U.S. Defense

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.

The US military has geographically divided up the world into six regional “commands.” Northern Command, which was created in the wake of the September 11 attacks, is based in NORAD in Colorado. European Command is based in Stuttgart, Germany, so it is right in the middle of its area of responsibility (AOR). Pacific Command has as its AOR, the Pacific Ocean, Australia, and Southeast Asia, so it is well placed in Hawaii. Southern Command is in charge of controlling Latin America. Until 1997, it was located in Panama, but since the Panama Canal Treaty, SOUTHCOM was forced to relocate to Miami, Florida, because no country in the region would host it. However, it is at least still close to the region it is responsible for. That leaves Central Command and Africa Command. 

CENTCOM has been the busiest command since 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At the time, many observers thought CENTCOM would take the opportunity to relocate itself to Kuwait, but it stayed in its home base in Tampa, Florida. Basing an entire command in its AOR may not be necessary nor even productive anymore. The new paradigm seems to be instead of one major headquarters, having many smaller ones dotted around the AOR. This is a new concept that the CENTCOM is trying out in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. The commander, General Lovelace said, the war on terror and a need to be more operationally focused compelled the Army to alter its approach. “You don’t have the element of time on your side anymore, like we did in the Cold War. We’ve got to be ready tonight. That’s why now you have that broader commitment. This is a big, dynamic theater. We track little hot spots in a time that’s exceedingly important to our nation.” George Bush’s current trip to Africa is being seen by some as laying the groundwork for the same diversified command structure for AFRICACOM, which is currently located in Germany. Bush has denied this even though every country he has visited has expressed interest in having AFRICACOM set up its base there. However, Bush did clarify that “that doesn’t mean we won’t develop some kind of office somewhere in Africa.”

From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Army attempted to occupy Afghanistan and defeat an insurgency of Afghan rebels. They failed and two years later found their own country falling to pieces and with it, the Soviet Bloc’s collective security alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Although, the Russian Afghan War was not the main reason the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, it definitely played a role. Now with the US Army mired in an Afghan insurgency of its own, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been trying to push America’s NATO allies to help out. Although Gates is right to seek more allies and  troops for Afghanistan, he is conveniently forgetting why they are needed in the first place. After the US military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, it should have devoted the vast resources that were necessary to winning the peace afterwards because a scattered Taliban does not mean a defeated Taliban. Instead, those resources were sent to fight a war in Iraq, which was being effectively contained and wasn’t an imminent threat to the stability of the Middle East, or America. Now, bogged down in two quagmires, the US has to go begging with bowl in hand to allies it has denigrated in the past. Gates has to even resort to empty threats saying, “NATO is a collective security agreement, a military alliance. The members have signed up with certain obligations in this regard. But if it were to become the case that some allies are not prepared to fulfill their military obligations, while others continue to do so, I think that that is a very dangerous situation for the future of the alliance.”

Afghanistan indirectly caused the end of the Warsaw Pact. It would be ironic if it did the same to NATO.

The Department of Defense released its figure for the 2009 budget: $518.3 billion. As this article points out, that number is only the military portion of the budget. There are other expenditures that could be easily classified as funding national security also. First, the $70 billion the DOD requested to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Secondly, the requested $17.1 billion the Department of Energy needs to maintain our country’s nuclear weapons. Then there is Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the State Department, and many other departments and agencies that relieve the DOD of some of the debt burden. The grand total of our national security state comes to well over $600 billion.

America’s national security budget is only 4-5% of its GDP, which ranks it 28th in the world on military expenditures as a  percentage of GDP. However, the US ranks #1 on total expenditure and in fact, spends more on defense than every other country in the world combined.

Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles are a family of armored fighting vehicles designed to survive IED attacks and ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an article called “Hopes for Vehicle Questioned After Iraq Blast,” the New York Times described the first loss of a soldier in a MRAP. However, this soldier was a turret gunner and was mostly outside of the vehicle when the explosion hit it. Did he die of fragmentation or did the vehicle roll over on him? The cause of death isn’t clear. The other three soldiers actually inside the vehicle survived with minor injuries. An obvious conclusion would be that the vehicle’s skin saved them and that MRAPs work. Until we learn the cause of death of the turret gunner and where exactly the IED went off in relation to the vehicle, we can’t make a completely accurate assessment of the survivability of the MRAP in real combat conditions and not a controlled environment like in Army tests.

