Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 137

A CIA reading list

As
you compile your resolutions for the new year, Best Defense is offering three
different reading lists to help you. Here is a list from CIA veteran
Hayden Peake.
One reason I don't write much about intelligence is that I don't know much
about it -- as this list reminds me -- I haven't read any of them. But he does.

Current Topics

Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance: Acquisitions, Policies and
Defense Oversight, by Johanna A. Montgomery (ed.).

General

The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak into English, by Joseph C.
Goulden.

Historical

Black Ops Vietnam: The Operational History of MACVSOG, by Robert
M. Gillespie.

Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II
Greece, by Susan Heuck Allen.

Dealing With the Devil: Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation During the
Second World War, by Dónal O'Sullivan.

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben Macintyre

Enemies: A History of the FBI, by Tim Weiner.

Franco's Friends: How British Intelligence Helped Bring Franco To Power
In Spain, by Peter Day.

Gentleman Spymaster: How Lt. Col. Tommy 'Tar' Robertson Double-crossed
the Nazis, by Geoffrey Elliott.

The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, by Joshua Kurlantzick.

Joe Rochefort's War: The Odyssey
of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway, by Elliot Carlson, with a foreword by RAdm. Donald "Mac" Showers, USN
(Ret.).

Memoir

Malayan Spymaster: Memoirs of a Rubber Planter Bandit Fighter and Spy,
by Boris Hembry.

Intelligence Abroad

Historical Dictionary of Chinese Intelligence, by I.C. Smith and
Nigel West.

Israel's Silent Defender: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli
Intelligence, by Amos Gilboa and Ephraim Lapid (eds.).

Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History, by Robert Dover and Michael S. Goodman (eds.).

Main Intelligence Outfits of Pakistan, by P.C. Joshi.

The Politics of Counterterrorism in India: Strategic Intelligence and
National Security in South Asia, by Prem Mahadevan.

Stalin's Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage, by David Levy.

Stasi Decorations and Memorabilia: Volume II, by Ralph Pickard, with a foreword by Ambassador Hugh Montgomery.

Soldier poets of the Great War (III): The gates of Heaven lacking guards and wire

From T.P. Cameron
Wilson, who was killed in 1918:

. . .  The gates of Heaven were open, quite


Unguarded, and unwired.

In case those two negative reviews of my new book on generalship got you worried

In contrast to Col. Gentile's
review that I mentioned last week, and the
negative review by the British hussar that I
carried the other day, here's the word on my new book from the
just-released issue of the Army's Military
Review:

THE GENERALS IS
a controversial but nonetheless
important read for military professionals seeking
to understand the management of Army generals over the last 70 years.

.
. . Readers may be tempted to dismiss Tom Ricks' book as one written by a
prejudiced outsider, a journalist who has never served as a soldier. This would
be a mistake. The
Generals contains
considerable research,
much from first-hand sources of soldiers, officers, and general officers. Those
sources frame Ricks'
discussion. Ricks also draws material from letters, journals, and duty logs.
The reader gets the
feeling of looking over the shoulder of people engaged in one of the most
dangerous and vital endeavors
in which military professionals engage: fighting and winning the wars.

.
. . Both civilian and military DOD personnel should read the book. Some readers
may find Ricks'
premises questionable and his conclusions unsatisfying. However, rather than
avoiding a controversial
discussion, the Army and the rest of the Department of Defense should face this discourse
head-on and use it to improve itself. Even if some think he fails to diagnose
the disease, the
symptoms he describes are undeniable, as evinced yet again in the recent series
of senior officer
meltdowns. The Generals is an excellent source for leader
development programs.

Don’t 4get the DC beer call 2nite

Bring
your thoughts,
and look for the table with the smart jarheads. 6 pm tonite at

Bier Baron (AKA the Brickskeller) 

1523 22nd Street Northwest 

Washington, DC 20037

And
while you are there, please raise a glass to the memory of H.
Norman Schwarzkopf. I have been critical of him, but
there is no doubt he did his best. 

Face it, Goldwater-Nichols hasn’t worked

By Col. Gary Anderson (USMC, Ret.)


Best Defense department of defense de-organization

Three decades ago, when the military reform movement was
beating the drum for what became the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, a number of
us in uniform and out, were trying to sound a cautionary note. We got outvoted
and the legislation passed. "Jointness" became the new mantra, and arguing
against it became heresy, if not hate speak. Based on recent events, it may be
time to reassess Goldwater-Nichols.

