Category: Military Strategy

Facing The Music

The Daily Escape:

First snow, New Hampshire creek – December 2021 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

“It’s always been about the music. And when it’s not, it’s about facing the music” – Wrongo

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is also Wrongo’s favorite day because he prefers daylight to darkness. This is an optimistic day since every succeeding day for the next six months will bring more daylight to the land.

But Wrongo struggles to see any political daylight at the end of this extremely dark year. Here is a summation of the three events most important to Wrongo in this dark, dark year:

The January 6 aborted coup. Nothing that happened this year can overshadow the effort to subvert our democracy. While it may be doubtful right now that the outcome of the Jan. 6 committee will bring justice for the coup plotters, let’s compare it to the Watergate scandal. Those plotters were held accountable. And Watergate occurred at a time when we didn’t have mobile phone, email, and text message electronic tracing to reveal what had happened. In this Jan. 6 case, proving accountability should be easier. We don’t need to know everything, we just need to know enough to prosecute people. With all the digital information that’s available, that should be an easier job than it was during Watergate.

The recent revelations by the House Select Committee are an encouraging sign because they moved quickly on passing a contempt resolution for a former Congressman, Mark Meadows. The Committee got to tell their story three times in 24 hours. They embellished it with juicy new details (texts from Trump’s family members, Fox News personalities, reporters, members of Congress) every time they told it. If they can keep that up through the early part of next year, maybe we’ll start getting somewhere with this.

Ending the Forever War. Biden was crushed by the media and the public for walking away from Afghanistan and the subsequent chaos around the pull-out, but it was the right thing to do. Nearly 2500 US service members were killed, 20,698 were wounded, and more than $2.2 trillion in American taxpayer funds were spent on warfighting, reconstructing programs, building the Afghan National Security Forces, and promoting good governance.

In the end, we have nothing to show for our time there except for more national debt and soldiers who will need care for the rest of their lives. We deserve a full and complete accounting of our 20 years in Afghanistan. After all, it’s another military defeat that requires a fundamental examination to ensure that we never again jump into a country when we fail to understand their social and cultural dynamics.

Losing the Covid war. We’ve failed as a country to work together to beat the virus variants, despite having a vaccine that offered protection. The politicization of Covid treatment is the second worse outcome in 2021, to the politicization of the January 6 attempted coup.

Anti-vaxxers believe that their strong natural immune system will beat the virus, and that “healthy lifestyles” will give you a healthy immune system. They think using a vaccine to enhance the natural protection offered by their beautiful immune system is a bad idea because [insert the excuse of the day]. Perhaps they don’t realize that you can’t have natural immunity to a virus that your body has never encountered. An unvaccinated but fit person can get Covid because their body has no idea how to fight it.

There’s also the argument that Covid only kills older people. While the facts don’t support that idea either, maybe the anti-Vaxx community views it as an experiment to see if “having living parents or grandparents” is an evolutionary advantage for the kids who didn’t lose their relatives.

These issues show America must face the music. Wrongo’s sure we’ll face more 2021 music, but this is his top-of-mind thinking.

We’re going to have Christmas or seasonal music in each post this week. Today let’s listen to U2 – “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” filmed in November 1987 at the Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These guys were children back then. Maybe this tune has a special relevance in a world where Covid has taken so many lives:

Be kind. Not just during this season, but all the time.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Biden and Putin Talk Ukraine

The Daily Escape:

Dawn sky, North Shore of Lake Superior – November 2021 photo by Ken Harmon

Biden and Putin had their heads-of-state version of a Zoom call yesterday. It lasted more than two hours. From the WaPo:

“In an email readout of the call, the White House said that…Biden voiced the deep concerns of the United States and our European Allies about Russia’s escalation of forces surrounding Ukraine and made clear that the US and our Allies would respond with strong economic and other measures in the event of military escalation.”

It seems that the two leaders simply assigned their respective teams to follow up. The White House said Biden and Putin also discussed ransomware attacks and the Iran nuclear negotiations.

Wrongo doubts that Russia intends to invade Ukraine. There are too many downsides to a full-scale invasion for both sides. It would be costly militarily. Ukraine’s military would not be a match for Russia. But it’s in much better shape than it was in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and entered Ukraine’s Donbas region. With help from the West over the past seven years, Ukraine’s regular units and reserves have come a long way.

It’s difficult to imagine why NATO would respond militarily to support Ukraine. Germany certainly doesn’t want a war with Russia. Rather, they want Russia’s Nordstream 2 gas pipeline to begin supplying energy to them. It’s even unclear whether a war in Ukraine would be supported strongly by the Russian people.

Understandably, Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO. And so far, it doesn’t look like NATO wants Ukraine in NATO, either. It’s doubtful that Biden would insist that NATO ask Ukraine to join it. OTOH, Ukraine has leaned toward the EU and NATO since its independence in 1991.

