PurpleheartOklahoma (scroll down)

Rick Hart Sinnreich

As Ronnie might have said, here we go again

Anyone professing surprise or mystification at Russia's and China's vetoes last Saturday of a U.S. co-sponsored draft U.N. resolution calling for Syria's embattled Bashar Al Assad to step down must be living on another planet.

A year ago, both nations grudgingly refrained from vetoing the U.S. co-sponsored U.N. resolution authorizing NATO enforcement of a no-fly-zone over Libya "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi."

Then they watched in impotent rage as NATO ignored that limited sanction to conduct an offensive air campaign against Muammar Gadhafi's regime, followed soon thereafter by the provision of weaponry and commitment of special forces "trainers" to the Libyan rebels in blatant violation of the resolution's weapons embargo and its explicit prohibition against introducing foreign forces into Libyan territory.

A familiar adage runs, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Reacting to international criticism of last Saturday's veto, China's quasi-official People's Daily pointedly commented, "Nato abused the security council resolution about establishing a no-fly zone and directly provided firepower assistance to one side in the Libyan war."

Referring to the collateral costs associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the article added waspishly, "Forceful prevention of a humanitarian disaster sounds [like] justice and responsibilityÖBut are not the unstoppable attacks and explosions over a decade after regime change a humanitarian disaster?"

It's a very good question, to which the escalating violence in post-Gadhafi Libya gives added point. In the four months since Gadhafi's demise, Libya has traded tyranny for anarchy. Meanwhile, as Wednesday's Terrorism Monitor noted, "It is proving difficult to distinguish between the new and old regimes in Libya as reports emerge of widespread torture and consequent deaths in detention centers run by the new military security agency and various militias."

Even Egypt, poster child for the Arab Spring, is proving to be something less attractive than a liberal democracy-in-embryo. Those who passionately urged the U.S. government to "get on the right side of history" by supporting the ouster of long-time U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak must wonder just which side of history we've chosen, as they watched his successors this week indict 19 American and 24 other nation aid workers on trumped-up charges.

Instead, apart from Mubarak's fellow generals, who understandably have yet to surrender power to a civilian government as likely to turn on them as they did on their former boss, the only apparent winners of Egypt's popular uprising are the long-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic fundamentalists and Al-Nour's outright Salafists, who between them control nearly three-quarters of Egypt's newly-elected parliament. That doesn't bode well for either Egyptian democracy or Middle-East peace.

Still less would a post-Assad Syria fractionated between its Sunni majority and Alawite, Christian, Kurdish and other minorities, each of which distrusts if not detests the others. On the contrary, it almost certainly would prove even more chaotic and violent than Libya in the short run and - given its relationship with Iran and Iraq - even more ideologically extreme than Egypt in the long run. This, in a country positioned at the very nexus of the volatile geopolitics of the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

None of which has prevented right-wing hawks like Senators Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain - none of whom seems ever to have seen a war that he doesn't like - from demanding that the U.S. provide humanitarian aid and arms to Syria's still inchoate opposition. It's a good bet that calls for Western military intervention won't be far behind.

Nor is all such pressure from the hawkish right. Lefty humanitarians are just as eager as their neocon colleagues to commit Western - read U.S. - military resources, in their case in still another costly and very likely futile effort to restrain the violence that almost inevitably erupts when long-suppressed ethnic, tribal, and religious antagonisms are unleashed from the authoritarian chains that formerly restrained them.

Back in 2002, as the Bush administration sought to build its case for invading Iraq, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman posed a timely and penetrating question: "Is Iraq the way it is today because Saddam Hussein is the way he is," he asked. "Or is Saddam Hussein the way he is because Iraq is the way it is?"

The same question might reasonably be asked of Gadhafi's Libya, Mubarak's Egypt, and the Assad family's Syria. All are in many ways Western artifacts, artificial nations held together until now only by the undoubted ruthlessness of their ruling regimes.

