Archive for the 'Department of Defense' Category

Defense Tech links an editorial by the New York Times on How to Pay for a 21st Century Military.  Ward at Defense Tech doesn’t like the editorial very much, and neither does The Captain’s Journal.  Ward summarizes the recommendations as follows:

End production of the Air Force’s F-22. (Recommends the use of “upgraded” F-16s until the F-35 comes into production.)

Cancel the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer. (Advises the production of the Littoral Combat Ship instead.)

Halt production of the Virginia class sub. (Recommends extending the life of existing Los Angeles class submarines instead.)

Pull the plug on the Marine Corps’s V-22 Osprey. (Recommends buying more H-92s and CH-53s instead.)

Halt premature deployment of missile defense.

Negotiate deep cuts in nuclear weapons.

Trim the active-duty Navy and Air Force.

Some, if not most, of these recommendations are stupid to the point of being dangerous.  We have already discussed the fact that existing nuclear weapons systems are in need of refurbishment in order to maintain viability, and also the fact that new nuclear weapons systems must be pursued in order to maintain deterrence and modernize the force.

While aircraft carriers can project U.S. power deep into foreign terrain, and guided missile cruisers even deeper, the Navy hasn’t given us a single viable littoral combat scenario or reason to believe that the littoral combat program is anything but daydreaming.  On the other hand, every single ship in the active U.S. Navy has produced and participated in the national defense, whether actively or passively through deterrence.

As for the F-22, we have already halted production after 183 have been purchased.  Good enough.  Continue with the 183 and halt any further production after that.  The proposal to cut the 183 that have been purchased comes from the same presupposition as the proposals to cut the nuclear weapons program deeply, pursue the littoral combat ships and halt missile defense.  This presupposition is that the only thing we will ever face in the 21st century will be asymmetric threats, guerrilla warfare and insurgencies.

The Captain’s Journal believes in fighting and winning the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s foolish and shortsighted to assume that the future will necessarily look like the present.  Finally, short cutting planning, training and equipping for a conventional struggle and proper deterrence might just ensure that that’s the threat that is faced in the future by creating the very weakness that larger near-peer nation states seek.

Robert M. Gates on a Balanced Strategy for the Pentagon

Sounding the Nuclear Alarm

An Aging Nuclear Weapons Stockpile

Littoral Combat and Other Navy Adventures

The 26th MEU Stuck at Bahrain

The 26th MEU, the USS San Antonio and Military Equipment

In what might be the clearest tale to date about SOF narcissism over the Afghanistan high value target campaign, we see that the gaming goes nearly to the top in a recent report at the Army Times (hotel tango SWJ Blog).

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to deploy three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over a proposed near-term “surge” of spec ops forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.

The National Security Council’s surge proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.

Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the so-called “war czar” whose official title is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan policy and implementation. The rationale behind deploying more special ops forces to Afghanistan was that any decision to deploy more conventional brigades to Afghanistan would take at least several months to implement, whereas special ops units could be sent much more quickly, the Special Forces officer said.

Not likely.  Afghanistan has been a SOF campaign from the beginning, and the lack of force projection and confused mission have led us to where we are.  It’s hard to believe that the power structure suddenly decided on a SOF surge, since SOF surging is what has been happening for seven years.  Furthermore, there is always CENTCOM ready reserve which is usually comprised of a MEU.  But continuing:

… the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies.

Most major special operations commands were opposed to the proposal, special operations sources said. The sources identified U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, headed by Michael Vickers, as all resisting the initiative.

Special operations sources said that those opposing the “SOF surge” were generally against the idea on two grounds: that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has not requested them, and that the CJSOTF-A does not have enough “enablers” — such as helicopters and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets — to support the forces it has in-country now, let alone another battalion’s worth.

Strayed indeed.  Kinetic operations against high value targets – for whatever worth this has been – don’t require SOF.  It might be that there is something deeper here.   Lt. Gen. Lute certainly must know that Afghanistan cannot continue to be a SOF campaign against HVTs, and the SOF command must certainly know that the beast of Operation Enduring Freedom has grown far beyond what they are able to bear.  If it’s a question of who will break first and say these things, then such gamesmanship over serious military operations is loathsome and detestable.  But it gets even better (or worse).

The short supply of helicopters in Afghanistan has been a constant problem for conventional forces and CJSOTF-A, the “white,” or unclassified, task force in-country. Unlike the secretive, “black,” Joint Special Operations Command task force, which is directly supported by elements of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, “white” Special Forces groups do not have their own dedicated aviation units and have to compete for helicopter support with the rest of the U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. CJSOTF-A is commanded by a colonel, whereas the other organizations are all commanded by flag officers.