Putin has observed that if Ukraine joined NATO, then NATO would be closer to Moscow than the USSR was to the US when they placed missiles in Cuba. Putin’s thinking that a nuclear warhead launched from Ukraine would have about a 5 minute flight time to Moscow.

That should be a threat Americans understand. If NATO had cruise or ballistic missiles in Ukraine or the Balkans it would be a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. And we should understand that Putin would react as JFK did in 1962.

It’s ancient history, but when Wrongo ran a nuclear missile unit in Germany, our role was a total defense strategy against a potential invasion from the Soviet Union. It seems logical to Wrongo that national defense in Ukraine and the Balkans is similar, a poison pill to deter Russian aggression.

A way out for Biden is to promise Putin that he won’t supply Ukraine with offensive weapons. The definition of what constitutes an offensive weapon has been clear for some time. It’s unlikely that Putin would be happy if Ukraine received state-of-the-art air defense weapons from NATO, but that crumb from Biden may have to be sufficient.

We in America should understand that NATO Chief Stoltenberg has been pushing to admit Ukraine into NATO. He’s also parroted what Biden has said about Russia paying a high price if it made a move against Ukraine. What about the US strategy for Ukraine? Reuters reported last week that Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried said that:

“As you can appreciate, all options are on the table and there’s a toolkit that includes a whole range of options…”

Donfried knows that there’s no “all options on the table” plan for the US. If Russia decided to invade, the US has neither forces nor resources in Europe to do much to stop it, unless NATO was to unleash a European-wide war.

Neither side wants that, because it wouldn’t necessarily be limited to Europe. There is something in the military called “Escalation Dominance”. That implies that when escalation begins, it can remain limited only if your side has a dominant nuclear capability. No one who looks at the US and Russia believes there’s any way to guarantee that an escalation will remain limited between these two powers.

There are no easy answers on how to avoid that. As long as we view this as primarily a military problem, we will see only military solutions. But if Ukraine falls to Russia, it would be a catastrophic reputational loss for the US, one that demonstrates our weakness in power and influence across our post-WWII empire.

Nobody knows what will happen, but we should expect Biden will do whatever he can to prevent direct confrontation. Russia has been deploying troops along its border with Ukraine, particularly around the Donbas region, where they have been carrying on a small war with Ukraine since late 2014.

In the middle of a pandemic in which millions have died, with no end in sight,  it would be a hell of a time to start a war.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – November 13, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, UT – November 2021 photo by Byron Jones

This week’s Veteran’s Day apparently isn’t finished with Wrongo just yet. It’s important to remember that when the US war in Afghanistan ended in August after nearly 20 years, there were both hard and soft costs that had been paid, and much that remains to be paid.

The Pentagon reports the hard costs of our Afghanistan adventure to be $825 billion. However, the “Costs of War” project at Brown University estimates those costs at $2.313 trillion. But it gets worse: They estimate the costs of all US post-9/11 war spending at $8 trillion, including future obligations for veterans’ care and the cost of borrowing on the associated federal debt for roughly 30 years. They also estimate the human costs of the “global war on terror” at 900,000 deaths.

Those are all truly staggering numbers.

And Congress is now considering next fiscal year’s military budget. Defense One is covering this so you don’t have to. They’re saying that the proposed 2022 defense budget will be another bipartisan effort by the old-timers in the House and Senate to add more money than was asked for into the pot. And it’s part of a long history of hiding flimsy arguments behind dramatic rhetoric: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“This year, both the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and House Armed Services Committee (HASC) have displayed a similar unwillingness to distinguish between needs and wants in their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, which recommend adding $25 billion and $24 billion, respectively, to President Biden’s recommended $715 billion Pentagon budget.”

More:

“It is difficult to imagine how either the SASC or HASC could convincingly demonstrate the necessity of such military spending increases when none of the most urgent crises facing the United States today have military solutions. Furthermore, the credibility of both the Pentagon and Congress on this subject is, to put it mildly, underwhelming: one has an extensive history of budgetary boondoggles, and the other is openly cozy with the U.S. arms industry.”

Defense One says that the most frustrating aspect isn’t the exorbitant amounts, but the lack of any substantive strategic justification for the increased spending by either Chamber. In specific, Defense One argues that  there’s been no effort to demonstrate that the Senate’s billions are funding needs instead of simply political wants.

Remember this is from Defense One, a stalwart defender of America’s military.

We shouldn’t assume legislators think carefully about the public’s interest when crafting the defense budget. Over the years, the defense budget process is driven partly by what the administration and the Pentagon ask for, and by what the defense industry wants for its bottom line. (Full disclosure, Wrongo holds a significant number of shares in a large defense contracting firm.)

