Category Archives: War

Meditation on Memorial Day

by caidid Posted on May 28, 2012

I have been lucky. Many of my friends and family members - and I know many of those who are kind enough to read Gunpowder & Lead - have people close to them who have given their lives in service. I have never lost anyone like that. I know I don’t carry the kind of raw personal connection to Memorial Day that, to name one, Alex Horton writes about so achingly beautifully. I do try to honor it each year, though, because the sacrifice these people and their families have made - and the fact that it has ever been, and continues to be, necessary - matters to all of us.

For the last few years, I have spent a little time each Memorial Day at the flag garden planted on Boston Common by the Massachusetts Military Heroes Fund. There are 33,000 flags this year, one for each MA service member who has died in service from the Civil War to today.

There are a lot of stories that stick with me through the year, and the one I found myself thinking about most today as I looked at the field of flags fluttering across the hill was that of Sgt. Dennis Weichel. I didn’t know Sgt. Weichel, but I know what kind of man he was by how he died.

This past March, Sgt. Weichel’s unit was traveling in a convoy in Laghman Province, Afghanistan, when they came on a group of children in the road. Sgt. Weichel was one of the men who got out of their vehicles to clear the road. As the MRAP started to move again, he saw that one little girl had run back into its path.

That is a split-second kind of moment. There isn’t time to consider whether an attempt to save her might be fatal, to weigh the value of your own life against that of a small Afghan girl. What you do in that moment is not about being a man, or a soldier, or an American. It is not about training, or calculation, or decision-making. It is built into who you are.

Sgt. Weichel jumped into the street. He pushed the little girl to safety. She was unhurt. He died. That’s hero stuff. A huge vehicle was about to hit a little girl. He made sure it didn’t. I didn’t know Sgt. Weichel, but he’s who I’m remembering this Memorial Day.

The flag garden is a beautiful and somber reminder of the sacrifice made by these service men and women, and their loved ones. Even more than that, to me, it is a reminder of how much we should all passionately want peace, and work to nurture it, and build it, so that in the future we won’t have to lose so many of the best of us this way.

It is easy to get angry and look to attack, to get impatient with diplomacy, or even to get overwhelmed by heartbreak when something terrible happens in the world, but looking at those rows upon rows of flags, or the rows upon rows of white tombstones at Arlington, it seems to me that the best way to honor their sacrifice is to do all we can to try to make future such sacrifices unnecessary.

Forget anger and blame toward the many people, institutions, situations, cultural features, interests, and social mores that might lead us into war. Forget outrage and pique at those who question the circumstances that lead to these sacrifices. Forget semantic battles over what it means to be a hero. Blame doesn’t make it better. Outrage doesn’t satisfy anyone. Semantics are meaningless. Let’s take all that energy that is so often spent on blame and outrage and use it to connect and build, to take tiny steps to nurture peace in whatever ways we can.

No one wants the fields of little flags to grow.

Posted in Uncategorized, War | Tagged , | 1 Comment

We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?

by caidid Posted on May 22, 2012

‘We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?’

This is how the target selection process sounds to me when I read about it. My semi-secret fear is that this might be quite close to how this process actually works. The Global War on Terror, the shadow war, the overseas contingency operation - whatever you want to call it, I’ve long worried that its reach and the place of importance it is given are out of proportion to any threat posed by Al Qaeda or any similar group, and I’ve long feared that the way we go about ‘countering’ terrorism may in fact cause more problems than it solves, possibly by orders of magnitude. I am no insider. I don’t see the process. I would like to think that more care is put into these decisions than it seems from the outside. But from here, from the outside, it seems like no matter how many times - through decades of experience - we see the second and third order effects, the collateral damage, the side effects of our actions, the people making the decisions are not really concerning themselves with taking time to consider how the benefits balance out against the potential unintended consequences and long-term effects. And it’s not just about doing things we maybe shouldn’t be doing; it’s also about failing to do things we maybe should be doing.

Then when I read an article like this one by Kimberly Dozier (and I strongly recommend reading that), it reads very cart-before-horse to me, like ‘Who are we going after with these drones and SOF guys?’ and not ‘This AQ leader is a terrible threat. What are we going to do about that?’ I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have contingency plans in place for how to deal with potential real threats to U.S. security, but it seems like more than that. I fear that maybe we use these tactics just because we can, that because we have drones and incredibly skilled and versatile SOF teams and such, we just look for people to use them on. That scares me because it implies a casual attitude toward the many forms of potential collateral damage, scant consideration of long term effects (and therefore the absence of a robust long term guiding strategy), meaning finally, an approach to national security that is not actually optimized to keep our nation secure.

The drones aren’t the issue any more than any other tool or tactic is - they are a tool, and can be a very valuable one - but if we’re looking around for people to kill with them rather than using them only in service of a true strategy or to counter a clear threat that has arisen, then we’re doing it wrong, and if we’re doing it wrong - and this is true even if you are concerned only with American interests and are fully indifferent to the collateral damage done to and within local populations in the areas of operation - we risk having to pay a harsh price in five years, or ten, or twenty, when the right things we didn’t do and the collateral effects of the things we did do comes back to haunt us.

But please tell me I’m wrong. I’ll feel a lot better if I am.

Bonus reading: h/t to Rob Caruso for linking up three great recommendations for current reading on operations (which yes, very much do consist of more than just drones): “Offshoring CT: Towards a Dissection” - Dan Trombly for Abu Muqawama; “The Vickers Doctrine” - Robert Caruso at Rocky Shoals; and “U.S. Foreign Policy and Contested Sovereignty” - Micah Zenko for CFR. All good reads that bear on various aspects of this subject, none quite addresses the question of what kind of big-picture, long-term strategy guides these operations, although Caruso comes closest to getting into this in that his (very interesting) post offers guidance on structure and prioritization in operations going forward.

Posted in Military, Strategery, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War | 6 Comments

Gimme Shelter

by wjrue Posted on May 17, 2012

In 1972, Marine captain Francis “Bing” West published an unadulterated account of a Marine Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam. The Village was and remains the seminal account of the Marine Corps Combined Action Program. Born out of lessons learned in the Banana Wars of the early 20th century, the Combined Action Program paired a Marine rifle squad with Vietnamese Popular Force militiamen and assigned the combined platoon responsibility for protecting a village or hamlet. West’s chronicle of fifteen Marines who lived, fought, and died alongside their Vietnamese brothers for 485 days in Bing Nghia offered a trove of lessons for military advisors fighting a brutal counterinsurgency.

Forty years later, Owen West, a Marine reserve major and Bing’s son, has published his own gripping saga of a modern day variant of the Combined Action Platoon – the Military Transition Team (MiTT) – fighting a similarly brutal counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Snake Eaters follows the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division (3/3-1) of the Iraqi Army and their American military advisors – known by their all-too-appropriate radio call sign, Outcast – during the dark days of 2005-07 as they attempt to defeat an insurgency and win the allegiance of Khalidiya, a village halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. It’s a raw account of a motley crew of reservists called up for duty to fight a war for which they were ill prepared, ill equipped, and ill supported. Through force of bravery and grit, Outcast and their Iraqi brothers-in-arms overcome the enemy and, sometimes, their own chain-of-command.

In a sense, Outcast was lucky. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Troster, the team leader during the hard days of 2005-06 and a Drug Enforcement Agent when he wasn’t moonlighting as a reserve infantry officer, instinctively understood both advising and counterinsurgency – many MiTTs had leaders that didn’t. Troster understood the necessity of constant patrolling. He also knew his MiTT needed to accompany 3/3-1 on every patrol in order to gain credibility so that their advice would be heard and heeded. He knew that in order to run constant patrols with a ten-man team, normal rank protocol went out the window. He flattened Outcast’s hierarchy – every man did every job. The military hadn’t trained him for this, but he knew what needed to be done and did it.

Troster led a team varied in complexion; it was a typical group of reservists. Sergeant First Class Mark Huss ran a plumbing company in Iowa and spent his reserve weekends “teaching soldiers how to maintain laundry facilities.” Sergeant First Class Eliezer Rivera, the team’s senior non-commissioned officer, was a post office supervisor. Specialist Joseph Neary was “a heating technician by day and a rock-and-roll guitarist by night.” Sergeant Shawn Boiko was a flooring manager. None had infantry training.

