show that the U.S. has gained dominance over urban terrain as much as it demonstrated dominance over open terrain in 1991. This dominance over urban terrain, if true, is predicated on a commander’s access to the density of overhead surveillance and technology that was available to the U.S. commander in Sadr City in 2008.

Will that be the case in the future? The exponential growth of U.S. combat drones points in this direction. Where will the enemy hide in the future?

Clinton’s North Korea trial balloon may crash

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:44:00 +0000

In the aftermath of North Korea’s second nuclear weapon test two weeks ago, U.S. officials have muttered a few dark warnings. But there has been no visible action, either diplomatic or military, in response.

Yesterday’s New York Times finally revealed a few stirrings, from both Secretary of State Clinton and some unnamed officials. According to the story, focus is now on finding a way to interdict suspected WMD and missile-related air and sea shipments from North Korea.

We can hope that U.S. officials have spent the past two weeks attempting to convince the Chinese government to cooperate with the Proliferation Security Initiative WMD interdiction program. However, the fact that the U.S. has nothing to announce in that regards might hint that they have made little progress thus far with the Chinese.

In a weekend television interview, Secretary Clinton explained how a lack of Chinese cooperation could result in a regional arms race that would not be in China’s interest. The fact that she is explaining this to the U.S. viewing public may indicate that the Obama administration is preparing its reasoning for future military actions it intends to take. Such a public preparation campaign also increases pressure on the Chinese to cooperate.

This is a risky course for the Obama administration. It is gradually committing itself to some sort of military interdiction option against North Korea. But it has not yet secured Chinese cooperation with the venture. It has now gone public with its intentions both to prepare the U.S. public and to pressure the Chinese.

This overt course risks strong resistance by the Chinese and, of course, military brinkmanship from North Korea against Seoul, which would test the South Korean public’s limits.

Will the U.S. now see this course through with a risk of a military clash and a break with the Chinese? Or will the Obama team ultimately have to back down with consequences for its North Korea and Iran policies?

'This Week at War' at Foreign Policy Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:21:00 +0000

Click here to read this week's edition of my column.

Topics include:

1) When organized crime meets terrorism,

2) Does it take a network to beat a network?

I welcome your feedback in the comments.

Cartwright still wants a ‘prompt global strike’ weapon

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman General James Cartwright, USMC spoke yesterday at a CSIS forum that examined optimal U.S. military basing strategies. But according to this story of his remarks in Defense News, more interesting was Cartwright’s renewed call for a “prompt global strike” capability:

Additionally, Cartwright said he continues to press for development of a new weapon that would allow Washington to take out a fleeting target in a manner of minutes.

The Marine Corps general said he has concluded conventionally armed bombers are "too slow and too intrusive" for many "global strike missions."

Cartwright for several years has advocated for a "prompt global strike" weapon, which would be ultra-fast and fitted with a conventional warhead.

Congress, due largely to worries that other nations, like Russia, would be unable to quickly determine whether an in-flight warhead was nuclear, has refused to fund the program.

Cartwright said even congressional skeptics of the idea realize there is a "military
requirement" for such a fast weapon to take out fleeting targets.

The requirements for such a weapon are "starting to emerge," he said.

"At the low end," a PGS weapon would probably need to be launched and hit a target within "one hour," Cartwright said. "At the high end," the time frame could be as short as "300 milliseconds."

The military might need a "hypersonic" weapon that would travel in the exoatmosphere to take out a limited number of fleeting targets, he said.

Readers may recall a proposal from several years ago to reconfigure a few Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles with GPS-guided conventional warheads. Congress rejected funding for the project out of fears that the launch of any U.S. SLBM or ICBM could trigger a launch-on-warning nuclear exchange.

What about a space-based PGS weapon? There is a good reason why the U.S. should hold off, at least for now, overtly putting weapons in space. The U.S. is highly dependent on its space capabilities, which are also highly vulnerable to attack. There is no sense in catalyzing a Chinese, Russian, or even Iranian space response right now. The U.S. certainly needs a capability to defend and attack in and from space. But a better approach is to introduce those capabilities in response to adversary initiatives.

Are there other ways of achieving prompt global strike capabilities without ICBMs or SLBMs? Armed drones are one solution that is currently employed. In many cases it is the Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawks that first find the targets that must be promptly attacked. Fitting Global Hawks with air-to-surface missiles would fill in a needed capability.

A supplementary capability would be advanced Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles that loiter, search, and reacquire fleeing or moving targets. Such TLAMS would not arrive within the one-hour time parameter cited by Cartwright. But that wouldn’t matter as much if they could loiter, search, and strike in coordination with other ISR support.

Are there additional scenarios that absolutely require striking a fixed target in under an hour and that could not be covered by armed drones or loitering TLAMs? The price for that subset capability is a price that Congress has not been willing to consider.

How to trigger an earthquake

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:24:00 +0000

This morning’s Washington Times reported on an al Qaeda recruiting video that boasted about plans to infiltrate anthrax into the U.S. through tunnels under the Mexican border:

"Four pounds of anthrax -- in a suitcase this big -- carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S. are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour if it is properly spread in population centers there," the recruiter said. "What a horrifying idea; 9/11 will be small change in comparison. Am I right? There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings and so on. One person, with the courage to carry 4 pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this 'confetti' all over them, and then we'll do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real celebration."

This is an old and stale scenario and the threat is almost certainly empty bluster – it is a recruiting video after all.

