January 07, 2005

The Army Goes the Other Way

Timing is everything, they say. As if in response to my warnings of the problems facing the reserve component, the Army announced yesterday that they would seek the authority to extend the tours of reservists beyond the 24-month limit currently in place. Now, given that recruiting is already falling off, what can we expect this move to do to the reserve component?

It's time to expand the Army, and maybe not just by keeping the 30,000 troops the Army is currently overstrength by. We need to look at our committments around the globe, figure out what it takes to meet all of them, and either get out of some of those committments or expand the active Army to a size large enough to handle them. The reserve component needs to return to its historical role as an emergency source of trained manpower rather than one of the primary sources of Army resources as it is today. We can do so voluntarily now, or we can watch as the structure crumbles out from under us over the next few years. The logical choice is to act before we've burned our bridges.

Posted at 07:42 AM · War · Comments (2) · TrackBack (0)

January 06, 2005

The Reserves Approach the Breaking Point

I have written numerous times about the need to change our force structure now rather than face growing problems with the Army down the road. It now appears that we're down the road. LTG Helmly, the chief of the Army Reserve, has written a pointed memo noting that the Army's current policies concerning the Reserves are breaking the force. This comes as no surprise to me, as a perusal of the above links should make clear, but that doesn't change the fact we've got work to do if we're to resolve the problems.

Before we can fix a problem, we need to understand it; what is going wrong with the Reserves? The immediate problem with the Reserves is that recruiting is down as fewer people are willing to sign up for a job that is effectively the same as going on Active Duty except with fewer benefits. With recruiting dropping, the Reserves will face an accelerating decline as fewer soldiers are called on to do the same number of missions. I don't know if LTG Helmly is yet correct that the Reserves are broken, but they are certainly breaking.

The government could fix this problem by expanding the active force to reduce the strains on the reserve component, by increasing the benefits of reserve service sufficiently to attract the requisite number of soldiers, or by reducing the Army's committments enough to eliminate the requirement for such a large number of mobilizations. The first two solutions are expensive; just paying the salaries of an additional two divisions of soldiers would cost roughly $1.5 billion a year. That doesn't take into account the costs of recruiting or the new equipment and the training expenses; building new forces is costly. Bumping the benefits available to reservists might be cheaper, but that carries a separate cost: if the benefits of reserve service are sufficiently enticing, many active soldiers may choose to transfer to the reserves. This would require either cutting the benefits again, putting us back where we started, or increasing the benefits of the active force enough to keep the supply of active duty soldiers where we need it, therefore increasing costs still more.

Which leaves us with trimming our committments, and number one on that list is Iraq. While the Army would still need to mobilize some soldiers without the Iraq committment, the numbers would be far lower, and far less likely to break the force. Furthermore, with President Bush now reelected and no heir apparent, a withdrawal from Iraq could easily provide the President with significantly greater political capital he could use for the domestic projects he will push for this year. The only thing preventing such a withdrawal is what strategic effects such a move would have on the war, but that's another argument for another time. Politically, I think we can agree that such a move would help the President and would 'resolve' this problem. That is to say, it wouldn't really fix the problem if we needed the reserves again, but it would mask the problem until the next time.

The problems of the reserves go deeper than just those exposed by our heavy reliance on them for this war. Both the Army Reserve and National Guard have two systemic flaws that will continue to plague the Army until or unless they are addressed. The flaws are how the reserve component accounts for the health of units and the unrealistic expectations we have of the reserve component. Before I get into those, I want to make it clear that I have a great deal of respect for the men and women of the reserve component. The work they do is awe-inspiring. I have had numerous opportunities to observe the reserve component over the past four years, and what I have seen is a lot of great Americans working hard under very difficult circumstances. The problems of the reserve component are simply too great for individuals to overcome them. Only systemic change can provide a resolution.

For most of the past 20 years, the way the Army has tracked reserve component units has come down to one question: how many bodies do they have? Units that maintain their required strength levels are rewarded, while units that fail to do so are penalized. This incentive structure has had predictable consequences. Reserve component commanders have put their efforts into attracting and retaining soldiers at the cost of training. Army training is rarely pleasant. Even relatively safe duty positions have to get out in the mud to qualify on their weapon, have to stay in shape, have to spend weekends away from their families, and have to risk being mobilized. Recruiting commercials and recruiters rarely emphasize the unpleasant nature of much military duty, and even when Hollywood makes an antiwar film, it focuses on how bad combat is, forgetting that even the routine duties can be difficult. A sizeable fraction of new recruits decide that they don't like the real Army once they're exposed to it. On the active duty side, this results in the headaches of company commanders and first sergeants everywhere: soldiers trying to escape their committments. Reserve component leaders have the same problems, only magnified: an active duty soldier may want to leave, but he probably lives in the barracks and is under the supervision of his NCOs on a daily basis. A reserve component soldier, however, is away from his unit for 28 of every 30 days. If he doesn't show up for a drill, there's little his leaders can do to compel his attendance. While there are methods to penalize the soldier, they are difficult to implement and rarely bear fruit. It is often easier simply to do the paperwork to drop the soldier from the unit's rolls and worry about the soldiers who do come to drill. But when the commander is graded based on how many soldiers he has, it's difficult for him not to start making deals. It's not a complex equation: ease up on the training, and more soldiers stick around. With the incentive system as it is, few commanders can resist that bargain.

The costs of that bargain should be equally obvious. Being a soldier is more complex than simply being able to shoot a rifle, and gaining proficiency in the myriad tasks a soldier must understand takes hard work. Getting hard work out of soldiers requires commanders willing to push their soldiers. Which offers the other half of the equation: push your soldiers hard enough to move them towards proficiency and you start losing soldiers and face pressure from above to boost your numbers. Of course, your unit may be far more effective at 75% strength than an ill-trained unit at 100% strength, but the bottom line units are graded against is numbers, not proficiency. Inevitably, training loses out.

That is a problem only compounded by the other systemic problem of the reserves: unrealistic expectations. Reservists train for 39 days a year: twelve weekends and one fifteen-day stretch of annual training. In that time commanders must fit weapons qualification, sexual harassment training, physical fitness tests, equal opportunity training, common skills training, consideration of others training...the list goes on and on, and those are just the classes required of every soldier. Infantrymen must still practice their individual movement techniques, squad and platoon maneuver and short-range marksmanship. Tankers must qualify their tanks annually on four different tank tables as well as practicing maneuvers. Every specialty has its own unique training requirements, all of which take time. But the amount of time to train never changes: you've got to fit it all into 39 days. Which is impossible, which means that training has to be cut, and the first things to go are the mission-specific training. Why? Because the Army tracks whether or not soldiers have attended sexual harassment training, but not whether or not they're competent at their jobs.

Then let's add in other individual training: new recruits must attend basic training and advanced individual training. When a soldier earns the rank of Sergeant, he must attend PLDC. At Staff Sergeant, he's off to BNCOC and at Sergeant First Class it's ANCOC. Officers face a similar gamut of courses as they advance. The bottom line being that most units face not having ten percent of their soldiers at any one time because they're attending these courses, so they have even less time to learn their jobs. Worse, the courses they attend are stripped-down versions of the active duty courses because a reservist can't take six weeks or more out of his life to attend the full course. The Army designates the courses as equivalent, but it is difficult to accept such a designation as realistic: is an officer who has attended eight weekend drills and a two-week course really the equivalent of one who attended a five-month course?

Let's use yours truly as an example. I've been in the military since 1988, with a little over twelve years of active duty time over that period. I'm a junior Major. Compare me to a senior Lieutenant Colonel commanding a reserve battalion: the reservist will have more years in service than I do, generally around 20. But those 20 years may well all be 39 days a year, so that 20 years of service is less than three years total wearing a green suit. (Most senior officers have some active duty experience, so this example exaggerates for effect. But there are probably reserve officers out there who fit this profile.) The Army certainly wouldn't trust a battalion to me, yet the reserves are trusting battalions to people with years less experience than I have. How realistic is it, then, to expect a reserve battalion commander to be as proficient as his active duty counterpart?

