GrogNews (Sorta-)Morning Headlines

Yep, we're running late again today... real life and all that :)


Mark Urban over at the BBC thinks that close cooperation between France and Britain is a good thing, and has actually been going on for a while now. Some people are already dubbing it the "Entente Frugale" as the nations combine their military efforts.

The mail bombers didn't know where their toner cartridge bombs would go off, but figured it would wreck havoc either way. The Greeks aren't waiting to find out where any mail bombs might go off, as they've suspended foreign airmail service following a few mail bombs there in the past several days.

Koreas are trading fire again.

NATO is looking for Russian cooperation in Afghanistan. As long as it's not the same kind of "cooperation" we gave them in the 1980s.

Americans helping al-Shabab? Wow.

So apparently GWB's memoirs include a reference that he had a "sickening feeling" that no WMDs were ever found. Excuse me, Mr President, they were found... don't you read WikiLeaks? Or shouldn't you have been reading Danger Room lately? Or heck, didn't you listen to LTG Maples back in 2006 when the then-head of the DIA said they found over 500 chemical munitions?

By: Brant

Archives

I've imported the old Stray Voltage military posts, and left them on their original dates they were run over there. So there's now GN content going all the way back to 2003... woohoo!

By: Brant

Great perspective from Friedman about Afghanistan

The State | 12/03/2009 | Friedman: What I believe about Afghanistan: "Friedman: What I believe about Afghanistan"

Friedman: What I believe about Afghanistan
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The New York Times
Let me start with the bottom line and then tell you how I got there: I can't agree with President Barack Obama's decision to escalate in Afghanistan. I'd prefer a minimalist approach, working with tribal leaders the way we did to overthrow the Taliban regime in the first place. Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security and a little-less-perfect Afghanistan.

I recognize that there are legitimate arguments on the other side. At a lunch on Tuesday for opinion writers, the president lucidly argued that opting for a surge now to help Afghans rebuild their army and state into something decent - to win the allegiance of the Afghan people - offered the only hope of creating an "inflection point," a game changer, to bring long-term stability to that region. May it be so. What makes me wary about this plan is how many moving parts there are - Afghans, Pakistanis and NATO allies all have to behave forever differently for this to work.

But here is the broader context in which I assess all this: My own foreign policy thinking since 9/11 has been based on four pillars:

1.The Warren Buffett principle: Everything I've ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.

2.Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things. If we become weak and enfeebled by economic decline and debt, as we slowly are, America may not be able to play its historic stabilizing role in the world. If you didn't like a world of too-strong-America, you will really not like a world of too-weak-America - where China, Russia and Iran set more of the rules.

3.The context within which people live their lives shapes everything - from their political outlook to their religious one. The reason there are so many frustrated and angry people in the Arab-Muslim world, lashing out first at their own governments and secondarily at us - and volunteering for "martyrdom" - is because of the context within which they live their lives. That was best summarized by the U.N.'s Arab Human Development reports as a context dominated by three deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of education and a deficit of women's empowerment. The reason India, with the world's second-largest population of Muslims, has a thriving Muslim minority (albeit with grievances but with no prisoners in Guantanamo Bay) is because of the context of pluralism and democracy it has built at home.

4.One of the main reasons the Arab-Muslim world has been so resistant to internally driven political reform is because vast oil reserves allow its regimes to become permanently ensconced in power, by just capturing the oil tap, and then using the money to fund vast security and intelligence networks that quash any popular movement. Look at Iran.

Hence, post-9/11 I advocated that our politicians find sufficient courage to hike gasoline taxes and seriously commit ourselves to developing alternatives to oil. Economists agree that this would ultimately bring down the global price, and slowly deprive these regimes of the sole funding source that allows them to maintain their authoritarian societies. People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never WMD. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities - Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds - write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Iraq has proved staggeringly expensive and hugely painful. The mistakes we made should humble anyone about nation-building in Afghanistan. It does me.

Still, the Iraq war may give birth to something important - if Iraqis can find that self-sustaining formula to live together. Alas, that is still in doubt. If they can, the model would have a huge impact on the Arab world. Baghdad is a great Arab capital. If Iraqis fail, it's religious strife, economic decline and authoritarianism as far as the eye can see - the witch's brew that spawns terrorists.

