Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 184

Reuters: Obama beats Romney with vets

"If
the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as
seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population," reports
Margot Roosevelt of Reuters.

I have to say this surprised me. Reuters says veterans
report being tired of our wars, are angry about the foolishness of invading
Iraq, and worried by the situation with Iran. One says he likes how Obama
handled Libya.

On the other hand, 37 percent of vets asked said they
disapprove of the way Obama has handled the presidency, vs. just 27 who approve,
and everyone else up in the air. So the poll numbers leave me a bit confused.

Mitt Romney is a Republican
version of John Kerry, I think -- a rich politician from Massachusetts who doesn't
really know who he is but (as James Carville has put it), was born on third base
and thinks he hit a triple.

Dempsey may be smart, but he's wrong, because the next war can't be predicted

By Jörg Muth

Best Defense department of allied counsel

I have to agree with my historian colleague Robert
Goldich that General
Dempsey's remarks contain more bad news than good news. Between his lines lies excuses for further cuts in the budget and the emphasis on
networking and good relations with the allies appears to be wishful
thinking rather than an actual reliable cornerstone for a strategy or force structure.

Historically no component of any policy or strategy is as
unreliable as an ally or former friend. In the 1930s the best partner of the U.S.
Army were the German Armed Forces. There was an officer exchange program in
place and until 1940 (!) all German military schools were open for U.S. officers
to visit or attend. The Americans saw the new German medium tank paraded in
front of them and the new top secret heavy howitzer. Finally, the U.S. assistant
military attaché rode with the German tanks into Poland.

Your current partner might be your future enemy or just
refuse to aid you in your next predicament. Military strategy and the structure
of force cannot reliably be based on networking and allies. The U.S. Armed Forces
need to plan to go alone if necessary and have adequate forces to do so. The
current planning moves in the wrong direction. It is again based more on gadgets and
technology and less on numbers and soldiers with rifles in their hands.

Recommended reading for all military planners would be Ralph
Peters' book War
in 2020 (especially
intriguing because the year is mentioned in Dempsey's remarks). The novel
describes a downsized U.S. Army which is super-professional, networked, and has an
enormous technological advantage over its enemies. For a variety of reasons
this small but gadget-heavy army sustains catastrophic casualties and thus
becomes nearly nonoperational as a result. With terrible costs -- human, monetary,
and ethical -- it is built up and set back on track to defeat its enemies on a
conventional battlefield as well as a in a guerrilla war. Sound familiar? Look back in U.S. military history, just minus the gadgets. You don't want to do
that again, do you?

Future wars and future enemies cannot be predicted. Too
often in the past the U.S. army was focused on the wrong opponent and had
doctrines laid out for the wrong kind of war. An army does not need an exact
vision of a future war -- there are too many variables. Because of that an army
needs to stay flexible -- first in mind, and second in force structure. And it
needs the numbers and quality to maintain both in any conflict.

Jörg
Muth, PhD, is a historian and an expert on the U.S. Army, past and present.
He is the author of Command
Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces,
1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II. The book was placed by the Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond T.
Odierno, on his professional reading list.

Slightly 'steamed,' Gen. Scales explains his criticism of the military's war colleges

By Maj. Gen. Robert Scales (USA,
Ret.)

Best Defense guest respondent

Tom Ricks' blog
post about me has generated a great deal of interest in my panel
discussion at FPRI two weeks ago. Naval War College professor Joan
Johnson-Freese was the principal speaker at this event. One blogger in
particular, Tom Nichols, wrote
a lengthy piece about Johnson-Freese and my responses. I'd like to answer both
in some detail. 

First, to answer some of Tom's points. In his blog he
quoted me as saying:

-These days, "the Army War
College is a great place for pre-retirement training." 

Response: By this I meant that the age of students has increased
steadily since I was commandant. As I wrote in my piece "Too
Busy to Learn," the age has gone up to 44 and many combat arms officer
students are colonels. If war college graduates are to contribute to the
national policy at the strategic level they should be younger. No reason we
can't even bring exceptional LTCs in as student BEFORE they command. 

-"The Army War College fell of the
cliff when it was subordinated to a trainer" (that is, to the Army's Training
and Doctrine Command, which, he [Scales] indicated, doesn't understand
education). 