The Pentagon military official said that the planned deployment of an additional 20,000 conventional U.S. troops, including three brigade combat teams, to Afghanistan would also include a lot of “enablers” that the special operations forces could use.

The Pentagon plan includes more helicopters being sent to Afghanistan, as well as the possibility of a one-star special operations flag officer to command “white” SOF forces in country, which would obviate the need to have “O-6s arm wrestling with O-7s and O-9s,” he said.

More politics, and make sure to take notice of what SOF command sees as the mission for these additional “enablers.”  They would go to SOF (‘a lot of “enablers” that the special operations forces could use’).  Finally:

A field-grade officer in Washington who has been tracking the debate said that the “white” SOF leaders’ argument that their forces need more ISR assets and helicopters is a reflection of how Special Forces has veered from its traditional mission of “foreign internal defense” — training host nation forces to conduct counterinsurgency — in favor of the more glamorous direct-action missions.

The officer said Lute believes that special operations forces, particularly Special Forces, “are the right force” to send to Afghanistan because of their skills at teaching foreign internal defense.

This might explain the special operations hierarchy’s opposition to Lute’s surge proposal, the field grade-officer in Washington said. “This is an implicit criticism of what SOF has done for the last five years,” he said. “They haven’t been training indigenous forces. That may be what SOCOM is objecting to, is it’s implicitly a critique of SOF’s over-fascination with direct action.”

It has come full circle, from Lute’s belief that training some Afghan soldiers can solve the problem – or so says the source – to the potential that this proposition is a critique of the evolved SOF mission and a charade, to the campaign that has grown beyond anything that the SOF can possibly handle alone.

Regular readers of The Captain’s Journal know our position, and we believe that this political maneuvering is disgusting and despicable.  The SOF navel-gazing is embarrassing, and it’s time for both the SOF and the American public to graduate beyond the Rambo understanding of irregular warfare where a SOF operator or two is turned loose in the jungles or deserts and the whole world changes in a day or two because of the thousands of rounds discharged from his weapon.

Really.  This is the stuff of children, adolescents and un-reformable movie-goers.  Can’t we be more serious about our military strategy than this?  Afghanistan will require political and financial investment, force projection (Army and Marines), and – yes – SOF too.  SOF performs an invaluable role in small footprint international force projection, with their special skills in language training and similar “enablers” for their mission.  But the daydream of creating a few extra SOF operators to do the dirty work and returning the Army and Marines stateside is just that.  A daydream.  A small footprint for seven years is why OEF looks the way it does.  We need more serious reflection than that to build the strategies for the future.

Prior:

Concerning Turning Over Afghanistan to Special Operations Forces

60 Minutes and the Special Forces Hunt for Bin Laden

The Cult of Special Forces

Another Disappointing RAND Counterinsurgency Study

Please take time to answer the poll question:

In the January / February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has a paper entitled A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age. It is a lengthy paper, and some selected quotes are extracted below, followed by a brief analysis.

The defining principle of the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy is balance. The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs.

The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States’ existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the U.S. armed forces successful and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done.

The United States’ ability to deal with future threats will depend on its performance in current conflicts. To be blunt, to fail — or to be seen to fail — in either Iraq or Afghanistan would be a disastrous blow to U.S. credibility, both among friends and allies and among potential adversaries.

In Iraq, the number of U.S. combat units there will decline over time — as it was going to do no matter who was elected president in November. Still, there will continue to be some kind of U.S. advisory and counterterrorism effort in Iraq for years to come …

It would be irresponsible not to think about and prepare for the future, and the overwhelming majority of people in the Pentagon, the services, and the defense industry do just that. But we must not be so preoccupied with preparing for future conventional and strategic conflicts that we neglect to provide all the capabilities necessary to fight and win conflicts such as those the United States is in today.

Support for conventional modernization programs is deeply embedded in the Defense Department’s budget, in its bureaucracy, in the defense industry, and in Congress. My fundamental concern is that there is not commensurate institutional support — including in the Pentagon — for the capabilities needed to win today’s wars and some of their likely successors.

What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign — a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation. Direct military force will continue to play a role in the long-term effort against terrorists and other extremists. But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory. Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies …

The recent past vividly demonstrated the consequences of failing to address adequately the dangers posed by insurgencies and failing states. Terrorist networks can find sanctuary within the borders of a weak nation and strength within the chaos of social breakdown. A nuclear-armed state could collapse into chaos and criminality. The most likely catastrophic threats to the U.S. homeland — for example, that of a U.S. city being poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack — are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.