Yet this is just what the reserve component assumes. A battalion is mobilized and expected to perform at the same level as an active duty battalion after only 60 days of post-mobilization training. I've been watching the process for the last year. The units certainly give it their best shot, and we see great improvement between their arrival and their departure. But they're not the equivalent of active duty units nor are they even close and it's ridiculous to expect them to be. When I served on a brigade staff, I was writing orders and participating in orders drills on a daily basis for 18 months, and even at the end I had room for improvement. Now take an officer on a reserve brigade staff who only gets to practice his trade (at best) 39 days a year, give him 60 days of intense training, and you've got someone who just tried to hydrate using a fire hose. There's too much to learn in too short a time, and all the dedication in the world won't change that.

Which brings us to our current dilemma. In order to keep the reserve numbers up, commanders have been forced to slack off on training. Due to mandatory training requirements, schools, and extremely limited training time, few units are able to train on more than a small fraction of their assigned tasks, leaving them with a huge gap between where their training should be when they mobilize and where they actually are. In Iraq we can overcome this deficiency to a limited extent by using reserve units in less dangerous parts of the country and for less dangerous tasks (a very relative term in Iraq). The question that remains is, are we willing to continue living with these deficiencies rather than trying to fix them before we face a situation where we can’t shield reserve units at all?

Posted at 11:01 AM · War · Comments (3) · TrackBack (0)

January 05, 2005

After January 30

As the violence in Iraq continues to escalate, now seems a logical time to ask the question: what do we do after the Iraqi elections are over? The assumption by most prowar commentators is that the current violence is directed at disrupting or stopping the elections, and that once the elections are over, the violence will taper off. The first half of that assumption is probably valid; it seems increasingly likely that the number of foreign fighters involved in the insurgency is much smaller than originally believed. That is at once good and bad news.

The bad news is obvious: we did a lousy job of preparing for the postwar environment in Iraq, and we our execution has generally been only slightly better than our planning. We knew (or should have known) going in that many Iraqis, no matter how happy they would be to see Saddam gone, would resent America for freeing them. Much of that anger might have been soothed if life after Saddam had been noticeably better, but the chaos, violence, and damaged infrastructure remaining after the war was anything but. And as the struggles to pacify Iraq have gone on, our presence has only continued to make things worse. Even were all of our soldiers perfectly mannered when they invade Iraqi homes in search of insurgents, even if none of our soldiers fired a shot unless they were certain it was aimed at an enemy combatant, the annoyance and humliation of occupation would continue to grow the longer we stay. Therefore we see growing numbers of Iraqis joining or helping the insurgency in the hope of removing the U.S. from power. Indeed, the party most likely to triumph in the coming elections is running on a simple platform: get the U.S. out of Iraq.

As the Chinese say, however, this crisis may also offer us an opportunity. If the insurgency is primarily Iraqi in nature, rather than foreign-dominated, then the withdrawal of Coalition forces from Iraq could quickly deflate the insurgency. There would still remain diehards looking to keep up the fight: former Baathists, possibly other Sunnis, and whatever foreign fighters are in Iraq. But without general support, it would be far more difficult for them to continue to disrupt Iraq as they have over the past months. Insurgency feeds on popular discontent; if the average Iraqi isn't willing to support the insurgency, Iraqi security forces would have a much easier time of taking it apart.

Withdrawal would not be a panacea. If the new government asks us to leave, we need to leave, but we will still need to provide Iraq with support for some time. If the new government proved unable to stabilize Iraq after our leaving, we could find ourselves in a difficult position.

The definition of insanity is supposed to be doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. We have yet to see much evidence that our occupation of Iraq is leading to the peaceful and stable Iraq we need. If the situation doesn't get any better following the elections, perhaps a withdrawal is the best available course of action. One thing seems certain: if we don't see some progress soon, we'd better change our approach, or the naysayers who continue to gleefully chant 'Vietnam' will get their wish.

Posted at 06:02 AM · War · Comments (6) · TrackBack (0)

December 24, 2004

Problems in the Reserve Component

So I see that a number of soldiers from the units I've been involved in training for the past six months claim they received inadequate training (link requires registration). Since I've been a firsthand participant in some of this training, and present for all of it, I thought I'd add a few firsthand observations about the claims.

I should note up front that I have been less than thrilled with many aspects of the training we've given these units. Because FORSCOM has such a long list of required tasks each unit going to Iraq is expected to complete, and because Reserve units simply aren't able to arrive at the training with the prerequisite training complete. I hope to write more about this at some future date, but for now I'll stick to the topic at hand.

It should also be noted that this essay is not intended to minimize the problems cited in the report. There are a number of problems in the Army, and the mobilization of so many National Guard and Reserve units is bringing those problems to light. However, I think the report omits (probably through a combination or ignorance and shoddy reporting) the source of many of the problems National Guard and Reserve units face.

The first issue cited is equipment problems. An NCO is quoted complaining that the unit's M60 machine guns were in poor condition, presumably so bad the unit couldn't use them in battle. Now the report does note that the problem began with the unit's mobilization, which would lead the thinking reader to the right answer: the weapons were in poor repair when the unit mobilized, meaning the problem lies not with the training they received when they arrived at Fort Bliss, but with their weapons maintenance program at home station. If they let their weapons deteriorate to such a degree they could no longer be fired, it seems to me that there's a bigger problem there than the training they received once they mobilized.

But this discussion also overlooks one more important issue: nobody is going to Iraq with M60 machineguns [Update: Dave tells me that some units are, in fact, deploying with M60s. I will have to ask around to see if we ended up running some M60 ranges I never heard about.]. The Army is in the process of removing the M60 from the arsenal and replacing it with the M240B, a superior weapon. While I welcome someone telling me I'm incorrect, I don't believe any unit is going to Iraq with the M60. I do know that every unit we've trained went to the ranges with M240Bs, not M60s. Given that going into battle with dysfunctional weapons is a serious issue, Mr. Gold would have done well to dig a little deeper before leaving his readers with that impression.

Next we hear about soldiers going to Iraq without having had a chance to fire the weapons they will use in theater. I suspect that is inaccurate, as we are not permitted to send units out of here until every member has fired his or her personal weapon. If the writer is referring to crew-served weapons, he may be correct, as everyone is not required to fire their crew-served weapons prior to deployment. But they certainly have had the chance. In the last ten days leading up to the Christmas break, my brigade was nearly consumed with running ranges for units who had not yet gotten all of their personnel to the various ranges we'd run in the preceding months.

When we run ranges, we generally can count on two things: the unit will not have conducted good PMI prior to arrival, and the unit won't bring all of their personnel to the ranges. Failure to conduct PMI guarantees that many of the soldiers arrive on the range without the training necessary to qualify their weapons; indeed, we often see soldiers show up who don't even know how to load the weapon they're on the range to fire. This means that much of our training time is eaten up with teaching the soldiers about their weapons rather than helping them fire them. Add in the fact the units don't ensure that all of their soldiers are there for the training and it should surprise no one that not every soldier is firing their weapon prior to deployment.

There are problems with the National Guard and Reserve units we're sending to Iraq. I'm quite confident that there are ways we can improve our training program here at Fort Bliss. But the problems we face go much farther than what a training brigade can provide. The biggest problems we face are systemic issues with the Guard and Reserve, problems that will take us years to fully resolve. But one big problem this article has running through its quotes and incidents is one that needs to be fixed sooner rather than later: the question of quality leadership for these units. Bad equipment, soldiers who don't get trained because they don't show up for ranges: these are leadership issues. And if the leadership of these units can't get their soldiers to attend weapons training prior to going into a combat theater, how can we expect them to lead troops into battle?

I will have more on this after Christmas.

Posted at 05:51 PM · War · Comments (15) · TrackBack (0)

December 21, 2004

Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying

One of the greatest movies of all time, for my money, is The Shawshank Redemption. Adapted from a Stephen King short story, the film follows a banker named Andy Dufresne (played by the incomparable Tim Robbins) who is sent to life in Shawshank Prison for murdering his wife and her lover. Inside, Andy is befriended by inmate 'Red' Redding (Morgan Freeman; need I say more?), the only guilty man in Shawshank Prison. The film spans the better part of two decades of Andy's life in Shawshank, as ugly as one might expect prison life to be (although probably still whitewashed). Near the end of the film, Andy tells Red that it's time to get busy living, or get busy dying. Red is concerned Andy means to kill himself, but they are not cellmates, so he spends a long night wondering if his friend will still be there in the morning. Sure enough, come morning Andy does not come out of his cell for the morning count. When guards enter his cell, however, they do not find a body: Andy is gone. He has escaped, to 'get busy living' in freedom. Andy was always living in the literal sense of the term. But life in prison is not truly living, and Andy has had to choose whether to risk his life in an escape attempt in exchange for a shot at real living, or accept his fate as a prisoner and get down to the business of dying in prison.

