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The case of Captain McAlpin
Can the Army order a reservist overseas when he doesn't want to go?

Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported on the case of a U.S. Army Reserve officer who was being threatened with "punishment" for refusing to sign a waiver that would permit his redeployment to combat after less than a 1-year stabilization period. CPT Steve McAlpin of the Army's 401st Civil Affairs Battalion spent most of last year deployed to Afghanistan, and his unit was slated for redeployment overseas. However, the Army has a policy against deploying reservists against their will in such short succesion. So the battalion commander came up with a solution: persuade his officers to sign a waiver, to show that they're part of the team. CPT McAlpin refused to sign the waiver, and questioned the very legality of the order. He was relieved of duty, and apparently transferred to the Individual Ready Reserve.

The commander, Lt. Col. Phillip Carey, charges in the memo that McAlpin had a "negative attitude" and was being "insubordinate towards the leadership" of the 401st.

McAlpin said he questioned the waiver last Saturday during a teleconference with Col. Guy Sands, commander of the McAlpin's parent unit, the 360th Civil Affairs Brigade based in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

About a dozen other officers refused to sign the waiver, as well as four enlisted soldiers called to redeploy, McAlpin said.

"Soldiers are proud to serve any time, anywhere. I'd go tomorrow," McAlpin said from his home in Victor, 20 miles southeast of Rochester. "But I have four soldiers that don't want to go."

The memorandum sent Wednesday commands McAlpin to clear up his affairs at the unit by Monday, when it bans him from battalion grounds. It also transfers him to the Individual Ready Reserves, whose soldiers can be called up in the event of a national emergency.

Instead of signing the reprimand document, McAlpin attached a note of protest, stating his performance evaluations have been excellent and that his record shows "no pattern of incompetence." He also plans to meet with a military attorney.

* * *
A spokesman for the 401st, Capt. Brian Earley, said McAlpin's questioning of the waiver was only one reason he was being disciplined. Individual members of the 401st are allowed to refuse to sign the waiver, but Earley said McAlpin was "butting in" for other soldiers.

"People who were on the mission, who wanted to go, he was questioning their orders," Earley said. "He was pursuing a non-issue."

Earley said the military was also taking action because of "an accumulation of things," including difficulties in one of his previous missions to Afghanistan. He declined to elaborate.

Analysis: The facts in this situation are complicated, but it's pretty easy for me to see what's going on having recently served in the Army Reserve. The first thing to keep in mind is that the only real choice you have in the Army is in making the initial choice to join. After that point, you're subject to the needs and orders of the Army. The Army could, if it wanted to, order CPT McAlpin overseas despite its policy to the contrary. If need be, the Army could even rewrite its original enlistment contract with CPT McAlpin, as it has done to thousands of soldiers who have been affected by "stop loss" over the past two years. But that's not what's going on here.

The Army developed a policy for the management of reservists in these kinds of situations. That policy apparently says that reservists won't be sent on back-to-back overseas tours. Soldiers can waive this right, but as any lawyer will tell you, a waiver must be knowing and voluntary in order to be valid. If the facts in this story are true, then it appears that LTC Carey exerted undue coercion on his command to extract involuntary waivers from soldiers who did not want to redeploy overseas. It's not uncommon for a commander to pressure his soldiers into doing unpleasant things. Leadership sometimes calls for that, and commanders often have to tell their troops to suck it up for the team. But in this case, LTC Carey may have stepped over the line, particularly if he threatened some sort of prosecution for failure to sign the waiver. (Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, failing to obey a lawful order is a criminal offense)

Unfortunately for CPT McAlpin, the law may not be much help for him. The decision to relieve an officer and transfer him out of the 401st CA Bn is entirely an administrative decision -- and squarely within the battalion commander's discretion. This may be a black mark on CPT McAlpin's personnel file, but that's the way the system works. It's a lot like a civilian job, in the sense that you can be fired. The 401st CA Bn hinted in the story that there may have been some malfeasance in Afghanistan to justify this relief. Maybe... lots of officers bend rules in combat to get the job done. But it really doesn't matter. A battalion commander doesn't need a good reason to relieve an officer and transfer him to the IRR -- just a reason. Every officer makes some mistakes if he/she is a good officer who assumes risk in order to train soldiers well. LTC Carey probably has a reason of some kind that he can use to create the paper trail to support this administrative transfer. And as an administrative action, this transfer isn't really subject to any judicial review or intervention.

Coda: The obvious question is: why put Army reservists through so many mobilizations? First, the Army isn't mobilizing every reservist like the men and women of the 401st CA Bn. These are Civil Affairs soldiers. They are the most sought-after specialty in the Army right now, because of the nation-building operations in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Civil Affairs units exist in the Army Reserve -- just one active duty Civil Affairs battalion exists in the Army today. In the last two years of operations in the war on terrorism, the Army has mobilized almost every single Civil Affairs soldier in its arsenal, and many more than once. This has created the need to double-tap men like CPT McAlpin and others.

It's a hardship, to be sure, especially for anyone who's in the private sector where employers are often less forgiving to their employees in the reserves. But it's also the nature of Civil Affairs, and anyone who joins a CA unit has to know that he/she is likely to be mobilized. Does that explain what happened here? Only the larger context, not the actual facts of this case. I think there's probably some bad blood between CPT McAlpin and his unit, and that's to blame for this.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:58

 
Farewell to a brilliant educator

The AP reports tonight that Clark Kerr, the former President of the University of California, has died. Kerr is often considered the architect of California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education -- widely considered the blueprint for the best public system of higher education in the world. In addition to his brilliant views on the structure and administration of higher education, Kerr was also known for his principles. He stood up for faculty who refused to sign a loyalty oath during the height of the Cold War, and stood up for student protesters at UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Indeed, this latter stand was so effective that then-gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan made a campaign promise to fire Kerr if elected. (The UC regents fired Kerr in 1967 at then-Gov. Reagan's behest).

I personally came to know Clark Kerr as a reporter for the Daily Bruin from 1994-97, where I covered the UC Board of Regents. Despite his age and eminent position in California history, he was always willing to take my phone calls. And he was always willing to teach a young student (me) about higher education in California, or give me the institutional history behind certain trends like privatization. In every interview, I always felt he was the genuine article -- a man who cared only about the University of California, and the principles for which it stands. Only a few politicians and public administrators have impressed me the way that he did, and I wish we had more of 'em.

President Kerr: thanks for a lifetime of public service to the great state of California. The university and the people will miss you.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:53

 
U.S. plans to release prisoners from Guantanamo

Nancy Gibbs and Viveca Novak report in Time that the U.S. government plans to release as many as 120 detainees from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they are currently being held. The news comes on the heels of an order from the U.S. Supreme Court granting limited review to the issue of whether these detainees can challenge their captivity in court, as well as an agreement between the Pentagon and Australian government for the military tribunal of David Hicks.

Though U.S. officials have released some inmates deemed harmless, new ones are still arriving, with about 20 coming and going last week. Amid a global argument about their rights, the Supreme Court recently agreed to decide whether the captives at Guantanamo can at least challenge their detention in federal court. But in the meantime, however great the outcry from allies and human-rights groups, the U.S. military, along with the White House and the Justice Department, has not retreated from an unprecedented approach to prisoners captured in an unprecedented war.

If you are a government hungry for clues about the enemies' plans, one problem with the Geneva Convention governing treatment of traditional prisoners of war is that it includes strict rules limiting interrogation. So these detainees are called "enemy combatants," and there is no field manual outlining the rules for handling them. Inmates arrive with no knowledge of how long they will stay, facing the possibility of trial by a military tribunal whose procedures have yet to be tested, on charges that have yet to be revealed and that carry sentences that may depend on not just what crimes they committed but what country they are from. The U.S. last week cut a deal with Australia that if its detainee David Hicks is found guilty, he will not be executed and will be allowed to have his family in the courtroom and talk to his lawyers without Americans listening in. But the Brits are pushing for more, and what about the inmates from Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan? Seeing the risks of multiple standards of justice, Pentagon officials said last week that they are conducting a wholesale review of the tribunal rules.

Washington attorney Thomas Wilner represents the families of 12 Kuwaiti detainees whose case is among those the Supreme Court will hear early next year. He rejects the Bush Administration's insistence that detainees have no legal rights. "The arrogance of saying 'Well, we're feeding them well' is just absolutely absurd," he argues. Two of his clients' fathers have died while they were incarcerated. "They have had children born and parents die.*spaceThey don't get to see their families, and they have no hope of getting out, even if they are innocent. That is what the Geneva Convention is about." Wilner has no problem with the U.S. imprisoning proven terrorists. He just wants a way to establish who the bad guys are. "Can you imagine being an innocent person being swept up into this thing and having no opportunity to say to somebody 'Hey, you've got the wrong guy?'"

So far, the processing of detainees, whether for trial or release, has been slow; the Supreme Court's intervention, however, may have delivered a jolt. A U.S. military official tells Time that at least 140 detainees—"the easiest 20%"—are scheduled for release. The processing of these men has sped up since the Supreme Court announced it would take the case, said the source, who believes the military is "waiting for a politically propitious time to release them." U.S. officials concluded that some detainees were there because they had been kidnapped by Afghan warlords and sold for the bounty the U.S. was offering for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. "Many would not have been detained under the normal rules of engagement," the source concedes. "We're dealing with some very, very dangerous people, but the pendulum is swinging too far in the wrong direction."

Analysis: What's going on here? I'm not so sure that the U.S. Supreme Court order had that big of an impact on the detentions at Guantanamo Bay. Clearly, it has officials in Washington worried that their Gitmo house may come crashing down. But even if the Supreme Court held in this case that U.S. courts had jurisdiction to hear challenges from detainees in Cuba, it would still take a while for those challenges to be litigated. So, there's really no reason to act so hastily with respect to releasing prisoners in Gitmo.

Instead, here's my analysis. The release is probably the result of two things:

(1) As the Time writers state, the processing of detainees has been quite slow. However, it's been two years since some of these detainees were captured in Afghanistan, and we've had enough time now to sort out who was a Taliban foot soldier, who was a lieutenant, and who was a bona fide member of Al Qaeda. To the extent that we've isolated those unfortunate foot soldiers who were unlucky enough to be captured, we're now ready to release them, having determined that they have no intelligence value. Repatriation is an important part of the Geneva Convention, and it's supposed to take place at the conclusion of hostilities. The war on terrorism won't end anytime soon, but the phase in Afghanistan probably has ended for the purposes of keeping Taliban foot soldiers in captivity.

(2) America needs more room in Gitmo for any foreign fighters it captures in Iraq, or elsewhere. The war on terrorism has gone on for more than two years now, and we've captured a number of individuals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere since the construction of the camps at Gitmo. The U.S. government may have also decided that it needs to focus its scarce Gitmo resources -- prison space, security, interrogators, etc -- on the detainees with the most intelligence value. In other words, those detainees captured most recently.

Ultimately, the release of prisoners is a show of good faith. Historically, the repatriation of prisoners has been a very signficant part of warfare. I'm not sure how this will play on the Arab street, but it should at least demonstrate that the U.S. isn't committed to keeping these men indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:30

 
Patriot Act author speaks out against anti-terrorism policies

Sunday's Los Angeles Times has an interesting report on the comments by two former members of the Justice Department who have spoken out against the detentions of Americans (e.g. Jose Padilla) as unlawful enemy combatants. Viet Dinh, the former Assistant Attorney General credited with writing the USA PATRIOT Act, and Michael Chertoff, the former Asst. AG who litigated the Moussaoui case among others, have recently criticized the Bush Administration's stance on this issue as "unsustainable".

Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.

The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.

In an interview, Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the Padilla case was not within his line of authority when he was in the department, but that he began to think about the issue later, and came to the conclusion that the administration's case was "unsustainable."

Another top former Justice Department official, Michael Chertoff, who headed the department's criminal division, has said he believed the government should reconsider how it designates enemy combatants.

"Two years into the war on terror, it is time to move beyond case-by-case development," Chertoff said, according to an excerpt from a speech he gave last month at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law school.

"We need to debate a long-term and sustainable architecture for the process of determining when, why and for how long someone may be detained as an enemy combatant, and what judicial review should be available," he said.

Chertoff, a federal appeals court judge, also mentioned at a judicial conference in Philadelphia this month the need to reexamine procedures for combatants. "Inevitably, decisions of war are made with imperfect information," he said. "Perhaps the time has come to take a more universal approach."

Analysis: The critiques are notable because both men played an integral part in the development of this stance, and because both are seen as candidates for selection to higher office. Mr. Chertoff was recently confirmed as a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, and Mr. Dinh's name has been mentioned in conjunction with both judicial nominations and future positions within the administration. These are brilliant men whose careers are still on the rise, and I think they're taking a big risk to speak out against the administration in this way.

It's important to note what these two men are not talking about. Mr. Dinh and Judge Chertoff are not criticizing the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56), the Homeland Security Act, the use of material witness authority (18 U.S.C. 3144) to detain individuals, or the use of immigration laws to detain and deport individuals suspected of terrorism. They are also not speaking out against the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801) warrants or any number of other secretive national security measures. Indeed, they're not even talking about the men detained at Guantanamo Bay. They are speaking about the detention of unlawful enemy combatants like Jose Padilla.

However, I think their critique is a valid one. It's one thing to say that we have the right to detain enemy combatants pursuant to the law of war, and that we will do so in our own defense. It's quite another thing to say that we can do so subject to no legal restraints -- not the Geneva Convention, not the U.S. courts, nothing. That's the issue now before the Supreme Court: whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear challenges to the detention of the men at Guantanamo. It's a different issue than what's at stake in the Padilla, Hamdi and Al-Marri cases, but it covers some of the same ground.

I currently have an academic article under submission which proposes a new system for the classification and treatment of enemy combatants -- both the kind at Gitmo and the kind like Padilla. If and when it's picked up, I'll post a link to a draft version. But for now, I'll summarize by saying that we need some principled mechanism for sorting these individuals and dealing with their fate. At some point, the judiciary may need to get involved in that procedure to legitimize it and give the detainees some due process. It has long been said that we are a nation of laws, not men. And as a learned friend put it, we can hardly hope to export the rule of law to nations like Iraq if we don't follow it at home.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:09

 
Happy 1-year birthday, Intel Dump

Saturday, Nov. 29, marks one year since the birth of Intel Dump. Thank you to everyone who has visited this page – upwards of 530,000 unique visitors to date. Thank you to everyone who’s linked to me; this weblog would not have reached as many people without your support. And thanks to all those news sources, who by way of federal copyright law, have allowed me to make fair use of their news reporting in order to provide informed analysis here. I don’t know what this weblog will turn into, but it’s been a lot of fun so far. Thanks.
posted by Phillip Carter at 23:55

 
Happy Thanksgiving

Intel Dump will resume activity after the Thanksgiving holiday, on Sunday, November 30. Thanks for stopping by, and please visit some of my friends linked on the left side of this page.
posted by Phillip Carter at 04:31

 
Pentagon announces U.S.-Australia deal for Gitmo detainee

The Pentagon issued a press release today announcing the terms of an agreement for the military tribunal of David Hicks, an Australian being held at Guantanamo Bay after his capture in late 2001 in Afghanistan. Pentagon lawyers negotiated this deal with Australian authorities, who were concerned that military tribunals might provide less procedural and substantive due process than ordinary American criminal trials. Mr. Hicks was already on a short list of tribunal candidates. With this agreement, I think it's a safe bet that he will be one of the first tried by these procedures at Gitmo. The U.S.-Australian agreement focused mostly on the procedural issues for Mr. Hicks' eventual trial, including:

The prosecution has reviewed the evidence against the Australian detainees, and based on that evidence, the prosecution would not seek the death penalty;

The security and intelligence circumstances of Mr Hick’s case are such that it would not warrant monitoring of conversations between him and his counsel;

If David Hicks is charged, the prosecution does not intend to rely on evidence in its case-in-chief requiring closed proceedings from which the accused could be excluded; and

The U.S. and Australian government will continue to work towards putting arrangements in place to transfer Hicks, if convicted, to Australia to serve any penal sentence in accordance with Australian and U.S. law.