What remains unexamined, or perhaps just unmentionable, is the profound cultural trauma that would occur in the U.S should al Qaeda terrorists from Eurasia actually infiltrate into the U.S. from Mexico and conduct any kind of spectacular attack. Anthrax is irrelevant. Ten suiciders with rifles conducting a Mumbai-style attack would be enough.

Should the post-attack investigation lead back to Tijuana or Juarez and a coyote smuggling operation, the cultural earthquake inside the U.S. could be bigger than that which followed 9/11. A nervous and frustrated slice (a majority?) of the U.S. electorate feels something is badly awry with government policy concerning border security. But most of this slice feels it’s impolite to openly discuss their fears. After an attack that would change.

What would happen after an attack? Militarization of the border? A crash in cross-border commerce? Economic depression in Mexico? Intense resentment of the U.S. in Latin America after the backlash occurs?

With the potential for such economic, political, and cultural disruption it is surprising that some al Qaeda affiliate has not put more effort into such an operation. Great border security obviously cannot be the explanation, given the immense drug and human smuggling that already occurs.

Forget about anthrax. A few young men with rifles will be enough to trigger an earthquake.

Preparing for retaliation?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:04:00 +0000

Israel has begun a five-day nation-wide civil defense exercise, reportedly the largest such exercise it has ever held.

Should the Israeli government ever decide to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear complex, Israeli society would have to prepare itself for retaliation. Israel would hope to reduce the effectiveness of that retaliation through air and missile defense, hardening critical sites, dispersing otherwise vulnerable assets (such as the population and military forces), and by maintaining alternate command and control systems. Civil defense measures are one of the principal ways of implementing these techniques.

In the case of a pre-emptive strike on Iran, a thorough and speedy dispersion and hardening of the government, military forces, and the population would be critical. Thus a rehearsal of such a scenario, a civil defense exercise, increases the chances of success.

Should Israel increase the frequency or thoroughness of such exercises, that could constitute strategic warning of a strike.

There may an additional aspect to this civil defense preparation. It is reasonable to conclude that Israeli government officials and defense planners are very worried about the eventual Iranian nuclear threat. They may have concluded that an Israeli pre-emptive strike is inescapable. But they must also realize that an attack using only conventional munitions and limited to Iran’s nuclear complex and associated military targets is not likely to be effective. Iran has itself thoroughly prepared for this through hardening and dispersion. For Israel to set back the Iranian nuclear threat for a decade or more will require an attack on the broader Iranian society, its electrical grid, oil economy, telecommunication system, transportation infrastructure, etc. Or the Israeli use of its own nuclear weapons in a first strike.

These options are not politically feasible for Israel. The resulting backlash and isolation could be as lethal as the scenario Israel was hoping to avoid.

But maybe the political backlash would not be as severe if it was Israel that was the first victim of a chemical or biological attack. Devastating Israeli retaliation after it had absorbed such a WMD blow might be seen as at least understandable.

Thus, the Israeli strategy for Iran might begin with a relatively small Osirik-like attack on, say, Natanz and Arak. As the Israeli Air Force reached its time-on-target the civil defense evacuation would begin. Israel would then hope to goad Iran and its local proxies into an overreaction, a chemical missile strike on Israel. Israel would then deliver the devastating and finishing attack on Iran.

Iran’s leadership would have to be pretty irrational to fall for this ploy. They would do much better to refrain from retaliation and instead take political advantage of the resulting outrage against Israel. And then reconstitute the Iranian nuclear program.

So it’s not much of a plan for Israel. But in the long-run, it may be the only plan it’s got. Civil defense preparation, Iranian excitability, and a lot of luck would be necessary for success.

Which one of these is not like the others?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:55:00 +0000

Let’s play that children’s game, this time looking at recent (and the prospective) U.S. ambassadors to Japan:

1. Mike Mansfield

2. Michael Armacost

3. Walter Mondale

4. Tom Foley

5. Howard Baker

6. John Roos

As we can see from this list, U.S. Presidents of both parties used to send the most experienced statesmen, such as a former Vice President, two former Senate Majority Leaders, a former Speaker of the House, and a career foreign service officer and future president of the Brooking Institution to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. In President George W. Bush’s second term, he let the standard slip a bit with the appointment of Tom Schieffer. But at least Mr. Schieffer was an old personal friend of President Bush, well-connected to Washington through his brother Bob, and had served four years as U.S. ambassador to Australia.

Who is John Roos? And what are his qualifications to be ambassador to Japan, currently America’s most important bilateral relationship? President Obama apparently reckons him qualified because he raised $500,000 for the Obama campaign from friends in Silicon Valley. By the White House’s own description of his background, he has utterly no experience in international relations, diplomacy, international security issues, global trade issues, or the various cultures in east Asia.

Given this glaring downgrade in respect, what might Japan’s leaders conclude about the Obama administration’s commitment to Japan and its security concerns? And how might Japan’s leaders respond?

Here’s a hint. Two articles from last week (Bloomberg and Asia Times) reveal that discussions have begun on the fringes inside Japan about the possibility of withdrawing from the NPT and establishing a Japanese nuclear weapons capability.

In his famous speech in Prague, President Obama described his hopeful vision of a world without nuclear weapons. To get there, Mr. Obama discussed his plans for strengthening the NPT and reducing proliferation. It would be ironic if the greatest setbacks to global nuclear security occurred on Mr. Obama’s watch.

