Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 48

Midshipman brings butter knife to fight

But he
still gets in trouble for threatening a taxi driver
with it. A blow to the Navy lacrosse team.

Welcome to Spartanburg!: The dangers of this growing American military obsession

By Jim Gourley


Best Defense culture correspondent

There are 25 Spartan-branded obstacle course races
in the United States. Microsoft's Halo game series, whose protagonist is the
last member of an elite group of futuristic super-soldiers known as Spartans,
is a multi-billion dollar franchise. Recently named one of the "hot 100"
companies by Internet Retailer and profiled in the Army Times, Ranger Up
apparel company made approximately $4 million last year on sales of over 300,000
t-shirts. Sixteen of their 150 designs feature images of Spartan warriors.
They're so popular they've been grouped into their own sub-category on the
company's website, which leads off with the sales pitch: "Let's face it. When
it comes to the definition of the warrior ethos, it is hard to top the
Spartans."

The commandant of the Marine Corps seems to share
that view. On his recommended reading list are two works by author Stephen
Pressfield: Gates of Fire, a work of
historical fiction on the Battle of Thermopylae, and The Warrior Ethos, the cover of which features an image of a
Spartan hoplite shield and first chapter opens with three anecdotes of warrior
life in Sparta. Also on the commandant's list is a book about Marines in
Vietnam titled American Spartans, not
to be confused with the newly released memoir of Special Forces soldier Jim
Gant, who was once prominently featured on Pressfield's website, titled American Spartan. And the film 300's highly stylized account of
Thermopylae used its Lakonian bona fides to rake in more than 3.5 times the box
office haul as Lone Survivor's modern
true-to-life story (it also broke the
war-film convention by making more money outside the United States).
The presence of Sparta in modern military pop-culture is everywhere. But our
contemporary understanding of what Sparta was and what it represents is
confused at best, and within the military it bears hazardous
potential.

The militaries of western civilization have
carried elements of Spartan values as part of their
inheritance from the Greek victory in the Persian wars. But since the beginning
of the war in Afghanistan there has been a renewed infatuation with all things
Spartan, or rather, all things we conceive to be Spartan. Thucydides and
Herodotus were often confused or ignorant about aspects of Spartan life, but
they only drew conjectures when necessary and based them on what they knew. By
contrast, modern military culture has crafted a whole mythology of Spartan life
to validate highly romanticized beliefs about who the Spartans were. The danger
is that American military culture unquestioningly accepts that mythology as fact,
and in pursuing the idea of "the American Spartan" it gets closer to becoming
something that is neither Spartan nor American.

The common perception elevated by contemporary
media is that the Spartans were a brotherhood of warriors, totally dedicated to
defending the homeland and willing to lay down their lives for their
brothers-in-arms and the greater cause of freedom. This put them in stark
contrast to the other states of Greece, where people took freedom for granted
and self-important individualism always triumphed over ideals of
self-sacrifice. The Spartans were a minority not only because of the demands of
their physically brutal training, but also because of their uncompromising
moral code. In this, modern military members can find much in common with and
much to aspire to in the legacy of the Spartans. Their one percent of the
American population equals about 3 million, and Iraq and Afghanistan constitute
the new Hot Gates, where they make their stand against the horde.

It's remarkable then that military culture has used
the Spartan identity to distinguish itself not from its enemies, but rather
from the very society it protects. The idealized self-image of Sparta only
works if the would-be Spartan is the dominant ethical, as well as physical, presence
on the battlefield. This necessarily demands a degree of self-righteousness and
a negative view of the rest of America. The sentiment is captured perfectly in 300 when Gerard Butler's King Leonidas
refers to the Athenians as "philosophers and boy lovers." In other words,
they're good at bickering and gossip but not in the way of substantive action.
This is problematic on historical grounds alone. The Spartans suffered many
defeats at the hands of other Greek city-states before the Persian invasion. But
more relevant is the danger to a relationship between military and civilian
society that has already been altered by more than a decade of war. Servicemembers
have brazenly
asserted the moral high ground to their most senior
civilian leaders. In a 2003 Military
Times poll, approximately 60 percent of respondents from the armed forces said
they felt the military had better moral standards than civilian society, and
classified the moral fabric of American society as "fair" or "poor." Making fun of
the problems of civilian society has even become something
of a pastime for servicemembers. This creates what U.S. Naval
Academy Professor Bruce
Fleming calls a "toxic situation" in which military members
gradually begin to believe society doesn't deserve the protection they provide.
Maybe it's the civilians who should serve the military. This is, of course,
exactly what the Spartans did when they enslaved the helots.