Response: I don't mean that TRADOC doesn't understand education.
I mean that TRADOC's sweet spot and center of excellence is at the operational,
not strategic level of war. Remember AirLand
Battle, Starry's crown jewel, was an operational doctrine and the manual
that started it was 100-5, again, an operational level document. In fact in my
recommended reforms for the college and army staffs I suggested transferring
the excellence of Leavenworth up to the college; things such as the CTC as a
framework for strategic gaming, CSI as a model for CMH to do relevant and
timely history, and SAMS as a model for assigning graduates to the force at the
strategic level of war. 

-The Army should bring
together its history offices, its military research entities, and related
offshoots, and put them all under the Army War College commandant, in part so
that research and teaching can inform each other. Right now, he [Scales] said,
research and education are "ripped apart." 

Response: This is a bit of inside baseball. But what I meant is
that, unlike Leavenworth's hold on operational art, the responsibility for
studying and research of strategy is all over the map in the Army. Root had it
right in 1903. We have much to do to get strategic studies right in the Army
and I suspect the other services as well. But whatever the solution
strategy must be centered in the institution intended for this purpose: the War
College. 

-For officers, "the object
of the PME system is to be selected but don't go." 

Response: This is a longstanding problem in all service PME and
has gotten worse during the war. Too many officers don't want to take time out
of operational service to go to school but they realize that selection for the college is a boarded cut that must be made to make flag. Therefore making
selection is what's important. I recommended that officers should in fact
compete for attendance not selection and that graduation from the college
should be the ultimate determinate of future success.

What follows are some excerpts from Nichols' blog and my
responses:

-Nichols:
PME schools need to be administered by
fewer people, and those administrators should actually have backgrounds in
academic teaching, research, and administration, instead of just being retired
senior military officers. (As Joan put it, schools for pilots are run by
pilots, aren't they?) Gen. Scales objected that the heads of the PME schools
should all be top officers, but that wasn't Johnson-Freese's point; she was
talking about the "herd," as she put it, of deans, assistant deans, associate
deans, associate assistant deans, and on and on, not the actual presidents or
commandants. 

Response: I agree that the senior administrative slots at all
colleges should be trimmed. But the most senior leadership should be in uniform
or recently retired (president, dean, etc.). The challenge is to find senior
officers who are qualified to lead and administer a senior military
college.  

Nichols: Perhaps most
important, Johnson-Freese called for independent analysis of the PME system,
perhaps by a panel appointed by Congress (but certainly not a paid contractor
aiming to please the DoD, since we've tried that already and it was an
expensive failure). No more "self-studies." As Joan put it: Who has an
incentive to find problems with their own organization in a self-study?

Response: I've done this for Congress several times to the
extent that I was put in the QDR to advocate for PME reform. Congress has held
hearings about PME and I participated in all of them directly or indirectly.
But since it doesn't involve programs or end strength Congress isn't
interested. Worse, there is no real advocate for PME in congress now. 

-Nichols: Still, General
Scales, as Ricks says, stole the show, at least for a bit, but in part that was
because much of what he said was either puzzling or contradictory.

Some of his comments, of course,
reflected attitudes civilian faculty always encounter: his loathing of the word
"tenure," for example (which Joan pointed out that military officers, do, in fact,
have), his suggestion that PME could be fixed by raising all the commandants
and presidents to three stars (why?), having them all report to an Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Education (more bureaucracy?) and replacing most of
the professors with military officers -- teaching history? -- were all pretty
striking, but they had little to do with the actual recommendations in the Orbis article. 

Response: Here's what I said: Tenure is not good for a military
college. In fact one of the few really effective personnel instruments for PME
is Title 10 selection and hiring. This system gives the college leadership full
authority to hire and fire. (I don't know what Joan means when she alleges that
military officers have tenure. They do not). I said that commandants should be
3 stars but of course should report to their respective service chiefs. (Note
that the AWC patch has 3 stars on it inferring that it was considered a full
bureau of the Army general staff when founded by the Root reforms in 1903). And
of course the NDU president should report to the CJCS rather than the J7, who
does training not education. The OSD Chief Learning Officer idea has been
around a long time. Ike agreed with it. It's in our QDR report. The issue is
that today PME and manpower management are in conflict. The ASD P and R is in
the business of filling the ranks not taking officers out of service to go to
school. This natural tension is shared by corporations as well. Hence the idea
of a secretariat position that advocates for learning. More bureaucracy? Not
really. Take the slots for education in P&R and shift them to the CLO. I
didn't say that all faculty should be military and they can't be by any means
due to statute. I meant that colleges should have a balance of retired military
(who are credentialed), civilians and active military. The art in getting this
right is to find the right people and keep them... 