US military spending in 2020 was $778 billion. The next closest nation was China, at $252 billion. In third place was India at $72.9 billion. Another perspective is to compare what we spent to fight in Vietnam to the costs of our Apollo moon landing. Apollo 11 got to the moon in July of 1969. That feat cost the US about $25.8 billion.

During the same era, it’s estimated that the Vietnam War cost the US $141 billion over 14 years. That means that we spent about as much in two years in Vietnam as we spent on the entire space race!

When we think about accountability for the costs of the Pentagon, we should remember that the Pentagon has never passed an outside expense audit. Waste is endemic; and the Pentagon simply fabricates numbers, but receives nearly zero pushback from Congress.

There’s so much corruption in the halls of Congress that we will never know how little we could spend on defense. Maybe we should just make some deep cuts to the defense budget and force real strategic decision-making down their throats.

Enough! It’s Saturday, and we need to take a break from trying to figure out whether Steve Bannon or Kyle Rittenhouse will ever go to jail. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

With a soaking rain in Connecticut today, we’re limited to indoor sports. Most of our fall clean-up is still ahead, but today, let’s grab a seat by the window and listen to pianist Max Richter’s “Mercy” with Richter on piano and Mari Samuelsen on violin. Richter originally wrote the piece 10 years ago for violinist Hillary Hahn. For Richter, “Mercy” places the need for mercy and compassion firmly within our view:

 

 

Facebooklinkedinrss

China’s New Missile Threat

The Daily Escape:

Moonlight on Nantucket Sound, Dennis Port, MA – October 2021 Samsung Note 20 ultra photo by Kelly O. & Bob W.

(We leave Truro, MA today, returning to our workaday lives in CT. It has been a wonderful time on Cape Cod, eating very well, and visiting with both local family, plus a few who traveled to spend time with us.)

From Vice:

“ the Financial Times, citing anonymous US intelligence sources, has reported that China tested a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead in August that left the Pentagon stunned.”

They’re saying that China may have launched a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) with a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV). Opinions differ, but they fired something that orbited the globe and dropped a hypersonic glide vehicle against a target.

Wrongo lost the fob for his car once, they’re expensive to replace. What are we talking about, and why should we care? In August or possibly in July, China tested a missile that might be a FOBS. While Wrongo ran a missile unit in the military, that was 50+ years ago, and the technology has vastly improved – so he’s not an expert.

Let’s define what we’re talking about: “Hypersonic” means that it flies faster than the speed of sound. Hypersonic means speeds from Mach 5 to Mach 25, which is orbital velocity. All ICBMs are hypersonic when they re-enter the atmosphere.

An ICBM can be tracked from launch, and since it can’t be redirected during flight, we will have 10+ minutes warning of the targeted location. But a FOBS can stay in orbit for an indeterminate time. You won’t know where it’s going until it begins its descent, which means that by the time it’s possible to determine the target area, there might only be 2-3 minutes of warning.

This has implications for our missile defense umbrella. A traditional ICBM flies a parabolic trajectory so a missile tracking radar can make projections of where and when it will hit a range of targets, providing “early warning” to our threatened locations.

But as the Drive says:

“The maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle, descending from high-altitude at extreme speed, could travel thousands of miles to its target, which can be…offset from a normal ballistic track. Complicating things…these systems can attack from the south pole, not just the north where most of America’s ballistic missile early warning, tracking, and defensive apparatus is focused.”

Our missile defense system is designed for launches from the north. Seems like a bad time for us to figure out they can also come from the south.

Regardless, America’s military has little ability to intercept China’s weapons. Our mid-course intercept capabilities are focused on traditional ballistic missile flight profiles. In practice, America’s missile defenses have never been able to stop China’s missiles, so this additional Chinese capability doesn’t change our vulnerability to their nuclear weapons.

From Jeffery Lewis of Arms Control Wonk: (brackets by Wrongo)

“They [the US] have a very poor [anti-ballistic missile] test record…It’s around 50% percent and only in very scripted scenarios. They don’t test in adverse weather. They’ll cancel missile defense tests on account of rain.”

Doesn’t work in the rain? Shouldn’t we have a more legit missile defense system? What if I told you it  cost more than $30 billion?

US spy satellites have revealed that China is constructing hundreds of new missile silos in northwestern China. Their military buildup is, at least in part, a reaction to the perceived threat of America’s pivot to China from the Middle East.

If this report ends up being accurate, one thing is likely: There will be a new profit center for America’s defense contractors! The Pentagon is pushing to deploy a whole new space-based early warning and tracking system for hypersonic and ballistic missiles.

Expect new calls for hugely expensive missile defense capabilities in Congress, as well as demands to do whatever possible to bring China to the bargaining table in hopes of obtaining some type of strategic arms limitation treaty.