The original concept of the American military was a
group of civilians who assume the role of soldier for a brief period of time.
Though time and advancements in the conduct of warfare gave rise to a
professional standing military, it remains a force of volunteer
citizen-soldiers. The Spartan civic model was the total opposite. Only men
who'd graduated the agoge and reached
the age of 30 in the army were recognized as full members of society -- they
were soldier-citizens. There are those who believe America would benefit if
more citizens took part in national service programs after models like those
proposed by Heinlein in Starship Troopers.
But that argument is undermined whenever "the success of Sparta" is invoked as
proof of its benefits. Sparta was utterly bereft in terms of architecture,
literature, art, and science. Though much of our military inheritance comes
from them, our politics and culture are all derived from Athens. Indeed, our
best information about the Spartans comes from Athenian writers, for little
from Sparta survived.

The Spartan mindset in American military culture is
hurtful on the individual servicemember, as well. Adding to the extant gap in
civil-military relations a mental paradigm that military members are an
entirely different nation only makes their reintegration after leaving the
service more difficult. How much harder is it for a wounded or student veteran
to reenter society when he's been conditioned to believe he was destined to enter
the military because he was always different from and superior to it? Such
feelings of inadequacy can make one wonder why they left the service in the
first place, leading to feelings of shame. And this is the most poisonous
aspect of the Spartan message.

The Spartan viewpoint reinforces the concept of
brotherhood. Its inherent misogyny aside, the messaging of this concept
embraces the phrase "death before dishonor." There is no nobler act than to die
for one's comrades, and so this is held up as the epitome of Sparta in the
tradition of Thermopylae. The antithesis of this ideal is desertion, and those
who commit it are irredeemable in Spartan philosophy. This was demonstrated in
the fates of two Spartan survivors of Thermopylae. One later committed suicide
out of grief and shame; the other died leading a charge at the battle of
Plataea. It is significant that they didn't share the fate of their comrades
because they were ordered off the field by Leonidas himself. No matter. That
they did not shoulder their portion of the burden doomed them to the scorn of
the Spartiate. Embracing this mantra today leads those who separate from the
service under honorable conditions to still feel a sense of disgrace for
leaving their comrades to carry on in battle. This can have extraordinary
consequences for one already coping with physical or mental wounds.

This is not to say that a t-shirt or a poster is
ruining civil-military relations. A little chest-thumping is even helpful at
times, and the gleaming lambda shield and red-crested helmet do lend themselves
to iconography. Yet it should be recognized that the American military is at a
precarious crossroads. It has never been more popular with the American public,
and it has never had greater need for public (read: taxpayer) support. But in
the last five years, the military as a culture has become more resentful of
civilian society than ever, while as an institution it has taken an
unprecedented number of black eyes. Popularity should not be mistaken for good
relations. The armed forces risk squandering public support with a
self-righteousness that doesn't match an emerging pattern of ethical failures.
Military leaders have lamented for years now that civilian society's failure to
understand the military creates problems. The military is creating its own
problems with its cultural messaging. It is perhaps time that the military
embrace Fleming's call for "military metaphysics," before civilian backlash
kicks the opportunity for discussion down the well.

Sherman (VIII): Individual replacement is a better personnel system than rotation

It turns
out that William T. Sherman, one of the best American
generals ever, was no fan of the practice of rotation that the Army follows
today.

Rather,
like retired Cmd. Sgt. Maj. Robert Rush, he favored the World War II
method of sending in new men to seasoned units. Sherman wrote that, "I believe
that five hundred new men added to an old and experienced regiment were more
valuable than a thousand men in the form of a new regiment, for the former by
association with good, experienced captains, lieutenants and non-commissioned
officers, soon became veterans, whereas the latter were generally unavailable
for a year."

Sherman
felt so strongly about this he took time out from the Vicksburg campaign to
write a lengthy letter to his commander, General Grant, about this policy, with
a request that his views be forwarded to President Lincoln.

