Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 130

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: DOD's longest-serving canine, Tanja, retires

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Tanja, a Belgian Malanois, was up until her retirement from
service this
week, the longest serving military working dog in the Department of
Defense. With a 12-year career behind her, she's deployed five times. They were
impressive tours of duty that included uncovering IEDs and even stopping
vehicles from making off with  "extremely
valuable" stolen classified documents.

Tanja, a patrol and detection dog with
the 366th Security Forces Squadron was stationed at Mountain Home Air Force
Base in Idaho. Her most recent handler, Tech.
Sgt. Roseann Kelly, says that despite Tanja's age, the dog was
still "kicking butt." During base patrol Tanja noticed a suspicious individual
and alerted others to him. When they got close, Kelly says, "he decided to leave instead of deal
with her."

Still, the tough
exterior didn't mean she was above a little extra comfort. Tanja wasn't
handling the cold weather like she used to so Kelly, who is adopting her
partner, made sure the dog wore sweaters to keep warm even though the other
handlers teased them. "I didn't care," Kelly insists, "because she liked
it."

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

What the last 10 years tell us about what kind of military we'll need in the future

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By Max Boot

Best Defense guest columnist

In my new book, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of
Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present,
I argue that low-intensity warfare always has been and always will be the
dominant form of combat. Assuming my analysis is correct -- and I believe it is
confirmed by thousands of years of experience -- what does this mean for the
future of the U.S. armed forces? What kind of military do we need to fight
terrorists and guerrillas?

It is hard to top the description offered by
Colonel Pierre-Noel Raspèguy,
one of the central characters in Jean Larteguy's classic novel The Centurions (1962) about the French
paratroopers who fought in Indochina and Algeria. Raspèguy, modeled on the
real-life legend Marcel "Bruno" Bigeard, says:

I'd like
France to have two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little
soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear
little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their general's
bowel movements for their colonel's piles: an army that would be shown for a
modest fee on every fairground in the country.

The other would be the real one, composed
entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put
on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts
of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I would like to fight.

As it happens, the United States today already
has the second kind of army -- and a Marine Corps too: Both have been shaped by
a decade of war into counterinsurgency (COIN) forces with few peers in history.
They may not look good on parade, and they may not be as proficient at fighting
with tanks and artillery as the peacetime forces of prior decades, but at the
messy, trying business of fighting terrorists and guerrillas they have few if
any equals.

Achieving this level of proficiency has not
been easy. It has required overcoming the built-in bias in favor of
conventional conflict among all conventional military forces. Indeed the COIN
revolution in the U.S. military would never have come about were it not for the
fact that the more conventional method of fighting nearly led the United States
to disaster in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. The danger now is that the armed
forces will revert to their default setting -- preparing to fight some version
of the (nonexistent) Red Army -- and turn their back on the hard-won lessons of
the past decade.

The danger is especially great because the
heavy deployment tempo of the last decade is winding down and both the Army and
Marine Corps are downsizing -- the former is set to lose at least 80,000
troops, the latter at least 20,000. Actually, the personnel cuts may be even
deeper if $500 billion in sequestration cuts are implemented or if they are
turned off by a budget deal that inflicts smaller but still substantial
cutbacks on the armed forces. A smaller force that will experience less combat
may see the exit of some of its most experienced COIN veterans -- the hardcore
warriors who have no desire to serve in a spit-and-polish parade-ground army.

A smaller force will also be less capable of
COIN operations in the future because such campaigns are manpower intensive.
The Iraq War showed that, while you don't need that many troops anymore to take
down a conventional force like Saddam Hussein's army, you need a lot more
personnel to pacify a country of 25 million people. We did not have enough
troops, in no small part because of the "peace dividend" cuts of the 1990s
which eliminated one-third of the Army's active-duty ranks. There was a modest
plus-up in active-duty strength over the past decade, but if the Army and
Marine Corps are now cut again they will lack the riflemen they need to conduct
COIN operations in the future.

Of course COIN requires not only large numbers
of general-purpose troops but also as many as possible who know the culture and
language of the land where they are deployed. This has long been a weakness of
the U.S. military, which has never stressed foreign-language training or
foreign-area knowledge save for a handful of foreign affairs officers who are
typically consigned to career purgatory. This is supposed to be a specialty of
the Army Special Forces, but over the past decade their A-teams from all over
the world have been sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan and focused on
direct-action missions, sacrificing whatever local language proficiency they
might have previously cultivated.

