Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 227

If you had just jumped against the Germans, what book would you want?

If you were Maj.
Gen. James Gavin, sleeping on the ground in Holland after Operation
Market Garden, it would be this, as described in a letter to his daughter
written in October 1944:

Would you ask Mommie
to get me a copy of the latest volume of 'Lee's
Lieutenants' by Douglas Southall Freeman, I believe it is Vol. III and has
just been published. It may be difficult to obtain. I'll send you a check along
when I can get to my checkbook if you will let me know the cost.

(From: P. 137,
Barbara Gavin Fauntleroy, The General and
His Daughter: The Wartime Letters of General James M. Gavin to His Daughter
Barbara.)

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Hats off to a brave handler and her 'Obama'

[image error]

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense chief canine correspondent



An army sergeant in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps was awarded
an MBE -- Member of the Order of the British Empire -- last week for her work
as a dog handler detecting bombs in Helmand Provence and for, "Always keeping a
cool head and demonstrating unwavering bravery. ... Wilson pushed herself and
her dog to the limits of endurance ... saving countless lives in the
process."



But Wilson was quick to share the commendation with her partner, a
two-and-a-half-year-old Belgian Malanois, saying that their work is a
"team effort."



Her dog's name? Obama.



Curiously, neither Wilson or the British press (at least the articles I read) made no
comment on the dog's name or his namesake. They did, however, report that
Wilson remembered Cpl. Liam Tasker, a handler, who was shot and killed in
Afghanistan last spring. He and his working dog Theo, who died shortly
thereafter, had set the record for uncovering IEDs.  



Wilson, who did three tours in Afghanistan doing the intense and dangerous work
of roadside detection, remarked that Tasker's death left an impact on her team.
"We are all very close, so what happened affected everyone. Unfortunately jobs
have to be done and we all had to carry on."



Obama -- the bomb-sniffing dog -- is still on tour in Afghanistan. Wilson, who
already has three other dogs at home, is considering adopting her former
partner when his service is over.

A tip of the WDotW hat to Mr. David Rothkopf

Auftrag-static (IX): Shamir's work on mission command strikes me as thin

The other day, one
of my guest columnists was citing
Eitan Shamir's Transforming Command: The pursuit of mission
command in the U.S., British and Israeli armies. Checking on line, I
saw that the title of Shamir's chapter 4 is, "Inspired by corporate practices:
American army command traditions." That intrigued me, because it relates to
some themes of the book I'm currently writing. I also was impressed that he got
Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a smart guy, to write a foreword.

So I was pretty
disappointed when I read the chapter to find that its title wasn't supported by
much evidence. Or any, really. Shamir writes that, "Army Chief of Staff General
George C. Marshall patterned army organization on the ideas of American
business." (p. 61). That surprised me because I have read thousands of pages of
interviews and documents Marshall produced and corporate practice almost never
comes up.

The second warning
sign: Shamir footnotes that sentence about Marshall to Gabriel and Savage's Crisis
in Command, which is not a very good book, and is about Vietnam, not
about World War II or George Marshall. So I went down to the Vietnam section of
my basement library and found on page 18 of Gabriel and Savage's book one
paragraph of unsupported assertions about Marshall relying on business practice
in World War II. No evidence, no footnotes, no nothing.

That is a mighty
thin reed on which to build a chapter. And, like the clock
striking 13, it makes me wonder what else Shamir has gotten wrong. So later
in the book when I read his statement that, "The British Army has probably been
most successful in implementing mission
command," (P. 197) I was skeptical. I wondered what his evidence was, or
whether this was simply more unsupported assertion.  

Based on what I have
read so far, I was surprised to see Stanford University Press published the
book. I mean, Stanford is supposed to be pretty good, no? Best university west
of UC Berkeley?

That Iraq crime novel, chapter two

The second chapter of that
novel could begin thusly:

BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: Security sources said today that an
intelligence official was killed following an armed attack against him west of
the capital, Baghdad.

The source told Aswat al-Iraq that the assassins
crossed his road and shot him dead.

No other details were given.

Maybe one of those Scandinavian mystery novelists my wife is
always reading needs to move to Baghdad.

Powell reviews Cheney: You undercut George Bush more than I ever did, bub

This is from awhile ago -- Face
the Nation on Aug. 28 -- but I've wanted just to put it on the record
here.

They
are cheap shots. I mean, several of the ones he tosses at me -- you know, he
takes great credit for my resignation in 2004. Well, President Bush and I had
always agreed that I would leave at the end of 2004. After the election, I
stayed on for three more months because I wanted to and because there were some
conferences that I wanted to attend and because Dr. Rice hadn't been confirmed.
So there's no news there.

He
says that I went out of my way not to present by positions to the president but
to take them outside of the administration. That's nonsense. The president
knows that I told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mr. Cheney
may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush, if you break it, you
own it; and you have got to understand that, if we have to go to war in Iraq,
that we have to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase. And
Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after
the fall of Baghdad. And I persuaded the president to take the case to the
United Nations to see if it could be solved without war. And if it couldn't be
solved without war, we would have people aligned with us.

