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News analysis and commentary from Phillip Carter -- now located at http://www.intel-dump.com 
"For military analysis, stop by Intel Dump" -Time "(One) of the more interesting war blogs on the Internet." -The Washington Post "[A]n excellent source for real-time military analysis" -Slate RSS Feed E-Mail: inteldump -at- yahoo.com About Phil Phil's Articles 'Intel Dump' Defined Noteworthy Blogs How Appealing Volokh Conspiracy Instapundit Mark Kleiman Kaus Files Oxblog Dynamist Balkinization The Paper Chase FedLawyerGuy Statutory Construction Zone SCOTUS Bag and Baggage Unlearned Hand Winds of Change CalPundit One Hand Clapping VodkaPundit Defense Tech Priorities & Frivolities SGT Stryker Outside the Beltway Citizen Smash BlackFive StrykerNews Plastic Gangster Stop the Bleating Tapped Dan Drezner Brad DeLong War & Piece IRAQ NOW Dagger JAG Law From The Center Noteworthy Books 1. An Army at Dawn 2. Terror and Liberalism 3. Embedded 4. In the Company of Soldiers 5. The New Face of War 6. America's Role in Nation-Building 7. Boyd 8. American Empire 9. Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals 10. A Problem from Hell Archives Amazon.Com Terrorism & Security Bestsellers (c) 2002-2004 Phillip Carter 
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Tuesday, August 12, 2003
A cartoonist with a sense of humor Daryl Cagle, who for some time has run Slate's political cartoon section, has a weblog. From what I see so far, it's great -- Cagle's weblog belongs at the top of every reader's list for morning news & views. No stranger to controversy, Daryl Cagle reprints this letter and rebuttal cartoon from LA Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez. The new cartoon is a response to a previous cartoon from Mr. Ramirez which caricatured President Bush as the victim in a famous Vietnam War photo of a public execution. Following a visit by the Secret Service, Mr. Ramirez had this to say: "The controversy over this cartoon is ridiculous. As political cartoonists, we are supposed to push the envelope to try to engage the reader in debate. I intentionally chose to use a disturbing image to convey a very salient point. President Bush is the target of a political assassination because of sixteen words which he uttered in the State of the Union speech that were, by the way, accurate. The cartoon was obviously not meant to encourage violence but was a reference to a famous photograph from the Vietnam era. There is a parallel between the politicization of the Vietnam war and the deconstruction of the success and the politicization of the current Iraq war. That photograph is one of the most powerful images from the Vietnam era . It was perceived as an a unjust act in an war mired in politics. Metaphorically, there are people currently engaged in the political assassination of our president. Those with political motivations are using the uranium story to attack the president. The photo is a very disturbing image. The editorial cartoon is meant to be a disturbing image. But the current manifestation of attacks on the president driven by political ambition rather than fact is far more disturbing then my cartoon. "You really have to see the cartoon that Mr. Ramirez penned to go with this letter... Another 3ID brigade comes home The Associated Press reports that the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, has returned home to Fort Stewart, Georgia. The last of the division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team landed at Hunter Army Airfield to turn in their weapons and the rest of their combat gear before being released to their families. Only the division's 1st Brigade remains in Iraq, and it is scheduled to begin heading home in the next few weeks. One veteran's battle for disability benefits The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a brilliant article this morning on the case of Jason Stiffler, an Army soldier who was seriously injured in Afghanistan. Following his fall from a watchtower, Stiffler went through several hospitals and medical evaluations before being given a partial disability by the Army -- good for $731 a month. Stiffler appealed that adjudication, but ran headlong into an Army and VA bureaucracy seemingly designed to frustrate veterans. Mr. Stiffler's story shows the human toll when critical benefits judgments are delayed, and the confusion veterans and their families often feel when they're forced to confront bureaucracy. It also illustrates some of the flaws in the $60.4 billion veterans agency, and how those problems could prove overwhelming as veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq start to enter the VA's rolls.Thoughts... I can sympathize with Mr. Stiffler, as a veteran who has gone through the VA process to seek a disability rating. (I have a 10% disability for leg injuries sustained on active duty) The process is Byzantine, and I can only imagine how it treats lower-ranking soldiers who don't have the legal or bureaucratic experience that I do. In fact, I sought my VA rating at the same time I took Administrative Law at UCLA, and I found that knowledge to be invaluable in dealing with the VA. There's something wrong with a VA system that takes a law degree to navigate. VA Secretary Principi is doing a good job of pushing the VA to become more responsive to the veterans who need the care the most. His proposal to shift resources to lower-income and service-disabled veterans -- to the detriment of higher-income, non-disabled veterans -- is the right thing to do. Secretary Principi has also pushed an aggressive program of privatization to purchase more medical resources for each dollar of VA funding, and I think that's also the right thing to do. The VA's mission is clear: it must be ready to deal with the bow wave of veterans about to leave the service after fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Historical data suggests that the majority of those who have fought in these wars will not reenlist at the end of their enlistments, and that hundreds of thousands of combat veterans will soon reenter the civilian world. Many will leave the service with injuries from combat, or conditions that merit a VA disability rating. The VA must be ready to serve these men and women when they come home. Krugman: Privatization partly to blame for American problems in Iraq? NYT columnist/economist takes on the Pentagon, but his ducks aren't all in a row Paul Krugman takes the Bush Administration and Pentagon to task in his New York Times column today. Some of this is certainly justified, but Krugman takes some license with the facts to make the ultimate argument that privatizing certain military functions has led to problems for the military in Iraq. Here's his basic argument: The U.S. military has always had superb logistics. What happened? The answer is a mix of penny-pinching and privatization ?— which makes our soldiers' discomfort a symptom of something more general.Analysis: Krugman's first mistake is to rely too heavily on the reporting of Col. David Hackworth. I respect Col. Hackworth a great deal, both for his military record and his criticisms of Washington. But Col. Hackworth has a particular agenda that includes a lot of stuff that Paul Krugman probably doesn't know about -- or doesn't agree with. Moreover, Hack's criticisms provoke such a visceral reaction in the Pentagon that anything citing him will immediately be rejected by the Pentagon establishment. Even if this was a more accurate piece, its citation to Col. Hackworth would diminish its credibility in the halls of the Pentagon. Citing authority with that effect can be risky. History also matters. Military history is conspicuously absent from Krugman's column. In the realm of military affairs, history matters a great deal because you rarely want to advocate for things that haven't been done successfully before under fire. In fact, privatization has been used with some success by various nations at various times in the world. "Mercenary" armies are one example, though an unsavory one. Another example could be the way industry was co-opted in the mass mobilization efforts of WWI and WWII. There is a fuzzy line between contracting out for services from industry, and simply enlisting industry in the cause. Krugman fails to account for this gray area. Here are some other points that leaped out at me while reading Krugman's piece: 1. Krugman starts his column with a description of American woe in Iraq -- based on the griping of a soldier about food. A few days ago I talked to a soldier just back from Iraq. He'd been in a relatively calm area; his main complaint was about food. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, his unit was still eating the dreaded M.R.E.'s: meals ready to eat. When Italian troops moved into the area, their food was "way more realistic" ?— and American troops were soon trading whatever they could for some of that Italian food.This should bring a smile to any veteran's face, because it's a time-honored tradition in the Army to gripe about food. In fact, they taught us as new lieutenants that your soldiers probably had a real problem if they weren't griping about their food, and that such gripes about Army chow were a sign of good morale. Frankly, I'm not a fan of eating MREs for 4 weeks straight, let alone 4 months. But I'm not too concerned when I see this gripe in the news... in the pantheon of Army b*tching, it's pretty low. 2. Krugman cites to some letters on Hack's website, including one where soldiers complain about water supplies. One writer reported that in his unit, "each soldier is limited to two 1.5-liter bottles a day," and that inadequate water rations were leading to "heat casualties." An American soldier died of heat stroke on Saturday; are poor supply and living conditions one reason why U.S. troops in Iraq are suffering such a high rate of noncombat deaths?This is a flat-out false statement. The truth is, according to Sergeant Major of the Army Jack Tilley during a recent press conference in Iraq, that soldiers are being issued two 1.5 liter plastic bottles of water today in addition to their regular water supply, which is provided in 500-gallon "water buffaloes" and other means. In fact, the planning factor for a soldier in a desert environment is something like 10 gallons of water per day -- plus between 10-50 pounds of ice per day (Note: a lot of this ice goes to food preparation and bulk water cooling, not directly to the soldier). A significant portion of the logistical effort goes to pushing this "Class I" supply forward to soldiers in the field, and distributing it. The physiology of this is obvious. If soldiers in Iraq were being forced to live on 3 liters/day, they would die. Clearly, there is other water out there. Some soldiers are simply whining because they can't get an unlimited supply of Evian bottles, the way they did in Gulf War I when the Saudis footed the bill and the American supply lines weren't set up yet. I say: "Tough". Get your water in bulk from the water buffalo, fill your CamelBak, and deal with it. A note on CamelBaks: I could write a book on this subject, from my active duty experience in the desert, but I won't. Suffice to say, the CamelBak is the best tool for hydration available, and every soldier should have one -- but doesn't yet. The Army has not procured these for every soldier in every unit. Many units have taken the initiative to spend their own funds on a commercial purchase, and many more soldiers (like me) have bought their own. Personally, I would buy enough CamelBaks to had one to every soldier in CENTCOM. Krugman could have written a great column (like this one) on the private gadgets that soldiers have bought for themselves because the military failed to buy them. 3. Next, Krugman tries to link military cost-cutting to homeland security cost-cutting, to make a more general argument about the Bush Administration. Once again, his argument falls flat: Military corner-cutting is part of a broader picture of penny-wise-pound-foolish government. When it comes to tax cuts or subsidies to powerful interest groups, money is no object. But elsewhere, including homeland security, small-government ideology reigns. The Bush administration has been unwilling to spend enough on any aspect of homeland security, whether it's providing firefighters and police officers with radios or protecting the nation's ports.Not quite. The Bush Administration has poured money into the new Department of Homeland Security, and has given quite a bit of money to local fire/police departments for things like chemical-protective gear. But structurally, our domestic anti-terrorism effort is structurally impaired by the fact that it depends on state/local funding, not federal funding, and most state/local governments are strapped right now. (See, e.g., my home state of California) This is an unintended consequence of the 10th Amendment, which reserves general powers to the states. Nearly all of America's anti-terrorism capacity -- save the FBI and CIA -- resides at the state/local level. Krugman, as an economist, ought to understand these structural issues and be able to explain precisely why domestic security goes underfunded. Instead, he simply blames the Bush Administration's penchant for privatization -- something which I think is inaccurate and unfair. 4. Going back to Iraq, Krugman says the military's contracts in Iraq have been a failure. He writes: The U.S. military has shifted many tasks traditionally performed by soldiers into the hands of such private contractors as Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. The Iraq war and its aftermath gave this privatized system its first major test in combat ?— and the system failed.Interestingly, he cites to the same article from Newhouse News Service that I wrote about here and here. First, Krugman's wrong that this is the first major performance by contractors in a battle zone. Civilian contractors played an enormous role in the first Gulf War, sparking a great deal of argument in the policy and academic sector over the wisdom of privatization. (Legal scholars also debated the Geneva Convention implications of this trend) Second, contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root have followed the U.S. military for some time, such as to places like Bosnia and Kosovo. They've done a good job in those places, often with similar dangers (e.g. landmines), and they know the operational environment. Krugman fails again to understand the details of the problem here, which largely are a matter of government contracts law. (See this note) No business is going to take a contract where the costs outweigh the benefits. In government contracts law, there are ways to shift the risk and extra costs (such as insurance) to the government, but those weren't done in Iraq initially because of faulty assumptions by the government about the post-war situation. The contractors in question made a business decision to back away from contracts they thought were too risky. But ultimately, it's the government that bears the responsibility to build a contract (since the clauses are all imputed as a matter of law with little negotiation) that works for both parties. Once again, Krugman ought to know this as an economist, or at least pick up the phone to call a government contracts lawyer who can explain it to him. Bottom Line: Krugman's column adds little to the debate over America's endeavor in Iraq. I could spend more time picking his column apart, but I won't because I think you get my general point. There are problems in Iraq, most of which trace back to poor planning before the war that was predicated on bad assumptions about the post-war situation. But those problems are steadily being fixed, and we are steadily making progress. As an economist, Krugman could provide great insight into the Iraqi economy and its failings, rather than going out on a limb to write about military affairs. This column falls flat because he doesn't provide the detailed analysis necessary to connect each of these issues to the problems in Iraq. Update: I've been tapped as a member of the "Krugman Truth Squad" by Donald Luskin in his National Review Online column. I try to avoid taking political sides, as NRO does, but I'm flattered by the quotes nonetheless. Mr. Luskin has an interesting column, summing up some of the other authors (such as Robert Musil) who criticized Prof. Krugman's column on privatization. It's worth a read. Sunday, August 10, 2003