The kinds of capabilities needed to deal with these scenarios cannot be considered exotic distractions or temporary diversions. The United States does not have the luxury of opting out because these scenarios do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war.

The military and civilian elements of the United States’ national security apparatus have responded unevenly and have grown increasingly out of balance. The problem is not will; it is capacity. In many ways, the country’s national security capabilities are still coping with the consequences of the 1990s, when, with the complicity of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, key instruments of U.S. power abroad were reduced or allowed to wither on the bureaucratic vine. The State Department froze the hiring of new Foreign Service officers …

Yet even with a better-funded State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, future military commanders will not be able to rid themselves of the tasks of maintaining security and stability. To truly achieve victory as Clausewitz defined it — to attain a political objective — the United States needs a military whose ability to kick down the door is matched by its ability to clean up the mess and even rebuild the house afterward.

Given these realities, the military has made some impressive strides in recent years. Special operations have received steep increases in funding and personnel. The air force has created a new air advisory program and a new career track for unmanned aerial operations. The navy has set up a new expeditionary combat command and brought back its riverine units. New counterinsurgency and army operations manuals, plus a new maritime strategy, have incorporated the lessons of recent years in service doctrine. “Train and equip” programs allow for quicker improvements in the security capacity of partner nations. And various initiatives are under way that will better integrate and coordinate U.S. military efforts with civilian agencies as well as engage the expertise of the private sector, including nongovernmental organizations and academia …

The United States cannot take its current dominance for granted and needs to invest in the programs, platforms, and personnel that will ensure that dominance’s persistence.

But it is also important to keep some perspective. As much as the U.S. Navy has shrunk since the end of the Cold War, for example, in terms of tonnage, its battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined — and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners. Russian tanks and artillery may have crushed Georgia’s tiny military. But before the United States begins rearming for another Cold War, it must remember that what is driving Russia is a desire to exorcise past humiliation and dominate its “near abroad” — not an ideologically driven campaign to dominate the globe. As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia’s conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.

All told, the 2008 National Defense Strategy concludes that although U.S. predominance in conventional warfare is not unchallenged, it is sustainable for the medium term given current trends. It is true that the United States would be hard-pressed to fight a major conventional ground war elsewhere on short notice, but as I have asked before, where on earth would we do that? U.S. air and sea forces have ample untapped striking power should the need arise to deter or punish aggression — whether on the Korean Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, or across the Taiwan Strait. So although current strategy knowingly assumes some additional risk in this area, that risk is a prudent and manageable one.

Analysis

The entire paper is worth studying, but Secretary Gates continues to build upon the theme of maintaining a balance between arming and training for near peer conflicts and irregular warfare. The theme is in keeping with his history, as he has convinced the current administration that the 183 F-22s already purchased are enough to fill the gap between now and the advent of the F-35 (which by all accounts is far outperformed by the F-22). The Air Force wants more, but will likely have to settle for 183. Gates’ pragmatic view is also in keeping with our own advocacy of the A-10 (which we believe to have been prematurely retired and entirely capable of performing another decade or two), but our advocacy is not entirely based on its performance in COIN. It is also a very capable tank killer, and can still function as originally designed. Not every aerial weapon has to be new, and outfitting the A-10 to bring it up to the digital age is quite enough for now.

Gates even goes to lengths that The Captain’s Journal isn’t prepared to go, in allowing money for the ill-conceived and (soon-to-be) ill-fated Army future combat system with its exoskeleton. We’ve made our desires know, i.e., lighter ESAPI plates with the same ballistic stopping power are a worthy investment, the exoskeleton is not (and is suited merely for erasing gender, strength and fitness differences in combat, not a laudable goal anyway). Kill the program, Secretary Gates.

Gates also pushes the notion that investment in almost-failed states is a worthy goal compared to the risk, i.e., the next attack that levels a city or kills civilians is more likely than not going to come from almost-failed states rather than stable ones. So far, so good. The Captain’s Journal has always been an advocate for Secretary Gates and will be so into the future.

But one cannot escape the sinking feeling that Gates is on another level in his understanding of things compared to the team that will surround him (excluding General Jim Jones). Gates clearly delineates between the army of State Department employees, foreign operatives and NGOs that are necessary for the proper engagement of almost-failed states and such notions for large state actors. The delineation is that while Gates works hard on the former, he doesn’t mention the later. The incoming administration appears by all accounts to believe that negotiations will suffice to dissuade bad state actors from their intentions. We have gone on record disagreeing with this.