It will be hard to enhance the foreign-area
expertise of the armed forces without taking some steps that are anathema to
the bureaucracy. Some ideas:

Recruiting more non-citizens into the
armed forces -- the premise of a small program, Military
Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI), which
was wildly successful when implemented in 2009 (one of its recruits, a Nepalese
immigrant, was named the Army's Soldier of the Year) but that was suspended in
2010 after the shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hassan, an native-born citizen, at
Fort Hood. The program has now been relaunched but it remains to be seen how
many slots it will have and how long it will last.



Creating an entire advisory organization
within the Army focused on security assistance -- an idea first suggested by
COIN expert John Nagl that has never come close to being implemented. Instead
advisors are currently taken out of conventional Brigade Combat Teams, which
means that top performers are seldom selected for this assignment.



Dedicating officers to spent years
focused on one region, whether they are down-range or at home station. This was
the premise of the AfPak Hands Program, an initiative launched in 2009 by Gen.
Stanley McChrystal and Adm. Mike Mullen, designed to dedicate a group of
officers to years of focus on Afghanistan-Pakistan. But the individual services
refused to support it by assigning top-performing officers and it has not lived
up to its promise. The program should not only be revived but expanded to other
parts of the world -- and it should be attractive enough to recruit
high-fliers.



Making a year of study abroad mandatory
for students in the military academies, command and staff colleges, and war
colleges.

Whenever such proposals are put forward, the
bureaucracy raises myriad reasons why they are supposedly impractical. What's
really impractical, however, is forcing the armed forces to fight on human
terrain they don't understand.

None of these is meant to suggest that we
should get rid of all heavy conventional forces. The Army and Marine Corps
should keep their tanks, albeit in smaller numbers than today -- not because
there is great likelihood that anyone will once again fight an armored war
against us, as Saddam Hussein tried to do twice, but because tanks can come in
handy in COIN. (See the two battles for Fallujah or the Israeli Operation
Defensive Shield during the Second Intifada.) The Air Force and Navy shouldn't
focus much on COIN at all -- they need more ships and aircraft to counter the
rise of China and deal with other conventional threats. But low-intensity
conflict will remain the most common form of warfare in the future, and the Army
and Marine Corps will need to dedicate the bulk of their resources to preparing
for this kind of war in the future.

And that will require not only identifying and
shooting insurgents but also dispelling the conditions that give rise to
insurgency. Perhaps the most important step we can take to increase our COIN
capacity in the future would be to create a civil-military nation-building
office, possibly by transforming USAID into an agency focused not on promoting
"development" for its own sake but on building up state structures in strategically
important countries that are endangered by actual or potential insurgencies. In
other words, places like Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali, and post-Assad Syria.

I know that "nation-building" is anathema to political
expediency in Washington. But there is really no other choice. If we can't do a
better job of assisting other countries to govern themselves, especially in the
arc of instability stretching from West Africa to Central Asia, we will find
our military forces sucked into more difficult and costly conflicts in the future.

Max
Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Invisible
Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (Liveright).

10 things I don't get about PME

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By Harun Dogo

Best Defense guest columnist

1. Why do we send field grade officers to two or three
separate, year-long schools over the course of a decade? In fact, why do we
send so many of them for a year of schooling a few years before they
retire?

2. If the Army can teach the staff college core at their
satellite campuses in 15
weeks, what do we get from the in-resident students for the other eight
months of residence that makes the added cost worth it?

3. The objective of both SAMS/SAASS and the War College is
to teach strategy. In fact there is much overlap in their reading material. If
we really need a number of "Jedi" strategist
majors running around, why not just send them to War College early?

4. The Air Force in particular has long had a bit of schizophrenia
about whether its officers are required to have a master's degree completed
before they meet their major's board. As a result, many of those officers pick
up an online master's degree somewhere along the way -- oftentimes those
degrees are in a subject area very similar to PME -- see some of AMU's
offerings or even the AU's own
online programs. With the staff and war colleges both
conferring the master's degree too -- is it really necessary for officers to
pursue up to three master's degrees in the same subject area over the course of
a decade?

5. With the sole exception of the Eisenhower School at the National Defense
University (the former Industrial College of the Armed Forces -- ICAF), PME
core curricula do not seem to include serious instruction in resource
management, economics or statistics. Can strategy that does not consider
resource implications still be called a "strategy"? Particularly since DOD
might be a tad more resource constrained
in the future than it has been in the past...

