Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 72

The Royal Navy failure was one of imagination, so cutting the size of the U.S. military might not force innovation

By
Michel Horowitz


Best
Defense guest columnist

I read your
recent Washington Post column on
the adaptability of U.S. forces with great interest, since building a force
that is adaptable for the future, rather than just prepared for one particular
future, is essential for U.S. forces to remain the best in the world over the
next generation. Your key argument is that a smaller U.S. military would be more
adaptable and innovative.

But will resource constraints lead to more innovation? For
smaller to lead to "smarter," the Department of Defense will have to respond to
budgetary pressure by allocating more resources to innovative experimentation
-- both in terms of operational concepts and technology, among other things.

The problem is that established powers like the United
States often face pressure to do the opposite -- to double down in favor of
status quo platforms and planning, because those are what people know. As I
argue in my
book on military innovation, new technologies and operational concepts,
lacking built-in constituencies and powerful institutional support, can often
end up as the first on the chopping block, rather than as a focal point for the
future. Wrestling with this challenge will be critical in the years ahead.

Turning to history and thinking about U.S. forces during the
inter-war period, it is not clear that the small size of the U.S. Navy,
relative to the British Navy, is what drove adaptability on the American side.
The U.S. Navy was actually quite sizable, in a relative sense, after WWI. Until
it collapsed, the Washington Naval Treaty locked in relative naval tonnage
equivalence for the United States and Great Britain, with the other powers
required to lag behind. Yet the U.S. Navy was committed to experimentation and
lacked the sclerotic commitment to the battleship that the British generally
demonstrated. Supported by the leadership of Admiral Sims and others at the
Naval War College, and Admiral Moffet at the Bureau of Aeronautics, the U.S.
Navy learned how to exploit the advantages of the aircraft carrier through real
world experiments and tabletop exercises. More generally, U.S. forces in the
inter-war period demonstrated a significant capacity to innovate, not only with
carriers, but in other areas as well (amphibious warfare concepts, for example).
Essentially, it is not clear that resource constraints primarily drove that
innovation by U.S. forces.

Along with innovation by U.S. forces in the inter-war period
came planning -- even planning for a particular adversary. The post-World War I
U.S. military created a series of "Color Plans" to plan for potential future
wars. Included among these was "Plan Orange," which sketched out plans for a
war against Japan (see the Edward
Miller book on the topic or the relevant section in Ronald
Spector's excellent book on the Pacific theater of WWII). Yet rather than
constraining U.S. forces into a box that undermined their performance during
the war, historians and scholars of military innovation tend to consider this
planning a success. After the war, Admiral
Chester Nimitz said, "The war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms
at the War College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing
that happened during the war was a surprise -- absolutely nothing except the
kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war. We had not visualized these."

On the British side, from the perspective of my research,
the key factor that drove the British understanding of the aircraft carrier
prior to World War II was not necessarily size, per se. Instead, in some ways,
the British were victims of their own past success (a crucial lesson for the
U.S. military today). With a track record of naval dominance and powerful
institutional interests that funneled most thinking about new technology
towards how they could support the battleship, the British experienced a
failure of imagination. It was a combination of their high organizational age
due to past success (which expanded the number of veto points that could block
innovative change), and their narrow critical task focus (viewing success as
delivering steel on target through gunnery), that meant the Brits had low
"adoption capacity." This made it extremely difficult for them to adopt
carrier warfare in the inter-war period and early years of World War II. Size
certainly mattered -- but the British Navy's struggles with the aircraft
carrier were due to more than size.

Michael Horowitz is an
associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He
is spending the 2013 year as an international affairs fellow, funded by the
Council on Foreign Relations, working for the deputy assistant secretary of
defense for force development in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense
for Policy. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of
the U.S. government or Department of Defense.

Hey, New York Times: For the military you want, pay should be the last thing cut

By Matthew Cancian


Best Defense bureau of military
compensation and cultural affairs

The New York Times recently ran an editorial
titled 'Putting
Military Pay On The Table',
a title that conveniently suggests both the subject and the position. I must
admit some puzzlement that the left-leaning Times
would criticize the most socialist pay structure in our country. For our
servicemen there is job counseling for dependents, child care, subsidized food,
and single-payer health care to name some benefits, all of which would be more
at home in Scandinavia than in America (a fact that I hadn't quite appreciated
when I was in).