Subject to any necessary security restrictions, military commissions will be open, the media present and appropriately cleared representatives of the accused’s government may observe the proceedings;

If an accused is convicted, the accused’s government may make submissions to the Review Panel;

If eligible for trial, and subject to security requirements and restrictions, an accused may be permitted to talk to appropriately cleared family members via telephone, and two appropriately cleared family members would be able to attend their trial; and,

An accused may choose to have an appropriately cleared foreign attorney as a consultant to the Defense Team. Foreign attorney consultant access to attorney-client information, case material or the accused will be subject to appropriate security clearances and restrictions and determined on a case-by-case basis.

Analysis: This is a really interesting development in the saga of the U.S. military commissions planned for members of Al Qaeda. On the big-picture level, this development represents a retreat of sorts for the Pentagon lawyers who drafted the military commission regulations. Essentially, the Pentagon has given ground on a number of key issues, such as attorney-client monitoring, the use of classified materials, and the use of ex parte proceedings. I think that critics of the tribunals will seize on this agreement to say "the Pentagon is willing to give these things up because they recognize that these procedures are inherently unjust." I think the situation's a bit more complex, but that's the likely argument to be made.

On the micro-level, each of these provisions makes an interesting statement about the nature of the charges against Mr. Hicks, and the evolution of thinking within the Pentagon about the tribunals:

1. "[T]he prosecution would not seek the death penalty" To me, this means the case against Hicks is pretty flimsy -- kind of like the case against John Walker Lindh. I think this guy was probably just a foot soldier -- on the wrong side at the wrong time in the wrong country. Unfortunately, that's a violation of U.S. law, and if he didn't follow the rules for combatancy in the Law of Armed Conflict, it could be a violation of international law too. But it's not a major violation, and it certainly doesn't deserve the death penalty. This interpretation of Mr. Hicks' case is buttressed by the following clause, which states "The security and intelligence circumstances of Mr Hick’s case are such that it would not warrant monitoring of conversations between him and his counsel." Clearly, the Pentagon wouldn't agree to this if they thought Mr. Hicks had any residual intelligence value whatsoever.

2. "[T]he prosecution does not intend to rely on evidence in its case-in-chief requiring closed proceedings from which the accused could be excluded." This means that the Pentagon does think it will use classified evidence at trial. The inference that I draw from this is that Mr. Hicks was a member of the Taliban, but not Al Qaeda, and that the U.S. government doesn't need to use any intelligence sources or assets to describe his membership in that quasi-governmental organization. If this guy were a member of Al Qaeda, a shadowy organization at best, we'd probably need to use some classified evidence to show that.

3. "[M]ilitary commissions will be open, the media present and appropriately cleared representatives of the accused’s government may observe the proceedings". Again, we're not looking at a deep sleeper in Al Qaeda or a leader of that global terror network -- we're looking at a foot soldier. Given the likely facts of his case, there's no reason to shut the media out. Indeed, if this is a slam-dunk case and if the facts are relatively innocuous, this coudl be the deception/diversion/obscuration effort for the rest of the military tribunals. If the Hicks tribunal goes first, it will get a lot of publicity -- more than it probably deserves on the basis of the facts of the case. Let's say the Pentagon throws the doors wide open, and uses this as a case study for how the tribunals can work in a kindler & gentler manner. After the publicity fades, and after public opinion switches to support for the tribunals, the Pentagon can roll out the real bad guys -- and use the full panoply of procedural devices such as ex parte hearings, classified evidence, and closed trials.

Recommendation: Look for the articles tomorrow by Jess Bravin (Wall Street Journal), Richard Serrano (LA Times), and Charles Lane or Dan Eggen (Washington Post). They do the best reporting on these issues, and I suspect they'll have the best analysis in tomorrow's paper.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:37

 
Army transfers Yee; announces new charges

The case of CPT James Yee, the Muslim chaplain suspected of espionage at Guantanamo Bay, took a strange turn today when the Army decided to release him from the military brig at Charleston to regular duty at Fort Benning, GA. The Army also added new counts to his current charges of mishandling classified information, including allegations of adultery, storing pornography on a government computer, and disobeying a lawful order. The next step for CPT Yee is an Art. 32 hearing, which is somewhat like a grand jury hearing, and then he may face a general court martial for his actions. Suffice to say, the stakes are much lower than when I wrote this article arguing for capital punishment in this case. But I still think there is more here than meets the eye. I expect we'll see more charges in the near future -- more to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:36

 
An amazing story of human kindness in war

Bryan Gruley tells a great story today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about Lt. John Withers, U.S. Army, and what he did at the tail end of WWII to save two Jewish concentration camp survivors. The story is more remarkable because Lt. Withers was black, at a time when the Army was bitterly segregated, and he could have faced serious sanctions for violating the general orders regarding the treatment of displaced persons at the end of the war. As the story relates, Lt. Withers' humanity won out over his orders.

The two young men stood trembling before Army Lt. John Withers, dressed in the rags they'd worn at the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp. Sores pocked their bony arms and legs. Decades later, the lieutenant would remember how their sunken eyes sought mercy.

But in 1945, near the end of World War II, they posed a problem. Lt. Withers was a black leader in an all-black supply convoy. In violation of Army orders, his men were hiding the refugees. Lt. Withers planned to have the strangers removed -- until he saw them.

They stayed with his unit for more than a year, two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust hiding among blacks from segregated America. The soldiers nicknamed them "Peewee" and "Salomon." They grew close to Lt. Withers. By the time he bid them farewell, they'd grown healthy again.

* * *
Quartermaster units had orders to avoid contact with the Dachau prisoners, Lt. Withers later recalled. His superiors worried that supply convoys would pick up diseases and spread them to other Army units. Researchers at the National Archives couldn't locate specific records of such orders but said other records indicate that Army brass were acutely concerned about health risks posed by Dachau prisoners.

Lt. Withers had learned that it was especially important for blacks to follow orders in the segregated Army. He recalled worrying that sheltering Dachau refugees might get him a dishonorable discharge -- and then there would be no GI Bill for him.

He assumed the two refugees were war-toughened men who were exploiting his soldiers' sympathy. So he was unprepared when the soldiers brought Peewee and Salomon. The refugees seemed shrunken and frightened, really just boys, he recalled thinking.

Peewee would later recall that his knees felt weak as he waited for the lieutenant's verdict. He assumed that his immediate family was dead. He was 16. He had no home, no money and no clothing but what he wore. He wanted no more part of the Allies' displaced-persons camps. In the chaos following the war, he had no idea what to do next.

Lt. Withers assumed that Peewee and Salomon would be returned to Dachau, where thousands of former prisoners were still convalescing, according to Army dispatches from the summer of 1945. He'd been to Dachau on a bread-and-milk delivery shortly after it was liberated. He'd seen bodies decomposing in an open ditch, smelled the rotting flesh. How could he send them back?

"Keep them," he recalled blurting to his men. "We're going to take care of them."

In recent interviews, he struggled to explain why he changed his mind. "I think I identified with them very strongly and instantaneously," he said. He said he also risked losing face with his men. "They were willing to take the chance. If I would have overruled them, I would have been on the wrong side of the decision."

Thoughts: This is the kind of story that makes me proud to have been an American army officer. There aren't many armies in the world that can lay claim to this kind of lineage -- as peacemakers and humanitarians as well as warfighters. Lt. Withers was a junior officer who knew what the right thing was -- and he did it, notwithstanding his orders to the contrary. If faced with a similar situation today in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think my peers would probably do the same thing. There's something about the American military officer that transcends more obeyance to orders; that wants to do the right thing. As Lt. Withers said in the story, he couldn't have done anything different, because to do so would have made him lose face in front of his men. American soldiers know the difference between right and wrong; good and evil. In this case, they chose the right path.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:08

 
The Pentagon starts a weblog... sort of
New "Penta-blog" service offers RSS/XML feed to the public

I've commended the Pentagon's web page before as a great repository for information -- press releases, transcripts of press conferences, and other useful data. DefenseLink is searchable; it keeps stuff on file for a long time; and DefenseLink is pretty well organized for a government website. Now, the Pentagon introduces an RSS/XML feed for defense news junkies who just can't get enough news from inside the Pentagon. This isn't really a weblog, but it's only a couple of steps removed from one. An RSS/XML feed lets interested parties tune in to information in streaming format, much like a weblog. Indeed, many people consume weblogs almost entirely via RSS/XML. In a few years, I think the weblog and RSS/XML formats will become the standard medium for news sites and public affairs offices who want to offer real-time news in a digestable format.

Of course, I doubt we'll ever get the SecDef or DepSecDef offering up snarky and irreverent commentary on a Penta-blog . . . but anything's possible.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:09

 
Army reserve starts to see personnel exodus

The Boston Globe has an interesting report on a very problematic trend: declining reenlistments among Army reservists coming home from the war on terrorism. For the past two years, Army and Pentagon officials have maintained that they were on glide-path for recruiting and retention, and that repeated mobilizations were not affecting their ability to get and keep quality people. I was always skeptical of those reports, but the Army had the hard data -- not me. Now, it appears that the rumblings in the ranks were true, and that the numbers support what many have thought for some time: repeated mobilizations have begun to decimate the ranks of America's reserves.

The Army Reserve has missed its retention goal by 6.7 percent, the second shortfall since fiscal 1997. It was largely the result of a larger than expected exodus of career reservists, a loss of valuable skills because such staff members are responsible for training junior officers and operating complex weapons systems.

* * *
With extended deployments and increasingly deadly attacks by Iraqi guerrillas, Defense Department officials are scrambling to combat a broader downturn in retention and recruitment that they fear is on the horizon.

The US Army, the primary service deployed in Iraq, is offering reenlistment bonuses of $5,000 for soldiers serving there. The Army National Guard is extending an official thank-you to members by arranging services to honor returning soldiers. The Massachusetts National Guard is offering rewards ranging from plaques to NASCAR tickets to members who lure recruits. And throughout the branches, recruitment advertising is up and programs are being launched to make the military seem more family-friendly.

The Army also is resorting to a policy called "stop loss" that allows the Pentagon to indefinitely keep soldiers from leaving the service once their time has expired. The policy, used during war, is designed to prevent staffing shortfalls in key sectors.

* * *
While Pentagon officials have insisted that recruiting and retention figures are mostly at or above expected levels, thanks in part to a soft economy that offers little competition, signs of trouble are emerging. Recruiting for the Massachusetts National Guard, a backup to the professional Army and Air Force, was down 30 percent this year. Nationwide, the Army National Guard has fallen 13 percent short of its recruiting goal, although that deficit was offset by fewer than expected troops leaving the service.

Perhaps the most troubling statistic is the drop in retention for the Army Reserve, first disclosed by Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker on Wednesday in testimony before Congress. The drop was due to the Reserve falling 9.3 percent short of its retention goal among career soldiers.

Analysis: Some background is useful here. The Army divides up its reenlistment numbers in countless ways, and it's often hard to figure out which number matters. The big picture is that the Army Reserve missed its reenlistment goal by 6.7%. The first thing is that this does not mean the Army Reserve is losing 6.7% of its total manpower each year. This statistic means that the Army Reserve has fallen 6.7% of its reenlistment target, which is a subset of that larger attrition figure.

Here's how it works. Let's say the Army Reserve has 200,000 soldiers who are up for reenlistment/discharge in a given year. The Army headquarters decides to set a reenlistment target of 50%, or 100,000 of those reservists who are getting out. To meet the target, Army Reserve commanders have to convince/persuade that many soldiers to stay in the force. If the Army Reserve missed its target by 6.7%, that means that it got 93,300 reservists to reenlist -- and fell 6,700 soldiers short. Not bad, actually. But not good if the Army Reserve has the same trend for month after month, year after year.

The next number is that the Army Reserve missed its "career soldier" retention mark by 9.3 percent. The same math applies, but this pool is different. This group does not include the "first term" soldiers who joined for one hitch and college money. These are the senior sergeants who have been in the reserves for a while, and presumably are pretty close to retirement or already eligble for retirement. These guys have put a lot of time into the reserves, and it says a lot that they're willing to walk away from it. My gut tells me these numbers indicate there's a large pool of guys who basically said "enough" after the last mobilization.

(Thanks to the detail-oriented readers who corrected my math above -- I appreciate the feedback)

One other note: these are aggregate numbers from across the reserve force. We haven't mobilized the entire Army Reserve or National Guard, just a percentage of it. Presumably, in those units that have been mobilized, these retention numbers are a lot worse. My recent experience indicates that the Reserve and Guard can retain as little as 40% of a unit after mobilization, depending on the mission and the unit's leadership. There are a lot of hollow units out there right now as a result of mobilizations, and the collective decision by soldiers to get out.

Is there any good news here? No, and yes. The bad news is that the reserves can't sustain these numbers. If senior sergeants and officers get out in these numbers, it literally decimates the Army Reserves' cadre of leadership, and that has a terrible effect on unit readiness and effectiveness. The good news is that the reserves will gain a lot of recruits from the active force as stop-loss is lifted and soldiers come home in large numbers from Iraq to get off active duty. Typically, the biggest recruitment source for the reserves is the active force. Despite the risk of mobilization, the flow of discharged active-duty soldiers to the reserve forces is still pretty good, and that will fill the reserves with a lot of knowledge and expertise. It may not completely offset this exodus, but it will help.

Over time, however, even this won't help. If the Army Reserve and National Guard continues to have the operational tempo it now does, a lot of active-duty veterans will decline the chance to serve in the reserves. They won't want to join up if it simply means a return to active duty. Second, the current operational tempo will continue to attrit units as they come off of their mobilization, at increasingly high numbers. In the reserves, it has increasingly become a question of when you will be mobilized, not if you will be mobilized. Most of these reservists are willing to go once, but I think the threat of a second or third trip to the desert will cause many to decline reenlistment.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:36

 
House committee to hold hearings on LTC West

The House Armed Services Committee put out a press release this morning announcing that it would hold hearings on the case of LTC Allen West, a former artillery battalion commander in Iraq who may face a court-martial for allegedly mistreating an Iraqi prisoner. (Thanks to M.L. for the e-mail) At this point, the military inquiry into LTC West is in the preliminary stages. His unit (the 4th Infantry Division) held an emotional Art. 32 hearing last week, and the decision has not yet been made to court martial him. However, an offer to let LTC West resign in lieu of court martial has lapsed, and all tea leaves point to a decision by his CG to try him in court.

Based on the information currently available to them, Hunter and McHugh believe that West's actions may well have been necessary to protect the lives and safety of his fellow soldiers and not the actions of a criminal, as he is charged. Hunter is Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and McHugh is Chairman of the Subcommittee on Total Force, which has jurisdiction over military personnel matters.

According to news accounts, the incident in question took place this past August near Tikrit, Iraq, when guerrillas attacked U.S. soldiers under West's command. An informant told U.S. authorities that a local policeman was involved. West ordered the policeman brought in, though he proved uncooperative. West has testified that he fired his pistol near the head of the Iraqi, threatening to kill him in an effort to obtain information to protect his troops. As a result of the tactic, the Iraqi provided information regarding a planned sniper attack on U.S. soldiers. Two insurgents were arrested, a third fled and there were no attacks in the area. West immediately informed his commanding officer of the incident. He is currently facing an inquiry to determine if there is cause for a court-martial.

"We are highly disturbed by media accounts that the Army is beginning criminal proceedings against Lt. Col. Allen B. West for taking actions in Iraq that he believed were necessary to protect the lives and safety of his men," stated the Congressmen in a letter to Les Brownlee, Acting Secretary of the Army. "To us, such actions if accurately reported do not appear to be those of a criminal," the letter continues.

In addition to the information previously requested, the Congressmen are asking to see a new report. "We are aware the Army has completed a preliminary inquiry regarding whether to proceed to a court martial and would like to review that report," said Hunter and McHugh in a joint statement. "Our interest is in justice. Based on what we know right now, it is more than reasonable to assume that Col. West acted in a manner proportionate to the threat against his soldiers."