Iraq was about "the war on terrorism." The Afghanistan invasion, for me, was about the "war on terrorists." To me, it was about getting bin Laden and depriving al- Qaida of a sanctuary - period. I never thought we could make Afghanistan into Norway - and even if we did, it would not resonate beyond its borders the way Iraq might.

To now make Afghanistan part of the "war on terrorism" - i.e., another nation-building project - is not crazy. It is just too expensive, when balanced against our needs for nation-building in America, so that we will have the strength to play our broader global role. Hence, my desire to keep our presence in Afghanistan limited. That is what I believe. That is why I believe it.

Krauthammer provides a solid critique of current waffling on Afghanistan

The State | 10/11/2009 | Krauthammer: Obama's agony over Afghan war

Krauthammer: Obama's agony over Afghan war
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
The Washington Post
The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious - particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq - while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq War bad, Afghan War good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that's exactly what Obama's handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 - a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don't commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review."

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama's own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it's McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy - "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge - you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago - Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans - the president declared Afghanistan to be "a war of necessity." Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

E-mail Mr. Krauthammer at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Someone you need to know about

911 Remembered: Rick Rescorla was a soldier

Don't Say This Like It's a Bad Thing

CIA hired Blackwater in plan to kill militants: report - Yahoo! News

The CIA in 2004 hired contractors from the private security firm Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to track and assassinate senior al Qaeda figures, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Blackwater helped with planning, training and surveillance in a program on which the Central Intelligence Agency spent several million dollars without capturing or killing any militants, the newspaper reported, quoting former and current U.S. officials.
The Times said it was not clear whether the CIA had planned to use Blackwater executives to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives or limit the contractors to help with training and surveillance.

And what's the problem with killing Al Qaeda leaders? Does it really matter who's pulling the trigger?

Great Quotes in Military Training

"It's an exercise artificiality that's created by the real world circumstances downrange."

It'll be curious to see who gets blamed for this

House rejects most Obama weapons cuts - Yahoo! News

Rejects Obama's $100 million request for the Pentagon to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba and extends a current ban on releasing Guantanamo detainees in the United States. It also requires an extensive risk analysis and a detailed justification for bringing detainees into the U.S. for trial or to serve their sentences.

Obama promised to close Gitmo. Congress won't let him because none of them want to go back to their constituents and say "we're parking the bad guys in your back yard."
It'll be interesting to see if Obama gets blamed for not closing Gitmo, or if Congress gets any of the blame.

Senator Boxer's vanity on display as she attempts to upstage her betters

The email I sent to Senator Boxer, following this disgraceful episode...

Dear Senator Boxer,
Your attempted 'smackdown' of General Walsh on national TV was stupid and unnecessary. It shows a contempt for the military in your blatant oneupmanship, and casts you as a vain, preening, self-centered, spoiled brat.
Any military officer of flag rank has worked far, far harder to get where they are than you ever worked to get elected. Any fool can fill a Senate seat (just ask Senator Burriss from IL). But you do NOT earn a star on your shoulder by demagoguing your way to an election victory. You earn it with 25 or more years of selfless service to the nation in places no one wants to go, doing jobs no one else will do, and will little expectation of thanks for it.
Your behavior is a disgrace to California and the Senate and next time you feel the need to wear your title front and center, you better first do a comparison of what it really took to earn that title.

Digging up the old news to vindicate a stellar general

Wolfowitz makes an ass-clown of himself back in 2003

THREATS AND RESPONSES: MILITARY SPENDING
Pentagon Contradicts General On Iraq Occupation Force's Size
By ERIC SCHMITT Published: Friday, February 28, 2003
In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon's second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general's assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.

Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, ''wildly off the mark.'' Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops.

Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.

''We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. ''Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion.''

Mr. Wolfowitz's refusal to be pinned down on the costs of war and peace in Iraq infuriated some committee Democrats, who noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the budget director, had briefed President Bush on just such estimates on Tuesday.