-Nichols: I was
particularly surprised, as I think many people were, to hear Scales downplay
the distorting role of student evaluations in the PME system, which has been
noted by many PME faculty, including in a blistering memoir by former National
War College professor Howard Wiarda. Scales, incredibly, claimed that
student evaluations never mattered at all in faculty retention decisions at the
Army War College while he was there -- and boy, that'll be a surprise to the
faculty in Carlisle -- and that he doesn't even remember if the War College even
bothered to do them while he was there. He added that in any case he didn't
remember ever seeing any of them (a remarkable thing to say in itself, since
they are required by both the Pentagon and academic accreditors). 

He twice asked one of the Army War
College civilian faculty in the audience about whether these evals were really
an issue back in Carlisle, and both times, the faculty member he singled out
had to demur and say: well, actually, sir, yes indeed, the civilians pretty
much *do* fear those evaluations. 

This led to Scales essentially
disposing of the issue by saying that judgments about faculty quality were just
"subjective" anyway -- a point with which Joan took severe issue (as did many of
us) as something no one would ever say about evaluations in any other
profession. 

Response: This one really steamed me. Truth be told I do not
remember anyone giving me a faculty recommendation based on student popularity.
I asked Craig Nation who was on my faculty and he couldn't remember either but
he did infer that the college is using these student evaluations now. I did say
faculty quality is subjective and I stand by that statement. Selecting future
leaders in the Army is subjective as well. And as a brigade commander I
wouldn't do an OER unless I watched the officer in action. Same for faculty
hiring. That's why I visited every seminar, every semester every year. And I
participated in discussions. Seems to me that good faculty liked it and poor
faculty disliked it. It's about leadership not student forms. 

Nichols: I don't mean to
make it all sound more conflictual than it was; I think Johnson-Freese and
Scales agreed about 80 percent of everything else, and particularly about the need for
more rigor in military education, and especially about the way the military
uses the words "training" and "education" interchangeably, which nearly everyone
agreed is a terrible mistake. 

But Ricks is right that Scales
basically came in with his phaser set to "incinerate" and proceeded to fire at
will. I might be biased from working with Joan on these issues over the years,
but I thought she laid out a pretty methodical set of problems and solutions,
and it didn't seem like Gen. Scales was much interested in engaging them. I
think that in itself was, in microcosm, an illustration of the problems faced
in the reform of military education. 

Response: No incineration intended. Everything I said in my
remarks I've written before in AFJ
and Proceedings. My big objection to
Joan's remarks was her inference that war colleges should focus on making the
civilian faculty happy by putting them in charge by offering tenure, academic
freedom and the keys to hiring and firing. No, this is the ARMY War College and
its mission is to prepare Army officers to perform at the strategic level of
war. Of course there are many similarities to the Wilson and Kennedy Schools,
but at the end of the day the mission of the college is to serve the services.
I agree with Joan that reforms are needed but I disagree that the problem rests
overwhelmingly with a failure to listen to civilian faculty. Truth is that
during my tenure faculty excellence was shared in equal measure between retired
military, civilians and retired military. Oh, by the way I've never seen a
civilian faculty CV fail to list in bold letters that the professor had taught,
lectured or attended a war college.

MG (Ret) Bob Scales is a former commandant of the Army War
College. He spent 18 of his 35 years of service in military education. He
earned his PhD in history from Duke University and was president of Walden
University after retirement. He is presently CEO of Colgen LLC, a consulting
firm that focuses on strategic leadership and land power reform.

The evils of rotation (III): Where have I heard this line before? Maybe ... Saigon?

More
on rotations:

In a
recent Leavenworth interview, Col.
John Harding Jr. commented that, "The
thing that we found in Iraq over the years was that we were fighting this war
one year at a time."

In
his last tour, in 2011, he noted, "at the
general officer, colonel and even lieutenant colonel rank, you saw those that
were just over there because they knew they had to be there and deployed, but
they didn't have anything invested in Iraq."

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: And the winners are…

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Competition

In last week's post
I sent a dispatch from Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas where I attended the
DoD's K-9 Trials -- a dog team competition that hadn't been hosted there since
9/11.

