Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 63

The Army recruiting fraud may have cost about as much as 10 hours of war in Iraq

A little
perspective on the Army recruiting fraud story: I think $100 million is about what the Iraq war, at its
height, cost the American taxpayer every 10 hours.

Day
after day, week after week, month after month. Year after year. You wanna talk
about waste, fraud, and abuse? Start there.

Marine HQ makes jihad on Marine Times

I think
public institutions always look bad when they try to suppress or punish publications that have been critical of them -- in this case, Marine
Corps leaders vs. the Marine Corps Times. It makes it look like the Marine Corps commandant can't
take the heat.

Is Keith Alexander the Tenet of today?

By "A.
Little Accountability"


Best
Defense guest columnist

In two months, NSA Director General Keith Alexander is
retiring. He'll likely be celebrated for all of his accomplishments, which will
put him in league with Tommy R. Franks and George Tenet. One could say that
Alexander has done for protecting our country's secrets what Paul Bremer did
for the smooth post-war transition in Iraq and former FEMA Director Michael "heckuva
job" Brown did for Katrina preparation and response. Yet there has been
absolutely no accountability regarding the Snowden leaks. Seems like the buck
should stop with Alexander and/or Director of National Intelligence Clapper,
no?

The Department of Justice prosecuted and put in
jail for three years a
former CIA employee who leaked the name of a covert
employee, claiming it harmed national security. Yet here we see the person who
arguably is responsible for the biggest unauthorized disclosure of our nation's
secrets lined up to get a nice retirement sendoff. Moreover, our government is
bending over backwards to tell us how much the Snowden leaks have hurt national
security (which I believe) and therefore they cannot also say that the NSA
lapse that allowed these disclosures is not important.

Tom, you took your premise in The Generals, of accountability in
generalship (or lack thereof), and applied it to all of our conflicts since World
War II. Yet, for a reader to understand what you wrote, he or she either
needs some familiarity
with the conflicts, or needs to have read your books. But everyone knows what Snowden was
able to do, and if you layer on the issue of government accountability, it
allows the premise of The Generals to
be made more clearly and succinctly to a much wider global audience.

The Best Defense review: Hew Strachan's new book examines our lack of thinking

By
Jim Gourley


Best
Defense chief cultural correspondent

As recently demonstrated on this blog, topics
like the nature of war and the modern relevance of Clausewitz are to military
officers and policy wonks what politics and religion are to the Thanksgiving
dinner table. Quite often, the problem is that the two groups, and even
individuals within them, use the same words to express very different ideas.
When you can't even agree on the definition of words that are fundamental to
your profession, they're
all fighting words. Into the fray steps Hew
Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at
Oxford University. His new book, The Direction of War,
comprises an effort to reconcile the dialectal schism between political and
military leaders today by retracing the history of strategic thought from its
origin in Clausewitz.

As Strachan writes in the introduction, "The
theme which holds this book together is strategy." While maintaining the
clarity of that theme throughout the work, he crafts the ensuing arguments and
observations using the rigorous definitions first written by the 19th and early
20th century originators of strategic theory, then documenting how the language
diverged over time. He even adds to the lexicon, proposing that the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan are best described as "astrategic." [Tom interjection:
Actually, that word appears on page 343 of my book The Generals. I had to fight the copyeditor to keep it in.] A
historian to the core, Strachan corrects the record on contemporary
inconsistencies in Clausewitzian interpretation. Offering no proposals on the
future of war of its own, The Direction
of War attempts a course correction, trying to bring our view of progress
more in line with its actual path through history.

Strachan repeatedly cites a few prominent
milestones to chart the azimuth of strategic development: the philosophical
works on strategy in the mid-19th century, the emergence of different
technologies during the inter-war period, the shift in strategic thought toward
nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, and then the post-Vietnam development
of flawed doctrines which culminated in the 1991 Gulf War. He contends that
nuclear weapons corroded the definitions of what strategy is and what it does.
Forced to legitimize itself and feeling compelled to explain the failures of
Vietnam, American military leadership took advantage of these emergent
ambiguities to create the operational regime of warfare and new philosophical
boundaries in civil-military relations. Allied militaries and NATO adopted the
same theories by proxy. This progression culminated in the overwhelming victory
of the 1991 Gulf War, thus reinforcing faith in ideas that ultimately led to
the utter failure to develop anything resembling a strategy during the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Whether finding flaws with Huntington's
Clausewitzian interpretations supporting his assertions of how democracies
should control their armed forces in The
Soldier and the State or describing the modern idea of "the strategic
Corporal" as "absurd," Strachan pulls no punches as he realigns contemporary
extrapolations with the Prussian theorist's original meaning. His objective is
not to discredit any individual, but rather to expose the faulty theoretical
foundations on which they and many others have constructed their ideas. This is
where Strachan is at his best, using his deep knowledge of Clausewitz's life
and other writings to renew our understanding of On War such that we may learn from history's mistakes and
successes.

