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Wes Clark on America's empire

The November issue of the Washington Monthly features this article from retired-Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who is trying to posture himself as an alternative to the current foreign policy being pursued by the Bush White House. The article is essentially an excerpt from Clark's new book, and it offers some insight into the foreign policy that Clark would adopt if he moved into 1600 Penn. Ave.

We need to see ourselves and the world around us in sharp relief--and use that vision to inform better our policies. Simply put, the United States needs a new strategy for the 21st century--a broader, more comprehensive, and less unilateralist approach abroad, coupled with greater attention to a sound economy at home, and sensible long-range policies. The Bush administration's strategy of preemption, published in the 2002 National Security Strategy, was focused against Iraq. At home, the formula of the supply-siders--tax cuts for the wealthy to feed trickle-down economics--has about run its course. It is time for America to return to the basic concepts that ensured its unprecedented prosperity and security and to adapt from these a new strategy that can better serve our needs today.

The first of these basic principles should be inclusiveness. The United States represents evolutionary values of human dignity and the worth of the individual-ideals that have steadily swept across Europe and into much of the rest of the world. We have been proselytizers, advocating our values, assisting states abroad, encouraging emerging young leaders to study and visit the United States. During the Cold War we were careful to reach across the Iron Curtain. And when the Cold War ended, we worked hard to encourage the enlargement of democracy around the world. We should be seeking allies and friends around the world.

Second, we should be working to strengthen and use international institutions, beginning with the United Nations and NATO. Such institutions can provide vital support to American diplomacy, bringing in others to share the burdens and risks that we would otherwise have to carry alone. The United Nations especially can contribute legitimacy to U.S. purposes and actions. International law is of little significance to most Americans, but it carries heavy weight abroad. Both the United Nations and NATO need refinement, particularly the United Nations--but these refinements can be made only through American constructive leadership, for we are the lone superpower, with the resources and incentives to do so.

And finally, we must place in proper perspective the role of the armed forces in our overall strategy. We should ensure that they retain the edge over any potential adversary and continue to modernize them to deal with foreseeable contingencies, including the possible need to preempt any threat to the United States. We always have the right of self-defense, including inherently the right to strike preemptively. But force must be used only as a last resort--and then multilaterally if possible.

Operating on these three principles, we should repair our trans-Atlantic relationships. When the United States and Europe stand together, they represent roughly half the world's gross domestic product and three of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. These are the countries that are most politically and culturally aligned with the United States. We are the major investors in each other's economies. We should turn upside down nineteenth-century Britain's view that Britain had no permanent friends, only permanent interests. In the West, we must have permanent friends and allies and then work to ensure that our interests converge.

Using this trans-Atlantic alliance as our base, we should then work to resolve our security challenges--the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the continuing threat from al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. We should be working with allies to help settle disputes between India and Pakistan and within the Middle East that could explode into deadly conflict. And we should be pressing through the United Nations and offering assistance to ease the ongoing conflicts in Africa.

Good words; hard to implement. I like Wes Clark's view of the world, and his view of where America should fit into the world. I think that we ought to enlist other nations and international organizations in the fight against Al Qaeda and other terror networks, because the only way to defeat a terror network is to build a stronger network of our own. However, I also recognize that saying these things and doing them are two different things. It will be exceedingly hard for President Clark to implement his vision -- harder even that it would be if he were General Clark again. A lot of fence mending must be done before we can start down this multilateralist road. If Wes Clark wants to make this vision seem realistic, I think he has to articulate the "how" instead of just the "what" for his view of the world and America's place in it.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:16

 
Lawmakers push for better body armor -- and the Pentagon responds

Lisa Burgess reports in Stars & Stripes today that 33 members of Congress have sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee requesting that the Pentagon be directed to buy better body armor and other gear for soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, 33 House members, led by Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., sent House appropriators a letter that emphasized the need to supply all deployed troops with the Defense Department’s new Interceptor flak vests, as well as provide adequate immunizations, drinking water and even sundries such as toothpaste.

“It is an outrage that servicemembers, deployed in the Global War on Terrorism, do not receive adequate personal hygiene products and drinking water,” the letter said. “Servicemembers have told us they lack personal items like razors, shaving cream, toothpaste, etc. Congress needs to provide these items to America’s soldiers and not rely on families to continually send their loved ones these necessities.”
* * *
Many members of Congress have expressed anger over Defense Department estimates that more than 40,000 troops, most notably Reserve and National Guard combat support units, were not outfitted with the new “Interceptor” body armor before deploying to Iraq.

Instead, the troops are wearing Vietnam-era “flak jackets,” designed to stop fragmentation but not larger caliber rifle rounds, or Kevlar vests without the ceramic inserts that prevent high-caliber ammunition from penetrating.

Some soldiers told members of the House Appropriations Committee that they were spending as much as $650 out of pocket to buy their own Interceptor Body Armor vests and protective insert plates.

DOD officials have said that the manufacturer of the new vests is producing the armor as rapidly as possible, and that the new vests are priority shipped to the Middle East.

In response to this story, and to widespread criticism over the Interceptor body vest procurement problem, the Pentagon released a statement today that it was doing all it could to get the body armor to Iraq as quickly as possible.

The Army and Marines are rushing to get enough body armor into Iraq and Afghanistan by December for everyone who needs it, as fast as it comes off the assembly line.

"Body armor is saving lives," Army Brig. Gen. James R. Moran emphasized. "There have been dozens and dozens of instances where body armor has saved lives of individual soldiers. We're producing that as quickly as we possibly can."
* * *
Getting body armor to combat zones by December is part of the Army's "rapid fielding initiative," Moran said. He said the initiative, which treats soldiers as part of the system, is saving soldiers' lives, improving the quality of their lives and improving their combat effectiveness. "And we're doing it immediately," the general noted.

Analysis What we have here is a lot of "too little, too late" on both sides. The push by the 33 Democratic legislators comes as Congress has given its blessing to the President's $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan, and also near the end of the FY2004 defense appropriations process. In other words, the push may be too late. I have learned that at least one member of Congress tried to amend the President's $87 billion request in the House to add funding for body armor, but that rider was rejected on procedural grounds. At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, given the fact that Congress has signed off on this bill and the President seems sure to sign it.

That said, I'm not sure what else can be done. The Pentagon jump-started the procurement of this body armor a few months ago, and there appears to be no feasible way at this point to make the production lines move any faster. At this point, December 2003 may be the best that our military-industrial complex can do in terms of a delivery date for these pieces of equipment, and soldiers couldn't even buy these items faster if they wanted to with a personal credit card.

What's left to be done? I think we're kidding ourselves if we think that Iraq will be the last battle fought by our military for some time, or that we will leave Iraq anytime soon. The Interceptor body armor should be fielded to every American soldier and Marine -- active and reserve -- as soon as possible. We ought to make the fielding of critical soldier equipment a priority. It was tragic to send men and women into combat without this gear this time. We will be derelict if we do it again.

Update: National Journal's Congress AM Daily reports that 103 members of Congress have called on the House Armed Services Commitee chairman to hold hearings on the Pentagon's failure to field Interceptor body armor before the war in Iraq.

In the letter to Hunter, Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) and the others noted service members' complaints that only some soldiers serving in Iraq have been issued the highest quality "Interceptor" body armor -- Kevlar bulletproof vests with removable ceramic inserts. Other soldiers have been killed when Vietnam-era "flak jackets" failed to stop enemy bullets.

The letter also cited reports that parents of soldiers have been purchasing ceramic plates for the Interceptor vests and sending them to their sons and daughters overseas.

posted by Phillip Carter at 16:13

 
Federal judges harder to predict on sentencing than lawmakers say

Jess Bravin and Gary Fields reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a really interesting draft study by the General Accounting Office on sentencing decisions by federal judges. The study belies much recent criticism of federal judges -- that they are too lenient across the board; that they always "downwardly depart" from the sentencing guidelines; that they bend the law where they think the facts warrant it. This new GAO study punctures at least one of those critiques, and hints at a much more complex picture of the federal bench.

Government researchers did find wide disparities in sentencing across the country's 12 regional judicial circuits. In drug cases, for example, district judges in San Francisco's Ninth Circuit were 19 times as likely to mete out sentences below the guidelines of the U.S. Sentencing Commission -- to make what are called "downward departures" -- as those in the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., an unpublished draft study by the General Accounting Office shows.

Those figures are adjusted to control for differences among cases and to exclude cases in which the government sought leniency because the defendant pleaded guilty and provided it with "substantial assistance."

But the two reports paint a different picture from the one legislators offered when Congress passed a law in April to restrict judges' latitude. The GAO, Congress's oversight arm, found that of 175,000 federal criminal sentences given nationwide from fiscal 1999 through fiscal 2001, 17% were downward departures. A separate study released this week by the Sentencing Commission itself, looking at fiscal 2001, found that about 11% of criminal sentences given by federal judges fell below the guidelines.

Both reports found rates substantially above the 5.8% reported for 1991 -- but below the 18.1% for 2001 that was cited during the congressional debate over whether lawmakers should tighten the sentencing rules.
* * *
But researchers cautioned that even though the Ninth Circuit is widely considered the country's most liberal, and the Fourth its most conservative, the numbers don't tell the whole story.

Because the Ninth Circuit includes the Mexican border states of Arizona and California, it has a disproportionate number of alien defendants, who often receive lighter sentences so they can be deported more quickly. The highest such departure rates were found in San Diego's Southern District of California, with 70% of 5,300 drug cases. Nationwide, noncitizens were twice as likely as citizens to receive lighter sentences, at 24% of cases.

The GAO also found considerable differences based on the defendant's race and the type of drug offense. Nationwide, 28% of 21,700 marijuana defendants received lighter sentences, while only 8% of 14,600 crack defendants did. Hispanic defendants were most likely to receive leniency -- 23% of 29,800 defendants did -- while blacks were least likely, at 8% of 20,400 defendants. The rate for white and "other" defendants was 13%.

Analysis: It's funny how numbers can go against conventional wisdom sometimes. A few outspoken judges have created the perception that all judges are willing to bend the rules for defendants -- and that appears to not be the case. The response to this perception has been quite Draconian. The Justice Department now wants to track all judges who downwardly depart from the sentencing guidelines. The federal judiciary has had to deal with this issue while trying to get more resources with which to hear cases and clear its backlog. Hopefully this data makes the debate a little bit more intelligent -- and honest.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:33

 
Start of military tribunals said to be 'imminent'

Col. Frederic L. Borch III, the prosecutor appointed by the Pentagon to lead the military tribunal effort, announced today to an American Bar Association meeting that the start of these trials was "imminent, soon". It has been nearly 2 years since President Bush authorized these tribunals in his 13 Nov 01 executive order, and some have predicted that the trials would never actually happen. Today's speech belies that prediction, and indicates that these proceedings may be just around the corner.

"I think it's safe to say that our start is imminent, soon," said Col. Frederic L. Borch III, who oversees nine prosecutors in a Pentagon office set up to handle the upcoming trials. Borch, speaking to an American Bar Association gathering, would not be more specific.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers later said there are numerous steps preceding the start of a trial, and nothing will happen immediately.

"We are weeks if not months away," Shavers said.

Plans have been in the works for such trials for nearly two years, but the White House has given no date for the first tribunal, nor specified who would be tried or where. Lawyers working with the Pentagon predict the first tribunal will take place at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. military is holding several hundred foreign prisoners picked up in the hunt for terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001.

The trial, when it comes, will mark the first time since World War II that the United States has put wartime prisoners on trial in such a proceeding.

Analysis: Why start now? I think the administration wants to fight the perception that the men detained at Guantanamo Bay are languishing there in perpetuity -- with no legal process whatsoever. These military tribunals represent a relatively low risk way to give the detainees some legal process and dispute that perception. Notwithstanding the procedural criticisms of these tribunals, they will represent more legal process than the detainees have gotten so far. The White House may be able to spin this as a magnanimous act -- something that goes above the requirements of the Geneva Convention.

To use a bad legal pun, I think the jury's still out on the tribunals. I've read the procedural rules created by the Pentagon and compared them to both the Manual for Courts Martial and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The differences are major, but the tribunals still have the potential to be fair proceedings for the men detained at Guantanamo. I'm not convinced yet that the tribunals will be the kangaroo courts that some have made them out to be. I guess I have faith in the career military lawyers who will staff the tribunals and sit as members of the jury, and their ability to do the right thing. Maybe that's overly optimistic. But at least we're giving these detainees some legal process. It remains to be seen how just that process will be.
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:00

 
Two U.S. soldiers killed in attack on M1A2 tank
Enemy tactics appear very similar to those in Israeli-Palestine conflict

The AP reports on a roadside bomb that struck and seriously disabled one of the Army's M1A2 tanks from the 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 4th Infantry Division -- killing two soldiers. The attack was the first to successfully knock out an M1 since the end of major combat operations on May 1, and only the third destructive hit on an M1 during the war.

The Abrams tank was disabled when it was struck by a land mine or a roadside bomb Tuesday night during a patrol near Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division. A third crewman was evacuated to a U.S. hospital in Germany, she said.

It was the first M1 Abrams main battle tank destroyed since the end of major combat May 1, military officials said. During the active combat phase, several of the 68-ton vehicles the mainstay of the U.S. Army's armored forces were disabled in combat.

Analysis: The M1A2 weighs more than 70 tons, and is the most advanced and heavily armored combat vehicle in history. They are considered virtually impregnable to attack from anything but another tank or sophisticated anti-tank missile (like the Hellfire). I imagine the Army is extremely concerned right now about this new development, because the majority of its vehicles in Iraq are not as well protected as the M1 tank or M2/M3 Bradley fighting vehicle. Indeed, the Army is currently deploying its new "Stryker" brigade to Iraq, composed of lightly-armored wheeled vehicles which were partially developed with an eye towards peacekeeping operations. If the Iraqi guerillas now have a way to take out the M1 tank, that's a very serious development.

There's another interesting angle here that was noted by an officer who participates in a military list-serv I belong to. That's the similarity between this M1 hit and the 15 Oct 03 attack which killed three Americans in the Gaza Strip. In that attack, a huge bomb exploded in the roadway under a U.S. diplomatic convoy of heavily armed and armored vehicles. Compare the TTPs used in Gaza to those used in Iraq:

The attack occurred at about 10:15 a.m. (4:15 a.m. EDT) Wednesday, five hours after the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have condemned Israel for building a controversial fence around the
West Bank, and as Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip continued a six-day-old operation to destroy cross-border tunnels. Eight Palestinians have been killed and more than 230 homes have been destroyed or severely damaged in that operation.

The bomb detonated as the convoy was about 11/2 miles inside the Gaza Strip from the Erez crossing at the Israeli border. They were driving along the pockmarked, partially blacktopped road that runs the length of the Gaza Strip and is frequently used by foreigners -- diplomats, aid workers, journalists and others -- as well as by local Palestinians.

According to witnesses and U.S. Embassy officials, a Palestinian security team led the convoy in one car, the American security guards occupied the second vehicle, at least two U.S. diplomats were in the third, and another Palestinian police car brought up the rear.
* * *
U.S. officials said the vehicle had armor plating on its roof and sides, but said they did not know whether the vehicle was equipped with armor on its underside to protect against land mines. Israeli officials estimated that
the bomb, which was buried in the hardpan roadbed, might have weighed more than 100 pounds.

A smaller bomb planted on another road in the northern Gaza Strip exploded under an Israeli military all-terrain vehicle Wednesday morning, injuring three soldiers, according to an Israeli military spokesman. The spokesman said the two incidents were not believed to be related.

Homemade bombs concocted from petroleum products, sugar, cosmetics, shampoo and varying amounts of TNT are commonly used by militants in the Gaza Strip. The explosives are frequently planted in potholes or beneath roadbeds on
routes used by Israeli military vehicles and have been used to blow up 50-ton tanks as well as lighter vehicles.

Some of the explosives are detonated on impact when a vehicle rolls over them; others are more sophisticated and are set off by remote control. A gray cable hanging into the crater left by Wednesday's attack on the U.S. vehicle suggested that the bomb might have been ignited by remote control from a nearby concrete hut.

This is pure speculation, but I think these two sets of tactics are pretty similar. The U.S. suspects right now that foreign elements are behind many of the attacks in Iraq, and that they are having a significant influence on domestic Iraqi guerillas. Even if they're not actually conducting the attacks, I think it's very likely these foreigners are providing training and expertise to the Iraqis in the art of urban combat and insurgency. To some extent, these foreign guerillas may also be passing along their doctrine from places like the Gaza Strip and West Bank, where guerillas and terrorists have learned how to defeat sophisticated Israeli security schemes and achieve deadly results. This is a very dangerous development. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:18

 
Embedded report from the 3rd ACR

Nir Rosen of the Asia Times is one of the last reporters to remain 'embedded' with a unit in Iraq. Asia Times publishes this series from Rosen which offers some vivid reports from the field with the soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Overall, I think the series paints a pretty good picture of what's going on over there with this unit. Here's an excerpt from the first article of the series:

AL-QAIM, western Iraq - "This is the wild wild west," says Captain Chris Alfeiri, holding a fly swatter while relaxing in between missions. A 30-year-old native of Boston, Alfeiri is one of about 1,000 soldiers from the 1st Squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR), based in Fort Carson of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and currently stationed in al-Qaim, at the western edge of Anbar province, bordering on Syria.

It is a dusty, arid and lawless region, with large towns by the Euphrates River, which snakes into Iraq from Syria. Americans are attacked on a daily basis by a recalcitrant community that used to shoot at the Iraqi army as well, and every night they can hear mysterious fire fights occurring inside the towns as tribes, gangs and smugglers battle over turf.

The 3rd ACR has converted an abandoned train station into home and called it Tiger Forward Operating Base. There is a cafeteria, or chow hall with a Pueblo motif painted on its walls, serving three different hot meals a day, from bacon and pancakes to pasta and Asian-flavored chicken with vegetables. There are TOCs, or tactical operation centers, pronounced "tok". There are barracks, where soldiers have small gyms, watch satellite TV and compete in board games like Risk, seeking world domination, or football video games on Sony Play Station. There is a detainment center for prisoners, and even a recreation center with wireless Internet and "morale phones" to call home.

Alfeiri's diminutive chin, small eyes, soft cheeks and shaved head give him a friendly baby-faced look incongruous with his role as a combat officer who served in Bosnia for a year, an experience that helped prepare him for dealing with conflict in an alien culture, as does his marriage to a former fellow journalism student from Honduras, whose family he often visits in their country. His men operate every day from the western-most base in Iraq. His 130 soldiers, known as Bandit troop, conduct border surveillance operations, raids, checkpoints and help reconstruct the towns in the region.

Every night his men roll out of Tiger X Ray, the call sign for their base, and a convoy of tanks and Humvees proceeds to the border, driving off the hardball, as they call the road, in order to avoid improvised explosive devices, IEDs. They stop at a test fire range, and make sure their heavy weapons work, the radio announces that their call sign, White 1, is at Red Con One (or Readiness Condition One, meaning everything works) and they head into the black moonscape.

posted by Phillip Carter at 08:55

 
The myth of the Republican military voting bloc

Benjamin Wallace-Wells deconstructs this myth in next month's issue of the Washington Monthly, and argues that the GOP ought not take military votes for granted in 2004. This well-reported and written story chronicles the recent political history of the military, from George C. Marshall to the present day, and paints the picture today of a military that's increasingly disenchanted with the current White House.

The effect of all of this, says Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and professor of political science at Boston University, is that "the soldier vote and the pro-military vote are in play." In 2004, says Feaver, the military sociologist at Duke, "there is the potential for these forces which have always pushed towards the Republicans to be neutralized, or even pushing towards the Democrats."

If these frustrations spill over into politics in the next election, they could profoundly shift the structural underpinnings of the current nearly 50-50 American split. This country has 1.4 million active duty soldiers, and 1.2 million reserves. It also has 26.4 million veterans, nearly 13 percent of the nation's adult population. Politicians and activists involved in veterans affairs take it as a truism that a defining feature of veterans' politics is their perception of how the active military is being treated, and used. Subtle shifts in the way that massive population votes could obviously have far-reaching impacts in national politics.

A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5 percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio, expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each have more than a million veteran voters.

But the military and veterans' communities don't simply deliver their own votes. All over America, voters look to the military as a sort of weathervane--an institution whose values civilians trust and want politicians to support. This is particularly true of working-class white swing voters, many of whom have a soldier in their family or know someone who does. The attachment to the military is even more potent among certain occupations-police, firefighters, engineers--whose ranks are heavily represented in the reserves. The policemen, firemen, and engineers who stay at home look across the room each day at the empty desks of their colleagues fighting in the Iraqi theater. They check email each day for personal dispatches from the front lines. They drop off food for the left-behind families.

Then there are those who are not personally connected to the military, but for whom honor of the military and the military's opinion acts as a moral barometer, revealing which politicians have the right values and which don't. The military is a deeply trusted and honored institution in American life-far more important than the media, politicians, or teachers. To respect the military doesn't simply require the sort of offhand pieties that liberal politicians frequently toss at it, but a deeply felt sense of belonging, a sense that the military embodies values which most of the country believes in. Treatment of the military consequently acts as an indicator for tens of millions of Americans who aren't enlisted of how seriously a party, administration, or politician takes the nation's security, and how competent he is to defend it. Political scientists call these people national security voters. "[They] are not so minutely interested in issues like health care for the military or how many reserves are in Iraq at one time," said Feaver. "These people rely heavily on general impressions of whether a particular politician or administration is good for the military or bad for the military. What should really worry the Republicans is the potential for all of these problems you hear about to add up to an impression for the national security voter that the Republicans may not be so good for the military."

Analysis: I've never thought the military really lived up to its stereotype when it came to politics. The conventional wisdom is that America's military is one of the last bastions of American conservatism. I do think that America's military officer corps is somewhat more conservative than society at large, but I think that it's largely become a professional class that is too diverse to effectively be pigeonholed that way. Moreover, the enlisted corps of the military is most certainly not conservative -- it's far too diverse in race and socio-economic terms. On balance, I'd say that the military leans slightly to the right of center, but it's no John Birch society. Military voters could vote for John McCain or George Bush -- or they could vote for Wes Clark or Bill Clinton.

(Quick personal vignette: I went into the military as a conservative and came out as a moderate/liberal. I attribute this change to the experience of living and working with such a diverse group of soldiers, especially the ones I was privileged to lead. Most of my enlisted soldiers came from working-class backgrounds, and their perspective was one that I had nto been exposed to while growing up in Southern California. Charlie Moskos and others have written that one of the best things about the draft was their exposure to other American kids, and social interaction and educatin that flowed from that. I think the same dynamic occurs in an all-volunteer force, except that only the volunteers are lucky enough to take advantage of it.)

In 2004, there are lots of issues in play which matter to national security voters. I divide these issues into two main categories:
1. Issues of national security per se, such as how to best fight the war on terrorism.
2. Issues which affect national security voters personally, such as how to equip the military and whether to give them a pay raise or certain benefits.

The Bush White House is vulnerable on both sets of military issues. The criticisms for the first set of issues are widely known. It will not be hard for the eventual Democratic nominee to make an argument against the White House on Iraq, on progress against terrorism, or any other front. The truth is that this is a very difficult war, and that smart people can disagree both over our progress and our direction in this war. That leaves a lot of room for disagreement. My hope is that the Democratic candidate offers a positive vision instead of merely attacking the President on this issue.

The second set of issues -- those which affect military voters personally -- will also be viable issues in the 2004 election. Some of these will flow directly from Iraq, and will include criticism over the administration's decision to put Americans in harm's way there in the first place, as well as criticism over specific problems in Iraq like the failure to equip all soldiers with the latest body armor. So too will the overstretching of America's reserves, which will probably result in a large exodus of reservists as they redeploy in 2004 from a year in Iraq. The Democrats will also hammer the White House over the "concurrent receipt" issue which affects veterans benefits, as well as military pay issues. The recent incident at Fort Stewart may also provide grist for the Democratic machine. All of these issues can (and probably will) be used by the Democrats to pull away military voters to the Democratic party.

Who stands to gain the most here? That should be obvious -- Wesley K. Clark. Of all the Democratic candidates, Wes Clark stands in a league all his own for his ability to exploit these issues. Moreover, I think he even stands above President Bush for his personal credibility on these issues. John Kerry may also be able to run with these issues, but not as well as Mr. Clark. It's still too early to handicap the Democratic race, and I'd be a fool to bet now on Dean or Clark or Kerry. Of course, lots can happen between now and Nov. 2004; these issues may not have the same resonance then as they do now. More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:13

 
Army announces plans to retain, expand Peacekeeping Institute

After almost eliminating its Peacekeeping Institute at the Army War College several months ago, the Army announced today that it would retain and expand the center, which has become something of an policy-oriented think tank within the Army on operations other than war. The decision to close came as part of a larger headquarters realignment proposal for the Army, but was quickly criticized as short-sighted by many inside and outside the Army. In hindsight, the move appears particularly daft, given the Army's extensive commitment to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The institute will be renamed the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) to encompass the revised charter.

The original PKI charter and structure are being adjusted to meet the future needs of the U.S. Army and the U.S. military across a broad range of peacekeeping and stability operations. Current planning calls for the new organization to have 13 Army positions and a distinguished visiting professor. The PKSOI will have an operating budget of between $1.3 to 1.5 million.

The PKSOI mission will be to study the strategic implications of stability operations; support senior Army leaders in understanding and dealing with the implications of stability operations; and study the impact of international organizations and nongovernmental organizations on the Army's conduct of peacekeeping and stability operations. PKSOI will also be required to understand current foreign militaries' objectives and doctrine on stability operations; contribute to evolving stability operations doctrine; and to help educate the next generation of Army strategic leaders on stability operations.

