Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 125

Worries spread about the narrowness of President Obama’s national security team

Over the weekend, two writers coming
from very different backgrounds expressed concerns about the tone and makeup of
the Obama national security team.

Mackubin Owens is a Marine veteran
(with a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts from Vietnam) and an expert in
civil-military relations. On Saturday he wrote in the Wall Street
Journal that, "A president has every right to choose
the generals he wants, but it is also the case that he usually gets the
generals he deserves. By pushing Gen. Mattis overboard, the administration sent
a message that it doesn't want smart, independent-minded generals who speak
candidly to their civilian leaders."

Administration
insiders may dismiss Owens as a hostile witness using a hostile platform. It is
harder to dismiss the concerns of David Ignatius, a veteran reporter in the
Middle East (and author of some terrific novels
about it), who wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday that, President Obama, " by assembling a team where all the top players are going in
the same direction...is perilously close to groupthink."

I suspect one reason that beat
reporters aren't writing about this is that they fear alienating valuable
sources in the administration, such as Tom Donilon, the national security
advisor. Yep, I am looking at you, New
York Times.

Army intelligence officer concludes: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is more right than wrong

By Lt.
Col. Douglas Pryer, U.S. Army

Best
Defense department of war movie reviews

Torture
has once again become a matter of noisy public debate. This time (thank
goodness!), the reason has nothing to do with new revelations of U.S.
servicemembers or CIA employees going amuck on prisoners. Instead, the cause de
célèbre is a movie, Zero Dark Thirty.
Critics of the movie say that it promotes the use of torture by linking torture
to a piece of evidence that proved indispensable in America's search for bin
Laden. This, critics like Senators McCain, Feinstein, and Levin say, is a
dangerous fiction not rooted in historical reality.

Fans of
the movie disagree. They argue that the movie portrays this evidence as far
less valuable than that obtained by clearly legal means. What is more, they
say, the movie performs a service by leaving no doubt in the audience's mind
that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) were torture, and
also by shocking the conscience of these same viewers, causing them to wonder
how the U.S. government could so easily surrender founding national values to
such little good effect.

I agree
with the movie's apologists. The movie does not depict torture as producing
indispensable evidence. It shows morally repugnant torture producing a piece of
evidence that the CIA already had but had tucked away in a file and forgot
about. Seven years of torture, the movie says, produced little if any
intelligence that clearly legal methods could have (and did) provide. The real
narrative of the movie: A new sheriff (President Obama) comes to town who
outlaws torture; subsequent CIA detective work relies exclusively on more
cunning, ethical techniques involving, not just humane interrogations, but
other intelligence methods; and -- presto!
-- in two short years, bin Laden's hideout is found and, a few months later, he
is killed. Even if the movie gets many details wrong, it at least gets the
basic story right.

But far
more important than the movie's historical accuracy is the deeper debate it has
resurrected: Does torture work? And, even if it does work, is torture something
Americans ought to be using on "hardened" terrorists
(or on anyone else for that matter)?

This debate
is sorely needed since most opinion polls show Americans' support for torture
steadily climbing. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey reported that 53 percent
of Americans believe that torture should often (19 percent) or sometimes (34
percent) be used against terrorism suspects to gain information. That marked a
steady 10 percent climb from 2004. A recent YouGov poll commissioned by a
Stanford University professor indicated that, over a five-year period, the
number of Americans approving of torture climbed 14 percent to 41 percent in
2012.

This
trend is something that those against "torture as American policy" should be
watching carefully. U.S. legislation, military regulations, and Army doctrine
-- most notably the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and U.S. Army Field Manual
2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector
Operations -- now enshrine prisoner treatment that is in keeping with
international standards and the national values expressed by such principled
American leaders as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In our republic,
though, all laws are subject to change -- even those in the Constitution -- if
enough Americans support this change.

There is
no question which side of the torture debate I fall on. First and foremost, it
is clear to me that torture fails as a tactic within the most important domain
of war, the moral one. It is thus something that we Americans simply ought not
to do.

When
people see images of torture, most empathize with the tortured rather than the
torturer. This is especially true for those who identify strongly with the
tortured in the first place because of in-group, out-group bias, say, because
the tortured is a fellow Muslim or a fellow Iraqi. The moral judgment that this
empathy has naturally generated -- the judgment that those torturing are
"cruel," "evil," or worse still, "inhuman" -- has inspired legions of America's
enemies to fight us. At the same time, shame has decreased the will to fight of
some Americans within the ranks and at home and damaged the political ability
of coalition allies to support America's military adventures abroad. Choosing
torture as policy is thus rightly seen as a kind of slow moral suicide,
strengthening the fighting spirit of our enemies while sapping our own fighting
spirit and that of our allies.

