Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 118

'Mission with LeMay': Perhaps the worst military memoir I've ever encountered

I recently picked up the
memoirs of General Curtis LeMay, partly out of guilt that I don't know more
about the history of the Air Force. My problem is, I still don't.

The book is mainly pablum. I gave
up about halfway through and skimmed the rest, something I rarely do.

I did learn a few things:

--Alamogordo, New Mexico, seems to
be the only Air Force base so lonely that even the chaplain once deserted.

--LeMay had a contempt for
professional military education typical of the fast-rising officers of World
War II. "It was utterly absurd, sending a lot of people to the War College
after the war, when they'd already been through the mill." I wonder if the
seeds of the Vietnam War are contained in that view -- that if you fought in
the big one, there was nothing more to learn?

--I didn't know that he actually
wrote that the solution to the Vietnam War was to threaten "to bomb them back
into the Stone Age." He did.

--He did seem to use mission
command, and see it as particularly American. "My notion has been that you can
explain why, and then you don't need to give any order at all. All you have to
do is get your big feet out of the way, and things will really happen. Forever
I took the same course. Get the team together. ‘There's the goal, people. Go
ahead.'"

That said, much of the rest of it is
the type of claptrap that H.L. Mencken made a living destroying. I had expected
that having Mackinlay Kantor, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville, as co-author of the
memoir was a recommendation. I didn't realize that Kantor was a hack.

So I would rate this memoir as even
worse than Douglas
MacArthur's, which at least gave the reader a strong sense of that
general's querulous grandiosity. And also worse than Tommy
Franks' book, which had some memorable passages that inadvertently revealed
that man's ignorance of his profession. (Plus, you can buy it used for one
penny.)

Army to 24,000 soldiers: Take a hike, bub

I've been reading a briefing by Maj. Gen. Richard P.
Mustion, commander of the Army's Human Resources Command, who predicts that
the Army will have to eject about 24,500 soldiers in the next five years. That
is, in order to reach the projected size of 490,000 in 2018, it will have to
lose 17,000 more enlisted soldiers than it would lose through natural rates of
attrition, and also 7,300 officers.

I hadn't seen those numbers before. Have youse?

I actually think the Army is going to have to lose more than
that, because I think the overall defense budget will be cut more than the Pentagon
expects. If that happens, I hope the Army aims to maintain quality more than
quantity.

'Baghdad Bob' was right? Yow.

So says
this sobering piece.

The Best Defense interview: Steve Coll on White House leaks & what might happen

Steve
Coll, a former managing editor of the Washington
Post and author of Ghost Wars, a favorite book of many readers of this blog, is one of the best
journalists I've ever met. He especially understands intelligence matters,
national security, and Washington. So when he wrote this week in the New Yorker about the possibility of
high-level indictments of national security officials at the Obama White House,
I paid attention. Here is an e-mail interview I
conducted with him:

What
makes you think that there may be indictments of high-level Obama administration
officials down the road?

It's clear that the Justice Department has been
carrying out extensive interviews with current and former senior administration
officials about David Sanger's excellent reporting on the Obama administration's
involvement in cyberattacks against Iran. At the same time, the administration
has established that it is willing to tolerate aggressive leak prosecutions
against current and former government officials. Equally, the White House is
allowing Justice prosecutors to make such decisions without political interference
-- as is proper (See: Richard Nixon). So if you add all that up, indictments
are a possibility.

Have
you talked to David Sanger, or to anyone else at the New
York Times, about the leaks to him? If so,
what did they say?

I have not formally approached the Times or Sanger about this investigation
-- the subject of my New Yorker
reporting was the separate prosecution of former C.I.A. officer John Kiriakou,
who pleaded guilty and became the first C.I.A. officer ever sent to prison for
providing information to the American press. In that longer story, I mentioned
the ongoing Sanger case as context, based on what I picked up along the
reporting trail, and I cited some reporting by the Washington Post, which appeared earlier this year.

Do
you think that the situation with Sanger and high-level Obama administration
officials may have altered the Times's coverage of national security issues? If so, how?

