News analysis and commentary from Phillip Carter -- now located at http://www.intel-dump.com

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Atrocities in Fallujah
Iraqi insurgents kill American contractors, then defile and display their bodies

Iraqi insurgents escalated the war of violence and images today by attacking a U.S. government contractor convoy in Fallujah, extracting the bodies of the killed Americans, and defiling them in full view of the mob and media present. In images reminiscent of Somalia, the mob towed one body throughthe street, burned others, beat one with a metal pole, and strung up two full corpses and other body parts from a bridge across the Euphrates. Also today, five Army combat engineers who were attached to the Marines also killed by an IED, according to the LA Times. (Correction: I double-counted the IED casualties earlier today due to conflicting reports.)

Every major news outlet -- NYT, WSJ, CNN, WP, LAT -- is running this as their top story right now, and they all have the graphic images displayed on their respective websites so you too can see the horror. Here's how Edmund Sanders of the LA Times described events in Fallujah:

The two burgundy SUVs were attacked at a stoplight with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades around 9:30 a.m. in Fallouja, a Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad and the scene of some of the worst violence since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

Iraqis threw rocks and bricks at the cars, and mutilated some of the bodies with shovels and poles. At least two bodies were dragged behind cars through the streets and taken to the Euphrates River, where they were hung from a bridge.

Chants of "We will kill the Americans" sounded in the street.

For hours there was no military at the scene; the few Iraqi police seen did not stop the events.

CNN added these gory details about the treatment of the Americans' bodies after the attack:

Cheering residents in Fallujah pulled charred bodies from burning vehicles and hung them from a Euphrates River bridge.

Crowds gathered around the vehicles and dragged at least one of the bodies through the streets, witnesses said.

Residents pulled another body from one of the cars and beat it with sticks.

Finally, Jeff Gettleman of the New York Times puts the attack in the context of recent U.S. operations in Fallujah:

... [American] generals have been saying that their main focus in the conflict has shifted to Islamic terrorists who they believe to have been responsible for many suicide bombings and other attacks on the Iraqi police, civilians and foreigners. These attacks, they say, have effectively carried the Iraqi conflict into a new landscape that makes the fighting here part of the worldwide war on terrorism.

But today's events at Falluja indicate that the war may not have changed as much as the generals have suggested.

The fact that the attack on the civilian vehicles occurred in Falluja, an overwhelming Sunni city that is the most volatile stronghold of support for Mr. Hussein, and that it followed a 10-day offensive by United States marines aimed at gaining effective control of the city, suggested that the current war may, in practice, be an extension of the conflict that began last year.

Capt. Chris Logan of the Marine Corps said today that the city was becoming "an area of greater concern."

He added: "This is one of those areas in Iraq that is definitely squirrely. The guerrillas in Falluja are testing us. They're testing our resolve."

In a modulation of their assessments in recent days, the generals had begun to say that there may be a merging of diehard loyalists to Mr. Hussein and Islamic militants, with the two groups at least loosely coordinating their attacks.

Analysis: Capt. Logan is certainly right about one thing: this attack is designed to test American resolve. Insurgents and terrorists around the world have incorporated the lessons of Mogadishu into their doctrine. Indeed, they have an almost religious belief that they can win if they inflict grievous and gory casualties on American soldiers. Such a strategy is designed to undermine our national will; it assumes that we don't really have the stomach for this fight or its cost, and that we will pull out at the first sign of adversity. Unfortunately, the U.S. did that once. And like it or not, our enemies learned from Beirut and Mogadishu that they could prevail using similar tactics in the future. (See this interesting article on America's history of casualty aversion from the Naval War College Review.) But I don't think we will turn tail and run here. We have invested far too much in Iraq in terms of spirit, blood and treasure -- we will not cede victory to these bandits and reward them for their atrocities.

At the tactical level, this attack may have destroyed one American convoy. But news of this attack, and the Iraqi mob's behavior, has likely reached every American and coalition soldier now serving in Iraq. Just as the news of the Malmedy massacre during WWII enraged U.S. troops and gave them a reason to fight harder, so too will this event. I don't want to suggest for one minute that American troops will commit an atrocity to respond in kind. This isn't Vietnam, and our junior officers and NCOs are too professional to let that happen. But you can bet that every American fighting man and woman in Iraq feels the rage from this incident, and their leaders will now seek to focus and apply that rage constructively to dismantle and destroy every remaining part of the Iraqi insurgency. Payback will be swift, severe and certain.

The hardest part of any counter-insurgency operation, as Army LTC Gian Gentile and MAJ John Nagl have observed, is properly calibrating force to destroy the insurgency without losing the hearts and minds of the civilian population. The challenge for American commanders in Iraq will be to devise an appropriate response for this incident that effectively targets and kills the Iraqi insurgents without causing too much collateral damage. For what it's worth, there is enough anti-American sentiment in Fallujah that we don't have that much to lose there, and thus a heavy-handed approach will not risk much. However, I am confident that American planners are working on this problem right now.

More to follow...

Update I: I corrected an earlier lead paragraph where I indicated two separate IED attacks which killed five Marines and five soldiers. Those two attacks were actually just one attack, which killed five Army engineers attached to the Marines in the Sunni Triangle.

Update II: Neil King and Greg Jaffe add some more context to the incident in Fallujah today in a story that will appear in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the WSJ article reports on the implications of this attack for the government contractors now working with U.S. government agencies to rebuild Iraq.

For now, the administration is sending a mixed message, issuing billions of dollars in contracts and encouraging companies to join in reconstruction while warning Americans against traveling in Iraq on their own and requiring contractors to provide their own security, which the government pays for. Army and Marine officers, for their part, are debating what tactics hold the most hope for gaining control of the seething Sunni Triangle area to the north and west of Baghdad.

Contractors have been increasingly on edge as violence escalates against foreign workers. Yesterday's attack, on a main street in the tense town of Fallujah west of Baghdad, is the latest in a series of assaults that has left more than a dozen foreign civilians dead over the last month. Five U.S. soldiers also died yesterday when a bomb exploded beside their convoy west of Baghdad.

"We're all very concerned about this incident, and we're taking every precaution we can," said Erin Kuhlman, a spokeswoman for California-based Parsons Corp., which is now working on electrical and construction projects in Iraq. Like other contractors, she declined to provide specifics on precautions.

* * *
The murdered contractors were security guards from a closely held North Carolina company, Blackwater Security, that relies heavily on retired U.S. soldiers and intelligence operatives, especially from Delta Force and special forces. The men were working under a U.S. government contract to protect food shipments to the Fallujah area, the company said in a statement. The names of the victims weren't released pending notification of relatives.

* * *
One Bush official, who declined to be identified, said that "because of the gruesome nature of this" the administration now expects "renewed requests from contractors for more funding and more help on security. That seems unavoidable at this point." Such desires are even more likely because the latest round of rebuilding contracts means that hundreds more U.S. civilian workers are supposed to begin streaming into Iraq in coming weeks.

In government contract terms, those requests are called "changes". (Finally, a government term that makes intuitive sense.) It is very likely that major contractors and smaller subcontractors will request a change to the terms of their contract to cover the increased costs of security for the more threatening environment in Iraq. The government basically has no choice here -- either it supports the contractors here, or faces the likelihood that the contractors will walk away from their work. Ultimately, these changes will add to the cost of the Iraqi rebuilding effort, both in terms of money and time. Additional security measures will impede rebuilding efforts by limiting the exposure of contractors to situations where they can be secured. For example, instead of 5 food convoys, you might now see 1 or 2 being run.

Though American taxpayers will pay the bill, it is the Iraqis who will suffer. The deteriorating security situation will disproportionately hurt contractors, relief agencies and non-governmental organizations much more than it hurts the military. The US Marines and US Army can adjust to a more threatening environment much more easily than these civilian agencies can. And it is these civilian agencies that do the majority of good for the Iraqis. The tough task now is to convince the Iraqi population of this fact, so that they take the lead in stopping their own insurgent brethren.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:59

 
New reservist civilian employment program announced by DoD

The Pentagon announced today that it would require all reservists to register in its Civilian Employer Information database. The new database will pull information from reservists about where they work, what skills they have, and what they do in order to aid the deployment process and help DoD and other federal officials interface with civilian employers about mobilizations.

Guard and Reserve members are required to register information about their civilian employer and job skills, in order for the department to meet three different requirements defined in law. The Department of Defense is required to: give consideration to civilian employment necessary to maintain national health, safety and interest when considering members for recall; ensure that members with critical civilian skills are not retained in numbers beyond those needed for those skills, and; inform employers of reservists’ of their rights and responsibilities under the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act.

The goal is to populate and maintain an employer database with 95 percent accuracy of the Selected Reserve and 75 percent accuracy of the Individual Ready Reserve.

Analysis: Ideally, we'd have had this program in place in Sept. 2001, because it would have been enormously helpful for DoD to have visibility of this stuff as it has mobilized 300,000+ reservists since then for the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. But given some of the issues (such as reemployment problems upon redeployment) now surfacing with respect to reservists, this is a good step. The first step when solving any problem is to gather more information, and this program will ideally gather lots of information about reservists and their civilian employment. I hope that the Pentagon continues to work this issue once it has the information, developing policy ideas and options to better manage the reserve force with this information.

In the wake of the past two years' reserve mobilizations, a number of academics and policy officials have speculated about the proportion of reservists who work as civilian first responders, or the proportion of reservists who work in other critical areas. The idea was that we might be doing harm to our civilian consequence-management community by calling up so many reservists, and a number of news accounts surfaced from small towns where the police or fire department was decimated by a mobilization. This program will tell us once and for all what the ground truth is about that problem, and it should enable the Pentagon to develop better policies for managing this problem so that its federal mobilizations don't harm the anti-terrorism readiness of state and local governments across America.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:58

 
Winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan: I missed it earlier today because I was focused on other projects, but David Rohde has an exceptional article in today's New York Times on the efforts of one light infantry company in the mountains of Afghanistan to win the allegiance of the civilians who live there.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:53

 
A new exception to the 4th Amendment: The AP reports that the Supreme Court has issued a ruling in United States v. Flores-Montano, holding the government may search, dismantle and inspect gas tanks of individuals driving into the United States at border checkpoints without any particular probable cause about that individual or car. The decision effectively expands the existing regulatory exception to the 4th Amendment, and it also limits the privacy expectations (in a 4th Amendment sense) of individuals in public spaces. "The government's interest in preventing the entry of unwanted persons and effects is at its zenith at the international border," Rehnquist writes for a unanimous court.

More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:46

 
Another exodus of the military's 'best and brightest'
America's special operations community may soon lose many of its operators

In what seemed like another world, I wrote about the junior officer and NCO exodus that was affecting America's Army in 2001 and early 2001. Simply put, this exodus had the potential to strip the military of many of its best junior officers, and was being driven by a frustrating Army bureaucracy and better opportunities on the outside. Mark Lewis and Don Vandergriff also wrote on the subject, describing the effects on the Army of what appeared to be a serious attrition problem among Army lieutenants and captains.

That problem has been overtaken by events since Sept. 11. But today, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker report in the NY Times that America's special operations forces may be facing an exodus of their own. This exodus is being driven by an unbelievably high operational tempo (OPTEMPO), coupled with economic opportunities on the outside driven by demand abroad for American special ops training and personnel.

Senior enlisted members of the Army Green Berets or Navy Seals with 20 years or more experience now earn about $50,000 in base pay, and can retire with a $23,000 pension. But private security companies, whose services are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, are offering salaries of $100,000 to nearly $200,000 a year to the most experienced of them.

The Central Intelligence Agency is also dangling such enticing offers before experienced Special Operations personnel that the Pentagon's top official for special operations policy, Thomas W. O'Connell, told a House panel this month that intergovernmental poaching "is starting to become a significant problem."

Evidence of a drain of seasoned Special Operations members, including elite Delta Force soldiers, is largely anecdotal right now, but the head of the military's Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan D. Brown of the Army, is so concerned about what he is hearing from troops in the field that he convened an unusual meeting of his top commanders in Washington last week to discuss the matter. "The retention of our special operating forces is a big issue," General Brown said.

* * *
One of those senior noncommissioned officers who chose to leave the Army for a private security job in Baghdad paused for a few moments on Monday to describe his decision, but requested that his name be withheld. After enlisting just over two decades ago, he received Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces training. At the end of 20 years of service, he received an offer to go to Iraq to guard public officials and help train local Iraqis to do the same.

"It wasn't that I minded the op-tempo or the deployments, that's why I joined," he said about the pace of operations. "But after putting in my time, I had this chance to make three times the money, and some of the guys are making even more than that."

Seasoned enlisted troops and officers have always offered skills that make them attractive to civilian employers, including military contractors, security companies and military consulting firms. Military personnel experts are cautioning that longer and more frequent deployments are threatening the ability of all the armed services to retain many of their best and brightest.

Analysis: First, let's be clear about what's happening here. There is no data which presently indicates there is a special ops exodus underway. The NYT is reporting on the basis of a few anecdotal examples, and the sense of the Special Operations Command's top generals that an exodus may happen as its operators return from overseas. So, the first thing is to gather data about what's going on here, and to make policy based on that data.

The second thing is that we should not be too worried about a natural level of attrition in our military, even in our special ops units. Every soldier is valuable, and that's even more true of these guys because of their training and experience. However, we have an all volunteer military, and our system is designed to accomodate a reasonable level of attrition. Often, it's better to let guys get out if they're feeling disenchanted or overused, because they may be less than motivated about future missions. I do think it's a problem if the special ops community loses its best soldiers, but there's no evidence yet that this is happening. So I go back to point #1 -- we need to see what the actual attrition numbers say, because this may just be natural post-deployment attrition. (Stop loss policies have prevented attrition in these units for a while, so it may even be natural to expect a surge right now.)

Third, I think it's interesting to note that the CIA is one of the leading employers taking personnel away from military special ops. That's probably a net positive thing for the United States, because presumably, these guys (and a few women too) are being hired to rebuild America's "human intelligence" ("HUMINT") capabilities in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. The CIA desperately needs these operators' experience to build more reliable and robust HUMINT capabilities -- the kind of capabilities that can gather the intel we need about emerging threats in the 21st Century.

Finally, I think we should be very careful as we go about expanding special operations -- which includes everything from Delta Force and the SEALs to Army Civil Affairs -- in order to meet the demands of current and future operations. The key to special ops success is people; they wholeheartedly endorse the John Boyd saying of "People, Ideas, Hardware -- in that order!" Special operations puts an enormous amount of resources into its people, and into building its units into the most professional and effective teams imaginable. Expanding special operations too quickly will almost certainly affect the quality of the special operations community, and that would be a very bad thing. It might make a lot more sense for the Army, for example, to make more of its units "special operations capable" like the Marines presently do with their MEUs prior to deployment. Similarly, it might make more sense to give Army units more full-spectrum capability in the area of low-intensity combat and stability operations, rather than standing up more Civil Affairs units and Special Forces units. The right answers are not necessarily apparent, and it may not be wise to simply throw money at the problem.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:39

 
New banner ads at latimes.com: "New careers come to those who speak Arabic -- U.S. Army: click here for more". This ad banner is running on the top of the latimes.com home page in bold black/gold colors with arabic script behind the text of the ad; it's also featured prominently on story pages inside latimes.com. The Army generally doesn't do MOS-specific recruiting like this (except for recruiting JAGs in law schools, doctors in med schools, etc)., so it struck me as interesting.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:07

 
Legislative update: government contractors may
soon be sanctioned for failing to take care of their reservists --
Citizen Smash lobbies for legislative proposal to aid reservist-employees

Last week, I wrote a note describing the disturbing treatment of Oregon National Guardsman CPL Dana Beadine by Securitas Corporation, following CPL Beaudine's redeployment from Iraq as a combat-wounded veteran. The essence of the story was that CPL Beaudine suffered injuries in combat, to include a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and his civilian employer displayed a startling unwillingness to take care of him after his discharge from active duty. Even the Department of Labor thought that CPL Beaudine was being mistreated in this case, yet the employer stood firm. The detail that stood out to me, and to several other mil-bloggers, was that Securitas was the holder of several major government contracts. It seemed incongruous and unjust that a government contractor should be allowed to break the law, mistreat a reservist, and profit from taxpayer money.

One of my readers now deployed to Iraq suggested that there ought to be a law proscribing such war profiteering by recalcitrant government contractors. I agreed, and wrote the following note:

Update II -- Memo to Congress: One of my readers now deployed to Iraq had an excellent suggestion -- why not amend federal law (and/or the Federal Acquisition Regulation in the CFR) to provide for suspension or debarment (or both) as penalties for government contractors who violate the USERRA or SSCRA protections for their employees who are mobilized as reservists? I think this is a great idea, and I hope that some Congressional staffer reads Intel Dump and recommends this to his/her boss. I don't think we should reward this kind of bad corporate behavior with government contracts and the money from American taxpayers. Congress already attaches all kinds of conditions to the receipt of taxpayer money, and it seems like proper treatment of reservists should be one of them.

Several of my MilBlogs colleagues -- including Citizen Smash, Donald Sensing, BlackFive, GreyHawk, and others -- added their voices to the fray. But Citizen Smash (who himself served in OIF as a reservist) took the issue one step further. At a recent event in San Diego, he cornered Congresswoman Susan Davis and her legislative aide on this issue; here's what happened.

When she had finished speaking, she opened it up for questions. The first guy she called on asked, "Is there any way we can get Bush impeached?"

As the Congresswoman was busy dodging around that one, I made my way over to Todd.

"Todd?"

"Yes?"

I introduced myself. "Can I bend your ear for a minute about a veterans’ issue?"

He immediately brightened. "Sure! Let’s walk over this way. How can we help you?"

"It’s not me, specifically, it’s more of a general issue." I very briefly summarized the Securitas case, and the subsequent online discussion regarding contractors abusing their returning reservists. "So the question is, if we currently withhold funds from universities that refuse ROTC and military recruiters, why can’t we do the same to corporations that don’t fulfill their obligations to returning reservists?"

I could see the lightbulb go on over his head. "Hey, you’ve got a good point there."

I continued along that line, explaining that I had searched through the acquisition regulations, as well as some Department of Labor information, and couldn’t find anything like what we had envisioned. "I don’t think it exists, to be honest," I concluded, "But it should..."

"And you know," he responded, "It wouldn’t be difficult to get something like that passed right now."

* * *
FINALLY the forum broke up, as Davis announced that she had another function she had to attend. At this point, I had already maneuvered myself to her right flank, immediately between her and the parking lot.

She turned to Todd, who directed her attention towards me. "This man has something to discuss with you," he told her.

I smiled, shook her hand, and gave her my name. "I’m a reservist, and I just got back from the Middle East last August," I began.

"Oh, thank you for your service!"

"Your welcome, Ma’am. I’d like to talk to you briefly about a veterans’ issue – it will only take one minute."

"Sure."

I quickly summed up the proposal. When I mentioned the parallel between our proposal and the current policy towards educational institutions and ROTC, her eyes lit up. I sensed that she had fully grasped what I was proposing, and she was already mentally writing a floor speech in support of such a bill.

"I know you’ve got to get going,” I told her, “but I want to thank you for taking a minute to listen to my idea. I’ll fax the details to Todd on Monday."

"No, I should thank you," she replied. "I think we’ve got a sure-fire winner here..."

And that, my dear readers, is how representative democracy is supposed to work.

Here's what you can do: If you support us on this issue, please write to your representative in Congress to make your voice heard on this issue. I think this one cuts across party lines, so write to your representative regardless of his or her party. Let them know that you support the full rights of reservists to reemployment under federal law, and that you don't want your taxpayer dollars going to corporations who mistreat their reservist-employees. Also, write your state legislators too, because plenty of reservists work for state and local government contractors, and they need legal protection too. In an ideal world, we'd have nothing but good corporate citizens, and there'd be no need for this kind of law. Indeed, I believe that most American corporations do the right thing when it comes to their reservist-employees. Yet, there are companies out there that don't do the right thing, and it adds insult to injury when we allow those companies to profit from taxpayer money.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:53

 
Thanks again for your support: I greatly appreciate the generous donations that so many of you have made to Intel Dump in the last week. Whether you gave $1, $5 or $25, I appreciate your vote of confidence and will do my best to return your investment in the coming weeks and months. I have raised enough so far to purchase server space and the domain name www.intel-dump.com, which will eventually become the new home for this site. However, I need additional support to facilitate this site's move and several other upgrades that will allow me to maintain Intel Dump. If you read my site and think it's worth as much as a daily newspaper, magazine, or even a magazine subscription, I would greatly appreciate your financial support. Thanks!

Also, I plan make several changes to the site once it gets established, in order to make it more readable and more visually appealing than what my current server and software allows. If you have any suggestions in this area as a reader or blogger, please let me know. Or, if there is content that you'd like to see me provide, please let me know that too.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:32

 
"Sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress"
Update: Unless the White House says it's okay for them to do so after a public furor erupts

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice invoked the time-honored principle of executive privilege yesterday in defending the White House's decision not to allow her to testify to Congress or the 9/11 commission. (Thanks to Tapped for the pointer to this quote)

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle here ... it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress."

For what it's worth, this principle is something that Presidents on both sides of the aisle agree with, starting with President Eisenhower and moving forward. As a general rule, the President's decisionmaking staff cannot be forced to testify before Congress. (Past NSAs have voluntarily testified though.) I agree with this rule, because I think it safeguards the national security process and increases the candor of those people giving advice to the President -- both political appointees and professionals.

However, two obvious questions emerge.

- First, Ms. Rice has said that she would step down as National Security Adviser by the end of 2004, either by virtue of an administration change or of her own volition. After that happens, she will no longer be a "sitting" adviser to the President. Will she then testify before the 9/11 commission, or another body such as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?

- Second, it is a well-settled principle that no adviser to the President can be compelled to testify before Congress; such compulsion is considered to violate the executive privilege. But there is no such legal rule against voluntary testimony before Congress, either in open or closed session. Thus, Ms. Rice misstates the rule in her comments on CBS. The absence of compulsion would remove the major separation of powers problem here. Presumably, this commission is supposed to be bigger than politics. (Yeah right) If the White House supports the goals and objectives of the 9/11 commission, so much so that it will volunteer the President himself to testify in closed session, why not allow the NSA to testify too? If we're all on the same team, trying to prevent another 9/11, what's the right thing for the White House to do here?

Update: The White House has answered that the right thing to do here is to let the National Security Adviser testify in public, under oath, before the 9/11 commission.

The decision was conditioned on the Bush administration receiving assurances in writing from the commission that such a step does not set a precedent and that the commission does not request "additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice," White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said in a letter to the panel.

Subject to the conditions, the president will agree "to the commission's request for Dr. Rice to testify publicly regarding matters within the commission's statutory mandate," Gonzales's letter stated.

"The president recognizes the truly unique and extraordinary circumstances underlying the commission's responsibility to prepare a detailed report on the facts," Gonzales added.

Congressional leaders, Gonzales noted, have already stated that this would not be a new precedent.

posted by Phillip Carter at 09:38

 
A very interesting First Amendment case study in Iraq
CPA officials shut down an Iraqi newspaper, citing "incitement"

Actual incitement cases in the U.S. -- where some legislature criminalizes speech that advocates crime -- tend to be rare these days. After the Supreme Court's ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio, most legislatures realized that these speech restrictions would have a really tough time in court. Prosecutors now target some of the same conduct with other statutes, such as conspiracy statutes and inchoate crimes, in order to accomplish the same goal of preventing extremist groups from acting on their ideologies. Nonetheless, the issue remains, and occasionally comes up in court.

Now, it appears that incitement law has made an appearance in Iraq. According to the LA Times, the U.S. Coalition Provosional Authority has decided to close a newspaper run by a popular anti-American cleric because it thinks this newspaper is inciting violence against coalition troops.

It was unclear why officials chose this particular moment to close the paper, but one senior coalition official said the publication had been warned several times before Sunday. "This is not the first time. We've given them a chance to retract and clean themselves up," the official said. "But if they continue to spew vitriol, well?. "

The occupation administration has had an ongoing battle with Sadr that extends far beyond the pages of his newspaper.

Sadr, who is in his early 30s, has routinely denounced the occupation in his Friday sermons and has sought to raise his own militia, the Mehdi Army. Initially a ragged collection of unemployed youths, it has become increasingly organized, and Sadr now has militias operating in several southern cities, including Nasiriya, as well as Baghdad's Sadr City, home to more than 1 million Shiites. U.S. officials have been closely tracking Sadr's efforts to expand the corps.

The coalition has also forced government officials and security forces in the city of Najaf to shut down an illegal court convened by Sadr and a private prison where he was believed to be torturing some of the people sentenced by his court.

* * *
Al Hawza newspaper was closed Sunday morning when dozens of U.S. soldiers arrived at its offices in Baghdad, ordered the staff out and locked and chained its doors. Troops handed the paper's editor, Sheik Ali Yasseri, a letter from Bremer alleging that the paper had breached an order issued last year that bans the incitement of violence.

"They told us they would arrest us if we did not leave. They said our articles incite people against America," Yasseri told Reuters news agency outside the paper's office.

The weekly paper, whose name refers to the students of the Shiite clerics based in Najaf, is read primarily by followers of Sadr. Its circulation is thought to be well below 50,000. Under Bremer's decision, it is banned from publishing for two months. Another breach of the anti-incitement order would result in jail and a $1,000 fine, the letter said.

