Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 121

The FP transcript (IV): Why is making the hard choices always someone else’s job?

[Here are Parts I,
II,
and III.]

Ricks: Michèle?

Flournoy: Two
things, and especially because I think in Iraq, because the fundamental premise
for the war was shown to be false, that should have triggered exactly the kind
of discussion that: "Uh-oh, here we are. We've discovered there are no
WMD, so what are we trying to do here, and what is our strategy and what are
the risks and what are the tradeoffs and how much in resources are we willing
to put in?" And then, the perverse effect is that it also affected
Afghanistan because once the focus was on Iraq, Afghanistan really did become
an economy-of-force effort for the first many years, which also takes the
oxygen out of the fundamental strategic discussion.

Fastabend: I
discovered this dilemma in Iraq. I wasn't in charge of strategy; I was in
charge of operations. From the strategy guys, I would get the strategic
conditions I was supposed to achieve: "Secure the borders of Iraq; end the
violence. Our job is done. Make it happen." And no choices had been made,
no options, nothing really was useful with respect to strategy.

Ricks: Shawn and
Michèle, you both effectively held strategic positions. In fact, Shawn had the
title, director of strategy for the American Empire.

Glasser: That's a
capital "E"?

Ricks: Again and
again we're coming back to original sin, fruit of the poisoned tree, and
strategic confusion at the outset, where the system did not work, where the
differences were not examined, and where assumptions were not examined either.

Brimley:
Right, so I think we have a profound inability to make hard, clear strategic
choices, but then I think that forces us to react, right? It forces us into a
reactive posture. And for years I've heard the phrase, "Oh, Shawn, you
know the enemy has a vote. The enemy has a vote." But we have a veto,
right? And as we think about the years ahead, as we think about a constrained
fiscal environment, we're going to have to make hard choices. And the enemy is
going to try to lure us to do things that are not in our comparative advantage,
so we're going to have to face up to the notion that we can veto that. We have
a choice, and that's in how we prosecute these things. Those choices carry
inherent levels of risk, but we should embrace that, not run from it.

Ricks: Michèle,
why doesn't the system make hard choices?

Flournoy: Well, I
can speak to what I experienced in the Obama administration. A lot of what
we're talking about here happened in a much earlier period. I'm just guessing,
I'm speculating, that part of why this initial fundamental strategic rethink
didn't happen in Iraq is that, in the middle of [the war], you've gone in and
you've broken the china, and now you have to say, "Whoops. The fundamental
premise was wrong. Now what are we going to do?"

That's a very politically fraught thing for an
administration to do when it's got tens of thousands of Americans in harm's way
on the ground for a mission that was very controversial from the beginning. I
think it would have been an extraordinary act of leadership for, whether it was
the president or the national security advisor, you know, the team, to sort of
say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is not what we thought it was. What are our
interests? How do we clearly define a new set of objectives and make some
choices about how we're going to prosecute this?"

Ricks: That
explains Iraq, but does it explain Afghanistan?

Flournoy: In
Afghanistan -- again, I wasn't there in the early days-- I think that we were
very good at getting in, very poor at seeing the way out. And I think part of
the reason why we migrated from the focus on al Qaeda to "What are we
going to do about Afghanistan writ large?" is getting caught in the sense
of: What is a sustainable outcome? If you take too narrow an approach, it's
like taking your hand out of the water. Once you leave, you're right back in
the exact same situation where you have a government that's providing safe
haven and you're facing a threat again. And yet we never really resourced,
fully resourced, a counterinsurgency strategy until very late in the game when
Obama did the review. But that was like coming in the middle -- the symphony
had been playing for a number of years. You're inheriting something and now
trying to say, "Well, now, given the interests at stake, clearly define
who is the enemy, who is not. What's the limited outcome we're going to try to
achieve, and how do we go after that?" But it's a lot harder to do coming
into the middle of an operation with a lot of history than it is to do it right
from the beginning. And I think that we probably would have defined it
differently had we had that opportunity to shape it from the beginning, but
given where we were and what we inherited, I think, you know, we did the best
we could.

