February 15, 2007

Supporting the Troops

I know I'll never convince anyone about this, but I'll point it out anyhow: today's example of what I expect to see more and more of over the coming months, people who never did like the troops and are no longer afraid to say so.

Professor(?) June Scorza Terpstra asks can we really support these troops? The answer, to her, is a clear no.

I knew in that moment that this was what the future of teaching about justice would include: teaching war criminals who sit glaring at me with hatred for daring to speak the truth of their atrocities and who, if paid to, would disappear, torture and kill me. I wondered that night how long I really have in this so called “free” country to teach my students and to be with my children and grandchildren.

Well, Professor, you may rest assured that this is one war criminal who will defend to the death your right to say whatever you like, even if you continue to feel the need to make scurrilous accusations about me and my fellow soldiers.

Although I will do my best to make sure that if I do have children, they don't attend a school where you're teaching, as I'd like my progeny to learn to think for themselves, thank you very much.

Posted at 08:10 PM · Military · Comments (4) · TrackBack (0)

On Assumptions

The blogosphere is abuzz today with the exciting news of slides from the Iraq planning. As it appears the people chatting about the subject are unfamiliar with the inner workings of the military, it's important to explain just what these documents do and do not say.

At issue is this slide:

In the military, the word 'assumption,' like many terms, has a very specific meaning. When planning, we rarely have all facts available to us. Developing a detailed plan often requires us to make assumptions. For example, if we are developing a plan to invade Canada, we may not know how the local population will react to our presence. Our plan needs to take that issue into account, so we make an assumption, say that the locals will attempt to disrupt our invasion force through insurgent tactics. When we make an assumption, it needs to pass two tests: it must be necessary and valid. Necessary refers to the plan. If we don't need to make the assumption, we shouldn't make it; we make assumptions only when planning cannot continue without more data. Valid refers to the realism of the assumption. We cannot assume that the Canadians will greet our invasion with open arms simply because that would make things easier. To use an historical example, when the Allies planned Operation Market Garden, they assumed that XXX Corps could reach Arnhem in four days. That assumption was necessary: without it, the Allies would never have dropped the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem. But it was not valid: it took XXX Corps seven days to reach the south bank of the Rhine, by which time 1 Para was combat ineffective. MG Urquhart took 10,600 men into Arnhem; less than 2,300 made it out and 1 Para was never reconstituted; bad assumptions lead to disaster.

A good staff will examine each assumption carefully against these criteria. A good plan makes only those assumptions that are absolutely necessary, and takes pains to validate assumptions as soon as possible. I am not in a position to criticize the staff that built the plan for Iraq, as I don't know what they did in developing these assumptions. But certainly in hindsight many of them look pretty bad. Let's review each of them.

"This operation will be the national main effort." Meets both criteria easily. The amount of personnel and supplies meant OIF needed to be the main effort so the assumption was necessary, and clearly Iraq has been our main effort for the last four years, so it was also valid.

"Opposition groups will work with us." I'm not certain this meets either criteria. The war plan itself was clearly successful without help from opposition groups, and I'm not convinced the occupation failed for a lack of assistance from opposition groups either, so I don't think this was necessary. It was not valid, either, although I recall reading in Cobra II that this was the CIA position at the time, so it may have seemed a valid assumption at the time.

"Co-opted Iraqi units will occupy garrisons and not fight either US forces or other Iraqi units." This one has confused a lot of people. This is not saying that the Iraqi Army will hide in its barracks. It is referring to the belief that some Iraqi units could be convinced to simply stay out of the fight. Again, however, this assumption was not necessary to the plan, as the Coalition was able to take Baghdad despite few, if any, Iraqi units choosing to go to ground rather than fight. Nor did it appear to be valid, although this was another area where the CIA claimed they had more success than they had.

"Regional states will not challenge US military operations with conventional forces." Both valid and necessary.

"DoS will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government prior to D-Day." The crux of the problem. It's questionable whether or not the State Department could have accomplished this, but it is certain they didn't even put any particular effort into doing so. Since leaders are supposed to develop their plan in such a way as to validate their assumptions, the failure of CENTCOM to even point out that this was not occurring in the runup to war is particularly damning.

"Continued freedom of navigation for shipping and naval forces through the Suez Canal / Straits of Hormuz / Northern Arabia Gulf." Valid and necessary.

"Operations in Afghanistan transition to phase III (minimal air support over Afghanistan)." Valid and necessary, albeit a factor in why Afghanistan remains a problem.

"BCT in Kuwait replaced by full-up brigade." Valid and necessary.

"US forces in Turkey (ONW and all other units) TACON at N-Day; SOF in Turkey OPCON to CINCCENT at N-day." The SOF part is valid and necessary. The other turned out to be neither, as Turkey did not grant permission for 4ID to attack from the north, but the operation still succeeded.

"Iraqi regime has WMD capability." Arguably neither valid nor necessary, but a wise precaution to take.

All in all, the list appears to have required a bit more work. The big failure, as I noted, was that the State Department did not do what was asked of them and nobody at CENTCOM raised that as an issue that I am aware of. If that was a necessary assumption for the success of the plan (and it certainly would not have hurt), CENTCOM should have screamed bloody murder when it became apparent it was not going to happen. Their failure to do so, while hardly the sole point of failure in the Iraq war, was a critical breakdown.

Posted at 02:10 PM · Military · Comments (7) · TrackBack (0)

Troop Availability

Matt Yglesias is a smart guy, but I see he's one of the many who doesn't understand the military much, if at all. In a piece about Rudy Giuliani Matt notes that Giulani stated that he would have sent 100,000-130,000 additional troops to Iraq beyond what President Bush used for the invasion "even though no such volume of additional troops was available." Really, Matt? And you know this from, perhaps, your extensive military experience? From intense study of doctrine and policy? Nope. He just knows it because 'everyone' knows that.

I don't mean to be cruel to Matt (not that he'd care), but this kind of thing really frustrates me, especially coming from a guy who likes to talk about how 'reality-based' he is. The U.S. Army alone could have supplied an additional 130,000 troops to the Iraq war in 2003 and still had troops to spare. This isn't complicated, it's just addition and subtraction. We used about 130,000 troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Double that and you're at 260,000 troops. There are a bit more than 500,000 troops in the Active Army, and about 1.2 million in the Army as a whole. It doesn't seem too hard to figure out that 260,000 is less than either of those numbers, and that doesn't even include additional Marine forces that could have been used as well.

Maybe Matt meant something else when he said the troops weren't available. Perhaps he was saying that high a number of troops would have been politically unfeasible. That's questionable, as we used more than that in Desert Storm, but at least some argument can be made for that. No argument can defend Matt's casual claim that an additional 130,000 troops were not available. That's sloppy at best.

Posted at 12:10 PM · Military · Comments (4) · TrackBack (0)

A Stain on the Army

I see that Colonel Janis Karpinski, formerly Brigadier General Karpinski, is continuing her attempts to escape any blame for Abu Ghraib. The woman is, quite frankly, shameless and it's a disgusting comment on my Army that she earned a star only mitigated slightly by the wisdom shown in taking it back.

Karpinski was in command of the prison at Abu Ghraib when the torture and mistreatment of detainees was routine. Karpinski is upset with Senator Lindsey Graham because he commented that he's sorry he didn't get the chance to court-martial her, prompting Karpinski to brand Graham a coward. I can't speak to the Senator's physical courage, but I certainly applaud his sentiment, noting only that it would have been even nicer had he pushed a lot harder for the Army to go after people further up the chain at Abu Ghraib. And that chain, at a minimum, should include the woman who was running the show at the time.