For all of this, Strachan's own admitted
fondness for World War I history is perhaps the sole weakness of The Direction of War. While many of the
issues he tackles refer to strategic developments in the last 60 years, he
spends what seems a disproportionate amount of time on writings and wars from
the early 20th century. Curiously, as much influence on current affairs as he
attributes to the Cold War and Vietnam, he scarcely discusses advancements in
(or detriments to) strategic thought during those periods. Instead of
investigating them the same way as the interwar or post-9/11 periods -- as eras
during which aspects of strategic thought evolved -- The Direction of War treats them as epochal moments of change.
Similarly, while the claim that the American military was wrong to embrace
maneuver warfare after 1991 appears indisputable in the context of its post
9/11 conflicts, Strachan neither qualifies nor criticizes the strategies
employed in the U.S. invasions of Grenada or Panama, leaving it open-ended
whether the American military was as wrong as he argues it was. Nor does he
provide any historical comparison of American employment of the mujihadeen
against the Soviets to what he characterizes as current American strategies to
utilize indigenous security forces as "proxies" to fight insurgencies. His
arguments are no less historically sound, but the work would benefit from a
more even application of historical reference, rather than placing so much
reliance on J.F.C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, and the British Army's 1909
manual on Field Service Regulations and Operations to carry its arguments.

These are minor nitpicks in the context of the
greater work. The serious student of military affairs will indulge and perhaps
even appreciate Strachan's decision to sacrifice historical breadth for
theoretical depth. His insistence on Clausewitzian exactitude produces a
uniquely incisive assessment of key moments in America's 21st century wars that
may be particularly valuable to American leadership as it leaves them behind.

This book's ultimate lesson is that the current
state of strategy and policy, both of the United States and its allies, is
without direction. It is difficult to know where to go without comprehending
where you've been. Strachan has illuminated the road behind us using the
clarity of an academic, without any political or institutional bias refracting
the beam.

Strachan's Direction of War: Tom's own two cents to follow Jim Gourley's review

The
Best Defense mailboat recently steamed to the pier carrying a treat -- Sir Hew
Strachan's new book. I know Jim G. is
reviewing it, but since I read it I want to add a bit.

This
volume is essentially a collection of his essays since 9/11, revised a bit. As
such, they make a great introduction to Strachan, in my view the most
significant thinker on military affairs in Britain today. I've been a Strachan
fan for awhile, so I'd already read a lot of these articles, when they first
came out. But it was nice to revisit them, and reading them together
underscored the consistency of his thoughts on strategy.

I
had forgotten how tough he can be sometimes. He dismisses Samuel Huntington's Soldier and the State as "historically
illiterate." He is, unfortunately, correct, I think.

Future of War (no. 5): The war we want is standoff -- so that's not the war we'll get

By Patrick McKinney


Best Defense future of war contest entry

Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan
demonstrated the value of standoff, and the Department of Defense's emerging
strategies, acquisitions, research, and intellectual debates emphasize
deterring and defeating opponents at standoff range. Unfortunately, the war
after next will again be fought in close proximity.

At their core, the combat forces of the
U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps exist to close with and destroy the enemy. The
joint fight with the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy enabled swift initial
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but stability and then counterinsurgency
operations necessitated that forces get close to the populace and to the enemy.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) first exploited American reliance on ground
transport and then on dismounted exposure. The harsh price paid in lives and limbs
demands means to keep the warfighter out of the close fight, but that remains a
tall order.

With Iraq "over" and Afghanistan
winding down, DOD is preparing its forces for future missions and the next
fight, which appears not to be another close fight. The majority of
Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), the armored vehicles procured
to protect U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not being returned to the
United States, and Congress and the Army just delayed the heavy Ground Combat
Vehicle. Instead, the Army plans to develop new sensors, unmanned aerial
capabilities, and robots to support and replace soldiers and maximize standoff
while it assesses vehicle options. The Marine Corps has not decided on its next
amphibious or armored vehicle as it weighs its desired amphibious expeditionary
mission against the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and the capabilities of
potential foes.