Mr.
Cheney went out immediately after the president made that decision and uncut it
by giving two speeches to two veterans' groups that essentially said he didn't
believe it would work. That's not the way you support a president.

Then
he also says that, you know, I was not supportive of the president's positions.
Well, who went to the United Nations and, regrettably, with a lot of false
information? It was me. That wasn't Mr. Cheney. I supported the president. I
support the president's decisions. I gave the president my best advice.

Is it time to just shut down the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers?

In my nearly two decades of covering the defense
establishment, I never really looked at the Army Corps of Engineers. It is like
a separate entity.

I regretted that neglect when I read a story
in this morning's Washington Post
about a scheme involving two Corps program managers and people at a private
company that prosecutors are calling "one of the most brazen bribery and
corruption schemes in the history of federal contracting." The Post continues: "they bought millions of
dollars worth of BMWs, Rolex and Cartier watches, flat-screen televisions,
first-class airline tickets and investment properties across the globe."

The story ended on this dismaying note: "Press officers of
the Corps of Engineers did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment."
The Corps needs to make dealing with this scandal priority no. 1 -- especially
in a budget environment where any entity that is not clearly contributing
greatly faces the prospect of being eliminated.

Justice William Douglas once suggested that every federal
agency should have a sunset provision -- that is, it ceases to exist after,
say, 10 years, unless the Congress renewed it. I think it may be time to
re-visit that thought.   

Meanwhile, in other legal proceedings, a Coast Guard chief
warrant officer was convicted of, among other things, malingering.
I can't remember seeing that charged before.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey: Learn to see down two levels but command down just one

Gen. Barry McCaffrey was one of our
most articulate generals. Here is a comment from his Army War College oral
history:

... battalion command taught
me ... to see down two levels but command down one. When I was a battalion
commander I always knew where my platoons were. I knew everything about what
platoons were doing -- but I was only about giving orders to company
commanders -- period. At every level [of] the chain of command, if you command
down one level and see down two levels, it is not very hard to be effective.

(P. 43)

I can't stand by and watch Peter Van Buren's account of the PRTs stand

By Stephen Donnelly

Best Defense guest respondent

I was surprised to see Foreign
Policy providing so high a soapbox
for Peter
Van Buren, a State Department Foreign Service Officer who, by his own
admission, "meant
well" during his brief and unproductive jaunt as an Embedded Provincial
Reconstruction Team (EPRT) leader in Iraq in 2009, but, according to him,
caused more damage there than most any other individual I have ever heard of or
witnessed.

Two articles and a blog spotlight in just a few days.

Obviously, Van Buren never got the drift of PRTs, a decisive
and controversial 2007 effort by the State Department's Office of Provincial
Affairs' Director Ambassador Henry Clarke to break through the failed
bureaucracy of top-down US colonial administration programs by forcing
decision-making out to committed civilian reconstruction staff on the ground.
Clarke always knew that the Achilles Heel of PRTs was poor assignments of
unqualified individuals, and that the only defense against the Peter van Burens
was to have many PRTs so that the failures did not pull down the whole mission.

The real Iraq PRT story is not pretty, fraught with
bureaucratic snafus, and involved much waste, fraud, abuse, and war wreckage:
the best laid plans of mice and men seldom survive a powerful IED, regardless
of bravery or the best of intentions! But it is not the story that Peter van
Buren tells which inaccurately paints a very bad light on the entire Foreign
Service, with which he seems very dissatisfied.

The military, as Clarke often explained, had a "do it now"
attitude that compelled each new brigade to launch one "quick hit" program
after another to have Iraqis pick up the trash. The PRTs had to break that mold
by focusing on the real problem: the Iraqis had no system, post-2003, to pick
up their own trash. PRTs had to work across the rotational boundary with Iraqi
counterparties, down to the local and provincial levels, to create permanent
solutions for Iraqis' technical, resource, and administrative problems or we
would be locked in Iraq forever. The real conflict was the damaging one between
U.S. bureaucracy (the Embassy and agencies) and the field, where localized
Iraqi solutions had to be found and nourished.

Clarke's effort echoed the philosophy of former CPA
colleague Ronald Neumann, later serving as Afghan ambassador, that endless
weekly metrics reporting -- the underpinning of Rumsfeld's managerial
philosophy -- always showed the same problems, never solved anything, and
absent a new approach, the only way to improve the metrics was to manipulate
them or fudge the reports.

Of course, none of that was PC for Rumsfeld who, according
to reports from a May 8, 2008 New York
Times article, opined:

The guy who replaced him
is just terrible Neuman. I mean he's a career foreign service officer. He ought
to be running a museum somewhere. That's also off the record. No, he ought to
be assistant to the guy...I wouldn't hire the guy to push a wheelbarrow.

[[BREAK]]

Rumsfeld added that the Pentagon working with other agencies
"was like an elephant talking to a
monkey," acknowledging who really controlled the power, staffing, and
budgets in Iraq, and the interagency conflicts that defined much of the Iraq
and Afghan debacles.