By encouraging the violent dissolution of those regimes and the resulting anarchy and misery, we merely compound that responsibility. No wonder the Russians and Chinese won't have anything to do with it.

 Richard Hart Sinnreich
29Jan12

How to talk ourselves into still another war
"Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal."

With that ringingly ambiguous declaration, President Obama sought in Tuesday's State of the Union address to deflect Republican critics seeking U.S. military action to derail Iran's presumed nuclear ambitions and/or prompt regime change in Tehran.

That military action on any scale that the American people would cheerfully support is unlikely to achieve either objective is neither here nor there. Neither is the president's assurance likely to dampen what has become a veritable chorus of bellicose declarations from three of the four Republicans seeking his job - Ron Paul being the notable dissenter - never mind the unelected neo-con cheerleaders who contributed so heavily to a war in Iraq for which the full price has yet to be paid.

Thus, from former governor Romney: "If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon." From former speaker Gingrich: "I think the world needs to understand, Iran is not going to get a nuclear weapon. All the world can decide is whether they help us peacefully stop it or they force us to use violence." From former senator Santorum: "I would be saying to the Iranians, you either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes."

Wow. Pugnacious words. Contrast them with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey's far more measured comments in an interview Thursday with National Journal: "I just think that it's premature to be deciding that the economic and diplomatic approach [to deterring Iran] is inadequate."

Of course, unlike the president's would-be successors, not one of whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger, Dempsey has spent his entire life in uniform, including service in three wars in 20 years. Which may help explain his insistence that dealing with Iran "doesn't necessarily mean dropping bombs."

Maybe not, but at some point, as we've seen too often, tough talk has a bad habit of ending in shooting. Today's hawkishness may be little more than election-year bluster. But enough of it can begin to make war  real war, not rhetorical war  appear to be inevitable. Indeed, between expanded economic sanctions and an undeclared but no longer clandestine campaign of sabotage and assassination, we're very nearly at war with Iran as it is.

Iranian politicians are no more immune than our own from the temptation to bluster, of course, witness recent threats to close the Straits of Hormuz to international maritime traffic. These since have been muted, possibly because someone in Tehran had a rush of judgment to the head, and realized - accurately - that a naval confrontation in the Gulf merely would hand Western hawks the very defensible justification for preventive war that so far has eluded them.

Meanwhile, as they did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, those beating the drum for military action against Iran envision an inexpensive cake-walk. Never mind that virtually no one with real military experience - including the Israelis, who probably have studied it harder than anyone else - is confident that airstrikes alone could do more than disrupt and delay Iranian nuclear development. Even that might be a stretch.

What we can be confident that they would do, however, is infuriate even those Iranians who despise their own leaders, just as America's "liberation" of Iraq from Saddam Hussein produced, not Iraqi acquiescence in America's strategic ambitions, but instead an eight-year insurgency that persists to this day despite our reluctant and too long deferred departure.

That a nuclear Iran would be uncomfortable, for us and for its neighbors, isn't in dispute. A nuclear USSR was uncomfortable. So also, today, are a nuclear Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. And doubtless a nuclear U.S., Britain, France, and Israel are similarly uncomfortable to others.

If discomfort were reason enough to go to war, the world rarely would enjoy any peace. Instead, as Gen. Dempsey implies, war is, or should be, the ultimate confession of political failure, to be employed only when no other solution remains. And even then, on both recent and historical evidence, we should be wary of optimistic predictions that war invariably will succeed where other more patient solutions have palled.

On Iran, we need to lower the temperature. Writing in 1913, British novelist and futurist H.G. Wells urged, "Let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scaremonger, and these excitable 'patriots' into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets everywhere and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and unlimited toy soldiers - tons, cellars-full - and let them lead their own lives there away from us."

No one listened, of course, and a year later, having talked themselves into war, Europe's great powers immolated a generation and themselves on the battlefields of World War I. Surely we can do better.