There are two possibilities about Karpinski's involvement at Abu Ghraib. Either she knew what was going on and failed to stop it, or she didn't know it was happening. The latter is no excuse. The woman was a general officer charged with running the prison. The buck may stop in the Oval Office, but a commander is responsible for everything her unit does or fails to do, and that makes Karpinski guilty as sin. She worked in that prison every day. The soldiers there were under her command. It was her duty and her responsibility to know what they were doing and to set the standards for her subordinates. Given what happened, it seems pretty clear what her standards are.

It's too late to try Karpinski for her failings. But it doesn't seem too much to ask for the woman to try and remember that she was an officer and to take responsibility for her failures.

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February 12, 2007

MAJ Bruce Crandall, the Medal of Honor

In the better late than never category comes the news that Major Bruce Crandall will be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle of LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley. This battle was, of course, recently made famous to the general public due to its portrayal in the movie We Were Soldiers based on the excellent book We Were Soldiers Once, and Young. MAJ Crandall was a helicopter pilot, and during the course of the battle he flew sortie after sortie to LZ X-Ray to carry in supplies and carry out wounded soldiers, clearly meeting the Medal of Honor's criteria of going above and beyond the call of duty.

For those interested, the Army has a listing of all Medal of Honor citations, although it has not yet been updated with MAJ Crandall's citation.

Hat tip: Jules Crittenden.

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February 05, 2007

Twain Was Right

I said that we were going to see soldiers start to get demonized more as opposition to the war gets more heated, and I stand by that. Today's example: Mona, who has been posting at Unqualified Offerings of late. She has decided to jump into the Arkin fray by explaining to all us poor dumb soldiers that we really are mercenaries after all.

Now, I'll grant you that in today's Humpty Dumpty world, you can probably find a definition of mercenary somewhere that would cover American troops. But under common definitions of mercenary, or the legal definition of mercenary, soldiers don't really qualify.

But Mona, as is her wont, dips into the Argument from Authority to prove her point, [Update: see below and Mona's post for what she was attempting to do.] noting that no less an authority than William Westmoreland thought of paid soldiers as mercenaries, and that Milton Friedman agreed with him. Reading the actual quote, however, it's pretty clear that Mona doesn't quite understand what Friedman was trying to say.

“In the course of his [General Westmoreland’s] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.” - Milton and Rose Friedman, Two Lucky People Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 380.

Yes, Westmoreland did refer to volunteer soldiers as mercenary. Which only means that he didn't understand the definition any better than Mona. But to interpret that quote as claiming that Friedman agreed with Westmoreland is, to be charitable, an interesting reading. It seems pretty clear to this observer that Friedman was demonstrating to Westmoreland that calling the soldiers mercenary simply because they were to be paid for their service was to debase the term and make it meaningless, since by that definition, every profession is made up of mercenaries.

That's not the important thing for these people, though. Accuracy always places a distant second place in politics, and that's what this is about. Soldiers, by and large, still support the war to a much greater degree than the average American. Add to that their volunteer status, and you have a group of people in need of demonization by the antiwar types in order to strengthen their case. Mark my words: the longer this war goes on, the nastier the antiwar side is going to get towards soldiers.

Update: Mona objects to my characterization of her post, noting that she was attempting to point out that the use of the term mercenary is not limited to the far-left. Fair enough, although somebody a bit more recent than Westmoreland might have been a better example of the right. She also objects to being painted as anti-military. She says she is not and I take her at her word. But however she uses the term mercenary, the fact remains that it is a pejorative term, and its advancement will be used to demonize the troops regardless of Mona's personal desires. This, I should note, does not mean that Mona shouldn't say what she thinks. My intent in highlighting her post was simply to note the spread of this issue. As I said before, this will get worse before it gets better.

Posted at 07:44 AM · Military • · Politics • · War · Comments (4) · TrackBack (0)

January 12, 2007

Small Change, Big Consequences

The Pentagon is changing the rules for reservists. Up until now, a reserve component soldier (this includes National Guard and Reserves) at least knew that after he or she served two years on active duty, their time was up. Now, any RC soldier can be called up to serve a two-year tour, demobilize, then repeat.

The Pentagon is claiming they hope to keep tours to 12 months, but that's not really possible without significant changes to how we operate. Right now, a unit mobilizes, moves to a mobilization station for training that usually lasts two or three months, then deploys to theater for twelve months. Tack on a month to bring them home and demobilize them and you're talking 15-18 month tours as a more likely number, assuming they don't allow RC units to serve shorter tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't know what this will do to retention in the reserve component, but I believe it's realistic to expect it to hurt it. It's not unreasonable to expect the reserve component to have to serve a single two-year tour on active duty while the nation is at war. Expecting them to do so repeatedly is likely sufficient to have reservists asking why they shouldn't either go full time or get out, since they're going to spend such a great deal of time mobilized in any case. This may actually provide some small assistance to the active force, as many reservists decide, as I did, that they want to return to the active force. But I'm concerned about how this may undermine the reserve component as it currently exists.

Posted at 07:57 AM · Military • · Politics • · War · Comments (2) · TrackBack (0)

December 24, 2006

Feeling a Draft

With a recent report stating that the Selective Service Administration is going to test its systems in case the government decides to initiate a draft, and the Bush administration apparently leaning towards a 'surge' (or dribble, as Jim Henley more accurately observes) of troops into Iraq, people are getting a touch excited about the possibility of a draft. Ezra Klein takes home the prize for his admirably honest observation that, while he's all about using the power of the state to force others to do what he thinks is right, since he's in the window to be drafted, he's wholly opposed to that particular use of government power. (Actually, I'm putting words in Ezra's mouth. He doesn't want his life to be placed in the hands of the fools and knaves who run our government. I'm in agreement with him on that as well, but I find it oh-so-amusing that when his life isn't on the line, he's more than willing to have those selfsame fools and knaves run so many other aspects of people's lives.)

As most people who look into the issue discover, those of us who are actually in the military are not enamored of the idea of a draft. As I have been pointing out in my ongoing series on the military, military service requires a lot more than just a warm body these days. You need people who are disciplined, tough, intelligent, and able to think on their feet. Our current military doesn't accomplish all of those things every time now, and that is with an all-volunteer force. I shudder to think what we might end up with were we to start grabbing people off the street and forcing them to serve overseas. It is difficult enough engendering discipline in troops who have volunteered to put their lives on the line. A conscript who has been forced to go to war is far more likely to shoot first and ask questions later in order to preserve his own life. This is a natural reaction, and it's one of the biggest problems we face in counterinsurgency warfare. Adding conscription to the mix would only make things worse.

But there is a far better reason to leave the draft where it belongs, in our past: the 13th amendment to the Constitution. That amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, and conscription is nothing less than involuntary servitude. We institute governments to protect people's rights; that is the primary function of government, which is why I argue so often against the use of government to take freedom away from people. But I should hope that even those who disagree with me regarding the basic purpose of government could agree that government exists for the people and not the reverse. That being the case, the idea that government can tell people to fight and die to preserve it is utterly wrong. If the government is not able to survive because people are unwilling to fight for it, than the government has no right to survive. To state that the government has the right to force us to take up arms to defend it is to completely invert the proper relation of the people to the government.

Once upon a time the people of this country chose to stand up and fight rather than submit to an unjust government. There is little more unjust in this world than a government that threatens violence against its own citizens in order to preserve its existence. The draft was a bad idea 30 years ago and it is a bad one now, and it should be fought by any and all means necessary to prevent it.

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December 18, 2006

Tenets for a Useful Military

Continuing the series begun here and continued here, this installment looks at the characteristics the United States should desire in the Army it builds for the 21st century.

I see seven critical tenets for a successful military force: deterrence, deployability, flexibility, scalability, support, deference, and minimizing temptation. Let's take a look at each.