I think
Sherman and Rush are right, for commanders as well as the enlisted troops. When
you have one-year rotations of units, no one "owns" a war. They get in and get
out. One way to do it differently would be to have units assigned to rotate in
and out every couple of years, perhaps with commanders from brigade up doing
four-year stints to provide continuity. To do that, you'd need to give them
months off every year, and so they'd need very strong XOs.

So it
would be difficult. The personnel people will say too hard. But perhaps better
to do difficult and win, than do easy and lose?

A letter to the West Point Class of 2014: No combat patch? That’s no problem!

By Maj. Crispin Burke


Best Defense guest columnist

An article in the New York Times the other day examined the West Point class of 2014,
which faces the dubious distinction of being the first class in nearly a dozen
years to enter a peacetime army.

It's a
daunting experience for a new lieutenant to lead soldiers twice their age, even
more so to do it as a as a "slick sleeve" -- the derogatory term given to soldiers
who lack the distinctive "combat patch" on their right shoulder. Let me offer
the Class of 2014 two pieces of advice.

First,
take a few lessons from West Point's Class of 1976. Believe it or not, I bet that
even brand new 2nd Lt. Ray Odierno probably had the same fears that you did. His
class joined their platoons shortly after the nation had concluded what was, at
that time, the longest war in its history. They survived their time as platoon
leader -- just as you all will -- and they all went on to serve our country
well when we inevitably found ourselves in wars again in Grenada, Panama, the
Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and even today in Afghanistan.

But
while the Class of '76 went on to achieve great things in wartime, their
greatest contribution was in rebuilding a badly battered Army. That's something
that you'll be doing over the next few years, though fortunately, our Army is
hardly in the terrible shape it was in then.

Those
lieutenants had to crack down on indiscipline, including criminal behavior and
drug abuse -- which has been on the rise as of late in today's Army,
unfortunately. They had to rethink the roles of women in our armed forces. Most
importantly, they had to make tough decisions as to whom to keep and whom to
let go. It'll be more important now than ever to counsel your soldiers regularly. Do it in writing. Get to know their goals, and give them a plan to
achieve them. Learn to use the resources the Army has in place to aid those who
truly need help -- such as those who are struggling with PTSD. But ultimately,
learn how to give candid advice to those soldiers who simply won't make it
through the drawdown, and empower them with the resources they need to be successful
as veterans. (Hint: If you're uncertain how to counsel a platoon sergeant with
20 years of service and three combat deployments, ask around at PlatoonLeader.army.mil.)

Second, read and write. Do it often.

Human
beings have, for better or worse, been fighting wars for the better part of
five thousand years -- there's very little you'll encounter in modern war which
someone hasn't lived through already.

For
instance, I recently had the opportunity to finish a book about the Duke of
Wellington
during the Peninsular Campaign during the Napoleonic Wars. You may think
there's little we can learn from the Napoleonic Wars in the era of drones and
cyberwar -- but you'd be mistaken. Indeed, the Iron Duke had many of the same experiences,
and headaches, two hundred years ago as our commanders today. Wellington
operated as part of a joint force with the Royal Navy, fighting a hybrid war
alongside Spanish insurgents, and, during the course of the campaign, he was to
find that his greatest enemies weren't the French, but rather, a hidebound army
bureaucracy and disgruntled officers who vented their frustration through press
leaks.

But
don't stop at history. Start reading through some of the publications at the
Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL). While our Army has been amassing vast
combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's become painfully apparent that some skills have atrophied, and that we've accumulated some
bad habits. Twelve years of being wedded to massive forward operating bases
will do that. We've made vast strides in computer technology, no doubt, but
you'll have to consider how you may fight without computers. Could you command
without PowerPoint slides and fragmentary orders emailed to you every hour? I would argue we can't.

It'll be
up to you to teach soldiers to un-learn many bad habits, while learning new
ones. Be sure to do your peers a favor -- write down your observations and send
them to CALL. Not only will it help your peers, but you'll learn something when
you go through the process of composing your thoughts, putting them to paper,
and going through the publishing process. This will help you later, whether you
choose to stay in the Army, or if you go into the civilian world.