Even within State, the PRT concept in 2007 directly
confronted policy planning director Steven D. Krasner, a leading advocate for
nation-building, who deeply believed in the concept of almost permanent
American neo-colonialism as the answer to failed states -- the implicit CPA
strategy outlined in a January 2008 Harvard
International Review article "Fixing Failed
States: A Cure Worse Than the Disease?"

Bringing in actual senior civilian advisors -- the opposite
of the tried and true "whole of government" strategy where any federal employee
(IRS? DHS?) could do a better job running a water treatment plant
reconstruction than any experienced public works engineer -- threatened to open
even more institutional Pandora's Boxes, especially if many of those civilians
saw local power grabs and influence pressures as something routine to their
field (the regular problem to be overcome) rather than a unique proof of the
corruption and incompetence of the colonials in need of intense and enduring U.S.
oversight.

Decentralization of decision-making, and civilian
engagement, the big "new ideas," were the essential keys to Provincial
Reconstruction Teams -- getting civilians (not military or federal assignees)
out on the ground to figure out what was wrong, what was needed, and to deliver
it with the mantra of empowering Iraqis to do for themselves, and to rapidly
work the U.S. (military) out of the job of micro-managing Iraq from Washington
through short-term assignees.

The risks of decentralization, especially with civilians at
the tip of the spear in dangerous, unstable and corrupt environments, were
many, as Clarke knew from Bosnia, but the only way to escape the devil we
already knew.

One risk that Clarke was abundantly aware of in 2007 was
that a provincial team leader, always an FSO, might be inept, whether at the
larger provincial level teams, as many as one hundred experts, security and
support staff, or in the smaller embedded teams of a dozen or less attached to
military units. That risk, of course, could only be offset by the number of
PRTs, one in each province, their independence of action, and the rolling
assignment process -- if one failed, it would not affect the others, and could
be corrected by reassignment. More important for Clarke and his team, now back
from Baghdad to oversee recruiting, was the selection process -- getting the
right team leaders and advisors on the ground in 2008 was the key, while
recognizing that some might not actually pan out, and some civilians, arriving
in the chaos, might just go home (as some did).

Although not nearly as entertaining as Peter Van Buren's
work, another book, Career
Diplomacy : Life and Work in the US Foreign Service, by Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie, seriously explains
the challenges faced by Clarke and the State Department in responding to the
Iraq Mission, not the least of which was the sheer lack of numbers in the State
Department (trained or untrained) to fill the postings needed without harm to
State's overall operating environment.

In December 2007, I sat with the Ambassador and a group of
former OPA/IRMO staff in the coffee shop at Foggy Bottom prior to my deployment
as senior civilian urban planning adviser. They made no bones about the mess I
would find on the ground there, or the need to steel myself from the "this is
the way we do it" bunch. If our small handful of senior civilian advisors was
not fired up every day with serious problem-solving (much of the problems being
U.S. ones) then it was time to move to the next batch of problems.

It was the same message he had given earlier to my whole
Foreign Service Institute class in Alexandria, but with details for my
particular assignment to join Steven Buckler's PRT operating out of Tikrit. The
class was a dozen foreign service officers (all volunteers and no "weenies"
amongst them), and a dozen senior civilians, all past military age but fit and
ready to do what was necessary. None of our civilian cohort were federal
employees, except one from the Federal Highway Administration, the only woman
in our 50-something group, and a very brave and particularly competent one
bound for the Department of Transportation's advisory mission to Iraq's
transportation ministry. The rest of us were all headed for Northern Iraq,
giving up the safety of civilian jobs as city managers, transportation
engineers, utility managers, and planners in Miami Beach, Anaheim, Kansas City,
and Crofton, Maryland for the dangerous sojourn to Mosul, Diyala, Kirkuk, and
Tikrit without any knowledge about hardship pay premiums or vacation schedules.

All of us had called the State Department in May 2007, as
the war raged, after a Washington Post
article indicating that Ambassador Crocker (and Clarke as we learned later)
needed experienced senior civilians; the job descriptions and pay scales were
created afterwards. Surprisingly from this national pool, many of us knew or knew
of each other, having worked as senior staff on related projects or for the
same employers. My transportation engineering partner and I knew each other's
portfolio, and Diyala's senior economic advisor (our provincial next door
neighbor for this assignment) and I had shared the same Gulf Coast employer at
different periods of time.

As explained by Clarke, the plan was simple: each of us had
been picked because of our backgrounds and skills as problem-solvers in our
respective fields; they would teach us what we needed to deploy, and deliver us
to the problems. From there, we were on our own, so learn as much as you can
before hand.

The FSI course we attended in fall 2007 brought the likes of
Phebe Marr, author of The
Modern History of Iraq, who provided us with detailed briefings on the
past and present of what we needed to know (and the obvious reading assignment
of her book), a military colonel to teach us (mostly veterans) the basics of
current military structure, protocol and procedures. Two of our group were Arab
speakers, who supplemented our digital and classroom language course (although
mostly with just the idioms and cuss words that make a language real).