Speaking of now wanting a new treaty, China and Russia have both expressed concern, multiple times, about the US abandonment of the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. The ABM Treaty was a 1972 deal with the Soviet Union that limited the number of such systems both countries could develop and deploy.

Colin Powell and George W. Bush dismantled that treaty in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps if GW Bush hadn’t unilaterally abandoned it in 2001, we might not be talking about this today.

Our presidents can say whatever they want, but our adversaries have to look at the worst case for their own defense, just as we must. They believe that abandoning the treaty opened the way for a US first nuclear strike.

But don’t be too worried about this.

Rest assured we will have an effective defense/response system just as soon as we can get the parts from China.

Facebooklinkedinrss

DOD Could Save $1 Trillion Without Changing US Security

The Daily Escape:

Sea Street Beach East Dennis MA – October 2021 photo by Ulla Wise

Rather than adding to the current vibe of general despair, a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) offers a number of interesting perspectives on how the US defense budget could sustain a $1 trillion cut over the course of 10 years.

The CBO report says that national defense programs could absorb a well-structured $1 trillion cut while still protecting the homeland and America’s allies from foreign adversaries.

From Responsible Statecraft:

“The new report outlines three different options for cutting the Pentagon budget by $1 trillion over the next decade — a 14 percent reduction. Doing so would still leave the department with $6.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars over the next ten years, in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars.”

The report’s mandate was to look at how to adjust the size and focus of US military under smaller federal budgets. It created three broad options to illustrate the range of strategies that the United States could pursue under a budget that would be cut gradually by a total of $1 trillion, or 14%, between 2022 and 2031. They developed the options using their Interactive Force Structure Tool.

Here are the CBO’s three options for military force reduction:

  • Maintain the existing national security strategy but with fewer personnel.
  • Change the existing national security strategy to focus more on countering adversaries with international allies and coalitions.
  • Change the existing national security strategy to focus more on protecting America’s access to sea, land, and air and space.

In all three options, the CBO slashed full-time active forces, while leaving the less expensive reserves at their current levels. While acknowledging that “none of the plans are without risk,” they concluded that the Pentagon could reduce spending without sacrificing our security.

According to the report, in all three of CBO’s options, units would be staffed, trained, and equipped at the same levels as they are today, but there would be fewer units, or different combinations of units. The CBO chose to retain fully staffed units because, while personnel are expensive, partially staffed units would not be able to execute their missions. That would make the US more of a paper tiger than we are currently.

The CBO report also put the potential cut in historical perspective. While significant, a $1 trillion cut (14%) over a decade would be far smaller than the cuts America’s military spending in 1988 to 1997 (30%), and the 25% cut we had in 2010-2015. A 14% cut from fiscal years 2022 to 2031 would also still leave annual defense spending at more than it was at any point from 1948 through 2002.

Lindsay Koshgarian, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) said:

“The US military budget is now higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Cold War….We are spending far too much on the Pentagon, and too little on everything else…”

A $1 trillion saving isn’t chump change. Those funds could be used to prevent future pandemics, address climate change, or reduce economic injustice. None of those are small matters. And they are all matters of political priorities.

No self-respecting Republican war hawk would have anything to do with cutting the military’s budget. And with the exception of a handful of left leaning Democrats, every other Democrat will shrink from the idea of reducing the military budget. It’s too risky politically.

We actually need Congress to solve three problems: Our revenue problem, our social spending/cost inflation problem, and our defense spending problem.

The CBO idea tackles the defense spending, but we need to consider taxes and revenue along with spending. We need to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals while cutting that defense spending.

Turning to social spending, if you ask Americans what spending they want to cut, they will never say that we ought to ravage people’s retirement security. And 90+% of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, or people who worked at least 1,000 hours in the past year. The big savings should come from reducing the growth in the cost of medical services.

Taking $1 trillion from Pentagon spending would be a great start, but we have other work to do.

Facebooklinkedinrss

How to Think About Australia’s Nuclear Subs

The Daily Escape:

Pumpkins, Bear River City, UT –  September 2021 photo by John Dodson

Should average Americans care that the French are pissed off at Biden? Should we care that within days after shutting down our Afghanistan adventure, we’re adding a new nuclear capability, girding for a possible war in Asia?

On the surface (pun intended) it’s all about nuclear submarines. Australia just reneged on a $66 billion deal negotiated in 2016 to buy French diesel-powered subs. Instead, on September 15, they signed a new deal with the US and the UK to purchase American nuclear-powered submarines.

Ironically, in order to win the Australia deal, France had to design a conventional power plant for its Barracuda-class submarine that was originally powered, as all French subs are, by a nuclear reactor.