WSJ: Guilty pleas expected in first military tribunals Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that 2 British citizens and an Australian citizen are expected to plead guilty before a military tribunal in order to avoid harsh punishment -- possibly including the death penalty. The three men are currently being held as "unlawful enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and have been put on a short list of 6 individuals who are under consideration for the tribunals. Pleas are being hashed out for these three between the U.S., British and Australian governments. Two other defendants are expected to face adversarial tribunals in the near future. British subjects Feroz Abassi and Moazzam Begg and Australian David Hicks are among six prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba that President Bush decided last month could be prosecuted before the tribunals. The three, currently subject to indefinite detention as unlawful enemy combatants, have been providing information to intelligence agents, and officials say they wish to reward the prisoners with a clear resolution of their futures.Analysis: Mr. Bravin's article has a lot of other good stuff. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the full text here because of copyright laws. I highly recommend buying the Monday issue of The Journal, or waiting until Tuesday to read the post-scoop story in the NY Times or Washington Post. This is a big story, and one that should hit the American Bar Association's annual meeting in San Francisco with a tremendous "thud". On the merits... It's not clear whether justice is being served here. On the one hand, taking prisoners and trying them for war crimes is an accepted part of war. On the other, we have not scrupulously followed the law with respect to these prisoners (See Art. V, Third Geneva Convention, requiring a "competent tribunal" to determine the status of any prisoner). And there are legitimate legal questions as to whether the President has the authority to order military tribunals under his 13 Nov 01 order. These tribunals will live under a cloud as long as these questions linger. The Economist ran a strongly worded editorial last month excoriating the Bush Administration for its use of military tribunals. Such trials diminish the moral and political capital that the U.S. enjoys in the world, and diminish the values that stand in stark opposition to our enemies. I'm not sure what the right outcome should be here, since I'm not privy to the actual facts of these cases. But I think The Economist raises valid concerns about the fallout from our choice to use military tribunals. We should weigh this step with a great deal of caution. Friday, August 08, 2003
Soldiers who criticized SecDef get "a good talk" In a sign that our junior leaders know how to lead their soldiers, the Washington Post reports today that soldiers who spoke out in the media against various political leaders have received no formal discipline -- but a stern lecture from their senior sergeants instead. "Those soldiers were not formally disciplined per se," said a senior Army officer in Washington who declined to be named. Instead, the soldiers received "a good talk" from senior noncommissioned officers who "reinforced their obligations as soldiers to respect their military and civilian chain of command," the officer added.Sounds about right to me. Senior NCOs are the "backbone of the Army", and the good ones have more informal authority than their officers could ever dream of. A stern talk from a senior Command Sergeant Major -- even to a lieutenant or captain -- can be extremely effective. I am impressed by the discipline of the chain-of-command to, not to do anything formal which might be seen as retaliation against these soldiers. This was the right course of action, and I imagine these soldiers will keep their thoughts to themselves and their mates in the future. DoD IG: Soldiers may encourage foreign trade in sex slaves The Los Angeles Times reports in a pithy 2-paragraph wire-service piece that a new Pentagon report blames American soldiers for the continued sex slavery trade in South Korea. The report comes from the Pentagon's Inspector General, who is responsible for internal investigations in the Defense Department. U.S. soldiers visiting South Korean brothels may have encouraged sex slavery because of a lack of understanding about human trafficking, the Defense Department's inspector general reported. Military patrols were sometimes too friendly with bar owners and often didn't report sex slavery because of a misperception that they needed solid evidence, the report said. That's all that was reported. Having recently served in Korea for a year with the 2nd Infantry Division, I can add a little bit more information. 1. The connection between soldiers and brothels is not a new one, and probably not one that the U.S. or Korean government can do a lot about. The same connection exists in the U.S. near major military bases, and I imagine it does for other nations as well. Without passing moral judgment on this, I think I can say the two things go together as a matter of economics, demographics, and sociology. 2. American soldiers typically serve a one-year, unaccompanied, "hardship" tour in Korea. The overwhelming majority of American soldiers in Korea are male, due to the higher-than-average concentration of combat units in the 2nd Infantry Division, and due to military rules preventing pregnant soldiers from moving to Korea -- and requiring their redeployment before they come due. Speaking as an economist, this means a large customer pool unencumbered by their families, who might normally act as constraints on their behavior. 3. The Korean economy has responded to the U.S. presence in a myriad of ways, from the establishment of bars and restaurants off base, custom tailoring shops, and brothels. The lines between bars, clubs, dance clubs and brothels are quite blurry, and it was never clear to me as a Military Police lieutenant how these businesses were regulated by the Korean authorities. The Koreans nominally outlawed prostitution, and U.S. commanders also issued edicts against the practice. But that's not to say it didn't happen. 4. The real problem here is the way the Korean (there are very few foreign nationals in the Korean club business) club owners staff their establishments. Unfortunately, that's a matter beyond American control (though we can certainly influence the Korean government in this regard). Korean businesses choose various forms of low-wage employment, to include forms of indentured servitude, to staff their businesses. The regulation of this activity falls squarely on the shoulders of the South Korean government. However, the South Korean government has been reticent to regulate these employment practices because of the spillover that might have into other low-wage employment areas, such as manufacturing and agriculture. 5. American forces provide the customer base for these bars. By failing to lock-down soldiers on post, it can be argued that U.S. commanders contribute to their prosperity. But American MPs are charged with the mission of keeping soldiers out of brothels, and with preventing prostitution to the best of their ability. Commanders often discipline soldiers for failing to follow orders, and STD detection often leads to some sort of administrative action against soldiers. More than that, I'm not sure what else can be done. Bottom Line: The U.S. has a moral obligation to oppose human slavery wherever it can. In pure economic terms, our soldiers contribute to the practice in Korea by providing the demand -- which drives Korean businesses to purchase the supply. I'm not sure what the U.S. can do itself to stop this practice, short of lock-down or redeployment. But we have an awful lot of influence with the South Korean government, and we ought to use that influence to stop this horrible problem. Update: I asked Mark Kleiman for an economist's thoughts on the problem, and he was kind enough to post them on his weblog. Mark writes about some of the complexities of the matter, particularly with regard to enforcement and its unintended effects on the "legal" prositution trade. Definitely worth a read. Update II: The Pacific Stars & Stripes reports on the U.S. reaction to this report. Top American officials in Seoul have pledged to take a "hard look" at what's going on with respect to American soldiers and sex slavery in Korea. Lt. Gen. Charles C. Campbell, 8th Army commander and USFK chief of staff, said in a written statement to Stars and Stripes that the command is encouraged by the inspector general’s “positive response to our aggressive actions so far in addressing these illegal and wholly unacceptable activities.”But at least one Korean official working on the issue was skeptical that any unilateral action by U.S. commanders could make a significant difference. The reality is, though, the trafficking situation may be beyond USFK capacity to solve, said Yu Yong-nim, head of My Sister’s Place in Uijongbu, a nongovernmental organization that helps women who have been involved in the sex trade. The military presence exacerbates the sex trade problem, but the issue is one that needs to be addressed on a higher level by both the U.S. and South Korean governments, she said.More to follow... Light Blogging: My laptop hard drive crashed this week. Until it returns from the manufacturer, I will not have my normal 24/7 access to the newswire or the 'net. Intel Dump will resume regular updates as soon as possible. Until then, I will be able to write 3-5 times per week. In my absence, please continue to visit my friends and supporters, both listed below and on my blogroll: - The Volokh Conspiracy - DefenseTech by Noah Shachtman - Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall - Mark Kleiman - Dynamist by Virginia Postrel - Winds of Change - One Hand Clapping - TAPPED - KausFiles - Balkinization And last but not least, for the best streaming legal news on the web, check out Howard Bashman's How Appealing Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Arnold's in The LA Times and NY Times websites both carry the banner that Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to run for Governor of California in the Oct. 7 recall election. My prediction: we're about to be deluged by trite Arnold-related headlines, metaphors, and leads by the media. Who wants to bet that some paper will run the headline tomorrow "Total Recall"? Or that someone will use "terminate" as a verb in their story with respect to Arnold's intentions towards Gray Davis? Or that the phrase "true lies" will be used to describe Arnold's campaign literature? Or that some political cartoonist will borrow the Conan motif for a cartoon? Or that "hasta la vista, baby" will be printed on t-shirts by the Recall Gray Davis crowd? Update: It appears that Arnold has drawn first blood (trite Stallone action movie reference) by invoking several of his own lines on Jay Leno, according to the LA Times: The studio audience whooped and cheered after he made the surprise announcement. In the course of his interview with Leno, the popular movie star and former body builder invoked several of the lines that made him famous, including, "Say hasta la vista to Gray Davis," and "When I go to Sacramento, I'm going to pump it up."Ouch... I hope that Mr. Schwarzenegger has a good speechwriter in the wings who can ween him off these lines as quickly as possible -- for the good of California. Military blood supplies run low -- Pentagon launches blood drive The Pentagon announced today that it desperately needs more Type O blood to support continued operations in Iraq. The Armed Services Blood Program is currently running a campaign to gather blood donations from service members who meet its donor criteria. The ASBP's situation is complicated by the fact that it only accepts donations from active duty service members, government employees, retirees and military family members. Additionally, DoD policy proscribes blood donations from soldiers who have recently redeployed from Operation Iraqi Freedom, Korea, or any other area where malaria is endemic. In particular, the ASBP says it needs Type O blood. "Type O donors are the first line of defense for trauma victims. Until a blood type can be verified, Type O blood is used to keep trauma victims alive," said Air Force Lt. Col. Ruth Sylvester, Armed Services Blood Program director. "Once their blood type is determined, type-specific blood is transfused. But without Type O blood available, many patients would never make it until the test results came back."Bottom Line: If you have a DoD affiliation, give blood to help your brothers and sisters in arms. If you don't have a DoD affiliation, you should contact your local Red Cross to give blood there instead. It's one small thing that we can do to help those in need. TIA becomes a reality... in Florida The Washington Post reports that Florida , in conjunction with the the federal Department of Homeland Security, has plans to field the "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange", or "Matrix" program. At its core, this system is a database designed to integrate information from several different sources, correlate it, look for non-obvious relationships, analyze it, and produce intelligence for police and security agencies to use in the war on terrorism. Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.Put simply, this is a local version of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program. It does almost the same things, except the Matrix does not integrate as much information from as many sources. Matrix also does not tie-in to the intelligence community the way TIA was supposed to. Nonetheless, the concept is the same: to use a large, sophisticated database to sift through large numbers of "indicators" in order to put the dots together for counter-terrorism analysts. I think this is a good system and that the civil liberties risks can be managed. I also think it's a great idea to put this system in the hands of local police where the real anti/counter-terrorism takes place. More to follow... Update I: Thanks to Instapundit for the link. Update II: DailyKOS has some interesting comments and predictions on this system, and what may result from its implementation in Florida. While proponents claim this information is already available to law enforcement, none of it is available correlated. Simply put, the Matrix will combine your credit history, criminal record and address into one, easy to read database and your inclusion has nothing to do with your criminal history. An abusive police officer husband could use this to track and terrorize an ex-spouse as easily as it could track a supposed terrorist. Information could be illegally sold to criminals, detective and other interested parties as well.I think DailyKOS's factual propositions are correct, but I don't agree with his conclusion. Fundamentally, I think the difference is this: there are people who trust the government to use this data, and there are people who don't trust the government to use this data. I've worked in the security community long enough to trust the people who would be invested with this authority, and to trust the institutional mechanisms which would police that use. But I also recognize that many Americans distrust those same individuals and agencies -- often for legitimate reasons. Support for TIA and TIA-like programs usually boils down to a matter of trust -- either you have it or you don't. Update III: An intelligent reader wrote me to suggest that this Florida program may in fact be a DARPA program in sheep's clothing. I hadn't considered that yet, but it's possible that the Pentagon, DoJ and DHS have decided to farm out TIA to local authorities who could test and prove their concept on a smaller, local level. This does not sidestep any of the legal, ethical, operational or political issues; it merely outsources them to the state/local agencies. But it does reduce the project to a manageable scale, and that's important for operational testing reasons. Testing a TIA-like program in some local setting will also help answer the legal, ethical, practical and operational questions were raised in Washington over TIA. Bottom Line: I don't know that this is an intentional test of the TIA concept, or if this is connected to DARPA and TIA in anyway. The concepts look similar enough for me to make that leap, but it's still a guess. Rumsfeld's new Army chief fires several top Army generals InsideDefense (subscription required) reports (and the San Antonio Express-News confirms) that Gen. Peter Schoomaker has asked several top officers in the Army to step down early in order to make way for his new team. Schoomaker was plucked out of retirement by SecDef Rumsfeld to serve as the Chief of Staff of the Army, and he has been widely seen as someone who will kill a few sacred cows in order to serve the SecDef's the hamburger he wants. This story is the first major indicator of his intentions, and if this story is true, I think it's a pretty bold move. High-ranking officers asked to leave the service, these sources said, include Lt. Gen. John Caldwell, military deputy to the Army's civilian acquisition director; Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, commanding general of the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command; and Lt. Gen. Dennis Cavin, commanding general of the Army Accessions Command. Caldwell and Cavin have told their staffs they are retiring, but Cosumano has not, Army officials said.Sig Christenson, a veteran Pentagon beat reporter, gives us the Pentagon's response in the San Antonio Express-News: The Pentagon contended Tuesday that the personnel actions and others apparently in the wings after Gen. Peter Schoomaker took command Friday don't translate into friction between Rumsfeld and senior Army leaders.True . . . but this is still an abnormal spike in the number of retirements for one point in time. I think it's somewhat disingenous to say that it's just part of normal operations, and that there's no animus on display here. In fact, my friends in the Pentagon tell me there is quite a bit of animus at work here, and that these retirements are indeed being forced. Personally, I think the SecDef ought to come out and say "Yes, I'm asking these generals to retire because I have a new vision for the military and they don't agree with it." I think the average American expects some amount of "housecleaning" by any new executive, whether its the CEO of GE or the Chief of Staff of the Army. It's not illegitimate to say these officers have served their country well, but now the time has come to bring in some new officers with new ideas. This sort of candor about personnel decisions can only help the push for transformation, by making it clear that you either get on board the train for transformation -- or get off at the next stop. Caveat: These officers did serve their country well, and in all cases, carry a wealth of institutional knowledge. I had the opportunity to meet Gen. Paul Kern while I was in 4ID, and to brief him on FBCB2 and other digital combat systems. He really knows his stuff when it comes to transformation, and I think he's a valuable asset to the Army. In the rush to replace old officers with new ones, we should be careful that we don't cast aside some of our best and brightest simply because they don't agree with us. If that means offering these men positions at the Army War College or some other institution to keep their knowledge on tap, then I think we ought to do those things. An "embellishment worthy of the New York Times"? An Air Force lieutenant colonel's letter appears in today's Washington Times to rebut an article which appeared on Aug. 4, 2003, which implied that the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was overflowing with casualties. If the letter author is right (and I imagine he is), this is a pretty bad treatment of the facts. Here's the full text of the letter: A clear case of embellishment worthy of the New York Times was the article by Jon Ward, "War casualties overflow Walter Reed hospital" (Page 1, Monday).Post Script: If you're wondering how an Air Force physician in San Antonio could keep up with the news in Washington, you're asking a pretty good question. The Defense Department runs a great news service called the "Early Bird", which is open to DoD active, reserve and civilian personnel. The site bills itself as "A daily (duty days) concise compilation of the most current published news articles and commentary concerning the most significant defense and defense-related national security issues. Available by 0515 hrs." It's a great resource -- if you have a DoD affiliation, I highly recommend making the Early Bird your one-stop shop for news. Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Rebirth of the Weinberger/Powell doctrine Remember the Powell doctrine? It was really an adaptation of the Weinberger doctrine, which itself was a response to Vietnam. The Powell doctrine essentially said the U.S. would not get involved anywhere militarily without a clear mission, a clear end-state, and a large enough force to do the job with minimal U.S. casualties. The doctrine has become the mantra of the U.S. military officer corps, and in general, I think of it is as pretty good planning guidance. Today, in a press conference, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers used this doctrine in a discussion of Liberia, and troop constraints presently facing the Pentagon. Q: General Myers, on the Liberia. If the U.S. commits a brigade set of soldiers, there's going to be inevitable cries from analysts and commentators that the U.S. is stretched too thin militarily and this is another example of them being stressed. From a purely military perspective, what problem would that cause, if you sent 2(,000) or 3,000 soldiers to Liberia, from just that military stress on the force perspective?So... we're not going to do any missions where: - We don't have a clear mission - We don't have a clear end state - We don't have sufficient force to do the job Does this apply to Iraq? Were these principles printed out on a PowerPoint slide and posted in the work cell of the planners who fashioned the occupation force? There appears to be a disconnect between this doctrine -- which has served us well -- and what we are now doing in Iraq. A failure of the imagination That's how Slate columnist Fred Kaplan describes the Pentagon's failure to effectively or adequately plan for the security and stability of post-war Iraq. Kaplan argues that the Pentagon's leadership should have known what was coming, because of recent experience in previous nation-building endeavors. The sad part is that there were thinkers in the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz circle who knew these things, and even wrote about them, but their ideas were dismissed before the war. Through much of the Bush administration, Wolfowitz could merely have picked up the phone and called a colleague named James Dobbins.Analysis: I recommended Mr. Dobbins' new book last week because I thought it was a good study of an important aspect of American foreign policy -- "nation building". Until reading today's War Stories column, I didn't know about the close connection between Mr. Dobbins and the Bush Administration. A number of scholars have convinced me in recent years that the most dire threats to America's security in coming years will come from failed states (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan) as opposed to powerful states (e.g. China and Russia). If that's true, then an awful lot of nation-building may be our future to pre-empt these threats. Mr. Dobbins' book seems like awfully good reading for this summer. But with all due respect to Mr. Dobbins, this isn't something you need a PhD to figure out. I wrote in May 2003 that American planners had failed to adequately incorporate the lessons from Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan into the plan for Iraq, in this piece for The Washington Monthly. The architects of the war might be forgiven for misgauging the number of troops required had the war come a dozen years ago, when the United States had little experience in modern nation-building. But over the course of the 1990s America gained some hard understanding, at no small cost. From Port-au-Prince to Mogadishu, every recent engagement taught the lesson we're now learning again in Iraq: America's high-tech, highly mobile military can scatter enemies which many times outnumber them, in ways beyond the wildest dreams of commanders just a generation ago. But it's not so easy to win the peace.Coda: It's hard to tell exactly how well (or how poorly) things are going in Iraq. We appear to be gathering, analyzing, and exploiting intelligence in the hunt for Saddam and his henchmen. We also appear to be building some institutions, and moving closer to a free, stabile and prosperous Iraq. On the other hand, we continue to take casualties from guerilla attacks on a daily basis. (Footnote: the media tends to only report fatalities. This masks the numbers of non-fatal attacks that are either fought off by our well-trained soldiers or that don't result in a fatality because of outstanding medical care and body armor.) I still think we have insufficient numbers of troops in Iraq to do the job right. Mr. Dobbins' research appears to confirm this. But getting more troops is a challenge of Herculean proportions. It does not appear that the reserves and National Guard can sustain this deployment for more than a few years. The active-duty force certainly cannot do so. Our only option is to seek support from our allies in NATO and elsewhere. That means going back to the UN for support, since our allies (namely France, Germany, India and most of NATO) will not send troops without the UN's blessing. It may be tough; it may take a lot of political capital; it may result in a large plate of crow being eaten by several senior administration officials. But if we truly care about getting the job done right in Iraq, it must be done. Congratulations to UCLA professor, fellow blogger, and friend Mark A.R. Kleiman for this piece in Slate. Mark has one of the most brilliant minds around when it comes to social policy, and he's also no Ivory Tower wonk -- he's actually practiced in this field as a policy consultant and analyst. In his Slate piece, Mark dissects the reported success of one of President Bush's faith-based initiatives to reduce recidivism among criminals. You don't have to believe in faith-healing to think that an intensive 16-month program, with post-release follow-up, run by deeply caring people might be the occasion for some inmates to turn their lives around. The report seemed to present liberal secularists with an unpleasant choice: Would you rather have people "saved" by Colson, or would you rather have them commit more crimes and go back to prison?Interesting... and worth a read. I also recommend Mark's book Against Excess, which remains one of the seminal works on drug policy, and his weblog for continuing commentary on various issues. PS: The recently-passed California budget contains no salary increase for UC faculty, as well as hefty fee increases for me. I appreciate the decision by Slate's editors to accept this article from Mark, since their stipend will help to offset the legislature's inability to adequately fund the university. I hope Slate continues to help the UC retain quality faculty in this way, since the Ivy League schools are probably chomping at the bit to exploit California's budget crisis as a way to lure top faculty to the East Coast. If only I could sell a few more articles, I could offset this fee increase too . . . Update to "The downside of outsourcing" Several smart readers wrote me to criticize this note as naive, saying that in essence, this was a business deal and these contractors should be able to walk away from a bad business deal at the cost of any purely contractual damages. That's one perspective, and it's a valid one. But I admit to being a little more moralistic than this, especially where contingency contracting is concerned. I think these contractors did a great disservice by backing out of contracts where they could reasonably foresee the risks involved. However, there are two caveats that are important to note as a matter of goverment contract law: - The great majority of clauses in a government contract are specified by the Federal Acquisitions Regulation ("FAR") and agency versions such as the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation ("DFAR"). These terms are generally incorporated into every government contract, and they are not open to negotiation. A contractor would have very little ability to change these terms during negotiations with the government. Essentially, government contracts are a package deal, and you can't negotiate the terms the way you can a private document. - The contractors' decision to scrap their contracts probably took place in the context of a "change". (See Notification of Contract Changes, 48 CFR 43.104) I don't know this, but it's an educated guess. At some point after April 9, the contractors probably looked at Iraq and said that the security situation did not look as good as the Army promised when they agreed to the contract. That situation necessitated increased security and insurance, which increased the cost of the contract. The contractors probably argued that they deserved more money in order to cover these costs, and the Contracting Officer probably rebuked them. Rather than lose money in Iraq, the contractors decided to abandon the contracts, seeing execution as more risky than breach of contract. That may have been a wise business decision. Ultimately our soldiers are the ones left holding the bag. But that does not reflect so much on these contractors as it does on our political leaders who have made the conscious decision to outsource so much of America's defense capability. Put simply, our military cannot go to war today without a legion of contractors in support -- to maintain everything from computers to helicopters to latrines. It should come as no surprise that the current Pentagon leadership wants to outsource even more of the military's support missions -- possibly as many as 320,000 uniformed positions. As we consider this proposal, I think we should carefully weigh the risks, as demonstrated by the problem with getting contractors to go to war. Update II: For more on the art and science of contingency contracting, see this webpage hosted by the Army Materiel Command on the subject. Update III: I've beat up on government contractors a little, and perhaps unfairly. The AP reports today that an American civilian contractor was killed in Iraq by a remote-detonated explosive as he traveled in a convoy of trucks. The contractor was employed by Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, a Houston-based oilfield-services and construction company. Halliburton, the former company of Vice President Dick Cheney, has major contracts for reconstruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan.Clearly, there are risks to doing business in Iraq. Monday, August 04, 2003
Culture Clash: CIA v. Homeland Security Bruce Berkowitz, a former CIA official himself, writes today in the New York Times that there are fundamental differences in the ways that the CIA and Department of Homeland Security use information -- and that these differences will continue to complicate the use of intelligence for domestic security operations. Berkowitz writes from a position of authority, and this argument sounds a lot like what he wrote in The New Face of War. Talk to intelligence professionals about their work, and you will hear them bat around this term: tradecraft. It's the combination of skills, procedures and, especially, the culture that guides them in their jobs. Tradecraft is similar to what people in the private sector call a business model, and just like any corporation, an intelligence organization develops its own tradecraft.Analysis: Ultimately, Berkowitz concludes that the culture gap is too wide and that a new intelligence center is a better answer than trying to pound the square CIA into a round hole. I'm not so sure. The CIA has a great deal of institutional knowledge and competence that can't be built overnight in a new domestic security agency. It may be the case that the two cultures cannot effectively be combined under the same roof. But starting a new agency to deal with a professional threat is like letting the Bad News Bears go up against the Dodgers -- not a good idea. In the long term, this may be right. But until such time as we can create an American version of MI-5, we need the CIA and FBI to work together and shoulder the load. CONGRATULATIONS to Prof. Norman Abrams, who was selected as interim dean for UCLA's law school. Prof. Abrams is an expert on federal criminal law and evidence law, and has served on the UCLA faculty since 1959. I helped him put together a casebook on Anti-Terrorism and Criminal Enforcement, and he is advising me on the course I'm teaching on that subject next year. I think Prof. Abrams is the right choice for the job, and think the school will do well with his hand on the rudder. The downside of outsourcing Soldiers in Iraq learn to live without contractors who failed to show up or perform David Wood reports for the Newhouse News Service from Washington that a number of government contractors have gone AWOL on the Army. Specifically, contractors that were supposed to deliver goods, provide ervices, build facilities, and perform other tasks have declined to a) enter the combat zone or b) do the job once there. Some of this may owe to the ongoing guerilla conflict, and the unwillingness of contractors to have their employees shot at. But our sons and daughters in Iraq are the ones left holding the bag. Though conditions have improved, the problems raise new concerns about the Pentagon's growing global reliance on defense contractors for everything from laundry service to combat training and aircraft maintenance. Civilians help operate Navy Aegis cruisers and Global Hawk, the high-tech robot spy plane.Analysis: First, it should be said that some contractors are doing an outstanding job in Iraq. But this last quote is certainly true. The government cannot order these contractors into combat the way they can order soldiers there. All the Army can do is sign a contract based on a mutual agreement between the parties. However, the government does have a whole host of penalties available to them, including suspension and debarment from competition from future government contracts, and substantial penalties. I would hope that our Justice Department looks into this story, and the conduct of government contractors with respect to Iraq. Where proper, I think the government should pursue civil actions to recover damages from contractors who agreed to these missions and then reneged. Our soldiers deserve better. Could the DARPA terrorism market have worked? Lou Dobbs, the prominent financial news anchor, argues in U.S. News that the planned terrorism futures market may have been the best predictive tool available for the complex irrational phenomenon of terrorism. Dobbs isn't a terrorism expert, but he is an expert on market behavior, and he thinks that markets make a good tool for quantifying collective opinion where a "swag" (super wild a**ed guess) is all you've got. There is a minor problem with all their declarations about the Policy Analysis Market: It just might have been the most accurate predictor of terrorist activity available to us in the war against radical Islamists. Instead of asserting the all-too-familiar orthodoxy of both Washington and New York, the capitals of politically correct-inspired conformity, Wyden, Dorgan, and the editors of the New York Times might have asked how useful a tool the market could have been in the war on terror.Analysis: This may well be right, but it's irrelevant. PAM failed because the powers that be failed to understand the political reality of the situation. DARPA's program officers failed to gauge how much the public would tolerate, and how much distrust lay dormant within the American public towards the government at this moment in time. The program concept itself was probably sound -- especially if the planned market would have been open by invitation only to experts and market professionals. But as the maxim goes: "politics is the art of the possible." You can't do what you can't pass, and in this case, DARPA didn't have a prayer of passing PAM. Friday, August 01, 2003
