Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 128

Hey, cranky JOs! You don't know what you got 'til you get fired from the Marines

By
"A Former Infantry Officer"

Best
Defense guest respondent

Recent reading of this blog would give the impression that every company grade officer is ready to leave the Corps.

Let me tell you: A year ago I felt many of the same
frustrations as my peers, and was unsure of what my future would be. Then the
Marine Corps made the choice for me. I was not career designated. It was one of
the toughest hurdles I have faced in my life. I got my "pink slip" on my second
tour to Afghanistan, right after coming back from an operation. Aside from the
feeling of failure that I had not measured up, it meant that my plans for a future
in the Corps would not happen as I envisioned. What I have learned in my year
as a civilian has made my experiences in the Corps have more meaning and
reaffirmed why I will stay a Marine (though in the reserves) for as long as I
can.

I was depressed for months after missing my boat space, which
was ironic as prior to not getting career designated I was just as frustrated
with the Corps' stifling bureaucracy as were my peers who were deciding to get
out. Senior officers who seemed concerned with everything but actual
battlefield prowess, a lack of real accountability, and unfair application of
rules all bothered me to no end. The issues that are being expressed by many
company grade officers are real and should be closely watched by senior
leaders, but many company grade officers should also think long and hard about
what they are walking away from. My peers should remember Teddy Roosevelt's "Man
in the Arena," as I do not think many of them would want to be identified as
the critic in that speech rather than the man "marred by dust and sweat and
blood."

In spite of those frustrations with the
bureaucracy, I still feel in my bones the need to be a Marine. For every bad
lesson I learned from seeing toxic leaders, I can think of ten very good lessons
I learned from very good leaders. The Corps taught me what it

meant to be responsible, and stripped away the
years of excuses that I developed growing up in suburban America. I learned
more about who I was, warts and all, by being a Marine than I think I would
have in any other line of work. Being forced off of active duty itself was beneficial
-- you do not know how much you value something until it is taken from you.

For me, service means much more than getting to
do "what I wanted." Doing interesting, exciting work in the service of our
nation is important to me, but I now know that intangibles like sacrifice, brotherhood,
and commitment are what spin my gears more than paychecks and cool missions.
The Marine Corps made me a better man. If I had been designated, I would have
stayed in: because of my Marines, because of the amazing things I got to do,
and because carrying the title of Marine Officer was a privilege and a gift.

But life took a different path. I have found new challenges
in the civilian world. I have new goals, but one that will remain is being a
leader of Marines as a reservist. For those reasons I am now in the reserves,
and plan on staying in until the Corps tells me my service is no longer
required again (hopefully many years down the road).

The many ways in which the French gov't is dead wrong to pay ransom for hostages

Vicki
Huddleston, a former U.S. ambassador to Mali, says that the French government paid
$17 million to ransom French nationals in recent years. She further alleges
that these payments funded al Qaeda-linked operations in Africa.

The
French are wrong to do this. Not just mildly wrong, but massively wrong. Not
only are they funding terrorism, they are increasing the chances that their
people will be nabbed.

I say
this as someone who feared getting kidnapped in Baghdad. This was at a time
when Iraqi criminals supposedly were nabbing people and then selling them to al
Qaeda. I was once in a group of reporters summoned to the Green Zone for a
briefing from an American security official. He informed us that Baghdad was
the most dangerous city in the world, that we were the most lucrative targets
in the city, and that he thought we were nuts. Thanks fella!

Bottom
line: I felt that my best defense was the U.S. government policy of not paying
kidnappers. I still do.

Some questions about COIN (IV): Do people prefer freedom or electricity?

[image error]

By Major Tom Mcilwaine, Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Set Four -- What makes us think that
schools and hospitals are going to help us alter the behavior patterns of
others and win people over to our way of thinking? In the magnificent remake of
the classic film Red Dawn, there is
an excellent scene in which the North Korean occupiers offer medical facilities
and electrical power in return for cooperation with their regime. The bargain
is not successful. Americans, it seems, prefer freedom to electricity. At the
risk of drawing theory from the scriptwriters of Red Dawn, this seems to me to be a reasonable reaction -- it is
certainly in line with the reactions I experienced to development projects in
Iraq. People want electricity, yes, and they will accept development projects
if they are offered -- just as the Indian people accepted and (perhaps) benefitted
from railways, the telegraph, and the legal system imposed by the British
during the Raj. They still wanted the British to leave, though. Why would this
have changed? This does not mean that ignoring the material needs of the
population is helpful nor that it cannot work if you select an endstate they do
want (e.g. their independence) and couple it with development. It does follow
that development is not enough and cannot be detached from politics: we must
remember that politics is the art of the possible.