Analysis: This is good news for at least two reasons. First, this institute does a great job of collecting knowledge on peacekeeping and educating the military about that knowledge. In a profession where mistakes cost lives, the effort to spread 'lessons learned' from previous missions is incredibly important, and the PKI did a good job of this. Second, this is good news because it shows that the Defense Department is willing to listen to criticism and react to it. I'm sure there were some egos bruised in the process, but at the end of the day, the Pentagon came around and kept the PKI open. It's amazing what can get done when you emphasize solving problems over winning bureaucratic battles.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:42

 
A bloody view of the war

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a superb article on its front page today by Yaroslav Trofimov on the 21st Combat Support Hospital, and how that organization's personnel see the war. The Army's medical community has historically been less hooah about combat operations. Medical personnel tend to see themselves as healers first and warriors second, and they are the ones who must deal with the human cost of war. This article tells their story, and shares their perspective of the war.

While attention focuses on the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq -- 115 by enemy fire since Mr. Bush announced the end of major combat on May 1 -- the military doesn't generally publicize the more-frequent incidents in which soldiers are wounded. According to a tally kept by the U.S. Central Command, as of 7 p.m. on Oct. 27, the U.S. military had sustained a total of 1,737 nonlethal casualties from hostile action in Iraq, including 1,186 since May 1.

The toll includes American casualties in the rocket attack on Baghdad's Al Rasheed hotel on Sunday, and U.S. military police killed and wounded in suicide bombings that devastated four Iraqi police stations across Baghdad the following day. October has been the bloodiest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since the occupation began.

Advances in medical care and bulletproof vests allow more soldiers to survive the kind of injuries that would have killed them in past conflicts. But the recent switch by Iraqi insurgents to powerful roadside bombs as their main offensive weapon has raised the number and severity of wounds even for those with high-tech protection. These bombs are usually rigged artillery shells that, hidden in vegetable crates, bicycle baskets or simple debris, can be detonated close to their target and shower it with shrapnel.

"Since May, the number and the rate of casualties has increased," says Col. Doug Liening, commander of the 21st Combat Support Hospital, which also operates a facility in the northern city of Mosul. "People in the United States do not appreciate what's going on here." In peacetime, the 21st Combat Support Hospital is based at Fort Hood, Texas, as are many of its personnel currently in Balad.

For many doctors and nurses, the daily gore makes it hard to sleep at night. "It's like a horror movie," says Capt. Nancy Emma, 49, a nurse for 16 years who worked on Sgt. Bartels in the emergency room. "I served in a trauma unit, I saw death in the face -- but nothing like here. And those who live, you've got to wonder how they are going to make it back in the States."

After the emergency room, Sgt. Bartels was wheeled into the operating room. His buddy Sgt. Myers, who received shrapnel wounds in his right arm and face, called his family back in Kansas as he waited to be treated. The two sergeants, reservists attached to the Fourth Infantry Division, were driving from a meeting at the town of Baqouba's agriculture ministry office. They accompanied a civil-affairs officer, Capt. John Teal, who was filling in for their usual captain, on leave in the U.S.

Sgt. Myers asked nurses what happened to Capt. Teal. No one could muster the courage to tell the sergeant the captain was dead, instantly killed by the roadside bomb that went through their unarmored Humvee.

Analysis: I have two reactions to this story, and they're at odds with each other. The first is to wonder whether reporting on casualties is really a good idea. Such reporting tends to demoralize the American public, and to embolden our adversaries as a result. Also, an emphasis on casualty reporting translates through the democratic process into public pressure to reduce casualties, which translates through the chain of command to pressure on commanders to minimize risk in their operations. That pressure reduces operational effectiveness, because commanders alter their plans to maximize force protection instead of mission accomplishment. I think that's a very dangerous thing, and that ultimately, it can lead to mission failure.

On the other hand, I think it's important to recognize the cost of war and to weight that cost against our raison d'etre. This cost has been quite high. As a vignette, a friend of mine told me that she has sent replacement uniforms to her physician friends in the 4th Infantry Division to replace blood-soaked uniforms that they could no longer wear. I can't even imagine such carnage, and I've worked in a Los Angeles-area emergency room before. These medical personnel see the cost every day, and I think they bear a difficult burden in explaning the "why" behind the injuries to soldiers when they come out of anesthesia. I support the mission in Iraq, however, I think I'd be hard-pressed to explain that every day to wounded soldiers the way these doctors have to.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:26

 
Army battalion commander faces assault charges in Iraq

The Washington Times reports this morning on an interesting legal vignette from the 4th Infantry Division, where LTC Allen B. West stands charged of assaulting an Iraqi prisoner in order to gain information in connection with an attack on his unit. These charges are remarkable because LTC West was an artillery battalion commander at the time of the incident. It's rare that a senior officer would take such a direct role in prisoner interrogation, and that the Army would prosecute such a senior officer. But in this case, the 4th Infantry Division's Staff Judge Advocate has recommended that LTC West either be allowed to "RILO" (Resign In Lieu Of court martial) or be court-martialed for his conduct.

An informant reported that there was an assassination plot against Col. West, an artillery officer working with the local governing council in Saba al Boor. On Aug. 16, guerrillas attacked members of the colonel's unit who were on their way to Saba al Boor.

An informant told the soldiers that one person involved in the attack was a town policeman. Col. West sent two sergeants to detain the policeman, who was placed in a detention center near the Taji air base. The interrogators had no luck at first, so Col. West decided to take over the questioning.

"I asked for soldiers to accompany me and told them we had to gather information and that it could get ugly," Col. West said in his e-mail.

He said his soldiers "physically aggress[ed]" the prisoner. A subsequent investigation resulted in nonjudicial punishment for them in the form of fines.

After the physical "aggress" failed, Col. West says he brandished his pistol.

"I did use my 9 mm weapon to threaten him and fired it twice. Once I fired into the weapons clearing barrel outside the facility alone, and the next time I did it while having his head close to the barrel. I fired away from him. I stood in between the firing and his person.

"I admit that what I did was not right but it was done with the concern of the safety of my soldiers and myself."

Col. West said he informed his superior of his actions. The incident lay dormant until the Army conducted an overall command-climate investigation of the brigade. The investigation turned up the interrogation technique, and Col. West was charged with one count of aggravated assault.

Col. West said the gunshots spurred the Iraqi to provide the location of the planned sniper attack and the names of three guerrilla fighters.

Col. West says the 4th Infantry's staff judge advocate, the unit's prosecutor, is offering him two choices: resign short of gaining retirement benefits or face court-martial.

Analysis: This story is interesting on a lot of levels. First, there's the question of effectiveness, and whether LTC West's use of his M9 pistol was effective in interrogating this prisoner. It appers that it was. Second, I think we have to balance that short-term effectiveness against any long-term consequences that flow from these kinds of interrogation tactics. In this case, the firing of two 9mm rounds near the prisoner was clearly coercion in a psychological sense, but I'm not sure whether it really crossed the line into torture. Remember, this is combat, not police work, and the rules are different. I'm not sure whether this incident will really have the kind of long-term consequences the Army is concerned about. Indeed, this kind of interrogation may be necessary to get information that can save American and Iraqi lives.

On another level, this story is interesting because it reveals American attitudes towards misconduct in the ranks. Generally speaking, the Army takes a dim view of this stuff, whether it's done by an Army MP private or an artillery colonel. Indeed, the colonel will usually be treated more harshly, both because of his experience and the command responsibility he bears. Truly, the buck stops in this case with LTC West, and he will be held responsible for anything done in his command. If one of his lieutenants had done this, LTC West probably wouldn't be facing charges now. But he surely would face some administrative action -- possibly the end of his career -- for the incident.

Finally, this story is interesting because it reveals the kind of stress our soldiers and commanders are under in Iraq. I bet that if you asked LTC West last year whether he'd do this, he'd have responded "no". Senior officers in the American Army tend to be very well educated about the laws of war, at least in comparison to our NATO allies and our enemies. If you gave him a hypothetical like this, he probably would have said he'd call in the brigade's counter-intel/HUMINT teams to do the interrogation. But the exigencies of the situation often make people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. Clearly, LTC West and his unit are under a great deal of stress right now, or else this incident would not have happened.

I'm conflicted about whether these charges are justified or not. LTC West has the ultimate responsibility as commander to protect his unit, and a little bit of "smacky face" (to borrow Jess Bravin's quote from the WSJ) may be justified in this kind of situation. The line between coercion and torture is a very difficult one to draw, and I'm not sure this was the wrong thing to do in this situation. If this case goes to a court martial, LTC West may be able to make that case to a military jury of his peers.

Coda: Want to know how the Washington Times got this story? Easy. Guy Taylor, the writer, was embedded with 4th Infantry Division for some time during their ramp-up at Fort Hood and their subsequent deployment to Iraq. I imagine he made a number of contacts during that time, and built relationships among the officers in the division. I think this will be an unintended payoff of the embedding program for both the media and the public over the next several years. These bonds will probably continue over the years, especially as journalists cultivate relationships with officers on their way up.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:14

 
Army takes intel AAR off the web

Over the weekend, Tom Ricks reported in the Washington Post about an "after action review" conducted by officers from the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center that was critical of American military intel ops in Iraq. Among other things, this report highlighted key areas where American units were not given the intel resources to do their job.

The Army critique of U.S. intelligence efforts in Iraq is especially noteworthy, because the Bush administration and senior military commanders have maintained for months that more U.S. troops are not needed in Iraq, and that what is needed, instead, is better intelligence. The report discloses, for example, that the intelligence teams already operating in Iraq have been far less productive than the Army expected them to be. The 69 "tactical human intelligence teams" operating in the country at the time of the study, at the beginning of the summer, should have been producing "at least" 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering an average total of 30, it states. It attributes that apparent underperformance to "the lack of guidance and focus" from the intelligence office overseeing the teams' work.

The report also says that some key intelligence machinery has been misused in Iraq, which raises questions about the high-tech solutions that some at the Pentagon are advocating to improve the U.S. military's performance in Iraq.

Most notably, it is critical of how unmanned aircraft have been used in recent months. At one point, it notes that one such "unmanned aerial vehicle," or UAV, was assigned to find buried aircraft. Also, a major UAV system, the Hunter, was kept idle for 30 days because it had not been assigned an operational frequency on which to operate.

Managers of UAV operations were "overwhelmed" with tasks and were "lucky" to have their aircraft in the right place at the right time, the report says. UAVs fly so slowly, it adds, that they could not get to where they were needed. So, while the planes were employed to try to locate Iraqi fighters attacking U.S. military convoys, "the daily mortar and rocket attacks on bases and convoys became virtually undetectable to the UAVs," the report says.

In another technological issue, the report says that a network that was supposed to link intelligence teams and convey time-sensitive information among them -- as well as permit them to tap into an evolving database -- worked so poorly that it was "nonexistent." The report recommended that, among other things, the teams be provided with satellite telephones -- gear that most news reporters working in Iraq and Afghanistan possess as a matter of course.

Today, the Federation of American Scientists reports that the Army has taken the unclassified report down off the web, though a copy of the report still remains available on the Post's website.

The Army has taken one of its popular web sites offline after the Washington Post reported on a critical account of U.S. intelligence posted on the site.

The web site of the Center for Army Lessons Learned (call.army.mil) was promptly disabled following a Post story about an "unusually blunt" report on the inadequacies of U.S. military intelligence in Iraq.

"We're doing some maintenance" on the site, an Army spokeswoman at Fort Leavenworth told Secrecy News initially. She then acknowledged that the move was prompted by the Post story on October 25.

The web site should be back up by the end of the week, she said, but the report cited in the Post story "will not be available."

Very interesting. For starters, this is not a classified report, so it's odd that they would have this reaction to it. It's possible that it should have been classified, in which case the smart thing would have been to figure that out before it ran on the front page of the Washington Post. At this point, I think the Army is trying to stuff a cat back in the bag that's already taken off down the street.

This secrecy penchant with respect to AARs is also a departure for the Army, which has learned to embrace brutal, candid criticism as a way of increasing learning and spreading knowledge. These assessments are usually quite candid -- and quite bruising. "No thin skins" is a rule of AARs. Typically, these AARs are printed and circulated widely. Naturally, other Army officers want to learn from some other guy's mistakes instead of making his own. My hope is that this report has simply been removed to the "For Official Use Only" part of the CALL website, accessible by any .mil computer or with an AKO password.

However, there were some great kernels of wisdom in this report with implications for the policy process. There are legitimate concerns about whether our commanders have the MI resources they need to get the job done. Indeed, 4ID commander MG Ray Odierno stated in a press conference yesterday that these were legitimate issues:

Q. Dave Fulghum, Aviation Week. Do you give any validity to this October "lessons learned" study out of Fort Leavenworth that says Army intelligence analysts were too few in number and under trained?

GEN. ODIERNO: First, I have not seen the report, so I can't comment.

I know that I have complete confidence in all my intelligence analysts in the division, and I think they've done a very good job of what we've asked them to do.

I can't really comment on the report, because I haven't read it.

My overall assessment is, what the Army needs to do for the future is we need to focus a little bit more on human intelligence and our ability to conduct human intelligence in a quick manner, just because the nature of the battlefield has changed, and I think we've recognized that, really, for the last couple years. We still need to act on that in the Army. And so we need to work towards developing a better HUMINT structure than are already embedded into our units, because we believe that is what will work best against the threat that's out there, and then combining that with the national intelligence that's available and also the other -- SIGINT and other intelligence assets that we have available to us.

So I'm not quite as hard on them as you suggest that the article might have said. Now I'm not going to talk about national-level intelligence, because what I'm talking to you about is division level and below, which is what I've been involved with.

So even if this report should have been kept in military channels, I think that a sanitized version should be released to the public so that we can discuss issues like appropriate resource levels for military intelligence units. These are contentious issues that come up every year in the DoD budget process -- a process through which we spend $400 billion in taxpayer money. We can't allow the Army to develop a monopoly on information that will cripple the debate on the subject. If we're having problems in this critical area, we (the public) need to know about it.

Update: Noah Shachtman at DefenseTech connects this intel AAR's removal to a larger pattern of such acts in the federal government.

Update II: Fred Kaplan takes this issue on in Slate, and criticizes the Army for taking its information down from the public section of the Internet.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:23

 
Skill & technology laid the foundation for victory in Iraq
Army study discounts the effects of technology alone, as well as jointness, in victory over the Iraqi forces -- luck played a role too

Prof. Stephen Biddle of the Army War College recently presented a study to the House Armed Services Committee on lessons learned from Iraq that concluded that Iraqi ineptitude was key factor in America's victory. Speed, technology and "jointness" could not explain, by themselves, the rapid American victory over Iraqi forces. As Prof. Biddle found in his 1996 study of Gulf War I, the key determinant of victory was the synergistic interaction of American skill with the lack of skill on the Iraqis' part -- magnified by the presence of a severe technology differential.

So both advanced technology and a major skill differential are necessary to explain OIF’s low casualties; to explain the failure of scorched earth requires Iraqi cooperation, whether deliberate (in the form of disobedience or lack of intent) or inadvertent (via organizational incapacity). Given Iraqi idiosyncrasies, a major skill differential, and modern technology, the OIF outcome would probably have obtained even without the speed of the Coalition advance or our precision or situation awareness per se; our technology was advanced enough and diverse enough that any of a wide variety of capabilities could have sufficed to punish Iraqi error very harshly. Inter alia, precision and situation awareness might have been sufficient, but neither were necessary as such; speed was probably neither necessary nor sufficient. A major skill differential, by contrast was necessary – as was some source of the modern lethality and protection needed to exploit Iraq’s mistakes. Given this, the causal importance of speed, precision and situation awareness has often been overestimated in the public debate on the war; the causal role of the skill differential between ourselves and our enemies has probably been underestimated. And the variety of ways in which technology can exploit that differential has been underestimated in the postwar focus on precision and situation awareness per se.

This is not to say that speed was a bad idea, or that either precision or situation awareness were unhelpful. Hindsight suggests that the Iraqis would not have torched their oil fields or used WMD with more time, but this was less clear beforehand. A rapid advance made sense given the credible possibility that Saddam might carry out such threats. And both precision and situation awareness were important contributors to the aggregate technological sophistication we needed to exploit the Iraqis’ mistakes.

But to say that speed was a sensible choice, or that precision and situation awareness were valuable, is not to find that their role was as important as often claimed. And the difference matters. Views of past wars shape future policies, and views on the relative importance of contributing causes can have serious postwar policy implications.

In particular, underestimating the skill differential’s importance could have a variety of dangerous consequences. First, it could lead to an assumption that precision and situation awareness can produce OIF-like results against other opponents with better skills than the Iraqis’. Even with skilled forces of our own, this is a dangerous assumption. In 2003, our technology could operate at near-proving-ground effectiveness against exposed, ill-prepared opponents. Enemies who do a better job of exploiting the natural complexity of the earth’s surface for cover and concealment could pose much tougher targets – as we have already seen in the performance of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Our technology’s performance is strongly affected by the nature of its targets, and our targets were extremely permissive in OIF. If we overlook this, we could thus exaggerate our technology’s potential against better skilled enemies elsewhere.

Analysis: Prof. Biddle's PowerPoint slides do a better job of breaking this down into bite-sized pieces. Basically, he doesn't think that we could have won in Iraq with such a small force if the Iraqis had fought better. Had we fought an enemy as well trained as the "Afghan Arabs" in Al Qaeda, we might have encountered much more difficulty -- particularly in any urban combat operations. (See this study by Prof. Biddle on the war in Afghanistan)

The implications of this study are quite large, as Prof. Biddle points out. On the strategic level, we need to consider how such factors like skill and technology affect the probabilities of success and casualties. At the operational level, we must plan operations that do not hinge so much on our enemy's inability to fight back effectively. And at the tactical level, we must train to fight an enemy better than ourselves -- like the OPFOR at the National Training Center -- to prepare for the day that we face an adversary more capable of opposing us.

Historically, militaries have learned more from their defeats than their victories. Military organizations that win wars historically tend to become complacent, and to adopt false lessons from victorious wars. The danger now is that America's military will think it can easily replicate its success in Iraq, and graft those methods onto future conflicts. We would be wise to not make that mistake.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:59

 
White House text file disables Internet search engines

Now this is odd... EnBanc reports (by way of the DNC blog) that the White House has put a text file on its home page to preempt external search engines (like Google) from looking inside the White House page for pages in certain folders -- everything from "Disallow: /911/iraq" to "Disallow: /kids/teeball2003/text".

Presumably, this anti-robot device is meant to force people to use the White House's search engine and page links. But in practice, this anti-robot page will act as a smokescreen, because there are lots of people like me who simply Google things like "President Nov. 13 tribunal order" to find the President's 13 Nov 01 military tribunal order (interestingly, it doesn't look like news releases have been delimited in this anti-robot device). I'd like to think that this is just administrative page management by a savvy webmaster in the White House. But I'm not smart enough about HTML to know.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:25

 
FBI jousts with librarians over Patriot Act

The front page of today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has an interesting article on Sec. 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and the visceral reaction it has provoked from America's librarians. The section allows the FBI to subpoena library records, among other things, and mandates that librarians do not disclose such subpoenas to their patrons. Though never used, the provision has provoked librarians to adopt policies whereby they regularly purge their records in order to safeguard their patrons' privacy. Now, the Journal reports that the FBI has gone on the offensive to try win over librarians' hearts and minds.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Gamely, FBI Special Agent David J. Beyer tried to convince three dozen Kentucky librarians that it is unlikely his agency will ever use the USA Patriot Act to search their stacks and records.

The new antiterrorism law gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation the power to rummage through their computers and patron files, yet "never once in my career" had an investigation led him into a library, Mr. Beyer said. Still, he warned that another terrorist attack is "probable," flashed a slide show of the crumbling World Trade Center to drive home his point and begged the librarians not to destroy any records that might help investigators some day. After all, he asked, "How much protection do you want to give to your patrons, and how much protection do you want to give to your country?"

Martha Jane Proctor, her silver hair combed into stiff spikes, was having none of it. An adviser to the libraries in eight counties in eastern Kentucky's coal-field region, Ms. Proctor pronounced the very notion of a library search "an abomination." And destroy records? "Of course. I tell the [library] directors to do it. That's pretty much my opinion," she declared.

"The only vocal concerns I've ever heard" about the Patriot Act "are from the librarians," Mr. Beyer sighed as he left the Kentucky Library Association's annual convention.

The Patriot Act has generated protests from the left and the right since it passed, almost unanimously, six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But few critics are more stubborn than the librarians, who see it as an assault on such basic civil liberties as reading privacy and intellectual freedom.

Analysis: The record is pretty clear -- the FBI has not used its Sec. 215 authority even once. The reason is that it's far more efficient to use the administrative subpoena powers of the Justice Department to gather information. It's unknown how often the FBI has used these powers to gather information. Presumably, such subpoenas have been used in the DC and New York anthrax cases to find people who have recently studied anthrax and bioterrorism. But that's speculation on my part.

What's the real issue here? It's not Sec. 215 -- that provision hasn't been used at all. The real issue here is trust. Simply put, large blocks of American society (I have no idea whether it's a minority or majority) do not trust the federal government with their civil liberties. This lack of trust enables them to believe the worst about their Justice Department. I happen to think that the Justice Department does mostly good things, and that its career attorneys and agents are some of America's finest public servants. But I often find myself in the minority when I discuss this issue with friends and students. The reality is that many of my colleagues do not trust the Justice Department, or the Bush Administration. And without such trust, these Americans are willing to see nearly anything as an assault on their civil liberties -- almost regardless of factual basis.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:21

 
Baghdad attacks portend a new Iraqi guerilla campaign
Recent strikes indicate an evolution in terrorist tactics, techniques and procedures

Guerillas launched a coordinated series of attacks around Baghdad today, killing at least 34 and wounding hundreds, using suicide bombings as their modus opperandi. (See also this WP article on the attacks) The attacks targeted the International Committee of the Red Cross and 4 Baghdad police stations -- symbols of international intervention and the U.S.-sponsored regime respectively. The effect on the capital, according to the New York Times, was to plunge the city into chaos. Officials think that a "new element" might be to blame for today's series of attacks.

The attacks took place between 8:30 and 10:15 a.m. local time, leading American and Iraqi officials to believe that they were part of a highly coordinated operation. There was a strong suspicion that foreigners were involved, and American and Iraqi officials referred to a "new element" being responsible for the bombings.

The officials differentiated between today's attacks and one on Sunday against a highly guarded hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying. The Sunday attack was attributed to loyalists to the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein.

Today's attacks come on the heels of a coordinated rocket attack on the Al Rasheed hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying. An American Army colonel was killed in that attack, though Mr. Wolfowitz escaped unscathed. As the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports, this attack represents an evolution from the previous six months of guerilla attacks, both in terms of its sophistication and the level of the risk the attackers took to get so close to a high-value target.

The attack on the U.S.-run Al Rasheed hotel, which sits in a vast "green zone" of Baghdad that is off-limits to ordinary Iraqis, marks a shift in the guerrillas' tactics. Rather than just hit-and-run ambushes, they are using more standoff weapons such as mortars, rockets and remote-controlled explosive devices that allow resistance fighters to strike without being hit in return.

Until recently, these rocket and mortar attacks -- including one on Al Rasheed in September -- usually failed to hit their targets. But, in the past few days, the guerrillas managed to inflict dozens of casualties, several of them fatal, by shelling U.S. bases in the cities of Samarra, Baquba and Balad, and by hitting a power station in Baghdad.

This ability to hit even the most protected U.S. targets raises new questions about how the American-led coalition can pacify Iraq. There are now as many as 35 anticoalition attacks a day, most in Baghdad and Sunni areas to its west and the north. In addition, guerrillas regularly kill Iraqis who help the coalition -- including the chief of police in the southern Amarah province, who was gunned down this past weekend.
* * *
Al Rasheed was hit on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, which is usually a period of increased religious feelings in the Muslim world. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander for Iraq, said last week he expected an increase in violence during this period. He said the guerrilla attacks appeared to be growing more technically sophisticated and more centrally directed.

In the first months after the war, Iraqi militants would try to ambush U.S. convoys with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire -- a tactic that usually led to immediate U.S. response and ended in the capture or killing of the attackers. Recently, the guerrillas switched to placing remote-detonated roadside bombs, usually made of rigged artillery shells -- a tactic successfully used against Israeli troops by Lebanon's Hezbollah militia in the 1990s. These bombs, disguised in crates of vegetables, bicycle baskets or buried in potholes, are hard to spot -- and often pierce through the soldiers' Humvees.

"The systems that they are putting together now are much more sophisticated -- the supposition is that they are bringing in trainers from abroad," says Maj. George Rosser, operations officer for a Florida National Guard battalion that has to deal with roadside bombs almost every night in the western city of Ramadi. "They've backed off from ambushes, from direct confrontation, because they can't stand up against our troops."

Analysis: It's far too early to know -- in the absence of a communique' from these groups -- who is responsible for both attacks. However, I think that both attacks represent a paradigm shift in the nature of the guerilla war we face in Iraq, as the Wall Street Journal alludes to in its report. These two attacks are markedly more sophisticated than the hit-and-run guerilla tactics used thus far. Here's how:

- The attacks today were time-coordinated so that they would happen with near simultaneity. That's a significant tactical evolution because a) it's tough to do, and b) it means they're sophisticated enough to know that simultaneous attacks work because your enemy doesn't have time to raise his guard after the first attack. (Attacks in series rarely work because the first one always raises everyone's guard)

- The attacks today employed suicide bombers, something not frequently seen in Iraq. Part of this owes to the lack of religious fervor on the part of the Iraqi insurgents -- they simply don't believe in their cause the way that Palestinian insurgents do. But with the exception of some Fedayeen attacks during the war, we have not seen suicide bombings en masse in Iraq. That trend may be changing.