I don't have any reason to think that. The Times, under executive editor Bill
Keller and now Jill Abramson, has had to handle a succession of tricky
editorial and publishing decisions involving classified information, from
Wikileaks to these multiple leak investigations by the National Security
Division at Justice. There was the Kiriakou case, which involved the Times; a separate case involving former
C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling and Times reporter James Risen; and now the
Sanger case. In the Risen and Sanger cases, the Justice investigations have
involved reporting done for books, in addition to reporting done for the Times. My reading from far outside is
that the Times editors have done very
well handling these dilemmas. It's a complicated responsibility, as I can
testify from experience at the Washington
Post. I'm sure there are at least a few calls the editors would like to
have back, but overall I think they've made courageous, responsible decisions
in the public interest.

Who
do you think might be indicted?

I don't know.

Do
you think such indictments would be justified?

Almost certainly not, particularly if they
involve heavy charges under the Espionage Act or other similar statutes, as
Justice has done in previous cases. As my story about the Kiriakou case
outlined, leak prosecutions are highly selective and they fail to take into
account the institutionalized failures and hypocrisy of the government's
management of classified information. David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia
University, estimates in a forthcoming Harvard
Law Review article that fewer than three in a thousand leak violations are
actually prosecuted, and the true percentage, if all leaks of classified
information could be counted reliably, is almost certainly much closer to zero.
These kinds of prosecutions -- aimed, apparently at creating a deterrent effect
-- in an atmosphere of such laxity just can't be justified as public policy,
even if they are permissible as a matter of law.

What does
all this say to you about how Washington (both in politics and journalism) works
these days?

The
Kiriakou case teases some of that out -- it's a very polluted environment.
There's a lot of opportunism from all sides. That's why they call Washington a
swamp. But I think the single biggest factor -- and a factor that could be
fixed -- is the broken system that over-classifies government information by
orders of magnitude. Until the government can credibly distinguish a real
secret from a phony or artificial one, prosecutions of leakers will always seem
selective and without adequate foundation.

Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster on the future of ground warfare: First, we need to unlearn some bad lessons from the last decade

By April
Labaro

Best
Defense guest columnist

(March 20, 2013)

What's new in warfare? Not much, according to Major General H.R. McMaster, commanding general of the
U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence.

Rather, McMaster said in a talk the other day (March 20) at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, we've actually had to re-learn some basic concepts. The
most important one being that despite technological advances, there are
continuities in modern warfare that shouldn't be overlooked. This is where he
got all Clausewitzian on us, arguing that the continuities are that war is an
extension of politics, has a human dimension, is always uncertain and,
ultimately, is a contest of wills. Ensuring that these lessons don't have to be
re-learned in the future may be more important than the outcomes of the wars
themselves, he said.

There are also a few lessons that we shouldn't have learned, the
first "wrong lesson" being that the raiding approach leads to a fast, easy and
cheap win. It didn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan and is not likely to work in
the future, he asserted.

The second bad lesson is that wars can be outsourced to proxy
forces. What can be accomplished via proxy forces is often exaggerated, he
warned, in part because collaboration does not necessarily mean congruent
interests.

And what projections can be made about the future of ground
maneuver warfare? There's a lot of uncertainty, but McMaster said he doesn't
buy the arguments made lately by schools of thought that believe that the
future will be more secure and our ground forces will not face many strategic
surprises. Institutionalizing the lessons learned (and unlearning the "wrong"
ones) is a critical first step towards making more accurate projections and
improving the effectiveness of our ground forces,
especially in the face of fiscal austerity and the growing range of
unconventional threats.

Bots on the ground: The FBI's reading list on military robots and other lethal drones

I don't know if this list is expertly done, but I do like
how it is organized. Here are their other reading guides.

More drone
fun here.

The FP transcript (Xth and last): What the last 9 segments tell us about the state of the American confrontation with Iran

[Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.] 

Ricks: We are
almost out of time. Speaking of mutually shared decisions, the U.S. government
is probably going to face one this year on Iran. How has everything we've been
talking about shaped how we are going to be thinking about Iran down the road?

First David, then Michèle.