The
critique by the Times is made more
baffling because it follows the recent circulation in New York Times-reading circles of a Bloomberg
piece on the
ratio of executive pay and compensation to those of the median employee;
McDonald's, America's third largest employer (behind the DOD and Walmart), has
a ratio of 351:1. With E-5 being the median pay grade in the military, assuming
six years of service, the ratio of base pay between an O-9 and the median is
just below 6:1. This is in keeping with a shared ethos of brotherhood and
entirely appropriate when those at the bottom of the pay scale are in greater
danger than those at the top. Additionally, in support of their position, the Times editorial cites a study by the
Congressional Budget Office that states that "between
2001 and 2012, when private-sector wages were effectively flat, basic military
pay rose by 28 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars." It's almost as if
something significant occurred during these years for our military that made
higher pay both practically necessary and morally imperative...

All this being said, there are some areas where changes are not
only acceptable, but even advisable. The current structure of paying for
dependents incentivizes premature marriages that cost the military money,
distract from personnel readiness, and most importantly often ruins the lives
of young servicemen (to quote a battalion JAG: "I swear to God, if I have to
process one more divorce with a woman named 'Cinnamon'..."). Eliminating the
dependent bonus for grades E-1 through E-3 (and, to be fair, O-1 and O-2) would
help to reduce the number of these premature marriages while still providing
benefits to those servicemen who are more mature.

Another measure that would reduce pay and compensation expenses is
the decentralization of separations procedures. As the Marines did with the
Expeditious Discharge Program of the late 1970s, the authority to grant
honorable or general discharges should be delegated to O-4s; other-than-honorable
discharges should be delegated to O-5s (as the Navy already does). Servicemen
with disciplinary problems would be separated faster and commanders would have
more control over their personnel. While we would prefer not to pay to train
servicemen just to kick them out in their units, this procedural change admits
that the initial screening process isn't perfect and instead looks to save
money by not paying for an unmotivated troublemaker to finish his or her
contract.

The best defense for our country is not having bleeding edge
technology or huge stockpiles of munitions; it's having the best minds in our
military, a point that is made throughout Tom Ricks's book The Generals. Cutting military pay across the board directly
attacks what should be the cornerstone of our defense policy by reducing the
financial incentives that ensure that the military gets the best material it
can. To go to extremes, if the Marines I deployed with traded gear with the
Afghan soldiers we advised, I have no doubt that the Marines would still be the
superior force. Some tweaks will help keep it that way; major reductions will
not.

Matthew Cancian deployed to Sangin, Afghanistan in 2011 with 1st
Battalion, 5th Marines. He currently resides in Triple A Pawtucket, RI. He has
left active duty and is applying to grad school, and would be glad to help with
your research until he matriculates.

Actually, Tom, some military historical trivia matters a lot--and here’s why

Having recently disparaged "brass buttons" trivia
by some military historians, I was interested in the distinction drawn by the well-known West Point historian Eugenia Kiesling in the conclusion of
her essay on doctrine in the
interwar period in the Cambridge History of
War, Vol. IV: War and the Modern World: 

--

"The color of collar tabs on parade uniforms does not
matter. Other seemingly trivial questions do. How much autonomy accompanied the
red trouser stripes of the German general staff officer? How often did infantry
units train with antiaircraft guns? Did generals join admirals for lunch?
Arguably more than analyses that parse military theory, questions like these
explain nations' wartime performance." 

--

Jack London describes an infantry platoon

Actually
he is writing about the crew of a 19th century seal-hunting ship,
but it is pretty similar: "They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly
against one another and growing daily more calloused from the grinding." (From The Sea-Wolf)

It
reminds me that somewhere, I think in War
and Peace, which I read while covering boring U.S. peacekeeping ops in
Haiti, Tolstoy describes an infantry unit in wartime as being like the crew of
a ship-moving through the world, but still constantly seeing the same familiar
faces.  

Moseley: USAF’s future looks pretty bleak

By Lacy Hebert


Best Defense guest columnist

What does the future of the U.S. Air Force look
like? Speaking recently at an event hosted by the Air Force Association's
Mitchell Institute and AEI's Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies, retired
Air Force General
T. Michael Moseley painted a very dire picture.