Beyond the classroom, we learned the basics of war zone
first aid, and particularly how to use a tourniquet and all the other parts of
the field kits we would later carry on our military movements. The infamous "Crash
and Bang" tactical driving course taught us the fine points of very rough and
dangerous driving, which, in hindsight, made the death spiral landing into
Baghdad Airport seem rather tame afterwards. We also re-familiarized on
weapons, and had demonstrations on IEDs.

As our group set off for Iraq, all of us felt as very
well-briefed and trained as we could be under the chaotic and fast-track
circumstances, although the parallels to disaster movies like Meteor, where a group of drillers are
rapidly assembled and shot into space to emplace a nuclear device on a meteor
threatening Earth, was not lost on any of us.

Our biggest challenge, as was predicted, was to get out of
Embassy Baghdad and up to our duty stations. Transportation out of Baghdad for
the uninitiated was not easy, as Embassy staff held one mandatory "briefing"
after another as different departments could tell us little but implored us to
report what we found to them (not the guy in the stove-piped office next door).

Finally arriving at the sprawling Contingency Operating Base
Speicher in the first week of January 2008, the lack of resources, planning,
and preparedness was obvious, offset only by the warmth and competence of
Salah-Ad-Din PRT Team Leader Steven Buckler who, like Clarke, was one of the
best examples of the foreign service, dedicated diplomats with a strength in
people, and vast experience in many diverse (and sometime very challenging)
places. The huge Salah-Ad Din PRT, more than one hundred, was hobbled by the
lack of secure movement opportunities, a few brief movements a week to nearby
Tikrit, which Steve had off-set by establishing a series of satellite PRT
offices in Bayji, Balad, Sammara and Tuz Khormatu to get out as far as the
security bubble would let him. Thus, the motto of the PRT: "Outside the Wire."

Mine and my transportation planning advisor partner's
assignment was to rapidly survey public and private infrastructure, and come up
with big fixes as fast as possible that would synchronize U.S. and Iraqi
efforts in and around Salah-Ad-Din (Northern Iraq). A nebulous assignment to do
whatever it is we could to make a difference. Within a week, we had hooked up
with the Division Headquarters staff (MND-North) co-located with us at COB
Speicher. They had their own helicopter and military ground movement resources,
so we could travel the length and breadth of the North without PRT constraints.
Steve also got us in to meet the senior provincial officials, and out to the
satellites to get as far as we could as fast as we could get there.

MND-North, under then-Major General Mark Hertling, made two
engineering battalions available -- if something needed fixing, they could do
some heavy lifting -- essential in provinces where every desk, pencil and
bulldozer had been looted or destroyed. The entire military team joined in our
effort of mapping and assessing the North -- every road and bridge, every
poultry house, oil refining facility, concrete plant, and electrical facility,
and followed that up with lots of unexpected expertises from electrical
engineers to physicists (yes, really important when you are reconstructing
power grids and oil refineries).

By April 2008, General Hertling, using "helicopter
diplomacy" (flying Iraqi ministers up to broken bridges on the Tigris to meet
with local officials at the problem site) had cajoled Iraq's Transportation
Ministry to prioritize reopening the bridges across the Tigris, first with
temporary bridges, then with permanent ones at Mosul, Bayji and Diyala, all
with Iraqi military security bases and checkpoints. Agricultural tracking had
identified each component of the "value chain" assets and stages, from grain
supplies to poultry hatcheries, with priorities on reopening local production
(chickens and tomatoes) instead of big processing plants (the old US way).
Iraqis needed very little training to simply start doing what they used to do,
once bridges and roads reopened access to markets.

Behind us through the PRT was a wealth of expertise; the
second in command of the CDC was our health team lead (there to study cholera
responses firsthand); his military civil affairs equivalent was a skilled
senior hospital administrator from Minneapolis (essential to reopening Salah Ad
Din's hospital system); USDA sent one of its best dry-land farming experts to
help restart small animal and rangeland activities; and, most prominent from
our group was a bold and tireless Rule of Law team, led by a senior Federal
Prosecutor who worked closely with threatened Iraqi judges to, with great
danger to all involved, establish a fledgling system of courts and prisons.

By June 2008, all hands at the PRT, and many at MND-North
were involved in drought relief and cholera prevention with the Iraqi
ministers, provincial staff and medical professionals. Our friend from the Federal
Highway Administration (based in Baghdad) worked closely with the Iraqi
Transportation Ministry and MND-North's military and mapping resources to
develop a complete national transportation map with every bridge mapped,
assessed and identified (by code number) using the Iraqi highway coding
systems.

The Embassy provided no centralized meeting or information
sharing processes between the civilian advisors -- every communication was one
way -- but the MNDs took up the slack through regional conferences, and,
because we had all trained together, we had our own informal networks.

