A simple and powerful reminder of what war costs

If you have a moment and some tissues nearby, check this out.

Will Obama get Osama?

Probably not directly, a la a Predator strike or the like, but Obama, as is is wont, may be creating the conditions for positive things to happen.

This Daily Kos dairist lays out the case for "Osama being a dead man" here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/17/743628/-Osama-bin-Laden-Is-a-Dead-Man

I won't be the slightest bit surprised if Osama doesn't make it to 2010. When you think of it, the Obama administration has moved at a rapid clip on a lot of things.

Fresh blood

Andrew Sullivan is alarmed about McChrystal's possible connection to detainee abuse. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/stanley-mcchrystal-a-history-of-torture.html

I'd like to find out more, but I'm generally in favor of firing unsuccessful generals. One of the worst attributes of the Bush era was an extreme reluctance to fire anyone over failures, although any hint of "disloyalty" resulted in a swift sacking.

In contrast Gates (and Obama, it seems) have demonstrated a commendable willingness to demand results and let go leaders who fail to achieve them. Serious failures of judgement, such as that exhibited by Caldera with the Air Force One flyover, have also been cause for termination.

It's unfortunate for those involved, of course, who have in many cases served long and admirably. And there should be no shame in being relieved under those circumstances. It's not a scandal. Not everyone is suited for every job. But at these very high levels, with so many lives at stake there can be no shirking of the command responsibility to demand results. Generals, in particular, should understand that nothing less than success is acceptable and that the commander-in-chief will keep trying until he finds the right man or woman for the job.

I can't help but think that Obama is, here, also following the lead of his hero Lincoln. He's searching for his Grant. Only time will tell in McChrystal is Grant or just another Pope, Burnside, Hooker or McClellan.

Why people don't trust the Left on Defense

Look, there's no denying that there's a lot of room for criticizing American foreign policy, especially its military interventions over the years. I think it's even reasonable to say that the majority of them have been ill-conceived. But it;s not accurate to say that ALL of them are and if there's a post World War II war that is justified it's the war in Afghanistan. People opposing THAT war frankly sound daft to most people. Like the Congresswoman who voted against entering World War II (the sole vote -- she also voted against WWI, but wasn't alone that time), facing such people you have to say under what conditions would you support fighting? Waiting until the Nazis/Japanese/Taliban/Al-Qaeda are attacking your neighborhood a little too late, no?

Nice discussion here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/2/17/194929/728/995/698695

Barack Obama said from Day One he wasn't against all wars, just dumb ones. In that sentiment he probably captured the common sensical approach of most Americans. When you are attacked there's really no other reasonable response. The only people who don't fight back are those too weak to do so, and there's not a very happy record for weak people in our human history. Weak political units can only survive if protected by some powerful entity (power being an extremely relative term in this context -- but relative power is the only relevant context for military conflicts).

Let's be very, very, clear on this. While Obama's opposition to the war in Iraq (the dumb war) was important to his winning the presidency, his support for waging justified war in Afghanistan was vital for winning the presidency. The voters would never have voted for a pacifist for commander in chief.

Trade-offs

Force protection is somewhat of a mantra in U.S. military policy, and as the beneficiary of that policy, I feel I need to tread carefully in being too critical of it.

But the fact remains that airstrikes and other uses of heavy firepower carry enormous risks for bystanders in the area.

The controversy over a recent airstirke that reportedly killed some 90 people in Afghanistan, including as many as 60 children, shows no sign of abating. New video evidemnce has emerged that suggests that the U.S. reports of no mor ethan seven dead civilians is incomplete.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080908/ap_on_re_as/afghan_civilian_deaths_7;_ylt=AsaBxWsJhZJDGzjCLEuUbZb9xg8F

I'm not sure why the military is having such a hard time pinning down the truth here. The U.N. and Afghan authorities seem to have information, one wonders if it's simply not accepted by the military as valid.