Ricks: Jim, it
seems to me that what this conversation is saying is that there's something
profoundly wrong at the civil-military interface, and your initial question
speaks to this.

Dubik: The sense
that I'm getting is we spend too much time worried about control and autonomy
and less time talking about shared responsibility in strategic and operational
decisions. The civil-military discourse is defined by civilian control of the
military -- absolutely essential to it -- but all relationships are more
complex than one formula can ever describe. So, while control and autonomy are
part of the relationship, the shared responsibility is a huge part that doesn't
seem to get as much play in the professional military education or in the
development processes that are used for producing civilian strategists and
leaders.

Ricks: This is an
unfair question, but let me ask it anyway. If you could rewind us to Sept. 11,
2001, how should civil-military discourse have been conducted at that point?

Dubik: Well it
certainly should have been centered around the fundamental questions, not of how, but of why and what.

But I'd like to kind of challenge the discussion a little
bit, in the sense that we didn't have these analyses. When I went back and
reviewed your
books [gestures at Ricks], Woodward's
books, Michael
Gordon's book, your
book [gestures at Chandrasekaran], I see a very similar pattern with
respect to Iraq for sure. There are at least eight or nine major strategic
reviews that clearly identified that what we were doing was not working. Yet we
didn't make really a big shift until 2007. My bet is you could go through and
find papers about Afghanistan that say the same thing, that until you [gestures
to Flournoy] did the review in 2009, that there were plenty of evidence that
what we were doing wasn't working, but we had no shift. Back to your original
question. The first question was more about how and not enough about why and
what, and then we couldn't adapt. It wasn't just in Afghanistan that we were
treating it as an economy of force -- we were -- but it was an economy of thought. There wasn't the attention.

Flournoy: Because
there's no bandwidth.

Dubik: Right.

Brimley: There's
only so much bandwidth for policymakers, and what you see early in Afghanistan
is all the planning power on the military and civilian side gets sucked into
the Iraq problem. And it is sort of on autopilot: Things are going well;
there's not a lot of thought that needs to be given to it.

Ricks: Bandwidth?
When I go back and read the papers of George Marshall and other senior leaders
in 1939, 1940, '41, they're dealing with much bigger problems, global issues,
and they are making really hard
choices, such as: Let the Philippines go, keep the sea lines of communication
open to Australia--but win in Europe first. These are basic, fundamental
things.

So I would argue with the bandwidth thing. What's clogging
them up nowadays?

Crist: The
initial question I raised was: Do commanders have to think? And I think it gets
to what General Dubik said about getting focused on shooting the close-in
target.

We don't think about the long-term ramifications of the
actions and the strategy. In my view, the great failing of Tommy Franks, he never
asked about that the assumptions were coming down about what this campaign
would look like -- assumptions being facts in the campaign design. Those
assumptions were never challenged. In many ways, as I describe in my
book, there was no red team to look at, "OK, how is this going to
impact Iran? Does it open opportunities for them, or does it have a deterrent
effect?" And so I think that, having sat down with a number of top
commanders and staff, that piece of it isn't done. It's almost discouraged
because "that's the policymakers' realm, it's not ours."

Dubik: Well
that's the civil-military issue. It's control and autonomy. So, at least on the
military side, the bulk of the training is deductive training. You are given a
mission, you are given an end state, you are tossed over the transom the
strategy, and just. . . .

Ricks: When
you're talking about shared responsibilities, it seems to me you're talking
about trust. Trust is the essence of that shared responsibility -- the sense of
a common future, that we trust each other, we'll be working on this. It seems
to me you're saying there's a fundamental lack of trust in our civil-military
system.