Analysis: My First Amendment law professor, Eugene Volokh, is surely the better person to comment on this story. Obviously, American constitutional law doesn't directly apply to this case in Iraq. But considering that we are trying to export the rule of law generally to Iraq, and that we want to build a lasting democracy in that nation, I wonder if we might reconsider our instincts here to suppress the presses. Dissent -- even dangerous dissent -- often serves a valuable role in free societies by letting dissident groups blow off steam peacefully. Moreover, the best test for bad ideas is to let them fight for airtime in the marketplace of ideas, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in his famous Abrams v. United States dissent:

. . . Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. . . . [250 U.S. at 626]

That said, I can see substantial security interests at stake here, and I can certainly understand the motivations of the CPA authorities who made this call. It's entirely possible that the prohibition of this speech meets the test from Brandenburg, and that even in America the authorities would be able to outlaw this newspaper as a brand of incitement. Clearly, it doesn't help the security situation in Iraq to have a firebrand publishing doctrine and operational edicts in a newspaper, and it's even worse if this newspaper is actually being used to religiously sanction and order attacks. I'm sure the CPA authorities are cognizant of the blowback potential here, and the risk that this move may actually incite more protest and violence. But I think they probably assessed that risk as less than the risk of letting this newspaper continue to publish, and made their decision accordingly. Was it the right call? Only time will tell. Perhaps this will be one of the first legal issues for the nascent Iraqi court system to decide.

Update I: Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale Law School, has a note on this incident, complete with an excerpt from the part of the Iraqi Constitution dealing with free speech.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:29

 
New trends in the Al Qaeda threat
Global terror network demonstrates new features in Madrid operation

Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) carries a very provocative article about the tactical and operational changes apparent in Al Qaeda's Madrid operation, and how they represent a more advanced and lethal terror organization. (I wish I could excerpt the entire thing, but federal copyright law won't allow that.) The essence of the story is that Al Qaeda has evolved again, into a more decentralized, less predictable, less hierarchical terror network that retains some operational capability to strike at Western targets abroad.

Evidence in the Madrid train bombings points to the participation of a new breed of Islamic holy warrior, unfettered by many of the religious and ideological constraints that defined Islamic terrorism in the past.

These Islamist warriors -- schooled in the North African doctrine known as Takfir wal Hijra and trained by Afghan veterans of al Qaeda -- think, recruit and operate differently from traditional Islamist networks. For Europe, that makes the threat particularly acute. The Takfir movement is strongest in Morocco and Algeria, the primary sources of Muslim immigration to Western Europe. Takfiri theorists openly advocate using immigration as a Trojan horse to expand jihad, or holy war.

* * *
Many elements common to the suspects in custody for the Madrid bombings so far, investigators say, bear hallmarks of the ultrafundamentalist Takfiris or their close cousins, the Algerian-based Salafists. These include the use of petty crime and drug trafficking to raise funds, the recruitment of women, and operatives who adopt a Western lifestyle to keep a low profile. The virulent brand of Takfiri Islam makes all-out armed jihad an obligation for all true believers; even apostate fellow Muslims are fair game.

* * *
As Osama bin Laden's control over terror networks has been disrupted, new radicals operate at the fringes of his movement. Many of his core beliefs, especially his anti-American animus, are being superceded by broader interpretations of global jihad. Instead of just apostate Muslim regimes or U.S. interests, jihad is being expanded to include virtually everyone outside the sect. That leads many antiterror specialists to say the Madrid bombings may represent a change for Islamic terrorism. "This is al Qaeda 2.0," says Jonathan Schanzer, a terrorism specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Immigration is a key way to extend the radical ideas into Western Europe. One Takfiri scholar, Abu Basir, wrote in 2001 that "jihad and immigration go together...the one cannot be achieved without the other."

* * *
Unlike previous generations of radical Islamists, who attracted police attention by their long beards, public proselytizing and orthodox postures, the newer generation of holy warrior blends in better. They are encouraged to lead a double life in the ultimate pursuit of jihad, according a German intelligence report.

"Outwardly they pretend to lead a modern lifestyle," says terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp. "But deep inside they adhere to a pure medieval strain of Islam." Many Takfiris shave their beards and avoid mosques for security reasons. "Recruits conceal their true beliefs until the time is right," Dr. Ranstorp says.

Analysis: There is a lot of great material in this article; I recommend buying today's Journal in order to read the whole thing. As I said above, the essence of the story is that Al Qaeda's offshoots have evolved into something different -- and potentially more dangerous -- than the Al Qaeda that attacked the USS Cole and conducted the WTC/Pentagon operation.

The decentralization of Al Qaeda is an especially important development because of its implications for U.S. policy. Until now, American counter-terrorism policy has focused mostly on decapitating and dismantling the Al Qaeda organization proper -- the parts that used to reside in Afghanistan, the parts that conducted the 9/11 attack, and any parts that had a footprint on U.S. soil. If there are now Al Qaeda-inspired affiliates in Spain, the Philippines, Algeria, and other places, that calls into question our entire decapitation/dismantling strategy. What purpose would it serve now to capture Osama Bin Laden? It would not impede the operational effectiveness of these splinter groups one iota. At best, it will remove some of the spiritual and operational coherence which has enabled this global terror network to remain viable. But I think it's more likely that it will have only a tangential operational effect, and that there are more than enough lieutenants willing to carry on OBL's guidon.

The moves to secular tactics, techniques and procedures also represent an important trend. We saw this with the 9/11 hijackers, and it enabled them to blend into U.S. society for so long to conduct their pre-mission training and reconnaissance. This trend has several implications. Primarily, it means that we must reevaluate our indicators of terrorist activity, and look deeper into backgrounds and connections. That may eventually necessitate some sort of Total Information Awareness-like program capable of non-obvious relationship analysis. Or it may require redoubled efforts to penetrate this world with HUMINT assets; something which has eluded Western intelligence agencies for decades.

Stories like this one paint a fairly bleak picture of the enemy, but it is one we must understand nonetheless. The enemy of terrorism will not go away anytime soon; there will likely be no end to the global war on terrorism. Terrorism is a methodology that small groups and states will use to asymmetrically attack large states and powerful interests. Its success hinges on the ability of the terrorists to see opportunities, develop TTPs, and to strike before states can develop appropriate countermeasures. The key, for us, is to develop institutions capable of observing this threat, assessing it, and reacting on a faster timeline than the enemy. Building large agencies like the Department of Homeland Security won't cut it. We have to create new models of organization and action that combine intelligence, analysis, decisionmaking and action.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:04

 
L.A. chapter of the Nathan Hale Society: We had our first meeting last night near Beverly Hills and spent the better part of the time discussing American "grand strategy" -- what it is, what it ought to be, and what it's not. As you can imagine, the discussion ranged from the war in Iraq to U.S. foreign aid policy to conceptual discussions of what a grand strategy actually is. The discussants brought a good mix of backgrounds and experience to the table, and it was a very interesting evening. Our next discussion is scheduled for April 25, with possible topics including intelligence reform, North Korea, and democracy promotion. If you're interested in learning more, surf over to chapter president Robert Tagorda's site, or e-mail him.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:45

 
Good and bad news from the "band of sisters"
WP survey of military families paints a mixed picture for military retention

Tom Ricks reports on the front page of today's Washington Post that a sizable percentage of military spouses are having doubts about continued service by their husbands or wives in uniform. The survey was conducted by The Post in conjunction with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, and it talked to more than 1,000 military spouses on ten separate installations. Mr. Ricks' lengthy article discusses the survey's findings, and includes many actual responses from military spouses; it also discusses some of the ways the military plans to mitigate this issue in the coming months and years. One point that quickly becomes evident is that military spouses don't speak with one voice:

Large majorities of Army wives said that coping with their spouses' deployment had been a problem, but that they were proud of their service to the country. Many resented media coverage that portrays them as not handling it well. "It's not fair to us, or to the guys over there, to say that we're all having nervous breakdowns, because we're not," said Holly Petraeus, wife of the commander of the 101st Airborne.

* * *
While half of the spouses rated their own morale as high, less than a third rated the morale of the families around them similarly.

And even though they feel at least somewhat supported by their nonmilitary countrymen, the spouses do not feel particularly well understood by them -- not even by their own extended families. With the community of wives living on and around Army bases offering an attractive alternative, this generation has broken the long-established pattern of going back home for the duration of a husband's deployment.

"We have become a sorority of separation," said Anne Torza, wife of an Apache attack-helicopter pilot in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, "and I wouldn't give up my sisters for anything. You know that 'band of brothers'? We're a band of sisters."

The story also included a really interesting discussion of the way that technology has affected this issue. Military spouses in previous wars had nowhere near the information flow as those in OIF -- especially from e-mail and embedded reporters.

Technology -- not only 24-hour news, but also e-mail -- has kept this generation of spouses extraordinarily close to their husbands' lives. But that, they have discovered, is a mixed blessing. The Iraq deployment has been the U.S. military's first war fought in an interconnected environment, in which even front-line soldiers generally have access to e-mail and the Internet. "It's the 'kitchen table to the battlefield' war," Morgan said. "Something happens -- between cable news, the cell phone, the Internet, e-mail -- it goes back and forth instantly."

That speed can be vexing: Almost every wife seems to have gotten a predawn call telling her to turn on the television because the "crawl" on the bottom of the cable news screen was reporting that a soldier had been killed in the region of Iraq where her husband was posted.

To squelch rumors sparked by such reports, the Army has had each unit's Family Readiness Group quickly transmit information on events in Iraq. "When something happens, the phone tree lights up, so you're not sitting there watching TV trying to figure out if your husband is hurt," said Kristin Jackson, whose husband is a mechanic in the 101st Airborne.

One other trend in the responses was the perception of a civil-military gap among military spouses. This is very interesting for military scholars like me, because it's one of the pitfalls inherent in an all-volunteer force where the burden of service is not universally or equitably distributed. It also has significant social, economic, political and cultural implications, both for the military and for civil society.

... military wives see a gap between themselves and the civilian world. About 90 percent of spouses said they were satisfied with the respect the American public shows soldiers. But Davis, wife of the 101st Airborne Division lieutenant, spoke for many when she said: "The farther away you get from post, the less understanding there is."

Often, the spouses see good intentions thwarted by a lack of comprehension. Desaree Venema, whose husband has been gone for a year as a senior sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, said that in her nonmilitary neighborhood, residents have been supportive, shoveling snow and babysitting her daughters "when I have a bad day." But when they complain about a spouse having to go on a week-long business trip, she said, "I just about have to draw blood from my tongue" to stop from shouting at them.

"It's wonderful to put the red, white and blue Dixie Cups in the chain-link fence to show patriotism, but you need specific tools," said McConnell, the Fort Carson youth services coordinator. Civilians sometimes will say things such as, "It's good your dad can e-mail you because it shows he's alive," unaware of how scary it will sound to a child -- especially when the e-mail breaks down, said Mary M. Keller, executive director of Military Child Education Coalition, a nonprofit group.

Ultimately, Mr. Ricks comes back to the basic policy issue undergirding this story: will military families push their men and women in uniform to leave the service when their term is up? On this point, the data is inconclusive. Many families think there will be a problem with military retention, but when pressed on this point in terms of their family, they seem less adamant about leaving the service.

About 76 percent of those polled said they believe the Army is heading for personnel problems as soldiers and their families tire of the post-9/11 pace and leave the service.

And yet, the same percentage said that, knowing what they know now about the Army, they would do it all over again.

What those numbers reflect, said wives and other Army insiders, is that the Army is adapting to the post-9/11 world. "We're seeing a harder Army come out of this," full of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, said Lt. Jason Davis, the husband of Meg Davis.

"The reenlistments that we'll see will be good ones," the Iraq veteran said. "These guys are experts, and they know what they're getting into."

A strong minority of military wives want no part of that frequent-flier life.

About half of those polled said they expect their spouses to reenlist, and that they will support the decision. But about three in 10 said that they are certain their spouses will get out -- and that they want that to happen.

If those numbers prove true, "that's a good news story for the Army," said Master Sgt. J.D. Riley, a Pentagon expert on enlisted personnel issues. Currently, he said, about 50 percent of soldiers leave at the end of their first term.

The greater worry is that more seasoned soldiers -- especially the senior sergeants who are the backbone of today's Army -- will start leaving in unusually large numbers, as they did during the latter part of the Vietnam War. It is too early to tell if Iraq will provoke such an exodus, but some Army experts are concerned by internal Army data indicating morale problems among troops serving there.

Analysis: So, the conclusion to be drawn from this story is that there is an issue here, but that the Army needs more data before it can establish exactly what is going to happen as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Anecdotal reports from the field indicate that redeployed units have not experienced an exodus of soldiers or officers as some have predicted, and that the majority of exiting soldiers have been those kept on active duty involuntarily through "stop loss" policies. Indeed, other surveys of military morale conducted by the Army have shown fairly high levels of job satisfaction and reenlistment intentions, although there is a significant gap between responses from active-duty soldiers and reservists.

Mr. Ricks does a good job of reporting on family support groups, but I think this point deserves some more emphasis. A major reason the military is doing well here is because it has learned how to deal with family issues in the 1990s. In the first Gulf War, the Cold War-minded military did a less than stellar job at managing these kinds of issues, and it did not have the benefit of institutionalized processes like the Family Readiness Groups in every company and battalion-sized unit. However, the Army learned during the deployments of the 1990s how to manage these issues, as well as a host of other deployment-related issues, and the result is that it now has a pretty good system. It will never be perfect -- deployment is necessarily hard on families, and there is no way to minimize the emotional and physical strain on familymembers from the actual separation and risk involved. But by forming "band[s] of sisters" (and brothers) for military spouses around the country, the military has gotten a lot better at taking care of its families at home while it fights abroad.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:10

 
Marines find violence in Fallujah
Engagements test the 'kindler, gentler' Marine strategy planned for Iraq

Before leaving for their second rotation in Iraq, the leaders of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton said they were going to do things differently from the Army. They would use more kindness and diplomacy; less armor and firepower. The edict issued from the top brass was "First, Do No Harm." Now, the Marines have deployed to Iraq, and taken responsibility for one of the baddest towns in the country: Fallujah. There, they have encountered stiff resistance from Iraqi insurgents who seem hellbent on perpetuating chaos and undermining U.S. efforts to create a civil government in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times reports that the violence in Fallujah is becoming the crucible for the Marines' tactics in Iraq:

FALLOUJA, Iraq — U.S. Marines on Friday engaged in their first major military confrontation since returning to Iraq, as a daylong series of firefights left one Marine and 18 to 20 insurgents and others dead, according to military and hospital officials.

At least five of the dead were civilians, including an 11-year-old boy and an ABC television network cameraman.

Twenty-five Iraqis and three Marines were injured, the officials said, in the gunfire that took place during an intensive operation by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Pendleton. The operation, which included armed searches and roadblocks, began several days ago, residents said, but burst into public view Friday.

* * *
[The Marines] said no tanks or heavy artillery were used.

The Marines said they believed at least one group of 12 to 36 men was fighting them, in contrast to smaller groups usually seen since the end of major combat.

* * *
The violent confrontation seemed certain to test the credibility among Iraqis of the Marines' motto for their second tour of duty in Iraq, which officially began last week: "First Do No Harm."

It appeared instead that the Marines, like the U.S. Army units that served here before them, were being drawn into a cycle of violence. Insurgents attack the U.S. military; the military responds with overwhelming firepower; and revenge-seeking relatives of wounded or slain civilians become more sympathetic to the insurgents.

Fallouja residents said the American show of force would backfire.

"Two days ago it was like a battlefield here," said an Iraqi traffic policeman who declined to give his name as he directed cars around the many roadblocks. "But today I hear our Iraqi guys have taken their revenge."

Some bystanders said the Marines did not yet understand the culture of Fallouja and nearby river towns. The area is deeply tribal, its close knit population as much rural as urban, making it an easy place for insurgents, many from the local community, to find safe haven.

There is also a growing current of radical Sunni Islam and an almost reflexive hatred of Westerners. City walls are covered with graffiti that say it is "halal," or lawful, to kill Americans.

The western end of the so-called Sunni Triangle area, which includes Fallouja, Ramadi and Khaldiya, has proved difficult for the Americans to control for more than short periods. Local police, who are often viewed as collaborators of the U.S.-led occupation, also have had trouble maintaining order.

Analysis: The Marines have a long an illustrious history of dealing with small wars, as chronicled in the recent book Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot. (For more, see this note, this note and this note.) The Marines' infantry-centric organizations can also be quite good at dealing with these kinds of situations, provided they have the training in low-intensity combat and peacekeeping ops (and the 1 MEF Marines got that during their pre-deployment ramp-up.) However, the essential challenge still remains: when to use firepower, and how much to use. The calibration of firepower is the hardest challenge in any counter-insurgency operation. In response to the Marines' statements about their "kindler, gentler" approach for Iraq, LTC Gian Gentile wrote in the Washington Post that it would be much tougher than they thought to get this right. Similarly, Army MAJ John Nagl (now serving in Iraq) has written some brilliant stuff on counter-insurgency warfare which focuses on this problem, and its difficulty. None of this means that the Marines won't be able to do it. Only that this is really difficult stuff -- "graduate level stuff" as one general I know used to put it.

It will take time, and mistakes, for the Marines to adjust to the Iraqi operational environment and to learn how to properly calibrate their use of force for that situation. We should expect more Fallujah-type battles in the near future, and we should not be surprised if the Marines err on the side of force because that is the natural tendency of combat units when they are attacked. However, as this mission matures and the Marines gain situational awareness about their battlespace, I would expect to see a gradual lowering of tensions in this area, accompanied by a reduction in violence. In other words, the violence this week in Fallujah is not a setback -- it's cyclical in nature, and to be expected.

Update I: Matt Rustler passes on a letter from the CG of the 1st Marine Division, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, over at his blog Stop the Bleating. It's always interesting to read the writings of the commanders in Iraq, to try and get inside their head.

Letter to All Hands,

We are going back in to the brawl. We will be relieving the Magnificent Soldiers fighting under the 82nd Airborne Division, whose hard-won successes in the Sunni Triangle have opened opportunities for us to exploit. For the last year, the 82nd Airborne has been operating against the heart of the enemy's resistance. It's appropriate that we relieve them: When it's time to move a piano, Marines don't pick up the piano bench—we move the piano. So this is the right place for Marines in this fight, where we can carry on the legacy of "Chesty" Puller in the Banana Wars in the same sort of complex environment that he knew in his early years. Shoulder to shoulder with our comrades in the Army, Coalition Forces and maturing Iraqi Security Forces, we are going to destroy the enemy with precise firepower while diminishing the conditions that create adversarial relationships between us and the Iraqi people.

Read the rest...

posted by Phillip Carter at 08:24

 
Looking for a few good corporate citizens

One of my regular readers wrote me to ask if I would publicize those good corporate citizens who do well by their reservists, in reference to my note about one bad corporate citizen who was apparently mistreating a returned reservist in blatant violation of federal law. My answer: absolutely! If you have a good news story to share about a company treating its reservist-employees right, please let me know. And when you do, please send a copy of your e-mail to Donald Sensing, Citizen (formerly LT) Smash, and Glenn Reynolds.

The Pentagon's National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) has constructed a list of good corporate citizens on this issue. Amazingly, it includes Securitas, the company alleged to be mistreating CPL Dana Beaudine, although it doesn't say whether they offer additional benefits like continued civilian pay after mobilization or health benefits. The other observation I have about this list is that it appears to disproportionately include public employers (states, cities, etc.)

Nonetheless, if you have a good news story, please let me know.

Update I: A friend wrote me to let me know that the Dow Jones Corporation, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, has a fairly robust military leave policy on the books.

We want to let all our employees know that Dow Jones will support those who are called into military service, or who voluntarily enlist in uniformed military service. The Company will ensure that you are not disadvantaged upon your return to work and you will suffer no discrimination or retaliation because of your service. Our current corporate policies regarding Military Leaves of Absence are summarized here for your reference.

[Signature omitted]

The Company will grant a Leave of Absence when an employee enlists or is called to active duty by any branch of the U.S. military. As explained in more detail below, when you return to work following a period of military service, you will be returned to your former job, or you will be placed in a job comparable to the one you held before your Leave, at the salary level that you would have achieved had you not taken the Leave of Absence. You will not lose eligibility for any employee benefits as a result of Military Leave.

At first glance, this goes beyond the legal requirements of the SSCRA and USERRA. The part about voluntary enlistments is especially notable -- it supports those reservists who might volunteer for mobilization because of patriotism or other motivations; it also supports employees who might choose to enlist for the first time. My friend at the WSJ didn't tell me about any examples of Dow Jones doing a good job, but I imagine there have to be some. It doesn't surprise me to see a media corporation doing the right thing here; they're probably more sensitive than other corporations to public relations issues.

Any other good corporate citizens out there? Let me know.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:37

 
Rumsfeld on Primetime Live: For those of you who missed it last night, ABC's PrimeTime Live did a very interesting special on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his "Rumfeld's Rules". The piece was somewhat flattering, although it included some pointed criticism from former DoD officials and senior military officers like former Army Sec. Tom White and retired LTG Greg Newbold. The Pentagon's press office has a full transcript of the show available online. Here's an excerpt from one of the more interesting segments of the show:

MR. MCWETHY: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are close friends of 30 years, but it did not start that way. When they first met, Rumsfeld was a young congressman; Cheney a graduate student who wanted an internship.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: He looked on me, and I think properly, as an airy-headed academic and I looked on him as a very arrogant, young, abrasive member of Congress and the interview literally lasted about 20 minutes and I left.

MR. MCWETHY: That time Cheney did not get the job. A few months later when Rumsfeld left Congress to work in the Nixon White House, he finally hired the eager young Cheney.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I walked into his office. He sat at his desk and never looked up. He never said, do you want a job, or I’d like to have you come to work for me; just you’re congressional relations. Now get the hell out of here.

MR. MCWETHY: What was he like as a boss?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: He was probably the toughest boss I ever had, but he probably taught me more than anybody I ever worked for. He was very demanding. He didn’t have a lot of time to say thank you or good job. The reward for doing a job well was you got more work.

MR. MCWETHY: Rumsfeld’s style has not changed in 30 years.

LT. GEN. GREG NEWBOLD: Very challenging boss.

MR. MCWETHY: For two years under Rumsfeld, Marine Corps Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, now retired, directed operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He is also described as abusive and brash. Is he?

GEN. NEWBOLD: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s an accurate description. I’m not sure he would use it, but absolutely.

SEC. RUMSFELD: I tend to be impatient, so there’s no question but that from time to time I help people understand the difference between good work and poor work.

GEN. NEWBOLD: If the environment’s intimidating and suppressive, if it demeans, people tend to clam up.

MR. MCWETHY: According to Newbold and others, the secretary bullied many in uniform, even four star generals and admirals, as he led the Bush administration’s charge toward war. Iraq, he said, was armed with weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was a haven for the very same terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on September 11th.

SEC. RUMSFELD: (From tape.) If you’re asking are there al Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes there are. It’s a fact.

THOMAS WHITE (FORMER SECRETARY OF THE ARMY): It clearly was a war of choice. We had not been able to establish that there was an imminent threat.

MS. MATTHEWS: The threat was certainly distorted and exaggerated in dozens and dozens and dozens of statements from the president on down.

MR. MCWETHY: Critics say that you and your advisors exaggerated the importance of the intelligence prior to going into Iraq. Yes? No?

SEC. RUMSFELD: False. When I spoke, I quoted generally public unclassified Central Intelligence Agency analysis and you’ll find my remarks are not terribly – (audio break) – came out of people in the past administration who said essentially the same things.

MR. CLARKE: The question is, was there an imminent threat to the United States? And the intelligence did not support that.

GEN. NEWBOLD: I think Saddam Hussein was a paper tiger.

posted by Phillip Carter at 10:14

 
A sad end to a warrior's story

A while back, I relayed the story of Dwayne Turner, an Army medic who was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom. His actions clearly demonstrated courage under fire. This guy was no hero in the sense that everyone who goes and does his job is a hero -- he really went above and beyond to take care of his buddies in the best tradition of a combat medic.

"I didn't figure myself a hero. I just wanted to make sure everybody came home," Turner said after the medal and 101st Airborne coin were presented to him. "Nobody was going to die on my watch."

Before the firefight in a suburb about 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Iraqis near the U.S. convoy were being friendly as usual, Turner said. But the scene quickly turned violent, and the soldiers were attacked with grenade and small-arms fire.

Responding on instinct, Turner went into action and repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire as he treated wounded soldiers. He was struck by AK-47 bullets in the arm and leg and was hit by shrapnel.

"When we got hit, guys were going down, and I was the medical guy on the scene. It was a split-second decision," he said.

During the 25-minute attack, Turner tended to the wounded until he finally had to be stopped. He was about to pass out from blood loss, said platoon leader Sgt. Neil Mulvany, who treated Turner's injuries.

"He risked his life to save 16 other soldiers," Mulvany said. "That's a hero in my book."

Unfortunately, there's more to the story. In the award ceremony, a friend of mine noticed that Turner had no rank on his collar -- which would mean he was an E-1, an unusual rank for someone with his time in service. Now, the AP reports why he was wearing E-1 rank: he was busted for going AWOL and smoking pot, and on his way out with a general discharge:

The smile he beamed at the medal ceremony masked months of problems he says he had since returning home with battle wounds: a suicide attempt along with flashbacks and nightmares so bad he resorted to binge drinking to fall asleep.