American military stretches to get the job done in Afghanistan Greg Jaffe and Christopher Cooper report in this morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that the U.S. Army is experiencing significant difficulty in making ends meet across all of its global commitments. Specifically, the mission in Iraq is taking away critical specialty units from the mission in Afghanistan -- civil affairs, MPs, Military Intelligence, and others necessary for nation-building. Frustrations such as this are becoming more common as the Pentagon rejiggers its forces to fight terrorism, handle the reconstruction in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and prepare for potential new missions in places such as Liberia. That is a broader portfolio than the Pentagon used to plan for; prior to Sept. 11, 2001, its strategy was geared to simultaneously handling two intense wars of limited duration. "I've been telling my soldiers the truth: You do need to understand that this is a changed world," says Gen. James Helmly, commander of Army reserve forces.Analysis: Josh Marshall criticized the facile argument that the war on Iraq took away from domestic security funding, e.g. federal sky marshals. For the most part, I agree with him that this is a useless point to make, because the federal appropriations process is much more complicated than that. You can't simply pull money out of the National Defense Authorization Act or DoD emergency supplemental act and put it into the Department of Homeland Security's budget. (But maybe you should be able to, if you really want to be adaptive and flexible enough to respond to a nimble threat like Al Qaeda. . . ) That said, this military resources problem is a zero-sum game where this argument holds water. There are a finite number of Civil Affairs, Military Police, and Intelligence soldiers in the Army -- both active duty and reserve. That finite number is set by Congress every year in the National Defense Authorization Act and by the Pentagon in its force structure documents. It cannot be altered without an act of Congress and a subsequent revision by the Pentagon of the force structure. SecDef Rumsfeld is trying to alter this mix right now, bringing more of these "nation building" units onto active duty. But that will be a tough fight, and we're not there yet. The point is this: the mission in Iraq deprives the mission in Afghanistan of resources like these "nation building" units. There are so many go to around, and the Pentagon has designated Iraq as the priority location right now. It would be a shame if that prioritization caused the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate. Iraq is an important place for a lot of reasons. But Afghanistan is the place where Sept. 11 came from, and it's the failed state that we ought to be most concerned with. Thursday, July 31, 2003
Another casualty in the DARPA wars, part II John Poindexter isn't the real reason DARPA programs keep dying After being scooped by the Wall Street Journal (see below), the New York Times catches up with this report by Eric Schmitt on Poindexter's resignation, based on a background briefing from an anonymous senior defense official. "It's fair to say that the secretary understood what Admiral Poindexter understands, which is that it's difficult for any work that he might be associated with to receive a dispassionate hearing,'' said the official, who spoke to a group of reporters at the Pentagon today on the condition of anonymity.Huh? That's like the classic Rumsfeld-ism that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. (Tell that to a judge on a summary judgment motion and you're toast.) Frankly though, I'm not sure that Poindexter is the issue here. Even if PAM fell outside the purview of his DARPA IAO shop, the project would still have been dead on arrival in the Senate. Why's that? Because the real issue here isn't John Poindexter -- it's the deep mistrust of the Bush Administration on issues of civil liberties that runs through American society like a cold stream. Since Sept. 11, the administration has leaned really far forward in its foxhole on issues of liberty and security, and I think the American people are a little spooked. Part of this owes to a successful campaign by the ACLU and others to frame these issues as a choice between liberty and security; part of it owes to deep divisions in American society over the Bush Administration itself. But in general, I think that DARPA's projects fail because the American people simply don't trust the administration to try anything that might further affect the balance between liberty and security. Let's be honest -- few people actually understand how Total Information Awareness, LifeLog, Genoa, or the Policy Analysis Market will actually work. These are very complex programs that are mostly still in the conceptual stage. Even without knowing those details, people find themselves opposed to these programs. I have seen among my friends in Santa Monica a visceral reaction to these programs -- even after I explained their details. I think this all traces back to trust. Bottom Line: the Bush Administration no longer has the trust of the American people when it comes to civil liberties. This is the "blowback" from the administration's aggressive stance towards anti-terrorism since Sept. 11. The administration aggressively implemented a long list of anti-terrorism laws and policies, including: - The USA PATRIOT Act - The Homeland Security Act - Military commissions - The presidential power to designate "enemy combatants" and hold them indefinitely without counsel - Detention of 600 combatants at Guantanamo without Geneva Convention protection - Broader surveillance powers under FISA - Use of the "material witness" statute to detain citizens - Use of immigration laws to detain and deport U.S. residents Right or wrong, I think the public perception is that these measures collectively encroach on American civil liberties. At some point, the administration had to have known that the American public would say "Enough!" That day has come. Until the administration regains the public trust on these issues, the American people and their legislators are going to torpedo every DARPA program that leaves the Pentagon. Congratulations: Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping has something to be very proud of: his son enlisted yesterday in the U.S. Marine Corps. Don has an MPEG video of the event posted on his weblog. As a retired military officer, Don was able to actually administer the oath of enlistment to his son, which must have been a proud moment. (My parents pinned my 2LT bars on me in June 1997, and I will never forget how that felt) Trigger pullers and video games Noah Shachtman has this interesting article in Wired about the military's decision to buy video games for soldiers stationed overseas. The move is driven largely by morale considerations, but is also geared towards the generation of young men and women now serving in uniform. Just out of high school, thousands of miles from friends and parents, and isolated by language and culture from the people around them, young airmen stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in Europe can find life pretty lonely. Another casualty in the DARPA wars First Total Information Awareness; then the Policy Analysis Market -- now John Poindexter. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports on A2 today that the retired Admiral and Iran-Contra figure will leave the Pentagon's DARPA team within the next several weeks. His resignation comes as Congressmembers on both sides of the aisle took the Pentagon to task for even conceiving of a "betting parlor" for terrorism. John Poindexter , director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, is expected to resign in a matter of weeks, a senior Defense Department official said. The office sought $8 million from Congress to help a private group set up a Policy Analysis Market as a way to provide the Defense Department with "market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events."How's this for irony? CNN/Money reports that you can now speculate on John Poindexter's future in at least one global market. What are the chances that Poindexter is still around at the end of next month? About 70 percent according to the Poindexter contract that began being traded on Dublin-based futures exchange Tradesports. Yep, Poindexter is about to serve as an example of how accurately a futures market can predict future events -- the very idea that he was espousing.I don't know if this is anything more than a glorified office pool -- no different from betting on the NCAA championship or when a co-worker's family might have their next child. But economists are convinced that markets can be harnessed for decisional purposes, as a quantification of collective intelligence and rational-choice. Maybe, but I'm not convinced yet. Wednesday, July 30, 2003
A tough break for Gulf War I POWs U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts handed a defeat today to 17 American POWs from the first Gulf War who sought to attach Iraqi assets currently held by the U.S. government. (Thanks to How Appealing for the link) The decision seemed like the only option for Judge Roberts as a matter of law, but he made his distaste for the outcome clear in his opinion: Plaintiffs immediately offered to compromise their awards in an effort to settle the case amicably with their government which they had served so well and for which they honorably endured severe torture. It was an unrequited gesture. According to the government, the President has the authority to designate a variety of assets seized from Iraq as available for satisfying the compensatory awards to the POW torture victims, but has not chosen to do so. Instead, the Secretary argues that he is entitled to summary judgment on plaintiffs' TRIA claim because Congress in a supplemental appropriations bill authorized the President to make TRIA inapplicable to Iraq, and because the President in a Presidential Determination issued May 7, 2003, exercised that authority.This decision looks like the legally correct outcome, but I don't think Judge Roberts thought it was the right outcome. Unfortunately, that can't change the law, and you can't win an appeal on the basis of sentimentality when the law's against you. This appears to be one case where the right outcome and the legal outcome don't quite match up. Update: The Washington Post reports today that these ex-POWs have no plans for surrender after their temporary setback in the D.C. District Court. Attorneys for the POWs called the decision "incredibly disappointing" and said they would immediately appeal it to the U.S. Court of Appeals. ACLU challenges USA PATRIOT Act in federal court The AP reports that the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a challenge to the continued use of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act in a Detroit federal court. This section broadens the authority of the Justice Department to request documents, library records, and other items about persons connected to foreign intelligence or criminal investigations. It has been the subject of much controversy since the passage of the act in Oct. 2001. The ACLU argues that this provision runs afoul of the Constitution. The suit asks the U.S. District Court to permanently enjoin the Justice Department from using Sec. 215; here's an excerpt: 153. Section 215 violates the Fourth Amendment by authorizing the FBI to execute searches without criminal or foreign intelligence probable cause.First off, there are a lot of hurdles this suit must pass in order to get in the door of a federal court. The federal judiciary can choose to avoid disputes for any number of reasons -- jurisdiction, abstention doctrines, mootness, standing, ripeness, etc. The ACLU is essentially suing on behalf of an amorphous group of individuals who may have been injured. The lawsuit itself admits that it does not know of any Constitutional violations under Sec. 215 because of the secretive nature of the violations themselves. This is a Catch-22 situation, because Sec. 215 prohibits disclosure of searches to the targets of those searches, or to anyone else. The ACLU's complaint does set forth statements by AG Ashcroft and others that Sec. 215 has, in fact, been used in various criminal cases. But I still think these jurisdictional and jurisprudential obstacles will be very hard to get over in this case. Furthermore, the District Court may decline jurisdiction because matters under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") belong to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Moreover, the FISA Court of Review has exclusive appelalte jurisdiction over FISA issues, and that body which decided last year that several parts of the USA PATRIOT Act were constitutional. The Supreme Court declined a request by the ACLU to review this decision. Whatever the outcome, this is going to be a really interesting skirmish in the battle over the USA PATRIOT Act. I suspect that neither side will back down until the Supreme Court rules on the matter, and that may take years. Recommended reading from RAND The RAND Corporation -- a private think-tank that does the bulk of its work for the Defense Department -- has put out two outstanding and timely pieces of research that deserve a look. RAND has also recently put its incredible terrorism database online, in a way that's accessible to the public. - America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq. Abstract: "In Iraq, the United States is facing its most challenging nation-building project since the 1940s. The authors draw lessons from seven case studies—Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan—then apply these to the Iraq case. The results suggest that nation-building will be difficult but possible. Success will, however, require investing sufficient financial, military, and political resources—and time." Hmmm... sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? - New Challenges, New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking. "The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War—and then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—transformed the task of American foreign and defense policymaking. This book outlines the dimensions of that transformation and sketches new tools for dealing with the policy challenges—from modeling and gaming, to planning based on capabilities rather than threats, to personnel planning and making use of "best practices" from the private sector." This book surveys some of the most current thinking out there on how to best plan for the defense sector. I'm not sure all these ideas are right, but they're certainly provocative and worth reading. - The RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database. The RAND Corporation has finally put its outstanding database on terrorism incidents online. "The MIPT Terrorism Database System acts as a "one-stop shopping place" where authorized users can go online to find comprehensive information and intelligence on terrorism. . . . The system includes two RAND databases, the RAND Terrorism Chronology Database and the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database. The RAND Terrorism Chronology Database records international terrorist incidents that occurred between 1968 and 1997, while the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database records domestic and international terrorist incidents occurred from 1998 to present." Alright... so it's a pretty wonkish list. But I guarantee you'll come away from reading this stuff well informed, if not well entertained. If you do choose to read these two books, you may also want to order a copy of Harry Potter for balance. An organized enemy or a decentralized enemy? Which one is better for U.S. forces fighting a guerilla war in Iraq? Mickey Kaus raises that issue in his Slate column, and I think he's right on target. The question has come up in relation to the shape of the enemy we face today in Iraq. Some have argued that we currently face a hierarhical, coordinated enemy force that is choosing to fight us by means of guerilla warfare. I think the evidence points more towards a loosely organized network of guerillas that share common goals, but no recognizable command structure. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek agrees, as this transcript from This Week shows, but I disagree with him about the implications of this conclusion. [M]y sense is that the resistance is also getting less centralized and more sporadic, which is the crucial issue because clearly we are facing guerrilla operations but this is not a guerrilla war because you do not have the same kind of central control. If you think of the Vietnam analogy, which many people are foolishly making, that was the case where you had an inexhaustible supply of people, long supply lines into North Vietnam and the guerrillas were being helped by not just the north Vietnamese government but two superpowers, China and Russia. None of that applies here. Here you have isolated bands of Fedayeen who kind of decide let's look at this road and see if you -find Americans coming down, take them out. Terrible tragedy but a very different circumstance. ... [snip] By and large the attacks do not seem to have the character of an organized resistance in the sense they're not advancing any objectives and finally, frankly, I mean, the people I've talked to say there's absolutely no, within the Pentagon, say there is absolutely no evidence that it's centrally directed.Zakaria's right about the threat, but wrong about the implications. Mickey has some great thoughts on this, but I'd like to offer another reason why Zakaria's conclusion is off. It's clear that these two organizational models present *different* threats, but it's not clear what threat is better for U.S. forces. I would argue that a networked, decentralized enemy is far more dangerous for American forces than a hierarchically organized enemy, regardless of what our experience was in Vietnam. A bunch of folks at RAND and the Naval Postgrad School have done work on network-centric warfare that looks at the implications of decentralized, network organizations in the conduct of warfare. The general conclusion is that it takes a network to fight a network. (See, e.g., the work by John Arquilla and Bruce Hoffman in particular) If this is true, this is very bad for the U.S., because our command structure is anything but a network. The U.S. military command structure is incredibly structured and hierarchical, and this handicaps us in many ways (beyond the scope of this note) for dealing with agile, flexible, decentralized, networked threats. Similarly, our homeland security apparatus is bureaucratized and hierarchical in a way that hobbles it. I hate to keep beating the John Boyd "OODA Loop" horse, but this is the best framework for understanding the core problem. That core problem is this: how can a large, cumbersome, heavily regulated, bureaucracy like the DHS (or DoJ or DoD) respond to an agile, flexible, small, decentralized, networked, innovate threat like Al Qaeda? Answer: it really can't. A decentralized enemy that fights from many different directions with loose coordination is precisely the kind of threat we are not organized to defeat. We may be able to do so with brute force and ignorance, but doing so will be quite costly. More to follow on the implications of network-centric warfare for the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism... Grilled Wolfowitz Senate panel throws Pentagon official on the barbie, so to speak The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post both report the "grilling" of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz yesterday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Frustrated by American progress in Iraq and upset by obfuscation on the part of Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State Josh Bolton, several senators engaged in pointed exchanges with the two men in the open committee meeting. Here's a sample of the discourse from the LA Times: Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the committee, twice got into heated exchanges with Wolfowitz over the question of how much the Iraq operation is costing.Here's a sample of what the Washington Post reported: "I agree with the rest of the members of this committee that I think you, Mr. Bolten, should be more forthright in terms of what the costs are going to be so that we have some idea, and the American people [know], how long, how much," said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio).Exactly. I've said this over and over. America is sacrificing a lot in Iraq on a daily basis. These sacrifices are not abstract; every casualty represents some American son or daughter with parents and friends in the communities from which they came. The Army's plan for Iraq calls for large numbers of National Guard soldiers to be mobilized, which equates to further sacrifice on the part of the American people. I don't think it's too much for these senators to ask: - Why are we in Iraq? - What will it cost to succeed in Iraq? - What is the end state for our mission in Iraq? - What is our plan to get to that end state, and how long might that plan take? Enemy Combatants II Today's Washington Post has the second article in a two-part series on law and terrorism -- this time on the case of alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. The article discusses the Padilla case from the perspective of Padilla's lawyers, so it has some slant towards that perspective. Nonetheless, it does frame the legal issues correctly: Court battles in these cases have centered on two primary questions. First, does the president have the constitutional authority to designate citizens suspected of terrorism as enemy combatants and hold them incommunicado, without charging them with crimes? So far, courts hearing the Hamdi and Padilla cases have ruled that he does, though the challenges continue.Issues of law and terrorism have been subject to a great amount of spin over the last two years since Sept. 11. To many, the issues have been reduced down to a deceptively simple balancing between "liberty" and "security". Unfortunately, it's not that easy. I highly recommend reading some of the original documents in these cases, such as Judge Michael Mukasey's December 2002 order in the Padilla case, for a greater understanding of how all the important issues play out in these cases. Findlaw.Com has built an incredible repository of documents on terrorism, and it's a great resource for this endeavor. Tuesday, July 29, 2003
The threat of "enemy combatant" status Prosecutors delegitimize this status by using it to extract plea bargains Today's Washington Post has a really good article on the case of the "Lackawanna Six" -- six men that pled guilty to providing support to Al Qaeda and attending terror raining camps in Afghanistan. As someone who teaches and writes on issues of law and terrorism, my eyes got wide when I read the piece of the story describing the tactics used by the government to get the plea bargain: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?This is not an isolated incident. On June 22, I wrote about another instance of the government using this tactic to extract a guilty plea from a defendant in federal court. The New York Times reported this in their story about alleged Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, who was accused of plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Prosecutors said Mr. Faris traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in 2000, meeting with Osama bin Laden and working with one of his top lieutenants, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to help organize and finance jihad causes. After returning to the United States in late 2002, officials said, he began casing the Brooklyn Bridge and discussing via coded messages with Qaeda leaders ways of using blowtorches to sever the suspension cables.Analysis: There are several implications for this kind of behavior for the government: The first is that it really does extend the threat of "enemy combatant" status to a broader segment of the population than was previously thought. When the men at Guantanamo were labeled enemy combatants, we could rationalize it by saying "They were picked up in Afghanistan, on a battlefield, with some plausible connection to the war on terrorism." When men like Jose Padilla were so designated, we could arguably say he was an enemy guerilla seeking to wage war on the streets of America. But when we start to see men charged in federal court, treated as civilians by the system, and then threatened with this status, I think it casts doubt on the protections afforded to those in the criminal justice system. Second, I think this delegitimizes the label of "enemy combatant" itself. That term has tremendous weight in court. The government is arguing in the Hamdi and Padilla cases that it should not even be questioned by the courts about this designation. Yet, the government casually uses this label as a threat in cases where the defendants are being charged in civilian court. Third, the casual use of "enemy combatant" status will hurt the government as it tries to win the trust of the American population. A lot has been written about the proper balance between liberty and security since Sept. 11. It takes political capital to pass measures like the USA PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act, and it will take more political capital to pass future anti-terrorism laws. That political capital is built on a foundation of trust between the people and the government; that the people trust the government to abuse their liberty in the name of security. I think the average American will see this story and think the government is abusing its public trust, and going too far in its war on terrorism at the expense of civil liberties. Update: An informed reader writes with a link to a story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) from April 2003 reporting this same story about the Lackawanna Six. When something appears in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal (papers which lean to the left, center and right, respectively), you can pretty much take it as true. Scot Paltrow adds an interesting dimension to this story that I hadn't considered: In the Lackawanna case, there were indications that the government's case wasn't as strong as officials in Washington had characterized it after the arrests. The government had called the arrests a major victory in the fight against terrorism. But Michael A. Battle, the U.S. attorney in Buffalo, confirmed the government has found no evidence the defendants were involved in any violent plot.A similar issue came up in the John Walker Lindh case, where U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III held that the material support statute (18 U.S.C. 2339b) did not unconstitutionally infringe on Lindh's rights. But Lindh did a lot more than merely attend a training camp -- he admitted to carrying weapons and explosives as part of the Taliban. Jess Bravin reported at the time of Lindh's plea bargain that this threat was made in his case as well, and that it was probably a factor in Lindh's decision to plead guilty in exchange for a 20-year sentence. Lawyers in the case said informal talks about a plea bargain began six weeks ago, and that the defense initially proposed a 10-year sentence. President Bush approved a 20-year term Thursday. The two sides spent the weekend hammering out the particulars, and signed off on the terms around 1 a.m. Monday.Final Thoughts: It's not clear how the courts will treat 18 U.S.C. 2339b when it comes before them. First, some defendant has to challenge the government and not be carted off to a military brig as an enemy combatant. Second, the defendant will need to overcome all of the judicial deference issues which have dominated the major terrorism cases to date. Third, the challenge will need to be made on the right facts -- someone who purely provided nominal material support to a terrorist organization, such as speech or advocacy on their behalf. Had the Lackawanna Six not pled guilty, they might have been the first defendants to take this issue up through the courts. But the issue for these six men is now moot. Interesting stories at DefenseTech Noah Shachtman has some great stuff at his site this morning, including: - An excerpt from his Wired news article on LifeLog, a Pentagon project which would create a system capable of recording everything you see, hear, sense, and know. The object is a personal digital assistant capable of supporting field commanders and bolstering their memories. But the implications resemble a cross between Total Recall and Minority Report... - A note on the Pentagon's new policy analysis market project -- also run by DARPA, the folks who brought you the Internet, Total Information Awareness, and Lifelog. My first reaction to this was that it was absurd. But Noah has some interesting links on the subject, including some economics studies that lend credibility to the effort. Update: CNN reports that the Pentagon has cancelled its "terrorism betting parlor" project. Still not enough troops to do the job right Retired General Barry McCaffrey argues in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that we need to bolster America's military by quite a bit in order to meet our current global commitments. McCaffrey's no amateur at this stuff -- he commanded the 24th Infantry Division in Gulf War I, and after retiring with 4 stars, served as President Clinton's drug czar. You also can't dismiss McCaffrey as a "liberal critic" who wants to see us fail in Iraq -- a brush which has been used by some (e.g. Ann Coulter) to tar moderate and liberal politicians on this issue. In blunt language, he writes that we don't have the resources to get the job done. Right now, U.S. active and reserve force-structure of infantry, military police, civil affairs, special operations, aviation and field logistics formations are inadequate. Contractors and allies (now a tiny 7% of the coalition supporting the effort) can mitigate some of the burden in Iraq. And if everything goes to plan, an additional 40,000 allies, organized in three multinational divisions, will be on the ground in Iraq by September. But we should be skeptical about their military effectiveness, independent funding, and logistics support. The only long-term solution is to create a well-trained and -equipped Iraqi police, civil defense corps, border guards, army and contract security force. L. Paul Bremer, chief administrator, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces, are seized of this effort. We must see to it that they have the cash, equipment and training resources required for the mission.McCaffrey's plan is to mobilize an extra 7 National Guard brigades on top of the 2 included in Gen. Keane's rotation plan. After those reservists demobilize at the end of a 1-year tour, McCaffrey would keep those "units" on active duty, but man them with additional soldiers recruited/trained in the intervening year. It's a viable concept, but it's also one that would cost a lot of money. This plan would also take congressional approval, since the end strength of the military is limited each year by the National Defense Authorization Act. This may be the right answer -- but it will require tough choices (e.g. missile defense funding vs. troops) and hardball politics to make it happen. Monday, July 28, 2003
Update on 3ID decision to remove embedded reporters Fred Kaplan writes in Slate that this move may be one of the first public signs that the Bush Administration knows things are going badly in Iraq. (The other sign is an attempt to enlist James Baker as the new proconsul for Iraq.) I wrote on this decision by MG Buford Blount last week, after seeing the news in the European Stars & Stripes: On Monday, the 3rd ID commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, decided to stop allowing reporters to spend time with his troops, other than to gather information for pre-approved “news features,” according to an e-mail response from Lt. Col. Birmingham, 3rd ID spokesman in Baghdad.Fred Kaplan thinks something is rotten in the E-Ring, and I think he's right. In his Slate piece, he implies that the Bush Administration sees saturating media coverage as a hindrance to further nation-building efforts. In short, too much coverage of casualties, adverse conditions, unfriendly locals, and griping soldiers may hurt American resolve to persevere in the face of all that adversity. Now, however, the story has turned sour, to the point where two soldiers with the 3rd I.D., who had grown all too accustomed to talking freely with the press, publicly lambasted not just the brass but the political bosses—on network television, faces exposed, names on the record—in startlingly stark language. One of the soldiers told ABC News, "If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I'd ask him for his resignation." The other said, "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list. … The Aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz."There's some irony to this... The most pro-military coverage of the war -- arguably of the last decade -- came from the reporters who were embedded with the troops on the march to Baghdad. Even when covering bad news, like the shooting of Iraqi civilians at a checkpoint, the embedded reporters generally told the story from a grunt's perspective in a way that would make their parents proud. The most skeptical coverage came from the rear, from reporters at HQ in Kuwait or further back in Washington. Removing the embedded reporters is likely to result in less "candid camera" moments for our troops in the field. (No more quotes asking for the SecDef's resignation) But it may result in a more negative spin in general for the military. That would be ironic, given the reasons the administration has for removing the embedded reporters from 3ID. Congratulations to Joe Doherty and his colleague Lynn Lopucki of UCLA Law School for their research on bankruptcy which earned them this mention in the Hearsay column of The Washington Post. According to researchers at the UCLA School of Law, bankruptcy costs for the largest U.S. companies in Chapter 11 reorganization have dropped 57 percent in real dollars since the 1980s. But the length of time that cases are in bankruptcy has decreased almost as much -- 50 percent -- which the researchers say roughly correlates with the drop in costs. Notes on the offense of treason Stop the Bleating, another military/legal affairs blog, has a great note today on the history of the treason clause in the U.S. Constitution. Matt takes on the thorny issue of whether you can prosecute someone for espousing views that might amount to treasonous speech, whatever that may be. He concludes: . . . I'm not entirely sure that we need to resort to any new rules of law to resolve the issue that Bell identifies. You see, in my own research on the topic I came to the realization that the overarching purpose of the Treason Clause was primarily to protect peaceful political dissent. But we have