A Facebook honor-the-troops picture I don't get

You know, I enjoy most of the captioned pictures I see on Facebook. And I normally at least understand them. But I've seen this one a few times now, and I think I must be missing something.

Complaining about the heat on a summer day is showing insufficient reverence for soldiers on active duty? Does anyone know any actual combat veterans who think it's a sin to complain about heat waves? I've certainly never run into one.

Tags: us military

SecDef Robert Gates on war: what's old is new

Andrew Bacevich is his various books has joined others in documenting how the Pentagon just kept on fighting the Cold War, long after the "Iron Curtain" had fallen and the Soviet Union had dissolved. The Iraq War and the Afghanistan War brought a new fashionability to counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN). But on closer inspection it largely comes down to using conventional forces to shoot up villages, with hit squads and mercenaries thrown into the mix.

The Cold War ended, but the Long War continues. And the military prefers to keep right on preparing to fight the Soviet Union. Republican Secretary Robert Gates, who Obama kept on as his on Secretary of Defense, expressed the Pentagon's Long War preferences in a speech at West Point today: Thom Shanker reports on it for the New York Times in Gates Warns Against Any More Wars Like Iraq or Afghanistan 02/25/2011; I say "reports", if you can call stenography reporting. The Department of Defense (DOD) Web site has its own article on it: Jim Garamone (American Forces Press Service), Gates Challenges Cadets to Change Army Culture 02/25/2011. The full text is available at Speech, United States Military Academy (West Point, NY) 02/25/2011. From the DOD text:

Which leads to the first major challenge I see facing the Army: How will it structure itself – how will it train and equip – for the extraordinarily diverse range of missions it will face in the future? ...

The need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest. And one of the benefits of the drawdown in Iraq is the opportunity to conduct the kind of full-spectrum training – including mechanized combined arms exercises – that was neglected to meet the demands of the current wars. Looking ahead, though, in the competition for tight defense dollars within and between the services, the Army also must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements – whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere. The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, be they Army or Marines, airborne infantry or special operations, is self-evident given the likelihood of counterterrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response, or stability or security force assistance missions. But in my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined," as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

By no means am I suggesting that the U.S. Army will – or should – turn into a Victorian nation-building constabulary – designed to chase guerrillas, build schools, or sip tea. But as the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely, the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size, and cost of its heavy formations to those in the leadership of the Pentagon, and on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, who ultimately make policy and set budgets.

The "swift-moving expeditionary forces" sounds an awful lot like the now-officially-defunct "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) and the related "transformation" to which Rummy, Gates' predecessor as SecDef, embraced as his way of relying on a massive army set to fight the long-since-defunct Soviet Union but handling interventions on the side with small, technologically-sophisticated forces relying on the "networked battlefield". It was this notion that led him to insist on minimizing the number of forces assembled for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with consequences that are all-too-well known.

Here is how Gates put it, apparently reincarnating Rummy's perspective while claiming to have learned from the recent past:

What we can expect in the future is that potential adversaries – be they terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states, or emerging powers – will seek to frustrate America’s traditional advantages, in particular our ability to shoot, move and communicate with speed and precision. From the look of things, the Army will not repeat the mistakes of the past, where irregular warfare was shunted to the side after Vietnam. The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq – invading, pacifying, and administering a large third world country – may be low. But in what General Casey has called "an era of persistent conflict," those unconventional capabilities will still be needed at various levels and in various locations. Most critically to prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly – and controversial – large-scale American military intervention. [my emphasis]

In other words, our we-don't-call-them-RMAed-any-more forces will handle these little constabulary actions like Iraq and Afghanistan but do so in a quick and efficient way so we won't have these big ole wars that make anyone actually watching wonder whether our mega-expensive armed forces can actually win a war larger than, say, invading the island Grenada back in the glory days of St. Reagan.