Crist: Well I
think it's all interrelated -- issues in Afghanistan, issues in Iraq, all
affect how we look at Iran and how we are positioned to be able to do something
about Iran. I think it's all interrelated. Lessons I think have been
institutionalized at least within senior leaders on some of the problems we had
in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially second- and third-order effects. What are
the consequences of different actions we take? What are consequences of
conflict in general? Is regime change a viable option? Isn't it a viable
option? If not, then how do we...? I mean, all that is in the background of
all the discussions. And I think it's been very healthy in many ways.

Ricks: One of the
issues that we've been talking about is the quality of civil-military relations
and straightforward, candid, honest advice from generals to civilian
leaders -- for which we have apparently just seen General
Mattis quietly fired. [Ricks note: I should have said "pushed out early."]

Crist: On the
record I won't comment on General Mattis's views.

I will say and I can say this with a certain honesty since
I've helped draft many of the memos: He has been very candid on what his views
of what needs to be done. I haven't seen anything like the Rumsfeldian approach
to stifling alternative views, and so as a consequence while...And some
people in the U.S. military -- maybe the political leadership isn't as
receptive as they would like on authority issues and some other response...the
dialogue is there, and frankly a lot of it gets to these ideas of what I have
always thought of as one of the intangibles where you have breakdown in
discourse between civilian and military leadership is as you say trust. And a
lot of it is personality based. Just personalities of the individual players
and how they personally get along, as well as concerns of political leadership.

Ricks: And you
have seen a trusting, candid exchange?

Crist: I have
from my level, absolutely. And I've sat in many -- not as many as Michèle and
some of the others here -- but a number of meetings with senior leaders on both
sides of it. And I have seen it be quite candid.

Ricks: My
impression is that the Obama administration has been almost afraid of Centcom
under Mattis and Harward -- the mad-dog symptom with two incredibly aggressive
guys. But I see Michèle shaking her head. Michèle, jump in.

Flournoy: I would
say of all the issue areas that I was exposed to in the deputies committees
process, there was none where we took a more deliberate, strategic,
questioning, and very candid approach than Iran. And it really started back --
this goes a few years back now when it was started up when Gates was still
secretary of defense -- and I think the thought that was put into exactly what
words the president says to describe our objective in Iran: Is it "prevent"? Is
it "contain"? That was debated, the consequences downstream of choosing one
versus the other, multiple senior leader seminars, war games looking at
different options, going down the road of different scenarios, very close
partnership with the military in actually setting the theater so that we are now
communicating a degree of deterrence to back up the policy of sanctions and
negotiations.

So I actually think on Iran, probably more than on any other
issue that I've seen, it's been very strategic, very comprehensive. There's no
idea that you can't bring to the table. There's no idea that hasn't been
debated. And people may have very strong views and disagree. But this is not
one where -- this was one where there was a real constant coming back to what
are our interests? What are our objectives? How do we make sure we are applying
rigor and not just going down the road towards confrontation with no limits or
no boundaries or no sense of what we are trying to achieve?

Crist: I would
add one more point in having looked at U.S.
strategy for a long time on Iran. One thing that I found interesting that
has evolved over the last few years that I haven't seen earlier is looking even
beyond the nuclear issue. What is our long-term relationship with this country?
Are we long-term adversaries? If so, how is that going to play out across the
region? And how do we counteract that? And also, are there areas, I think,
which despite the engagement piece, seemed to have died off, there has been a
lot of thought given -- are there areas where there is mutual cooperation? And
what will that lead to long term? Can we have maybe not rapprochement but some
kind of détente with Iran?

Ricks: So can we
start to get Putin to be aggressive again and drive Iran into our hands?

Crist: Yeah, it's
tough because in my personal opinion we are for a host of reasons adversaries
in the region. We have two different strategic views of what we want out of it.

But the issue is bigger than just the nuclear issue. The
nuclear issue is a symptom, more than a cause, of our problems.

THE END... -- or is
it?

Coll: Possible that senior White House officials may be indicted for leaking

Steve Coll's article in the issue of the New Yorker out this week, about a CIA
officer jailed for leaking, is interesting especially for two asides:

-- Over the past 100 years, he writes, 10 government
officials have been prosecuted for leaking. Six of them have been during the
Obama administration.

-- Coll predicts that this may come back to haunt the
administration: "If prosecutors find that senior White House officials broke
the law while communicating with Sanger, President Obama may be unable to
prevent high-level indictments."

