re: "The Definition of Insanity"

Deebow at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") found fault with the latest iteration of the "peace dividend."

Money quote(s):

"We did this after WWI, WWII and during the decade of Slick Willie and the Peace Dividend. Resurgent China, collapsing Norks, Nuclear Iran, unfinished Afghanistan; really, I probably could go on and on with people who would wish us ill."

&

"(D)id anyone consult any random first sergeant out in the motor pool or Infantry branch officer on what they learned at West Point?, I mean, besides the mandatory attendance at presidential speeches and diversity classes? You know, the strategy and tactics part, theatre logistics, air land battle? Have any of those mental midgets heard of being there "firstest with the mostest" to win the battle? The 82nd Airborne is built around the idea that we are not going to spend time in the mutual circle jerk of international diplomacy, we are going to put men on the ground to influence our enemies decision making process and get inside their OODA Loop. Ships and airplanes driven and flown by men can still not own the ground that young men in the mud will be forced to wrest from our nation's foes. We owe it to them to give them enough comrades to ensure it can be done.

And the last time I walked the battlefield, the only dude who owned the ground was not the pilot in the B-1B I invited to the party after I kicked it off with my own fireworks; it was me, and all the other dudes on the bad-ass list I brought with me; standing on the earth I wanted to own and kicking the stinking jihadis off of it in the nastiest, most lethal and final fashion I could come up with moment to moment."

These are serious subjects studied seriously by serious people. I'm not sure they fit in with the narrative.

"Wars are not something you can fight with a coupon or try to duck out on the cheap and my bet is that we could afford a poop ton more troops and equipment if we weren't making loans/campaign contributions to outfits like Solyndra and putting our debt at 100.3 percent of our GDP, along with all of the other Marxist crap that the OinC has decided is good for America.

This is bad voodoo and the sooner the amateurs in Foggy Bottom and the Puzzle Palace that are entertaining the whisperings of the Good Idea Fairy are on the rocket sled to irrelevance, the better."

&

"(T)his is the worst idea this administration has ever had, and the Libturds that thought this up better start studying up on their Chinese and getting familiar with the 12th Imam, because there may test questions at the re-education camp later."

This presumes that their new overlords will bother trying to re-educate them.

1/5

re: "Military-Academic Conflict"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") discusses the contradictions in military higher education.

Money quote(s):

"Thomas Ricks has had a series of blog posts over the academic quality and integrity of the Air War College and its parent Air University in Montgomery, Alabama. It was sparked by a book chapter written by disgruntled retired AU professor named Daniel Hughes, which prompted Ricks to argue for closing the college."

See my earlier post on this topic.

"The war colleges simply have to be hybrid institutions, blending the best cutting edge scholarship with practical training. Each of the services now sends a large number of promising mid-career officers to civilian universities and Washington think tanks (including my own) to broaden their horizons. And that’s great! But the vast number of young colonels and captains need to learn to be strategic thinkers in today’s environment. That means being around really smart scholars who’ve had the luxury of thinking really hard about Iraq, Afghanistan, counterinsurgency, military interventions, and a host of related issues. There just aren’t many institutions in the country with more than one or two of these people on staff.

Now, here’s where my own bias comes in: Anders’ arguments for having most of the faculty at the war colleges consist of active duty officers are well taken. While almost by definition they’re less accomplished scholars than some of their civilian peers–it’s not their chosen career after all–it’s perfectly reasonable to have senior officers training the next generation at these institutions.

But, as Anders notes, Congress stepped in two decades ago and mandated that a certain percentage of the faculty at the various professional military education (PME) schools and the service academies (West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force) be civilian academics. The rationale was obvious: leaven the faculty with professional scholars to move the education-training balance further in the direction of the former while at the same time broadening the perspectives to which students are exposed."

Read the whole thing.

re: "Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") contributes some thoughts to a discussion on elitist institutions.

Money quote(s):

"(W)hile the Ivies and their elite cousins confer many advantages on their graduates, they also wall them off from normal people and create an entitled, out-of-touch elite. As a product of decidedly non-elite institutions working to put my daughters on an elite path, much of it rings true."

"The closest thing in my personal experience to the “you are special” indoctrination is the year and a half I spent at West Point. While admission was largely meritocratic and more economically diverse that our brethren at the Ivies, the notion that we were an elite vanguard was inculcated in us from the earliest days. (Rather odd in hindsight, since they also spend the first year doing their best to make cadets feel inadequate.) Not only were we a cut above our civilian college brethren but the Army and the country were depending on us to guard its virtue. While academy graduates were a small part of the officer corps, we would be like a drop of ink in a barrel of water, changing the character of the whole Army.