something in the Constitution now that wasn't present when the Clause was enacted, and it protects such dissent quite well. It's called the First Amendment, and I think it may be up to the task of dealing with situations like the Al Qaeda Al scenario that Bell proposes. Going on the offensive Tom Ricks has an outstanding piece in today's Washington Post, which he wrote from Iraq where he is currently reporting on the Army's 4th Infantry Division. The piece assesses the latest campaign by American forces to quash the Iraqi insurgency. Using a mix of unconventional tactics and intelligence-driven operations, American forces appear to be winning some significant victories -- but at a cost. The whole story's worth reading for an understanding of what's going on over there right now. Despite their losses, Army officers and soldiers asserted that they are making solid gains in this region, where most of the fighting has taken place and where about half the 150,000 U.S. troops in the country are posted.Update: Mark Kleiman, a UCLA professor who I know and respect, thinks this is unethical conduct -- and possibly unlawful under the laws of war. Mark (with an assist from Atrios) cites to Art. 75 of Protocol I to the Geneva Convention, as his support for the contention that this is unlawful. Unfortunately, the U.S. has not signed Protocol I, and thus cannot be bound by it by the conventions of positivistic international law. Of course, that's just a legal footnote about Protocol I. The U.S. did sign the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, and it explicitly precludes hostage taking in armed conflict: Art. 34. The taking of hostages is prohibited.There is also a norm of international law known as "distinction" -- which literally means distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants. This principle would probably preclude the kind of conduct conducted by COL Hogg in Iraq, since the Iraqi Lt. Gen.'s family members are unquestionably non-combatants. Doing what's unlawful is one thing; doing something which is counter-productive is quite another. We're trying to rebuild Iraq as a kinder, gentler place -- a nation that contributes to regional stability, economic growth, personal liberty, etc. To accomplish our mission, we need to win the Iraqis' hearts and minds. Kidnapping the wives and daughters of our adversaries is not a way to win hearts and minds -- it's a way to squeeze their private parts. This is the kind of tactic that can backfire, bigtime. Especially if your opponent is willing to go a step further in his atrocities than you. America's finest sons and daughters Ruth Voshell Stonesifer writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning about her son -- Kristofor Stonesifer -- who was killed in combat during the first days of combat in Afghanistan. Her essay discusses some of the reasons her son went to war, and some of her feelings since his death in 2001. My son was a quiet and thoughtful patriot. When I questioned him about Sept. 11, while he was still at Fort Benning, Ga., and before he went overseas, he spoke only about his fellow Army Rangers chomping at the bit to right the wrongs perpetrated on America that day. But Kris expressed no such zeal.Steve Lopez, one of the Los Angeles Times' best columnists, also writes today about the mother of a soldier killed in combat. Evan Ashcraft was killed last week. He was 24 and an Army sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division. When his mother invited me to visit with her, she had only one purpose. She wanted to honor her boy, and to put a human face to the daily tally of casualties.Thoughts... I think the essential question is precisely "Was this for a good cause?" America has sacrificed a great number of its sons and daughters on the fields of Iraq for some cause -- whether it's WMD, regional stability, prevention of terrorism, oil, humanitarian goals, or something else. Some people have questioned the efforts of reporters (such as Josh Marshall) in seeking out the truth about the Bush Administration's casus belli -- our reason for going to war with Iraq. I don't think such queries are misplaced. If we are going to send our finest sons and daughters into harm's way, then we deserve to know as a nation the reasons for doing so. The lawfulness of killing in war John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor who recently served as a political appointee in the Justice Department, opines in the Weekly Standard that there is no reason to wring our hands over the killing of Saddam's sons. This essay is one of the better ones I've seen on the subject. It concisely sums up the law and states why no legal problem exists with last week's targeted killing of the two Hussein men. No law prohibits the targeting of specific enemy leaders in war. Assassination is different: the murder of a public figure for political reasons. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln were assassinations. By contrast, the killing of the enemy in combat is protected by the laws of war. As Hugo Grotius, the father of international law, observed in 1646, "It is permissible to kill an enemy." Legitimate military targets include not just foot soldiers, but the command and control structure of an enemy's military, leading up to its commander in chief. Assessment: women in combat A semi-official after-after review of Gulf War II has concluded that women performed effectively in combat, after a decade of policy changes that opened up a myriad of opportunities close to the front lines. Women in all four services saw combat in Iraq, whether as helicopter pilots, MPs, chemical warfare specialists, or logisticians. Anthony Cordesman, now a professor at CSIS, wrote the study, which says: Women made up roughly 15 percent of U.S. military forces during the Iraq War, ranging from a high of 19 percent in the Air Force to 6 percent in the Marines. The number of women in high-risk jobs increased strikingly compared to those in the Gulf War, although women are still barred from ground combat positions. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this change is that there are no meaningful reports of gender problems in combat or high riskpositions. While scarcely unexpected, this experience is a further refutation of the arguments that women cannot perform such duties or will disrupt operations in wartime.Analysis: Notwithstanding the ordeal of PFC Jessica Lynch, I think this conclusion is right on. In general, women performed effectively in the gulf, proving the wisdom behind the policy changes in the 1990s that opened more combat and combat-support roles to women. I wrote about this in December 2002 in the Washington Monthly, saying essentially the same thing as Cordesman. Indeed, if mixed-gender units perform as they have in the California desert--and in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--it would strengthen the integrationist trend in several ways. The least likely possibility would be the elimination of all rules barring women from full combat service, from special forces to light infantry. But even if this were to happen, surveys suggest that only a small number of women would apply. And only a fraction of those who do would have the physical ability and fortitude to make it through, say, the crucible of Army ranger school, from which a majority of qualified men wash out before graduation.Bottom Line: Women went to the gulf, they fought, and they did as well as the men they served with. Today's military is a remarkably diverse organization, and it knows how to build cohesive winning teams regardless of the backgrounds of the soldiers in those units. Male, female, black, white, brown -- it makes no difference. Everyone wears green (or desert camo), and that's what counts. Sunday, July 27, 2003
LANCE WINS HIS FIFTH CONSECUTIVE TOUR DE FRANCE! Lance Armstrong, the gifted athlete who battled testicular cancer and won, added a fifth consecutive Tour De France title to his long list of accomplishments today. This tour was tougher for Lance than previous ones. He faced fatigue, dehydration, French citizens, crashes, and near wipeout during the grueling 2,130-mile race. But in the end, his experience and endurance enabled him to win the race, supported by the strong U.S. Postal Service team. Lance already ranks with the best American athletes of all time -- Jim Thorpe, Jackie Robinson, Bruce Jenner, Mark Spitz -- to name a few. But this title puts him in the rarefied ranks of cycling. Only one man (Miguel Indurain) has ever won 5 consecutive Tour De France titles. Maybe Lance will go for six? Friday, July 25, 2003
More on the impact of killing Odai and Qusai Hussein Speaking by video teleconference from Iraq, 4th Infantry Division commander MG Ray Odierno said today that the killing of Saddam Hussein's two sons in Mosul on Monday had little practical effect on the threat he was seeing arrayed against him. Q: General, Eric Schmitt with the New York Times. What's been the effect of your region in the last few days since the deaths of the two Hussein sons? What impact has it seen in your area?Analysis: This sounds very similar to what I wrote on Tuesday. I opined that America would not see a significant dropoff in guerilla attacks because Odai and Qusai probably spent more time hiding than exercising command and control over insurgents. Moreover, the evidence tends to indicate a loosely connected network of guerillas in Iraq -- not a hierarchical organization controlled by former Saddam henchmen. Ultimately, I think the killing of these two men will probably have a marginally positive effect on our operations in Iraq, but not a large one. MG Odierno agrees: . . . What I would say is -- to comment on that -- I think there will be more of a long-term effect. It's very important that this operation occurred and that we have shown them that no one of the old regime's going to survive. And I think it's going to have a long- term effect. It will take a little bit of time. Might take months, might take weeks, might take three months, four months, but it's going to have an effect overall on the overall outcome. But I have seen no immediate impact based on the specific attacks.Sounds like a very prudent commander, and one that I'm glad we have over there. Taking these men out was the right thing to do, but it's not the end of our mission in Iraq. We must continue to persevere, to take the offensive, in order to prevail over the guerillas who aim to thwart our goals in Iraq. 3ID commander orders an end to media embedding In response to the controversy this month surrounding some out-of-school comments by his soldiers to the media, MG Buford Blount has put the 3rd Infantry Division "off limits" to embedded reporters from the states, according to Lisa Burgess in the European Stars & Stripes. The move appears to be calculated to reduce troop contact with the media, giving them a chance to blow off steam without having their comments picked up by a journalist and transmitted around the world. This move comes after one soldier candidly told an ABC News reporter: "If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I’d ask him for his resignation." On Monday, the 3rd ID commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, decided to stop allowing reporters to spend time with his troops, other than to gather information for pre-approved “news features,” according to an e-mail response from Lt. Col. Birmingham, 3rd ID spokesman in Baghdad.It would be a shame if the "media embedding experiment" ended on such a low note after the second Gulf War. For the most part, I think this experiment worked very well. It gave the American public a grunt's eye glimpse of the war and exposed a generation of reporters to the military. If anything, media embedding created problems because news reports from the field were largely positive, and most media did not offset that coverage with quality analysis from the rear. (The Washington Post is the notable exception to this criticism) Nonetheless, this may be the right thing to do now, with so many media "flooding the zone" in Iraq to find stories of disenchantment and quagmire. Our soldiers need to blow off some stress, and they don't need a reporter embedded in their unit to hear them do that. Furthermore, there's nothing preventing a reporter from covering the news as a "unilateral" in Baghdad or any other part of Iraq -- they don't need to be embedded anymore. Was it legal to take out Saddam's sons? Corollary: was it legal to show their post-mortem photos? Slate provides an excellent explainer on this subject, citing to Executive Order 12333 and other relevant authority on the subject. The basic answer is "yes -- it was legal to kill Odai and Qusai Hussein". The legal analysis boils down to one question: were these political leaders, or military leaders? Political leaders (e.g. Yassir Arafat) cannot be killed because it would be an assassination. Military leaders (e.g. Admiral Yamamoto in WWII) can be killed lawfully in wartime. Whether Odai and Qusai were military or political targets is a matter of argument, but I think the administration is on firm ground in saying that they were not legitimate political leaders now, after the fall of the Hussein regime. During wartime, it is generally acceptable to attack figures who are involved in military operations, and it is widely believed that Odai and Qusai were helping to coordinate resistance to the American occupation. As long as the brothers weren't killed by treacherous means—say, by luring them to a peace conference, then shooting them—they are legitimate targets. A close parallel is the 1943 killing of Japanese Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. When U.S. aircraft* ambushed his plane, Yamamoto was the mission's sole target. However, because the admiral oversaw military operations against the United States at the time, the killing is generally not considered to have been an assassination.The Slate explainer goes on to tackle a more pressing issue: the legitimacy of our decision to publish photos of the two men's corpses. The military claims that the publication of Odai's and Qusai's photos was necessary in order to prove to the Iraqi public that the pair were dead. But as Explainer noted in March, the Geneva Convention prohibits the public airing of pictures that might humiliate a combatant—the same justification the United States used to object to broadcasting interrogations of American POWs.As a matter of law, the Third Geneva Convention does indeed prohibit anything that would expose POWs to "public curiousity". Of course, one can argue that these were corpses, not POWs, and that at no time were they alive and in the custody of the United States. Some have also suggested that the U.S. might have given the bodies and photos to the Iraqis for dissemination -- or for public display as was done for Mussolini when he was killed. Though that may technically sidestep the Geneva Convention problem, I think it's still wrong. Using our agents and surrogates to do our dirty work is not a good answer. Furthermore, doing so would make the Iraqi "government" look more like our puppet. The Moral Dimension of War: We've dealt with this issue in other contexts, such as the "rendering" of captured suspects over to allies (like Pakistan) for interrogation, or the use of foreign interrogators in American detention facilities to do things that our guys can't do. Those things don't sit well with the American public, let alone the international human rights community. And I'm not sure that the marginal gains are worth the loss in political capital and moral capital. One of John Boyd's ideas that really intrigued me was his perspective on the moral dimension of war. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of 4th Generation Warfare. If you can define the moral dimensions of a conflict and the norms/rules of conflict, you can dominate it. To date, we have been able to do so by casting asymmetric means like terrorism and guerilla warfare in a negative light. But the more we employ unconventional tactics, and the more we step into the gray area of international law, the more we will cede the moral high ground to our opponents. I think it's something we need to be cognizant of. Thursday, July 24, 2003