The competition itself spanned three long days. Each day every
team had to complete a series of new tasks, which stretched from detaining
unruly and aggressive "suspects" they encountered on a patrol, to multiple
cordon searches for explosives (or for the narcotics dogs, drugs), and finally to
the Iron Dog challenge. The competition overall was designed to push each team
to the edge, forcing them to dig into all areas of their handling-skills and to
call up the full-length of their training. But without question the Iron Dog --
a six-mile course outfitted with a series of obstacles, including a dog carry
up and down a 100 meter incline, a mud crawl, a dash through a low-rising
river, a few walls to hup over with the canines, and a human carry (basically a
fireman's dummy that I heard weighed upwards of 150 lbs) -- was the most arduous
leg of the trial. On this day contestants, who were judged by noted
experts in the field on a scale of points, were rated as they had been days
prior, but the Iron Dog was without a doubt, a race to the finish.

I stationed myself at the first obstacle -- the dog carry.
The weight and size of these dogs varies greatly. The first German shepherd to
get hauled up the hill weighed 98 pounds. (That's a lot of weight to begin
with, but not all of these dogs enjoy getting a bumpy ride on their handlers'
shoulders and struggled the whole way up, and all the way back down.) A few
teams opted out of this obstacle altogether, taking the ten-minute penalty
rather than enduring the climb. But more than just a remarkable feat to watch,
this part of the challenge is a great example of how important a skill carrying
a dog actually is when these teams are downrange for real. Handlers do not leave their dogs behind; they must
be able to bear the weight of their four-legged partners. One of the lessons a
handler learns in preparing to deploy is that when he or she is assigned a
mission they must convey to the mission's commander one unrelenting and crucial
thing: Where I go, my dog goes.

It was not a remarkably cool week in San Antonio, and the
Texas sun, which drove temperatures in the mid-90s, coupled with oppressive
humidity, made for challenging conditions for not only handlers but for the
dogs as well. There were veterinary techs stationed around the course checking
the dogs to make sure their temperatures hadn't climbed to a dangerous level
and on hand to douse their backs with cool water. While no dogs were seriously
injured, I did hear that a couple weren't able to withstand the heat and
couldn't complete the final run.

But in the end, most of the teams crossed the finish line at
a run -- hot, tired, bruised and blistered, but deservedly proud, with their
dogs trotting in fine form beside them.  

Following is a small gallery of photos from the event along
with the official list of winners. Special thanks to photographer Christy Bormann for generously
sharing these images with us, and who also happened to be great company during
the competition. [[BREAK]]

Official
Results from the 2012 DoD K-9 Trials

Patrol: 3rd Place: SFC
Dorsey; 2nd Place: Sgt. Guajardo; 1st Place: MA1 Brooks



Explosive Detection: 3rd Place: Sgt.
Palmer; 2nd Place: TSgt Brown; 1st Place: MA1
Brooks



Drug
Detection: 3rd Place: SPC Ventura; 2nd Place: SPC Cartwright; 1st Place: Sgt
Helm



Iron Dog:
3rd Place: SSgt. Handy; 2nd Place: TSgt
Kitts; 1st Place: Sgt.
Guajardo



Top Dog:
MA1 Brooks

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

Dempsey's not so smart -- and he may be wrong about the utility of mass formations

By Robert Goldich

Best Defense guest
respondent

I've gone in the other direction regarding Gen.
Dempsey.

A bit to my surprise, given how much he was praised before he became the
CSA by people who I really respect and admire, I am becoming increasingly
disenchanted with him.  

I see official remarks and documents that seem to me to be nothing more
than a stringing together of contemporary pop phrases in military-strategic
affairs, dispensing conventional wisdom. There seems to me to be a lack
of intellectual rigor in his published statements of policy. I found his
first CJCS reading list to be amazingly puerile, filled with that most
suspicious of categories of written material, best sellers on general
booklists. And while as an historian I'm suspicious of excessively
precise historical analogies, I'm also concerned that excessive soft-peddling
of rising Chinese truculence and expansionist probing will encourage a Chinese
Sparta to indeed threaten us Americo-Athenians. Gen. Dempsey should recall
that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, or
at least willing to try in times of crisis.

