Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 100

'Ruthless' in handling sexual assault? Let's take some lessons from our allies

By Donna McAleer

Best Defense guest
columnist 

One would think that when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
members of their staffs took their seats in the Senate
Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing on June 4, 2013, they would come armed with
statements promising change and detailing actions being implemented. But,
instead of being like Lt.
Gen. David Morrison,
chief of staff of the Australian Defense Force, who inspirationally went bare knuckles on the issue, stating in a video distributed to his command and his country,
and posted on YouTube, "I will be ruthless in ridding the Army of people who
cannot live up to its values," our chiefs can't even talk a good fight!

At the June 4 SASC hearing they delivered confessions of
failure (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey: "We
have become too complacent." Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno: "We
have failed in our efforts to date to fully protect our soldiers, civilians,
family members from sexual assault and sexual harassment within our ranks."), apologies, and, most
astonishingly, ignorance of what the militaries of our allies
have done and are doing to address the issue. When questioned by Sen. Roy
Blount how U.S. allies had dealt with sexual assault, since the problem has
been known for years, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, responded that
was "something I should have done."

Unlike the militaries in Australia, Canada, Israel,
Germany, the United Kingdom, and most of our NATO allies, who no longer allow
unit commanders to determine the prosecution of sexual assault cases, American
military law requires that the officers directly in command of individuals
charged with sexual assault offenses decide how the cases are handled. The
result is that only 8 percent of military sexual assault cases are prosecuted
and only two percent are convicted. Even after admitting the failure of the
present system, and after President Barack Obama in his graduation address at Annapolis and Secretary of
Defense Chuck Hagel in his commencement speech at
West Point made calls for action on the issue, the joint chiefs unanimously
supported keeping that present system in place.

And, despite acknowledging the problem, SASC Chairman Sen.
Carl Levin refused to support SASC member New York Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand's Military Justice Improvement Act, which has 27 bipartisan
co-sponsors. That legislation proposes a reformation of the military justice
system and removes the court martial conveying authority on issues of sexual
assault from unit commanders and places responsibility in the hands of the
military's own professional legal corps. Instead, Levin replaced Gillibrand's
legislation with his own amendment: If unit commanders decide not to prosecute
servicemembers for alleged sexual assaults, those cases would be required to
undergo "an independent review by the next higher level of the chain of
command."

Since the 1991 Tailhook scandal in which Navy pilots were
accused of sexually abusing female officers at a Las Vegas convention, the
armed forces have put in place numerous policies and programs to reduce
assaults. Gen. John Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, enumerates many
in his SASC
testimony. Yet,
two decades later, the problem persists. The 2012 Department of Defense "Annual
Report on Sexual Assault in the Military" indicates that 3,374 cases were
officially reported. The Pentagon itself estimates that more than 26,000 incidents
of sexual assault actually occurred in 2012, not the 3,374 officially reported.

So what happens next? Sexual assaults, notoriously
underreported crimes (in fairness, a problem in the civilian world as well) are
likely to remain that way -- underreported.

What is the good news? The legislative framework is set up
for implementation in 2016. Why 2016? Because a new panel
commissioned to begin a year-long process of researching and collecting more
data on sexual assault in the military convenes on July 1, 2013. Their findings are due in 12 months, on July 1, 2014. Interestingly, that is nearly three weeks
after the 2014 SASC hearing. Therefore, the earliest this legislation can
be proposed again for inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act, the defense spending bill, is 2015
for inclusion and implementation in 2016. That is unless new legislation
is proposed directly on the Senate floor.

So, I guess we need to tell all the victims of sexual
assault to "just suck it up" for another three years.

The shame of it is that the militaries of Australia, Great
Britain, Israel, and others are leading the fight to rid their ranks of those
who, as Lt. Gen. Morrison said, "behave in a way that demeans or exploits their
colleagues." Our chiefs are not talking a good fight -- they are apologizing.

Donna McAleer is a West Point graduate, army veteran,
award-winning  author,  and speaker.

One of the advantages of writing for this blog: You might get blasted into space

Navy Lt. Cdr. Victor Glover, who
contributed columns here and here to Best Defense,
was just selected to be an
astronaut.

So first, a Best Defense 21-gun
salute! And let's hope he remembers to contribute a guest column from outer space.
I would love to have a bureau on Mars.

Here's the whole list of
the new crop of space cadets.

The Best Defense Interview: Armitage on Pakistan's Tactical Nukes, Afghanistan's Future, and Why We Should Withdraw Now

Best
Defense: Do you think Pakistan turned against the United States in Afghanistan
in 2005? What makes you think that?

