Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 209

Discussing the battle against veteran suicides: Harrell and Berglass respond

By Margaret C.
Harrell and Nancy Berglass


Best Defense guest respondents

The blogosphere discussion
regarding our policy brief, Losing the Battle, has been
rich and provocative. Of the criticisms sent our way, there are some with which
we disagree, some with which we concur, and some about which we have little
evidence but take interest. One among the latter is the assertion that were the
VA to incentivize healing and not reduce or eliminate veteran
benefits when patients improve, more veterans would heal from wounds both
physical and invisible, and fewer would reach levels of desperation deep enough
to lead to suicide. We know of no empirical data to support that idea, but it's
a compelling hypothesis that is gaining traction in policy circles and merits
serious investigation.

There are also a few
criticisms that, we assert, are misguided in elemental ways. Two concerns have
been voiced to which we take particular exception, but that we also think raise
the opportunity for some clarity in this discussion.

First is
the assertion that our work puts the burden of solving military and veteran
suicide solely on the shoulders of government agencies. We see how the writer
may have perceived this to be the case. However, the truth is that Center for a New American Security's (CNAS) role
as a research partner to the White House's Joining Forces initiative -- under
which Losing the Battle was written
-- was largely seeded by co-author Nancy Berglass's influential policy brief America's
Duty. The premise of America's
Duty is that civilian stakeholders, and specifically community-based
organizations, are critical to "winning the battle." With all due respect to
the blogger, CNAS has played and continues to play a leadership role not only
in framing the discussion about the role of community players in the veterans space,
but in defining best practices for such involvement. Not only do we understand
and appreciate the role of communities in reintegrating veterans, but the
Joining Forces initiative under which the suicide brief was authored is based
on the very fundamental assumption that federal agencies and communities alike
must "join forces" in order that our communities, including service members,
veterans, families, remain well.

That said, we believe that while communities have a central
role to play in the reintegration of veterans, DOD and VA do bear primary
responsibility for the wellness of their charges; underresourced community
organizations cannot be effective in addressing the entirety of the problem. We
agree that it is a moral imperative that the 99 percent who have not been to war
should care for the 1 percent who protect our nation. However, moral imperatives do
not play well in the face of reality and constrained resources; and neither DOD
nor VA has invested meaningfully in helping resource community organizations so
that they can do their share to meet this "moral obligation."

Second, we'd like to
address the assertion that our only motivation for writing the piece was "to
ensure that men and women would keep enlisting." The notion is an unfortunate
misinterpretation; both authors have dedicated significant aspects of their
careers (and personal lives) toward understanding and -- where possible and
appropriate -- developing actionable solutions that emphasize and proactively
address the human concerns of war. The writer of that comment, however, hit upon
something we do think worthy of further exploration. How does a think tank
dedicated specifically to examining issues from a national security perspective
contribute to discussions about the human experience of war? A decade of unprecedented warfare has taken
an intense toll on our families, friends, and communities, but CNAS, the platform from which we produce
our work, is a national security think tank. Our job is to view the issues
through that particular lens. Our primary audience includes leaders who change
our nation's course, and they are largely concerned with costs and benefits. Unlike
advocacy organizations -- whose missions allow for more impassioned and morally based
arguments -- CNAS elicits positive results through research and analyses that are in
greatest part informed by data and interpreted via the political reality of
the cost-benefit equation. Thus, the best approach to policy change is rarely a
focus on the personal, even if those stories are tragic and personally
meaningful. That it is our job to discuss these issues in the context of how
they affect our nation's security does not mean we do not care about the human
aspect. But our primary goal is to elicit change. To be effective, we must know
our audience. In that sense, Losing the
Battle was meant to raise discussion of how we address a serious human
condition of war, in light of the far more material emphasis on the allocation
of resources in tough times. This paper was developed to give DOD and VA
actionable recommendations to reduce suicide among their constituents -- and it
did just that.

Our policy brief had four stated objectives: to examine the
phenomenon of suicide within the U.S. military community, including both
frequency and relatedness to service; to outline steps taken by the DOD, the
armed services, and the VA to reduce suicide; to identify obstacles to reducing suicides further (we never
asserted, as several bloggers seemed to think we should have, that we had all
the answers); and to make recommendations to address those obstacles. We think
we did those four things well. To those who criticize this framework as faulty
for not offering "solutions," we counter that were the issue that simple, we
would have. But look at the blog posts so far; how actionable and constructive
are recommendations like "treat veterans like people" or "Do not equate playing high school football or
other sports with the camaraderie of military service"? The recommendations
we've made are not framed as complete solutions to the suicide problem, but
they are actionable measures that can mitigate it.

