Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 165

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Summer Postcard Series: How Navy SEALs roll onto the beach...

By Rebecca Frankel
Best

Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Can you spot the war dog...?

Navy SEALs demonstrate the Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction rig during a capabilities exercise at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story during the 43rd annual Underwater Demolition Team (UDT)-Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) East Coast Reunion on July 21 on Virginia Beach, VA. The annual reunion started in 1969 and has expanded into a weekend of events, contests, and a SEAL capabilities exercise."

Rebecca Frankel, on leave from her FP desk, is currently writing a book about military working dogs, to be published by Free Press.

Libya: Qaddafi running out of cash?

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on June 16, 2011.

Remember in early April I highlighted a David Ignatius column saying that Qaddafi was weaker than people thought and predicting that the old coot would run out of money in three months? Well, the bills may be coming due. John McCreary, another smart guy, notes that pro-Qaddafi fighters deserted a town in western Libya on the road to Tripoli. He observes, "This development is significant because it is the second instance in a month in which pro-Qadhafi fighters just stopped fighting. That is a strong suggestion that their pay or their contracts ran out."

Doonesbury's take on the troubles of vets: A response from Garry Trudeau

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on June 14, 2011.

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I asked the author of Doonesbury to respond to your comments
on his Sunday strip. Here it is:

By Garry Trudeau

Best Defense guest columnist

As I'm
old enough to recall the stereotypes that formed around Vietnam veterans, I'm
well aware of this danger. The purpose of my stories has been to participate in
the national conversation about the costs of war. JPWREL
and VICTOR
are correct that the majority of warriors return home without invisible wounds,
but it is by no means an "overwhelming" majority. There are an
estimated 600,000 veterans (out of 2.2 million who've served in OEF and OIF)
who are suffering from either stress disorders, MST, or the effects of TBI. The
proportion is considerably higher than in previous wars because of multiple
deployments and the aggregate number of consecutive days that participants are
in a high-conflict environment, thus in a rolling state of stress and
hyper-vigilance.



This is a substantial cohort whose continuing care represents a major challenge
to our country. I have tried to represent the sacrifices of the wounded -- both
physically and mentally -- across a broad continuum of affliction and recovery:
B.D., the amputee, who learns to manage his PTSD well enough to reach out to
Melissa, the helicopter mechanic, who recovers from her MST enough to actually
re-enlist; Leo, whose TBI leaves him with Broca's Aphasia, but whose resilience
propels him into community college, a job at a studio, and a healthy romantic
relationship; Ray, who recovered from physical injuries in the Gulf War, led a
normal life at home, only to endure multiple deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan, leading to the collapse that recently sent him home. All different
journeys, all different outcomes.



War changes everyone, and most veterans can manage that change without become
impaired or dysfunctional. Their stories are important, too, but by focusing on
their less fortunate brothers and sisters, I mean to keep front and center the
sacrifices they have all made in our names.

Tom's suggested Pakistan policy: Short-term embrace, long-term divorce

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on May 9, 2011.

Here is an elaboration on some of what I said yesterday on ABC's This Week. (Also on the show was Lawrence Wright, who has
this terrific piece on Pakistan in the new issue of the New
Yorker.)

I think we need to have a short-term plan that temporarily keeps us close to
Pakistan, followed by a much different long-run strategy that cuts us loose from
this wreck of a state.

In the short run, our goal should be to collect our winnings. Pakistan
screwed up, bigtime. We have them off balance, and the blustering of their
officials isn't helping their cause. Over the next several months, we should aim
to use this situation to get the terrorists and information we want. 

And then get out. In the long run, we should back away from Pakistan. They
believe they have us over a barrel, that (as Steve Coll has observed) they are
too big to fail. They have nuclear warheads and they stand on our supply route
to the U.S. troops in Afghanistan. So I think we need to accelerate the troop
drawdown in Afghanistan, and move from a large footprint of conventional troops
to a smaller footprint of Special Operators and support units conducting
counterterror missions. (But note Petraeus' pushback over the weekend: "Targeted military strikes don't
produce security on their own.") This reduced force of perhaps 20,000 troops
could be supplied by air and through Central Asia. Expensive, yes. But cheaper
than giving billions of dollars annually to Pakistan and seeing it spent on its
nuclear program and corruption. We also should encourage ties between
Afghanistan and Central Asia.