The greatest assets in many respects were our "clients," the
Iraqi ministers, provincial officials, and local residents who were active and
engaged at every level. The Minister of Planning needed maps and air photos to
create regional assessments to plan and allocate Iraqi funds; his critical
agency had access to mountains of planning, budgeting and project resources
desperately needed in the North, so we had much to share, plus, he sent nice
thank you letters to Ambassador Crocker for the assets we were able to make
available to him. These kinds of ministerial relationships helped to bridge
Iraqi funding gaps for essential projects for the provinces, from hospitals in
Samarra to housing projects in Tikrit.

Across all of our activities, the biggest stumbling block to
Iraqi self-governance was the lack of basic maps, studies and information to
allow effective management. No two governors had the same maps of the same
provinces, and many in key positions were constrained from travel. Getting
basic resources like Geographic Information Systems (integrated digital mapping
and resource information) was a critical next step which, in real life, needed
to be done on a national level, and through the ministries. It was also part of
our immediate assigned mission.

By July 2008, our Salah Ad Din planning pair shifted to
Baghdad (with support from our PRT and the Embassy) to coordinate the GIS
effort with USAID/RTI, US military terrain specialists (MNC-I at camp Victory),
National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (in Bethesda & Baghdad), and the
Ministry of Planning and Iraqi Mapping Directorate. A basic Iraq-wide GIS
framework was widely distributed to ministries and provinces in October 2008 following
a large GIS conference at Al Rasheed Hotel (Baghdad).

By September 2008, much of our provincial reconstruction
efforts were coming to conclusion (as was our short-term assignment), but
General Hertling brought us down to talk to the Ambassador about the next big
US problem, the Kurdish disputed boundaries for which our mapping and wide
travel throughout the North was important. At that point, our tour was extended
and we were specially assigned to the United Nations Assistance Mission-Iraq's
Disputed Boundary Team to help where we could in that effort.

Certainly, my planning partner and I accomplished a lot
during our temporary assignment, but it was no different than many of our
senior civilian advisor cohort, working throughout the North. Several were in
EPRTs in Diyala and Mosul. They came with the tools, and put them to use. Some
followed the military into Sadr City in June 2008 (not for the fainthearted).

Beyond our cohort, there were truly remarkable bands of
civilians in other PRTs and EPRTs, rebuilding industry, government and
agriculture in Kirkuk and Anbar, and folks out on the very dangerous streets of
small towns across Iraq, side by side with soldiers, doing important work,
wherever and whenever they could.

Throughout, all of us had one mission -- to turn over
control to Iraqis so that we and our military colleagues could go home leaving
a functional, but far from perfect, Iraq behind.

How much did we waste in stupid project funding? I don't
know that I ever wasted a penny, particularly because much of our efforts were
Iraqi funded, or through sharing of already existing resources (mapping,
assessments). Knowing the role and resources of the Iraqi ministries assured us
that money was really not an effective weapon. Behind us was MG Hertling,
notorious for not wasting Commander's Emergency Funds unless there was a
genuine emergency, and with whom we forced through conditions that no US funds
would be used without Iraqi concurrence to accept and sustain the projects
(that one condition killed off a lot of stupid US projects).

How much waste, fraud, and abuse did we see that was not "in
our lane?"

Plenty. One of SIGIR's biggest prosecutions was the US Army
Corps of Engineer's contract manager for Northern Iraq; like some poorly
managed contract management departments in local US counties and school
systems, he never saw a contract he didn't like, and most -- the schools and
clinics that were never completed and not accepted by the Iraqis -- were a
Gordian knot of "pass along" contracts, shoddy construction, and bloated
budgets. Our main focus was on larger Iraq-funded projects (roads, bridges,
treatment plants, etc...), so we were not completely dependent on our Corps staff
as many PRTs were.

In fact, we routinely saw waste, fraud and abuse, fought it
daily, or just avoided it (by Iraq-funded projects). One big battle, for
example, was between State and Corps of Engineers over their competing $25
million dollar multi-year GIS projects; the only way to stop it was to create
your own (as we all did) and give it to the Iraqis.

One we couldn't avoid was a DoS-funded program for 23
schools in Salah Ad Din that the provincial government did not want. These were
the bureaucratic vampires that seemingly could never be killed -- until a very
good new Corps of Engineers officer rotated in and killed it dead in late 2008
after a US contractor showed up to knock down a crowded 12 room schoolhouse in
Samarra to replace it with a 6 classroom one -- nobody in Samarra wanted to
lose classrooms just to accommodate a silly State Department program with no
rhyme, reason or purpose on the ground (the kind Clarke was working to stop).

Like so many things in Iraq, the Corps of Engineers was
disastrous in one year, and excellent in another. Every rotation is a new year
in this game.

As explained by provincial officials, if we ask for a water
tank, the US gives us a fire truck which we can't maintain (Yes, in Tikrit),
and if we want a school, we will build a good one for $300,000 where we want it
and how we want it. If you build it, it will cost $3 million, be of such poor
quality that we cannot maintain it, and it will be in the wrong place. They had
watched us in every year, and knew what to expect.

Oh, I forgot. The stereotype is that the Iraqis, not the United States,
are corrupt and inept. Well, no more so than the U.S. parties who trained and
appointed them.