France’s power conversion for the Australian order ran into difficulties and time delays. Vox reported that the French deal had already been unraveling, saying that it had fallen behind schedule while costs nearly doubled:

”In June, Australian Defense Secretary Greg Moriarty signaled…that the original deal was proving untenable…and that Australia was pursuing other options should the pact fall apart.”

There were other issues. Shortly after Australia and France reached their agreement, the French shipbuilder revealed it had been hacked, and documents related to a separate Indian submarine project were exposed. Meaning plans for another Barracuda-class sub were floating around the internet, not a big confidence builder.

On the strategic side, France’s conventional, diesel-powered attack vessels may have made sense before China began its quest for dominance in the South China Sea. But new geo-political realities along a major Australian trade route made the French submarines obsolete before they could be delivered.

FYI, a sub designated an “attack” submarine has only conventional weapons on board. The US-made attack subs are nuclear powered, so they have a far greater range, don’t require refueling, and can stay underwater for months at a time without being detected.

Australia has already sunk some $3 billion into the French contract, and France will likely demand additional compensation for the cancellation. The new contract with the US/UK not only costs more, but it only includes 8, instead of the 12 submarines France was delivering.

Generally, navies require three boats in order to have one at sea full-time, since the other two are often either in training, or in refit. This means that the actual patrolling capacity for Australia’s nuclear navy will only be 2-3 concurrent submarines at sea.

Losing the sub deal places French President Macron in a tough spot. GZero reminds us that France is just six months away from a general election that’s shaping up to be a close race between Macron and his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen:

“Macron, who has increasingly veered to the right on certain issues…knows that he can’t afford to look toothless, and that taking a hard line on the US could reap political benefits come election day (only 44% of French adults now view the US favorably).”

That helps explain some of the anger. Aside from the financial hit from losing the deal, and the slight by the US, France is also miffed because it shows the world something no country wants to admit – that France is not a superpower. And despite its pretensions, it really isn’t a global power.

Most would agree that a nuclear sub strategy is the right choice for Australia. It is a member of the British Commonwealth. Australia and New Zealand are out in the Pacific, much closer to China than to Europe. They seem to think that planning to work with the US and Britain is a better fit.

But the US shouldn’t have excluded the French or lied to them. France has 2 million inhabitants in the Indo-Pacific, and had by 2018 already defined its strategy for the region. Biden must work to mend these fences, and that seems to be underway.

Amid all the pearl clutching regarding France’s anger, isn’t the real question what’s best for Australia’s defense? This is Australia’s way of showing China that if they choose to block Australian trade routes, the Australian navy will have several untraceable attack subs that could deter the Chinese Navy.

China’s massive military buildup is the primary reason for this new arms race in the Indo-Pacific. Australia, along with Biden, are responding. We shouldn’t take seriously the accusation of “sparking” an arms race that is already underway.

For the US however, this amounts to a relatively cost free and significant de-facto expansion of America’s Asian nuclear attack submarine fleet, our most effective deterrent to Chinese territorial expansion.

With this, Biden has executed a masterstroke in Asia.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Afghanistan Defeat May Energize Military

The Daily Escape:

Fall foliage begins with Swamp Maples, Westborough MA – September 2021 photo by Juergen Roth Photography

For Americans, our pull-out from Afghanistan was a roller coaster of emotion. Many felt anger at our failure to win against the Taliban. Some felt we should have stayed for an indefinite time until some indefinite goal was reached. Many were just sad we stayed as long as we did.

Jeff Groom, a former Marine officer, asked in Responsible Statecraft whether the failure in Afghanistan will touch off a “revolution from below” by more junior military members. He says that lower levels of the military blame their top leadership for problems with veteran’s health. And they also blame their leadership and the politicians for sending them to fight without clear goals or purpose.

The front-line military understands that the top brass was, at least in part, in the business of obfuscation and deception of America’s politicians and the public. Senior military leaders have often presented overly optimistic views, while insisting on ever-more resources for warfighting.

The front-line knew that US airstrikes and raids often killed women and children. From Groom:

“To expend human life for a cause you believed in but didn’t win is one thing, to break human beings and their families forever because of lies and deceit is another. Is it any wonder then, that our veterans are disgusted and angry? They were treated, as Kurt Vonnegut said in 2004, like “toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Pew found that 64% of Iraq veterans said that war was not worth fighting. For Afghanistan, the number was 58%. Some of these angry and disappointed veterans are now running for office on both sides of the political aisle. More from Groom:

“Lucas Kunce, a former Marine officer and now Democratic Senate candidate for Missouri, has taken a stand against the lies. And Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and Gold Star husband running for a Republican congressional seat in Washington state, has suggested establishing an “Afghan War Commission” with his sights set on “the blob.” “

The term “Blob” describes members of the mainstream foreign-policy establishment: Government officials, academics, Council on Foreign Relations panelists, and television talking heads — who share a collective belief that it’s the obligation of the US to pursue an aggressive, interventionist policy in the post-9/11 world.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in this context as Blob-approved.