The bottom line, however, is that firepower is of limited use in counterinsurgency and is no substitute for numbers on the ground and presence. This has been, all along, the fatal flaw of the Rumsfeld strategy for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many reasons why Gen. Petraeus has seen some success in Iraq, but foremost among them seems to have been changing the deployment of U.S. troops from centalized bases to forawrd positions among the population. This carried risks, of course, and initially casualkty rates did climb, but eventually they fell and now Iraq is safer for U.S. forces than ever.

A similar thing nees to happen in Afghanisatn, where, really, the overall situation should be more favorable. A cost of the Iraq venture has been in preventing the U.S. from having reserves avaikable to influence the Afghanistan fight.

Petreaus is moving up to Central Command and one expects he will apply his talents to redressing that deficiency.

The McMaster Promotion board

Kaplan has a good article in slate about something that's real important, but usually flies well under the radar of the Media and the public. He notes how the latest Army general officer promotion board may represent a very important seismic shift in the Army's leadership: http://www.slate.com/id/2196647/

The guy at the top always matters, for good or ill. In the case of the ill, for example, we can't really expect a major across-the-board improvement in the U.S. strategic situation so long as Bush is president.
But, to the extent that lower-ranking officials have quality they can make improvements within their sphere. There may be no clearer example of this than the Department of Defense. The shortcomings of Rumfeld are made starkly evident by the dramatic improvements under Gates, who may be one of the most important and effective SecDefs ever.

Gates has brought back to the Pentagon something that has been sorely lacking otherwise in the Bush administration -- accountability. Gates has been willing to fire failures. And now we are also seeing that he's interested in rewarding successes.

Unhappy with the kinds of decisions being made by the all-important Army one-star general promotion boards he brought back Gen. Petraeus from the war zone to oversea a promotion board. This alone can't help but send a powerful message how important Gates considered this board.

One of the biggest scandals of the last few years was the failure of two successive promotion boards to promote COL H.R. McMaster. There's hardly a more famous -- and justly so -- O-6 in the Army and it's failure to give him a star was nothing short of scandalous. Anyone who has been following McMaster's career has little doubt that he is one of the most outstanding officers of his generation -- bearing comparison with luminaries such as George C. Marshall and Creighton Abrams.

So Gates filled the board with the kind of outstanding successful combat officers the Army needs. Officers who had managed to rise to the top despite the system, but who could now reform that system to promote like-minded juniors in sufficient numbers to make a difference, as Kaplan points out.

I sure as hell hope the Navy names an aircraft carrier after this guy someday.

The war hits close to home for George Will

makes your heart stop: http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/will070608.php3

Ranger killed on tour of duty No. 7!

Details here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/us-soldier-killed-in-afgh_b_99842.html

But the headline version is that an Army soldier was killed this week in Afghanistan on his seventh tour of duty in the country in six years.

This sort of thing just can't be kept up.

Backwards at Brooking

From an AP story about how Afghanistan could use a couple more brigades:
Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution warned that adding forces to Afghanistan could hurt efforts in Iraq. “We shouldn’t shortchange the Iraq mission to find the brigades for Afghanistan,” O’Hanlon said.

No, how about not shortchanging the mission IN AFGHANISTAN!
That's where the blokes who attacked us and killed 3,000 Americans came from. Oh, and by the way, the bastards who did it are still AT LARGE.

Get a clue, Mr. O'Hanlon.