Deterrence is one of the most important things a good military provides to the country, because the most successful wars are those that never need be fought. All things being equal, the United States would be far better off never fighting another war. One means of securing that is to have a military that is clearly able to defeat its country's enemies. That is not foolproof by any means, but a strong, capable military does tend to make enemies think twice prior to engaging in military actions. Conversely, deterrence also requires a judicious use of military force. Getting engaged in one area requires either ramping up one's military forces to maintain a deterrent to other enemies, or accepting the loss of that deterrent as long as one is engaged in combat, as we now see in Iraq. Further, a failed engagement can destroy one's deterrent, as we saw in the aftermath of Somalia when al Qaeda was encouraged by our decision to leave after the battle of Mogadishu, and as we are likely to see again if we leave Iraq without a clear victory. Despite the fact our actual military abilities were undamaged after Somalia and may actually be better after Iraq and Afghanistan with a cadre of combat-hardened soldiers, the perception of defeat will still undermine the Army's deterrent value. Deterrence is more than big battalions; it requires a degree of judiciousness as well.

The United States has been fortunate throughout its history by its separation from other powers. The last real threat of foreign invasion of the United States dates back to the War of 1812. When we have gone to war, it has been on foreign shores far from the U.S. That means that our military force must be able to get to where the fighting is relatively quickly and effectively. Since World War II we have used military bases spread across the world to preposition forces in order to reach conflicts more rapidly. Our experience with radical Islam should have taught us the problem with such a policy: one of al Qaeda's signature grievances with the United States was our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia. And while the majority of American troops overseas conduct themselves honorably, there are always bad apples in the mix, and it only takes one to rouse a people to ask why they must tolerate foreign military forces on their soil. Those who think those nationals should be grateful for our presence might consider the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution. Rest assured, the British Empire believed that colonists should have been grateful for the presence of British soldiers stationed there to protect them from Indians. There is no reason for us to borrow trouble and bad feelings to base soldiers overseas when it is unnecessary. Instead we should focus on building a force we can move where it needs to go if the need arises and not before.

Flexibility speaks to the issues I noted in my last essay. Our military needs to be able to fight in any environment and in all kinds of warfare, from high-intensity combat (HIC) to counterinsurgency (COIN). Because COIN is so difficult, that means a great deal of time should be spent on developing highly-disciplined forces who can perform COIN missions successfully. However, that does not mean that we can allow our HIC abilities to go by the wayside; our forces need to be equipped and trained in HIC as well. Balancing the two will be difficult, and we will probably want to focus some forces in each area to give us an immediate capability for either style of conflict while our other forces switch their focus should it become necessary. What we do not want to do, however, is have any part of the force (outside of the Special Forces) focus entirely on one form of conflict to the exclusion of all others, for if there is one lesson we should take from our latest warfighting experiences, it should be that if we do go to war, the entire force will be expected to fight regardless of the type of war we face.

Scalability is the ability to expand the force if necessary. The U.S. should maintain a relatively small military commensurate with its goals, but it must be able to ramp up to a larger force in time of war. That means not only competent reserve forces, but also a plan in place to expand the active force if war breaks out. One of the biggest problems our armed forces have had in the post-Cold War era has been a failure to tailor forces to requirements. During the 1990s, the military was likely too large for what it was asked to do. In the 2000s, the military is clearly too small to attend to the tasks the nation has asked of it. We should build our forces with an eye towards expanding them during time of crisis; had the government asked for volunteers in the days following the September 11 attacks, for example, we could have easily expanded our military forces to meet our needs, and then reduce them again once the fighting was over. Our decision to use a one-size-fits-all force has left us with too much and too little military force in turns, a highly ineffective use of our resources.

Support refers to supporting our allies. We have not fought a major war on our own since the 19th century, and there is little reason to believe we will do so in the 21st century. That means that our armed forces have to be able to work with foreign forces from around the world. That means building a force that can work with others operationally and logistically. It means soldiers learning foreign languages; at a minimum, all field grade officers ought to be fluent in at least one foreign language, and the incentives for learning languages should be increased significantly to encourage all soldiers to improve their ability to work with other nations. This will also require a careful examination of likely allies' capabilities to ensure that we can work together with them. Our radios have to be able to communicate with theirs, for example, and the more basic systems (fuel, ammunition, etc.) we have in common, the easier it will be for us to sustain both our forces and theirs when we work together. Also, while I would reduce foreign basing to a minimum, joint exercises would still be a priority for the military, as the more forces work together, the more effective they can be in time of war.

Deference to civilian authority is an important part of the American military tradition. Military personnel don't like being told what to do by civilians. As a rule, civilians are remarkably ignorant of what the military is actually like, with most of their exposure coming at the theater. Nonetheless, it is civilians who must decide when the nation should go to war and, when it does, what goals it should have. It is therefore vital that our military forces have leaders who are strong enough to explain what our military can and cannot do honestly, and then doing their best to execute the goals given to them by the government. Yes, the generals are smart men and women whose knowledge should be respected, but their knowledge still must be subordinated to political goals. Building such a corps will require a Congress and executive willing to remove generals who fail to live up to such requirements. Our civilian leaders would do well to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln, who when told that a Brigadier General and a train of horse and mules had been captured by Confederate forces observed, "I don't care about losing generals; I can make them. But horses and mules cost money." I do not want to denigrate the hard work and contributions of our generals. I consider myself a pretty smart and hard working guy, but I'm never going to be a general; they are truly exceptional men and women. But sometimes smart people can forget that there are other smart people out there as well; the military's civilian leadership needs to make sure they understand where they stand.

Finally, our military must be built in such a way as to minimize the temptation it offers our government leaders to overuse it. Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously asked Colin Powell what the use of a magnificent military was if it couldn't be used, a philosophy that led to an exceptionally busy final decade of the 20th century for the U.S. military. Military force is seductive, in that it seems to offer a degree of decisiveness that diplomacy generally lacks. A large military makes military action entirely too tempting for government, particularly in an age when Congress has abdicated its responsibilities and allows Presidents almost carte blanche to wage war as they see fit. A good military, then, needs to be relatively small to reduce the temptation to use it. Obviously this goal is in tension with deterrence, but given our military preeminence and the lack of true military threats against the United States, it should not take a massive military to deter our enemies from foolish actions, particularly if it is coupled with the other tenets outlined here to make it a dangerous force.

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December 08, 2006

Fixing the Government

Bill Bennett's reaction to the Iraq Survey Group report seems to me to exemplify a significant problem with how the American government currently works.

Who are these commissioners and what is their expertise in Iraq — or even foreign policy?  Ralph Peters has made the point, “Washington insiders pretend to respect our troops but continue to believe that those in uniform are second-raters and that any political hack can design better war plans than those who've dedicated their lives to military service.”  The entire report is contemptuous of the military, spoken of as pawns on a chess table, barriers, observers, buffers, and trainers.  Never as what they are trained to be: the greatest warriors in the world.  Would it have been too much to ask that one general, or even one outspoken believer in the mission from the get-go, be on this commission?

I do agree with Bennett that it would have been a good idea to have a military man or two on the commission, if only to help evaluate the feasibility of the ISG's recommendations, but Bennett's reaction suggests he either fails to understand or (more likely) disagrees with the purpose of the ISG.

When the military takes the field, it does so to achieve a military objective in order to achieve a political objective. We do not go to war in order to kill people or destroy things. We go to war because we want to impose a political settlement on a nation or group that is unwilling to come to an agreement with us through diplomatic means. There is good reason to make use of military professionals to plan how to fight a war. But because war is ultimately a political action, both the decision to go to war and decisions about the war's objectives must be left to political leaders.

I’m tempted to go on about knowledge of American government, but for brevity, can we just say the president is the commander-in-chief and in charge — because he is elected by the people. 