The present state of the Air Force, he said, is
not satisfactory, and if things continue as they are, at some point, someone is
going to have to put together troops with no training and no equipment. The
United States going to face a series of Task Force Smiths, the former Air Force
chief of staff maintained, and it's not going to be pretty.

A capable Air Force is key, he said, to
overcoming the challenges that the United States and the world will face in the
next century. The United States Air Force in particular has a unique set of
tools to see and access anything on the face of the Earth. Moseley said that
the U.S. and its allies need to be serious about setting the conditions for
peace, dissuading belligerent activity, deterring conflict, protecting
populations, and promoting stability. The U.S. Air Force and other branches of
the military are key to this effort.

The core concepts of the Air
Force -- organization, equipment, and training -- in recent years have been
neglected, he said. The Air Force fails in its mission when it misses the
opportunity to properly organize, properly train, and properly equip. It fails
when its people get too comfortable.

One major reason that the Air Force has
recently suffered is the sequester, Moseley argued. The Air Force has four
different accounts: personnel, infantry, operations, and investment. During the
sequester, he says, the first thing to go is operations-training and flying
hours are cut. The second thing to go is investment-there is less acquisition
of new technology. As resources are chipped away, the quality and the
performance of the Air Force declines.

People privileged enough to
be in policy jobs need to draw a hard line on standards of training,
organization, and equipment, he said. When the Air Force is able to partner,
project force, and deter aggression, the likelihood that a conflict will arise
declines. Investing in these very important capabilities is an insurance
against future conflict. Gen. Moseley, a former F-15 pilot, said he is not sure
that today's Air Force is organized, equipped, and trained well enough to fully
serve this purpose. This is a serious problem, he said, and it is one that the
United States needs to address.

The never-ending fight over aircraft supporting ground forces in combat: Close air support vs. interdiction

There seems to me to be a never-ending fight between close
air support (that is, against the enemy's frontline forces) and interdiction
(that is, on the lines of supply to those forces). Why do the twain never meet?

I suspect the answer is that both sides are totally right --
from their own perspectives. Air commanders want to be able to boast that they
blew up 90 percent of the mortar shells that were being shipped to the enemy's
front. But if you are on the receiving end of the remaining 10 percent, that
means nothing. What you wanted stopped is the 100 percent of the shells aiming
to kill you at that moment.    

How to resolve this? I suspect it is to drop the other shoe
and give the Army its own fixed-wing close air support aircraft, to go along
with the helicopters. Back when the Army Air Corps failed to provide enough
spotting aircraft, the Army's artillery branch bought its own aircraft, Edgar Raines tells
us (via the estimable Eugenia Kiesling).  If I were sec def, I'd say to the Air Force,
"Dudes, it's like drones: By handling the mission so poorly, you've forfeited
the right to sole ownership."  

Things that undermine people's faith in the workings of the military justice system

A Navy lieutenant was found by
social workers in the city of Virginia Beach to have committed child abuse, and signed a decree admitting to Level 2 abuse, according to a report
by Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot.
Yet the officer remains in the Navy -- which never investigated the case at the
time.   

Skeptical? Try this: "In a tearful interview with a social worker, the daughter
said her father took her into a bedroom, locked the door, pinned her down by
her wrists and raped her, city records obtained by The Pilot show. She said the assault followed two years of
inappropriate touching by her father."

Cowboys and Indians?: American movies about Special Operators killing Somalis

I saw Captain Phillips over the weekend. I thought it was very good, and
pretty realistic in its portrayal of how the military operates. As I left the
movie I thought, Yow, that's the second movie I've seen in two weeks about
Americans getting in lethal trouble while out in the Indian Ocean, the other
being Robert Redford co-starring with the water in All is Lost.  

Then I had another thought: Over
the last 12 years, Hollywood has made two movies involving Somalis, and both
involve killing Somalis, the first one being Black Hawk Down. Maybe they are the new "Indians" to our "cowboys."

Want a better U.S. military? First make it smaller -- because preparedness now is really about adaptiveness, not readiness

Here
is a piece I had
in yesterday's Washington Post:

"Want a better U.S. military? Make
it smaller. The bigger the military, the more time it must spend taking care of
itself and maintaining its structure as it is, instead of changing with the
times. And changing is what the U.S. military must begin to do as it recovers
from the past decade's two wars.