6. Why does everyone have to study the same thing? Social
psychology literature tells us that a greater diversity of experiences and
backgrounds makes us better at innovating and avoiding groupthink, despite a
greater proclivity for clashing opinions. Why not allow officers to pursue a
diversity of graduate opportunities instead -- MBAs, MPPs, master's degrees in
social science, engineering or (gasp!) basic science? DOD's corporate
universities (NPS and AFIT) could pick up some of it, while still
enabling students to complete the core staff/war college courses. For those
going out to a civilian university, they can take their indoctrination at a
distance or spend the summer re-militarizing their thinking...

7. If the goal of war college is to ensure we have senior
military leaders who are familiar with strategic thought, rather than trying to
identify those with flag potential among PME students when they are majors,
why not wait until they are selected for flag rank and then have them attend
whatever strategy education we deem to be necessary? Between the four services
there are approximately 100 new flag officers per year, and all of those
officers already have to attend the CAPSTONE
course. Making war college only a general's course or making it six months like
the NATO course in Rome might be a more
efficient way of making senior officers more strategic...

8. Why not let promising officers attend PME earlier? George
Marshall attended staff college six years into his military career. He seemed
to do OK in the long run...

9. We already send a fraction of eligible officers to detail
with other government
departments, non-profit
organizations, or businesses
in lieu of attending PME. If those experiences are just as valuable as
in-residence education, then why not make them more pervasive at the
intermediate level? It might help with that pesky
retention problem, or serve as a bridge to that sabbatical
idea folks want to see...

10. All that said, it appears that attendance of
in-residence PME is (at least in certain services) a signaling
device for promotion and a reward for top performers. It can also be seen
as an opportunity for a frequently deployed force to rest and recuperate and
spend some uninterrupted family time. But the current PME framework has been around
since the 19th century -- the world and the military have both
changed a bit since then -- is this still the best system we can come up with?

Harun Dogo is a doctoral fellow at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and is
currently based in Washington DC. He also hangs with his homeys in the CNAS
Next Generation National Security Leaders 2012-2013 cohort.

High time to make the chief of USAID a member of the National Security Council

By Maj.
Jaron Wharton, U.S. Army

Best
Defense guest columnist

In
September 2010, President Obama's Policy Directive on Global Development offered
that development is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative for the United
States. Undeniably, it is a core pillar of our foreign policy, along with
diplomacy and defense, in an integrated, comprehensive approach to national
security. It follows that USAID's contribution to national security is vital --
but this has not been codified.

Because
we are living in times that require a fully integrated national security
approach, the USAID administrator should become the president's principal
advisor for development and assistance (akin to the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff role and associated linkage to the secretary of defense, but
concomitant to the secretary of state) and a permanent member on the National
Security Council. This elevated position will provide the president with
unfettered development advice, while codifying the position that development is
on par with defense and diplomacy. Maintaining USAID's intimate relationship
with State recognizes the inherent ties of development assistance to foreign
policy.

While
historical trends, events, and statements have created numerous challenges to
elevating the administrator's role, the agency's comparative advantage as an
expeditionary organization which alleviates human suffering, develops markets
of tomorrow, and expresses American values, provides an invaluable perspective.
State's 2010 QDDR calls for USAID to play a greater role in the interagency
policy process, including making its mission directors primary development
advisors to the chiefs of mission. An elevated role for the administrator would
be a logical follow-on to these other shifts.

Just
over 25 years ago, Goldwater-Nichols changed the Defense Department in both a
fundamental and positive way. One of the main shifts was to empower the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs in two ways: (1) By expanding his staff into a large "Joint
Staff" that reports directly to him; and (2) identifying the chairman as the president's
senior military advisor. Over the last several decades, the newly powerful
position of chairman has helped elevate the role of professional military
advice to the president, while not compromising the secretary of defense's
civilian authority. The history of this aspect of the Goldwater-Nichols
legislation can apply to USAID in several ways: (1) It can help formally elevate
the role of development; (2) it can help preserve the secretary of state's
authority in foreign assistance; and (3) it improves the nature of development
assistance advice to the president. An elevated status would assuredly achieve
a more efficient use of development assistance resources and enhance their
effectiveness.

USAID
is undertaking a potent reform agenda, analogous to an internal
"Goldwater-Nichols-light" to forge a more modern development enterprise. This
change is as conscious and as basic a transformation in its 50-year history,
and it is desirable for the USG to build on this framework through a persistent
invitation for increased interagency engagement at the highest levels.