The anger at the military’s top brass and at Congress is leading more veterans to now run for political office. In 2020, 182 US military veterans ran for a seat in the House or Senate, and there are now 91 US veterans serving in Congress (17% of the Congressional total). Of these, 36 served in Afghanistan and Iraq; 27 are Republicans and 9 are Democrats.

At least 11 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are running for the US Senate in 2022, along with at least 33 seeking 2022 House seats. The majority are Republicans. These numbers will likely increase as both Parties are actively recruiting veterans who are willing to stand for election in the mid-terms.

Like our Congress, most American voters haven’t served. But voters have had a front row seat for decades of failed policies. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume the next decade will see a retrenchment of the US empire due to voters’ disillusionment with the Blob’s foreign policy consensus in Washington.

As for the future of the all-volunteer military, problems with the quality and quantity of service members loom on the horizon. The length of our recent wars has forced the armed services to cut corners to achieve service targets.

In 2003 94% of enlisted Army personnel had a high school diploma. In 2007 it had dropped to 71%. In World War II, the cut-off for the IQ test in the Marine Corps was a score of 120. In 1980, 85% of officers achieved that score but only 59% did in 2014.

In addition, concerns about the motivations for volunteering exist as well. America’s military relies upon citizens who willingly decide to sacrifice. Traditionally this was because the volunteers felt a strong connection to the nation and to its government. The failures of the war on terrorism coupled with our current cultural divide, indicate that this connection could be weakening.

Consider that the majority of the military is drawn from the South and Midwest. It may only be a matter of time before those volunteers stop raising their hands. If our all-volunteer system becomes a de-facto mercenary army, motivated only by a paycheck or college tuition, it will be devoid of real loyalty to country, a necessary condition for effectiveness.

We could be about to face both declining standards, and declining volunteerism.

Who will want to fight for us the next time? How hard will they fight?

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – September 13, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde NP, CO – September 2021 photo by David Milley Johnson

Daniel Byman of Georgetown University has the cover article in the WSJ’s Weekend Review: “Why There Hasn’t Been Another 9/11”. He says that while jihadism remains strong globally, the US has been spared a repeat of 9/11:

“Twenty years ago, the 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans. Since then, the US homeland hasn’t suffered any comparable terrorist assault, nor even one a tenth of the size. The total death toll from jihadist attacks inside the US over these last two decades stands at 107…”

Byman’s point is that despite losing in Afghanistan, the US has become skilled at limited interventions: a drone strike to kill a terrorist leader here, a raid by special operations forces there, including the killing of Osama bin Laden and ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, among others. This has forced the terrorist leaders to hide constantly and has eliminated their ability to run large terrorist training facilities.

Our abilities to intercept terrorist phone and internet communications, monitor activity from the skies and coordinate in real time with our allies, allows us to be on top of most large-scale attacks that might be planned against us. From Byman:

“A jihadist arrested in Morocco may have made phone calls to an operative in France, who received money from a funder in Kuwait, who is tied to cells in Indonesia and Kenya and operates under the instructions of a leader in Pakistan…”

All of this is tracked. And the US then assembles this giant jigsaw puzzle, encouraging the arrests of suspects, while using drone strikes where arrests are difficult. Byman implies that we’re being kept safe because of our investment in anti-terrorist assets and technology.

He’s planting a stake in the ground for additional funding for America’s successor to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

Adam Tooze reminds us that US military spending was driven to new heights by the GWOT. Overall spending peaked in 2010 at $840 billion. You might expect that America’s defense budget would have decreased when we got out of full-scale Iraq and Afghanistan operations, and it did. Tooze says that overall DOD spending fell to $629 billion in 2015.

With Trump in charge, the Pentagon’s budget was pushed back over $700 billion. So far, Biden is staying the course. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan in no way signals a retreat from global ambition, as the budgetary request for National Defense in 2022 is $752 billion, a 7.4% increase.

And the amazing part is that the military doesn’t seem to have an articulated strategy to combat future threats. That may explain why it took 20 years, four presidents and $ trillions for America to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. As the think tank CSIS points out:

“It has been about 15 years since DoD explained, even roughly, how it calculated the force levels that it was proposing….”

Tooze says: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In other words, America’s grand strategists formulate goals, the Pentagon draws up lists of things it wants…but it is unclear how each of these decisions relates to the other.”

The US military is a giant professional organization run by leaders with postgraduate degrees. Like most large organizations, it is hierarchical and thrives on amassing internal power. The battle for resources between the branches of the military is intense.