It takes time to build an Army. During World War II, it was nearly a year (November 8, 1942, Operation Torch) after Pearl Harbor before large numbers of new American troops saw battle. Even then, only a small number of American troops were involved in the fighting: ten divisions, out of the 90 divisions the U.S. Army would eventually field. And that small force was dealt a sharp rebuke in its first encounter with the Wehrmacht, as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel hammered the 1st Armored Division in the first real contact between U.S. and German forces. U.S. forces learned quickly, but not cheaply, as casualties ran high among U.S. units early in the campaign. The Italian Campaign would see the U.S. putting more divisions into the fight, but not until late 1943, and the full weight of the American Army was not engaged until June 6 1944, more than two and a half years after the war had begun. It had taken that long for even the industrial powerhouse that was 1940s America to assemble the men and materiel needed to take on Fortress Europe, even starting right after the war began. And even then, the Army was often referred to as the "90 division gamble" because General Marshall limited the Army to 90 divisions despite projections ranging as high as 350 divisions needed to win the war, and later decisions to build the Army to a strength of 100 divisions.

We are now little more than one-quarter of the way through the fourth year of the war. (Marking the start from 9/11, of course, since that's when we started fighting it.) In that time the Army has grown from an end strength of 482,400 to 495,374, thanks to stop-loss orders and Congressional approval to temporarily exceed statutory limits on end strength. Those additional soldiers have been used only to maintain units going to war at full strength, however; not a single new unit has been created since 9/11, although the introduction of Units of Action will change that soon. But that won't change end strength; the UAs will change the Army's structure, and may free up some additional soldiers for action, but the total force will be precisely the same. And doing the simple math that one soldier deployed actually requires three soldiers: one training to relieve him, one actually deployed, and one retraining and recovering after deployment, that means that maintaining 150,000 soldiers in Iraq actually chews up 450,000 troops. That leaves the cupboard pretty damn bare for other contingencies, even when a growing fraction of that 450,000 soldiers is coming from the reserve component. Add in the fact the reserve component may not be able to sustain the current tempo and the argument we don't need a larger Army doesn't seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.

The number one argument I hear against expanding the Army is that we don't know how long we will need them. That is certainly true. Iraq could stabilize before we could train the additional forces we need, in which case the Army would be larger than we require. That would cost money, particularly as we would have to raise base pay and benefits in order to attract enough volunteers to expand the Army by two divisions or more. Given our current budgetary woes, it's understandable why many people would be concerned about spending money on soldiers we might not need, although given Congress' willingness to spend our money on every other project under the sun, I'm not sure what's holding them back.

But here's a news flash: we'll never know if we'll still need the troops by the time they're ready. Had we started building new divisions immediately after 9/11, we'd already have them, and maybe our troops wouldn't be quite so overstressed. Two years from now, when we could have two new divisions on the field, who knows what the situation will be, or how badly we may be wishing we'd taken the time to build them when we could? Because of the long lag time involved in increasing the size of the Army, either we take a chance on not needing them, or we continue to grind down what we have and pray that the enemy will break before the Army does.

We are at war, whether we want to be or not. But we have decided to go to war without truly fighting a war, because our civilian leadership doesn't want to ask Americans to make the kind of sacrifices necessary to fight a war. So we're fighting on the cheap, forcing soldiers to return to Iraq 18 months after they left and causing possibly irreparable damage to our reserve components. It's time to make a choice: get busy fighting this war, or get busy losing it.

Posted at 07:29 PM · War · Comments (7) · TrackBack (0)

December 12, 2004

American Soldier

SPC David Mahlenbrock was killed in action on December 3d of this year. SPC Mahlenbrock had a few requests in the event of his death, one of which being the playing of Toby Keith's "American Soldier" at his funeral. SPC Mahlenbrock will be interred at Arlington National Cemetary on December 15th at 10am EST. His family and friends are asking for people to call their local radio stations and ask them to play "American Soldier" dedicated to SPC Mahlenbrock at 1pm EST. Via Smash comes this link you can use to find your local radio stations to contact them to pass on the request. If you can take the time to call, email, or otherwise contact your local stations to pass on the request, I'm confident SPC Mahlenbrock's friends and family would be quite grateful. As would I.

Posted at 06:44 AM · War · Comments (1) · TrackBack (0)

December 10, 2004

Politics and War

During World War II, two sets of high commands faced identical choices. Their troops were driving east deep into enemy territory, so quickly that their supplies couldn't keep up. Winter was coming on, and the logisticians had to decide whether to ship ammunition and fuel or winter clothing forward to the front lines. Each high command made the same choice: ammo and fuel had priority. Most students of World War II are familiar with the disasters the Wehrmacht faced on the Russian Front in 1941 when the brutal Russian winter, especially harsh in 1941, settled across eastern Europe. Fewer know that the American army escaped a similar fate in 1944, when the European winter was exceptionally warm, sparing GIs the harshest consequences they might have faced without true winter clothing. Back then, of course, General Bradley probably wouldn't have faced too harsh criticism over his decision even if the winter had been worse; the press corps was less enamored of ambush journalism back then. Today, one can only imagine how such a decision would be treated.

Or maybe not, as antiwar columnists of all stripes are tripping over one another to condemn the Bush administration for sending troops to war without the very latest in equipment. It's funny, because I'll wager that none of those columnists was worrying about making sure the military had top-of-the-line equipment prior to the last few months (or few days). No, I seem to recall lots of talk of 'peace dividends' and downsizing. I'm not going to argue that we were necessarily wrong to do so, but you reap what you sow. We agreed to maintain a military that was equipped with 1970s vintage equipment leavened with the occasional toy from the 1980s. December 2004 is way too late to be complaining about equipment shortfalls we've spent the better part of two decades accumulating.

Would it be better to make sure that every soldier we send into battle is equipped with the latest and greatest equipment available? Absolutely. But we're not willing to pay that price, and with good reason. One uparmored HMMWV runs $155,000, and the military needs close to 10,000 for operations in Iraq. That would mean we would have needed a stockpile of $1,550,000,000 worth of HMMWVs alone standing by for the operation (and probably more, but call it $1.5 billion for argument's sake). Add to that the costs of maintaining a fleet of uparmored HMMWVs (since they require additional maintenance and training to operate), and you're talking a nontrivial addition to the defense budget. In retrospect it seems cheap, a few billion dollars, but in peacetime any expenditure on the military frequently is seen as expendable when balanced against more constituent-pleasing expenditures like, well, take your pick.

For decades we've tried to maintain a military on the (relative) cheap. Now that decision is coming back to haunt us in Iraq. It's likely that the Bush administration could have done more to alleviate the problem, but the fact we don't have all the equipment we would like proves nothing about the rightness of our cause or what we should do next. Jim Henley has the real argument: if we're not prepared to accept troops going into combat without the latest equipment, then we shouldn't send them in the first place. I disagree with Jim's contention that the Bush administration went to war the way it did because it believed it needed to fool the American people, which may indicate that I'm simply gullible; I tend to believe that incompetence is a far greater force in political decisions than malice. But that is the discussion we need to be having: what do we do now, not what should we have done six months or sixteen years ago.

Posted at 08:30 PM · War · Comments (5) · TrackBack (0)

Defining Miracles Down

Charles Krauthammer is upset that the recent inauguration of Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan isn't being more widely hailed as a miracle, given Afghanistan's recent history. Let me offer the explanation of at least one hawk.

It's terrific that Afghanistan is better off now than it was under the Taliban. The moves towards self-government and greater individual freedom are certainly things to be celebrated. But they're hardly a miracle.

