Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 241

The defense budget implosion (IV): Gourley on Romanian strippers and the financial lives of today's soldiers

Like I said last
month, this
guy can write. Here,
in our blog post of the day, he explores the financial lives of today's
soldiers. Keep his comments in mind as your Congress pole dances around its
plans to
trim military benefits. I know some of those bennies are going to have to
go, but brace yourself for the many news articles we will read, see, and hear
about the problems such congressional fiddling causes for Army units:

By Jim Gourley

Best Defense
department of financial, physical, and
mental health

I commend the uninitiated to spend a day walking any commissary's aisles and
parking lots on payday. You'll see the importance of the institution. Steady
assault waves hit the place throughout the day like the Normandy landings. Go
there during lunch at your peril. It's going to take you an hour to pick up that
tube of toothpaste you need. The wives are well-trained at navigating the
grocery terrain, too. They'll put their brood of two or more kids in two
separate carts, pushing one ahead and pulling one behind, and stack them to
overflowing with necessities. It amazes me that they don't suffer from carpal
tunnels negotiating the hairpin turns with those behemoths using only one hand.

Eggs. Cheese. Kids'
snacks. Soft drinks. Milk. Bread. Most of the chicken and all of the ground
beef. The place will be cleaned out by 5 p.m. Guaranteed.

These people live
paycheck to paycheck. I'm not saying that the American soldier is
embarrassingly low paid for his/her honorable service. Though that may be the
case, it's more relevant to discuss things in terms of economics, and the truth
is that a great many enlisted military members are very poor money managers.
All you need to do is sit outside the main gate at Fort Campbell and watch the
Mustang parade at 6 p.m. to know where the deployment bonuses go. You've got 19
and 21-year-old kids in the barracks who are playing XBox and drinking beer
like it's water one minute, and before you know it they're 25-year-olds with a
wife, a 6-month-old, a car payment, rent (or worse, an adjustable rate
mortgage), utilities, and a bunch of buddies calling from the barracks asking
if they want to go drink beer all weekend. Let's drop all the discussion about
how mature they are and their leadership in combat-- in the financial realm,
these people often find themselves thrust into a life they're unprepared for
and are slow to mature into.  [[BREAK]]

The Thrift Savings
Program, Army Emergency Relief, Commissary System, and on-post child services
are important programs that provide immense help to service members when they
stub their toes on life's financial issues. I had troops that had no idea how a
debit card worked, couldn't balance a checkbook, and fell for some of the
oldest identity theft scams in the book. I also had more than I'd like to
remember that got burned by their stripper girlfriends. Programs and
institutions like the ones I mentioned above are necessary buffers and
parachutes to keep troops from hitting bankruptcy before their leaders can pull
them out of a financial nosedive. And heaven knows we need THOSE institutions
to slow the free fall, because the main streets outside the gates of every post
in the Army are lined with OTHER institutions whose sole profit model is to
usher service members into Chapter 13. I refer to payday advance and loan
establishments the same way Obi Wan Kenobi described the Mos Eisley cantina--
you won't find a more wretched den of scum and villainy anywhere in the galaxy.
Those people are thieves.

There are those that
argue that the AER fund and "discount" establishments within the Army
foster irresponsibility among troops when we should be discouraging it and
helping them learn to save. I agree, but do you want the Army to teach
financial management to America's youth, or fight two wars, because we kind of
have our hands full with that war thing right now. True, even in peacetime the
Army isn't good at educating people at how to make good life choices. There is
no "reconditioning training" that teaches people how to go from the
Army lifestyle to the civilian workplace. There is no "dude, don't marry
the Romanian stripper" class here in Vicenza. And if you listen to the
folks at the passport office, it's apparently a huge problem because they clean
out the bank accounts, book a ticket for the United States and file for divorce
as soon as they get their citizenship and see the hubby off to Afghanistan.
There is no "do not go car shopping within 50 miles of Fort Campbell
because the guys at the dealerships in Clarksville are vipers, especially at
Wyatt-Johnson and Gary Matthews."

Just trying to help
a few people as I go here.

We talk about the
grand scheme of things to a large extent in this forum. However, like the Libya
proposition, the commenters in here and from Americans at large rarely have the
chessmaster discussion of "if I do this, what will the board look like two
moves hence?" We never talk about second-order effects. I would certainly
like to see a more efficiently run DECA. However, I believe that said
efficiency must necessarily come as the result of a near-transparent process
from the perspective of the commissary shopper. These people live on very
narrow margins. "Why" is less important in this case, because that
leads into a discussion of solving a large problem that isn't the priority
right now. What really matters is not making the problem worse.

