It’s Hard To Win Counter Insurgencies With Air Power

More proof:

The Pakistani government on Wednesday condemned American air and artillery strikes that it said killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers during a clash on the Afghan border Tuesday night.

The Pakistani soldiers appear to have been caught up in a firefight between coalition forces and Taliban fighters in Kunar Province, on the Afghan side of the border. A spokesman for the Taliban said their forces had attacked an American and Afghan position near the border and said eight of their fighters had been killed and nine wounded in the fighting.

The American military in Afghanistan and Pentagon officials said that coalition forces responded to fire from “anti-Afghan forces,” their name for insurgents who frequently cross the border from sanctuaries in Pakistan to mount attacks in Afghanistan.

A Pentagon official in Washington said that after coalition forces returned fire on the ground, two United States Air Force F-15E fighter-bombers and one B-1 bomber dropped about a dozen bombs — mostly 500-pound laser-guided munitions — on the attackers. “The bombs hit the target they were aimed at,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

For all of the much vaunted improvements in the accuracy of air strikes, it’s still very hard to distinguish between civilian and combatant, and even harder to distinguish between paramilitary combatant and paramilitary combatant. This is especially true in Afghanistan, which is a huge country in which we have far too few troops. Because we can’t practice anything resembling a proper counterinsurgency strategy due to a troop density that’s about ten times less than standard COIN doctrine recommends; we turn to air strikes, which inevitably kill civilians and our allied forces. This is especially important in Afghanistan, because we’re highly dependent on allies, Afghani forces and Afghani civilians to help locate insurgents and Taliban. Of course, if we only had Iron Man, this wouldn’t really be a problem.

The Flyboys Are Done

The Air Force is a perfect example of what happens when you have a narrow band of personally interested people who are totally unaccountable to anyone. In short, you have a bunch of ex flyboys who are in charge of buying planes for the Air Force, their flyboy buddies lobbying on behalf of defense companies, and a complacent Congress that doesn’t care to exert discipline on military spending. Thankfully, Robert Gates has come to realize that an Air Force focused on buying new F-22 and F-35s (despite our status quo air dominance) is completly pointless and one that doesn’t really fit in with out new focus on low intensity conflicts and counter-insurgency. Benjamin Friedman breaks down his decision to have Norman Schwartz run the Air Force and concludes that is an amazing step forward. Schwartz was the head of US Transportation Command and a former c-130 pilot, so we can assume that his vision for the Air Force is one that focuses on what it could actually be useful at - namely moving around troops and providing air support in urban or counter-insurgency environments.

So one can hope that his sea-change in inter-military politics will mean that Friedman’s dream will come to fruition:

The chances of F-22 procurement going beyond 183 (the Air Force, at least until today, wanted 381) just went down, although Congress and the next administration will have something to say about that. The China threat inflation coming from the Air Force should diminish. The Air Force’s commitment to supporting Army led counter-insurgency campaigns will increase. The cries that the Air Force is underfunded will soften.

I sure hope so.

The Beauty of Utilitarianism in Wartime

It’s unfortunate that in many circles, the ethics of large scale civilian bombing in World War II is off limits. Sure, AC Grayling wrote a book about it, but for many, it’s just assumed that because we won the war and because the Nazis winning was an unthinkable prospect, everything we did was basically OK. But it clearly wasn’t. As Robert Pape argued in, strategic air bombing as a means of coercion, distinct from a means of destroying military equipment of capability, isn’t all that effective. The Nazis, after all, didn’t really care much about the lives of their people and the people actually being bombed, whether they’re German, Japanese or Vietnamese, rarely blame their home country’s government for the massive death tolls. They blame those actually killing them. So, in the most moral war ever, there were hundreds of thousands pointless civilian deaths.

But it’s hard to talk about such moral complexity, because no one wants to seem “objectively pro-fascist” or “soft on fascism” even 60 years later. So that’s why I applaud Nicholson Baker’s new work, Human Smoke, which makes the case that not only were the massive civilian bombings wrong, but the allied involvement in the War itself was immoral. He is making the pacifist case. I don’t agree with Baker’s conclusion, but his work should at least expand the playing field along which we think about the morality of civilian death in wartime. If we can talk about the needless loss of civilian life in World War II, then the needless loss of life in, say, Iraq becomes all the more pertinent.

But the title of this post isn’t “Why We Need to Listen to AC Grayling and Nicholson Baker more.” What’s so interesting about the case of civilian causalities in war is that the strongest argument against deliberate area bombing is utilitarian - classic, greatest good for the greatest number, aggregate preference utilitarian. Pure bean-counting would easily show that the Allied area bombing, or the bombing of North Vietnam, was pointless, immoral and stupid. “But greatest good for the greatest number means we kill more people to win the war” says the just war theorist or the squeamish. Well that’s true, but only if you don’t count everyone. The beautiful thing about utilitarianism, you see, is that you ought to count everyone’s interests equally. There’s no reason that we should be counting an Iraqi civilian more than an American one, so some utilitarians would say. So, with the case of area bombing in World War II, we killed all these German for no reason. It didn’t make the war end sooner, it didn’t break their morale, it didn’t ultimately save more lives.