Mudd: Hold on.
One interjection that relates to bandwidth is the difference between choices
and questions. I think [back in 2001] we blew over the questions. You said it's
not "how," which is what we did on Sept. 12; it's why and what. On Sept. 12, 2001, can you imagine asking the question: Is
the Taliban really a threat? Today, 12 years later, I'd say, "Well
clearly it's not a threat! In fact, they're going to be in the government!" But
we blew through the question, which led to space, because you have to have
space because the Taliban's a problem -- in retrospect, they weren't. So we
made a choice, but we didn't know we had a choice.

I'll close by saying there's a bandwidth issue; part of this
is the speed of decision-making in Washington. Can you imagine at the Washington Post, sitting back on Sept.
12 and saying, "Wait a minute; you sure the Taliban's a threat?" You
would have been crushed. That, clearly, would have been a good question.

Ricks: I want to
go to two things here. Dave Fastabend, you talk about the inability to make hard
choices. How do we get the system to surface and make hard choices?

Fastabend: I
think we need to relook at what we teach about strategy and train people about
how these decisions are made. I think we should teach strategy much like the
Harvard Business School teaches strategic decision-making in business, on a
case-study basis. There's lots of good history out there where they could teach
people what were, in essence, the choices people had in various situations. You
[Ricks] very articulately described the ones Marshall had. Talk about what the
options were, how they made the trades and came to it. But don't take people
through these ridiculous exercises about define the ends you want and go see if
someone can make a path to it.

(and more yet to come)

The British Army and the people of Ireland: This is one complex love story

By
Henry Farrell

Best
Defense office of ethno-military affairs

You
asked recently whether the
"British Army ever formally
recognized and honored the role that Irishmen (not Anglo-Irish aristos)
historically played in its enlisted ranks?"

The answer is yes, at least for World War I. Neither the British nor the Irish
government was particularly inclined to celebrate the role of Irish soldiers in
the British Army until quite recently. World War I split the Irish Volunteers
into a majority under the sway of John Redmond, who supported the British in
World War I (and in many cases volunteered to join the British Army), and a
minority who opposed the war and the threat of conscription (which was
nominally led by my great-grandfather Eoin MacNeill). The latter started the
Easter Rising and the War of Independence, and won, more or less (the Irish
civil war was fought between two sub-factions of this faction; as Brendan Behan
once remarked, the first item on the agenda of any IRA meeting was always The
Split). The former nearly completely disappeared from historical memory --
nobody, except the Ulster Unionists, particularly wanted to remember the
Irishmen who had fought on Britain's side. Sebastian Barry's extraordinary
play, The Steward of
Christendom, talks to this amnesia from the
perspective of the "Castle Catholics" who had sided with the British
administration. Frank McGuinness's earlier play, Observe the
Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, talks about it from a Unionist perspective.

This began to change in the 1990s,
leading to an initiative to create a memorial to the Irish who died in World
War I, which was folded into the more general peace initiative. The result was
the building of a tower with financial support from both the British and Irish
governments, commemorating the war dead from both parts of Ireland. The British
and Irish army bands played together for the first time at its opening. The
Wikipedia page on the memorial gives a good overview of the project and the politics behind it.

Henry
Farrell is an associate professor of political science
and international affairs at the George Washington University. He blogs at the Monkey Cage
and Crooked Timber .

The other rebalance

By Lt. Cdr. David
Forman, US Navy

Best Defense guest
correspondent

Before President Obama's national security team started
their analysis in 2009 that eventually led to the current rebalance
to the Asia-Pacific, then-Senator Jim Webb experienced a peculiar event. It was
so peculiar that it now helps shape his argument that we need another type of
rebalance: one that returns the legislative and executive branches to actual co-equal partners in government.

In December of 2008, Sen. Webb entered a soundproof room to
review the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) that would shape our long-term
relations with Iraq. Though not actually classified, the White House controlled
the document as though it was. According to the logbook he signed to enter the
room, Sen. Webb was the first member of the legislative branch to review it. The
irony of "secretly" reviewing a document that should have been written or
thoroughly debated by Congress was not lost on such an experienced public
servant.