Will Gates fire the Air Force leadership, again?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sun, 31 May 2009 15:59:00 +0000

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is stuck for the moment in Singapore because his Air Force jet is broken. The New York Times reports on the Secretary’s rapidly rising blood pressure:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was grounded by his own plane on Sunday when the specially fitted 747 he uses for travel broke down because of a series of mechanical problems. Mr. Gates, who was due to travel to Manila on Sunday, instead spent another night in Singapore, where he has been since Friday for a regional security conference.

That conference, the Shangri-la Dialogue, ended on Sunday and aides said Mr. Gates would have a quiet dinner and head for Manila on Monday morning to keep to previously scheduled meetings. In the meantime, an Air Force flight crew was still trying to repair the 747, which has had mechanical problems since it took off from Washington on Wednesday night. But a back-up plane was being flown to Singapore to transport Mr. Gates on Monday if needed.

Aides to Mr. Gates described him as exasperated.

The Air Force should know better than to exasperate Mr. Gates.

'This Week at War' at Foreign Policy Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sat, 30 May 2009 09:36:00 +0000

Click here to read this week's edition of my column.

Topics include:

1) Can counterinsurgency ever be used again?

2) Social scientists in the trenches.

I welcome your feedback in the comments.

Renewed nuclear testing should not be a surprise

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:31:00 +0000

Today’s Los Angeles Times has an article that discusses the technical difficulties the U.S. government is having with its aging nuclear weapons stockpile.

The Clinton administration came up with the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) with the hope of indefinitely extending the life of the U.S.’s 1960s-vintage weapons. The goal was to demonstrate that it would be safe for the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In addition, the Clinton administration also hoped to show that a new generation of nuclear weapons would not be needed. The Bush administration continued SSP and obviously didn’t conduct any tests. But it also shelved the CTBT and pushed for a new warhead design, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). Congress scrapped funding for the RRW pending the results of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review and Quadrennial Defense Review.

Today’s story in the LA Times is not reassuring about the usefulness of the SSP:

At issue with the W76, at least in part, is a classified component that was used in the original weapon but that engineers and scientists at the Energy Department's plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., could not duplicate in a series of efforts over the last several years.
The component, known by the code word "fogbank," is thought to be made of an exotic material and is crucial to a hydrogen bomb reaching its designed energy level in the microseconds before it blows apart.

The W76 is designed to release energy equal to about 100 kilotons of TNT, through both fission and fusion of atoms.

When it came time to make new batches of fogbank for the refurbishment program, the current workforce was unable to duplicate the characteristics of the batches made in the 1970s and 1980s, according to a March report by the Government Accountability Office.

"I don't know how this happened that we forgot how to make fogbank," Coyle said. "It should not have happened, but it did."

[…]

The technical problems with the W76 were also partially disclosed in the report from the GAO, which said the Energy Department had failed to "effectively manage cost, schedule and technical risks" not only on the W76 program but on another refurbishment effort for a warhead known as the B61.

In the case of the B61, the Energy Department boasted that it had completed the job ahead of schedule and under cost, even though it sharply reduced the number of bombs that it rebuilt and curtailed the scope of the work on each bomb, the GAO said. The cost of refurbishing each bomb doubled, the office said.

Commentary

The U.S. government has spent enormous sums shrinking its nuclear establishment, reducing its stockpile, and maintaining the remaining weapons. In spite of this very costly effort, results are questionable and the trend line for the future is poor.

We should bear in mind that Russia and China (not to mention France and the UK) face the same issues. However, they don’t have nearly the resources the U.S. has for such efforts.

An additional crucial point is that nuclear weapons are currently far more important to these states than they are to the U.S. With its massive conventional superiority, America’s nuclear weapons are currently something of an abstraction (a reverse from the condition between 1955 and 1990). For these other countries, their nuclear weapons are not such an abstraction.

How will these countries cope with their aging weapons? Or with the uncertainty associated with modern but untest designs these countries are very likely working on?

We should not be surprised if within the next five years the Chinese, Russians, or even the French conduct a full-power test. Conventional military inferiority, nagging uncertainty about nuclear reliability, questions about the reliability of treaty guarantees, and growing global insecurity will prove too maddening for statesmen from these countries to bear.

If that results in a chain reaction of tests by other countries, that might not be such a bad thing. Statesmen that have confidence about their own power and knowledge of their adversary’s are less likely to miscalculate.

New ideas for North Korea

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Although many national security analysts would prefer to simply ignore North Korea’s latest misbehavior, the proliferation threat posed by the Kim regime makes that impossible to do. That appears to be the position of James Jones, the U.S. National Security Advisor, according to this report from Bloomberg:

“They still have a long way to go” to create a nuclear weapon and “have a delivery system” for it, Jones told an audience of the Washington-based Atlantic Council during a question-and-answer period after he gave a speech. “That’s obviously a very worst-case scenario and one that we very much hope to avoid,” he said.

“The imminent threat is the proliferation of that type of technology to other countries and potentially terrorist organizations and non-state actors,” Jones said. “That, in my view, is the most imminent danger.”

Shutting down North Korea’s arms trade is important for at least two good reasons. First, according to this story in the Wall Street Journal, North Korea has links to virtually every ballistic missile program in the Near East, Middle East, and south Asia. Shutting down North Korea’s arms trade would seem to be a good way of cooling the growing arms races in these areas. Second, according to the same piece, North Korea’s arms trade brings in $1.5 billion per year to the Kim Family Business. If the international community wants to get serious about sanctions on the Kim regime, is will have to get serious about interdicting its arms trading.