Aiding the enemy and supporting the troops

A commenter on Intel Dump makes this valuable point in the context of the Obama 24-man Platoon anecdote:

there are a lot of people who believe the Rush Limbaugh line that any soldier who comes back critical of the war is a phony soldier. This has been an unfortunate pattern. When that guy asked the question about the Hillbilly armor, the right immediately used the fact that he had worked with a reporter about shaping the question as evidence that the soldier was a dupe of one of those biased members of the liberal press, rather than come right out and face the music on what was a very real shortfall.
Hell, I remember there being a story earlier in the year about the improvised measures. I can understand that in the real world of war, supply lines are not always 100%, and readiness in relaxed times falls short.
But what seems to be happening here is that one side in this debate has made it a habit to cover for and offer apologetics for these shortfalls. That, I think, has had very real consequences for the war. It's given political cover to some people to essentially let the problems fester, and not take the risks and make the sacrifices necessary (like saying no to big military contractors, or recruiting a bigger army from the start) in order to improve the situation. The apologist's actions have created a bad situation for the soldiers, where a deficient supply chain is excused away as normal, and where alarm about problems is hushed up. These help to make our soldiers more vulnerable and in a much more material way than any discouraging words ever could. In an effort to fight the negative image of the war and battle a supposedly biased media, the disconnect the war supporters are creating may ironically lead to further defeats of America's armed forces and foreign policy.

This is one of the more pernicious ideas floating through the right-side commentary of late, that criticizing the war's leadership is aiding the enemy and not supporting the troops. Now, in fact, in a democracy, nothing could be further from the truth.
Certain kinds of criticism can always be destructive, but this generally results from the nature of that particular criticism. The best recent example is the Move-on.org ad that basically called Gen. Petraeus a "betray-us." In plain English, name-calling. That's rarely constructive under any circumstances.
But pointing out flaws in strategy, logistics, planning, leadership, policy and the like is legitimate. In every prior American war there's always been healthy debate over these kinds of issues. Scandals over war profiteers, bad equipment being sent to the troops, inadequate leadership or poor strategy have been a staple of democratic warfighting since Thucydides. It's not disloyalty to want our side to benefit from the best possible leadership, equipment, doctrine and strategy. It's common sense.
One of the worst aspects of Bush's war leadership has been his absolute unwillingness to hold anyone accountable, ever, for failure. The only failure that brings swift retribution is a failure to toe the party line and actually express some doubts about an administration policy. But actual, operational failure is tolerated, excused and defended.
Is it a surprise that things have gone better since Gates took over from Rumsfeld? Couldn't some of that success come much earlier if Bush had demanded success and fired people to get it? How many generals did Lincoln go through before he found his Grant? Getting fired comes with the territory when you're a military officer. Often it's not fair. But war is not about being fair, it's about winning. And you win by having the right leadership. The experience of history is that you usually have to fire quite a few before you find the leaders with the right talent to fight the war you're in.
Being unwilling to do that is itself a profound failure of leadership.

Ballon Juice asks Are they (Wingnuts) really that dumb?

Er, yes.
As, of course, are their pals on the left side of the spectrum. Indeed, as soon as one becomes wedded to any one ideology, one loses the capacity to think and analyze. The entire attraction of an ideology is the ability to stop thinking. Thinking is hard work, after all. Reality is never as neat as theater.
Check out Cole for details: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=9759
But the gist of the story is this. Obama cited an example of how the Iraq war has distracted us from finishing the job in Afghanistan. He cited the experience of an Army officer who had to deploy with only 24 men in his platoon to Afghanistan because demands for Iraq siphoned off the rest.
The blognuts descended instantly with criticisms.most of which were pretty stupid off the bat. Some jumped on the fact that a captain wasn't a platoon leader's rank. Naturally, I assumed when I heard the story that the man was a current captain who was most likely a lieutenant when he was a platoon leader. Duh.
Without rehashing the whole thing, several media outlets checked the original source and the essence of the story is completely accurate, within the necessary limits of making a point within the constraints of a sound bite.
Conservatives used to be most devastating when they made clearly reasoned, logical arguments based on facts. There are a handful who still remember how to do that. William F. Buckley, of course, and his heir apparent as the intellectual conservative, George Will. Until that style comes back into fashion, and they drive back the yahoos, they're not likely to come in from the wilderness anytime soon.

Taxi to the Dark Side -- Cheney's legacy

And this represents which American values?

http://www.taxitothedarkside.com/