In his recent article,
"Congressional Abdication," in The
National Interest, Webb draws attention to three main events he believes
indicate Congress is not fulfilling the full range of its responsibilities,
including Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution
as it pertains to use of the military. First, as mentioned above, the Congress
did not play any meaningful role in the development of the SFA agreement with Iraq. Though not an official
treaty, the agreement was a unique display of exclusive executive-branch
negotiations. Second, and most alarming to Webb, is that the Congress played no
part in debating or approving combat operations in Libya in March 2011, a
previously unprecedented type of military intervention. And last, the Congress was
kept in the dark until the president was ready to sign the strategic
partnership agreement with Afghanistan in May 2012.

To be clear, Webb's remarks at a recent session at the
officers of The National Interest
began with, "I'm not on a crusade." He is not trying to throw stones in the
Congressional arena now that he is on the sidelines. Webb's goal is to provide
an honest and insightful assessment of the current imbalance between the two
branches.

After the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in 2001, the president
was understandably afforded great leeway to act. No elected official wanted to
be seen as unpatriotic in the aftermath of such a penetrating and deadly
assault on American territory. However, the complexity and diversity of
pursuant foreign policy issues combined with the perpetual need to fundraise
has prevented Congress from digging deep into foreign policy issues and
recovering the ground it patriotically sacrificed in 2001.

The path to rebalancing is not easy or entirely clear, but
recognition by the president and the Congress, the media, and the American
people is a necessary first step. Congressional approval may seem like a
nuisance in the pace of today's political developments, but it is also vitally
important. Not only does this process adhere to our laws, it also shows the
resolve of the American government and the nation it represents.

Though the eventual solution will take time, the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee is a natural focal point to help restore
legislative balance to executive branch involvement in foreign policy. The
framework for Congressional involvement and genuine oversight still exists, but
its members must duly exercise this capability. With American involvement in
Afghanistan winding down, issues with North Korea and Iran are most likely
front-runners of opportunity for the Congress to reassert its constitutional
authorities and work as a co-equal partner to steer our nation through a myriad
of upcoming foreign-policy decisions.

LCDR David Forman, USN , is
a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security . The
views presented here are his own and do not represent those of the Navy or the
Department of Defense.

Navy captain: Time to deep-six the old school manned aviation carrier -- before long-range Chinese missiles do it for us

Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix has just written one of the best
papers I've seen in the last several years by an
active duty officer. In it, he challenges some of the central beliefs of his
service. "After 100 years, the [aircraft] carrier is rapidly approaching the
end of its useful life," he asserts.

Hendrix,
the current
director of naval history, says the current aircraft carrier is
too expensive, inefficient, and of doubtful survivability. It is now in danger
of becoming, like the battleship during the mid-20th century, "surprisingly
irrelevant to the conflicts of the time."

"If the fleet were designed today," he
observes, "it likely would look very different from the way it actually looks
now -- and from what the United States is planning to buy."

He would like to see unmanned combat aerial
vehicles, more than mere drones, capable of flying off both big carriers and
the smaller "amphibious" carriers.

What would the equivalent of this paper be in
the Army? Has it been written? Any smart colonels out there challenging sacred
cows?

The FP transcript (III): How did we back into the strategies we used, and why?

[Here are Parts I and II.]

Crist: I agree on
the notion of the tendency of the U.S. military. In Vietnam, they used to call
it the "Little Brown Man Syndrome," which is: The Americans come in
and show you how to really fight your war. But I think with Afghanistan the
fundamental problem is a lack of a long-term strategy. What do we want
Afghanistan to do? And I see we sort of evolved into it without a lot of
thinking.

The initial force went in; we got enamored with the idea of
SOF [special operations forces], light footprint, using the Northern Alliance
-- in fact we probably should have had more conventional forces. We missed a
lot of opportunities as these guys skirted across Pakistan, and we, frankly,
allowed them to do it because the Afghans wouldn't go after them. If they wanted
to sit up in the hills, the Northern Alliance was more than happy to let them
sit in the mountains, and we didn't have that capability.