Preventing further North Korean proliferation of missile and nuclear technology will require active measures, namely stopping and inspecting cargo ships and aircraft to and from North Korea. The U.S. and the rest of the international community cannot realistically take this step without some level of cooperation from China and Russia, cooperation that has thus far been lacking. Will leaders in China and Russia now change their minds and cooperate in some way with the Proliferation Security Initiative? That remains to be seen. As I have argued, the threat of an arms race aimed at China and led by Japan could help change some minds.

I will now refer readers to two other views worth reading. First, Robert Kaplan writes that it is not worth taking aggressive measures that risk a collapse in Pyongyang. This risk has long explained the soft lines taken over the years by China, Russia, and South Korea. But Kaplan argues that a North Korean collapse would be like “another Iraq” for the U.S., requiring a huge U.S. military commitment and financial expenditure to clean up the mess. Kaplan seems willing to take risks on proliferation to avoid this outcome.

Second, Dan Twining discusses five factors that make this iteration of North Korean saber-rattling different than previous iterations. He sums up by arguing that the U.S. should consider bypassing Beijing and working more closely with South Korea and Japan to change North Korea’s behavior. Twining notes (as does Kaplan) that North Korea’s leadership has an interest in diversifying away from its sole dependence on China. Twining reasons that if the U.S., Japan, and South Korea were to approach North Korea after explicitly cutting out China, they may achieve the incentives and leverage, over both North Korea and China, that they have previously lacked.

Over to you, Hu

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:35:00 +0000

Yesterday’s nuclear weapon test by North Korea doesn’t add any new information or change in any way the structure of the North Korea proliferation problem. The Chinese government is the only entity with the power to change the situation (within a reasonable bound of consequences). And President Hu Jintao and his colleagues in the Chinese leadership currently have no intention of doing so. They do not want to see the Korean peninsula unified under a regime they don’t have leverage over. And they don’t want to have to contain or clean up a humanitarian mess that would likely occur after the Kim Family Business collapses. Delaying as long as possible this day of reckoning is still viewed in Beijing as the best policy.

If the U.S., South Korea, and Japan don’t like China’s stubbornness on this problem, they will have to take some action to get China to recalculate its interests. The most dramatic such action would be Japan’s acquisition of offensive strike capabilities in response to North Korea’s provocations. Yesterday’s Australian had an article showing the path ahead for Japan:

THE Japanese Government is about to ease its universal embargo on weapons exports in a move that may foreshadow Japan joining the US-controlled F-35 joint
strike fighter project.

The decision is another whittling-away of Japan's long-standing policy of standing apart from foreign military engagements and co-operation.

It would allow Japanese companies to join international weapons development programs, such as the F-35 program, by removing the ban on exporting components to other participants

Tokyo has already lifted one corner of the 33-year-old embargo to participate in the US's Pacific ballistic missile defence program - Japan is developing an advanced nose-cone for the SM-3 high-altitude interceptor missile.

It is well past time for Japan to join the F-35 program. Acquiring a fleet of F-35s will give Japan some of the offensive strike capability it needs to both threaten North Korea and to force China to recalculate its grand strategy. And since the F-35 program is a multi-national program among U.S. allies, by joining Japan will ensure interoperability with its most important allies.

Once it has taken this step, Japan should follow up with the acquisition of advanced long-range land attack cruise missiles, more refueling aircraft, and airborne electronic attack capabilities.

China remains the only solution to the North Korea problem. China will change its attitude about the problem only after it feels some negative consequences from its current intransigence. Japan can provide the loudest wake-up call.

What happens after preventive detention collapses?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Last Thursday President Obama gave a speech at the National Archives during which he discussed what he intends to do about the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The most important part of the speech was his proposal to create, for the first time in U.S. history, a legal system of preventive detention, the prolonged detention of individuals who have not been convicted in a criminal trial. Here are President Obama’s words:

Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here -- this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

[…]

But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

There are very valid grounds to doubt whether the Congress would ever pass a statute creating a system of preventive detention. Regardless of political ideology, any American should be concerned about a law that allowed the government to confine someone indefinitely without an indictment. Even if the first iteration of the statue applies only to, say, non-citizen terror suspects, once the precedent is set, future Congresses could expand the parameters of preventive detention.

In the current political environment, Republicans might oppose the Obama preventive detention proposal in order to force the President to keep Guantanamo open and the “unprosecutables” out of the U.S. Democrats might have these same interests, plus revulsion to the statute’s assault on traditional civil liberties.

Should a preventive detention statute pass the Congress and become law, its chances of surviving judicial review would seem very slim - such a statute would directly contradict the 5th and 6th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The tragedy here is that the U.S. already had preventive detention power perfectly tailored to the current problem with al Qaeda. It was the power the U.S. government had to detain, without judicial oversight, non-citizens outside U.S. territory, a power the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950). The U.S. Supreme Court disastrously overturned Eisentrager in its notorious decision Rasul v. Bush (2004). Since then, the Guantanamo detainees have acquired access to the U.S. courts and in subsequent court decisions have edged closer to the “indict or release” standard of the U.S. criminal justice system.

Let us assume, as seems reasonable, that Congress either fails to pass a preventive detention statute or that the Supreme Court strikes it down. What then will become of the “unprosecutables”?

Here are some possibilities:

1) The Supreme Court might, on its own, reverse its current course and settle on some doctrine that permits the government to continue detaining without trial the “unprosecutables” either at a “supermax” prison inside the U.S. or at a foreign location like Bagram.