But World War II is over, as is US military policy of bombing civilian areas with the intent purpose of killing civilians. So the question becomes, what ethical guidelines are best now? And to me, pure aggregate utilitarianism provides the best rough guide to our actions. Glenn Greenwald, looking back the Iraq war, thinks that this line of argument is insufficient, and that it will always justify more wars, because people can always exaggerate the possible risks of not intervening while understating the costs of war itself:

But virtually every line of rationale is purely utilitarian in its reasoning. The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them — either in Slate or elsewhere — even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn’t exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

Greenwald is making two arguments here: one which fully fits into a utilitarian framework and the other which rejects it. Those “hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens” could easily just be included into some sort of utilitarian calculus. If you approached war this way - where you roughly count innocent civilians lives equally, then surely we’d see much less war. But Greenwald goes further than just expanding the utilitarian calculus to including non-Americans, but to make a more deontological claim - that war that isn’t in response to the homeland being attacked or threatened is not just stupid and destructive, but wrong. Although Greenwald and I are probably similarly dovish, it’s hard to see how his admirable calculative generosity towards the lives and interests of Iraqis (and other Others) is consistent with this hard principle of limited/non-intervention. Greenwald’s main pragmatic point is that war is always awful, and that we systematically underrate the costs of war, so we should have very, very stringent requirements for engaging in it. And this point is fair, I really don’t trust the American public and the Republican party, especially after a terrorist attack, to show enough nuance when deciding whether or not the costs and benefits of military action work out.

But just because our politics are imperfect doesn’t make Greenwald’s Jeffersonian position the correct one. That’s because the reason he endorses it is that war leads to excess civilian death. And that’s it! So, can you imagine a situation where the US ought to engage in some sort of military conflict, despite not being “attacked or even threatened”? Sure, plenty of us can. Gulf War I, Bosnia, Kosovo, cases of genocide etc etc. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be prudent about intervention - in Darfur, for example, there are good reasons why a military intervention is a bad idea and we did kill an awful lot of Iraqis in Gulf War I, but to stipulate that we limit our military to this impossibly narrow criteria really ties our hands down unnecessarily.

The other, more speculative and nuanced reason why Greenwald’s criteria is bad is because, well, it would lead to the killing of more innocent civilians than my criteria of pure, body-count utilitarianism. Let’s say a country, or a country which harbors terrorists, does attack us. Is it always right to invade that country, kill civilians and endanger more American lives? Not necessarily. Just look at Israel. Surely they are justified in taking military action in the West Bank and Gaza strip, but it is in no way clear that any of these actions actually work at making Israel more secure. Or look at the war in Lebanon, both in the 1980s and the summer of 2006. These were surely “justified” interventions, in the case of Lebanon in 2006, there were forces within Lebanon lobbing rockets into Israeli civilian centers. And Israel intervened, killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians, littered cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon and then didn’t make their country much safer. It’s hard to say that from a third party, utilitarian, eye-of-god perspective, that the Summer War was a good one.

Greenwald can’t have it both ways. If he really wants every innocent civilian to count as “one” in his war-calculus, then adding on silly addenda about being “attacked” or “threatened to be attacked” is nonsensical. For it leaves some civilians, who by virtue of their birth are fated to be slaughtered by their own governments or neighboring nations, out to dry, while other civilians are perfectly justified in being killed because their governments or terrorists in their midst attacked some other country which lead to an overreaction. This principle is neither consistent nor prudent. All it has to recommend to itself is that it would have stipulated against the Iraq War. Beyond that, however, it’s not much.

I Understand That Times Are Tough For the Air Force, But Really?

Things haven’t been going well for the Air Force recently.  After performing amazingly well in the first few months of the Afghanistan War and the first few weeks of the Iraq war, they look increasingly useless.  It’s hard to see how air power fits into a counterinsurgency where winning the hearts and minds of the population and population protection are two main objectives.  With air power, of course, comes collateral damage, and it’s hard to get people on your side when you inadvertently drop bombs on wedding parties and things like that.   There’s also the long term problem that the Air Force doesn’t need to upgrade its fighter force, i.e. buy a bunch of F-22s and F-35s, and yet they really, really want to and are pissing off Congress.  So, the Air Force is trying to turn itself into just another tool in the COIN kit, despite the fact that most COIN practitioners are very wary of air power.