With our military posture in Afghanistan shifted, we then could move to a
purely transactional aid plan with Pakistan: "For doing X, you get Y amount of
money." No more money for promises, and certainly not $4 billion a year for
being a frenemy. In the long run, our interests are much more with
India, anyway. If Pakistan wants to retaliate by allying with China -- knock
yourselves out, fellas.

War College papers: A brief history of trends in U.S. Army thought since 1950

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on April 29, 2011.

For my current book project, I spent part of last weekend going over a list
of 13,542 papers and group studies done at the Army War College since 1950. A
lot of them were what you might expect, such as two from 1952: "The Soviet
Railroad System" and "The Soviet Iron and Steel Industry." Some of them are
downright scary, such as 1953's "A United States Program for the Post-World War
III Peace."

And there are the hardy perennials, such as "Retention of Junior Officers"
(1959), "Kashmir Dispute - Appropriate US Role" (1964), "Haiti: Another
Abscess in the Caribbean" (1966) and "The Future of Stability Operations"
(1970). With some updates in names and numbers, a clever but unethical student
probably could re-submit any of those papers now.

Some of them just make you shake your head. In 1961, one officer studied "The
Missile Killer Belt: The Ballistic Missile Defense of the Future." (You wanna
talk about government spending? How many multi-billions of dollars has the
Pentagon spent on ballistic missile defense over the last 40 years?) And
speaking of throwing good billions after bad, there is 1963's hopeful "Pakistan:
A United States Investment." Yep, I am sure it will pay off any decade now.

But there were some surprises to me, like how many papers were done on
unconventional warfare in the 1950s, which military historians tend to depict as
a decade when everyone was focused on nuclear warfare. And even some of that
stuff on nuclear warfare looks interesting, such as 1958's "Critique of
Kissinger's Strategic Force - Tactical Force Concept."

I also was surprised at how little written about the Korean War. It just
seems never to have been foremost in the collective mind of the Army. Indeed,
Vietnam seems to get almost as much attention in the mid-'50s, with papers such
as Richard Stilwell's "The Indochina Contest," done in 1955, and another paper
in 1958, "Military Strategy in Southeast Asia."

And then, 15 years later, this sorrowful topic: "Lesson from My Lai."

There are fads. Lots of papers about energy in the late 1970s. Then,
"Contemporary Terrorism," written in 1982, marks the start of a new trend. After
a long absence, the Civil War begins showing up again in the '80s, though in
small numbers compared to the early years of the 20th century, when it
dominated. In the 1970s, computers are an occasional curiosity in some papers.
In the late 1980s, they begin showing up in large numbers, as in "The
Application of Microprocessor Technology in Enhancing Combat Unit Effectiveness"
(1987). In the '90s, the word was "digitization." Over the last decade it was
"networks." The late '80s also saw a spate of papers on the military's role in
"the war on drugs." The '90s are full of "revolutions" in various areas, such as
"military engineering," in 1997.

The papers by future generals don't stand out particularly. One of the more
interesting one appears to be Alexander Haig's "Military Intervention: A Case
Study of Britain's Use of Force in the 1956 Suez Crisis," written in 1966. More
typically, in 1985, there was Tommy R. Franks on "An Alternative Corps Concept
for Winning the AirLand Battle."

In the papers written in the wake of 9/11, I had expected to see a torrent of
papers on terrorism, Islamic extremism, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and
such. There were a few, but in general the papers for 2002 looked pretty much
like previous years, featuring studies of "U.S. International Fresh Water
Policy," "Vince Lombardi as a Strategic Leader, " and "Major General William S.
Rosecrans and the Transformation of the Staff of the Army of the Cumberland: A
Case Study." Plus, of course, a naval officer's 2007 contribution, "Algae:
America's Pathway to Independence." You certainly can't accuse them of all
running to the soccer ball. 