Richard Armitage: "When I
was deputy secretary [of state], from 2001 to February 2005, I looked
constantly for information that the Pakistanis were aiding the Taliban.... I
did see liaison, but I could not find" strong evidence of more.

"2005, if you look at
casualties [in the Afghan war]. There was the beginning of a sharp rise. I
believe two things happened. The Talibs started digging up their weapons and
the Pakistanis thought, Maybe the Americans will prove short of breath, and so
maybe we should keep our hand in.

"There was a background to
this. From our point of view, it was black and white. From a Pakistani point of
view, it wasn't. In their view, we are a very unfaithful partner, with four or
five divorces since 1947. So in the back of their minds is always, When are
they going to cut and run?"

BD: How does that inform your view of the current situation?

Armitage: "My present view
of the situation is that the Pakistan government is persuaded of the ultimate
ability of the Taliban to form a deal with the Afghan government, with a rough
return to corners -- the Tajik in the north, Pashtun in the south and east, the
Hazaras in the middle getting kicked by everybody, and so on.

"I think in addition,
Pakistan dramatically increased its nuclear arsenal after 2008-2009. They fear
that we will swoop in and take them.

"With India, they now are
looking at tactical nuclear weapons." [Their fear, Armitage said, is that if
there is another Mumbai-like attack, India will respond with a corps-sized
attack on Pakistan.] "Tactical nukes is what you'd use against a corps." [This
might provoke India to escalate further.] "But Pakistan would say that its
tactical nukes would deter that."

BD: I saw
today (Monday) that 3 SAMs were reported intercepted near the Pakistani border . What do you make of that?

Armitage: If it were true,
"That would be seen as a very unfriendly act," one directed not against Afghan
forces but against our airpower. "I'd be skeptical of that" report -- it more
likely is MANPADs than larger SAMs.

BD: As
the United States tries to draw down its presence in Afghanistan and turn over
security to Afghan forces, what do you expect Pakistan to try to do?

Armitage: "I think they
will remain on the trajectory they are on" -- that is, supporting Talibs in the
south and east, and keeping an eye on Indian (and possibly Russian) dealing
with the Tajiks.

If internal unrest grows in
Pakistan, "they may have to spend a little more time at home," but still will
likely remain on the same trajectory in Afghanistan.

BD: If
you had lunch with President Obama today, what would you tell him about the
Afghan war and about Pakistan?

Armitage: "Twenty-five
years from now, Mr. President, I can assure you there will be a nation called
Afghanistan, with much the same borders and the same rough demographic makeup.
I probably couldn't say that about Pakistan."

On the Afghan war, "I would
say, Mr. President, it is not worth one more limb." Perhaps just leave enough
for counterterror missions and maybe some trainers.

Rosa's Dystopia: The Moral Downside of Coming Autonomous Weapons Systems

By Brendon Mills

Best Defense guest
columnist

Last
Wednesday, Tom posted about one of the more
provocative statements made during CNAS's fantastic annual conference. FP's Rosa Brooks, while discussing the
morality of drones, implied that future drones with artificial intelligence
would make better judgments than humans about when to kill in war. And if
that's the case, she asked, how can we morally justify not using these drones? Brooks
may be correct that drones one day will be better at making judgments about
when to kill, yet the broader negative moral consequences of making AI drones
the staple of our military far outweigh the benefits of better tactical
decisions.

Drones
with artificial intelligence (commonly referred to as autonomous weapons
systems) do have the potential to make better decisions than humans on the
battlefield because those systems will employ nearly perfect rational
decision-making. Some may argue that we can never make a machine sophisticated
enough to make all of the necessary decisions in an environment as complex as
combat. However, Brooks reminded us that a decade ago the same was said about a
computer's ability to drive a car. Yet Google's driverless
cars
have done exactly that -- in fact, they drive better than humans! Fellow
panelist Ben FitzGerald agreed, saying that
the technology will exist for autonomous weapons systems soon.

Such
technology would bring some positive benefits. A massive decrease in casualties
for U.S. forces represents the most obvious benefit. This would alleviate both
the terrible human suffering associated with ground wars and some of the
biggest long-term cost drivers of such conflicts. Autonomous
weapons systems may also lead to fewer civilian casualties due to enhanced
rational decision-making, which would enable them to make decisions absent the
emotional stresses of combat.

However,
more autonomous weapons systems on the battlefield would mean fewer humans on
the battlefield, thereby reducing the costs of war and further insulating the
public. The aforementioned benefit of fewer casualties and reduced human
suffering represents a double-edged sword: Some already argue that the American
public is too sheltered from the costs and burdens of our current wars; imagine
how little attention the public would direct towards a war in which the only
casualties were expensive erector sets that shoot. Ultimately, reducing the
barriers to war makes war easier to choose. If it's easy to choose and the body
politic doesn't care, there will be more wars.