The Air Force is considering the
retirement of the A-10, a close air support aircraft, and plans to replace it
with the multi-role Joint Strike Fighter (F-35). The F-35 and F-22, the USAF's
premier fighter aircraft, are designed to engage foes at long ranges (foes
should never even see the F-22). The Navy assessed the Anti-Access/Area Denial
(A2/AD) developments in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific, and seeks
to provide capabilities at longer ranges (stealth, unmanned aircraft,
rail-guns, missiles, etc.). The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is designed to
operate close to shore, in the littorals, but it may be under-armed and
under-armored for the task, and the Pentagon just announced plans to shrink the
future LCS fleet.

Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control
propose ways to use maritime and air forces at standoff range in response to
competitor A2/AD, maritime, and air capabilities. Operation Odyssey Dawn, the
2011 campaign against Muammar Gaddafi's regime, sought to keep coalition ground
forces out of Libya and relied upon air and naval forces to attack the regime
and assist rebel forces. President Obama threatened air and naval strikes
against the Assad regime in Syria, and the United States and its allies
continue to resist providing ground forces to help calm or end the conflict.
Should Air-Sea Battle, Offshore Control, airstrikes, or deterrence fail,
though, U.S. forces will once again close with the populace and enemies abroad,
and when they do, they will need firepower, mobility, intelligence, and
survivability. Standoff is desirable, but it is expensive, hard, and it does
not last.

The French hoped for a light and quick
presence in Mali, but their forces remain to maintain stability. U.S. forces
were rushed into South Sudan to help evacuate personnel and they took
casualties from rebel fire. The Corps plans to put Marines back out to sea and
forward deployed, and the Army has started to regionally align units for
foreign assistance and training missions. The war after next will be fought in
close proximity, just like the conflicts before it, and DOD must continue to
invest in training, protection, and firepower which will carry the U.S. warfighter
through the next close fight.

Patrick McKinney is an Army civilian in acquisitions. He
served as an Army field artillery and military intelligence officer, and
deployed as a platoon leader to Operation Iraqi Freedom IV. The opinions in
this piece are his and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army or the
Department of Defense.

TOM NOTE: Entries are still being accepted for the Best
Defense Future of War
contest , probably until the end of March or until I get tired of
reading them. Here's info . Please, no
footnotes, previously published stuff, or War College papers.

Toby Dodge: Don't go blaming Obama for the situation in Iraq, he didn't make it

One of the people I
always listen to on Iraq is Toby Dodge, who is now a member of the ruling elite
at the London School of Economics.

The other day he was
asked about comments by Senator John McCain busting President Obama for failing
on Iraq. I've been pretty critical of old Obama lately, so I was interested to
see Dodge come to his defense, according to the IISS website:

Dodge, calling it the "the myth of abandonment", explained that
McCain was wrong for two reasons.

The first is that the structure of the Status of Forces Agreement
(SOFA) in 2008, which formed the blueprint for US troop withdrawal, was
negotiated under Bush's tenure. When the agreement was being negotiated, Iraq's
leverage grew as the US's diminished; Maliki and the government -- buoyed by
public support under the banner of nationalism and realising that Bush needed a
deal before he left office -- would not accept the first draft of SOFA, which
Dodge describes as "almost quasi-imperial". The SOFA that was eventually passed
contained the non-negotiable 2011 withdrawal dates. "It was George W. Bush what
done it," he observed.

Secondly, when then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates approached
Maliki to ask permission to leave a residual force behind, the idea was roundly
rejected. Maliki had made it clear that all US soldiers must be gone by the
deadline.

"Maliki then sealed this by saying any amendments to the SOFA had
to go through parliament," said Dodge, "and there was never going to be a
majority there who would support a continued US military presence.

"This
failure is a failure of neo-conservatism and regime change, and has very little
to do with Obama," Dodge argued. 

Bad Dog of the Week: Texas judge takes a big bite out of McGruff the Crime Dog

The actor
who played McGruff the Crime Dog was
sentenced to 16 years for possessing a thousand marijuana plants and 27 weapons
(including a grenade launcher).