The National Defense Strategy of 2018 redefined America’s future security challenge as great-power competition with China, not counterterrorism. The main arena isn’t the Middle East, but the Indo-Pacific. And Biden is doubling down on this strategic blueprint.

This requires transformative technologies: AI, robotics, cyber weapons, and new space technology. The technology will come from Silicon Valley, even though they have somewhat conflicting technological partnerships with China.

We’re no longer training military in Afghan villages in California, we’re planning on building robot submarines. All of this shows that the withdrawal from Afghanistan in no way signals a retreat from our military’s global ambitions, despite our historically mediocre military leadership.

Time to wake up America! The war hawks in each Party along with the defense contractors have no intention of taking their collective feet off the gas pedal of military spending. What animates the alliance between them are buzzwords and money.

Despite what you think, social programs will always need to be paid for by new revenue, while defense spending is always “on the house”.

To help you wake up, listen to “New York Minute” by Don Henley. While it has some deep relevance to 9/11, it was recorded in 1989 for Henley’s solo album, “The End of the Innocence”. It was one of the songs radio stations in NYC played frequently in the weeks after 9/11. The track features Toto members David Paich on piano and Jeff Porcaro on drums:

Lyrics:
Harry got up
Dressed all in black
Went down to the station
And he never came back
They found his clothing
Scattered somewhere down the track
And he won’t be down on Wall Street in the morning

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – August 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Chaco Canyon, NM – 2021 photo by Freek Bouw. This is the best collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico.

On February 29th, 2020, the US signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that provided for a full US and international troop withdrawal on a 15-month timetable. The Taliban promised to take measures to restrict the activities of other terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda) and to negotiate a ceasefire and a political settlement with the Afghan government. (Read the full text of the agreement here.)

Many in the media are asking how the Taliban succeeded so quickly. They’re blaming the Biden administration’s execution of the withdrawal, but that agreement has a lot to do with why things are so chaotic.

Here is a Twitter thread by Joel Cawley about the agreement: (emphasis by Wrongo)

1/ There’s a lot of disinformation floating around on what exactly was agreed in Doha. The more you read this, the more you realize how amazingly out of touch our current commentary has become.

2/ This document specifically spells out a mutual understanding that the Taliban will negotiate a settlement with the Afghan government, just as they did. Less clear, but 100% tacitly implied throughout, is that the Taliban will be the new rulers.

3/ In other words, we knew those “settlements” were surrender agreements. All the Taliban had to do was show this document to each Afghan provincial leader and they could see we were now backing the Taliban.

4/ We even spell out our intent to then provide the Taliban, as Afghan’s new ruling party, development aid, UN recognition, and immunity from any future US military incursion or even threat.

5/ This wasn’t an intelligence failure. We agreed with them in advance on what they would do. This is a failure to properly advise and inform the incoming administration of a critical foreign policy agreement.

It’s clear that Trump’s failure to agree to an orderly transition may have delayed Biden’s team’s full understanding of their agreement with the Taliban. Michael Semple of the Irish Times writes about the consequences of the agreement:

“The US talked up the prospects of a…settlement and the hopes that it would hand over to a power-sharing administration including the Taliban. But throughout the 2018-2021 peace initiative, the Taliban leadership gave their fighters an entirely different narrative. Unambiguously….Taliban fighters were told that they had defeated the US in the war and that the US had agreed to hand over power to them as they left – ‘the Americans have handed us the keys of the presidential palace’ was a frequently repeated phrase.”

Semple adds: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“Critically, the 2020 deal between the US and Taliban severely curtailed the use of American air power against the Taliban, although [it allowed] the Taliban…to fight on against the Afghan government.”

The US basically quit the battlefield a year before our troops actually left. In the last year, when the US should have been building the resilience of Afghan forces, we reduced our financial support for the Afghan government, weakening a key military advantage which Afghan forces had enjoyed over the Taliban. And after the agreement was signed, the Taliban enjoyed full freedom of movement across the country and started to build their military pressure.

Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, subsequently ran two non-profits in Kandahar for 10 years. She speaks Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two NATO commanders, and later for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her blog post about the fall of Afghanistan is well worth your time:

“Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with US fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints….I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince US decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.”

She notes that the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan:

“The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders.”

About Hamid Karzai, America’s first puppet president, she says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned….[that] Hamid Karzai, the US choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994….Karzai may [also] have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994,”

She also wonders about the role of Trump’s chief negotiator for the agreement, US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s an old friend of Karzai’s. She asks:

“Could…Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?”

Chayes concludes: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I hold US civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can…find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the US military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But…no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.”

When you read all of this, you realize that America’s end game in Afghanistan was bound to be a clusterfuck!