Analysis: This is really strange. First, it should be said that Congress has the Constitutional authority under Art. I, Sec. 8, to make laws for the governance of the armed forces. But I'm not sure if they have the authority to exercise direct oversight of the military justice system in this fashion. Although Congress passed the statutes (the UCMJ and others) which set up the military justice system, that may be the limit of their authority. Everything else may fall within the President's sphere of responsibility as Commander-in-Chief, per Art. II of the Constitution. So there are Constitutional questions raised by this press release.

Second, if the President or SecDef exercised this sort of prerogative, it would almost definitely be seen as a case of "unlawful command influence." According to law and custom, senior officials and higher headquarters are not supposed to intervene from above in courts martial. The 4th Infantry Division's commander, MG Ray Odierno, is supposed to make the decision to try or not to try on his own, on the recommendation of his Art. 32 hearing and the counsel from his Staff Judge Advocate. This move by HASC may give LTC West some ammunition for his appeal if he is ultimately tried and convicted.

Finally, even if Congress does have the power to hold this hearing and it's not command influence, I'm not sure this is a wise thing to do. If Rep. Duncan Hunter is truly concerned about the Rules of Engagement in Iraq and other operational law issues, he can hold hearings on that. Indeed, he can subpoena just about anyone he wants on the subject, up to and including the Secretary of Defense. If there is a problem with ROE in Iraq, such a macro-level look may be better for policy reasons than a micro-level look at LTC West's case, or a macro-level look through the lens of LTC West's case. The facts of LTC West's case are, as they say, not good for the defense. In addition to allegedly protecting his unit, he ordered his soldiers to do his "wet work", and then let them be tried by the same military justice system he now stands accused in.

If I were the decisionmaker here, I probably wouldn't try LTC West, anymore than I would try some of the other officers who have made tough decisions in wartime. My reason is that I wouldn't want to communicate to commanders in Iraq that they will be second-guessed by a court martial for errors in judgment. Ironically, by intervening here, Congress may be sending that same message on a higher level: if you make a discipline decision we disagree with, we'll hold hearings back in Washington. That may not be the best thing for LTC West, or the Army, or the mission in Iraq.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:03

 
Real combat heroines

For those that think women have no place in ground combat, there's this excellent report from Baghdad by Vernon Loeb of the Washington Post, one of the 10 best reporters on the military beat. (Thanks to M.L. for the tip) Loeb writes about several women now serving in Iraq as Army military police soldiers, an MOS where they often find themselves fighting as scouts or infantry. Thanks to tough training and good leadership, gender hasn't gotten in the way of these women's performance in Iraq, as this story shows:

Pvt. Teresa Broadwell is in the middle of the maelstrom, standing on tiptoe in the turret of a Humvee in a vain attempt, at 5 feet 4 inches tall, to see through the sight of her M-249 machine gun. American soldiers are down in the street. Iraqis are firing at her truck from the rooflines and alleyways along Highway 9 near the center of this dusty city an hour south of Baghdad.

Her lieutenant, Jay Guerrero, jumps out of the Humvee to help rescue his wounded comrades. He needs Broadwell's cover to suppress the Iraqis' withering fire and listens for the distinctive bursts of her potent weapon.

Before this gun battle ends, three Americans will be killed and seven wounded. For Broadwell, 20, a year and a half out of high school, having chosen the Army over a modern-dance scholarship to the University of North Texas, her moment of truth in combat has arrived.

The Army prohibits women from serving in infantry, artillery and armored units, the combat brigades on the front lines of war. For years, women like Broadwell and her commander in the 194th Military Police Company, Capt. Terri Dorn, have chosen careers in the Military Police Corps because all jobs in the field are open to women (34 of 171 soldiers in Dorn's company are female) -- and it is the closest a woman can get to serving in the infantry.

Women MPs have engaged in combat operations before, in Panama in 1989, in the first Gulf War in 1991 and in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, when the peace in what became a peacekeeping mission was still taking root. But their missions were short-lived, and they were designed to support conventional combat troops.

In contrast to those previous deployments, the military police are in Iraq for the long haul and they're in the thick of the action. The Army faces a low-intensity counterinsurgency campaign without front lines, in which troops are being asked to move back and forth between peacekeeping and combat. MP companies, with their heavy complements of women, are often performing exactly the same mission as all-male combat units. And the MPs have become the units of choice for many commanders, given their infantry-like capabilities and the extra training they receive in policing and stability operations.

When mounted patrols from the 82nd Airborne Division move through Fallujah, the machine gunners standing in Humvee turrets are all male. When military police companies conduct identical patrols throughout Iraq -- in Baghdad, Tikrit and Karbala, to name just a few -- the gunners are quite often women.

Analysis: As several of the women point out in this story, the MP corps is really the leading edge for women in the military. It's the closest they get to being in the combat arms -- and many times, the MP corps is a combat force that sees as much action as the infantry. One thing that often gets missed is that MPs are more likely to see other kinds of action, e.g. riot control or hand-to-hand combat, than their infantry brethren. And MPs are also likely to be tapped for urban missions like cordon-and-search, or other "kick in the door" operations.

In my experience as an MP officer, women like PVT Broadwell and her commander, CPT Terri Dorn, were the rule, not the exception. Women who join the MP corps and make it through basic training (or officer selection) are typically more motivated and more mentally prepared than their male peers. Though they may lack some of the upper body strength and size of their brethren, they quickly make up for it in marksmanship, street smarts, and interpersonal skills (all important skills for an MP). In fact, the female MP officers I knew were head-and-shoulders above the average male officer, and were often some of the best leaders you could find in uniform. Again, the dynamics of self-selection had a big role here, in that the toughest and most motivated women from West Point and ROTC knew the MP corps was where the action was at. (The same is true for women in the aviation and the MI branches)

So what does this mean for the larger debate over women in combat? Well, as I wrote nearly a year ago in the Washington Monthly:

In the end, what will really determine public reaction is how well women perform their jobs under fire. On the ground in Afghanistan, women did not participate in the main actions of Operation Anaconda. But since the fighting died down, female MPs have gone out on long infantry patrols with the 82nd Airborne Division, and by most indications perform-ed well. To be fair, they have not seen combat, and haven't performed the most physically demanding tasks the military has to offer. But women have covered 10 to 20 miles of very hard country per day carrying loads of up to 75 pounds, all while living in close quarters with male infantry.

And so far, as in the Gulf, the worst predictions have not come true--no reports of mass pregnancies or other issues have come to light in Afghanistan. "I'm learning what grunts do, [and] they learn what I do. As MPs, we search people and look for weapons ... I never thought we would be walking for hours or be on the front," MP Sgt. Nicola Hall told a reporter in Afghanistan after the mission. "[The 82nd Airborne soldiers] have been nothing but respectful to us; as long as you walk, carry your own weight and don't whine, you're respected."

Indeed, if mixed-gender units perform as they have in the California desert--and in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--it would strengthen the integrationist trend in several ways. The least likely possibility would be the elimination of all rules barring women from full combat service, from special forces to light infantry. But even if this were to happen, surveys suggest that only a small number of women would apply. And only a fraction of those who do would have the physical ability and fortitude to make it through, say, the crucible of Army ranger school, from which a majority of qualified men wash out before graduation.

The second, and more likely, possibility is that certain combat jobs currently off-limits to women would be opened. For instance, women can currently serve in Patriot air-defense units, but not in short-range air-defense or offensive artillery units closer to the front--even though the skill levels are virtually the same. Female soldiers frequently win the Army's highest awards for marksmanship and even participate on the U.S. Olympic marksmanship team--but outside the MPs cannot be snipers. If Saddam's Baathist regime falls to U.S. forces that include women, these kinds of job limitations may collapse, too.

Finally, a successful showing by female soldiers is sure to increase pressure on the Army to end the subtle day-to-day discrimination that remains a fact of life for so many female soldiers, from anachronistic "wives clubs" in some units to assignment policies that place a premium on female soldiers willing to defer childbearing indefinitely.

I think the proof is in the way that women have performed in Iraq -- both in "major combat operations" and in the guerilla war since 1 May 03.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:51

 
Assessing blame for the Istanbul attacks

The Washington Post reports today on the reaction of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to the bombing in Istanbul, which killed the British consul-general among others. The article is misleadingly headlined "Bush, Blair Say Iraq War Is Not Cause Of Attacks". The story's lead paragraph goes on to say that "President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared Thursday that the invasion of Iraq was not to blame for the recent wave of terrorist violence and that bombs that devastated two British facilities in Istanbul . . . ", but the rest of the story (and its quotes) do not support this assertion:

"Our mission in Iraq is noble and it is necessary, and no act of thugs or killers will change our resolve or alter their fate," Bush said at a joint news conference with Blair, as tens of thousands of demonstrators protested the Iraq war on streets nearby. "We will finish the job we have begun."

The two leaders spoke hours after Britain was stunned by the news that two truck bombs aimed at British targets killed at least 27 people in the Turkish city of Istanbul. British civilian facilities had up to now escaped being targeted in the string of terror attacks that have followed those of Sept. 11, 2001.

Blair echoed Bush's remarks, calling for attacking terrorists "wherever and whenever we can."

Okay. So far, that's the sort of defiant "still upper lip" rhetoric we expect to hear from political leaders after a terrorist attack. However, the only quote that supports this headline is buried far down in the story:

At the news conference, Blair responded with pique when asked if the U.S.-British alliance in Iraq has invited terrorist attacks such as Thursday's. "What has caused the terrorist attack today in Turkey is not the president of the United States, is not the alliance between America and Britain," he said. "What is responsible for that terrorist attack is terrorism, are the terrorists."

Analysis: Tony Blair is a brilliant orator and statesman, but I think he's wrong. First of all, his comment is both circular and conclusory. He asserts that terrorism is responsible for the terrorist attack. That says nothing. Moreover, it ignores an essential element of the definition of terrorism, which is that terrorism is politically or ideologically motivated violence. It is not violence for its own sake, or violence for pecuniary gain, as crime is often described. Terrorism is violence for a purpose. The purposeful targeting of British nationals in a Muslim nation provides strong evidence of the purpose behind this attack. While Al Qaeda has not explicitly claimed these attacks, nor linked them to Iraq, I think that's a fair reading of the tea leaves.

Update: The WP also has this excellent analysis of who was behind the Istanbul attacks. The article makes two important points. First, Al Qaeda has morphed into a far more decentralized and dangerous enemy than on Sept. 11. Second, the real enemy is Islamic international terrorism writ large -- an Al Qaeda is only one of a number of groups committed to global terrorism in the name of Allah. Al Qaeda's doctrine may have inspired these attacks, and its TTPs may have been used for them, but the actual act may have been carried out by anyone in the loose confederation of international Islamic jihadists.

One senior U.S. official said al Qaeda's children were "growing up and moving out into the world, loyal to their parents but no longer reliant on them."

Intelligence officials and analysts said the evolution posed new challenges to efforts to combat terror, because rather than facing a few defined, recognized targets, counterterror forces had to confront dozens of small groups that were much more difficult to trace and attack. And, they said, knocking out one small group does not have the same crippling effect as taking down a major leader of a large organization.

"The threat has moved beyond al Qaeda," said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at the Singapore-based Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies. "While al Qaeda was the instigator of recent attacks, very few have actually been carried out by al Qaeda."

* * *
"Al Qaeda is as much an ideology as a structure," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. "Iraq is now the center of gravity, but I think they are seeking out soft targets and hitting from every flank imaginable by any means. This is an ongoing, raging war with all the gloves off."

Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon terrorism consultant, argued that the evolution of the terrorist groups is analogous to a process of corporate merger and acquisition. At a terrorism conference earlier this year at St. Andrews College, Pillsbury said regionally focused terrorism groups with their own particular agendas join with al Qaeda to learn their operational techniques or benefit from their contacts, but are not subordinate to al Qaeda.

For example, he said, Jemaah Islamiah seeks to create a pan-Islamic state in Asia, an agenda that has little to do with driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia or other goals of bin Laden's. "They like to get advice and equipment from al Qaeda but still have their own political agenda," Pillsbury argued.

This story quotes all the "giants" in the field of terrorism, and is about as accurate as any threat assessment I've seen lately.

There is some tragic irony here. Al Qaeda has built an international coalition of sorts with which to wage multilateral, networked, global jihad against the West. The Western coalition in the war on terrorism is strong, but it also shows some signs of fissure over issues like Iraq. America's best hope for defeating such a global networked threat is to build a network of its own -- it takes a network to fight a network.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:11

 
Army sergeant develops a new body warming system
Battlefield innovation shows the ingenuity of the American NCO

There's an old maxim of leadership in the Army that if you tell someone how to do something, you'll get results, but if you tell someone what to do, they'll often amaze you with their initiative and brilliance. Army Staff Sgt. Adam R. Irby of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) of the 28th Combat Support Hospital proves this maxim in spades with his new invention: an improvised field warming system for casualties which works three times better than the similar Army-procured device and is made from cardboard boxes and hair dryers. (Thanks to Donald Sensing for the link)

Soldiers wounded in combat or accidents who suffer high blood loss almost always have internal bleeding. Stopping internal bleeding is crucial to save their lives - but the blood loss lowers their temperatures dramatically. And cooler blood does not coagulate to seal internal wounds quickly. Casualties have died from internal bleeding before their bodies could be warmed in the hospital.

Perhaps no longer, though. The standard method of warming patients has been to wrap the in multiple, ordinary blankets and shine heat lamps on them, or use a use a “Bear Hugger” blanket, "which incorporates small ventilation pipes distributing warm air around the patient." But the hospital has not received the special blankets.

So Staff Sgt. Irby constructed a box now known as the "Chief Cuddler."

“I constructed the ‘Chief Cuddler’ out of old cardboard boxes and [Maj. Michael] Greenly’s hair dryer,” Irby said. “It creates a micro-environment of about 105 degrees and will bring a patient from about 90 to 98.6 degrees in about three hours, almost a three-fold decrease in time.”

Analysis: This is truly amazing work by SSG Irby. There's a reason why Army leaders call non-commissioned officers the "backbone of the Army". NCOs are the repository of the warrior ethos, as well as the professional knowledge and technical ability that is necessary to fight on the modern battlefield. You can't take conscripts, train them for a year, and expect them to fight the way that SFC Eversman did in Mogadishu, or do things like SSG Irby. Building NCOs like these takes years, and an incalculable amount of investment in training, education, and leadership development. Borrowing a phrase from the Army's standard award language, SSG Irby's actions reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:57

 
Sending a message with terror

As Brian Jenkins said so many years ago, "terrorism is theater." The Los Angeles Times captures that point nicely with this article today on the twin suicide bombings in Istanbul which killed dozens and left hundreds wounded. The aim of this attack was clearly not destructive, although it did horiffic damage. It was to communicate the simple message that "we're here, we're still capable, and we're still on the offensive."

By bombing the British Consulate and the headquarters of a Britain-based bank, the attackers served notice on Washington's chief ally in Iraq and other members of its coalition, as well as moderate Islamic countries, that cooperating with the Bush administration is risky — and that the danger extends to the business as well as the diplomatic community.

By pulling off the attacks only five days after twin synagogue bombings in Istanbul, they also demonstrated an audacious tactical prowess. British and Turkish authorities said Thursday's attacks, designed to steal the limelight from President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, appeared to be the work of Al Qaeda or its affiliates in an increasingly decentralized terror network.

"This is very much an attack designed to have maximum public relations impact," said Charles Heyman, a terrorism expert and editor of Jane's World Armies in Britain. "It happened just as Blair and Bush were having their press conference. The terrorists have managed to grab the headlines. They did it very cleverly. It shows they are very aware of media operations. It may have neutralized any positive press in the war on terror that Bush could have had during his visit."

Every Al Qaeda strike resonates with symbolism: target, timing, setting. Thursday's bombings revealed expert planning and multiple layers of meaning.