It’s instructive to look at Air Force Charles Dunlap’s Small Wars Journal piece defending the USAF and explaining how its a key aspect of COIN operations.  This is a tough job to carry out, and he starts by putting forward one of the most absurd assertions about the Surge I’ve ever read:

Clearly, the complexities of today’s COIN operations require a more fully joint approach that takes advantages of the full range of capabilities – and thinking – available in the U.S. armed forces. Fortunately, this seems to be the approach actually being taken in Iraq. Notwithstanding FM 3-24, USA Today reports, for example, that a four-fold increase in airstrikes through the first nine months of 2007 reflected “a steep escalation in combat operations aimed at al-Qaeda and other militants.”7 As a result of the greater use of airpower, both Iraqi and American deaths have fallen.

To which I say….ARE YOU SERIOUS?   There is a real debate going on in defense policy circles about what, exactly, is responsible for the reduction of violence.  The explanations favored by many COIN types is that the increase in troops with Petraeus and the adoption of COIN tactics has led to the violence reduction. Advocates for conventional military power, like Gian Gentile, say that we’ve always been using some form of COIN and that the reduction in violence can be attributed to a combinations of sheer troop strength, bribing Sunni insurgents and Sadr’s cease-fire, not a subtle change of tactics.  While it’s certainly true that air strikes have increased, just about no one thinks that it’s been the key to reducing Iraqi and American deaths.  If anything, the increase in air strikes is a recognition that we can’t meet basic COIN recomendations about troop strength (approximately 500,000), so we have to supplement our on-the-ground capabilites with air power.   This is not what any COIN practitioners, or really anyone outside the Air Force, think we should do, it’s more a second or third best option we’re stuck with.

But besides his misrepresentations of the Surge, Dunlap defends his branch against the classic COIN incitement of air power -that its indiscriminate nature causes too much collateral damage which then jeopardizes the mission of separating the civilians form insurgents - by pointing out that air strikes have gotten much more precise.  Although this claim is, in a sense, true; in practice, most commanders recognize the limits of air power.  For example, in Afghanistan, where we have nowhere near enough troops to do population protection, Afghan civilians have been refusing to cooperate with Americans because of errant air strikes.  I’m sure that the authors of the COIN manual are aware of how much more accurate air munitions have gotten, but they still recommend against its use.

Dunlap makes good points that ground troops can also kill civilians and that killings that appear to be intentional are more likely to inflame Iraqi public opinion against American troops.  Even if this is true, what Dunlap ignores is that air power can not be positive in a way that ground force can be.  You can’t do population protection with bombers.  You can really only kill people.  So while ground forces may cause more collateral damage, they can redress it in a way that air power can not.

Defending The Press Embargo

Despite my nearly impossibly high levels of what scholars would call “privilege”, I have an innate, visceral aversion to markers of class or hierarchy.  Maybe it’s the Jewish-Socialist in me or something, but few things piss me off more than a hereditary royalty, who by sole virtue of their birth get a whole bunch of shit that not even their parents, grandparents or great grandparents earned.  The fact that so many royals turn out to be rather average folks, rather than endear me to them, just makes them look pathetic.

There is one saving grace, however,  particular to the British monarchy. That’s the strong tradition of royals who are one-off from the royal line serving in the military.  Although it would be nice to see Prince William on the front lines a la Prince Hal in Henry IV and Henry V, I am actually quite happy that the current Prince Harry managed to serve in Afghanistan for ten weeks like a normal soldier.  This shows that even within an institutions as hysterically unjust and anachronistic as the monarchy, they are aware that they essentially suck off the fat of the land and should “give something back.”  Sure, I oppose the mandatory military or community service of regular 18 year olds, but royal ones should be in the shit as much as possible.  And so I must say that the British press did something truly patriotic by not reporting on Harry’s service for ten whole weeks.  This allowed him to serve without endangering his fellow soldiers.  It’s not like there’s some compelling reason why the public has to know that Prince Harry is serving while he’s still doing it.  And since the info is out now, we can get all the pictures and interviews we want.

It sure looks dangerous, from a liberal, freedom of the press angle, to see journalistic organizations deliberating not reporting something because the government wants them to.  But this Prince Harry situation  isn’t going to push us down the slippery slope, and if it does, we’re already too far down it anyway.  So, bravo British press!

Obama and Rumsfeld

Jake Tapper’s “scoop” that Obama, in 2001, said Rumsfeld was in “the mainstream of American political life” is unspeakably lame. Not only is there no news, but if you look at the quote, you’ll see that Obama is disagreeing with Rumsfeld on policy - “I for example do not agree with a missile defense system, but I dont think that soon-to-be-Secretary Rumsfeld is in any way out of the mainstream of American political life.”

Sure, I dislike Rumsfeld as much as the next guy, but he was a pretty reasonable pick for Defense Secretary and not particularly out of the mainstream for GOP defense guy. In fact, no one in the Senate really opposed or questioned him intensely, so it’s not like Obama was bucking his party. Tapper tries to stir something up by pointing to a small newspaper editorial opposing Rumsfeld and the president of the Council for a Livable World opposing the nomination (The CLW has since commended Obama’s no nuclear weapons pledge). Too bad these were just about the only voices who even really cared about Rumsfeld — at the time, Democrats were concerned with Ashcroft.