Will Hagel withdraw? I’d say 50-50

But declining by the
day. No, that hearing last week didn't reflect well on
the U.S. Senate. But he didn't do well in it, either. He didn't appear that
interested in the job.

He has the votes, but
not much else. His big problem is that no one much wants him running the
Pentagon. Congressional Republicans consider him a traitor. Congressional
Democrats see him as anti-gay and anti-abortion, undercutting their support for
him. And Northeastern Democrats (and some others) worry about his stance on
Israel. Democratic support in the Senate appears more dutiful than passionate.

That said, I don't
think that a Hagel exit would hurt President Obama much. SecDef nominees have
blown up on the launch pad before: Remember John Tower (picked by the first
President Bush) and Bobby Inman (picked by President Clinton to replace Les
Aspin)? Interestingly, both were succeeded as nominees by men who went on to be
very successful stewards of the military establishment: Dick Cheney and William
Perry. Calling Michèle Flournoy?

The prospect of a
Hagel regime at DOD is a real problem now because the next SecDef will need to
do two things: Work with Congress to reduce the defense budget thoughtfully,
and work with the military to re-shape the military to make it relevant to
future conflict. At the moment, Hagel appears to lack the political capital to
do the former, as well as the intellectual appetite to do the latter.

Bottom line: Every
business day that the Senate Armed Services
Committee doesn't vote to send the nomination to the
full Senate, I think the likelihood of Hagel becoming defense secretary
declines by about 2 percent.

Some questions about COIN (III): Just what do we think we are doing out there?

By Major Tom Mcilwaine,
Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Set Three -- If we aren't
fighting a series of counterinsurgency campaigns, then what are we doing? There are (at least) two
possible answers to this question, both of which raise further questions.

The
first is that we are fighting a series of punitive campaigns, designed to show
to the world the effect of our wrath and the results of crossing us. In which
case, why are we concerned with cultural sensitivities and the like -- given
that it is presumably their culture (or some part of it) that has led them to
displease us in the first place? This may be simplistic (it is) but it is still
a question that requires an answer.

The
second possible answer is that we are fighting old-fashioned wars of imperial
aggression, designed to alter the behavior of other countries so that they
better fit into the global system at the head of which sits us; in short, we
are compelling our opponent to do our will. This raises a further intriguing
question -- if this is the case, why do we look to historical case studies of
decolonization for guidance, rather than case studies of colonization? Is it
simply so we can feel better about ourselves? There is a third option: We are
compelled to invade a country to change its government because it is sheltering
terrorist networks that are attacking us. What then?

Or
another option, we are compelled to invade a country because of its foreign or
nuclear policy that is hostile to our interests but have no interest in
reshaping the society and culture in our image at all. What then?

Comment of the day: A father discusses the marker for his son in the backyard

From "Gold Star Father":

The government marker (VA supplied) is (illegally) in my
backyard bolted to a flat stone that I found and it lies under a Weeping Willow
that friends of my wife gave to her. I make it a point to look at it nearly
daily, christen it with splatterings of whatever cocktail I may have in hand,
and have a conversation with my son. The marker is mine, its for me. My son's
ashes were returned to the sea. The marker is my place to go. It's illegal that
I have it, but I know/knew ways to make it happen to be in my possession. I
defy the VA cemetery police to come and get it. There will be blood if they
show up in my driveway.

Do we dishonor the dead with 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' on their tombstones?

By Charles Krohn

Best Defense department of second
thoughts

Is it an honor or a cruel joke to read "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" on the headstone of a fallen soldier?

Given the irony of OIF in a historic
context, the question is
not irreverent, but it is relevant. This wouldn't be true, of course, if our
invasion had yielded results intended and predicted, however imperfectly.

As an old soldier who has carried
one too many body bags out of the battlefield, I feel a great kinship with the
next of kin of the fallen. Few memories hold greater pain.

I wouldn't even ask this
question if I didn't wonder if some in the Gold Star community weren't also
asking it, even to themselves. And if any read this, please accept my reverence
for you and the deceased. I know your loved one answered
the call of the nation, understanding great risk was necessary to protect
our country and help spread freedom among the oppressed. What could
be more noble?

Is it not just as honorable now to
recognize the prospect of freedom in Iraq as originally postulated is remote?
As others have written, there is still great confusion about who will lead
Iraq. The only thing most agree upon is that Iran, once held in check by Iraq,
is now spreading its virulent reach deeper into the region, with a nuclear
threat just around the corner.

Simply stated, the inspiration for
Operation Iraqi Freedom was a dream. Does it honor or dishonor those who fell
to perpetuate this myth on their headstones?