To all of those who
have commented, we are grateful for the discussion; fostering dialogue about
the issues that affect service members, veterans, and military families is a
core objective of the Joining
Forces initiative under which the paper was developed. As a nation, we are
unlikely to reach consensus about many of the tough issues pertaining to war,
but such open discussion about them is critical to strengthening the role of
civilian actors as stakeholders in veterans' wellness.

Margaret C. Harrell is a senior fellow
and the director of the Joining Forces initiative at the Center for a New
American Security (CNAS). Nancy Berglass is a nonresident senior fellow at
CNAS, the director of the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund (IADIF) of
the California Community Foundation, and the principal of Berglass Community
Investment Consulting.

4 surprises about the life of Paul Nitze

One surprise to me
about Paul
Nitze is that he says in his memoirs that Henry Kissinger once threatened
to sue him for libel for a review he wrote of Kissinger's book on Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy. 

Another revelation
was that Nitze played a major role in developing Aspen as a ski resort.

A third (from
Nicholas Thompson's dual
biography of Nitze and George Kennan) was that when Nitze was nominated to
be secretary of the Navy, a young congressman named Donald Rumsfeld challenged
the move on the grounds that Nitze was a fuzzy-thinking one-worlder, which is
odd considering Nitze's current rep as an über-hawk.

Perhaps the
biggest surprise, also in the Thompson book, was that Nitze's uncle was
involved in a German plot to sabotage New York Harbor during World War I.

Reflections on Vietnam, 1963-64: Trying to talk to Gen. Westmoreland about COIN

By LTG John H. Cushman, U.S. Army (Retired)

Best Defense guest columnist

On 1 July 1963, a lieutenant
colonel on my first tour in Vietnam, I became senior advisor to the commander
of the 21st Infantry Division of the South Vietnamese Army. His headquarters,
and my MAAG Advisory Team 51, were located at Bac Lieu in Ba Xuyen province,
deep in Vietnam's Delta. As
commander of the 42d Division Tactical Area, Colonel Bui Huu Nhon was
responsible for the security of Vietnam's four southernmost provinces. A
million and a half people lived there, south of the Mekong River, in a region
about the size of Connecticut. Except for the U Minh forest on its west
coast the land was mostly rice paddies interlaced by canals.

In 1958 the Viet Minh had begun
a campaign, including the intimidation of villagers and the assassination of
officials, to take control of this territory. The Government of Vietnam had countered
with the strategic hamlet program and a buildup of its own forces. My
predecessor and lifetime friend, LTC Jonathan F. Ladd, informed me that the
strategic hamlet program had tried to do too much too fast. It was in disarray.
At mid-1963 the Viet Cong controlled the majority of the countryside.
Government control was limited at best to the outskirts of district towns.

In the next nine months our
advisory team provided advice and assistance to the commander of the 21st
Division and his four province chiefs as they created and put into place for
the first time in Vietnam an effective program of pacification in the
countryside. The
program was a cooperative American-Vietnamese civil-military effort. It was
mounted on the Vietnamese side by the division commander and his staff and by
his province chiefs with help from GVN agencies in Saigon. On the American side
its civil component was assisted by a US foreign service officer newly
graduated from Brown University, assigned to the US Aid mission in Saigon and
stationed in Soc Trang, Ba Xuyen province's capital. His name was Richard Holbrooke.

The chief planner on our
advisory team was my deputy senior advisor, LTC Robert M. Montague. Bob
Montague was a brilliant officer and a great organizer, first in his 1947 class
at West Point. He teamed up with Dick Holbrooke and with a grizzled
English-speaking major from the division staff, Major Yi, to develop an
approach that would be used throughout the 21st Division area.

Major Yi told us about an idea
used by the French in Algeria, known as the "oil spot" concept. It called for a
gradual, step-by-step, process that would start from a small populated area, such
as one of our hamlets under government control, and would move outward with an
organized effort, bringing government control to hamlets one at a time.

The first requirement was to
provide security to the hamlet population. At the same time there must be a
civil effort to provide good government and win the hearts and minds of the
people.

The 21st Division with US
advisors' help created its own "clear and hold" approach. Joint planners
developed a civil-military organization that along with a standard operating
method would be put into place by the district chief in every district in the
21st Division zone.

The district chief would expand
an oil spot with a military-civil pacification force. The military part was a
civil guard company and two or three self-defense corps platoons under the chief's direct command. Their mission
would be to provide local security for the hamlet and the operations of the
pacification effort. [[BREAK]]

The pacification effort was the
task of an organization under an ARVN captain who was called the district
chief's "deputy in the field." This deputy would work with and assist the village
chief and village council in the targeted area who would in turn direct the
affairs of the hamlets and their hamlet militia. These latter were farmers by
day and fighters by night.