What makes this even sillier was that, at the time, Rumsfeld wasn’t associated with Iraq (obviously) but instead with trying to transform the military into a smaller, leaner, more hi-tech operation. Of course, his plans got screwed by Iraq and his own wasting of support, but Rumsfeld’s vision at the time wasn’t particularly conservative or partisan and so he was very much in the mainstream.

If we want to talk about kind words towards military advisers and strategists, isn’t Hillary’s friendship with retired General Jack Keane, one of the chief architects of the surge, just a wee bit more relevant?

The 144

Matt Stoller has been talking a lot lately about how a true “progressive” aim, as opposed to liberal aims like universal health insurance, is the withdrawal of troops from the 144 countries they are stationed at around the world. Stoller is being rather expansive by suggesting this is self-evidently a progressive aim and that having troops stationed in 144 countries is necessarily a bad thing because it constitutes “American Empire.” While any self respecting liberal or progressive wants troops out of one country (Iraq) the case for full withdrawal, or even massive withdrawal, from foreign military bases is a much more muddled one. Stoller is being irresponsible by basically saying that 1. The US is Deploying troops in 144 countries 2. Deploying troops in that many countries constitutes an empire 3. Empire is always bad and 4. empire is bad.

If Stoller is serious about advocating retrenchment, offshore balancing or whatever he wants to call his proposed foreign policy, he ought to give a justification for why troop deployments in Germany, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Jordan, the Straights of Malacca, Qatar and Kuwait (just to name a few) are a bad thing — without using the word empire. It’s not that there aren’t good reasons for scaling down our international presence, it’s just that those who talk about our military commitments and deployments in such sweeping language ought to be much more specific about specific deployments and policy. Blithely throwing around the E-word does very little to advance the discussion.

Better Hammers and Fewer Nails

Tim Lee has a smart post discussing the relevance of improving COIN capabilities in the face of the overwhelming empirical evidence that the best counter insurgency strategy is not getting involved in the first place.

But I think it’s hard to draw from Iraq the lesson that the only problem was the lack of proper counterinsurgency training. Obviously, if our troops had been well trained in counterinsurgency tactics, the odds of success would have been higher. But they still would have been quite small. My understanding of the history of counterinsurgency is that they practically never work, and in the rare case where they do work the costs are often unacceptably high.

All of which is to say that it’s almost never a good idea to get ourselves into counter-insurgency operations. And indeed, if we get to the point where counter-insurgency forces seem desirable, that should be a sign that we ought to start looking for the exits. Creating a dedicated counterinsurgency unit will create institutional pressures for near-perpetual counterinsurgency operations. I suspect that most of the time even the best counterinsurgency efforts won’t be effective, but if we’ve got a hammer, we’ll be awfully tempted to keep pounding any nails we see.

I certainly agree with the sentiment, but I think Lee ignores other factors that will lead to the prosecution and subsequent execution of any given war.  While I agree that in Iraq, the best strategy was to never invade and is to withdraw, the new emphasis on intelligent counter insurgency capabilities is still probably a good thing. The most obvious reason why we should emphasize intelligent COIN is a place like Afghanistan, where our reliance on air strikes is assisting the Taliban’s resurgence.  Also, what Iraq and Afghanistan both show us is that wars whose purpose has nothing to do with counter-insurgency can quickly devolve into them.  If we’re likely to be engaged, as many think, in a series of small wars, including ones where the US troop commitment isn’t very high (like our deployments in the Philippines or Djibouti), we should try to do our best to effectively achieve our goals.

Essentially, the institutional pressures for both potentially starting new wars and continuing the ones we’re in are already present — our military is the best in the world, the public gets belligerent following terrorist attacks etc.  This may be a  reductio ad absurdum, but one could take Lee’s argument to mean that we should intentionally cripple our forces so as to demonstrate to the public that any war or counter-insurgency operation will be impossible.  I’d much rather, for example, direct our defense spending (as many COIN theorists suggest) away from big ticket weapons systems that have little utility to training soldiers to be more knowledgeable about populations under the assumption that not every future administration will be as tragically misguided and inept than our current one. That seems like a better option than just throwing up our hands and saying that we can do no better than Ricardo Sanchez and Tommy Franks.

First Impressions of Planet Militia

Before I write this, let me say that there is probably no contemporary military analyst more astute, creative and visionary than John Robb. With that said, his post on global militias strikes me as a sloppy. His basic argument is that nation building as a counter insurgency strategy is ineffective, and instead the only effectual COIN strategy has been “militias” whose tactics, operations and general profile is very similar to the guerrillas they replace. He gives three examples of the open-source militias to counter the open-source insurgency:

What does work to slow the spread of temporary autonomous zones and open source insurgencies are open source militias. While messy (and many times as bad as what they replace), these militias do work:

• Colombia. The AUC blunted the spread of the FARC and other revolutionary groups.
• Sao Paulo, Brazil. Neighborhood militias have purged neighborhoods of the PCC (a criminal drug gang).
• Iraq. Anbar awakening and other militias have radically diminished al Qaeda’s operational sphere.