Should the matter be swept under the rug as an incidental
slip of history or should next-of-kin have the option of a new headstone,
marking sacrifice without promoting an idea whose time has passed?

Charles A. Krohn   is the author of  The Lost Battalion of Tet . Now chilling in Panama City Beach, Florida,  he   served in Iraq in 2003-2004 as public affairs adviser to the
director of the Infrastructure Reconstruction Program, and later as public
affairs officer for the American Battle Monuments Commission.

10 questions about COIN (II): Some issues to address before trying to do it

By Major Tom Mcilwaine,
Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Group Two -- Can you fight an
expeditionary counterinsurgency campaign? Isn't it really something you only do
on home turf? Like the Turks, or the Sri Lankans, or even the British? It
strikes me as a strange type of war to fight on someone else's home turf. Isn't
that more -- well -- imperial? Is it really classic pacification? And if so,
what does that mean? Does it mean that we might need to acknowledge that this
changes the context of the war? Does it mean that we might have to accept at
the start that we can only achieve very limited objectives?

(To
be continued)

Integrating women into combat units is an issue of leadership -- and nothing else

By Jörg Muth

Best Defense guest columnist

From the point of view of a professional historian the
integration of women into combat units is not surprising and it was also long
overdue. Historically women have pulled their weight in all other professions
that had been male dominated before. Each time such a barrier was broken and
women were allowed access to such a profession the objections about the
supposed descent of that profession were manifold but that decline actually
never happened. The world is a better place because women now work as doctors
and police officers, and the U.S. Army will reap the benefits of the decision
to allow women in combat roles, maybe not now, but in a few years. Women often
offer a different perspective and therefore will come up with solutions to
military problems, the development of new gear and weapons systems, the
solution to a conflict, that men have not thought about.

I am coming from the world of traditional martial arts and I
have witnessed since I was a teenager girls and women breaking bricks or two-inch
thick wooden panels with their feet or fists. For two decades now I have been
teaching self-defense, boxing or Thai-Boxing classes, either mixed gender or
all female and I am going to teach new classes soon. Well, this is not war, but
it is close combat and full contact. To those who argue that close combat in
war is different, I answer, you have never really seen a woman fight. Women
possess every inch the ferocity, the courage, and the determination that men
have and they have proven that long ago.

An athletic woman today would outperform physically many
male soldiers who fought half a century before. New training methods and a
different nutrition allow women to rise to new heights of physical performance.
Still, many will not make the cut into the most elite fighting units of this
world because the physical performance levels required are rarely achieved.
However, they deserve to be allowed to try and those few who make it deserve to
become fighting members of those units.

The all-female units of the Red Army were a painful thorn in
the side of the Wehrmacht in World War II. And, yes, the captured female
soldiers were often tortured and raped when caught, but it is the decision of
the individual woman to make if she wants to enter such a hazardous environment
and face the consequences, it is not for the males to make such a decision for
her. For many women, entering combat will be as catastrophic an experience as
it has been for many men. Combat is not healthy for anybody, not even the
winner.

Historically, all military problems with integrated units
have been leadership problems and not problems with the consistency of the
unit. All services of the U.S. Armed Forces have fielded several studies to
that effect since the introduction of Black men into the military and women
afterwards. When female cadets today still have to fear sexual assault at an
American military academy, this is a leadership problem. When a female soldier
needs to find the single capable old senior NCO in a unit to believe her that
she was touched improperly by her superior, this is a leadership problem. When
a female soldier does have to fear not the enemy but fellow soldiers, this is a
leadership problem.

A good leader will be able to make any unit an outstanding
fighting unit that consists of people of different ethnicities, genders, and
sexual orientations. A bad leader will not be able to integrate Mormons with
Mormons, or Texans with Texans.

It is now the job of the heads of the U.S. Armed Forces to
make sure these outstanding leaders are selected, educated, and promoted,
because the present system has proven to be insufficient. The current command
culture needs an adjustment and the bar has to be set higher for leaders and
that is good for soldiers of any gender. Women will not fail in a combat role,
but their senior leadership might fail them if they don't make sure that they
get the officers they deserve.

Jörg Muth, Ph.D.,  a lifelong student of military history, is
the author of Command Culture: Officer Education in the
U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for
World War II ,  which
was  placed by the Army chief of staff,
General Raymond T. Odierno, on his professional reading list. In addition, the
commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, General James F. Amos, made Command Culture required reading for all senior enlisted men and all intermediate
officer ranks of the Marine Corps.

