re: "September 11"

The DiploMad at The DiploMad 2.0 ("long time US Foreign Service Officer; now retired") speaks to some basic truths many are unwilling to face.

Money quote(s):

"We in the West refuse to understand that simple fact, to wit, when Islam says it seeks to conquer us, it means it."

&

"It seems from the  limited reporting on it, that we are successfully pursuing a policy of turning large numbers of AQ, ISIS, Al Shabab, etc., into bloody jelly. As we have always known, the Islamists are good at torturing and killing flight attendants and other unarmed civilians,  but they don't do well when confronted by Western military know-how employed as it's meant to be employed."

re: "Commodifying the Force"

The recently-departed, late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") cautioned about the ripple effects of military retirement "reform."

Money quote(s):

"Career-minded active duty military members are no doubt watching the ongoing discussions about military retirement compensation with avid interest. This interest is due to the recommendations of the Defense Business Board, made up of 20 exquisitely educated, very successful and highly paid consultants, CEOs and entrepreneurs. Fully twenty percent of the board’s membership – according to their bios – have actual military experience, and one among them served long enough to be eligible for a military pension. They may not know that much about life in the uniformed services, but they know loads about profit and loss, cutting costs and quarterly shareholder returns.

This makes them experts.

Basically, the board recommends junking the military’s defined pension benefit plan as anachronistic, recommending that DoD instead move to an industry standard 401k style contribution. The 401K system would allow the services to permit first tour enlistees to receive certain benefits after leaving the services – they get none today – and save loads of money on out-year obligations to grizzled warriors far into the future."

Because a military career is just like working at Dunder Mifflin.

"(H)hundreds of thousands of other peoples’ sons and daughters, each of whom will make their own career calculus in their own way, the effect of which will doubtless ripple across the force and at least potentially affect war fighting readiness in ways that are not easy to calculate.

But we’ll save a lot of money."

Wars cost more than money. The precise term is "blood and treasure."

"(E)ventually the worm may turn, as it almost always does. And when it does, we may find that re-writing service retirement regulations and commodifying the force has unintended second and third order consequences which will manifest themselves long after the current crop of four stars have gone on to serve on their own corporate boards."

8/22

re: "Threatening Military Pay Emboldens Adversaries and Destroys Morale…Way to Go, Obama!"

Michael Angley at Big Peace had strong things to say about leadership in high places.

Money quote(s):

"(P)ronouncements (or lack of reassurances) not only demonstrate cowardice and an absence of leadership, they may suggest to a potential enemy that we are not going to fund a strong military, a situation fraught with dangerous potential. The mere fact that Obama failed to assure the military that it would get paid is a despicable action by a Commander-in-Chief, one that has already fostered low morale among the troops. This damage cannot be undone, and no matter what happens with paychecks, the fact that Obama did not prioritize troop pay will not be forgotten."

Never let a crisis go to waste; never let an opportunity to let something turn into a crisis slip by unexploited.

"Real leaders rise above petty party politics and reassure the American people that their lives will not be disrupted as the machine of government grinds its gears and debates heavy issues like the debt ceiling. Real leaders take care of seniors, soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and veterans. Real leaders signal to our adversaries that no matter what political issues simmer on the domestic front, that we are a United States of America and we will always have a military force with high morale and esprit de corps ready and capable of destroying any threat we face." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

7/19

re: "National Security Part 2: The Armed Forces"

The Curmudgeon Emeritus at Eternity Road takes a look at "military" missions.

Money quote(s):

"(I)n the event of an invasion of the land territory of the United States, America's armed forces should reply with their full speed and power. That's what armed forces are for. If we're not going to use them for that, we needn't have spent all that money on guns, ships, tanks, planes, and various sort of ammunition for them. Despite that self-evident fact, the existence of our armed forces is itself an element of ongoing controversy, mainly arising from two questions:

How large a military do we need?

What should it do when it's not fighting in the field?

It is here, rather than in the use of whatever military we have at the moment to respond to an attack on America or her vital interests, that questions of national security arise."

IIRC (from my long-ago days as an AROTC cadet), the Army's mission is to defend the nation and carry out the national mission.

Defending the nation sounds simple enough, but is actually extraordinarily complicated.

Carrying out the national mission is whatever the commander-in-chief or the Congress says it is, pretty much.