The most basic point is that the AUC is hardly better than the groups they replaced, which Robb even admits is going to be a likely outcome with a new era of using militias to fight insurgents. The second point is that it’s unclear, from the data-points Robb cites, whether the militia strategy can be effective in the long term. Robb hand waves around this, and talks about a “grand strategy of delay (it holds disorder at bay while allowing globalization to work).” I’m sorry, but if one proposes that our preferred COIN strategy be giving guns and moneys to indigenous criminal gangs whose rise we can’t predict or be too closely involved in — because the open-source militia “process works according to its own rules, it cannot be forced” — then one must have a better idea of the end game. If Robb’s goal is some sort of stable central government, but he’s pretty unclear on how to get there using the counter-militia model.

But Robb is certainly correct in identifying the trend, so what’s to be done with the fact that we’re likely to live in a world where amorphous, networked insurgents take on similarly amorphous and adaptive militias? The main problem with Robb’s analysis is that he’s largely taking a snapshot of (parts) of the global scene. One would hope that these militias, after they root out the insurgents, would be a bit more than, as Robb says, “less hostile to the government and commercial interests than the guerrillas.” If that’s really all we can expect, then this is hardly a prudent strategy to pursue.

If we look at Iraq, we have the Anbar Awakening happening largely with the oversight of American troops providing large amounts of logistical and material support. More importantly, in so much as Al Qaeda in Iraq is being routed out by Sunni tribes, we still have large, seemingly intractable political divides that the counter-militia strategy have exasperated. The reason why AQ in Iraq was able to gain a foothold in the first place was because Sunnis accommodated them as part of their anti-US and anti-Shia insurgency. In Robb’s estimation, the issue in Iraq is AQ and the greater lack of reconciliation among Sunni and Shia factions doesn’t seem to be all that important. But it is important, as long as the main power groups in Iraq remain hostile towards each other, we’ll have no meaningful central government and incorporation of these Sunni militia and tribes into the central government and military will fail, as it already is, because the Shia central government (rightfully) doesn’t trust forces who were previously trying to kill them to be in the Army.

Robb has identified what is likely to be a growing trend in conflict, insurgencies will promote localized counter insurgents. The problem is the extrapolation from that basic insight. Conflicts, especially Iraq, are more than foreign insurgents vs local militias and , for the time being, the only ways to stop an insurgency or a civil war is either the total defeat of one side or the redress of insurgents grievances and some sort of accommodation with a stable political process. If Robb is right that nation building is indeed passe and his model for open source militia is indeed the future, the best policy recommendation following that insight is simply that we should probably withdraw from Iraq and not get involved in any conflict that will lead to this insurgent-milita dynamic, seeing as they’re essentially unwinnable and irresolvable.

Adam Elkus has some smart things to say about all this.

Officer Retention

Fred Kaplan writes about what may be the most important issue for the military in the next 10-15 years - getting promotion boards to appoint brigadier generals with experience and competance in counter insurgency and the asymmetrical conflicts we’re likely to be ensnared in for the next generation or so. Since the majors, captians and LTC’s of today are going to be the generals of tommorrow, it’s important that we get our promotions culture on track — so as to avoid another war prosecuted by Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez — but the big problem isn’t so much the quirks and biases of promotion boards, but the fact that the Army is having trouble retaining junior and field level officers at all. Because of the frequent rotations and the frequent combat tours younger officers have to to serve, there’s a 3,000 officer shortfall projected every year through 2013.

The situation is analogous to the Army figuring out some basic COIN tactics and implementing them - there’s a mismatch between good tactics and bad strategy. Sure, we can get promotion boards to value more highly certain types of experience and skills, but as long as we’re fighting in wars with no strategic purpose or viable strategy for winning, attracting and retaining skilled officers is going to be incredibly difficult.

Tactics and Strategy

One problem with discussing counter insurgency doctrine as well as the decline in violence in Iraq is that the discussion too often turns to tactics as opposed to strategy. While the Anbar Awakening may be a good example of adaptive changes in tactics and the decline in violence may show that the military is becoming more effective in Iraq, it’s something of a smokescreen for the larger issue — there’s no hope of national reconciliation even on the horizon. To drive home this depressing fact even more, Maliki and his vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, are actually squabbling more.

The sniping is incessant, the skirmishes bruising. For months, the verbal warfare between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, and his Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, has been escalating. Now Iraqi politicians and American diplomats and analysts fear that the very public feuding between two of Iraq’s most influential leaders will doom even the minimal hopes that exist for progress on a host of key benchmarks — such as holding provincial elections and equitably sharing oil revenues.

