Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 142

Decline Is a Choice - By Hubert Védrine

The West has nothing to fear but fear itself.

Military gun ownership and suicide: Give commanders the hand they need to help

By
Col. Hank Foresman (U.S. Army, ret.)

Best
Defense guest columnist

In
the December 7 Washington Post there is an interesting opinion piece by
Generals (Retired) Reimer and Chiarelli, where they urged that Congress repeal a
provision of the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act that prevents commissioned and non-commissioned officers from talking with their troopers
about their gun ownership. 

One of the most effective measures of suicide
prevention is to ask those perceived to be under duress: "Do you have a gun in
your home?" If the answer is yes, we might then suggest that the individual put
locks on the weapon or store it in a safe place during periods of high stress --
things that any responsible gun owner should do.

Unfortunately, that potentially lifesaving
action is no longer available to the military. A little-noticed provision in
the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has had the unintended
consequence of tying the hands of commanders and noncommissioned officers by
preventing them from being able to talk to service members about their private
weapons, even in cases where a leader believes that a service member may be
suicidal.

I
commanded three companies for a total of 54 months. I did not have to talk to my soldiers about
their gun ownership because I did not have to deal with the epidemic of
suicides that face the military today.
But, if I had, I would have wanted to know about gun ownership so if I
thought a trooper was suicidal I could do something to help him.

I
know how important this is. A few years
ago, shortly after I retired from the Army, I experienced several weeks of
acute vertigo. As a result of being
carted out of the Pentagon on a stretcher, I experienced a very serious episode
of depression to include having suicidal thoughts. When I realized what was happening I had my
wife gather the pistols which we each keep near the bedside and had her lock
them up in the gun safe; on top of that I had her change the combination of
the gun safe and not to give it me. Why? Because I wanted to take away any access to weapons that would allow me to do
something stupid.

I
got help; the doctors were able to address not only the vertigo, but also the
underlying depression. I now know the
combination to my gun safe, and I regularly go shooting. In fact I am doing so
today.

Generals
Reimer and Chiarelli are right, commissioned and non-commissioned officers need
to have every tool available to them to battle our epidemic of suicide to
include asking soldiers about their gun ownership. Despite what some in
Congress think, this is not an attempt to circumvent the Second Amendment of
the U. S. Constitution. Rather, it is a tool to our soldiers.

The author served 33 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a
colonel. He deployed to Kosovo, Iraq, and Kuwait. 

Signs of the apocalypse: The NY Times and USMC Gazette agree about my book!

Unusual though it is, the New York Times and the Marine Corps Gazette are on the same
page.

In his Sunday Times
review, Max "Das" Boot
basically summarizes the book. He calls it "an entertaining
and enlightening jeremiad that should -- but, alas, most likely won't -- cause a
rethinking of existing personnel policies."

In his Marine
Corps Gazette review, Frank Hoffman writes, "Aside from Ricks, no one has yet had the courage to step
back and assess the big lessons from conflicts that have seen the United States
sustain great burdens and spend no small amount of treasure for little
strategic gain. . . . The Generals does not lay the blame for
leadership shortfalls entirely at the feet of the uniformed military but does
argue that we should shoulder our share and regenerate a mastery of strategic
leadership and operational art worthy of our soldiers and Marines. For this
fact alone, The Generals is strongly
recommended reading for all students of the art of war."

The
Weekly Standard also is approving. Tim Kane states in his review that the book "does not get bogged down in the logic or bureaucracy,
but tells a fascinating story of how Army leaders came out of Vietnam with a
singular focus on tactics at the expense of strategic thinking." His conclusion
is that "Ricks shines, blending an impressive level of research with expert
storytelling."

Gangnam style vs. Abu Ghraib style?

Here it is:

Kill those fucking Yankees who
have been torturing Iraqi captives

Kill those fucking Yankees who
ordered them to torture

Kill their daughters, mothers,
daughters-in-law, and fathers

Kill them all slowly and
painfully

Mr. Psy
did not write the song, but covered
it. Abu Ghraib was awful -- and the biggest American defeat in Iraq. But still.

A few things our generals could learn from Alfred Sloan’s history of General Motors

For
the most part, I do not believe that the military should imitate business. The
differences are too big, especially the risks: In wartime you risk lives, while
in business you generally risk filing for bankruptcy. Hence the inclination in
business to go for the 51 percent solution, which I think is generally too
dangerous in military operations. 