This comment particularly disturbs me. In large part, the comment is probably accurate, because Congress has abdicated most if not all of its responsibilities. But the fact remains that, under our system of government, it is not up to the President to decide when we go to war. That privilege is reserved for Congress, and with good reason. Going to war is far too important to leave to a single individual, and by that same token, leaving war in the hands of one person is equally inappropriate.

I'm willing to bet that some readers read that last sentence and immediately thought that you can't run a successful war by committee. And that is true as far as it goes. But running a war without oversight is a demonstrated path to failure, at least based on our experience in Iraq. Individuals make mistakes, no matter how skilled they are. Congressional oversight provides a backstop against such errors. The President has the lead in running the war, but Congress does not bow out of the play once the declaration of war has passed.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, can be salvaged from Iraq. But there is no evidence the Bush administration is going to make any changes, positive or otherwise, without Congress getting involved. The 109th Congress has left the building. It's time to see if the 110th can improve on its record.

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Posted at 08:48 PM · Military • · Politics · Comments (2) · TrackBack (0)

December 05, 2006

Military Equipment Woes

Back in the days before the war, the biggest thing heavy units did was a rotation to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Located in the Mojave Desert not far from Death Valley, the NTC had a dedicated opposing force (OPFOR) and enough space to conduct maneuvers at the brigade level, the only place in the world the Army could train such maneuvers effectively. One of the painful parts of going to the NTC was that you didn't bring much of your own equipment: the NTC maintained two fleets of vehicles for units rotating through, so units would draw vehicles prior to entering 'the box,' and would then have to turn the vehicles back in once the rotation was over, a painful process that usually took at least twice as long as drawing the vehicles because they were in poor shape due to the amount of use they saw. When I made my last trip to the NTC in 2000, however, my battalion was able to maintain the NTC vehicles to an extremely high standard, because back at Fort Carson we had one of the oldest fleets of M1s in the Army, so we knew all the tricks for making old, worn out vehicles run.

Those tricks are likely to come in handy over the next few years, as our old vehicles would probably look like new compared to the fleets that we have been using in Iraq over the last three years. Vehicles in combat not only face the not-insignificant dangers of battle damage, they also get a great deal more use than vehicles see during normal garrison operations, and every mile they're driven is that much more wear and tear that increases the odds of the vehicles breaking down. I have no idea how close we are to a breaking point with our equipment, but the issue at least is getting a little attention in today's piece in the Washington Post. In addition to the human costs of war, war takes a tremendous toll on equipment, and trying to get all that equipment back into service is a costly and time-consuming endeavor that hasn't been a priority for some time.

It is to be hoped, of course, that we won't need all this equipment for combat for some time to come once we finally withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the reason the U.S. Army does so well in combat when we go to war is that we have spent so much time training with our equipment in the time leading up to the war. Once the war is over, we're still going to have hundreds of thousands of soldiers who need to train on this equipment, and Congress and the Bush administration need to step up and start taking action to make sure that we'll be able to do so. Congress appears to have taken a first step by committing additional funds to repair operations this fiscal year, but that is only a start.

Anyone who has followed the history of the war well-remembers the complaints made about the equipment the military took into battle at the start of the war. Soldiers had inadequate body armor, there was a serious shortage of uparmored HMMWVs, and so on. While the Bush administration got a lot of the blame for that, the fact is that responsibility for those shortfalls covers a lot more ground than any one administration. It takes years to properly equip an army, and the shortfalls people decried at the start of the war had accumulated over years, when Congress and different administrations decided that the military had what it needed to fight and win on the battlefield. It's important to remember that when this war is over: if people are really serious about not sending soldiers into battle with inadequate equipment, that means we're going to have to commit some serious money to stockpiling the right equipment for the next war, and keeping it properly maintained. That means more uparmored HMMWVs and body armor. It means looking into a replacement for the M1 and M2. It means not only buying the right equipment, but getting it into the hands of soldiers quickly so they can train with it before they go into battle.

The incoming Democratic Congress no doubt has a lot of things they want to do rather than look into making sure the military is really prepared for combat. But if they're serious about their complaints about the Bush administration, then Chairman Skelton has a lot of hard work ahead of him. I look forward to seeing how seriously he takes that charge.

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November 29, 2006

Heros, Revisited

I am on the CENTCOM mailing list for bloggers, so I get press releases now and then. This morning's referenced Chief Warrant Officer 3 ( CW3) Lori Hill, recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Since CENTCOM's web site, to be blunt, is terrible, I'll quote extensively from the release here.

Back in March in Iraq, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lori Hill, with the 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, was piloting her Kiowa Warrior when the lead chopper came under heavy fire. She drew the fire away, simultaneously providing suppressive fire for the troops engaged with the enemy on the ground.

A rocket-propelled grenade hit her, damaging the helo’s instrumentation, but instead of focusing on her predicament, she established communication with the ground forces and continued to provide them with aerial weapon support until the soldiers reached safety.

As she turned her attention to the aircraft, which was losing hydraulic power, the helo took on machine-gun fire, a round crashing into one of Hill’s ankles. Still, with a damaged aircraft and an injury, she landed at Forward Operating Base Normandy, saving her crew and aircraft.

For her actions she was presented the Distinguished Flying Cross by Vice President Richard Cheney at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Oct. 16.

That is, to put it mildly, pretty amazing. (An important reminder, I'll note, to those who think that heroism is a solely male bastion.) Helicopters aren't the most stable of platforms to begin with, and a single well-placed RPG can turn one into a pyre in disturbingly short order, as we learned to our peril in Mogadishu. But, helicopters can also provide excellent ground support, far superior to fixed wing aircraft, because they travel so much more slowly their pilots can be a lot more precise when they engage the enemy. Going into combat is a risky business no matter what your job, but it's hard not respect someone who sticks around when they've got an excellent means of leaving whenever they choose.

Reading about people like CW3 Hill always fills me with a combination of awe, envy, and curiosity. I know, that's an odd mix, but I'm an odd guy. I think we can all agree on the awe part: anyone who is able to go above and beyond the call of duty in combat is a pretty amazing individual. I suppose there are those who disagree, on second thought, but I have no use for them. (And doubtless they have no use for me, so we're agreed.) The envy is not over the award itself, but for the ability of the individual to do such a thing. I'd like to believe that I'd perform well in combat, but it seems the Army doesn't want me to find out, and who knows until you've been there whether you'd serve honorably or wet your pants and cry for Momma? And the curiosity stems from the same source: could I do that? What would I do in a situation where bullets are flying and people are dead and wounded around me? I suppose it sounds a little crazy to have even the slightest desire to experience such things, but it can be frustrating to spend your entire life preparing for something and never actually get a chance to do it.

In any case, congratulations to CW3 Hill and all the other real heroes out there. It is people like this who help to explain why I love the Army and my job, regardless of whatever frustrations I may find in it from time to time. "No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for another."

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November 28, 2006

What the U.S. Needs from its Armed Forces

Second in a series. Part one here.

The purpose of the Army, as is laid out in FM 1.0 The Army, is to fight and win the nation's wars. As far as mission statements go, that isn't bad, as it lays out what needs to be done clearly and succinctly. However, it also doesn't get into the level of detail necessary to determine how the Army needs to be constructed in order to accomplish that task, and it is therefore no more than a starting point for our discussion.

The Army views war along a spectrum ranging from peace to war. Along that spectrum are the Army's primary missions: high-intensity conflict, low-intensity conflict, stability operations, and support operations. Counterinsurgency (COIN) falls somewhere between low-intensity conflict and stability operations. Traditionally, the Army has trained primarily for high-intensity conflict, because it was assumed that was the critical task. If the Army failed in a stability or support operation, the nation would survive. Losing a high-intensity conflict, however, would mean a far more dire problem. (Conversely, the U.S. was only involved in one threat that could be considered existential in the 20th century: World War II.) So the Army focused on high-intensity conflict and adapted to other operations as necessary. When it came to stability operations, that worked well; Army forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia have been pretty successful in keeping the peace in those locations. Unfortunately, the Army had set counterinsurgency aside after Vietnam, and it paid the price for that in Somalia in 1993 and in Iraq over the past three years.