"Only after World War II did our peacetime military grow to "superpower size." In large measure, that growth was elicited by the alliances the U.S. entered in the years after the war, most particularly NATO.

The NATO alliance occupied about half of America's combat power for forty-five years. The great size of the putative opponent -- the USSR -- seemed to demand a large military presence in Europe, if the Old World was to avert yet another continent-shattering war."

Mission accomplished. Second- and third-order consequences which nobody predicted (no one ever does) shouldn't obscure that basic fact.

"After the World Wars, it became America's job to secure the world's oceans, those indispensable conduits for travel and trade. Thus, the Navy could not be permitted to shrink to its pre-war size (even though it has). The emergence of the intercontinental bomber and the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile as strategic threats made it necessary to erect the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), best known for its redoubt in Cheyenne Mountain. The swelling of those two services required the support of vast defense-contracting and defense-procurement apparatuses; modern wars must be fought with modern weapons, wielded according to the best available strategic and tactical thinking available." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

"This was inevitable; technological advance, plus the emergence of a new, aggressive ideology and its dominance of two enormous nations, demanded it. Those who objected to the large military, saying that that nuclear weapons made it unnecessary, completely missed the critical point: You cannot respond to small, confined incursions with large, indiscriminate weapons. Indeed, large nukes cannot deter a similarly armed opponent willing to use lesser forces and military proxies to advance its interests. To meet the threat of such an opponent, a military capable of responding with calibrated force, from the smallest engagements all the way up to global nuclear war, is required.

Yes, even in "peacetime." " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

"The current crisis along our borders, particularly our southern border, screams for a military response. Surely, an invasion need not be composed of uniformed men to be a danger to the nation. Indeed, it's arguable whether the armed drug gangs or the (generally unarmed) hordes of illegal aliens constitute the greater threat to our national security. "

This same argument has been posed, from a legal standpoint, to justify the exclusion of children born to illegal immigrants from birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

re: "The real danger in Washington: defense cuts"

Dov Zakheim at Shadow Government ("Notes From The Loyal Opposition") looks at the consequences of defense cuts.

Money quote(s):

"The military simply cannot sustain cuts of that magnitude and preserve a strategy that, in its fundamentals, has not changed since the end of the Second World War. That strategy called for U.S. forces to deploy "forward", whether in Europe, the Middle East or Asia, so as to fight far away from the United States' shores. With cuts the size of those being discussed, the United States will no longer be able to maintain its presence overseas, other than in a "virtual" sense, and, as one wag has put it, "virtual presence is actual absence."

It is difficult to see how cuts approaching $100 billion in each of the next ten years will not eviscerate the U.S. defense posture. Defense "entitlements" -- military pay and retirement, as well as military health care -- absorb a substantial portion of the budget and seem virtually immune to reductions. It has taken years to move Congress just to contemplate enacting a minor increase in co-pays for the Tricare health program, while any change to the military retirement system, which penalizes anyone who serves less than twenty years but over-rewards those who serve longer, has been strictly verboten. Civilian personnel are immune to reductions -- cuts in any office simply have led civilians to migrate to other offices. Operations and maintenance, which account for about a third of all defense spending, include payments to a huge cadre of "staff augmentation" contractors whose number the department has never been able to calculate."

As a retired reservist, I won't see a dime of my own earned military retirement until I reach age 60. There was talk of starting reserve retired pay earlier than that based upon wartime active service, but I don't think anything ever came of that. In any case, my own military retired pay will be peanuts compared to that of someone in the same grade who served the same number of active duty years that I did in a combination of active and reserve service.

"Cuts in procurement, research and development, training, and spares marked previous drawdowns, whether in the 1970s, the era of the "hollow Army" or the 1990s, the decade of the "peace dividend." This time around, however, the U.S. military and its equipment are worn out, ravaged by two seemingly never-ending conflicts and several other smaller ones that receive far fewer headlines. It actually would take a budget increase, not a decrease, to restore U.S. forces to their pre-September 2001 state.