That
said, there are some parallels that illuminate situations. For example, Alfred
Sloan, in his autobiographical history My Years With General Motors,
which I just finished, makes a sharp distinction between what General Motors
did every day and what it sold. What it did was cut and bend metal. What it
sold was not basic transportation (from the mid-1920s on, he said, that was the
job of the used car market, and so not his business), but instead a form of
more expensive transportation -- a new car that offered style, speed, and
comfort. This is the departure point in strategy: Figuring out you who
are.   

One
thing that struck me reading it is that Flint and Detroit in the 1910s were a
lot like Silicon Valley in the 1980s, with Sloan hanging out on weekends with
Walter Chrysler, Charles Nash, and the like.

Sloan placed an enormous emphasis on running the company with
centralized policy and de-centralized execution. This strikes me as another way
of saying "mission orders." It is a lot harder than it looks. Much of the book
depicts how he went about implementing this. 
The line guys had genuine power, the staff guys only the power to make
recommendations.

As
part of that, he developed the sense of a corporate need for what military
people call "doctrine." In explaining the structure he devised for General
Motors, he writes, "The Operations committee was not a policy-making body but a
forum for the discussion of policy or of need for policy. . . . In a large
enterprise some means is necessary to bring about a common understanding."
That's a good layman's explanation of doctrine, in a military sense.

Details
also matter, and understanding your process. One of the biggest problems in the
automobile industry is managing inventory, even now.
It used to be that one of the slow points in moving inventory was waiting an
average of three weeks for paint and varnish to dry and cure. It also took up a
lot of real estate. Du Pont (a major investor in GM) invented a new lacquer
process that allowed a car to be finished in one eight-hour shift.

Finally,
the book reminds me of war in that it consists of long boring sections
interrupted by points of brilliance.

Two WWII bonus facts: I didn't know that the
tail fins of Cadillacs and other automobiles of the 1950s were directly
inspired by the P-38. Nor did I know that the price of a GM-made .50 caliber
machine gun fell from $689 on Dec. 7, 1941, to a low of $169 in the fall of
1944. (As production numbers were cut after that, the price rose $5.) So I
guess that the better we were doing, the cheaper the .50 cal usually was. 

Comment of the day: A concern about how officers act in a downsizing army

From a comment posted the other day by "jvizzard":

The danger in
a shrinking army is that we become sheep always seeking the center of the
flock, lest we stick out and get picked off.

Rebecca’s War Dog of the Week: Battle of Fallujah veteran, Hexa, retires

By Rebecca Frankel 

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

At eleven years old and after a long career of detecting
explosives and no fewer than two deployments behind her, Hexa is hanging
up her working leash. She is leaving her home station kennel at the Marine
Corps Air Station in Yuma, AZ (not to be confused with the Yuma Proving Ground)
for life as a housedog with former MP Staff Sgt. Neal
Moody.

It seems that Hexa is suffering from a neurological disease
that will ultimately leave her blind; Even now you can see that her eyes are coated
with the telltale milky glaze. The article also reports that Hexa is suffering
from Canine PTSD, though it doesn't hint at a specific trauma or how deeply
affected her day-to-day life is by either affliction. Still while life as a
working dog wears on any animal (as do multiple deployments), Hexa's handlers
report that her keen sense of smell is very much intact and the article makes
special mention that she still goes wild for tennis balls.

Back in her heyday Hexa, a large Shiloh Shepherd, was a
force to be reckoned with. In 2010 she helped lead a demonstration
aimed to prepare the Combat Logistics Regiment 15 for their upcoming deployment
to Afghanistan -- the special lesson being how MWDs could be used in a hostile
combat zone. They are not only there to help find bombs or drugs but can be
used to chase down and detain a suspect. The "suspect" Hexa detained in this tutorial
was Sgt. Jay Parales who described the experience (seen in the photo above) as
"pretty intense" and "scary but fun."

"That dog," Parales said then speaking of Hexa, "Took
me down like I was a little toy."

War-Dog
Aside: In last week's post I
wrote that Marine canine handler Sgt. William Sutra was going to be awarded the
Navy Cross for the heroics he (and his dog Posha) displayed in Afghanistan. You
can watch Sutra receive the Navy Cross here. The comments offered during this
ceremony give a far better account of what happened on that fateful day than
any report I've read elsewhere. (Hat tip: Mike Dowling.)

Rebecca Frankel, on leave from her FP desk, is currently writing a
book about military working dogs, to be published by Atria Books in September
2013.

What a good senior NCO does: Move around, keep an ear open, turn over rocks

One
of the things a good senior leader does is move around his or her unit. Don't
wait for bad news to come to you. Often, it won't be allowed to.