The proponents of the elevation of jointness to absolute
military supremacy claimed that it would prevent long open ended wars such as
Korea and Vietnam by giving the President and Secretary of Defense better
military advice than they got in such conflicts. The reformers also promised
more competent and professional military leadership and less cumbersome command
arrangements. The results of the wars in Kosovo and Operation Desert Storm
in the immediate aftermath of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation seemed to
confirm the validity of those promises; but somewhere in the ensuing decades,
the wheels came off.

Instead of fast and clean conflicts, we got Afghanistan
and Iraq. Not only were they long and strategically muddled, they were also
poorly executed by the joint institutions that Goldwater-Nichols was supposed
to fix. In his new book, The Generals,
Pulitzer Prize winning author Tom Ricks ruthlessly exposes the myth that our
generalship was improved by Goldwater-Nichols. He argues that the generalship
of the likes of Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez was marked by absolutely
mediocre planning and strategic leadership. In Afghanistan, we have had
averaged one supreme leadership change a year. In addition the Navy relieved
more commanders than in any time in its history, and the other services have
been plagued by instances of misconduct by senior officers.

Many of those who argued for Goldwater-Nichols used the
German General Staff as a model to aspire to. While the German generals were
superb at tactics, they were lousy strategists. After winning the wars of
German unification in the nineteenth century, they lost two disastrous world
wars. As Ricks points out, our generals are good tacticians, but poor
strategists. Ironically, the reformers got what they wished for.

The problem is not just with general officers; our joint
staffs have become bloated with unneeded officers due to the legislative
mandate that every officer aspiring to reach flag rank has to serve two years
in a joint billet. No-one has ever explained how serving as a Joint Graves
Registration Officer will produce our future Grants, Shermans, or Pattons.
There was a time when being selected for major was the great cut in an
officer's career. Today the running military joke is that if you can answer a
phone, you can become a Major.

Strengthening the unity of command of joint operations
was a good idea, but most of our regional joint staffs are bloated to a point
where they ill-serve the commanders who lead them. Because of the number of
joint officers the law requires. Admiral Halsey and Rommel won their most
famous victories with staffs a fraction of the size of the average U.S. Army
brigade combat team staff today.

This can be fixed. Unfortunately, we will need even more
legislation. First, we need to get rid of the requirement that all general
officer candidates be joint certified. All of our generals and admirals don't
need to be superb joint war fighting experts. Rommel was not a General Staff
officer, and Halsey would not have wanted to be one. The joint staff track
should be reserved for those who aspire to eventual joint command and staff
positions, but there should not be a stigma for those who want to lead air
wings, Marine Corps Expeditionary Forces or Navy fleets; we need real warriors
as well as soldier-diplomat strategists.

A smaller, more elite joint staff corps would allow us to
concentrate on creating real strategic expertise. Joint Staff candidates should
be put through a series of rigorous force-on-force seminar war games that would
test their capability to make both diplomatic as well as military decisions
against competent, thinking opponents. Those candidates who come up short in
such tests should be sent back to their services with no stigma to their
careers. Successful graduates would still spend time with troops, fly
airplanes, or drive ships when not serving on joint staffs; however, once
selected for flag rank, their command and staff positions would be primarily
joint. This would allow joint staffs to be smaller and more efficient.

Goldwater-Nichols has institutionalized mediocrity. We can, and must, do better.

Gary
Anderson, a retired Marine Corps officer, is an Adjunct Professor at the George
Washington University's Elliot School of International Affairs.

A response to Lady Emma: No, start by actually helping the Iraqis do things

By Steve Donnelly


Best Defense guest respondent

Emma Sky's recent
paper for CNAS provides a welcoming and Iraqi-freshened perspective to
the most recent of many chapters in the story of U.S. relations with Iraq.

But there remain a great many unspoken undercurrents in
the human interest stories of a U.S. CPA and military actor, no disrespect
intended, rather than a professional analysis of the gaps and deficiencies
identified -- which all relate to Iraqi self-governance and support for Iraqi
civilian institutions.

Emma's stories reminded me of several meetings in Tikrit
and Baghdad in 2008, which, I believe, underscore the complexities of the US
muddle, and the limitations on U.S. successes in light of our past history.