There are few illusions reflected in the titles from the post 9/11-era. From
2004, this paper, from an Army Reservist, intrigued me: "Operation Iraqi Freedom
- An Unjust War." Two years later, an Army officer discussed, "Iraq: How We May
Lose the War We Won."

Overall, the biggest hole, I would say, is a long-term tendency to study
foreign strategic problems, but not to examine battles or wars that did not
involve American forces. There are a few, and they generally seem to involve
Germans, often the battle of Kursk. For example, I was surprised not to see a
study of the Iran-Iraq War --though a small percentage of the papers are simply
marked "CLASSIFIED," and that may where such papers are hidden.   

Also, there are some that I just plan to read for fun on my next research
trip, such as, "1953: Creighton W. Abrams, 'Mobility and Firepower.'"

Anyway, this is just one of the gems up available at the U.S. Army Military
History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Army is mulling eliminating it,
probably by putting it under the Army's Center of Military History. I think that
is nuts. If anything, the Center of Military History should be made part of the
Military History Institute, which has a broader mission, and connects the Army
to the American public. Also, for researchers, Carlisle is a much cheaper place
to go do a week of research than is the Washington, D.C. area. If you are
researching on your own dime, and I think most military historians are, that
matters.

Crocker (and Tom R.) are wrong: The Iraqis won't extend the U.S. presence

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on April 18, 2011.

Here's a thoughtful response to the post I had last week about where the
post-2011 U.S. military presence in Iraq might be based.

Meanwhile, on the Southern Iraq watch: Someone bombed
a U.S. convoy near Hilla the other day.  

By Adam L. Silverman, Ph.D.

Best Defense guest Iraqi affairs analyst

While I appreciate both Ambassador Ryan Crocker's remarks
and forethought on this, as well as Mr. Ricks' commentary, and keeping in mind
that I've not been in Iraq since the end of 2008, I think that any meaningful
attempt to renegotiate the security agreement, or parts of it, are very
unlikely.

I do think that you're going to see an ongoing, but comparatively small U.S.
presence of trainers covered under the Security Force Advising concept, but
we're talking relatively small footprint here. The Iraqis, and here I'm
referring to every major faction, have made it very, very clear beginning with
our Sawha allies out in Anbar starting back in 2007, that they are waiting for
us to leave. They are waiting for us to leave in order to settle scores. The
Sunnis and non-expatriate Shiite that make up the Sawha and primary opposition
that composed the Iraqiyya Party (which was disenfranchised from forming the
most recent Iraqi government after winning the largest plurality due to Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki's directing the power of the state at them in a
successful attempt to reverse
the electoral outcome) know they can't really win a head on confrontation, but
they've made it repeatedly clear that they are ready to fight (back). Maliki is
waiting for us to go so that he can cut his forces loose on these folks once and
for all and put an end to them. The Sadrists want us gone -- badly! The Kurds
want their own state and are just waiting for us to stop paying attention long
enough so that they can find an opportune moment to declare independence.
Moreover, given past and/or ongoing Iranian support for the bulk
of the parties in the governing coalition (Dawa, Sadrists, the Kurds, ISCI/Badr)
they won't allow their proxies to agree to anything that significantly prolongs
any significant U.S. presence. They'll tolerate training of security forces as a
large
number of the Arab portion of the Iraqi Army (IA) are Badr Corps, which is
tied
directly to the Quds Force. So whatever we teach the IA, we're teaching the
Iranians. No need for subterfuge at all. [[BREAK]]