"I kind of felt like I was blowing in the wind pretty much," said Turner, 23, of Indianapolis, who was an Army medic.

After going AWOL for two days and smoking marijuana while drunk, he said he got a general discharge from the Army rather than an honorable discharge.

That means he is not eligible for at least $40,000 in college funding he expected to receive. The Army also demoted him from specialist to private before his discharge.

Analysis: This is a really hard case in my opinion, and I'm sure it was hard for his commanders to handle too. On the one hand, you have a bona fide hero -- a man whose actions under fire earned him the nation's third-highest award for valor, and who many of his buddies think saved their lives in combat. Those are big things in the warrior community. On the other hand, going AWOL is a serious offense in the military; so is smoking pot. Both threaten to undermine unit cohesion and effectiveness; the drug use may put his buddies at risk. Pvt. Turner's commanders took a middle road here -- they didn't court martial him, as they could have. Instead, they probably gave him non-judicial punishment, a rank reduction, and a discharge for his conduct. I probably agree with that course of action, although I disagree with the character of his discharge. These incidents were serious, but I think his actions in combat merit a more honorable characterization of service. The rules for administrative actions exist largely for a peacetime Army, and I don't think they give guys like this enough credit for what few of us have the courage to do. If it were up to me, I would've tried to get this guy an honorable discharge so that he could keep his veterans' benefits. A discharge is supposed to reflect the totality of a soldier's service -- not the one incident that results in the discharge. In this case, I would've tipped the scales towards an honorable discharge.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:03

 
The mother of all contractual disputes: This front-page story in Friday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) chronicles the massive insurance dispute which has arisen out of the ashes of 9/11, where billions of dollars are stake over the meaning of the word "occurrence". The whole issue may be decided on the basis of what contractual form was in effect at the time. The stakes are huge -- one interpretation will generate a $7 billion payout; the other a $3.55 billion insurance payout -- a loss for WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein may kill several of the current WTC reconstruction ideas. Keep your eye on this case... it will have a huge impact when it's ultimately decided or settled.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:47

 
"The problem is, when everything is a priority, nothing is."

Mark Kleiman quotes some comments from Amy Zegart, one of his faculty colleagues at the UCLA School of Public Policy, regarding the prioritization of intelligence about terrorism in the Bush Administration. Prof. Zegart knows quite a bit on this subject, having written the excellent book Flawed by Design on the national security process, and having had Condi Rice for a thesis adviser, among other things. She has this astute observation about the national security process, and what happens when you fail to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community:

... The Commission asked the wrong question. Was terrorism a priority? Of course it was. The real question is how many other priorities both administrations were confronting. I'll tell you: too many. Clinton wrote a Presidential Decision Directive in 1995 that sought to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community. There were so many in the top tier, they actually divided them into Tier 1A and Tier 1B. But it gets better (or worse). There was also a Tier 0, apparently for the very very very top priorities. Note to self: when you can't list priorities with regular numbers, you haven't really made priorities.

As time passed, priorities were added to the list but old ones were never removed. By 9/11, the National Security Agency had roughly 1,500 formal requirements, and developed 200,000 "Essential Elements of Information." I'm not making this up. See the Congressional Intelligence Committees' Joint Inquiry Report, December 2002, p.49. Intelligence officials told Congressional investigators that the prioritization process was "so broad as to be meaningless."

This is not new. For the past 50 years, there have been more than 40 major studies about the intelligence community. A common theme among them has been the spotty and fleeting attention policy makers have given to setting intelligence priorities. One former senior intelligence official told me that during the Cold War, he was asked about the state of the Soviet economy exactly once, when the Secretary of Defense wanted to convert rubles to dollars for a budget presentation to Congress.

Analysis: Absolutely, positively, right on the money. I haven't had much experience at the upper echelons of the national security community, so I'll take Prof. Zegart's word for the applicability of this logic to the National Security Council. However, this is a fundamental principle of intelligence operations at the tactical level as well -- if you prioritize too many things, then you prioritize nothing. And if you don't establish priorities for intelligence collection and analysis, your scouts and analysts will work very hard on a lot of disparate things that may or may not add up to a complete and accurate picture of the battlefield. Our observer/controllers used to tell us on the 4ID plans staff that we should have no more than 10 priority intelligence requirements for the division -- those things the general absolutely had to know in order to defeat the enemy. In theory, the same principles of simplicity should apply at the national strategic level too, although with much greater consequences and implications.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:04

 
The cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom for the Brits

The London Daily Telegraph (registration required) reports today on testimony by the Chief of Defence Staff that Britain's Army will not be ready to mount another major combat operation for five years because of what it has expended in spirit, blood and treasure to fight with America in Iraq. Like the U.S. Army, the British Army has been stretched to its limits by its worldwide deployments -- many in support of the global war on terrorism.

Gen Sir Michael Walker told the Commons defence committee that the Army in particular would not be able to recover from operations in Iraq until 2008 or 2009.

"I think we have already accepted that we cannot do another large-scale operation now," he said. "We are unlikely to be able to get to large-scale much before the end of the decade, somewhere around 08 or 09." The claim goes much further than Adml Sir Michael Boyce, his predecessor, who said at the end of the war that the Armed Forces would not be ready for another such operation until the end of this year.

The Army has been stretched to breaking point by its involvement in the war on terrorism and a series of operational commitments in the Falklands, Cyprus, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

Sir Michael said the Army was still reconstituting units from the Iraq conflict and at the same time undergoing reorganisation.

He told the MPs that if he was asked to send the same number of troops to another troublespot urgently he would have to tell Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, that "something will have to give".

I think we can take this estimate at face value -- the British senior military leadership has a reputation for candor, especially when testifying to Parliament, and this report tracks what I've read in other sources. But it gets worse, according to the Daily Telegraph:

The problems have already affected the deployment of extra troops to Afghanistan to back up the American-led hunt for Osama bin Laden. Defence chiefs have been considering sending 1,400 commandos and paratroopers to support the SAS and US special forces' operation in Afghanistan.

Operation Mountain Storm is led by Task Force 121, which is made up of US and British special forces units and has been ordered to capture bin Laden before the US presidential elections. But Gen John Reith, Chief of Joint Operations, has warned Sir Michael that the British troops could not be committed to the hunt for bin Laden for more than six months.

One of the two units being considered for Afghanistan, the Royal Marines' 40 Commando, was due to be sent to Basra, so if it goes to Afghanistan another infantry unit will have to be sent in its place.

Analysis: So, America's closet ally has also paid a high cost for Operation Iraqi Freedom in addition to the cost in blood. One of my smart colleagues thinks this is an example of incurring security related costs in pursuit of the war in Iraq, and I agree. As he says: "Sure, Britain is safer in the sense that [Saddam Hussein] did pose some measure of threat. The question is about cost - unit of security gained per unit of effort expended. If they really can't fight again for 5 years, that is significant strategic risk. Since we are their allies, presumably their risk is our risk."

Right. The cost of the war in Iraq shouldn't just be measured in terms of dollars or lives spent -- it should also be seen as an expenditure of American military power that precludes the expenditure of American (and allied) military power for other purposes. It's like you've got a six-shooter and several targets -- if you're smart, you pick the most threatening targets and shoot them first, and as accurately as possible, to conserve ammo for future targets and hopefully to survive. America and her allies have a finite military capacity, just like the bullets in a revolver, and if we shoot up our bullets at one target (Iraq), we will have less to shoot at others (e.g. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, the tri-border region of South America, etc.) Ultimately, this means that the U.S. may be less secure in the future for expending its military capacity on Iraq today.

Query: We know what the British are saying about their future capacity to conduct major combat operations -- what are the American projections on this issue? Assuming we can eventually leave Iraq, how much time will the U.S. military need to consolidate, reorganize and reconstitute before it's ready to fight again? My hunch is that it will take less time, because of the rotational readiness systems being adopted in the Army and the pressure to get redeployed units ready for the next OEF/OIF rotation. But the question remains -- what will the long-term readiness cost be of Operation Iraqi Freedom?

More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:20

 
Major U.S. military realignment planned

Bradley Graham has a really good report in the Washington Post today about the planned realignment of American military units and bases overseas. In total, he reports that roughly half of America's 71,000 troops in Germany may come home to the states -- and that our Cold War-era bases in Germany may be shifted within Europe to Romania and other nations more receptive to the U.S. and more strategically situated. As you can imagine, this plan has massive political, strategic and operational implications for the U.S., its allies and its enemies.

Under the plan, which is nearing approval, smaller, relatively spartan bases would be established in Romania and possibly Bulgaria, and designed for the rapid projection of U.S. military power against terrorists, hostile states and other potential adversaries.

Farther east, in Central Asia, bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan that were established in 2001 to support the war in Afghanistan would be preserved as training sites and as staging areas that U.S. forces could use in emergencies.

In Asia, about 15,000 troops out of a total presence of about 100,000 would be withdrawn, mostly by streamlining administrative staffs of the U.S. military commands in South Korea and Japan, the officials said. But much of that reduction could be offset by a buildup of personnel and aircraft in Guam and the possible stationing of another aircraft carrier battle group in either Guam or Hawaii, the officials said. The Pentagon plan also calls for new training and staging areas in Australia and expansion of military ties with Singapore and Thailand.

U.S. officials have said before that they intended to eliminate a number of large, full-service Cold War bases abroad and construct a network of more skeletal outposts closer to potential trouble spots in the Middle East and along the Pacific Rim. But neither the proposed size of the reductions in Europe and Asia nor details about locations of the new sites were previously disclosed.

The realignment would amount to a dramatic change in how U.S. forces are positioned around the globe. Some of the troops now overseas would be brought home, while vital equipment would be dispersed more widely to enable more nimble dispatch of forces. Another major objective, officials added, is to deepen military ties and joint training with a greater number of allies in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Analysis: There are lots of things at work here, and it's hard to tell which one is really driving this change. The first and most obvious driver is cost. It's very expensive to station U.S. forces overseas, particularly in an advanced Western country like Germany where the cost of living is relatively high and the costs of doing business are also high. It costs a lot (either hundreds of millions or billions) more to keep American forces there than it would cost to keep similar units in the U.S. It used to be that you could justify this cost because these forces were "forward deployed" -- you knew where they would fight, and accepted these costs because they got these units close to the battlefield. But after the end of the Cold War, our military has started to transition away from being a forward deployed force to an expeditionary force -- and we never know where we're going to deploy next. Thus, it may make much more sense from a cost standpoint to find the most efficient place to garrison our troops (inside the United States), and then to purchase additional strategic lift assets like C-17 aircraft to fly them wherever they need to go on a moment's notice.

Efficiency is related to cost, and it's also driving this move. The garrisons in Germany and South Korea require a huge amount of institutional overhead and force structure. Shifting from the Cold War garrison model to the "lilypad" model will eliminate the need for large logistical and infrastructural systems in those locations. Consider South Korea. The 2nd Infantry Division (minus its 3rd Brigade) is stationed there, complete with its division headquarters, aviation, artillery, and other support assets. To support one infantry division of roughly 15,000 soldiers, we have a total force package on the Korean peninsula of 37,000. Granted, much of this exists to support follow-on forces from CONUS that would deploy to Korea for a contingency. But a lot of these forces could be eliminated by changing the nature of the South Korea garrison to either a rotating brigade-sized deployment model, or a pre-positioned equipment model. The same concept applies to Germany, except that there are more combat forces in Germany and proportionally more support units as well.

The second major driver is probably politics. Without getting into the details, Germany and the U.S. do not have the warmest and fuzziest relationship right now. This will pass... but there may come a day when Germany might not allow U.S. troops to even deploy from its soil to a war they don't approve it. (Not likely, but possible) More importantly, there has been a gradual tightening of restrictions on American forces over the past generation in Germany. Whereas they could once maneuver freely around the countryside, they now must stay in small maneuver areas that barely can contain a battalion task force, let alone two brigade-sized units in a force-on-force engagement. Gunnery has been restricted; so have the activities of Army and Air Force aircraft. Overall, Germany has become less hospitable to American forces, and the net result is that American forces in Germany have a tougher time training for combat than their stateside peers. Politically, nations like Romania and Bulgaria going to be much more receptive -- at least initially. They will welcome American bases (and dollars) with open arms. And the greater power differential between the nations will ensure that these other nations do less to impede U.S. military activity than Germany.

Finally, the third driver behind this shift is related to the first -- a need to create a more expeditionary model of basing that supports deployments, not large forward-deployed units. The current model of basing in South Korea (especially) and Germany (less so today) was designed to fight sequels of wars in those two locations. Trying to consolidate units for training or deploy them from those locations is like trying to pound a very square peg into a very round hole. A shift to a "lilypad" model of basing would presumably place a premium on deployability. New bases would be built around seaports and large air transport facilities. Major consideration would (or should) be given to future hotspots, and also to overflight permissions and other tricky details that could frustrate future operations in 10-30 years. The idea is to create a military infrastructure to support an expeditionary military, instead of the current situation where we are trying to use a Cold War military infrastructure to support an expeditionary force.

What are the risks? The first and obvious one is cost. Though this plan will achieve some net efficiencies, it's not entirely clear that it will cost less in the short-term or long-term to pursue this option. The success of the lilypad model hinges on other expenditures, such as the purchase of strategic lift capability and the short-term construction of new bases in CONUS and overseas. Those equipment and capital expenditures will run into the tens of billions of dollars, and it's unclear how long it will take to balance the ledger under what we would've paid for the current Cold War model of basing.

The second major risk is security. A lilypad model may be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, particularly during critical deployment times, because there are less forces at these bases to secure them and because they're more dispersed. Say what you will about the ponderous Cold War basing model -- it certainly left spare manpower with which to run force protection operations. Additionally, we will be throwing away generations of cooperation with the German polizei and South Korean national police. I know first-hand just how valuable these relationships can be for passing criminal intelligence and preventing future threat operations.

The third risk is political -- this plan may not fly in Congress. There are a myriad of reasons why Congress may torpedo this plan. In theory, the members should embrace it -- more bases = more money in their districts. But there may be significant disruption too, especially if DoD proposes to cut some stateside bases in order to make this plan work. (Schumpeter would probably justify that as "creative destruction", but it's still a tough sell politically.) Also, the purchases of C-17 and C-5 aircraft will be hard to get through Congress unless the Pentagon kills other costly projects to offset the multi-billion cost of buying more strategic lift. While I personally think that's a good trade, it's going to be a very tough fight politically.

Update I: The Pentagon tried to spin this issue as uncertain today, and still subject to a great deal of change. In a press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld backed off the story as reported by The Post, putting things in a much less categorical way. Here's an excerpt from the Q&A:

Q. My question is, under the proposed realignment of forces that you advocate and the Pentagon is sending up to the White House, there is talk about moving troops out of Europe and moving them to Central Asia and taking down -- going down some forces in the Pacific. But there's nothing in there that we know about, about possibly withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea. Would you like to withdraw U.S. forces? If so, how many and when?

SEC. RUMSFELD: We started almost three years ago, at the president's request, to look at how our country was arranged around the world in terms of bases and force structure. After the Cold War ended, troops were reduced but generally left where they were. And where they had been and where they are today was basically in a status defense mode, arranged to fight a war where they were. The chances of their fighting a war -- for example, a tank battle in Germany -- today are so modest that it calls for a review of how we're arranged.

We are doing that. We've got wonderful people doing an excellent job. We've talked to our friends and allies around the world and we've established certain principles.

One principle is that we clearly do not want to want to bring all of our forces home. We want to have a presence in various parts of the world because it has a healthy deterrent effect. It has the effect also of enabling us to train and work with our friends and allies around the world so that we can function in a combined and joint manner in the event we're called to take actions.

A second principle has been that we really want our forces where they're wanted. We don't want to be in places where it's not terribly hospitable.

Third, we have to be arranged with understandings with the countries where they are such that we're able to use our forces for whatever the taxpayers of the United States may need them for. We can't have one Defense Department for one country and another for another country and another for the American people. We need to be able to be located in a way that, since we can't know where the next problem will be, we can't -- we're much better at assessing what the capabilities are that we'll have to deal with than where the precise threat might come from; therefore, we have to be arranged flexibly so we can move wherever we may need to go.

The next principle was that we'd have to have those kinds of agreements with countries. So any speculation in the press that you see thus far is speculation, because what we now have is a template where we feel we have options as to what we could do.

One of the things will be to bring forces -- some forces home. There's no question about that. We want to reduce the number of permanent changes of station, the costs that that imposes on our people. We'd like, to the extent that's no longer necessary to have people posted overseas, to reduce stress on families so that, for example, the spouses that work won't be having to change jobs every five minutes, or kids that are in high school don't have to be jerked out as frequently and moved to some other place as often as has been the case in a typical military career.

We're now at the point where we're going to begin talking to those countries directly. And we won't know what we want to know until we have talked to them and gained a better understanding of what they're willing to do and how they're willing to arrange our agreements and understandings with them in a way that fits the needs of our country. To the extent we talk to two or three about where we might be located, we obviously would arrange ourselves where the best arrangement was for the American people and for our friends and allies. We have choices.

And we feel that the process has been very professional. It's excellent. It's going to be tied eventually to -- for example, we could not have a BRAC in the United States, which we need -- that we must have, everyone estimates, maybe as much as 20 percent excess facilities for our force structure -- we could not do that unless we had a look worldwide and brought home those people who ultimately ought to be here.

So we're in that process. It's being undertaken, I think. And I -- let me put it this way. Let's say we go to the next step and we find out where our first choice is in each part of the world, and then whether or not that works, and then we go to our second or third choice and whether that works. Then we'd have to look at the cost. And we'd probably want to phase it over a period of time, where we would take a certain amount of military construction expense over a period of years. My guess is it would take, oh, a number of years to roll this out.

So it's a big thing, it's an important thing, we're going to be much better off arranged -- much better arranged as a country. And I think it'll be a good thing for the armed forces. It'll reduce stress on the armed forces. And I'm just very pleased with the professionalism of the work that's been done.

Q. Can you give us a sneak preview on South Korea?

SEC. RUMSFELD: No, no, no. We want to talk to our friends and allies before we start drip --

(Cross talk.)

And there's more, specifically related to the realignment of forces in Korea and what that might do to the strategic balance there--

Q. Would you tell us, sir, how it will affect the security of South Korea against the military threat from North Korea?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Sure. Let me take it in two pieces. South Korea has a gross domestic product that possibly is 25 or 30 times that of the North. It has a highly capable armed force. It is a partner and an ally and a friend of the United States, and we have worked cooperatively with them under the U.N. umbrella for the better part of 50 years -- and that's a good thing.

We are going to make no changes in the U.S. force posture that would be to the detriment of any of our friends or allies. What we're going to have to do, however, is to begin to think in different terms, in a different context.

Analysis: I happen to agree with the Secretary here; you don't want to do things that tip the strategic scales in the wrong direction simply for the sake of efficiency. Korea is a special place, and there are smart operational planners in the Pentagon who understand the balance of terror there as well as I do. Even though South Korea may have 1/2 million men under arms, it still needs us for symbolic and political protection, if not actual combat power. And we should be careful in pursuing this strategy too quickly, because haste will undermine old alliances and create opportunities for our enemies.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:24

 
Thanks for your support! In less than a day, Intel Dump has been able to raise more than $200 thanks to your donations. I really appreciate this, and this money will be put towards the costs of purchasing server space and a website address (www.intel-dump.com) to make this into a more professional site. However, and I feel like NPR in asking this, I still need your continued support. If Intel Dump is worth the cost of the New York Times to you, please donate $1. If you value Intel Dump like a decent magazine or two that you'd buy on a newsrack, please contribute $5 or $10. If this blog is more like a magazine subscription to you, then I hope you'll consider donating $20 or $25.

Once again, thanks for your donations. I've gotten thousands of e-mails over the past year from readers -- most good, some bad -- but I am incredibly heartened by this kind of support.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:15

 
Book Recommendation: I'm near the end of Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson. As the title implies, this is a book about the way the media covered Operation Iraqi Freedom, and to some extent, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan as well. It contains 40 or 50 short essays by embedded journalists, non-embedded "unilaterals", photographers, DoD officials, and some other miscellaneous observers. The book includes the now-famous essay by NYT reporter John F. Burns where he accuses other major media of bribing the Iraqi government with money and favorable coverage; the book also includes memorable essays from WP reporter William Branigin, CNN reporter Martin Savidge, and Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright. This book is a must-have for any journalist or military historian interested in the stories of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the way that history's first draft was written in the desert.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:35

 
Attention L.A. area readers: If you're interested in national security, foreign affairs and international relations, you may want to attend the upcoming meeting of the Nathan Hale Foreign Policy Society, hosted by Robert Tagorda. The Hale Society is a discussion group founded by the Oxford students who run OxBlog, and it's essentially a forum where intelligent people can come together to discuss important issues in an academic-like setting. Here are the details for the L.A. meeting.

Sunday, March 28, 2004 -- 5:30 p.m.
Acapulco Restaurant
385 N. La Cienega
Los Angeles, CA 90048-4117
Phone: (310) 659-6831
1 block north of Beverly Center
Map

If you plan on attending, please RSVP to Mr. Tagorda. If you're interested in the society but not in L.A., check out the group's website to see when a meeting is coming to your neck of the woods.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:30

 
Seattle company mistreats National Guardsman after his return from combat
DOL says company is breaking federal law; company says it doesn't care

The Seattle Times carries this report on the employment problems of Dana Beaudine -- an Oregon National Guardsman who fought in Iraq, was wounded by a mortar attack, and diagnosed with some residual disability -- who has run into trouble with his recalcitrant employer who refuses to reemploy him in accordance with federal law. The Department of Labor has gotten involved, saying that Securitas is in violation of federal law in its treatment of CPL Beaudine. Yet, the company refuses to do the right thing -- even though it's a security contractor with lots of government business, and even though it's won an award from DoD for its treatment of reservists.

Beaudine, 34, worked as a guard at the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle before he was called up, serving in Iraq as a corporal in an Oregon National Guard infantry unit.

* * *
At the time of his deployment, his employer was Argus Services, a Spokane-based company that held the security contract for all federal buildings in the Pacific Northwest. His record with the company was unblemished, he said.

When he came back, Securitas had taken over the $12 million contract.

Securitas initially returned him to his post at the federal building. His duties consisted mainly of screening people as they entered the building. In fact, he said, neither the nerve damage nor the post-traumatic stress disorder kept him from doing anything in his job description.

But he was back on the job only a few days. The company, after learning secondhand about his injuries, asked him not to return to work until he supplied more information about his health, he said. In particular, Securitas wanted to know more about his diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The company asked him for a list of all his medications, a signed release so it could review his medical records and a letter from Army psychiatrists saying he was fit to work.

Beaudine said it took time working through Army channels, but he met the company's requests. In a November document to Securitas, the chief of psychiatry at Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis and a second Army psychiatrist found Beaudine "mentally competent" to do his job.

Securitas then requested he undergo a "fitness-for-duty exam" with a psychiatrist of its choosing. At that point, Beaudine balked, saying the Labor Department had advised him such a screening was unnecessary.

* * *
In a Jan. 26 letter to the company, the Labor Department stated that after reviewing information from Securitas and Beaudine, it concluded the company was in violation of the Uniformed Service Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, a 1994 law that stiffened job-protection guarantees for returning soldiers. Securitas also got a warning letter from the human-resources director of the Oregon National Guard, who recommended Beaudine be allowed to return to work.

The company, however, resisted. In a Jan. 27 letter, the company's regional human-resources director, Felecia Clarke, informed Beaudine that unless he consented to the company's psychiatric exam, "we have no choice but to determine that you have chosen to quit."

Analysis: Are you disgusted yet? I am. Employment law issues are never pretty -- there are usually unclean hands on both sides. But this looks like a pretty clear case of bad corporate citizenship, and I personally hope that Securitas gets slammed by DOL with an enforcement action that costs them thousands of dollars in legal fees and many more thousands in damages. I find this company beyond contempt for its actions -- how dare it serve as government contractor, taking taxpayer money, profitting from our national security budget, when it can't deign to treat a reservist fairly and lawfully upon his return from combat? I would be plain mad if this were a normal case of a normal reservist who did his duty -- I'm absolutely disgusted because this company is acting like this towards a combat disabled veteran who wants nothing more than to do his job and support himself.

Fortunately, the law on this subject is pretty pro-veteran, and there's a fair amount of caselaw supporting the rights of reservists in these kinds of situations. I know it costs businesses money to hold jobs for reservists and I know that this imposes an economic cost on the public at large. But frankly, I don't care. We have an all volunteer military; society at large benefits from the fact that a few brave Americans volunteer while they don't. For the most part, I think the all-volunteer military is a great system. But I think its viability hinges on the willingness of society to honor and support the sacrifices of a few. If the average American has to pay a few more cents for a certain good or service to offset the cost of these reservists, so be it. I think that sacrifice pales in comparison to what CPL Beaudine gave up.