There are still thousands of foreign troops in Afghanistan helping to keep the peace (or at least reduce the fighting) and keeping the current government in power. Would Karzai control anything without the might of NATO behind him? Maybe Kabul, maybe even a small area beyond Kabul, but nothing more. That suggests to me that the miracle of Afghanistan hasn't happened quite yet. No, the first real miracle won't occur until the current government has demonstrated that it can remain in power without foreign troops keeping it there. Until Karzai is more than a puppet (and if he can't hold power without foreign support, he's a puppet regardless of whether his policies are actually directed by his sponsors), I see no miracle.

Krauthammer also misses the great miracle of our own government, and of all self-government. The miracle of the American government didn't occur in 1787 when the Constitution was written, nor in 1788 when George Washington was elected our first President. Not in 1792 when Washington was reelected nor even 1796 when Washington stepped down and John Adams was elected President. No, the real miracle came in 1801, when John Adams voluntarily surrendered power to Thomas Jefferson after losing the election of 1800. Until a so-called representative government demonstrates that whoever is currently in power can be removed by the people, it isn't real. It's too early for that to occur in Afghanistan, but until it does, that's another strike against any claims of Afghan miracles. Plenty of countries have elected a leader once.

Is Karzai's election good news from Afghanistan? Absolutely. But let's not make it more than it is. There remains much work to be done.

Posted at 10:28 AM · War · Comments (1) · TrackBack (0)

December 09, 2004

Clinton's Army No More

So SecDef Rumsfeld took some tough questions during a Q&A session with some soldiers in Kuwait, (transcript here), and now the blogosphere is abuzz trying to figure out what it all means. (Amusingly enough, some of those soldiers were from the 116th Brigade, which I last saw at JRTC in late October getting ready to go on leave before heading to Iraq.)

Kevin Drum uses the incident to imply that there's something deficient in Rumsfeld's character. Well, there may be, but I wonder if Drum actually read the transcript or watched what happened before he wrote that, or if he's just fitting a preordained conclusion to the available facts. Reading through the transcript, I don't really see what all the fuss is about, but perhaps it looked worse on TV. Still, Rumsfeld seemed to handle most of the questions reasonably well. The question regarding uparmored HMMWVs was a tough one, but the answer was honest enough: we go with what we've got.

I actually got to see Secretary Rumsfeld at a Q&A earlier this year (or maybe it was last year, I'm not sure...the years really are running together) at Fort Carson. Rumsfeld gave a brief speech, then spent about 30 minutes answering questions from soldiers and family members. (In retrospect, it must have been last year, since the family members were there because their spouses were deployed.) I saw nothing in the Pentagon transcript that was any tougher than some of the questions Rumsfeld had to answer at Fort Carson, perhaps because the spouses knew they had nothing to fear (although I suspect few soldiers let themselves be overly awed by the SecDef, either; despite the propaganda, U.S. soldiers are not even close to automatons). He displayed a pretty good sense of humor that I believe may have thrown off some of the readers who got only selected quotes. In particular, Kevin complains that Rumsfeld responded to a question about retirement benefits by asking why the soldier was asking about retirement at his age. What Kevin doesn't mention, probably because he didn't know, is that Rumsfeld then answered the question as best he could. (Retirement is a big bone of contention for the Reserves. Active duty is simple: once you're at 20 years, as soon as you retire you start getting a check. For the reserves, you don't start getting checks until you're 60, and the checks are smaller. Reservists often get annoyed with the disparity, although the reasons are logical enough: if the retirement for active duty soldiers isn't significantly better than that available for reservists, it's hard to convince soldiers to remain on active duty.)

Kevin points to this article that claims the reservists (National Guard, actually) were actually much angrier with Rumsfeld than was reported. Maybe. More likely, however, this is just indicative of ignorance on the part of the reporter. The three questions he cites deal with single parents in the Army, retirement benefits, and Stop Loss. I've addressed the second topic above. The single parent question is a painful issue, from an administrative standpoint. The active Army will not allow single parents to enlist in the Army, for practical reasons: what does a single parent do with his or her child when it's time to deploy? Soldiers who become single parents during their service are required to assemble a detailed family care plan that explains precisely who will take care of the child in case of deployment. The packet includes legal documents and sworn statements all designed to ensure the child will have a safe place to live if the parent has to deploy, and it's a pain in the ass to put together and keep current. Not to mention the fact most single parents are probably going to have some difficulty keeping their mind on their business if their child is now thousands of miles away from them being cared for by a parent or family friend. And sometimes, even with a complete and properly filled out family care plan the designated caregiver backs out, leaving the unit short a soldier. So the active Army does its best to avoid the problem by simply not taking in single parents. The National Guard, however, still does. Can anyone guess why? If you guessed because National Guard recruiting rules predate 9/11, give yourself a prize. When the National Guard mobilized once a decade or less, single parents really weren't a problem for them. So they saw no reason to keep them out. Now that the Guard is expected to remain busy for the foreseeable future, that policy may change. Until then, soldiers like the one who questioned Rumsfeld can still get in.

Which brings us to Stop Loss, or what antiwar types call the backdoor draft (which sounds vaguely obscene, but never mind). I'm not a lawyer, and it's possible that the military's Stop Loss policies are, in fact, not legal. I don't have my enlistment contract handy, so I can't tell if it was in there somewhere or not. But Rumsfeld is certainly correct when he says that it has been used for years and years. At a minimum, I know it was applied for the first Gulf War, and it may go back further than that. I don't like it, but then I'm partial to the cap troopers of Heinlein's Starship Troopers who could quit right before a drop if they so chose. That's not how our system works, and when you volunteer for the military, you had best understand that you're giving up your right to do whatever you want to do for at least a few years. And while Stop Loss is painful for the troops so affected, it would be just as painful for the thousands of soldiers who would have to be jerked around to fill the billets of soldiers who wouldn't go to war if Stop Loss didn't apply. Maybe that's better, maybe it isn't. But it's indisputable that there is going to be some pain, and this is how the military has decided to deal with the pain for the time being. In the interim, I'm curious what Drum and Ackerman would have Rumsfeld say? Because I can't think of a damn thing he could say that would answer the question to the satisfaction of the questioner.

Again, I wasn't there, and I didn't see video of the interview. Maybe the soldiers really were as angry and Rumsfeld as terrible as Drum and Ackerman would have me believe. But I'm not seeing it based on what I've read.

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December 03, 2004

That Can't Be Good

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Iraq war is that it's so difficult to know what the real situation is on the ground. The media does its best, but I'm somewhat leery of normal reporting simply because reporters just don't understand the military. I don't discount everything they say, of course, but I don't think they're necessarily able to give us the full picture, particularly since each reporter only sees a narrow slice of what is happening in Iraq. I've also got two good friends in Iraq, but they don't have the opportunity to write as often as I would prefer, and they have a narrow view of the situation as well. Trying to assemble a cogent narrative from those various snapshots tends to leave the reader unsure how close the picture he's assembled is to reality.

That having been said, this note doesn't inspire much confidence in our current position in Iraq. Assuming this is legitimate, the writer is apparently responsible for providing water to the entire country of Iraq, and the level of experience she seems to have seems disturbingly low given the importance of her job. Worse, however, is her description of how bad conditions are where she lives: she can't go out on the economy, and she's required to wear her flak jacket whenever she is outside the buildings. She's so inured to rocket and mortar attacks, she doesn't even flinch at them any longer. If these are the circumstances under which the government of Iraq has to work, it suggests that we can't even secure one of our most critical C2 nodes. What does that say about the rest of the country?

Winning in Iraq isn't going to be easy under any circumstances. But if the government offices can so easily be threatened, it's hard to argue we're having the kind of success we need for ultimate success.

