North Koreans to be blamed for sinking South Korean warship

This bears watching. If it turns out to be from a NK sub, this will be just the third sinking of a warship by a submarine since World War II. The others were an Indian frigate in 1971 and an Argentine cruiser in 1982.

A simple and powerful reminder of what war costs

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

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.

Doing the right thing is good strategy

Scott Horton lays out the details behind our eviction notice from our Kyrgyz airbase:

But this is far from the whole story. In fact at the time the Kyrgyz agreed to let the United States open the base, the two nations enjoyed excellent relations and the Kyrgyz public was arguably the warmest and most pro-American of the region. That changed rather dramatically, and the change did not result as much from Russian propaganda as it did from American ineptitude and misconduct. For a decade, American advisors and aid contractors had lectured the Kyrgyz on the need for budgetary transparency and anti-corruption measures. Yet when the United States Government first arrived in country with a serious contract to negotiate—for the creation of the air base—it wound up concluding an under-the-table deal with the president’s family under which most of the financial benefit from the airbase wound up parked in offshore bank accounts. That deal was cut by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon with Rumsfeld’s direct involvement. Had a private U.S. company cut such a deal it would probably have found its officers on the other end of an indictment under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act brought by a U.S. attorney. However, following an FBI investigation that confirmed these depressing facts, the Bush Administration concluded that in this as in other areas, it would hold itself immune from the criminal law standards it applied to ordinary citizens.
But the longer-term problem was with the Kyrgyz. A prominent Bishkek lawyer discussing the dealings over the base with me pronounced a judgment that I heard consistently: “We finally got an up-close look at your government. You’re a bunch of hypocrites, no less corrupt than our own government–just a lot bigger.”
Off to a bad start, things quickly got even worse. In 2006 U.S. serviceman Zachary Hatfield shot and killed Aleksandr Ivanov, a truck driver employed by the base’s aviation fuel contractor. The incident was catastrophically mishandled by U.S. military and diplomatic personnel. U.S. spokesmen issued a statement claiming that Ivanov had physically threatened Hatfield with a knife, and that Hatfield shot him in self defense. While making vague and unconvincing statements of “regret” about the “incident,” the soldier was whisked away back to the United States. That was flight to avoid prosecution and to block a homicide investigation–such flight, of course, a serious crime unto itself. While offering vague assurances that the soldier would be dealt with under the military justice system (something which, in the eyes of the Kyrgyz, never occurred), American officials did little to atone for the crime. Kyrgyz newspapers made mincemeat of the proffered excuse, reporting that Hatfield’s claims that Ivanov was armed with a knife were untrue and establishing that Ivanov had made numerous prior deliveries to the base, and was known to the soldier. The Kyrgyz media fanned suspicions that the homicide was an unprovoked act, accounts that American officials only fueled by issuing a false report and failing to convincingly show either contrition or an intention to bring the soldier to justice. The U.S. government offered a $2,000 damages payment to Ivanov’s family on account of his death, an act widely viewed in Kyrgyzstan as a calculated insult. Although the U.S. embassy later clarified that this was an interim payment only and that a larger sum would be paid later, the damage was done.
The American management of the incident was totally bungled, leaving the local population with the idea that the Americans on the base were arrogant and not accountable to the law. The public’s view of Americans underwent a radical and sudden transformation. A nation once seen as generous benefactors now were seen as arrogant bullies.
“This base is doomed,” I was told repeatedly. It is only a matter of time before public opinion forces its closing. The question at this point is whether America will learn any lessons from this experience.

Lest anyone think this is an isolated occurrence, remember the problems we have had in Korea and in Okinawa recently over similar criminal acts involving local people. No one expects that you can avoid all criminal activity by soldiers, but how it is handled is critical. It's not just a question of strictly following the rules, it's a question of diplomacy. Soldiers shouldn't be handed over to the mob to appease the locals, of course, but they equally need to face the music just as they would back home.

Unfortunately, or Kyrgyz critic was right, the U.S. under Bush was just as corrupt as the local government, and for much the same sorts of reasons. Obama may correct this, but much of the damage has already been done. It only takes one "Aw shit" to cancel a lot of "attaboys" and Bush's "aw shits" erased the hard-earned attaboys of 200 years.

Larison, as usual, gets to the nub of the matter

Damile Larison on loophole seekers for Just War theory:

Of course, it is possible that applying high standards will simply cause those who wish to wage war for whatever reason to ignore the restraints of the tradition entirely, but then I thought that one of the purposes of establishing moral standards was not to accommodate the unjust in their desires. After the last six years, I would have thought that the tendency to water down these standards and thus make escalating and starting wars more morally and politically acceptable was the far greater problem that we face. We are not in danger, it seems to me, of “giving ammunition to the side of the debate that wants to do away with moral restraint in the struggle against terrorism entirely,” as these are the people who are perfectly happy to warp and distort the just war tradition (and the Constitution, international law and the basic meaning of words, among other things) to accommodate the virtual abandonment of that restraint. One could make a similar argument that opponents of the torture regime, by taking an absolute stance against torture as wrong in all cases, are giving ammunition to those who have defended and justified it as necessary, but I think Ross and I would agree that there is an obligation to oppose injustices that are carried out by the state, whether in isolated incidents or as a matter of systematic policy, that needs to be fulfilled whether or not apologists for those injustices can demagogue that opposition to their temporary advantage.