No one is going to argue harder than I that we have a moral responsibility to
do right by the Iraqis, but I don't see how staying helps us do so. We had
actual legal requirements to do certain things, like fix the power grid, when we
were officially recognized as an occupying power. Now we're guests. Without a
doubt the electrical infrastructure in Iraq was terrible when U.S. forces
arrived in 2003 and the early attempts at repair and reconstruction led to the
creation of new targets for the insurgent forces, but a lot of what we wound up
doing wrong, or not doing at all, was based on what the CPA enshrined in their
bizarre and ideologically driven attempts to turn Iraq into a test lab for all
sorts of bizarre political and economic ideas. I remember being told that we
weren't to do anything to fix the Iraqi power grid as the Iraqis were going to
privatize the power
generation industry. My understanding was that this was based on an earlier CPA
decision to privatize power generation and distribution in Iraq, based on
attempts to do it in the United States, which, as many have documented, have
been largely disastrous and done nothing to improve the United States' aging and
crumbling power infrastructure. In Iraq not enough power doesn't just mean no
air conditioning, it also means not much water being pumped into the irrigation
canals, which means little agricultural production. This has led to migrations
of the population to towns and cities looking for work where they can be
recruited to emplace IEDs and commit other bad acts; not because they hate
Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds or Americans, but because they're desperate for cash
to feed their families. 

Despite all the hard work by the U.S. military, our coalition allies, and
civilian agency partners that led to successes at the tactical and operational
level, we have failed at the strategic level in Iraq. As General David Petraeus
stated
before testifying to Congress in April 2008: "Iraqi leaders have failed to take
advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving
their political differences." Part of the failure here was when the leverage was
available to push the Iraqis towards societal reconciliation and the beginnings
of societal/social reconstruction the Bush (43) Administration wasted the space,
the COIN break if you will, by having AMB Crocker try to negotiate a SOFA
agreement that the Iraqis wouldn't and didn't accept. At the same time
negotiations were ongoing for provincial elections. As I've written before here
at Best Defense and in other places too: the Iraqis rolled
us on both sets of negotiations. They ran the clock out on us, forcing us into
the security agreement as the U.N. occupation authority was running out and into
blessing a hybrid electoral process for the provincial elections that was the
worst possible combination -- open list and proportional representation -- if we
wanted to overcome the problems with the 2005 elections. It also didn't help
that one of the State Department's own election specialists did not understand
the system that the Iraqi High Electoral Commission had put into place. I know
he didn't understand it because I had to explain how it was going to work to him
at least five times and that was after he read the briefing paper I wrote on it
for my brigade commander so that he would understand why it was a potential
problem.

I appreciate that Crocker would like to do right by the Iraqis, I would like
to do right by the Iraqis, but I just don't see any way that they are going to
allow significant numbers of American troops to stay. The major Iraqi factions
don't want a significant U.S. troop presence as it prevents them from settling
their scores, which is what they really want to do. The Iranians that are direct
patrons for Dawa and ISCI/Badr and indirect patrons to the Sadrists and the
Kurds don't want it and won't allow it. They want us out of their near abroad as
well. And how we've been positioning ourselves vis-a-vis the Arab Spring is
making our other allies in the area very nervous too. I honestly hope I'm wrong
about what is likely to happen in Iraq after U.S. forces draw down the rest of
the way -- but I think that the events of the last several years make that
unlikely.

Adam L. Silverman is the culture and foreign language advisor at the U.S.
Army War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily
reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or Daisuke
Matsuzaka.

The surge's 'secret weapon': Lessons of interagency high-value targeting teams

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on March 25, 2011.

There's a good new study out of interagency high value target teams and the
role they played in Iraq in 2007. Secret
Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation, by
Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing, argues that the interagency targeting teams
are neither well understood nor much liked inside the national security
establishment. It also is one of the most interesting monographs I've read in
some time.

The study's core conclusion is that, in Iraq in 2007, "the interagency teams
used to target enemy clandestine networks were a major, even indispensable,
catalyst for success" (6) Even so, the authors note, the bureaucracies in
Washington were not much interested in supporting them. "Cajoling parent
organizations for support was a major preoccupation of senior leaders in Iraq."
(58)

The most compelling part of the study is the discussion of interviews with
former members of the high-value targeting teams about what worked and why. Some
highlights:

--The single greatest variable of success was "access to the most senior
decision makers...because it allowed the interagency teams to bypass multiple
layers of mid level approval and obtain cooperation that otherwise would not
have been forthcoming " (40)

--Middle management at the home headquarters and agencies of team members
proved to be an impediment to information sharing, which was not the case with
top management. The way to get around this, the study says, was to recruit
personnel with enough seniority and experience to enjoy direct access to top
level officials.    