The deputy in the field ran the
pacification group; it was the key. It was under a competent militia officer or
a village action cadreman especially selected for his leadership qualities and his
love of country. He and his cadre would supervise hamlet action teams, whose
members had expertise in fields like agriculture, medicine, education, and
animal husbandry -- all supported by government agencies at district or above.

These teams were to go into the target
hamlet, determine the people's needs, assist in agricultural and economic
development, establish intelligence nets, detect and eliminate Viet Cong
infrastructure, act as a link between higher governmental agencies and the
people, and eventually restore the legitimate government in the hamlet.

Coups in Saigon in November and
January brought in the new division commander, Colonel Cao Hao Hon. He
supported the pacification concept with enthusiasm. He decided to run a test of
the organization and to establish a division training school for pacification
groups. The first trained pacification group began operating in early April
1964. By the end of May a pacification group was operating in each province.

On June 8, 1964, a newspaper
piece appeared in the Washington Star, with Scripps-Howard dateline and
the byline of Jim Lucas. He had visited the district town of O Min in Phong
Dinh province:

Nguyen Van Dieu, 45, the father of six
children ranging from six to 21 in
age, is a little old to be enlisting in a war. But Mr. Dieu has joined a
village action team as part of Vietnam's 'oil spot" pacification program. He
was a member of the first class to complete the three week course... Nguyen Van
Dieu will lead a hamlet action team. It will follow the civil guard after it
has driven the Viet Cong from a hamlet and will attempt to reestablish local
government... Until now, he says, the hamlets have had no protection. If the
pacification plan works out, they will...

I had been describing our effort
In letters that I wrote my wife. An excerpt:

February 9:

"The troubles over here are very
basic and we are going to try to solve them in a very simple, basic, way - by
starting where the people are - in the small hamlets...

"Protection is important -
perhaps the first prerequisite. The Viet Cong come in and terrorize the hamlet
officials - threaten them with assassination if they continue to serve. Then
they do kill them - or enough of them to make their threats believable. One
fine village chief was murdered four days ago - a very good man whom we had
been relying on to recruit more militia in his area. The communist movement
feeds on this sort of tactic - combined with promises of a better life to the
peasants and a way of achieving the fanaticism and dedication among its cadres
and workers that we do not yet understand.

"Our hope is to offer the farmer
hope in two ways - protection, and a better deal for the little guy. The
national government is not yet sure what its program will be. We intend to
start a program of our own down here - write it into our lesson plans that we
are preparing for the courses we will conduct and deliver on the program in our
execution of the oil spot concept - and hope that the government will allow us
to do so. It is not an easy thing to do. But we have a lot of Americans backing
us and I think it will develop into something very good if we are lucky. I say
again - there is no other way in my opinion for us to pacify this country."

In late January 1964 Lieutenant
General William C. Westmoreland arrived in-country as presumptive COMUSMACV. A
month later I wrote my wife:

February 24:

"Today we will have a visit by
General Westmoreland. We will explain our plan to him, and hope that he will
agree with what we say we need and will carry the message back to Saigon so
that we can get what we need."

February 25:

"We impressed General Westmoreland with the
quality of our plan and the thinking that went into it.
Whether he will be able to gain approval of his financial features - we don't know..."

I did not tell my wife that
General Westmoreland gave the impression that his mind was on something else. I
was not sure that he really understood the significance of what we were trying
to do. He may have heard the words, but I didn't believe he heard the music.

On March 16 I wrote my wife:
"One thing about this situation is the lack of communication between Saigon and
the field. Before I leave I will ask for an audience with General Westmoreland
and tell him that and a few other concrete suggestions as to how we can do this
job better over here. I am sure he will be delighted to hear all about it!"

I called General Westmoreland's office to say that I wanted to talk to
him before leaving Vietnam. He told me that his schedule was busy, but
invited me to accompany him as he drove to Tan Son Nhut to welcome visiting
National War College students.

In the car, letting General
Westmoreland know of my belief that we had come up with the solution to
pacification, I said that if he could find the right thirteen senior advisers
for the four ARVN corps and the nine ARVN divisions, and that if they put into
place something like what we were now doing in the 21st Division, he could win
back the countryside.

I told General Westmoreland that
the thirteen advisors should each be assigned for a two year tour and that they
should have their families stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines if they
desired.

I said all of this expecting
that General Westmoreland might well ask me to extend my own tour. I knew that
I was taking that chance. I had not prepared my reply. It was a reckless move.