Corporations -- especially large corporations like Securitas -- can share some of the burden too. I'm not asking for them to do a lot; they don't have to provide matching pay or other benefits (though they should if they can afford it). I'm just asking these corporate citizens to follow the law, and to treat reservists and disabled vets the way that Congress requires them to. It's the right thing to do, and it's the law. Unfortunately, the Seattle Times reports that there have been 3,200 USERRA complaints filed with the Department of Labor since Sept. 11, out of roughly 360,000 reservists mobilized since that time. That's an awfully large number of bad corporate citizens, and I hope they all get what they deserve from the Labor Department and the Justice Department. Personally, I wouldn't want to be the lawyer for one of these companies, having to explain to a jury of 12 Americans why I mistreated this reservist. Especially in a case where punitive damages are available... ouch.

Update I: ABC's World News Tonight also has a story on the saga of CPL Beaudine. While I think all this publicity will probably force Securitas to do the right thing, I am still not satisfied. I think that any corporation that treats a soldier so shamefully deserves this kind of public excoriation, and I will pounce on any other instance of that that I learn of.

Update II -- Memo to Congress: One of my readers now deployed to Iraq had an excellent suggestion -- why not amend federal law (and/or the Federal Acquisition Regulation in the CFR) to provide for suspension or debarment (or both) as penalties for government contractors who violate the USERRA or SSCRA protections for their employees who are mobilized as reservists? I think this is a great idea, and I hope that some Congressional staffer reads Intel Dump and recommends this to his/her boss. I don't think we should reward this kind of bad corporate behavior with government contracts and the money from American taxpayers. Congress already attaches all kinds of conditions to the receipt of taxpayer money, and it seems like proper treatment of reservists should be one of them.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:23

 
Apparent unlawful command influence found by USMC 3-star

The Washington Times reports today on an order issued in February by a Marine Corps military judge that finds "apparent unlawful command influence" by Marine Lt. Gen. H.P. Osman in the cases of two Marines under his command. Specifically, Lt. Gen. Osman called the accused Marines "pond scum" at an officer call, and "said that an officer must at some point shift loyalty from the individual Marine to protecting the Corps as an institution." The Times reports:

"The court finds that apparent unlawful command influence has occurred because of certain comments made by Lt. Gen. Osman at two officers' calls on 10 December 2003," wrote the judge, Col. Alvin W. Keller, in a Feb. 9 order obtained by The Washington Times.

A military legal source, who asked not to be named, said the fact that a colonel took on a much more senior officer is "really remarkable."

"It is unusual for a three-star to be accused of unlawful command influence," the source said.

* * *
Col. Keller found that Gen. Osman's comments did not result in "unlawful command influence," but did constitute another form called "apparent unlawful command influence." This occurs when "reasonable members of the public believe command influence prejudiced the accused."

"Although it has no direct impact on the fairness of a trial, the appearance of unlawful command influence is as much to be condemned as its actual existence," Col. Keller wrote.

Analysis: Unlawful command influence is a real problem in the military justice system, and the system takes it very seriously. As Mr. Scarborough reports, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has called such influence the "mortal enemy of military justice". There are a substantial number of safeguards built into the military justice system to prevent UCI, among other things, from affecting the rights of military defendants. (I discuss some of these in my this article on military justice.) The fact that a military judge -- not even an appellate judge -- has caught and sanctioned this UCI is a testament to the efficacy of the system at dealing with this problem. It's probably also a testament to the military defense attorneys in this case -- JAG officers who likely heard about this incident and presented it to the military court as an example of UCI.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:45

 
Professional whistleblowers

Washington Post columnist (and American Prospect editor) Harold Meyerson picks up on a point made by several of us on Monday regarding Richard Clarke -- that he's the latest in a series of senior White House officials to resign after having his professional opinion ignored by the political powers that dominate the current West Wing.

Step back a minute and look at who has left this administration or blown the whistle on it, and why. Clarke enumerates a half-dozen counterterrorism staffers, three of whom were with him in the Situation Room on Sept. 11, who left because they felt the White House was placing too much emphasis on the enemy who didn't attack us, Iraq, and far too little on the enemy who did.

But that only begins the list. There's Paul O'Neill, whose recent memoir recounts his ongoing and unavailing battle to get the president to take the skyrocketing deficit seriously. There's Christie Todd Whitman, who appears in O'Neill's memoir recalling her own unsuccessful struggles to get the White House to acknowledge the scientific data on environmental problems. There's Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who told Congress that it would take hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to adequately secure postwar Iraq. There's Richard Foster, the Medicare accountant, who was forbidden by his superiors from giving Congress an accurate assessment of the cost of the administration's new program. All but Foster are now gone, and Foster's sole insurance policy is that Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress were burnt by his muzzling.

In the Bush administration, you're an empiricist at your own peril. Plainly, this has placed any number of conscientious civil servants -- from Foster, who totaled the costs on Medicare, to Clarke, who charted the al Qaeda leads before Sept. 11 -- at risk. In a White House where ideology trumps information time and again, you run the numbers at your own risk. Nothing so attests to the fundamental radicalism of this administration as the disaffection of professionals such as Foster and Clarke, each of whom had served presidents of both parties.

Analysis: Obviously, Mr. Meyerson has an axe to grind with this White House. He's a Democratic partisan, and he's quite open about that. But he has a point, and it's one that's not confined to the more political issues like national security or fiscal policy. Nicholas Thompson wrote a great piece for the Washington Monthly last year documenting some examples of where the White House has disregarded the best ideas that America's scientific community had to offer -- often for political reasons. I'm not surprised by the presence of politics in the White House -- it is, after all, one of the "political branches" of government. However, I'm disturbed by the extent to which political considerations permeate every aspect of the White House decisionmaking process, and the extent to which these considerations dominate that process.

The conventional wisdom goes that the Clinton White House was full of wonks, and that the Bush White House is full of hacks. Well, it seems obvious to me that the right thing for America is a mix of the two. Friends tell me that the Clinton White House had a good population of hacks in addition to its legions of wonks. Maybe what the Bush White House needs are a few good wonks...
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:30

 
Late condolences: If you haven't done it yet, please visit the weblog of Bob Zangas, a U.S. Marine Corps reserve lieutenant colonel who was killed while working as a civilian nation builder in Iraq. Several friends have e-mailed me about LTC Zangas, and their comments can be summed up in a few words: "He was a great American."

LTC Zangas was killed in the company of Fern Holland, an American attorney working for the rights of women in Iraq. She too earned the epitaph of "great American", and will be missed by many.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:04

 
New additions to Intel Dump: I am planning some major revisions to this site in the near future, including a move from Blogspot to a professional server and several upgrades to Intel Dump's form and content. To help pay for these initiatives, I have added an Amazon.Com PayPage for this site. If you have read this site over the past year and you like what I've had to offer, please help me by making a small contribution. Thanks.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:36

 
Clarke Testimony: More interesting stuff from the 9/11 commission hearings today, including the testimony of Richard Clarke. I'm watching via webcast right now on CSPAN3.

Some things to look for in the transcripts of this testimony:

- Interesting discussion of what "actionable intelligence" is, in reponse to questions from former-Sen. Slade Gorton.

- Mr. Clarke says that American "HUMINT capabilities were eviscerated during the 1980s and 1990s", and draws a connection between this capabilities gap and our failure to interdict Al Qaeda while it was growing in the 1990s.

- Good exchange between former IL Gov. James Thompson and Mr. Clarke. It started with Gov. Thompson holding a copy of Against All Enemies and a copy of Mr. Clarke's Aug. 2002 press conference and asking "Which one is true?" The answer, from Mr. Clarke, was that both were true. He said that he was asked to defend the Bush Administration's policies to the press in August 2002 after a critical Time magazine story came out, and that he did so as a loyal member of the White House staff.

- Excellent dialogue between former Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick and Mr. Clarke about pre-9/11 threat assessment and response planning. At one point, Ms. Gorelick asks why Mr. Clarke didn't go further with his recommendations, and why his recommendations weren't followed, especially after the thwarted attacks on L.A. airport at the time of the Millenium. The response -- (1) that policymaking is often the art of the possible, and (2) that it wasn't possible to get these policies adopted before the horror of 9/11 and the reality of 3,000 American deaths. To paraphrase, Mr. Clarke says that it takes body bags to make policy changes. (Post script: as an Army anti-terrorism planner in late 2000 and early 2001, I can verify that it was difficult to get AT/FP measures adopted even after the USS Cole attack showed there was a viable threat to the U.S. armed forces.)

- "I'm not working for Senator Kerry." Mr. Clarke says he is, by voter registration, a Republican. Professionally, he says that he has worked for both sides of the aisle. He also defends his relationship with Rand Beers, who's now a member of the Kerry staff, saying that they are good friends and that they teach together. Moreover, Mr. Clarke swears on the record, under oath, that he will not accept a position in any future Kerry Administration.

- Notable quote: "By invading Iraq, the President has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

- In response to a question about what might be needed to effectively counter terrorism, Mr. Clarke suggests a separate domestic intelligence agency, albeit with very strict oversight to prevent civil liberties abuses. As a preliminary step, he recommends placing that agency in the FBI, but thinks the FBI is ill-suited for this kind of work because of its organizational structure and culture.

- Mr. Clarke testified that he was very supportive of retaliatory and preemptive strikes against Al Qaeda during the Clinton and Bush Administrations -- "not waiting for the terrorist attack ... but taking the offensive against terrorist organizations that looked like they threatened the United States". So my guess is that Mr. Clarke was initially happy with the President's National Security Strategy which incorporates pre-emptive (preventive?) military action, but that he later became disillusioned with the White House strategy when the target became Iraq.

Update I: Slate's Fred Kaplan thinks that Richard Clarke scored a knockout today before the 9/11 commission, citing many of the same exchanges and quotes that I have above. I'm a little less sure that he won so handily, but then again, I'm a little less experienced than Mr. Kaplan in this area. Read the transcripts -- you be the judge.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:59

 
Changes in training; changes in soldiers

Esther Schrader reports in today's LA Times on some changes -- evolutionary or revolutionary, depending on your perspective -- that are reshaping America's Army for the fight in Iraq and the next place America sends its military. Some of the changes are hidden from casual view -- they affect doctrine, force structure, and other areas. Ms. Schrader reports on some of the more visible changes, such as those taking place at the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center during pre-deployment exercises for Iraq-bound units.

"When I was a captain, battle training was very predictable," said Col. Robert Brown, standing outside a mock Iraqi city at Ft. Polk as the infantry brigade he commands — the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division — waged battle inside with Arabic-speaking role players.

"I used to know exactly what we would do in a training exercise six months in advance. It was like you were in a football game and you knew what plays your opponent was going to run. But now you get out on the field and the other team might play soccer, or it might play lacrosse, or it might cheat.

"Our Army trained for a checklist mentality," Brown added. "Now we can't rely on the checklist."

* * *
Nothing was proposed that would move the Army away from its basic culture, built on the belief that major wars would be fought in a linear way, with large groups of tanks and smaller groups of infantrymen moving across a battlefield against an easily distinguishable foe.

The mind-set had such deep roots — and the sort of peacekeeping and nation building that now preoccupies the Army in Iraq was so out of political favor — that just a year ago the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., was ready to close its Peacekeeping Institute. Only a major campaign on the eve of the war saved it from the ax.

Today's war-driven demands fit neatly into a broader push by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to remake, or "transform," the entire military — but especially the Army — for a new era in which enemies might not wear uniforms, represent nations or use tanks. Rumsfeld plucked Schoomaker out of retirement for the task.

"The current emergency presents a period of risk," Schoomaker said. "Yet it also creates a window of opportunity to effect dramatic changes in the Army."

Analysis: Transformation is in the eye of the beholder. Change often does look transformational to those going through it, when from the outside it only looks like adapation or mere evolution. Moreover, transformation may be moot if the enemy transforms in such a way as to negate any advantages gained. That is the the basic theory of asymmetric warfare -- now being practiced against us in Iraq -- to strike where the enemy is weak. Our enemies have watched us evolve into a techno-centric, firepower-centric, command-and-control military. They have evolved in parallel, developing tactics which frustrate our technology and our ability to apply precision firepower. DARPA may be working on projects that can pick underground facilities out of ground clutter and pinpoint insurgents by their body odor (no really). But for now, our soldiers must improvise, adapt and overcome the old fashioned way. This training is useful, insofar as it bridges the gap between current Army doctrine and what the Army faces in Iraq. But more change is necessary.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:08

 
Part of U.S. spring offensive begins in Afghanistan

The Associated Press doesn't have an embedded reporter with the American forces operating on the mountainous Pakistan-Afghanistan border, because those forces are largely part of the clandestine special operations community. Nonetheless, Noor Khan was able to report this evening that American forces have established a forward operating base in the area from which to launch air assault operations and other missions to find, capture and/or kill the top leaders of Al Qaeda. The FOB is part of the nascent Operation Mountain Storm.

ON THE AFGHAN BORDER - Using bulldozers to slice bunkers and a helicopter landing pad out of a mountainside, U.S. special operations forces dug in Tuesday on a peak overlooking Pakistan — fortifying the area for the intensifying battle against al-Qaida and Taliban forces.

Special operations forces — who include Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and CIA operatives — are playing a secretive but leading role in the battle against al-Qaida and Taliban suspects believed to be hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan's tribal areas.

Remote posts like this one near the Afghan city of Orgun, scratched out of a mountainside to house a small contingent of U.S. forces and a larger Afghan militia unit, serve as forward launch pads for the fight.

* * *
The camp is home to 60 Americans, working with 200 Afghan militia, the Afghan militiamen say. The Westerners wear T-shirts and sunglasses, and most sport beards and mustaches, with pistols strapped to their legs. Rank and file U.S. soldiers must remain in uniform and are banned from growing beards, but special operations forces are not subject to the same regulations.

But wait -- there's more. The AP has some very interesting news to report about the extent of U.S. activity in Pakistan -- both official help for President Musharraf's forces, and less visible activity.

On the Pakistan side, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has said about a dozen U.S. "technical experts" are in his country. Some are located across the border from the special operations post in Miran Shah, Pakistani intelligence officials told AP.

Last week, a Pakistani army spokesman, Gen. Shaukat Sultan, said a dozen or so U.S. intelligence agents were in the country "assisting Pakistan in technical intelligence and surveillance." The CIA declined to comment.

* * *
No uniformed American forces have been seen in recent days along one of the front lines in the U.S. campaign against terror suspects based in Pakistan's North and South Waziristan, locals say.

Analysis: Senior Pentagon officials have said for some time that they would be launching a major offensive in Afghanistan soon, and that its vanguard would be special operations forces operating in conjunction with Pakistani forces and intelligence assets. This report from the AP fits that plan. So even though we don't have a lot of official confirmation in this story, it seems consistent with other "known known's" (to use a Rumsfeld-ism) about American operations in Afghanistan.

What's next? Presumably, the U.S. will not execute this operation exclusively with special operations forces. The terrain is simply too severe; the battlespace too large. Large formations of elite light infantry formations must be employed to effectively seal this region and secure the exit routes that our prey might use. Currently, there is one such brigade on the ground in Afghanistan -- not a large enough force for the terrain in question. I predict that we'll see the deployment of additional forces from the U.S. and/or NATO to Afghanistan in the near future, and that we will subsequently see the launch of larger, more conventional operations in the mountainous Afghan border region. More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:28

 
Another voucher for Clarke: Slate's Fred Kaplan, who has covered America's defense community for quite some time, writes that Richard Clarke is probably telling the truth about counter-terrorism policy in the Clinton and Bush Administrations. He has a few reasons to think so, including a professional relationship with Clarke as a reporter. And like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, and myself, Mr. Kaplan thinks the allegations are true because the White House has focused its counter-battery fire on Mr. Clarke's credibility -- not the substance of his assertions.

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.

As Lewis Carroll once wrote, things are getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser.
posted by Phillip Carter at 16:32

 
Army mandates fewer physical for redeploying and exiting soldiers

Bruce Alpert reported on Friday that the Army had told its senior commanders and medical officials to drastically scale back the number and depth of its soldier physical examinations, ostensibly in an effort to help redeploying soldiers get home faster. Mr. Alpert writes for the Newhouse News Service, and his story was picked up by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, among other sources. Here's a slice of the story:

The Army is scaling back the medical exams it offers soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, discouraging routine blood tests, electrocardiograms and X-rays, according to a Pentagon memo.

The directive from Army Assistant Surgeon General Richard Ursone is drawing criticism from some veterans organizations and members of Congress, who say the department should make the exams mandatory and more comprehensive to enable earlier diagnosis of the kinds of medical problems reported by some veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But in his Jan. 20 memorandum to regional medical commands, Ursone said the "performance of routine screening laboratory, radiologic and electrocardiographic tests in this setting is extremely low yield and is discouraged."

Even if giving those tests is "supported by evidence-based medicine," Ursone said in his memo, they "may be deferred if the soldier is without symptoms and the laboratory tests will delay release from active duty."

The directive applies to soldiers leaving active duty, which in recent months mostly has been troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Analysis: Mr. Alpert reports that several members of Congress have asked the Defense Department to clarify just what is going on with this policy directive. Army public affairs officers declined to elaborate on the issue. This is an early report, but notwithstanding that, it's still disturbing to me. Given the problems with Gulf War Syndrome and other deployment-related illnesses in the 1990s, as well as problems with leishmaniasis and other ailments during Operation Iraqi Freedom, I'm surprised the Army would issue this directive. There have been problems with squeezing redeployed soldiers through the gates of Army hospitals to give them a full physical. But I think the Army is inviting long-term problems -- not to mention mistreating soldiers -- by not ensuring that they get a full check upon discharge. This may also be transferring a workload to the VA that the VA is neither resourced nor ready to absorb. The right answer, in my opinion, would be to contract for short-term augmentation of military health care capabilities in order to meet this wartime surge.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:09

 
Seeing the President's briefs

Thomas Blanton writes in Slate that the White House should release its Presidential Daily Briefs -- with appropriate security measures -- to the commission investigating 9/11 in order to show what the President knew and when he knew it. According to the Wall Street Journal and other sources, the White House has been stonewalling on this particular document's release, because it reflects the ultimate in privileged executive documents.

The PDB is the CIA's top-of-the-line product, a secret intelligence report prepared each morning for the president. Ari Fleischer, the former White House spokesman, has called the PDB "the most highly sensitized classified document in the government." Vice President Dick Cheney has called it "the family jewels." Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency, has called it "sacrosanct" and "something you never, ever share." Even the commission's chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, has said, "To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history." After much sturm und drang, a compromise was worked out allowing three commission members and the staff director to see the originals of the PDBs from the Bush and Clinton years and then write up a summary for their peers.

This is far too restrictive. Contrary to all the cloak-and-dagger talk, the PDB is less James Bond than Headline News, based on the CIA's best information on world events, spiced up with intercepted communications and spy photos. According to the CIA's own history of its presidential briefings, roughly 40 percent of what the PDB covers is addressed in the newspapers. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported in 2002 that President Clinton used to complain that "most days the PDB contained material he had already read elsewhere." Thousands, and perhaps even millions, of code-worded documents and compartments are more highly classified than the PDB.

Analysis: Obviously, I've never seen a PDB or anything close to it in terms of intelligence. But my common sense tells me that it's an important document for understanding White House decisions with respect to Al Qaeda and other threats on America's horizon. To understand what a decisionmaker did, you have to learn what a decisionmaker knew. This is a fundamental precept of after action reviews in the military, and it seems like a pretty fundamental part of the 9/11 commission's mission too.

Ultimately, the PDBs may not establish fault on the part of the White House. If the PDBs didn't contain relevant, actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda, that says a lot about our intelligence community -- the kind of information it was gathering and the kind of intelligence it was producing. Also, the absence of Al Qaeda information from the CIA's daily brief to POTUS may explain a lot of why other agencies (FBI, INS, DoD, etc) had their guard down. On the other hand, if the PDB contained indicators of Al Qaeda activity and the President did nothing (or not enough), that's important to know. The basic idea behind an after-action review is to learn from mistakes in order not to make them again. If the White House erred on Al Qaeda, it is important to find out why, and to ensure that such mistakes never happen again.

To be sure, there are those who will use the PDB, as well as the 9/11 commission findings, for political purposes. Part of that is necessary; our Constitutional system establishes legislative oversight of executive action -- a necessarily political process. Some may use these findings, if leaked, to influence the November 2004 election. Worse yet, some may disclose highly classified parts of these PDBs which disclose intelligence community "sources and methods". Those are all risks inherent in the release of these documents. But that is what they are -- risks -- and those risks can be either mitigated or accepted. The payoff is much greater -- the opportunity to learn lessons from 9/11 that help us prevent another 9/11. The U.S. Supreme Court once said that "no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation", and I think that's true. There should be no higher priority for this White House than preventing another terrorist attack on the United States. To do that, we must learn the hard lessons about our failure on 9/11. Anyone who stands in the way of this commission, or its efforts to learn those lessons, is doing grave harm to the national security of the United States.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:21

 
White House engages in public duel with former counter-terrorism aide
Comments reveal deeper issues with White House decisionmaking in the war on terrorism

The AP reports today that the White House has fired back at former-counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, whose new book includes many criticisms of the current White House and its counter-terrorism policies. Despite the headline "White House Rebuts Ex-Bush Adviser Claim", it appears that the White House is not rebutting Clarke's claims, so much as trying to impeach his credibility because of his timing and political animus towards the Bush Administration.

"When you compare Dick Clarke's current rhetoric with his past comments and actions, the bedrock of his assertions comes crumbling down," said chief presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. He called Clarke's new book, criticizing the administration's handling of the post-Sept. 11 terrorism environment, "more about politics and book promotions than it is about policies."

* * *
Kerry's adviser on national security, Rand Beers, is a close associate of Clarke's and held the job as terrorism adviser under President Bush during part of 2002. Clarke quotes Beers in the book as asking his advice when Beers considered quitting because "they're using the war on terror politically."

Bartlett, the White House communications director, noted Clarke's friendship with Beers and the upcoming presidential election.

"We believe the timing is questionable," Bartlett said. "When (Clarke) left office, he had every opportunity" to make any grievances known.

Analysis: I find it interesting that the White House has chosen to engage the Clarke criticisms on the level of his personal credibility -- not the truth of the matters asserted. Surely, there are classification and security issues at stake which may preclude a full and fair response by the White House to the Clarke book on the merits. But given the political stakes of this issue -- which could ultimately decide the November 2004 election -- I would think the White House would find some way to actually rebut Clarke's claims (if they weren't true) using unclassified arguments.

That said, I think there is some merit to what Mr. Clarke is asserting, given my limited knowledge of the subject area. For one thing, I completely agree with his criticism of National Security Advisor Condi Rice.

Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator, had said among other things that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, "looked skeptical" when she was warned early in 2001 about the threat from al-Qaida.

"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," Clarke wrote in his new book — "Against All Enemies" — that is scathingly critical of Bush's response to the 2001 terror attacks against New York and Washington.

Clarke said Rice, who previously worked for Bush's father, appeared not to recognize post-Cold War security issues and effectively demoted him within the national security council. He said Rice has an unusually close relationship with Bush, which "should have given her some maneuver room, some margin for shaping the agenda."

Dr. Rice is a Cold War animal, through and through, and she does not have much depth when it comes to the post-Cold War security environment. Part of this makes sense -- you wouldn't get to the stage in your career where you could be an NSA unless you "grew up" in the Cold War and "made your bones" with doctoral and post-doctoral research on the Cold War. However, with the notable exception of contemporary security problems in the former Soviet Union, Dr. Rice has not effectively built an expertise in this area, to the President's detriment. She has also pushed away smart people brought into the White House to work in this area, including Mr. Clarke and retired Gen. Wayne Downing. The Cold War ended during the first Bush Administration, but if you look at the brain trust in the current West Wing, that fact isn't reflected. I think that's a bad thing.

Second, I think there is a great deal of merit to the assertion that the focus on Iraq has diverted all sorts of political, military, economic and diplomatic energy away from the fight on terrorism. Notwithstanding the pedantic assertions of neo-cons like James Taranto and others who constantly say we're not distracted, the pure military calculus of the issue is irrefutable. We have roughly 11,000 military personnel in Afghanistan right now according to GlobalSecurity.Org. In terms of combat personnel, this includes a sizable special operations component and roughly one brigade combat team of light infantry. In Iraq today, we have more than 10 times that number of aggregate personnel, including 16 brigade combat teams of heavy and light forces. American infantry and special operations forces have played a cat-and-mouse game with Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than two years, and one has to wonder about how effective this would've been if we had put some of the combat power into Afghanistan that we have put into Iraq.

Moreover, the U.S. has devoted so much combat power to Iraq for the near term that it has substantially constrained its ability to (1) deploy additional forces to existing theaters of operations, e.g. Afghanistan and (2) deploy forces to new hotspots like Haiti or the Philippines, which may or may not be part of the global war on terrorism. So the question is not merely "How has the war on Iraq affected the U.S. war on terrorism?" -- the question is also "How has the war on Iraq constrained future exercises of American power abroad, by limiting the forces available to the President?" I think it's safe to say that we did not foresee these long-term issues in early 2003, largely because the White House planned Operation Iraqi Freedom on the assumption that "we would be greeted as liberators." (See James Fallows' brilliant piece "Blind Into Baghdad," as well as my Washington Monthly piece "Faux Pax Americana", for more on this.) Today, we are not only distracted from the more important war on Al Qaeda, but we are hamstrung in the other things we'd like to achieve in the world.