Once teams like Outcast were assembled, the Army and Marines had to train them. Here too, efforts fell far short. But as West incisively notes, much of this was a result of the divide between ground truth and Washington fantasy about the war’s progress and the nature of counterinsurgency. Early advisor teams received, as they described it to West, “forty five days of ill-conceived classes crammed into ninety.” The classes at Camp Atterbury were taught mostly by people who had never been to Iraq and who had never been advisors. The entire training program was premised on the notion that the advisor teams would be living on large, American run Forward Operating Bases, training Iraqi soldiers in basic soldiering skills and staff work. “It was as if Atterbury was preparing the advisors to defend a log fort against a Sioux attack in 1863,” West writes.

As Outcast brutally discovered in late summer 2005 upon arriving in Iraq, their training had been worthless. The Snake Eaters, the name 3/3-1 gave itself, were coming off six months of hard combat and expected more as they were newly responsible for of the more dangerous areas of Anbar Province. The Iraqis didn’t need classroom teachers – they needed combat advisors.

Outcast shouldn’t have succeeded; at least, not on paper. A disparate group of ten reservists with no infantry training or combat experience is a perfect metaphor for America’s efforts in Iraq. But Outcast conducted over 1,500 combat patrols. Team members like Sergeants First Class Huss and Rivera each logged more than 450 combat patrols in a ten-month deployment. Outcast hit fifty improvised explosive devices. Seven of the ten were wounded. One died.

And yet they persevered, overcoming the normal aspects of hard combat and a Spartan existence on a small combat outpost, devoid the normal accouterments found on the larger FOBs, and even a lack of support from their own side. Outcast looked to Task Force Panther, a National Guard unit – who, it should be noted, was also ill prepared and ill equipped for the mission and fight they were given – that was supposed to “partner” with 3/3-1 and support the advisors. But Panther and its higher headquarters didn’t get it. First, there was the order mandating the Iraqis patrol in armored vehicles. Think about that one for a second. Then there was Panther’s refusal to conduct joint patrols with 3/3-1. And as if Outcast’s existence wasn’t Spartan enough, Panther removed the main generator providing power to Outcast’s small outpost. With insightful vignettes like these, West demonstrates one of the main challenges advisors often face is the U.S. military command.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that many of the lessons gleaned forty years ago were either discounted or forgotten when the U.S. military scrambled to field advisors to the newly rebuilt Iraqi Army in the summer of 2004. This inability to retain lessons learned is somewhat surprising. Combat advising is not a new concept – the United States has been in the business of training foreign militaries for at least 100 years. The Marine Corps, as noted earlier, has a long heritage of partnering with and advising foreign militaries. As all Marines are steeped in the Corps’ history, there is institutional memory and widespread awareness of Marines as advisors. The U.S. Army institutionalized combat advisors by creating the Special Forces; however, the pernicious effect of this decision was to insulate this mission within this small community – regular Army units and commanders came to despise the mission. Since their inception in the early days of the Cold War, the Green Berets have been the principal force for advising foreign militaries. They spend years training, and when it comes to advising, the Green Berets are the best the United States has to offer. Regrettably, the task of building and advising the new Iraqi Army after it was disbanded in 2004 vastly exceeded the capacity of the Green Berets to do alone. The Army and Marine Corps were thus forced to field advisor teams like Outcast.

Unfortunately, the services did so with little understanding or appreciation for the task in front of the MiTTs. As West notes:

Our generals are uncomfortable prescribing advisors as a solution to these twenty-first century wars. Advising a foreign military requires nontraditional training that takes years; soldiers need a wonk’s cultural awareness, the rudimentary language capability of a border cop, a survivalist’s skills, and the interpersonal savvy of a politician. Military hierarchy is built on control, so it feels unnatural for the leadership to dispatch these small bands of advisors, who on paper cannot give orders, to live among foreign, sometimes hostile soldiers in an effort to stabilize their countries.

Indeed, being an advisor requires patience, understanding, and tact – three traits not normally emphasized in military training and culture. Throw in an organizational culture that disdains advising as an inferior mission and promotion policies that delineate a career path to the top – advising is, uh, missing – and the result was an advisor selection and training program that emphasized quantity, not quality.

Advising is a mindset. An otherwise outstanding officer might be a terrible advisor, and the most incompetent infantry corporal might be incredibly effective. It’s less instruction and more persuasion. The Army initially turned to reservists like Outcast and later adopted the Marine Corps model, meeting its requirements by pulling individuals from disparate units across the fleet, which sometimes incentivized commanders to send underperformers. West, in his typically blunt manner, notes, “Selection for advisor duty was not rigorous. Soldiers could not be overly prejudiced, handicapped, or too fat to deploy.”

In his history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Summons of Trumpet, retired Army Lieutenant General Dave Palmer writes: “Another unchanging reality of advising is the more or less constant cocoon of frustration enveloping the advisor. Adjusting to advising is a greater individual challenge than can be easily imagined by anyone who has not done it.” The challenges an advisor faces over the course of a combat deployment are impossible to overstate. Owen West succeeds simply by telling Outcast’s tale. But what really sets The Snake Eaters apart from the other advisor memoirs* to come out of Iraq is his sharp, evocative prose – “a group of jundis who were watering the pavement with spent brass casings” – and his thorough account of the various challenges Outcast faced and their relation to the strategic direction of the war.

When the American military was fielding advisor teams like Outcast in 2004-2005, they could almost be forgiven for forgetting lessons learned from successful advising concepts from wars past. After all, the military did an exceptional job of purging the lessons of Vietnam during the late 1970s and 1980s, and by 2004 Vietnam was but a distant memory. The same cannot be said for our advisory efforts in Afghanistan.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the U.S. is beginning the transition out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior staff non-commissioned officers pulled from the same brigade staff, so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like Outcast. More good news is that the SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing on individual and team military skills like land navigation, weapons usage, and patrolling techniques. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training repeats many of the same mistakes from 2004. After the SFATs complete training at their home station, they’ll go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they’ll receive – wait for it – three weeks of advisor training. Three weeks.

Given the spike of so-called “green-on-blue” incidents in the last six months – 22 ISAF deaths in 2012, or 13% of total ISAF KIA, have come at the hands of Afghan security force personnel turning on their advisors – the lack of cultural, negotiation, and language training is troubling. Like the advisors sent to Iraq in 2004-05, the SFATs are not getting the proper training. Green Berets spend years learning how to advise foreign militaries. Even the Marine Corps puts its MiTTs through roughly five months of pre-deployment training, with a heavy emphasis advisor skills like best practices for speaking through an interpreter and cultural do’s and don’ts. These are reinforced throughout the training program so that they become second nature. Of course, this training isn’t perfect, but at least the USMC MiTTs are being set up for success.

The story of American military advisors in Iraq and Afghanistan is not well known. Should Americans read The Snake Eaters and learn more about a little known aspect of the savage wars less than one per cent of their fellow citizens have been fighting, great. But the audiences who will gain the most from reading West’s book are mid-career officers attending the Army and Marine Corps staff colleges in Fort Leavenworth and Quantico. Outcast is a testament that advisors can succeed even when the armed services do not appreciate their mission. The advisor needs robust, appropriate training and the full support of his command as soon as his boots hit the ground because as long as we continue to wage counterinsurgencies as a third party, advisors are our saving grace. As West notes, “No matter how we enter these murky twenty-first century wars, all roads out lead through the combat advisor.”

* Here are the three other memoirs about the military advisor experience to come out of Iraq. Interesting that all four are written by Marine officers.

Folsom, Seth. (2010) In the Gray Area: A Marine Advisor Team at War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Gray, Wes. (2009) Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Navarro, Eric. (2008) God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army. Washington: Potomac Books.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, Reviews, War | 3 Comments

Still in Saigon

by wjrue Posted on May 7, 2012

GEN Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has released his Chairman’s reading list. So far, this one is receiving better reviews than the reading list he released during his short stint as Army Chief of Staff last summer, which received some harsh reviews. Just about every general officer publishes a reading list, formal or informal, but the Chairman’s reading list and those of the service chiefs generally get the most press.

