Who kidnapped Obama the orator and replaced him with this guy at NDU?

By Emile Simpson

Best Defense White House correspondent

I thought President
Obama's speech at NDU on Thursday was conceptual car crash -- a collision
between two incompatible desires to aggregate, or disaggregate, threats.

He spent half the speech saying he wants to end a war, not have endless conflict, and not
blur boundaries. But he spent the other half of the speech veering from
identifying the enemy as al Qaeda, then its franchises, then just terrorists in
general, and saying these terrorists hide at the ends of the earth.

Seems to me completely muddled: If you want to target networks
and disaggregate threats, fine, I agree with that, but one would be forgiven
for thinking any jihadist under the sun is still the enemy here, which is
plainly aggregating threats to the extent that one will never narrow an enemy
down enough to defeat militarily, so cannot therefore "end" the war.

For me this wasn't a speech about drones, but about war, and
despite, ironically, agreeing with what I think Obama was trying to say (i.e.
disaggregate threats, move away from endless war), the way in which the concept
of war here is (mis)applied seems to me to do the opposite.

The reality is
that the administration is locked in to using the concept of war as a legal
idea to justify the use of force in self defense, but that the legal concept of
war today doesn't match the military concept.

Emile Simpson
served in the British Army as an infantry officer in the Gurkhas from 2006 to
2012. He deployed to southern Afghanistan three times and is the author of War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century
Combat as Politics (Columbia,
2012).