--Smaller teams generally worked better than large ones. "Team members we
interviewed ...agreed that smaller teams, usually 8 to 15 people, were more
effective and allowed greater cohesion and trust."

--The safer the area in which a team was based, the more pronounced
bureaucratic differences became, with the Green Zone being the obvious example
of a bad environment in which the sense of a common purpose was undermined.

--Teams that tried to operate "virtually" were far less effective than those
that were physically co-located, eating and living together.

--One area that required constant attention resulted from the different view
points of SOF and intelligence analysts. "There was a constant tension between
the desire of the intelligence organizations to develop sources and targets and
the desire of ... operators to take out targets even at the expense of
compromising sources." (45)

--The SOF general overseeing the joint targeting teams found that in order to
get cooperation from CIA, FBI and other officials, SOF culture had to change to
become more transparent. "SOF Task Force personnel were directed to set the
example by being first to give more information. They were told to ‘share until
it hurts.' As one commander explained it, ‘If you are sharing information to the
degree where you think, "Holy cow, I am going to go to jail," then you are in
the right area of sharing.' The point was to build trust, and
information-sharing was the icebreaker." (46)

--The leadership of the teams was hand-picked by the SOF general. He knew
that the team leaders had only limited authority over their team members and so
could not order, but only ask, their members to do things, so he chose officers
he thought were hyper active Type As who could pull back to Type B as needed.

It took several years for the teams to become effective, but "By 2007, the
interagency high-value target teams were a high-volume, awe-inspiring machine
that had to be carefully directed." (50) As it happened, there was a new top
American commander who came, Gen. Petraeus, who embraced the teams and used them
effectively.

Unfortunately, they conclude, once the crisis passed, the bureaucracies back
in Washington who were contributing to the teams began to lose interest in
supporting them. They also began to re-assert their own priorities. "By 2008,
other departments and agencies, particularly one unidentified intelligence
agency, began pulling back people and cooperation, believing information-sharing
and collaboration had gone too far." (54)    

It reminds me of something I once read about the British defense against the
Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, that the real trick was not radar but
the organization that was able to combine radar, radio and aircraft to get the
right planes to the right places at the right times, and keep doing it for
months.

Why India is so half-hearted about the U.S. rebalance towards Asia

By Joseph Singh

Best Defense
diplomatic desk

The U.S. may be seeking an unconditional partner in its
effort to rebalance towards Asia, but it shouldn't hedge its bets on India. "We
want strategic autonomy. We don't want to be identified with U.S. policy in
Asia, even if we secretly like it," Ambassador T. P. Sreenivasan, retired
Indian diplomat and former Permanent Representative for India at the United
Nations, said at an August 9 event hosted by the Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies. 

Sreenivasan painted a complicated picture of U.S.-India
relationships, mired by domestic political pandering, a history of distrust
between the two countries, and a concern that a firm commitment to the American
rebalancing effort will further aggravate tensions in a rapidly changing Asian
strategic landscape. 

Despite these challenges, however, U.S.-India cooperation is
closer than ever. Indeed, as Sreenivasan sees it, the rebalancing effort has
incentivized a more accommodating U.S. approach toward India. In 2010,
President Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to endorse permanent
membership for India on the U.N. Security Council. He also reversed previous U.S.
policy opposing India's application to join the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation economic forum. The U.S.-India strategic dialogue, launched in
2011, included a host of agreements on a wide range of issues including
collaborative endeavors in higher education and clean energy to increased
cooperation on cyber security. And earlier this year, the Defense
Strategic guidance specifically acknowledged that a "long-term strategic
partnership" with India is vital if the U.S. is to achieve its goals in East
Asia. 