Defense crime blotter: U.K. defense official who served in Af’stan guilty of sex assault

A woman who had too much to
drink fell asleep on a train. Mark Scully, an official in the British Ministry
of Defence, pretended to help her to a taxi but instead dragged her into some
woods and assaulted her. He worked on reconstruction issues in southern
Afghanistan in 2009-10, the Daily Mail
reports.

The FP transcript (IX): Did we really do any counterinsurgency in the last 10 years?

[Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII.]

Fastabend : I
want to challenge us at the table. I want to give an example of some of the
things we lapse into. Half of us have said that the problem of the past decade
has been counterinsurgency and that we've done it and now we are all wrapped up
about whether we are going to do it again or not. I'm not sure we've done it.

You could equally assert that what we have done is brokered
two civil wars. And what's really striking to me about the difference between
the two experiences of the last decade and El Salvador: In El Salvador, there
wasn't that -- there were many moments that I had in many nights in Iraq
wondering about, "I wonder if we are fighting for the right guys
here." I think in retrospect we were brokering a civil war, and that's how
we calmed it down, by giving the Sunnis a chance to get it to a stalemate.

I think that civil war is still ongoing. I don't think Iraq
was a success unless we have an incredibly low standard for success. I can't
believe after over 6,000 dead and over 50,000 wounded -- not counting what's
happened to the Iraqis -- we leave behind a government that can't stop
overflights of arms to Syria from Iran. That counts for success? Really?

Alford: Would it
be better to still have Saddam there?

Fastabend: That's
a ridiculous statement, if you don't mind me saying. Of course not. It would be
better to have enough presence and influence in that area to have justified
that sacrifice having made it. Or having had a better decision process about
whether we are going to make that sacrifice or not. We'd be a lot better off in
the coming months in our face-off with Iran if we had two, three brigades
around the five strategic air bases in Iraq. It would definitely influence
their decision-making.

Alford: So that
should influence our decision in two years in Afghanistan.

Fastabend: Yeah,
it should.

Ricks: So you
think the way that the Obama administration resolved Iraq has fundamentally
weakened our position vis-à-vis Iran?

Fastabend: [Response off the record.]

Flournoy: Can I
just say for the record, a little bit of a point of fact. I think there was serious
discussion of a willingness of having a residual force. What changed the whole
dynamic was when [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki made the judgment that
he could not bring the guarantee of immunity for U.S. forces through the COR
[Council of Representatives] without risking a confidence vote on his
government, and therefore he wasn't willing to do that. Then you're left with
do you leave forces there with no immunities? That was a nonstarter. That's
what ultimately drove us to zero. It wasn't necessarily a preferred option for
the reasons you are describing.

Glasser: So
thinking about this in the context of Afghanistan and the decisions that are
yet to come, I have questions.

One, has anything changed that has made us take a more
strategic approach or to ask the right questions now after so long of somehow
not getting to the right set of questions over the next two years? Because that
certainly -- this is a very reasoned discussion, but I think pulling back you
get a sense that there's just a rush to the exits and that that's what we are
doing. In part because the politics and the public opinion in the U.S. have
already gotten us out the door, does that have an increased risk from a
military point of view?

Second one: This issue that Shawn raised of what is our
post-Vietnam legacy? What is the version of that for post-Iraq and
post-Afghanistan legacy? There were obviously crucial decisions that were made
in the 1970s after Vietnam about what the U.S. military force was going to be,
how it was going to be reorganized. Have we learned the lessons from that? We
know we are going into a period of transition. Are the right things happening?
Are the right preparations happening? Is there a process to understand what
this moment of transition can mean over the long term?

Chandrasekaran:
Can I tack another question onto that? Which is, what do we see as an
acceptable end state in Afghanistan given the parameters that are on the table?

Fastabend: I like
Tom's light footprint, having a few bases there from which you go out and hunt
every night.

Mudd: Just the
ability to eliminate the target we
went into. [CROSS TALK, INAUDIBLE.] The only way Kabul makes a difference is it
affects our capability to protect ourselves. That's it.

Ricks: David
Kilcullen, who couldn't be here today, maintained you can't do that because you
need the larger presence to acquire the intelligence that gives you the
targets.