It is
also clear to me that torture is an extremely poor method for collecting
reliable intelligence. This clarity derives in part from military doctrine,
training, and professional reading. But it is also rooted in personal
experience.

During
the summer and fall of 2003, my boss and I managed interrogation operations for
Task Force 1st Armored Division (TF 1AD) in Baghdad. My boss was Major Nathan
Hoepner, who wrote an email in August 2003 that would one day be quoted by Tom
Ricks in Fiasco. When told by the
highest command in Iraq that "the gloves are coming off" and that our unit must
provide a "wish list" of harsh interrogation techniques, Major Hoepner emailed
a passionate rebuttal: "We need to
take a deep breath and remember who we are...It comes down to standards of right
and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient." He
concluded: "BOTTOM LINE: We are American soldiers, heirs of a long
tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there."

Tragically,
his impassioned plea fell on deaf ears. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez soon
signed a policy memo encouraging the use of EITs on prisoners, tactics employed
at U.S. military Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (SERE) schools to
teach trainees how to survive torture with honor. Sanchez replaced this memo with
another in October that ostensibly required interrogators to obtain his
approval for non-doctrinal techniques. However, it actually reinforced the
belief of some interrogators that they themselves had the authority to order
that clothing, food, shelter, light, and warmth be withheld from detainees.
Thus it was that degrading, formally promulgated tactics laid the foundation
for more serious crimes at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

At the
height of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, I regularly communicated with an
interrogation chief working at the prison. The reason was to press him to have
TF 1AD detainees re-interrogated. Despite his team's conducting numerous
interrogations for us, we did not receive ANY useful intelligence whatsoever
from Abu Ghraib. Sure, they produced reports on our detainees, but invariably,
these reports contained either useless information or different versions of the
same stories we had already extracted using humane, rapport-based approaches.

I was
not alone in my frustration with Abu Ghraib. For example, Kyle Teamey, the S2X
(senior human intelligence officer) for 1st Brigade, 1st
Infantry Division, in Ramadi at the time, said: "The folks at Abu Ghraib not only failed to provide any intel
of value, they turned the entire Sunni population against us. Meanwhile, we
were getting actionable intel by giving detainees Skittles and a cup of
coffee."

Despite
our nation's and military's gross failures at Abu Ghraib and several other
detention facilities, most interrogators
at Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan did not choose to torture. Why is this
the case? One reason is that many
shared the idealism expressed by Major Hoepner, which holds that torture is
just something that Americans should not do.

But we should not dismiss professional competence as a
reason, either. Those interrogators who had done their professional reading
were less likely to engage in torture. In a future guest column, "Top 10 Books
on U.S. Interrogation," I will provide a list of some of these books. Interrogators
had also learned doctrine and conventional wisdom at the military intelligence
schoolhouse that taught that torture is an ineffective intelligence tool. This
conventional wisdom included the proverb, "The longest list of lies in the
world is that given by the tortured." Many interrogators had taken doctrine and
such conventional wisdom to heart, before they deployed.

Lieutenant
Colonel Douglas
A. Pryer is a military intelligence
officer who has served in various command and staff positions in Iraq ,
Kosovo, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and, most recently,
Afghanistan. He is the author of the Command and General Staff College
Foundation Press's inaugural book, The
Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation
Iraqi Freedom, May 2003 - April 2004 . The views
expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the
official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of
Defense, or the U.S. Government.

You can literally bake off rounds?

Turns out you can.
Yet another reason not to stash your Glock in the oven.

Deterring indiscipline by generals: A proposed code of conduct for flag officers

Everyone has a good
idea of what discipline looks like in an enlisted soldier. He takes care of himself,
his gear and his comrades, he trains diligently, responds quickly to orders,
looks you in the eye when he speaks, keeps a good lookout.

But I don't think we
have a good idea of what discipline looks like in a general. I would begin with this list of
characteristics or rules of the road for flag officers:

Thinks of himself
as a steward of his profession, rather than as a member of a mutual protection
guild.




Rewards success and
relieves incompetents in his command after giving them a fair chance.




Enforces standards
for his peers as well as his subordinates, and is transparent in these efforts,
explaining what he is doing and why, and not just on a "need to know" basis.




Understands that it
is his duty to speak truth to power (in a respectful manner, and mainly on
matters of importance, rather than as a constant burr under the saddle) but
then, when the decision is made, executes lawful orders without griping to subordinates
or leaking to the media.