Economists like to talk about "marginal costs" and "marginal benefits" when discussing the pro's and con's (in economic terms) of a given decision by a rational actor. It is becoming increasingly clear, one year after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that the marginal cost of our Iraqi operation outweighs the marginal benefit. And more importantly, that the U.S. may have bought more for its buck by putting the billions spent on OIF into other endeavors. Imagine the marginal benefit earned for every dollar spent if we put $87 billion into cooperative threat reduction, or into the Department of Homeland Security, or CBRNE training for local first responders, or any number of other anti-terrorism/counter-terrorism initiatives. I know enough about the appropriations process to know that federal money isn't entirely fungible, but I think this is a valid question because of the enormous debt we have taken on in order to liberate Iraq. It can still be argued that Saddam was a bad guy, and that OIF was a good thing for the people of Iraq and the region. But given America's finite resources, and the need to combat other threats in the world, I'm not sure that it can be argued that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the right choice at the right time for America.

Mr. Clarke's book paints some of these choices in stark relief, and I look forward to reading it.

Update I: Kevin Drum has a good rundown of the White House's response to Mr. Clarke's criticisms. He also has a good note on Mr. Clarke's appearance on 60 minutes.

Update II: Also see Josh Marshall's note on VP Cheney and the Clarke book, and his note on the clear disagreement between Mr. Clarke and Dr. Rice on Al Qaeda. Josh has a lot more on this subject, so keep reading below those two notes.

Update III: The New York Times has a Monday afternoon report on its website detailing the counter-battery fire loosed at Mr. Clarke by the White House, including some pointed barbs from White House spokesman Scott McClellan and Vice President Dick Cheney. Here's a sample of the stuff being fired:

Mr. Cheney appeared on the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh's radio program and alternately dismissed Mr. Clarke's credentials and questioned his expertise.

"He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff," the vice president said.

Seeking to turn Mr. Clarke's government experience against him, Mr. Cheney noted that Mr. Clarke was in the government at the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; when American embassies were attacked in Africa in 1998; and when the warship Cole was attacked in 2000.

"The question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?" Mr. Cheney said.

* * *
Mr. McClellan implied that Mr. Clarke might be motivated at least in part by annoyance at effectively being demoted early in the Bush administration, and that he was trying to promote his book, set to go on sale today.

"Well, I mean, why all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?" Mr. McClellan said. "This is one and a half years after he left the administration. And now all of a sudden he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had.

"And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book, and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."

"Let's look at the politics of it," Mr. McClellan added. "His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy adviser to Senator Kerry's campaign." Mr. Beers, a former State Department official, is a colleague of Mr. Clarke's at Harvard.

Regarding the Vice President's comments, I think Laura Rozen gets it right. Don't you think it's odd that the White House counter-terrorism czar would be out of the loop when it came to meetings about counter-terrorism policy? And doesn't it say something about the war with Iraq that the counter-terrorism advisor was not part of the decisionmaking process? (Josh Marshall comes to this conclusion too.) To me, it says three things. First, that Ron Suskind's reporting is right -- this White House really is run by its political offices (instead of its policy people). Second, that the opinions of professional policy people are probably less valued in this White House than is the norm. Third, that terrorism per se was not the raison d'etre for Operation Iraqi Freedom -- and that it never was a significant part of the decision to go to war.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan still isn't rebutting any of the assertions made by Mr. Clarke -- he's merely trying to impeach his credibility. The White House has yet to make a defense of its actions on the merits. Even if we take the White House's salvo at face value -- that Mr. Clarke is political, is trying to sell his book, and is buddies with Sen. John Kerry -- we still have nothing from the White House to refute what Mr. Clarke is saying. The only credible White House charge is the one about why Mr. Clarke didn't speak up sooner. But maybe he did... he resigned in March 2003 from the White House, just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was being launched. What message do you think Mr. Clarke intended to send by his resignation?

Update IV: I just picked up a copy of Against All Enemies at the local Barnes & Noble, where they graciously have it marked down 20% (plus 10% more for BN members). While in line, an elderly woman asked me if I had seen Mr. Clarke on 60 Minutes last night, and what I thought of it. (I was wearing an Army sweatshirt with Oakley sunglasses, and my military affiliation probably provoked the question.) I answered that I thought the book was worth reading, given Mr. Clarke's background and the gravity of his allegations. But afterwards, I couldn't get this encounter out of my head -- it really left an impression on me. Say what you will about the abstract nature of these issues and their complexity -- Mr. Clarke's allegations are serious enough to resonate with a little old lady from Santa Monica. If that's true, the American public may want more than soundbites and spin about security in this election cycle. We'll see.

Update V: David Frum, a former Bush Administration speech writer who now pens a 'blog for the National Review, has an interesting take on the Clarke allegations from the perspective of someone who served in the same GWB West Wing.

I have yet to read his book, but I have studied his interview, and I think I understand his argument.

Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush admininstration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole. The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world. Instead, his way of presenting his concerns seems to have had the perverse effect of making the terrorist issue look small and secondary - of deflating rather than underscoring its importance.

And this propensity continues.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt - for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? - or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate - and it's the wrong side.

What's Mr. Frum saying? Is he saying that Mr. Clarke's allegations were right, but that he just wasn't articulate enough to sell his agenda to the President? Is Mr. Frum, who was part of the White House political apparatus, saying that Mr. Clarke's real failures were political -- not factual? Did the Bush Administration really ignore a national security threat because one of its advisors couldn't find a way to sell the problem politically? If true, this statement by Mr. Frum is a damning indictment of the entire White House and National Security Council, and it indicates a near-total breakdown of the national security process. The idea behind the NSC staff, intelligence community, Joint Chiefs, and all the other systems in the national security process is to professionalize the decisions of the President in this area -- not to politicize them. Now comes Mr. Frum, saying essentially that the White House ignored its in-house expert on terrorism because he couldn't package it well enough. That's a really disturbing relevation -- especially because it comes from one of the President's own.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:45

 
Academic integrity problems at UCLA

The Daily Bruin has a report in today's paper on student integrity that coincides with the start of Winter Quarter finals week. As you might imagine, it talks to anonymous students who claim they have cheated or came close to cheating, as well as professors who are struggling with the problem. Then, three paragraphs from the bottom, the writer discloses this staggering fact:

The Office of the Dean of Students penalizes hundreds of students each year for academic dishonesty.

Hundreds???: UCLA has an undergraduate population of roughly 20,000 students, so while this is not a high percentage, it is more than I expected. Moreover, this represents the small number who are actually caught and disciplined, versus those who are never caught or let go by wishy-washy professors. I'm disappointed that UCLA has such a problem with this, and I'm not sure where to lay the blame. However, I think it's safe to say that students who learn cheating in college will grow up to see cheating as an effective -- albeit risky -- course of action. These students will take their moral code with them into the post-graduate world, and they will be the ones (along with their cheating peers from other schools) who instigate the Enron scandals of tomorrow.

For what it's worth, I have taken a very hard line on this issue in my seminar this quarter. I included an academic integrity statement in my syllabus, essentially putting the students on notice of my zero tolerance policy. And I am using Turnitin.Com to screen all of the final papers for plagiarism and citation issues. So far, my experience has been that my students have no integrity issues. I draw two lessons from this. First, I have good students. Second, even if I have a couple of bad apples, it is possible for a professor to sanction bad behavior and encourage good behavior in the classroom. UCLA ought to recognize this problem, and its faculty ought to do more to fix this. College isn't just about learning what's in the textbooks. A truly liberal education gives students a moral framework as well, and UCLA needs to do better on that front.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:24

 
Israeli strikes kills Hamas leader: The AP reports tonight that an Israeli missile strike has killed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas. It's hard to guess what the effects of this targeted killing will be, but I think it's safe to say that it will lead to an escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine -- if not in the entire Middle East region.
posted by Phillip Carter at 22:35

 
Voices from America's fallen warriors: Sunday's New York Times has the second installment of final letters home from American servicepersons who have died in Iraq. The feature carries the title "The Things They Wrote," which is undoubtedly an allusion to Tim O'Brien's 1990 novel The Things They Carried. O'Brien, who saw combat as an infantryman in Vietnam, wrote the book as both a criticism of the war and a tribute to those soldiers who fought it. One gets the same impression today from the New York Times -- that it means to praise the brave men and women who serve in the military, while simultaneously showing the cost of war and the folly of America's leaders. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the use of soldiers' personal letters for this purpose, although I think it's a great tribute to have these soldiers' thoughts forever memorialized on the NYT op-ed page. Read the letters, and come to your own conclusions.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:29

 
Gitmo produces results: Neil Lewis has this report from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where American intelligence officers say they are collecting valuable, actionable intelligence from the detainees we have housed there. It appears from this story that the White House and Pentagon are trying to rebut fierce criticism of American policy at Gitmo by arguing that these detentions are producing results. I don't think this will necessarily sway the Supreme Court when it opines on Gitmo in Al-Odah v. United States, but it may help the administration score some points in the court of public opinion.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:31

 
L.A.'s enigmatic law enforcer: Saturday's LA Times has a really interesting story about L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and his recent visit to Pakistan. Within law enforcement circles, Sheriff Baca is widely respected, and his department has led the way in the anti-terrorism field with innovations like the L.A. County Terrorism Early Warning Group. Among other anecdotes, Times reporter Matt Lait shares this one, showing just how politically adept the sheriff can be:

Baca enjoyed the role of visiting dignitary. "Assalam alaikum," he said when introduced to people. Peace be with you.

Several times, Baca clasped his hands together and gave a slight bow, which in this country can be viewed as a Hindu greeting. But Muslims here did not appear to take offense.

He gave Pakistani greetings, a hug and kisses on the cheek, to officials, including Musharraf. In one meeting after another, Baca called the Pakistani president "a man of vision, a man of character, a man of history," ignoring the complex political cross-currents that dominate the country.

Baca gave out miniature sheriff's badges to nearly everybody who crossed his path. He made a small ceremony out of pinning them to the recipients' lapels. After a while, his hosts lined up to receive the gold miniatures.

"Is he running for office," asked one Pakistani, "in this country?"

It never hurts to make friends in the anti-terrorism community. Given the global networked nature of the threat, I imagine these contacts will pay off some day for Los Angeles County.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:12

 
Army drops case against Gitmo chaplain: CNN.Com is carrying a banner on the top of its page saying the Army has decided to drop all charges against Captain James Yee, the Muslim chaplain once accused of conducting espionage at Guantanamo Bay. More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 16:12

 
Gitmo Blues: Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor who has been working with military defense attorneys assigned to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, has an interesting essay up at Slate on the charges filed thus far under the rubric of the Pentagon's military tribunals. His conclusion is that the conspiracy charges alleged against these two men are ill-conceived.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:37

 
Army's Cold War thinking impeded production of armored HMMWV

Greg Jaffe has a brilliant article on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that reports on why it has taken the Army so long to develop, procure, produce and deploy its up-armored HMMWVs in Iraq. The article also does a great job of generalizing from this instance to make a larger argument about the Army's anachronistic thinking about weapons systems and the battles it would need to procure gear for in the 21st Century. Here's a short excerpt:

On the eve of the war in Iraq, just 2% of the Army's world-wide fleet of 110,000 Humvees were armored, and the Army was planning to cut back its purchases. As late as last May, the Army saw little need for the armored Humvee, saying it needed only 235 of them in Iraq. Only in October, with its soldiers under daily attack, did the Army decide it needed 3,100 armored Humvees. Today, the requirement stands at 4,500 and climbing -- a number the Army doesn't expect to hit in Iraq until late this summer or early fall.

The Army's failure to produce more of the vehicles, a hot topic among soldiers in Iraq, is slowly becoming an issue among lawmakers. A look at why the armored-Humvee program has struggled to gain acceptance shows flaws in the Army's vision over the past decade of how future wars would be fought. Even as the armored Humvee proved itself in small conflicts around the globe, the Army failed to buy more because it was focused on preparing for major wars with other large armies -- rather than low-end guerilla conflicts.

Moreover, in pursuit of big technological leaps that fundamentally alter the way wars are fought, the service also has tended to overlook simple, low-cost innovations that often count for much more on the battlefield. "Getting the Army to support the armored Humvee was like pushing a limp rope up a hill," says Jim Mills, a retired colonel who was a senior manager on the program for several years in the late 1990s.

Critics of the armored Humvee had pointed to its limitations: Unlike an Abrams tank, the vehicle can't repel a blast from a rocket-propelled grenade or .50 caliber machine-gun fire. Iraq, however, has shown that even a marginal technological advance can save lives. While the armored Humvee may not deflect a blast from a rocket-propelled grenade or roadside bomb, the solders in the vehicle are far more likely to emerge from the attack with their lives.

Prior to the Iraqi war, senior Army officials, looking to save money in the 2004 budget, drafted a plan that would have cut the number of armored Humvees the service planned to buy by 2,800 vehicles to a total of 1,000.

Now the Army, rushing to fix the imbalance, says it needs 11,000 of the vehicles world-wide. In addition, it is scrambling to produce about 8,400 add-on armor kits that can be bolted to existing Humvees with sheet-metal or fiberglass skin and canvas doors.

Analysis: If there is a good news story here, it is that the Army has learned (relearned?) the lessons of urban combat in Iraq and seen the utility of this vehicle. More importantly, it has jumpstarted production with emergency procurement orders for up-armored HMMWVs, and transferred almost every up-armored HMMWV in the world to forces in Iraq. The Army had a problem, and it responded the best it could with the resources it had in place. Some general officers probably deserve a pat on the back for making what is normally an inflexible Army supply/procurement system respond so quickly to this problem.

However, the larger problems of the system remain. In many ways, this problem could never be satisfactorily solved because the Army did not have the resources on the battlefield in order to move them to the right place and time. That problem owes to procurement decisions made much further upstream by the Army, in which it decided this was not a valuable system. As evidence of that, I submit these two passages from Mr. Jaffe's story:

Army officials insist that no one could have predicted that the service would have been involved in such a huge peacekeeping effort, which dwarfs previous missions to the Balkans, Haiti and Somalia. Nor could the Army have predicted Iraqi insurgents would use remote-detonated roadside bombs so effectively to kill U.S. soldiers, says Brig. Gen. Jeff Sorenson, a senior Army procurement official. "We didn't anticipate this threat nor were we prepared for it," the general says.

Really??? That's a planning failure of the most basic kind -- the failure to anticipate the threat. And I find it quite hard to believe, honestly, that the Army could fail to appreciate this kind of warfare after watching all of the brushfire conflicts of the 1990s. From Somalia to Chechnya, it was clear what kinds of wars we'd be fighting in the next century to anyone with a clue about history and the population trends that were moving towards urban centers. Moreover, as one of my NSRT colleagues points out, the Army recognized these trends and incorporated them into exercises at the Joint Readiness Training Center as early as 1993. Roadside IEDs were a known threat, and the Army trained for it -- it just didn't buy the gear it needed to have to meet this threat effectively.

A second passage from Mr. Jaffe's article is even more damning:

... The program's most enthusiastic backers were military police, who specialize in riot control, peacekeeping and stabilizing an area following combat.

But officials involved in the program worried that the Army might not embrace a peacekeeping vehicle. They were also concerned the relatively small military-police force, which boasts no three- or four-star generals, lacked "the horsepower to get the armored Humvee built," says John Weaver, an Army program manager who oversaw the service's Humvee fleet. So Mr. Weaver and his colleagues instead pitched the armored Humvee as a scout vehicle that would venture out in front of the tanks during big battles and beam back information about the enemy.

The armored Humvee proved terrible at that job. Early test vehicles were too heavy, and whenever they ventured off road in soft soil they got stuck in the mud. Senior officers in the Army's armor school, which trains and equips the service's heavy-tank force, wanted to kill the armored-Humvee program entirely.

It is true that early armored HMMWV prototypes had problems. They basically bolted armor onto an existing HMMWV and it was too much for the engine, chassis, suspension, and steering to bear. However, all prototypes have these problems, and the up-armored HMMWV certainly had less problems than the early Abrams and Bradley prototypes. (See the book Pentagon Wars -- or the Kelsey Grammar movie -- for some examples.)

The Armor community may have cited these problems in its decision, but the real issue was that it didn't want to procure equipment for anything less than high-intensity combat. You see, an admission of the value of equipment for low-intensity conflict and peacekeeping operations would diminish the value of armored forces, which are designed to fight high-intensity battles. The Armor community was even willing to do so at the expense of its scouts, who drive the exact same M1025 un-armored HMMWVs that MPs do. This Cold War high-intensity combat paradigm was so prevalent in the Army that the MP community -- the Army's center of excellence for peacekeeping ops -- could not sell this program to the Army in any sufficient numbers. Mr. Jaffe is right that the MP corps lacks a 3- or 4-star general. The path to advancement in the Army has never been through low-intensity conflict or peacekeeping operations; it has always been through the combat arms. Senior Army leaders today may see things differently, because many have Balkans experience (like retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, who predicted it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to secure Iraq). But in the mid-1990s, when this program was in the early stages, the Army still believed in its Cold War/Gulf War I paradigm.

The armored HMMWV problem isn't the only procurement problem to surface during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The other big one was the lack of Interceptor Body Armor -- newly designed body armor that was proven to save lives. Thousands of troops (including a disproportionate number of reservists) went into combat wearing Vietnam-era flak jackets capable of stopping some shrapnel, a level of protection far below what was available. Again, this traced back to procurement decisions made far upstream by military and civilian officials who decided they could afford a phased purchase of IBAs, rather than a one-time purchase, because they didn't see this kind of conflict on the horizon. Once again, that reflects a very big failure of the imagination. The military did prepare and procure for the kind of tech-heavy conflict it wanted to fight in the 21st Century; it bought JDAMs, it bought cruise missiles; it bought into R&D on programs like the Future Combat System. What it did not do was buy equipment to fight the low-tech battles that many experts predicted would become the norm in the 21st Century. And the results are now becoming clear.

But wait -- there's more. Vehicles and body armor are just two equipment problems, and they're quite narrow. If you look at the Army's vehicle fleet generally, you will see that very few vehicles have any sort of armor or crew protection at all. The vast majority of Army HMMWVs and cargo trucks were designed to move in a permissive "rear area" environment, and thus they have nothing but fibreglass and canvas to protect their occupants. Similarly, if you look at the Modified Table of Organization and Equipment for most "rear area" units -- from maintenance companies to medical companies to signal companies -- you will see a noticeable lack of combat equipment. These support units lack crew-served weapons, night-vision goggles, GPS systems, and tactical radios. Simply put, they don't have the equipment necessary to protect themselves while they do their support mission.

I don't think we need to transform transportation companies into door kick-in'ers. But I do think we need to equip these support units with the gear they need to defend themselves in a convoy or logistical base. Until now, the Army's paradigm was that these units would fight on a linear battlefield and rely on front-line units to kill the bad guys before they could get back to hurt them. That paradigm looks nice on paper, but it's not the reality we're likely to face in future conflicts, as illustrated by recent experience in Iraq.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:41

 
On Scalia's Recusal Refusal

For a serious report on the issue, see this New York Times article by Steve Twomey, complete with a link to Justice Scalia's memo. For a more skeptical treatment of the issue, see Je Refuse! by Slate's Dahlia Lithwick. And finally, for a humorous (yet realistic) treatment, see last night's Top Ten list from David Letterman:

Top Ten Signs Your Supreme Court Justice Is On The Take

10. Begins every case with, "We'll start the bribing at ten thousand."

9. His written opinions always have several mentions of the thirst-quenching taste of Mountain Dew.

8. Regularly convenes court at the dog track.

7. Asks, "Does either attorney plan on inviting me on any hunting trips?"

6. For a Supreme Court Justice he certainly is mentioned on "The Sopranos" a lot.

5. All the bling bling.

4. His last article in the "Law Journal" was about finding the right fence for your stolen goods.

3. When you have a meeting with him in chambers, frisks you for a wire.

2. He's on the Forbes 500 List between Bill Gates and Oprah.

1. Already declared Bush the winner of the November election.

Bonus: For an example of a previous recusal refusal, see this memorandum of then-Assoc. Justice William Rehnquist from 1972 in Laird v. Tatum, in which the current Chief Justice refuses to recuse himself from a political surveillance case against the Secretary of Defense.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:22

 
Government files brief on the merits in 'dirty bomber' case: The Solicitor General's office filed its legal argument yesterday with the Supreme Court in the case of Padilla v. Rumsfeld. (Thanks to How Appealing for the tip.) Jose Padilla was initially arrested on a material witness warrant in May 2002, and later designated an enemy combatant by the President and transferred to military custody. Since June 2002, he has been held by the Department of Defense as an unlawful enemy combatant, subject to interrogation and seclusion from the outside world.

Clearly, Padilla's case raises Constitutional issues of epic proportion. The Supreme Court might ostensibly use his case to sharply limit the President's war powers under Art. II of the Constitution, or it might greatly expand those powers by reversing the 2nd Circuit's decision that President Bush lacked the authority to detain Padilla -- a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil -- as an enemy combatant. The Court will hear Padilla's case jointly with that of Yaser Hamdi, another U.S. citizen/enemy combatant whose capture and detention was blessed by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The difference between the two cases boils down to geography: Padilla was captured in the U.S., not in an active combat zone; Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, in what the 4th Circuit deemed an active combat zone. My sense of these cases is that the Supreme Court will try to split the baby between them, and draw some line on the basis of either the "active combat zone" issue or geography issue. We'll see.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:13

 
Pakistanis may have Al Qaeda #2 surrounded: CNN reports that Pakistani military units have encountered extremely heavy fighting from about 200 militants in the Pakistani mountains thought to be sheltering top leaders of Al Qaeda. The intensity of the fightinghas led some to believe that the Al Qaeda fighters are defending Ayman Zawahiri -- or possibly even Osama Bin Laden. First reports are always wrong, so I anxiously await some more credible information from this scene.

We've been here before. Remember the Tora Bora campaign in late 2001/early 2002, where American firepower was used to support indigenous forces on the ground? It has been argued by many that the failure to introduce American ground troops in that campaign facilitated the escape of several top Al Qaeda leaders, including possibly Bin Laden and Zawahiri. This time around, the U.S. has said publicly that it would not repeat that mistake -- that it will deploy company and battalion-sized units in order to capture or kill Al Qaeda's leadership. Keep your eye on the news for indications that the U.S. has committed troops to this operation.More to follow...

Update I: The Washington Post reports (near the bottom of its story) that the U.S. officially has no troops participating in this op. That statement may or may not be true; it may or may not include special operations forces and covert paramilitary (read: CIA) forces. Given the American interest in this op, I sincerely hope we have some involvement.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:45

 
Another Gitmo case starts to crumble

The Washington Post reports today that classified information problems have appeared in another of the Guantanamo Bay 'espionage' cases, that of Airman Ahmad Halabi. Of course, like the case of Captain James Yee, this case has degenerated into something less than an espionage case, though Airman Halabi still does face charges of aiding the enemy. The Post reports that one of the Air Force investigators assigned to the case has himself developed problems with the handling and storage of classified information, and that military prosecutors have asked the judge to strike his name from all parts of the case. Presumably, the prosecution wants to limit any damage to its case from the mention of this guy at trial.

Last week, Air Force lawyers prosecuting Halabi asked the judge to exclude from the case any mention of the probe of Special Agent Marc Palmosina of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Palmosina's alleged misconduct is similar to some of the charges against Halabi.

The documents on compact discs at Palmosina's home did not concern the Halabi case, but instead focused on cargo transport operations, an area to which the agent had been assigned before he was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where the United States is holding more than 600 alleged al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, the government document said.

Palmosina, who has been removed from work on the Halabi case, could not be reached for comment, and the Air Force declined to confirm whether he is being investigated or to provide the name of his attorney.

* * *
Military officials began looking at Palmosina last fall, during his one-month stint at Guantanamo Bay working on the Halabi case, the document said. Last Friday, prosecutors in the Halabi case filed the document, which asks the judge to remove from Halabi's upcoming court-martial any mention of the Palmosina investigation.

Analysis: Without making light of a really serious situation for the defendant, this is starting to become comical. The prosecution in the Yee case fell apart largely because there was never a proper classification review done of the documents that Yee was alleged to have mishandled. The Army and its JAGs were responsible for that case. Now, we have similar problems emerging in the Halabi case, which is being handled by the Air Force and its JAGs. These problems make me think that we might have some sort of larger systemic problem with the classification of information regarding Guantanamo Bay. It's possible that the government has overclassified a lot of material relating to that mission, and that it did so with great haste and little thought about the secondary and tertiary consequences of that overclassification. Thus, to get their jobs done, officers at Gitmo are having to break the classification rules in order to be more efficient (e.g. storing some material on their laptops instead of checking it back in each day). There are at least two results: (1) lots of people are breaking the rules to be more efficient, and (2) the military is selectively prosecuting/disciplining individuals for reasons known only to senior decisionmakers in the Pentagon.

That's not to say that mishandling classified information is a good thing -- it's not. The interrogations at Gitmo are said to be producing valuable, actionable intelligence. Moreover, the sources and methods used there are also things we want to keep secret. But imagine you're an staff officer at Gitmo, living and working in one of the most secure locations in the world. Given the pervasive security there, you might be tempted to bend the rules a little to be more efficient, because after all, it's not like there's a lot of outsiders poking around Gitmo to see what you're working on.