On a crisp morning in January 2008, a military convoy
wound its way through Tikrit's morning traffic to deliver three State
Department civilian advisers to Salah ad Din's provincial headquarters. Parents
walked their children to the local schoolhouse, garbed in the clean, pressed,
yet shabby garb of war refugees, wary of the passing convoy. The turret-mounted
M60 intermittently pop-popped warning shots to oncoming traffic at each
intersection, as the electronic jammers shut down all civilian cell phone
traffic. Children with no parents to take interest sat by the roadside selling
gypsy gasoline from small containers. All these scenes were visible to the
civilian advisers through the grimy window of the Humvee.

As the provincial headquarters' halls were swept by the U.S.
military escort, widows and their young children, descending into PTSD events
when confronted with the same soldiers that, under Big Ray, had once kicked
down their door and taken Daddy away, and likely to be suicide bombers, were
cleared before the civilian advisers entered to attend a brief meeting with
Salah ad Din's civilian leaders.

The civilian advisers were warmly greeted by elected
officials from the Provincial Government, mostly Kurds favorable to the United
States, and "democratically" elected as a result of the majority-Sunni boycott
of elections in Salah ad Din and Ninewa. But the Iraqi civilian administrators
were, on first meeting, typically reluctant to speak directly to an American,
whether military or civilian.

The reasons for that reluctance were understandable,
given their backgrounds. Some were survivors of the Shia opposition left by the
United States to fend with Saddam after Desert Storm, highly-skilled civil
engineers returning from prestigious exile in Kuwait to find their country in
ruins as it had been after the Iraq/Iran War, but with the resources and
responsibilities for reconstruction now in the hands of well-intended but
unskilled U.S. military E-5s and 0-3s. Most important was an unwillingness to
be publicly identified as "collaborators," when, after the United States left,
reprisals would be certain, and did occur.

After the meeting, two civilian advisers were directed to
another room while the return convoy was being organized. After very careful
negotiations through one of the Sunni leaders, they had the opportunity to meet
in private with the former civilian engineers and administrators who had
operated and rebuilt Salah ad Din before the Baathist purges. They knew where
everything was, how to fix it, and were anxious to help, but could not do so
directly.

As the U.S. civilian advisers intermediated between the U.S.
military, and Iraqi provincial and national leaders to rebuilt the bridges over
the Tigris, a complex chain of communication was required, with "anonymous"
help from the former Baathist administrators, and indirect calls from current
administrators and anti-Americans unwilling to be identified as direct
collaborators, but needed to get their country reconstructed.

Through an equally byzantine chain of events and
contacts, two of the civilian advisers were invited to attend an Iraqi meeting
(no U.S. military, please) in Baghdad in June 2008, where ministry and
provincial officials were meeting to coordinate procedures for the upcoming
2009 budget deliberations.

Here, behind closed doors in the Al Rasheed Hotel's main
ballroom, Iraq's leading national and provincial technocrats were blunt in
their criticisms of the current state of affairs, the crooked politicians they
were confronted with, and the hope that by returning to their older and
technically-based processes for project and budget considerations, hoped to
move the system to one based on genuine need, public participation, technical
reviews and cost/benefit frameworks to get Iraq moving again.

As the meeting proceeded, the old-timers mentored the
handful of confused post-Saddam administrators on the old cost-budget analysis
processes and technical studies used in the older processes, and agreements
were made to republish and re-distribute the old budget manuals, so that a
modern and functional government could hopefully emerge.

Why were these two State Department civilian advisers
being invited into meetings to which U.S. military and prior CPA advisers were
never invited, and embraced by the civilian solutions that the CPA and U.S. military
had not engaged?

Each was an actual U.S. civilian developer, planner,
engineer and builder. They spoke the same language as the technocrats,
understood the complexities of the systems problems, and the routine paths for
solutions. Bureaucrat to Bureaucrat. Bridge Engineer to Bridge Engineer. Water
Treatment Plant Operator to Water Treatment Plant Operator. Builder to Builder.
The language, social, and cultural barriers were irrelevant to the common
language of troubleshooting and public systems.

Most important, they had each been sent with explicit
instructions from Foggy Bottom and Ambassador Crocker's "bubble" to find those
solutions, and were empowered by MND-North Commander MG Mark Hertling, and his
experienced command staff, who all came with the same common mission: Give Iraq
back to the Iraqis.