For example, the Navy recently
christened the USS Gerald R. Ford , an
aircraft carrier that cost
perhaps $13.5 billion. Its modern aspects include a smaller crew, better radar and a
different means of launching aircraft, but it basically looks like the carriers
the United States has built for the past half-century. And that means it has a
huge "radar signature," making it highly visible. That could be dangerous in an
era of global satellite imagery and long-range precision missiles, neither of
which existed when the Ford's first predecessors were built. As Capt. Henry
Hendrix, a naval historian and aviator, wrote this year, today's carrier, like
the massive battleships that preceded it, is "big,
expensive, vulnerable -- and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the
time." What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a
range twice as long as that of the carrier's aircraft?

Indeed, if the U.S. Navy persists
in its current acquisition course, it runs the risk of being like the Royal
Navy that entered World War II. As ours is today, the British navy then was the
world's biggest and could throw more firepower than any other sea service. Yet
it proved largely irrelevant in that war because its leaders had missed the
growing significance of submarines and aircraft carriers, not grasping how both
had changed the nature of maritime warfare. They thought of carriers as scout
ships, providing far-seeing eyes for battleships, when, in fact, carrier
aircraft had replaced battleships as the striking arm of the fleet.

Yes, the Royal Navy won the Battle of the Atlantic -- but that's partly
because the United States gave it destroyers and other escort ships the
admirals had neglected, as well as some crucial long-range land-based aircraft.
(One-third of U-boats sunk were hit by aircraft, with another third knocked out
by combined air and surface-ship action.)

The issue, therefore, is how to
have not the most powerful military today but rather the most relevant military
at the point of necessity -- a point that cannot be known. To have that, the
United States needs a military that is not necessarily "ready for combat" at
any given moment but instead is most able to adapt to the events of tomorrow.

The wrong way to prepare is to try
to anticipate what the next war will be and then build a military -- on land,
sea and air -- that fits that bill. Guesses about the future will almost
certainly be wrong. In 2000, no one thought we would invade Afghanistan the
following year. In 1953, Vietnam was a faraway country about which Americans
knew little. In 1949, Korea was thought likely to be beyond our defense
perimeter. And so on.

The best form of preparedness is to
develop a military that is most able to adapt. It should be small and nimble.
Its officers should be educated as well as trained because one trains for the
known but educates for the unknown -- that is, prepares officers to think
critically as they go into chaotic, difficult and new situations.

Eugenia Kiesling, a professor
of history at West Point, observed that in the period between the world
wars, "Smaller forces brought fewer logistical constraints and more rapid
adaptation to changes in technology." That observation is an argument not for a
big jack-of-all-trades military but for one that is smaller and optimized
through its spending to be nimble.

My point is not to beat up on the
Navy. All branches of the U.S. military face the same issue. By and large, the
United States still has an Industrial Age military in an Information Age world.
With some exceptions, the focus is more on producing mass strength than
achieving precision. Land forces, in particular, need to think less about
relying on big bases and more about being able to survive in an era of
persistent global surveillance. For example, what will happen when the
technological advances of the past decade, such as armed drones controlled from
the far side of the planet, are turned against us? A drone is little more than
a flying improvised explosive device. What if terrorists find ways to send them
to Washington addresses they obtain from the Internet?

Imagine a world where, in a few
decades, Google (having acquired
Palantir) is the world's largest defense contractor. Would we want
generals who think more like George Patton or Steve Jobs -- or who offer a bit
of both? How do we get them? These are the sorts of questions the Pentagon
should begin addressing. If it does not, we should find leaders -- civilian and
in uniform -- who will."

Tom, the odds for joint Israeli-Saudi airstrikes against Iran are about slim to none

By Richard L. Russell


Best Defense guest columnist

Israel and Saudi Arabia are seething that President Barack Obama
reneged on his threat to use military force against Syria after it crossed
Obama's "red line" and repeatedly used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil
war. For Israelis and Saudis alike, Obama just doesn't get the power politics
of the Middle East. If a leader threatens the use of force and doesn't
follow-through, he suffers a loss of face and a severe deterioration in his
prestige or reputation for power, which is the coin of the realm in Middle East
politics.