The MRAP is not without other problems as one critic notes: it’s big and heavy, which limits its mobility, especially in urban terrain, and it can’t be towed by a similiar vehicle. It’s height is also a liability in urban terrain as it becomes an easy target for armor hunting insurgents. Speed and mobility is being traded for brute force protection. The problem is that if you have the speed you probably don’t need the protection, but if you are slow and heavy, you better have all the protection you need. There is a Navy saying that “Speed is life,” which may be applicable to the MRAP.

All of this leads to questions about the effectiveness of the MRAP, but even if it performs as advertised it still is just a tactical solution to a strategic problem. It is a tactical question to ask, can a MRAP survive an IED hit, but a better, more strategic question is, why are Iraqis planting IEDs to hit MRAPs? The MRAP is merely a stopgap measure to lower the body count of American dead and pre-empt the American people from asking that strategic question.

America is already operating in Pakistan covertly, with CIA and Special Forces on the ground and Predator drones in the air. However, whether the US Army itself will cross the border and cut off the insurgent sanctuary as it did in Cambodia in 1970, remains to be seen. President Musharraf has repeatedly warned Bush about the consequences of Americans violating Pakistan’s sovereignty and taking on the tribal areas themselves saying, “the man in the street will not allow this — he will come out and agitate.” So, an increased presence of Americans risks playing into the hands of Al Qaeda’s propaganda, and increasing the ire of regular Pakistanis, but not to use US forces risks not achieving important military goals.

The New York Times reports that “the top two American intelligence officials traveled secretly to Pakistan early this month to press President Musharraf to allow the CIA greater latitude to operate in the tribal territories where Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups are all active.” Although Musharraf has denied the US unilateral means to operate inside Pakistan, he will allow better coordination of joint activities. This includes sharing of actionable intelligence so Pakistani forces can do the actual mission and increasing the number and scope of missions by armed Predator surveillance aircraft. Does this mean US operators have the power to attack with the Predators on their own volition or will they have to seek permission from the Pakistanis? These rules of engagement and the speed of decision will mean the difference between a successful hit and a target that gets away.

UPDATE: The Asia Times reports that the US has completed construction and made operational ”a military base in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, just three kilometers from Bajaur Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The new US base is expected to serve as the center of clandestine special forces’ operations in the border region.”

MSNBC cites a report from a research group “that nearly 71 percent of Army recruits graduated from high school in the 2007 budget year.” MSN goes on to state that “the Army’s goal is 90 percent high school graduates, which it hasn’t met since 2004. Each year since, the number of recruits with at least a high school diploma has steadily declined.”

In a conventional war, soldiers don’t need to be critical thinkers, strength and guts is usually enough to win through to victory. However, counter-insurgency is a thinking man’s war. The enemy has to be outthought as much as outfought. Often, knowing when not to shoot is as important as engaging, which takes discipline born from intelligence, maturity and selflessness. Also, fighting an insurgency is more ambigious than fighting an interstate war between uniformed armies. The soldiers involved do not have clear military objectives that can be attained by applying the right amount of force at the right place. There will be no liberation and joyous people thanking the soldiers. Instead, there will be indifference at best and resistance at worst. This also will prey on those without the mental agility to deal with this aspect of their role as occupiers.

Now, because of its losses, the Army has to lower its standards in order to put more soldiers in the field. The same situation existed in Vietnam during the last few years of US involvment. The officer corps lowered its standards and allowed its cadets to go through a quick leadership program, which came to be derisively called “shake and bake.” Lieutenant Calley of My Lai infamy became an officer through this program.

I’m not saying anything so heinous will occur in Iraq because of relaxed standards, but there will be a slow, grinding price to pay. The new soldiers will have less discipline, which will lead to more casualties and more deadly errors. In turn, this will lead to greater resistance among the Iraqi population, which translates into more US casualties and an even more urgent need to replace them. The longer the occupation goes on, the lower the recruitment standards will fall. The Army is caught in a vicious circle.

Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates criticized NATO troops in Afghanistan for not understanding how to fight a counter-insurgency campaign. Now that 3,200 US Marines will be deploying to the country, Gates is saying they are there to help the overall war effort and the move is not intended to be a statement about NATO’s efforts. However, the Marines are considered to be the most experienced branch at counter-insurgency within the US military and 1,000 of them will deploy as trainers.