The lessons of these many experiences were distilled by
the State Department civilian advisors into a report arguing for the rapid
transition to Iraqi civilian government based on three insights: (1) Iraqis, by
their national culture still driving them, are inveterate builders who had
proudly built and rebuilt their country as each war and flood swept through;
(2) Iraq had invested heavily in training core groups of administrators, public
works managers and engineers, who were available, respected by their peers, and
anxious to take responsibility for restoring a functional public service
structure, but needed help to get past the interim political leaders (many of
which were our own); and (3) that joining these insights into SOFA negotiations
could provide rapid transition to Iraqi government, and enduring value for
future U.S. and Iraqi relationships.

Where Emma Sky's limitations, as a former CPA
Administrator and Odierno adviser are most apparent, is perhaps unintended bias
toward what the United States, rather than Iraqis, shoulda or coulda have done
during and after a chaotic and ill-informed occupation which drove out the very
Iraqi engagement and responsibility that was the only viable way forward, and
the lack of training and technical experience in the actual systems of
government needed to address the lingering issues.

If anything could be recommended at this point, it would
be for the Obama Administration to abandon the unwanted meddling in Iraqi
police affairs and ineffective training, and to openly and effectively engage
that broad Iraqi public through positive political focus on the "plain vanilla"
operations of civil government systems and technical advice, which the United
States has an abundance of and the Iraqi public seriously needs.

It is clear that the spooks and spies, by not leaving a
basically functional, and somewhat reconciled government, lost their entry,
and, perhaps, ceded that U.S. role to Iran (actually more to Turkey).

Focus on what the Iraqi public actually needs, and they
will tolerate, if they have to, a handful of spooks and spies, but it is
axiomatic that if the United States is viewed by that Iraqi public as a helper
rather than an unwanted intervener, less spooks and spies would be required,
and valid intelligence on the actual Iraq and its problems would be abundant
and routine.

The
Lesson from Benghazi and Syria: Effective U.S. engagement in
these countries is going to require a more sophisticated and meaningful
exchange with these many publics than the current military and diplomatic
systems consider. Big U.S. footprints, soldiers, and colonial occupiers are
unwelcome. Better to use internet engagements to link Iraqi administrators to U.S.
technical resources, then re-engage overtime.

Stephen
Donnelly, AICP, is a Crofton, MD-based planning and development consultant who
served as Senior Urban Planning Adviser, US Department of State, Iraq
Reconstruction, during the civilian surge (2007-2009).

Mission command is nice but I suspect we are indeed only paying it lip service

By Richard Buchanan


Best Defense office of mission
command

In 1993, when I left the Army
as a CWO (HUMINT/CI) myself and another CWO (Order of Battle) were training 7th
Infantry Light non-MI personnel on MI skill sets using a hand-jammed two-week
NEO scenario exercising against Abu Sayfeh. Down right counter guerrilla if you
ask me as we were using my Special Forces Vietnam experience to frame the scenario.
Bottom line up front -- if a light fighter is trained well in his infantry
skill sets counter-guerrilla operations are not a problem -- it was true in
1993 and it is just true in 2012 so why did we have to create COIN?

We were actually breaking
ground in 1993 by creating the CoIST and DATE concepts years before they became
standard terms. The MI Center in Ft. Huachuca was interested in the scenario
and concepts of our version of CoIST/DATE, but came to the decision that
guerrilla warfare was where the Force was not heading so they basically canned
what had been provided to them.

I then left the Force and
moved into the IT world of ATT and Cisco where for years we spoke using the IT
slogan "people, processes, tools" long before the Army broke into the G/S6
world.

Now 29 years later the Army
has "people, processes and tools" -- People is a PME system generating Cmdrs
and Staffs, Processes is Science of Control, and Tools is multiple mission
command systems.

I recently meet (after 29 years)
that same retired CWO who has as a retiree done his rotations to Iraq and
Afghanistan and just as I am he is still trying to educate the Force. When we
met we simply smiled and almost at the same time said "boy did we get it right
29 years ago" and then compared notes on what has been working and what is
failing since 1993. There are not many of us greybeards still out there working
with the Force -- and still the Force does not "listen."

So Tom's recent question ("Mission command is nice but what will commanders
actually practice it?") caused me to go
back and give it some serious thought as mission command is really something
some of us have been where possible practicing since 1993.