The
new issue of Army Times has a good
piece by Michelle Tan about a predatory drill sergeant who in one
10 day period earlier this year had various forms of sex with one female
recruit, oral sex with another, a groping and kissing session with a third, and
indecent language with some others.

The
first
woman to complain was a 20-year-old victim who found the
chain of command unresponsive. She went to one drill sergeant, who told her,
"You don't want to open that can of worms, Private. . . . That's my battle
buddy's career you're trying to fuck up." Her first sergeant didn't believe
her. The company commander said he would launch an inquiry, which, she said, led
nowhere, and wasn't reported to superiors. The woman said that other trainees
who had been assaulted were afraid to come forward, especially after they saw
how the drill sergeants ganged up on her and accused her of lacking integrity.

Then
she ran into the battalion command sergeant major as he was moving around the
unit. He listened to her, then called a meeting of all the females in the
company. It lasted about 90 minutes. "That's when the others came forward," the
woman said.

The
abusive drill sergeant, Luis Corral, has been found guilty. He was busted to
private, sentenced to five years in the brig, and will get a bad conduct
discharge when he gets out. Then he must register as a sex offender. 

Why McHale is wrong about the pivot

By Shawn Brimley

Best Defense strategic respondent

I read with interest your
link to Paul McHale's comments on
the so-called "Pacific Pivot." I was surprised to read his argument
that President Obama's Asia team has "grounded the pivot in its military
strategy, as revealed in the document released in January [2012] "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership:
Priorities for the 21st Century Defense."

That comment would
surprise not only the authors of that defense strategy, but the hundreds of
diplomats and civilian strategists at the White House and other agencies who
formulated this approach starting in early 2009. It would probably also
surprise the president, who has consistently focused on the need for the United
States to embrace its role
as a resident, Pacific power. There are literally hundreds of Cabinet-level
interactions, trips, and regional forums that have provided the groundwork for
the most sustained U.S. engagement in Asia in many years. Just as one example,
President Obama has met with Hu Jintao, the outgoing Chinese president, a dozen
times since 2009. Thanks to the efforts of diplomats such as Kurt
Campbell and White House strategists such as Jeff Bader, Danny Russell, and
Evan Medeiros,
the United States has consistently leaned forward in Asia since the day
President Obama took office. From joining the East Asia Summit, adding a
permanent U.S. mission to ASEAN in Jakarta, to securing trade deals with the
Republic of Korea and joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is hard to
argue that our engagement in Asia "fails to distinguish threat and
opportunity," as McHale argues. 

And even on a purely
military basis, I disagree that focusing on ways to work with allies and
partners in Asia to buttress their military capabilities and to find ways to be
more present in Asia sends the wrong signal to our partners in the Middle East. I find it hard to believe that a small contingent of U.S. Marines in Darwin,
Australia, or four Littoral Combat Ships in Singapore, are causing serious
heartburn for Saudi Arabia (with whom we signed a massive arms deal
in 2011) or Israel (with whom our military aid is at record highs). And I
doubt that Iranian strategists are comforted at night thinking of the massive
U.S. air and naval presence in and around the Persian Gulf. Finally, the
assertion that a military strategy that adds some focus to the Asia-Pacific
somehow skews procurement and planning of weapons systems to the detriment of
plausible contingencies in the Middle East is odd. In fact the types of
military trends we see in Asia are very much applicable to the Persian Gulf,
where military planners must contend with the proliferation of capabilities
that can potentially put U.S. power projection capabilities at
risk.   

The Asia rebalancing strategy is not perfect -- no
strategic initiative can be. But having witnessed the formulation of this
approach, from my time at the Pentagon and at the White House, I am convinced
that the president deserves credit for conceiving the strategy, and civilian
strategists, diplomats, and defense officials and officers that have
implemented it over the last four years should be proud of what they have done
and will continue to accomplish over the next four years.  

Shawn Brimley is a jolly good Senior Fellow at
the Center for a New American Security . Until
recently he was director for strategic planning on the National Security
Council staff at the White House. 

Military acronyms: All VUCA’d up

Here
at Best Defense we've never really gotten into VUCA,
an acronym apparently developed at the Army War College to describe the
"Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous" environment that many think we will
face in coming decades. It actually brought to mind a woman I dated in my
senior year of college for a few crazy weeks. It was a learning experience, OK?

But
I think the acronym-makers missed a chance here. If they added "Lethal" in the
middle and "Novel" at the end, then we could face a "VULCAN" challenge.