Rick Sinnreich
How to talk ourselves into still another war

"Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal."

With that ringingly ambiguous declaration, President Obama sought in Tuesday's State of the Union address to deflect Republican critics seeking U.S. military action to derail Iran's presumed nuclear ambitions and/or prompt regime change in Tehran.

That military action on any scale that the American people would cheerfully support is unlikely to achieve either objective is neither here nor there. Neither is the president's assurance likely to dampen what has become a veritable chorus of bellicose declarations from three of the four Republicans seeking his job - Ron Paul being the notable dissenter - never mind the unelected neo-con cheerleaders who contributed so heavily to a war in Iraq for which the full price has yet to be paid.

Thus, from former governor Romney: "If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon." From former speaker Gingrich: "I think the world needs to understand, Iran is not going to get a nuclear weapon. All the world can decide is whether they help us peacefully stop it or they force us to use violence." From former senator Santorum: "I would be saying to the Iranians, you either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes."

Wow. Pugnacious words. Contrast them with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey's far more measured comments in an interview Thursday with National Journal: "I just think that it's premature to be deciding that the economic and diplomatic approach [to deterring Iran] is inadequate."

Of course, unlike the president's would-be successors, not one of whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger, Dempsey has spent his entire life in uniform, including service in three wars in 20 years. Which may help explain his insistence that dealing with Iran "doesn't necessarily mean dropping bombs."

Maybe not, but at some point, as we've seen too often, tough talk has a bad habit of ending in shooting. Today's hawkishness may be little more than election-year bluster. But enough of it can begin to make war  real war, not rhetorical war  appear to be inevitable. Indeed, between expanded economic sanctions and an undeclared but no longer clandestine campaign of sabotage and assassination, we're very nearly at war with Iran as it is.

Iranian politicians are no more immune than our own from the temptation to bluster, of course, witness recent threats to close the Straits of Hormuz to international maritime traffic. These since have been muted, possibly because someone in Tehran had a rush of judgment to the head, and realized - accurately - that a naval confrontation in the Gulf merely would hand Western hawks the very defensible justification for preventive war that so far has eluded them.

Meanwhile, as they did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, those beating the drum for military action against Iran envision an inexpensive cake-walk. Never mind that virtually no one with real military experience - including the Israelis, who probably have studied it harder than anyone else - is confident that airstrikes alone could do more than disrupt and delay Iranian nuclear development. Even that might be a stretch.

What we can be confident that they would do, however, is infuriate even those Iranians who despise their own leaders, just as America's "liberation" of Iraq from Saddam Hussein produced, not Iraqi acquiescence in America's strategic ambitions, but instead an eight-year insurgency that persists to this day despite our reluctant and too long deferred departure.

That a nuclear Iran would be uncomfortable, for us and for its neighbors, isn't in dispute. A nuclear USSR was uncomfortable. So also, today, are a nuclear Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. And doubtless a nuclear U.S., Britain, France, and Israel are similarly uncomfortable to others.

If discomfort were reason enough to go to war, the world rarely would enjoy any peace. Instead, as Gen. Dempsey implies, war is, or should be, the ultimate confession of political failure, to be employed only when no other solution remains. And even then, on both recent and historical evidence, we should be wary of optimistic predictions that war invariably will succeed where other more patient solutions have palled.

On Iran, we need to lower the temperature. Writing in 1913, British novelist and futurist H.G. Wells urged, "Let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scaremonger, and these excitable 'patriots' into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets everywhere and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and unlimited toy soldiers - tons, cellars-full - and let them lead their own lives there away from us."

No one listened, of course, and a year later, having talked themselves into war, Europe's great powers immolated a generation and themselves on the battlefields of World War I. Surely we can do better.