For what it's worth, classified information often wreaks havoc on federal district courts too. More than 20 years ago, Congress passed the Classified Information Procedures Act to deal with this problem, and to set up judicial procedures for the management of classified information in espionage cases and other cases that used such material. The Act creates processes for ex parte and in camera review of classified material, as well as other mechanisms for the safeguarding of this information in open court. I've reviewed the statute and its history for the casebook I put together, and it's generally worked. But one need only look at the Zacarias Moussaoui prosecution to see the problems with classified material that can emerge in federal district court. It's really hard to manage this kind of evidence.

None of this excuses the way the Yee and Halabi cases have been conducted. In these two cases, the classification process itself seems to have created problems that prosecutors now have trouble fixing. I'm reluctant to endorse any criminal liability for Captain Yee and Airman Halabi when such problems in the classification process exist. It seems to me, as a basic matter of substantive and procedural justice, that the military ought to square away its classification system before it puts anyone in jail for breaking the rules that its own prosecutors and investigators can't follow. My SWAG (sophisticated wild a**ed guess) is that the military will start negotiating a plea bargain in the Halabi case as they have in the Yee case. More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:20

 
Can a volunteer soldier become a conscientious objector? The answer, according to Slate, is maybe. The issue has come to light recently with the case of SSG Camilo Mejia, who has claimed CO status after going AWOL from his unit in Iraq while on leave in the U.S. "CO" status used to apply to conscription, and it seems odd that a person who might become a CO would volunteer for military service in today's Army. But that's precisely what does happen, and the military actually does grant discharges to those individuals provided they can show evidence of objection to "participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms." Check out the Slate explainer, and accompanying NPR segment, for more if you're interested.

And there's more: two medics with 1-18 Inf (M), part of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, have declared themselves to be conscientious objectors as well. The facts of these soldiers' cases are under wraps, partly because they've been sequestered from the media by their commander. But honestly, I'm less than sympathetic to their plight. In my opinion, the time for objection is at the recruiting office -- or in basic training, when your drill sergeant tells you that your primary mission as a soldier is to fight as an infantryman and kill people. The bottom line, as I see it, is that these COs are willing to abandon their buddies who are in a combat zone. Regardless of their change of heart or the depth of their views, I find that desertion of their buddies to be a singularly selfish and immoral act.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:58

 
JAGs with a purpose

Jess Bravin reports in Thursday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the military lawyers who have been assigned the mission of defending detainees at Guantanamo Bay. With tribunals scheduled to start any day now, these lawyers have received a great deal of attention for their initial moves as defense attorneys. Among other things, they have filed a 'friend of the court' brief challenging the Bush Administration before the Supreme Court, and held press conferences denouncing the commissions as unfair and improper. As Mr. Bravin writes, the JAGs are fighting to win, not to make the system look good -- one of the JAGs in the story said that he has "absolutely no desire to be the loyal opposition".

In November 2001, when President Bush authorized the first U.S. military tribunals since World War II, the process drew fire from human-rights groups and some legal experts. Now the critics have an unexpected set of allies: the detainees' five military lawyers, who have launched a surprisingly vigorous assault on the system that hired them.

The five JAGs -- as members of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the military's legal arm, are known -- have attacked the tribunals as inherently unfair, contrary to international law and susceptible to political influence. In a brief they submitted to the Supreme Court, Cmdr. Swift wrote a section comparing the president with King George III and likening the treatment of tribunal defendants to the injustices that helped spark the American Revolution.

Ultimately, the JAGs are expected to challenge virtually every aspect of the administration's policies on Guantanamo detainees, from the denial of protections of the Geneva Conventions to the interrogation methods used in extracting statements. As the first trials draw near, the JAGs' approach could force the administration either to answer in open court or risk undercutting its longstanding promise that the tribunals will be "full and fair."

Citing national-security concerns, Mr. Bush decreed the tribunals free from federal court review, "the principles of law and the rules of evidence" used in civilian trials and the rights afforded U.S. military defendants in courts-martial. That gives the tribunal members, who are military officers selected by the Pentagon, vast leeway to consider hearsay, unsworn statements and other evidence that wouldn't pass muster under normal court procedures. Defendants are entitled to a military defense lawyer and, at their own expense, a civilian lawyer who can pass security checks. But they aren't guaranteed the right to see all the evidence against them.

As military officers defending accused enemies of the U.S., the JAGs say they are motivated by a mix of patriotic duty, personal values and a desire to help shape legal history. Air Force Col. Will Gunn, the Harvard-trained lawyer who heads the defense office, says he wants to show future generations that "even under fire we held firm to our ideals."

posted by Phillip Carter at 00:51

 
A new mess in the Balkans: Laura Rozen passes along some bad news from Kosovo, where at least 8 Serbs have been killed in violence said to be the worst since NATO's 1999 Kosovo intervention.

The fighting erupted in midmorning in the divided city of Mitrovica after a protest over the drownings of at least two Albanian children. The protesters blamed Serbs for the deaths.

The province, in southern Serbia, is inhabited mostly by Albanians.

By nightfall the United Nations had lost control of several city centers, and mobs of Albanian men were attacking Serbian areas at will. In the provincial capital, Pristina, machine gunfire and explosions could be heard late into the night.

A United Nations police spokesman said the exact number of casualties was difficult to calculate because the police and peacekeeping troops had not re-established control.

"This is the severest case of unrest since the end of the war," said Derek Chappell, the chief United Nations police spokesman in Kosovo.

Analysis: I'm not saying that U.S./NATO troops would've prevented this from happening, but I think there's some question about whether the remaining UN/NATO/U.S. forces on the ground have the strength to stabilize the situation. Since 1999, America has gradually pulled out of Kosovo and Bosnia. And since the global war on terrorism started, the U.S. troop levels in the Balkans have dropped even further. (Ironic, considering the long-time presence of Islamist militants and Al Qaeda agents in the Balkans in support of the Bosnian Muslim population.) According to GlobalSecurity.Org, the U.S. currently has significantly less a brigade combat team in Kosovo. I am not certain about the strength of the UN mission in Kosovo. I'm also not certain about the strength of the recently reconstituted Kosovo civil police forces. But I seriously doubt this would have escalated to this point if we had the robust force in Kosovo that we had in 1999, or if there were some multinational force in there to maintain stability in our absence. More to follow...

Update I: The violence in Kosovo has escalated, claiming the lives of 22 people, according to the Washington Post. NATO has decided to dispatch additional troops -- including 150 additional U.S. soldiers -- to the region in order to quell the unrest.

NATO members, in a statement this morning, called "upon leaders in the region to take concrete action to restore peace and security.

The statement said the reinforcements--up to 700 additional troops--will demonstrate "the Alliance's will and capability to carry out its mission to provide security for all Kosovars, regardless of their ethnic identity."

About 17,500 NATO troops are already in the province. Some 150 additional U.S. troops were reported already en route along with 80 Italians, according to wire service reports. A spokesman for the British Ministry of Defense said it was considering sending 500 troops.

posted by Phillip Carter at 21:18

 
New weblog to check out: Several law students have put together a group weblog called De Novo. On first glance, it looks like a really interesting site. Among other things, it's got a continuing symposium on legal education featuring essays from some of the brighter legal minds in the country. Check it out.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:06

 
One step closer to military tribunals: The Pentagon announced a minor rule change today for its planned military commissions that substitutes retired-Maj. Gen. John Altenburg as the "appointing authority". With defense counsel appointed, charges preferred, and minor changes like this taking place, I think it's a safe bet that tribunals will begin sometime this summer.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:13

 
Washington Monthly launches new weblog: Political Animal: The Washington Monthly has rolled out its new website, which is built around the "Political Animal" weblog hosted by Kevin Drum (formerly of CalPundit). The new site does a good job of incorporating Washington Monthly print content with the dynamic musings of Mr. Drum, and I've been told that the magazine plans to add more online content in coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:43

 
Time to rethink women in the military?
Not by a long shot -- women proved their mettle in Operation Iraqi Freedom

James Revels, a retired Army colonel, has a column today on Military.Com arguing for a reevaluation of the American decision to send women into harm's way as part of ground combat units. He reiterates several of the common arguments on the subject, including physical ability, pregnancy, and sexual harassment. Here's an excerpt:

Dressing women in battle dress uniforms does not make them soldiers. Calling them soldiers does not mean they possess the requisite skills required of warriors.

No nation, in modern history, has advanced the cause of equality and women rights by sending women into combat. Until the American people demand reconsideration of existing deployment policies, women will continue to die needlessly in Iraq and Congress will continue to waste time and resources reviewing sexual assault complaints.

For years, the senior leadership ignored declining physical standards caused by increasing reliance on female recruits to fill manpower quotas. Mention pregnancy rates and no comment follows. Now, because some women, who are as culpable as some men at initiating sexual contact, are complaining, the brass are forced to take another look at predictable problems created by sex integration.

* * *
No one seems to understand that it is not the primary purpose of our armed forces to provide employment opportunities for women and young men. Our armed forces exist for the single purpose of defending the nation by destroying any enemy that threatens our national security. Clearly, women can contribute to the nation's defense, but not as warriors.

Analysis: There's a lot in here to respond to. I'll start with the general, and move to the specific. Col. Revels' conclusion -- "Clearly, women can contribute to the nation's defense, but not as warriors." -- is way off base. It's also unsupported by the recent evidence from Operation Iraqi Freedom. Female soldiers and Marines fought as warriors and they fought well. The examples I'm most familiar with, as a former MP captain myself, are the stories of female military police soldiers and officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. As MPs, they conducted combat patrols, raids, cordon-and-search operations, convoy-escort missions, and numerous other operations indistinguishable from their infantry brethren. Indeed, I might say these MPs engaged in more dicey missions because they lacked the heavy armor of their mechanized infantry and armor brethren, and because they often deployed in smaller units -- teams and squads versus platoons and companies. Clearly, the evidence from Afghanistan and Iraq shows that women have fought as warriors -- and fought well. So I think this general statement is wrong.

Now, let's tackle some of the other arguments made by Col. Revels and others on this subject, such as Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness (see my response to her).

(1) Physical Ability. The colonel writes that "For years, the senior leadership ignored declining physical standards caused by increasing reliance on female recruits to fill manpower quotas." This statement both mischaracterizes the facts and conflates the issues. Physical standards have not declined over time, contrary to popular myth. Indeed, if you look at physical fitness and health standards for induction during WWII and you compare them to today, you will see a marked increase in physical health and fitness standards. Veterans always want to say it was tougher back when they went through, but the truth is that it's not. Today's soldier is fitter, and forced to do more physically, than his or her father (or grandfather). Now, it's true that today's Air Force inductee does less physically than yesterday's (or today's) Army Ranger -- but that's obviously comparing apples and oranges.

Second, the increasing reliance on female recruits has not led to a decline in physical standards. The services have adopted physical-fitness test standards for each sex, after conducting exhaustive physiological studies on the subject to see what the right measures of fitness should be. But these are fitness tests -- not combat readiness tests -- and the standards are designed to test baseline fitness. In essence, they test for the ability to work long hours, be resistant to disease (historically the largest battlefield killer), deal with physiological and psychological stressors, and other factors. Consequently, age and gender-normed standards are appropriate, because these are not combat readiness tests. Any doctor will tell you that disease and fitness risks vary by age and sex, and the military's standards simply reflect that reality.

Where standards have not declined is in the combat-readiness standards expected of soldiers and Marines -- the requirement to road march for 12 miles, carry a wounded comrade, carry an M249 squad automatic weapon, etc. Every division I'm aware of has a training regulation (usually numbered 350-50-1) that outlines these standards for its subordinate units. In the units I served in -- gender-integrated combat MP units at the division level -- these standards were enforced without regard to gender. And that was because we, as leaders, set the standard and enforced it ruthlessly because we knew that these combat readiness standards were important. (It helped that the senior MP colonel in 4ID at this time was a tough-as-nails female West Point graduate with two combat patches and the experience to know the importance of enforcing standards.)

Col. Revels says that "Dressing women in battle dress uniforms does not make them soldiers", and he's right. It doesn't turn men into warriors either, and that's the point. Transforming an American citizen into a warrior takes a lot more than just a uniform. It takes good leadership, tough training, solid teamwork, experience and rigorous standards. It may well be true that many women can't make the cut to serve in the infantry -- but a lot of men can't meet those tough standards either.

So, there are two take-away points here. First, there is a salient difference between fitness standards and combat readiness standards -- a difference often lost on pundits who write on this issue. Second, the combat readiness standards have not declined. But they depend on the willingness of tough leaders to enforce them, and that does vary from unit to unit. I think it's safe to say that units like the 507th Maintenance Company (PFC Jessica Lynch's unit) enforced a less rigorous PT, weapons, and soldier skills program that the 4th Military Police Company (my old unit). But that's not a function of gender -- it's a function of leadership.

(2) Pregnancy. This argument usually gets batted around with reference to "love boats" in the first Gulf War and streams of women that had to be sent home before Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. I have yet to see statistics on this issue from OIF, but anecdotal reports from the field indicate that pregnancy was not a major issue on this deployment. It is a risk on a deployment, inherent in any situation where you combine young men and women without easy access to a Savon Drugs or family planning clinic. But generally, I have heard that leaders effectively managed this issue during their deployments to Iraq. Two friends who served as company commanders explained it this way to me: their female soldiers didn't want to get pregnant because that would mean letting their male buddies down, and deserting them. Unit cohesion can be a pretty powerful -- even the most powerful -- motivator in combat. (See "Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War" by Dr. Leonard Wong, et al., of the Army War College.) I'm not surprised to see it affecting this issue too.

Where pregnancy is a problem is in the pre-deployment process. Part of this is perception -- male soldiers see one pregnant female skipping the deployment and they generalize from that to form opinions about the entire class of female soldiers. Part is real -- there are women who get pregnant before a deployment, and they are not deployed as a result. I've interviewed military physicians and military sociologists on this subject, and they say that it's a mix of women who accidentally get pregnant, women who intended to get pregnant, and those women who got pregnant in order to avoid the deployment -- with the last category representing a very small number. The reasons are obvious -- women are rational actors, and they're not (generally) willing to bring a life into this world just to skip a deployment. However, the Army (and I think the Marines too) have gotten a lot better at dealing with this issue in the post-1990s operational environment. After dealing with this in Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, leaders now know how to manage this issue in connection with deployments. Consequently, it is less of an issue today than it was a decade ago. Dr. Laura Miller, an expert on military culture and gender issues at the RAND Corporation, had this to say: "It used to be that the deployment child-care plans of many men and women were convenient fictions--the Army ensures that they're much better now."

(3) Sexual Harassment. Talk about blaming the victim! Let me get this right. The presence of women is so inherently tempting -- so inherently disruptive -- that we should seriously consider removing them from the force so as to reduce the sexual harassment (and sexual assault) problem? That flies in the face of 30 years of sexual harassment and rape law, not to mention logic. In America, we typically don't punish the victims (as a class) for misconduct committed against them. The way to fix the military's sex problem is not to remove women, but to make men and women behave better.

That, in turn, takes tough leadership and strict discipline. I have no problem with prosecuting servicemembers for misconduct -- even throwing the book at them -- in order to correct this problem. Indeed, I think that most instances of sexual misconduct are often underpunished by commanders. That underpunishment tacitly condones such behavior, and leads rational male actors to evaluate their planned sexual misconduct in light of lenient sentences. My experience as an MP platoon leader was that if you discipline the little things, your soldiers will often develop their own moral framework for making the right decisions about the hard problems they will see in the future.

And to those three arguments, I'll add a fourth problem that is more sophisticated -- and thus less prone to argumentation by unsophisticated critics like Col. Revels and Ms. Donnelly:

(4) Unit Cohesion. The very presence of women can be disruptive, as it adds a big element of heterogeneity to the group dynamic of a given military unit. For obvious reasons, homogenous units tend to be easier to develop into cohesive teams; more diverse units tend to present more leadership challenges because of more complex social dynamics. Other variables, such as race, socio-economic status, education level, fitness level, marksmanship ability, age, etc., pale in comparison to sex when it comes to the effect on the group dynamic. Dr. Anna Simons said it well in my article: Forget the sex--this is about the clouding of judgment. No matter how close the friendship is between men, it still doesn't jeopardize their decisions the way that love does." Her experience is built on years of studying Army Special Forces A-Teams, and other special operations units, so she knows what she's talking about. Regardless of any other fact, women will always complicate the group dynamic in a unit and present a leadership challenge.

That said, the Army has learned how to build cohesive, effective teams that are ready for combat. As I've written: "[V]arious studies of mixed-gender units have shown that cohesion was not a problem--both in exercises at the National Training Center and in actual combat. (The critical variable in unit cohesion proved to be not gender, but such differentials as the unit leader's time in command and the length of time the troops had spent together.)" Even in units led by women, the Army has seen comparable levels of effectiveness, because it has learned how to build cohesive units that fight well despite (or even because of) their diversity. Moreover, recent experience in Islamic countries has shown the value of women for pure effectiveness reasons -- you need female soldiers to interface with female civilians in these countries for diplomatic reasons.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that women have done well in the military and earned their right to serve our nation as warriors. I wrote in December 2002 that female performance in Iraq would likely determine the direction of this issue over the next decade. The results are in: women fought in Iraq, and they fought well. The result is that the Army has decided to change its rules for the assignment of women in the new design for the 3rd Infantry Division. First reports indicate that women did well enough in Iraq to convince the Army to broaden its opportunities for women in the new 3ID force structure, but details are still sketchy. More to follow on this point.

Unfortunately, the success of women has generated some blowback from critics like Col. Revels and Ms. Donnelly -- critics who think women have no place in combat, in the military, or possibly even in the work force. They see the military as an all-male warriors club, where women ought not go. However, I find their arguments to be wholly unpersuasive, based as they are on flimsy evidence and conjecture without reference to the facts. The facts clearly show that women did well in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. But I suspect that Col. Revels, Ms. Donnelly and others don't really care about the facts; they only care about an anachronistic vision of the military (and society) that is completely divorced from 21st Century realities about women and their performance in combat.

Update I: The Army's public affairs office has this story today on the women who have made the ultimate sacrifice as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:16

 
Army says it shouldn't have surveilled Texas law conferees

The New York Times reports briefly today that Army officials have acknowledged wrongdoing on the part of 2 Army intelligence officials from Fort Hood, TX, who tried to gather information from UT-Austin about two people who attended an Islamic law conference there.

The Army acknowledged that two agents in its Intelligence and Security Command overstepped their authority in seeking information about a February conference on Islamic law at the University of Texas Law School. The agents sought the names of participants and a videotape of the conference after two Army lawyers reported suspicious behavior by an attendee. Army regulations bar its agents from investigating civilian affairs unless the F.B.I. waives jurisdiction.

Analysis: The story I got from former colleagues at Fort Hood was that these agents were acting because they thought the events at UT-Austin could pose some kind of a threat to Fort Hood, America's largest military base and home to roughly 42,000 troups and thousands of armored vehicles. I can sort of see the validity of that, because Fort Hood does have an interest in getting information about potential threats to the installation and its surrounding community. However, when I was there, we got this information through interface with state, local and federal authorities -- not through direct intelligence gathering. This seems a little far off the reservation, in literal and figurative terms.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:36

 
Deal near in Gitmo chaplain case

The Washington Times reports today that Army prosecutors have tentatively struck a deal with Army Captain James Yee, originally accused of espionage at Guantanamo Bay but now thought to have only committed minor infractions of military law. Since the announcement of initial charges, the case has gone downhill for the Army, due both to zealous advocacy by Captain Yee's lawyer and administrative mistakes by the Army. Among other things, a military judge suspended the Art. 32 hearing (roughly analogous to a grand jury proceeding) because the Army had failed to conduct a proper classification review of the documents Captain Yee is alleged to have mishandled.

Negotiations ensued between U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Eugene R. Fidell of Washington, Capt. Yee's civilian attorney.

The deal would have the government drop the classified-information charges. Capt. Yee would be subjected to administrative punishment on charges of committing adultery and storing pornographic material on his computer. He would resign from the Army with an honorable discharge.

The agreement would also give him immunity from charges stemming from his answers to questions about whether he engaged in espionage.

* * *
Mr. Fidell has repeatedly said his client is innocent of espionage charges.

Analysis: Without a doubt, I think the Army is eager to get this albatross off its neck. It now appears the Army and many commentators (including me), who howled for Captain Yee's scalp, were wrong. He may have been a lot of things, but he certainly wasn't a spy. And I think at this point, the Army is trying to salvage what it can of its public relations while still maintaining some rule of law for the miscellaneous charges that Captain Yee still stands accused of. Adultery, mishandling information and misusing a government computer are still criminal in the military, and it might set a bad precedent to let Captain Yee off for those crimes. That said, I think that an Art. 15 is the right punitive move for an officer accused of such crimes. I've seen these cases brought on active duty, and I think that is the punishment that fits the crime. It effectively ends the officer's career, but allows him to leave the service with an honorable discharge and no felony conviction. Law From The Center and I agree -- the ideal course of action here is to make this case go away as quickly and quietly as possible.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:23

 
Book Recommendation: I'm near the end of The Naked Growd by GWU Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in some of the cutting-edge arguments about the propriety of ubiquitous police surveillance in America. This is also a good book for those who want to connect American criminal procedure law (as it stands today) with the technology of tomorrow.

However, that's not to say that I agree with Prof. Rosen, or that I think he gets it right in every part of his book. I think Prof. Rosen dismisses some proposals too quickly -- like the potential for use of data-mining for the purpose of generating particularized probable cause. I also think he gives short shrift to the legal, policy and practical arguments in favor of certain surveillance and "dataveillance" systems. The result is that his arguments seemed a little one-sided to me, as a former anti-terrorism planner and someone who's probably more partial to the security arguments than the liberty/privacy arguments.

For example, Prof. Rosen argues that there is no marginal benefit gained by using an x-ray machine that reveals every detail of a person's body ("the Naked Machine") versus a similar x-ray machine that anonymizes a person's anatomical detail, showing their body as a mannequin-like mass ("the Blob Machine"). Prof. Rosen says there is no marginal value in the Naked Machine, and that we should always pursue technologies like the Blob Machine because they give us the same security without the invasion of privacy. I disagree. There are times when more invasiveness does produce more security, and airport screenings are one of them. When composite materials are advanced enough to elude x-ray machines, as they are today, it may be necessary to have a more invasive screening device. Similarly, data-mining technologies are valuable when they include an anonymizing component, and can be used to see aggregate trends. But they can be significantly more valuable, in a security sense, when they include enough granularity so as to generate individualized suspicion. The whole point of TIA wasn't just to see trends, but to pick out the needles in a haystack who could then be arrested and prosecuted for their inchoate crimes before they could commit a terrorist attack. Of course, the very concept of inchoate crime raises questions about the nature of guilt, and whether we want a "Minority Report" society. So I admit there may be good liberty/privacy arguments against these technologies. But in his book, I think that Prof. Rosen dismisses the security arguments too easily in favor of the liberty/privacy arguments.

Finally, I think Prof. Rosen falls victim to the same tendency of many scholars and critics, which is to lump all the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures together and speak against them at a very high level of generality. You certainly can synthesize a larger argument about privacy and security by connecting such things as the USA PATRIOT Act, Homeland Security Act, Total Information Awareness, detentions at Guantanamo, and exclusion of the press from immigration hearings. However, you must make this argument with a high level of detail in order to be effective, because otherwise you will be comparing apples to oranges. Prof. Rosen fails in this regard, despite his background as a law professor, although he succeeds in making some provocative theoretical points about these subjects.

Despite its problems, however, I still recommend The Naked Crowd. Its philosophical and theoretical discussions are quite provocative. If The Naked Crowd makes other people scratch their heads as hard as I have, then I guess Prof. Rosen has done his job.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:41

 
Tomorrow's Soldier Today on NPR: I'm slated to appear on NPR's "Day to Day" show today to talk about my Slate DARPATech article, and some of the more interesting pieces of technology which were on display last week at this conference. The segment is scheduled to air at 12:30 p.m. EST (9:30 a.m. PST) on KPCC, Southern California public radio, and also at WYNE in New York at the same time. KCRW, L.A.'s other NPR affiliate, will play the segment during the noon hour here on the West Coast. Update: Slate has uploaded the segment to its website.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:21

 
Interesting survey of the week
U.S. Army asks its own troops whether we'll ever catch OBL

The U.S. Army has an Internet portal site called "Army Knowledge Online". The Army requires every soldier and Army civilian to get an account, and to use it for interfacing with the Army e-bureaucracy. AKO includes a web-based e-mail system, an online discussion board, and an online document repository called the "Army Knowledge Collaboration Center".

On the AKO front page, where the system currently displays information about your current DNA and physical exam status, the Army is now asking its soldiers a survey question:

Poll Question: Will we ever catch Osama Bin Laden?

- Yes, by the end of March
- Yes, by the end of May
- Yes, by the end of 2005
- No

Results: I took the survey (answering "Yes, by the end of 2005"), and was put through to a new home page that showed the survey results. 12,816 votes have been cast out of a total Army population well over 1.5 million. Here's what American soldiers think about this question:

3% -- Yes, by the end of March
20% -- Yes, by the end of May
49% -- Yes, by the end of 2005
28% -- No

Analysis: I'm no statistician or sociologist, but I think these numbers are somewhat interesting. Of course, different people will see different things in the same statistics, but here's my take. Less than 1/4 of the Army thinks that the current spring offensive in Afghanistna will net Osama Bin Laden. And similarly, just over 1/4 of the Army is pessimistic (realistic?) enough to think that we may never catch Osama Bin Laden. However, roughly half of the respondents take a cautiously optimistic stance, which is characteristic of the soldiers that I know: we're going to catch the guy, and probably in the near term.