- Today's attacks also were precisely targeted at "soft" symbolic targets of the continuing U.S. occupation. Rather than attack the CPA headquarters itself or other hard targets, they chose to attack the softer Red Cross and Iraqi police stations. These sites have a lot of symbolic value, because of the role that each organization plays in post-war Iraq. I think this is a pretty sophisticated targeting decision.

The trend is clear: We are seeing the outbreak of a truly 4th Generation War in Iraq, which pits American-led forces against a loose-knit network of guerillas with increasingly sophisticated tactics, techniques and procedures. If I had to guess, these tactics are being heavily influenced by both Al Qaeda and Ansar Al-Islam (see this LA Times article on Ansar Al-Islam by Esther Schrader), as well as other international terror groups, and there are probably a number of veteran terrorists directing the action from behind the scenes now. The only viable course of action at this point is to seize the offensive -- to gather intelligence, launch raids, and disrupt the terrorist cells before they can strike again. Undoubtedly, our enemies are planning to strike again.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:15

 
Study reports success in treating Gulf War II casualties

Dave Moniz reports today in USA Today on a military analysis of casualties in Iraq that shows that wounded soldiers are twice as likely to survive their wounds than in previous conflicts. The military physicians conducting the study cite a number of factors, including:

* Wounded troops see surgeons and trauma specialists much more quickly. In Iraq, mobile surgical teams travel with combat units and can begin operating on severely wounded troops in minutes.

* Most troops in Iraq have protective Kevlar body armor that covers vital organs and can repel shrapnel and small-caliber bullets.

* Medics and other first-aid specialists carry blood supplies with them into battle so they can immediately stabilize patients who in previous wars might have bled to death before reaching a field hospital.

* The war in Iraq has been characterized by guerrilla attacks and not by traditional battles involving tanks, aerial bombs and casualty-producing heavy artillery fire.

Analysis: This is probably one of the biggest military success stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to push forward surgical teams up to the front line was a calculated risk on the part of military medical planners, but it appears to have paid off. These teams did not become casualties themselves, and they were at the right time and place to provide critical trauma care to soldiers. Similarly, most of the soldiers and Marines who fought their way into Iraq had new Kevlar body armor, which made a tremendous difference in preventing fatal thoracic wounds. What will be interesting now is to see how these 'lessons learned' filter back via reverse osmosis to the civilian medical community. A recent study showed that the medical knowledge gained during the Vietnam War by military physicians found its way back into civilian trauma centers during the 1970s and 1980s, and actually had a statistically significant impact on the number of murders in America because it lowered the fatality rate for violent wounds that otherwise would have resulted in death.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:51

 
Twice the citizen or second-class soldiers? Or both?

An op-ed of mine ran today in the Sunday @Issues section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I comment on the situation at Fort Stewart, GA, where hundreds of reservists now wait for medical care and administrative processing before they can be released from active duty. But instead of purely siding with the reservists or criticizing their complaints, I try to generalize from this incident to make a larger argument about the role of today's reservist -- and the lack of resources he/she has to fulfill that role.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, America mobilized its reserves in a way that hadn't been seen since Korea. At home and abroad, reservists performed missions that active soldiers couldn't (such as guarding airports) and supported the active force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since Sept. 11, no fewer than 40,000 reservists have been on active duty at any given time, both for homeland security missions and combat operations overseas. Today, the Defense Department has 168,915 reservists on active duty in support of the war on terrorism. Senior officials have made it clear that the military could not function without the support of the reserves.

Yet, America's reserves have never achieved full equality with their active-duty counterparts. The reservists marooned at Fort Stewart -- as well as their reserve brethren around the world -- have long suffered from a lack of resources. America gives less to its reserve forces at every step -- recruiting, training, deployment, equipment, manning, medical care, even veterans' benefits. In the Army Reserve and National Guard, the nation gets a bargain -- trained soldiers with civilian experience who can be called at a moment's notice, but paid for only one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.

Even in Iraq, reservists had to make do with less than their active-duty counterparts. Reserve units typically stand last in line for new equipment, behind active-duty Army units and the Marines. National Guard and Army Reserve units deployed to Iraq with radios older than many of their soldiers -- radios that could not talk securely with the active-duty units they worked with.

Many reserve units drove into Iraq with cargo trucks that were more than 30 years old. Reservists were also last in line to receive the military's new "Interceptor" body armor, specially designed to stop bullets from an AK-47.

Some units, such as Florida's 53rd Infantry Brigade, were designated as enhanced readiness units and given better training, equipment and resources. But they were the exception.

posted by Phillip Carter at 22:20

 
INTEL DUMP on weekend break. I will be disconnecting this weekend from both my news feed and my laptop. Please come back on Monday for new analysis and commentary.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:48

 
Bankrupting terrorism
Federal prosecutors charge key figures in anti-terrorism case

Glenn Simpson reports today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the case of Abdur Rahman Alamoudi, who federal officials believe is at the center of a global financial web stretching from the U.S. to the Middle East, and which has put millions of dollars in terrorist coffers over the last several years. Alamoudi is currently charged with 18 counts of money laundering and tax, immigration and customs-fraud crimes, related mostly to illegal dealings with Libya. But federal officials believe, according to Mr. Simpson, that he is responsible for much more than these crimes. Alamoudi's lawyers deny the allegations.

Investigators have laid out the network's intricacy and geographic breadth in recent court filings related to a terror-finance investigation of a Virginia-based group of charities and businesses. Thursday, they indicted a key figure they say is linked to Hamas and al Qaeda.

The funds flowed from Saudi Arabia and Europe to the U.S. -- possibly to help make the money look legitimate -- and then through a maze of Virginia entities and back to Europe and the Middle East, authorities say. The money went through secretive Swiss banks and Isle of Man trusts and ended up in suspect hands, including a charity founded by an alleged Tunisian terrorist and a group implicated in the plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, court documents say.

At the network's center is Abdur Rahman Alamoudi, a Muslim-American activist who was indicted Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. on money laundering and tax, immigration and customs-fraud charges. The 18-count indictment isn't directly related to the Virginia probe, focusing mostly on alleged illegal dealings with Libya.
* * *
The authorities have been investigating Mr. Alamoudi and his associates since late 2001. The probe seemed to make little headway until June, when Mr. Alamoudi was detained at London's Heathrow Airport for carrying $340,000 provided by Libyan agents. He was arrested when he returned to Virginia and indicted Thursday on charges of violating U.S. sanctions on Libya.

Prosecutors say the Virginia network's money trail, involving millions of dollars, begins in Saudi Arabia. Over $550,000 came from Mr. Alamoudi's five brothers in Saudi Arabia. The funds originated in accounts at al Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. of Riyadh, which is controlled by the al-Rajhi family, and the National Commercial Bank of Jeddah, which the bin Mahfouz family controlled for a time. Both families and banks are defendants in the Sept. 11 suit and are under scrutiny by U.S. investigators.

Notes: This is the latest in a long series of excellent articles from Mr. Simpson in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of terrorist financing (see here, here, here, here and here). The articles have unveiled an incredibly sophisticated web of financiers, banks, commercial businesses, and individuals who have come together around the world to contribute to the international Islamic jihad by giving it the means to move money around the world. Arguably, these men have done as much to promote terrorism as those who ran the training camps in Afghanistan, or procured the explosives for bombs in Africa. Without these financial networks, Al Qaeda could not operate its global terror network; it could not project its power beyond the sands of Afghanistan and the Arabian peninsula. These financiers give Al Qaeda its global reach, and have supported its operations from Chechnya to Sudan to America.

It has taken U.S. prosecutors some time to unravel this network, but they appear to be doing so -- one terror cell at a time. This is painstaking, tedious work, and it may be years before we see a major reduction in Al Qaeda's operational capabilities as a result of these efforts. But these efforts' importance cannot be understated. Starving Al Qaeda of cash is one of the most important tasks in America's war on terrorism.

It's also a task that's very hard to measure. In his now-infamous memo, SecDef Rumsfeld wrote that "we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." The financial war on terror is one area where lack such metrics to measure progress. Sure, we can easily measure our progress in terms of assets frozen or successful prosecutions. But those metrics don't necessarily tell us how much operational capability we've stripped from Al Qaeda, at least not without knowing the total assets that Al Qaeda has on hand. Moreover, it's very difficult to count our successes in this way because Al Qaeda's resources are not exactly finite. As long as they are able to raise money (or make it as profit on legitimate business ventures), we will have to continue this aspect of the fight.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:42

 
Reversal of Boykin
NRO pulls editorial calling for general's resignation or termination

In a strange turnaround, the editors of the National Review have withdrawn their editorial calling for LTG William "Jerry" Boykin's resignation. The editors say this editorial was never meant to run, and that a production error allowed the paragraph to appear on their website.

A draft editorial paragraph was prepared, stating the position that Boykin should be fired; at just about the last minute, we decided to withhold judgment--to see how the investigation into the general’s behavior proceeded, and to reach a conclusion then.

Because of a production error, that paragraph--the one calling for Boykin’s head--went to the printer. And thus appears in the magazine. We removed it from our html edition, but about the “hard copy edition,” we could do nothing.

This explanation seems odd to me, given the time lapse between this editorial's appearance yesterday morning and today's retraction at 2:24 p.m. East Coast time. To me, the more likely explanation is that the NR editors felt out-of-step with the White House, and decided to correct the initial thoughts much like a weblog author would upon further introspection. But I'll let you be the judge.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:32

 
Total Information Awareness lives on

Noah Shachtman reports today in Wired that members of Congress continue to debate ways to conduct "data mining" and "non-obvious relationship analysis" ("NORA") in ways that won't compromise Americans' civil liberities. Earlier this year, civil liberty concerns helped torpedo the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, which was envisioned as a massive data collection and analysis project that could fuse data from private and public sources. Despite the end of that project, the debate continues over the use of these systems, largely because their potential -- for use and abuse -- is so great.

"When somebody buys a ticket on Delta Airlines in Munich, Germany, if there's any potential for (that person to have) a suspicious background, I want bells and whistles to go off on that computer," Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) told the group of 25 or so policy makers assembled in the Russell Senate Office Building's third floor by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. But Congress "won't allow (intelligence) agencies" to "truly gather information on people's personal lives."

Nice words. But as Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, notes, "none of us really have the answer" for how to put them into action.
* * *
For example, the panel's moderator, Daniel Gallington, a longtime Justice and Defense Department official turned Potomac research fellow, floated a seemingly innocuous idea: that information legally collected by the FBI, CIA and local law enforcers should be combined and made searchable. Since 9/11, information sharing has become a mantra among these groups, after all.

But even this close-to-clichéd notion was met with resistance. A "global database" could be much harder to correct than a mosaic of distributed information centers, noted Peter Raven-Hansen, a professor of national security law at George Washington University. A single misspelling could associate an innocent person with suspicious activities, marking that person as a potential enemy of the state for a lifetime.

Our basic challenge is this: how can we fight terrorism within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution? Every aspect of the war on terrorism raises difficult Constitutional questions which reveal a basic tension between the means we might like to adopt (such as universal surveillance) and the principles we've sworn ourselves to (like the 4th Amendment proscription on unreasonable searches and seizures). These tensions cannot easily be resolved.

I happen to think we're at a good balancing point now, and that most (though not all) of our means have been carefully thought out to preserve Americans' constitutional rights. Material support prosecutions have not chilled speech the way some thought. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has not been abused since the USA PATRIOT Act's passage to snoop on average Americans who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence. Sec. 215 of the PATRIOT Act has not been used to gather library records or other information, largely because it's not as effective as other means at the Justice Department's disposal. At the end of the day, our nation's government has somehow managed to balance liberty with security. Vigorous advocacy by civil rights groups and cool heads at senior levels have made this happen.

Total Information Awareness -- and projects like it -- raise difficult questions because they are such a radical departure from the types of things that lawyers and scholars have looked at over the years. Surveillance tactics today represent more of an incremental change than a revolutionary one, and it's not that hard to apply legal precedent (such as Kyllo v. United States) to determine how these technologies should be dealt with under the Constitution. Similarly, material support prosecutions aren't that much of a departure from historic prosecutions of organized crime. They're an evolution of the concept that you go after the little fish first in order to get the big fish.

But TIA and its progeny are different, because they represent such a total departure from the means of criminal enforcement. These new technologies don't easily fit the rules on the books, and indeed, we don't even understand these technologies' implications enough to write new rules yet. Maybe the best thing would be to have a few lawyers in DARPA who can say "Hey, wait a minute" every time a scientist has a good idea like TIA. The scientists probably wouldn't like that very much. But a few good lawyers might help DARPA think through the legal and policy implications of its futuristic programs before they're torpedoed by people who are frightened by those implications.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:04

 
Thoughts on the Rumsfeld memo and metrics of success

I've had a little more time to digest the "Rumsfeld memo" which was first made public by a USA Today story on Wednesday. (See also this LA Times story from today on the matter) As I said earlier, I think this memo represents a healthy dose of skepticism, optimism, and realism about America's war on terrorism. But one paragraph in particular struck me as quite insightful:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

What are metrics? I'm no engineer, but I learned last year in a business-school seminar that "metrics" is a fancy word for "measurements" that matter to management. A metric can be something like number of customers who enter a retail store on a given day. Or in the terrorism context, it can be some other indicator, such as number of Al Qaeda members in custody.

As Sec. Rumsfeld points out, the problem is this: If you choose the wrong metrics, your execution will invariably orient on those metrics and produce unintended results.

A great case-in-point is the Army Physical Fitness Test. It's the Army's chosen metric of fitness. It has become the end-all/be-all of fitness for most of the Army. Does it measure true fitness? Not really. Does it measure combat readiness? Not really. Does it measure job performance? Not really. But it's the metric, nonetheless. (The Army chose this PT test of pushups, situps and a 2-mile run largely because of standardization, ease of administration, and the fact that it's a pretty good -- albeit not perfect -- indicator of basic physical fitness.) Army platoons and companies have oriented on this test as their basic metric of success in the area of physical fitness, creating PT programs and remedial PT programs and incentive programs focused on improving performance under this metric. They have done so to the exclusion of other kinds of fitness which are arguably more related to combat, such as the ability to road march long distances or carry a wounded buddy. Indeed, I've seen units cut things like road marches out of their PT program in order to focus on pushups, situps and the 2-mile run. I think this is a case where the metric of success (the APFT) has become more important than the mission (improving fitness and combat readiness), and that the tail is now wagging the dog.

I took a strategic planning class at UCLA's business school last year, and our group project was to pick a company doing poorly and turn it around with a strategy built on metrics. My small group (1 Disney exec, a consultant, and me) picked AOL, and we built a strategy focused on leveraging AOL-Time Warner's tremendous content and the "pipes" of AOL to deliver that content to the customer. We chose a set of objectives in each operational area of the firm -- Innovation, Customer Targeting, Operational Effectiveness -- and aggregate performance metrics to measure our success for each objective. Each of these was fed, in turn, by granular metrics from AOL's subordinates. Ultimately, they fed up to the 5-10 key metrics that we recommended the AOL CEO watch on a daily basis. (Who knows if the strategy would have worked or not?) But the point of the class was that you can't emphasize these metrics enough, and that your strategy would become a function of your metrics if you didn't think them through well enough. When you tell your subordinates that their performance will be measured by certain indicators, it's only natural for them to focus on these indicators and work to do well by those -- even if there is dissonance between those indicators and your stated mission. (See also Bureacracy by James Q. Wilson for a great explanation of how incentives and organizations work in public agencies)

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have allowed certain metrics to become accepted measures of our success or failure by default, including:

- Capture or death of Osama and Saddam
- Number of U.S. KIA + U.S. non-battle casualties
- Number of enemy high-value KIA/captured (the Iraqi deck of cards)
- Number of IED events/week in Iraq
- Total amount spent on Iraq and Afghanistan

I would submit to you that these are the wrong metrics, and that we have let them become the default metrics in the absence of a clear strategy from the White House and Pentagon. These metrics don't measure our success so much as our commitment in terms of spirit, blood and treasure. (Isn't that a book title?) Over time, our strategy will reorient towards these metrics. Our commanders will reduce their operational risk in order to minimize the risk of casualties. Our commanders may not spend money on certain things because they don't think it's worth the political fight with their higher HQ. And so it
goes. At the end of the day, our official metrics of success read more like a Harper's Index column than a serious set of policy metrics. They measure the wrong things, and they drive commanders to do things at the strategic, operational and tactical levels that don't necessarily mesh with our national strategy.

In my book, the only metric that matters in America's war on terror is this one:

- # of terrorist attacks on U.S. persons or interests at home and abroad.

The closer we get that measurement to zero, the closer we get to victory. Every other measurement of success and every other strategy ought to feed up to this aggregate metric. I think the metrics put forward recently by the White House and Pentagon (e.g. # of schools built in Iraq) are irrelevant to this all-important metric of success. At best, you can make an attenuated argument that winning hearts and minds of Iraqis with schools will help to reduce the recruitment pool for international jihad, but that's a really big stretch. There are other aggregate and granular metrics which do matter, such as # of terrorists in U.S. custody, money frozen through anti-terrorism financial investigations, number of suspected terrorists denied entry visas, etc.

But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that we never see another attack on America again. That's how we ought to measure success. Deep down, I think Don Rumsfeld knows this, and he's puzzled about how to construct aggregate and granular metrics that measure progress towards this ultimate goal. Thankfully, he's supported by some incredibly smart people in the Pentagon, and he can call in support from other agencies such as State, Treasury, Justice, DHS and the CIA to help unpack this problem. Defining success in this war won't be easy. But it's still important that we try.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:57

 
Liberals and conservatives agree: Boykin should go

I could probably count the number of times The American Prospect and The National Review have agreed on one hand if I actually took the time to research that statistic. Yet, both the left and right appear to agree on one thing: LTG William "Jerry" Boykin's conduct was wrong, and he ought to be removed from his position as Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Ironically, the National Review goes even further than TAPPED, the American Prospect's weblog, in comparing Boykin to MacArthur as "manifestly insubordinate". Here's what the NR editors have to say in their Nov. 10 editorial:

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to attack Manchuria, and he let that be known to everyone who would listen. That was not U.S. policy, however, and President Truman promptly sacked the great man. During the Cold War — in fact often pretty hot — NATO general Edwin Walker was instructing his troops in the theorems of the John Birch Society. That the U.S. government was 60 percent under Communist control was not the view of the Kennedy administration, and Walker was gone. Flash forward to today. A three-star general, William "Jerry" Boykin, has been lecturing, in public and in uniform, to the effect that we are in a war with Islam, than whose god his God is bigger, that this is a war against Satan, of whom he has a photograph in the sky above Mogadishu. President Bush has made it national policy that we are not in a war with global Islam. Furthermore, it is hardly good for the morale of troops to understand that their commander is a wacko who goes around photographing Satan zooming overhead. General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday.

What's going on here? I can only guess. I think the left sees Boykin's conduct as problematic for a multitude of reasons -- legal, moral, political, intellectual. The right sees Boykin as a problem child for much more pragmatic reasons. The suggestion that America's fight against terrorism is a religious crusade could do serious damage to America's war on terrorism, both at home and abroad. Always quick to recognize a political liability, I think the right is now trying to do damage control here. I stand by original prediction though. LTG Boykin will not be sacked. This old warrior will resign before he lets his actions affect the mission or his nation.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:55

 
The 'ground truth' on morale in Iraq

Stars & Stripes has an outstanding series of articles available on its website that ran over the last seven days detailing its survey of morale among soldiers in Iraq. The survey earned a great deal of criticism and praise when it appeared last week. Critics seized on its superficiality and lack of scientific methodology; supporters argued that it did a better job than anything thus far at gauging morale in Iraq. (I fell in the latter camp) Now, Stars & Stripes gives us a series of stories aimed at explaning the survey in more depth. Here's a sample of the stories available:

Day 1: The troops speak
Voices on the ground: Stars and Stripes surveys troops on morale in Iraq

Stripes reporters visited nearly 50 camps in Iraq to gauge sentiment

Day 2: What defines morale

Many servicemembers filling out questionnaire call morale low, but leaders say the job is getting done

The many definitions of troop morale

Day 5: The evolving mission

Is the mission clear: Evolving goals mean unusual roles for servicemembers in Iraq

Day 7: A better outlook

What will spell success? Leadership, rotations seen as ultimately more important than comforts.

Troops' wish list: Straight talk from commanders, better phone and e-mail access.

Troops in Iraq find comfort in keeping mind occupied, body strong.

This is must-read reporting. The Stars & Stripes reporting team does a remarkable job in these stories of remaining relatively objective, and balancing soldier comments with objective analysis from seasoned veterans. They also appear to report the survey results without an evident bias for or against the policy of the mission. This may not be pure sociology; it may not be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal. But I think it's darn good reporting, and I recommend every article in this series.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:50

 
USA Today publishes leaked Rumsfeld memo
Text shows critical thinking and self-examination within the Pentagon

The story du jour comes from USA Today, which reports today on a leaked memo from SecDef Don Rumsfeld to his top staff. This memo appears more self-critical and introspective than anything I've yet seen from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The memo questions America's progress in the war on terrorism, its focus, its metrics of success, among other things. Here's an excerpt from the text of the memo:

October 16, 2003

TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:

- We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

- USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.

- USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.

- With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.

Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?

Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?

Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.

Do we need a new organization?

Analysis: I tend to agree with what Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel have said on this subject. (The downside of living on the West Coast is that I read the news when everyone else is hitting their mid-morning stride) Sure, this leak is bad for operational security reasons -- it offers our enemies a glimpse into the upper echelons of Pentagon decisionmaking. But the truly insidious effect of this leak is to chill future introspection and self-examination.

At the lowest levels of the Defense Department, platoons and companies conduct "after action reviews" afte training exercises to determine how to do each mission better the next time. These AARs have ground rules -- no thin skins, no grudges, etc. What happens in the AAR stays in the AAR, just like the Las Vegas saying. This is done to promote honesty, candor, and self-examination, because it's been proven that tough, candid AARs can identify lessons in training that will save lives in combat. The same is true on a strategic level within the Pentagon. If our top Pentagon decisionmakers can't engage in this kind of introspection without leaks, then they may not have as good of a decisionmaking process. We all suffer as a result.

I have been one of the Secretary's most strident critics on occasion, critiquing the Phase IV (post-war occupation) planning and a variety of other policies from the E-Ring. In this case, I think some praise is in order. This is precisely the kind of thinking I want from a chief executive in the Pentagon -- unconventional, questioning, thoughtful, and precise. This kind of thinking, if followed up by good planning, resources and command emphasis, can lead to real change. As the SecDef points out, we currently face an incredibly agile, innovative and dynamic adversary in Al Qaeda. We can't win if we fight him in the same old way that defeated Germany in WWII -- we must ourselves become agile, innovative and adaptive. The SecDef's memo shows us that we're moving in the right direction, or at least that we're thinking of moving in the right direction.

Coda: I wouldn't be surprised to see Eliot Cohen's hand behind this memo. His book Supreme Command lays out four historic cases of civilian leadership over the military. Cohen concludes his book with an argument for an aggressive, managerial, questioning style of civilian leadership of the military. The SecDef appears to have adopted Mr. Cohen's prescriptions, with some minor stylistic changes. Not that this is a bad thing... The Pentagon is the largest bureaucracy in the world, and it takes a firm hand to manage it effectively. I'd rather have Don Rumsfeld's strong hand on the rudder than that of a Ken Lay-style CEO who focuses on external relations while letting Skilling & Fastow run the ship aground. (See Jeffrey Toobin's excellent story in the New Yorker for the details of this analogy)
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:02

 
Do wounded soldiers really have to pay for their own food?

Stop the Bleating takes on this urban legend and debunks it quite effectively. A news story has been making the rounds that soldiers wounded in Iraq have had to pay for their own meals at the hospital -- and that they've been upset when the hospital took away their Basic Allowance for Subsistence in return for covering their meals.

"WASHINGTON — Sgt. Brandon Erickson, 22, had just finished the third of five surgeries on his amputated right arm when he awoke at 6 a.m. to find a private in his room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (search) with paperwork ready for him to sign.

'She said, "This is a paper that says you have to pay $8.10 a day for your food." I went off the deep end,' said Erickson, a North Dakota National Guardsman who was injured in Iraq in July when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the cargo truck he was riding in.

Erickson, still groggy from surgery, refused to sign anything. The sergeant from the 957th Multi-Role Engineer Company (search) had just arrived back in the United States the night before, six days after the attack occurred.

'It didn't seem right that he would be fighting for our country and lose a limb for our country, and have to pay for his meals,' said his mom, Ruth Vogel, a Maryland resident."

Matt at Stop the Bleating explains why this is bunk:

Servicemembers receive a "subsistence allowance" with their paychecks. This money is not part of their base pay--it is an allowance for a specific purpose. That specific purpose is the purchase of meals. (Thus, "subsistence.") Now, under peacetime conditions many servicemembers will eat many of their meals on the local economy. By living frugally, they can often eat for less than their subsistence allowance, which can mean a little extra money in the bank at the end of the pay period. To those who manage to pull this off, I offer kudos. Good for them! But it doesn't change the fact that this money has one purpose and one purpose only: buying food for the servicemember. It's not there for car payments, rent, CDs, new games for the PS2, or "bling bling." Many servicemembers forget this simple fact, and come to consider their subsistence allowance as part of their pay--and a part to which they're entitled, no matter what!

Now, when servicemembers go to the field for training (and, I must presume, when they go into places like Afghanistan and Iraq, to put their training to use), they no longer have the option of subsisting on the local economy; they eat what the government provides. But since the government is providing them with meals--meals that is has already paid the servicemembers to purchase--it rightly expects them to pay for those meals. Why should they get both money for meals, and free meals?! They shouldn't, of course--but I've seen Marines become extremely indignant at having to fork over some of their subsistence allowance for MREs after field ops.

That, I am quite sure, is what has been happening with the wounded. They've been asked to fork over some of their subsistence allowance to pay for the meals they're eating.