By hitting the consulate and local headquarters of the HSBC bank, the terrorists struck not only at Britain but at the international financial and diplomatic communities that spread Western influence in the world. Just two or three years ago, Britain seemed an unlikely Al Qaeda target because many Islamic extremists were based in London. However, that was before the Blair government became the United States' most important ally in the invasion of Iraq, analysts said.

"With the attack on Britain, one sees how Iraq now plays a central role in the mentality of terrorism," said Olivier Roy, a senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

Analysis: This last point is intriguing, and correct in my opinion. Iraq has become a focal point for international jihadists; a point on the map they can rally towards. From their perspective, Iraq is a place where Western/American/Christian imperialism has squashed a secular Arab state, and is now frustrating the Sunni and Shiite Muslims there from determining their own government and establishing an Islamic state. Iraq provides evidence of our evil for the terrorists to raise money, arms and personnel. It also provides a training ground for terrorists to hone their deadly arts. And it gives them a raison d'etre -- a reason to fight -- by justifying any political violence which might hasten the end of the occupation. I think it's inevitable that such violence will spread to countries beyond the U.S. and Britain, to possibly include our other allies helping with Iraq like South Korea and Poland. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:41

 
An old refrain: too few MPs to go around in America's reserves

Jeff Quinton passes on some news from South Carolina that ought to seem eerily familiar to those who have been following the state of America's military reserves since Sept. 11: too few Military Police units for too many missions. Immediately after Sept. 11, MPs were called up to handle force protection missions everywhere from the Pentagon to the Golden Gate Bridge. Since then, reserve MPs have taken on the Afghanistan MP mission, the Guantanamo Bay mission, and a great deal of the MP mission in Iraq. I can't think of a single MP unit in the reserves that hasn't been mobilized in some way since Sept. 11, along with a few other high-demand specialties like Civil Affairs, Military Intelligence, and Special Forces.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:58

 
Practicing judo with the Senate Armed Services Committee

The New York Daily News reports that Gen. Peter Schoomaker has effectively learned how to deal with Congress -- agree with them when they criticize the military, and turn the criticism to the Army's own benefit. In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized a recent Pentagon study and used the occasion to argue for more pay, more benefits, and more money for Americans who serve and their families. (Not a bad way to get votes, according to this Washington Monthly story) Rather than obfuscate, obscure and tapdance, Gen. Schoomaker took ownership of the problem and did something wholly unexpected -- he agreed with Sen. Clinton.

New York's junior Democrat laid into a Pentagon cost-cutting study that suggests closing dozens of schools and commissaries on bases - and won the support of Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the new Army chief of staff.

"For the life of me, I do not understand this," Clinton said of the study on the viability of schools and the low-cost shops (PXs) for military families.

"This sends the wrong message" in a time of war, and could hurt recruitments and reenlistments by "undermining the quality of life of our soldiers and their families," Clinton said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

To Clinton's delight, Schoomaker, the former commander of the supersecret Delta Force, was in full agreement.

"It's a great point," Schoomaker told Clinton. "The issue you raise here is central to having the kind of Army we want to have," he said.

"It's absolutely important for this nation" to boost morale with improved benefits for soldiers, Schoomaker said.

Nice job, Gen. Schoomaker. If you can combine your political acumen with your extensive experience as a snakeeater to pry money out of Congress, the Army will be better for it.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:23

 
Admin note: Just as my college newspaper, the UCLA Daily Bruin, studiously ignored the O.J. Simpson trial while I worked there as a reporter and editor, so too will I studiously ignore Southern California's latest celebrity trial: People v. Michael Jackson. I may comment on the implications this story's prominence has for foreign policy, in that it may push news of Iraq and terrorism off the front pages and TV news shows. But probably not -- I think such stories are best left to Court TV and the tabloid news shows.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:08

 
Al Qaeda 3.0?
Global terror network evolves into an opportunistic enemy

Peter Bergen, the brilliant journalist who wrote Holy War, Inc., described the evolution of international corporate jihad recently as "Al Qaeda 2.0". A report in today's Los Angeles Times makes me wonder if the enemy has evolved even more, to something beyond what Mr. Bergen has described thus far. Here are the two key parts of the story:

Al Qaeda has always been relatively decentralized and unstructured. But today it moves faster, inciting attacks that require less time, expertise or high-level supervision, said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI analyst and terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"It was always a network of networks whose inner core would wait patiently for three to five years to carry out spectacular attacks," Levitt said. "What's different today is that it's not clear they can conduct attacks with that kind of command and control. So to maintain relevancy, they gave the go-ahead: Do what you can, where you can, when you can. And they are targeting softer targets more frequently."

* * *
The resurgent global menace leads critics to assert that the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have boomeranged by scattering Al Qaeda's forces, making them harder to detect, and inspiring like-minded extremists.

"I think it [U.S. strategy] has backfired," said Alani, of the London defense studies institute. "There is no evidence they can cope effectively with these groups."

On the other hand, some U.S. and European officials see signs of weakness as inexperienced, improvised terrorists turn to soft targets. Even in a diminished condition, Al Qaeda has shown how effectively it can harvest the seeds of hate, said Olivier Roy of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

"It's a movement that functions by franchise," Roy said. "You find a local group like the Casablanca group who exist all over, who are radicalized and controlled by intermediaries. Al Qaeda gives a general attack order, and then it's not really important if the attack is rational. Casablanca was not rational in many aspects…. The real message was in the suicide, not in the targets. It was necessary to strike fear."

Analysis: This is truly a living, breathing, thinking, evolving enemy. Its original form was probably the "Afghan Arab" movement which successfully fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with a composite force of Afghans and Arabs supported by America and others. In the 1990s, this force mutated into the international terror network responsible for the 1996 bombings in Africa, 1998 embassy bombings, 2001 USS Cole attack, and Sept. 11. Over that period, the Al Qaeda network evolved, building redundancy and operational capabilities, building doctrine, and learning lessons from other conflicts. One lesson it learned well was how to survive the eventual Western counter-attack.

The organization had enough redundant operational capability, as well as enough dispersal, to withstand our operations in Afghanistan and continue its operations abroad. The best that can be said is that Al Qaeda has been diminished. It currently appears to lack the ability to conduct "spectactular operations" in the U.S. or Western Europe. But Al Qaeda does not lack the ability to conduct operations abroad, either in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. It appears likely that Al Qaeda has adopted a purposeful operational strategy of "wait and strike where we can." Even pinprick attacks on seemingly insignificant targets can be a big deal for Al Qaeda, because they show the ability to continue the fight even in the face of overwhelming odds.

The tale of David and Goliath is an old one, but it has never lost its ability to inspire the masses. Al Qaeda vs. the United States has became a tale of David and Goliath writ large on the Arab street, and only spectacular successes on our part (which are broadcast by Al-Jazeera) will have any effect on this. To lure more recruits and more donations from sympathetic Arabs around the world, Al Qaeda doesn't have to launch another 9/11-style spectacular operation. They can simply go on, throwing rocks and bombs at insignificant targets while being hunted by American special operations units. Doing so will inspire their followers, which will make them stronger.

At some point in the future, Al Qaeda 3.0 will resume its larger operations, perhaps when we have become complacent or when America can no longer politically justify the exhaustive hunt for Al Qaeda. This enemy has the tactical patience to wait for that moment, and to strike then. Our best counter-measures are psychological. We can never allow ourselves to become complacent, and we must conceptually think of everything as a potential target.

Coda: The original Afghan Arabs may be evolving too, and learning lessons from both the Somalia operation and the current occupation of Iraq. Michael M. Phillips reports in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that Afghan insurgents have adopted many of the same disruptive tactics as their Iraqi contemporaries. That is to say, they are striking so-called "soft targets" of opportunity when they can in order to create chaos and inflict casualties. The goal is not to defeat the NATO military operation in Afghanistan, but to destabilize the situation and make it politically untenable for the West to continue its nation-building operations there.

The recent surge in violence, particularly in areas adjoining Pakistan where the Taliban enjoys considerable support, is impeding the international reconstruction effort. Following the assassination of a French staff member, the United Nations refugee agency scaled back its aid operations Tuesday and, for now, shuttered its offices in several southern and southeastern cities. The killing followed a bomb attack on a U.N. vehicle and another on the U.N. offices in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the ousted Taliban regime.

Nine charities working in Afghanistan, including CARE and the International Rescue Committee, say in a report circulated among policymakers that the growing insecurity has delayed, reduced or cut off reconstruction aid for 600,000 Afghans. They and other aid agencies are urging the U.S. and its coalition allies to boost both financial assistance and military forces in Afghanistan, which they fear has taken a backseat to Iraq.

"In most cases the terrorist groups are coming with clear instructions to undermine the reconstruction activities," said Said Tayeb Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S. and former chief of staff to President Hamid Karzai. "In some instances, there have been clear instructions, for instance, to kill the people working on road projects."

The opposition's hit-and-run tactics are similar to those being used in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign extremists and others opposed to the U.S.-led occupation have attacked the International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N. and private contractors assisting in the reconstruction effort. The aim appears to be to cow the populace by demonstrating the inability of international forces to keep the peace or improve the public's living standards.

Coda II: Citizen (formerly LT) Smash has an illuminating chronology of post-Afghanistan Al Qaeda operations around the world. Note the fact that all are confined to the Arab and Islamic world. Why? Because Al Qaeda has been hobbled -- not dismantled -- by our global war on terrorism. They are limited to opportunistically hitting the soft targets now. Will they rise again? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes, for some of the reasons discussed in this UN report. Our charge is to be ready for them.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:53

 
America's new military plans for the world

Bradley Graham reports in the Washington Post about an extremely important strategic/operational development in the Pentagon: the creation of new operational plans for such major theaters as the Middle East and Korea. Unfortunately, news of the sniper's conviction and Arnold's swearing-in pushed this story from page A1 to A18. But I think this is probably the most important story to come out of the Pentagon in weeks. The most important change is that the new operational plans assume America's ability to "do more with less" -- that is, to fight a military campaign with fewer boots on the ground and more airpower/artillery guided by "C4ISR" (command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance).

U.S. military commanders, working with the Pentagon's Joint Staff, have revised plans for potential wars on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East and elsewhere based on assumptions that conflicts could be fought more quickly and with fewer American troops than previously thought, senior officers said.

The changes reflect advances in precision munitions, greater use of Special Operations forces, and improved coordination between air, ground and sea forces tested in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By incorporating these and other new elements in all U.S. war plans, Pentagon authorities hope to make them permanent features and gain greater combat efficiency, the officers said.

Although many specifics remain classified, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has alluded to the revised plans in recent statements, saying they show the Pentagon would be able to deal with other conflicts while U.S. forces stay heavily committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has rejected calls from lawmakers and others to increase the overall size of the armed forces.

In the case of a North Korean attack on South Korea, one senior Joint Staff officer said, the new plans would allow the United States to respond without waiting for as many ground forces to arrive, by substituting air power for artillery and getting such critical equipment as counter-battery radars -- for pinpointing enemy mortar and artillery fire -- on scene ahead of the rest of their divisions. The resulting force might not be as "elegant" as planners would like, but "it will certainly be capable," the officer said.

Still, the new planning does not appear to have addressed issues of postwar stabilization and peacekeeping, which in the case of Iraq have imposed huge burdens on the Pentagon that were not foreseen by Rumsfeld and many of his top aides. Instead, it has focused on how to win wars fast.

Analysis: In essence, these changes take the alleged lessons learned from Iraq and incorporate them into updated and revised operational plans. We all watched the way that American firepower and intelligence capabilities worked together in Iraq to defeat the Iraqi army in three weeks. I haven't seen these new operational plans (obviously, they're classified), but I would guess that these plans assume a lower number of infantry, armor and combat-support troops on the ground as well for the mission, either because those troops may be tied up elsewhere (e.g. Iraq) or because there won't be time in future conflicts to deploy them before the balloon goes up.

What's wrong with this plan? Well, I see two glaring areas where the operational plans assume substantial amounts of risk -- at the strategic, operational and tactical levels.

Risk Area 1: Security. The decision to fight a war with less of a ground footprint leaves you with less manpower to protect those things that you do actually put on the ground. Although the initial stages of a war may be fought entirely by airpower, I think it's still true that you must eventually commit ground troops in order to seize, hold or occupy terrain -- or to truly impose your will on an enemy government. As T.R. Fehrenbach said so brilliantly in This Kind of War:

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

This is still true. The problem then becomes one of force protection. Our enemies have learned to hit us asymmetrically because they know that they cannot hope to succeed against the combined-arms effort of American infantry, armor, artillery and air support. Indeed, if Gulf War I and II are any indicator, they will lose thousands of soldiers in any such effort. However, they have also learned from Somalia, Afghanistan and Gulf War II that asymmetric tactics can be highly effective -- particularly against those parts of the American war machine that are less well-protected: supply lines, logistics bases and command posts. Such units are absolutely critical to the American way of war, because our front-line units can't operate without the support of a heavy logistics tail -- and they will be less effective without the assistance of a command post to direct close-air support and artillery, among other force multipliers. Asymmetric attacks on these targets will likely produce American casualties, which in turn will make Americans question the war effort and possibly hasten our withdrawal from any endeavor, according to this theory. They will also reduce our effectiveness and slow our advance.

As we saw recently in Iraq, such attacks will eventually rise to the point where the operational commander must pull front-line troops out of the fight to secure the lines of communication and critical American high-value assets. The asset requirements for force protection will sap combat power from the fight, where it's needed. And if the decision was made before the fight to deploy less troops to the theater, it's often too late during the fight to get them there, since American units typically require weeks to deploy anything heavier than a paratroop battalion to war. If this problem grows bad enough, it will necessitate an operational pause. But at that point, the whole point of moving fast and light is lost, and you should've just deployed enough troops when you had the chance.

Risk Area 2: Troops to Secure the Peace. As this article states, the new operational plans don't fully consider the post-war requirements in each respective theater of operation. In Iraq, those post-war requirements were assumed away too, according to excellent reports in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, among other sources. The result was a hasty effort to secure the peace in the immediate aftermath of the war, compounded by a lack of resources (boots on the ground) to do the job in April and May. The result was chaos. If there is one lesson that operational planners (and I've been one) should take away from Iraq, it is this: don't assume the post-war phase of the operation out of the planning process. You simply can't afford to assume a d*mn thing when it comes to planning, and failing to plan such a major part of the operation is planning for failure. The post-war phase in Iraq is turning out to be far more important, far more costly, and far more lengthy than the war itself.

But that's always been the case. In every war we have fought since WWII, the ends have been messy. After WWII, we had to occupy Germany and Japan for years. We're still in Korea, although the nation-building efforts were largely complete by 1960. Vietnam ended quite messily, though we're now returning there to rebuild the nation's economy with the foot soldiers of capitalism. Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, East Timor -- every recent nation-building op has shown that it takes more troops to secure the peace than to win the war (or change the regime, if that's the case). I made this point in May in the Washington Monthly, and Amb. James Dobbins made it more elegantly in the RAND study America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq.

If you commit less troops to the fight, then you will have less troops on the ground at the moment the mission changes from war to post-war stabilization. Moreover, America lacks the strategic-lift (think Air Force cargo plane) capability and rapid-deployment (think 82nd Airborne) capability to rapidly get troops to the battlefield in the time it will take to affect the situation on the ground. In Iraq, the situation deterioriated in a matter of days, and even if we had made the decision on 9 Apr 03 to deploy additional forces, it would've taken weeks to get them there. The pre-war decision to commit less troops to battle has profound post-war implications, and these operational plans appear to miss that point.