Wrongo has a problem with those who are treating the instantaneous collapse of the Afghani government and army as some sort of argument against Biden’s decision to abide by Trump’s negotiated agreement. The media has now decided to cover the withdrawal, but out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan.

Those five minutes covered the February agreement between the US and the Taliban.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans are shocked at what the media are now feeding them. And isn’t it astounding how the people who were totally wrong about Afghanistan keep being invited back on TV to tell us what we should be thinking about what’s happening now?

Time to wake up America! We need to acknowledge the errors by giving them a true perspective, even if it doesn’t fit the Blue vs. Red agenda.

To help you wake up, listen to this new tune by The Killers, “Quiet Town”, about the good and bad in small town life:

The animated video is very nice.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Afghan Finger Pointing – Part II

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Mt. Hood, OR – August 2021 photo by CampsG. Note the haze from wildfires.

Biden’s effort to reframe the Afghanistan conversation to a decision-to-withdraw narrative rather than an execution-of-the-withdrawal narrative – at least for now – hasn’t controlled the narrative. But it’s still early days of media spinning about our failure in Afghanistan.

Kevin Drum reminds us:

“Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That’s why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.”

But are the events of the past few days horrific? Maybe you should re-think that – they haven’t been. Remembering how the Taliban operated when they were in control in the 1990s, we should have expected much worse. The Taliban’s takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than at least Wrongo expected.

That isn’t a pro-Taliban comment. But maybe 20 years of being hit by US bombs and drone attacks has moderated them, at least temporarily. Things could change rapidly. And the chaos we’re seeing, and that the media are complaining about, is simply what happens when a military must withdraw under armed pressure.

A harsh truth is that any US evacuation from Kabul airport requires the concurrence of the Taliban. The US controls the military side of the one runway airport. Here’s what the Kabul airport looks like:

The plan, as articulated by the Biden administration, is that evacuations will continue at least until August 31 at roughly 5000 a day, or 70,000 people in total by then. That of course, depends on the continued cooperation of the Taliban.

This once again calls into question the competence of the US military’s contingency planning. We have a supposed agreement with the Taliban that allows the US to continue to control the airspace and the Taliban to cooperate in allowing foreigners and Afghans who want to depart, safe passage to the airport.

Again, we should question General Milley’s decision to shut down Bagram airbase in July, apparently without ensuring Kabul would be defensible in a worst-case scenario. As Wrongo stated, Bagram is more easily defended and has longer runways and greater capacity than Kabul. Planning of this type is Milley’s job. Early indications so far are that it wasn’t done competently.

Think about how we plan to evacuate our ± 5,000 soldiers protecting the Kabul airport once all of the people we’re trying to evacuate leave. Who protects their exit? Has Milley planned for that?

Let’s look at some curious facts about the Afghanistan end game. Since 2014, the US has provided about 75% of the $6 billion annually needed to fund the Afghan National Security Forces while the remainder of the tab was picked up by US partner nations and the Afghan government.

However, for fiscal year 2021, the US Congress appropriated only $3 billion for Afghanistan’s fighting forces, the lowest amount since 2008. Remember that the fiscal year started on October 1, 2020. This diminution of US support came after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his government cannot support its army for even six months without US financial aid. This practically guaranteed that the front-line Afghan troops wouldn’t be paid. What was the Trump administration thinking?

Link that to comments by Afghanistan’s Central Bank head, Ajmal Ahmady, who said that the country’s supply of physical US dollars is “close to zero.” Afghanistan has some $9 billion in reserves, mostly held outside the country, with some $7 billion held in the US. These funds are now frozen.

Ahmady said the country did not receive a planned cash shipment last week. From the NYT:

“On Friday, the central banker received a call saying the country wouldn’t get further shipments of US dollars, though the next one was supposed to arrive on Sunday. The next shipment never arrived…Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.”

Facts don’t lie: the US believed things were heading south and didn’t send the usual cash infusion. So, the administration can’t say they were completely surprised by the speed of the Taliban takeover, somebody high up had figured it out.

A key question that politicians and the media are asking is: “When did we know that the government would fall?” Some would say they knew it from the early days of the war. This from Laura Jedeed:

“I remember Afghanistan well. I deployed there twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009–2010. It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left. And here we are today.”

There are many, many military who deployed there who share that view.

For Wrongo, it was clear in 2020 when Trump and Pompeo negotiated a deal with the Taliban, without the Afghan government in the room. That insured that their government would fall.

The military loss of Afghanistan isn’t the end of the world. It’s awful, but there’s a difference. So everyone should calm down. Afghanistan is gone. We’re out of there, and the Taliban are back.

But stop the anger. That’s only a reflex. Think about what country this describes:

“A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.”

Today, it describes Afghanistan. Tomorrow, is it us?

Facebooklinkedinrss