Bravo Zulu to Matt to pointing this out. Just another example of how soldier gripes can spin the media because the media doesn't know enough about the military to understand what's really going on. (See, e.g., Paul Krugman's column several weeks ago about soldiers getting only 3 liters of water/day in Iraq). As I said then, "quotation does not necessarily equal fact-checking." You've got to ask the hard questions when you get a gripe like this to make sure the soldier isn't mistaken about what the system is actually doing -- something that's more common than you'd think. This phenomenon is not limited to news outlets on the left or the right -- this story has gotten the most airplay from Fox News. C'mon guys... take the time to interview some grizzled old soldier on stories like this so you can get the story right. Don't just air the gripe without taking the time to check it out.
posted by Phillip Carter at 05:42

 
A game of chess on the DMZ

Chris Cooper had an extremely good article in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that laid out some of the strategic and operational considerations behind America's plan to realign its military presence in Korea. The Pentagon has plans underway to move the 2nd Infantry Division south from its current "tripwire" posture near the DMZ, to consolidated bases south of Seoul. At the same time, the U.S. plans to move its headquarters out of downtown Seoul to a more rural and secure location in the central part of the country.

In one sense, the move represents a de-escalation from the situation today where U.S. and North Korean units sit on a hair trigger across the DMZ from one another. But as Chris Cooper explains, the move can also be seen as an escalation of tensions, and the precursor to a pre-emptive strike by the U.S. on North Korea.

In the first major redeployment of American troops in South Korea since the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War, the U.S. plans to roll up 19 camps scattered in and along the Korean demilitarized zone and relocate them to a pair of large bases south of Seoul. The Pentagon says the restructuring will allow it to reduce its 37,000-strong force; a State Department official who has seen the plan says the force reduction could total more than 10,000.

Anywhere else, such a move would appear likely to lessen tensions. Instead, North Korea brands the plan an "arms buildup" and a prelude to an invasion. Already courting a crisis by threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb, North Korea promises to protect itself.

President Bush, attending a regional economic summit in Bangkok, Thailand, said Sunday that the U.S. is prepared to offer North Korea specific security assurances if it will dismantle its nuclear program. But rather than respond to the overture, Pyongyang Monday test-fired a surface-to-ship missile into the waters separating the peninsula from Japan. (See related article.)

South Korean officials oppose the pullback plan as well, U.S. officials say. The South Koreans fear a force reduction would roil their financial markets, disrupt the country's fragile economy and require an increase in Seoul's defense budget. They also are increasingly unwilling to antagonize North Korea, and don't want to do anything seen as emboldening the Bush administration's hawkish tendencies.

The confusion over U.S. intentions lies in the nature of the troops it plans to pull back. Since the Korean War ended, American and South Korean troops have arrayed themselves along the border region between the North and South to serve as a "tripwire" -- an early warning of a North Korean invasion. The 19 camps between Seoul and the border house about 15,000 U.S. tripwire troops.

Because many of these troops likely would die in a surprise attack by North Korea, their presence serves to assure both sides that the U.S. would be fully committed if war broke out.
* * *
Pyongyang sees the plan as a strategic move to get American troops out of the North's artillery range, making it easier for the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive attack and disrupting the current military balance.

"They think we're clearing the decks so we can roll to Pyongyang with impunity," says Jack Pritchard, until recently the State Department's envoy to the region. Mr. Pritchard says the Pentagon understands the threat implicit in its plan, and while he doesn't believe it is a prelude to war, "I don't think they care what North Korea believes."

Indeed, some hawks in the Bush administration privately see the move as expanding its military options by separating the U.S. and South Korean forces and unwinding the joint structure of the current configuration. "If we were to discuss the need to perform pre-emptive strikes on North Korea, under the current configuration, we'd need South Korean approval," said one such administration hawk. "Under the new configuration, we wouldn't need that approval so much."

Analysis: A lot has been made of the President's statement that the U.S. has "no intention of invading North Korea". (Query: was the word 'invading' chosen over 'attacking' to preserve the option of a pre-emptive airstrike?) Presumably, this statement was offered as a carrot to induce North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons program. I think this pledge moves the ball forward in negotiations with North Korea, and hopefully, that it will de-escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula. The sooner we can re-engage the North Koreans with diplomacy, economic contacts, and trade, the better.

I agree with the Pentagon plan. I think we need to move our soldiers off the DMZ both to make them more efficient and to make them more survivable in the event of a North Korean attack. But also think this is an extraordinarily complex situation. Our moves in Korea will have repercussions for the South Korean political and economic situation that need to be mitigated. The secondary and tertiary consequences of our moves in Korea could affect the rest of East Asia -- China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and others. Our forward-deployed 2nd Infantry Division is not just a "tripwire" to give early warning; it's what has maintained an uneasy peace for more than 50 years. We should be very careful about giving up this posture.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:56

 
Were LTG Boykin's comments on Islam unlawful?

Much has been made thus far of LTG William Boykin's comments on Islam, and his fitness for service as the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Eugene Volokh provides a great analysis of this issue from his perspective as a Constitutional Law scholar. The question presented is whether the government can punish such speech -- which is arguably both political and religious expression -- within the bounds of the First Amendment. Eugene thinks the government can.

Between these three doctrines, I'm pretty sure the President could dismiss Gen. Boykin on the spot with no constitutional problems: His speech may well have substantially interfered with the government's mission -- and courts tend to defer considerably to the government's judgment about such interference -- but more importantly, he's a very high level official, and a member of the military. (Even if you think that Gen. Boykin's speech did not substantially interfere with the government's mission, the high-level official point and the military point, especially put together, should be conclusive.) And the President, or other government higher-ups, can impose discipline or restrictions short of dismissal as well.

What about the fact that the speech is religious? That shouldn't generally change the analysis, I think. As a general matter (subject to complications that I set aside here), the Free Exercise Clause comes into play only when the government punishes people precisely because their conduct was religious. Presumably any government punishment (if there will be such punishment here) would have equally applied if the general's statements were political rather than religious, or delivered in a nonreligious place rather than in a church. The Free Exercise Clause thus wouldn't be in play.

What if the government does punish the general more precisely because his speech was religious? Or what about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that does require the government to give special exemptions to religious believers even from generally applicable rules that don't single out religion? It's a long story, but I think that even these theories would fail because of the government's conclusion (if the government so concludes) that the speech seriously harmed the government's mission, and even more so because he's a high-ranking official and a member of the military.

Two last items. First, it's possible that courts would simply refuse to intrude into decisions about the President firing a general; but my analysis relates to whether the President's actions are constitutional under existing law, not the sometimes different question of whether courts would step in to decide the question. Second, I strongly suspect that Gen. Boykin would in any event not sue over any dismissal or other discipline.

Analysis: As my transcripts readily show, I'm no First Amendment scholar. However, I am familiar with several federal and military regulations that would seem to proscribe the conduct by LTG Boykin in this case. I will reserve my analysis at this point, because I'm still developing some of my arguments. But if you're interested, I recommend comparing LTG Boykin's conduct to the rules found in the following places (also see the DoD Standards of Conduct Office for more information on DoD ethics rules):

Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations
PART 2635--STANDARDS OF ETHICAL CONDUCT FOR EMPLOYEES OF THE EXECUTIVE
BRANCH
Sec. 2635.702. Endorsements.
Sec. 2635.803. Prior approval for outside employment and activities.
Sec. 2635.807 Teaching, speaking and writing.

Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations
PART 3601--DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.
Sec. 3601.108 Disclaimer for speeches and writings devoted to agency
matters.

Department of Defense, Joint Ethics Regulation 5500-7R, Sec. 3-307. Policy & Security Reviews.

Army Regulation 600-20 (Army Command Policy)
4-12. Extremist organizations and activities.
4-17. Standards of conduct.
5-3. Political activities.
5-6. Accommodating religious practices.

Army Regulation 670-1. (Wear and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia)
1-10. When the wear of the Army uniform is required or prohibited

I would argue that LTG Boykin's comments violate at least some -- if not all -- of these regulatory authorities. As an active-duty officer, LTG Boykin is bound to follow federal and military regulations. If he violates these regulations, he can be prosecuted under Art. 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for failing to follow a lawful order.

I support the principle of free speech and I support the Constitutional rights of our servicemembers. However, there are other principles in the Constitution as well, including that of civilian control of the military. We don't let our generals speak openly on political, social, religious and other hot-button issues for good reason. (Note to Gen. Clark: beware the implications of this issue for your campaign) We also don't condone outside speaking by military officers in uniform, also for good reason. Setting aside the morality or correctness of LTG Boykin's comments, the legality of his conduct seems to be fairly cut and dry to me. LTG Boykin should not be allowed to break the rules.

Update: The AP reports that LTG Boykin has requested an investigation by the Army or DoD inspector general of his remarks. Such an investigation will likely look into the regulatory issues discussed above, and issue a report as to whether any further action needs to be taken.

Update II: Sen. John Warner and Sen. Carl Levin, respectively the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have also requested an investigation into LTG Boykin's comments. More importantly, they have called for the temporary reassignment of LTG Boykin from his position as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Intelligence). (The LA Times confirms this report, and adds that the SASC investigation request was sent on Friday)

Prediction: LTG Boykin will step aside voluntarily, and offer to resign before any major investigation gets going. He's an old soldier who would rather be remembered for his exemplary career than this last gaffe. And most of all, he won't want his p.r. blunder to affect the Pentagon or its ability to fight the war on terror.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:36

 
30+ soldiers miss flights from R&R back to Iraq

The Washington Post reports today that more than 30 soldiers have missed their flights back to Iraq after being granted two weeks of leave. Some have requested extensions for extenuating circumstances, but at least two have expressed a desire to avoid returning to the combat zone. The Pentagon has not labeled any of them AWOL yet, but it has said it will investigate each case.

A week after return flights began, 28 soldiers had not made it to Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the journey back to Iraq, said Air Force Maj. Mike Escudie, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa. Six others did not make yesterday evening's flight out of BWI for unknown reasons, said Lt. Col. Robert Hagen, an Army spokesman.

Escudie said "a small number" have been granted emergency extensions by military commanders because of extenuating circumstances, including deaths in the family. Military officials could not say how many presented valid reasons or how many had failed to contact authorities.
* * *
Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, said the absences "demonstrates there is a morale problem." Robinson said he had been contacted by two soldiers home on leave who do not want to return to their units

One of the soldiers, a National Guardsman from Florida, missed his scheduled flight back to Iraq three days ago, Robinson said. "I told him he needs to get his [rear end] back to Iraq," Robinson said.
* * *
"We had the same problem in Vietnam," said retired Marine officer Gary Solis, who commanded a company in Vietnam and later wrote a history on military law during that war.

Solis, of Alexandria, said the combination of "Australian women and Australian beer" kept several of his Marines from returning from leave on time.

The leave program from Iraq, which unlike in Vietnam is bringing soldiers home to the continental United States to reunite with their families, may make it even more difficult for soldiers to return, Solis said.

"It's a lonely thing to do, but then that's the soldier's duty," he said.

Analysis: Everyone knew this would happen. It was an explicit risk of this R&R program, and I'm sure the commanders on the ground in Iraq accepted this risk as an acceptable tradeoff for the boost in morale that R&R would bring. Indeed, I'm sure that the JAG officers in CENTCOM and CFLCC developed contingency plans for how they would enforce Art. 86 (Absent Without Leave) in the event these soldiers did not come home.

That said, these soldiers must be dealt with strictly. Each may have some compelling personal reason to avoid the return flight to Iraq. But their buddies do not have the luxury of such excuses; they must soldier on without their absent comrade, shouldering more of the burden with each day he or she is missing. That's wrong, and these soldiers cannot be allowed to hurt their buddies that way. The Ranger Creed, which I consider to be one of the best expressions of the warrior ethos, says it like this:

Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be. One-hundred-percent and then some.

Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the field of battle for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.

The cornerstone of military justice is that it punishes acts which are prejudicial to good order and discipline -- those acts which undermine unit cohesion. I can think of few acts which undermine unit cohesion more than shirking your duty to return to your buddies in combat. Every AWOL soldier will have his or her own special story, and I trust their commanders will take that into account. But the bigger picture is the effect of these selfish acts on the unit they left behind.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:32

 
Army to investigate reservist treatment at Fort Stewart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that an Army investigation has been launched into allegations of poor treatment by reservists back from Iraq -- but now waiting for medical treatment at Fort Stewart, Georgia. These reservists appear to have complained quite loudly about poor medical care, substandard living conditions, and other problems with their extended stay on active duty. Pentagon officials and members of Congress appear to have answered the call.

An advance investigative team from the Pentagon arrived Monday to begin interviewing officials and reservists with complaints about their treatment, an Army spokesman said.

Some of about 600 reservists currently on "medical hold" at Fort Stewart complain that they are being housed in barracks without window screens or air conditioning and have to walk, sometimes on crutches, to outdoor latrines. Some say they have waited weeks or months for appointments with Army doctors.

The reservists claim that regular Army troops with medical problems are being given priority attention at Fort Stewart. The complaints were initially reported by United Press International on Friday.

"Medical hold" is a term the Army uses to describe soldiers with medical problems that need to be evaluated for treatment and possible benefit claims, a complicated process akin to the evaluation procedures for civilian workers' compensation claims, said a Fort Stewart doctor involved in the process.

"A lot of [military] doctors don't want to do this," said Col. John Brooks, a physician and Army reservist at Fort Stewart who serves on the medical boards evaluating the soldiers' conditions. "It's not a popular job. Some soldiers hide injuries because they want to stay soldiers; some overemphasize their problems because they want money; some just aren't clear about what's wrong with them."

Brooks said his office is doing its best to process claims quickly.

But veterans' advocate Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md., said the treatment of reservists on medical hold at Fort Stewart is unacceptable.

"In essence this is about their benefits in the service of their country," Robinson said. "The government has a duty to restore them to their pre-service condition or to compensate them if that isn't possible and to do it quickly."

Analysis: This is actually something I've seen happen with the redeployment of California Army National Guard soldiers from Operation Noble Eagle (the homeland security mission). Some soldiers wanted to get home right away, so they concealed injuries that might have kept them on medical hold at Fort Carson, CO. When these soldiers sought military medical care back in California, they had to deal with layer upon layer of bureaucracy stacked against them. Ultimately, it took several generals' involvement to get them medical care. A second group of soldiers would inflate minor medical problems into big ones to remain on active duty, either for financial security or in the hopes of receiving a VA disability rating. These soldiers tended to gum up the works, and deprive needy soldiers of scarce medical resources. Suffice to say, my experience showed me that this is a very difficult area to manage, and it takes a lot of commander involvement to get it right.

The case at Fort Stewart is similar, but different in some important ways. As an initial matter, these reservists should not have to live in antiquated WWII barracks while they wait for medical care, nor should they have to wait an inordinate amount of time. If the Army can't accomodate these reservists in a reasonable amount of time, they should be released from active duty and referred to a civilian provider at government expense. Or they can be seen near their home on an outpatient basis. Or they could be maintained on active duty, but seen by a civilian provider on an expedited basis. In any event, there's no reason to keep these guys around for so long.

The Army is right to say here that the needs of those deployed to Iraq right now trump the needs of those already redeployed. Our Army has sent a great deal of its net medical capacity to Iraq, and that leaves a delta between what it can do and what it needs to do here at home. These reservists may have to suck it up a little as a result. But I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and hopefully this investigation will help both sides come to a reasonable solution.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:19

 
WSJ: U.S. sails alone to stop weapons proliferation

Carla Robbins has an interesting article on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about U.S. efforts to fight WMD proliferation. Ms. Robbins starts with an anecdote from Dec. 2002, when Spanish soldiers boarded a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean after U.S. intelligence said it had missiles from North Korea bound for Yemen. The Bush Administration eventually ate crow over the affair, once it was determined that the missiles were being shipped lawfully.

MADRID -- By the time the Spanish frigate spotted the unflagged cargo ship in the Indian Ocean last December, the Americans had been tracking it for a month and the Spanish had been racing toward it for four days. But when Spanish Rear Admiral Juan Moreno Susanna ordered the freighter to slow for boarding, it ignored his demand, as well as two salvos of warning shots and a third salvo into its bow.

After a six-hour standoff, Spanish special forces rappelled from a helicopter onto the moving deck while snipers stood by. "The effort was worth it," Adm. Moreno says. Hidden in the ship's hold were 15 North Korean Scud missiles.

Two days later, the U.S. let the freighter sail on. There was no clear legal basis for holding the missiles and their purchaser was Yemen, an ally in the war on terrorism. Frustrated by the outcome, the Bush administration decided to launch a broader initiative to fight weapons proliferation.

But in a hallmark of the way President Bush conducts foreign affairs, it chose not to seek a new United Nations Security Council resolution banning the transport of dangerous weapons. Instead, the U.N.'s host and largest financial contributor created its own coalition of the willing, outside U.N. auspices. The 11 members have agreed to block arms shipments from countries or groups "of proliferation concern" in their territory, waters or air space, or aboard ships flying the members' flags on the high seas.

As the U.N. struggles to redefine its place in global politics, the American initiative underscores a giant hurdle: a profound skepticism by the sole superpower. The U.S. under President Bush has often bypassed the world body, as it did in its decision to invade Iraq. With the occupation there proving far harder than expected, the U.S. did seek -- and win -- U.N. backing for its rebuilding efforts, in hopes of persuading more nations to contribute money or troops. But Washington's antiproliferation move is an end run around the U.N. on just the kind of mission the U.N.'s leaders think it is ideally suited to tackle.

Analysis: The global arms trade is extremely difficult to regulate. It's also an area that lends itself to international cooperation, regulatory regimes, and enforcement. The global arms trade has two Achilles heels -- the need to move large sums of money around the world, and the need to move stuff around the world. International cooperation can go a long way towards attacking each of these weak points.

posted by Phillip Carter at 08:10

 
Oxblog reports from Kabul

A friend of the Oxbloggers has an interesting letter from Kabul, Afghanistan. I hope this becomes a regular feature on Oxblog, because I'm always interested in lucid first-person accounts from places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's a sample:

Kabul has sort of an old west feel to it -- a boomtown, and a city of dust. Every surface is covered in the stuff. Dusty wooden scaffolding is hung with dusty posters of the Tajik-Afghan hero and martyr Ahmed Shah Massoud. The trees are all muted shades of green, and in the mornings, the whole sky is a grey-brown haze. Dust-colored mountains shoot up on every side -- some barren, others with an astonishing clutter of mud-brick houses clinging to their steep, craggy slopes. The roads are clogged with yellow taxis and dirty buses, and trucks painted so gaudily that even the dust can't mute them. Some of the trucks were loaded so high with bundles and boxes I can't believe they stayed upright. One pick-up had a camel hog-tied and tossed in the back, its head and neck lolling ridiculously over the side.

posted by Phillip Carter at 06:42

 
WP: Pentagon plans to reduce troop levels in near future

Tom Ricks reported in this Sunday's Washington Post that a new plan has been adopted inside the Pentagon to reduce American troop levels in Iraq. The plan is an optimistic one, aiming to cut the current number of 130,000 troops to less than 100,000 within a year and 50,000 by mid-2005. This plan appears driven both by political calculations in the Bush Administration, and the hard reality that America does not have the military force structure to manage a long-term occupation of Iraq. (The Pentagon's official plan does not disclose the details that Mr. Ricks reports on, presumably because this reduction plan is still in the deliberative process.)

The plan, which amounts to being the first formal military exit strategy for Iraq, is designed to show how the U.S. presence might be reduced without undercutting the stability of the country. Military officials worry that if they do not begin cutting the size of the U.S. force, they could damage troop morale, leave the armed forces shorthanded if crises emerge in North Korea and elsewhere, and help create a long-term personnel shortage in the service.

At the same time, some of the people involved in the discussions said they consider the force reduction plan optimistic, as much a goal as a guaranteed outcome.

If it is implemented successfully, the troop reductions could reduce political pressure on the Bush administration as the presidential campaign gets fully underway.
* * *
Officials involved in the discussions about troop reductions insist that implementation will be dictated not by a set timetable, but by security conditions in Iraq. Nonetheless, the drawdown is tied to events that are scheduled to begin in January, when a major round of U.S. troop rotations that will last several months is to get underway.

During that period, the U.S. military hopes to turn over as many basic security functions as possible to the Iraqi security forces now being created and to any additional foreign peacekeepers that U.S. diplomacy secures. If the Iraqi security forces can shoulder more of the security burden, it might be possible to replace the departing divisions of about 16,000 troops each with brigades of about 5,000 each.

Over the spring, that changeover would represent a cumulative reduction of more than 30,000 soldiers; along with other cuts, it could lower the U.S. troop level to fewer than 100,000 by mid-2004.

As more units of Iraqi soldiers and civil defense troops are created, and as some additional foreign peacekeepers begin to arrive, cuts in U.S. troop levels would continue next year. Ideally, said one official involved in the planning, by mid-2005 the number of U.S. troops would be as low as 40,000. Army planners consider a presence of that size to be sustainable for years without placing undue stress on the overall force.

Analysis: As Mr. Ricks reports, this is an incredibly optimistic plan. It hinges on the amount of international support (in terms of troop commitments) we're able to get, as well as on the number and caliber of Iraqis we can train to take over security functions. This plan also hinges on our abilities to rebuidl the Iraqi infrastructure, jumpstart democracy, and a bunch of other things. It's great to have such an optimistic plan, and I hope we can achieve it. But "hope is not a method." We've got to have contingency plans, branch plans, sequel plans, and other options for when one of these key tasks fails to happen.

One other important thing emerges from Mr. Ricks' report that should not be glossed over. He refers to an "exit strategy" for Iraq that's dependent on the fulfillment of certain conditions. Although the logic is backward, it's possible to extrapolate our actual objectives in Iraq from these tactical, operational and strategic conditions of success. The basic argument goes like this: if we fulfill these conditions, then we will have accomplished our mission. Therefore, our mission in Iraq is to set these conditions of success which will enable us to leave. Therefore, we are in Iraq because of these conditions. I know it's backwards, but it's possible to pull our raison d'etre from this exit strategy.

Granted, it would have been nice to have these conditions spelled out up front. But sometimes, you have to hide the ball for reasons of operational security. If you spell out your success criteria too explicitly, you tell your enemies how to defeat you. At this point, we have to define success for political reasons, mostly to get the international community to help us. In any event, this is a good development, and I think it reflects some good work within the Pentagon to boil this mission down to practical, executable, logical elements that can be put into action on the ground.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:18

 
Recall fever moves from California to Iraq

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) leads one of its front-page articles this morning with a tongue-in-cheek question from an Iraqi lawyer in Baghdad: if California can recall its recalcitrant governor, why can't Iraqis recall the Americans now occupying their country?

"When the people of California were unhappy with their authorities, they threw them out and elected Schwarzenegger," said Salah Erebat, a bearded lawyer who supports the insurgents. "So why is it that Americans can do it and we in Sadr City cannot?"

Last Thursday, Iraqi police backed by American tanks showed them why not, chasing the renegade officials out of the Sadr City council headquarters and tossing a dozen of their supporters in jail.

Now, members of the official assembly are afraid to return to work. The standoff has left the contested building sitting empty, ringed by tanks and covered with anti-American graffiti -- testimony to the challenges the U.S. military occupation faces in trying to create a new democratic government in Iraq after decades of totalitarian rule.

U.S. Army Col. P.J. Dermer, who helped establish the district council and has been trying to referee the current showdown, calls it an important litmus test for Iraq. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime shot, and we can't fail it," he says.

Everyone involved in Iraq -- the U.S., the United Nations and the Iraqis themselves -- want the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government as quickly as possible. But six months after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, no Iraqi official can claim to be truly elected. The 24-member Governing Council at the top of the national government structure was handpicked and installed by the CPA in July.

As early as May, the U.S. military tried to involve local citizens in the selection of Baghdad's 88 neighborhood councils. Those councils, in turn, elected district assemblies -- including the one for Sadr City -- and a citywide council. For weeks after Baghdad fell under U.S. control, soldiers toured the city blaring messages through loudspeakers mounted on Humvees, urging residents to attend the selection meetings held in their neighborhoods. In some areas, thousands showed up, packing an entire sports field in one. In others, only a handful of Iraqis who were already cooperating with U.S. forces attended.

"These were their first experiences in actually practicing democracy," says U.S. Army Lt. Col. Joe Rice, the project's coordinator who served until the war as mayor of Glendale, Colo., population 5,000. "In some places it was easy to do right off. In others, we're still not there."

Analysis: Humor aside, the Iraqis have a point. They have a legitimate right to national self-determination, a principle long enshrined in political philosophy and international law. Now freed from the yoke of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis want to be able to choose their own government. For the most part, I think we're facilitating that choice by building the institutions of democracy and liberal society. But after suffering Saddam for 30 years, I can understand how the Iraqis might be a little anxious.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:03

 
More rural Americans died in Iraq than urban Americans

An analysis of American casualties in Iraq by the Austin American-Statesman has found something very interesting -- that rural Americans account for a greater proportion of killed-in-action than urban Americans. Also, among those urban Americans killed in Iraq, the numbers reflect a disproportionately high number of African-American and Latino soldiers. (Thanks to Donald Sensing for the tip to this story)

Howard County is poorer than most. Its young people are leaving, although Hispanic immigrants are replacing them. It is small. Its people have low incomes. It has relatively few people with college degrees. It is economically depressed.

Disproportionately, the young men dying in Iraq come from places just like this. Compared to the nation's population, those who have died are disproportionately from smaller counties. They are disproportionately from counties with lower per capita income. They are disproportionately from places with low levels of college education.

A statistical analysis of the more than 300 U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq by Austin American-Statesman consultant Robert Cushing shows that this may be America's war, but it is being fought by only a part of America.