One cannot escape the reality that Russia just might push for some version of its former global empire, that China might just decide that it has lost patience with Taiwan, and that Iran, no matter the size of the army of negotiators, will continue its push for nuclear weapons grade material. At some point we must consider that in addition to the ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s prudent to have fleets in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Aden along with Marines for CENTCOM ready reserve.

It’s going to be a difficult four years, we believe, but we feel certain about one thing. President-elect Obama couldn’t do any better than Secretary Gates, and his team is stronger for having him there, and would be profoundly weak without him. For those who have opined that the U.S. military is losing focus on conventional warfare with the institutional focus on counterinsurgency and stability operations, the argument is settled for the moment. We’ll do both, but we’ll focus for now on the campaigns we have at hand. And that’s that.

The Captain’s Journal respects only one individual on the national security team and featured in the photograph above – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. He has earned every bit of respect he has throughout the defense community. The balance of the team must earn their respect but is off to a very bad start. Eric Holder with his pitiful judgment inspires absolutely no confidence, and Janet Napolitano may as well have turned Arizona over to MS 13. The President-elect stands opposed even to refurbishing the existing nuclear weapons stockpile (the greatest deterrence we have), much less do we believe that we’ll get support for new developments in nuclear weapons.

As for the incoming Secretary of State, that horrible, juvenile interrogation before the Senate where General David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were mocked by both Biden and Clinton will go down as one of the worst and most dishonorable displays of any politicians in our history. As it turns out, Crocker and Petraeus were right, so our incoming Secretary of State and Vice President-elect are batting 0.000.

President-elect Obama has talked a good game at times, vowing to fund the U.S. military needs of the 21st century.

“We will also ensure that we have the strategy — and resources — to succeed against al Qaeda and the Taliban,” Obama told a news conference. “And going forward, we will continue to make the investments necessary to strengthen our military and increase our ground forces to defeat the threats of the 21st century.”

But these words ring hollow when he has all but given up on high powered deterrence such as nuclear weapons and put into place a national security team that has such a poor incoming record. Secretary of Defense Gates, who opposes Obama on nuclear weapons, is the one bright spot on the team. Thank God for Gates.

The Obama team will back the use of soft power in the coming months and years.

President-elect Barack Obama’s national security team, introduced Monday in Chicago, includes two veteran Cold Warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as old rival turned secretary of state; General James Jones, the former NATO commander to be the national security adviser; and Robert Gates, the current and future defense secretary – were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift in resources, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. Obama also said he was nominating Susan Rice, a former National Security Council official, as ambassador to the United Nations.

“Whether they can make the change one that Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best, will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently. But the adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three officials had all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But is Gates really completely in line with this thinking? To be sure, he has advocated the use of soft power in counterinsurgency.

… my message today is not about the defense budget or military power. My message is that if we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world in the coming decades, this country must strengthen other important elements of national power both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad. In short, based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former Director of CIA and now as Secretary of Defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use “soft” power and for better integrating it with “hard” power

Gates nowhere discusses the diminution of combat capabilities or the jettisoning of military power as a foundation for being able to afford this soft power. In fact, just before making the statement above, Gates said this.

One of my favorite lines is that experience is the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Four times in the last century the United States has come to the end of a war, concluded that the nature of man and the world had changed for the better, and turned inward, unilaterally disarming and dismantling institutions important to our national security – in the process, giving ourselves a so-called “peace” dividend. Four times we chose to forget history.

The left has their pet views about what Obama has promised and what he should accomplish.

President-elect Barack Obama has affirmed his commitment to bring the war in Iraq to a close and to refocus our attention on Afghanistan. To do both, Obama must do more than fix ambitious timelines or offer hazy plans with muddy particulars. He must stick to his campaign pledge that would fundamentally shift the ideological orientation of America’s foreign policy establishment: ending the Iraq mission will require engaging Iran, solving Afghanistan will mean dialogue with terrorists.

Tacit in this demand is that Iran is participating in the violence and engaging them in dialogue will convince them to renounce that violence despite the fact that twenty five years of engagement has failed to do this. Tacit in the expectation that we dialogue with the Taliban is that they are interested in this dialogue. Hamid Karzai has literally begged Mullah Omar to negotiate and promised him complete safety, but both The Captain’s Journal and Ayman al-Zawahiri have pointed out that we would be currently negotiating from a position of weakness rather than strength.