Then the problem is, as we slowly evolve with, frankly, not
a lot of thought -- if you look at the force incrementally increasing, it's not
a well-articulated strategy. Then it comes to the point where, well, we have
the force, we need to start doing this ourselves, and we sort of fall back on
our natural patterns and tendencies and things that are comfortable with an
effective military that likes to solve problems. So I lay it on the long-term
strategy that went in in 2001.

Jabouri: Let me
say something from my experience: I think American forces focus just on the
enemy, on al Qaeda, and they forget about the people.

I think if you want to win the war against al Qaeda, you
should protect the people first. The American forces always, in the beginning,
in Iraq, they put their eyes on al Qaeda, and they don't care about the people.
I think the security forces can't create the security without the long-term
forces. If you now go to Kurdistan in Iraq, if you see the images, Kurdistan
has very good security, but they do not have many checkpoints or forces. The
people have, and the government has the security forces to keep the security.
They are the people in other parts of Iraq, the people not interested in the
security forces of Iraq because they do not have to create the security.

Ricks: This seems
to go to Phil Mudd's question of space versus targeting, but it seems to me
also to Colonel Alford's comments because one of the answers to reconciling
space and targeting is to have local forces occupy the space, not American
forces that alienate locals.

Dubik: But a
strategy, correctly or not, a strategy that emphasizes local forces, building
local conditions, is de facto a long-term strategy. It gets right back to the
question of -- we backed into both these wars.

Ricks: Not unlike
in Vietnam, where we put in ground troops originally to protect the air bases.

Dubik: And it
sucked us in. We just backed ourselves into the problem we faced, and had we
thought that the solution was going to be a 10- or 15-year solution, we
certainly would not have committed. We would have changed many of the decisions
that we made, but we didn't adopt the indigenous force because we thought we
could solve it and leave.

Fastabend: I
think the reason we do that consistently is, as I hinted at in my question (I
really liked your question; I'll explain to you why), is because we think
strategy and we keep strategy, and our theory of strategy is the linkage of
ends, ways, and means, which is how I got here, which is how I'll do my job
tomorrow.

It is pablum; it is a way to avoid making a real choice, so
no one in or out of the government ever said to themselves, "Let's decide
what we're going to do. Are we going to target individuals regardless of space,
or are we going to go in there and have space?" No, what we said is,
"We need a stable government in Iraq, so therefore, you need a stable
government in Iraq." Deductive logic tells you that you need to control
everywhere in Iraq. And then you have to worry about the security forces;
you've got to make sure they've got border patrols. And we never went back to
the fundamental choice about what do we really need to do. We hide choices. We
never talk about choices because choices are hard and choices mean making a
decision. Choices mean taking responsibility for who makes the choice and which
choice they take -- and that, in my view, is the biggest flaw we have
institutionally in this country, is we've got very shallow theory and doctrine
about what strategy really is.

Ricks: This is a
great comment.

(Much more to come)

Army force structure in World War II

I bet there is a good
blog post in this chart of the Army of World War II, if
I could only understand it.

If you are in a
hurry, here is the official answer.

Remember my 'More Salvadors, Fewer Vietnams'?: Turns out it's already written!

Remember how last month I was thinking aloud
about how I should write an essay on future force structure with the title "More
Salvadors, Fewer Vietnams"? Well, it turns out it already has
been written, by Army Maj. Fernando
Lujan. It was published last week.

Maj. Lujan, a career Special Forces officer who
extensively studied the operations of American forces in Afghanistan, and also
spent a lot of time hacking his way through the jungles of South America,
called it "Light
Footprints: The Future of American Military Intervention."
And it is a fine article about military human capital. The essay, he said at a
seminar I attended last week, "is about how to do more with less." Not only is
the light footprint, indirect approach more effective than sending in brigades
of conventional ground forces, it also is cheaper, he argues.