The soldiers who died aren't numbers, but numbers tell some of their story. Those who died in Iraq were 39 percent more likely than the nation as a whole to live in counties with fewer than 100,000 people. They were 16 percent more likely than the nation as a whole to live in a county with lower than average levels of college education and 16 percent more likely to live in counties with below average incomes.

Those soldiers who came from the nation's large cities were disproportionately black or Hispanic. And a small proportion of those who died come from the nation's technology hubs, the score of urban areas that are creating the world's newest inventions and companies _ cities like San Jose, Seattle, Austin and Dallas. Those who have died largely grew up in old economy towns or rural regions, places with low levels of technology and little innovation.

Was this same divide evident in the Vietnam War? "I don't think so," said Steve Maxner, associate director of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University. "During the war in Southeast Asia, you had the draft."

More than anything, however, those who died in today's all-volunteer military came from small-town America. Their names, lives and hometowns roll through the news, and places long forgotten are known again, if only for a day.

Analysis: I missed this story when it ran on the wire last week, but I think it's very significant. It's important to know which part of America has borne the human cost of this war, and in more general terms, which part of America actually serves in uniform. A number of people argued before the war that we needed to reinstate the draft to more evenly spread the burden of military service across society -- horizontally and vertically. The military establishment counter-argued that a draft would be counter-productive, and that the burden is relatively equal now because of the self-selection dynamic of today's force. I think this story undercuts the military position that the burden is shared equally. It does not necessarily support the argument of Rep. Charlie Rangel and others who say the military burden cuts on the basis of race, but it does support the argument (in my opinion) that America's working and middle classes do more than their share.

But honestly, this study raises more questions than it answers, and I'm hesitant to go much further than this. Here are some of my questions after reading this story:
- Why do rural Americans seem more likely to die than urban Americans?
- Are rural Americans volunteering in disproportionate numbers for the combat arms? Is there some correlation between rural/urban and occupational specialty in the military? (Conventional wisdom holds that the 'country boys' will join the infantry to go hunting in the woods, while the urban kids will go to work as mechanics and technicians. Like most CW, it's just hyperbole)
- Is there a way to parse the data for the most dangerous occupational specialties? This war has included a lot of unconventional war, exposing logisticians and others in the rear area to battle. But I still think that combat troops faced the brunt of the danger, particularly during the combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
- What about the active vs. reserve mix of casualties? Were there any statistically significant differences between urban and rural reserve units in terms of their casualties?
- Is there any way to get the Wounded In Action data, as well as other non-battle casualty data? I'd like to see these numbers because KIA often reflects the enemy's marksmanship and our MEDEVAC capabilities more than anything else. Total casualty data -- KIA plus WIA plus non-battle casualties -- would paint a more complete picture of the relative dangers faced by our soldiers in Iraq.
posted by Phillip Carter at 05:41

 
A moment of silence

INTEL DUMP will observe a day of silence in memory of 4 military police soldiers killed in Iraq. Three of these soldiers belonged to the 716th Military Police Battalion (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The fourth hailed from the 105th Military Police Company (National Guard) in New York. Listed below are the details according to the Pentagon.

The Department of Defense announced today the death of three soldiers who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom on Oct. 16 in Karbala, Iraq. The soldiers were attempting to negotiate with armed men who were congregating on a road near a mosque after curfew. The Iraqis opened fire killing three soldiers and wounding seven others.. Killed were:

Lt. Col. Kim S. Orlando, 43, of Tennessee.

Staff Sgt. Joseph P. Bellavia, 28, of Wakefield, Mass.

Cpl. Sean R. Grilley, 24, of San Bernardino, Calif.

The soldiers were assigned to the 716th Military Police Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), based in Fort Campbell, Ky. Orlando was the commanding officer of the 716th Military Police Battalion.
* * *
The Department of Defense announced today that Spc. Michael L. Williams, 46, of Buffalo, N.Y., was killed on October 17, 2003, along MSR Jackson, near Baghdad, Iraq. Williams was killed in action when his vehicle ran over an improvised explosive device. He died as a result of his injuries. Williams was assigned to the 105th Military Police Company, Army National Guard, based in New York.

posted by Phillip Carter at 21:30

 
8 Marines charged with mistreatment of Iraqi POWs

The AP reports tonight that 8 Marines have been charged with various military offenses relating to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war -- up to and including negligent homicide.

The reservists belong to the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. Their hometowns were not immediately released, and it was not known if all had retained lawyers.

Two of the men were charged with negligent homicide in connection with the June death of an Iraqi who was held at a detention facility, said Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Lisbon, a spokesman at Camp Pendleton.

Lisbon said Saturday he was unsure how many of the other six reservists had been charged in connection with the death. He would not say whether the man was the 52-year-old Iraqi prisoner of war whose death at a camp run by the 1st Marine Division near Nasiriyah was reported last June.

Maj. Clark Paulus and Lance Cpl. Christian Hernandez face negligent homicide charges. The other six face lesser charges involving mistreatment of prisoners.
* * *
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing one of the men said the Army did not have the necessary personnel to run the detention camp and the reservists were untrained for the job.

"In the rush to war with Iraq, providing the mandatory training to reservists seems to have had little if any priority with the Pentagon," Donald Rehkopf Jr. said in a statement released Saturday.
* * *
Under military directives, the Army is supposed to handle POW facilities, said Rehkopf, who is representing Lance Cpl. William Roy.

The reservists "had no training at all. They were given a 30-minute training on the Geneva convention," Rehkopf said, referring to the international accords for treatment of POWs.

Analysis: This case is going to move forward now in the military justice system to what's called an "Article 32 hearing", which is roughly the equivalent of a grand jury proceeding. There, a military judge must decide whether there is enough evidence present to formally charge these men in military court. From there, the case will move into a military court, most likely in a general court martial.

None of the facts are present in this story and I haven't had time to dig up the charging documents yet. The charges sound serious -- it appears that one (or more) Iraqi died in a POW camp tended by these men. The defense they're putting forward about their training may mitigate their culpability, especially the lower-ranking Marines, but it probably won't absolve them completely. However, I can't make even an educated guess here without more of the facts.

More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:21

 
Who's covered by the Third Geneva Convention?
And is the U.S. violating the 3rd GC with its prison at Guantanamo Bay?

Eugene Volokh passes on a critique by Zev Sero of a New York Times editorial that criticizes America's detention of men at Guantanamo Bay who have been captured in the war on terrorism. Eugene also does a great job of parsing the definitions of combatants under the Geneva Convention, and explaining why the NY Times may be wrong in its editorial. The Times asserts that the detention has no basis in the Geneva Convention, an argument which is conclusory at best.

Why are the men still without trial, still without rights? The Bush administration has two justifications. One is, in essence, self-defense: in the war on terrorism, in which the security of the United States is in mortal danger, normal rules cannot apply. The other, more narrow, is about legality: the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not combatants in traditional or legal terms, and are therefore not eligible for the protections due to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Both arguments miss the point. The men held at Guant?namo are prisoners of the United States. While they may not have the same rights as American citizens, they should be treated in the highest tradition of American justice. That means they must be given some forum in which to contest their imprisonment, and there must be reasonable rules and some individualized proof for the detentions to be upheld.

That the Pentagon should be allowed to run this prison camp in total secrecy and in utter disdain of what America stands for should be heavy on the conscience of all Americans, whether libertarian or liberal, Republican or Democrat. For this reason alone, the detainees should be brought to justice or released.

The justifications offered by the administration are equally unpersuasive. The argument that the detainees are not prisoners of war because they are not uniformed members of a regular armed force has no foundation in the Geneva Conventions.

As for the claim of self-defense, it simply cannot be applied indefinitely. We accept that there are extraordinary times — Sept. 11 was one of them — when a government must take extraordinary measures to protect the nation. But with Guant?namo, the administration has gone far beyond the needs of the moment, seeking to ensure in every way possible that the prisoners remain indefinitely beyond the reach of law or scrutiny.

Analysis: Eugene correctly cites to the definition of combatants in Art. 4 of the 3rd GC. Regular army soldiers automatically qualify. Members of militias and volunteer corps (the GC was written in 1949 so the language is a little archaic) have to meet a 4-part test for status as a prisoner of war:

(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Suffice to say, there has been an open debate in legal and operational communities about whether the Taliban and Al Qaeda satisfy these definitions, or whether American special operations forces do. In general, I think that unconventional warfare -- whether practiced by us or our enemies -- does not fit the Geneva Convention paradigm. Trying to use these definitions to cover today's forms of warfare is a stretch. (See "Extend Geneva to Gitmo") In any event, I don't think the text of the Geneva Convention supports the NYT's contention that our actions at Gitmo have no foundation in the Geneva Conventions. Our actions do have some legal foundation under the Geneva Convention, though in my opinion, these are very shaky foundations.

Why? Eugene and Zev both miss another argument that could be made for why the Geneva Convention does not support our action. Art. 5 of the Geneva Convention creates a rebuttable presumption that prisoners are to be considered POWs until determined otherwise by a properly constituted tribunal:

ARTICLE 5

The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.

Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

An executive determination (like the one made by President Bush) cannot suffice under the Geneva Convention for this article, unless you buy the argument that the President himself is a "tribunal" under the meaning of this article. FM 27-10, the Army's field manual for the law of land warfare, is also quite clear about this requirement. In practice, the Army has constituted many such tribunals in Iraq, usually with mid-level officers (Captain through Lieutenant Colonel) with some connection to the detention operation (MP, JAG, Intel, Civil Affairs). These do not have to be formal proceedings, and they don't even have to be adversarial. The tribunals can conduct an ex parte review of each combatant to make this determination and report that in writing to the commander, with a courtesy copy to the ICRC. (The Red Cross is charged as the executor of the Geneva Conventions.)

However, in the absence of such tribunals, we may very well be in violation of the Geneva Convention. Not in the way the NYT suggests with its editorial, but in a technical and procedural way. I'm well aware of the dissonance between substantive law and procedural law, and how the former tends to trump the latter. If this is mere formalism, then why bother? I'm biased as a law student, but I tend to believe that the foundations of substantive justice lie in procedure. The way we ensure our principles are executed is by crafting procedures to carry them out. In the instant case, the Geneva Convention exists to promote humane treatment of prisoners of war, and it sets out procedures to ensure that this principle is practiced. America ought to follow those procedures, even if they are empty formalities, because it's the right thing to do.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:33

 
Two more plead guilty to terror charges in Oregon

Patrice Ford and Jeffrey Battle pled guilty today to charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States. The pair was charged as part of a group of 7 persons that the Justice Department believed to be part of a terrorist cell in the Pacific Northwest. With these pleas, 6 of the 7 members of the group have pled guilty to charges. The 7th remains at large. Before their pleas, some observers thought this case might prove interesting because the government sought to use evidence gathered with powers gained in the USA PATRIOT Act.

The pleas came during a hearing when defense attorneys had intended to challenge evidence gathered under the USA Patriot Act.

Because of the pleas, those challenges will not be heard during this case.

Last October, federal agents nabbed Ford, Battle and two other men and one woman in what Attorney General John Ashcroft called a "defining day" in the fight against terrorism.

It's not clear when we'll have a person willing to risk prison -- or capital punishment -- to challenge some of the government's post-9/11 security measures. The ACLU thought this might be the case, filing this amicus curae brief. However, the defendants decided it was in their personal interest to plead guilty. Given the strong likelihood they faced of life in prison, I think that was probably the prudent decision for them.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:07

 
Shameless self promotion: CNN.Com picked up my article from last week that ran in Writ titled "High crimes at Guantanamo Bay". As news breaks in this case, I will continue to provide analysis on INTEL DUMP and also for Findlaw.Com.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:34

 
Stars & Stripes poll: morale down in Iraq

The Washington Post passes on the results of a poll conducted by the Stars & Stripes newspaper of soldiers in Iraq that does not bode well for our mission there. As a preliminary matter, this poll was conducted somewhat informally, and does not represent a statistically perfect sample of the U.S. military in Iraq. However, I think it would be irresponsible to ignore the results, because they offer the most objective evidence yet of American soldiers' attitudes in Iraq.

The survey, conducted by the Stars and Stripes newspaper, also recorded about a third of the respondents complaining that their mission lacks clear definition and characterizing the war in Iraq as of little or no value. Fully 40 percent said the jobs they were doing had little or nothing to do with their training.

The findings, drawn from 1,935 questionnaires presented to U.S. service members throughout Iraq, conflict with statements by military commanders and Bush administration officials that portray the deployed troops as high-spirited and generally well-prepared. Though not obtained through scientific methods, the survey results suggest that a combination of difficult conditions, complex missions and prolonged tours in Iraq is wearing down a significant portion of the U.S. force and threatening to provoke a sizable exodus from military service.

In the first of a week-long series of articles, Stars and Stripes said yesterday that it undertook the survey in August after receiving scores of letters from troops who were upset with one aspect or another of the Iraq operation. The newspaper, which receives some funding from the Defense Department but functions without editorial control by the Pentagon, prepared 17 questions and sent three teams of reporters to Iraq to conduct the survey and related interviews at nearly 50 camps.

"We conducted a 'convenience survey,' meaning we gave it to those who happened to be available at the time rather than to a randomly selected cross section, so the results cannot necessarily be projected as representing the whole population," said David Mazzarella, the paper's editorial director here. "But we still think the findings are significant and make clear that the troops have a different idea of things than what their leaders have been saying."

Experts in public opinion and the military concurred that the poll was not necessarily representative, but they characterized it as a useful gauge of troop sentiment. "The numbers are consistent with what I suspect is going on there," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. "I am getting a sense that there is a high and increasing level of demoralization and a growing sense of being in something they don't understand and aren't sure the American people understand."

Analysis: A few quick points of analysis emerge from this story. I think it's important to note at the outset that Stars & Stripes is a quasi-independent newspaper. It exists under the auspices of the Defense Department, though it has editorial discretion to run the articles it wants to. The reporting from S&S reporters in Iraq has been first-rate; as good as anything the NY Times or Washington Post has put out there. These reporters know the units they're covering and they know the military as an institution, and I think that informs their stories -- including this one.

Now for some analysis of these polling results:

1. American soldiers love to gripe. As Eliot Cohen said in the WP article, "American troops have a God-given right and tradition of grumbling." That's true. But the character of the gripes counts, because it indicates what soldiers are upset about -- and what they're happy about. I always expected my soldiers to complain about the food, the weather, the hardships, the family separations, and other things. In fact, I thought griping was healthy. I accepted it as normal, and thought these gripes often opened up channels of communication that enabled me to connect with my soldiers. I thought it was dangerous when my guys complained about the mission, the deployment, the leadership, or their peers. Those gripes usually meant I had to explain the "why" behind the mission, or adjust fire on something else I was doing. Similarly, I think the same is true in Iraq. The nature of the gripes counts here because the soldiers are doing more than just complaining about the food and conditions. (Though I've been told those two things continue to suck for many soldiers.) Many of these soldiers are complaining about the mission, their political leadership, and their raison d'etre for Iraq. That's not a good sign.

2. Junior soldiers and officers tend to be honest -- especially when anonymous. These poll results are likely to be more accurate than reports from embedded reporters or politicians who've made the journey to Iraq. Why? Because those kinds of visitors get a "dog and pony show", as the WP story points out. Commanders often selected the most "hooah" soldiers for those meet & greet visits, and they often coach the soldiers on what to say (and what not to say). Similarly, major media reporters who don't fully embed into units will only get a small glimpse of unit morale. Because they're not there long enough to build trust and rapport, they probably won't get the straight answers. These surveys are more likely to get the straight answers than most of the high-level "factfinding" trips, and thus, I think these survey results are pretty valuable.

3. The data, if granular enough, may reveal important differences across units and regions. It's common knowledge that the majority of Iraq is doing well -- particularly the southern and northern parts of the country. Most of the fighting is happening in Baghdad and the "Sunni Triangle." Presumably, these poll numbers will show a greater disenchantment among soldiers in those areas, while soldiers in the good areas will be happy with their mission. I haven't yet reviewed the data, but this seems intuitively true. (Update: I've read the surveys, and they don't have this level of granularity. This is probably something that our commanders ought to be doing in Iraq, and that they probably are doing right now.)

4. Other metrics to look at. These surveys are great for measuring subjective attitudes, but we should also start looking at some objective metrics of soldier morale and performance in Iraq. Reenlistment is the obvious one, both during the deployment and during the year afterwards. Safety-accident rates are also an important indicator of morale. Though the visits themselves are confidential, aggregate data about chaplain visits and mental-health visits may also provide a good metric. The Army should be looking at all of these on a constant basis -- and in historical context -- to evaluate whether we have a problem in Iraq or not.

Bottom Line: Does poor morale mean we should leave Iraq? No. No military can be effective if it lets soldier morale determine its mission, and that's certainly true here. Moreover, our system of civilian control of the military can't allow the dog to yank the chain in this way. If our national objective in Iraq is important and if we have committed our nation to that objective (as we have), then we must succeed. If military morale declines, then we must do what we can to take care of our soldiers to maintain that morale (e.g. providing R&R, body armor, phone calls home, good food, mail service, effective training before deployment, etc). Taking care of soldiers is the answer here, not withdrawal.

Update: J.P. Carter (no relation) has a different take on the story. I think his reading of the numbers is plausible, especially the differences he notices between services. If anything, I think these surveys raise more questions to be asked and answered.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:14

 
Live blog from the DC sniper trial

UnlearnedHand pointed me to this outstanding weblog being run by Kerry Sipe, the online news coordinator for The Virginian-Pilot, who's reporting first-hand from the court complex in Virginia Beach. Here's an excerpt from what the 'blog has to offer:

12:42 PM Oct. 15

Prospective Juror 386, a Navy retiree, said under questioning by Judge Millette that his brother had been killed by police during a robbery and that he himself had been charged by police after a fistfight. He assured the judge that neither of these incidents would have any affect on his ability to consider testimony from law enforcement officers in the case.

The man said he had no objections to the death penalty.

"I didn't peronally feel threatened down here," the man told Ebert, "but I cancelled a trip to D.C." while the killings were going on last year, partly because of safety concerns and partly because of the traffic problems the crimes had caused there. He said he would have no trouble setting aside those feelings in rendering a verdict in the case.

Defense attorney Greenspun again, as he has throughout the questioning of potential jurors, apologized to No. 386 for not being able to call him by name. "It's to protect you from our friends who are surroundng the courthouse here," he said. "Of which there are many." Presumably, the attorney was referring to extensive press coverage of the case. The Pilot's Larry Bonko reported in this morning's edition that there are 353 members of the media from 76 news organizations registered to cover the Muhammad trial.

Greenspun questioned the man about any knowledge he has about military justice based on his service in the Navy. The man said he understood that the military justice system was not the same as the civilian justice system.

"I don't have anything against the death penalty," the man said. "I think it's serious to take someone's life, but being in the military, I may have a someone different view about that." Greenspun asked him if he meant that his job description as a military officer may have involved taking human life under certain circumstances. He said that's what he meant.

This is a brilliant idea, and it appears to be brilliantly executed as well. The editors/reporters who thought of this deserve some kind of journalism award. I, for one, am very interested in the issues of this case because of the domestic terrorism implications, and this will enable me to follow the details of this trial. Well done.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:17

 
Iraq war diary of a mobilized law student

Law.Com provides a reprint of an article in the Fulton County Daily Report that describes the journey of Tenn. Air National Guard Capt. Michael R. Moebes. (Thanks to How Appealing for the link) Shortly before finishing law school, he was called to serve in the Gulf in charge of an Aeromedical Evacuation Liaison Team, responsible for coordinating the MedEvac of wounded soldiers from the battlefield. The news article describes his mobilization, and then gives excerpts of Capt. Moebes' e-mails from Iraq.

Moebes' messages also offer a gritty and compelling glimpse of the life of a soldier on the ground in Iraq.

His account shows how, just as in the television show "M*A*S*H," dedicated, homesick medical professionals treated truckloads of wounded soldiers while trying to maintain a semblance of a normal life.

Military snafus and oddities became a part of daily life. On the way to Iraq, his unit's Humvee was misplaced. Another day, he was forbidden from taking a shower because he wasn't wearing the required Kevlar helmet and flak jacket.

But like a modern-day Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre, Moebes and a buddy, Capt. Shane Gilliam, kept their sense of humor. They installed a wading pool in their tent, escaped the chow hall to eat in a local Iraqi restaurant and befriended National Guardsmen from another state who circumvented Army alcohol restrictions by concocting a home brew.

Meanwhile, a stream of interesting characters crossed Moebes' path. They included rescued prisoner of war Jessica Lynch, actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mohommed, an Iraqi translator who narrowly escaped the wrath of Uday Hussein.

Moebes says he tried to keep his messages upbeat, so he sent nothing when he felt too depressed to write. But like the edgier moments of "M*A*S*H," Moebes' e-mails depict the grim realities of war.

Definitely worth a read.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:57

 
'Every soldier a rifleman'
New Army chief outlines his plans for America's oldest service

Sean Naylor reports in Army Times (subscription required) that Gen. Peter Schoomaker has laid out an ambitious plan for transformation of the Army after Gulf War II. For what it's worth, transformation after victory has always been harder than transformation after defeat, and the Army appears anxious to seize on 'lessons learned' from this war in order to prepare for the next one. The cornerstone of this effort is the plan to train every Army soldier as an infantryman first -- and specialist second -- in order to build a warrior ethos within the ranks and ensure that every unit can competently fight when called upon. The move is an implicit response to the failures of the 507th Maintenance Company and others in Iraq.

“Everybody in the United States Army’s gotta be a soldier first,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker told reporters during an Oct. 7 roundtable meeting with reporters in Washington.

The specialization of jobs in the Army pulled the service away from the notion that every soldier must be grounded in basic combat skills, he said. But Iraq has demonstrated that no matter what a soldier’s military occupational specialty is, he must be able to conduct basic combat tasks in order to defend himself and his unit.

“We’ve dismounted artillerymen in Iraq, and we’ve got them performing ground functions — infantry functions, MP functions,” Schoomaker said. “Everybody’s got to be able to do that … Everybody’s a rifleman first.”
* * *
*Every soldier will be required to qualify on his or her individual weapon twice a year, [Gen.] Byrnes said. The current Army standard requires soldiers to qualify only once a year, although some commanders have their troops qualify more frequently.

*New recruits will qualify on their individual weapons in basic training and then again in advanced individual training, Byrnes added. Until now, qualification in basic training only was the standard.

*Every soldier, regardless of MOS and unit, will conduct at least one live-fire combat drill a year. For higher headquarters rear-echelon units, it might include reacting to an ambush, Byrnes said.

In addition to transforming the grunt, the new Chief of Staff of the Army has plans to transform the way units are structured. His goal is to maximize the number of deployable brigades that the Army has, in an effort to boost the number of troops available for deployment without busting the Army's "end strength" cap as set by federal law. And Gen. Schoomaker has had enough of rotating senior commanders out of combat while their troops stay behind.

This policy has infuriated many in the Army, especially the outgoing commanders, who feel it forces them to abandon their troops just when their soldiers need them most.

Schoomaker is sympathetic to those who feel the policy should be changed, and has told the units preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan that he does not want midtour changes of command. Staying with a unit until it redeploys is “a fundamental role of leadership,” he told reporters.

This is all good stuff. The question will be whether Gen. Schoomaker gets the support he needs from the SecDef to make this happen, and whether he can get the authorization/appropriations authority from Congress to do it. Gen. Schoomaker's likely in for a long fight, since some of these changes may collide with other service objectives and programs. There's a lot of parochialism in the Army, and a lot of stakeholders with vested interests who know how to fight like a guerilla in the halls of Congress. Thankfully, Gen. Schoomaker's a pretty good snake-eater too.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:34

 
Feds investigating Islamic terror recruiting in U.S. prisons
"Prislam" may create a fertile recruiting ground for foreign terrorists

In a Senate hearing yesterday, two top federal officials disclosed that the FBI and Federal Bureau of Prisons are becoming increasingly concerned about "Prislam", the fusion of prison culture and radical Islam that is rapidly growing within America's prison system. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported on the development in connection with testimony about military and prison chaplain recruiting. (Also see this ArmyTimes story) The issue has become hot after the arrest of CPT Yousef Yee, the U.S. Army Muslim chaplain who now stands charged for security lapses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As disturbing as those charges are, I think the reports about America's prison system are worse.

The government also believes radical Islamic groups, including possibly al Qaeda, are actively recruiting in U.S. prisons, Mr. Pistole and Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Harley Lappin testified. There are about 9,600 Muslims in federal prisons, about 5.5% of the population, not including members of nontraditional Muslim offshoots such as the Nation of Islam.

The Bureau of Prisons is seeking to weed out any radicals among its 10 Muslim clerics, Mr. Lappin said, and recently blocked access to prisons for cleric Warith Dean Umar after the imam's comments and writings were the subject of a Page One article in The Wall Street Journal.

Paul Rogers, president of the American Correctional Chaplains Association, said reports of terrorist recruitment in prison "have been blown out of proportion."

Paul Barrett of the Wall Street Journal has done some great work on this subject, reporting some time back in a Page 1 article one on imam in New York who was preaching radical Wahhabist teachings to the inmates in that state. Christine Fair at RAND and others have also looked at the problem from an academic and policy perspective. Others have written on it too, such as Chuck Colson and Marc Morano. But too few people take it seriously.

This is an exceptionally dangerous problem. Imagine a group of men who have U.S. citizenship, training in violence, experience with violence, a predisposition towards criminal activity, access to weapons, and a reason to dislike the U.S. government. Put them together in a prison with moderate supervision and let them share tactics, techniques and procedures. Then add a radical Islamic cleric who enjoy a position of power and prestige within the prison. Allow him to infuse these dangerous, disaffected criminals with his ideology. Voila... you have the perfect Al Qaeda recruit for inside the United States. Why infiltrate men from Saudi Arabia or Egypt when you can recruit from inside America's prisons instead?