2) The Supreme Court could order the Executive to either arraign the “unprosecutables” in Federal District Court or release them. The President, to much popular acclaim, would then “pull an Andrew Jackson” and defy the Court.

3) Through a foreign aid program to the Afghan government, the U.S. could finance the construction of a supermax wing at Bagram, staffed by guards employed by a U.S. contractor. The U.S. would extradite the “unprosecutables” to Afghanistan, which would find grounds for indicting them under Afghan law (perhaps, if necessary, some Afghan “universal jurisdiction” law).

4) The Supreme Court would order “indict or release.” The President would comply by releasing the “unprosecutables” to the “supervision” of Pashtun tribal elders along the Durand Line. U.S. Joint Special Operations Command would take care of the problem from there.

5) The President and congressional leaders would propose a constitutional amendment which reactivates the Eisentrager decision. Something like: “The judicial power of the United States, and of the States, shall not extend to persons who are not citizens of the United States and who are in the custody of officials or agents of the United States outside the territory of the United States.”

I invite readers to add their own ideas of what will become of the “unprosecutables.”

While we wait for this legal story to play out in the years ahead, we can already see the consequences of Rasul v. Bush and its successors. According to the New York Times, it has been over two years since a new detainee has arrived at Guantanamo. The CIA supposedly has no more in its possession. The U.S. has expanded Bagram’s capacity, but the U.S. government knows that Bagram is now getting more scrutiny. The surges in Iraq and Afghanistan have surely resulted in more contact with important terror suspects. What is happening to them?

First, as the New York Times piece discusses, the U.S. has subcontracted custody and interrogation to foreign security services. Critics of the Supreme Court’s meddling this decade predicted this would occur, and not for the betterment of human rights.

The second consequence has been the breeding of more and more Predator and Reaper hunter/killer drones. A volley of Hellfire missiles means never having to explain yourself to a federal judge.

Finally, there is the “Sri Lanka Way.” The Sri Lankan government killed every member of the LTTE leadership and its support cadres. It has kept the media, NGOs, and the UN away from the remaining Tamil refugee camps, which its security services are now combing for residual resisters. Providing overhead cover is China, Sri Lanka’s new best friend. Although probably a minor part of their planning, Sri Lanka’s leaders may have looked at the U.S. experience with Guantanamo and decided that interrogations and trials were a lot more trouble than they might be worth.

Strictly obeying the law of unintended consequences, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on Guantanamo have resulted in more death and suffering, not less. What remains to be seen is the unintended damage that will occur to U.S. law, the Constitution, and respect for the law.

'This Week at War' at Foreign Policy Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Click here to read this week's edition of my column.

Topics this week include:

1) Losing the media war to the Taliban,

2) Pakistan's hedges are growing wild.

I welcome your feedback in the comments.

Storm clouds over the Indian Ocean

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Writing in today’s Times Online, Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist, summarizes China’s expanding archipelago of military outposts around the Indian Ocean (please read the whole thing):

The victory of the Sri Lankan Government was assisted by the supply of arms from China, especially fighter jets, as The Times revealed on May 2, while the Chinese are also building a spanking new port on the southern coast of the country, which the Chinese Navy will be able to use for refuelling and repairs.

This is part of a broad move by China into the Indian Ocean, which India has traditionally considered its sphere of influence. Chinese engineers are building another port at Gwadar in Pakistan; roads are being cut or improved through Burma to help trade routes between Yunnan province in China and the Indian Ocean; ties are being improved with island nations such as the Seychelles; surveillance stations are being sited or upgraded on Burmese islands.

The obvious consequence will be an arms race with India, a country that matches China for enormous military potential. India will not be able to tolerate a threatening Chinese military presence in the Indian Ocean region, especially when that Chinese presence, both at sea and ashore, encircles India on all sides.

And then there are the second and third order effects. I previously discussed Australia’s massive military expansion plan. Next to follow will be Japan, which will establish significant offensive strike capabilities for the first time since 1945.

What will be the U.S. interest regarding these trends? Should the U.S. encourage these arms races as a distributed way of containing future Chinese military power? Or will the creation of significant Chinese, Indian, and Japanese air and naval power cause the U.S. to lose control over the sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, leaving the U.S. dependent and without options?

Under the latter view, it could be in America’s interest to propose a naval arms limitation conference to head off an arms race in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. Over the past decades, U.S. air and naval hegemony has worked well for China, Indian, Japan, and others in the region. Leaders in these countries may see it in their interests to continue this regime rather than risk upsetting it.

Unfortunately, such treaties and self-control in general have very poor records. U.S. military planners thus need to anticipate a future which will find the Indian Ocean and western Pacific packed with warships from rival fleets.

Will the U.S. Navy and Air Force be able to keep up? Not if U.S. warships and aircraft costs maintain their latest trends. Just one more reason why the Pentagon will need one more Revolution in Military Affairs.

Did Sri Lanka debunk counterinsurgency theory?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:51:00 +0000

The Sri Lankan government has demonstrated one way to end a civil war: massive force, employed without remorse. An article in yesterday’s New York Times summarized the final campaign against the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers:

Starting in 2006, the government forces staged intense air, sea and ground assaults against rebels in the east and the north, sustaining the attacks even though the two sides were still officially engaged in cease-fire negotiations. The government also adopted some guerrilla tactics from the Tamil Tigers, using small groups of troops to penetrate deep into the jungle and assassinate rebel leaders.