Mudd: I don't
think that's true . . .

Dubik: Well, you
need the intelligence; whether it needs the larger U.S. presence to get that
intelligence is a separate issue. You can get the intelligence from Afghans...

[CROSS TALK]

Mudd: We can get
it in Pakistan.

Dubik: If the
relationship is correct and there is enough stability and trust that the
Afghans will give it to you. So I think that there's, for me anyway, a very
difficult set of questions to ask yourself.

First, what's necessary to protect our interests? Apropos of
why we went in there to begin with.

Second, what do I have to do in the country to be in the
position to make attacking al Qaeda a real capability? For me anyway, when I
ask myself that question, that gets to some degree of stability in the country,
some degree of relationship with the military and the population, and some
propping up of the military in terms of enablers to allow them to do what they
can do and, I think, want to do.

Crist: To me a
larger issue of defining success in Afghanistan is something that doesn't
destabilize Pakistan. I'm far more worried about the impact of a drawdown from
Afghanistan is going to have on Pakistan than I am . . . [inaudible].

Flournoy: I
wanted to respond to, "Is this all just a rush to the exits?" I think
you'd see a very different set of decisions if it were just a rush to the
exits. I think Dale actually described it well when he said that we are at a
critical juncture in the whole campaign, which is when you really do put the
Afghan forces you've built -- helped to build -- in front. And you still have a
hand on the back seat, but you want to do that before you draw down
substantially. You want to put them up front while you are there to be able to
help and advise and adjust. It's that milestone that's being -- the judgment is
that they are ready for the most part.

Let's have a year, year-plus, to make sure that this is
going to work and make adjustments as necessary and then get to the much more
circumscribed mission, which is about securing our counterterrorism objectives
long term vis-à-vis al Qaeda in the region and making sure that the Afghan
forces can at minimum prevent the overthrow of the central government and a
return to some kind of safe-haven situation. That's the critical thing -- that
does not take a huge long-term U.S. force. It requires some, and I would agree
with your point on at least in the near time some of those neighbors ought to
be pretty [INAUDIBLE OVER COUGHING]. So it can't just be advisors. If it were
really like wanting to wash our hands of this, you would see a very different
profile than what just came out of the White House and the meeting with Karzai.

Chandrasekaran:
It's hard to reconcile the kind of wash-your-hands view with what has been
telegraphed -- you know, deputy national security advisor talking about a
potential zero option even though that was likely just a negotiating tactic --
the very real possibility that it could be a presence anywhere between 2,500
and maybe 6,000. That's certainly sufficient to continue the necessary CT
[counterterrorism] missions.

But we've built an army there that is going to require an
enormous follow-on assistance presence as well as financial support, a part of
this that really hasn't gotten, I think, nearly enough attention. If the bill
for the sustainment of the Afghan security forces is somewhere around $4
billion in 2015 and if we only have 3,000 forces there, we can say all we want
to about trying to diverge the troop footprint from the congressional
appropriation, but our history shows us that those two things are inextricably
linked and that the fewer troops you have there the less chances you have of
getting the necessary money to support them. And we all know why the
communist-backed regime fell was when Moscow stopped funding Kabul. And so I
think we are not paying nearly enough attention to the money question.

But we still, I think, are not asking ourselves -- our
government is not asking -- whether this grand plan of building such a large
ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] with such complex logistical
requirements, with such complex need for enablers, which will likely have to be
internationally provided for some years, is at all feasible there, and in the
time remaining between now and the end of 2014 should the security force
assistance mission be more than just pushing the Afghans into the lead but also
one last-ditch attempt to triage this to get to a smaller, more manageable
force that has a better chance of holding its own.

Ricks: This
actually goes back to the whole issue of, "OK, it might have been a better
original decision to go with local forces. Then, what sort of local
forces?" I actually think in Vietnam our fundamental error was in '62, '63
not emphasizing local forces and keeping our eye on that ball and just
"no, we are not putting our national forces in." It might not even
need to look like your forces. It might be better to have an indigenous force
that looks like an indigenous force. But Jim Dubik is an expert on this having
done this. Jim?