To be sure, there are concrete reasons for India to support
the U.S. rebalancing. Its relationship with China is handicapped by a host of
intractable issues, including a disputed border between the two countries,
increasingly close Sino-Pakistani relations, and Chinese access to India's
Himalayan water supply, which the government fears it could one day divert.

But ultimately, U.S. policymakers believe that an
increasingly muscular China will most magnify tensions in the congested
maritime landscape. A U.S. naval and air presence would be India's best parry
against a China that could use its growing military prowess to resolve regional
schisms -- or so American policymakers have tried to convince their Indian
counterparts. U.S. strategy, as laid out in the guidance, is to draw India
into a regional alliance to hedge against China through gradually increasing
military cooperation, beginning with humanitarian missions, and then
progressing towards high-profile operations, such as naval special warfare
exercises. Strong intergovernmental and interagency cooperation, intelligence
sharing and collaborative efforts in weapons development will herald new and
historic strength in partnership, according the guidance. 

No doubt, military cooperation between the two countries is
at an
all time high. Yet there are reasons to question that the Indians that the
Indians will translate this increased cooperation into concrete strategic
alignment. For one, India remains skeptical that the U.S. would actually defend
core Indian interests in the face of Chinese aggression.  It sees U.S. involvement in the region as
fundamentally self-serving, with the transactional arrangement between the U.S.
and Pakistan constituting the case-in-point. Indeed, the rebalancing will do
little to assuage Indian concerns about growing Sino-Pakistani cooperation.
Instead, India believes its foremost interest is in retaining its "strategic
autonomy" to retain the capacity to respond to potential threats on its own
terms. But as a recent
CSIS report notes, "Rather than being guided by an overarching national
security strategy or strategic planning documents, these decisions are usually
made on a case-by-case basis."

Second, India fears that the U.S. move away from the Middle
East will result in sparse resources for Afghanistan and counterterrorism
efforts writ-large. India has already poured billions of dollars into reconstruction
and development aid in Afghanistan, and has committed to training Afghan
security forces as the U.S. drawdown continues. A rushed withdrawal or scant
deployment of residual forces could leave the country unprepared to provide for
its own security and serve to reignite insurgencies, spark civil war and close
a crucial gateway for trade in Central Asia. If the Indians are preoccupied
with guaranteeing stability in their own backyard, they will be unable to look
eastwards.

Finally, increased U.S.-India defense cooperation is
complicated by India's close
defense relationship with Russia. India, which is the world's leader in
defense technology imports, purchases over three quarters of its military
technology from Russia. Recent efforts to increase U.S.-Indian defense
cooperation haven't been successful, the most notable example being India's
decision to deny American firms a
$12 billion contract for fighter jets. Thus, bold policy pronouncements
relaxing export barriers on U.S. defense technology, for example, while
potentially fruitful for long-term cooperation, will be unlikely to unravel
Russian industry's grasp on the Indian defense apparatus. 

At the moment, it seems the Indian government's insistence
on strategic autonomy may be concealing what is more likely a state of policy paralysis.
On the one hand, India is concerned by increased Chinese assertiveness in the
region, but also fears that throwing its military heft behind U.S. rebalancing
efforts will induce further economic and military instability and hurt
relations with Asian countries that feel Chinese growth is benign. Until India
reasons that these latter risks are outweighed by the threat posed by Chinese
regional hegemony, its strategic calculus is unlikely to change.

Libya: You want clarity? Here it is

While
Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to
re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally
ran on March 22, 2011.

Everybody's going all wobbly over Libya, except those who never
liked the idea in the first place. Tom's advice: Calm down. We have done what
we set out to do in Libya. We kicked the door down, and with radars and SAM
sites degraded, have made it possible for lesser air forces to patrol the skies
over Qaddafi.

We should now say, OK, we have created the conditions, time
for you all to have the courage of your convictions. The goal now for the
United States, I think, is a negative one: To not be conducting a no-fly zone
over Libya 5 years or even 5 months from now. If the French and Italians want
to park the good ships Charles de Gaulle and Garibaldi off the Libyan coast,
good. And if the Arab states want to maintain an air cap over Benghazi, fine. Step right up, fellas.