How did this problem get so bad? The biggest contributor has been the skyrocketing American prison population, both at the state and federal level. Here in California, our prison population has surged since 1994 when the state adopted its "3 strikes" law for repeat offenders. The federal prison population has mushroomed since the 1980s when stiff mandatory sentences were introduced for federal offenses, especially drug crimes. The result today is the largest American prison population in our nation's history, and one that continues to grow. I'll let my readers play amateur sociology, but there are plenty of racial, ethnic, gender, socio-economic, and religious trends that emerge from America's prison population. These also play a role in creating the phenomenon of "Prislam", and making this group a fertile recruiting ground for terrorist groups.

Both Democrats and Republicans deserve the blame for the failure to legislate rationally on crime during the last two decades. No legislator can afford to say "Wait a minute" on any anti-crime bill, lest he/she appear soft on crime and vulnerable to challenge on the issue. Consequently, nearly every crime bill ratchets up sentences and penalties, and once raised, these tend never to go down. Only recently have some federal judges coalesced to oppose these sentences, though on the grounds of judicial discretion, not policy reasons.

We've been lucky so far. Our law enforcement surveillance network -- particularly the parole and probation system -- has managed to keep a handle on this problem. With the exception of Jose Padilla, I can't think of many instances where a terrorist's origins were traced back to prison. But given the large numbers involved, unfortunately, I think it's only a matter of time.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:33

 
An insider's view of the Justice Department on Sept. 12, 2001

Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC Law School, offers us this glimpse via the words of Judge Michael Chertoff, recently confirmed to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Before his appointment to the federal bench, Chertoff served as Chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. He managed the criminal law enforcement part of the Bush Administration's legal war on terrorism, and personally litigated issues in contentious matters such as that of Zacarias Moussaoui. Muller notes that most judges don't speak with as much candor as Chertoff, so this was both a rare glimpse into the DOJ and into the mind of a federal appellate judge. Here's an excerpt:

He devoted the first part of his talk to sketching a view of the task he faced on 9/11 and in the days after. One of the lasting contributions of his talk, I think, was his frank depiction of the relative ignorance in which he and the others at DOJ were forced to operate. Nobody at DOJ had no way of knowing whether the WTC and Pentagon attacks were just the prelude to an even larger disaster. What he did know, though, was this: (a) the enemy had masqueraded as friendly visitors, (b) the enemy had to have had a complicit (or perhaps an innocent) support network--people who'd provided shelter, money, sustenance, and so on, and (c) there was no way to distinguish between the many well-meaning visitors to the USA and the few who meant us harm. "It was not just like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said. "It was like looking in a haystack for a needle disguised as a stalk of hay."

The limited information they had suggested a realistic possibility of further strikes. (And, he pointed out, it still does.)

People who make decisions under this sort of pressure, and in this state of imperfect information, he noted, do not have the benefit of hindsight. They must act.

He said that he is entirely prepared to accept history's judgment of how he acted. And, interestingly, he reported that he and others were "accutely aware" of the eventual judgment of history, even as he was acting in those first few days. But he unapologetically defended most of what DOJ ultimately did.

He said that the early efforts after 9/11 were organized around 3 principles: 1. Enhancing intelligence in order to predict another attack. 2. Taking steps to identify those who might stage such an attack. 3. Disrupting networks from which al Qaeda drew support, even innocently-offered support.

How well, he then wondered aloud, did DOJ do?

Read the rest to find out. Then ask yourself, based on your knowledge of the situation and your personal feelings of security in October 2003, how did the Justice Department do?
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:49

 
Update to body armor story
Query: Can today's defense industry logistically support a strategy of pre-emption?

Simula Inc. announced today in a press release that it had received an additional $14 million order for the Small Arms Protective Insert, or "SAPI". This is the ceramic plate that goes into the Interceptor protective vest, and it is the part of the vest that can actually stop a 7.62 round. Without this plate, the vest is good only against fragmentation and oblique bullet shots.

In a news release, Simula said the combination an initial delivery order announced Sept. 29 and Tuesday's order brings the total value of the contract to $41 million. The latest order is a "surge order" for additional SAPI exercised under the terms of the previously announced contract.

All shipments are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2004.

With this order, the company said it enters 2004 with the largest backlog in its history.

Why the backlog? There's a micro-economic and a macro-economic reason. The micro-reason is that this company does not have the capacity to churn out 30,000 plates overnight, because it was originally contracted to procure these overtime and it built production lines to manage a steady flow of these plates. It must now build new production lines, work round-the-clock shifts, or find some other means to produce the plates. All of these measures will cost a lot, and they still won't result in instantaneous production of SAPIs.

The macro-economic reason for this problem is the overall trend since the fall of the Berlin Wall towards consolidation in the defense industry. (See this survey of the defence industry by The Economist) Small specialized contractors have either gone out of business or been swallowed up by larger contractors, and for most major end items, there remains one contractor capable of making that item. The same is true for smaller items, such as SAPIs and HMMWV tires and Bradley tracks. When the Pentagon wants to procure a bunch of these right away, it can't, because the defense industry has downsized and consolidated itself to the point of maximum efficiency, and it can't respond quickly enough to meet this wartime demand with its peacetime production lines.

The implications of this macro-economic trend cannot be understated. I think this is an area of strategic risk for the American government, and it probably hobbles our current national strategy of pre-emptive action. Our military cannot perform well in war (and after war) if it does not have the procurement and logistics base to support it. We have nearly spent our post-Cold War stockages of spare parts in a number of areas, and so far, the defense industry has not shifted to a wartime footing to replace these things (except for some items like JDAM bombs). There's an old maxim that "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." In this case, I think our pre-emptive strategy may contain an element of amateurism, in that it ignores logistical realities that are now beginning to show across our force.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:54

 
LAT: More than 100 bases considered for closure in 2005 BRAC round

John Hendren reports in this morning's Los Angeles Times that the Pentagon has a list of more than 100 military bases that it's considering for closure in the 2005 round of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission ("BRAC"), out of a total of 425 bases. The move comes as part of the SecDef's larger "transformation" effort for the Defense Department, wherein he seeks to streamline everything from procurement to housing to warfighting. Consolidating and reorganizing bases could save the Pentagon billions of dollars in capital costs and operations costs. However, these closures would hit the bases' communities hard. To close these bases, Sec. Rumsfeld will have to fight scores of Congressmen and Senators committed to keeping bases in their states alive.

Such a proposal would guarantee a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers jealously protect the bases in their home states or districts.

Military analyst Loren Thompson reported Rumsfeld's plans in an analysis prepared late last week for defense officials and reporters. Thompson, of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based public policy organization, said the savings are expected to exceed the $66 billion the Pentagon saved during the last decade from previous base closures, but would come at the politically controversial cost of shutting about 25% of the nation's bases.

Thompson's report was confirmed Monday by the senior defense official.

Under legislation passed in 2002, Rumsfeld is required by May 16, 2005, to prepare a list of bases to be closed or realigned, and the nine-member Base Closure and Realignment Commission must submit its list to the White House by Sept. 8, 2005. A vote by a simple majority of the nine is all that is needed to keep a base on the closure list. If President Bush accepts the list, the closures become law in 45 days unless Congress blocks them — something Congress did not do in the first four rounds.

The more activities a base performs — if more than one service is housed there, if it is a command post, or if it is home to Reserve and National Guard units, for instance — the less likely it is to be closed. Defense insiders estimate that as many as 150 bases could be on the 2005 list because the cuts would come in overall capacity and would likely target smaller, less efficient locations.

"If there's a base that only has one particular purpose, one particular unit, one particular mission that could be accomplished somewhere else, that would be more vulnerable," the senior defense official said.

In the past, lawmakers have grudgingly accepted the lists of base closures, but this time, because the facilities to be realigned or cut would be spread over a majority of the 50 states, they might revolt, Thompson said. An effort last summer by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) to eliminate the 2005 round of base closures received more than 40 votes, even before any bases to be cut were named.

"I think this could backfire on them," Thompson said of Rumsfeld's Pentagon managers. "This would be so big in one round that it might affect enough senators or congressmen that they might have enough critical mass that they could vote the whole thing down."

Analysis: From a purely economic standpoint, BRAC makes sense. The efficiencies which can be gained from closing bases outweigh the loss of jobs and economic activity in these small communities. This is true purely on a dollar-for-dollar basis. If you add in variables such as the greater combat effectiveness of units that are able to train more because of proximity to training areas or other units, then the scales tip even further. And if you add in the strategic value of reorganizing our forces to deploy, rather than sit in peacetime garrison locations like Fort Riley, Kansas (originally established to aid in the Indian wars of the 19th Century), then you really get more bang for your buck with these closures.

Operationally, this move goes hand-in-hand with others announced in the last several months by the Pentagon to reorganize its footprint abroad. The U.S. currently has plans to radically change its stance in South Korea, pulling soldiers back from scattered bases near the DMZ to a consolidated posture south of Seoul. Similarly, the U.S. has plans to reduce the overall footprint in East Asia and consolidate into bases in the Pacific from which these forces could deploy to other parts of the world if necessary. In Europe, the SACEUR has announced plans to close a number of bases in Germany and redeploy large units back to the states. In their place, the U.S. would leave a system of "lilypad" bases that were lightly manned, but able to serve as jumping-off points for deployment in Europe and abroad. The 2005 round of BRAC will resemble both of these proposals, in that it will place a premium on consolidation, deployability, and security, among other criteria.

Historically, few of these bases were constructed (or kept open) with an eye towards these criteria. Most military bases today were built during the mobilizations of WWI or WWII. After those wars, these bases stayed open because their states' representatives had enough pull in Congress to keep them open. One reason why the South has so many military bases today is because of the pull that Sen. Richard Russell (D-Ga.) had over such matters, as the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. (See Master of the Senate by Robert Caro) But the continued existence of these bases owes very little to rational criteria (e.g. deployability) and very much to politics.

I'm not sure we can afford that kind of luxurious irrationality anymore. Maintaining all these bases saps billions from an already bloated defense budget, and we need to find whatever efficiencies we can. Closing bases will hurt many communities, but those effects can be mitigated. (See, e.g., the case of Fort McClellan, AL, where the former U.S. Army Chemical and Military Police schools were converted into law enforcement training facilities) Ultimately, the benefits from BRAC far outweigh the costs of closing these bases, and we can't afford to ignore the outcome of that equation.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:30

 
AP: 1/4 of U.S. troops in Iraq lack good body armor

The Associated Press reports tonight that funding delays and other procurement problems have stalled the deployment of "Interceptor" body armor to soldiers in Iraq, leaving thousands without the critical gear. This despite after-action reviews from Afghanistan and Iraq saying this body armor saved hundreds of lives with its ballistic protection (see also this story and this story); this despite billions spent so far in the war on terrorism; this despite promises from politicians on both sides of the aisle to take care of the troops.

Delays in funding, production and shipping mean it will be December before all troops in Iraq will have the vests, which were introduced four years ago, military officials say.

Congress approved $310 million in April to buy 300,000 more of the bulletproof vests, with 30,000 destined to complete outfitting of the troops in Iraq. Of that money, however, only about $75 million has reached the Army office responsible for overseeing the vests' manufacture and distribution, said David Nelson, an official in that office.

Angry members of Congress have denounced the Pentagon. They say up to 44,000 troops lack the best vests because of the sluggish supply chain, significantly more than the Pentagon figure. Relatives of some soldiers have resorted to buying body armor in the United States and shipping it to their troops, congressional critics say.

"I got a letter from a young soldier in Baghdad saying that the men in his group were concerned that they had cheap armor that was incapable of stopping bullets. And they wondered why they could not have the best protection possible under the circumstances," said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio.

The House version of an $86.7 billion Iraq spending bill passed last week would include $251 million for body armor and for clearing unexploded munitions, although it's unclear if additional money would speed up the process at this point. President Bush's original request included no more money for body armor.

Analysis: This is a monumental logistics screwup for the Army's procurement community, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Congress (especially the Armed Services committees), and for the White House. Unfortunately, it's hard to pin the blame on any one office, or even on any one administration, because the blame belongs to lots of people who touched this program over the last several years. The initiative to develop new body armor may have started as early as the Reagan Administration; this particular program dates back to the Clinton Administration. The earliest decisions about how many Interceptor vests to buy and when were made when President Clinton held office.

However, the current administration doesn't get off the hook that easily. When the decision was made to invade Iraq in late 2002, this shortfall could/should have been identified, and dealt with. The blame for that mistake starts with Army logisticians and runs all the way up the chain of command to the E-Ring of the Pentagon and to Congress. The job of logisticians is to anticipate requirements and move resources to the right time and place on the battlefield to influence the fight. Clearly, this requirement was not anticipated, or decisionmakers at various levels decided to ignore this requirement.

As a nation, we have let our soldiers down by sending them into harm's way without this equipment. Our soldiers can make do without a lot of creature-comforts when necessary, but this is absolutely mission-essential equipment that no soldier should have crossed the LD without. What's even worse is that the distribution of this gear has been inequitable thus far, with reservists worse off than active units, and some active units worse off than others. I've received no less than a dozen e-mails from reservists saying they were told they would get this gear only after every active-duty soldier got it. (Query: is there any legitimate distinction between an active-duty soldier and mobilized reservist when you're both deployed to a combat zone?) Many said they had already bought their own ceramic plates over the Internet with personal funds and/or unit funds, because they could/would not wait for the Army to procure this gear. I think that's despicable, and something must be done.

So what can be done? Congress typically doesn't move at the speed of light, but it can when it wants to. If Congress was willing to jump through its fourth point of contact (paratroopers know what this means) to legislate authority for the Do Not Call list, then they can also move heaven and earth to fund body armor for our soldiers. Similarly, the Pentagon could do a lot to acquire, ship and distribute this equipment once it's procured. As my old First Sergeant used to say: the maximum effective range of an excuse is 0 meters. So far, all I read in this article is a litany of excuses from offices in the Executive and Legislative branches about why this process is taking too long. Tell that to the guys in Iraq waiting for their body armor while they face Iraqi guerillas armed with AK-47s and RPGs.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:36

 
Why was Gitmo so vulnerable to espionage?

Richard Serrano asks that question in today's LA Times, and answers that the Guantanamo Bay facility was not full of counter-intelligence measures to check on its people, and that it relied mainly on trust to keep everyone in line.

What has been learned is that while Camp Delta may have been secured from outside attack, its internal security system rested largely on trust — the belief that its staff, all of whom had security clearance, was loyal.

Allegations that the detained staffers appear to have developed sympathies for the prisoners also have alarmed the American Muslim community, raising fears of a backlash against Muslims serving in the military.

Heavily fortified, far from the Afghan battlefield, so remote and hard to get to that it seemed the ideal solution for holding suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban captives, Camp Delta was meant to be the most secure site for detaining combatants in America's war on terror.

Now, the Pentagon has dispatched a special task force to determine the extent of the alleged security breaches, what damage has been caused and how Camp Delta can be fixed.
* * *
Col. John J. Perrone, an Army reservist from New York who served as Camp Delta's prison warden for eight months last year, said he believed the facility was safe from an outside attack. He acknowledged that he often worried about an internal breakdown, but he said he was amazed that three staff members had been arrested.

"There are a lot of soldiers that are in and out there," he acknowledged. "You have e-mail and telephones, and there are various other methods of communication. The Internet is a great source of information."

Security clearances should be tightened and random searches conducted, Perrone said, noting that getting through the prison doors was no harder than boarding an airplane when he was at Camp Delta.

Analysis: I'm not sure you can dismiss trust and personal loyalty so easily as effective mechanisms for maintaining security. After all, that's generally what keeps every military unit functioning in combat -- trust and unit cohesion. It's also what keeps most of our government running, although we have counterintelligence systems in place to detect leaks in a lot of places. Our society is not one that watches every person, every moment, everywhere. Even at Guantanamo Bay, we have not subjected our military personnel to that kind of regimen because it runs contrary to American norms and values. Trust and personal loyalty sometimes break down, as in the three Gitmo spy cases, but they still remain pretty effective. Indeed, I would say they're more effective on the whole than building a repressive society where every move is watched.

That said, there remain glaring holes in our security at Gitmo. Trust aside, we should've been screening luggage on the way out and maintaining tigher control over classified documents. It may be the case that too much is classified at Guantanamo, thus making this latter job very hard. Regardless, physical security must be the foundation of any larger security effort at Gitmo, and physical security entails placing an absolute quarantine around this prison and around the larger base where our personnel are living. If the intelligence there is so valuable, then we ought to do what's necessary to keep it secret.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:20

 
The story of the 'Lackawanna Six'

The New York Times has an excellent story on the saga of the 'Lackawanna Six' in Sunday's paper. The case was brought against six men for providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations, including attendance at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, among other charges. Ultimately, the six men pled guilty to various lesser offenses, in exchange for information and the government's pledge not to designate them as enemy combatants. The case has generated some amount of interest already, as a possible example of Al Qaeda "sleeper cells" in America. This article discusses that idea, but instead focuses on the ways this case has forced law enforcement officials to retool their criminal enforcement paradigm for terrorism.

. . . an examination of the case by The New York Times and the PBS documentary program "Frontline" demonstrates that behind Washington's sweeping proclamations is a more measured victory over a profoundly ambiguous threat.

After the suspects kept up a cover story about their trip for more than a year, Mr. Alwan and five other men from Lackawanna pleaded guilty to training with a terrorist organization. And investigators determined that the men had been recruited by an American Muslim with connections to the upper echelons of Al Qaeda.

But counterterrorism officials never figured out the mystery that consumed them through the long, tense, terror-obsessed summer of 2002: What, if anything, did Al Qaeda have in mind for its Lackawanna recruits? In fact, the federal prosecutor whose office won the guilty pleas, Michael A. Battle, does not call them a terrorist cell. "It's a heavy burden to prove," he said, "and I wasn't prepared to do that."

Lackawanna was the first major test of a retrofitted law enforcement establishment whose mission is less to solve terrorist crimes than to make sure they do not happen in the first place. The inside story of the case — pieced together from interviews with investigators and counterterrorism officials, as well as a review of confidential documents — reveals a government feeling its way across a fresh landscape to crush a threat it cannot quite grasp.

Peter Ahearn, head of the Buffalo F.B.I. office, described the riddle of prevention this way: "If we don't know for sure they're going to do something, or not, we need to make sure that we prevent anything they may be planning, whether or not we know or don't know about it."

The imponderability of the men from Lackawanna made them a magnet for the government's deepest suspicions and anxieties. An arsenal of new antiterrorism tools was applied to their case — enhanced surveillance, interrogation of enemy combatants and a free flow of information between criminal investigators and intelligence officers, once barred by rules devised to protect Americans from improper domestic spying.

But the men's true intentions remain locked away with them. Mr. Alwan, speaking to The Times in a rare interview of an American Al Qaeda recruit, said that the men had no plans, no hatred for America, and that when he walked away from Osama bin Laden, he left Al Qaeda behind. He explained his trip to Afghanistan as "a lot of curiosity." Yet he acknowledged lying to authorities in a failed attempt to avoid jail.

The question posed last fall by prosecutors still stands: "Why do a group of young Yemeni-Americans, born and brought up in Lackawanna, N.Y., and, in the majority of cases married with children, suddenly leave their otherwise unremarkable lives to spend six to seven weeks in a terrorist training camp, then quietly slip back into roles of middle-class Americans?"

Analysis: This is a great story, which is rich in detail. It really was a coup for the NY Times to recruit Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino in the movie The Insider, and Matthew Purdy is an exceptional reporter as well. Both have written a story that deserves a read from both anti-terrorism insiders and the public alike.

Terrorism will likely be an issue in the 2004 presidential election, as either a subset of national security or a major issue in its own right. I believe the Democratic candidates will soon start to use this issue in the primaries to appeal to their core constituencies -- liberal Americans who feel their civil liberties are at risk with the current administration. The Lackawanna Six case will be a major piece of that argument, just as President Bush used the Willie Horton case in 1988 to appeal to the fears of moderate and conservative voters. (In principle the two are the same; in practice the latter is inherently more dirty than the other as far as political tactics go.) In the general election, I believe this will be an issue too. The Democrats will likely use this issue as a wedge to separate moderates from the Republican Party, and I think they will be successful.

Update: I intended this last note to be controversial, and sure enough, I've gotten some e-mail. Ryan Booth thinks I'm way off the reservation with the political comparison between the Lackawanna Six case and the Willie Horton issue of 1988. Clearly, the facts are different. However, the political strategies behind each issue are similar:
- The use of an issue which appeals to fear and insecurity among voters (terrorism and violent crime). However, in the Horton instance, the argument was if you choose Gov. Dukakis, you will be less safe from criminals. In this case, the argument will be that if you choose George Bush, you will be less safe from your own government. Similar, but different.
- The use of an issue which appeals to each party's respective base, as well as moderates.
- The meta-narrative that "You can't trust this candidate on X issue" that lies behind each. In Horton's case, it was "You can't trust Mike Dukakis to be tough on crime." In this case, it will be "You can't trust John Ashcroft with your civil liberties.

So at the end of the day, the two arguments are not exactly the same. But they share some common meta-narratives and themes. At each argument's core, there is an appeal to fear.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:11

 
An $87 billion slush fund?

Fred Kaplan at Slate thinks that's the best description for the President's appropriations package for Iraq. In particular, Kaplan points out a few places where the Secretary of Defense can move money around within the $87 billion package, or even borrow from other parts of the $400 billion Pentagon budget, to pay for current operations in America's war on terrorism. The guidance in this budget document is as vague as the phrase "war on terror", thus leading Kaplan to criticize the budget sections as a slush fund.

Add them all up: $9.3 billion—11 percent of the entire, already-controversial sum (and that doesn't include the expandable loophole provided by the "not less than" clause).

There is no overlap or double-counting in this calculation. Each of these separate sections explicitly notes, "The transfer authority provided in this section is in addition to any other transfer authority available to the Department of Defense" (italics added), or words to that effect.

In the supplemental document, the Pentagon offered explanations for these loopholes. Transfer accounts are "necessary due to the dynamic nature of these operations," or "to provide the flexibility needed to allocate funding to those components that are actually incurring costs," or "to help the Department address the unpredictable scope, duration, and intensity of these military operations."

Certainly postwar Iraq and Afghanistan are a lot more unpredictable than, well, the Pentagon predicted. Much of life is unpredictable. That's why budgets have supplementals. The entire $87 billion request is officially designated "an emergency requirement." Yet much of it is broken down into specific line-items or at least general categories of spending. Is the situation really so unpredictable that more than $9 billion of that sum—and possibly much more (the "not less than" clause)—might need to be spent in ways so quickly, and so differently from what is currently imagined, that Rumsfeld must be given the authority to move it around, from one account to another, without prior congressional approval? If the circumstances do warrant it, couldn't he simply put forth another supplemental? The present supplemental didn't run into many obstacles, despite growing criticism of the whole operation; there's no reason to fear that a subsequent one would, either.

So why have three committees of Congress essentially abrogated such a sizable chunk of their oversight powers? Mainly because they wanted to. The lawmakers can play populist politics, tossing out hundreds of millions of dollars for new Iraqi hospitals, housing, garbage trucks, and business subsidies. They can thunder that their constituents—the American people—don't get federal money for such niceties, so why should Iraqis? Meanwhile, they know that Rumsfeld can use some of the slush-fund money—the "transfer funds"—to put them back in the budget, very low key, notifying the committees but not needing their permission. Responsibility is thus eluded, electoral-politics points are gained.

Right -- Congress deserves much of the blame here. It is true that the President recommended this legislation to Congress in accordance with his Art. II, Sec. 3 power to "recommend to their [Congress'] Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient". (Bonus fact: the President actually initiates more legislation than Congress under Art. II, Sec. 3, a development widely traced to the rise of the modern administrative state and the need for large packages of legislation to guide each executive department.) That said, Congress never leaves a piece of Presidential legislation alone, and they could easily add conditions and other requirements to these parts of the President's $87 billion package. But they haven't.

There are two reasons why not -- one legitimate, one political. Legitimately, the Pentagon needs some discretion in the way it allocates its funds. Here's a simple example why. One day, the Iraqi guerillas are attacking vehicles, so you need vehicle parts. Next month, the Iraqi guerillas start attacking base camps, so you need to buy new construction materials. If the budget were too detailed, the SecDef and his staff couldn't move that money around. This is oversimplified, but you get my point. You also have timing issues in play, where the Pentagon probably doesn't want to slow down the funding process by having to report to Congress every time it moves money around.

Secondly, this is a political punt by Congress. The members of Congress don't want to tackle the systemic issues for why such a large appropriations package is needed (e.g. the lack of good body armor for every soldier in Iraq). The members also don't want responsibility for deciding how to spend this $87 billion, either because that responsibility properly lies in the Pentagon, or because they want the freedom to attack these spending decisions down the road. And the list goes on.

Does a slush fund like this really matter? I'm not sure. Certainly, it can hide spending that the American people and its representatives might not otherwise approve of. But I would balance that oversight problem against the practical problems of vetting every expenditure with Congress -- and still having time to get the money to the right time and place on the battlefield. Congressional appropriations are a cumbersome process, and we can't have soldiers' fortunes riding on it.

Personally, I'd be much more concerned about some of the structural issues revealed in this supplemental request, like the lack of body armor, the problems with M2A2/A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle track procurement, ammunition shortfalls, radio batteries, and other parts problems which affect the entire Army and Marine Corps right now. Put bluntly, the warehouse shelves are dry. We have used up many of our peacetime stockages of key items that soldiers need to fight in Iraq. The problem will only get worse with time. Moreover, as we force defense contractors to jumpstart production of these items, we incur significant startup costs. Frankly, I don't think that good planning was done before we crossed the LD about precisely what we'd have to buy over the long haul. I think our optimistic expectations of this occupation infected every aspect of planning -- from troop deployment orders to orders for SINCGARS radio batteries. If I were an enterprising journalist in Washington, that's the story I'd be writing right now. And if I were an enterprising Congressman, that's the issue I'd be pursuing too.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:07

 
Update to note on FedEx's anti-terrorism efforts

A number of readers have written me to remind me of the police forces created during the late 19th Century within most major railroad companies. Originally, these forces were created to police the rail lines against Indian tribes, bandits, and other hazards. Today, they continue in this law enforcement role, although against other threats. Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Rail is one example of a railroad company with its own police force, and one reader writes that these police take an active role in making sure the rail lines stay safe.

