U.S. Defense

Although in regards to Iran, Bush used his favorite phrase, “all options are on the table,” he did say, military action would not be his first choice. More importantly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen admitted “opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us — that doesn’t mean we don’t have capacity or reserves — that would really very challenging, and the consequences on that would be difficult to predict.” But I’m convinced that the solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behaviour, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure.”  

With nationalist resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq starting to pick up again, is this really the right time to open a third front? While the Army and Marines are bearing the brunt of occupying the first two fronts, the Air Force and Navy would be conducting the initial assault against the third front in Iran. But what then? Destroying a few buildings with centrifuges and some Iranian military capability will not slow down appreciably Iranian enrichment activities, if that is what they are doing. To have any kind of long term objective, any air attack on Iran must be followed up with a ground presence.  

Unlike Iraq’s armed forces which had been retrograded from 1991 to 2003 by US action and sanctions, Iran’s military is expanding and acquiring greater stand off capabilities. Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, where US forces pretty much just waltzed in as far as invasions go, Iran will not be as easy. Getting in will be bloody and the occupation will be resisted by a professional guerrilla organization, Hezbollah. 

The US won’t attack Iran because it can’t. Or in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, it will be “challenging” and “difficult.”

Yesterday evening the Foreign Policy Association hosted a lecture by Ambassador Ronald Neumann (retired), current President of the American Academy of Diplomacy. As the former US Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 – 2007, Mr. Neumann has intimate knowledge of what happened there and also with the current situation.  Streaming video of his lecture can be seen on the FPA website.

Ambassador Neumann took some questions, which were not featured on the video, but his answers were important so I include a summary below.

The first question was about the opium trade. Neumann concurred that drugs were a major problem there. The money to be made from poppies is so great that it too has played a hand in corrupting traditional Afghan society. The US must make an anti-drug policy part of our counter-insurgency program. He discussed the problems with some of the methods that had been tried to deal with the drug problem. The British tried to buy the opium crop in 2003, but all this accomplished was that more opium was planted to sell to the British! The farmers only make about 600-700 million on a crop of opium. Meanwhile the Afghans who ship it and deal it can mark up the price and make roughly four times that amount. This creates a good situation for the farmers as now they have two markets to sell to, the occupation forces and the dealers. So, if the British want to try to buy the opium, they will end up in a bidding war with the dealers who are willing to pay almost four times its worth because they know they can still turn a profit. Since the farmers are guaranteed a buyer, more opium will be grown, so buying the crop is not the solution. 

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forced Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley and Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne to resign and appointed a former secretary of defense to devise new ways to better guard nuclear weapons. To justify this extraordinary move, Gates has pointed to a Pentagon report chronicling gross negligence in the way the Air Force has been safekeeping its nuclear weapons. However, considering this decapitation of the Air Force leadership comes so quickly after April’s verbal attack against the Air Force, something more must be going on behind the scenes.

     General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, has belittled the service of Bernard Kerik for failing to produce results while Kerik was the interim minister of interior of Iraq in 2003. In that position, Kerik was supposed to oversee the rebuilding of the National Police, the Intelligence Service and the Border and Customs Police. None of which have performed their jobs effectively. Thus one of the most important positions in Iraq in 2003 was squandered while the resistance movement grew.      

     The goal of an occupation is to gradually turn military operations into police operations and a militarized state into one of civilian control based on law and order. Therefore, fielding a viable police force with political legitimacy amongst its own people should be the first priority of any occupation. Indigenous people are more likely to support security forces from their own country rather than foreigners with alien values and beliefs. Without an indigenous police force, the occupying soldiers have to conduct the necessary police operations, which they are ill-equipped culturally to do.          