The question of how do we
facilitate mission command training in a Force that is centrically singularly
focused on mission command systems is a valid concern and yes one might in fact
think the Force is only paying lip service. Processes and tools are simple to
understand/control -- but the Art of Command is all about Leadership and right
now "Leadership" in the Force is a "black art."

The fuzzy "black art" thing we
call Art of Command with the equally warm and fuzzy terms of team building,
open dialogue in a fear free environment, and TRUST is the elephant in the room
that everyone wants to ignore. It is ignored in the AARs coming out of the DATE
exercises, it is ignored by MCTP AARs, it is ignored in Staff training
exercises and the list goes on.

WHY? The answer is easy -- not
many are comfortable and confident with themselves in the areas of Trust and
open dialogue or they have had negative experiences with these terms. Trust and
dialogue are hard to mentor day to day in the current Force.

Has anyone recently seen in
any CTC AAR or in any MCTP AAR a section on Trust? Meaning, was Trust being
demonstrated within the Staff or between the Cmdr and his Staff, a section on
how was dialogue being handled within the Staff or what the Cmdr's leadership
style was? That is, did it contribute to team building or did it push dialogue
and or contribute to trust being developed in his unit? Or was there ease in
the way the NCOs and Officers worked with each other. Or was failure tolerated
and learned from with the Cmdr leading the way in the lessons learned by a
failure?

Has anyone recently seen a CTC
AAR or a MCTP AAR speak out about the quality of the Cmdrs Mission Orders to
his subordinates (was it clear/concise) or did they speak about the quality of
the Commanders Intent -- two critical core elements in the "Art of Command"? Or
did the OCs speak about his and his Staff's micromanagement?

What is inherently missing is
a clear strong Army senior leadership emphasis on Leadership in the current
group of O5/6s and one/two Stars. Leadership that develops the team,
develops/fosters open dialogue and fosters Trust. If junior officers see that
emphasis in their daily routines then it becomes second nature to them -- right
now not many O5/6s are leading by example. We have way too few "truth seekers"
in the current O5/6 and one/two Star ranks.

In some aspects the necessity
for mission command (Art of Command and Science of Control-the processes not
the systems) has been articulated in ADP/ADRP 6.0, in the concept of "hybrid
threat" TC 7-100, in the doctrinal thinking behind Capstone 2012, and anchored
in the new DATE scenarios that are now standardized at the CTCs.

With the future of the Army
training being refocused on hybrid threats tied to DATE training exercises the
"Art of Command" is the key in moving forward. If the Cmdr has built his team
using the elements of Trust and open dialogue there is no "hybrid threat"
scenario that cannot be mastered by an agile and adaptive Cmdr/Staff.

In addition the concept of
"Design" then starts to make sense and just maybe we can move into a open
debate about whether the current decision making process MDMP makes sense in a
"hybrid threat environment" or should it be replaced by a different problem
solving process which actually "Design" and "mission command" demands.

Or as a recent article in
Tom's blog put it, "I am leaving the Corps because it doesn't much value
ideas." It is not only the Army that is having Trust issues. We are losing the
"best and the brightest" simply because senior leaders are not serious about a
"Leadership" that builds teams, fosters dialogue, and Trust.

Richard
Buchanan is mission command training facilitator with the JMTC/JMSC
Grafenwoehr, Germany training staffs in the areas of mission command,
MDMP/NATO Planning Processes, MDMP/Design, and Command Post Operations.
From 2006 to 2008, he rebuilt as HUMINT SME together with the Commander
Operations Group (COG) National Training Center (NTC) the CTC training
scenario to reflect Diyala Province. From 2008 to 2009, he introduced
as a Forensics SME into the NTC training scenario the first ever battlefield
forensics initially for multifunctional teams and then BCTs. From 2010 to 2012,
he trained staffs in the targeting process as tied to the ISR planning process
as they are integrated in the MDMP process. The opinions here are his own and
not those of U.S. Army Europe, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, the
U.S. government, nor even the shattered remains of the once-proud New York
Jets.

Stress in special operators

[image error]

A Navy SEAL commander committed
suicide in
Oruzgan, Afghanistan, last weekend. I hear through the grapevine
that there is a real stress problem among Special Operators that the leaders of
that community haven't dealt with well. There seems to be some belated recognition going on.

If you know a
survivor who might need a call during this season, lift up the phone. Here also
is a possible resource.