During
this administration, USAID's participation in senior-level NSS meetings has
dramatically increased. While data are not readily available to compare across
administrations, there has been a definite uptick in participation from
previous years. This demonstrates a need on behalf of senior NSS leadership to
hear from USAID, but also suggests USAID's contributions warrant continued
participation. Having resident development expertise on the NSS only helps to
better lead through civilian power, especially in issues that contribute to an
imbalance in defense representation.

USAID
should take internal steps to reinforce its relevance and further
professionalize its engagement in the national security apparatus. However, as
in Goldwater-Nichols, where the ramifications for the professionalization of
the Joint Staff were extreme, USAID is already fully-capable of the increased
level of responsibility. There is no longer a dichotomy within USAID between
those focused on altruistic development and assistance and those who understand
the necessity, practicality, and Hill-emphasized need for more targeted work to
support national security objectives.

Indeed,
the development portfolio is now facing critical challenges and is at
significantly increased risk given growing fiscal constraints. Despite being
elevated by the Global Development Policy to be on par with defense and
diplomacy, elements of any effort by the agency to demonstrate true relevancy
in national security must include improved and sustained engagement in the NSS.
This inherently makes the case USAID's activities are considered in the
national interest. Elevation of the administrator as a permanent member on the
NSC provides an additional forcing function on the broader USG to recognize
this point. At a minimum, the USAID administrator should be elevated and
maintain his presence at the principals' committee level beyond an "informal
member as appropriate."

Major
Jaron S. Wharton is an active-duty infantry officer in the U.S. Army who
served in Afghanistan (2002 and 2010) and in Iraq (2003-06). He previously
served as a White House Fellow at USAID. The views expressed in this article
are his own and do not reflect the official policy or positions of the U.S.
Government.

The JO exodus: Senior officers don't understand that I joined to go to war

By yet another departing Marine
officer

Best Defense guest columnist

I have been following the Junior
Officer Exodus entries with great interest, because I, too, am a Marine
Corps company grade officer who will be leaving active duty this summer after
five years of active service. I share many of the frustrations of my fellow
lieutenants and captains, and even had a number of friends email me to ask if I
was the
Marine who wrote about being disappointed that the Marines are not the elite
force I was expecting. Apparently I have a history with
vitriolic rants. Though while my frustrations run deep, I am sure that I would
run into similar issues if I worked at the State Department, Goldman Sachs, or
GE.

Yet more than any of the frustrations
I have with my job, my senior officers, or what I perceive to be my future in
this organization, the single driving factor for me leaving active duty is that
I never wanted the military as a career. I joined the Marines a few years after
graduating from college. Throughout my undergraduate years, I kept pretending
that Iraq was a passing event that would be over shortly. I graduated from
college to take a corporate job, and after 18 months I couldn't shake the itch
that if my country was at war, I should be a part of it. I attended OCS, and
the rest is history.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in
the Marine Corps. I believe I had the best job a 24-to-29 year old can have. I joined
because I wanted to go to war and lead Marines in the pursuit of an enemy. Now
that we are in the full midst of the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, there
is only a slim chance that I will deploy again. I got what I wanted from the
military (experience, adventure, the chance to shoot things, maturity,
discipline, leadership, new approaches to problem-solving), and the military
certainly got their money's worth out of me. It is simply time to move on to a
new phase of my life.

The problem I am facing now is that
most of my senior officers simply don't understand why I would ever want to
leave active duty. With few exceptions, all field grade officers joined the
military prior to 9/11. I am not questioning their motivation or patriotism,
but those of us who joined after 9/11 did so basically to go to war. I see many
older Marines (both officer and enlisted) enjoying the relatively low stress of
garrison military life. Fine, but that's not for me. In my late 20s, I am eager
to try other things (teaching, graduate school, business), and am willing to
take the risk that I will take a pay cut. The majors and lieutenant colonels
that I count as mentors have cautioned me against leaving a steady paycheck and
a possibility for a pension. I worry that this risk-averse nature it also
emblematic of the cover-your-ass trends in the military, but that is
an entirely separate discussion.

My caution to others in similar
positions is that you should be prepared to be looked at with suspicion and
disdain from senior officers as you prepare to leave active duty.

Gen. Marshall's confidence during WWII

I
just learned the other day that George Marshall began planning for the postwar
demobilization of the Army on April 14, 1943, before the landings on Sicily,
and indeed before a single American soldier was fighting in Europe. That's
confidence.