Success at each level of war requires different tools. High-intensity conflict requires some manpower and a lot of expensive equipment: tanks, armored fighting vehicles, jet aircraft, naval forces, and so. Low-intensity conflict requires more manpower and less equipment, much of which is also used for high-intensity conflict. Stability and support operations tend to require manpower and equipment. For these levels of warfare, the same Army can handle all of these tasks, as long as the manpower base is large enough.

Counterinsurgency is often called the graduate level of warfare. As we're seeing in Iraq now, there is good reason for that. While high-intensity conflict requires a great deal of training and coordination, high-intensity conflict also gives the Army far more latitude in imposing its will on the enemy. In a high-intensity conflict, we seek out and destroy the enemy. Sure, the enemy gets a vote, but with our advantages in training and equipment, we're able to impose our will on the enemy and win high-intensity conflict with impressive frequency. Counterinsurgency, however, doesn't give combat forces that ability. You can't win a counterinsurgency fight by killing people. Indeed, killing the wrong people is a great way to lose a counterinsurgency campaign, since the entire purpose of counterinsurgency is to gain popular support for your side. Winning counterinsurgency involves knowing the ground and people intimately in order to seek out and destroy the enemy while drawing popular support to your cause. That means it depends in great measure on things that are very difficult for the Army to control. If you shoot an enemy tank with a 120mm Sabot round, you'll probably destroy it and therefore make good progress towards defeating the enemy. If you build a water purification plant for the local population, they may appreciate it, but there is no way of knowing how any particular individual will react to that action. Counterinsurgency also requires incredibly disciplined soldiers. Soldiers are, as a rule, well-disciplined to begin with, but there is a significant difference between disciplining troops to enter a situation where they may die in combat and requiring them to move about a populace where the enemy looks just like your friends. At least in combat, once you're engaged you can shoot back. In counterinsurgency, shooting back when engaged may do more harm than good, and many insurgent tactics don't even give soldiers an opportunity to shoot back. Dealing with that kind of situation requires a degree of discipline beyond anything most of us will ever require.

At the moment, the odds of the United States becoming involved in a high-intensity conflict are very low. We have demonstrated several times over the past few years that an enemy force foolish enough to stand toe-to-toe with the U.S. military will quickly be destroyed. But that position has only come about due to the expenditure of a great deal of money and even more hard work on the part of the services to develop personnel capable of fighting extremely well in high-intensity conflict. Our future military must still be capable of fighting such battles, or in time we will risk fighting in high-intensity conflict when we no longer possess such superiority. On the other hand, if we can be defeated by an insurgency, then our ability to prevail in high-intensity conflict is of limited utility; yes, it will ensure nobody can successfully invade the United States, but they may not need to do so if they are successful overseas. American interests, at least according to our actions of the past century, stretch well beyond the borders of the United States. As long as we determine our national interests in that fashion, the ability to defend ourselves alone will be insufficient. That means we need armed forces capable of fighting and winning against insurgencies as well as in high-intensity conflict. That means we need to make some significant changes in how we construct our armed forces. I will address what changes I think need to be made in my next installment in this series.

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November 26, 2006

The Democrats and the Military

You really have to hand it to the Democrats. Just weeks after John Kerry's gaffe threw a terrific (though ultimately unnecessary) scare into them when he gave the Republicans a weapon with his "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq" comment, Congressman Charles Rangel jumps in with both feet with this gem:

I want to make it abundantly clear: if there’s anyone who believes that these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment. If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

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November 14, 2006

Warfare Changes Gears

Over the next few days or weeks, I am going to take a look at how warfare is changing, what that means for the United States and the Army, and throw out some thoughts on how we can adapt to 21st Century warfare. Today I'm going to address where we are today, and how we got here.

As even the casual student of history knows, warfare is a means to an end, not a means to itself. Nations go to war when they determine that they want to acquire something that they do not believe they can acquire through other means, and that they believe is worth a war to acquire. In many cases, war differs from simple armed robbery only in scale: a nation decides it wants a resource and invades another nation to get it. But in every case I can think of, nations go to war for a reason, not simply to make war.

In the 20th Century, the United States established itself as the master of classical warfare. In a purely military encounter, American forces became something very close to unstoppable, accomplishing military feats that would be considered impossible prior to their occurence. Facing the United States in a conventional military conflict was demonstrably little less than committing suicide. This development caused the U.S. to develop a degree of overconfidence: no one would dare face up to us, because we had a demonstrated ability to defeat them militarily.

But the world is not a static place. When situations change, people adapt to them. In the case of warfare, the world has taken a look at what the United States does well and does poorly, and has found methods of attacking us where we are weak. This is the infamous asymmetrical warfare that we've heard for years. But people tend to assume that because it's asymmetrical, it is somehow inferior. We often hear that this war isn't a big deal, because it's not an existential war. That is true as far as it goes, in that losing on either of our two current major battlefields will not lead directly to our destruction. But if our enemies can develop forms of warfare that render them capable of consistently defeating us, we may find ourselves in some bigger problems that we currently face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

War, Clauswitz observed, is politics via other means. Winning a battle doesn't mean a thing if you can't exploit that victory. And the U.S. has demonstrated that while we are very good at winning conventional military battles, we're lousy at exploiting those victories politically. Our enemies have observed this problem and have developed strategies that allow them to defeat us politically, which is the only place victory really counts.

The Army, in particular, has been slow to adapt to this new form of warfare. We like high-intensity conflict (HIC). It's fun to practice for, we have a lot of experience at it, compared to counterinsurgency, it's pretty easy, and it involves lots of complicated gadgets like tanks and helicopters and artillery. In HIC, new gadgets act as massive force multipliers, and the Army bet heavily on those force multipliers in the 1990s. Heavy battalions trimmed from four to three maneuver companies each. Artillery platoons went from six guns to four guns. Better systems would allow us to accomplish similar effects on the battlefield with fewer personnel. There were those who questioned the new paradigm, but the question came down to one critical issue: money. Sure, the Army would have been better off to maintain full-strength battalions and batteries, but we couldn't afford to do that and purchase the new, better equipment that would allow us to maintain the technological edge against our adversaries. Men are expensive, as odd as that sounds. But beyond the costs of training a soldier to a level where he can be of value on a battlefield, the United States has developed a degree of casualty aversion that makes every loss far more painful than what we have historically accepted, although part of this comes from the problems we've had in achieving measurable results. Yes, we took more casualties on D-Day than we have thus far in Iraq, but at least at the end of June 6, 1944, we could point to Utah and Omaha beaches and show that we had bought something with our losses. We have been far less able to do that in Iraq. The bottom line is the same, however: in both real dollars and emotional costs, soldiers are more pricey than equipment.

Now the Army is involved in a forced transformation due to the fighting in Iraq. But while we have developed a generation of company grade officers who don't think about HIC, because their experiences have been formed in the crucible of COIN in Iraq, senior soldiers like yours truly are still highly familiar with HIC, but are struggling to learn the vagaries of COIN. At the highest levels, this has resulted in senior leadership that hasn't begun the process of changing the Army's systems to fight 21st century war. There has been no call for increasing the size of the Army, despite the fact COIN is a manpower-intensive form of war. Senior officers are not speaking out about the decline in quality of new enlistees. We're not looking at how to rebuild units to make them more effective in the COIN fight. In part, this is because senior leaders don't generally like the idea of ending their careers by making politically inconvenient comments. It takes an inordinate amount of work to become a General officer, and I have a great deal of respect for anyone who earns the right to wear stars on their shoulders. But when you've put that kind of effort into reaching that position, it's not hard to justify actions that keep you in position so you can help protect your soldiers. Let me say right now that every General I've known has cared very deeply about soldiers, and they have worked exceedingly hard to do what they can to make sure that their soldiers have the best available training and equipment. But the Army is also a culture where we learn early on that mission accomplishment is the sine qua non of our existence. If you're given a mission, you find a way to accomplish it (with the law and moral constraints). While that's a highly valuable trait for military personnel, since in combat you will rarely have the optimum tools available to you, it often causes us to swallow our protests when we're told to accomplish a mission and instead find a way to succeed despite the shortfalls we're given. This is where I think a lot of senior officers find themselves now: they know they have a mission to accomplish, and they're going to find a way to do it regardless of the constraints placed on them by their superiors.