“This is not merely about personalities quarreling over something trivial,” said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on the Middle East for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “It’s about control of the state. … It’s about basic interests, factional and sectarian, and survival.”

So yes, violence is down 55%, which is good and all, but we still have 160,000 troops deployed in Iraq with basically no long term strategy or goals. We have a government that is ineffective and balkanized along secretarian lines. Seeing these basic facts about Iraq overwhelm tactical successes is very disheartening, and it makes me wonder: how much good are the authors of the new counter insurgency textbook, the folks at the Small Wars Journal and the entire COIN community — some of the most innovative and intellectually exciting folks in any field — doing when our basic policy, our strategy, is terminally deficient. Isn’t, ultimately, the best COIN tactic not to get involved in counter insurgencies in the first place?

Anthro War

The Weekly Standard has an interesting piece by Ann Marloew attacking Human Terrain System — a new program that has cultural anthropologists embed with forward combat units — as an unproductive and fadish waste of money and time.

She bases her critique on a few things.  First, that good COIN doesn’t require cultural knowledge, all it requires is that troops go out into the areas they’re trying to protect, make themselves vulnerable and demonstrate the value of cooperating with the United States and provide basic stability.  The second is that right now, without HTS, the counter insurgency in Afghanistan is going swell because the former techniques have largely been adopted.  The third contention is that HTS and the pursuit of a culturally informed COIN strategy is wasteful and distracting.  Her evidence is that one HTS team she met up with was woefully misinformed about Khost and that another HTTer was a Farsi speaking woman, when they were in a Pashto reason.

What’s odd about Marlowe’s argument is that premises conflict with her conclusion.  Marlowe fully supports the idea of forward units being more integrated with the communities they protect - through greater interaction with local officials and by doing most of their patrols on foot, rather than buzzing by in a Humvee and even basing remotely.  If this type of operating procedure really is the “best practice” for COIN, then doesn’t it follow that increased cultural knowledge would become more important for the millitary, not less? How would deploying more people with both an academic base of knowledge about a region and the training to observe social and cultural phenomena and synthesize that information so that the military can use it not improve the very tactics she thinks are so great?

She even supports more predeployment cultural training and the creation of a database of local leaders’ genealogies and histories.  How else would the information for predeployment training and for this database be gathered than by anthropological and social science work done with the military?  Would Marlowe say that we need to scrap a weapons system if she - who doesn’t have any real military expertise - judged it unnecessary and inefficient after a few anecdotal demonstrations of it?  And this hypothetical weapons system would cost a whole lot more than the $40 million being budgeted towards HTS.

Whether increased investment in social and cultural knowledge in COIN is a question of what should be done instead of HTS.  Does Marlowe think that, say, a high level of air raids are a good COIN tactic?  These air raids, which basic COIN doctrine recommends against, kill civilians, sap our good will and make it very difficult to implement the COIN tactics Marlowe praises.  And since, contra Marlowe, things might not be so going so well in Afghanistan after all, a bid for increased cultural knowledge might not be such a bad idea.

Burden Sharing and European Integration

Like so many liberals, I’m a sucker for multilateralism. If not so much in the actual deployment of forces, then certainly in the authorization of any given conflict so as to grant it more legitimacy. And while I’m a cautious fan of US hegemony, I realize that ultimately, our power has limits and that if we want to maintain any sort of preponderance, we need to accept that burden sharing is both necessary and inevitable. The most obvious candidates for burden sharing are clearly Britain, Australia and then New Zealand, Canada and France. Why not the rest of continental Europe? Combined, the EU’s GDP and population surpass the US. Stuart Koehl has a good piece dissecting exactly why Europe’s military contributions are oftentimes so marginal. The most obvious reason is simply that EU defense spending is very low compared to the US, roughly 2 percent of GDP compared to 4. There’s also the issue that many European countries have militaries designed to fight the USSR when they roll over West Germany, meaning that money which could be used for modernizing militaries is instead wasted on big ticked items like new tanks. Then there’s the real big stumbling block — lack of defense integration:

Europe must recognize that the days when every country could maintain “full spectrum” military capabilities is gone. It is neither necessary nor desirable for every country to have an air force, a navy, or (in some cases) an army. What purpose does it serve that Belgium has a squadron or two of F-16s (or Eurofighters, a plane that provides F-16 capabilities at F-22 prices)? Why does the Netherlands need four very expensive diesel electric submarines that can only operate in and around the North Sea? Why does Portugal need tanks? Given the cost of acquiring and operating advanced military hardware, the time has come to consider a rational division of labor among the countries of Europe, with some countries specializing, e.g., in tactical air force, others in naval warfare, others in mine countermeasures, etc. Making this work will require development of a single, integrated European defense policy, which in turn impinges on issues of national sovereignty–real countries have their own armies, navies, and air forces, and they do not cede control of these things to other countries or international organizations. Europe needs to decide if it wants to be a single entity or a federation of nation-states.