Even though I nearly drowned in that environment and wound up finishing at a podunk regional school for financial reasons, it took me a couple of years to fully shake off the notion that, simply having been selected to go to West Point, that I was special. So, I can certainly see how someone who spends years in that sort of environment–and years in select schools competing to get there–would have an enormous sense of entitlement."

Sadly, in my many years in and around State Dept., I've seen many examples of the entitlement syndrome. Back before I joined the Foreign Service, I was even known to theorize that the "A" in "A-100" (the traditional but unofficial* designation of the Foreign Service Officer Orientation course, which as an actual course number completely different from that) stood for "arrogance." As in it was the capability being taught in that course.

That's not actually the case, but we do get quite a few "special snowflakes" joining the service and they can have some adjusting to do as they proceed abroad to some very non-elite assignments as junior officers.

Selection into the Foreign Service is almost completely meritocratic. Plenty of us come from non-elite backgrounds. And the only reason I say "almost" is because of the Qualifications Evaluation Panel phase which is now part of the FSO accession/selection process. It was implemented some years after I was hired and I find it just a little bit opaque, something of a "black box" in the process.

Personally, I've had the privilege of being part of several "elite" groups in my professional life over the years, culminating most recently in my career as an FSO and in some of my assignments therein.

(Oh, and attending an "elite" educational institution was not one of them until fairly late in life)

What those experiences taught me was that, as smart as I think I am or believe myself to be, there are folks even smarter than that and it's never a good idea to think you're either the smartest guy in the room or that you already know everything there is to know about something or that you can't learn something from people who might not be as smart as you are.

"(W)ell-connected graduates of elite schools often get on the fast track right from the outset. There are people working at the White House, Congressional staff, and the Joint Chiefs with less subject matter expertise and real world experience than I had fifteen years ago. There’s simply a huge degree of path determinacy at work."

In D.C., in certain "social circles," one encounters the youngest versions of these folks, the "Hill rats." As in "Capitol Hill." More than one FSO has come away from encounters with these, and some of their more senior brethren, convinced that many bear a serious chip on their shoulders about the Foreign Service, a grudge dating back to when they were unable to either pass the FS examinations or otherwise make it through the selection and appointment process. None of us could prove it, but the impression has come across to many different FSOs around the world at various times.

(I should mention, just to be clear, that I've also had tremendously positive professional encounterss with various Hill and Executive Branch staffers. They tended to be the ones experienced enough to know what the Foreign Service does and what FSOs can do for them assisting the completion of their own responsibilities.)

"Moreover, the degree is always a trump card. I’m well past the point where anyone cares where my undergraduate degree is from. Unless I’m applying for an academic job, it’s at the bottom of my resume. But people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and the like are still getting credit for it decades later."

He concludes:

"It’s very easy for those in the professional class to live in a bubble of their own creation and, especially, to put one around our kids. And, frankly, the incentives to do so are powerful. There has to be a balance between making providing opportunities for your kids and walling them off from reality."

re: "Gates: Any DefSec Who Proposes Wars Similar to Iraq and Afghanistan "Should Have His Head Examined" "

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ reacts to SecDef Gates' recent West Point speech.

Money quote(s):

"He also talks about "reshaping" (that is, cutting) the Army's and Marines' budget because he thinks a large conventional mechanized-units-vs.-mechanized-units war is unlikely.

I don't know about that last part. I'd say we'll have few of those wars. And more of the smaller-unit/guerilla war. But I'd say the likelihood of either is pretty high. The former's at like 70% and the latter's at 100%. Just because most fights will be small-unit engagements doesn't mean large-scale warfare isn't going to happen."

There's a way to break down threats like this, into four quadrants, where you evaluate possible events in terms of both probability (i.e., likelihood) and risk (i.e., hazard or cost) as being either High or Low. So you get Low Probability - Low Risk, High Probability - High Risk, Low Probability - High Risk, and High Probability - Low Risk.

The probability that major mechanized combat is going to happen in any given year may be low, but the risk is so high that you have to prepare for it. After all, you can't just excrete a major mechanized force and the ability to project it globally on 11 months notice; it takes literally decades to build.

"After eight years of pacifying Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm not at all sure we were right to depart from the basic idea that nation-building was a bad idea.

This is less about Iraq and Afghanistan and more about the next war, which just might be Iran. Personally, I'd be on board for military action, but I would strongly prefer to leave the pacification and nation-building to the Iranians. Pay 'em, arm 'em, give them targeting lasers to paint targets for jet strikes, but I wouldn't support a massive, decade-long police action in a country with more than twice as many people as Iraq.