Our facilities are crawling with these folks - they carry guns, have arrest power, and nationwide jurisdiction. The police forces of the various railroads cooperate with each other and law enforcement to a great extent, and could definitely provide a model as to how other types of companies could implement the same thing, though I think the railroads possess of lot of maturity in handling the power that comes with it due to their length of experience.

Railroads are just one part of America's critical infrastructure, however. The anthrax attacks showed just how vulnerable our country can be to a small strike against one aspect of its infrastructure -- in that case, the public postal system. Financial institutions, railroads, water treatment plants, power plants and distribution networks, and other parts of America's infrastructure all need to be hardened against the threat of terrorism. The paradox of anti-terrorism planning is "the more you protect the hard targets, the more vulnerable you make the soft targets." If we harden our airports and public sites against terrorism, we will simply make our private sites more attractive as targets. America depends on its infrastructure, and most of its infrastructure is private, not public. Thus, we need to encourage more companies to be proactive like the railroads and FedEx, and to think about how they can protect themselves.

Update II: Several readers were kind enough to write me about an incident in 1994 where one of FedEx's planes was hijacked and nearly crashed into its main hub in Memphis. I'm sure I read the news of this incident back then, but it had totally left my mind until now. No wonder FedEx takes anti-terrorism seriously. My real hope is that there's cross-talk between the logistics and airline people at FedEx and the law enforcement people on the Memphis FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The FBI holds some of the best legal and investigative minds in the world, but they're not subject-matter experts on everything.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:24

 
Group takes Gitmo appeal to the Supreme Court

A coalition of retired military officers, judges, ex-POWs, and others has filed an amicus curae brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeals of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The petition on behalf of 12 detainees was dismissed by lower courts on procedural grounds, and the group is now asking the high court to overturn that dismissal so the case can go forward on the merits.

Representing seven groups that have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of 16 detainees at the base, the former officials said the detentions of more than 650 terror suspects without access to lawyers is a mistake of law that hurts the United States' reputation and could endanger Americans elsewhere.

The detainees have sued in federal court, seeking the right to talk to lawyers and to challenge their detentions before a court, but have had their cases rejected and are now appealing to the Supreme Court.

''The perception of this case abroad -- that the power of the United States can be exercised outside the law -- will diminish our stature and repute,'' said a brief filed by 19 former diplomats. ``Our most important diplomatic asset has been this nation's values.''

They said countries from Egypt to Malaysia were now citing the Guant?namo precedent as they held suspects without trial.

In a separate brief, three retired military officers said they feared that the failure to apply the Geneva Conventions in Guant?namo is giving other nations ''an excuse'' to do the same ``and will endanger American soldiers captured in the future.''

The diplomats include two former assistant secretaries of state, William Rogers and Alexander Watson, and Allen Holmes, a former assistant secretary of defense. Among the military leaders was Rear Adm. Donald Guter, who retired last year as Navy judge advocate general. Guter said he was involved in early decisions about Guant?namo and reviving military tribunals for some suspects.

So far, federal judges have ruled that because the base, leased from Cuba, is on foreign territory, aliens held there have no access to U.S. courts to challenge their detentions. The Bush administration maintains that the detainees -- most of them captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- are ''unlawful combatants,'' do not deserve POW status under the Geneva Conventions and can be held indefinitely.

Also today, the New York Times reports that the Red Cross has restated its disapproval of the way America is behaving at Guantanamo. This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the ICRC has enormous international prestige, as well as moral authority. Second, the Third Geneva Convention charges the ICRC with what amounts to the job of executor. If this body thinks our behavior at Gitmo is inconsistent with the Geneva Convention, they're probably the best ones to make that call.

Christophe Girod, the senior Red Cross official in Washington, said on Thursday in an interview at the United States Naval Base here, "One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely."

Mr. Girod spoke as he and a team of officials from the international organization were completing their latest inspection tour of the detention camp. Although he did not criticize any physical conditions at the camp, which houses 660 detainees, most of them captured in the Afghan conflict, he said that it was intolerable that the complex was used as "an investigation center, not a detention center."

He said the International Red Cross was making the unusual statements because of a lack of action.

United States officials have said they have begun moving to sort the detainees, choosing which to release and which to take before military tribunals on criminal charges.

Some officials, notably Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have said the detainees may be held until the effort against terrorism ends.

Mr. Girod said, "The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem."

Analysis: My thoughts on this subject have not changed substantially since I wrote "Extend Geneva to Gitmo" in the Washington Times in early 2002. For principled and practical reasons, we ought to give the detainees at Gitmo the protections of the Third Geneva Convention, recognizing that those rules were written for a different paradigm of war and that we need to adjust our rules to fit the reality of today's war on terror. At the very least, we need to give these detainees Art. V tribunals to determine whether they are lawful or unlawful combatants -- and what legal process they are entitled to as a result of that decision.

In America's rush to condemn the men currently imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, we have forgotten the reasons why we adopted the Geneva Convention in the first place.

The Geneva Convention was not intended to serve as a manual for courts martial - it was intended to make warfare more humane. Many of those reasons for its adoption now argue strongly for protecting captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters under its provisions.

Three good reasons exist for extending the Geneva Convention to include the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters we have captured:

(1) The nature of warfare has changed a lot in 50 years; the Geneva Convention's definitions of warfare and soldiers are anachronistic. (2) The United States employs unconventional warfare and warriors itself - we ought to be concerned with their treatment if they're captured. (3) America needs to retain the moral high ground in this conflict because our global war on terrorism depends on international cooperation, which is largely based on the sympathy and approval we now enjoy among other countries.
* * *
These three reasons combine to make a very strong case for a change in U.S. policy toward the men it now holds at Guantanamo Bay. The consequence of not recognizing these men as prisoners of war will be quite severe. American unconventional warriors will pay the price in future conflicts for this decision if they are captured. And most of all, this policy jeopardizes the international cooperation we need to win this conflict.

Though the Geneva Convention does not strictly apply to these prisoners, we should extend its reach in order to retain the moral high ground and further our overall goals in the war on terrorism.

One final note: I often use the phrase "the moral high ground" and its close cousin "moral authority". I should define these terms. I use "moral high ground" to mean a political or policy position where you are doing the right thing. Not the technically legal thing, or the political expedient thing, but the morally right thing. To the extent that morality is subjective, this is vague term. However, I still feel there are right and wrong things in this world, and that most Americans can tell the difference. "Moral authority" is the political capital that accrues from doing the right thing. It's a powerful tool, and one that we can use domestically and abroad to support our war on terrorism. When you don't do the right thing, you lose moral authority. Unfortunately, I think that's where we're at with Gitmo.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:51

 
FedEx starts its own police force to fight terrorism

Today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) carries an interesting article about FedEx's initiative to counter terrorism in its operations. Faced with the responsibility for a vast cargo airline and distribution network, FedEx really had no ability to tap into official sources for intelligence about terrorist threats or countermeasures. Partly to tap into these resources, and partly to form an investigative unit of its own, FedEx persuased the state of Tennessee to authorize a police force for the corporation. Among other things, this has enabled FedEx to become a part of the Memphis area Joint Terrorism Task Force, an interagency working group managed by the FBI.

More importantly for FedEx, having a private police force qualifies the shipping company to serve on a regional joint terrorism task force, overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The 66 task forces currently in operation across the country -- which consist of local, state and federal officers -- are entrusted with more-sensitive and specific data regarding terrorist threats than businesses usually receive. FedEx is the only major air carrier that is a task-force member.

Although the FedEx representative on the task force can't give his corporate boss inside information because it may be classified, the company still gains a great deal from its membership. That is because the FedEx representative can signal the company to take preventive actions. If the task force learns certain kinds of explosives are being used by terrorists in Asia, for instance, the representative can alert the company to install specialized explosives detectors there.

"If they feel there is a threat to a particular part of FedEx's operation, they can take steps to improve security in that area without revealing security information," says FBI agent George Bolds, who is general counsel in the bureau's Memphis, Tenn., field office, where FedEx is based.
* * *
But the new arrangement does raise complex questions that have yet to be fully resolved: Does FedEx's task-force membership give it an unfair competitive advantage? Do the FedEx cops have an obligation to alert the company's rivals to terrorist threats? If the FedEx cops find wrongdoing among FedEx's senior officials, will the police ignore it because the company pays their salaries?

Tim Edgar, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, questions whether corporate cops can be trusted to act in the public interest, and argues that a watchdog agency should oversee the company's performance. "You're given all the powers of someone accountable to the public, but you're driven by the profit incentives of a private company," he says.

Maybe... but on the other hand, FedEx has a lot of stakeholders who have various degrees of power to keep the company on the right path with respect to civil liberties. From a purely economic perspective, I imagine shareholders and directors will be quite reticent to allow any abuse of this power that could lead to a lawsuit -- or worse yet, a class action suit on behalf of a large injured class. Moreover, FedEx is an extremely visible company that depends on its public image of trustworthiness for its business viability. I don't see them doing a lot to jeopardize that.

I think this is a great idea, and honestly, I wish more companies would lean forward in their foxholes like FedEx. The overwhelming majority of America's critical infrastructure resides in the private sector -- power grids, dams, transportation, rail, water supply, etc. An attack on any aspect of America's critical infrastructure would ripple through every aspect of American society, and inflict billions of dollars of damage. The FBI can't protect everything, and it should focus its resources on proactively investigating intelligence about terrorism. The firms themselves should focus on defending their assets -- which they know best -- and preparing to manage the consequences of an attack. There are legal issues inherent in giving this kind of power to private entities, but I think the benefits outweigh those risks, and that those risks can be mitigated.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:01

 
Don't mess with Texas. . . or use your middle finger there either

Howard Bashman reproduces part of a Texas Court of Appeals decision that affirmed a motorist's right to give another driver the middle finger, and that such a gesture was not unlawful because it did not tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. The court explained its reasoning in footnote 1:

The "bird" is "an obscene gesture of contempt made by pointing the middle finger upward while keeping the other fingers down." Merriam-Webster OnLine, at http://www.m-w.com. This gesture is of ancient origin:

[T]he middle-finger jerk was so popular among the Romans that they even gave a special name to the middle digit, calling it the impudent finger: digitus impudicus. It was also known as the obscene finger, or the infamous finger, and there are a number of references to its use in the writings of classical authors. . . . The middle-finger jerk has survived for over 2,000 years and is still current in many parts of the world, especially the United States.

Desmond Morris et al., Gestures 81-82 (1979). This symbolic gesture has come to mean many things to many people in many contexts, including "displeasure" and "mild annoyance." See Martha Irvine, Is the Middle Finger Losing Its Badness?, AP Online, Feb. 23, 2003, available at 2003 WL 13367718 (reprinted in several newspapers). See also the cover of the September 20, 2003 issue of The Economist magazine, depicting a cactus in a desert panorama giving the gesture because of displeasure with the outcome of the Cancun trade talks.

Who said judges have no sense of humor? I suspect that this decision would be geographically and contextually dependent, however. Giving the bird in some places would certainly cause an immediate breach of the peace. In other places, it might be regarded as a friendly gesture. Like obscenity, this kind of thing is harder to define as anything more precise than "I know it when I see it."
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:47

 
Formal charges to come against Gitmo suspect

CNN reports that the Pentagon has decided to press formal charges in military court against CPT Youssef Yee, the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay who stands accused of espionage. The initial charges will be for relatively minor offenses, such as the mishandling of classified documents. Sources tell CNN that more charges will follow over the next several days and weeks, possibly to include capital counts of espionage.

Charges of espionage, which Yee could eventually face, are likely to take considerable time to assemble.

By filing the less-severe charges first, the military will demonstrate that it is continuing to work on the case and that Yee is not languishing in the naval brig at Charleston, South Carolina, where he is being held, officials said.
* * *
The investigation into the apparent infiltration of the remote Guantanamo Bay facility is ongoing, and a senior defense official has told CNN that more arrests may come.

More to follow . . .
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:41

 
Why do Democrats swoon over men in uniform?
Ghosts of the 1960s linger in the relationship between the military and the left

Michael Kinsley asks this question in Slate today, trying to answer why Democrats seem to be so taken with retired-Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

The notion that liberals disdain people in uniform was always a bit of a myth. Even during Vietnam, concern for the loss of young American lives was probably the anti-war movement's most powerful motivation. Since then, sneery right-wingers have had it both ways about liberals and the military: When liberals oppose military action, conservative voices accuse them of betraying our fighting men and women. When liberals support military action, they are accused of callous indifference to the lives of American soldiers.

But the current liberal swooning over (retired) generals is truly something new. A widespread fantasy among liberals who loathe the Bush administration, for example, is that Colin Powell will resign as secretary of state and "say what he really thinks." This will bring down the whole house of cards, these liberals believe. What he really thinks, they think, is more or less what they really think.

There is not much basis for this belief. Powell is skilled at distancing himself from certain policies without seeming disloyal. But if he really were as opposed to the administration he serves as these liberal fantasists imagine, a resignation at this point would come much too late to have any moral force.

Then there is Gen. Wesley Clark. Much of his support comes from people who think they haven't swooned themselves but believe that others will do so. But most of these people are in a swoon whether they realize it or not. They think that Clark has the best chance of defeating George Bush, and that nothing else matters. Their assessment is based on what seems to me a simple-minded view that you can place all the candidates on a political spectrum, then pick the one who's as far toward the other side as your side can bear, and call it pragmatism.

That's one piece of the puzzle. Another more personal account comes from Robert Poe in "Prisoner's Dilemma", which ran in the October issue of The Washington Monthly. Mind you, not every Democrat was a draft resister who was sent to prison, and not every Democrat bears the guilt for those who did so. Nonetheless, I think some of these issues continue to plague the left to this day, and Mr. Poe's account adds a voice not often heard to this debate.

While Bush's poll numbers have been plummeting, the drop reflects worry over the continuing chaos in Iraq more than any growing anger at administration members for ducking service in their youth. Partisan Democrats may be furious that a president who sidestepped combat now poses as a war hero. But what really drives Democrats crazy is that Bush seems to have paid no political price for doing so.

This tolerant public attitude did not begin with Bush. In fact, in the last three presidential elections, a candidate who had served in the regular military was defeated by a candidate who had not (Clinton v. Bush in ' 92; Clinton v. Dole in '96; Bush v. Gore in '00). It has now become unremarkable for those who in their youth avoided putting themselves on the line for their country and their ideals to successfully impugn the patriotism of political opponents who served with honor. Think of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). He got out of Vietnam with a bum knee, but unseated former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee, with ads attacking Cleland as soft on national security. Somehow, in the public mind, the ancient link between physical courage and patriotism has been broken in this country.

One can imagine any number of reasons for this shift. One obvious factor is the end of the draft in 1973, which no longer forces every young man to consider the possibility of military service. Another is the triumph of individual market thinking in this country--the growing sense of personal freedom and individual entitlement in modern life, and the corresponding fading of the notion that one has a duty to anything outside one's self and family. But there is another, related factor for which liberals--especially those of my generation, who came of age in the late 1960s--bear heavy responsibility. Too many of them opposed the Vietnam War in ways that required no personal sacrifice, while at the same time successfully grabbing the banner of high idealism by growing their hair long and marching in anti-war protests. Though they may not want to admit it, members of the anti-Vietnam War movement, who today dominate the opinion-making class, helped erode the connection in the public's mind between patriotism and courage, idealism, and sacrifice. And that change in public attitude has let today's so-called "chicken hawks" off the hook.
* * *
In 2003, it turns out that my questions about the anti-war movement do again matter. The reality of a major war launched by the Vietnam generation for reasons that, just as with Vietnam, didn't quite make sense, finally drove me to think through the implications of Lompoc's missing activists. I quickly concluded that the anti-Vietnam War liberals and the pseudo-patriotic neocons were more alike than different. Both embodied a privileged elite claiming to be paragons of idealism and patriotism, while hiding behind college or medical deferments to avoid putting themselves on the line, either in rice paddies or in prison. Indeed, there's a case to be made that, for conservative draft dodgers, one of the biggest benefits of the war with Iraq has been its extreme (and certainly intentional) divisiveness, which helps obscure how closely, in terms of character and integrity, they resemble anti-Vietnam War draft dodgers.

But more important, I realized that the success of the anti-war movement in selling itself as idealistic, while never showing up to do the hard time, directly paved the way--in fact, pioneered the techniques--for neocons to sell themselves as courageous patriots, after having never shown up for service in Vietnam. And with neocon draft dodgers now trying to prove their patriotism at the cost of American lives, that leaves anti-Vietnam War liberals with a lot to answer for.

The puzzle's still not complete. I think that Mr. Kinsley and Mr. Poe add two important parts of the picture, but there's more to be written.

First, Mr. Poe's right that the Vietnam War set in motion a number of dynamics which affect partisan politics to this day. After the advent of the all-volunteer force in 1973, the Vietnam War had an enormous impact on the self-selection of America's "best and brightest" for military service. No longer did the George Herbert Walker Bush's, John F. Kennedys and Al Gores of America's elite join the military, as they did in WWII and Vietnam respectively. Indeed, neither did the young conservatives of the 1970s, who opted instead for the fast-track to money and/or power (see, e.g., Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz, Tom Delay, Richard Perle, etc)

Fast-forward thirty years, and suddenly you have an elite on both sides of the aisle with a dearth of military experience. The number of veterans in Congress has dropped over the last 30 years; so too has the number of veterans appointed to the bench or executive positions. Unfortunately, this dynamic affects the Democratic Party more, because of the self-selection inherent in an all-volunteer force. Values and attitudes towards the military translate across generational lines into the choices made by children. More than ever, with our all-volunteer force, these choices shape the military's composition, which in turn produces the pool of eligible veterans to serve at high levels of our government.

My experience, growing up in liberal Santa Monica during the 1980s, was that most parents did not encourage their children to consider military service -- even for a brief tour, even for the educational benefits. A lot of this traced, in my opinion, to the attitudes harbored by my friends' parents who grew up during the 1960s, and held certain attitudes towards the military as an institution. Those attitudes were passed onto the children of my generation, who have had the opportunity to choose or refuse military service in the absence of a draft. These attitudes were enough to shape school choices and career choices, and steer the overwhelming majority of my friends away from uniformed service. Those who did serve usually had some specific reason, like college financial aid or a service academy appointment. Most went off to college, found a career, and moved into adulthood without a serious glance towards military service.

The result is an ever-increasing divide in American society between those who've served and those who haven't. I have no data to back this up, but my emprical observation is that this divide correlates quite well with political attitudes and socioeconomic status, with both liberals and the wealthy shunning military service. (One caveat: these same groups that shun military service often flood other forms of public service. I think that fact deserves mention, although for obvious reasons, such public service doesn't carry the same credential for issues of national security.) Again, fast-forward 30 years after these decisions were made, and you see a liberal and wealthy elite that contains disproportionately less veterans.

So what? Why does veteran status matter in politics?

At the end of the day, this boils down to the politics of identity. A white man cannot criticize affirmative action with the same credibility as a black man; he even risks being called a racist for his views. An old man cannot criticize the right to choose an abortion without being labeled a hypocrite and worse. Similarly, a non-veteran cannot advocate for military action -- or the lack thereof -- with the same credibility as a veteran. I don't think this is the most intelligent want to assess credibility; I don't think someone's c.v. necessarily affects the quality of their ideas. But the American public does not see it that way. These credentials serve as shorthand for the American public; they enable voters to make decisions about credibility and trustworthiness.

The recognition of this fact is why I think that Democrats swoon over men in uniform. It's more than guilt over opposition to Vietnam; it's more than trying to offset the political advantage of the incument president. This swooning is about demonstrating credibility on issues of national security where the Democratic party currently has -- rightly or wrongly -- less credibility than the GOP. Wes Clark and John Kerry both realize this, and have each tried to leverage their military records for political gain. Whether their war records will make any difference in how they serve as Commander-in-Chief is a matter for debate. (FDR did well as a wartime President with no uniformed service; LBJ did a less than stellar job despite service in WWII.)

I don't like the politics of identity, and I suspect most politicians don't either. But the Democrats have to play the game, and that means appealing to voters in 2004 on national security issues. If winning takes putting a veteran on the ticket, I wouldn't be surprised to see Dems doing what it takes to win. I'm okay with that. After all, candidates have been picked for decades because of their geographic value, religion, age, and other "important" reasons. In 2004, the key constituency may not be Southerners or moderates or the elderly -- it may be Americans who care about their security. If that's true, why not pick a veteran?
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:31

 
Sodomy and 'don't ask, don't tell' go to court

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces heard arguments yesterday over whether the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas requires the military's sodomy statute -- Art. 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- to be overturned. The facts of the case seem tailor made for the challenge: an airman was prosecuted for having off-base sodomy with another airman. The charges squarely implicate Art. 125, notwithstanding some factual issues at trial surrounding consent and even whether the sodomy occurred. Howard Bashman at How Appealing provides this first-hand report from the argument yesterday before the CAAF. (Also see this discussion of the issues from NPR this morning)

. . . the judges appeared troubled by the positions taken on all sides. Counsel for the government (a career military lawyer), insisted (unsurprisingly) that Lawrence did nothing to Article 125. Citing Justice Scalia's characterization of the Lawrence majority opinion, she insisted that Lawrence, at best, subjects Article 125 only to rational basis review -- to which one of the judges pithily responded, "The traditional way to read opinions is to look at a the majority opinion, not the dissent." Nevertheless, even assuming that rational basis review should apply, two of the five judges seemed clearly troubled by the rational bases offered by the government -- unit cohesion, maintenance of discipline, morale, etc. Article 125 criminalizes homosexual as well as heterosexual sodomy, and some of the judges couldn't seem to understand how private, consensual sodomy (whether heterosexual or homosexual) could possibly relate to these legitimate interests. While government counsel appeared to concede that some heterosexual sodomy falling under Article 125 would be protected by Lawrence, she insisted that Article 125 was constitutional as applied to this particular defendant, who was convicted of both consensual and nonconsensual sodomy. When pressed to explain why, she rather conclusorily returned to the litany of "unit cohesion, maintenance of discipline, and morale" -- an explanation with which the judges did not seem particularly impressed.

Counsel for amicus, who was represented by a gentleman from Wilmer Cutler, argued that Lawrence mandates strict scrutiny of the statute. According to amicus, when the Supreme Court said in Lawrence that the Texas statute served "no legitimate purpose," the Court wasn't implying that it was engaging in rational basis review. Rather, according to counsel, the Supremes meant that the Texas statute served not even a legitimate purpose. The sweeping language of Lawrence (and the cases upon which it relies), he maintained, makes clear that prohibitions of Article 125 should be strictly scrutinized, and that the professed justifications of the military are (a) hardly compelling or (b) narrowly tailored. Therefore, Article 125 is unconstitutional on its face. The judges, however, seemed somewhat skeptical of this argument. One judge posed the following hypothetical: suppose that the Secretary of the Air Force or a military commander issued a rule or a general order that prohibited the conduct described in the Don't Ask Don't Tell statute, 10 U.S.C. 654(f)(3)(B) (mandating discharge for engaging in "any bodily contact which a reasonable person would understand to demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in [a homosexual] act"). Now suppose a servicemember violated that order. Could the servicemember then be prosecuted for insubordination? Under amicus's theory, wouldn't Lawrence bar such a prosecution? Therefore, doesn't amicus's theory call into question the whole Don't Ask Don't Tell policy?

Appellant's civilian counsel initially declined to opine on what level of scrutiny should be applied following Lawrence. His approach appeared to be, Lawrence said what it said, namely, the state can't criminalize consensual sodomy, and the military is no exception. Counsel also seemed to distance himself from the facial challenge advanced by amicus, and directed the court's attention to the facts of this case. The defendant was convicted (among other things) of engaging in consensual sodomy off base. Lawrence, if anything, should prohibit prosecution for that. The judges responded, however, by noting that simply because the government failed to prove that the sodomy was forcible does not mean that it was consensual (apparently the testimony of the "victim" was inconsistent on this point).

Analysis: Shortly after the Court's opinion in Lawrence, I wrote a piece for Findlaw and CNN.Com opining that the courts would probably defer to the military on deciding whether "don't ask, don't tell" should remain in place. This conclusion was based on the courts' longstanding tradition of deference to the executive branch on national security grounds -- present in both the gay rights and terrorism contexts (see, e.g., the Hamdi and Padilla cases). If this were a challenge to "don't ask, don't tell" (codified at 10 U.S.C. 654), I would stand by that conclusion with respect to this case before the CAAF. But this is not a facial challenge to "don't ask, don't tell" -- it's a challenge to the military's sodomy statute. The Supreme Court held in Lawrence that you cannot criminalize sodomy, among other things, in an extremely powerful and broadly-written opinion by Justice Kennedy. The CAAF judges are bound by Supreme Court precedent just as any Art. III appeals court would be (the CAAF actually sits in Art. I as an executive branch court). I think they will apply Lawrence to hold that Art. 125 of the UCMJ is unconstitutional, and that the military can no longer criminalize sodomy.