Rick Sinnreich 15Jan2012
Drawing down smart: Managing Army reduction

Early in 1989, with a new president in office and evidence mounting of the Soviet Union's impending implosion, the Army's chief of staff, then halfway through his four-year tenure, assembled a group of colonels from around the Army to conduct a special project. The Army would be downsizing, he told them. "I need to know how to do it in a smart way."

In fact, Army staffers already had begun to examine that question. Building on their work, the chief's ad hoc committee proposed three fundamental principles by which to guide the expected drawdown:

First, a post-Cold War Army might be smaller, but it also should be better: strategically more agile, operationally more versatile, and tactically more lethal. There should be no "hollowing out" of the Army as had happened after the Vietnam War. A smaller Army might be less able than its predecessor to sustain prolonged operations without augmentation, but its initial combat capability should remain unimpaired and if possible be enhanced.

Second, to compensate for that inevitable diminution in staying power, the drawdown should be designed with malice aforethought to permit rapid force expansion should the need arise for a larger or longer military commitment. That implied rethinking the active/reserve mix. It implied retaining a surplus of equipment like armor, artillery, and aviation that couldn't easily or rapidly be replaced.  And it implied finding ways to retain and gainfully employ trained leaders who, like long-lead-time materiel, couldn't be reacquired on short notice once divested.

Finally, the drawdown should be managed in a way that kept faith with those who had served honorably and well. Personnel should be diminished by normal attrition and reduced accession. There should be no mass purges of officers and NCOs of the sort that had previously happened after every war. And, once again, talent critical to expansibility should be retained.

That episode and its aftermath, which included the first Gulf War only two years later, seems relevant once again with the promulgation last week of new defense guidance prescribing a similar slimming down of the nation's ground forces. The size of the reduction remains to be announced, but pundits have predicted decrements ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 troops.

As was true in the late 1980s, however, the scale of reduction may be less important in the end than the manner in which the Army conducts it and the shape of the residual force that results. Although the threats for which it must remain prepared may have altered somewhat in the intervening years, the core principles that guided that earlier Army drawdown may be equally applicable today.

Indeed, there's evidence that the Army and the joint force overall already are thinking in those terms. JSC chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, himself briefly the Army's chief of staff, has made it clear that expansibility was a condition of the senior military leadership's approval of the new strategic guidance. And both political and military leaders have insisted that force reductions won't come at the expense of continued support of troops and their families.

There remain the questions, for what sort of post-reduction combat force should the Army aim, and how should achieving it be managed? Here too, a few basic guidelines suggest themselves.

First, a versatile post-drawdown Army argues against accepting excessively limiting presumptions about the sort of fights to which it might be one day be committed. Recent regular versus irregular warfare debates ultimately are sterile. Like most past conflicts, future wars almost certainly will witness both.

That acknowledged, the U.S. Army's warfighting preeminence resides above all in its unexcelled skill at combined arms operations. That argues against entirely divesting it of any capability, organizational or materiel, essential to conducting high-intensity combat against a competent, technologically mature opponent.

Second, if the Army is to be expansible, it must retain a surplus of those capabilities that would be the hardest and take the longest to re-acquire if not already in hand. The days when U.S. industry could turn on a dime from building sedans to building main battle tanks are long since over. Ditto for the tactical competence and organizational leadership developed only through education, training, and experience.

 Finally, to keep faith with and assure productive and rewarding employment for officers and NCOs to whom a smaller force necessarily will offer fewer field service opportunities, it's past time to rebuild a generating force largely gutted by the past decade's need to satisfy overseas deployments.

That means refurbishing the Army's schools, labs, and combat training centers. It means furnishing new opportunities for civilian schooling and other talent-enriching assignments. And it means convincing a skeptical Congress that, in an expansible force, top-heavy is not automatically commensurate with wasteful.

The Army can't avoid reduction. As it did before, however, it can reduce in a smart way, and should.

Rick Sinnreich 8Jan12
At last, believably prioritized strategic guidance

On Thursday, the Pentagon finally unveiled the long awaited result of its 8-month strategy review, launched by former defense secretary Robert Gates and completed under his successor Leon Panetta.