We used to do this a lot. We would arm indigenous fighters, train them, feed them intelligence, offer assistance. After 9/11, I think the decision was made that we had to show a very, very bright-line distinction between the real soldier -- professional, uniformed, acting under orders, scrupulously avoiding (to the extent possible) civilian collateral damage -- and the terrorist, and that led us to conclude, I think, that we couldn't just depart Iraq after smashing the Baathist state and let the Iraqis fight it out. Because there would be a whole lot of terrorist, civilian-targeting attacks, and we'd be on the hook for that."

"American troops are of course the most disciplined, ethical, and heroic in the world. So heroic, in fact, we typically expect them to put their own lives in danger for the purpose of reducing the chance of collateral damage. Few other troops would even consider such rules of engagement; our guys might complain about it, but in the end, they follow orders.

So if American troops are the primarily force in a country, we can expect the lowest possible number of civilian collateral casualties. But the question I'm asking myself now is: How much do I really care about the fewest number of civilian collateral casualties? In Iraq, if the deaths of 3000 American soldiers (in the later post-war campaign) saved, let's say, 60,000 Iraqi civilians -- was that a good trade? Or, more importantly, because the more important thing to me is the doctrine going forward: Would I be willing to make that trade in a hypothetical pacification campaign in Iran? Would I trade 3,000 US soldiers to make sure the fewest Iranian civilians died in the chaos that ensued after a decapitation of the state?

I think I'd say the Iranians will have to fight it out themselves."

Gates is only reprising MacArthur's (and Vizzini's) "never get involved in a land war in Asia" dictum. Odd how no one noticed both Iraq and Afghanistan are Asiatic countries before now.

The mathematics are a bit cold. Thinking the unthinkable is like that. But the calculus is necessary.

"I wouldn't support an Iraq-style American-troops-as-primary-combatants pacification.
And I don't even think that it matters what I think -- I don't think any President, Republican or Democrat or Tea Partier, is going to propose such a thing. Which makes this question very important, because unless the country can accept that arm-your-proxies style of limited warfare, I think we're going to have a Vietnam Syndrome going forward. Given the choice between no military action at all and full-scale invasion plus pacification/nation-building, I think the country will select, by large margins, "no military action at all," and I think that is very dangerous.

We will need to fight another country again, most likely sooner rather than later. We need a doctrine about such a war that can actually gain popular support.

I just don't believe the country will undertake another Iraq or Afghanistan you-break-it-you-bought-it plan, at least not for a long time. So I think those who believe that warfare must always be a possible tool available to us (even if only occasionally used) must formulate a doctrine in which the post-war pacification campaign is specifically ruled out and our goals in the post-war scenario are achieved by means other than heavy presence of American troops as primary combatants.

I just don't think the Iraq model of post-war pacification is an option in the next five to ten years, at least, for political reasons."

Frankly, I suspect we'll have U.S. troops, at some level of strength, in both Iraq and Afghanistan for at least five of those years, so I'd envision that, barring a catastrophic event that "resets" U.S. grand strategy, five to ten years is a very conservative estimate.

"(I)f we actually want to credibly threaten a country like Iran -- and do more than merely threaten, should it come to that -- we need a doctrine that has a chance of getting the nation behind it, and we have to begin conditioning the nation to realize what happens when disciplined, heroic American troops are not the primary combatants -- a lot of civilians are going to die, most likely, because only American troops (and some other professional Western-tradition troops) are brave enough to put the lives of civilians before their own."

re: "Muddy Boots"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") noticed SecDef Gates' speech at West Point.

Money quote(s):

"Mr. Gates’ predecessor notably regretted having to “go to war with the army you have,” rather than the one he wished he had. To me that means having a ground combat element capable of the full-spectrum of military missions, from humanitarian assistance, to training foreign indigenous forces to combined arms mechanized maneuver.

This is not to say that you’d ever seriously contemplate another nation-building mission as we’ve attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we ought to retain a nation-breaking power, and when it comes to enemy ground formations that cannot be done with air and naval power alone – someone has to hold the hill and plant the flag, even if only to haul it back down again once the enemy’s will to fight is broken.

To me the secretary’s speech sounds like we’re tailoring our missions to our budget, which is not in itself an irrational thing to do. But we might as well be honest about it, and admit that we’re voluntarily curtailing our ability to project power in traditional ways in favor of I’m not exactly sure what."