I'll track these numbers over the next few days/weeks to see if there's any change. More to follow...

Update I: As of 10:45 PST on March 15, 23,766 respondents have answered this question -- with precisely the same survey results. Either there's a remarkable amount of group-think in the Army, or they're posting dummy results on AKO.

Update II: At 4:09 p.m. PST on March 16, 31,029 soldiers have responded -- with exactly the same percentages for the results. Now I'm convinced this is a dummy survey.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:36

 
It's really hard to secure trains
Rail security presents many challenges for anti-terrorism planners

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal (subscription required) all come to that conclusion with articles in Friday's paper. Passenger volume makes it difficult to screen train travelers as exhaustingly as air travelers. Additionally, easy access to train lines on the ground in remote (and not so remote) locations makes it easy to plant an improvised explosive device on a train line. According to the WSJ:

The challenge, authorities have long since decided, is too great: Rail systems typically span hundreds of miles of track and facilities, too large to be watched constantly and completely, and move thousands of people every day, with only limited means to screen passengers and their belongings. The systems put a premium on moving people in and out of trains and stations quickly, so stopping passengers for airport-style security checks hasn't gained traction. Funding to install massive extra security has often been difficult to come by.

Concerns over the security of both commuter trains and subway trains grew even more pronounced Thursday with the possibility that the bombings in Spain might be linked to al Qaeda, instead of Basque separatists, as originally thought. The U.S. has escaped such tragedy so far, but transportation officials are well aware of the dangers. In October 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alerted state and local law-enforcement agencies that al Qaeda terrorists might target U.S. passenger trains. The FBI announcement painted a broad threat, describing potential attacks on passenger trains, subways, commuter lines and freight trains.

The U.S. rail system includes about 140,000 miles of routes and some 500 Amtrak stations. There are hundreds more commuter train stations. This makes it almost impossible to fully secure them from potential terrorist attacks. And unlike airlines and airports, the rail system faces few mandatory security requirements, meaning that passengers and baggage get aboard with little or no screening.

The NYT echoes those concerns, and adds that train lines have been targeted in recent years because of these vulnerabilities.

Brian Jenkins, a transportation security specialist at the Mineta Transportation Institute, said the Madrid bombings, like the frequent bus bombings in Israel and the occupied territories, the sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995 and other attacks, showed the vulnerability of mass transit systems.

"Our ability to prevent these attacks is limited because public service transportation is public and therefore is easily accessible, and the volume of traffic on these systems is huge," dwarfing air transit, Mr. Jenkins said in an interview.

Officials say that it would be nearly impossible to check every passenger boarding from myriad train platforms along any given rail line, or to screen the luggage and other bags that are carried on every day.

Experts say that to be successful, public transit must be convenient and inexpensive, making it difficult to impose the types of strict security seen at airports. The passenger volumes are enormous, about 14 million people a day, according to the American Public Transportation Association, of whom most are on buses, plus about 4 million on subways, suburban commuter trains or other rail transport, and smaller numbers on ferries. In contrast, there are a little under 2 million airplane boardings every day.

And according to the Washington Post, there hasn't been the kind of specific intelligence yet which would make the Department of Homeland Security jump through its fourth point of contact to implement such measures:

"We acknowledge the U.S. rail sector has vulnerabilities which terrorists may choose to exploit," said the bulletin, sent Thursday to local law enforcement officials and transit authorities. "Trains and rail stations remain potential targets for terrorist groups due to their reduced security (in comparison to airports)."

Transit systems across the country, including the Washington area's Metro system and New York's subway, tightened security yesterday as federal officials kept in close touch with them about the latest intelligence from Madrid on the 10 tightly choreographed bombings that killed nearly 200 people during the morning rush hour on Thursday. The attacks came five weeks after a Moscow subway bombing that killed 41 people.

Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for border and transportation security, told reporters yesterday that the U.S. intelligence community has "no specific indicators that terrorist groups are considering such attacks in the United States in the near term."

Yet Hutchinson also said that "we've had a substantial concern over the threat of attack on our mass-transit systems," in part because of what he and other government officials say is al Qaeda's ceaseless preoccupation with striking U.S. transportation networks of all sorts.

Analysis: So, it's really hard to secure railroads -- both cargo and passenger rail travel. America devotes an inordinate amount of money to the security of passenger air travel, largely because of our experience on 9/11, without a proportional amount of money for air cargo or rail transportation. Relative to passenger air travel, air cargo and rail transportation are thus compartively unprotected. They are "soft" targets in force protection parlance. The conventional wisdom in AT/FP planning is that the more you protect the hard targets (i.e. airports), the more likely you make an attack on a soft target (i.e. train station). That has been the inherent risk of America's homeland security strategy since 9/11, and the attacks in Spain bring home just how risky this strategy has been.

So, can we afford this risk? The answer is, like most things, "it depends". If we perceive there to be a real threat to passenger air travel, then we still must protect that mode of transportation. Unlike trains, airplanes can be flown into buildings and transformed into guided missiles, and thus they pose a larger destructive capacity than trains. On the other hand, we probably ought to scrutinize the parts of our rail system that look most attractive to terrorists: densely populated stations (e.g. Penn Station in NYC, Union Station in DC), rail movements of hazardous materials, and critical rail junctures that would have a major disruptive effect if targeted. Eventually, we may also have to suck up the price of some kind of passenger screening on trains, because nothing short of passenger screening will effectively prevent a Madrid-style backpack bombing. But that would be enormously costly, both in terms of the security itself and the lost efficiency of rail travel. Pervasive surveillance of train stations might also be a solution, but only if you're willing to pay for the systems and willing to be constantly surveilled. I'm sure there are other less obvious solutions out there too. At the end of the day, every security solution has a risk and a payoff, and it's up to our decisionmakers to get that right.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:42

 
DARPA Grand Challenge ends with a whimper

The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge was billed as a race across the desert by futuristic "autonomous" machines without any human intervention. Unfortunately, the AP reports that every single machine has broken down just four hours into the 150-mile race, and that DARPA officials have shut the event down. Noah Shachtman reported earlier this week in Wired that these machines had mostly failed to meet the qualification standards, so it comes as no surprise that they fared poorly on the real course.

That said, there was a great deal learned during this race -- both by DARPA, about the present-day limits of autonomous robot technology; and by the teams themselves, about their design and engineering work. There was also a great deal learned during the week-long DARPATech conference in Anaheim. Even though the teams all failed to finish the Grand Challenge, the event wasn't a total failure. As I noted in my Slate article, you have to take a lot of at-bats (and strike out a lot) in order to hit a home run like the Internet or the B-2 stealth bomber -- two of DARPA's biggest success stories.

Nonetheless, this is a disappointing end for the race, and for the teams of scientists/contractors who invested so much time and money in the race vehicles. Better luck next time, chaps.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:02

 
On this day in history: President Harry Truman went to Congress to ask for $400 million in aid to help stop the spread of Communism into Greece and Turkey. Truman's 12 March 1947 speech, widely regarded as one of the most influential foreign policy addresses of the 20th Century, launched what came to be known as the "Truman Doctrine". Here are some excerpts from this speech; I think these words still hold meaning today:

One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.

To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations, The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.

* * *
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

* * *
The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain.

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world -- and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.

posted by Phillip Carter at 00:05

 
Procurement headaches hamstring U.S. efforts to field Iraqi force

Richard Sisk writes for the New York Daily News about delays in the Pentagon's procurement system which have frustrated American commanders in Iraq with their inability to properly equip Iraqi defense forces for the counter-insurgency mission. Specifically, American commanders are upset that they can't get body armor, radios, weapons and other mission-essential items necessary to create a viable Iraqi force.

"If we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along" in defeating the insurgents, said Army Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

"We are still short a significant amount of vehicles, radios and body armor to properly equip them," said Swannack, whose 18,000 paratroopers will be replaced in the coming weeks.

Without the proper gear, the Iraqi police and civil defense forces have been restricted in their ability to patrol and take over other security missions from the Americans, he said.

"As soon as we get this equipment we'll see a rapid improvement," Swannack said.

Swannack echoed the complaints of other field commanders about the military supply chain that relies heavily on private contractors.

Analysis: Actually, I don't think it's the private contractors that are the problem here. I think it's the red tape in the procurement process that's causing these delays. Of course, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and its DoD companion were invented to create delay -- it's the red tape that helps maintain accountability and control over taxpayer money. But in an operational situation such as this, that delay can mean opportunities and lives lost. A lot of smart people have pointed to situations like this and said that the procurement system needs more streamlining; more fast-track authority. Indeed, it already has the limited ability to buy commercial off-the-shelf items on an accelerated timeline -- but not the ability to buy large purchases of wartime materiel for missions like this one. The DoD procurement system needs this ability, and it needs the flexibility to be able to react to unforeseeable needs in the future. Oversight and accountability are a good thing, but too much can be detrimental to mission accomplishment.

But wait -- there's more: The Washington Post reports that "[v]ague contract language, missing paperwork, staff turnover and general instability on the ground led to such flaws in a $327 million contract to outfit the new Iraqi Army that the work had to be canceled and rebid". If true, this would undercut some of the arguments being made by MG Swannack, and lay the blame squarely at the feet of the overworked CPA staff for the failure to outfit the nascent Iraqi army and civil defense force. I still think the military procurement system needs more flexibility -- but it also needs to be managed by competent staffs with the capability to dot the i's and cross the t's of their contracts.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:46

 
DOD General Counsel given nod for 4th Circuit: The AP reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee has sent the nomination of William J. Haynes II to the full Senate for confirmation to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. (Thanks to How Appealing for the heads up.) Mr. Haynes currently serves as the General Counsel of the Department of Defense. While he's eminently qualified for this position, some have criticized his nomination because of the Pentagon's stand on controversial legal issues during his tenure -- such as the right to detain enemy combatants like Yaser Hamdi in military custody. Despite these issues, Mr. Haynes' credentials and close ties to many in Washington virtually assured his confirmation. He still needs the approval of the full Senate, but I think it's highly likely that he will soon be leaving the Art. II branch for the Art. III branch of government.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:32

 
Welcome Home: Jason Van Steenwyk of IRAQ NOW is on his way home from a year-long tour in Iraq as an Army reservist. His plane should touch down on U.S. soil sometime tomorrow, barring some sort of delay which is always possible (or even likely) where military travel is concerned. Jason intends to return to financial journalism, and may also write a book on his year in Iraq. That would definitely be something worth reading.

And while I'm welcoming people home, let's welcome back more soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division to Fort Hood, Texas. Job well done -- steadfast and loyal.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:24

 
Tomorrow's soldier today: Slate has posted my article about the futuristic gadgets on display at this year's DARPATech conference in Anaheim. The story focuses on some of the more interesting pieces of technology on display this year in the exhibit hall, including a "Phraselator" capable of rapid 1-way translation for more than 30,000 phrases and a "Human Exoskeleton" from the labs at UC Berkeley.

But gadgets weren't the only thing going on this week at DARPATech. Noah Shachtman has the definitive report on his DefenseTech site and at Wired on the DARPA Grand Challenge -- a race across the California desert by autonomous vehicles. Noah also has an interesting report on some of the urban operations initiatives being taken by DARPA to revolutionize the way that battles are fought in the urban environment.

Also see Peter Pae's article in Thursday's Los Angeles Times detailing some of the problems facing the DARPATech Grand Challenge competitors.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:59

 
Ex-congressional aide charged with spying for Iraq

In a stunning development, federal prosecutors have charged Susan Lindauer of Takoma Park, Maryland, with spying for the Iraqi government of a period of several years -- including during the recent war. Ms. Lindauer is being charged with two Iraqis (Raed Rokan al-Anbuke and Wisam Noman al-Anbuke) who are the children of a former Iraqi diplomat. The Washington Post reports that federal prosecutors will proceed in a New York court against the three individuals who are accused of various intelligence-related crimes.

Lindauer was to be presented in U.S. District Court in Baltimore today and arraigned in New York, where the indictment originated, on Monday. Lindauer was not immediately available for comment, and a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Baltimore said she did not know whether Lindauer had a lawyer. The U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, however, said they expected that she would be represented by an attorney from the federal public defender's office in Baltimore.

In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, David N. Kelley, and FBI officials in New York and Baltimore said Lindauer acted as an unregistered agent of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), the foreign spying arm of the Hussein government. The statement said the service "played a role in terrorist operations, including the attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush, and attempted bombings during Operation Desert Storm," the first Gulf war in 1991. Bush was the target of an assassination attempt when he visited Kuwait after the war.

The press release said the intelligence service also "located, intimidated and killed Iraqi defectors and dissidents living abroad."

The indictment did not charge Lindauer with involvement in any such operations, or with actual espionage, but said that she had prohibited dealings with several members of the IIS from October 1999 through March 2002 in visits to the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in New York. It said she also traveled to Baghdad in early 2002 to meet with IIS officers and received about $10,000 for her services during this period. The indictment did not specify what information or services she allegedly provided.

According to the indictment, Lindauer also met on two occasions in Baltimore in June and July last year with an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a representative of the Libyan intelligence service and was seeking to support resistance groups fighting U.S. forces in post-war Iraq. It said Lindauer discussed with the agent "the need for plans and foreign resources to support these groups operating within Iraq."

As a result of these contacts, the indictment alleged, Lindauer left unspecified documents for the agent at a prearranged location in Takoma Park in August last year.

The indictment charged Lindauer with conspiracy, acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Iraq and engaging in a prohibited financial transaction with the government of a country supporting international terrorism. She faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted, the press release said.

More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:52

 
Terrorists kill nearly 200 in Madrid
Act was first thought to be the work of ETA; now thought connected to Al Qaeda -- no one's really sure

I woke up this morning to the horrible news of terrorism in Madrid, a city where several of my family members live. The New York Times reports that at least 10 bombs placed in several commuter train stations exploded near simultaneously today, killing at least 190 Spanish civilians and wounding hundreds more. The work first appeared to be the work of ETA, also known as Basque Homeland and Freedom, an ethno-regionalist terrorist group with a decades-long history of terrorism and murder. However, authorites now suspect the work of Al Qaeda, or another Islamist terrorist organization, because of evidence found at and near the bombing scene. However, the LA Times reports late on Thursday night that Spanish authorities remain unsure about the attacker's identity.

The Interior Ministry said more than 190 people were killed and more than 1,200 wounded.

Three other bombs were discovered and detonated by the police in the highly coordinated explosions, which went off within a 10-minute period.

As the country struggled to absorb the carnage just three days before general elections, Prime Minister José María Aznar appeared on television and called the attacks "mass murder." He vowed that Spain would never negotiate with "these assassins."

* * *

There was no advance warning of the attacks. At first, the Spanish authorities blamed E.T.A., the Basque group that has been seeking independence from Spain for more than three decades.

Later today, however, the Interior Ministry said the police had found a van with detonators and an Arabic-language tape of Koranic verses, according to news agencies, and that it was considering all lines of investigation.

An Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, said it had received a claim of responsibility for the train bombings issued in the name of Al Qaeda.

The five-page e-mail claim, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the paper's London offices. It said the brigade's `death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain."

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the claim said.

First Things First: Let's care for the wounded, mourn for the dead, and heighten security to ensure that no larger wave of terrorism succeeds in coordination with this attack.

Second, we should recognize the tactical and operational techniques at work here and the lessons to be drawn from them. This morning's bombing used near-simultaenous detonation for a set of high-explosive devices placed in high-density populated areas. This is a tactic we've seen before, both in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and in the tactics of Al Qaeda. Indeed, Al Qaeda doctrinal publications teach the use of this tactic as a way to inflict maximum destruction and disruption. The simultaneity of the devices prevents any immediate counter-measures from disrupting the attack, and the geographic disperson of the devices paralyzes the incident response and consequences management systems of a nation, state or municipality. It's a very sophisticated operational technique, and one that's quite difficult to carry out despite its simplicity. We don't know yet that Al Qaeda's Afghanistan organization is behind this -- we don't really have much at all besides the discovery of a nearby vehicle, and the uncharacteristic claim of responsibility from an Al Qaeda confederate. The lesson to be drawn is that the terrorists share a common operational doctrine and that they learn from each other. Run a Google search for Al Qaeda's operational manuals and you'll see how broadly these materials have proliferated. Our enemies are smart; they learn from us and they learn from each other. We have to be smarter.

It's becoming more clear by the day that the "war on terrorism" is really much larger than what even America conceives of it. Liberal society, broadly defined, is at war with the forces of terror which seek to undermine the global civil society that prizes such things as liberty, equality, interdependence, free trade, self-determination, human rights, education, and science. (This is essentially Paul Berman's thesis from his brilliant book Terror and Liberalism) At times, the values of liberal society clash with each other, such as the clash between free trade and human rights. But ultimately, I believe our liberal (small "l") society to be far better than the alternative, and to be the ideal that we all must strive for. Terrorism seeks to undermine this global order through fear and violence; it seeks to destroy liberal society in order to replace it with a far different vision of the world.

Whether you are Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, French or American, you are a target. We have all been victims of this terrorism in the last decade; we will continue to be targeted in the next. Our challenge is to face attacks such as the one today in Spain and to confront them with the appropriate tools of law, statecraft and war. But we must do more. We must also beat this enemy with our ideas. It is not America, capitalism or democracy per se that terrorism seeks to destroy -- it is global civil society itself. To prevent that, we must make global civil society as strong and resolute as possible, and to make it good enough that it will ultimately beat the terrorist ideology in the marketplace of ideas. That is the challenge. The key terrain in the war on terrorism is not a mountain, cave, or even a place. Instead, this war's key terrain is the mind of every global citizen, and it is that key terrain that we must seize with ideas in order to win the global war on terrorism.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:04

 
Air Force Secretary Withdraws Nomination for SecArmy: James Roche, the current Secretary of the Air Force, withdrew his name from consideration today for the Secretary of the Army position. Roche's nomination had been held up for a variety of reasons, but primarily because of two issues: (1) lingering questions over his handling of the recent sexual assault scandal at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and (2) questions about a $20 billion airborne tanker lease deal between the Air Force and Boeing. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allegedly wanted Roche to head the Army in order to push through some transformational programs for America's largest service, but it now looks like he's going to have to get another guy for the job. The Army has been without a top senior civilian leader since mid-2003, when Army Secretary Tom White stepped down after a series of battles with the SecDef, Congress and questions over his prior work for Enron.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:25

 
A sign of trouble in the Army budget

Inside the Army (subscription required) reports today that the Army has sent a $6 billion "unfunded requirement" ("UFR" in Pentagon-speak) list over to Capitol Hill in the hope that some of these projects might get funded with additional funds.

While the Army's UFR list identifies mostly operational shortfalls, "modularity requirements" tops the list with a deficit of $2.4 billion. The service is in the process of overhauling its force structure in the near term, looking to increase the number of soldiers by 30,000 and the number of brigade units from 33 to as many as 48.

The remainder of the Army's unfunded priorities are largely tied to operations. In its force protection accounts, the service is short $200 million for "bolt-on ballistic armor" and $1.1 billion for the Rapid Fielding Initiative. RFI is a relatively new program that uses a revolutionary acquisition model to bypass traditional acquisition processes to more rapidly field equipment to soldiers who need it.

The Army also identifies a deficit of $100 million to replace combat vehicles and aircraft that were lost during operations. In addition, the service is still $700 million shy of its requirement for up-armored humvees; reset shortfalls rolled forward from FY-04 include another $1.2 billion.

Military construction also is short $300 million, according to the list.

Analysis: As the story notes, the submission of a UFR list is time-honored tradition in the Army. Having gone through this process, I always thought that part of the idea behind UFRs was to make units feel like their programs/needs really mattered, even if they weren't being funded. Sometimes, according to legend, UFRs would actually be funded by the powers that be at some higher echelon of command. I've actually seen it happen... the money just sort of shows up one day in an account, and you get to spend it. If it's something you really need in your unit, it can be a great day.

However, I don't think that's what's going on here. The scale of this UFR list indicates there is a much larger systemic problem in the Army's budget -- and the budget of the other armed forces. This UFR is just the latest indicator of a tension between funding current operations (e.g. Operation Iraqi Freedom) and transformation and modernization (like Comanche, Future Combat System, and other systems). Simply put, the Army can't afford to do both at the levels necessary to assure success. The Army can either fully fund current operations today, or it can transform/modernize, but it will fail if it tries to do both without additional funding.

In my opinion, we ought to prioritize current operations funding. For one thing, we have men and women in harm's way right now, and we can't underfund current ops because that would jeopardize their lives. Second, our military is already a generation ahead of our allies -- let alone our enemies -- and further modernization/transformation efforts may not yield that much more of an advantage than we already have. Third, our enemies have chosen to engage us in asymmetric ways, for the most part. We need to develop technologies and counter-measures to deal with these -- not to refight the Cold War or the first Gulf War.

It's an election year, and the debate over this year's National Defense Authorization Act will be more politicized than usual as a result. The UFR list will give ammunition to Bush Administration critics who want to charge the Administration with skimping on military readiness; the NDAA will also give ammo to critics who say there's too much fat in the defense budget. In the end, I think both sides will be right. The UFR list does show that the Bush Administration has skimped on many important areas of defense, and the current NDAA is bloated. With any luck, our elected representatives in Congress will hack at both to come up with a reasonable solution that finds the right mix of funding for current operations and future transformation.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:57

 
Off to DARPATech: I'll be away from Intel Dump for the next couple of days covering the DARPATech conference in Anaheim, California. I hope to have some reports from there on the interesting projects being displayed.

Update: DARPA has uploaded the briefing slides and scripts from the major briefings given at this week's conference. The materials still don't give you the feeling of what it's like to be around all these smart people, or what it's like to see the stuff in person on the exhibit floor. Nonetheless, there's a lot of interesting stuff.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:56

 
More bad news about sex in the military

Eric Schmitt reports in this morning's New York Times about at least 92 rape accusations within the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific Command made during the 2001-2003 period. (The NYT story actually reproduces a story from last week by the Colorado Springs Gazette.) Apparently, these rapes had been reported and known to authorities, but no one had ever added up all the reports to come up with an aggregate number for the theater of sexual assaults.

The five-month review was the most comprehensive report of its kind by an Air Force command and has led to a servicewide investigation into how sexual assault is reported, how it can be prevented and how commanders deal with victims. Investigators said Monday that conditions varied among installations, depending on the services available on and off bases.

Last week, Gen. William J. Begert, the commander of Pacific Air Forces who sought the review, ordered broad changes in training, reporting of sexual assaults and assistance for victims.

He has also summoned his top field commanders to a meeting in April at his headquarters in Hawaii to discuss the problem.

"I found it disturbing," General Begert said in a telephone interview on Monday, referring to the number of rape accusations, made mostly by servicewomen but some also by civilians. "We've got to take this on and lower the number of incidents. Our mission gets done by us trusting each other, and this undermines that trust."

Of the 106 service members accused in the 92 cases cited in the report, 14 were tried by court-martial. Seven were convicted of rape and sentenced to an average of eight years in prison; for lesser, related offenses, more than 40 others received punishments like demotions, lost pay and letters of reprimand. No action was taken against 28, and many cases are still pending. The review was first reported Friday by The Colorado Springs Gazette.

The Air Force's Pacific command study comes as the overall military faces the most serious accusations of sexual misconduct in years. There have been at least 112 reports of sexual misconduct, including rape, in the past 18 months in the Central Command area of operations, which includes Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. Two dozen women at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas have reported to a local rape-crisis center that they were assaulted in 2002.

* * *
The majority of the cases involved Air Force men and women, age 25 or younger, and took place in the dormitory room of either the accuser or the reported assailant. Alcohol was often a factor.

Though in most cases male airmen assaulted female service members, some civilian women, including married women and prostitutes, also reported being raped.

The largest number of reported rapes — about one-third of the accusations — arose in South Korea, where about one-quarter of the Pacific command's 34,000 troops are based. About 19 percent, or 6,635, of the command's troops are women. The report noted that most service members were on unaccompanied tours, with families remaining in the United States; that most lived in dormitories; and that alcohol was prevalent.

Analysis: It goes without saying that this is bad news. Rape in any context is an awful thing. In my moral code, rapists deserve to be punished swiftly, severely, and without remorse on the part of the criminal justice system. Rape in the military context is particularly heinous because of its effect on unit cohesion, and "good order and discipline" -- the very foundations of unit effectiveness in combat. A military rapist doesn't just assault his victim, he assaults the combat readiness of his unit. That, in turn, threatens the lives of his buddies, and by extension, the lives of all Americans who depend on the military for our security. Given the seriousness of rape in the military context, I have a hard time understanding why any rape case would be treated with anything less than a general court-martial. If I were the convening authority (a 2-star general in GCM cases), I'd throw the book at these dirtbags.

On the surface, these reports appear far more serious than the reports of sexual misconduct in the Persian Gulf region during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The scores of cases to come out of Southwest Asia appear to be a mix of fraternization, sexual misconduct, and rape -- with the last category being the minority. Fraternization is still bad, but it's generally consensual conduct and it's only criminal because of its deleterious effect on good order & discipline. These reports of rape in the Pacific -- if they're mostly rape and not just sexual misconduct -- look a lot worse to me. This isn't just a unit discipline problem. This is an indicator that we have hardcore predators in the ranks, and that we may have systemic problems in the way we recruit, train and command servicemen.