He listened and that was it.
Passivity. No reaction, no questions, no exploration, no curiosity. I went home
two weeks later.

We in the 21st ARVN Division
advisory team had shown General Westmoreland the right approach to regaining
control of South Vietnam's countryside. He did not grasp it. His next four years
were search and destroy.

I see that as a profound moment
in the story of Vietnam.

Colonel Hon and my successor as
division senior advisor continued with the program. Bob Montague kept me
informed by mail until he was transferred to Saigon to work on pacification, as
was Dick Holbrooke. In 1965 Bob went to the Army War College and after that to work
under Bob Komer in the Johnson White House. There he was joined by Dick
Holbrooke to develop with Komer the program known as CORDS. In 1967 CORDS was
put into place in Vietnam under Komer as Deputy COMUSMACV with rank as
ambassador. Bob Montague was his assistant. It was essentially a Cadillac
version of our Model T 21st Division effort, years earlier. Vietnam's president
Nguyen Van Thieu appointed Cao Hao Hon, who had been our division commander and
was now a major general, to work alongside Ambassador Komer as chief of his
government's nationwide pacification effort.

By the time CORDS really got
rolling, after Tet 1968, it was too late.

General Cushman commanded the 101st Airborne Division, the
Army Combined Arms Center, and the ROK/US field army defending Korea's Western
Sector. He served three tours in Vietnam.

Described
in more detail in my article "Pacification Concepts Developed in the Field by
the 21st RVN Division," published in ARMY magazine March 1966. See also pp 108-117 of Harry
Maurer?s Strange Ground; Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975, An Oral History, Henry Holt & Co, 1989

Obama and defense

I got nothing new to say about Thursday's pronouncements,
except this thought: These
cuts are the beginning, not the end.

Also, President Obama's favorite metaphor, "the tide of war
is receding," is more pessimistic than it seems. Nothing is more predictable
than shortly after the tide stops going out, it starts coming back in. 

 

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: So Long, Farewell, Lucky

By
Rebecca Frankel

Chief Canine Correspondent

It
was almost exactly this time last year when we met Lucky,
a MWD who lived up to his name having survived two bouts with cancer and who, at
ten years old,  was just gearing up for his fourth deployment. Sadly, while on
tour in Kyrgyzstan last August, just five days before their deployment was set
to end, Lucky's handler noticed another tumor growing on the dog's hind leg. It
would be the third and final round for the seasoned war dog, who died stateside
in September. As Maj. Garon Shelton put
it, cancer was the 'only battle he would lose.'"

In
a memorial service held yesterday
at Fairchild AFB in Spokane, Washington, soldiers paid tribute to their squad's
fallen canine, a Belgian Malinois whose bright eyes and floppy ears belied the
dog's tougher, working side. Those paying their respects remember Lucky as cool
under fire, incredibly fast, and ultimately fearless. "'He could take
anyone down to the ground,' Major Shelton said during the service."

Lucky
came to Fairchild AFB in 2003 and during his many years of service he worked
with a total nine handlers, served 5 tours (which included Iraq and
Afghanistan), worked on a number of details for govt. officials and was "called
out on 31 emergency events locally, including bomb threats." His claim to
bomb-sniffing fame came while deployed in Afghanistan in 2008, when he uncovered
some C-4 planted on a generator.

The
Spokesman-Review, a local Spokane publication, covered Lucky's story over
the years. In addition to some great photos there's also a 2010 video
of Lucky running drills with his then handler, Staff Sgt. Gerald Martinez
-- the pair had just completed a tour in Iraq. It seems there was more than one
handler on base hoping to adopt Lucky when he was ready to retire from service.
"He's just a big kid," Staff Sgt. Martinez said at the time, grinning
sheepishly. "He's just a big goof ball."   

Another fine line on 'I Love Bagram'

"2533.
Because when I found a copy of the Constitution, I gave it to my commander. He
put it in his desk and said not to talk about it ever again."

Thoughts provoked by seeing a photo of an Israeli general working with his troops

By Jeff Williams

Best Defense bureau of general officer
behaviors

Sometime in the last year in
either Haaretz or the Jerusalem Post -- I forget which -- I
found an article about Gen.
Benny Gantz the current Chief of Staff of the IDF. Apparently, it is
Gantz's custom to take a few days and join a section of the 35th Bgd.
(Para's) and do tactical field exercises with them as a common soldier. This to me is a very impressive act on his part. Gantz, going back to his
roots and observing what is happening with troop training, weapons and
equipment is much better that a staff report on the same subject. Troops
also get the feeling that he is in touch with them.