This is great:

A second challenge that I believe faces today’s and tomorrow’s Army – your Army – is whether and how the Army can adapt its practices and culture to these strategic realities. From the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers and junior- and mid-level leaders down range have been adjusting and improvising to the complex and evolving challenges on the ground – in many cases using the Internet, especially tools of social media, to share tactical lessons learned in real time with their colleagues at the front or preparing to deploy back here in the United States.

Notice that he doesn't include in adapting the Army's "practices and culture" any frivolous stuff like learning Arabic. Or Pashto or Dari or Persian or Urdu or other languages spoken in places that are or might be the scene of US wars.

Tags: long war, robert gates, us military

Argentines discover (unauthorized) pamphlets, guns and narcotics in a US military transport plane

"Don't touch my bags, if you please, Mr. Customs Man"

There's an odd story coming out of Argentina. The US military tried to bring in a suspicious cache of undeclared items on a military transport plane, including unauthorized weapons, narcotics (!!), encryption devices and booklets instructing US soldiers what to do if they are caught operating in a foreign country.

Horacio Verbitsky reports for Página 12 in Seguro que no 13.02.2011. Also reported in Juan Cruz Sanz, Un avión militar de EE.UU. le trajo complicaciones al Gobierno Clarín 13.02.2011.

The plane in question was a Boeing C17 Globemaster III cargo plane. It was supposedly bringing supplies to use in training police on handling hostage situations. The fact that the material was being brought in on a military plane was an issue in itself. After their experience of "El Proceso", the military dictatorship of 1976-83, Argentina insists that internal security is a civilian and not a military responsibility. They're more scrupulous about the point than the United States, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

During a routine inspection upon landing Thursday, the C-17 was discovered to be carrying 1000 cubic feet of material not declared on the plane's manifest. Verbitsky's report, considerably more detailed than the Clarín, says that the undeclared materials amounted to around a third of the plane's cargo. The unauthorized cargo included machine guns, rifles, various drugs including narcotics, transmission equipment, and a instruction booklets in five languages for American soldiers, and a case the crew would not allow the Argentines to inspect. The American Embassy also refused permission. Argentine President Cristina Fernández ordered that the case be inspected, which was done over a period of six hours on Friday, and it contained "software y material sensitivo para la seguridad" (software and sensitive security material). By Verbitsky's report, further inspection of the material is scheduled to continue on Monday.

One part of the instruction booklet provided the Spanish explanation, "Soy un soldado de los Estados Unidos. Por favor, informe a mi embajada que he sido arrestado por país" ("I am a United States soldier. Please inform my embassy that I have been arrested in your country").

It wasn't the first time this had happened recently. The hostage-rescue training had been scheduled to begin in August 2010 but was postponed when the US plane carrying the weapons to be used in the training was also found to be carrying unauthorized materials. Argentina sent it back home to North Carolina.

Verbitsky comments that part of what is happening is that the US military has a very disproportionate role in domestic security in the US, far disproportionate to that common in Latin American countries. "Estados Unidos intenta exportarlo a los países bajo su influencia, que son casi todos." (The United States is intent on exporting [that same disproportion] to [Latin America] countries under its influence, which is almost all of them."

Verbitsky concludes his report:

El Departamento de Estado citó al embajador argentino Alfredo Chiaradía y le expresó su "sorpresa" por el procedimiento ya que "Estados Unidos desea mantener relaciones amistosas con la Argentina". Curiosa forma de lograrlo. Cualquier argentino, civil o militar, que intentara ingresar armas y drogas no declaradas a los Estados Unidos iría preso en forma inmediata.

[The {US} State Department met with the Argentine Ambassador and expressed their "surprise" at the procedure {i.e., their surprise that the Argentine authorities enforced their own country's laws!} and that "the United States wants to maintain friendly relations with Argentine." Strange way to show it. Any Argentine, civilian or military, who tried to bring undeclared arms and drugs into the United States would be jailed immediately.]

One obvious possibility is that the Argentines intercepted materials intended for use in some clandestine US military operation in Argentina not authorized by the Argentine government.