The last
thing I'll say about reading is that you need to be wary of those who claim
they know what the next war will be
like. They are almost always laughably wrong, as Colonel Keith Nightingale
wrote on this blog recently. We thought we'd never do counterinsurgency (after Vietnam), or
nation-building (after the Balkans) again. Look where we are now. We thought
airborne operations were an anachronism. Look at Mali. Never say never.

Get
ready to learn. Get ready to make mistakes. Get ready to learn from those
mistakes. The Army's going to be doing a lot of great, new things over the next
few years.

To the
West Point Class of 2014, thanks for your decision to serve, and I look forward
to seeing you in our units.

Major Crispin J. Burke is a U.S.
Army officer stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. He went his entire platoon leader
time and some of his company command time as a "slick sleeve" as well. His
views are his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense.

I think this is the fundamental problem in U.S. civil-military relations these days

The other day I was speaking
on an Army base to a bunch of bright officers. Talking and listening, I came
away with this thought: The fundamental problem in 21st century American
civil-military relations is that we need presidents willing to listen and learn
from dissenting generals -- and generals who know how to dissent in strategic
discussions, and are willing to do so.

This is not just a hit on
President Obama, though I think he has stumbled in this area with Admiral
Mullins and General Mattis.

Think, for example, of Tommy
Franks, unable to see that Phase IV of the Iraq war was his responsibility, and
that if he thought it wasn't, be willing to send up a rocket about that. And
think of President Bush, seeking consensus in discussions of Iraq, rather than
using those sessions to explore assumptions and bring differences to the fore
-- which is the essence of strategy. If you don't solve civil-military splits
around the table, they will persist in the field, as happened with General
Sanchez and Ambassador Bremer in Iraq in 2003-04.

Remember, if you are
comfortable while making strategy, you probably aren't making strategy, you are
just listing goals.

Getting generals who are
willing and able to educate their presidents in strategic thinking, and
presidents willing to respond in kind -- yeah, that's the hard part.

Hunter: Wash Post obit of Gen. Mundy was a shamefully disguised editorial

By Duncan Hunter


Best Defense guest
columnist

Using an obituary to editorialize against a
man is the worst of bad taste. 

Matt Schudel's
obituary for the Washington Post on
former Marine Corps Commandant General Carl Mundy appeared to be more
of an editorial espousing liberal views on gays in the military and women in
combat. The column served neither the truth nor the legacy of a great Marine
general. 

Schudel excoriates Mundy for his stand against allowing
homosexuals into the ranks and resisting the movement to place women in combat
positions. Further, he takes Mundy to task for refusing to cut the Marine Corps
below their traditional level of 170,000. The Army unfortunately was more
acquiescent during the same period, allowing its forces to be cut almost in
half with only 10 out of 18 divisions remaining when President Clinton exited
the White House.

Ten years later, during the Iraq war, thousands of Army
families were punished by multiple 15-month tours in the combat zone. Through
his previous resistance to cuts, Mundy spared his Marine Corps the same fate.

It was also Clinton who made a campaign promise to remove the
ban on gays in the military. Mundy battled back. The result was a continued
ban, a result of the American people and both houses of Congress standing with
Mundy.

Schudel further criticizes Mundy for his stand against permitting
young women in close-quarters combat. Yet as secretary of defense, Les Aspin, a
liberal Democrat, had issued a policy banning women in combat. He apparently
agreed with Mundy's statement that direct combat is "a very dirty, distasteful
and physical business."

Mundy's views were formed in the brutal cauldron of combat in
the jungles of Vietnam. Years later, the primal, house-to-house battle for
Fallujah validated his views. It was difficult after seeing film clips of
Fallujah to argue that young American women should have been in the middle of
that battle. 

Mundy, like many Marine commandants, was forged and tempered
on the battlefield. Sometimes complicated U.S. foreign policy resolves into
life and death struggles in remote parts of the world. Prevailing in these
conflicts is the paramount security interest of this country.

For 200 years, Americans like Mundy have stepped forward -- forthright
and courageous, with a sense of honor. We should respect Mundy for his
tremendous service to this country and thank God for his career. 

If men like Mundy stopped coming forward,
America would lose. 

Duncan L. Hunter
served in the House of Representatives from 1981 to 2008. He is a former chairman
of the House Armed Services Committee.

Former Blue Angels cdr gets the heave-ho

The Navy is unusually vague about
this one. "Inappropriate command climate" could mean almost anything. It is a
little odd because this commander was brought back in when the previous one
stepped down.