Hat tip: Unqualified Offerings

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December 02, 2004

Democracy in Iraq

As we approach the Iraqi elections still scheduled for 30 January, the $64,000 question remains whether or not representative government can take hold in Iraq sufficiently to reduce the insurgency to the level of a minor nuisance. It is my belief that it can, but that our current strategy is not calculated to get us there. That does not necessarily mean that the elections will not help the situation in Iraq; shifting to a representative government is a process that will involve many events over a period of years, and the elections are a key event. But while they are necessary, they are not sufficient.
Most of the violence in Iraq can be attributed to the Sunni minority. Some are Ba'athist holdouts who want to return to the power they held under Hussein. Others are fearful that the Shi'ite majority will now use the power of the ballot to oppress the Sunnis just as the Sunnis oppressed the Shiites when Hussein was in power. There is only one solution to the first group: killing enough of them so that the remnants are insufficient to threaten the new government. But the first group is small relative to the second group. The vast majority of Sunnis don't necessarily care who is in power. Their concern is protecting their rights under a representative system that will be dominated by the Shiites. This is the eternal challenge of representative government: how to protect the rights of the minority while adhering to majority rule. Without careful consideration to that concern, it is impossible to gain the level of faith necessary for representative government to succeed.
The reader may object to my use of the term 'faith,' but that is a critical ingredient in any representative government. We just endured an election campaign during which both sides assured the electorate that the election of their opponent would lead to death, disaster, obesity, and sundry other disasters. Yet once the election was over, there were no riots in the street, nobody grabbed their gun to hold off the troops, and the rhetoric actually dialed down significantly from the highs of the campaign. If either side really believed that the victory of the other side would lead to the disasters they had predicted, why wouldn't they take steps to prevent it? Because they have faith in the system.
The U.S. government turns over every two to six years. Like clockwork, every two years we elect representatives, a third of our Senators, and a President every other time. While we've been doing it so long it's just a habit now, there is no mystical force that requires us to continue. The President holds the power to simply hold onto power by force in theory, given the unrivaled conventional strength of our military. So what prevents him from doing so? Faith. I don't think any President would be successful if he tried to cling to power through a coup, but I can't prove that, because none has ever tried. I suspect that most Americans believe, as I do, that an attempt to circumvent our republican processes would fail because the people simply wouldn't stand for it, but that ultimately comes down to a question of faith, not facts. The fact that we all believe that to be the case allows us to live without the concern we might have to test the proposition.
That faith is the result of more than 200 years of reasonably successful government. For all of our other problems, we can look back over American history to times like the terrible period from 1861-1865 when Americans died in wholesale lots or the confusing times from 1783-1787 when we tried to work out how we could govern ourselves, and know that the republic survived. History can go a long ways to calm people's fears; it's hard to argue that we're really in that much trouble when people look back to times when we really did face the threat of dissolution or defeat.
That same faith is oriented directly against us in Iraq. There is no history of self-rule there, not even the low-level town meetings that formed the bedrock of New England democracy in the eighteenth century. Worse, the history of Iraq does offer plenty of memories of oppression and misrule. Where Americans can look at government and equate it with a system that, for all its flaws, has provided a reasonably good life to many generations of Americans, Iraqis look at government and see something that has brought terror and death to many generations of Iraqis. Representative government may sound great, but most Iraqis have no frame of reference for it. While we may look at the Sunnis who fear democracy as strange, from their perspective we're asking them to make a pretty big leap of faith in abandoning a system that served them predictably for a new system that we say will be better for them, but that will certainly place them at the mercy of the Shiites at the ballot box.
Iraq also offers the problem of a different kind of faith: Islam. Where Christianity has historically separated church and state to varying degrees, Islam has no such provisions. Islam is a one-stop-shop of sorts, providing guidance on how to live your life in almost every sphere. Self-rule is a contradiction of sorts in Islam, where people are expected to submit to God's law in all things. While representative government is not necessarily incapable of coexisting with Islam, I'm not convinced we're spending nearly enough time considering how to make the two dovetail effectively. Religion is massively more important in Iraq than it is in America, and we ignore that fact at our peril.
It appears that the Shiites and Kurds have bought into the representative government plan. Democracy offers the Shiites a chance to rule, given their numbers, while representative government is still a vast improvement for the Kurds. This means that the disorder in Iraq is focused primarily in the Sunni areas. The Shiites and Kurds, seeing the elections as in their best interests, have little reason to risk their homes and their lives by hiding insurgents. The Sunnis see things differently.
Apparently one plan under consideration is to accept the Sunni intransigence and let them reap the consequences of disorder by having even less influence over the new Iraqi government as the disorder in Sunni areas prevents voting in great numbers. This strategy seems calculated only to perpetuate the current problem. Many Sunnis support the insurgency now because the risks of helping the insurgency seem smaller than the risks of supporting the new government. If the new government actually confirms or appears to confirm the Sunnis' fears regarding representative government, it will only encourage them to continue fighting.
While it is possible that the new Iraqi government could eventually batter the Sunnis into submission, that is hardly an appropriate way to start what is, for all intents and purposes, a new country. I suppose the hard feelings such treatment would engender might someday fade, but our own Civil War experience suggests that hard feelings from war don't fade quickly or cleanly. That also presupposes success against a Sunni resistance that would only grow worse in the face of a government perceived to be persecuting them, hardly a foregone conclusion.
Success in representative government depends on buy-in by all the major players. Just as the buy-in by Democrats and Republicans ensures the continued success of the American system, a successful Iraqi government will depend on buy-in by the three main ethnic groups in Iraq. Cutting the Sunnis out of the system is not guaranteed to prevent a new Iraqi government from succeeding, but it will raise the odds against it to a great degree for no good reason.
The elections should go on. Delaying the elections only requires the Coalition to remain in Iraq that much longer, when one of our key goals in Iraq should be getting out of the country as quickly as we feasibly can. But we shouldn't leave until a stable Iraqi government is in place, and that cannot occur until a majority of each of Iraq's three ethnic groups accept the legitimacy of the new system. Cutting the Sunnis out, even if only temporarily, will only increase the time we've got to spend in Iraq by years.

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November 27, 2004

Choosing our Direction in Iraq

The Democratic Party may be looking for a new direction in the wake of their narrow loss in this year's election, but if they follow Tom Hayden's suggestions, they should be well on their way to cementing their status as a minority party.

Hayden wants the left to band together to pressure the government to shut off all funding for the Iraq War in order to force the U.S. out of Iraq. While that might be effective in installing Hayden's more progressive policies in the United States, what else would it mean?

The answer is obvious: the same thing it meant to millions of Vietnamese after Hayden and his ideological brethren pulled the same stunt in 1975; death and devastation. Granting that Iraq has entirely too much of that right now, the violence would only grow worse in the absence of Coalition troops. With the number of troops we have in Iraq now, the insurgents and terrorists can disrupt parts of the country, but they cannot hope to take control of the country. Their only hope is if Coalition forces leave before the new Iraqi government is capable of defending itself. Should that occur, however, the insurgency could easily spread to involve the entire country. Granted, the impression might be of less chaos in the country if American troops were no longer on the ground, since the media wouldn't report on it as much, but the reality would be far worse as the various factions warred for control. The number of deaths would far outstrip what we're currently seeing.

I would like little more than to see our troops come home from Iraq. But our goal in Iraq wasn't simply the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. When we leave Iraq, it needs to have a representative form of government and at least a nominal amount of stability. The representative government can get moving in the right direction early next year (assuming the elections aren't postponed). Stability will require training enough Iraqis to fight the insurgency to a standoff. They don't have to be able to hunt them down and destroy them. Once a true Iraqi representative government is in place, the number of Iraqis willing to hide the terrorists and insurgents will shrink to insignificance. At which time, the Iraqi government should be able to wrap up the worst of the problem in short order.

Will it be easy? Of course not. Is it guaranteed to work? No way. But is the possibility of a free and independent Iraq better than the certainty of another despot or Islamic tyranny imposed on them and our terrorist enemies given a new foothold from which to attack us? I'd say so, and perhaps it can be argued that our recent election shows that a slim majority of the American people concur. Here's hoping Hayden and his band of leftists don't succeed in turning that tide.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

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November 22, 2004

Kevin Sites' Explanation

Kevin Sites, the man who videotaped the shooting of an insurgent by a Marine in Fallujah, has posted his own version of events as he recalls them. Were I a betting man, I suspect that Mr. Sites is enduring some difficult times right now, as his footage is being used as propanda around the world to 'prove' how horrible America is. Many of the Marines he has travelled with may now consider him an enemy as well, since this incident has the potential to stain a proud and honorable corps. It's an interesting read, if a bit overwrought in places.