The full engagement of the State Department should involve things like democracy programs for Iran (which the State Department effectively killed), while the perspective is being nurtured by the incoming administration that full involvement of soft power involves thousands of negotiators, as if, hearkening back to their experience in American jurisprudence, we can lawyer our way to victory if we only deploy better talkers than they do.

So there seems to be a fundamental difference between Gates and the balance of the team. Gates apparently doesn’t believe in fairy tales and myths, while the demands on the left are for Obama not only to defund the military and engage enemies with dialogue, but to succeed, and that, remarkably so. This administration and the American public are being set up for huge disappointment, but all is not lost.  At least we have one adult on the national security team who can speak sense to the others.

See also W. Thomas Smith, America’s Naval Supremacy Slipping, and The Captain’s Journal, Is Obama Proposing Leviathan and Sysadmin?, and Civilian National Security Force.

Donald Rumsfeld is peddling a bit of revisionist history in the New York Times. His overall aim is allegedly to describe how the Iraq troop surge and strategy may not be able to be precisely duplicated in Afghanistan. But leaving behind his thesis for a moment, we can get right to the revisionist history.

As one who is occasionally — and incorrectly — portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq, I believe that while the surge has been effective in Iraq, we must also recognize the conditions that made it successful. President Bush’s bold decision to deploy additional troops to support a broader counterinsurgency strategy of securing and protecting the Iraqi people was clearly the right decision. More important, though, it was the right decision at the right time …

The decision to conduct a surge came out of an interagency review in the fall of 2006. By mid-December, as I was leaving the Pentagon, there was a rough consensus in the Defense Department that deploying additional combat brigades to Iraq was the right step. Some military leaders raised reasonable questions about the potential effectiveness of a surge, in part because of a correct concern that military power alone could not solve Iraq’s problems. I agreed, and emphasized that a military surge would need to be accompanied by effective diplomatic and economic “surges” from other departments and agencies of the American government, and by considerably greater progress from Iraq’s elected leaders.

During my last weeks in office, I recommended to President Bush that he consider Gen. David Petraeus as commander of coalition forces in Iraq, as General Casey’s tour was coming to an end. General Petraeus and his deputy, Gen. Ray Odierno, had the experience and skill to recognize and exploit the seismic shifts that were taking place in Iraq’s political landscape. And United States troops had the courage to win the alliance of Iraq’s people against a common enemy — and the benevolence to win their friendship.

At the critical moment — a moment when the Iraqis were able and willing to be part of the surge with the American forces — the United States surged into Iraq with the right commanders, additional forces and a fresh operational approach rooted in years of on-the-ground experience. Americans can be proud of what has been accomplished in Iraq over the last five-plus years. They should also be impressed by the results of the surge, which, thus far, has outstripped expectations, including mine.

Balderdash and myths. Rumsfeld and his reports repeatedly talked of standing down as the people and Iraqi Army stood up, and the strategy wasn’t one of counterinsurgency. It was one of a quick turnover and rapid drawdown. Saving the day had to rest on the shoulders of the enlisted men and those in the states who would support the campaign.

For the next three years, Donald Rumsfeld and the senior generals pushed a “short-war” scenario, “which was to get a political solution quickly, transition to the Iraqis security quickly, and get out,” says Gen. Keane. “It didn’t work” ….

In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.

Rumsfeld, who apparently never sat down in his office, would have done much better to park himself in a chair and study why his philosophy of rapidly turning over to an Iraqi Army was destined for failure; or perhaps he could have listened to General Eric Shinseki’s recommendation that we needed more troops than called for under the current plan; or perhaps he could have prevented Paul Wolfowitz from making a clown of himself by publicly denouncing Shinseki’s remarks to the Congress; or perhaps he could have paid attention to General Anthony Zinni’s war-gaming of Iraq in which his team found that they needed 400,000 troops; or perhaps he could have thought a little more about the toppling of a government with troops expected to keep order under the ridiculous rules of engagement and rules for the use of force that more closely followed the SCOTUS Tennessee v. Garner decision than rules necessary for post-invasion Iraq.

But he didn’t do any of this. Upon the beginning of looting and after watching the streets of Iraq turn into Lord of the Flies except with adults and guns, the best Rumsfeld can offer is to say stuff happens.

Continuing with Rumsfeld’s fantasy:

The way forward in Afghanistan will need to reflect the current circumstances there — not the circumstances in Iraq two years ago. Additional troops in Afghanistan may be necessary, but they will not, by themselves, be sufficient to lead to the results we saw in Iraq. A similar confluence of events that contributed to success in Iraq does not appear to exist in Afghanistan.