Having been through
the disaster and drama that is a financially dysfunctional soldier multiple
times, I believe just about every other leader on this board would agree that
they're no different than a litter urgent casualty on the battlefield-- it takes
more people out of the fight to address the issue than a KIA. It would not take
a severe interruption in commissary services or a tremendous price hike to
severely imbalance the checkbooks in many lower enlisted families. That leads
to all kinds of second-order effects. Arguments over finances lead to serious
violence, legal troubles, substance abuse problems, and broken homes and
marriages. Upsetting the fiscal situation in a military home doesn't take much,
and it has severe consequences. It really doesn't take much more than the beat
of a butterfly's wings to initiate the typhoon.

Consider that
against the possibility that military paychecks may get delayed substantially
longer in August than they did a few months ago. If the military went 60 days
without pay, you'd have people putting down their rifles and taking whatever
other jobs they could find. AWOL doesn't mean anything when your baby is crying
and there's no formula in the house.

The defense budget implosion (III): Republicans may see Obama's defense cuts and then cut another $200 billion

So says Max "Das" Boot, attributing
to a Capitol Hill newspaper. Whatever equipment the
military owns now, it better get used to it.

Meanwhile, there is some weird bill moving through Congress
to try to raise $1.3 billion by changing
the way commissaries operate. I don't understand how this is supposed to
work. Funny how all the congressional initiatives are going after troop
benefits, instead of programs that might touch the defense industry.

 

People who joined the military since 9/11, when the money
spigot was opened full, have no sense of the budget environment they are
heading into. Kind of reminds me of the time during the Depression when the
military took a month-long pay holiday. Back then George Marshall, overseeing a
garrison, encouraged his subordinates to make sure that married soldiers
planted vegetable gardens, to ensure that their families would eat.

Who gets southern Afghanistan now?

It appears to be up for grabs now
that President Karzai's half-brother has been assassinated.
Amazing how many people are killed by their bodyguards.

I never met Ahmed Wali Karzzi, but
I have eaten at the family's restaurant
in Baltimore.
I was a little surprised to see seafood served in an Afghan restaurant --"Helmand
River salmon," as I recall.

1st step in COIN: Figure out the local governance system -- and work with it

Everybody's trashing
COIN
these days. Reminds me of the baseball player who fouls out and blames the bat.
I think a COIN approach remains a useful tactic, as part of a larger strategy
-- if done well. But as Little Jimmy Rushing used to advise, it takes patience and fortitude.

Here's a perspective
from remotest Afghanistan.

By "A Staff Guy in
Afghanistan"

Best Defense
department of salvaging COIN

From my perspective a large part of COIN
doctrine involves connecting the local population with the government.
Coalition forces in Afghanistan spend a great deal of time and effort
attempting to improve local governance and its relationship with the people. I
would suggest that this local governance already exists and that our
shortcoming, as coalition forces executing COIN operations, is our failure to
recognize this governance and how the existing governance interacts with and
within the larger governmental context. 

Take an average village. They have a village
governmental structure that interacts with other villages, with their district,
with local ministerial representatives, and with coalition and non-coalition
elements. The village makes something -- food, rugs, whatever -- and this
economic activity necessitates interaction with external actors. Basically,
they import and export. Our problem set, as a coalition force, is how to
understand both the immediate governance of the village and its interactions
with the external actors. [[BREAK]]

The business of our village here will
determine how much or little they support larger governance. If the external
governance supports predictability in economic activity and the costs are not
too onerous then, generally, they will. The business of the village will
determine their support of more government. Similarly, that external government
will want to be involved in the village if the village is a viable economic
entity. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.

A good first step would be our understanding
local, not national, governance and its economic impacts. Not just who, but
what are the laws and structures that constrain and support this local
governance. People are tied to their government when their livelihood depends
on said government, their business determines how much or little they will
support larger governance. It is not that everyone needs a government job or
handout, rather the governmental structures in place need to support,
predictably, the population's day-to-day economic activity.

'A Staff Guy in Afghanistan' is not a disgruntled
member of the AfPak Hands program. By the way, are there any gruntled members?