[…]

The victory, like Russia’s smothering of Chechnya’s separatist rebellion, comes at a high cost. The United Nations says 7,000 civilians have been killed since January alone, and more than 265,000 ethnic Tamils who fled the war zone are now interned in overcrowded camps. Some civilians are missing, including three government-employed doctors who worked in the rebel-held area and regularly spoke out about the shelling of hospitals there. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly said the government shelled civilian areas, even as the rebels held tens of thousands of ethnic Tamils as civilian shields.

Now, some of Sri Lanka’s erstwhile allies, including those that had banned the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization, are calling for an international commission of inquiry into possible war crimes.

But in exchange for the punishment suffered by the non-combatants, the Sri Lankan government achieved the deaths of virtually all of LTTE’s leadership, the occupation of all of its territory, and the disbanding of its militia. Sri Lankan’s civil war is over.

Commentary

The end of the Sri Lankan civil war - most especially the way it ended, with a clear military solution – will cause many sleepless nights for Western counterinsurgency theorists. The Sri Lankan government severely violated accepted Western counterinsurgency doctrine and by doing so has achieved a clear result. Meanwhile uncertainty and foreboding hang over the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, currently prosecuted under new Western rulebooks such as Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency and Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations.

Had the Sri Lankan government used FM 3-24 and FM 3-07 to battle the LTTE, it would have:

1) Formed an alternative, pro-government administration in the Tamil area,

2) Used infantry patrols and little else to provide security to the Tamil population,

3) Spent lavishly to improve the living conditions of the Tamil population,

4) Earned the trust of the Tamil population, thus denying the LTTE a sanctuary and gaining intelligence on LTTE activities.

Instead, the Sri Lankan military used heavy unconstrained firepower to blast the LTTE, shatter civilian sanctuaries, and occupy Tamil territory.

Now that it has crushed the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government may be well-advised to vigorously implement a population-centric approach in order to prevent a new outbreak of rebellion. It may figure that the demoralized and defenseless Tamil population will be more accepting of a governmental population-centric treatment than it would have been if the LTTE still had military power. Or more accepting than some Iraqis or Pashtuns in Afghanistan currently are, when they calculate they still have alternatives other than submitting to American will.

Government leaders around the world currently suffering from insurgencies and observing U.S. counterinsurgency practice in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Sri Lankan government’s experience against the LTTE will draw some conclusions. What might those conclusions be?

First, cut off all media access to the battlefield. Control the message and the images the world receives.

Second, invite in the assistance of an authoritarian patron. Sri Lanka received generous assistance from China which we can be sure was not the least judgmental about Sri Lankan tactics. In the aftermath of the civil war, we should expect a small but growing military relationship between Sri Lanka and China. The Chinese military will be happy to have access to Sri Lankan air bases and port facilities in the Indian Ocean. China will also protect Sri Lankan officials from pesky United Nations investigations and tribunals.

Finally, be ruthless and rapid. End the campaign before most of the world is even aware of what is happening.

Although the Sri Lankan civil war is over, the Sri Lankan government can still mishandle the aftermath, reigniting a Tamil terror campaign. Thus, we won’t know for many years whether the Tamil crisis is really over.

Nor will we know for many years whether FM 3-24 and FM 3-07 are truly effective approaches. Around the world, leaders struggling with their own insurgencies are sizing up the evidence and contemplating their choices. This week, the ruthless fist may look appealing.

Face it - the U.S. has no leverage over Pakistan

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Today’s New York Times repeated a story that has swirled around the past week, namely that Pakistan is spending enormous sums expanding its nuclear weapons complex. During a Senate budget hearing last week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen confirmed the story with a single, “Yes.”

What, exactly, is the Pakistani government expanding? The NYT describes:

“We see them scaling up their centrifuge facilities,” said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which has been monitoring Pakistan’s continued efforts to buy materials on the black market, and analyzing satellite photographs of two new plutonium reactors less than 100 miles from where Pakistani forces are currently fighting the Taliban.

[…]

The program employs tens of thousands of Pakistanis, including about 2,000 believed to possess “critical knowledge” about how to produce a weapon.

Commentary

I draw several conclusions from this report.

1) Pakistan’s leaders are still the masters of the double game. It is possible, indeed very likely, that the Pakistani government engineered the crisis in the Swat valley in order to extract more emergency and long-term assistance from the U.S. government. Money being fungible, Pakistan was able to reduce its own funding on anti-Taliban activities and divert those funds to the nuclear program. All the while the U.S. believed (incorrectly) that its new funding was adding to the resources against the Taliban.

2) Is the U.S. now in a position to punish Pakistan for its duplicity? No, not any more than it has been since the afternoon of September 11, 2001. As long as the U.S. remains committed to a large-scale military and nation-building campaign in Afghanistan, it will have to tolerate all manner of Pakistani behavior.

3) Conversely, long and deep U.S. engagement with Pakistan this decade has apparently done nothing to reassure Pakistan’s leaders concerning Pakistan’s long-term security concerns. No amount of U.S. cajoling, reassurances, arguments, or assistance has convinced Pakistan’s leaders to downgrade in their minds the perceived threat from India.

4) Pakistan’s expansion of its nuclear program is an ominous sign for the cause of non-proliferation. If Pakistan, in spite of its links to both the U.S. and China, feels that 100 nuclear weapons are not enough, what chance is there of persuading Iran’s leaders that they don’t need nuclear weapons of their own? And Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey after that?