 

 

This is the negative review of my book that Col. Gentile should have written

By
Major Tom Mcilwaine, Queen's Royal Hussars


Best Defense guest
book reviewer

This
[The Generals] is an extraordinary book which will be widely
read by serving officers. It raises some very interesting ideas, is fluent and
persuasive and provides a junior officer with all the ammunition they would
require to ask some very awkward questions of their seniors. That said I am not
certain that it deserves some of the extravagant praise that has been heaped
upon it (notwithstanding the fact that some of that praise comes from those
such as General Zinni who know more about the art of generalship in the
American military than I ever could).

There
are a number of reasons for this. There is the problem of Ricks's use of
military history. He certainly has breadth, but depth is perhaps absent in
certain areas and he appears to ignore context, particularly when discussing
the actions of the British in World War Two but also when discussing Vietnam. He
tends to rely on secondary sources which support his argument (such as Lewis
Sorley's recent hatchet job of Westmoreland) and chooses to ignore largely that
which contradicts his argument. On the rare occasions when Ricks does
acknowledge other points of view (such as Millet's assessment of Ridgeway) he
fails to provide an analysis of their opposing view, trusting instead that the
power of his writing will explain why he is right and the opposing view is
wrong.

Secondly,
for a book based around the idea that Marshall is the acme of military
perfection and American generalship, and supposedly based on research so
extensive that he even read Marshall's officer litter, there is surprisingly
little on why Marshall is so good. He never deals with the fact that Marshall
was badly wrong on the decisive strategic question of when to invade Western
Europe, or that he was also wrong on the subject of the African campaign. The
overall picture we are given is that of a superb selector of men (despite the
fact that so many of his selections had to be replaced) and developer of a
human resources system without parallel, which is fine as far as it goes, but
perhaps not enough to justify the extravagant claims made by Ricks.

This
leads onto the third and biggest problem with the book. Ricks's argument is
riddled with passages and chapters that directly contradict that which has come
before. So Marshall creates a superb system - but the system fails without him
- so is it really a system at all? Marshall's system values character over
intellect - which is precisely the flaw Ricks identifies in the selection of
modern general officers. MacArthur leaves no mark on the US Army - but
Westmoreland (who whatever his flaws certainly did influence the US Army) is a
creature in the MacArthur mold. Korea is a disaster because commanders lack
command experience in war - which doesn't seem to hold either Eisenhower or
Petraeus back. There are many more and this habit extends to his oral defense
of his thesis and to his much publicized view that moral issues are of less
importance than professional issues. When asked for something that Marshall
doesn't do well at a Q&A session at CGSC recently his first answer was his
treatment of African-American soldiers - a moral issue - not his misjudgment of
the timing of Overlord - a professional issue.

At
that at root is the problem with this book. At a shallow level it has much to
recommend it. An interesting topic, covered in just enough depth to provide
useful talking points at a dinner party. But for a keen field grade officer it
lacks depth, rigor, coherence and understanding.  There is a superb book to be written on the
flaws of American generalship and how to improve it (although I would suggest
that on the whole American generalship is rather good) and such a book would be
of great value but this most certainly is not it. Having read this book and
heard Ricks speak, I would argue that he is not, and never will be, the man to
write it.  Worse, by writing a book as
riddled with inconsistencies as this and by then promoting with such a
breathtaking lack of humility he has done exceptional damage to the reformist
cause which he allegedly supports.

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).

NRA magazine goes all pro-Obama!

Oddly enough the most
pro-Obama statement I have read lately was in the editor's letter in the
November issue of America's
First Freedom,
a magazine of the National Rifle Association. Among the "undisputable facts,"
we are told, are that "Obama supports reinstituting the failed ban on
semi-automatic rifles" and "Obama has already appointed two vehemently
anti-Second Amendment justices to the U.S. Supreme Court."

Sounds good to me! I
know that they don't mean it that way, but by the time I put down the NRA magazine I
was ready to contribute to the Joyce Foundation. I'd never heard of that outfit
until I saw them denounced in this issue of the NRA magazine. That interested
me enough to look them up. 

Elsewhere in the same
issue, the NRA rejoices that the University of Colorado finally has a
"right-to-carry" policy "that allows permit holders to carry most anywhere on
the campus." Because you never know when you might have to bust a cap during
Economics 101?