The
sentence seems excessive to me, given that marijuana is practically legal in
this country, and gun possession positively seems to be encouraged in Texas.
I'm surprised he didn't get time off for the grenade launcher, which a friend
once described to me as "the best weapon ever for clearing the treeline."

The top 10 books I've never read and really am giving up hope of ever getting to

It
seems these days everyone does lists of books they've read. I enjoy them, and
read them all -- but I still always detect of whiff of Protestant work ethic
boasting in them: I put myself through reading this, and now I am going to
inflict it on you.

Here
instead is a genuinely Calvinist list: Books I have been intending to read for
ever so long, but confess that I haven't gotten around to. This is not a list
of books I didn't like, but rather of stuff that I have really meant to read,
but for some reason haven't.

1. Michael
Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. My
all-time favorite book I haven't read. I have two copies of this. One has been
moving around with me since college. The other is on my nightstand right now.
But I just put on top of it a collection of essays by Albert Murray, another
author I have been meaning to read for some time. (I try not to read about war
just before bed -- too much work-like.)

2. Anything
by Faulkner. I've finished some of the short stories, but never one of the
novels. I know, as with John Coltrane, that the fault lies with me. But somehow
I don't care. Maybe Faulkner was overrated. I hope so because I'd sure hate to
miss out on something great.

3. The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. I really was going to read these,
someday, until Al Gore listed the first of these as his favorite book during
his 2000 presidential campaign. Even if it was true, he shouldn't have said so,
for political reasons. And I still suspect it wasn't true. This might have been
no. 1 on my list but when Al dragged it into the campaign I lost all desire to
pick it up.

4. Even
worse, German literature. At least I tried to read some of the French. Most of
all, I loves me some Montaigne. But I honestly don't think I ever have
seriously tried to read Faust, or
Thomas Mann, except for Death in Venice.
I have never even pretended to read Hegel or Kant. In college I did read
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but they struck me as wankers.

5. Maj.
Albert Murray, USAF (Ret). Yes, I
really do plan to remedy this soon. I've wanted to read him for years, and the
other day, as I was thinking about getting Stanley Crouch's new book on Charlie
Parker, I thought to myself: "Tom, before you do, you really ought to read Albert Murray, mainly because Crouch
is always invoking him." Unlike pretty much everything else on this list,
except maybe no. 9 Dante, I do expect this to happen in this lifetime, probably
this year.

6. Adam Ulam on Russia. I really
started wanting to read his stuff in the 1980s, but it never made it to the top
of the pile. By the time I was close, the Soviet Union had evaporated. And
lately, Russia just puts me off. Putin is a punk -- and not in a good way. Btw,
someone once told me that Ulam's older brother was key in helping
Israel build an atomic bomb.

7. Every
official U.S. government document on national security
strategy.
I realized a couple of years ago that these documents are for chumps. Dirty
little Pentagon secret: No one who runs the country reads them. Mid-level
bureaucrats write these for each other to cite.

8. Tennyson and other Victorian
poets. Somehow I never got around to them. In the great college course I took
on English poetry, the professor ended the second semester with the Romantics.
Lately I have realized I likely never will get to the Victorian poets, unless I
get hit over the head with a cricket bat. (On the other hand, I am a big fan of
Oscar Wilde.)

9. Dante's
Inferno. It barely makes this best
dissed list, because I've read parts, and I love Italy and if I wind up there
again for a month or two of work I might read it, finally.

10. James
Joyce's Ulysses. I don't know how I
evaded this. I actually was planning on reading it in about 1985 but a friend
said to wait until the Hugh Kenner edition came out. But since then I've gone
almost 30 years without picking it up. I may be the only English major ever to not
read it. Maybe confessing this will shame me into it. I actually suspect I will
like it when I do.

What if two Chinese colonels think that warfare is changing, even if you don't?

By Col. C. Anthony
Pfaff, U.S. Army


Best Defense guest
columnist

There has been a great deal of discussion lately regarding how political
and technological developments have impacted our understanding of
war.

More than a decade of frustration combating weaker insurgent
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the likelihood of future frustration
to ensure political stability in developing nations and U.S. access to critical
markets and infrastructure has led many to question whether we still adequately
understand what war is. Central to this discussion has been a debate over
whether the nature of war has changed or simply its character. At stake in this debate is not only how we
develop, organize, and employ military forces, but also our doctrinal view of
war, which has important implications for how we justify the use of those
forces. How we justify the use of those forces has equally important
implications for how often we find ourselves using it. 