Unlike Tom,
I'm very concerned that by incessant remarks about how "mass formations" won't
be necessary. We'll play into the hands of adversaries who decide that they
aren't equally dubious about their utility.  

Perhaps we can modify the alleged
statement of Trotsky to read: "You may not be interested in conventional war,
but conventional war may be interested in you." I don't think we're as
bad off as the British Army in 1914, because we have a very large reserve force
by comparison and a much greater diffusion of fairly recent military service
within the general male population (and, of course, a growing number of younger
women). But there's no question that for a prolonged conventional
conflict beyond a certain unpredictable level, an AVF is always going to have
less trained mobilization potential than  larger draft-fed force that
generates a lot of recently-trained individual reservists. There are
always tradeoffs.

And this doesn't even touch on industrial mobilization. As far as I
can tell, nobody but nobody in officialdom is thinking about this (if they are,
they're quiet about it). Trained manpower can always be generated a lot faster
than the material to equip it. If we had had to put the very large ground
forces we had in action from mid-1944 to mid-1945 into the field in 1942 and
even 1943, as well as being much more poorly trained, they would have had a lot
of inferior weapons.  

Robert L. Goldich retired from the Congressional
Research Service in 2005 as its senior military
manpower analyst. Currently
he is consulting and drafting an A-1 book on the history of conscription.

Pakistani PM blames entire world for failing to get bin Laden for so long

"I think it's an
intelligence failure from all over the world," Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani told
a London newspaper.

But -- it happened in your backyard,
dude. Not in Argentina's nor indeed in ours.  

'The Typist': MacArthur in Tokyo

Awhile back, one of you recommended this novel
about the American occupation of Japan. I read it and sort of enjoyed it. I
found it kind of slight. My favorite was the opening vignette, titled 'The Atom
Bowl,' about a football game in Hiroshima.

It did make me think there is a
good prequel for John Adams to write to 'Nixon in China,' titled 'MacArthur
in Toyko.' Maybe a trilogy, with the third part yet to come. Maybe McCain in
Hanoi'?

JCS chairman on the future of the U.S. military: Fewer mass formations, more partnering, more sharing of intel and tech

A bit to my surprise, I am becoming a fan of the relatively
new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. This guy
has his head screwed on right.

I was particularly struck by a talk he gave recently
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. It was
remarkably coherent and quite concrete, with little of the mush and weasel
phrases that often characterize strategic discussions in Washington.

He began by throwing overboard the Powell doctrine:
"We found that model didn't fit real well toward the end of the '90s, as you
recall, because the challenges that faced us -- first and foremost, they weren't
existential necessarily. So you couldn't
galvanize the entire nation behind a particular challenge."

Following on that thought, he indicated that conventional
mass forces were not the way to go in future conflicts, especially those
against non-state actors. We need to allow ourselves, he said, "to confront
these networked, decentralized foes with something other than huge formations
of soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines."

He would put a particular emphasis on working with partners.
In particular, he said, U.S. intelligence organizations need to get with that
program. In intelligence and related areas such as technology transfer, he
said, we continue to follow "Cold War processes that have not yet adapted
themselves to what we really need to be doing today. And in order to deliver the strategy that
we've all agreed is the right strategy for the country, we've got to get after
those processes."

A man after my own heart, he also gave a big shoutout to Thucydides.
"Athenian fear of a rising Sparta that made war inevitable. Well, I think that
one of my jobs as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and as an adviser to our
senior leaders is to help avoid a "Thucydides Trap." We don't want the fear of that emerging China
to make war inevitable.  So Thucydides --
we're going to avoid 'Thucydides' Trap.'"

That's a pretty good blueprint, I think.

A farewell to Lugar: The continuing erosion of the national security middle

The defeat
of Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican Party primary for Senate last
night tells me two things. First, it says that the national security centrist
position continues to erode. Losing Lugar reminds me of the defeat a few years
back of Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the patron saint of professional military
education. Second, it makes me wonder if the great Midwest is turning away from
internationalism and back to its pre-World War II isolationism.

I remember someone trying to sell
to me the materialistic view that the Midwest only turned away from
isolationism when grain exports became a big deal after World War II,
especially as we elbowed Argentina out of the European market. At the time I
didn't buy it. But I wonder -- now that grain is a corporate enterprise, employing
far fewer individuals, maybe Midwesterners don't see any reason to engage in
the world.  

Here's another, harsher take.