There are several characteristics of successful
missions, he explains:

They are led
by civilians, which plugs them into the larger political strategy. "Without
a robust political plan, military action may only postpone state failure or
prolong the conflict."




They are small.
"It's hard to be arrogant when you're outnumbered," he quotes an SF officer as
saying.




They are indirect,
"working by, with, and through the indigenous forces that can preserve peace in
the future."   




They are consciously long-term. "An overly aggressive pace can inadvertently cause
advisers to ‘mirror image' Western methods and organizational structures onto
local forces rather than taking the time to understand the unique historical
and cultural context of the country first. Unless indigenous forces see the new
methods as organic ... they are likely to jettison them as soon as foreign
advisers withdraw."




They are preventive.
"They are generally intended to prevent and contain security problems, not to
resolve them decisively."

Special operations, he reminded us at the
seminar, is "not just drone strikes and ninjas." Word up.

The 'Foreign Policy' roundtable (II): What we should have done in Iraq and A'stan

Ricks: What I
hear from around
this table is a remarkable, surprising consensus to me. I'm not hearing any
tactical problems, any issues about training, about the quality of our forces.

Instead, again and again what I'm hearing is problems at the
strategic level, especially problems of the strategic process. To sum up the
questions, they are asking: Do our military and civilian leaders know what they
are doing? And that goes to the process issues and to general strategic
thinking. That's one bundle of questions. The second emphasis I'm hearing, and
this also kind of surprised me, is, should we have, from the get-go, focused on
indigenous forces rather than injecting large conventional forces? That is, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, have we tried to do El Salvador, but wound up instead doing
Vietnam in both, to a degree?

Mudd: Just one
quick comment on that as a non-military person: It seems to me there's an
interesting contrast here between target and space. That is: Do we hold space
and do we help other people help us hold space, or do we simply focus on a
target that's not very space-specific? And I think at some point fairly early
on we transitioned there [from target to space], which is why I asked my
initial question. A lot of the comments I hear are about the problem of holding
space, and should we have had someone else do it for us? And I wonder why we
ever got into that game.

Ricks: Into which
game?

Mudd: Into the
game of holding space as opposed to
eliminating a target that doesn't
really itself hold space.

Alford: It's our
natural tendency as an army to do that. To answer another question, it's also
our natural tendency as an army to build an army that looks like us, which is
the exact opposite of what we should do. They're not used to our culture. One
quick example, if I could: the Afghan border police. The border police, we
tried to turn them into, essentially, like our border police and customs
agents. Right across the border, the Pakistani Army uses frontier guardsmen.
Why do they do that? They use their culture -- a man with a gun that fights in
the mountains is a warrior. He's respected by his people. He's manly. All those
things matter, and it draws men to that organization. We always talk about how
our borders on [the Afghan] side are so porous; it's because we don't have a
manly force that wants to go up into the mountains and kill bad guys, because
we didn't use their culture.

Ricks: So we're
already breaking new ground here. We're holding up the Pakistanis as a model!

Alford: On that piece. It's a cultural thing.

Dubik: I agree
with the second comment. On the first point, in terms of why we held space, I
think it's how we defined the problem. We defined the problem not as al Qaeda
-- it was "al Qaeda and those who give them sanctuary." And so we couldn't conceive
of a way to get at al Qaeda without taking the Taliban down, and because of the
problem definition, we inherited a country.

Ricks: So what
you're saying is actually that these two problems I laid out come together in
the initial strategic decision framing of the problem.

Fastabend: I
don't think there was such framing.

Ricks: The
initial lack of framing...

Fastabend:
Getting back to Ms. Cash, we didn't really decide what the questions were. We thought we knew
the question. You know, we thought we had in each case [of Afghanistan and
Iraq] governments to support that would hold space, and that was a secondary
thing that came on us when we got there: that actually the sovereign government
wasn't so sovereign.

Ricks: I just
want to throw in the question that [British] Lt. Gen. Sir Graeme Lamb sent. He
couldn't be here today. General Lamb said, "My question is, given the
direction I had -‘remove the Taliban, mortally wound al Qaeda, and bring its
leadership to account' -- who came up with the neat idea of rebuilding
Afghanistan?"