Seeks to surround
himself with officers and other advisors who can think critically, but
understands that it is his job first to think, and that the task cannot be
farmed out to "the 50-pound brains."




Strives to ensure
that he is not only trained as a general, but educated as one. (Training
prepares one for the known, education for the unknown, which is the bulk of
what a senior officer must deal with in the chaos of war.)




Doesn't do his
subordinates' jobs. Turns off the Predator feed after a few minutes. Focuses on
his level, and pushes decisionmaking down as far as possible. Only does the
jobs that only he can do.




Doesn't complain
about lack of "bandwidth" because he realizes it is part of the job of a general
to manage his time and inbox in order to give himself time to think.
Understands that if George Marshall could run World War II and still leave the
office by 5, he can run Camp Swampy without burning out subordinates -- or
second-guessing their every move.




Doesn't abuse his
power. Watches himself on that account.




Welcomes loyal
dissent, and cultivates an atmosphere of trust that rewards subordinates for
expressing doubts and concerns




In retirement,
doesn't drag his service into politics, but is free to be involved in politics
if he doesn't use his former rank or service affiliation.




In retirement,
doesn't go off to work in the defense industry and sell stuff to his former
subordinates.




In retirement, if
commenting as an expert on TV, learns to say "I don't know," if he doesn't.




When in doubt, he asks
himself " WWGMD ?" ("What would George Marshall do?")

Signs of hope and reconciliation: Irish troops to operate with British unit in Mali

Pretty small to
start: Six Irish troops with work
with 21 British troops.
And less than 100 years after the Easter Rising! (And why six Irishmen -- for the "six counties that live under
John Bull's tyranny"?)

I wonder: Has the
British Army ever formally recognized and honored the role that Irishmen (not
Anglo-Irish aristos) historically played in its enlisted ranks?

In other
Anglo-foreign military news, a Canadian reservist who presided over a lethal
screw-up with Claymore mines in Afghanistan was demoted from major to
lieutenant.
I don't remember that sort of two-grade demotion occurring in the U.S. military
-- do you?

Tom’s Northern Virginia winter campaign

I'll be
doing a book signing at the Barnes & Noble at Seven Corners in Falls Church, northern Virginia,
tomorrow (Saturday, Feb. 23) at 2 pm. Wear your Best Defense t-shirt for a 10 percent discount.

The
bonus is that there are about 10 great Chinese, Persian, and Laotian
restaurants within walking distance from there, including my favorite joint for
Peking duck. Check it out. Indeed, in just one shopping center across the highway at 6755 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA., there are 12
Vietnamese restaurants, cafes, and bakeries.

It's a
real NoVa weekend for me -- the next afternoon, at 3 pm this Sunday, I'll be
riding toward the sound of the guns at the George Marshall house in Leesburg, Va.

Finally,
I am told that The Generals is now
available on Kindle in the U.K. This came in response to reader demand, I am
told, so thank you.

A terrific look at the Afghan army: Embedding with Col. Daowood’s unit

My friend Bob Killebrew told me weeks ago to read the
cover story about the Afghan army that ran Jan. 20 in the New York Times magazine. It is by one
Luke Mogelson. I have no idea who he is, but he is impressive.

I finally got a chance to read the thing yesterday. It is
really good, one of the best articles I have read about the Afghan war in a
long time. Mogelson's bottom line :

The more time I spent with him, the clearer it became that
Daowood [an Afghan army battalion commander] was practicing his own version of
counterinsurgency, one that involved endearing himself to locals by
characterizing as common enemies not only the Taliban but also the Americans
and the Afghan government.

Mogelson also has some illuminating observations about the
Afghan army soldiers. Sure, he says, they don't dress or march like crack
troops. "But," he continues,

...they will also accept a much higher level of risk than
any coalition force ever has. Their ranks are filled with tough and brave men
who run toward the fight without body armor or helmets or armored vehicles and
sleep on the frozen ground without sleeping bags and dig up IED's with a pickax
and often go hungry and seldom complain.

Even if you are bored with the Afghan war -- read this
one.

A few more questions about COIN (IX): Future force structure isn’t an either/or

By Major Tom Mcilwaine,
Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Set Nine --

a. Will we really have to do this again?

It
is difficult to say. While the future might be light infantry, so long as Iran,
North Korea, Egypt, and Pakistan maintain large armored forces I think that it
is as well that we keep them too, lest we find ourselves on the wrong end of
the asymmetric warfare stick. While there does not appear to be any appetite
for lengthy large scale entanglements in the third world, events have a habit
of changing things dramatically. It is as well to be prepared for them.

b. So do we need a balanced force well-practiced in
transitioning from one to the other?