Another systemic problem is evident from the location of these rapes. A disproportionate number of sexual assaults took place in South Korea, where servicemembers are stationed for a 1-year "hardship tour" where they are separated from their families and housed in barracks that resemble a cross between college dormitories and normal apartment buildings. Given my experience as an MP lieutenant in South Korea, I think this is a very dangerous environment when leaders are unable/unwilling to effectively police their personnel. Without the positive influence of their families and stateside social networks, servicemembers in South Korea often misbehave in ways you can't begin to imagine. The MP blotter at Camp Casey was full of married, respectable NCOs and officers showing their backside in public because they thought they could get away with it, and because of the atmosphere in that country. It's worse than Vegas -- there's a prevailing atmosphere of "What happens in Korea, stays in Korea". There's also an atmosphere of "boys will be boys" because of the overwhelming proportion of combat (read: no women) units in certain parts of Korea. Put these together, add some alcohol, and you have a volatile mix.

The Army has recently considered a proposal to change Korea from an individual-replacement tour to a brigade-rotation tour, wherein it would rotate brigade-sized units through Korea for 6 months or 12 months at a time. I think this proposal would be great for combat readiness reasons -- it would also go a long way towards fixing this problem as well. Such units would deploy with their stateside social networks intact, and soldiers in those units would be less likely to behave badly for lack of their spouses and stateside friends, because what happened in Korea would surely not stay in Korea.

That said, I'd like to see a few more analyses done on this problem. I would like to see a comparison of sexual assault statistics done between the U.S. military (all 4 services) and the U.S. college setting -- specifically, the dormitory and fraternity house environments. The two age groups are similar, although there may be socio-economic and educational attainment gaps between them. Second, I'd like to see a comparison between the military's rate of rape (and sexual assault, domestic violence, etc) and society at large. My gut tells me that even though the military has problems like this, it still does better than the rest of American society. Finally, I'd like to see a comparison of sentences between the military and civilian courts, to see if there are any lessons to be drawn there.

None of these statistics will erase the problem which has arisen in the Pacific. But they will help illuminate the problem, and place it in its proper perspective. Solving the problem of rape in the military will ultimately take tough leadership, and probably a few courts martial as well, but it is absolutely essential for maintaining good order & discipline in the military.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:53

 
Website to Watch: The Washington Monthly is about to launch its new online weblog/magazine titled "Political Animal", which will be hosted by Kevin Drum (formerly of CalPundit). In some ways, the site will mirror TAPPED, the online magazine/weblog of The American Prospect. But instead of featuring journalists-as-bloggers like TAPPED, Political Animal will include contributions from a panel of experts in various fields. I have agreed to contribute occasional notes to Political Animal in the field of national security, and the Monthly's editors tell me they have several other pundits/experts to round out the Political Animal jury. Keep checking the Washington Monthly's webpage over the next few days to see when this new project starts -- it should be a great site for news & commentary.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:33

 
Invasion of the body snatchers at UCLA: The news this weekend of problems in UCLA's willed body program seemed eerily familiar for me. You see, I wrote about problems with this department back in 1996, when family members sued the university alleging that their loved ones' remains were treated "without dignity". Don't get me wrong -- I'm one of the biggest UCLA boosters in town. But I'm not surprised to see problems emerging again with this program at the Medical Center, given the sheer size of the medical enterprise at UCLA and the lack of meaningful oversight over many parts of the hospital. I hope this mess gets sorted out quickly.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:31

 
How much is enough (or too much) money for defense?

That's the question posed today by an article on the front page of the Washington Post which examines the current defense budget. Many in Washington have begun asking whether America can afford its current level of defense expenditures, including annual spending for Iraq and Afghanistan nearing $100 billion/year. This article sets up the issue as a conflict between competing imperatives: modernize the force, maintain the current force, operate the current force, and manage the defense infrastructure. Except that there's no conflict in the current budget -- everything appears to be winning.

The military bills, which are approaching $500 billion a year, reflect an exceptional confluence of events, as the Pentagon attempts to cover the costs of stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan while pursuing an array of new weaponry, exploring revolutionary technologies and caring for an all-volunteer military.

In a sign of mounting pressure to constrain the Pentagon's purse, the Senate Budget Committee voted last week to trim $7 billion from Bush's defense request. Defense hawks vowed to restore the money and to block a similar cost-cutting move expected in the House.

The looming political battle bore a striking parallel with conditions 19 years ago when congressional alarm over a soaring federal deficit led to the end of President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup.

"This feels to me the way it did back in 1985," said John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary and comptroller under President Bill Clinton and now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "I believe the tide has begun to turn. These deficit and defense budget numbers are so shockingly big now that, politically, they're untenable."

posted by Phillip Carter at 12:24

 
The making of a combat general: Rick Atkinson, who covered the 101st Airborne Division as an 'embed' for the Washington Post, has the second of a 3-part series in today's Post on Major General David Petraeus, the commander of the storied 'Screaming Eagles'. The series offers a preview of Atkinson's new book, In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. In my opinion, Atkinson provided some of the best reporting of the war, and his previous books Crusade and An Army at Dawn have been first rate. I look forward to reading the rest of the series, as well as the book when it comes out.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:21

 
Building a better human body: DefenseTech passes on an interesting story from the labs at UC Berkeley, where researchers are building a human skeleton that would enable an average man (or woman) to carry more than 200 pounds for an indefinite period. The idea is to enable military personnel to carry large loads for long periods of time without fatigue.

This human exoskeleton is just one of the many things planned for display this week at DARPATech -- a conference sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I'll be there, and will be reporting regularly on Intel Dump about the more interesting things on display at DARPATech.
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:17

 
Former CPA official: reconstruction planning "did not go well"

InsideDefense (subscription required) reports this morning on comments from a very recently retired general from the Coalition Provisional Authority that planning for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq was less than stellar. This isn't really news, but it's significant that we're hearing it from this kind of source now.

Prewar planning for the combat offensive to drive then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power was "an A-plus effort," but crafting the coalition's reconstruction strategy "did not go well," retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg said. U.S. officials "made a lot of bad assumptions" that continue to plague coalition efforts "to this day."

Kellogg, who last week returned from Iraq after working for Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, headed the Joint Staff's command, control, communications and computer systems directorate (J-6) when administration and Pentagon officials were charting how the coalition would battle Iraqi troops and begin rebuilding the nation. He spoke today during an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association conference in Arlington, VA.

Analysis: The evidentiary record before the bar of public opinion is pretty complete on this issue; we didn't need a retired 3-star to tell us that post-war reconstruction planning was less than stellar. However, it is telling when recent officials start to say this, as opposed to outsiders and journalists, because it means that this idea has morph'd into something approaching the truth.

The standard Bush Administration response has been the old military maxim that "no plan survives first contact". As a general proposition, I buy that; I learned that lesson the hard way as a platoon leader in many training exercises. But what I also learned was that 1) you still have to plan, 2) you have to build flexibility in your plan, and 3) if nothing else, your plan should put the resources (i.e. subordinate units) in the right time/place on the battlefield to react to change when it occurs. The real failure, in my opinion, was not the plan per se. It was the failure to put adequate resources on the ground in Iraq (or to stage them in Kuwait) so these units could react to change when it occurred. Failing to see the future can be forgiven; failure to plan for contingencies -- especially bad ones -- cannot be forgiven. If those resources were there, commanders could have made a bad plan work by improvising, adapting and innovating on the ground. But without those resources, the commanders were hamstrung in their ability to fix a deteriorating security situation -- they made do with what they had. That was the failure, and that's why having a bad plan made such a big difference in the early days of April and May 2003.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:45

 
The living history of the Supreme Court: Linda Greenhouse has a long report in the New York Times on the release today of Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun's papers -- an event which was delayed until 5 years after his death. Blackmun is renowned both for his ideology, which moved from right to left during his tenure on the court, and his opinions, such as Roe v. Wade. As Ms. Greenhouse writes, Justice Blackmun's papers offer a rare look inside the Supreme Court, which has become one of the most important institutions in American society. Undoubtedly, these papers will help historians and journalists understand and write about the Court, including its present members who were on the Court with Blackmun. I look forward to reading their books when they're published.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:04

 
Spring hunting season begins in Afghanistan

David Cloud reports on the Wall Street Journal front page (subscription required) that a new campaign has begun to find Osama Bin Laden and his top lieutenants in the remote mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It is being led by the CIA and Special Forces, supported by regular U.S. infantry, and resourced with lots of money, intelligence and logistics. Since the battles for Tora Bora more than two years ago, there have not been many battalion-level operations in this region; most patrols and operations have been conducted at the company level and below. As it unfolds, this campaign will likely see large numbers of U.S. troops introduced on the ground in this area to cordon and search areas for the leadership of Al Qaeda.

In recent weeks, the U.S. and Pakistan have launched a push to find Mr. bin Laden and his allies, making greater use of U.S. infantry units to patrol the porous border. For the first time, U.S. soldiers, who previously were used mainly to fight the Taliban, are supposed to get close to the people in the mountain villages and win them over as informants.

The U.S. is deploying infantry units to supplement special forces and Central Intelligence Agency personnel near the border, who are spearheading the search but have only a few hundred personnel, officials say. With more troops, the U.S. hopes to close off escape routes to and from Pakistan and to generate better intelligence about who might be helping Mr. bin Laden. The expanded effort is driven in part by pressure from Washington, which has made capture of top al Qaeda leaders an election-year priority.

As part of the effort, the U.S. is beefing up its presence on the border. Currently, only 1,600 of the 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan are deployed there. At Capt. Gibbs's 500-person camp, workers are nearly doubling the number of tents for the several hundred troops expected to arrive in the next few months. Nearby, an airfield once used by the Soviets is being upgraded so that more aircraft can be moved nearer the border, officials say.

The intensified search faces big obstacles. In the border towns where militants and their supporters are thought to be hiding, U.S. troops are treated with suspicion and sometimes hostility. The Taliban is sowing fear and intimidation. Attacks against aid workers, supply convoys and local officials working with the U.S. have increased sharply in recent months. The violence has stunted reconstruction efforts and forced Afghan officials to consider delaying national elections scheduled for this summer.

And although Pakistan has shown signs of new aggressiveness in searching its side of the frontier, U.S. and Afghan officials say Pakistan still is not doing enough to pursue militants in the tribal border regions that have long been outside of Pakistani authorities' direct control. The latest push by Pakistani security forces is "something we're watching with some cautious optimism," said Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan in a recent interview in Kabul.

Pakistan officials say the can handle the search without U.S. help. But, according to a U.S. official, they have privately agreed to let U.S. special-forces troops cross into their territory to capture al Qaeda and Taliban leaders if no Pakistani units are in the vicinity.

Analysis: Obviously, this plan is risky. The mountains of this region have swallowed armies before, and they may do so again. Moreover, sending large units into harm's way means putting large numbers of young men and women at risk -- something which may have secondary and tertiary consequences in an election year when the American public has seen a lot of blood already spent in Iraq. Nonetheless, I think this mission is worth the risk. The prey we seek in Afghanistan is the ultimate prey in the war on terrorism -- these are the guys that actually struck the United States and killed 3,000 of our fellow citizens. Clearly, this endeavor is worth some risk, and it's probably worth more than Operation Iraqi Freedom. My hunch is that the American public will support this operation, even if it proves to be costly. But what they will ask is: why did it take so long for us to hunt these guys down?
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:57

 
'Enemy combatant' meets with his lawyer

Yesterday, alleged dirty bomber and unlawful enemy combatant Jose Padilla got a chance to meet with his lawyer, Donna Newman. Since being designated an enemy combatant and transferred to DoD custody in June 2002, Padilla has been held virtually incommunicado at the military brig in Charleston, SC. Yesterday's meeting marked the first time he has had access to someone from the outside world.

The Supreme Court last month agreed to review the constitutionality of Bush's decision to indefinitely hold Padilla and another U.S.-born man. Padilla's case is scheduled for a hearing in late April, with a decision expected by July.

Shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the Pentagon reversed course and allowed Padilla to meet face to face with Newman. But the Pentagon emphasized that Newman's meeting with Padilla was discretionary and would be "subject to appropriate security restrictions."

Newman saw those restrictions first hand at the naval brig yesterday. She and Padilla talked through a glass security window, while two government officials listened to the conversation and videotaped the meeting. A former street-gang member, Padilla is a Muslim convert who has traveled in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"He was in very good spirits to finally see someone, but this was not an attorney-client meeting," said Newman, a constitutional lawyer with offices in New York and New Jersey. "This was invitation-only, and we were not allowed to ask about the conditions of his confinement."

* * *
Newman said yesterday that she hopes to meet with her client again. "I gave him some newspaper articles about his case, and he was most appreciative," she said. "Now I'll await another government invitation to meet with my client again."

Analysis: The most significant argument advanced by the government for the seclusion of its enemy combatants from the outside world has been that the process of interrogation and intelligence gathering requires it. This also justifies the denial of access to counsel for such persons, because advice from an attorney would only frustrate the interrogation process. Unfortunately, the government has not articulated this point very well in public documents. One of the only public statements of this argument is the "Woolfolk Declaration" filed in the case of Yaser Hamdi, another alleged enemy combatant being held by the military. Presumably, the Justice Department will make this argument to the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Padilla cases.

So, the implicit message in allowing Padilla access to counsel now is that he has no more further intelligence value. We have pumped him for all the information he has. Since he has been in custody now for nearly 2 years, anything else he has is probably stale. Therefore, the Pentagon is willing to allow him access to counsel because there's no more interrogation left to frustrate or impede. If that's true, and I think it probably is, then I think there's a strong argument for obeying the 2nd Circuit decision and transferring Padilla into the custody of the civilian court system. The national security purposes of his combatant detention have been met; as a U.S. citizen, I think he now should either be charged with a crime or released. (Note: this position still allows the possibility of enemy combatant detentions, but it puts a usefulness/necessity limit on the end of such detentions.)

What will the Supreme Court do?: The high court will hear Hamdi and Padilla's case at the end of April, and presumably they will opine on a variety of issues presented by these individuals' detention. I'm not sure that the recent moves by the Defense Department to grant Hamdi and Padilla access to counsel will have any effect on the court's decision, though it could show some good faith on the government's part. We'll see.
posted by Phillip Carter at 06:49

 
DoD announces draft policy for detainee review boards: The Pentagon announced today the policy for considering the freedom of detainees now held at Guantanamo Bay. Interestingly, the public is being invited to submit comments on this policy, much like a typical notice/comment period for administrative rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act. (DoD is statutorily exempt from these provisions of the APA.) This panel looks like an Art. V tribunal from the 3rd Geneva Convention, but for the fact that we're not giving the Gitmo detainees Geneva Convention POW status.

Update: The Washington Post reports on Thursday morning on this development and adds some more details about what the panels will look like, and how they'll work.

Under the procedures, the review panels would include one intelligence specialist. Each detainee would receive assistance from a military officer in seeking his release, but the officer would not be acting as a lawyer before the panel. Another officer would present "threat information" about the detainee to the panel, but that officer also would not be "an advocate for or against" detention, according to the rules.

The process would be overseen by a Senate-confirmed civilian at the Pentagon selected by the defense secretary. The civilian would name the three-member military panels hearing the cases.

The detainee's nation of origin would be allowed to present evidence for and against continued confinement and could invite the detainee's relatives to do so as well. The inmate himself would be allowed to present information to the panel, which could question him.

By majority vote, the panel would recommend whether to release or continue holding the detainee, and the civilian official would make the final decision. But the rules state that the military is under no legal obligation to hold the hearings, and that they are being held "solely as a matter of [Pentagon] discretion."

posted by Phillip Carter at 12:34

 
Is Gitmo that bad? Well, it depends on your frame of reference

The London Times (subscription required) reports that the seven detainees repatriated from Guantanamo Bay to Russia have said they would have rather stayed at Gitmo, instead of facing the famously cruel treatment of the Russian justice and prison systems.

Fatima Tekayeva and Nina Odizheva said that they had received letters from their sons saying that they wanted to remain at the prison camp rather than face the beatings, torture, malnourishment and rampant tuberculosis that exist in Russia’s overcrowded jails.

"Of course they wanted to stay there," Mrs Tekayeva said by telephone from the southern city of Nalchik. "They had human rights and good living standards there. They had dentists and good meals — everything they wanted. And here, in Russian prisons, there are very bad conditions and very bad punishments."

* * *
American officials said that they had been assured that the prisoners would be treated humanely in Russia, but human rights groups say that they will not get a fair trial and could face torture, including prolonged beatings and electric shocks, to extract confessions.

"Police torture is rampant, especially in pre-trial detention centres, where these people are likely to spend a long time," Anna Neistat, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said.

Analysis: This is actually a very old problem in international law -- whether to repatriate prisoners when a) the prisoners themselves don't want to be repatriated, or b) the conditions in the country of origin are worse than the conditions in captivity. Art. 118 of the 3rd Geneva Convention states categorically that "Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities." In practice, some nations have allowed POWs to stay behind as a matter of choice; thousands of German and Italian POWs stayed in the United States after WWII. But the situation here is somewhat different, insofar as 1) the Gitmo detainees are not lawful POWs (according to the Pentagon) and 2) they're presumably going to be charged with some violation of the laws of armed conflict. So, I think the U.S. will either continue its program of direct repatriation, or repatriation by means of bilateral agreement that includes some provision for trial, where the Gitmo prisoners are concerned.

Nonetheless, it does say something that America's detention facility for unlawful enemy combatants is better than the Russian prison for civilians. Liberal (small "l" liberal) states tend to observe different norms of justice and prisoner treatment than authoritarian states, and I don't think Russia has quite shaken off the chains of its old justice system. There may not be a Gulag anymore, but that's scant comfort to a prisoner looking at confinement in one of Russia's other prisons. Moreover, the Russian course of conduct with respect to its own Islamist terrorist problem (in Chechnya and elsewhere) has made a mockery of international law and human rights. Sometimes, I think the efforts of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International would be better directed at abuses such as these, rather than the inordinate efforts of these groups directed at the United States.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:56

 
Central Intelligence (and Venture Capital) Agency

Kevin Maney has an interesting report in today's USA Today about the CIA, and its entrepreneurial endeavors in funding startup tech outfits that may produce valuable technologies/systems in the future for the intelligence community. The CIA has even stood up a subsidiary agency -- In-Q-Tel -- for the purpose of providing venture capital to start-ups outside of the legal rules for government contracts.

In-Q-Tel, set up in 1999, invests about $35 million a year in young companies creating technology that might improve the ability of the United States to spy on its nemeses. It has kept a low profile and is not much known outside of the intelligence community and Silicon Valley.

Though In-Q-Tel started as a five-year experiment, it has been so successful that the CIA wants to extend In-Q-Tel's charter. That's up to Congress, which is likely to approve. In-Q-Tel has become a new darling in Washington. The Defense Department even wants to duplicate the In-Q-Tel model for the military.

What does In-Q-Tel invest in? "It's not like in the James Bond movies, making a car invisible or something," says Gilman Louie, who runs In-Q-Tel. Instead, many of the technologies are focused on finding and sorting data — a gigantic problem for intelligence agencies. Every three hours, U.S. intelligence sweeps up enough information to fill the Library of Congress, according to a report in Technology Review.

So one In-Q-Tel-backed company, Language Weaver, is helping by developing a new kind of capability for instantly translating documents from, say, Arabic into English. Another, Inxight, is like a smarter Google — a search engine that can sort online documents into categories. In all, In-Q-Tel has invested in 59 start-ups.

The result is an idiosyncratic blend of tech and spies. For instance, In-Q-Tel isn't run by a CIA operative. Louie previously founded a couple of video game companies. Here in In-Q-Tel's modern black and tan offices, Louie endures a constant string of quips from CEOs and investors who are unused to being in the CIA's presence. " 'I can tell you, but I'd have to kill you,' " Louie says mockingly. "I get that all the time."

Analysis: This is really interesting stuff, and it's probably going to become the new way of business where the federal government wants to think "out of the box" and stimulate innovation/creativity. As with any unconventional means of federal funding, there are oversight issues and accountability issues that ought to be addressed. But I think In-Q-Tel does a good job with these, both because of its corporate management structure and its requirement to produce results for the agency. Also, I think the market corrects In-Q-Tel when it makes a bad call, and its bosses then have to justify that bad call to the CIA. However, the biggest reason why I like this idea is its potential for success. When things like this succeed, they usually do so in ways beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Public/private alliances and partnerships like the ones paid for with CIA money can do amazing things. Oracle Corporation started as a joint venture of the U.S. government and private industry to develop relational database technology, and look where Oracle is today. The same can be said, in a less apt analogy, about the Internet and the development of various Internet apps where the government has played a role. The key is always maintaining some mechanism of accountability and control -- but not too much control, so the wizards can produce their wonders.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:43

 
Courage under fire: In December 2002, I wrote about the policy changes in the 1990s which allowed American military women to serve in front-line roles. Chuck Yarborough has a great report on some female MP officers from the 720th MP Battalion at Fort Hood, Texas, who are proving their mettle under fire right now in Iraq. I think their battalion commander gets it right when he says: "If my sons want to join the Army, I'd be happy if they were led by Jennifer Knight." Me too.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:16

 
A conclusion not supported by the evidence

Eric Schmitt opines today in a news article for the New York Times that the current USMC deployment to Haiti "shows that the United States military can still intervene in crises large and small" despite commitments to Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries around the world. He goes on to cite a number of experts to support this proposition, including some of the smartest guys in the field of national security and force structure.

That does not unduly tax a Marine Corps that is in the midst of sending 25,000 troops to Iraq, and preparing to move another 25,000 there later this year. "This isn't the straw that will break the camel's back," said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington group that studies the military.

* * *
"There's no question that we have to respond to instability in this hemisphere," said Joseph Hoar, a retired four-star Marine officer. "And this can be handled with a relatively small force."

Analysis: It may be true that the U.S. military can send a quick-reaction force of one Marine task force to Haiti on short notice without disrupting the force too much. However, it does not follow that the U.S. can accomplish all it needs to in Haiti with the forces left over from commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan. For one thing, we don't know the length of the Haiti mission, anymore than we know the length of the Iraq mission. Second, we don't know yet the extent to which our allies will help out in Haiti, though the French and Canadians have already made promising overtures. (It also helps to have a Chapter VII resolution from the UN.) Third, we've only committed one MAGTF right now -- maybe up to a MEU -- and that isn't really enough of a load to test whether the military can handle a commitment to Haiti. The body of Mr. Schmitt's story goes into these details eventually, but his lede doesn't. Instead, the lede parrots the party line from the E-Ring -- "can do sir!" -- without stepping back to add any independent analysis or skepticism. C'mon...
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:09

 
Election Day in California: Today, we get to anoint a Democratic presidential candidate. Thanks to California's open primary, everyone gets to vote in one party's primary if they want to, even non-affiliated voters like me. We also get to pick candidates for one of California's two Senate seats today. And, in keeping with California's policy-by-popular-initiative tradition (not the best or wisest tradition, to be sure), we also get to decide whether to float a $15 billion bond to bail our state government out and liberalize the state constitution to allow future tax/bond measures more easily.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:15

 
The human cost of war: Dan Baum has an excellent article in the New Yorker on the experiences of Michael Cain, a U.S. Army soldier who was seriously wounded in Iraq and who has since come home to heal and move on. The New Yorker also has an online Q&A with Mr. Baum on the article and the issue of wounded vets generally. For comparison, also check out this 1943 report from Philip Hamburger in the New Yorker, which the magazine has on its website alongside the 2004 article.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:48

 
TIA lives to die another day, Part II

Picking up on notes authored last month by DefenseTech, Wired and Intel Dump, the Washington Times reports this morning on the resurrection of Total Information Awareness -- the Pentagon's data-mining/non-obvious relationship analysis system -- in other forms. The story doesn't really break any news, but it ought to get some attention by its prominent placement on the front page of this newspaper. The Washington Times is heavily read in the GOP and Bush Administration, and it's likely that some Republican members of Congress will be upset that their edict to cancel TIA has been ignored so completely.

Congress killed the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project to create a supercomputer and sift through the private information of U.S. citizens, calling it a vast violation of privacy.

The Defense Department says it has not shared the data-mining technology it researched for the TIA project, but similar supersnoop programs using advanced technology are under development.

The funding of such endeavors by the Homeland Security Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has angered privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

* * *
Data-mining technology was central to the TIA project to identify and predict terrorism, but critics called it an unprecedented invasion of privacy and civil liberties.

Government officials are trying to distance their programs from the term "data mining."

* * *
"I don't like the term 'data mining,' but 'data correlation' I think is probably a more appropriate term," said one Defense Department official.

Terminology aside, this looks like a clear attempt to evade the funding restrictions placed on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by Congress, and I doubt that the members of Congress responsible for those restrictions will be happy. That's not to say that TIA is a bad thing. In my opinion, it's valuable technology that we should research more thoroughly. But when Congress cancels a program, you can't just rename it and move it to another agency. That course of action tends to result in Congressional hearings, inquiries, and government officials having to 'take the 5th', and sometimes even in criminal charges. More to follow...
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:37