If it's an accurate recollection of events, it seems to point to a tragic accident, not a malicious execution. The Marine didn't execute everyone there, and when it seemed he might have erred, he was clearly concerned about it. A cynic might suggest he was more worried about getting in trouble, and that's possible as well. But the description reads more like a series of unfortunate but unsurprising errors exacerbated by the fog of war: an unclear transfer of responsibility for the mosque and a failure to realize that the wounded had been there for some time.

Ultimately I stand by what I said about this earlier: we need to step back and allow the Marines an opportunity to investigate what happened. If the Marine did knowingly execute an unarmed man, then he should face trial. If it was a horrible accident, however, there is no reason to prosecute. I suspect that the Marine's memories will be a far harsher punishment than whatever a court could hand down in any case.

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November 21, 2004

Elections Go On

Iraq's national elections will go forward on 30 January despite the violence that still affects parts of the country. This is a big victory for Iraq, although only as long as it all happens on time. Victory in Iraq will ultimately come down to turning the country over to a real Iraqi government that can sustain itself.

These first elections aren't going to be perfect by any means. Polls in the disputed areas will be huge targets for the enemy, and we can expect them to attempt to keep levels of violence as high as they possibly can in the days and weeks leading up to the election. All we can hope from the first round of elections is the institution of a government led by Iraqis that has the support of a plurality (preferably a majority) of the population. It will then become the Coalition's task to help that government learn how to fend for itself.

We need to make sure we aren't endorsing any candidates. Such endorsements might be the kiss of death anyhow, but it's important for the incoming government to be representative of Iraqs, not what the Coalition thinks is best for Iraqis. If the Coalition establishes that the Iraqis can have any government they want except for certain candidates, we're undermining the entire purpose of the exercise. Self-determination has to involve choosing people the Coalition doesn't like, or it's only a sham. Only when the Iraqi people realize that they really have a say in their government can we expect to see any real reform set in among the people. Otherwise the new elections will be seen as little different from those held under Hussein.

In retrospect, I think we might have been better off in Afghanistan had Karzai not been elected. The real test of representative government is not establishing a system and holding elections. The real test comes when the side currently in power loses and hands power over voluntarily to the other side. Until that happens, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our work is far from over.

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November 18, 2004

The Marine Shooting

Let's get one thing straight right now: I don't know exactly what happened in a Falluajah mosque this week involving a marine shooting a wounded Iraqi, and neither do you.

By now I feel reasonably safe in assuming that my readers are familiar with what I'm talking about: the video of a U.S. Marine entering a mosque, seeing several dead or wounded Iraqis, claiming that one of them was faking being dead and shooting him dead. The reaction of most of the world has been predictable: this is typical of America/Americans, the war in Iraq is a war on Muslims, it's a war crime, etc. The reaction of many on the prowar side has been predictable as well: terrorists deserve no better, there's no need to investigate, the Iraqis do much worse, etc. I have no interest in trying to navigate between those turbulent (and ultimately uncertain) waters.

What I do know is that this is a tragedy of war regardless of what the facts of the situation are. The odds are good that the truth is one of two possibilities: the Marine believed that the Iraqi in question was going to set off some kind of booby trap and kill him and his squad, so he shot the Iraqi first, or the Marine committed a war crime by executing a man who was not threatening him. While the first is slightly less horrible than the first, it's only in degree, not kind. We do know that the enemy in Fallujah utilized numerous such tactics against our forces. They lured Marines into ambushes using white flags, feigned surrender to take shots at close ranges, booby trapped wounded and dead bodies, and even used their wounded to lure Marines into suicide bombs. It is difficult to imagine trying to exist under such circumstances.

The argument is made that we should be better than the terrorists. I certainly agree, but how far does that mean we should go? How many men do we have to lose checking wounded enemy before we can justifiably avoid them? How many times can they abuse a flag of truce before we can fire on people waving white flags? These are academic questions for us, far from the battle, but they're matters of life and death for the soldiers and Marines currently fighting in Fallujah, Mosul, and elsewhere. How much responsibility do the terrorists bear for consistently violating the laws of war?

I don't know what happened in that mosque. I believe that the Marines are doing the right thing in investigating the incident. I only hope that the rest of America can set aside its prejudices long enough to consider the totality of what that Marine was facing that day rather than simply focusing on what can be seen on a few seconds of video.

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November 12, 2004

Let's Talk the Future

I see that a CIA analyst who headed the Osama bin Laden unit from 1996-1999 is leaving the agency in order to gain a larger hearing for his belief we're not fighting the war wisely. At the risk of losing my 'hawk' credentials, I think we need to take the time to listen to what he's saying and assess it on the merits.

For those who oppose the Iraq war, I'd like to see a little less 'he's saying what I believe, therefore it must be true.' For those who favored it, I'd like to hear more about why his arguments are right or wrong, and not at all about how he had an affair with his Guatemalan houseboy or whatever. I haven't yet read his book, Imperial Hubris, but I've ordered it and will assess it once I've had a chance to go through it. I think it's a subject important enough to examine carefully, and without partisan blinders.

As most of my readers probably know, I voted for President Bush because I believe that he is more likely to do the right things in the war than Senator Kerry would have. Now that he has won, I believe it's important to do what I can to make sure that he does, in fact, do the right things to win the war. That may mean that I'll end up changing my mind after new evidence emerges. That should be the position of anyone looking at the war, although I know that's far too much to ask. (And, in fairness, it's easy to say that I'll do it, but much harder to prove.) If we are going to go about the war the right way, we've got to be willing to listen to the arguments of those who disagree with us, and try to decide the questions based on the facts, rather than on how we'd like things to be. That means those of us who supported the war in Iraq need to take a look at the arguments presented by Mr. Scheuer and assess them on the merits.

Again, I have no idea where such an examination will take us. It's possible a review of his arguments will not change my mind at all. It's possible he's right and reading his book will change my mind. And it's possible he's right and reading his book won't change my mind. Regardless of which outcome results, I think we'll all be better off if we take the time to see what he has to say and assess it logically, rather than emotionally.

Let the feeding frenzy begin.

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October 31, 2004

Iraq Report, 1 Nov 2004

Due to technical difficulties at Winds of War, I'm posting this here for the time being. If regular readers could help get that word out, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Welcome! Our goal at Winds of Change.NET is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from Iraq that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Thursday. This briefing is brought to you by Joel Gaines of No Pundit Intended and Andrew Olmsted of Andrew Olmsted dot com.

TOP TOPICS

• US Forces are continuing air strikes against positions in Fallujah, where insurgents, terrorists and thugs have kept the city in a state of lawlessness. Most of the inhabitants are believed to have left the city and planners await the permission from Iraqi PM Allawi to launch a fresh ground offensive against the enemy. It is important to stabilize the Sunni strongholds prior to the elections at the end of January. Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi is warning that efforts to peacefully resolve the situation in Fallujah are nearing the end.

• Anticipatory Retaliation offers a roundup of Iraqi bloggers' picks for President. Not presented as a guide for voters, it does offer some important insight into how a Bush or Kerry victory will be interpreted in Iraq.

Other Topics Today Include: analysis of the next battle for Fallujah; Iraqi political factions; goals of Iraq's political parties; threats to Iraqi election officials; 100,000 Iraqi deaths disputed; Iraq takes on France; the Black Watch loses a man in Baghdad; more on the missing explosives; terrorists kidnap a child.

REPORTS FROM THE FIELD

• Wretchard takes a look at the still-pending Coalition attack on Fallujah.

• Fresh troops are arriving in Iraq, just in time for the expected assault on Fallujah. Expect the Coalition to take advantage of the OIF III rotation's additional troops on the ground to put some pressure on the enemy now.

IRAQI POLITICS

• You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and Joel Gaines has provided us with one: a rundown of Iraqi political movements for your edification.

• Iraqi political parties which share common goals are looking toward unifying in order to solidify their base in the run up to the elections on 31 January. The Islamic parties are looking toward Kurdish and Turkoman parties, whereas Shiite SCIRI has already created an alliance with the Dawaa party and may look to Christian groups as well.

• Iraq's electoral commision has received a letter from al-Zarqawi's group stating, "The members of the {commission} and anyone associated with fraudulent democracy, will feel the sword of righteousness on their necks." It is reported that attacks on poll workers has already begun.

THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

• The Lancet claims some 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths due to the war. Chicago Boyz demolishes the assertion without breaking a sweat.

• A number of Iraqis are increasingly displeased by France's attempts to interfere in their internal politics. Now Omar at Iraq the Model points to a petition that formally protests the French actions to the United Nations.

• The Black Watch suffered its first casualty connected with the deployment north from Basra. An overturned vehicle killed one soldier and wounded three others on the road march to Camp Dogwood. There was also a roadside IED attack to greet them as they neared Baghdad, but no injuries were reported as a result of the attack. The Black Watch has reportedly been told they will be home by Christmas - which in US military speak means July.

ETCETERA

• Zeyad of Healing Iraq discusses a resurgence of religious intolerance in Iraq. Not precisely the kind of society we're hoping to see take root in Iraq.

• Were the infamous missing explosives still at al-Qaqaa when the U.S. arrived, Wretchard wonders? He notes the dichotomy between the pictures of what is claimed to be the missing explosives, as well as claims by David Kay that the pictures are, in fact, HMX. Phil Carter, meanwhile, has a series of links that suggest the problem may be worse than we thought.

• Mohammed Hamad, who was kidnapped in Iraq while on his way home, spent a week in captivity before being released by ransom. When Hamad was released he was picked up by family nearly 100 miles from his home - he is 7 years old.

• Iraqi PM Allawi will visit Pope John Paul II at the Vatican next week and a delegation led by Msgr Emmanuel Delly visited Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani in Najaf for talks about security and the upcoming elections.

• The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops: American, Australian, British, Canadian & Polish. Anyone out there with more information, contact us!

• Don't forget Chief Wiggles' Toys for Iraq drive!

Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think we missed something important, use the Comments section to let us know.

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September 28, 2004

Iran: What Do We Do?

As Iran continues to move closer and closer to joining the nuclear club, President Bush insists that they will not develop a nuclear weapon on his watch, but little progress appears to be made in preventing it. Matt Yglesias hopes to see the Democrats use Iran to needle President Bush during the debates, which is certainly a logical tactic for winning, albeit not particularly helpful. Neither side has a monopoly on allowing concerns over the election override doing what's right, though. But such an approach leaves unanswered the hard question: what is the right policy to follow in Iran?

I would argue that we definitely do not want to allow Iran to join the nuclear club. A bunch of religious zealots who already support terrorism and who have a tenuous grasp on power would not mix at all well with a nuclear weapon or two. Israel would find itself in particularly dire straits were Iran to develop the bomb, and it's not inconceivable that Israel might act to ensure that Iran doesn't get the bomb, even if that means using some of Israel's nuclear arsenal to destroy Iran's program. I think most of us can agree that such an outcome would be bad for all concerned. So we should try to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but the how remains an extremely difficult question.

There are basically two ways we can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons: we can destroy their program, or we can convince them to stop it on their own. Destroying the program could mean bombing the development sites, seizing the sites to ensure their destruction, or even an invasion of Iran. Convincing Iran to stop their program would require some method of verification that would ensure Iran didn't pull a North Korea, taking the carrot while ignoring the terms of the agreement.

Destroying the program is easier from the standpoint of certainty: if we decide that we're going to go all-out to destroy Iran's program, we can certainly do so. Such a decision carries a lot of baggage, however. Bombing alone would not assure us of destroying their program, save in the very unlikely event our intelligence in Iran is several orders of magnitude superior to that we had for Iraq. That means that raids to seize and destroy the sites won't work either, as we won't know whether or not we got everything. That leaves us with invasion, a difficult proposition even without much of the U.S. military tied up elsewhere around the globe. We could still defeat Iran's military, but the occupation would almost certainly be disastrous. Iran is simply too big, both physically and in terms of population, for us to reasonably occupy it while we continue to occupy Iraq. The best we could hope for would be to see the country descend into anarchy while we focused our attention on rooting out every trace of Iran's nuclear program, a long process that would entail substantial U.S. casualties (to say nothing of how the Iranian people would suffer). Could we do it? Probably yes, but the cost in dollars and people would be staggering.

Unfortunately, diplomacy isn't likely to be effective at all. A wag once called diplomacy the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a big enough rock, and there is some truth to that. Diplomatic efforts to convince another country to act as we would like them to generally only succeed when the other country believes it is in their best interests to do so. That may require a carrot like trade or treaties, or it may require a stick like military intervention or bombing. Most countries aren't going to acede to our demands without a carrot or a stick, however, and Iran certainly falls into that category. That means that the mullahs will not give up their nuclear program unless they believe it is in their best interests to do so. If we rule out the sticks mentioned above, then all we have to offer are carrots. The question then becomes, do we have a carrot that will interest the mullahs more than having a nuclear weapon does, and I fear that the answer is no. I suppose there might be something out there the mullahs care enough about to give up their nuclear ambitions, but I'm not aware of what that might be. Which means that, without the threat of the stick, diplomacy will not be sufficient to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

So what does that leave? I don't know. I don't believe that military intervention is a good idea. I don't believe that diplomacy will work. We could do nothing, but that raises concerns as well. In all seriousness, I'd love to hear some ideas for what we can do to restrain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

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September 01, 2004

Why Do They Hate Them?

I think Spoons has summed up the situation regarding the terrorists in Russia perfectly.

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June 26, 2004

Good News From the Front

Even Iraqis who want America out of Iraq as soon as possible aren't happy about the latest wave of attacks that have killed many more Iraqis than Americans. Naysayers will note (correctly) that these Iraqis have not come over to our side; they still want us gone, they just don't want their country to become a proxy battlefield for another fight. But that in and of itself is a victory for our side.

Our goal in Iraq from day one has not been to create a client power in the Middle East. It has not been to create a reliable American ally. It has not been to give us cheap oil. The goal in Iraq is to create a generally representative state that can help to begin moving Islam away from the radical Islam that the West is currently at war with. We don't need Iraq or Iraqis to like us or to work with us in the future in order to be successful. We just need them to be in charge of their own country, and to be stable.

Students of current events are well aware that Germany, Italy and Japan do not always agree with the United States. Indeed, Germany has wavered between neutrality and near-enemy since our decision to go into Iraq, possibly because of German deals with Iraq's prior regime under Saddam Hussein. This is the case even though the United States rebuilt Germany after World War II, expending a great deal of blood and treasure to give the Germans a system that would represent their views while remaining stable. Do we now consider the Second World War a failure because we're no longer friends with Germany? Of course not. Regardless of our differences with Germany, we don't fear their suddenly taking up arms against us. After two world wars in the 20th Century, that is no small victory.

By that same token, an Iraq that wasn't particularly friendly towards the United States would still represent a success in this war as long as it was run by Iraqis and was no longer fomenting terrorism. Certainly we would prefer to become and remain friends with Iraq once their new government is in place, but that's not the goal of the reconstruction. An Iraqi government that is heavily influenced by the Shiite clerics that have called for our ouster from their country can still be a success for us as long as it's representative and stable. While we do not share many of the same goals as these clerics, there is an important one that we are agreed on: Iraq should be run by Iraqis. The fact they're willing to stand up to radical Islam in favor of Iraq is a very good sign for the future.

This is no miracle; things could still go very wrong in Iraq, and any number of disasters may yet have to be overcome. But it's a very good step in the right direction.

Posted at 06:57 PM · War · Comments (2) · TrackBack (0)

June 23, 2004

Too Many Carrots

Diplomacy is a balancing act between providing carrots to encourage or reinforce favored actions and applying a stick when necessary to discourage or halt disfavored actions. When done well, the stick is never actually used, while a steady stream of carrots are provided in response to favored actions. When done poorly, it almost always ends up with furious application of the stick. The Bush administration appears to be pursuing the second course in North Korea.

