Neda

Like many people, I've been a fascinated observer of the recent events in Iran.

It's never easy to get a firm grasp on the politics of any foreign country, especially from afar, without a lot of study. So I won't venture a guess as to how it will all play out or what it may mean.

But I am old enough to remember the 1979 revolution, watching Iranian students march in protest in the streets of Boston. And I remember that many of them ended up having their dreams dashed as the revolution consumed their futures, as revolutions often do. Mos of the Iranian students at Northeastern U. then were the well-connected offspring of the elite classes there on oil money. Many never did go home.

Now, almost exactly 30 years later, Iran is convulsed again, with most of the population too young to know anything other than the Islamic Republic. But like the young people of 79, they demand a different future. And like the young people of 1979, many of them are paying and will pay, a stiff price.

The video of one young woman, in particular, has touched many. While there are, naturally, conflicting reports, the best ones I have seen identify her as a 26- or 27-year-old woman named Neda, who was near the protests with some friends, including an older man (often erroneously identified as her father) who was her music teacher. Her fiance is quoted as saying she wasn't all that political, and wasn't a fervent supporter of any particular candidate, but just wanted votes to count.

Watching her death on video is profoundly disturbing. Yet her fate does put a very human face on what is happening, and if the regime changes, it may very well be because of the power of her example.

Going green

It's clearly a very small gesture, especially for a blog read by no one, but I'm going green in support of the Iranian voters.

More at Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/yes-the-dish-is-not-green-ctd.html

Obama's quiet coup

Bush may be the lamest of lame duck presidents, but there's one area where even the lamest duck president could do a lot of mischief if so inclined, Under our system there's little meaningful restraint on the ability of the president to order attacks on foreign countries under the best of circumstances (since 1950, anyways) but what restraints there are lose all their power in the waning days of an administration.

Obama has clearly taken positive steps to exert leadership on the economy, our most pressing issue, even before taking office, but he also has deftly covered his foreign policy flank by keeping Gates on as SecDef.

There are many very good reasons to keep Gates on, and I'm sure they counted most in the decision. But the happy result of this decision has been to essentially remove the ability of Bush to start trouble with Iran. While it's true that Gates still works for Bush officially, he's now also Obama's man and has every incentive to make sure that nothing stupid is done in these last 48 days to screw things up for the new team.

Another well-handled move.

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.

National Geographic on Iran

This month's National Geographic has an informative piece on Iran, including an handy detailed map of the country that will undoubtedly prove useful if there's a war.

While studiously non-political, the article does manage to bring up some interesting points. One thing that I think that most of those that are pushing for war and demonizing the Iranians ignore is the bad feeling that Iranians still feel over the coup that brought the Shah to power. Certainly this kind of thing ought to be thought about before glibly advocating a strike. Now what kind of self-respecting country is not going to be enraged by such an act? Remember Pearl Harbor?

The Iranians are proud heirs to an ancient civilization, so we know they are self-respecting. It's really insane to even think about starting a war that we know we can't finish.

The shape of the next war

This article about Chinese cyber attacks points out some valuable points to consider for anyone touting America's military might: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080531_6948.php

First of all, there's no question America is "mighty" by any measure of conventional military capability.

The Army and Marine Corps are strained by Iraq right now, and dangerously degraded, but even degraded they are far-and-away more capable than almost any other ground military force on the globe. The only armies with comparable capabilities are firm allies. The main limitation on American ground capability is size. Many ground scenarios require a lot of boost on the ground and there the U.S. capability is always limited (and more so because of the war)

In the air and at sea, however, there is simply no contest. There are no air forces in the world that are not allies that have a prayer of successfully defending their air space. There are no navies afloat, including allies, that can contest anything more than their immediate coastal waters. When Britain "ruled the waves" it was content to have a Navy that equalled the next two biggest. The U.S. Navy is larger (not counting minor ships) than all the rest of the world's navies put together. No one since Imperial Rome has had that level of superiority.