Tags: argentina, us military

Something to think about: how many wars do our invicible generals win?

To see the Pentagon press releases and our press corps' stenographic news reports, our glorious generals haven't lost a single battle since around the time Custer went down at the Little Big Horn. A huge part of mainstream military doctrine revolves around the claim that the Tet Offensive in 1968 was yet another in the endless stream of battles won.

But wars? Not so much, as William Pfaff reminds us in A Far From Happy New Year Truthdig 12/28/2010:

Since the Korean War (a draw, plus a cease-fire that remains dangerously unresolved) and the Vietnam War (away from which the unsuccessful U.S. tiptoed, while continuing to issue empty threats which had no public backing), the U.S. has won wars only against former CIA "asset" Col. Manuel Noriega of Panama, a Cuban airport construction crew on Grenada, and Saddam Hussein, thereby delivering Iraq into the hands of Iran.

Pfaff, like some other of my favorite commentators on military affairs, emphasizes that military spending contributes to what he apparently sees as a problematic level of debt. Though I sympathize with his general point about military overreach, it's not because the US is running out of debt capacity or that our borrowing costs are soaring. Neither of those is the case.

Scare talk about budget deficits may be one of the knives plunged into the Social Security system in 2011. I don't want to encourage it even in support of reasonable proposals.

But Pfaff gives a good summary of where American foreign policy is now at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011:

The U.S. is entering the new year, and a new age, still with a policy paradigm of aggression, war and global domination in the stubborn belief that the agency for accomplishing its security is to attack religious radicalism in other people's countries, teach democracy to societies ill-equipped for it and fight nationalist resistance (other people’s nationalism, not America's). The inevitable result will simply be more aggression, war, reciprocal terrorism, defeat and failure. This promises a far from happy new year!

Tags: us military

Andrew Bacevich on civilian-military relations

From "Elusive Bargain: The Pattern of U.S. Civil-military relations Since World War II" by Andrew Bacevich in the 2007 book edited by him, Long War: A History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II:

With U.S. military commitments stretching existing resources to the limit, with the prospect of more war stretching to the far horizon, and with the implications of an increasingly militarized conception of policy simply ignored, national security nonetheless remained after 9/11 - as it had been since World War II - the one arena of American life from which democratic processes were persistently excluded.

Thus did the civil-military reality that that had pertained throughout the Cold War persist during the new global war on terror: as factions of the national security elite, both civilian and military, vied with each other behind closed doors to control this or that aspect of policy, all remained united in their collective determination to keep the people - assumed to be ill-informed, vacillating, and untrustworthy – out.

Tags: andrew bacevich, us military

Hearts, minds and McChrystal

Marcy Wheeler's post Ill-Considered Trash Talk McChrystal’s Idea of Winning Hearts and Minds Emptywheel 06/22/2010 makes a connenction that hadn't occurred to me between two of the themes in my previous post:

So take a step back and think about what that means for McChrystal (and should mean for the question of whether or not he gets fired for this). Stanley McChrystal, the guy in charge of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, okayed this article, presumably intending it to win hearts and minds in the US.

And McChrystal presumably knows US culture better than he knows Afghanistan culture.

This article is McChrystal’s idea of winning hearts and minds.

Argue what you will about whether McChrystal’s insubordination requires his firing. Argue what you will about his unique qualifications for the job.

But if this is McChrystal’s idea of how to win hearts and minds then we will never achieve success in Afghanistan so long as he’s in charge.

Tags: counterinsurgency, us military

Fort Hood massacre and early news

When the news was coming out this afternoon about the mass murder at Fort Hood, I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker who was also following the news. He currently has two sons in the military so, as he said, the news "hits too close to home".

I said something to the effect that it was a horrible event. But I also said I was reserving judgment on the specifics until we heard some more solid news. He said that he believed what the base commander, Gen. Robert Cone, had reported in the first news conference he held after the incident. I said, "But the military's first statement on things like this is always a lie." He was taken aback by that. And we had an interesting talk about it.