But soldiering on against all obstacles can only get you so far. America's enemies have found our military weaknesses (I would argue that culturally they are strengths, such as our concern over civilian casualties) and have developed a form of warfare that allows them to take full advantage of those weaknesses. If we are to succeed against these tactics, we are going to have to make some serious changes to how we do business, or we're going to lose. While losing Iraq or even Afghanistan may not be fatal in and of themselves, sooner or later we are going to find ourselves fighting on a battlefield where we cannot afford to lose. When that day comes, we need to have an Army that can win there.

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Heroes

Since the Iraq War began, I have been thanked by random strangers at least a half-dozen times simply because I was in uniform. Four times I have gone to lunch and discovered when the check came that someone else covered my bill. These have been profoundly uncomfortable moments for me; my two trips overseas in the military were a one year tour in Korea and four months at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 1995. While I do think my service has some value, it certainly pales next to the service performed by those who have been separated from their homes and loved ones for a year at a time or more, particularly for those who have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan more than once.

Phil Carter, like me an RC officer, put up an excellent opinion piece in last Saturday's LA Times addressing this dichotomy. In the nation's rush to embrace those who volunteer for military service, we have undermined the very concept of heroes. Signing up for the military doesn't make you a hero. I think Kipling got it right with his wonderful poem, Tommy: "We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you". Are there heroes in uniform? No doubt; McQ at QandO has been doing a marvelous job of recounting some of their exploits via Project Hero. Those are the ones who really deserve the accolades and the free meals and the thanks from people on the street.

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November 11, 2006

Veteran's Day

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, the guns fell silent on the western front, and the first 'War to end all Wars' came to an end. (Or, more precisely, went to halftime.) Today I will wander the hills of a battlefield of another war, the largest ever fought in the Americas, where two great armies clashed for three days in 1863 to determine whether or not a government dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could survive. Months after the battle, President Lincoln came to the site and delivered what is probably his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address.

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Happy Veteran's Day to you all. I will have pictures and more up this evening.

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November 10, 2006

Happy Birthday, Marine Corps

Uncle Sam's Misguided Children turned 231 years old today, and they celebrated in style with the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps and Heritage Center in Quantico, Virginia. While I give 'em hell as part of a friendly rivalry, the Marines are one of the finest fighting forces on Earth and I'm proud to stand beside them. On their birthday, this soldier raises a glass to my brothers in arms, and I'll join them in a round of the Marine Hymn.

From the Halls of Montezuma To the shores of Tripoli We fight our country's battles In the air on land and sea. First to fight for right and freedom And to keep our honor clean; We are proud to bear the title Of United States Marines.

Our flag's unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We have fought in every clime and place
Where we could take a gun.
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes;
You will find us always on the job --
The United States Marines.

Here's health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we've fought for life
And never lost our nerve.
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven's scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.

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November 02, 2006

God Save the Queen

Much as I love the U.S. Army, I have a great deal of respect for the British Army. When I was stationed in Korea, I had the distinct privilege of enjoying the last linkup between elements of the British Army in Hong Kong and my unit, 1-72 Armor. The British came up to see us every year because the 72d Armored Regiment has an important link with the British Army.

During the Korean War, the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment was cut off during the Battle of the Imjin River. For three desperate days they held Gloster Hill against four Chinese divisions. At 0600 on 25 April, 1951, Lieutenant Colonel Carne gave the order for what remained of his battalion to attempt to break out. Three companies were captured attempting to escape. D Company, Captain Mike Harvey, commanding, broke out by initially going north before turning south, and hit the U.S. lines where the 72d Armor Regiment was positioned. The Americans opened fire, believing them to be Chinese wounding at least seven British soldiers and possibly killing some, although the British never told the horrified Americans, who quickly realized their mistake and pulled the Brits into friendly lines.

Unlike the American Army, where units change names and nomenclature more often than Madonna changes personas, the British Army is a big believer in tradition. Because the Gloucestershire Regiment remembers what the 72d Armor Regiment did in Korea, representatives of the British Army would come up for a few weeks to spend time with the current incarnation of the 72d: 1-72 Armor at Camp Casey, Korea. Because the British turned Hong Kong back to China in 1997, their visit in summer 1997 was to be their last, and I was fortunate enough to spend several days with some of my British counterparts, visiting some battlefields, going to formal dinners, and showing them some of our training.

One thing I remember most vividly about that visit is eating dinner with a British Major in the dining facility at the Multi-Purpose Range Complex. I was a Captain at the time and, as is American custom, I called him 'Sir' when I spoke to him. After about three or four rounds of this he paused, and told me, "Andy, in the British Army, officers refer to each other by first name when not in a formal setting." For the rest of the time he was there, he was Paul. It's a small thing, but it was an interesting look into the different culture of the British Army.

In the U.S. Army, the culture is very formal and directive. I would never call a senior officer by his first name, and I would not react well if a junior officer called me by my first name. In our Army, it's just not done. By that same token, we can get ourselves into all kinds of trouble by disregarding any of the numerous rules laid down by the leadership in an attempt to maximize safety: wearing helmets almost all the time, body armor use, and so on.

But trying to explain in words just doesn't get the message across. But when I saw this video, it all came together. That performance is by a British Army unit in a FOB on the Al Faw peninsula. It's obvious it was done with the full knowledge of the leadership. If an American unit did that, it would take a miracle for them not to get court-martialed. (Yes, that's an exaggeration. But not a huge one.) And it would be a tragedy if that video hadn't been made, because it's hilarious. Sometimes I think the Army would do well to adopt a few British attitudes.

(For those curious about the video, it's a parody of this one. More history here.

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October 30, 2006

Project Valour IT

"All gave some. Some gave all."

--Anonymous

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tough toll on our troops. While advances in personal protection have reduced casualties by a great degree, there are still a lot of wounded warriors out there who will carry with them the wounds they received for the rest of their lives. Project Valour IT is a fund-raising drive intended to purchase voice-operated laptops for soldiers with hand or arm injuries or amputations, allowing them to use a computer despite their injuries.

I try not to ask my readers for money, as I know we all have plenty of things to spend our hard-earned dollars on. But in this case, I think this is an awfully worthy cause, and I'd also like to show that Army blogs are capable of keeping up with our Marine brethren, who are currently kicking our tails. So if you have a few dollars to spare, please consider Project Valour IT. Any amount will help the men and women who have given so much for their country live a better life. Thank you.

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October 20, 2006

Army Strong

When I first heard that 'Army Strong' was replacing 'An Army of One' as the new recruiting slogan, I'll admit my first instinct was that we were just replacing one lousy phrase with another one. Army Strong doesn't sound right, and it certainly doesn't carry the cachet of 'Be All You Can Be.' But after watching the video on YouTube, I've got to admit to being impressed. Whoever put that together did a damn good job of capturing some of what makes Army service what it is, and what it can be.

I just hope that we can stay true to those ideals.