Extra points to whoever it was in the Navy that decided
an officer named Kafka should
go into public affairs. (See last paragraph of that
linked story.) Probably the same guy who assigned Capt. James Kirk to
command the USS Zumwalt.

The future of war (25): You better be ready to fight like it's a pre-electronic age

By
Capt. Jesse Sloman, USMCR


Best
Defense future of war entry

The best way to predict the
future of warfare is to look to its past.

Major battles in the 21st century will be confusing and
disorganized affairs more similar to the clashes of a pre-digital age than the
‘network-centric' combat we've become accustomed to. A new generation of
offensive technology targeting the electromagnetic spectrum -- systems such as
cyberweapons, electronic jammers, anti-satellite missiles, and electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) munitions -- will deprive militaries of the sensor and
communications links they rely on. Forget 24-hour streaming video from a
Predator drone. Armies of the future may struggle just to use their radios.

Taken together, these technologies will strip away many of the
capabilities the United States and other first-generation militaries now take
for granted. The Department of Defense has spent decades pursuing
‘full-spectrum dominance' -- an all-seeing, all-knowing vision of battlefield
control that relies on constant bandwidth-intensive communications and
ubiquitous surveillance to give commanders a crystal clear picture of friendly
and enemy forces. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is often cited as the prototypical
example of this method of warfare, a campaign about which it's been said that
U.S. officers knew more about the disposition of the Iraqi army than Saddam himself.

Instead, on a conventional 21st century battlefield, senior
officers will have to re-learn how to conduct operations with communications
and intelligence capabilities reminiscent of wars fought a half-century ago.
Drones will go blind and crash as their satellite links are severed. Aircraft
and ships will get lost when their Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers go
dead (and their crews struggle to remember the map and compass skills they were
briefly exposed to in basic training). Leaders will struggle to communicate
with their subordinate units, leaving perplexed junior officers alone and
exposed, with no links to higher command, facing the enemy the way their
forefathers did at Belleau Wood, Bastogne, or Hagaru-ri.

We've already gotten some isolated previews of what's to come.
In 2007, Syria's air defense system was disabled by an Israeli military
cyberattack long enough to allow warplanes to strike a partially completed
nuclear reactor. The specific details of the incident are still unclear, but there is little doubt that Syrian radar operators had
their scopes disabled by some type of electronic attack.

According to Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, the head of Navy Fleet
Cyber Command, we are also seeing a "great convergence between the [electromagnetic] spectrum and
the cyber world." Thanks to modern microchip technology, old-fashioned
electromagnetic jammers now have the capability to spoof radar receivers with
digitally recorded copies of their own transmissions. They can also insert viruses into a network from a standoff distance, providing a new means
of gaining access for cyberattacks.

The proliferation of anti-satellite weapons, just a few of which
can degrade or destroy space-based communications and navigation networks, also
has the Pentagon worried. China's successful 2007 test of a kinetic kill vehicle provided a wake-up call to the world
that relatively simple rocket technology can be modified to create a satellite
killer for which there is currently no effective countermeasure. The impact of degrading
or destroying the satellite constellations used by a modern military would be
enormous. So many capabilities are critically reliant on these networks, from
phone calls to vehicular navigation, that many militaries would have difficulty
functioning at a basic peacetime level without them. The U.S. Air Force, for
example, no longer trains navigators in celestial sightings, a vitally
important skill for long overwater flights flown without a GPS.

The most potentially catastrophic threat is a high-altitude
electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) generated by a nuclear warhead detonated at or
above 100,000 feet. At such heights, the electromagnetic radiation created by
the nuclear explosion would be capable of disrupting, damaging, or destroying
any solid-state electronic system within its line-of-sight, including on
satellites. Due to its altitude, the effects of a HEMP are non-lethal. The
weapon can be employed without the catastrophic effect of a nuclear explosion
near ground level. Major General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., the Marine Corps
representative to the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, describes the HEMP
threat as being a "challenge [to] the very heart of our operational doctrine
and national stability," and asserts that "it could change the character of a
theater war from that of a Desert Storm to a Verdun."