I don't think these are necessarily fatal flaws. The combatant commands (e.g. CENTCOM) can scrub these plans, generate their own requirements, and request more resources for operations when the order is given. But they really don't have the resources -- or the asset visibility -- to do so as effectively as the Joint Staff and the service staffs (e.g. Army and Navy). Plus, they will be under significant time pressure to execute the mission, and it will be hard to request more resources if and when the balloon goes up in a place like Korea. The right answer would be to incorporate the real lessons learned from Iraq into these operational plans. History has shown us that winning the peace is often more difficult than winning the war, and we should plan for that. Depending on your perspective, such an event may be a contingency or an eventuality. But a good planner plans for both.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:43

 
Novices at nation building

Stanford Professor Stephen Krasner writes in today's Los Angeles Times that American difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq should come as no surprise to observers around the world, because frankly, America and the world lacks experience in building democracies.

What we do know — or should know — is that getting from here to there will be hard. The states we're most interested in helping to transform today generally have low per-capita incomes, limited experience with democracy and long histories of autocratic and sometimes brutal rule. These are not conditions that tend to foster democracy.

Among the surprisingly few things we know about creating democracies is this: While it doesn't necessarily take higher per-capita income to establish a democracy, it certainly helps in sustaining it. No democratic country with per-capita income above $6,000 has ever reverted to autocracy.

We also know that democratic transitions are dangerous. Autocratic leaders feeling threatened by democratic reforms can respond by cracking down. A destructive sort of nationalism can surface (think Kaiser Wilhelm II before World War I, Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s or Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe today). And states in transition are more likely than either stable democracies or autocracies to become involved in wars.

Foreign occupation, even when accompanied by large amounts of money, does not guarantee a smooth transition to democracy. Since the Dayton accords of December 1995, Bosnia has effectively been under the control of the international community, led by Europe. Aid has flowed freely: In the late 1990s, foreign assistance amounted to a quarter of the country's gross national income. While this international effort has kept the lid on a volatile situation, it has hardly set Bosnia on a clear path toward democratic autonomy. The situation in Kosovo, which in 1999 became a de facto NATO protectorate, is no better.

The simple fact is that we do not know how to do democracy-building. We do not have clear historical precedents. Germany and Japan after World War II demonstrated that an extensive, sustained American presence can contribute to the establishment of stable democracies. But in 1945, Germany and Japan were countries with more wealth, better-educated populations and more experience with democracy than the countries with which America is now engaged.

In other countries where we have attempted regime change, results have been mixed. Over the last century, the United States has intervened both covertly and overtly in the Caribbean and Central America. But we have not done nearly as well as we would have liked in leaving successful democracies and market economies in our wake.

Analysis: I think this is a powerful argument, and one that's not without a shred of truth. I suppose it's debatable whether democracy should emerge first -- and set the conditions for a liberal society -- or whether the liberal society and market economy must come first. In many ways, it's a classic chicken/egg problem. I happen to think that the market economy, infrastructure, and educational systems must come first in order to set the conditions for the emergence of democracy. You have to build a class of educated persons with a personal economic incentive to become stakeholders in society; to defend what they have acquired by means of civil government. Towards that end, America can create the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Iraq by building roads, schools, markets, hospitals, and other institutions to help Iraqi society reestablish itself. Self-determination will take over at that point, and while we may not get the government we want, I think that the Iraqi people ought to be trusted to decide their own destiny.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:38

 
"A citizen check on war"
Active/reserve mix in American military effectively checks the President's war powers

Former Air Force pilot Janine Davidson has a well written essay in today's Washington Post Outlook section on the "total force" concept, which is the term of art to describe the mix of active and reserve forces in today's American military. Ms. Davidson lays out the history behind this concept, and the way this concept has developed into a check on Presidential warmaking and deployment power.

The current U.S. military structure -- known as the "Total Force" -- was implemented after the Vietnam War. The system was designed to require activation of Guard and reserves personnel in order to wage war. Defense officials ensured that war-fighting capabilities were integrated across the active and reserves components to such a degree that, as an Army chief of staff, Gen. Creighton Abrams, is said to have claimed, "they're not taking us to war again without calling up the reserves."

Abrams and others recognized that when reservists are mobilized, whole communities are affected to a much greater degree than when a draft is conducted of only young eligible men. Their primary concern was that when reservists went to war, troops serving abroad would have more support "back home."

But the Total Force had another goal as well -- to act as a check on indiscriminate or capricious uses of military force. Recent experience in the Balkans and the Middle East demonstrates that it is easier to send troops abroad than it is to bring them home. And history shows that Congress rarely has acted against a president to limit the use of force. Thus, the Total Force was designed to compel Congress to scrutinize military operations. As employers give up workers and as families say goodbye to soldiers augmenting active forces, Congress should be pressured by constituents to act. In sum, the sacrifices of waging war -- or even keeping peace -- are supposed to spread throughout our democratic society to such a degree that our elected officials are forced to debate the wisdom of sending troops abroad.

Analysis: Indeed, Gen. Creighton Abrams' total force concept has become a more effective check on presidential warmaking ability than either the Art. I power of Congress to declare war, or the potentially unconstitutional War Powers Act. This check works because it's closely tied to the Art. I power of Congress to fund the military. Mobilization decisions also require political capital, and even in this gerrymandered age of safe Congressional seats, decisions to send large numbers of Americans into harm's way translates into lots of political pressure on Congress to manage those deployments.

On the other hand, this force balance effectively ties the SecDef's arm behind his back, because it limits his ability to deploy certain critical units such as Civil Affairs, Military Police, Military Intelligence and logistics. And, America's reserve system was designed for a WWIII-style scenario where the entire nation would mobilize to fight the Soviet hordes as they streamed through the Fulda Gap. It does not work well for the constant level of peacekeeping deployments we had in the 1990s, and it is about to break down from the strain of repeated, long-term deployments to support the Global War on Terrorism. There is a good argument for moving some of the most critical units into the active force, such as Civil Affairs, at least in sufficient numbers to give America a 9-1-1 capability in these specialties.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:26

 
The travels of LCPL David C. Botti

Sunday's New York Times carries an exceptional personal essay from David Botti, a Marine reserve infantryman who was mobilized first for post-9/11 security and later for combat duty in Iraq. LCPL Botti answered the call both times, taking himself away from his nascent writing career and dreams of living in New York City. But he took his journal with him to war, and captured a number of the stories of his comrades while deployed. The result, I hope, will eventually be some sort of war memoir (or work of fiction) that accurately characterizes the experiences of Marines in Iraq. His essay today marks his journey from New York to Iraq and back again to the big city.

The August night I returned to the city from Iraq, I found myself drunk in the bathroom of an East Village bar. As I steadied the wall, I wondered how this skin of mine, tanned brown from the Iraqi sun, could now soak up the atmosphere of a good, seedy city bar. Wondered how the people in line behind me could enjoy the night while their peers still slept with rifles, halfway around the world, where I had been just the week before.

I wandered back to my friends, and drifted out of the conversation as soon as I sat down. It was easy to leave the city once more, relive the past four months in the time it took for the next round to arrive. No one spoke to me. Perhaps my silence betrayed my thoughts; I was glad to be left alone. But at that moment I was not having flashbacks, or letting alcohol numb grief and pain. There was no nervous tick or trembling hands. My thoughts, my reverie, lay with the people I had known in Iraq, the soldiers and citizens still dealing with the violent reality.

As the fighting unexpectedly intensifies in Iraq, as the American body count rises, each headline strikes deeper, and I can still see it, still feel it: walking through a foreign city, looking to the rooftops, the windows, in alleys, behind me, in front, to the sides. One person thanks you for freedom, and the next stares through you as if you are already a ghost.

It is a forceful process, ingesting the news and carrying it with me through the day. There are moments when I want the rifle back in my hand, so I can return to Iraq and remain there, until the war ends in a solid conclusion. There is still a reluctance to forget my initial, unwavering idealism that leaving Iraq meant that things were improving, and that others would soon be following me home.

But sometimes, it's New York that feels like a foreign city. One night, in another bar, I read a note posted by the staff above the urinal that ridiculed the city's smoking ban and urged patrons to send Mayor Bloomberg hate mail in an attempt to change the law.

This was the city I had returned to: outspoken and opinionated, the center of freethinking. I want the inspiration and nurturing that New York can give young writers. I am not ashamed of my service, but am conscious that my past might overshadow what I want to accomplish. As my friends and I headed home from that Village bar last August, I allowed myself respite from the guilt of being safe and happy. I watched the blocks pass with the hopeful feeling that soon the city would cease to feel new again.

posted by Phillip Carter at 10:05

 
Is the NYT rewriting Time's copy?
2 stories on combat casualties seem eerily familiar, down to the details

Time had an exceptionally well-done piece in last week's issue (with Russell Crowe on the cover) about America's wounded from Iraq, and the long road they travel from wound to recovery. I was about to comment on it, and some of the advances (like body armor and medical corps doctrine) that have led to this paradigm shift in casualty evacation, treatment and recovery. Then I saw this piece by Neela Banerjee in the New York Times, scratched my head, and said "Gee... these look awfully similar." The stories are so similar, they even talk about the same computerized prosthetic limb that costs $100,000 each. And what's even odder is that the 16 Nov 03 New York Times story bears a 10 Nov 03 dateline, leading me to believe it sat in the editor's hopper for a while.

After the Blair incident, I doubt the NYT is actually lifting Time's copy or story ideas, and Ms. Banerjee is known as a good reporter. But it still struck me as odd that these two flagship publications would run what is basically the exact same story. What do you think?
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:10

 
Jessica Lynch and women in combat
Why Elaine Donnelly gets it wrong in the National Review

A lot has been said so far about Jessica Lynch, from the date of her capture through her rescue, recuperation, return home, discharge, and release of her book. Now, the inevitable charge has come from Elaine Donnelly, chair of the Center for Military Readiness, that Lynch's story exemplifies why women should not be sent into ground combat. Moreover, Donnelly argues in the National Review that Lynch was sent into harm's way because of 1994 reforms by the Clinton Administration that changed the Pentagon's policies for women on the battlefield. Here's an excerpt:

How did Lynch get to the frontlines, many Americans may wonder. Under rules issued by the Clinton administration, female soldiers in support units are now being forced into areas involving a "substantial risk of capture." This policy is inconsistent with privacy rules that deny information about what happens to women who are captured — unless a victim of sexual abuse decides to write a book months later.

During the first Persian Gulf War, then-major Rhonda Cornum, a medical doctor, was subjected to sexual indecencies within hours of her capture in 1991. An ardent advocate of women in combat, Cornum kept silent when Congress debated and repealed one of the laws exempting women from combat. Candor about her experience in captivity, which later appeared in her own 1992 book, could have changed the course of the congressional debate.

Jessica Lynch is not responsible for the media's irresponsible hyping of expedient myths that many people knew to be false. Nevertheless, the fairytale story manipulated public opinion on the issue of women in combat, which ideological feminists keep insisting is "not a big deal."

In 1994, Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, announced new personnel-assignment regulations that were billed as expanded "career opportunities" for women. Female enlistees, including Lynch and former POW Spec. Shoshana Johnson, clearly were not aware that the rules had changed. No one told them, it seems, that women would be assigned to previously all-male units, even in support missions known to involve a "substantial risk of capture."

These Clinton-era rules remain in effect today. Civilian and uniformed Pentagon officials will not act on their own to initiate change unless the Commander in Chief provides a clear mandate for objective review and constructive change. Without further delay, President Bush should direct Pentagon officials to find a way for female soldiers to serve their country without deliberate exposure to greater, unequal risk, to the greatest degree possible.
* * *
There are restrictions on the discussion of war crimes such as rape, but with so many women being exposed to unprecedented risks of capture and abuse, perhaps those rules are in need of revision as well. If Defense Department officials cannot bring themselves to tell Americans the truth about what happens to women in war, perhaps they should not be sending female soldiers so close combat zones in the first place.

Analysis: This argument is wrong on several levels. As an initial matter, I should say that good things happen to bad units (sometimes it's better to be lucky than good) and bad things happen to good units. I have analyzed the 507th Maintenance Company ambush and I think that this was the predictable result of training, resourcing and leadership decisions made which sent a poorly prepared unit into combat and put them too close to the front lines. At the end of the day, though, the 507th was unlucky, and they paid a heavy price for that misfortune.

1. Jessica Lynch's position in the 507th Maintenance Company was not opened to women as a result of then-SecDef Aspin's rule change in 1994. (See the actual memo here) The 507th Maintenance Company habitually supports a Patriot missile unit. Doctrinally, this unit exists at the echelon above corps level. Doctrinally, they should fight far back on the battlefield, beyond the reach of enemy artillery and well behind the battalions, brigades, and divisions which actually fought the ground war in Iraq. PFC Lynch's supply clerk billet would have been open to women in 1990 for Gulf War I. PFC Lynch was not a front-line position, such as that in the 3rd Military Police Company or 1-227 Aviation (Attack) -- two units where women fought as MP soldiers and Apache helicopter pilots respectively. Instead, she held a supply clerk position in a rear area logistics unit where the risk of combat was thought to be low.

The 1994 rule change opened up a number of jobs for women, as I explain in this December 2002 cover article in the Washington Monthly. This rule changed allowed women to lead the way to Baghdad as MPs, intelligence officers, Apache pilots, front-line surgeons, and many other specialties. But this rule change had nothing to do with the 507th Maintenance Company, which even under the old Reagan-era rules, would have been open to women. Even under the "risk rule" that Ms. Donnelly writes of, the 507th would have been open to women.

2. So what happened? Well, the 507th Maintenance Company stumbled into combat as the result of many factors. Most importantly, CENTCOM planners built a warplan that called for a rapid advance through Iraq to Baghdad -- an advance which stretched American supply lines and left main supply routes unprotected. This allowed Iraqi guerillas to attack American logistics convoys and wreak havoc in our rear area. In addition, the "bypass criteria" was set very high on the advance to Baghdad, meaning that American tanks and infantry would bypass enemy platoons and companies as they fought on. These bypassed units were then faced by lightly-armed MPs and logistics units in the rear area, and also caused problems. At one point, GEN Tommy Franks had to pull entire brigades of infantry out of the fight in order to secure his rear area, because the dual problems of enemy guerillas and bypassed units had become so threatening to logistics and command units. The 507th Maintenance Company convoy was in this rear area, and they suffered as the result of an ambitious operational plan that lacked effective planning for security in the rear area.

On top of this failure, PFC Lynch's unit failed her. CPT Troy King, the company commander for the 507th, failed to effectively lead his company on the day in question. He wrote his route down wrong, got his convoy lost, and then failed to take effective actions on contact when the ambush was initiated -- at least, according to the Army's report on the subject. PFC Lynch paid the price for her company commander's dereliction of duty and poor performance, as have soldiers throughout history for the failures of their commanders. (Note: CPT King has not been officially disciplined by the Army, which appears to have taken the position that his bad luck should not be punished with criminal or administrative action. I beg to differ, and have a hard time reconciling the prosecution of men like LTC Allen West when the Army lets a commander like this escape the blame. Good or bad, company commanders are responsible everything that happens to their unit. The buck stops with the man or woman who wears captain's bars.)

3. Ironically, had PFC Lynch been assigned to a front-line unit like the 3rd MP Company, she probably would have been better prepared for combat. The 1994 reforms did open up a number of opportunities for women, including service in front-line MP units assigned at the division and brigade level. In these MP units, male and female soldiers conduct missions such as route reconnaissance and area security -- missions which often require them to train and fight as infantry or scouts. My last unit, the 4th MP Company, trained hard on these missions, and was well resourced to conduct them. We often trained with the scouts and infantry of our brigade, and even shot gunnery with our brigade's reconnaissance troop. That training has paid off. Despite seeing as much fighting as any unit on the battlefield, MP units have experienced relatively light casualties -- including no fatalities in my old unit. (Thank God) The best way to take care of soldiers and bring them home alive is to train them hard, and front-line units at the brigade level and below train hard with that in mind.

PFC Lynch was not assigned to such a front-line unit. She was assigned to a rear-echelon unit that likely had never done an NTC rotation, had never done a live-fire exercise, and had never done a field exercise longer than 2 weeks. Indeed, I doubt that PFC Lynch had effectively trained for combat since she graduated from basic training. The 507th certainly did not train effectively with the 3rd Infantry Division, under which it fought in Iraq. None of the 507th's officers or sergeants had experience with 3ID orders, maps, or TTPs. This lack of training and readiness was to blame, according to the Army, for the chain of events that led to the 507th being ambushed.