How many times did all of us see military and PRT alike
working on projects that were little more than "make-work" projects to help
create much-needed income for the many destitute families (and especially the
widows) in need of any humanitarian resources within the appropriate US role
for post-conflict humanitarian relief?

Plenty, and while some of the efforts may look silly on
paper in a very slanted presentation, they made perfect sense if you were there
and understood what was really happening: women's groups, small business
efforts, trash pickup, canal clearing, etc... That was not waste, fraud or abuse
to anyone confronted with those circumstances. None of us, civilian and
military alike, were unaffected by the destitute war widows and once proud
engineers begging for jobs -- any jobs.

The battles for pure waste, fraud and abuse projects were
nasty, routine, and mostly between U.S. agencies. Management of reconstruction
leaves little to be proud of by any U.S. agency (USAID, DoS, or DoD). All the
civilians and military that actually accomplished things did so by the serious
efforts that Ambassador Clarke had explained from the outset.

Ineptitude was not a norm, but it was around, as was
corruption, but so too was bravery and sacrifice. There were some truly
remarkable and competent FSOs in the mold of Clarke and Buckler (10 percent),
regular folks doing the best they could (80 percent), and, as in any
organization or profession, a small group of very questionable ones not
appropriate for these kinds of assignments (10 percent).

It is ridiculous to compare what a dozen carefully selected
civilian troubleshooter experts were involved with or accomplished with the
reconstruction capabilities of an FSO, with no particular training or exposure
to our professional fields. Our role was to either support them or target
through them.

Beyond the PRTs, nothing "we" accomplished could have
happened without countless FSOs, military and Embassy staff handling the
immense bureaucratic tasks and battles needed to keep us active. There were few
big projects "we" succeeded on without Vinnie Azzarelli, ITAO Chief of Staff,
General Hertling, or MG Mark Zamzow (General Petreaus's adjutant) fighting it
through, or, as with our ministry and UN work, Ambassador Crocker not
approving.

PRTs aside, Embassy Baghdad, given the US role in Iraq, was
a huge endeavor with many FSOs in Baghdad doing their actual professional tasks
-- analysis, administration, reporting, diplomacy.

Was all of this hard for everybody? You bet.

Was it a chaotic mess? You bet.

Did security make all of this much more dangerous and
problematic? Absolutely.

One of our senior advisors, Terry Barnich of Chicago, died
in May 2009 in a car bombing, to the great regret of many of us who worked
closely with him.

Many of us, too, owe our lives to the young soldiers who
died or were severely injured making things safe for us and our projects.

Christopher Warren Lotter, 19 years old, from Chester Heights,
PA, was shot on Dec. 31, 2008, while on patrol to inspect one of our water
treatment plant projects in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Tikrit.
I went to Arlington for his service in January 2009, but didn't want to intrude
on his family, or know what to say, so I watched from the hillside. He's the
soldier I carry in my memory as the symbol for so many more. But how do you
explain all of this to his parents if they asked deeper questions?

Sadly, too, many of our Iraqi provincial colleagues were
killed in the March 2011 attack on Tikrit's provincial headquarters. Political
infighting aside, the friendliness, courtesy, and professionalism of these
folks to their US colleagues left many in the PRT with lasting fond memories
and sadness at their losses.

So much bittersweet, So many mixed emotions. So many tears
and smiles. And then you read the reports of Peter van Buren.

It is just incredible.

Stephen Donnelly,
AICP, is a planning consultant in Crofton, Maryland. He served as Senior Urban
Planning Advisor, Iraq, Department of State (2007-2009).

The defense budget implosion (IX): The end of U.S. policy since WWII?

I don't automatically blog about every new report from CNAS,
but I am particularly struck by one
being issued this week about what future defense
budget cuts might be and what their effects might be. Bottom line: They say
that if the cuts go beyond about $550 billion, it will be difficult to carry
out the basic American policy since World War II of being engaged
internationally.

Lotsa people are rattling on these days about defense in an
age of austerity, but the report's authors -- retired Army Lt. Gen. David
Barno, Nora Bensahel, and Travis Sharp -- do a good job of doing more and
showing how the meat will come off the bones. They look at four levels of
budget cuts: About $350 billion, about $500 billion, about $650 billion, and
about $800 billion.

They don't quite say so, but they seem to favor the first
two -- which is significant, because they (at "the Obama Administration's
favorite think tank") are saying they could live with $500 billion in cuts. Go
much deeper than that, they say, and we start creeping toward isolationism.

The report bursts with provocative thoughts and suggestions.
Surprisingly for a study whose lead writer is a retired Army general, it favors
the Air Force and Navy over the Army and Marines. It wants to cut both ground
forces back to their pre-9/11 sizes. In the deeper cut scenarios, it basically
wants the Marines to get out of fixed-wing aviation, both lift and strike. It
also wants the Marines out of tanks, and wants the Army to reduce its number of
tanks, and to move a lot of the heavy Army force into the Reserves. It wants to
radically cut back on buying new weapons, but instead to keep alive R&D
until a new threat emerges.