I showed him the one of the first news articles I had seen about it from La Opinión - I actually first heard about it from the paper's Twitter feed - which at the time was reporting seven dead and 20 injured, apparently based on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's statement using information from the base. It was also said shooting had been reported at two locations on the base, and that there was believed to be one shooter and one additional suspect. I also showed him a Salon report that had been updated in an additional section after Cone's press conference. Then we were talking about 12 dead, 31 wounded, the shooter and a police officer also killed (the shooter maybe or maybe not one of the 12), and two additional suspects in custody.

I explained that expected just this kind of changing reporting from a situation like this. And that even if we assumed that the base commander had the best of intention, he might actually have good reason to give out incomplete or false information at that moment when they were still trying to resolve the immediate situation and make arrests. But I was a little surprised myself at how totally skeptical I was of Cone's information. As far as I recall, I've never heard of the man before. But as I explained to my co-worker, an endless number of false statement about battle situations has had it's effect. And especially the Pat Tillman case, in which senior Army officers knowingly lied to the public and to Tillman's family about his being killed in a "friendly fire" incident, because they wanted to cover up their own mistakes and also use his death as propaganda.

I also said that I could see reasons for the base commander to have not so admirable reasons to lie. After all, this is the largest US military base anywhere. And one of the worst terrorist-type incident, a real mass murder, had just taken place on the base under his command. Reading about recent German history, I know there were incidents in which the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) terrorist group attacked US military bases, sometimes killing several Americans. And there have obviously been deadly attacks on American bases in combat zones. But I don't recall ever hearing of one this costly in lives happening in the US outside actual combat situations like the Civil War. So he very well might have incentive to dissemble. As citizens and news consumers, we'd be foolish to overlook that possibility.

But I did say that I would be surprised if the death toll or the number of wounded turned out to be lower than reported, because I couldn't see any motive for the base commander to exaggerate those figures.

Well, here we are a few hours later. As the subtitle on this Alex Koppelman report at Salon puts it, "Much of what was initially reported about the mass murder at an Army post turns out to have been wrong." And while the last I saw, the count of dead and wounded is still at 12 and 30+, respectively, it appears I was a bit too optimistic about the likely accuracy of the Gen. Cone's information. Because the officer that was being reported killed at one point was wounded but not killed.

Even more surprisingly, the alleged shooter is still alive. Now, that's a real surprise. And somebody along the chain from the wounded but alive suspect to Cone's press conference to us was almost certainly knowingly lying. It's not unthinkable that there could have been a legitimate reason to disseminate that bit of disinformation. I can't think of what that might be. But if there was, I want to hear about it. As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher observed on Twitter, "Military says they reported Hasan dead due to confusion at hospital. Huh?"

If the top brass at the base really thought there was a sole shooter and that he was dead, I'm not sure if that's more worrisome in its own way that the fact that they just lied about it. How good a job were they doing handling the emergency if they could get something that important wrong? As Mitchell said in another Tweet, "Get ready for days of jokes, old and new, about 'military intelligence.'"

But we also can't forget what kind of country we live in after the Cheney-Bush years and the Obama administration extreme claims of government secrecy for "national security" issues. Did the military initially make the false claim that the shooter was dead because they thought they might ship him off to Gitmo or some CIA gulag station and torture him for the next 10 years? Or did they say he was dead because they were torturing him already? Until there is a full legal investigation and prosecution of the known torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush administration, we have to learn to ask these questions.

Sen. Levin Carl Levin said early on that his Senate Armed Services Committee was calling for "a detailed accounting" of the incident. I hope they don't just take the base commander's word for it. We'll see if Levin's makes a decent follow-through. I've been disappointed by him more than once.

I suppose I should add that the military should look closely at Cone's performance in this matter. I won't hold my breath they they will do it responsibly. We've seen too much too often of how our glorious generals operate in such matters the last eight years.

Tags: fort hood massacre, us military