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August 14, 2006

Air Power

[Y]ou may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life--but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

In response to a reader request, I'd like to take a look at what air power can and cannot accomplish in combat. Specifically, the reader asks for a piece "about the effectiveness and implications of extensive use of air power in situations like Iraq and Lebanon."

Modern air power is frightfully effective within certain boundaries. An AC-130 gunship can lay down a curtain of fire so deadly nothing can cross it to reach targets on the far side. A B-52 bomber can drop enough dumb bombs to level large parts of a city. Utilizing 'smart' weapons, aircraft can eliminate point targets, putting a missile right through a window or destroying a specific car or armored vehicle. No modern army wants to go to war without at least air parity, and much of America's military superiority is predicated on our ability to achieve air dominance over a battlefield in short order.

These advantages only go so far. The mass destruction airpower can generate is rarely the desired end state of conflicts the United States finds itself in these days; even during the initial invasion of Iraq, care was taken to try to hit only the targets we wished to destroy, minimizing collateral damage. But no matter how much care is taken, there is almost always some collateral damage. Modern weapons are simply too devastating to avoid that, and in the case of Lebanon, Hezbollah's placement of its weapons systems in and among the civilian population guarantees collateral damage even in the case of a perfectly targeted strike. The U.S. is actually developing weapons that hold less explosive in order to reduce the collateral damage because they can now place weapons so precisely. But 'smart' weapons are only as smart as the intelligence they are given. To start the invasion, a U.S. strike hit a field where we believed Saddam Hussein was hiding. The strike hit right on target; but Hussein was nowhere in the vicinity. The U.S. ran into worse problems during the Kosovo War when a bomb hit right on target, but because of a bad map, the target was the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Airpower is also limited by weather. While the U.S. Air Force has a number of all weather aircraft, bad weather markedly reduces the effectiveness of airpower. Smart weapons that use GPS coordinates can still function, but weapons that depend on a laser to 'paint' the target are useless in conditions of rain, fog, sandstorms, and other poor weather conditions. While the weather in the Middle East is generally conducive to air operations, that advantage can never be counted on.

Airpower's ability to support small scale operations is further degraded by operational choices made by the Air Force over the years. The U.S. Air Force has never liked ground support operations. Ground support is dangerous, it's not sexy, and it requires too much coordination with the Army. Air Force Generals like strategic bombers and sleek fighters, not ugly, slow ground support craft. Thus the Air Force's ongoing attempts to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II, one of the best ground support aircraft ever designed, and their refusal to look into dedicated ground support aircraft. Instead they offer the A-16, an F-16 that is optimized for ground support. While that's a nice thought, the F-16 simply isn't capable of flying low and slow enough to provide good ground support. Ground support aircraft need to be able to see what it is they're shooting at in order to be effective, which means they need a low stall speed. The F-16 simply cannot fly slow enough when fully loaded to be an effective ground support aircraft, and it also cannot carry nearly as much ordnance so its ability to support the ground fight is further limited.

So what does this mean for counterinsurgency (COIN) fighting in Iraq or trying to destroy Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon? Airpower can still be of use, but its effectiveness is not nearly what we might expect given the lethality of the weapons. In COIN, airpower is only useful in situations like Fallujah where the insurgents control the town and the intent is to regain possession. In that case, airpower can be of great use in hitting concentrations of insurgents, destroying strong points, and so on. When you're looking at a situation like what currently obtains in Baghdad, however, airpower can be counterproductive in the COIN fight. Even if an airstrike kills insurgents, if it also eliminates civilians the insurgency can come out ahead depending on the two sides' ability to exploit the incident through information operations. This has been a massive problem for Israel in Lebanon; because Hezbollah has thoroughly intermingled its forces with Lebanese civilians, any Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets will kill civilians, and Hezbollah has done an excellent job of publicizing these deaths. Even if the strikes are killing many members of Hezbollah, the civilian deaths may provide Hezbollah with the political support it will need to replace those dead. The U.S. has seen similar issues with use of airpower in Afghanistan and Iraq, striking targets that were later claimed to be a wedding party or a tourist bus coming from Syria. Even if the targets were good targets, by making them appear innocent the insurgencies gain strength.

I am, of course, biased in favor of ground power. That is what I do, after all. But history and our current experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to back me up on this. Airpower is a great combat multiplier in many situations. But it is not the be-all and end-all of military power, and when it comes to COIN its strengths can be turned to the enemy's advantage. When considering future uses of American hard power, it would be wise to keep that fact in mind.

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July 12, 2006

Gardens of Stone

Vietnam was popular fodder for movies from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. War pictures are thought to be good box office material, what with all the shooting and explosions and whatnot, and more highbrow directors could use Vietnam to tell more plot-oriented stories. Of the various films, the only one that really spoke to me was the 1987 Francis Ford Coppola film, Gardens of Stone.

Unlike most Vietnam films I've seen, Gardens of Stone barely shows us any of Vietnam. The film is instead set with the 3d Infantry Regiment, The Old Guard, at Arlington National Cemetary, where business was very good during Vietnam. The plot centers around the relationship between a young soldier named Jackie Willow (D.B. Sweeney), newly arrived to the Old Guard and eager to head to Vietnam where the fighting is, and his platoon sergeant, SFC Clell Hazard (James Caan), who has served two tours in Vietnam and now only wants to go to Fort Benning to teach at the Infantry School. Hazard served with Willow's father, so he naturally drawn to the young man, and he attempts to teach the young soldier why he doesn't want to go back to Vietnam and why Willow shouldn't be so eager to go.

The larger story, at least to me, is the film's portrayal of the damage that was done to the Army by the Vietnam war. Tens of thousands of the Army's best died during the war, and tens of thousands of more saw their careers cut short by wounds suffered there. At the same time, the war's unpopularity led to significant protests against the military. ROTC was expelled from numerous college campuses, reducing the Army's ability to bring in officers from some of the country's top colleges. Soldiers branded as 'baby killers' (true story: in college a fellow student stopped me one day while I was wearing my dress greens and asked why I wanted to kill babies.) and war criminals made the profession of arms a far less attractive one, reducing the Army's recruiting and retention and forcing us to accept soldiers of markedly lower caliber than we really needed. By the late 1970s, in the wake of the damages wreaked by the Vietnam war, officers did not dare to enter some barracks without carrying a sidearm. Drug use was rampant, and discipline was breaking down in some units.

The Army recovered, eventually. Significant pay increases made military service a better option for many prospective soldiers. A resurgence of patriotism under President Reagan helped recruiting by removing some of the stigma of military service. Army leaders opened the National Training Center in California and made training the force a priority. By the time I came along in 1988, the Army was a proud and professional force. The years following the end of the Cold War and the peace dividend were hard, as funding was often scarse and a lot of good soldiers left, but we still held onto a solid cadre of officers and NCOs who understood the value of discipline and training. By the late 1990s, we could see evidence of problems seeping in as recruiting standards were allowed to slip to meet targets as the strong economy made military service less attractive, but we were confident in our ability to train the raw material we were given and make them into good soldiers over time.

The standards continued to slip, however, particularly as the peacetime Army transitioned to an Army at war. Armies run on manpower, so stop-loss was back in force, and we started admitting non-high school graduates. Putting soldiers out of the service became much more difficult, as the Army brass wanted to make sure that commanders were making every effort to retain as many soldiers as possible. Promotion requirements began to slip; promotion to Sergeant, once seen as the biggest transition for enlisted troops as they moved from soldier to NCO, became almost automatic. Officers began leaving in great numbers. (When I was selected for promotion to Captain, the selection rate was 89%, meaning almost nine in ten eligible officers were selected for promotion. Last year the selection rate to Major was 96%, even though the Army needs far fewer Majors than it does Captains.) Gang activity is reported to be a rising problem in military units, although I have no personal experience of any such thing in my service. And reports of atrocities in Iraq will only serve to further damage the Army by making it less likely we can recruit the kind of high-quality soldiers we need.