''I think you're deliberately keeping us in the dark,'' said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. ''We're not so naïve as to think that you don't know more than you're revealing.''

Representative Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, also voiced exasperation with Mr. Wolfowitz: ''I think you can do better than that.''

Mr. Wolfowitz, with Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, at his side, tried to mollify the Democratic lawmakers, promising to fill them in eventually on the administration's internal cost estimates.

''There will be an appropriate moment,'' he said, when the Pentagon would provide Congress with cost ranges. ''We're not in a position to do that right now.''

At a Pentagon news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld echoed his deputy's comments.

Neither Mr. Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, by name. But both men were clearly irritated at the general's suggestion that a postwar Iraq might require many more forces than the 100,000 American troops and the tens of thousands of allied forces that are also expected to join a reconstruction effort.

''The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,'' Mr. Rumsfeld said.

General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: ''I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers -- are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.'' He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.

A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. ''He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment,'' Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq.

He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that ''stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,'' but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it.

''I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, many nations agreed in advance of hostilities to help pay for a conflict that eventually cost about $61 billion. Mr. Wolfowitz said that this time around the administration was dealing with ''countries that are quite frightened of their own shadows'' in assembling a coalition to force President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. ''I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.

Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. ''To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong,'' he said.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, ''I've already decided that. It's not useful.''

Veterans

A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to 'The United States of America' for an amount of 'up to and including my life.' That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.'

What really matters

Captain's Log: Fallen Soldier

This is both horrifying and hilarious at the same time

Brant crashes another otherwise respectable publication

The Escapist : The Thinking Man's Warfare

For the past seven years in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies have fought irregular enemies who eschew traditional military confrontation in favor of asymmetric tactics. These wars have been costly, painful and, consequently, highly controversial, both within the military and among the public at large. More than most other areas of popular culture, videogames have demonstrated awareness of their historical moment, as the plethora of military shooters and dystopian plotlines can attest. But thus far, games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding.

Very good article featuring a bunch of people I know, but didn't know were part of the article...

Parameters - Storing for later reference

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer 2008: "Lost for Words: The Intelligence Community’s Struggle to Find its Voice"

StrategyPage Predicts the future!

Intelligence: The Secret American Army

June 29, 2008:
The United States now has thousands of spies inside Iraq. This didn't happen overnight. For the last five years, the U.S. has been building an informant network there. This sort of thing takes time, and knowledge of how Arab culture works, and how to work it. The U.S. Army Special Forces, the CIA, reservist cops and Israel were key components.
The results (mostly classified) have been impressive. For example, last year, tips from Iraqis led to the discovery of 6,963 weapons caches, plus similar information on safe houses and terrorists themselves. During the first half of 2009, tips led to finding nearly 5,000 weapons caches.

Covert no longer

U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush's funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.

The United States Army Birthday

The United States Army Birthday
Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, the United States Army was established to defend our Nation.

Now that we know

BBC NEWS | Africa | Veterans ready to fight - Mugabe

Mr Mugabe was quoted by the Herald newspaper as saying the veterans had asked approval to take up arms but he had dissuaded them.
They said Zimbabwe was won 'by the barrel of the gun' and should not be surrendered by a vote, he said.

Now that we know what it'll take to 'fix' Zimbabwe, what are we waiting for? If the barrel of a gun is all these guys understand, maybe it's time to reintroduce them to the business end of the gun.
Then again, the War of Rhodesian Succession (or whatever we're calling it) was almost 30 years ago. So unless the fighters were 8 years old back then, they're going to be pushing senior status.

Interesting News Series on Military and the Internet

The Military's Internet 'Civil War' - The Washington Independent - U.S. news and politics - washingtonindependent.com

The Army cleverly dodged the bans, setting up its own versions of popular Web 2.0 sites, but hiding them behind password-protected portals. In that way, the Army appears to have found a middle ground between Internet proponents and skeptics. On this toehold, the land combat branch is steadily building new Internet tools that might help the United States catch up to Internet-savvy jihadists. In late April, the land-warfare branch even launched an official blogging service for officers. The blogs combine the best of the civilian Web 2.0 with old-fashioned military-grade security.