CNAS won't acquire TIME magazine, but will partner with it on a television series

The little think tank that could
is launching a new TV series, titled "Command Post," with the Lucian empire.
You can see the first episodes, about the future direction of U.S. policy in
Afghanistan, here.

Next, "CNAS: The Movie"? If so, I
wanna be played by Homer Simpson, the TV character with whom I most closely
identify.

Time to show some respect for people laboring in thankless government jobs

I was in a
discussion the other day about all the national security officials leaving the
Obama Administration. One person snidely said that the rats were leaving the
ship. My friend and CNAS colleague Bob Killebrew responded thusly.

By Col. Robert
Killebrew (USA, Ret.)

Best Defense guest
columnist

In my own view, anybody who puts up with life in that
hothouse for two weeks, even, deserves better than that kind of shot.

I once was considered for an appointed post, but thankfully
came out second-best to an enormously talented person who took a pay cut to
serve her country. I later visited her in the office that would have been mine;
she was sitting at a nicked-up wooden desk in an office that had a bunch of
gray safes and old office furniture; I would not have been surprised to see a
naked lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling. I left thankful that the cup had
passed from me and with great sympathy for her and all the people -- many of
them military officers -- who worked with her. She put in a little less than
two years, did a superb job under very trying circumstances, and never
complained.



The person I'm describing is not the only example; I was in the Pentagon this
week and was again struck by the caliber of people in appointed posts who can
quit anytime, but instead show up at 7:00 a.m. and grind away every day at both the
petty and the grave tasks of American policy. I know there is the occasional
dirtbag, and the occasional career-seeker padding his or her resume, but on the
whole these are people working below their pay scale because they've been asked
to do so, putting their own careers and families on hold. I know it's stylish
to denigrate government, from the President to the postman, but Bill Lynn and
others below and above him deserve our respect.

Gen. Bruce Clarke on the history of the Vietnam War: Still hasn't been written

Gen. Bruce Clarke,
one of the heroes of the Battle of the Bulge, also was historically minded. I
was struck by this comment in his oral
history. I think he was right when he said this in 1970, and still is: A
good operational history of the Vietnam War, taking into account views of both
sides, still has not been written.

I don't think the
history of the Vietnamese war will be written before the year 2000. . . . I
think by the year 2000 we will see what the import of the Vietnamese war was in
southeast Asia, but it will take that long to, I think, sift it out. I don't
think you could get the history of the Vietnamese war by studying any of our
papers. I certainly wouldn't want to take it out of the big papers. It's my
opinion that it has been the poorest reported war of the four that I've had
something to do with."

(Pp. 31-32)

The more I learn
about the Vietnam war, the more I agree with him.

Btw, Gen.
Frederick Franks mentions in the awkward, dull memoir
he penned with Tom Clancy that in the waning days of the Vietnam War, Clarke
was the only senior officer who visited the amputee ward in the old military
hospital in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, when Franks was recuperating there from
war wounds.

Not eligible for Rebecca's column: Packs of wild dogs roaming Fayetteville, NC

Fayetteveille, NC, apparently is
becoming more and more like Baghdad was a few years ago -- hot and humid, dog-threatened,
and with a lot of Army guys wandering around.

I keep on thinking of the Arab who
said around the time of the American invasion of Iraq, "You Americans think you
will change the Middle East, but I think we will change you."

Perusing the Fayetteville Observer, I also see that the
command sergeant major of Army SF Command is in hot water
for alleged adultery and some other stuff.

Debt's right

This is probably the most insightful summary
of the U.S. debt mess I've read.

(HT to TXH)

Murdering journalists in Pakistan: The road from Daniel Pearl to Saleem Shahzad

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, essentially accused
the Pakistani government of beating a journalist to death in May. "It was
sanctioned by the government," he said.

There is an interesting parallel
here to the murder of
Danny Pearl back in 2002. He was killed by al Qaeda in Pakistan. Saleem
Shahzad was killed by the government of Pakistan, Mullen is saying.

Also, the New York Times reports
that there is new evidence that the Pakistani military sold nuclear weapons
technology to North Korea.

Again, I wonder why anyone thinks
Pakistan should still be considered an ally.

Meanwhile, Karachi continues to writhe
with political violence. For reasons I don't understand, the Edhi
Foundation's ambulances
are being attacked.