Probably.
The consequence of getting a high-intensity fight wrong is likely to be
catastrophic, whereas we got COIN wrong for the best part of 12 years without
much in the way of strategic consequence. (The consequences for those who
fought were of course rather more severe.) The first step is getting out of
this binary mindset that it must be one or the other. The philosophy is that we
spend 90 percent of our money on house insurance (in the form of one distinct capability)
but next to nothing on car insurance (other capabilities).

Rebecca’s War Dog Film Review of the Week: 'Glory Hounds'

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Tacked up against a chain-link wall inside FOB Barioli in
Helmand Province Afghanistan, is a large plywood sign. Its white paint is buckled
and peeling, but you can't miss the message: "We Find What You Fear." Above
that large lettering is a monstrous black paw, spray-painted across its middle
in scarlet red: "K-9."

FOB Barioli is just one of the many intense backdrops of Glory Hounds, a new feature documentary that follows four U.S. Military
Working Dog teams during their combat tours in Afghanistan. Glory Hounds, which premieres tonight at
8pm EST on Animal Planet, offers an in-depth and poignant look at a dog's role
in modern war.

The film revolves around the mostly discreet and separate
narratives of each handler and his dog -- Lance Corporal Kent Ferrell and Zora,
Corporal Drew Nyman and Emily, Staff Sergeant Len Anderson and Azza, and Lance
Corporal Durward Shaw and Falko. After introducing each dog team, the film bounces
back and forth between their in-country experiences. The majority of these
narratives unravel through the action of the moment -- out on patrols, during
traffic searches, and while they kick back on base. (Full disclosure, I've
written about some of the handlers and dogs featured in this film in my
forthcoming book.)

Very little time is wasted in Glory Hounds setting up the premise of military dogs, their history
in combat, or their introductory training. Instead John Dorsey and Andrew
Stephan, the documentary's creators and directors, wisely focused their film,
and subsequently their cameras, on the relationship between the handler and his
dog and the dangerous job they do together.

Dorsey and Stephan kept the filmmaking formula pretty
simple. As Dorsey explained during an interview earlier this week, "We [and our
crew] just tried our best to have our cameras pointed in the right direction
when these guys do the heroic stuff they do every day. We tried our best to do
justice to the guys that were cool enough to let us ride shotgun."

Glory Hounds's crew
worked out of Afghanistan for roughly 10 weeks time during the summer of 2012,
embedding with these four dog teams and their units, following them from Camp
Leatherneck to Kandahar Air Field to smaller outposts like Barioli. This
transpired during the height of the fighting season, when these areas are at
their most dangerous and the summer heat is at its hottest.

Through a mix of footage taken from helmet-mounted cameras worn
by the handlers and from their embedded crew members (one soundman and one
cameraman went out with every patrol), Glory
Hounds reveals many rarely, if ever, captured moments of dog teams hunting
IEDs outside the wire. The result is a riveting mix of high-pressure scenes -- from
heavy firefights to finding a locked box possibly full of explosives, possibly
triggered to blow. And Glory Hounds doesn't
shy away from the gruesome realities of war -- the IED explosions or the
resulting injuries -- leaving them on (almost) full display. And in that way,
the two-hour film leans more Restrepo-esque
than viewers might expect from an Animal Planet feature. Kudos to Dorsey and
Stephan, Animal Planet, and the military for not scrubbing out the grit. The
film is still plenty heartwarming; its more intense war scenes are rounded out
by the quieter, softer moments captured in the film, but steers clear from
being too cloying. The audience watches these young men call home to speak to
their families or putting together a makeshift cake from MRE packs for a fellow
handler's 21st birthday.

[[BREAK]]

While Glory Hounds offers
an engaging emotional balance, at times its storytelling is uneven. Marine
handler Kent Ferrell's introduction includes the story of his childhood dog,
flashing through old photos, giving the audience a sense of the kid behind the
handler. But of the four, he's the only one. In another instance, when one handler's
dog is badly shaken after a particularly rough patrol, the issue of canine PTSD
gets a nod but not much else. And that team's story ends on a slightly
unfinished or muffled-feeling note.