It's a measure of both the review's importance at a time of fiscal pressure and its political sensitivity in a presidential election year that, for the first time, the president himself visited the Pentagon to present the strategic guidance emerging from the review, and that will underwrite his forthcoming defense budget.

In broad terms, that guidance largely reasserts longstanding and relatively uncontroversial strategic aims: continued U.S. global military presence aimed at deterring aggression and supporting longtime allies, military and naval forces designed to deal with the full range of military challenges from conventional and irregular warfare to counter-terrorism and homeland defense, continued investment in advanced technology, and commitment to troops and their families.

As the president and his senior subordinates acknowledged frankly, however, the new strategy is as much budget as objective driven. In terms reminiscent of President Eisenhower, Mr. Obama noted that "we have to renew our economic strength here at home, which is the foundation of our strength in the world. That includes putting our fiscal house in order."

Accordingly, to no one's surprise, Thursday's guidance forecasts a leaner military. To achieve that, however, the new strategy wisely abjures across-the-board cuts in favor of major changes in geostrategic emphasis and mission priorities, and consistent with both, a revised balance among major force categories.

For starters, the new strategy sets in motion a long-deferred shift of America's geostrategic center of gravity from Europe toward the Pacific. But for Iraq and 9-11, that would have happened long ago, the threat to Western Europe having largely evaporated.

But in shifting its concern from Europe toward the Pacific, the strategy perforce trades a continental for a heavily maritime theater, and one to which access is relatively assured for one in which it increasingly is at risk. Both imply significant changes in force design.

The same is true of mission priorities. The new guidance makes it clear that our Wilsonian passion to export democracy by force has ebbed. While continuing to prioritize counter-terrorism and non-proliferation, the new guidance reveals little appetite for future large-scale nation-building commitments. Instead, recalling the Nixon Doctrine, it foresees limiting counter-insurgency efforts to special operations forces and the provision of advice and training. As with shifting the focus to South Asia and the Pacific, that change has implications for future force design.

Finally, both changes imply enlarging air, naval, space, cyber, and special ops capabilities at the expense of conventional ground forces, which will become smaller and leaner. Hard numbers await the president's budget. But it's clear that both the Army and the Marine Corps will be thinning down significantly.

How that reduction will be managed is nearly as important as the numbers themselves and deserves a column of its own. But the prospect already has prompted howls of anguish from the administration's (nominally fiscally responsible) conservative critics.

At the core of the criticism is the assertion that reducing ground forces will demolish the military's ability to fight two major wars at the same time. This alleged shift from a "2-war" to a "1-war" ground combat capability, opponents contend, simply invites opportunistic  aggression by a second enemy should the U.S. find itself engaged against a first.

Putting aside for the moment the strategic "let not a sparrow fall" implications of that argument, the premise itself is specious, as JCS chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey made clear at Thursday's briefing. "Our strategy," he noted, "has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they occur. This won't change."

The reality is that the U.S. has never had sufficient conventional ground forces to engage two competent enemies simultaneously without massive mobilization. Even in World War II, resourcing the European and Pacific theaters concurrently was a persistent challenge.

In the decades since, we've gone rhetorically from sizing for 2O to 1O and back to 2 wars, and in no case has the change meant a great deal. It's no accident that invading Iraq in 2003 demoted the war in Afghanistan to an economy-of-force effort, and even then, required mobilizing reserves on a scale not seen since the Korean War. The same would be true in spades of any future simultaneous contest against two more robust enemies such as Iran and North Korea.

The new guidance is still very general, and as always is the case with such documents, the devil will be in the details. Next week's column will look more closely at its potential effect on ground forces.

But this much can be said for it: for the first time in years, we have strategic guidance that attempts explicitly to reconcile ends with means. That's an overdue development that all Americans should welcome.