The report also says we will be focusing less on the Middle
East in the coming years and more on the Asia/Pacific rim.   

I asked Barno about how the report is going down at the
Pentagon. "We did find the Army's reaction a bit more sparky than the other
services'," he said. No word yet on whether they are cutting off his pension.
Barno also said that operationally, the services are joint, but in budgeting,
they have failed to become so.  

Travis Sharp, who reminds me of John Hamre maybe 15 years
ago -- someone who really understands the interaction of budget and strategy --
commented that "the services are in a full defensive crouch" right now.

The Air Force, once again, is leaving the field of strategic discourse to others

Yesterday I mentioned
that I'd heard that the Air Force had decided to close its Strategic Studies Quarterly. Here is a comment on the possible
institutional implications of that decision.

By "Alejandro Estéban Teixeira Castillo"

Best Defense guest PME columnist

In times of relative fiscal austerity, organizations are
likely to focus on their core competencies, those tasks and processes that
define their essence. The American military services have been directed to
reduce their projected budgets substantially over the next decade and they, in
turn, have been determining where funds have been allocated for nonessential
tasks. The USMC, for instance, has determined
that it will cut five of its 88 general officer positions and that these
billets will be those on the Joint Staff.

As the Services prepare for a peacetime operations tempo,
resting, resetting, and renewing their forces for the next conflict, they ought
to devote more resources to thinking
about how to more effectively and efficiently achieve the political goals of
the nation. While certainly commanders' action groups (CAGs), the Service
staffs, and the Joint Staff will focus on vision statements and meeting budget
caps, they will likely rely on the musings of external thinkers to provide
arguments and justifications for their decisions. But where do these ideas come
from?

One of the key venues for stimulating thought and presenting
arguments to the professional community is the professional journals of the
services. The USAF's Air University started this genre when it published its Review in 1947, coinciding with the
founding of the USAF as an independent service. As General
Muir S. Fairchild's memorandum establishing the Review demonstrated, service leaders at the time realized that a
professional journal was essential to shaping the debate about the profession
of arms so as to make room for air-centric thinking. The Naval War College
followed suit in 1948 with its own Review,
perhaps realizing that strategic thought needed to be encouraged at a time when
nuclear weapons and fiscal austerity threatened the service's budget. The U.S.
Army was a latecomer to this genre, having suffered through being downgraded to
a supporting element of national strategy with President Eisenhower's policy of
Massive Retaliation and the indignities of the loss in Vietnam. It began
publishing Parameters in 1971 so as
to help reinvigorate the professionalism of its force and to shape strategic
thinking amongst the defense establishment. In doing so, it adopted a more
strategic tone than either the Air
University Review of the Naval War
College Review, and quickly set the standard for the profession. [[BREAK]]

On its fortieth anniversary, the USAF unceremoniously
cancelled the Air University Review
and its content was redirected toward the tactically- and
operationally-oriented Airpower Journal
(today Air and Space Power Journal). The
faculty of the schools at Air University regretted this decision, as it left
the field of publishing strategic thought to the Army and Navy. This had a
significant effect on strategic discourse within the profession of arms for a
generation -- to the Air Force's detriment.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, airpower demonstrated its
strategic potential in Operation Desert Storm, Operations Northern and Southern
Watch, Operation Deliberate Force, Operation Allied Force, and Operation
Enduring Freedom. In each of these, the USAF carried the primary burden of
achieving the nation's objectives: ejecting Iraq's forces from Kuwait,
deterring Saddam Hussein from massing his forces at the border of his southern
neighbors, and supporting indigenous and irregular ground forces as they seized
territory with an extremely light American ground force footprint in the
Balkans and Afghanistan. This period was the culmination of all of the USAF's
dreams of demonstrating an independent, strategic impact in the service of the
nation's political objectives. Or so it could have argued.

But it did not because it lacked the venue to make its case.
Where were these conflicts analyzed and the case for airpower made?

In Foreign Affairs,
the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations that sets the conventional
wisdom for the foreign policy establishment, Eliot Cohen warned against the
seductive "mystique"
of airpower, with its promise of cheap and easy victory. Robert Pape,
formerly of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, likewise argued that
"the
true worth of airpower" was its ability to support ground forces on the
battlefield. He also made this argument in his 1996 Cornell University Press
book Bombing
to Win.

In International
Security, a publication of MIT Press and the primary academic journal in
the field of strategic studies, analysts such as Steve Biddle argued that the
future of warfare still required closing with the enemy on the ground and that
this was beyond airpower's capabilities. RAND's Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman
argued in "Kosovo
and the Great Airpower Debate" that all components mattered, especially in
Kosovo, and that focusing on only one instrument of military power would skew
the analysis in an era of joint operations. In the same issue, MIT's Barry
Posen argued that
Milosevic's decision calculus was conditioned by the air campaign, but the
proximate cause of his decision to cede the most valuable and sacred part of
Serb sovereign territory was the withdrawal of Russian diplomatic support and
the looming threat that NATO might begin to debate preparations to plan adding
a ground aspect to its coercive campaign within a few month's time.