Actually,
I can't imagine an American General officer of the Army or even the more hands-on
Marines doing the same thing. The only comparison I have to Gantz's
proclivity to see for himself is Adm. Olsen, who retired last year as Commander
of USSOCOM, a very gritty SEAL to be sure. While unlike Gantz he did not
join a SEAL platoon doing exercises on San Clemente Island, he did frequently
showed up at Coronado to join in doing free weights, long distance runs, and
more gruelingly, swim out to the Point Loma buoy and back with the teams. Even at age 59 it was hard to beat him in the water.

I
don't know if Gantz is representative of Israeli brass (some of them seem to
have a pretty developed paunch) but it should be standard procedure for the IDF
and every first rate fighting force. MG Julian
Thompson, who commanded 3rd Commando Bgd. in the Falklands, was
well known for putting on a ruck and grabbing a rifle and joining his Marines
for a speed march over Woodbury Common, not in command but as one of the
men. 

And
that's my thought for the day.

The way the world would end

I see why in 1961 the secret British government codeword
to signal an imminent Soviet nuclear attack was "orangeade."
It seems such a sad word to go out on.

General 'Mike' O'Daniel: One soldier's arc all the way from WWI to the Korean War

I'm not a fan of Gen. Mark W. Clark,
but I did like this passage, in an oral history interview he gave to Columbia
University in 1971, about Gen. John "Mike" O'Daniel-of whom I had never heard:

Hell, O'Daniel had been my second
lieutenant on my infantry company in World War I when I was wounded and he took
over, won the Distinguished Service Cross. I pinned his first star on him at
Salerno, his second star on him at Anzio, and his third star on him in Korea.

O'Daniel also served in Vietnam
briefly in the mid-1950s. Kind of reminds me of Sam
Damon. I recently spoke at an old soldiers' home and was struck by the
number of three-war vets there, including a 96-year-old retired general who had
worked for, among others, MacArthur and Ridgway. I gave a laudatory talk about
Ridgway and even then, the old general said, I underestimated him. 

My Christmas break reading: the Jews, baseball, gnostics, the great Abigail Adams--and her wanker great-grandson

I have been deep into a rewrite of the manuscript of my
book about American generalship since 1939, and am finding it exhausting, with
lots of heavy mental lifting. I have been writing as long as I can every day,
and sleeping an extra hour or two every night.

So instead of my usual evening fare of military history,
I've been trying to read further afield. I whipped through Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews, which though
almost 600 pages, was a fast and enjoyable read. Even here I found an
interesting military tidbit, that Alexander the Great had on his staff an
interpreter of dreams (at least, according to Freud).  It made me imagine the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs shouting one morning, "Hey, get me the J-55 -- I need my dream last night
interpreted." Then for some reason I picked up Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels but it left me cold.
I skimmed it, which I rarely do. 

At my wife's recommendation, I also read an enjoyable,
Franzen-like novel, The Art of Fielding.

My favorite book of the break was The Letters
of John and Abigail Adams, which a historian recommended to me back in
November. It was terrific. He's kind of a stodgy whiner, but she is a lively
personality-and a better writer than he. She's a perceptive observer: "Burgoyne
is a better poet than soldier." She also was well ahead of her husband on the
rights of women and blacks. This book also turned out to have a military
connection: The introduction says that John Adams was effectively the first
American secretary of defense, in his capacity as chairman of the Board of War.

I liked the Adams book so much that I finally picked up The Education of
Henry Adams, which I have had sitting around for decades. All I can say
is: What a big wanker. His grandfather and great-grandfather were both
presidents. Henry must have been the Fredo of the Adams
family. Still, I enjoyed the first half of the book for its portrayal of life
in Boston and Washington before the Civil War. Henry Adams comes off like a
minor league version of Oscar Wilde: "The Secretary of State exists only to
recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore." He is
especially good in describing the pomposity of U.S. Senators, and the political
effects of the Grant presidency. I hated the second half -- if you pick it up, I'd
recommend stopping after Chapter 20, which covers 1871.

I came away thinking The
Education of Henry Adams is actually a huge, circular self defense for his
sitting out the Civil War, the event of his era, and indeed so far the most
important event in American history. (He was in his twenties during the war,
but spent it in London as an aide to his father, a diplomat.) Mostly he ignores
the Civil War. Sometimes he seems to mock those who fought, as in a reference
to looking out his window in Washington decades after the war and seeing an
doddering, half-forgotten officer: "There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines
at Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!" Yet by the end of
the book, oddly enough, he seems to give himself the mantle of a veteran,
referring to himself at one point as, "an old Civil War private soldier in
diplomacy." That's quite a construction.