These reading lists are easy to poke fun at and critique because no list is perfect. That said, they serve a useful purpose. Most of the books, especially those targeted to field grade and general officers, are intended to get the military reader thinking and learning about larger, strategic issues that govern the military profession or affect U.S. foreign policy. For instance, both of Dempsey’s reading lists had Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power and Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. On the other hand, the generals have a tendency to include some weird stuff, like books about starfish and spiders.

Last summer, I re-read E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. The GOP primary season was nearing its pinnacle of farce and I thought to myself that this book ought to be required reading for anyone who sought the office of President because anyone who wants to be Commander-in-Chief needs to bone up on the consequences of their decisions to send American boys and girls to war. While the military does an exceptional job of publishing reading lists to help officers and staff non-commissioned officers better understand civilians, the reverse is, sadly, not true.

In that spirit, here is a reading list that, if the G&L collective was President or National Security Advisor, it would require each civilian political appointee working in State, Defense, or the NSC to read. Like GEN Dempsey’s list, this one is not exhaustive and I’m sure there are some things we missed or omitted. This will be a list-in-progress and we’ll be adding/subtracting titles. So, feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments section.

America, F Yeah!

Democracy in America
Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy
For the Common Defense
9/11 Commission Report
The New American Militarism
Arsenal of Democracy
Buying National Security

The dogs of war, they’ll carry you away (or: How smart people make bad decisions)

The Guns of August
The Best and the Brightest
Rubicon Theory of War

On combat (or: Carrying shit and killing people is not pleasant)

The Face of Battle
With the Old Breed
If I Die in a Combat Zone
A Rumor of War
Achilles in Vietnam
No True Glory
On Killing

Big(ish) Think

On War (Books I-III, VIII)
Twenty Years' Crisis
Bureaucracy
Arms and Influence
War and Politics
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
War and Change in World Politics
Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy
Shield of Achilles

Posted in Analysis, Civil-Military Relations, Military, War | 3 Comments

Orwells and Oppenheimers: Drone Opponents’ Marriage of Convenience

by drunkenpredator Posted on May 3, 2012

As a self-aware Predator drone, I get my share of criticism. “You’re flying lost-link again!” “You vaporized a playground!” “You’re trying to usher in a post-human robo-dystopia!” Some of this is valid, some of it…okay, most of it is valid. But sometimes, the public discourse over drones like me becomes so turgid and dramatic that it obscures reasonable discussion of my pros and cons. And when the hyperventilating gets most hyper, when the language becomes most overwrought, when the prognostication gets most preposterous, I see it stemming from the conflation of two very different issues. And I don’t think that that’s an accident.

Two distinct constituencies use UAVs as a touchstone. One is concerned with the national security and foreign policy implications of drones, and the other with their privacy and domestic law enforcement applications. For brevity’s sake, I’ll call the first group “Oppenheimers,” after a guy who got a good look at a new kind of warfare and spent the rest of his life championing international institutions to make sure it never took place. They feel that remotely-piloted aircraft represent a qualitative shift in the ability of a nation, and a chief executive, to use force. And not a shift for the better.

Oppenheimers think drones will usher in an Imperial presidency. The capitalization there is important, because we’re talking Imperial as in Palpatine at the helm of the Galactic Empire. They fear that through technical means, drones are reducing or eliminating the political impediments to war, and blurring the line about what kind of conflict constitutes war in the first place. (Nobody puts a flag over drone wreckage, let alone puts it on the nightly news.) Oppenheimers also deplore the role that drones play in the larger framework of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, which the Obama administration interprets as giving them clearance to use force (whether under Titles 10 or 50) against al-Qaeda or its affiliates anywhere on the planet.

Oppenheimers advocate for the application of international law to the use of drones, and where such laws don’t exist, for their development and implementation. They see UAVs as tools that let rich countries violate human rights, flout national sovereignty, circumvent the judicial process, and do it all in a legal gray area that requires no real accountability for those who command them. And they foresee a world in which a string of tactical successes, a veritable terrorist Whack-a-Mole, leads to a crippling strategic failure by turning local populations against us through faceless violence.

The second constituency I’ll call the “Orwells.” Their primary concern about drones is domestic. They see the technological potential for drone surveillance, the interest from law enforcement and government agencies, and the massive aerospace industry primed to meet the demand. While there are often noises made about UAV safety, the primary gripe of Orwells- who can point to an actual passage in 1984 which describes small unmanned aircraft peering through people’s windows- is that drones are vanguards of a pervasive surveillance culture. The police watch you outside with robots, corporations like Facebook and Google parse your user data to better bombard you with ads, and the NSA hoovers up your phone and email communications to feed through a secret counter-terrorism algorithm.

But the Orwells face a problem of domestic case law. Despite fractious debate over “reasonable expectations of privacy,” the Supreme Court has consistently held that police departments are permitted to conduct aerial surveillance of private citizens and property, so long as they traverse publicly-available airspace and use the same technology commonly available to members of the public. Those rulings made no distinction between whether the platform used for such surveillance was manned or unmanned, nor do many court-watchers expect that precedent to be soon overturned.

While the Orwells demand action from the FAA (which, as I’ve complained, is a safety regulator and not a privacy watchdog) the only real recourse will come from state and federal legislation to restrict such searches. But it’s certainly not imminent, thanks in large part to burdensome FAA regulations and review processes. Right now, police departments drone programs lag behind such surveillance ninjas as hobbyists and high school science teachers.

The Oppenheimers want to curb the executive branch’s authority to conduct lethal operations overseas, primarily through the military and intelligence community. And they want international norms and laws to constrain the kinetic use of remotely-piloted aircraft. Conversely, the Orwells want to more carefully govern the power of local, state and federal law enforcement to conduct surveillance and evidence-gathering on Americans.

On the surface, the distinction between Orwells and Oppenheimers may not seem significant. But they truly are. Yes, both are trying to rein in the use of flying robots, which, depending on who’s talking, are assuming a role in society somewhere between J. Edgar Hoover and a winged Terminator. And both want to accomplish that goal by bringing national security and surveillance law into the 21st century. But the similarity ends there, and they are doing two important discussions a twin disservice by deliberately allowing the public to conflate them.

The Oppenheimer challenge is relevance. Why should the vast majority of Americans care about the particular platform our spies and soldiers use, when they’re using it to kill people we’ve never met, in a country we’ll never visit, as part of an effort we generally support? And the Orwell challenge is harm. Why should Americans worry about the police using drones when most of us have never seen one, most of us will probably never be surveilled by one, and even if we are, police helicopters do this kind of thing already?

By allowing the two questions to blur together- drones abroad and drones at home- the Oppenheimers demonstrate relevance and the Orwells show harm. The recent FAA reauthorization, despite the hype, allowed only a gradual phasing-in of government drone usage over the next three years. And yet it was a gift to both sides; by using stock photos of MQ-1s, MQ-9s or Global Hawks, media outlets implied that military-grade, Cessna-sized robotic weapons platforms would be found under the Christmas trees of every police department from Manhattan to Mayberry.

It’s a lot easier to make people uneasy over privacy concerns when you pair the article with pictures of a targeted-killing machine. Same way it’s easier to make people care about collateral damage in Yemen or the Phillipines by being able to say with a straight face, “You may be next.” This line-blurring is inaccurate, widespread, and actively harmful to an informed debate.

Oppenheimers are wrestling with the problem of how America uses force in hostile, fluid or ungoverned territory; Orwells are trying to apply 250 years of the rule of law to a new police technology. Both are doing so, by and large, in good faith. But establishing international standards for the deployment and operation of lethal military assets will do precisely nothing to curb the rise of the surveillance state within America’s borders. Nor will enhanced American legal protections against police UAV surveillance somehow prevent collateral damage in the lawless regions of Pakistan or Yemen.

While I actually agree with many of the concerns of both groups, pretending that their goals have anything in common, just because they use the same stock photography, is ridiculous. And when Orwells and Oppenheimers imply that the New Jersey State Police will soon rain Hellfire missiles onto Garden State Parkway speeders, it creates a rhetorical fog bank that’s too thick for logic to penetrate.

