Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 141
December 11, 2012
General Assistance - By Micah Zenko
the military?
Rally 'Round the Jihadist - By Aaron Y. Zelin
administration slapped a terrorist designation on Syrian rebel group Jabhat
al-Nusra -- but only managed to spark an anti-U.S. backlash among anti-Assad
groups.
The Architect of the Future That Never Was - By Richard J. Williams
The Fierce Urgency of Now - By David Rothkopf
The Extricator in Chief - By Aaron David Miller
fantasies. Barack Obama's not going to reshape the world order in his second
term.
Last act in Damascus: How will the end come for Assad’s crippled regime?
By Jeffrey White
Best Defense department of regime collapse
Down, down I come;
Like glistering Phaethon,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades
Like Shakespeare's Richard II, Bashar al-Assad is a
doomed monarch. The failure of his polices and the failures of his men have set
the regime on an accelerating path to destruction.
There is no question that the regime
has fought back hard against the powerful revolutionary currents it evoked. But
its choice of violence from virtually day one of the rebellion set it on a
course that would ultimately produce its destruction. A peaceful or negotiated
solution was neither sought nor desired by the regime. Assad and his cohorts
bet that the security structures his father created and he nurtured could crush
the opposition. These structures proved inadequate for the task.
The Assad regime is caught in potent
forces that it cannot hope to escape. Its military is being ground down by
constant battle with the rebels. Regime forces are beginning to look and act
like they are nearing defeat. They appear to be losing the will to attack, and
to some extent even defend. The armed opposition elements are gaining strength
in men, weapons, and the all-important factor of will. Despite increasing casualties
of their own, they appear willing, in many cases eager, to fight. Throughout
the country, the regime's hold is weakening or has already vanished under
pressure from the rebels.
This decline can be seen most readily
in the regime's growing reliance on air and artillery operations, and in its
failure to defend or rescue key positions subjected to siege and assault. It
now appears incapable of massing large forces, unlike earlier stages in the war
when it could marshal several tens of thousands of troops for an operation.
Assad appears doomed, but when and how
will this be realized? It is unlikely to be in the form of some grand climatic
battle; more probably it will transpire like the fall of Tripoli and the pursuit
of the Libyan dictator. Or perhaps it will be more like the slow closing of the
ring around the bunker in Berlin, and the descent into fantasy by family
members, extreme loyalists, and those who waited too long to escape. It will
not necessarily proceed in a straight line. The tides of battle do not run only
in one direction, and the regime may even score successes here and there in the
fighting.
Can the regime do anything to arrest or
reverse its downward direction? It seems unlikely. It could resort to chemical
weapons as defeat nears and desperation rises. Is a regime that has already
killed tens of thousands going to reject the use of gas weapons to stave off
defeat, if even for only a while? Resorting to CW is not a sure thing, if the international
community were to respond with force that would likely hasten the fate of the
regime. Still Assad could try it, banking that the failure of the world to
respond with force to other cases in which he dramatically escalated violence
against the civilian population would be repeated.
Jeffrey
White is a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He
previously served in the Defense Intelligence Agency in a number of senior
analytical and leadership positions.
What the military could learn about mission command from General Motors
Like I said,
I generally don't think that the military should use business as a model. But
there are exceptions in specific cases, especially on leadership of large
organizations.
Peter Drucker, one of the great thinkers about
how corporations really work, in describing
the Generals Motors of the 1940s, mentions that 95
percent of all decisions were left to the heads of the company's various
divisions. "Hence central management refrains as much as possible from telling
a division how to do its job; it only lays down what to do."
Mission
command, anyone?
Acronyms: The last days of DISCO
Phil Cave reports that the security
clearance office known as the Defense Industrial Security
Clearance Office (DISCO) is being replaced by a
much less cool office named the Department of Defense Central
Adjudicative Facility (DoDCAF). I thought it should have been called GANGSTA or
something.
December 10, 2012
Access Denied - By John Arquilla
Internet even if it wanted to.
Return of the Silviosaur - By James Walston
Sunset Boulevard meets Jurassic Park.
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