The Art of War Jess Bravin has a fascinating piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the combat artists who accompanied allied forces in Iraq. These men went as soldiers first, artists second, and captured some incredible images of the war that simply transcend what photographers were able to capture. Britain started the modern practice of appointing war artists in 1916. Hungry for propaganda to shore up the war effort, officials sent such leading painters as John Singer Sargent and Paul Nash to the front lines. Britain's World War I allies, including the U.S., Canada and Australia, followed suit with combat artists of their own.The Journal has one of the Marine Corps artists pencil sketches embedded in the story on its website, of a Marine cleaning his rifle in Kuwait while wearing chemical protective gear. The elegant simplicity of the sketch is quite powerful. I recommend reading this piece if you can, and looking for these artists' work over the next several months. Editor's note All of the news stories I post on this site are the intellectual property of their authors and the publications which originally run them, e.g. the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, I own the copyright to all of the content that I write for this site, and I have a copyright notice posted on this page to indicate that. Federal copyright law prevents me from posting anything more than brief excerpts or summaries of an article, with due credit, under the "fair use" doctrine. I intend to follow the law, and respect the intellectual property of the authors and publications which I cite. In one note (see below), I excerpted parts of a story that altered the balance that the writer attempted to achieve between conflicting viewpoints. At the editor's request, I have posted the entire story in order to provide that balance. Normally, I would not post the entire text of a story because doing so would infringe on the copyright of the publication. However, I have received permission to do so in this case. Finally, some of the publications I cite to include the notation (subscription required) after the link (such as the Wall Street Journal). That means that these journals require a subscription in order to see the full text of the article. I am typically more careful about borrowing text from these publications, since they have made a conscious decision to sell their content instead of giving it away online. If you want to read the full text, then I ask that you purchase a one-time subscription or general subscription. Good reporting is worth paying for. Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Recruiting and retaining top talent in the FBI Today's Los Angeles Times has a great Column One piece on their front page about the difficulties the FBI is facing with recruiting and retaining its best agents despite a meager salary scale. Unfortunately for all of us, the difficulties appear most acute in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York -- where the threat of terrorism is greatest. While the FBI plays a lead role in the war on terrorism, many agents say they are waging a private battle against financial hardship. An outdated pay structure has left many agents struggling to make ends meet, especially in high-cost cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.Analysis: This problem is not unique to the FBI. Lots of public agencies are having difficulty with recruiting and retaining the best and brightest Americans they can. Nick Thompson had a great piece in the Washington Monthly on this issue in June. Federal judges (including Chief Justice Rehnquist) have also expressed their discontent with the federal salary structure. Although they're making as much money as any federal employee save the President, the differential between the pay for a federal judge and a private law firm partner can run into the thousands of dollars. This has been an issue for America's military as well, with an exodus of junior officers from all four services in the late-1990s due to chronic problems in the military and opportunities in the outside world. (This exodus has slowed somewhat due to world events, but it may resume when large units redeploy from overseas and "stop-loss" orders come off.) So how do we encourage more public service? That's a really hard question. I'm not in favor of a draft, nor am I in favor of compulsory public service. However, I do think that we should create an opportunity-based system (like military enlistment) where young Americans can serve in various capacities in return for college scholarships, graduate-school scholarships, and other benefits. In the age of terrorism, our lives depend on the FBI's abilities. The FBI's abilities, in turn, depend on the people it can recruit and retain. Given the importance of these agents to our national security, it may be wise to pursue some sort of housing allowance or cost-of-living offset for the agents we put in high-threat/high-cost areas like New York and Los Angeles. Better terrorism intelligence -- or a longer OODA loop? That's the question posed by members of Congress in today's Los Angeles Times. The Times reports that several lawmakers have taken the new "Terrorist Threat Intelligence Center" (TTIC) to task for being just another piece of bureaucracy instead of an effective clearinghouse for the gathering and analysis of intelligence. The intelligence center, staffed by more than 100 agents from all three agencies as well as the State and Defense departments, was established to remedy a widely acknowledged failure of the CIA and the FBI to share critical intelligence in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Analysis: These members of Congress are on to something, but they're not there yet. The central problem is this: how can the large, bureaucratic, federal security apparatus (DoD, CIA, DHS, DoJ, etc) compete with a nimble, agile, networked, flexible foe like Al Qaeda? How can it possibly react to intelligence reports fast enough to actually do something before a terrorist attack? The best conceptual framework for this problem comes from the late-Col. John Boyd, whose ideas redefined military strategy over the last 4 decades. Boyd also developed the "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act" (OODA for short) model of military decisionmaking. He developed this model to map the competitive mental processes of fighter pilots in the Korean war, largely to explain why U.S. pilots did so much better with ostensibly inferior aircraft. The answer was that they had slightly more maneuverable aircraft, and better training, which enabled them to move through their OODA loop faster and react faster than their opponents. Though designed for 1-on-1 combat in the skies, the OODA loop can be used to illuminate almost any competitive endeavor, from corporate decisionmaking to warfighting. In the context of terrorism, it provides the perfect framework for understanding the difficulties of the U.S. government in dealing with a threat like Al Qaeda. We now face a global terror network capable of rapid innovation and adaptation to our actions. They, in short, have a very tight OODA loop. It is imperative that we construct organizations capable of rapidly gathering intelligence on Al Qaeda, analyzing it, and exploiting it. The TTIC can be such an organization, if given the chance. But it must be embraced by its colleagues in DoD, DoJ and DHS, who ultimately must act to exploit the intelligence from TTIC. Tuesday, July 22, 2003
U.S. confirms the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein -- now what? The Washington Post (and others) report that American military officials in Baghdad have confirmed the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein -- sons of the former Iraqi dictator. The two men died after a fierce firefight with American infantry who surrounded a residence they had sought refuge in. After pounding that house with rifle, machine gun, and other fires, American infantry entered the building to find the two Husseins dead. [Lt. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, gave few details about the operation, but he said it lasted about six hours and involved troops from the Army's 101st Airborne Division, Special Forces and others. U.S. officials became aware of the location when a "walk-in" informant came to them last night and said that several high-ranking suspects could be found there.So what does this mean for our Iraqi endeavor? Well, it depends. If these two men were providing some of the command and control behind the ongoing guerilla attacks on American forces, then some of that activity may drop off, assuming they did not have a redundant command structure. However, it's not clear that these two men were directing those attacks, or doing anything other than trying to hide from American forces along with their father. Optimism is good, but realism is better. We need to consider all possible scenarios in Iraq, including the possibility that the guerilla resistance we're seeing is not the result of a coordinated, shadow command structure led by Mr. Hussein or some other "Mr. Big". (American forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan have been predisposed to see this organized crime-style model even in the absence of evidence indicating its truth) It's very possible, given the diffuse locations and tactics of these guerillas, that we are seeing a loosely connected network of enemies in Iraq. If that's the case, then we may not see any drop at all from this latest success. Bottom Line: The jury's still out on this one. This success may have some effect on the guerilla activity in Iraq, but I don't think we're going to see it disappear entirely anytime soon. Relentless pursuit of the Hussein regime (and Hussein himself) will help the infant government now forming, and add to the sense that the Hussein regime will never return to power. But it's hard to tell anything else with a great deal of certainty. Did we plan for success in Iraq? "Maybe," according to a report in today's USA Today, which mirrors a story in the Los Angeles Times last week. Barbara Slavin and Dave Moniz make the point that U.S. planning for post-war Iraq was less-than-stellar, largely due to faulty assumptions and group-think about what post-war Iraq would look like. Baghdad fell just 21 days after the initial assaults, and military analysts describe the campaign as historic, even brilliant.Apparently, Bush Administration knew the post-war phase would be the toughest. The USA Today report notes the advice given by the Army's leadership -- former-SecArmy Tom White and retired-Gen. Eric Shinseki -- that the occupation would require "several hundred thousand" troops. The USA Today report also notes a National Security Council memo analyzing past nation-building operations and projecting a need for 500,000 troops for this one: As late as February, barely a month before the war began, the question of how many troops to send to Iraq to stabilize the country after the war was unsettled, according to a high-ranking Defense Department official involved in the planning process.Shortly after American troops entered Baghdad, I wrote a piece similar to this memo in the Washington Monthly, arguing that our recent experience with nation-building should be a guide for doing it this time around. The architects of the war might be forgiven for misgauging the number of troops required had the war come a dozen years ago, when the United States had little experience in modern nation-building. But over the course of the 1990s America gained some hard understanding, at no small cost. From Port-au-Prince to Mogadishu, every recent engagement taught the lesson we're now learning again in Iraq: America's high-tech, highly mobile military can scatter enemies which many times outnumber them, in ways beyond the wildest dreams of commanders just a generation ago. But it's not so easy to win the peace.So what's the bottom line? I think we can draw some conclusions from today's article, the LA Times article last Friday, and some of my writing. (1) The U.S. knew what it would take to do the job right in Iraq, because of our recent experiences in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Indeed, our top officials knew what it would take, based on studies done by the Army War College and National Security Council. (2) Senior officials in the Pentagon and White House appear to have chosen courses of action which were contraindicated by the advice mentioned in (1). It's not clear why this choice was made. It may never be possible to pin down the exact decision calculus inside the minds of the top leaders in the Pentagon. However, it appears that the Pentagon made a conscious decision to accept risk in the planning and execution of its post-war plan, in order to start and fight the war faster. That may have been an acceptable tradeoff, given the effect that our high operational tempo had on the Iraqis. But it's clear now that the risk on the back-end (in the post-war phase) was significant, and possibly larger than planners anticipated. (More on operational risk and planning later...) (3) The entire post-war plan was given relatively short shrift by planners and commanders at the top levels, apparently because of assumptions at the highest levels of government that "we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." (Vice President Cheney, March 16) This assumption drove every other aspect of the plan, from mobilization of additional reservists for security to contracts for additional civilian security forces. When this assumption proved to be false, it was too late to change those other aspects of the plan. Without a contingency force already sitting in Kuwait ready for commitment, it was impossible to rapidly mobilize one from the states to get there when they were needed. The result: American soldiers have not been set up for success in Iraq. The Administration has not yet done all it can do to set them up for success, and we must. Our mission in Iraq is important, notwithstanding questions about our casus belli. (See Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo for the best reporting on this issue.) We must succeed there in order to create regional stability and prevent the kind of threats from emerging in Iraq that have emerged in other failed states (e.g. Afghanistan). Going to the U.N. on bended knee to get official U.N. sanction and peacekeeping support is one answer. Mobilizing sufficient numbers of reservists to implement a long-term rotation plan with enough boots on the ground is another. Contracting with Iraqis for civilian security forces is a third good option. Ultimately, we must prevail. But we must get smarter about our planning in order to do so. Monday, July 21, 2003
Army examines its choice of weapons lube After taking sharp criticism from current and former soldiers alike for its continued use of "CLP" weapons lubricant, Inside the Army (subscription required) reports today that the Army has decided to relook its choice of lubricant for the standard M-16A2 assault rifle that most soldiers carry. (The same lube is also used for the M4 carbine and M249 squad automatic weapon) Inside The ArmyThis is something I've written on before, in connection with the report on the 507th Maintenance Company ambush. "Soldiers For The Truth" has also had some good reporting on this, along with blogger colleagues One Hand Clapping and Winds of Change. Few things are more important in combat than having small arms which work when they're needed. I'm not sure if Militec is the right answer here, but I'm pretty sure that CLP is less than adequate. Of course, no weapons lubricant will work when soldiers fail to do the necessary weapons maintenance, a trend which also appears in the 507th report. However, we owe it to our soldiers to give them the best materiel that our defense dollars can buy. I hope this investigation pushes the Army a little bit closer to that product -- whatever it is. Update: I recently updated this post with the full text of the article from Inside the Army, which is an independent publication which covers the Army and is associated with several other such publications about the other services. The original article was quite balanced, but I made the editorial decision to only post certain excerpts which criticized the Army. I received a note asking me to post the entire article, as well as permission to do so from the publisher, in the interest of fairness. I thought it was the right thing to do. For more outstanding coverage of this issue and others, I recommend making Inside the Army a regular stop. Their reporters consistently do a good job of reporting on this kind of stuff -- which as we see from this story, has a direct effect on the way our soldiers perform in combat. Sunday, July 20, 2003
Every generation has its heroes Sunday's Washington Post has an extremely moving story about the men who suffered some of the most grievous wounds during the war with Iraq, and who now are recovering from their wounds at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. (The Post also has the photos from the article available online.) On TV, the war was a rout, with infrared tanks rolling toward Baghdad on a desert soundstage. But the permanent realities unfold more quietly on Georgia Avenue NW, behind the black iron gates of the nation's largest military hospital.Some thoughts... The human cost of war is always one of the most troubling things to accept, because it really calls into question our reasons for the war itself. When you look at a wounded combat veteran, the question stares back at you: "Was this man's injury worth it?" I will reserve judgment on that question, given all that has come to light in the last few weeks regarding our casus belli in Iraq. However, I believe that we owe these answers to the men and women we sent to Iraq, and to the families of those who will not return. Our nation should never fight for an unworthy case; the cost in blood and treasure is too high. Saturday, July 19, 2003
Two memorials in Santa Monica I took my dog Peet for a walk today to the Third Street Promenade, and walked through two memorials to Wednesday's horrific incident at the Santa Monica farmer's market. One was what you might expect from the city of Santa Monica -- a multicultural, non-sectarian gathering to mourn the dead and give thanks for our existence. I've been a lot of memorial services, but this one didn't move me in any particular way. The second memorial was the Saturday farmer's market itself, which promoters and farmers decided to hold today despite Wednesday's tragedy. Every vendor commemorated the incident in some way, whether with black cloth around his stand or black ribbons in front of his table. But the overall message was: we will persevere through this tragedy. That was a powerful message, and I think it was the best way to memorialize those who died on Wednesday. Friday, July 18, 2003