What’s needed in Afghanistan is an Afghan solution, just as Iraqi solutions have contributed so fundamentally to progress in Iraq. And a surge, if it is to be successful, will need to be an Afghan surge.

Left unanswered in the current debate is the critical question of how thousands of additional American troops might actually bring long-term stability to Afghanistan — a country 80,000 square miles larger than Iraq yet with security forces just one-fourth the size of Iraq’s. Afghanistan also lacks Iraq’s oil and other economic advantages. It is plagued by the narcotics trade. Its borders are threatened by terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq.

So after designing the strategy to topple the Taliban regime and push the Taliban into neighboring Pakistan, Rumsfeld now tells us that his strategy failed and going forward in Afghanistan is going to be difficult. But Rumsfeld’s force transformation (otherwise called by the erudite phrase “rationalizing the force structure”) is described for us by John Noonan of OpFor.

To some, his leadership was inspirational. To others, he was the guy who was single handedly dismantling a force that had barely survived eight years of Clinton-era defense cuts. The name for the pain was Transformation, Rumsfeld’s baby. The Pentagon’s “bridge to the 21st century.” And before September 11, it sounded and felt pretty slick. A lighter force, with emphasis on flexibility, technology, and force multiplication. Maximum effect, minimum loss cheered supporters.

In Afghanistan, Transformation was looking pretty good. A couple of hundred SPECOP warriors exploited our new, network-centric approach to warfighting and accomplished what the much-feared Soviet juggernaut could not. Who needs tanks? Who needs divisions? One foward air controller with a horse, a laptop, and a MILSTAR uplink to a B-52 could now do the heavy-lifting of an entire mechanized brigade.

And that’s when Transformation blasted off. The Air Force started delivering Raptors and Global Hawks while BRAC cut our fighter force by 20%. Money poured into the Army’s Future Combat Systems, the Marine led V-22 procurement, and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships. New tankers for the Air Force, new EELV heavy lift rockets to facilitate our budding space weapons program, a new class of aircraft carrier and a new class attack sub. All very useful weapon systems, but all very expensive weapon systems.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to get the Transformation concept over that final, sizable high-cost hurdle. Afghanistan was mostly asymmetric, fought almost exclusively at the platoon and company level. OIF was Transformation’s real test. State v. State conflict, a real army -albeit ill-equipped and poorly trained- to prove the mettle of the new force. And again, Transformation worked. Less troops, higher tech did the job. Mission accomplished.

And like a Shakespearean tragedy, Rumsfeld’s bold new vision for a brave new military collasped at the height of its success. The insurgency dug-in, and with each IED blast another hole was punched in the Transformation concept. Billion-dollar B2s flew helpless overhead as suicide bombers and roadside bombs took the lives of troops who lacked armor on their Humvees and on their bodies. 100 dollar bombs killed 100,000 dollar weapon systems. The highly touted, highly financed UAV force could only watch as car bombers exploded Iraqi marketplaces. What we needed was more troops. What we got was more gizmos.

John describes what will forever be the Rumsfeld legacy for us, and it doesn’t include the surge. After ignoring his own role in the disaster that was post-invasion Iraq and taking credit for the surge, Rumsfeld then refused to admit that his strategy for Afghanistan led us to the debacle we have today with Operation Enduring Freedom. Finally, he tells us that more troops won’t necessarily fix the problem without a new strategy since there is no direct analogue to Iraq – an assertion so obvious that we don’t need to hear it from the man who developed the initial strategy, and who, if he had committed the troops early on in Afghanistan, wouldn’t have to tell us that more troops won’t fix the problem.

Some men have no shame, and history is important enough that lies deserve to be corrected.

So Obama wants to quit relying on the U.S. military alone to implement U.S. national security objectives. Okay, in contemporary slang, The Captain’s Journal is “down with that.” So he’s going to get the State Department playing on the same side as the military? Er … maybe not.

“Just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well funded.” So the astute observer and deep thinker might reflect for a minute and be compelled to pose several questions (although the MSM won’t).

1. How will this Civilian National Security Force (hereafter CNSF) be just as powerful as men with guns, artillery, ordnance, war ships and aircraft?
2. What will make the CNSF “just as strong” as the U.S. Marine Corps?
3. How will this CNSF implement national security policy?
4. Since the 2009 budget includes just over half a trillion dollars for defense spending (The Captain’s Journal supports this, and calls for even more), and since it is judged that this CNSF be “just as well funded” as the military, where will this half a trillion dollars come from?
5. Finally, if he didn’t really mean that this CNSF would be the beneficiary of half a trillion dollars (to do with we don’t know what), then why did he say so?