The war in Iraq will end, and probably sooner rather than later. Even assuming President Bush can defy public opinion for the last two years of his term, by late 2008 the pressure to leave will be impossible to resist, and if the U.S. is still in Iraq in force at that time, the candidate who promises the fastest way out of Iraq will be our next President. Whether we leave in an orderly fashion after turning security over to the Iraqis, or with the last few men out rushing to a helicopter with insurgents on their heels, I don't see a significant U.S. presence in Iraq past 2009.

At which point I wonder what kind of Army we will have. I don't think it will be anything close to the damage we saw after the Vietnam war; we're coming from a much stronger base, and I don't think Iraq has been nearly as damaging to morale as Vietnam was. Conversely, I don't think the damage is easy to repair, either. We have lost a great many good soldiers, to death, to casualties, to getting out rather than face a third tour in Iraq. We haven't recruited the same quality of soldiers that we have in the past, meaning it will be harder to find young leaders to take the place of those we've lost. And our equipment base is going to be a big mess, exacerbated by the fact Congress isn't going to want to spend the kind of money it will take to repair and replace the damaged gear. That's not even considering the fact the M16 dates to the Vietnam era, the M1 Abrams was developed in the late 1970s, and the M2 Bradley in the early 1980s, with no systems in the works to replace any of them.

The Army will survive. I'm not trying to suggest for a moment that we're doomed. But as I look around the institution I love and extrapolate current trends forward a few years, I think the young Captains and Lieutenants I see will have a significant challenge waiting for them in the wake of this war.

Here's to us, and those like us. Damn few left.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Posted at 04:31 PM · Military · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0)

July 09, 2006

Tracking Personality Problems

Via Gary Farber comes this New York Times article that discusses how people like Stephen Green get into the service, emphasizing my point that it's virtually impossible for the Army to prevent this kind of problem, much as I wish we could.

As the article notes, it can be difficult to discriminate between a top-notch soldier who exhibits cool under fire and a psychopath. Making it even more difficult is the way we've reduced the difficulty level of basic training. That stems from two forces: one, some vocal civilians think it's inappropriate to place recruits under extreme levels of physical and psychological stress, and two, the Army doesn't want to lose numbers by making basic training so difficult that too many recruits wash out.

To deal with the second issue first, while the problem has grown worse since the war began, the Army has had trouble with recruiting and retention for many years. I attended OSUT (One Station Unit Training, a combined basic and advanced training) in 1989 at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, also known affectionately as the Benning School for Boys. Even then, infantry training wasn't nearly as difficult as I had imagined when I signed up. While I did learn a great deal, and I came out in significantly better shape than I was when I entered, I wasn't really a fully trained soldier at that point. It was expected that the first unit I went to would do the job of completing my training and making me a true infantryman. That process has only gotten worse in the intervening years. When I went through, we were still expected to be minimally physically fit, for example. If you failed the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) at the end of OSUT, you weren't permitted to graduate. One of my classmates was unable to qualify with his M16 rifle, and was therefore forced to 'recycle' or be put into a new basic training group so he could go through basic rifle marksmanship (BRM) again to see if he could pass. I don't know if he ever did, but I know that he either passed BRM or he went home a civilian. Today, those basic standards are no longer required. By the time I was commanding a company in the late 1990s, we were getting soldiers out of basic training that couldn't pass the APFT or qualify with their assigned weapon, two of the most basic tasks any soldier has to accomplish. When it came to the more complicated tasks expected of soldiers in their specialty, they were even worse. I can only imagine how much worse it has gotten since the war began.

As for the first, we are fortunate in this country to have very little experience with war. Because we don't have much experience with it, we tend not to realize just how unpleasant it is. So when civilians hear about soldiers being placed under physical stress by being forced to remain awake and alert for days at a time while conducting simulated combat operations, or under mental duress from Drill Sergeants who are properly trained to taunt and harass recruits in order to press their buttons and see how they act under stress, the civilians sometimes get upset. Why is it necessary to dehumanize recruits, they ask. They fail to understand that nothing done to recruits in basic training can compare to the stress people undergo in a combat environment. And the only way we have to assess how soldiers may perform in combat is by placing them in as stressful an environment as possible. It's harsh, and it can be dangerous, but I would argue that it's a lot less risky than placing a soldier in a combat environment only to discover that he's so terrified he can't react at all, or that he views a combat environment as a chance to step outside the rules of civilized society without restraint.

There is a solution to these problems, but they are not popular and are very unlikely to be implemented. On the recruiting side of the house, we could raise the benefits of service to a degree sufficient to bring in significantly more recruits than we need. Doing this would allow us to make basic training hard enough to weed out at least the vast majority of recruits who have no business on a battlefield. Even that wouldn't guarantee that a psychopath couldn't slip through the system, but it would severely reduce the chances of anyone doing so. But it would cost a lot of money, so it won't happen. The only good news is, even as I think the system we have now isn't doing a very good job, only "about 8 in 1,000 service members have been evacuated for psychiatric problems," a rate far lower than in any previous war, so we're apparently doing something right.

Posted at 03:11 PM · Military · Comments (1) · TrackBack (0)

July 01, 2006

Hamdan Backlash

I see a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is suggesting that the officer who defended Hamdan and won a rather significant victory for his client is being punished for his vigorous defense of his client. Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift was passed over for promotion to full Commander last year, and he is waiting to see if he will be picked up by this year's board. If he is not picked up this year, he will have to leave the service, as military officers work under an up-or-out system.

Was Swift punished for his service? That seems to be the position of the Post-Intelligencer. I'm not so sure. While the Navy and Army are different in many ways, but the promotion systems are pretty similar. The move from Lieutenant Commander to Commander is equivalent to the move from Major to Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. That's a pretty big step. ILooking at naval selection rates for staff ratings in 2005, JAG officers (Designation 2500) saw 25 of 40 officers in the primary zone, as Swift was last year, selected for promotion. That's a selection rate of 62.5%, or not a lot better than flipping a coin.

The makeup of promotion boards, make it less likely Swift was singled out for punishment for defending Hamdan. Each promotion board is made up of a group of senior officers from across their service. Each board member assesses each file individually. Because there are a large number of officers being considered, there is rarely any discussion among the board members. Instead, each member rates each file, then the top files are selected for promotion. To suggest that Swift was singled out, either each member would have to have recognized Swift's name and decided to punish him by giving him a poor rating, or one of the members would have had to broken protocol and recommended to the other members that they not promote him based on his defense of Hamdan, and the members would have had to agree that those actions merited passing him over for promotion. That seems unlikely to me.

What seems more likely is what is mentioned late in the article. Because the members of a promotion board are drawn from across the service, each of them is familiar with the normal career path of officers in their field. Each member of the board briefs the others on the standard career path before they begin examining the records. This allows members to judge the files fairly. The flip side to this is that officers whose career path is different often end up being passed over, because the board members aren't sure how to assess a career path that varies so much from the norm. And LCDR Swift has just such a career path.

There is no way to be sure why LCDR Swift wasn't picked up for Commander. But to claim that it was some kind of retribution for his defense of Hamdan is questionable at best. The Post-Intelligencer may be a fine paper, but to suggest that the government is somehow lashing out at Swift for his actions in Hamdan is an extreme claim that requires more evidence than the only facts we have: that Swift defended Hamdan, and that he was not selected for promotion. There were fourteen other JAG officers who didn't defend Hamdan who weren't picked up for promotion, either. The Post-Intelligencer should have done a little more research before advancing that kind of hypothesis.

Update: Meanwhile, some people are convinced they know the real story behind Swift being passed over. As I said before, I can't tell you what the truth is behind LCDR Swift being passed over. But a review of the facts sugge