     In a guerrilla war, there is a constant struggle between the occupier and the insurgents for the allegiance of the people. If the insurgent is seen as a genuine resistance fighter, his presence will be concealed from the occupiers and no intelligence on his activities will be forthcoming. The goal of the occupiers is to erase the perception of the insurgent as a heroic resistance fighter and instead make it clear that attacking the security forces is a crime and the resistance is not heroic, but criminal. Once the resistance fighter is seen as a criminal, then actionable intelligence will be given to the security forces         

     Ultimately, capturing insurgents should be a matter of local Iraqi police forces picking up wanted criminals. We shouldn’t be seeing US forces conducting house to house searches, roadblocks, checkpoints or protecting VIPs. Every “police” operation our combat forces engage in is another example of how we have failed to accomplish our most important mission in Iraq: building up the Iraqi police and army so they can effectively take the place of the foreigners with alien values and beliefs.  

General Petraeus has been tapped to be the new commander of Central Command and his current deputy, Lt-Gen Ray Odierno will succeed him as Commanding General, Multi-National Force - Iraq. It’s interesting to note that like most generals in the army, both men do not have combat experience as infantrymen. 

When I was a soldier in the early 1990s, all of our generals and senior sergeants had Combat Infantry Badges (CIB) from Vietnam and they were hardcore. You could tell just by looking at them that these old guys were killers. I don’t know how many generals are left with Vietnam service, but it can’t be many, although retired General Tommy Franks who commanded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 was a Vietnam veteran. His successor, General Abizaid had a CIB but it was for taking part in the invasion of the small, helpless Caribbean country of Grenada, which could hardly be considered “war.” After him came Admiral Fallon who was a Navy pilot in Vietnam, but again, no infantry combat experience. Now General Petraeus will be in charge of Central Command and he and Odierno do not have CIBs.

The CIB is the mark of a combat soldier who has been there, done that and got the stories to go with it. It used to be that having a CIB was practically a prerequisite for any infantry officer trying to become a general. I can’t remember seeing or reading about any general from 1945 up through the 1990s who didn’t have the CIB on his uniform.

Since Vietnam however, actual ground combat has been a rare occurrence and therefore not many officers from the 1970s – 1990s have seen real action. This is reflected in the lack of CIBs amongst currently serving general officers. General Petraeus, for instance,  does not have a CIB. He does have the newly created Combat Action Badge, which apparently generals can receive, which is ridiculous. How many generals have had to “close with and destroy the enemy” in Iraq? Did Petraeus engage in urban combat and clear buildings room by room? I am not calling his bravery into question or his toughness. He must be tough to survive a gunshot to the chest even if it was from one of his own soldiers. But to give a general who is sitting in a Tactical Operations Center the same badge as the soldiers who are fighting and dying on his orders lessens the award. That is why the CIB can only be given out to colonels and below. At least colonels might actually be somewhat near a firefight at some point.

Just because most army generals have never been in direct combat doesn’t mean they aren’t as competent directing combat operations as those who have. But to the grunts on the front line it probably matters a lot to know if the guy ordering you to fight and perhaps die has been in the same situation himself and knows what he is asking.  

In this month’s Esquire magazine, Thomas Barnett fawns over Admiral Fallon, Commander of Central Command (CENTCOM). He laughably calls Fallon “The Man Between War and Peace.” Fallon is not between anything. As commander of CENTCOM he is currently waging two wars and will unhesitatingly start another one if he feels it is necessary.

It’s ironic that the media first painted Fallon as the man who was specifically chosen by the Bush administration to lead a war against Iran. The thought behind this was that since the Army was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, it couldn’t possibly invade Iran. Therefore, Iran had to be attacked by the Air Force and Navy because they were the only branches of the military not hollowed out by those two occupations. They were ready for the kill. Who better to lead the air attack than a former ground attack pilot and commander of carrier battle groups?

Now the media would have us believe he is serving as a spoiler to Bush’s plan to attack Iran. They quote him saying negative things about Petraeus (which is possible, flag rank officers tend to be arrogant and disparaging of each other), and that an attack on Iran won’t happen on his watch (doubtful he ever said that). If any regional commander tried to spoil his commander in chief’s plans, then that regional commander would be fired and a more pliant officer put in his place. After all, the military is supposed to obey the civilians, not the other way around.