Mudd: It's
interesting. If you define threat as capability and intent to strike us, then I
think there's confusion early on with the Taliban, because I would say they had
neither the capability nor intent to strike us, but they provide safe haven. If
you look at areas where we have entities that have those twin capabilities or
those twin strengths -- Yemen and Somalia come to mind, maybe northern Mali --
we're able to eliminate threat without dealing with geography. So there are
examples where you can say, "Well, we faced a fundamental -- I mean, not
as big a problem as Afghanistan." But you look at how threat has changed
in just the past two years, and I don't think anyone would say that the threat,
in terms of capability and intent, of Shabab or al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, is anywhere near where it was a few years ago. That's because we
focused on target, not geography.

Glasser: Just to
go back to this question, was the original sin, if you will, focusing on U.S.
and NATO presence in Afghanistan, versus working from the beginning to create
or shore up local forces? I want to probe into that a little bit. How much did
people at the time understand that as a challenge? I remember being in Kabul
for the graduation of the first U.S.-trained contingent of Afghan army forces,
and they were Afghan army forces. These guys worked for warlords that had come
together, Northern Alliance warlords who made up the fabric of the Defense
Ministry. They had nothing to do with an Afghan force, and that's why we're
still training them now.

Ricks: But
Colonel Alford's point is that, those are the guys you want to work with,
though. But don't work with them on your terms; work with them on their terms.

Glasser: But
that's what we did. That's what we do. We worked with the warlords in
Afghanistan. That's who our partners were in toppling the Taliban.

Alford: But we
never turned it over to them, though. In '04, I was [in Afghanistan] as a
battalion commander. We never would let them fight unless we always led the
way. It's part of our culture, too, as soldiers and Marines. You send an
infantry battalion into a fight, they're going to fight. It takes a lot to step
back and let the Afghans do it, and do it their way. Provide them the medevacs and
fire support -- that's the advisory role for those missions we're going to
switch to this spring, and I'm all for it. We should have done this four years
ago, but now we also need to see if this is going to work over the next almost
two years. We need to be ruthless with young lieutenant colonels and colonels
who want to get out there and fight, or generals who do, to support the Afghans
and then see how they do against the Taliban. I'll tell you how they're gonna
do: They're gonna whoop 'em. The Taliban does not have the capability to beat
the Afghan army if we get out of their way.

(more)

Headline of the day: 'War of 1812 enthusiasts gather in Hamilton'

Oh, Canada.
I guess the two of them shook hands.

The 'Foreign Policy' transcript (I): Our basic problem over the last 10 years has been decisionmaking at the top level

Here is the first part
of a transcript of a conversation held at the Washington offices of Foreign
Policy magazine in January of this year. A shorter version, with full IDs of the participants, appears in the current issue of
the magazine. This is the full deal, edited just slightly for clarity and ease
of reading, mainly by deleting repetitions and a couple of digressions into
jokes about the F-35 and such.  

I had asked each
participant to bring one big question about the conduct of our wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. I began. We began with those. 

Thomas E. Ricks:
One of my favorite singers is Rosanne Cash, a country singer who is Johnny
Cash's daughter, who has a great line in one of her songs: "I‘m not looking for the answers-- just to
know the questions is good enough for me." And I think that is the
beginning of strategic wisdom: Rather than start with trying to figure out the
answers, start with a few good questions.

So what I'd like to start by doing is just go around the
table with a brief statement -- "I'm so-and-so, and here's my
question." So, to give you the example: I'm Tom Ricks, and my question is,
"Are we letting the military get away with the belief that it basically did the
best it could over the last 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that
civilians in the government screwed things up?"

Philip Mudd: I
guess my question is: "Why do we keep talking about Afghanistan when we went in
12 years ago, we talked about a target, al Qaeda. How did that conversation
separate?"