One might even argue that it is to Dorsey and Stephan's
credit that they did not force all four narratives to fit one particular mold, allowing
the on-the-ground experience to dictate the larger story. As the filmmakers will
tell you, once their crew was in Afghanistan they soon realized, as Stephan
explained, "no matter how much planning, no matter how much prep, it's not
going to roll out the way you thought it would." They were at the mercy of the
unpredictable nature of a combat zone. "The ground was always shifting beneath
our feet," Dorsey said. "Just like it is for dog handlers out there on a daily
basis."

But any quibbles are minor and they do little to disrupt all
that Glory Hounds does so well. Much
of the real brilliance of Glory Hounds comes
in the film's unexpected moments -- both for its viewer, its creators, and
especially its crew. For me, it was the secondary, supporting story lines like
that of their cameraman, Craig Constant, which I found especially moving.

As a former Marine, Constant, who saw combat during the
first Gulf War, was perhaps uniquely prepared for what happened to handler Len
Anderson during a patrol into a Taliban stronghold. When an IED blast literally
blew apart Anderson from his dog, Azza, Constant put down his camera to
administer first aid. Remarkably much of the gripping, heart-stopping scene was
still captured on film and that included Azza's reaction -- she did not run but
stayed alert and concerned, her attention always on Anderson. Even in the chaos
and terror, her devotion did not go unnoticed. In the film Constant describes it
as "probably the most amazing thing I've seen between an animal and a man."

Dorsey and Stephan are adamant that their driving motivation
was to show what these dogs do and to get their audience -- who likely has
little personal connection to the war in Afghanistan and little sense of what
these dog teams do on a day-to-day basis while working outside the wire -- as
close to the danger as possible. No pomp, no frills, just handlers and their
dogs in a combat zone. In Dorsey's words, "We just tried
to get out of the way, and let the subject matter stand up for itself."

Glory Hounds airs
tonight and is scheduled to run at least two other times on Animal Planet, so
check your listings. Beyond that, the directors say that as of now there aren't
any plans for screenings elsewhere. Let's hope that changes. But in the
meantime, skip tonight's episode of The
Office and set your DVRs; Glory
Hounds is not to be missed.

Rebecca Frankel's book about
military working dogs will be published by Atria Books in August 2013.

Shambaugh: China won’t be a global power until it figures out what it wants

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By
Alexander Sullivan

Best
Defense department of psynology

Contrary to some of
the more sensationalist appraisals of China's rise in world rankings, David
Shambaugh argues in his new book, China
Goes Global: The Partial Power, that despite China's undeniable
achievements, it has succeeded in becoming a global actor but not a global power.
Hence the word "partial."

Shambaugh, a George
Washington University political scientist, introduced his book last week in a February
13 talk at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He focused less on China's "vertical" rise -- its
skyrocketing GDP and increasing military sophistication -- than on the extent
of its "horizontal" expansion of its influence to the rest of the planet. He
analyzed China's current global presence along five vectors: diplomacy, global
governance, economics, culture, and security.

China has expanded
its reach in most of these areas: It is the world's second largest economy and possibly the largest trading nation; it has relations with over 170 countries;
it sits at the main table in most global multilateral fora; its official media
outlets are opening new bureaus abroad; and it just launched its first aircraft carrier to lead its navy
ever farther out in the Western Pacific. But according to Shambaugh, all the
government's efforts along these lines have yielded precious little in the way
of real power, as understood by people like Joe Nye -- that is, influence
exerted to make actor A do thing X.

On the face of it,
Shambaugh's conclusions are not unwarranted. China remains a "lonely power"
with few genuine friends in the world. Increasing assertiveness in the East and
South China Seas has helped roll back diplomatic gains made in its neighborhood
since the Asian financial crisis, and even in African and Latin American
countries where Chinese investment dollars (untrammeled by governance
guarantees) had gained fast new friends, the picture is becoming less rosy.

One of Shambaugh's
most interesting arguments is that while China's economic statistics are worthy
of admiration, its "multinational" corporations have abysmal international brand
recognition and an overall poor track record of breaking into overseas markets,
calling into question whether China's corporate sector is really as much of a
global business player as it is assumed to be.

He acknowledged that
China has tremendous latent potential as a true global power and that its
capacities will likely increase. What provoked by far the most interest during
the Q&A session was one of his explanations for why China has so far failed
to convert its potential into power, namely that Chinese elites are divided
over China's identity in the world and the values it should represent. The lack
of coherence among decision-makers in China, he said, has been one of the
biggest impediments to their effective exercise of power. Absent consensus, the
one thread that runs through it all (yi
yi guan zhi) is poorly disguised, narrowly defined self-interest, which
inevitably provokes counterbalancing by other international actors.