Aside from the depredations of submarines, there's no nation that can fight us at sea. While subs are worrisome, history suggests that they cannot be decisive alone. The only successful submarine campaign (U.S. vs. Japan) was won by the stronger navy against the weaker one. Attempts by the weaker naval power to parley a sub campaign into strategic success fell short (Germany in two world wars, Japan in WW2).

The fate of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 is not lost on our potentiall opponents either.

No nation can challenge us in conventional warfare with any hope of success. Being, however, unwilling to simply surrender their interests and let the U.S. humiliate them, bully them and otherwise have its way, countries with interests opposed to ours will obviously search for other ways to fight.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the creativity of potential opponents, especially those with long military traditions such as Iran and China. While their economic power doesn't allow them to match the U.S. in conventional military capability, both of those nations have very long military traditions independent of the Western one.

The Iranians, for example, no doubt noted that an American admiral was able to use unconventional tactics to neutralize a Navy battle group in a notorious wargame. The admiral resigned when the game was rigged and restarted to void the defeat. Have the recent incidents involving small boats stalking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf been tests of that tactic? Possibly. It would be wise to consider the probability that an attack on Iran might unleash incidents of unconventional was and terrorism in widely separated areas of the world. Still, while the Iranians can hope to achieve some embarrassing successes, they represent an inherently limited threat. Even the loss of an aircraft carrier, while an enormous embarrassment and a naval tragedy, would not change the relative balance of power one bit. Details: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/12/america/12navy.php?page=1

Much more dangerous is China, which is a continental-sized power that is growing in economic might. The Chinese are still a couple of generations, at least, from being able to match the U.S. in conventional military arms -- if they were even interested in doing so. But the Chinese are heirs to a military tradition that stretches back several thousand years. One that never had a "dark ages" that broke its connection to classical times. That Chinese military tradition has always emphasized the value of outthinking, out maneuvering and surprising the foe. Western military thought has tended to regard many tactics as too "sneaky" or "ungentlemanly" for real warriors. Unconventional warfare has posed many challenges for westerners because it rarely results in stand-up "fair" fights. Chinese military thought doesn't really make a distinction between "unconventional" and "conventional" fighting. To the Chinese all warfare involves yin and yang, the interaction between the ordinary and the extraordinary fighting elements. And importantly, yin and yang, ordinary and extraordinary, are not inherent properties of the force. Depending on circumstances the yin can become the yang. The extraordinary can become the ordinary. A general might mass his armored forces on the plain to fix the attention of the enemy while some light infantry flanks through difficult terrain to cut off a retreat.

This directly relates to the cyber skirmishing that's been going on for some years now between hackers suspected to be Chinese and various American business and government computer systems.

The Chinese, knowing that they can't compete with bombs, aircraft carriers and missiles, may be seeking to turn the conflict into one they can compete in -- a war of cyber attacks, anti-sat actions, mines, subs and terror.

They're teasing around with conventional surface naval capabilities, but very seriously building a significant sub force. There's no reason to think they would try to emulate the U-boat campaign with those subs. There's no reason to think that the U.S. would be vulnerable to a sea interdiction campaign in any sort of useful time frame for a Sino-American conflict. But subs could be used as platforms for other kinds of attacks and raids that could be very damaging.

The Chinese have demonstrated an interest in anti-sat weapons. The U.S. is heavily reliant on satellites for all sorts of uses and it could take many years to rebuild our networks if they were destroyed.

The overseas Chinese community is enormous and the Chinese have had some success in recruiting among those populations to further their interests. In a conflict one should expect some support from them, which could take many, many forms -- not necessarily direct action.

And finally, the cyber threat. Apparently there are many ways that attacks through the Internet could be waged. The very characteristics that make the Internet so useful also make it very vulnerable. The Y2K threat turned out to be minimal, but looking back at those concerns points out the ways that the system could be vulnerable -- maybe not to bad code, but to hostile action.

If a conflict were to break out between the U.S. and China, it will take some unexpected directions.