These guys are way more of a problem than I'll ever be.
Posted in Analysis, Slightly Larger Arms, War | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

All About the (Private) Benjamins

by Jimmy Sky Posted on March 17, 2012

Lets get this out of the way upfront: there is no way to objectively calculate what military members “deserve.” Military life can be rough even in peacetime, and the risk and sacrifices expected of military members are even greater during war, or whatever we’re calling this thing now. But it’s misleading to say it’s all sacrifice.

Here is the bottom line on active duty military pay and benefits. They are much, much, much better than anyone realizes, and by “anyone” I really mean anyone. Pay and benefits are probably the best-kept secret in the military and over the last 12 years they have increased at a substantial rate. The Tenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation from February 2008 states that

…compensation for members of the uniformed services compares favorably to compensation in the civilian sector, and the differential is substantial when the comparison includes not only cash compensation but also elements of a generous benefits package. But this fact is not well understood by service members in general. While service members tend to understand that their cash compensation compares favorably to the cash earnings of comparable civilians, they do not appreciate the full extent to which their total compensation—including benefits—exceeds that of their civilian counterparts.

This widespread ignorance is problematic for a couple reasons. First, it contributes to military personnel making career decisions without fully understanding what life is like outside the military. Second, it feeds into the myth amongst the military, the general population, and Congress that every facet of military existence is perpetual sacrifice and that the least we can do is pay them more. On several occasions this has even led to Congress tagging an additional 0.5%* across the board pay increase beyond what the Pentagon requested (FTR, this happened under both Bush and Obama). This mentality also discourages us from facing the uncomfortable truth that money put into personnel compensation may be more advantageously spent elsewhere.

Complicating all of that is the convoluted nature of the military compensation system. Pretty much everyone who has studied this issue has stated, in varying degrees, that the compensation system is too complicated to allow for sound policy decisions: the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, RAND (in at least two reports). Even the Department of Defense says as much in the most recent QRMC and the Defense Advisory Council on Military Compensation. (it should be noted that most of these documents explicitly avoid answering the question ‘How much should we pay the military?’)

So let’s try to break it down a bit. Every report on this topic utilizes a slightly different formula to calculate military compensation, but I’m primarily using the graphics from the 10th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, published in February of 2008. Yes, surprise! This is enough of an issue that there is a statute that every four years the President must establish a committee to study the topic and report back to him (incidentally, I’m also enough of a nerd to know that the 11th QRMC has been delayed - my guess is to assure that its findings align with the new fiscal realities within the department).

So, here is what military compensation currently looks like…

Why is this important? Because any time you hear someone talking about military “pay” (basically the right hand side of the pie chart) they are essentially ignoring over half of the monetary value that military members receive.

The term used to describe this 48% of the pay and benefits pie is RMC, meaning “Regular Military Compensation.” After controlling for education, the military is consistently higher than the 70th percentile of earned income. Relatively to this 70th percentile metric, officers have it slightly better than enlisted.

A couple of things to point out in these graphs; First off, for both officer and enlisted there is a steady, predictable increase in take home income. This, of course, will vary somewhat from individual to individual, but based on the fairly standard promotion timelines for service members (especially officers), the military provides an income that places them in the upper levels of their social cohort for the duration of their career. Keep in mind, all of this is before you include the Deferred and Noncash benefits.

You should also note that for the “typical” young enlisted member in the top chart (18-yo, without college) the military provides an additional $10,000 a year over what they could anticipate earning as a civilian for the first few years of their career.

All of this paints a picture of a fairly well compensated military force relative to the general population of the country. However, once you include the monetary value of the additional benefits (the left-hand side of the pie chart above) the picture changes considerably. The term used for the inclusion of the entire benefits and compensation package is MAC: “Military Annual Compensation.”

The income percentile for the military, both officer and enlisted (blue line), jumps up to between the 80th and 90th percentile for the majority of a 20 year career. At the start of an enlisted career, the service member is actually exceeding the 90th percentile income bracket for his cohort. For officers, the movement into the 90th percentile occurs both at the beginning of a career and again beyond the 18-year mark.

So, how well paid is the military? Even if you take out all the Noncash and Deferred benefits listed above and just focus on take-home pay, the military still has it pretty good. There is a longer discussion to be had over the “deferred benefits” (aka retirement), which I discussed at length here and here). But there is a natural tendency to focus on the “take-home” salary of military members – and by doing so, we are inadvertently contributing to a continued narrative of the military being underpaid.

So aside from demonstrating how much I hate America and setting myself up for a brutal comment section, what am I trying to accomplish here? I’m not advocating that we reduce the take-home pay of military members, but we do need to take steps to convey to military personnel, the public and Congress exactly how well compensated the military is relative to the rest of the population. This means taking some basic steps like simplifying the compensation system and updating servicemembers’ LESs so that the monetary costs of benefits is reflected.

In addition, we also need to assure that we are clear-eyed about the impact compensation packages have on the overall budget. Military compensation, like all government spending, should be limited to the minimum amount necessary to achieve goals; in this case the maintenance of a certain quality of life for the All Volunteer Force. The problem is that this has to simultaneously be balanced with the need to maintain adequate personnel numbers and sustain retirement benefits. Unfortunately, no one seems to really want to delve into what that actually means.

For example, in 1999 there was a push to address a “13% pay gap” between the military and their civilian counterparts. The problem is that this number seems to have been largely arbitrary and not the result of a serious analysis (if someone has a study reference for this, please point me to it). On the contrary, the 13% pay gap was actually refuted fairly convincingly at the time by the CBO. Regardless, this lead to a new law that authorized Congress to increase that annual military pay raises by an additional 0.05% beyond the Employment Cost Index every year for the next 6 years in an effort to close this (questionable) gap. [The Employment Cost Index is set by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is the baseline for annual raises for all federal employees including military]

However, when the six years was over, Congress continued to fund this additional 0.5%* for several more years, even though there was no longer any legal requirement for it and the Pentagon was no longer even requesting it. [In the interest of full disclosure, I personally benefited from several of these pay raises and never once complained]

There are a few indications that the attitude towards pay and benefits is starting to change. The Pentagon has made long overdue changes to the costs of Tricare for both Active Duty and working age retirees. They have also begun prorating ‘Imminent Danger Pay,’ which may have been the single most abused benefit in the history of the DoD. Basically, if you spent a single day out of the month in a hostile area, you were paid an additional $225/month. This meant that the entire military rushed to make it into theater before the end of the month and drug their feet in order to stay in theater until the 1st day of the next month. A finance officer relayed the story of one senior USAF official who made 6 trips into theater in one year, each trip approximately 60 days apart, but conveniently straddling the monthly transition. That means he made an extra $2700 ($225 x 12) that year for a spending a just few weeks in theater (also all tax free if I recall the rules correctly)

I sincerely don’t want to oversimplify this issue. There are myriad reasons why people join the military along with a largely different set of reasons for why they stay. An aspect of that decision is certainly financial. However, to act as if the only way to maintain the status of the all-volunteer force is by perpetually increasing the compensation and benefits for military service members is an indictment of our policy makers’ ability to make sound fiscal judgments and an insult to uniformed personnel. The compensation policies we have pursued over the last decade imply that we think service members are solely motivated by personal financial gains. Let me assure you, this is not true, but the question remains; how much is too much? Where do we draw the line? How much do you pay people when it’s impossible to objectively determine what they deserve?

Also, if you are one of those people who breathlessly criticize slowing active duty military compensation growth and reductions in retiree benefits and the drawdown of personnel, you need to come to grips with the fact that all of these items come from the same ‘pot’ of money. Since it’s now becoming clear that the DoD is going to face a truly flat budget over the next few years that means that this ‘pot’ can no longer grow at the unchecked rates it has over the last decade. That means that from here on out, every dollar that goes into active duty compensation or retiree benefits is a dollar that doesn’t go into maintaining the size of the active duty force. Secretary Panetta has announced the planned drawdown of 80,000 from the Army and 20,000 from the USMC. Ostensibly, this is because we no longer need to sustain forces at these levels, but you have to ask if it is possible that we might “need” these personnel a little more if we could afford to keep them.

UPDATE:

* Thanks to Justin T. Johnson (@justinjdc) for pointing out that my pay raise number should have been 0.5%, not 0.05%.