Unfortunately,
this isn't the only drawback. If we populate our military with autonomous
weapons systems, our adversaries would adapt. States, and everyone else who
fights these days, use war to force a policy on an adversary through violence,
and our enemies wouldn't be able to change our policy by creating a scrap heap
of our autonomous weapons systems on the battlefield. Instead, they'll go
asymmetric and target our noncombatants because that would be the only way to
truly make us hurt.

Although
to some extent our enemies already do this, it's not their only option. We have
people in uniform who have stood up and said, "me, not them." However, in a
world where we only fight with autonomous weapons systems, targeting our
civilians would represent our enemy's only hope for success.

And
we're vulnerable.

In
the age of cyberattacks and terrorism, we need to look for policies that seek
to further insulate our noncombatants rather than serve them up as the only
viable targets for our enemies to attack in the hope of incurring real costs to
American society. As someone who wears the uniform, I would welcome a world in
which my friends and I did not have to place ourselves in harm's way to protect
the nation. But my friends and I signed up so that our enemies will fight us
instead of our families. And I worry that if humans don't fight our wars, we'll
have more wars and our families will be the enemy's primary targets.

Brendon Mills is a
lieutenant in the Marine Corps and a graduate of both the U.S. Naval Academy
and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He also worked as a research
assistant on Tom's most recent book, The Generals.
The views expressed here are his own and represent neither the Department of
Defense nor the United States Marine Corps.

Who Played Left Field, Stalin or Lenin?

Normally
I wouldn't mention this, but I was surprised to see that the winning pitcher in
a Pennsylvania high school state championship game was Dylan "Trotsky"
Borawski.

Reminds
me of a fun novel I read once, The Dixie Association, about the Arkansas
Reds. Also the fact that Fidel Castro was a pretty good hurler in his day.

SAMs in Afghanistan -- from where?

If surface-to-air missiles are being
intercepted near the Pakistani border, where are they coming from?

Australia's top general shows how to talk clearly about sexual harassment

Bottom line from
Australia's top general: Respect your fellow soldiers. "If that does not suit you, get out .... I will be ruthless."

(HT to PL)

Robots causing a fading warrior spirit?

By Col. Shane Riza, USAF

Best Defense guest columnist

I'm a fighter pilot. I have 2,700
hours in the F-16. Here's a shocker -- I have misgivings about unmanned and
robotic warfare. I recognize I am at a distinct disadvantage in this discussion
based on the duty history stacked up over twenty-some years. I'm clearly living
in an over-glorified past and fearing for the future of what Peter Singer
describes as the Air Force's leadership DNA. I routinely take spears from my
joint brethren due to acquisition debacles like the next-generation tanker,
incredibly long procurement cycles for projects such as the F-22, and growing
dissent over the validity of the most expensive defense acquisition program in
history, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. These issues give the casual observer cause
to believe the Air Force somehow missed the memo on the future of war and still
believes it is preparing to fight a long-dead enemy.

There is no denying such concerns
play on the minds of current and future Air Force leaders. It makes for fertile
ground for those who see the perceived reluctance of services to press forward
with unmanned systems as simply a culture problem belonging to what the DOD's Unmanned Systems Roadmap
describes as those "pockets of resistance" that must be "eliminated." Even
defense policy analyst Andrew Krepinevich jokes that "no fighter pilot is ever
going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV.... Fighter pilots
don't want to be replaced." In the end, these are too-easy retreats to
simplistic arguments about matters that deserve all the intellectual capacity
we can muster. Allow me to suggest there might just be something much deeper at
play.

Unmanned systems capable of lethal
action subvert what it means to engage in combat and confront our sense of what
it means to be a warrior. This is a culture issue, for sure, but on a whole
different plane than the "I'm a fighter pilot -- how do you like me so far?"
level. It is very important to understand that experiencing combat and being a
warrior are two very different things, and our misunderstanding of their
relationship causes friction in the ranks and in our own sense of who we are as
war fighters. As Singer says, "this disconnection
from the battlefield also leads to a demographic change in who does what in war
and the issues it provokes about a soldier's identity ... or status ... or the
nature of combat stress and fatigue."

Consider these two views. In recent
discussions about targeted killings and our ability to strike from afar and
with total impunity, a senior officer and former fighter wing commander
remarked, "Where's the chivalry in that?" Then there is a young officer just
out the Air Force Academy who speaks with wonderment about how flying Predators
is seen "as this geeky thing to do" despite the fact that its pilots have seen
far more combat than fighter pilots in recent years. Misgivings about unmanned
warfare are not about pickup lines or shiny stars lined up on epaulettes. They
are about a nearly dormant and continually repressed sense of our warrior
spirit.