Dubik: I think
there's still some learning to be done on both our part and the Afghan part on
exactly what the ANA [Afghan National Army] is. And I'll just focus on ANA and
not the greater. We certainly, I think anyway, made exactly the right decision
in 2009 to expand the Afghan army and at the same time to disintegrate the
development effort, to take the combat forces and to accelerate them as fast as
we could and to allow the enablers to grow at what is going to be a really slow
pace. I think that was the right decision, and I think it got us to a better
point than we are now. The enablers, though for me, is really going to be a
very -- it's not a settled question, let's put it that way. For me, anyway, in
the near term, the set of enablers they need are pretty well known and have to
be externally provided.

But we've never really asked the Afghans in a way that is
meaningful. To say, "OK, how do you really want your army to be
organized?" We have asked them, so I don't mean to say we haven't. But
we've asked them in our presence, and that's like asking your younger brother,
"You want to go to a movie with me?" or "Oh, yeah, I'm going
with you." When you're not there, the answers might be different. The set
of enablers that we assume now -- and I've written about them and drank some of
that Kool-Aid myself -- but the enablers that we ask now may not be, after the
question is settled in, say, 2015, which I think is probably the right time
frame, the enablers that they really need or want. And the current organization
of regional commands probably will stay, but in our absence the arrangement and
relationship of those regional forces and how they're -- that I still think
there's some learning to occur in 2013 and 2014 when our presence is
diminishing and their sovereignty and judgment increases.

We saw a good bit of that in Iraq in 2009, '10, '11 when they
started making more independent decisions about their own force. Now I know the
two cases are significantly different, but there are certain commonalities.

Chandrasekaran:
On paper what was done starting in 2009, I think, made sense. There was a lot to
be said for it. But it just didn't fundamentally take into account the
political realities that we face here. It made assumptions about the
willingness of the U.S. government to continue sustainment, and it assumed that
there would be a robust U.S. security force mission. I don't think 2014 was on
the table in '09, but it made assumptions about robust U.S. support -- physical
support -- for many years.

Dubik: No
argument. But those assumptions, as questionable as those were, were better
than the assumptions of 2001 through '9, when we were going to grow the army at
such a slow rate that we would be there for 150 years before we were done with
it. Because we were growing it at the rate of its slowest -- we integrated the
force, so we weren't going to put a force out until all elements were ready.

Ricks: I remember
reading somewhere that we couldn't start training the Afghan soldiers until
they were literate. 99 percent of soldiers in world history have been
illiterate. Why can't we have a few illiterate soldiers here?

Blake Hounshell: Are
the Taliban literate?

Alford: Don't you
think they'll evolve back after we leave in '14? There'll be an evolution back
to their history and natural tendency?

Dubik: There'll
be a shift. I don't know if it's evolution back or forward. And that's what I
mean by learning. We are going to learn what actually works and what's actually
sustainable.

Glasser: I'm
raising that point actually only to get us to this question of clearly there is
a broad consensus around this table that the civilian-military dysfunction was
a key part of what got us to where we are. All I was trying to do was to
suggest how can we isolate what are sets of decisions or strategic choices that
do fall more on the military side of the ledger.

For example, Shawn started us off with his question about
rotation. Why wasn't there ever a decision? I don't know and I may be wrong
with this, but my guess is that is not so much coming from the civilian leadership
as this is how our Army works, this is how our system works. So, yeah, we have
to have a new commander in Afghanistan every year.

Dubik: I have a
different opinion. It certainly is a major component of the military decision.
But if you make the assumption that the war is going to last X amount of time
and [so] you don't need to grow the size of the ground forces, then you're kind
of left with a de facto rotation
decision. Or you're not going to allow policy-wise to go there and stay because
that's not an acceptable policy.

The nexus of those kinds of decisions is by its nature
civil-military. And in fact in my other comment about autonomy, that's why we
have the wrong model. These are shared
decisions, and they have to be shared decisions. The commitment of resources in
a military campaign is not merely a military decision. This is, and necessarily
will be, an important civilian component of the decision. The rotation stuff --
in Iraq for example -- if we are going to leave by 2004, then you don't have to
grow the size of the army, and, well, we're not really 2004. Maybe it'll be
2006: "OK, we'll just rotate our way through this."

(One last installment to come, about Iran, of course.)