Tony Blair: a great American The British have been blessed in our time to have great orators like Winston Churchill and Tony Blair for national leaders. In times of crisis, these men lift their citizens' morale and spirits with moving words. Speaking before a joint session of Congress yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair turned his words towards us, his somewhat reluctant allies across the Atlantic. Members of Congress, if this seems a long way from the threat of terror and weapons of mass destruction, it is only to say again that the world's security cannot be protected without the world's heart being won. So America must listen as well as lead. But, members of Congress, don't ever apologize for your values. (Applause.) Tell the world why you're proud of America. Tell them when "The Star-Spangled Banner" starts, Americans get to their feet -- Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, East Europeans, Jews, Muslims, white, Asian, black, those who go back to the early settlers, and those whose English is the same as some New York cab drivers I've dealt with -- (laughter) -- but whose sons and daughters could run for this Congress. Tell them why Americans, one and all, stand upright and respectful. Not because some state official told them to, but because whatever race, color, class or creed they are, being American means being free. That's why they're proud. (Cheers, sustained applause.)Words like these remind us of our ideals, and of what it means to be an American. I can't help but feel pride when a national leader like Tony Blair speaks this way about America and its role in today's world. Now all we have to do is live up to these expectations -- a task which is easier said than done. Planning for success? The Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times has a very interesting (and very lengthy) report today on what went wrong with America's planning for post-war Iraq. This is more than your typical "first draft of history" journalism -- the Times reporters painstakingly lay out the pre-war planning process, and the various ways that nation-building planning was neglected by the Administration. Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, U.S. and British troops have struggled to bring order from chaos. Water, electricity and security are in short supply, fueling resentment among many Iraqis. A guerrilla-like resistance has taken shape against the occupation; U.S. casualties mount almost daily in an operation that is costing nearly $4 billion a month and stalling the withdrawal of American forces. Thursday, July 17, 2003
Great initiative... not so great judgment Every month, the Defense Department General Counsel's Standards of Conduct Office publishes a monthly advisory on ethics within the Pentagon and the military services. SOCO has responsibility for promulgating ethics regulations, training guidelines, etc., for the Pentagon. Their staff takes it really seriously too, however, they often find ways to teach their lessons in humorous ways. Here's an excerpt from their July 2003 advisory: In yet another remarkable case of bad judgment, a Marine Corps company commander who was deployed in Iraq asked a tobacco company to send his men its products for free. After receiving the free goods, he sent a "thank you" note that was used as part of the tobacco company’s advertising. The letter implied that the DoD endorsed the product, and, eventually, garnered the attention of two Congressmen. Please remember the standards of conduct apply in Iraq, too.It's hard to suppress a smile at this Marine captain's initiative. If I was his commander, I'd probably recommend him for a Navy Achievement Medal for this sort of thing, while chiding him privately about the thank-you note. These are the kinds of things we expect of our junior leaders, who we entrust with the lives of our finest sons and daughters. I hope his chain of command took care of him the way he took care of his Marines. Federal judge says legal mission to Iraq was a sham USA Today reports today that 6th Circuit Judge Gilbert S. Merritt has blasted the American government in Iraq for impeding a mission arranged by the Justice Department to restore Iraq's legal institutions. The DoJ-sponsored mission included federal judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys who had the charter of advising Iraq on its Constitution and the establishment of a new legal system. Senior U.S. District Judge (sic) Gilbert Merritt said the 25-member delegation's hopes of assessing Baghdad's judicial and law enforcement institutions were hindered by the chaos in the city of 5 million people. Guerrilla warfare continues, water and electricity service are limited, police forces are barely functioning, and many courthouses are bombed-out shells, he and other members of the delegation said. Pentagon to call up two National Guard brigades for Iraq Greg Jaffe reports in this morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that the Defense Department has decided it must call up two brigades of National Guard soldiers for the Iraq mission, since it has been unable to enlist America's allies in the effort there. Two brigades equates to roughly 10,000 soldiers, which does not seem like a lot for the 480,000 active-duty Army to manage. However, as the article points out, nearly all of the Army is committed to operations in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Korea and Afghanistan right now, leaving the Guard as America's only option. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is expected to sign off on a plan later this week that would establish a rotation to relieve Marine and U.S. Army soldiers deployed in Iraq, a Pentagon official said. After training, it would be March or April by the time National Guard soldiers would be deployed, likely for stints of 13 to 16 months including the training. Even so, demands on the active-duty Army would remain intense. Asked if he had ever seen the Army stretched so thin, one senior defense official recently said: "Not in my 31 years" of military service.This is going to be a challenge. America's National Guard has already been stretched thin by consecutive homeland security deployments since Sept. 11, known as Operation Noble Eagle. In the California Army National Guard, nearly every combat arms unit has already deployed once. The units which have deployed have returned in deplorable condition, with most soldiers opting to leave the Guard. There are a number of National Guard units which have been left alone for homeland security, and these are the likely units to deploy to Iraq. However, even that is a finite supply. If America is to stay in Iraq for the long hall, this solution won't work. Painful lessons in Santa Monica Yesterday's tragic incident in Santa Monica which left nine people dead is a tragic reminder of how quickly accidents can escalate into mass-casualty situations when crowds are involved. The incident (not an accident -- nothing is ever accidental; it always has some cause) happened a short walk away from where I live. I go to 3rd Street a lot, and I've been to that farmer's market a dozen or so times. Suffice to say, it was hard to work yesterday afternoon as the story unfolded. It appears that this driver had no evil intent. Details are still emerging, but it looks like he tried to pump his brake pedal, but instead found his accelerator pedal. That doesn't change the carnage he caused. He still killed 9 people, and left dozens more hurt. Despite the apparent lack of evil intent, this incident holds many lessons learned for us as we think about how we might respond to another kind of mass-casualty event -- a terrorist attack. This is just my thinking, as a former anti-terrorism plans officer, but I think it's what a lot of folks in the Santa Monica Police Dept. are probably thinking about right now. 1. Large groups of people are targets. The reasons are many fold. First, large groups of people maximize the chances for large casualty counts, and that's usually a goal for terrorists. Second, the proportion of people who have been to a place where lots of people are is high, thus, lots of people will say afterwards "I've been there before -- that could have been me." This increases the fear factor of an attack, adding to its psychological impact. Finally, large gatherings of people tend to be media magnets -- there's often a camera crew there already to catch the news. As Brian Jenkins said 30 years ago, "terrorism is theater." 2. Simple measures can work. A threat assessment for the farmer's market in Santa Monica would have noted the threat of an inbound car or truck-borne explosive -- either one of which would be deadly. The proximity of this market to traffic makes that a possible threat, though not a probable one. Moreover, mitigating this threat would not have been hard. Parking two cars to physically block the street at either end of Arizona Ave. would have been sufficient; so too would have been placing "jersey bounce" barriers (concrete barriers that can stop a speeding car) at either end. (This would've been more costly, and entailed a crane to move them every time. Ironically, the 3rd Street Promenade has retractable, sunk-in metal barriers at all ends, but those devices were never installed for the farmer's market area -- which has become somewhat of a permanent fixture. Perhaps the City Council should consider those before they reopen these markets. 3. Mass casualty plans and mutual aid plans work. The city of Santa Monica does not have the ambulance or medical capacity to deal with this kind of event. Luckily, the larger West L.A. area does. Within minutes, reports indicate, ambulances from other jurisdictions sped to Santa Monica to help, as did Life-Flight helicopters. Emergency rooms elsewhere in the area also pitched in, adding to the capacity of UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital and allowing the most urgent patients to be seen at the closest hospital. These measures save lives. California (and the L.A. area in particular) are actually quite good at this kind of anti-terrorism preparation. Our region has been cursed with natural and man-made disasters like earthquakes, wildfires, floods and riots. In response, our "consequence management" agencies (fire, medical, public health, etc) have developed great plans and working relationships for these kinds of incidents. Those plans and coordination paid off yesterday in Santa Monica. There are more lessons to be learned, but those are my initial thoughts on this morning after. More to follow as the story develops. Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Pentagon to loan Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to homeland security effort The trade journal Aerospace Daily reports today that the Defense Department plans to loan some of its high-tech unmanned aerial vehicles ("UAVs") to the Department of Homeland Security for border security. The loan will include military personnel and equipment. It's not clear whether the DoD personnel will merely train and familiarize DHS personnel with UAVs, or whether this loan will include some operational use of the UAVs for actual border security missions. The deployment, set to take place within the next few months somewhere along America's southern border, comes at the request of Gordon England, deputy secretary for homeland security at DHS and former secretary of the Navy.Analysis: This raises some of the same legal questions that I wrote about in Slate last year when the Pentagon loaned surveillance aircraft to look for the D.C. sniper. Federal law bars the use of military personnel for law enforcement, although a number of exceptions exist. So, when, exactly, can soldiers help the cops?As a matter of law, this UAV plan may be different from the case of the D.C. sniper. Arguably, the Department of Homeland Security is a national security agency more than a law enforcement agency. Its primary purpose in guarding the border is to prevent entry and secure the nation, though it certainly has the secondary purpose of prosecuting those who might break the law entering the U.S. The Posse Comitatus Act bars the use of military personnel and equipment for law enforcement -- it does not bar their use for national security functions. In addition, a number of exceptions exist, such as 10 U.S.C. 372, which states: (a) In General. - The Secretary of Defense may, in accordance with other applicable law, make available any equipment (including associated supplies or spare parts), base facility, or research facility of the Department of Defense to any Federal, State, or local civilian law enforcement official for law enforcement purposes.Ultimately, these exceptions are limited by 10 U.S.C. 375, which states that such assistance shall not include "direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law." Bottom Line: It looks to me like this UAV loan program will be covered by the exceptions to Posse Comitatus. The interesting thing will be whether the loan program will be covered by two provisions in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the DHS. Sections 876 and 886 expressly limit the military activities of the new department, and reaffirm Congress' commitment to the Posse Comitatus doctrine. Sec. 876 states: Nothing in this Act shall confer upon the Secretary any authority to engage in warfighting, the military defense of the United States, or other military activities, nor shall anything in this Act limit the existing authority of the Department of Defense or the Armed Forces to engage in warfighting, the military defense of the United States, or other military activities.There's a pretty good argument that this deployment of UAVs violates the spirit -- if not the letter -- of the Homeland Security Act. If Congress wanted a military homeland security effort, they would have simply told the Pentagon to make it happen without creating a Dept. of Homeland Security. Instead, I think that Congress wanted a civilian effort on the domestic security front. Eventually, I think that DHS probably plans to buy its own UAVs to run its own border security operations. But in the interim, I think they need to answer some tough legal questions about their plan to borrow them from the Pentagon. Judicial deference and national security I have a piece today in Writ, Findlaw.Com's online journal of legal commentary, which criticizes judicial deference to the Executive Branch on national security grounds as somewhat anachronistic and out-of-step with modern reality. The piece tries to paint a picture of Constitutional tension between individual rights on the one hand, and the President's power to command the military on the other. Ultimately, what's needed is more of a balancing approach, rather than a strict policy of deference by the courts whenever national security is involved. Does the judicial deference doctrine still make sense today? For a number of reasons, it may not be as well-justified as it once was.Update: CNN.com just picked up this piece and published it on the legal page of their news site. Monday, July 14, 2003
3rd Infantry Division to remain in Iraq MSNBC and others report that the Army has delayed the return of its 3rd Infantry Division from Iraq again. With attacks on Americans growing more frequent and deadly, Pentagon leaders appear unwilling to reduce their force in Iraq to deal with those attacks. The decision is the second for the "Rock of the Marne" division, whose soldiers had been told they would return to the U.S. in June. Many of 3ID's soldiers have been in the desert for 9-12 months, and numerous stories have reported on the morale problems for both soldiers and families created by the back-and-forth over the division's redeployment. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the division’s commander, said last week he hoped the division’s 1st and 2nd Brigade Combat Teams of roughly 9,000 soldiers could return home to Fort Stewart within the next six weeks.According to the 3ID website, a number of units have redeployed from Iraq, and more are on the way home. It also appears this redeployment is being done in rough reverse chronological order, based on who deployed to the desert first. Balancing mission accomplishment against morale is a hard thing. It's the quintessential challenge for every military leader, in peace and war. Every unit finds its own balance; some are more "hard core" than others. The redeployment of 3ID is essentially a large version of this problem. The Pentagon must accomplish the mission in Iraq; we've spent too much blood and treasure to lose now. But at the same time, we must take care of our soldiers and their families -- we owe them that. I think it's time to bring 3ID home and rotate another unit over there. But I would hate to see this division come home at the cost of the mission, because that would undermine all the sacrifices these men and women have made. Sunday, July 13, 2003
GO LANCE!!! Four-time Tour De France winner Lance Armstrong seized the overall lead today in the L'Alpe D'Huez stage that he has historically dominated. Although Lance didn't win the stage as he normally does, he did gain enough time on the pack to slide into 1st overall in the 21-day race. Lance now leads Joseba Beloki of Spain by 40 seconds. Winning the Tour De France four times in a row is spectactular enough, but Lance hopes to match Spain's Miguel Indurain by winning five consecutive tours. As many people know, Lance nearly died a few years ago from testicular cancer -- a story which he tells in his extremely moving book "It's Not About the Bike". I think it's amazing for anyone to even finish the Tour De France, let alone win it. Add to that winning it four times. Add to that winning it four times in a row after near-certain death. Lance is one of my heroes, and I am stoked that he has taken the yellow jersey in the French Alps. |