As for the American military, let's knock off the muttering
in the ranks about clear goals and exit strategies. Fellas, you need to
understand this is not a football game but a soccer match. For the last 10
years, our generals have talked about the need to become adaptable, to live
with ambiguity. Well, this is it. The international consensus changes every
day, so our operations need to change with it. Such is the nature of war, as
Clausewitz reminds us. Better Obama's cautious ambiguity than Bush's false
clarity. Going into Iraq, scooping up the WMD, and getting out by September
2003 -- now that was a nice clear plan. And a dangerously foolish one, too. The
clearer we are now about command and control, rules of engagement and other
organizational aspects of the intervention, the harder it will be to pass if
off. Better they do it in their own way than we make it so they can only do it
our way.

What we need now is good, candid, hard-hitting discussions
between our military leaders and their civilian overseers. Because war changes
the reality of the situation every day, it is essential for the operational, or
campaign, level of war to be connected to the political level. That is the
purpose of strategy, and of those free and frank discussions.

The narrowness of Obama's national security team is making me nervous

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on March 14, 2011.

The more I study President Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War, the more nervous I get about the Obama Administration.

I am still thinking this through, but when I read the history of LBJ and Vietnam, I see him looking at the world through congressional glasses. He seems to thinks that Hanoi is like the opposition in the Senate, something to be cajoled and manipulated. He does not realize he is fighting a limited war but that his Vietnamese enemy is not, and that the Communist leadership really thinks and lives outside his known world. They are not into "signals."

I don't think President Obama is excessively congressional in his outlook. But I fear Vice President Biden is. What's more, they've compounded the error by stocking the White House staff with like-minded people, such as a national security advisor who was a lobbyist and a deputy national security advisor who was a Hill staffer. That comes on top of a president, a vice president and a secretary of State who all came directly from the Senate. That is a very narrow, very peculiar range of experience to bring to the task of dealing with the world out there, especially as Congress has been unusually weak in national security over the last 15 years, to the point that if often has been irrelevant to the discussion. I can't think of a national security team with a background as narrow as this one. Why put on blinders voluntarily? Whatever happened to the "Team of Rivals" concept? How about mixing in some academic knowledge, military experience, journalistic savvy, or business acumen? And if they are so good on the politics of it, which is the one thing they should be, how could they screw up Guantanamo so badly? And why have they left a dysfunctional team in place in Afghanistan?

In addition, Hill staffers who move into the executive branch tend to worry me a bit. I remember covering Les Aspin as a defense secretary and being surprised at how little he really knew about how the military operated, especially beyond the Pentagon. I think former Hill people often focus too much on Congress, and sometimes defer to it in a way that I suspect is inconsistent with the Founding Fathers' intent in creating an adversarial system of competing branches of government. In addition, I suspect that some former Hill staffers retain the habit of excessive deference to the boss, when sometimes the job for the head of an executive agency is privately telling the boss he is wrong before he goes public with it. Exhibit A is George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who gave his president too much of what that president wanted and too little of what he needed.

Most of all, the congressional mentality sees little danger in inaction. On Capitol Hill, there's always the next term. That's not the case in foreign policy, where opportunities slip away never to return. Lost time is not found again. I think Obama handled Egypt well, but he didn't have to do much there except speak well, which he does consistently. On Libya, though, dithering is dangerous. If you wait for an international consensus to emerge, it probably won't. I am not saying we should do a no-fly zone. I am saying there are many other steps we could take, as I have written aboutbefore. 

If we have a foreign policy disaster on Obama's watch, I think historians will zero in on the dangerous lack of diversity in the backgrounds and viewpoints of his key national security advisors. I wonder how Samantha Power, the former journalist who is the NSC's director for multilateral affairs and human rights, stands it.

So, while I haven't turned in my Obama fan card yet, I am not sure I am gonna renew it.