The Israelis and
Saudis judge that the U.S. failure to use military power against Damascus sent
the wrong message to Syria's staunch security backers in Tehran. The mullahs
now know that if President Obama was not willing to "pull the trigger" on
Syria, he does not have any appetite to do it against Iran's nuclear weapons
program either. Both Jerusalem and Riyadh see Tehran's aggressive military
support to Syria's embattled regime as part and parcel of its determination to
maintain its geopolitical land bridge from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus
and into the realm of Arab-Israeli politics in Lebanon. Both Israel and Saudi
Arabia fear Iran's support of its Hezbollah proxy in sub rosa war against them. Saudi Arabia especially sees itself as
the vanguard of Sunni opposition to Iran's leadership of the Shia Muslim
community. The Sunni and Shia are now pitted in sectarian battles throughout
the Middle East.

[[BREAK]]

The six-month
interim agreement with Tehran to freeze its nuclear program does nothing to
relieve shared threat perceptions in Jerusalem and Riyadh of Iranian ambitions
to dominate the Middle East from behind a nuclear weapons security umbrella in
the future. The Israelis and the Saudis see the interim agreement as little
more than buying Iran diplomatic time and protection from American military
strikes. They anticipate that the Iranians in six months time will parlay the
interim agreement into endless negotiations to buy more diplomatic time,
political legitimacy, and economic sanctions relief. While Israel and Saudi
Arabia see an acute Iranian threat, both countries are exceedingly frustrated
that Washington sees Iran's nuclear program more as a nuisance.

The Israelis -- unlike the Americans -- have on numerous occasions enforced their
"red lines" in the region. They have made good on their "Begin doctrine" never
to allow another state in the Middle East to harbor nuclear weapons. They have
mounted preemptive military strikes against both Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007
to bludgeon Saddam's and Bashar's nuclear programs, respectively.

Iran's nuclear
program, however, is much more robust, diversified, and farther away from
Israel than the past Iraqi and Syrian programs, making for a much more
formidable and demanding military problem. The Israelis would much prefer that
the United States do the job for them because they lack the wherewithal needed
for a sustained campaign against Iran's nuclear infrastructure that the
Americans have. Hence, the seething anger in Israel today that for all intents
and purposes the American military option against Iran's nuclear program is off
the table as the West exclusively pursues negotiations with Iran.

Might the Israelis
now look to Saudi Arabia for assistance in mounting a military campaign against
Iran? The Israelis sure could use access to Saudi airbases for refueling,
rearming, and generating faster sorties against Iran for a more intense and
robust campaign given Saudi Arabia's proximity to Iranian airspace. That Saudi
real estate certainly has been put to good use in supporting U.S. military
operations in the region, especially during the 1990-91 Gulf war and to a
lesser extent -- and with even a lower public profile -- during the 2003 war
against Iraq.

While hosting Israeli aircraft on Saudi airbases would make
tactical and operational sense when viewed entirely through a military prism,
it would be an extraordinarily dangerous move for the Saudi royal family when
viewed through a political lens. And, as Clausewitz reminds us, the political
always trumps strictly military considerations.

The Saudis could not be confident that Israeli operations from their airbases
could be kept secret. They would have to worry that word would eventually leak
out from Washington because that city leaks like a sieve these days. The public exposure of such close military
cooperation with Israel would risk shaking the political foundations of the
Saudi regime. The Wahhabi religious establishment might violently protest against
the royal family for allowing Zionists into the land of Mecca and Medina. They could take to
the streets and shake the political legitimacy of the regime in an echo of the
1979 Mecca uprisings. The Saudi royal family is especially on nervous guard for
political discontent on the heels of the "Arab Spring."

On top of that, the public exposure of Israeli-Saudi military
cooperation in an air campaign against Iran would be a huge windfall for
Iranian propaganda. Tehran would argue that the Saudi regime had lost its
legitimacy as an Islamic state and as host of Islam's holy sites. The Iranians
would be gifted a powerful critique of Saudi Arabia as the land of Arab tribes
held together by an old and invalid royal family that was so weak it could not
use its modern Western-purchased military hardware against Persian civilization
itself. Instead, the Saudis had to go and beg the Israeli Zionists to attack
Iran from Islamic sands.