This could be the EU’s grand moment. Since the threat of inter-European war is essentially nil, there is little need for European countries to develop individual, overlapping, full-spectrum capabilities. If the EU were to integrate their defense forces — with the probable exception of Britain, and maybe France — there might even be a net decrease in defense spending, and certainly a reduce in wasteful spending.

There’s a problem that, not surprisingly, Koehl doesn’t mention - the piece was, after all published in the Weekly Standard. That problem is, of course, the influence of defense contractors. Just as defense contractors distort the defense spending priorities of the US government, so they too distort the defense priorities of European governments. Ultimately, it’s better for Typhoon to sell Eurofighters to Portugal, France, Spain and Denmark, rather than to the EU. Even if the net number of planes that EU countries buy were to stay the same with a totally integrated force structure, with many countries buying the same product on individual contracts, there isn’t any bargaining power for any one state to drive down the price. With EU defense integration, a very hefty percentage of Typhoon sales would come from the EU, and they could then drive down their purchasing costs.

So, ultimately, we have a political problem which is compounded by a public choice problem. If we want European integration and modernization, the US is going to have to convince Europeans that it’s worth the sacrifice of sovereignty , the angering of defense contractors, the reversal of legal and cultural norms (Germany) and the increase in defense spending. For that to happen, we have to assure the EU that this integrated defense structure isn’t going to be deployed in unilateral, elective, preemptive wars. Otherwise, there is no incentive for them to overhaul their defense infrastructure to suit our (and ultimately their) needs.

The Eggman on PMCs

It’s a well known conceit of this blog that my qualifications — beyond doing a lot of reading — are rather nonexistent.  Most of the time I can get away with it, but sometime another person comes along who just knows more than me about a certain subject.  In light of that reality, I’m taking Eggman’s comment on my previous post about PMC law and giving it a post all its own:

So, I’m a law student at undisclosed really good law school. I’m working on getting a student note of mine published on this very topic. I can assure you that most of the commentary in the media regarding the legal framework surrounding private military contractors (PMCs) is completely wrongheaded. First, the contours of the law:

The Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction Statutes (SMTJ): this is the only part of the law which has actually been used to prosecute anyone: one David Passaro in Afghanistan. This case highlights the overarching problem with ALL enforcement of a legal regime in regards to PMCs: the difficulty in obtaining evidence. David Passaro beat an Afghani prisoner (who turned himself in) to death with a flashlight. Passaro is now serving merely eight years on a conviction of assault. Why? The victim’s body was taken by his family and examiners were unable to perform an autopsy. One can imagine the problems existent in most cases. Furthermore, its not merely a matter of the “will” to prosecute such offenders, but the resources as well. One needs to interview witnesses, collect evidence, etc., all in a foreign and likely hostile territory.

Also, the SMTJ only applies to crimes committed on military bases and the like, so its not terribly useful.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice: Max Boot’s heart seems to be in the wrong place, as does yours Zeitlin, but last year’s amendment to the UCMJ placing PMCs under the UCMJ is not going to get much done. First, there’s the constitutionality of the provision, which is questionable (see an article in this year’s Boston College Law Review). Secondly, there’s a very real question of whether the UCMJ in and of itself is equipped to deal with these people (its an idiotic loophole in the law, but trust me, it exists; furthermore the UCMJ has light penalties compared to domestic law). Thirdly, your solution, and Boot’s apparently, is for the military to be policing these people as though they were part of the military.

The problem is this: traditionally, PMCs have almost always been simply PCs, or simply private contractors, providing food, washing clothes, etc. The vast majority of PCs in Iraq furnish such services, as they did in previous conflicts, (Bosnia, Gulf War, Vietnam). But the numbers we are using nowadays simply DWARF what we have used in the past. We are now at about a 1:1 ratio of military to PCs. This makes enforcement problematic. Furthermore, these PMCs are ex-military, usually Rangers, Seals, Marines, Special Forces and the like. They get paid A LOT and evidence indicates they would be very perturbed at being put under a military command structure again. Most importantly, do we really want the military policing about 30-50,000 (the number is hard to pin down, since some contracts are classified and some of the unclassified contracts are very vague) armed professional soldiers in addition to their current responsibilities? And no, they are not “soldiers,” as you assert. If they were, we wouldn’t have this problem. Their pay scale, mission, attire, equipment, training, etc., all attest to that fact.

The Military Extra Territorial Jurisdiction Act: same problem as the UCMJ and SMTJ. Its extremely difficult to enforce. Has no teeth. Also some major loopholes to let people off easy.

I, for one, think HR 369, which creates an FBI team to investigate these people in every theater of operation they operate, is a fantastic idea. Since your idea is never going to happen, since the JAG and the DoJ are never to go the will or resources to effectively investigate and prosecute these people, a dedicated FBI team would do wonders.

On the other hand, my solution is simply not to use PMCs. But hey, gotta outsource all government services to the private sector, cause they work so much better.