Jessica Lynch herself had this to say in an interview with Time Magazine:

What did they tell you to expect? "What you trained for [maintenance and supply] obviously wasn't what happened. We had to do the whole weapons qualification again to make sure that we knew how to operate a weapon, but also we did a lot of training with gas masks. In a sense we were ready, but we weren't ready for an ambush attack."

Did you feel your commanding officer had the training and equipment he needed to do his job? "Yeah, I think he did. I think it was just all a big mistake that happened. Just fatigue, sleepiness, the whole thing—we were just not prepared."

As I stated earlier, it's impossible to know whether good training and leadership would have made the difference when the 507th was ambushed. But we can certainly point to the absence of such training as a key factor in the 507th's failure to respond to its ambush. As PFC Lynch herself has said -- she didn't even get off a shot. Why? Because her weapon jammed. Why? Because it was poorly maintained and poorly lubricated and poorly cleaned. Why? Because the NCOs and officers in her unit lacked the training, experience and fieldcraft to effectively lead their soldiers in combat. The results were all too clear. If you want to fix these problems, don't take women out of these units. Make every soldier a rifleman instead, led by competent officers and NCOs who have what it takes to accomplish the mission and take care of their soldiers.

Bottom Line: PFC Lynch and her unit were not ready for combat when they went into harm's way. Too many of the soldiers in the 507th paid the price for that readiness. PFC Lynch was no front-line soldier, and she was no Rambo. But PFC Lynch was no further forward on the battlefield than thousands of other women -- women who have served ably and effectively for more than 15 years. Her ambush and capture should not be used to judge the 1994 reforms which opened up more positions to women, because frankly, those reforms had nothing to do with where PFC Lynch was on the battlefield.

If you want to draw lessons from the 507th Maintenance Company incident, you should do so. But draw those lessons from what actually happened, as reported by the Army's after-action review and its forthcoming 15-6 investigation; draw those lessons from the facts about the 1994 policy change, and how it allowed women further forward on the battlefield than ever before. But don't draw conclusions about the 1994 policy changes that let women into front-line units, when those policy changes had nothing to do with the 507th Maintenance Company or PFC Lynch. Doing so is disingenuous, and takes liberties with the facts and the policy of this matter. It also does a disservice to the thousands of women in Iraq today who have ably and effectively served their nation in uniform, and deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:43

 
John Keegan's latest work

Joseph E. Persico reviewed John Keegan's latest book this past weekend in the New York Times, titled Intelligence In War: Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. (The Times also has this excerpt from the first chapter of the book) The book looks like a must-buy for anyone interested in military history, intelligence, or operational art. (In other words, it's on my list to buy/read) Mr. Persico's review makes the book look even more appealing.

Though ''Intelligence in War'' carries the subtitle ''Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda,'' Keegan has written not a history, but several case histories, measuring the contribution that intelligence made to victory. He is put off by the romantic notion generated by espionage fact and fiction that spies somehow win battles, even wars, by ruses, pilfered secrets and cracked codes. His own conclusion, hammered home again and again, is that ''decision in war is always the result of a fight, and in combat willpower always counts for more than foreknowledge. Let those who disagree show otherwise.''

While spying is as ancient as the pharaohs, Keegan dates the beginnings of ''real time'' intelligence, that is, information obtained in sufficient time to be used, to the invention of radio. He illustrates the limitations of intelligence before then in the chapter entitled ''Chasing Napoleon,'' his case history of Admiral Nelson's 1798 zigzag hunt across the Mediterranean in search of the French fleet. Surprisingly, even in that era, information could fly -- from the Admiralty in London to the English coast in two minutes, via a chain of semaphore stations. But once the fleet put out to sea, communication vanished over the horizon. Consequently, while the Admiralty had intelligence from several sources that the French fleet was headed for Egypt to obstruct Britain's trade routes to India, no way existed to get this information into Nelson's hands in time for him to act on it. That the French fleet was finally destroyed at Alexandria after a 73-day chase had more to do with Nelson's deductive genius, Keegan says, than with the stale intelligence that was arriving from London. By World War I, however, the development of radio, as Keegan puts it, ''altered for ever the nature of war at sea,'' and on land as well. Which leads to his root question: can intelligence win rather than merely abet victories?

Keegan takes a hard look at the role of intelligence in the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II, beginning with an observation from Prime Minister Winston Churchill that ''the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.'' Was Churchill's concern justified? In the conventional telling, Allied intelligence, particularly code breakers, located German U-boat wolf packs, which Allied ships and planes then sank. This, it is said, saved Britain from strangulation. But Keegan is quite ready to sacrifice the heroic legend to the duller truth. Yes, the Allies did defeat the German U-boat fleet in the Atlantic. And yes, intelligence did play an instrumental role. But, he points out, even in 1943, the year of the biggest convoy battles, 9,097 Allied ships made it safely across the ocean, while only 139 were lost. He concludes that ''the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won without the assistance of the code breakers.''
* * *
In this latest work, Keegan has not set out to debunk intelligence. Rather he has sought to place the clandestine underbelly of war in perspective, to wrest it from the popular imagination as some sort of entertaining shortcut to victory. In the end, as he puts it, ''It is force, not fraud or forethought, that counts.'' Whatever its truth, the roots of this conviction are not hard to divine. Keegan came to military history well before he came to military intelligence, and he understands all too well the barbarous physical reality of war as contrasted to the largely cerebral battlefields of intelligence warriors. To John Keegan, warfare has always been far more blood and guts than cloak and dagger.

posted by Phillip Carter at 09:15

 
A letter from Kabul

Patrick Belton also has this report at Oxblog from his correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan, which gives a pretty interesting slice of life from a country that's largely been forgotten by the major newspapers. Interestingly, my military friends send back two kinds of e-mail. Those stuck on the major bases (e.g. Bagram Air Base) for force protection reasons write about a dreary existence, much like the movie Groundhog Day. Those allowed to move around the country, such as civil affairs officers, paint a much more dynamic and interesting picture of the country.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:47

 
Language analysis, gender and blogging

Patrick Belton has an interesting report at Oxblog on the results of a language analysis he did on several blog posts, using the internet Gender Genie. He also plugged in some female authors, including Maureen Dowd and Virginia Postrel. Suffice to say, the results were less than stellar. I imagine that an analysis of Intel Dump would look about the same, although it would certainly reflect the language used by my sources (NYT, WP, WSJ, LAT, etc) as much as my own prose.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:44

 
Mark Kleiman on Clark's ideas to enlist Saudi commandos in search for OBL

My UCLA mentor/colleague Mark Kleiman has some thoughts on the comments by retired-Gen. Wesley Clark that he would like to attach Saudi commandos to U.S. special operations units looking for Osama Bin Laden. Mark things it's a no-lose proposition, insofar as we would gain diplomatically and maybe even catch the guy.

Operationally, I'm not so sure. There is the risk of sharing too much of our special operations capabilities -- things the Saudis, Egyptians, and Pakistanis have no idea about. This is a lot like the reticence showed by spooks about revealing "sources and methods". We don't want to show countries (who aren't our really close allies like Britain or Australia) what we can do with units like the Army's Special Forces or the Navy's SEALs. A lot's been made about the "blowback" from American support for the Afghan rebels during the war with the former Soviet Union. Well, if we taught the Saudis to do special ops and then the Saudis had a regime change of their own (not an improbable thing), we'd see a whole lot of blowback.

Then there's the matter of Saudi special forces themselves. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've never heard of Saudi commandos extolled along with the great commando forces of the world, like the British Special Air Service or the Israeli commandos who took down the airliner at Entebbe. Surely, the Saudi military has some intelligence and language/cultural capabilities that we would love to add to our special operations community. But I'm not sure the Saudis could really add anything in operational terms to our own American special operations forces.

Still, this idea has some appeal. I would bet that Wes Clark got this idea from an old special ops veteran that he knows, and that it's an idea being seriously considered in the military's "black" community right now. Though a 4-star general, Clark has very little special operations experience of his own. "Good ideas" that are ill-considered tend to get people killed in this line of work, and Clark knows at least that much. I think he would have vetted this idea with some of his special ops friends before offering it up for public debate.

Update: Apparently, operational capabilities mean a lot more to the Pentagon than language or cultural abilities. The Korea Times reports that American officials are interested in deploying the South Korean special forces units known as "Sangnoksu'' to Iraq.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, will inspect South Korea's Special Forces Command Tuesday--a symbolic move indicating that the United States is eyeing the crack contingent for dispatch to Iraq.

"Gen. Myers' visit to our Special Forces Command was arranged at the request of the United States delegation to the Military Committee Meeting (MCM), which will be held on Saturday,'' a Defense Ministry official said. "The U.S. side explained it has heard much about the fame of the `Sangnoksu' unit and Gen. Myers wanted to observe it in person.''

The "Sangnoksu'' Unit, part of the Special Forces Command, was sent to newly independent East Timor for peacekeeping operations four years ago.

Experts believe the top U.S. military officer is hinting that his country wants the special forces to be sent to Iraq, since it is rare for a someone of Myers' rank tomake such an inspection.

Interesting... more to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:41

 
Did Iraq plan to fight a guerilla war all along?

Vernon Loeb and Tom Ricks suggest in Thursday's Washington Post that the Iraqi plan all along might have been to fade away in the face of the American-led onslaught, and to launch a 4th generation guerilla offensive with Iraqi troops and weapons not used to fight the Americans on the open field of battle. If true, the Iraqis are running a classic play from the insurgency playbook. As Mao wrote more than 50 years ago, the reed should bend with the wind and then snap back up again. In this case, the Iraqi reeds bent down low while American armored vehicles swept through the country, and have now begun to snap up as guerillas where they can inflict the maximum potential damage on America's efforts to build a new Iraq.

Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baath Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded this spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics.

"I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall."

In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August but then began to trend upward.

* * *

Lt. Col. Oscar Mirabile, a brigade commander credited with running a sophisticated and largely successful security operation in the Sunni Triangle town of Ramadi, agreed that the Baathist attacks were long planned.

"He released criminals out onto the streets," said Mirabile, a Miami police official and former homicide detective who commands the 1st Brigade, 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, which has been operating in Ramadi since May. "Why would anybody do that? Saddam knew he couldn't win a war head to head against coalition forces. He was setting the stage for what you're looking at right now."

Analysis: I think this article is dead on. The longer the Iraqi insurgency goes on, the more sophistication it demonstrates, and the more and more it looks like a concerted, planned, resourced effort to fight the U.S. with asymmetric means. This is no ad hoc insurgency thrown together by amateurs. Recent operations against the UN compound, the American "green zone", and other locations have shown that we are facing a well-led and well-resourced enemy with substantial intelligence and a relatively coherent operational plan.

However, it does not look like we face a hierarchical, centrally-planned and controlled enemy force. Instead, it looks like the Iraqis issued mission-style guidance to their subordinates sometime back in March or April. At a certain decision point -- the "tipping point" of American success -- the Iraqi command probably decided to activate this branch plan and fade away to fight asymmetrically. The Iraqi army cached war materiel and established a network of insurgent cells around the country -- possibly mirroring the former Iraqi Army command structure. The result is a highly decentralized, cellular, insular network of enemies that cannot be decapitated or stopped by the excision of a single cell. Indeed, this type of enemy presents itself much like the Hydra of mythological lore -- when you cut off one head, another grows in its place.

This type of Iraqi insurgency does not preclude the possibility of foreign terrorists operating inside Iraq. Indeed, this operational construct would embrace such a possibility. In the threat doctrine promulgated by the Army's intelligence community, the enemy almost always embraces some sort of terrorist or paramilitary organization to do its "wet work", and to conduct sensitive or political operations beyond the capability of its conventional forces. In the instant case, it appears that the Iraqi insurgent networks have incorporated at least some aspects of Ansar Al-Islam or Al Qaeda -- if only by embracing those groups operational doctrine and expertise. (See this LAT piece by Esther Schrader on that threat) The recent simultaneous suicide bombings, mortar and RPG attacks illustrate these common tactics, techniques and procedures. But the jury's still out as to whether Al Qaeda or Ansar Al-Islam is actually conducting operations inside Iraq.

Bottom Line: If the intel picture painted by Loeb and Ricks is shared by CFLCC and CENTCOM, it could explain the recent statements by LTG Sanchez and GEN Abizaid that they plan to resume offensive operations in Iraq. Last night, the 1st Armored Division (among other units) launched a new operation in Iraq directed at destroying this nascent insurgency. It could also explain Paul Bremer's visit to the White House this week. Fred Kaplan and Josh Marshall both seem to think that nation-building operations are about to take a back seat to a new phase of combat operations. If it's true that we're facing a planned Iraqi insurgency of this magnitude, that may be the right thing to do.

Update I: The insurgency may be working in at least one sense: it's isolating America from our allies and keeping a number of nations from sending troops to Iraq. Korea has stalled its deployment of a brigade to support the American-led occupation of Iraq, and now Japan has balked too. The deteriorating security situation in Iraq continues to deter nations who are interested in nation building -- but unwilling to incur casualties -- from joining our effort in Iraq. At this rate, the Iraqi insurgency may succeed simply by exhausting the American military's force structure (we can't occupy Iraq indefinitely with our current force structure) and preventing our allies from helping out. Of course, a political change in the U.S. could change this calculus, particularly if a committed multilateralist like Wes Clark were elected. But this appears to be the Iraqi end game: inflict casualties and cause chaos for as long as it takes to exhaust America.

Update II: GEN Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, estimates that America faces roughly 5,000 insurgents in Iraq, according to the LA Times. The CENTCOM commander also paints this fight in terms very similar to those in the Ricks & Loeb piece quoted above:

"The goal of the enemy is not to defeat us militarily," Gen. John Abizaid said at a news conference in Baghdad today. "The goal of the enemy is to break the will of the United States of America, to make us leave."
. . .

"People will say, 'Well, that's a very small number," Abizaid said. "But when you understand that they're organized in cellular structure, that they have a brutal and determined cadre, that they know how to operate covertly, they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are."
. . .

In order to defeat the guerrillas, the general said the key is gathering information so U.S. forces can preempt their plans to "split the coalition." But Abizaid said he agrees that U.S. plans in Iraq ultimately will succeed.

"There is no doubt in my mind that with patience, perseverance and courage," he said, "we will see this thing through."

Right. The question presented by this latest escalation in violence is whether tactical actions by the Iraqi insurgents will inflict such losses so as to diminish the American public's "patience, perseverance and courage". This, in turn, will create political pressure to minimize casualties at the cost of mission accomplishment, placing the imperative of force protection over mission accomplishment. Over time, this will translate into political pressure to withdraw from Iraq entirely. The only way to forestall that strategy is for the White House to justify these sacrifices to the American public. In Churchillian fashion, we must let our enemies know that we will pursue victory at any cost. Only then will the Iraqi insurgency's strategy fail.

Update III: Another tea leaf has been uncovered today that points toward the resumption of major combat operations in Iraq. According to ABC News, GEN John Abizaid has directed CENTCOM to deploy a major headquarters element to Doha, Qatar, where GEN Tommy Franks operated during the war earlier this year.

By moving his headquarters back to Doha, Qatar, Abizaid will be able to move in and out of the war zone, making it easier for him to keep track of the situation, the sources said. He will also be in the same time zone, allowing him and his staff to act more quickly on intelligence, the sources added.

Since taking command of U.S. Central Command, which covers the Middle East, in July, Abizaid has run the Iraq war from CENTCOM's permanent base in Tampa, Fla.

Abizaid has made frequent trips to the region — a grueling 7,000-mile commute across the Atlantic Ocean. The arrangement will allow U.S. officials more planning and operation capabilities.

Although Abizaid's predecessor, Gen. Tommy Franks, left Qatar on May 1, the day after Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over, Doha never officially closed as a headquarters. It is considered a "split headquarters," along with Tampa.