What is "the warrior spirit?" Allow
a perspective from one untrained in the social sciences, but one who has
attempted to find such a spirit for over two decades in the midst of the
technologies we discuss. The warrior spirit is a sense that what a warrior does
in war and how he comes at it on a personal level transcends the cold
rationality of performing a mission, completing an objective, taking a hill. It
neither ignores nor celebrates the necessity of taking human life. It understands
sacrifice only on a personal level and in relation to fellow warriors, and
therefore does not expect or desire any recognition of status other than that
of "warrior." It sees combat as the ultimate and artistic expression of a life
spent in its preparation. Combat for the warrior is an intricate dance, a test
of personal will and technical skill, played for the highest of stakes, in
which form and means is as important -- perhaps more so -- than the desired
end. The end state must be achieved, to be sure; that is the reason for
military action. But those who can perform it with more finesse and elegance
are better respected for their mastery of the craft.

Author George Leonard, writing in
the introduction of Richard Strozzi-Heckler's In Search of the Warrior Spirit
-- an amazing book about this Aikido master's experiment in training U.S. Army
Special Forces soldiers in the ancient ways of the martial arts -- describes
this idea in the context of Strozzi-Heckler's black-belt test: "It was like one
of those sporting events that are later memorialized, perhaps a World Series
game or a bullfight, during which every last spectator realizes at some level
that what is happening out on the field is more than a game, but rather
something achingly beautiful and inevitable, an enactment in space and time of
how the universe works, how things are." It is this personal and aesthetic
quality of war we risk losing with unmanned or robotic warfare.

Would we recognize a no-hitter
pitched by a pitching machine with the same awe as we do when we see the battle
between the man on the mound and the men at the plate? Would we feel the same
sense of loss when, in the ninth inning, the last at bat slings one into the
upper deck in center field? Our sense of the warrior and his sense of his place
in war are not trivial matters, for it is the aesthetic quality of war that
helps ground it as a human activity. Unmanned and robotic warfare might
accelerate the demise of the warrior spirit, or it might force a new
understanding of this ancient concept. We would do well to heed our warrior
philosophers' calls for caution, meditative thinking, and deep discussions when
it comes to what we should and should not do with unmanned weapons. These
issues are not about mere pride or the perceived loss of some unfounded glory.
They are, in fact, about the deep moral questions of our time.

M. Shane Riza is a U.S. Air
Force colonel and author of Killing Without Heart: Limits on Robotic Warfare in an Age
of Persistent Conflict, published by
Potomac Books, Inc. He is a command pilot, a graduate and former instructor of
the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, and was a fighter squadron commander in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A Best Defense competition: The worst op-ed column on the whole NSA mess?

I am struck by
how many bad op-ed columns have been written on Edward Snowden and the NSA
mess. We are seeing a lot of columnists who wouldn't know Big Data if it hit
them over the head struggling to explain what exactly happened. In total, they
remind me that we are seeing the last generation of pundits who can remember
the world before the Internet. They know something is happening but they don't
know exactly what it is, do they?

There are lots of
bad analogies flying around. (Is Big Data surveillance like reading addresses on
envelopes? Or, pops, is the Internet just like a telegram but faster and more
colorful?) 

There has been
lots of unearned intellectual snobbery. How could a high school dropout have
such a job? (I dunno, how could a college dropout be allowed to run Microsoft?)

There have been
some mighty casual dismissals of our constitutional rights by people who don't
understand just how invasive the new surveillance regime can be.

As Jack Shafer, opinionator for Reuters, noted, there
has been a whole lot of cheap psychologizing: "Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don't merely risk
being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state
secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two
days, the New York
Times's David Brooks, Politico's Roger Simon, the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen, and others have vilified Snowden for
revealing the government's aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him
self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist."

As a former
dead-tree journalist, I am embarrassed to see it. No wonder no one under 30
reads newspapers.

So, I am
announcing a contest: Nominate the worst column you've read about all this. If
there are enough comments, I will at some point compile the results.

A Chinese newspaper gives its readers some tips on how to behave overseas

A friend in Beijing sent along this article from Global Times, an English-language publication
related to the People's Daily,
advising Chinese tourists against certain behaviors overseas. Among them:

Don't write graffiti on ancient
monuments.




Don't take the towels from hotels.




Don't take all the food on the
cruise ship buffet, just because you can.

Meantime, the South China Morning Post reports that the most
popular articles it runs consistently are those about rude Chinese tourists. "You cannot reason with
these kinds of people," said Jenny Wang, a Beijing-based travel agent. "They
think they can do anything with their money."

More here, if you read Chinese. And here, if you don't.