That said, I do not think they will rule so broadly so as to overrule "don't ask, don't tell." For one, that's not the issue of the case -- this is a criminal appeal of a sodomy conviction, not an appeal from a discharge for violation of 10 U.S.C. 654. Second, as a matter of administrative law, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy can stand separately from the sodomy statute; one is not legally dependent on the other. (The same is also true of the Solomon Amendment, which threatens to cut off federal funding for universities if the universities ban ROTC or military recruiting on campus. This funding restriction is not legally dependent on the the legality of Art. 125 or even 10 U.S.C. 654. A challenge to the Solomon Amendment predicated on the legality of 'don't ask, don't tell' conflates the issues and is almost surely destined for failure.) If the court overturns Art. 125, it will certainly give the Lambda Legal folks some more ammunition for their fight against "don't ask, don't tell". But the CAAF's decision on Art. 125 -- if it overturns the statute -- will not overrule that "don't ask, don't tell" per se.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:41

 
Out of the loop
SecDef says he didn't know of White House plans to reorg for Iraq

The Washington Post (and other media) report today that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was caught by surprise when the White House announced that it would create a new top-level working group for the management of America's occupation of Iraq.

Rumsfeld said in an interview with the Financial Times and three European news organizations that he did not learn of the new Iraq Stabilization Group until he received a classified memo about it from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday.

Rumsfeld was asked several times why the changes were necessary. "I think you have to ask Condi that question," he said, according to a transcript posted on the Web site of the Financial Times.

Pressed, he said: "I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English? I was not there for the backgrounding."

Rumsfeld's tart remarks offer a window on the tensions among members of President Bush's war Cabinet, which are vividly described by administration officials but are rarely visible to outsiders. Rumsfeld's bluntness has occasionally rankled allies and caused headaches for the White House, but Bush is said to remain supportive.

The new group, headed by senior Rice aides at the National Security Council, gives the White House a stronger role in overseeing the reconstruction effort, which is under attack on Capitol Hill as poorly planned and unexpectedly expensive. Republican sources said the White House realizes that the consequences could be dire if the pace of the reconstruction does not improve markedly before the 2004 presidential election campaign begins.

Rumsfeld said he has not talked to Bush about the changes. When an interviewer said it sounded as though Rumsfeld had not been briefed about the changes before the memo and an interview Rice gave the New York Times, he replied, "That's true."

Analysis: Two quick points emerge from this story. First, Don Rumsfeld is no teddy bear, and he's no diplomat either. Asking reporters from the Financial Times (a British paper) and three other European papers if they speak English in an interview is a surefire way to make enemies. It's insulting, and it's the kind of comment likely to enrage the citizens of Europe once again about Rumsfeld.

The second point of analysis is that the SecDef has been cut out of the loop. Not just in a small way, like he wasn't invited to some ceremony at the Rose Garden, but in a very big way. Until this working group was formed, the chain of command for Iraq ran straight from the President to the SecDef to L. Paul Bremer III and General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM Commander. Now, it looks like we have a working group interposed between the President and SecDef, and more importantly, we have the elevation of State and other cabinet agencies to a peer position within this group. That the SecDef wasn't informed of this before it happened is very significant, especially in this administration. I think it's too early to tell precisely what this means, but I think it's one indicator that SecDef Rumsfeld might not be asked back for a second Bush administration.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:06

 
High crimes at Guantanamo Bay

I've written an article for Writ, an online legal magazine, on the allegations at Guantanamo and why they're worthy of capital punishment if true. The piece looks at why espionage and aiding the enemy charges in this case are so serious, and how the actions of a few men might damage the entire global war on terrorism.

The essence of the charges against these three men is this: According to the government, they gathered classified information about Guantanamo Bay, and interfered with the interrogation effort there. If these allegations are proven, the men could be convicted of capital espionage, defined as communicating, delivering, transmitting, or attempting to communicate, deliver or transmit information about nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft, early warning systems against large-scale attack, war plans, communications, or other major weapons systems. (A lesser, non-capital charge of espionage exists for communication information about other secret matters).

Yee and Halabi could also be convicted of aiding the enemy, defined as giving (or attempting to give) "arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things" to the enemy, communicating with the enemy, or having "any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly".

If convicted, the two military defendants could face the death penalty. (In contrast, Mehalba currently faces up to 5 years in federal prison for his alleged false statements to airport officials, but more charges are expected that could lead to a life sentence for him.)

At first glance, imposition of the death penalty here might seem severe, especially for non-violent crimes; after all, murder is the classic death-eligible crime. But, as the government doubtless points out, these crimes, if they are proven, will have jeopardized not just one life, but literally thousands, for they could have a lasting impact on America's ability to understand the threat it faces from Al Qaeda.

Viewed in this context, the death penalty begins to seem far more appropriate. Certainly few who support the death penalty for murder would oppose it for Richard Reid - the so-called "shoe bomber" who tried to down a passenger airliner. Yet if the allegations against Yee and Halabi are proven, they have put many, many more people in serious jeopardy than even the notorious Reid did.

posted by Phillip Carter at 05:57

 
The absentee ballot nightmare in California
Could thousands of deployed soldiers be disenfranchised by this rapid recall?

The New York Times has an interesting story today on the mess we're likely to see in the next several days concerning absentee ballots for today's gubernatorial recall election. The Times reports that a record 3.2 million Californians have requested absentee ballots, and that just 2 million of those have returned them thus far -- leaving 1.2 million ballots outstanding as of election day.

Of that total, 800,000 absentee ballots and an expected 400,000 ballots that will not be counted until after election night because of anticipated snags will not be included in preliminary results from the counties, said Stephen Weir, the clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County in Northern California and the treasurer of a statewide association of county clerks and registrars.

"If it's close, it's bloody," said Mr. Weir, who estimated that 10 percent to 12 percent of the votes statewide would be counted after election night. "The next day we're dead, and people want to know what's left to be counted, and the bottom line is we're talking about 1.2 million votes that are not counted election night."

There are too many unknowns, including how many of the 15.4 million registered voters will turn out to vote and how the votes will shake out, to predict the influence of the absentee ballots. But Mr. Weir was estimating that 8 million to 10 million voters would turn out, with at least a third of them voting by absentee ballot. County election officials, who said absentee ballots had decided local elections in recent years, said on Monday that if the race was close enough, it could take the counties, who have up to 28 days after the election to count the absentee ballots and certify the election results, several weeks to finalize a tally.

Let me add another variable here: military voters. I probably should've written an op-ed about this two months ago when there was time for the ACLU to make these arguments before the Ninth Circuit. If I'm right, thousands of military voters will not have their votes counted in this election. The culprit is the mail system, and specifically the tension between the tight timeline (60 days) of this recall and the relatively slow mail pipeline to deployed soldiers overseas.

Federal law (the "The Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act") provides for some mechanisms to assist military personnel overseas with voting, but these mechanisms are all premised on the fact of a regularly scheduled election with a lot of lead time.

The UOCAVA provides for a "back-up" ballot, called the Federal Write In Absentee Ballot ("FWAB"), should a citizen overseas not receive his or her regular ballot from the state or territory. Under the UOCAVA, citizens can only use the FWAB under three, very specific conditions. To be eligible for this ballot, the citizen must: (1) Be located overseas (including APO/FPO addresses); (2) Have applied for a regular ballot early enough so that the request is received by the local election official at least 30 days before the election; and (3) Not have received the requested regular absentee ballot.

In this case, Californians in uniform overseas have not had such lead time. They really have had 60 days, assuming they were plugged into the news and monitoring this situation. It's possible that a Californian deployed overseas might have missed both the 30-day cutoff for requesting an absentee ballot and the 30-day cutoff of requirement (2) above.

There are really two groups of soldiers overseas that are likely to be disenfranchised here:

(1) Reservists deployed from their homes inside California. Thousands of reservists have been mobilized from California and sent to Iraq. These soldiers likely deployed with a mail forwarding order in place, so that their mail would be forwarded by the U.S. Postal Service from their civilian address to their military APO address. In the best of times, the USPS can forward such mail domestically in a few days. In the military, such mail deliveries can take longer. Mail delivery in theater is less frequent (2-3 times per week), and it has to account for variables such as security.

- Best case (and also most unlikely) scenario: the reservist applied for an absentee ballot at the time of deployment, possibly in anticipation of the March 2004 primary. The absentee ballot gets sent to the home address in California, then forwarded to the soldier, who may or may not have time to read up on the issues. He/she then sends it back to California through military mail, which can take 2 weeks or longer to get back to the states.

- Middle case: the reservist deployed with other things on his mind and did not pre-request an absentee ballot. The regular ballot announcements arrive in the mail, get forwarded to him in Iraq, where they arrive after the absentee ballot deadline has already passed. It's too late to request an absentee ballot, and this soldier is precluded from using a Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot under the UOCAVA.

- Worst case (and also quite likely): the reservist wasn't even registered at the time of the election, possibly because he just turned 18 or because he had other things on his mind. He wants to start voting, because he feels a sudden sense of civic engagement while deployed to a combat zone. The soldier learns of the election late because he gets an infrequent news feed through his unit newsletter and First Sergeant. The soldier tries to register to vote, but by the time his registration gets to L.A. County's Registrar-Recorder, he's missed the deadline for the Oct. 7 election.

(2) Active duty soldiers with a home of record in California. There are literally thousands of these soldiers on active duty, and I was one them. For various reasons (such as maintaining residency for future tuition purposes), these soldiers maintain California as their state of legal residence. Most of these soldiers are permanently registered as absentee voters, meaning that their absentee ballots get generated automatically just as an infirm person's ballot would be. However, these soldiers' ballots still have to contend with the military mail system to get to and from the combat zone. And it's unlikely the soldier will have full access to the Los Angeles Times or San Francisco Chronicle to become an informed voter, so the vote may be somewhat diluted by an information deficit.

Most soldiers won't fit any of these hypotheticals, but they'll fall somewhere near the middle case. Legally, it's hard to pin the blame for why their vote won't count. Certainly, the tight timeline of the election deserves most of the blame, because it's simply too short of a time window for the mail and absentee ballot systems to work properly. The mail service deserves some of the blame too. So do the soldiers, for not pre-requesting absentee ballots.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is this: many of these soldiers' votes won't count. I think that democracy suffers when anyone's vote goes uncounted. But I think it's patently offensive that many of our soldiers serving in combat overseas should lose their democratic voice because of the mechanics of this recall.

One of the strongest arguments for the 26th Amendment was that Americans who were old enough to fight and die for their country ought to have the right to vote. I think the connection between suffrage and service is very real, and that these soldiers are literally earning their right to vote right now with their blood and sweat in Iraq. Our election system has to do better at making their votes count.

Update: Every news outlet in Los Angeles is projecting a big win for Arnold, which essentially makes the issue of military absentee ballots moot. I think that's true as a practical and legal matter, but the larger issue of military disenfranchisement remains. I still think we need to do more on this front.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:10

 
The value of intelligence
Army leaders lament the lack of "human intelligence" in Iraq

Greg Jaffe has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the struggle by U.S. commanders in Iraq to fight a war without sufficient amounts of "HUMINT", or "human intelligence". A consensus seems to have emerged that our commanders have sufficient combat power ("boots on the ground") to do their job now in Iraq -- but that they don't have sufficient intelligence to fight the guerilla networks they now face in Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who commands all of the 35,000 U.S. troops arrayed across Baghdad, came here in July with orders to transform the city into a stable and secure place. Since he arrived, 16 of his troops have been killed and about 170 wounded. In his left front pocket the general carries 16 laminated cards, each bearing a picture of a dead soldier, his address, date of birth and the names of his spouse, children and parents.

While Washington debates whether President Bush should send more troops to stabilize Iraq, Gen. Dempsey says what he really needs is better intelligence to track down and defeat the enemy. "Right now, I have more than enough combat power. What I need to know is where to apply it," he says.

Gen. Dempsey's predicament spotlights a larger trade-off the Pentagon made in its vision for the Army over the past decade: As the Army shrank in size, it focused on winning high-intensity conventional wars and didn't emphasize the intelligence needs that are essential to victory in guerrilla fights.

As a result, the Army is short of interrogators and counterintelligence soldiers, forcing commanders in Iraq to improvise solutions on the fly -- and make some significant mistakes along the way. Overwhelmed by looting and guerrilla attacks, for example, the U.S. relied on mass arrests to restore order, which bred resentment and suspicion among Iraqis and may have fed the enemy's ranks.

"We haven't fought a war where human intelligence was the coin of the realm for decades," says Brig. Gen. John Custer, the senior intelligence officer at U.S. Central Command, which oversees troops in the Middle East. With the Army fighting guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, "we're coming to realize the value of human intelligence on the battlefield."

Emily Hsu also writes on this issue today in Inside the Army (subscription required), saying the Army is looking to deploy some of its latest C4ISR ("Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance") systems to Iraq to help bridge the HUMINT gap. Specifically, the Army hopes to speed the procurement processes for a few systems that have the potential to aid commanders in visualizing the enemy and the battlefield in Iraq.

Systems being eyed include an automated language translation service, as well as the “PackBot” unmanned ground vehicle, which has been operationally tested in Afghanistan clearing caves and compounds, DOD and Army officials said in an Oct. 1 interview with Inside the Army.

Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, met late last month with officials from the Army Research Lab to generate possible dollar figures and time lines on which these two capabilities might be put into the hands of the soldier in Iraq, these sources said.

Decisions on the deployments are pending specific allocation of the $87 billion supplemental request which has yet to be approved by Congress. The exact number of systems that may be deployed and when they will “roll-out” to the field is “still on the drawing table,” one official said.

Analysis: While I applaud the initiative of the Army in pushing forward its procurement in these areas, I don't think this will be enough to cure the problems that Mr. Jaffe writes about in today's Wall Street Journal. Specific, actionable, credible, exploitable intelligence is the kind of stuff that generally comes from having smart intelligence operatives and analysts on the ground in Iraq, working at the muddy boots level. You can leverage technology only so much to manage information and speed up your OODA loop. At some point, you simply have to go out there and get good raw information to feed into these intelligence systems. That's the real crux of the problem.

In much of Iraq, I think this intelligence gathering effort is going well. There is a direct correlation between our relations with the Iraqi people and our ability to collect intelligence from them. In places like Basra and Mosul, where coalition troops have stabilized the situation, this effort is going well. In Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, it's going less swimmingly.

One bit of good news is the increasing "Iraqification" of the stability mission. The graduation this weekend of the first battalion of Iraqi troops is a step in the right direction, and it may ultimately become the key to this intelligence problem. It should be obvious that Iraqis can collect intel better than Americans -- if only for linguistic and cultural reasons. If deployed with American forces in the tough spots, these troops will contribute a great deal towards the gathering of actionable intelligence about Iraqi guerilla networks. Learning about your enemy is never easy. But I think that these Iraqis represent our best hope in gathering the intel we need to accomplish our mission in Iraq.

Update: Terry Boyd has a great story in the European Stars & Stripes about the way intelligence gets used at the tactical level to conduct a raid.

Earlier in the week, Chenoweth had been relayed a tip that Maj. Gen. Rafi abd Al-Latif Tilfah al-Tikriti, former head of Iraq’s security apparatus and No. 15 on the United States’ most wanted list, may be hiding along with two other Saddam loyalists in an area at the confluence of the Tigris and Diyala rivers.

At 2 a.m. Wednesday, a hunting party of 300-plus people gathered at Muleskinner Base on the southern edge of Baghdad. Six hours earlier, the 1st AD units involved — the 2-6 and 1st Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment — spent an hour rehearsing the raid in a soccer field. Company commanders and platoon leaders walked soldiers through an improvised layout of the area including the three target compounds.

Nothing is left to chance.

Great reporting from one of the few reporters still embedded with the force in Iraq. Also see this story on the "Three Block War" from Mr. Boyd.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:03

 
Notes on Wes Clark's new book

Fred Kaplan, the War Stories columnist for Slate, has some "talking points" on Wes Clark's new book "Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire," which is basically a critique of U.S. foreign policy since Sept. 11. And no, the timing is not coincidental -- this is clearly intended as Clark's national security platform for his presidential campaign. Kaplan, who's no stranger to defense issues, offers a pretty even-handed assessment of the book, which I will probably go buy now to add to my copy of Waging Modern War.

Page 130: A revelation:

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. … He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.

A few questions come to mind: Who was this senior staff officer? If that can't be revealed, couldn't Clark at least tell us how senior he was? Why did Clark want to "move the conversation away"? Why didn't he pursue it? Why didn't he mention anything about this "chat" during his wartime CNN commentary? Still, it's shuddersome that the Bush administration was planning such a broad imperial sweep (Somalia and Sudan?) so insouciantly just weeks after 9/11.

Pages 131, 148: Clark goes after Bush's doctrine of "preventive war." It was "an idea that the United States had consistently rejected for itself and condemned in others," and it was "likely to make us the enemy" in the eyes of much of the world.

Pages 175, 178: The neocon concept of a "New American Empire," Clark goes on, is not only impractical, given the size and training of the U.S. military, but also contrary to "the principles of national self-determination." The idea also ignores the fact that American power and prosperity since World War II have been "sustained not by classical empire but rather by an interlocking web of international institutions and arrangements that protected and promoted American interests and shared the benefits, costs, and risks with others."

Thoughts... If elected, Wes Clark would probably be one of the most intellectual American presidents in history -- on par with Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton. His comments in an interview with Josh Marshall, his writing in this book, and his writing in Waging Modern War are all quite lucid, well informed, and right as a matter of policy. Unfortunately, a guy this prolific also has to deal with the burden of his prior statements, and that may become an issue for Wes Clark during the campaign. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:04

 
Senator proposes to pay for soldiers' full travel fare for leave from Iraq

Last week, I criticized the Pentagon's leave plan for soldiers in Iraq as being too cheap because it only paid soldiers' fare as far as Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Since then, the Pentagon has broadened its plans to cover the cost of soldier travel to a few other major hub airports -- but still not all the way home. Rick Maze reports in Army Times that Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn) has introduced a bill to change that.

“The least we can do is get them home and back at government expense,” Dayton said Monday as he introduced a bill, S 1670, making troops on R&R leave eligible for travel and transportation allowances.

“Those service men and women are serving with great courage in 115-degree temperatures and other truly awful conditions,” he said. “They are being given two weeks leave, many of them because they are in the reserves or National Guard and they have just had their five- or six-month tour extended by another six months. This will be the only time that many of them will have a chance to see their families during the entire year.”

The price tag for providing allowances to cover travel costs would be about $69 million if all 138,000 U.S. service members now stationed in Iraq took leave, he said.

Dayton, whose bill has four other Democratic cosponsors, said he plans to pay for the allowances by tapping into President Bush’s $87 billion Iraq supplemental funding request. Dayton plans to offer his proposal as an amendment to the supplemental, which is expected to be on the Senate floor for debate later this week.

Dayton’s proposal would apply only to those taking leave under the U.S. Central Command’s rest and recuperation leave program for troops involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It would not expand travel allowances for any other military leave program.

Analysis: I think this is a great idea, and frankly, it's the kind of thing that military planners should have done as an administrative matter. I'm not as familiar with the Joint Travel Regs as I was when I was on active duty. But I'm pretty sure that there is a way commanders could have taken care of this. In fact, I know for certain that some commanders tried to do this for their troops, only to have the idea vetoed at a higher level.

Note 1: The DoD travel card fiasco may be coming back to bite soldiers in the backside here. A few years ago, nearly every soldier had an American Express (or Bank of America) travel credit card issued to him or her, to cover the costs of official travel. Many service personnel abused those cards, creating a staggering amount of delinquent credit card debt and earning a black eye for the military from the financial community. The military responded by cancelling most travel cards, and placing strict controls on the system. Unfortunately, that hinders soldiers now who might use those cards to float the cost of their travel from Iraq (or from BWI) to their home of record, while they wait for reimbursement.

Note 2: There are serious equity issues that need to be addressed in this leave policy. Those are issues to be addressed at the lowest level, e.g. brigade and battalion level. But I would not be surprised to see the first leave approvals being given to certain groups of soldiers, such as those who distinguished themselves in combat, those who reenlisted, and those who have other compelling circumstances (such as the birth of a new child). I think in nearly all cases, commanders will do the right thing. But there may be some situations where commanders use leave as a carrot to induce soldiers to reenlist, and that would be unfortunate (and possibly illegal). Nothing will kill a unit's cohesion and morale faster than the perception of unfairness and inequity from the commander. Hopefully, that's not happening here.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:50

 
USAFA scandal delays new Army Secretary's confirmation in the Senate

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago when the commission report was released on the U.S. Air Force Academy scandal, the Los Angeles Times reported today that Air Force Secretary James Roche's bid to become Army Secretary has been blocked in the Senate. Interestingly enough, the hold on Roche's nomination came from Armed Services Committee Chair John Warner, a Republican Senator from Virginia. Clearly, this goes beyond the partisan politics that often stalls many nominations in the Senate.

Having failed in the past to grill nominees for the top civilian job in the Air Force about allegations of sexual abuse, Warner told Roche that his committee would take no chances on approving the nomination until all questions had been answered.

"This committee, frankly, got burned one time, and we're not going to get burned again," Warner said.

Within the Pentagon, Roche is regarded as having reacted decisively to a scandal in which female cadets reported a culture that provided only light punishment for sexual assault and imposed a code of silence around knowledge of the events. However, he faced aggressive questioning Tuesday by senators who argued that the Air Force has done too little. Members of an independent panel told the Senate committee last week that Air Force leaders, both in Washington and at the academy, ignored numerous warning signs.

"I don't know why it didn't get to me," Roche said of the scandal.
* * *
Some of the toughest questioning came from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who criticized Roche's March 23 statement in which he said the academy's problems could not be blamed on the Air Force's current leaders.

"We're in the dog-ate-my-homework and not-on-my-watch defense," said an outraged McCain.

Analysis: The investigation should be complete in December, and then we'll probably have another round of confirmation hearings for Sec. Roche. These hearings will be quite nasty when they're held. Indeed, they may rival the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for vitriol and lewdness when the dust clears. My reading of the USAFA scandal is that there were serious problems at the Academy, and also serious problems in the Air Force chain of command that allowed the problems to continue for years. It's upsetting that Congress would exercise oversight of the Air Force through its approval of the Air Force chief's next career move. But the buck has to stop somewhere, and the Air Force Secretary's desk seems like a good place to me.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:31

 
More information on the latest Gitmo suspect

The Los Angeles Times gives us some more details about Ahmed Mehalba, the man picked up at Logan Airport in Boston yesterday for allegedly carrying CD-ROMs full of classified documents about the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The interpreter, 31-year-old Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, appeared in U.S. District Court in Boston on Tuesday and was formally charged with making false statements to federal agents after attempting to clear an airport security checkpoint Monday.

Prosecutors allege that he was carrying 132 compact discs, at least one of which reportedly held secret information about operations at Camp Delta, the U.S. military prison in Cuba where some 660 Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners are detained.
* * *
Authorities say Mehalba, a former Army intelligence officer and the nephew of a retired Egyptian army intelligence officer, was working as a linguist at the Cuban prison on a contract basis for Titan Corp., a defense industry firm based in San Diego.

But his court-appointed lawyer, Michael Andrews of Boston, said in a telephone interview that his client did not lie when he asserted, repeatedly, that none of the compact discs contained classified material and that if any secrets were found on the discs, he did not know how they got there.
* * *
Mehalba was described as a naturalized U.S. citizen of Egyptian descent who was living in Massachusetts and working at Camp Delta to help military interrogators interview detainees.

He earlier had enlisted in the Army and served at the Counter-Intelligence School at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz., until he took a medical discharge in 2001, officials said.

The Boston Globe adds a few more details to the story:

During the questioning Monday night, Mehalba also acknowledged that he has an uncle who has worked in Egyptian military intelligence and that his girlfriend is a former US Army specialist who was caught with classified information on a stolen laptop in 2001.
* * *
Court records and interviews with neighbors and acquaintances painted a picture of a man who traveled often and juggled an array of occupations, from Boston taxi driver to diamond consultant. He had applied to be a gatekeeper Massport two days after the attacks of Sept. 11.

Neighbors in Salem said Mehalba drove a car decorated with bumper stickers for the Army Reserves and Palestine.

Records show he had spent at least a decade in Greater Boston. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Mehalba immigrated to Salem area in the early 1990s.
* * *
In 2000, Mehalba joined the Army, and in November reported to Fort Huachuca to take a 79-day interrogator course, but never graduated, said Fort Huachuca spokeswoman Tanja Linton.

But while he was there, Private Mehalba grew close to Deborah Marie Gephart, an Army specialist and a fellow student at counterintelligence school.

Gephart was discharged on Sept. 21, 2001, "on less than honorable conditions," according to the FBI affidavit. She was initially arrested by the Sierra Vista police department for allegedly stealing a car. But a subsequent search uncovered a stolen laptop and classified counterintelligence training material, the FBI affidavit said. The affidavit did not provide details about the information.

Analysis: Some of these details have real significance. The fact that he's a citizen means that he can't be charged by a military tribunal. In theory, he could be designated an enemy combatant and detained indefinitely without access to counsel (see, e.g., Jose Padilla). That's a real possibility here, although it's hard to understand how the government makes these decisions since it has moved forward in civilian court against some and through enemy combatant proceedings against others -- with no apparent principle to distinguish between the two paths.

The fact that he's been in the military, and more specifically, in the military intelligence community, means that he knows what he was doing and what he would've been looking for. Generally speaking, you want operatives (if you're the enemy) who know the inside of the system they're trying to gather information from. Fort Huachuca is the Army's military intelligence school, and it runs its counter-intelligence courses as well as its interrogator courses. Mehalba certainly fits the profile of someone you'd want to recruit, even if he was just giving general information about Gitmo that could then be passed back to Syrian or Al Qaeda officers.

The facts of his military background, and his family background, add a lot of color to this case. It's unclear how much of that will be admissable in court, if the government moves in federal court against him. My prediction is that Mehalba will plead guilty to some lesser-included offense in exchange for information about who he was working for. But if he doesn't, I'm sure the government is prepared to throw the book at him.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:59