North Korea has already demonstrated its willingness to violate agreements: the Bush administration cut off the fruits of the deal the Clinton administration cut with North Korea because it had determined that the North had been cheating on that agreement almost from the beginning. This should have come as no surprise to anyone, since the only reasons any nation have to obey agreements they sign are personal honor (not to be counted on when it comes to international affairs) and the threat that failure to obey will result in serious consequences for the party that violates the agreement. This is a significant factor in the arguments people make against applying the Geneva Conventions to terrorists: if nations can be sure that they'll be treated humanely even though they don't treat their captives in accordance with the Conventions, they have no incentive to sign the Conventions or to adhere to them, since the only enforcement mechanisms on the Conventions are reciprocity and, if the other side wins the war, eventual war crimes trials. North Korea guessed that they could violate the Agreed Framework without paying a price, and for the better part of a decade, they were correct.

The United States is under no real pressure to conclude a new agreement with North Korea. Plenty of artificial pressure, yes, but North Korea really only has two things it can use for leverage against us: war and WMD proliferation. Both of these levers carry extremely serious consequences for North Korea, and therefore are vastly more effective as potential threats than as realized threats. If North Korea were to invade South Korea, they would cause great death and destruction. They would also lose handily, and North Korea would cease to exist. While it's certainly possible that Kim Jong Il is sufficiently isolated from reality not to realize this, the disparity of forces is great enough that even a madman should be able to see it. A similar problem faces the North when it comes to proliferation. If a terrorist group struck an American city with WMDs that came from North Korea, it is unlikely Kim's regime would last very long past that point. American reponses to terrorism have been markedly restrained thus far, but our restraint is unlikely to survive a WMD strike on a U.S. city. It is therefore in the North's own interests not to actually exercise either of the threats it continues to pose to the United States. As long as the U.S. isn't imposing any real threat to North Korea, the North is worse off if it follows through on its threats than if it does not.

North Korea, conversely, is under a significant amount of pressure to reach some accomodation with the United States. A poor country to begin with, fifty-plus years of Communist mismanagement have left North Korea rich only in shortages. The fuel oil and other resources they were getting from the Agreed Framework are very important to their economy. It's quite conceivable that the entire North Korean system could come crashing down around Kim's ears if he can't get the external resources he needs. He is, therefore, pretty eager to make a deal. (This also means that he might well do something stupid if he doesn't get the deal, so the U.S. is by no means in the clear.)

Since both sides realize these facts, there are certain limits on the conduct of both sides. The U.S. has to treat the threats seriously, because while the likelihood of the North carrying them out is probably very low, the consequences if they do are too great to be ignored. But North Korea has to be careful not to overplay its hand, because following through on its threats doesn't actually get them what they want.

Unfortunately for us, President Bush's new initiative is throwing away the advantages we do possess in exchange for the appearance of progress. North Korea has no real incentive to follow through on this agreement any more than it did the last. Yes, the administration claims it will cut off the carrots if the North doesn't comply, but simply by starting them again it seems safe for the North to assume that they will start again in time, if the North rattles its sabers properly. And having established that pattern, who can say when an American administration will actually mean it when they say there will be no more concessions? And will Kim believe it when he hears it, or will he go too far in the belief that we will cave again, because we have in the past?

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June 22, 2004

The 9/11 Commission: Fixing the Blame, Not the Problem

Jeff Jarvis is not happy with the work of the 9/11 Commission, and with good reason in my opinion. It is to be hoped that the Commission could identify some systemic problems with our homeland defense measures that would therefore render us at least a little safer than we were on September 11, 2001. But defense is a crapshoot at best.

Unlike normal military action, where the defense is significantly stronger than offense, terrorism is far stronger than any defense we can muster. Even assuming that it is now too much of a challenge for terrorists to hijack jets (and I don't think that's as clear as people think), all that means is that the next terrorist attack will hit something else. And because there are so many targets in the United States, it is simply impossible for us to even begin to protect them all. If terrorists are determined to strike at the United States again, we can't stop them.

That does not mean that any terrorist attack on the United States is guaranteed to succeed. Between effective intelligence and reasonable security measures that don't unduly interfere with civil liberties we can crease a decent chance of defeating any one terrorist attack. Unfortunately, even a system that is 99% effective in detecting and preventing terrorist attacks has a one-in-ten shot of failing in just the first ten terrorist attempts. If the terrorists make fifty attempts, the system only has a 60% chance of stopping them all. In the end, it's just a numbers game: eventually, a terrorist attack will succeed if they try long enough.

That means that the only way we can effectively defend ourselves in the long run is by eliminating the source of terrorism. In the short term, that really isn't possible, so our best chance of preventing terrorism in the United States is by killing as many terrorists as we can track down while providing them with simpler targets than the United States to strike. In the long term, it means trying to remake the Middle East into a place where suicide attacks and neverending war aren't the preferred solutions for every problem. Needless to say, doing this will take a long time, if it's possible at all. That means that the short term goal of eliminating terrorists and providing them with other outlets for their rage is even more important. This is why Iraq is so important. Granted, there are many people who believe that it is simply impossible for us to transplant a more Westernized system of government into Iraq; but judging from how the terrorists are reacting to our attempts, they seem to think that our chances are better than they'd like. And as long as Iraq is the main front in the war, we're killing two birds with one stone: creating the chance of eliminating future terrorist attacks while reducing the odds of a terrorist attack on the United States.

Or, as Jeff notes, we could curl into a fetal ball, demand that our government not allow a single future attack while noting how, with 20/10 hindsight, the last one could have been prevented, and wait for the next big explosion in an American city so we can start the cycle over again. Granted, there's a pretty good chance there will be another attack in the United States whichever course of action we choose. But over the long term, the first method may see fewer and fewer attacks over the years. The second method is a quick road to disaster, as sooner or later the United States will decide it is willing to do the unthinkable in order to eliminate the terrorist threat.

Posted at 07:34 AM · War · Comments (4) · TrackBack (0)

June 17, 2004

The Secrecy Trap

It appears that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the request of DCI George Tenet, agreed to hold a prisoner without publicly acknowledging his existence to prevent the enemy from gaining any intelligence regarding the prisoner's whereabouts. The Army then seems to have forgotten all about the prisoner, since without any record of his existence, nobody thought to interrogate him or otherwise address what to do with him. While the decision to keep the prisoner incommunicado is defensible from the standpoint of keeping as much information as possible out of the hands of our enemies, the end result suggests to me that most secrets are more trouble than they're worth.

Pragmatically, this decision is going to cost the administration dearly with little to no benefit to show for it. The prisoner was interrogated only once, because everyone forgot he was out there thanks to the secrecy order. There's no way to know if he held any actionable intelligence when he was captured, but it does seem safe to assume that whatever he does know is probably fatally dated by this point. Since hiding the prisoner kept the Red Cross from visiting him, this adds to the impression (whether accurate or not) that the administration expected the prisoner to be abused or otherwise treated during interrogations in such a manner as to cause problems with the international community. And trying to hide the prisoner's location from the enemy certainly raises the question, just how insecure do we consider our prison facilities that we're concerned a group of terrorists could conceivably raid one to retrieve some of their own?

This speaks to a larger truism; secrecy is rarely worth the problems it causes. Secrecy is a hallmark of our enemies, not us. We work in the light, they work in the darkness. Many people seem to see this as a weakness on our part, but I believe it is one of our greatest strengths.

Openness is a hallmark of western society, and the reason the west has been so successful. The more people who are able to see data, the more likely someone will spot patterns in the data and the more likely someone can determine solutions for problems. One of the major reasons we failed to detect the September 11 attacks was that information was so carefully compartmentalized and classified that nobody was in a position to see all of it at once. Picking out the pattern was therefore not even a possibility. It's almost three years since 9/11, yet we're still making the same mistakes.

Are there things the government needs to keep secret? Absolutely. But we tend to overestimate what needs to be kept under wraps by several orders of magnitude, which tends to hurt us more than it helps us. The Bush administration should take the lead in narrowing down the secrets it keeps to a bare minimum. Not only would this make it significantly easier to protect the vastly smaller number of secrets, but it would also increase the chances of preventing future terrorist attacks by making as much data as possible available to the largest number of viewers. While this approach would increase the risk of terrorists learning things that might help them, I believe that risk would be more than outweighed by the increased chances of our catching the next major terrorist attack before it could culminate. I consider that a tradeoff well worth the risk.

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June 14, 2004

Iraq Report

Joel Gaines turned in today's Iraq Report for Winds of Change, and he's got some interesting information over there you may not have seen.

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