The whole thing is here: http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/01/05/high-standards/

Baffle them with Warfare link

An amusing, yet accurate read on the problem of winning a war against terrorists:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/9/9813/16416/597/624860

Good run down from the War Nerd on Georgia

Meaty link

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-south-ossetia-the-war-of-my-dreams/

Georgia

I can't begin to comment on the deep-seated grand political intrigues of the Caucasus, so anyone wanting more on that front is welcome to read folks such as this: http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/2008/08/georgia_on_my_mind.html

But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is more consequences of our misadventure in Iraq. If we had kept our eye on the ball and finished off the Taliban in Afghanistan with sufficient force instead of frittering it away with an ill-advised and poorly-conducted war in Iraq we (the U.S.) would have both the military force to have options and the credibility that success would have brought so that military options wouldn't be required.

Instead we have over-extended, over-committed and worn down the military so that we have no realistic military options at all. AND, instead of appearing strong and no one to trifle with the limits of U.S. power have been exposed for all to see in their naked glory because of the way we allowed ourselves to get mired in two long wars without apparent victory or end. (Bushite comments about how things are better in Iraq now display their cluelessness -- the damage has already been done. "Winning" now, whatever that means, doesn't rebuild the reputation that we had for decisive effectiveness we enjoyed before Iraq. It's too late for that.)

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

Wrong way to do it

As much as I think the war is a bad idea, I think it's a much worse idea when soldiers refuse to serve when legally required to:
http://kokesh.blogspot.com/2008/06/matthis-chiroux-openly-resists-in-dc.html

While soldiers can reuse unlawful orders they're not serving the public good when refusing lawful orders, even if those orders are stupid. That's simply not their call in a republic.

As time's mist thickens, it's still worth remembering

June 6, 1944

Barack and Iraq

There are some preliminary signs of progress in Iraq, which prompts the question of what Obama should do if things are going relatively well there when he takes office. (There's less of a question for a McCain presidency, because he has essentially committed us to staying there.)

On the one hand, Obama clearly will have a mandate to pull the U.S. out sooner rather than later. Presumably anyone who thinks we should stay will vote for McCain.

On the other hand, every indication is that Barack Obama is a man who deals with the world as it is, not as he wishes it to be. And as much as he might be tempted to pull out anyway, I suspect he'll evaluate conditions on the ground and calibrate any pullout to match the situation.

Is does not necessarily follow, by the way, that we should stay if things are going well. Or leave if they are going well. The key thing is to determine why things are going well. IF they are only going well because of high U.S. troop levels then pulling out quickly is obviously a poor choice. But if the improvement is largely because of Iraqi choices, then leaving without unnecessary delay will help.

The one thing I don't think Obama is interested in is creating a permanent U.S. presence a la Germany or Japan after World War II or Korea. It's likely that any Iraqi government strong enough to govern will ask us to leave. A long-term presence in an Arab country seems to cause more trouble than it is worth. Sticking around in Saudi Arabia has caused no end to our troubles, for example. Better an off-shore naval presence or small special forces bases in small, friendly states like Kuwait.

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.

Guess who said this

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Hiroshima

A collection of 10 photos taken immediately after the atom bomb attack but not released until now give an unsparing look at the aftermath.
The link is here: http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/smalloy/atomic_tragedy/photos.html

I think it's valuable to remember the obscene cost of war. As Robert E. Lee said. "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."

Those who would flippantly urge war should remember it's never without costs.

I note this despite the fact I'm not Hiroshima revisionist. Given what they knew at the time, I don't think Truman and his advisers had any choice but to use the weapon. There may be some quibbling over the choice of target, although I rather doubt any purely military target was available. And in the context of World War II, where cities had been ruthlessly bombed since 1940, merely targeting a city does not seem especially remarkable. As devastating as Hiroshima was, it was not the deadliest city bombing of the war. Among more deadly attacks were Dresden and Tokyo.

There's simply no question that Turman could not forgo the chance of ending the war immediately. He couldn't authorize a hugely costly invasion of Japan while keeping the atom bomb in his pocket. How could he justify all those additional Allied (not to mention Japanese deaths to the American people?

And I find arguments that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway very unpersuasive, even given the benefit of hindsight. It's completely unreasonable to expect Truman and the U.S. government to spot the opportunity, if one existed.

As it was, even after two atom bomb attacks there were Japanese officers who wanted to fight on and there was even an abortive coup by some die-hards. Given the sorry history of violent politics in 1930s Japan, the potential for troublemaking by such die-hards cannot be underestimated.

No, criticism of Truman is unfair and unreasonable and based on hindsight and information he could not know at the time.

But, while justified, the atom bomb attacks were no less horrifying. And that, perhaps, is the real lesson. Even when justified, even when just, war is necessarily an awful tragedy.

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.

What it looks like to be shot down

Interesting video taken from a drone shot down by a Russian MiG-29 of its last moments.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/22/2223517.htm?section=justin

Iraq: Should we leave or stay?

Here's what the Gallup poll shows:

Note: The withdrawal question asked if we should leave regardless of the situation in Iraq. in other words, whether or not things were getting better or worse. An unconditional withdrawal.

Pawnderings: The Other BEF (long post)

Some military history from my other blog:

Pawnderings: The Other BEF (long post)