New Rules for Contractors?

In light of the ongoing Blackwater debacle, it was inevitable that there would be some legislation looking to regulate and perhaps circumscribe the armed contractors that are now a substantial part of our military efforts. The House passed a bill placing contractors under American criminal law and making the FBI responsible for investigating claims of wrongdoing.

While it’s nice to see Congress doing something about a deleterious situation, this particular bill seems rather wrongheaded. Max Boot points out that contractors are already “within the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as civilian law (the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act), but neither the Department of Justice nor the Judge Advocate General’s Corps has shown much enthusiasm for enforcing these rules. That needs to change.” Congress’ strategy - passing legislation that expands on previous legislation but mostly just fulfills the need for Congress to do something whenever anything bad happens - is not really grappling with the main problem.

The problem is that we have contractors carrying out military tasks that involve carrying weapons and firing those weapons at Iraqis, but the contractors aren’t fully integrated with the military command structure, and consequently, military justice. We should try to integrate those contractors with combat roles into our own combat units and require them to follow orders from military officers, not the State Department, and have the military investigate and prosecute their crimes, not the FBI. The military has the requisite infrastructure and experience in commanding and prosecuting soldiers, which is what these contractors are.

How Anbar Screwed the Surge

When the surge was initially launched, the premise was that when security was established in major cities, the national government would be given “breathing room” to reconcile with the Sunni insurgents and other secretarian forces. When reconcilliation failed to happen, supporters of the surge pointed to Anbar — where former Sunni insurgents were now accepting pardons and logistical support from the Americans to fight Al Qaida in Iraq. Some pointed out that this strategy was A. not related at all to the surge and B. ran totally counter to our strategy of strengthening the central government. Instead, we were arming its enemies and opponents, removing the Sunnis insurgents to make a deal with the government.

Well, the Washington Post reports that Shia parties are pissed about the same people who were trying to kill them a few months ago now being accepted into the Iraqi army at American’s behest:

The largest Shiite political coalition in Iraq demanded Tuesday that the U.S. military abandon its recruitment of Sunni tribesmen into the Iraqi police, saying some are members of “armed terrorist groups” and are engaged in killing, kidnapping and extortion under the guise of fighting the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. The statement by the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite bloc of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is the most direct rebuke to a policy that U.S. military officers hold up as one of their most important achievements over the past year.

The best story from Iraq since the most recent elections is undermining our central mission and planting the seeds for further instability and increased secretarian bloodshed. This is why the war is fundamentally misguided — even when we get it right, we get it wrong.

The Elite Military

Despite my misgivings about the draft, I feel that there’s an issue when so few highly educated, upper middle class young people join the military. For example, there was only one military parent in Stanford’s most recent graduating class, and since our military is now becoming more and more hereditary, the window for any elite presence is closing. It’s not healthy for our military or for our democracy that the armed forces have essentially become caste and regionally based (no, I don’t think the military preys on the poor or any of that nonsense).  So, how do we get more children of elites into the military? Surely trying to make a big push to get a wider range of social classes into the military in the midst of a vastly unpopular war will be difficult, but there are some basic things that could be done.

1 - Strictly enforce the Solomon Amendment - no colleges or universities get any federal funding unless they fully encourage and allow ROTC.  (I think this is mostly happening)

2 - Get rid of DADT, as young people get more and more tolerant towards gays, the military’s policy looks even more bigoted and stupid.  Not to mention that gay elites aren’t very likely to join up either.

3 - Umm, no more shit like Iraq.  Unpopular wars don’t help widen the appeal of the military to those who are predisposed to not join.

4 - Stop obscuring and obstructing investigations of Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib, the appearance that the military establishment is immune from admitting and fixing their mistakes helps perpetuate negative views of it.

5 - More creative enlistment options - a 15 month enlistment followed by service in the Peace Corps or Americorps was a good start, but this program ought to be expanded and similar options thought up.  Charles Moskos has advocated a 15 month enlistment with generous  educational benefits attached, this is the right type of idea.

Ultimately, the only thing that will get more elites into the military is having all their baby boomer parents no longer be an influence.  As Dietz points out, “the single biggest factor is whether someone has a direct personal experience with someone they admire who is in or was in the service.”  When so many of our parents avoided service in Vietnam through student deferments, our only connection to the military is our grandparents.  But those times are too far gone to be truly influential and so we’re stuck with our parents attitudes towards the military (mostly warranted, I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to go to ‘nam and then bad mouthing the military establishment afterwards).

Any possible gain or policy change to get a wider range of social classes in the military will likely be swamped by Iraq.  After 9/11, the country was whipped up into a patriotic fervor that resulted in many enlisting who otherwise wouldn’t have.  Iraq has totally squandered that feeling, leaving our military broken, overstretch and even more polarized as the trend of elite abandonment of the military has no calcified into a seemingly permanent state of affairs.