There is much talk of reducing the Army's end-strength, cutting back on the carrier force, and shrinking the F-35 buy, among other programmatic reductions. While some cuts in land forces are to be expected when all U.S. troops finally leave Iraq at the end of this year (unless Prime Minister Maliki decides he wants thousands of them to stay), and more cuts when U.S. troops depart from Afghanistan in 2014, assuming they actually do leave, those cuts surely place an even greater premium on naval and air forces. If those forces are also cut back, the United States will, sooner rather than later, have to scale back its air and naval presence in both the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, ceding those oceans to others, be they China, Iran, or India. Indeed, it is ironic that as Washington decides whether to reduce the carrier force by one or two ships, China is building its first aircraft carrier."

I'm sure that our "peer competitors" (i.e., prospective enemies) will be happy to wait and let us catch up to them later when we've got more dough. (Or maybe they won't.)

"The world will not stand by idly if the United States wrecks what has been the finest military force in the history of the world. Instead, nations will, as some in East Asia and the Middle East already have done, look to other powers for support and leadership."

re: "Why the Libyan War is important to us - and to our children"

Fabius Maximus ("A discussion of geopolitics – broadly defined as economics, government, sociology and the military arts – from an American’s perspective.") puts our intervention in Libya and the War Powers Act into mutual perspective.

Money quote(s):

"Summary: The Libyan War will have long-term consequences, no matter who eventually rules Libya. It’s another precedent. Another step away from the Second Republic (1788-) towards a new political regime. One with a far stronger Executive than the Founders wanted. One as strong as they feared."

This is not an uncommon viewpoint on the right side of the political spectrum.

"The Libyan War does not meet the requirements for Presidential authorization of military action. The relevant clauses are both brief and clear."

"US Code Title 50, Chapter 33: The War Powers Resolution, § 1541. Purpose and policy Section C: Presidential executive power as Commander-in-Chief; limitation
The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to
1. a declaration of war,
2. specific statutory authorization, or
3. a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

No president, since the War Powers Act was first passed, has conceded that it actually binds them, but all have been punctilious about not violating it and complying with it, even if only as a courtesy.

"A cure will come only when we as a people decide to return to a Constitutional form of government. That would mean no public support for these discretionary wars, and the senior military leadership coming to a different understanding of how to balance their duties to obey the Commander-in-Chief and defend the Constitution.

The latter is an important and seldom mentioned point. I fear we’re slowly moving to a time where the two duties of our most senior officers will conflict, radically and unmistakably. Perhaps not in our time, but likely in our children’s time"

Accepting congressional resolutions authorizing the use of force, as was done for Afghanistan and Iraq, as constituting declarations of war is reasonable enough; it's not like the Constitution established any sort of format for this kind of document. It's up to Congress to make that sort of rule for itself, or not. It's once you start subcontracting that element of sovereignty outwith the federal system, to UN or NATO or other organs, that Constitutionalists get.... twitchy.

"The primary precedent expanding Presidential war powers; “The Korean War: On What Legal Basis Did Truman Act?“, Louis Fisher (Congressional Research Service), American Journal of International Law, January 1995 – American history might have taken a different course if our senior generals had gently requested that Truman first get Presidential approval. If they had only taken their oath more seriously."

_____

Hat tip to Tigerhawk ("thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations").

re: "When To Use America's Military To End Genocide: A Conversation with Nicholas Kristof"

Hugh Hewitt summarizes a recent interview.

Money quote(s):

"The U.S. under Bush used two interventions to topple two regimes in rapid indeed amazing fashion. It proved far less competent in establishing successor governments, though in the past year in Iraq we have seen new tactics bring about extraordinary progress, and we are hoping for the same sort of turning in Afghanistan."

"President Obama has a unique opportunity to establish rules under which the U.S. will move decisively to end slaughter in countries where the U.S. does not need to worry about significant military opposition, such as Sudan and Zimbabwe. Because of the new president's standing in the Third World and because of his party's complete control of the Congress, he has it in his power to lay down the law for Bashir and Mugabe and bring their murderous regimes to an end, and by doing so to send a message to the rest of the continent that dictatorship has its limits, and widespread slaughter as in Zimbabwe and outright genocide as in Sudan will not be tolerated."

&

"For the next three-and-a-half-years, the United States means President Obama and the people who influence his decisions. The new president has already approved of the use of deadly force in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and at sea off the course of Somalia. His advisors and those who influence them and him should begin working out a larger framework for deploying the awesome might of the American military where tens of thousands of lives are at stake, none of them American."