Posted in Big Money, Careerism, Military, War | 42 Comments

Build a House and Burn It Down

by wjrue Posted on March 14, 2012

In the last five years, ANSF members have killed more than 75 ISAF military advisers. In 2012, 1 out of every 4 ISAF casualties has been at the hands of a member of the ANSF. These deaths present a huge problem to the U.S. exit strategy, which is based on the expectation that the ANSF will be able to provide enough security for Afghanistan that will prevent the reemergence of the Taliban or use Al Qaeda’s unimpeded use of Afghan territory to plan attacks.

But only a very small percentage of Afghan National Army battalions are capable of conducting combat operations on their own, which means ISAF military advisers will be in Afghanistan for a long time. The need for trust is crucial – and may be gone for good. We can expect these advisers to be dispersed throughout the country on small combat outposts without major American support nearby. How will they simultaneously protect themselves from militants and the Afghans they are advising? How will policymakers ask troops to advise an army that might kill them at a moment’s notice?

Being an adviser can be an incredibly frustrating experience.* Regular military units typically don’t trust you because of your close association with local forces; meanwhile, advisers often see regular units as working at cross-purposes to the advisory mission. Advising local forces can be like herding cats; it requires patience, understanding, and tact—three traits not typically emphasized in American military training. An adviser must spend hours and hours each day with the men he is advising - even when he’s not advising or assisting with an issue at hand, he’s hanging out, building a relationship. While everyone else is at salsa night or playing Xbox, the adviser is having chai with his counterpart. Actually, a proper campaign plan doesn’t even give the adviser an option to attend salsa night on the FOB - he’s out on an indigenous base living with his counterparts.

Moreover, an adviser must enter his deployment knowing that he will not likely succeed. At the very least, he has to revise his standards for success. My team leader, who served on three different adviser teams, put it like this: “Advising is like pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill. You’re not going to push the boulder to the top; you just have to prevent it from rolling to the bottom.” Making lasting changes to another country’s military cannot be accomplished in a standard 7 or 12-month deployment; the best you can hope for is not to lose ground and hand the unit off to the next adviser team in as good a state as you found it.

An example: the Iraqi Army, which is generations more advanced than the Afghan army, has developed an organizational culture derived from Russian military doctrine and the personality of Saddam Hussein. In American military doctrine, the S-2 intelligence officer is always in communication with the S-3 operations officer. Intelligence drives operations. Operations result in new intelligence, which begins the cycle anew. The Iraqi Army, however, does not subscribe to this doctrine. The S-2 and S-3 officers often do not communicate at all. The S-2 officer runs his own operations based on his own intelligence. The S-3 officer has his own sources through family or tribal connections. S-2 officers are often more concerned with the insider threat. Altering a culture of separation that ingrained is challenging; advisers may have success at the individual unit level, but they’re not going to change those kinds of behaviors across the entire organization in 9 months. It would take an entire generation or longer. The adviser must learn to work within the organizational culture of the military he is advising, not necessarily try and force the advisees to conform to American military doctrine. And this is independent of the need for cultural understanding, which, suffice it to say, requires another dose of patience, understanding, and tact.

Traditionally, advising has been almost exclusively the purview of the Army’s Special Forces, the vaunted Green Berets. Historically, regular Army and Marine units do not train for this mission. That’s not to say that conventional forces haven’t done it, it’s just not something that the service chiefs like to do as it impedes on their traditional missions and budgets. Once policymakers recognized that the only way we were going to leave Iraq with any semblance of stability was by [training Iraqi soldiers to be good at their jobs], the advisory mission took on new importance. But the scope of the task was so big that Green Berets alone could not do the job, and the Army and the Marine Corps began organizing and training Military Transition Teams (MiTT).

The Marine Corps fashioned its MiTTs out of individual augments, which meant that a team was composed of Marines pulled from their regular units across a range of military occupational specialties. Officers and staff non-commissioned officers (SNCOs) would typically pair up with Iraqis who worked in the appropriate staff section, e.g. an infantry officer would work with the Iraqi S-3 to advise him on planning and conducting operations while an intelligence officer would pair up with the Iraqi S-2 to advise and assist him on intelligence matters. The MiTT team leader would advise the Iraqi battalion commander. This was repeated for the other staff sections as well — logistics, training, administration, etc. Marine MiTTs also had junior Marines to serve as drivers and gunners on MiTT tactical movements, but the Marines also used them as advisers to great effect. My team used their expertise to teach classes on weapons, tactics, maintenance, and communications to enlisted Iraqi soldiers.

My MiTT spent three full months working up together. Our training package emphasized language, culture, and negotiating. We also spent the requisite amount of time patrolling, running convoys, and practicing other team and individual military skills. We spent 3 weeks in Twentynine Palms for a final exercise that included native Iraqis as role players in a full, mock up Iraqi village. There were hundreds of us out there and many of the scenarios in the exercise repeated themselves in Iraq. It was intense.

And it wasn’t nearly enough. I could have used more training. A lot more. We all could.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the US is going to begin transitioning out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior SNCOs pulled from the same brigade staff – they will not be individual augments pulled from disparate units – so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like mine. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training is close to worthless. The SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing primarily on individual military skills (land navigation, weapons usage, patrolling techniques, etc.). Afterwards, they will go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they will receive - wait for it - three weeks of adviser specific training. Three weeks. We are taking soldiers and expecting them to absorb at least four months’ worth of training in three weeks.

I don’t know if the trust between American advisers and their ANSF counterparts is broken for good. But I do know that sending teams of “advisers” to Afghanistan with nothing more than three weeks of training is not likely to help get it back. If advising is the backbone of our exit strategy, and we’re not preparing ourselves properly for the challenges, we shouldn’t be surprised if this strategy fails.

*Based on my one-year deployment to Iraq as an adviser. This isn’t meant to be a sweeping proclamation of how the entire Iraqi army behaves, or how all advisers experience their deployments. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.

**If you served on an Army or Marine MiTT in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d love your assessment and thoughts, especially if I missed anything. Please email me at [email protected].

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, War | 13 Comments

From safe zones to where?

by dptrombly Posted on February 28, 2012
As the terrible violent suppression of the Syrian opposition continues, policymakers and commentators have scrambled to find some kind of solution. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department Director of Policy Planning, has proposed peace” “no-kill zones in Syria” as a form of action more robust than diplomacy, but theoretically less provocative than an all-out war. Setting up “no kill zones” would involve the limited provision of arms to the Free Syrian Army, and training and intelligence from foreign special forces from Arab League states, Turkey, and perhaps Britain and France. Using aerial resupply from unmanned aircraft, foreign intelligence, and support from special forces, the FSA would expand the “no kill zones” until a truce could be made with the Syrian government. Supposedly, these interventions will be too limited to exacerbate retaliation by Syria or greater involvement by Assad’s allies. However, Spencer Ackerman, firing back at his own blog, noted that Slaughter’s piece is a prolonged exercise in avoiding the implications of R2P as the rest of the world understands them, and in doing so creates a militarily incoherent monstrosity that can only achieve its goals save by luck:

Now, why do I say this is a broader problem with the Responsibility to Protect? Because it shows that the R2P is a military endeavor that still lacks actual, substantive objectives for militaries to achieve. If I am one of the Qatari SOF captains who has to aid the “no-kill zones,” I don’t know from Slaughter’s guidance how to design my operational campaign. I get that I have to help the Free Syrian Army clear out a “no-kill zone” of loyalist Syrian troops; I can presume that I must hold that zone. But what happens when I get mortar fire from the loyalists who’ve pulled back? Does protecting that zone mean I can push it outward? If it does, then I am escalating the objectives as Slaughter has described them; if it doesn’t, then I have failed to hold the no-kill zone.

Slaughter, in a comment responding to Ackerman’s charges, elucidated her argument further. She premised her argument on three assumptions: the inevitability of international action stronger than diplomacy to relieve Syria’s crisis, the possibility of an FSA that seeks only civilian protection without regime change, and the disloyalty and demoralization of the “vast majority” of Assad’s forces. She further argues that foreign special forces, drones, and arms will not constitute international forces or the instigation of a proxy war – and that the threat of revoking this aid will keep rebels satisfied with civilian protection rather than regime change or revenge killings. However, these deployments are still military intervention, and any such choice demands careful scrutiny of the plan at hand, no matter how morally reprehensible the foe may be or dire the situation may appear.