Barnett’s article is a liberal’s dream: a decorated admiral and regional commander standing up to President Bush and preventing him from starting another war. Unfortunately, ‘tis but a dream. A more realistic assessment of Fallon is by Chris Floyd who writes that there are only “a few mild disagreements between Fallon and the White House over certain questions of tactics, timing and presentation in regard to American domination of a vast range of nations and peoples.” A mere question of tactics, not strategy. On that, they are in perfect agreement; the military option is still on the table for Iran. And if it comes to war, the good admiral says, “These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.”

Fallon is a Man Of War and will go to war when ordered to do so. War is not just his job, it is his way of life.

UPDATE: Fallon has been forcibly “retired,” but the reasons are why I said they would be. The commander in chief has lost confidence in Fallon and can’t be perceived as not having a unified team for his foreign policy. The next commander will have learned from the Fallon example and be much more compliant with the president’s views.

Apparently, the senior brass of the US military are unsure of Obama’s “leadership” qualities to be commander in chief. However, what is their definition of leadership? What qualities make a good commander in chief? Does previous military experience matter for this position?

Personal military experience doesn’t help unless the person was of flag rank and was in command of vast amounts of men and material. Otherwise, what difference does it make what someone did when they were in their early 20s? The only president I can think of whose military experience had a direct bearing on his role as commander in chief is Eisenhower. As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe he managed an international coalition and oversaw the strategy of an entire theater of war. This knowledge could have definitely been helpful had Eisenhower decided to go to war. However, he never involved the military in anything more serious than a show of force, perhaps because he had seen war and knew how terrible it was firsthand.

Which presidents have had similar experiences? George W. Bush was a fighter pilot in the National Guard. This means he flew planes over Texas one weekend a month. How did this experience qualify him to wage counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq? The president before him, Bill Clinton, never served in the military. George H. W. Bush flew a dive bomber against Japanese aircraft carriers in the Pacific Campaign of WWII. 45 years later, how did this experience help him wage a mechanized desert campaign in Iraq? Ronald Reagan served as a public relations officer in California during WWII. Gerald Ford served aboard a carrier in the Pacific. What action he saw was meaningless to the Vietnam War. I could go through the careers of Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy, but none of their personal experiences in the military helped them to make decisions as commander in chief during the Vietnam War.

I spent three years in the infantry, deployed to two combat zones and if I was elected president in November, I would have no more knowledge of being commander in chief than someone like Obama who never spent a day in the military. What does my experience occupying Somalia in 1993 have to do with the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq? Do I have some sort of esoteric knowledge that would allow me to make the right decisions that someone who never heard a shot fired in anger might not be able to make? The only thing I might know is how much it truly sucks to be there and how badly the troops want to come home. I may feel for the plight of the grunts but I would have larger considerations, such as the national security of the United States of America.

What experience do the three leading candidates have? Obama and Clinton never served in the military at all. McCain’s experience consists of flying bombing missions over Vietnam, eventually being shot down and made a prisoner for over five years. He courageously defied his captors and returned with honor, but how does this give him commander in chief experience? Unless he is going to help teach SERE school, McCain’s military experience has not given him any more qualifications than the average man on the street.

In an article in the Washington Times, General John Keane, an architect of the Iraq War said, “Anyone who is advocating a precipitous pullout of U.S. forces, believing this will be a catalyst for political progress, does not understand the realities of Iraq and the minds of the key political leaders.” Does Keane have the right to talk about the “realities of Iraq?” This is a man who admitted he “never saw the insurgency coming.” I was able to figure out that there would be an Iraqi national resistance long before we attacked and I left the army as a Specialist.  

However, the military’s real problem with Obama becoming commander in chief is not where he stands on Iraq or his lack of experience, it is his possible willingness to curb our record breaking military spending, which is more than the rest of the world combined. “Defense industry executives worry that Mr. Obama will end six years of defense budget increases and, as he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail and in debates, tap into war and military funds to support his plan for universal health care.”

According to the military brass, this is the real qualification for being a good commander in chief: whether the candidate will support a “strong” military or not. In this case, “strong” does not mean effective or even able to win wars. It means an ever increasing budget for them to play with.