This story will prove to be an embarrassment for the Obama administration. It will show that the U.S. has minimal leverage over the Pakistani government; indeed all of the leverage seems to run in the opposite direction. The resulting frustration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere will eventually add energy to those on the political left who are beginning to question the Administration’s “Af-Pak” policies.

A bleak future for combat pilots

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:41:00 +0000

Last Thursday at a Senate hearing on the FY10 budget, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen gave his thoughts on the future of combat aircrews. In a word, the future is bleak. This story from Defense News explains:

Unmanned aircraft likely represent the future for U.S. military aviation with next generation bombers and fighter planes operating without pilots onboard, the top U.S. military officer said May 14.

[…]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the same hearing that military planners needed to answer the question whether a new bomber would have a pilot in the cockpit or operate as unmanned aircraft.

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mullen said that Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter now being built could be the last manned fighter jet before robotic planes take over that role.

"I mean, there are those that see JSF as the last manned fighter," Mullen said of the F-35. "I'm one that's inclined to believe that."

[…]

Although Gates has pushed for cuts in expensive weapons systems - including plans for expanding the fleet of F-22 fighter jets - his proposed budget for fiscal 2010 calls for increasing funding for unmanned drones, including Predators and the newer Reapers.

"This is one of the significant growth areas in the budget," Gates said.

The defense secretary's budget calls for spending $2 billion on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, with much of the money going to drones.

"We will ramp to build 48 Reapers a year during this budget," Gates said. "We are really placing a major bet in this area."

In his first briefing on the FY10 budget on April 6, Gates reaffirmed the Pentagon’s goal to purchase 2,442 F-35s over the life of the program. I would be very surprised if that full purchase occurs. Five or ten years from now congressional appropriators and Pentagon acquisition officials will question why they should continue to purchase F-35s when they can purchase smart and stealthy combat drones with five to ten times the combat radius and sortie endurance. Should peer adversaries acquire such capabilities, denying access to U.S. carrier strike groups or forward tactical airfields, that would pretty much end the argument over drones versus manned aircraft.

Gates cancelled the next generation bomber (NGB) program. On the other hand, the Pentagon’s “black” classified budget has apparently grown sharply. Did Gates kill the NGB because it was a lame concept? And will it restart in the black budget with something more visionary? If Gates is pushing for more innovation in unmanned combat aircraft, he is doing at least one thing right.

'This Week at War' at Foreign Policy Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:20:00 +0000

Click here to see this week's edition of my column.

Topics include:

1) Why McChrystal?

2) Can an antiwar movement stop the Long War?

I welcome your feedback in the comments.

Gates finally gets some sniping

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Today’s Washington Post ran a story about Defense Secretary Robert Gates, his emotional connection to the welfare of his soldiers, and the decisions about the defense budget that have resulted. No appropriation request could be less open for criticism than one which increases the safety of a soldier in a war zone, comforts a wounded Marine, or makes life better for families left behind by deploying troops. Since arriving at the Pentagon Gates has made it a personal mission to redirect Pentagon spending in these ways. How could anyone possibly criticize these actions?

But with long lead times required to design and buy mine-protected vehicles or adequate hospital capacity or improved base housing, failures to have enough of these resources today was a failure by the Pentagon between 1995 and 2005 to anticipate these requirements.

Which should cause one to wonder what, in his apparent single-minded focus on the present, is Secretary Gates overlooking about the future?

Compared to Donald Rumsfeld, his predecessor, Robert Gates has enjoyed a tenure without controversy. This has occurred because no one has yet sniped in his direction. Mr. Rumsfeld, by contrast, received a continuous fusillade of sniper fire from all manner of critics. However, in today’s Washington Post piece, some sniping has finally begun. Not surprisingly, the first marksmen are those Mr. Gates unceremoniously fired from office:

Gates's critics, including some active-duty generals and many of the senior officials he has fired, say his intense focus on Afghanistan and Iraq threatens to turn the vaunted U.S. military into an army of occupiers and nation-builders. "I am sure the North Koreans fear the MRAP and the Iranians are cringing in their boots about the threat from our stability forces," former Air Force secretary Michael W. Wynne, who was dismissed last year, wrote in an online column. "Our national interests are being reduced to becoming the armed custodians in two nations, Afghanistan and Iraq."

Even more stunning, the article revealed that last year the Joint Chiefs staged something of a mini-rebellion against Gates’s judgment:

Last year, the four-star generals who run the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps formally "non-concurred" with the classified version of Gates's National Defense Strategy, which called for "taking additional, acceptable risk" in the area of conventional war so that the military could improve its ability to fight irregular wars. Gates met with all of the chiefs to listen to their objections. He then concluded that their concerns were "not compelling," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The article indicates that Gates possesses an extraordinary level of confidence in his budget decisions, referring to them as “no-brainers.” Admiral Mullen said, "There is a certainty about what he wants, and you can't get around it."

There is no doubt that the Pentagon is too frequently paralyzed by analysis. Much of that is due to bureaucratic timidity. But much of that timidity might also be due to humility about predicting the future. Gates, by contrast, seems remarkably certain about his department’s enduring superiority in conventional warfare and peer-versus-peer competition. Gates seems to have no hesitation about predicting the future.

What has changed now is that critics of Gates are now beginning to emerge from the shadows, just as they did for Rumsfeld. They will provide ammunition (live or dud) to congressional staffers and others who may object to Gates’s ideas.