The Wishful Thinking of Safe Zones

To recap my post at the New Atlanticist, Syrian safe zones are useless unless there are forces capable of defending them from massed armored and artillery formations. So long as even a fraction of the Alawite career military forces remain loyal to Assad, he will have access to heavy weapons and be able to reduce population centers and encampments with relative ease. Anti-tank weapons and anti-air weapons will only blunt these attacks, they will not be repulsed without the ability to direct counter-fires en mass. Furthermore, the attacks and sieges will not be successfully broken without a ground force capable of defeating Syrian forces in a stand-up fight.

Anne-Marie Slaughter and other advocates of a safe zone have argued that a guerrilla and paramilitary force armed with small arms, crew served weapons, and anti-tank rockets and missiles could defend against massed formations without devolution into siege warfare by cutting off communications using intelligence, communications, and support from special forces advisers. Particularly against a lightly-armed foe Syrian heavy forces could easily make a mockery of no-kill zones by simply pressing ahead with attacks on cities and any FSA forces foolish enough to concentrate themselves in their defense.

Look at the past example of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars. The siege of Sarajevo was not lifted when NATO airstrikes began. In fact, despite attempted negotiations, the siege continued, and Bosnian Serb forces did not fully withdraw until relatively equally matched Croatian and Bosniak forces were able to launch a ground assault in the area. Similarly, the Srebrenica safe area failed despite international observers, local militias, and air support precisely because the forces on the ground were unable or unwilling to risk a fight against Serb forces. In the case of Syria, a Free Syrian Army of a strength matching that of, say, Croatia’s, is certainly not forthcoming - which means that any city which falls under assault will be incredibly difficult to retain or incorporate into a genuine safe zone. The vast majority of proactive FSA warfare has essentially been guerrilla operations, raiding and bleeding Syrian armed forces rather than clearing, let alone holding, territory outright (with a few temporary exceptions in small towns). The notion that with just some unmanned aircraft and foreign special forces they can somehow develop the cohesion necessary for a unified command and control system that can successfully implement a coherent operational plan to actually assault Syrian forces at all points is wishful thinking. - Advocates of no-kill zones must acknowledge these shortcomings or advocate for more arms, more support, and more intervention to fill the gap between the opposition and they Syrian army.

A stalemate, as Adam Elkus ably explains in his recent post on Slaughter’s piece, is simply an intermediary step, and will not serve military or diplomatic interests - and probably not even humanitarian interests. Enforcing a stalemate would simply prolong the war, because even if Assad chose to cut a deal or flee the country, fearful Alawite military officers or ministers might choose to fight on. Few within the government will be gullible enough to think that the ultimate goal would not be regime change, it is simply not a plausible argument. Few believed it in Libya, and fewer still will believe it now. “Assad must go” is the default position of the governments that would be involved in the intervention, who on earth would really think the intervention they sponsor would be unrelated to this end?

There is an assumption of neutrality about the “no-kill zones” that bears no logical weight. The no-kill zones, whether Slaughter intends them to or not, exist to deny control of the population to the Syrian government. They would function as safe havens for opposition activity. Slaughter, in a follow up comment in Ackerman’s piece, insists, “R2P is not about winning, it’s about forcing a government to fight fair, which means it doesn’t shoot civilians as a strategy.” Yet establishing a no-kill zone where the FSA may operate, but not the Syrian government, is providing protection to a movement seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government. Separating this from support for regime change is a matter of semantics, not policy.

Dangerous Assumptions

Slaughter explains her argument for indefinite stalemate, and the political viability of enforcing it, starting with three assumptions:

1) That sooner or later something beyond diplomatic pressure will have to be done with regard to the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria;

This is not true in practical terms. R2P is a system of ideals that can be adopted or ignored in accordance with state preference. R2P is a luxury or a preference rather than an imperative, outside actors cannot be forced to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. In fact, they might choose to intervene with goals indifferent or even antithetical to the humanitarian interests at play. No, if the diplomatic measures, as skillfully and clearly outlined by Marc Lynch, fail, then alternatives will basically be fighting a bloody war or proxy war under which humanitarian considerations will, for the most part, be undertaken by friction and the course of events, or the international community will have to live with Assad. Framing war as inevitable simply results in the narrow-minded and dangerous thinking that Diana outlined in her earlier post on how we think about waging war. Adopting that sort of mindset results in precisely the sorts of strategically illogical arguments that get intervening soldiers and civilians alike killed for minimal gains.

Slaughter tries to argue that the FSA can be restrained from undertaking offensive warfare (that is, warfare beyond the inherently offensive action of expanding the no-kill zones, although Slaughter does not portray it as such) by ascribing a solely humanitarian purpose to what is expressly an army seeking to liberate Syria, saying:

2) That the FSA started as a force dedicated to protecting peaceful protesters rather than attacking Assad and could be persuaded to return to that mission (although not if the decision is simply to arm them, as is happening now)

The goals of the FSA, insofar as we can derive the intentions of a disaggregated force from its leadership’s statements, are to bring about the destruction of the regime through attacks on military targets. See the statements of Colonel Riyad al-Assad, who argues the FSA must “work hand in hand with the people to achieve freedom and dignity to bring this regime down” and that attacks would occur across the country, arguing, ”We will target them in all parts of the Syrian territories without exception.” Offensive and defensive warfare are complementary, not contradictory - while a strategy can be weighted towards one or another, even a strategic defensive may require tactical offenses. A viable defense requires seizing key terrain features, population centers, counter-offensives, and the disruption of enemy logistics and lines of communication. Yet what expanding safe zones requires, and the FSA’s nation-wide guerrilla campaign acknowledges, the need for a strategic offensive, even if many of its components are tactical defenses. For the inherently offensive action of expanding safe zones, forward actions to disrupt or halt the advance of Syrian forces will prove necessary to secure the safe zones. Drawing an arbitrary line between offense and defense will only serve to confuse the issue, not restrain the Free Syrian Army. Even if some members of the FSA choose to forswear regime change and accept stalemate, some units will act offensively or new paramilitary groups might emerge to meet the aspirations of Syrian political leaders, people, and yes, the Sunni Arab states which are eager to see Assad gone. Already the Syrian National Council appears to be splintering, with 20 members forming the ”Syrian Patriotic Group,” a bloc avowedly in favor of the FSA. Fracturing among political groups might occur if the SNC acquiesces to Western pressure not to seek outright regime change through armed revolt.

Slaughter justifies the inadequate resource commitments of the no-kill zone plan by eschewing worst-case planning:

3) that the vast majority of Assad’s army will not in fact fight for him.

This is an example of the exact opposite kind of assumption to make when planning a military intervention. Even if the majority of Assad’s conscript forces defect or simply desert, that still leaves the best-trained and best-equipped professional formations relatively intact. The morale of these units is presumably more robust and the sectarian composition much more amenable to the regime’s interest. The more the FSA and associated movements look like a Sunni majoritarian force backed by co-sectarian partners in the Gulf, the more likely non-Sunni minorities will more fully throw in the lot with the regime. Furthermore, how many loyal, well-trained professional troops with heavy weapons does Syria need to put down a FSA that is basically limited to guerrilla attacks if they are willing to just blast the population into compliance? It may well not require a majority of the forces willing to fight, just enough cohesive and well-equipped ones which can overcome a much more nebulous force of guerrillas which is unable to coordinate attacks at an operational or strategic level.

Based on those three assumptions, I do think it is possible to use special forces, high-grade intelligence, modern communications, and a relatively limited number of specialized weapons to help the FSA establish and maintain these zones. Of course they could use those weapons any way they want, but see my second assumption. Further, if my third assumption is right then the zones will encourage more defections than attacks.

Such assumptions completely ignore the potential counter-actions of the enemy. If the number of weapons is limited, and indeed, even if they are widely distributed, it is highly unlikely that safe zones defended only by guerrillas that have proven manifestly incapable of protecting cities such as Homs from siege would trigger a collapse in Syrian, especially Alawite Syrian, military morale. In fact, the prospect of defections would likely spur more aggressive use of the military, as quickly and violently proving the safe zones unsafe would stymie defections and potentially draw the FSA into a defensive fight ripe for the sort of massacre Syrian forces have inflicted on cities and population centers before. Additionally, Syrian security services could take advantage of defectors by intentionally sending some as informants about FSA activity - something which has very likely already occurred, and is another potential source of distrust and division between FSA officers. Were the FSA to try and kill these informants within the no-kill zones, or militias were to conduct revenge killing, torture, or any of the other malign behavior all too common to civil wars, would we really imperil the vast majority of civilians within them by weakening the rebel groups? Or would supposedly fair, impartial, and humanitarian-minded outsiders need to take a bigger role?