Ten questions about the future of counterinsurgency and stabilization ops (I)

By Major Tom Mcilwaine,
Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

There
appears to be a growing sense that the era of COIN that began on 9/11 is
drawing to a close. The chief prophets of the philosophy are, for various
reasons ranging from the personal to the professional, no longer quite the
force they once were, or are not needed quite as urgently by politicians who
have accepted the drawdown from Afghanistan as the end of the era of nation-building
through COIN. Nations are growing tired of seemingly endless wars that rumble
on, without a positive conclusion. There is a belief that we, the West, cannot
afford to fight these campaigns anymore, not in an age of austerity and fiscal
cliffs, which seems to be the one thing on which economic commenters and
treasury secretaries across the political spectrum and across the West can
agree. Perhaps more interestingly there is also a growing belief that we can
opt out of fighting such wars in the future. The trend in staff colleges around
the world is to return to the proper business of
soldiering
-- major combat operations. This trend is bolstered by a belief that our skills
in this area have atrophied over the last decade or so of constant patrolling
in the deserts, towns, and mountains of obscure foreign countries of which we
never really knew much about, or cared much for.

Notwithstanding
the wishes of senior commanders, who make much of the fact that the we in
Western militaries must not simply press the reset button and dump our
experiences of the last decade, it seems probable that the need to train for "old
school" major combat operations will probably lead to this happening in
practice -- because people train to be good at what they are going to be
assessed on, which in the near future is going to be old fashioned warfighting,
however it is currently described. And at the moment we lack experience in this
area. A personal example illustrates this. I will take command of a cavalry
squadron in September; I have not been employed on tanks since 2005 and the sum
total of my armored experience amounts to a little less than two months. If you
were my regimental commander, in a post-Afghan conflict world, would you be
more worried about training me to do my core skills -- armored warfare -- or
ensuring I retained more esoteric knowledge that is no longer in vogue -- COIN?

As
this belief grows stronger (and it will -- especially after 2014) there will be
a tendency to put away the lessons of the period of 2001-2014, in a part of our
brain that we do not choose to look at very often. And then, when in years to
come we find ourselves fighting another similar campaign in another part of the
world that we also know little of and care even less for, we will find
ourselves having to go through the same painful process of learning and
adaption that we have experienced over the last decade. At the risk of naming
the elephant in the room, we run the risk of repeating the mistakes of the
post-Vietnam era.

There
is an even more frightening prospect than this, however. What if we don't
actually learn the correct lessons at all from our experiences? What if, in the
hurry to put away the experiences of the last decade, we find ourselves failing
correctly to identify what it is we have been doing, and so when the time comes
to bring forth the knowledge so painfully earned, we bring forth the wrong
solution? Put bluntly -- will we actually learn any lessons at all, let alone
the correct ones, or will we simply repeat the platitudes of today in the
future, while ignoring the hard facts? If we avoid the Vietnam syndrome, will
we fall victim to the Northern Ireland syndrome?

This
is an urgent point that needs to be addressed. Now. Not when we next find
ourselves doing COIN. To try and ensure that this is not the case I have drawn
up a list of 10 questions which I believe it might prove profitable to answer,
or at least discuss. I have no particular answers in mind for them, because I
myself was a distinctly average COIN practitioner, full of zeal but lacking
tact and understanding. With these limitations in mind I present my questions
for better minds than mine to answer.

Question One -- Have we really been fighting counterinsurgency
campaigns at all? The simple answer to this question is, "Yes. That is what the
manual is called, idiot." But before the idea that we haven't been fighting
counterinsurgency campaigns at all is dismissed out of hand, consider the
following supplemental questions. Is it possible to fight expeditionary COIN? Can
you fight a COIN campaign when you first have to remove the legitimate
government of another country? Can you fight a COIN campaign when you are seeking
to radically alter the fundamental nature of a society? Or, taken together, do
these factors make you a better fit for the role of the insurgent (albeit one
so well-equipped with iPads and bottled water that we could pass for the Occupy
Movement) than counterinsurgent? This links back to the fundamental question
asked by Clausewitz -- what sort of war are you fighting? It is critical to
acknowledge that we are not likely to deploy deliberately to fight a COIN war; we
deploy to do something else -- e.g. foreign internal defense or regime change
-- and then our stabilization operation goes wrong and we are forced to fight a
COIN war. Being able to recognize this (the nature of the war we are fighting)
is the first step in being able to adapt and win.

Major Tom
Mcilwaine is a British Army officer who is currently a student at the School of
Advanced Military Studies at Ft. Leavenworth. He has deployed to Iraq as a platoon commander and battalion operations and intelligence officer, to Bosnia
as aide to the commander of European forces and to Afghanistan as a plans officer with I MEF (Fwd). The views here are his own and do not necessarily
reflect those of the School of Advanced Military Studies, the U.S. Army, the
U.S. Department of Defense, nor perhaps even those of the Sussex
County Cricket Club .

(To
be continued)