To its credit, Parameters
did address airpower topics and did publish the work of Air Force school
faculty during this period. Current Air War College Dean Mark Conversino
critiqued Bob Pape's argument in Bombing to Win that "strategic bombing
doesn't matter" in his 1997 article, "The
Changed Nature of Strategic Air Attack." Air War College professor Jeffrey
Record called "Operation Allied Force: Yet Another Wake-Up Call for the Army" in the Winter 1999-2000 issue and argued that it "shed a harsh
spotlight on the Army's intellectual and structural inadequacy in the post-Cold
War international security environment." In his 2002 "Collapsed
Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War," Record argued
that "the war in
Afghanistan also shows that modern airpower, under the right conditions,
can achieve decisive strategic effects even against the kind of irregular,
pre-industrial enemy once thought unbreakable by air attack."

These arguments were routinely leavened by those that downplayed
airpower's efficacy, however. Former Air
University Review editor Earl Tilford argued in his "Operation Allied Force and the Role of Air Power" that
Allied Force "looks like a win, but a rather ugly one" given the amount of effort and
length of time that it took. Vincent Goulding's "From Chancellorsville to Kosovo, Forgetting the Art of War" put forth the argument that despite the strategic success of Allied
Force, "precision is insufficient" and combined arms was necessary in such
operations. William Hawkins echoed this argument in his "Imposing Peace: Total vs. Limited Wars, and the Need to Put Boots on the
Ground," and in his "What Not to Learn from Afghanistan."

After a decade of unprecedented and successful
air operations, when airpower had finally met the promise of its early
advocates -- from pickle-barrel accuracy to strategic effects -- the
conventional wisdom reflected at best cautious optimism about its efficacy. This
happened in part because the debate occurred as an away game for the Air Force,
depriving it the ability to take the initiative and shape the collective
strategic consciousness to its liking.

Without the Air
University Review to offer considered arguments about these operations, the
USAF allowed others in the defense establishment to establish the narrative
about airpower, about the value of what the service brought to the fight, about
the relevance of "flying, fighting, and winning in air, space, and cyberspace"
to the conflicts of the recent past, and ultimately found itself at the mercy
of those who "didn't get it." Thus when the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and
the Secretary of the Air Force attempted to make the case that certain
capabilities were vital to the security of the nation, to its ability to
project military power overseas, and to undertake expeditionary operations,
they found themselves fighting an uphill battle. The prevailing strategic
narrative had undervalued airpower and, even though they had the national
interest at heart, their arguments sounded parochial, service-centric, and
unconvincing. The environment of the Washington AOR had not been shaped;
indeed, it had been neglected for a generation.

It was in this environment that Strategic Studies Quarterly was founded. In its five years of
publication, it has addressed strategic issues of interest to the wider defense
establishment but, following the lead of the Naval War College Review, it has given attention to those issues
that particularly interest the USAF: airpower, nuclear deterrence,
cyberwarfare,
the rise of China,
space, regional
security in South
Asia and Africa,
and NATO. It
has also given space for Air Force leaders to present their service's views,
including the Secretary
of the Air Force, the Chief of Staff,
and component commanders.

Yet it has also followed the lead of Parameters in that it has not directly advocated any particular
point of view. The articles on nuclear deterrence for instance, have advocated
and criticized
reductions in nuclear forces. Those on China have argued that it is a rising peer competitor
and that it is a budding
partner for the United States. Those on cyberwarfare have debated
the possibility and value of offense, defense, and deterrence as the basis for
a strategy in this new domain. It has also addressed issues that are broader
interest to the professional community: the relevance of Clausewitz's On War, the value of intervention
to American
grand strategy, the
Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, the relation of international
relations theory to strategic thought, nation building
and counterinsurgency
in Afghanistan
and Iraq, terrorism, and "Don't Ask, Don't
Tell." By publishing quality arguments on topics of interest to the USAF and the defense community writ large but
not explicitly advocating a particular line, it has brought the USAF back to
the table to participate in the strategic dialogue within the profession with a
presence and credibility that it had lacked.

Yet, in Sept. 2011, Air Education and Training Command
decided to discontinue its publication. As with Air University Review before it, its contents will likely be
redirected to Air and Space Power Journal.
In a time of fiscal constraint, the Air Force will once again leave it to
others to shape the national dialogue on strategic matters, roles and missions,
and the problems facing the nation. The editors of Parameters, Naval War College
Review, Foreign Affairs, and
other journals will set the agenda, choose the topics of interest to them, and
put forth the arguments that will form the conventional wisdom. Sadly, the USAF
will be a second string team, its arguments always on the road looking for a
field on which to play, and relying on the good graces of these others to let
them have some play.

Another generation will likely pass before an Air Force
leader realizes that they could have been shaping the conventional wisdom for
years, rather than fighting it, when they press their case to other services,
civilian policy makers, legislators, and the American people. In the meantime,
the service will likely suffer.

"Alejandro Estéban Teixeira Castillo" is a pseudonym.