In a recent article on
"War on the Rocks," Christopher Mewett described war's nature as "violent,
political and interactive." His concern, rightfully so, is that if we do not
get the nature of war right, we will not properly prepare for it. However, this
view of war is not necessarily shared by at least some possible U.S.
adversaries. In their oft-cited 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, two
Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang
Xiansui, argued that the United States narrowly defined war and
this narrow understanding exposed it to a vulnerability
that weaker states, like China, could exploit. In fact, they
stated the U.S. military does a poor job of deliberating upon future
fights, adding "lucid and incisive thinking ... is not a strong point of
the Americans." If only they knew.

They
argued, employing the language of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, that U.S.
conventional success has more or less permanently transformed war. Since no
adversary can hope to defeat U.S. conventional forces, war for them is no
longer about "using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one's will,"
as Clausewitz might say, but rather "using all means, including armed force or
non-armed force, military and nonmilitary, and lethal and nonlethal means to
compel the enemy to accept
one's interests," which they argue is more in line with Sun Tzu's thinking.

While
they did not explicitly use the words nature or character, their point suggests
that something about war has changed that goes beyond simply the means by which
we wage it. The shift of war's aim from imposing one's will to gaining
acceptance of one's interests in turn changes what it means to fight well, in
both the practical and ethical sense. One revision this view suggests is that
rather than seeking decisive battles, which Victor Davis Hanson has argued is
the signature of the Western style of war, military force may be better used to
shape and incentivize the kinds of alternatives adversaries can make. Another
revision is to view military force as just one kind of national power that can
be employed in war against an enemy.

To underscore
their point, Qiao and Wang list numerous "kinds" of warfare which
include nuclear, diplomatic, financial, network, trade, bio-chemical,
intelligence, resources, ecological, psychological, economic aid, space, tactical,
regulatory, electronic, smuggling, sanction, guerrilla, drug, news media,
terrorist, virtual, ideological warfare, and many more. Additionally, these
elements of warfare can be combined in infinite ways to form various kinds of
warfare. For example, the Chinese colonels describe the U.S. war on terror as
"national terrorist warfare + intelligence warfare + financial warfare +
network warfare + regulatory warfare." They also describe efforts by the Hong
Kong government in 1998, just prior to its return to Chinese government
control, as a war fought with "financial speculators," using financial warfare
combined with regulatory, psychological, and news media "warfare." I would note
that not all of these kinds
of warfare entail violence, which as previously noted, is often cited
as an essential feature of the nature of war.

Further,
from this shift in ends emerges a view of war that expands on our
traditional conceptions associated with war. Friend and enemy are
joined by collaborator and competitor; resistance and surrender are replaced by
acceptance and rejection; victory and defeat are replaced by success and
failure. Further, "friend" and "enemy" do not refer simply to states, but to
sub-state and non-state organizations as well. Additionally, such conflicts are
not zero-sum. If one can achieve one's interests by benefiting the enemy, or
some subgroup within the enemy's community, so much the better.

It is not
clear if this shift counts as a change in the nature of war or simply its character.
If the nature of war is that it is "political, interactive, and
violent," then perhaps the shift from imposing one's will to compelling
acceptance of one's interest simply marks a difference in the character of the
political component of war's nature. However, by broadening their understanding
of war the way they did, they clearly articulated forms of warfare that do not
necessarily entail violence. I think a fair criticism of this view is that
given war's close association with violence they risk expanding the kinds
of international engagements that can lead to violent conflict. But that is an
ethical concern that doesn't address directly whether they
are right that violence isn't a necessary feature of warfare. 

Qiao and
Wang's views are instructive on how the Chinese military engages in this
debate. However, given that the debate over the nature vs. character of war is
largely a linguistic exercise (I don't mean to trivialize it -- words do
matter), there is at least some utility in favoring the view that war's nature
doesn't change and that it is inherently violent. Otherwise, metaphorical uses
of the term could conceivably be employed to justify the use of
military force in response to non-military "acts of
aggression." Such a situation could set conditions
for increased violent conflict, which under our current understanding of
war would not be justified.

Col. C. Anthony Pfaff is senior military and Army advisor to
the Department of State. The views stated here are his own and do not represent
those of the Army, the Defense Department, or the Department of State.