Some observers may argue that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
phenomenon is so potent that the Saudis would firmly align with the Israelis to
strike out at Iran's nuclear program. More specifically, they may argue that
the Saudi Sunnis hate the Iranian Shia more than they do the Israelis so they
would be have no qualms about aligning with a lesser evil to erode the power of
a greater evil. Maybe so, but the Saudi political sphere simply could not run
the risks of hosting an Israeli military campaign from Saudi airbases which
might last weeks, and potentially evolve into a prolonged war of attrition
lasting years reminiscent of the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq. To do so,
would be the Saudis cutting off their political heads -- not just their noses
-to spite their faces.

In short, small-scale clandestine Israeli-Saudi intelligence cooperation
is doable -- and plausibly denied, if uncovered -- but hosting the Israel Air
Force for a war against Iran would be politically unsustainable for the Saudi
regime. The best the Israelis
could hope for would be for the Saudis to turn a blind-eye to Israeli
penetrations of Saudi airspace in route to bomb Iran as well as for air-to-air
refueling, which too would have plausible deniability.

Then again, might
the Saudis undertake military action against Iran's nuclear program absent
Israeli or American action? The Saudis, as well as all the other Arab states,
are fond of their narrative that the United States has a "double standard"
between them and Israel. They argue that the United States has relentlessly
provided security assistance to Israel. Lost in the narrative is that while the
United States has given Israel about $1.5 billion in annual security assistance,
it has nearly matched that with about $1 billion dollars per year in security
assistance to Egypt to secure the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The United
States, moreover, has never had to dispatch American soldiers to fight
shoulder-to-shoulder and to die with Israeli troops in battle. But it had to do
so with Arab forces in the 1990-1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. American
Marines also were put in harm's way to ensure that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian
forces were allowed to depart Beirut for Tunis in the wake of Israel's invasion
in the 1980s of Lebanon.

The United States
and Western allies have increasingly made available top-shelve military
hardware to Arab Gulf states making them some of the best-equipped military
forces in the world. According to the Military
Balance, the Saudis can boast of an impressive air order-of-battle that
includes more than 150 F-15 fighter aircraft, 70 Tornado fighters, and five E-5
Sentry command and control aircraft that could be harnessed for an air campaign
against Iran. The United Arab Emirates, which also views Iran as a grave
threat, could add 70 F-16 fighter aircraft and 44 Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft
into an air campaign pot.

Even though the
Saudis and the Emirates cooperated closely in marshaling Gulf forces to quell
domestic unrest in Bahrain in 2011, they probably would not be up to the task
of preemptively striking Iran's nuclear program. To be sure, the Arab Gulf
states in the past have assigned aircraft to multinational campaigns, like the
1990-91 Gulf war and symbolically with the NATO-led campaign against Qaddafi in
Libya in the midst of the "Arab Spring." But they have never waged an
integrated, joint air campaign by themselves. Iran's air defenses and air
forces have deteriorated in the decades since the fall of the shah, but the
Arab Gulf states have never launched a campaign to take down an adversary's air
defense system and air forces as a prelude to airstrikes against strategic
facilities such as Iran's nuclear program. The Arab Gulf states too would have
to worry that Washington would not be eager to come to their defenses should
they strike Iran on the their own to bring on Iranian retaliation in the likely
form of ballistic missiles.

For all the Arab
Gulf state narratives that accuse the United States of a double-standard with
Israel and berate Israel for "reckless" behavior in international security,
they are no doubt secretly hoping that the Israelis will unilaterally do the
dirty deed and preemptively strike Iran's nuclear facilities. The Arab Gulf
states want to see the Israelis act unilaterally, much as they did in Lebanon
in the 1980s without an American "green light," and to suffer the consequent
international opprobrium. The Arab Gulf states then could publicly denounce
Israel for yet another example of "reckless" international action,
diplomatically reassure Iran to stay out of the regional military fray, and
resume admiring their impressive military inventories, which are more used to
ensure domestic and international prestige than to wage war against a hostile
neighbor. 

Richard Russell is professor of national
security affairs at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. He
is the author of Sharpening Strategic Intelligence
(Cambridge University Press) and Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater
Middle East (Routledge). The views expressed are
Russell's alone.