At any rate, these questions seem to be compelled by the proposal. The best bet, however, is that the MSM won’t pose a single one of them (but we do get to add another snappy sounding category to our stable of articles – Civilian National Defense Force).

Yes, you heard right. The title is correct.

In the future, U.S. troops could be on the ground in hotspots anywhere on the globe in only two hours. This may sound like science fiction, but it is exactly what a group of civilians and military officials met to talk about at a two-day conference.

The meeting’s purpose was to plan the development of the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion (SUSTAIN) program. USA Today reports that the invitation to the conference called the idea a “potential revolutionary step in getting combat power to any point in the world in a timeframe unachievable today.”

The biggest challenge for the SUSTAIN program is certainly the technology. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Brown, a spokesman for the space office said that the next step in the plan is addressing technological challenges and seeking military input.

The goal of the program is to be able to insert a team of 13 soldiers anywhere on the globe in two hours. John Pike, a military analyst told USA Today, “This isn’t even science fiction. It’s fantasy.” Pike says that the concept defies physics and the reality of what a small number of lightly armed troops could accomplish.

Burt Rutan, the rocket pioneer who won the X Prize in 2004 for building a private spacecraft capable of flying into space says that the plan is technologically possible. Rutan wrote in an email to USA Today, “This has never been done. However, it is feasible. It would be a relatively expensive way to get the troops on the ground, but it could be done.”

Some things leaves one speechless. Well, not quite. Absurd. “Relatively expensive?” Try ridiculously expensive for no purpose (13 Soldiers can accomplish nothing useful). John Pike, who is smart and whom The Captain’s Journal likes, is correct. This is nothing but fantasy, but the sad part is that dollars are being wasted on even contemplating such a thing.

The litany of potential problems are too long to be enumerated (e.g., If ingress by rocketship, by what means egress? What kind of emergency could possibly warrant the deployment of troops within two hours, but only 13 troops in number? Who is going to maintain this rocketship launch capable 24 hours per day, 365 days per year? Etc.) Want “ready reserve?” That’s what Marine Expeditionary Units are for. Rather than wasting dollars on rocketships, spend them on increasing the size and deployment of Marines in ready reserve.

Similar to the opposition to the surge in Iraq, the chorus of voices calling for a military stand-down in Afghanistan are growing.  There is the classical “we can’t win” approach, analogous to the “insurgencies cannot be beaten” meme (regardless of the fact that the insurgency has essentially been beaten in Iraq).  Then there is the “we must educate the extremists out of their extremism” approach.  In this version of the problem, the root of the extremism becomes disenfranchisement, poverty, and valid grievances which require redress (regardless of the example of Bangladesh, which is 90% Muslim and one of the poorest nations on earth, but without the violent extremism).  There are other stupid arguments for a draw-down of troops (or leaving a very small military footprint) over which we won’t waste our time.

But The Captain’s Journal has been advocating increased forces and force projection for more than half a year, along with a change in the command structure and the implementation of a comprehensive strategy.  Finally, we have also pointed out that regardless of the fact that Pakistan is no apparent ally in the fight against the Taliban, Afghanistan is the first and primary place to engage them, with U.S. military pressure resulting in Pakistani commitment to the campaign.

It sounds as if Admiral Mullen has been listening to The Captain’s Journal rather than the other arguments.  “It’s very clear that additional (US) troops will have a big impact on insurgents coming across that border,” Mullen asserted Wednesday.  Gates is also looking for an increase in troops.

The US is looking for ways to send more troops to Afghanistan amid a resurgence of violence in the country nearly seven years after the ousting of the -Taliban regime.

Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said the Pentagon was “working very hard to see if there are opportunities to send additional forces sooner rather than later”.

His comments, late on Wednesday, increased the likelihood of further reductions in US troop levels in Iraq later this year to free up forces for Afghanistan.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he expected to recommend additional withdrawals from Iraq in early autumn provided recent security gains were sustained.

US commanders in Afghanistan have been appealing for additional troops for months as the insurgency has revived.

Pentagon leaders have made clear that significant increases would have to wait until more troops returned from Iraq but the need to rebalance forces between the two battlefields has become more urgent in recent weeks. Coalition deaths in Afghanistan have exceeded US fatalities in Iraq for the past two months and nine soldiers were killed on Sunday in the deadliest insurgent attack against US forces since 2005.