Foreign Support: Mere Failure or Casus Belli?

Furthermore, it is utterly unconvincing that a “limited” shipment of “specialized” arms would smack any less of a proxy war from the Iranian or Russian perspective. Such arms shipments would almost certainly convince Iran and Russia to increase their support for the Syrian government and bring in “specialized” arms and advisers in return. Slaughter surprisingly argues that despite, in her original piece, for special forces from “Qatar, Turkey and possibly Britain and France,” and then Turkish and Arab League “remotely piloted helicopters, either for delivery of cargo and weapons — as America has used them in Afghanistan — or to attack Syrian air defenses and mortars in order to protect the no-kill zones,” as well as drones, because somehow drone strikes, unlike ground troops (which Slaughter is already advocating deploying in the form of special forces), will somehow not be perceived by Assad as an act of war or grounds for retaliation. Yet in her response to Ackerman, she claims she never mentions international forces. Domestic political audiences might swallow such semantic circumlocutions, but Assad and his allies will not.

Of course, special forces are hardly going to be able to provide FSA troops with the ability to isolate and defeat battalion-sized formations of Syrian troops - something that appears never to have happened, even during tactical withdrawals. Organizations such as MPRI did provide the Croatian forces with the ability to conduct complex operations such as Operation Storm in the Balkan Wars, but the Croat military was far more organized than the FSA and far more capable relative to its Serbian foes than the FSA is to Damascus’s troops.

Additionally, providing “high-grade intelligence” will require large amounts of manned and unmanned platforms, both at sea and in the air, in order to adequately support the SOF on the ground, and as Robert Caruso notes, this could balloon into a commitment of thousands of U.S. personnel. As for the remotely-piloted helicopters and drones, without a much broader campaign of electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, and other combat operations involving jet aircraft, bombing, and manned platforms, it is highly unlikely drones and RPAs would be reliable conduits of supply for FSA guerrillas in the field. After all, even the USMC has only talked about flying K-MAX, the Afghan-tested resupply drone Slaughter references, at night because small arms fire - Taliban with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades - might fell it. How well will it do against crew-served anti-air guns, man-portable missiles, or SAM sites? Not well enough that I’d bet the combat viability of outnumbered, outgunned, and logistically and organizationally-impaired FSA troops on it.

Operation Viking Hammer, a 2003 assault by U.S, Special Forces embedded with Iraq’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, is an instructive contrast to Slaughter’s happy vision. The assault’s success required, firstly, a massive over-match in manpower. Thousands of PUK troops attacked an Ansar al-Islam camp of just a few hundred men - roughly the size of a battalion. The PUK was an older, more cohesive organization with which the US CIA had prior ties. Furthermore, it occurred in the context of a logistical tail that involved huge numbers of C-130 cargo aircraft and the attack itself required air support from U.S. combat aircraft that drones are unlikely to match. To expect foreign special forces with intelligence, communication, and drone support to take on Syrian armored units is to demand a much tougher fight with far fewer necessary tools.

The Self-Defeating Humanitarian Stalemate

The very logic of the no-kill zones and the associated policies gives the FSA an incentive to launch offensives it is theoretically not allowed to conduct, and practically unlikely to succeed in - but the unacknowledged reliance of these zones on offensive success might give rebels a tool to escalate foreign involvement.

Merely establishing the safe zones for civilian protection would just be a stopgap measure, and it would likely undermine the prospects for a lasting truce. Instead, they would provide the impetus for further civil war. Some towns will be leveled or besieged to prevent the safe zone from reaching them. Truces will be attempted and then their limits tried. The dynamics of internal warfare will continue.

When some of the safe zones are rolled back when FSA troops are unable to hold them - when special forces troops are killed in these events - will the international community strictly adhere to its policy of stalemate for the civilians sake, even as Syrian assaults render it a laughingstock? Or will safe zones provide a political platform or more arms, and more and deeper intervention? How will the international community respond when Bashar uses the extra time of stalemate to strengthen loyalist forces and draw more resources from Russia and Iran? How would it respond to the strengthening of more radical or militant secular and religious components of the FSA and armed resistance which aren’t content to seek a truce with their oppressor?

How will the rule against revenge killings be enforced? Slaughter claims that the curtailment of support will discourage revenge or extrajudicial killings, but this is utterly impractical. Gulf Cooperation Council and other Arab League states do not care about human rights, they care about deposing a pro-Iranian minority government and empowering a Sunni, anti-Iranian majority. Furthermore, the FSA does not necessarily trust all defectors, who were not the original participants in the armed resistance, since some of them are informants for the regime. Additionally, irregular groups might attack within these zones to disrupt FSA training. Assad’s local rivals will pump money and arms into the opposition regardless of their human rights record, because just like their complicity in the oppression of protests in Bahrain, Arab intervention in Syria has nothing to do with embracing R2P and everything to do with geopolitical interests.

Ultimately, the combination of vague and indefensible no-kill zones with supposedly limited arming of the mass of armed groups under the banner of the FSA- all done through allies and proxies with limited specialized capabilities and interests at variance with humanitarian protection and perhaps even American interests - will, at best, produce a stalemate that prolongs the Syrian civil war before what would likely be a violent conclusion or the centrifugal unraveling of its central authority. At worst, it will accelerate the incipient proxy war by provoking further Iranian and Russian support for Assad and Sunni support for their own favored militias and terrorists, or even provoke a further military intervention when failures force the U.S. to uphold its commitment to the failed plan by providing yet more resources to its original objectives, and likely supplementing them with more muscular and direct action. Military intervention must be based on the conditions on the ground, the capabilities and standing interests of the parties involved, and a viable end state to which the intervening parties can affix a strategy. Ignoring obvious truths - that foreign special forces are international forces, that foreign armament of rebels is proxy warfare, that regime change and power politics, not civilian protection, will guide armed rebel and intervening partner behavior alike - may provide for a satisfying narrative with which to assuage our rightfully anguished consciences, but it woefully fails policymakers’ responsibilities to their citizens and armed forces, nor, ultimately, will it provide the basis for adquately protecting civilians.

Posted in Syria, War | 2 Comments

Thinking About Thinking About War

by Diana Wueger Posted on February 21, 2012

I spent January listening to the first half of Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, in which she dissects the run-up to World War I. Tuchman describes conversations taking place across Europe in which generals and politicians alike are all, “We’re absolutely going to be home by Christmas. There is no possible way that couldn’t happen. The other side? Pushovers. Probably won’t even show up to fight. Also this is totally a great idea and we will get everything we want out of this war. EVERYTHING.”

We all know how well that worked out.

Reading the heated op-eds about the necessity of war with Iran and/or Syria, it strikes me that they’re nothing new. The strange overconfidence on display in the 1910s - that war would be quick, easy, and end favorably - was echoed in the run up to Iraq and is being rehashed today. This reminded me of the Rubicon Theory of War, a barely-noted article from last summer’s issue of International Security that offers valuable food for thought, particularly for those charged with thinking or writing about war. The authors address the overconfidence conundrum, namely, that people who should know better than to think war will be quick and easy often act like this is their first rodeo. The authors conclude:

When people believe they have crossed a psychological Rubicon and perceive war to be imminent, they switch from what psychologists call a “deliberative” to an “implemental” mind-set, triggering a number of psychological biases, most notably overconfidence. These biases can cause an increase in aggressive or risky military planning. Furthermore, if actors believe that war is imminent when it is not in fact certain to occur, the switch to implemental mind-sets can be a causal factor in the outbreak of war, by raising the perceived probability of military victory and encouraging hawkish and provocative policies.