Fifth anniversary of the war

Like most people, I saw the war start in CNN, even though I was on my way to the war zone. Or at least, I was trying to get a ride to the war zone, as I was in Colorado Springs at Ft. Carson.
I eventually managed to get to Iraq, after stops in Germany and Romania, although I didn't stay in Iraq very long -- just 35 days in country.
I will admit that I was very, very wrong about the war, which I supported at the time.
I was wrong because I assumed that Saddam did have some WMDs hidden away. It seemed like the most logical explanation for his odd behavior. What all of us failed to remember was that Saddam and logic were not good friends.
I was wrong because I assumed that, because Bush was betting his entire presidency on the outcome. he would everything possible to ensure that it would succeed. What I failed to recognize was ideology would be married to incompetence to create a perfect storm of ineffectiveness.
I was wrong because I assumed that the need to win he war would cause Bush to hold people accountable. In fact, the only people ever punished by Bush were people who were insufficiently loyal to the official line. Mere incompetence, corruption or partisan blindness were no problem, so long as you were loyal.
I was wrong to trust the government.

Uh oh, Fallon is out

There's no question that Fallon's comments as reported in the Esquire magazine article put him in a tenous position. Bush, for better or worse, (I know it's worse) is the Commander in Chief and Fallon was clearly chafing against the limits of what is allowable dissent by a subordinate officer.
On the other hand, Fallon was performing a useful and patriotic role to the extent he saved the U.S. from a strategic blunder of an Iran war.
The question is whether or not this means there will a war with Iran after all. It's very worrisome if this clears the way for a war.

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.

Iranian games

The recent incident between Iran and the U.S. Navy is interesting on a few levels.
Politically the Bush administration didn't handle it all that well, which is no surprise. A lot of folks compared it to the Tonkin Gulf incident. Some wag in my newsroom posted a map of the Strait of Hormuz and labeled it the Gulf of Tonkin. It's a bad analogy, not the least because THIS incident really did happen, unlike the Tonkin incident.
Secondly, Johnson was looking for a reason to strike. While there are elements in the current administration that would like to strike, it's not at all clear that Bush, himself, does, and that's all the difference in the world. If this same incident had happened last summer it might have led to fighting, but the momentum for that has shifted against it for now and it appears something more overt will be required to ignite fighting.

Militarily, on the other hand, there's a lot to be noted. It's evidence that the Iranian plan is to use swarms of very small boats to attack U.S. Navy warships. This is most likely to work if the Iranians can surprise us. In Sunday's confrontation, for example, it appeared to me that the Navy warships would have been vulnerable if the Iranian boats had suddenly launched a coordinated attack,. They were very, very close.
On the other hand, an out-of-the-blue ambush of some U.S. Navy ships that provokes a massive counterstrike doesn't seem like something the Iranians would consider in their interests. The U.S. can afford to lose a destroyer more than the Iranians can afford to have the crap bombed out of them. An unprovoked surprise attack would throw away any political benefit the Iranians would hope to otherwise get.
On the other hand, if the U.S. were to launch airstrikes on the Iranians they may very well try to retaliate against U.S. Navy ships within reach.
The question is whether "swarm" tactics by light ships could work. There's some reason to think that there's a chance they can get through. Very small craft are very difficult targets. Too small to shoot at with missiles, hard to hit from jet aircraft, they're vulnerable to gunfire but if there were enough of them there may be too many to engage.
The swarm still has its work cut out for it, though, especially if it's expected. Coordinating a large number of small boats using nothing other than voice radio would be very difficult. Meanwhile the U.S. Navy ships can rely on a sophisticated network to coordinate their actions and call for help. The ships can be data-linked together so they can allocate fires efficiently. The U.S. Navy is very well-trained and professional and one must assume that they've considered this tactical challenge and come up with countermeasures.
Perhaps the biggest problem for the Iranians is targeting the swarm. The small boats have limited endurance, they can' just be sent out randomly to search for U.S. ships. Without good, real-time information the Iranian command won't know where to send the swarm.
It's the information battle that the Iranians are least equipped to win. The Americans will see the Iranians coming. Any ships endangered by the swarm will be able to dodge away while the U.S. uses its air power to chew chew them up.
The swarm tactic holds some danger for the U.S., but it would need all the cars to fall just right to actually work. On the other hand, it's really the only tactical option open to the Iranians, so they have to try it or give up.