Maj. Gen. David
Fastabend (U.S. Army, ret.): My name is David Fastabend, and my question
is: "Do what we think, our theory and doctrine, about strategy -- is that
right? Could we not do a lot better?"

Rajiv Chandrasekaran:
Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, got a lot of questions. I suppose one among them would be,
"How did the execution of our civilian-military policies so badly divert on the
ground at a time, at least over the past couple of years, when there was supposed
to be a greater commonality of interests in Washington?"

Lt. Gen. James M.
Dubik (U.S. Army, ret.): I'm Jim Dubik, and my question's related to
Rajiv's and Tom's: "How do we conduct a civil-military discourse in a way that
increases the probability of more effective strategic integration in
decisions?"

Shawn Brimley:
Shawn Brimley. I have a lot of questions, but one that keeps coming to mind,
being halfway through Fred
Kaplan's book, is: "How did we,
collectively, screw up rotation policy so badly that we never provided our
military leaders the chance to fully understand the reality on the ground
before they had to rapidly transition to a new colonel, a new brigadier, a new
four-star?"

Maj. Gen. Najim Abed
al-Jabouri (Iraqi Air Force, ret.): My name is al-Jabouri. As an Iraqi, I
have a different view of 2003. I was a general in the Iraqi Air Force, so I
wanted to shoot down your airplanes. After 2003, I was a police chief and a
mayor, so I wanted your help to build my country. In the last 10 years I have
learned that America has a great military power. It can target and destroy
almost anything.

However, I have also learned that it is very difficult for
America to clean up a mess it makes. Leaving a mess in someone else's country
can cause more problems than you had at the beginning. Military operations in
Muslim countries are like working with glass. If you do it right, it can be
beautiful and great, but if you break it, it is difficult to repair or replace.
My question is: "Do American strategy planners understand the consequences of
breaking the glass, and if so, do they know what it will take to repair or
replace the broken glass?" Thank you.

Col. J.D.  Alford, USMC: My name is Dale
Alford. I too have many questions, I guess, but I'm going to stay a little
bit in my lane and I'm going to talk about the military. My question would be:
"Can a foreign army, particularly with a vastly different culture, be a
successful counterinsurgent? And if not, why haven't we switched and put more
focus on the Afghan security forces?"

David Crist: My
name is David
Crist, and a bunch of people had very similar lines of thought to what I
was going to use, so I'll take a common complaint that James
Mattis says all the time and frame that into a question: "Do our commanders
have time to think? Think about the issues and the information -- in some ways
they have to be their own action officer. Do they have time to sit back and
think about the issues with the op tempo going on and just the information
flow?"

Michèle Flournoy:
I have two, and I can't decide which one.

Ricks: You get
both.

Flournoy: I get a
twofer? So the very broad, strategic question is: "How do we ensure that we
have a political strategy that takes advantage of the security and space that a
military effort in counterinsurgency can create? How do we ensure that the
focus remains primarily there while we resource that aspect?" Kind of a
Clausewitzian question.

Second is a much more narrow question, and we have the right
people in the room to reflect on this, which is: "What have we learned about
how to build indigenous security forces in a way that's effective and
sustainable?" I mean, this is a classic case where we reinvent the wheel, we
pretend like we've never done it before, we pretend like there aren't lessons
learned and good ways -- and less effective ways -- to do this. So: "Can we
capture what we know about how to build indigenous security forces?"

Susan B. Glasser:
I have a question of my own that's particularly for the people with a military
background in this room, which is: "In September 2001, if you had told us that
in 2013 we are going to be in Afghanistan with 65,000 American troops and
debating what we accomplished there and how quickly we can get out, how many
more years and how many billions of dollars we'd have to pay to sustain this
operation, my strong sense is that there would have been an overwhelming view
in the U.S. military -- and among the U.S. people more broadly -- that that was
an unacceptable outcome. So, if we can all agree that 13 years was not what we
wanted when we went into Afghanistan, what did we miss along the way?"

(more to come...)