The move to Qatar will involve about 400 people on the CENCTOM staff, and they are expected to be there at least two months.

Update IV: The Washington Post reports that the Army has uncovered a large Iraqi weapons cache in Tikrit and captured or killed a number of Iraqi guerillas in its renewed offensive. This appears to be a tactical success, and will certainly help the coalition reverse the deteriorating security situation.
posted by Phillip Carter at 05:42

 
The changing definition of American heroism in battle

Tuesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) had an excellent article by Jonathan Eig on the daring wartime exploits of Captain Zan Hornbuckle of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. The article makes the point that while you've heard of PFC Jessica Lynch -- and probably heard many describe her as a hero -- you probably haven't heard about many heroic warriors like CPT Hornbuckle, whose actions were credited with turning the tide at a key point in the battle for Baghdad.

Capt. Hornbuckle's name has never appeared in a newspaper or on television. He has received no book deals, no movie offers, no trips to Disneyland. In September, when he went to see his parents in Tifton, Ga., his mother called the local Holiday Inn and asked the manager to put her son's name -- he goes by Zan -- on the hotel marquee. That has been his most public recognition so far.

He is one of several soldiers who rose to extraordinary heights on the battlefield in Iraq, received honors from the military and returned home to anonymity. Instead, the best-known soldier of the Iraq War is Jessica Lynch, who suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked. She was rescued from an Iraqi hospital a week later.

The rescue and initial reports -- later discredited -- that the 19-year-old had survived bullet and stab wounds and continued fighting helped make her a celebrity. Stores in her hometown of Palestine, W.Va., sold T-shirts with her name on them. Volunteers planted a new garden in front of her house. Alfred A. Knopf, the publishing house, signed her to a $1 million book deal. "Saving Jessica Lynch," a TV movie about her plight, was broadcast Sunday.

Why did she become the individual celebrated in popular culture and not one of the other men and women who distinguished themselves in combat? The answer lies on the home front as much as on the battlefield.

In World War I, Cpl. Alvin York gained fame for killing 25 Germans and capturing 132. In World War II, Second Lt. Audie Murphy was credited with 240 kills and went on to star in the movie "To Hell and Back," which told the story of his bravery.

Military culture still celebrates the soldier who racks up a high body count. But since the Vietnam War, much of the country has tended to venerate survivors more than aggressors, the injured more than those who inflict injuries.

"People didn't want to view Vietnam vets as heroes," says Army Sgt. Scott Hansen, 56, who served as a helicopter-door gunner in Vietnam and won a Bronze Star with a V for valor for his conduct last year in Afghanistan. "I think people went there to survive -- put in their time and move on."

Many modern war memorials, most notably the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, don't include guns at all. In the 1990s, Hasbro Inc. marketed some of its G.I. Joe action figures as "Eco-Warriors" who fought the destruction of the environment. These days, when Hollywood makes a war movie, it often focuses on saving American lives -- "Saving Private Ryan," "Black Hawk Down," "Behind Enemy Lines" -- not killing others.

* * *

. . . the military today has some discomfort with the stories of individual soldiers. Asked why the Army didn't do more to publicize Capt. Hornbuckle's feats, Richard Olson, a public-affairs officer for Capt. Hornbuckle's battalion, says the thought never occurred to him. "An aspect of a soldier is that he's trained to kill," he says. "And I don't know that the public is comfortable with that."

"There's a funny shift," says John A. Lynn, who teaches military history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We want to fight wars but we don't want any of our people to die and we don't really want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a hero even if she doesn't do much. She suffered for us."

Analysis: I think this story nails it on the head. Our society has changed a great deal since WWI (when Alvin York was called a hero), WWII (when Audie Murphy earned the same title), or even Vietnam. We live in an age when merely serving in uniform sets one apart from the crowd. Survivorship is something which is exalted. We call PFC Lynch a hero even though she did not do anything particularly valorous or heroic in the tragic 507th Maintenance Company ambush, which left her grievously wounded. We call her a hero because of what she suffered through while in captivity. While her acts were certainly courageous, they can be distinguished from the type of heroism and valor demonstrated by CPT Hornbuckle, and prized by warriors throughout the ages.

On some level, every man or woman who serves in uniform is a hero, because they have volunteered to serve in a job that could place them in harm's way. On another level, every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine who deploys to war and does his/her job is a hero. And on a final level, we can certainly exalt those who made the ultimate sacrifice as heroes. But all of these definitions depart from that of warriors throughout history, who have defined heroism as something different; something that goes above and beyond the call of duty.

There are those situations, such as the battle for Objectives Larry, Moe and Curly, or other engagements, where every soldier steps up to perform in a heroic manner. Admiral Chester Nimitz said it best when he said that "[a]mong the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue." From what I've read of that terrible island battle, Admiral Nimitz was certainly correct in his assessment. Similar comments can probably be made about other battles, from Little Round Top in 1863 to Shah-i-kot Valley in 2002. But in most situations, I think we lose something when we devalue the word "hero", and use it to describe the masses. Heroes are something special; they provide an inspiration and an example for us. We should keep it that way, and reserve this label for only the most deserving acts.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:14

 
Book recommendation

There aren't many non-fiction books that you can start and finish on a cross-country flight. The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism is one of them. Despite the ominous title, this is not a series of tirades against John Ashcroft or the Bush Administration -- it's a series of moderate, well-written, well-researched essays in each aspect of the legal war on terrorism. I liked it so much that I plan to assign it for my class on American Law & Terrorism next quarter. If you're looking for a one-stop-shop book that covers everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to FISA to 18 U.S.C. 2339b, this is it.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:48

 
Air Force sends forward non-capital charges against Gitmo interpreter

Senior Airman Ahmad I. Al Halabi will face non-capital charges before a general court-martial at Travis Air Force Base in California, according to the Air Force. Some of the charges were dismissed against Airman Halabi. The most important part of this news release is that the Air Force will not seek the death penalty for Airman Halabi, as it theoretically could have done under the UCMJ articles for espionage and aiding the enemy.

Charges referred include seven specifications alleging the accused failed to obey a lawful general order or regulation in violation of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ); one specification alleging the accused aided the enemy in violation of Article 104; four specifications alleging espionage in violation of Article 106a; five specifications alleging the accused made false official statements in violation of Article 107; two specifications charged under Article 134 alleging the accused willfully retained documents without authority in violation of 18 U.S.C. 793; and one specification charged under Article 134 alleging the accused executed a fraudulent credit application scheme in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1344.

Charges against Senior Airman Al Halabi that were dismissed include four specifications alleging the accused failed to obey a lawful general order or regulation in violation of Article 92; one specification alleging the accused aided the enemy in violation of Article 104; four specifications alleging the accused made false official statements in violation of Article 107; and one specification charged under Article 134 alleging a violation of 18 U.S.C. 793.
* * *
Senior Airman Al Halabi was on temporary duty at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba, for nine months serving as a translator at the time of the alleged offenses. He was apprehended at Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Fla., July 23, and was transported to his home station, Travis AFB the next day. He is currently being held in pretrial confinement at Vandenberg AFB, Calif.

Analysis: Despite the dismissal of certain charges and command decision to forgo the death penalty, I still think these are serious charges. Airman Halabi may still spend the rest of his life behind bars for the crimes he is alleged to have committed. We have no way of knowing -- based on the information that's been made public -- how much damage he did to America's national security at Guantanamo Bay. Presumably, that kind of evidence will be part of the trial in this case, and the members of Airman Halabi's military jury will have to weigh the facts of those crimes in determining whether he should be found guilty or not. Even then, we (the public) may never learn of these facts, if they are considered too sensitive to release to the public that they remain classified for the duration of the trial. We'll see.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:34

 
1,300 reservists allege job discrimination after demobilization

The Washington Post carries this disturbing report today on complaints filed with the Department of Labor by soldiers who allege discriminatory treatment by employers upon their return from duty. Mobilized reservists enjoy the protection of two major laws -- the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. More than 1,300 reservists have filed complaints with the Department of Labor saying their employers may have violated those laws, up from 900 in 2001.

Concerned about the rise in complaints, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao has released a televised public service announcement reminding employers that they must reinstate workers called to military duty. "They did their job -- now let's do ours," Chao says.

Under a 1994 law, it is illegal to discriminate against military personnel mobilized for duty. Returning personnel are supposed to be allowed to return to their same, or a comparable job, complete with any pay raises or promotions they might have otherwise received if they had remained at work.

The United States has become increasingly reliant on National Guard and reserve forces, which now make up about half of the U.S. military personnel in Iraq. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 306,000 Reserve and Guardsmen have been mobilized, including about 163,000 now on active duty.

For the most part, employers across the country have been generous in dealing with their National Guard and reserve employees, officials said. Hundreds of firms have begun making up the pay difference between their military and civilian pay, according to Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, and many offer health benefits as well.

In about one-third of the cases filed in the past year, reserve and guard personnel said they missed out on jobs and promotions as a result of their mobilization, and about 20 percent said they weren't reinstated in their jobs. The rest of the cases involve vacation, seniority and pension issues, Labor Department officials said.

The department referred 79 of the cases to the Department of Justice for possible civil prosecution. A Justice spokesman said the department couldn't determine whether any lawsuits have resulted from the recent complaints. The U.S. attorney in Denver has filed two lawsuits on behalf of National Guard and reserve forces in the past six months.

Analysis: These two laws provide a lot of protections for active-duty and reserve soldiers, including protection from creditors and employers while overseas. But the protection is imperfect, as this story illustrates. The USERRA in particular contains loopholes through which employers can restructure themselves to eliminate jobs, or take other measures which have an adverse impact on the soldier. At the end of the day, our soldiers pay a heavy price for their decisions to serve in the military, especially those with jobs in the private sector. If we want reservists who are able to make a good living as civilians and serve their country as part-time warriors, we need to take a hard look at these legal protections and see if they need adjustment for today's reservists. The laws were written at a time when a major mobilization was only expected in the case of another world war -- that's no longer the case. Today's reservist must live with constant mobilizations, and I think these legal protections are probably insufficient for that situation.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:50

 
Veterans taking care of veterans

The Washington Post carries a moving report this morning about a group of older veterans of past wars who have taken it upon themselves to greet American soldiers coming home on leave from Iraq through Baltimore-Washington International airport. Many of these men are Vietnam veterans who want to ensure that these men face a better homecoming than they received.

"Welcome back. Good to have you home," said Bill Self, a Vietnam War veteran, extending his hand to each soldier arriving for two weeks of home leave. Beyond him, a second line of veterans was waiting with telephone cards allowing the soldiers to make free calls across the country.

At the end of the gantlet stood Ray Shipley, 75, a Korean War veteran from Bowie who served in both the Army and Air Force. He knew that every second of leave is precious and wanted to make sure the soldiers didn't waste it sitting in an airport. Like the old buck sergeant he is, Shipley hurried them off to the appropriate ticket agent.

"They only have 15 days, and that time starts as soon as they get off the airplane," he said.

He spotted a soldier dragging a green duffle bag. "Hey, sarge, come on over here. Welcome home, buddy. Where you going? . . . Chicago? See the man here. He'll get you there in a couple of hours -- or less."

With polls showing rising doubt at home about the wisdom of the Iraqi war, the veterans who show up every morning to greet the troops at Baltimore-Washington International say their mission is to make sure the returning soldiers know that they still have the support of Americans.

"These guys are fighting over there, and there are all these arguments. Somebody should tell these guys, 'Hey, you're fighting for us, and we appreciate it,' " Shipley said. "It's not their fault that we get in the predicaments that governments put us into."

It is a lesson some of the veterans know well. Self is a former Navy corpsman who served with the 3rd Marine Division in Da Nang in 1965 and 1966.

"I went through the same thing in Vietnam," Self, 74, said. "There wasn't anyone to see me when I got home, so we're here to make sure that doesn't happen again."

posted by Phillip Carter at 06:41

 
Older veterans who hold their own

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article this morning about a couple of older gentlemen serving in the Florida Army National Guard -- and now fighting in Iraq. Warfare has historically been a young man's endeavor, largely for the physical toll it exacts on the body. But these men are proving that they're tough enough to hang in there.

A few days ago, resting on his cot after a nighttime patrol in the brutal streets of Baghdad, [Sgt. James] Flores, a grandfather, sat bolt upright: "It hit me all of a sudden. I said, 'Oh, Lord, I turn 50 tomorrow.' I never thought in my lifetime that I'd be at war at that age."

With his birthday, which he celebrated on another patrol, Flores dashed the notion that war belongs to only the young and joined a minority of servicemen and women who, at 50 and above, have gone to battle.

Fewer than 1% of U.S. troops are in the 50-to-59-year-old bracket, which makes up 12% of the nation's population.

While it is not unusual for senior officers and noncommissioned officers to achieve "senior citizen" status in the military — Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition troops in Iraq, is 52 — Flores is still one of the foot soldiers, pulling guard duty, eating MREs, staying in shape and, as best he can, thinking young.

"To tell you the truth, I don't see much difference between what I do and what a 19-year-old does," said Flores, who works two jobs as a cook back home in Kissimmee. "I passed the annual PT [physical training] test, and I saw some 22-year-olds who couldn't. That made me feel really proud."
* * *
In Iraq, Staff Sgt. Paul Stevens, 52, thought for a moment about his age, then said, "Well, some people tell me I may be the oldest squad gunner — machine gunner — in the infantry." He quickly added that he relished duty with the Florida National Guard here.

"This is why I stayed in the reserves," said Stevens, who's in Iraq with Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 124th Infantry. "To serve. It's an honor for me to serve at this age."

A two-tour Vietnam veteran who rejoined the military after 13 years as a civilian so he could fight in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Stevens knows Charlie Company's younger soldiers view him with a touch of awe.

"The way this thing is going," said a 19-year-old specialist eyeing Stevens, "I may be as old as he is by the time I get out of Iraq."

"We figured we'd be guarding a Patriot site or something," Stevens said. "But we got lucky and got assigned to the Special Forces, training in Jordan for pilot rescue. It was a lot of night training. The terrain was terrible, like walking on the moon. You'd fall over stones, hit the ground, roll and get up and go on. With my machine gun, 600 rounds of ammunition and body armor, I figure I was carrying 80 or 100 pounds.

"Sometimes I was really hurting. But the younger guys were hurting worse. Some of them broke and had to drop out. I never got to that point. Sure, the younger guys kind of joke about my age. But that doesn't bother me at all. I think it's pretty cool. Just like I think it's pretty cool we crossed the berm into Iraq two days before the war started."

posted by Phillip Carter at 06:36

 
Veterans Day message from Intel Dump

Veterans Day is always a solemn occasion to reflect on and to show our gratitude for those who have fought to preserve the freedoms all Americans enjoy today.

This day was designated as "Armistice Day" after World War I to pay tribute to those who served in that war. This holiday was originally commemorated on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to mark the anniversary of the agreement which ended WWI. In 1954, the day's significance was expanded by Congress to honor all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, coast guardsmen, and merchant marines who have worn our Nation's uniform. By pausing to remember, we recognize the many diverse and difficult circumstances that our Veterans have faced. However, no matter what the time or the uniform, they are united by the same ideals: life and liberty, peace and prosperity, service and sacrifice.

There are currently more than 25 million living American veterans, many of whom put their lives on the line to preserve our freedoms. Through each of these challenges, the members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard have protected our country and liberated millions of people around the world from the threats of tyranny and terror.

On the observance of Veterans Day in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on all citizens to not only remember "the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly..." but also to rededicate themselves "to the task of promoting an enduring peace...." Today, almost 50 years later, we remember the dedication of our veterans, and resolve ourselves to upholding their legacy of justice, liberty, and opportunity for all.

I ask that you set aside a moment this Veterans Day to remember the service and sacrifices of American veterans, past and present.