But
no, George Marshall was not perfect. On July 16, 1946, the Pentagon "suspended
Army enlistment of Negroes (except certain specialists) because Negro recruits
enrolled at a rate of 1 to every 5 white recruits, exceeding Army's 1 to 10
ratio." I read in another book that that ratio was set at the end of the Civil
War, so hard to blame on Marshall. But still.

Finally,
I didn't know that an estimated 20,000 American servicemen publicly
demonstrated in Manila in 1946 to be allowed to return to the United States
sooner than planned.

(All
three facts from the Army's official 1952 History
of Personnel Demobilization in the United States Army)

Shocker of the day: No theaters want to show 'Zero Dark Thirty' in Pakistan

No Pakistani distributor has bought the rights. I imagine that
the Taliban and al Qaeda might violently object.

Is there a natural rate of relief of about 9 percent for commanders in combat?

That's the question
that occurred to me as I read Douglas Allen's fine essay on how the Royal
Navy managed its skippers -- and provided incentives for aggressive approaches
-- during the age of fighting sail. I was struck by his passing observation
that in the mid-18th century, 8.5 percent of its captains were
dismissed or court-martialed.

That's not far from
the rate of relief of 16 out of 155 U.S. Army generals who commanded divisions
in combat in World War II -- the point of departure in my latest book. So I wondered: In organizations determined to enforce standards and
insist on aggressive competence, is there a natural rate of relief of roughly 9
or 10 percent? Business is not the same as military operations, but I also
remember that three decades ago, when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Florida, one of the better
banks in the state, Barnett, had an annual branch manager relief rate of 10
percent. A couple of people also have reminded me that GE, under Jack Lynch,
had a policy of easing out the bottom 10 percent of its managers every year.

But the piece on the
Royal Navy is much more far-ranging. It essentially is a study of how the Navy
leadership of the 18th century addressed the important question of how
to run a large organization with global reach but iffy communications. (The
person who sent it to me was thinking about how one might organize command and
control of a future U.S. space fleet.) It was also a successful organization,
in which, despite being "constantly outnumbered in terms of ships or guns,...still
managed to win most of the time." Professor Allen outlines what he calls "the
critical rules of the captains and admirals" that ensured that commanders would
operate more or less in the interest of the nation rather than in their own.
"The entire governance structure encouraged British captains to fight rather
than run" -- and so also to have crews trained to fight.

Prize money was
especially important. Some senior officers grew rich off the capture of enemy
ships. "At a time when an admiral of the fleet might earn 3,000 pounds a year,
some admirals amassed 300,000 pounds of prize money." The awards also trickled
down: In 1799, when three frigates captured two Spanish ships, each seaman in
the three crews received 182 pounds -- the equivalent of 13 years of annual
pay.

Women in combat in the military: Dudes, where’s the old can-do spirit?

By Brandon Friedman

Best Defense guest columnist

Regarding this discussion
about women in combat, I have to say I'm amused by the sudden absence, in some
quarters, of the "can-do" spirit that has typically defined America's
armed forces.

This directive
was signed by the secretary of defense and backed by the commander-in-chief -- after
being endorsed unanimously by the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and
Marine Corps.

And instead
of, "Roger that, sir, we'll make it happen," we see foot-dragging and
explanations for why this won't work and how it's unfair and impractical. Maybe
this also happened when women were allowed into West Point and Airborne School.
I don't know.

Such arguments
would be understandable during the debate, but this is a done deal. The
decision has been made. So I'm just surprised there's not more discussion about
how to make this work -- as opposed to the hand-wringing about how awful it is.

I would argue that such an attitude is more dangerous to our military
than women serving in combat roles.

Brandon Friedman served in Iraq
and Afghanistan as an officer with the 101st Airborne Division and
is the author of The War I Always Wanted .
He is now a vice president at Fleishman-Hillard International
Communications in Washington, D.C.

A reader asks: What’s the best book on WWII from the Russian perspective?

A
reader writes with this request for you well-informed BD readers. It reminds me
that I read the other day that Russia took more casualties at Stalingrad than
the United States suffered during the entire war:

While I've
read many books about World War II, they've all been from the Western
perspective (and predominantly about the United States' role in the war). I've
been reading Dominic Tierney's mediocre but salvageable How We Fight, and he made a particularly interesting note about Russia's
more significant role in WWII compared to the US -- more loss of
life, greater stakes, and ultimate victory. 

I've
never read an account of WWII from the Russian perspective, and I'm not quite
sure where to start in my search for one or two good volumes. I was hoping you
might either have a suggestion, or be interested in posting to your blog to see
what answers may come.