There are a few caveats worth mentioning. The first is that the most
debilitating technologies -- HEMPs and anti-satellite weapons -- are also the
most provocative and therefore the least likely to be used. It's one thing to
jam someone's radar or launch a cyberattack, but shooting down a satellite or
detonating a nuclear bomb represent such clear violations of international
norms that no leader will undertake these actions lightly. As a result, the
full scope of the electromagnetic threat may not be realized in any
circumstance short of a major theater war. Secondly, at some point, the
pendulum will swing away from offense and back towards defense as militaries
field countermeasures to the systems described above and claw back the ability
to operate freely within the electromagnetic spectrum.

Today, however, most first-generation armed forces, including
America's, are woefully underprepared for the full array of challenges they
will face in a medium- to high-intensity conflict with a near-peer competitor.
For the U.S. military -- the global force most reliant on networked sensors and
technology -- the good news is that they've fought like this before and they
can do it again. The bad news is that it will entail a long process of
painfully relearning the bloody lessons of the past.

Jesse Sloman is an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and a member of
the Truman National Security Project's Defense Council.

Tom note: Send along your thoughts on the Future
of War before you lose your own comms. If submitting
an essay, remember that the contest ends very soon. Try to keep it
short -- no more than 750 words, if possible. And please! -- no footnotes or
recycled war college papers.

Tom's helpful suggestion of the day: Why doesn't the Army offer to fund the A-10?

I
sympathize with the Army's belief that the A-10 is about the most helpful
Air Force plane that now exists. A nice political move would be for the Army to put its
money where its mouth is and offer to fund the A-10 for the Air Force. I mean,
just write the check. As a friend says, combine it with photos of Air Force
golf courses and fancy new headquarters buildings.

My campaign motto: "Take the cash, keep the CAS!"

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Leska's Visit to the Dentist

By Rebecca Frankel


Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Maintaining a military working
dog's health is crucial and handlers are given extensive training on how to
care for their dogs -- from grooming them to administering emergency care in a
combat scenario. They learn to read their dogs for signs of pain, dehydration,
gastrointestinal issues, spider bites, and dental problems.

An MWD that has a broken tooth or
teeth that are worn down from age will not only be in some degree of pain
(which could impede their eating and appetite) but won't be able to bite with
full capacity. In the photo above, U.S. Navy Master-at-Arms 3rd Class Ashly
Lester, a military working dog handler, carries MWD Leska off the operating
table after a surgery to remove a broken incisor at the camp's medical facility
on April 2. The pair is on assignment at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

From the handlers I've interviewed over the years, it's not uncommon to hear
that the most proactive and committed among them have not only been present to
observe their dog's procedures and surgeries, but have scrubbed in and lent a
helping hand. (In this photo, Leska is intubated during her surgery.)

Occasionally, when veterinarians aren't on hand to manage medical
procedures, doctors, or in this case dentists, who treat people will take over.
It's not at all uncommon in a combat theater where veterinary technicians aren't
on the scene, or even at a home station, for a medic with a unit to treat a dog
-- especially if the handler is incapacitated. A good case in point: In August
2013, the dentists from the 2nd Dental Squadron performed a root
canal on MWD Zzeki at the Veterinary Treatment Facility
at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

But, obviously, operating on a
dog's mouth poses certain challenges for someone used to a human's set of
teeth. "The largest difference in patients is the
length of the tooth," said Maj. (Dr.) Richard Howard, 2nd DS chief of
endodontics at Barksdale. "In this case of performing a root canal, the
tooth is longer and thinner, requiring us to change the tools and techniques we
use."

As Capt.
(Dr.) Stephen Boh, a dental resident at Barksdale said, "During dental school
there are lectures and pictures to familiarize us with canine anatomy." But, he
concedes, "the best way to learn this is to actually perform the operation."
And while there may be few opportunities to treat dogs, he views the ability to
treat military working dogs a tremendous asset. "...[W]hat I'm learning now will
have an impact in my career when I'm down range and I could possibly be the
only dental specialist in the area to help keep MWDs mission-ready."

Above, Leska wakes up after her
surgery is over, maybe a little groggy from the anesthesia. Her handler is
there by her side to greet her. Not to worry, Leska made a full recovery from
the surgery.

Rebecca
Frankel is senior editor, special projects at Foreign Policy. Her forthcoming book War
Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love comes out on Oct. 14 from Palgrave Macmillan.