(I cobbled this message together from past messages sent by the President and JCS Chairman to send to the UCLA law school student body and faculty.)
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:20

 
Supreme Court grants cert to Gitmo cases

The AP reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a pair of cases arising from America's detention of more than 600 men at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They are currently held there as "unlawful enemy combatants", just outside the reach of the 3rd Geneva Convention, but with most of the humanitarian protections found in that document. The narrow question presented by these appeals is whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear the appeals from these men.

The appeals came from British, Australian and Kuwaiti citizens held with more than 600 others suspected of being Taliban or al-Qaida foot soldiers. The court combined the appeals and will hear the consolidated case sometime next year.

Lower courts had found that the American civilian court system did not have authority to hear the men's complaints about their treatment.

"The United States has created a prison on Guantanamo Bay that operates entirely outside the law," lawyers for British and Australian detainees argued in asking the high court to take the case.

"Within the walls of this prison, foreign nationals may be held indefinitely, without charges or evidence of wrongdoing, without access to family, friends or legal counsel, and with no opportunity to establish their innocence," they maintained.

The men whose names are on that case do not even know about the lawsuit, lawyers from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights told the court. The lawsuit brought on their behalf claims they are not al-Qaida members and and no involvement in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Bush administration replied that a lower federal appeals court properly looked to a Supreme Court case arising from World War II to determine that foreigners held outside the United States cannot bring the kind of court challenge at issue now. The 1950 case said German prisoners detained by the United States in China had no right to access to federal courts.

The Guantanamo base is a 45-square-mile area on the southeastern tip of Cuba. The land was seized by the United States in the Spanish-American War and has been leased from Cuba for the past century. The lease far predates the communist rule of Fidel Castro.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had rejected the detainees' claim that Guantanamo Bay is under the de facto control of the United States, even though it remains a part of Cuba.

Solicitor General Theodore Olson, whose wife was killed aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, told the court that the prisoners' lawsuit has great "potential for interference with the core war powers of the president."

President Bush (news - web sites) has recommended that six of the Guantanamo detainees, including Australian David Hicks, be the first to face military tribunals established for the global war on terror.

Analysis: As with nearly every Supreme Court case, the real issue is whether the Court will decide this case narrowly or broadly. If the court rules narrowly on the jurisdictional question alone, that may not necessarily derail the Bush Administration's legal strategy for dealing with detainees in the war on terrorism. Moreover, such a narrow legal ruling might not affect the detentions of U.S. citizens at U.S. military prisons, such as Jose Padilla. However, if the Court decides to issue a sweeping decision (a'la Lawrence v. Texas) addressing all aspects of the war on terrorism, then I think this could be significant. In this decision, the Court will have the opportunity to hear and address many aspects of the war on terrorism, and the larger question of balancing liberty with security. If the Court takes the opportunity to address those larger questions, then this could really be a monumental decision.

What are the odds that they'll do that? I don't know. But my hunch is that the Court will seize this opportunity to issue a decision larger than the facts of this case. In a Q&A session I attended last year at the Reagan Library, Justice Anthony Kennedy hinted that he felt such issues would ultimately be decided by his court. Also, there appears to be a circuit split growing between the 2nd Circuit and 4th Circuit on the issues of unlawful combatants and access to counsel, among other issues. The law in this area is somewhat messy and outdated, and the Court may want to clarify its precedent for lower circuits. In the end, I still can only make an educated guess, but I think the court will issue a broad holding in this case when they ultimately decide it.

Will Justice Rehnquist have to recuse himself from this vote? I'm not all that clear about the rules of judicial conduct as they apply to justices of the Supreme Court. But there is an argument to be made that the conservative Chief Justice might have to step down for this case because of his past writings on civil liberties in wartime. Justice Rehquist is the recent author of All the Liberties But One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. To some extent, I think his research and writing in this area reveals some bias on the issue, and his bias appears to be against the petition in this case. If Justice Scalia recused himself for his remarks on religion and the state, then I think there's at least an argument to be made that Justice Rehnquist should recuse himself on this case. We'll see.

Update I: Robert Greenberger and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) correct one of my statements about the breadth of this decision to grant cert. The Supreme Court will only look at the narrower question of whether the courts have jurisdiction to hear petitions from prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay. The Court's order limits the case to "[w]hether United States courts lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba."

In accepting the case, the Supreme Court limited its review to whether federal courts have any jurisdiction over Guantanamo, rather than some of the broader legal issues raised by the detentions. Mr. Ratner said the court may "look at this as a Guantanamo vs. Bagram question," referring to the Afghan military base where the U.S. also detains and interrogates suspected terrorists.

So...we're not likely to get a major decision about the balance between liberty and security, or something which might apply to the Padilla and Hamdi cases. However, this decision will certainly impact the American decision to detain men at Guantanamo Bay. Suffice to say, it would be a major complication for the administration if prisoners there were allowed to bring suit in federal court to challenge their detention. My prediction echoes that made by Eugene Volokh -- the Court will likely follow Johnson v. Eisentrager and hold that enemy combatants outside the United States do not have the right to petition for habeas corpus in U.S. courts. But this case could easily go another way.

Update II: The Washington Post's article on the Supreme Court's decision to hear this case has a couple of interesting links on the right side of the page:

• Defendants' Web Site
• Guantanamo Bay Defendants
• Kuwaiti Detainees

To which I'd like to add the Pentagon's official site for Military Commissions, and the Findlaw.Com repository of documents from the war on terrorism. The latter is probably the best repository for primary legal documents on terrorism.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:52

 
Admin note: I am in the middle of grading undergraduate exams this week and several other projects, so I'll be away from my news feed for most of the day. Please check back infrequently over the next few days, and come back for regular analysis & commentary on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. Thanks.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:01

 
Pentagon calls up 43,000 reservists for duty in Iraq
Active-duty, Marine contingents also alerted for deployment

The New York Times reports this morning on an alert order issued by the Pentagon yesterday to reserve and National Guard units around the country, letting them know they will be going to Iraq. 397 units in nearly every state are affected by this order, which includes both combat troops (such as infantry and armor) and support units (such as logistics and communications).

Pentagon planners have sought to limit additional call-ups of National Guard and Reserve forces beyond combat units identified months ago, but ultimately realized that, at the very least, logistics units would be required in the next rotation.

Military planners say the United States could deploy a slightly smaller but still sizable force in Iraq by tailoring the replacement troops to the mission now facing the American-led occupation. For example, they said, the plan calls for swapping tank-heavy armored divisions for units that put more foot soldiers in Iraq. The proposal also takes account of plans to accelerate the training and fielding of Iraq's own security forces to more than 200,000 personnel next year.

The administration has failed to win new commitments of foreign troops for Iraq beyond the two multinational divisions serving there. Mr. Rumsfeld is ordering two brigades, or about 20,000 active-duty marines, from the First Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, Calif., to help fill the gap left by departing Army forces. It will be the first time since the Vietnam War that large numbers of marines, traditionally an expeditionary force, will serve long-term duty for a military operation.

Joining that marine force will be one brigade, or about 7,000 soldiers, from the Army's 25th Infantry Division, based in Hawaii.
* * *
Of the 43,000 whose units are being alerted, more than 37,000 are Army Reserve and National Guard troops. The remainder are Marine reservists. In addition, the Pentagon is telling about 2,000 Air Force personnel and about 1,000 Navy personnel they could be going to Iraq or Kuwait.

To fulfill the requirement of serving a full year on the ground, those troops actually mobilized may serve up to 18 months, including training and leave.

Analysis: This is a large chunk of the reserve force. Here in California, this deployment is tapping into a unit which has not deployed for combat since the Korean War. When you add up Operation Noble Eagle (homeland security) deployments, Balkans deployments, and other missions, you soon see that we have run through a very significant portion of the reserve force. What's left is basically a hollow shell of a force. Moreover, each deployment since Sept. 11 has tended to decimate the units called up. After being called away from their jobs and families, thousands of reservists have decided not to re-up for more time in the reserves. And the cycle goes on and on.

America's reserve force is a precious resource. It has done yeoman's work since the end of the Cold War in supporting the active force and in deploying itself for missions like Bosnia and Kosovo. But if we continue down this road, we will absolutely destroy the reserve force and render it mission incapable. I'm not sure the mission in Iraq is worth that price. However, I'm not sure what the answer is. We're committed to the Iraq mission now, and short of conscription, there's no other way to make ends meet than with reserve forces. But we should start developing mitigation plans to ensure that in 3-5 years, we'll still have a reserve force capable of doing something. Whether that means additional educational benefits or VA benefits for reservists, or additional reenlistment bonuses, we should probably do it.

Update: Even the Pentagon acknowledges the "challenges" in managing our reserve forces for the Iraq mission. "Challenges" is a great euphemism. It's a way to say something is incredibly difficult while still sounding positive about the endeavor. That's the kind of "can do" attitude I'm used to seeing in the military officer corps, and I'm not surprised to see it in the upper ranks of the Pentagon. However, I would add that some challenges are more challenging than others, and that this issue (management of reserve forces) will be a really tough nut to crack. A positive attitude can help, but it will only do so much.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:30

 
NYT: Iraq tried last-minute diplomatic effort to avoid war
Update: Is this story really what it appears -- or is it more smoke & mirrors?

James Risen has a startling report about Iraqi efforts to engage in back-channel diplomacy via influential DoD adviser Richard Perle to avoid war. The lengthy article describes the networks used to make the contacts, what was said, and how the U.S. responded to the Iraqi requests for more diplomacy.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. They also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, the intermediary said in an interview, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed by the intermediary in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved in the discussion.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of Saddam Hussein, according to interviews and documents.

The overtures, following a decade of evasions and deceptions and a number of other attempts to broker last-minute meetings with American officials, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages from Baghdad raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage. According to both men, Mr. Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Mr. Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr. Perle or another representative of the United States.

"I was dubious that this would work," Mr. Perle said, "but I agreed to talk to people in Washington."

Mr. Perle said he sought authorization from officials of the Central Intelligence Agency to meet with the Iraqis.

Mr. Perle said the C.I.A. officials said they did not want to pursue this channel and indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Mr. Perle said the response was simple: "The message was, `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.' "

Analysis: I think there are two basic ways to look at this. Either the Iraqis were trying to delay the conflict via diplomacy, in order to shape the outcome by engaging in more defensive preparation. Or the U.S. was trying to deny the Iraqis that opportunity by spurning diplomacy after it had committed to war. My gut tells me that these are not mutually exclusive, and that both interpretations are probably correct. This may all be a moot point. But my gut also tells me that a little bit more time would have helped us now in Phase IV, by allowing us to put more troops on the ground and lay the groundwork more for the post-war phase of the operation.

Update: Josh Marshall is more skeptical than I am about this story, given a line that's buried far down in the story about the leaker's motivation for speaking with the Times. Here's the all-important paragraph:

Senior Pentagon officials said Mr. Durnan relayed messages he received from Mr. Maloof to the appropriate officials at the Pentagon, but they said that Mr. Durnan never discussed the Hage channel to the Iraqis with Mr. Wolfowitz. (In May, Mr. Maloof, who has lost his security clearances, was placed on paid administrative leave by the Pentagon, for reasons unrelated to the contacts with Mr. Hage.) [emphasis added]

Josh is very savvy about these things. (I consider him to be one of the smarter reporters inside the Beltway.) Here's his analysis of this story and how it "leaked" to the press:

Let's say I'm a career defense bureaucrat struggling to get my security clearances restored because it's very hard for me to be a defense bureaucrat without them. And let's say one of the reasons I can't get them restored is because of some unauthorized contacts I had with a Lebanese-American businessman under investigation for running guns to Liberia. And let's further add to the mix that my whole mess with the security clearances is part of a larger struggle between different factions in the national intelligence bureaucracy. Oh, and one last thing: let's say I'm a protégé of Richard Perle.

Okay.

Now, if I'm on the line for these unauthorized contacts with the gun-running businessman, wouldn't it be a lot harder to punish me for it if it looked like that contact almost allowed me to secure a deal that would have averted the need for war?

And if that's the case, wouldn't it be cool if my buddies and mentors went to the press with the story of how I almost saved the day?

If true, this certainly diminishes both the newsworthiness and veracity of this story. Unfortunately, like the recent Rumsfeld memo that was leaked to the public, it's getting hard to see through all the smoke and mirrors to what the truth actually is. I'd like to take newspapers like the New York Times at something close to face value, because I rely on accurate news from prestigious sources for information that shapes my view of the world. Unfortunately, this incident and others makes it clear that I can't afford to rely on any one source of news -- and indeed, that I do so at my own peril.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:49

 
1st Armored learns to act like CIA-police hybrid in Iraq
"Everyone is an intelligence officer . . . everyone you come in contact with [has] intelligence value"

Vernon Loeb has an interesting article in today's Washington Post on the exploits of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, and its efforts to develop intelligence sources in the neighborhood of Baghdad. The tactics look less like those of an armored division and more like those of an intelligence agency, or a very street-savvy police department.

When the 4-27 Field Artillery started patrolling parts of north Baghdad in late May and June -- McKiernan did not take command until July -- its 535 soldiers found themselves under almost constant attack.

The violence reached a zenith on July 3, when a patrol was ambushed on Haifa Street, the main thoroughfare in Karkh, by Iraqis who fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a Humvee and then opened fire with automatic weapons. Three U.S. troops were wounded, two Iraqi bystanders were killed in the crossfire, and 14 were injured.

Maj. Michael S. Patton, the unit's operations officer, was trying to secure the area immediately after the shooting when his interpreter told him a man in the crowd had some information for him. Patton sent his interpreter back to tell the man he was going to pretend to arrest him, so that no one would suspect he was passing information.

Back at the base camp, the informant, a cigarette vendor in his mid-forties who has lived in the neighborhood all his life, told Patton who carried out the attack -- and Patton's troops quickly nabbed him.

The episode made Patton understand who held the key to the battle: Iraqis in the neighborhood. It also was the start of a beautiful relationship. To date, the cigarette vendor has delivered 35 Iraqi resistance fighters to the Americans. "The guy," said Patton, 37, a cigar-smoking Oklahoman, "has been a gold mine."

Analysis: The article goes on to say that the 2nd Brigade's commander learned these tactics, in part, from his experience teaching at the British Military Academy at Sandhurst. These methods reflect hard-won British experience in Northern Ireland, which was built on centuries of colonial and constabulary experience. What's interesting is to see how the U.S. melds this experience with the American army's unique technological edge and experience in the Balkans. The result seems to be better operations that are driven by intelligence. If every unit in Iraq does this kind of thing, they should soon be able to penetrate the guerilla cells responsible for recent attacks on American forces. The key to penetrating those cells is developing HUMINT capabilities -- mostly Iraqis -- who are willing to work for us instead of the other side. Doing so will take a lot of work and a long time, and it won't be something the media can cover. But it will be effective in the long run. This kind of intelligence is absolutely critical for fighting a 4th Generation War, and we will lose without it.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:36

 
Allies' concerns delay military tribunals

After a report last week that military tribunals were "imminent," the New York Daily News reports today that several American allies have expressed political concerns over the process which may affect their citizens.

Britain, Australia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt and Yemen want their people being held in Camp Delta at the U.S. base in Cuba sent home for trial or released.

Many of the 660 detainees were scooped up in Afghanistan during the early months of the war to oust the Taliban and hunt down Osama Bin Laden.

The Pentagon is in negotiations with Britain over two Britons and an Australian at Gitmo.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has taken more flak at home over the issue than President Bush does from Democrats, complained one foreign official. The U.S. now says the three suspects won't face the death penalty.

"It's obviously not a legal question but more of a strategic political reason for [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz and [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld," said a former administration official familiar with the 2001 order that created the controversial tribunals.

Wolfowitz wants to keep Pakistan happy, according to two former Bush officials. Since breaking with the Taliban, Pakistan has nabbed dozens of Al Qaeda, including 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Analysis: It's more than keeping Pakistan happy, although that's part of it. Each of these countries has provided some aid in our war on terrorism, whether it's troops for Afghanistan or intelligence information. I imagine that if push comes to shove, and the administration is forced to decide between tribunals and our allies, they'll choose our allies. But we'll see.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:26