Robert Gates had a remarkably long honeymoon. That honeymoon may now be coming to an end.

Why buy military power when you can lease it instead?

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:02:00 +0000

On Monday, Bloomberg News had an interesting story about the re-emergence of equipment leases inside the Pentagon’s acquisition office:

Boeing Co., the second-largest U.S. defense contractor, is leasing drones to government agencies and militaries seeking to bypass years-long purchasing processes, a market the company says may grow to $10 billion in a decade.

Boeing won contracts in 2007 and 2008 for a total of $312.7 million to supply the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps with ScanEagle spy drones on a fee-for-service basis and got a $250 million contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command on similar terms last month. Under the deals, Boeing owns the equipment and sends the operators where the military wants them.

Drones including the ScanEagle, the A-160 Hummingbird and the Unmanned Little Bird may be used to perform surveillance and cargo-delivery missions for militaries and civilian agencies worldwide, said Phil Panagos, Boeing’s director of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Services.

“The purpose of our business is to provide platforms and systems to customers who don’t want to purchase” them right away, Panagos said in an interview. The global market for supplying drones and other services on that basis may be worth “$10 billion over the next 10 years,” he said. He declined to give an estimate of what Boeing’s share of that market may be.

[…]

The Navy’s contract with Boeing allowed it to deploy a drone from the USS Bainbridge destroyer to help rescue Captain Richard Phillips from pirates off Somalia’s coast on April 13, said Navy Captain J.R. Brown, program manager for Small Tactical Unmanned Air Systems.

The Bainbridge was equipped with ScanEagle and Boeing- supplied operators as part of the ship’s maritime surveillance mission, he said.

[…]

The contract with Boeing was the quickest way for the Navy to get the drones to the battlefield and ships, Rear Admiral Bill Shannon, the program executive officer for unmanned aviation, said in an interview.

“The No.1 reason we went for fee-for-service is to be as responsive as possible,” Shannon said. The normal acquisition process would have required “a year or two” just to define the requirements.

[…]

The contract requires Boeing to provide the operators and drones, which also are operated from land bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and other Navy ships around the world, for as many as 55,000 hours, Brown said.

Commentary

A decade ago, Boeing found itself in extreme legal and political jeopardy after it criminally mismanaged a leasing scheme for new Air Force tanker aircraft. The insider corruption that attended that deal should not however discredit the general concept of the Pentagon leasing instead of buying the hardware that it needs.

The use of leases in this particular case very likely results from Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s urgent push to get more ISR platforms in the air as quickly as possible. As discussed in the story, leasing a “turn-key” solution from Boeing shaved years off the normal Pentagon/Congress acquisition process.

In the years ahead, as the Defense Department’s annual budgets stop growing, there will be a large temptation to hide otherwise expensive acquisition decisions with lease contracts rather than outright purchases. As we saw with the tanker fiasco a decade ago, there is much room for ripping off the taxpayer inside a lease-versus-buy decision. In spite of this risk however, whenever a critical shortage of some esoteric capability appears, we should expect the Pentagon to quickly fill the gap with contractor leases.

Which brings up a final and obvious point: defense service contractors are here to stay. At his budget announcement last month, Secretary Gates discussed at length his intention to convert thousands of private sector contractor employees into government civil service employees. But this episode with ISR drones, a response to an urgent Gates request, shows that government procurement processes, which properly are designed to protect the taxpayer, are also too inflexible to rapidly adjust to urgent battlefield requirements.

Boeing studied the situation, risked some of its money, built some ISR capacity on its own, and then landed some leases with the Pentagon. In the short-run at least, everyone seems like a winner. Especially those in the defense service contract business.

Gates’s ax severs McKiernan’s neck

noreply@blogger.com (Westhawk) — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:26:00 +0000

Having let, oh, months go by without firing someone, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reminded everyone that he still knows how to swing his ax. This afternoon he announced the end of General David McKiernan’s career. Replacing McKiernan as ISAF commander in Afghanistan will be Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a special operations expert who inexplicably survived the media inquisition surrounding the Tillman affair.

Mr. Gates is also sending his personal military advisor Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, previously a very successful commander in Afghanistan, to be deputy commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, a new position. As I discussed in a recent post, I wonder how Lt. Gen. J.B. Dutton of the British Royal Marines, the current ISAF deputy, feels about this development.

The New York Times had this reporting on the McKiernan dismissal:

Defense officials said that General McKiernan was removed because of what they described as a conventional approach to what has become one of the most complicated military challenges in American history. He is to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who recently ran all special operations in Iraq.

The decision reflects a belief that the war in Afghanistan has grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch.

That last sentence brings to mind a few questions:

1) What are the criteria for determining when a war has “grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch”?

2) By Gates’s standards are any commanders from general purpose backgrounds eligible for top command in today’s circumstances? Should Mullen and Petraeus consider acquiring some packing boxes?

3) What can general purpose flag officers do, if anything, to regain relevancy while Robert Gates is defense secretary?

4) If after some transition period general purpose forces and commanders have adapted by acquiring the skills and mentality of special operators, what will be “special” about the special operators?

5) What are the risks of everyone becoming a “special operator”? Are there any skills, training, or experiences that general purpose soldiers get that special operators don’t get? And are there occasions when those advantages are critically valuable? I know the answer to those questions is “yes.” It just helps to remember what those advantages are. And to remind people like Mr. Gates.