Briefing reporters after visits to both war zones last week, Admiral Mullen said security was “remarkably better” in Iraq but warned the US faced a “tough and complicated” fight in Afghanistan.

The hand wringing over a large footprint – it’ll cause the population to turn against us, military action cannot win against an insurgency, etc., etc. – has been seen before concerning Iraq.  The meme is getting tired and old, but some “experts” and “analysts” don’t mind sounding tired and old.  Fortunately, Gates and Mullen see the need.  But note that The Captain’s Journal saw this need before the so-called analysts did.  Finally, we say that the campaign needs more than three Brigades (as has been claimed).  But it will take a while to convince the chain of command of our position.

Scenes of Marines (24th Marine Expeditionary Unit) from Garmser, Afghanistan, courtesy of DVIDS.

The always interesting Bill Gertz at the Washington Times has the scoop on a hot debate between the intelligence community and DoD on the use of Special Operations inside Pakistan to kill or capture OBL.

Defense officials are criticizing what they say is the failure to capture or kill top al Qaeda leaders because of timidity on the part of policy officials in the Pentagon, diplomats at the State Department and risk-averse bureaucrats within the intelligence community.

Military special operations forces (SOF) commandos are frustrated by the lack of aggressiveness on the part of several policy and intelligence leaders in pursuing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen, who are thought to have hidden inside the tribal areas of Pakistan for the past 6½ years.

The focus of the commandos’ ire, the officials say, is the failure to set up bases inside Pakistan’s tribal region, where al Qaeda has regrouped in recent months, setting up training camps where among those being trained are Western-looking terrorists who can pass more easily through security systems. The lawless border region inside Pakistan along the Afghan border remains off-limits to U.S. troops.

The officials say that was not always the case. For a short time, U.S. special operations forces went into the area in 2002 and 2003, when secret Army Delta Force and Navy SEALs worked with Pakistani security forces.

That effort was halted under Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who recently blamed Pakistan for opposing the joint operations. Mr. Armitage, however, also disclosed his diplomatic opposition to the commando operations. Mr. Armitage, an adviser to Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain, told the New York Times last month that the United States feared pressuring Pakistani leaders for commando access and that the Delta Force and SEALs in the tribal region were “pushing them almost to the breaking point” …

Another major setback for aggressive special operations activities occurred recently with a decision to downgrade the U.S. Special Operations Command. Under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the command in 2004 began to shift its focus from support and training to becoming a front-line command in the covert war to capture and kill terrorists. In May, SOCOM, as the command is called, reverted to its previous coordination and training role, a change that also frustrated many SOF commandos.

Critics in the Pentagon of the failure to more aggressively use the 50,000-strong SOF force say it also is the result of a bias by intelligence officials against special forces, including Pentagon policy-makers such as former CIA officer Michael Vickers, currently assistant defense secretary for special operations; former CIA officer Mary Beth Long, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs; and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former CIA director.

There’s more at the link, but the gist of the argument is captured above.  More than a little daydreaming of daring-do invades this notion of the use of special operations to perform the hard activities.  It’s a nice notion, this dream of more training in explosives, airborne qualifications and language making soldiers into supermen and capable of leaping borders and mountains in a single stride, but the fact is that the Pashtun are opposed to the global war on terror, and upon questioning, it has now been learned that the majority of Pakistani soldiers in the NWFP are in favor of the Taliban and believe that they are in a wrong war with them.

The Pakistanis don’t want combination bases with U.S., be they special operations or otherwise.  Any known special operations presence inside the tribal region would be an open invitation to mortar fire and the unnecessary death of all of the special operators caught without the proper force protection, and this — very soon after discovery.

The Small Wars Manual makes no mention of the use of special or black operations (although it does incorporate the use of distributed operations with as small as squad-size units connected to larger forces), but focuses more on known presence and contact with both the population and the enemy, as the Marines have done in the Helmand Province.

The reflexive turning to black operations and surreptitious engagements to remove high value targets is an artifact of the failed Rumsfeld paradigm for Afghanistan.  High value targets, according to the Small Wars Manual which makes little mention of such a thing, are not so high value after all.

The proper use of special operators has to do with the conduct of operations and operations support which requires different and specialized training (such as language, airborne qualifications, training of indigenous fighters, reconnaissance, and so forth).  There is no replacement for the conduct of counterinsurgency, not even special operations.  Afghanistan is the place to start for the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban.  After Pakistan senses commitment to the campaign, their disposition towards U.S. troops on Pakistani soil will change.