Their research suggests humans are only rational actors until we make a decision - cross the Rubicon - at which point our mental apparatus will go through whatever logical leaps necessary to avoid questioning that decision. The authors frame this idea in terms of mind-sets - deliberative vs. implemental - to account for the full range of attendant biases, which they’ve laid out in a helpful table:

Essentially, when we’ve crossed the Rubicon, we are less likely to accept information that does not support our decision, and we’re more likely to believe we will be successful regardless of evidence to the contrary. This overconfidence leads to riskier war plans and a higher likelihood of going to war. As for the standard rational actor model, the authors suggest that rationality goes out the window once a decision is taken:

Early on in the decisionmaking process, a leader is more likely to be in a deliberative mind-set and may approximate a rational actor. Later during the crisis, the same leader is more likely to be in an implemental mind-set, and may display a range of biases that deviate from rationality.

This phenomenon affects the general public as well. Take Iraq:

For example, in 2003, regime change in Iraq might have been relatively straightforward, but postwar stabilization was likely to be difficult and protracted. Nevertheless, as the invasion drew near, Americans concluded that success in both of these objectives would be swift. … In the months leading up to the conflict, a majority expected “a long and costly involvement” in Iraq. But judgments switched immediately before the war, such that a majority now expected “a fairly quick and successful effort.”

Again, we know how well that turned out.

It should be noted that this decision needn’t be a conscious one, nor is it necessarily predicated upon a rational cost/benefit analysis. However, when one writes that the alternatives are narrowing, as Elliot Abrams did, and that some action must be taken, and then concludes that action must be military in nature, we can assume the die’s been cast:

If success were made of speeches and sanctions the Obama policy would be marvelous — and adequate. The problem is that Syria is at war, and one side or the other will win that war. It will be the Assad/Russia/Iran/Hezbollah side, or the popular uprising with its European, American, and Arab support. A deus ex machina ending is possible, wherein some Syrian Army generals push Assad out and agree to a transition away from Assad and Alawite rule. But such a step by the generals is far more likely if they conclude that Assad’s war is lost.

So we must make sure he loses. Directly or indirectly, the next step is to provide plenty of money and arms, training, and intelligence to the Free Syrian Army and other opponents of the Assads.

Abrams notes that there could be problems down the road, but dismisses them with a handwave: “All those questions will come with victory against the bad guys — but only with victory.” As though the path to victory will have no bearing on the eventual outcomes. As though arming the opposition is a surefire way to win this war. As though there’s no way it won’t be over in days, not weeks or years.

An attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would also be challenging - which hasn’t hampered calls to go ahead and get on with it already. Polling suggests that Americans are in favor of military strikes if it meant preventing a nuclear Iran. Troublingly, the repetition of the expectation that strikes are imminent means we’re more likely to believe that it is true (psychological biases again), which sets up a feedback loop in which we perceive war as imminent - and thus cross the Rubicon.

Whether we should get into a war with/in Iran/Syria is outside the scope of this blog post. Rather, I want to make clear that there are unconscious psychological biases that come along with the acceptance of war that make it difficult to maintain objectivity and rationality - and that we must be on our guard against sloppy thinking. Once we’ve committed to the idea, we begin to assume things will go our way, and we avoid thinking about - and planning for - negative outcomes. If the actual decision about going to war is a determinant of our ideas about how that war will play out - and not, say, intelligence about an opponent’s military preparedness, or the potential negative consequences of war, or even the difficulty of executing the war - it’s crucial that we guard against overconfidence. And it’s not like we can’t fight against that inclination; it’s just that we often don’t.

At the end of every war, somebody says, “This. This is the end of war. Now, finally, it’s too expensive/too stupid/too wasteful/too destructive.” And indeed, it seems like the costs of war are rising and the benefits shrinking. But we seem incapable of the necessary in-the-moment questioning our cognitive processes to determine whether this war, just this one, will actually be easy, cheap, and rewarding, or if we just really want it to be.

It’s critical for leaders, intellectuals, the media, and the general public alike to understand consciously what mind set we are in and the attendant cognitive biases that brings. These sort of metacognitive tasks are admittedly difficult - our knowledge about how and what we think is limited, and gaining greater control over those processes is challenging (read Thinking, Fast and Slow for some great - and disturbing - examples of this). But it’s not impossible, and given the stakes, I’d argue that we are all responsible for knowing when we’ve cast our lots. Without the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to recognize when we’ve switched to an implemental mindset - and to then guard against the resultant surge of overconfidence - we’re doomed to the same debates and the same outcomes.

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Post script: It was while chewing over all that that I made those sarcastic Go The Fuck To War prints. I’ve never been good at artist statements, so I’m going to assume y’all understand what they mean (to wit: once you start thinking war is an okay idea, you’re probably gonna be a little too enthusiastic about it). Anyway, I forgot that I was supposed to give two of them away last week, so! You get another chance: head over to this post and comment and you’ll be entered to win. Manage your expectations.

Posted in Analysis, War | 12 Comments

On Taking Nonviolence Seriously

by caidid Posted on February 8, 2012

Daniel Serwer has a post at the Atlantic arguing for the use of nonviolent means in the Syrian conflict:

The point is to demonstrate wide participation, mock the authorities, and deprive them of their capacity to generate fear. When I studied Arabic in Damascus a few years ago, I asked an experienced agitator friend about the efficacy of the security forces. She said they were lousy. “What keeps everyone in line?” I asked. “Fear,” she replied. If the oppositions resorts to violence, it helps the authorities: by responding with sometimes random violence, they hope to re-instill fear.

It has stirred up mentions of unicorns and rainbows and that sort of thing from the many who discount this as a pipe dream. I understand the urge to dismiss nonviolence in the face of the brutality of the Syrian regime. I certainly don’t know what is best for the people of Syria in this conflict, and I’m not sure I would have the courage to urge non-violence to people who are being attacked by their own government daily, but I would urge anyone dismissing nonviolent means as completely absurd to read a little Gene Sharp (whose work Mr. Serwer references in his piece) first.

Early in his seminal work From Dictatorship to Democracy (pdf), Sharp makes a key point about the why for nonviolent means, that ”By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.”

It is not a casual use of nonviolence that Sharp encourages; he urges very calculated use of nonviolent tactics as part of a thorough plan. He puts great emphasis on the importance of strategic planning in revolution. He is quite clear that it is not enough to simply to use nonviolent means randomly. Carefully planned use of non-violence has much more potential for effectiveness than any willy-nilly application of various means.

Very careful thought based on a realistic assessment of the situation and the capabilities of the populace is required in order to select effective ways to achieve freedom under such circumstances.

If one wishes to accomplish something, it is wise to plan how to do it. The more important the goal, or the graver the consequences of failure, the more important planning becomes. Strategic planning increases the likelihood that all available resources will be mobilized and employed most effectively. This is especially true for a democratic movement – which has limited material resources and whose supporters will be in danger – that is trying to bring down a powerful dictatorship. In contrast, the dictatorship usually will have access to vast material resources, organizational strength, and ability to perpetrate brutalities.

“To plan a strategy” here means to calculate a course of action that will make it more likely to get from the present to the desired future situation. In terms of this discussion, it means from a dictatorship to a future democratic system. A plan to achieve that objective will usually consist of a phased series of campaigns and other organized activities designed to strengthen the oppressed population and society and to weaken the dictatorship. Note here that the objective is not simply to destroy the current dictatorship but to emplace a democratic system. A grand strategy that limits its objective to merely destroying the incumbent dictatorship runs a great risk of producing another tyrant.*

Agree with Sharp’s views or not, he has done an enormous amount of work on nonviolent means of revolution, and has been very influential in various movements around the world. (If you have the opportunity to see the recent documentary about him, How to Start a Revolution, I definitely recommend doing so). He frames it in such a way that invites you to consider nonviolence as a serious approach, not a refuge of weakness, and makes a strong case for at least taking it seriously as an option.

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* Sharp’s warnings about planning for the aftermath have a great deal of resonance, too, when considering the current situation in Egypt, to name one.

While spontaneity has some positive qualities, it has often had disadvantages. Frequently, the democratic resisters have not anticipated the brutalities of the dictatorship, so that they suffered gravely and the resistance has collapsed. At times the lack of planning by democrats has left crucial decisions to chance, with disastrous results. Even when the oppressive system was brought down, lack of planning on how to handle the transition to a democratic system has contributed to the emergence of a new dictatorship.

Posted in War | 2 Comments