Category Archives: Military

Graham, et al., warn against Defense cuts

46 Replies

The video above contains most of what Lindsey Graham had to say yesterday at the press conference at which he, Joe Wilson, Steve Benjamin, Bobby Harrell and Rich Eckstrom all decried the looming “sequestration” of the defense budget.

I didn’t get the video up and running at the start of Graham’s remarks, so here are some excerpts from what he said before that:

  • “As a Republican, I was very disappointed that my party leadership would put the Defense Department in such a bad spot.”
  • “If politicians can’t come up with a way to reduce spending in a responsible manner, fire us; don’t fire the soldiers. It’s the one thing that seems to be working at the federal level is the military. So we’ve come up with this hare-brained idea that if we can’t do our job, the penalty to be paid is by those who’ve been doing their job very well. I don’t know if you can print this, but I’ll say it: That’s ass-backwards.”
  • “What does it mean to cut a trillion dollars out of the Defense Department budget over the next decade? [the sequestration plus $400 billion in cuts being sought outside that] It means you have the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1915 — 231 ships — the smallest Air Force in history.”

After that, it’s pretty much all on the video. Sorry about the crudity of the clip — I was unable to edit it because I shot it on my iPhone, and don’t have software for editing that on my PC.

Bottom line, the message was that the nation shouldn’t dramatically weaken our defense just because members of Congress couldn’t do their job. Half of the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts, resulting from the failure of last year’s supercommittee (which was a mere microcosm of the overall failure of Congress), are set to come from the Defense budget — $600 billion. And they would not be targeted — no eliminating $300 hammers and preserving pay for soldiers. “These are blind, across-the-board cuts.”

He kept hitting the point that one part of the government that’s doing its job — the military — shouldn’t get eviscerated because Congress isn’t doing its job at all.

Perhaps fitting given the setting and the presence of Mayor Benjamin, Graham’s tone was decidedly nonpartisan. For instance, he challenged Mitt Romney to put forward a plan for achieving the cuts without hollowing out the military.

I’ve got video of the other speakers as well, and can provide on request. But they said much the same things he said. His presentation was just more complete.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeff Wilkinson

5 Replies

So I was at this presser at midday today, at which Lindsey Graham and Joe Wilson and Steve Benjamin and others had gathered to defend the Pentagon’s budget (more on that when I’ve had a chance to write it) and I was aiming my iPhone around doing what I always do at news events these days — looking for interesting, extremely horizontal images that I could use as a new header image. And as you see at the top of this page, I succeeded. At least, it’s extremely horizontal.

At which point Jeff Wilkinson, who still has a job writing for The State, stuck his face in to say, “What are you doing?”

I showed him, and he said, “You have my permission not to use that on your blog.” Or maybe he said, “You have my permission not to publish that.” Whatever. I’m only sure about the first few words.

Which, I want you to attest, is not the same as saying, “You do not have my permission to use that on your blog.”

And I’m a literal kind of guy.

I’m trying to be very careful with this sort of thing. I don’t want to get into the kind of trouble my fellow blogger is in.

Sorry about the focus, Jeff. But I wasn’t aiming at you…

Gallup: Veterans are cause of the gender gap

18 Replies

Here’s an interesting fact I didn’t know before.

Turns out that the “gender gap” that has Mitt Romney doing better among men and Barack Obama doing better among women (the usual pattern for a generation, at least) is less a gender thing, and more a matter of whether men have served in the military or not. According to Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — U.S. veterans, about 13% of the adult population and consisting mostly of older men, support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama for president by 58% to 34%, while nonveterans give Obama a four-percentage-point edge.

These data, from an analysis of Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted April 11-May 24, show that 24% of all adult men are veterans, compared with 2% of adult women.

Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points. It turns out that the male skew for Romney is driven almost entirely by veterans. Romney leads by one point among nonveteran men, contrasted with the 28-point edge Romney receives among male veterans.

The small percentage of female veterans in the U.S., in contrast to their male counterparts, do not differ significantly in their presidential vote choice from the vast majority of women who are not veterans…

Here’s a graph:

Interesting. I wonder what the long-term implications of this will be. Most of the men who have served in the military are older than I am. Twenty years from now, will much of the gender gap have disappeared, in favor of Democrats? I don’t know. I’d need to understand better why this veteran gap exists to be able to answer that.

Virtual Front Page, Wednesday, May 16, 2012

16 Replies

Army Specialist Leslie H. Sabo Jr., an American hero.

Here’s what we have at this hour:

  1. Greeks withdraw €3bn in 10 days since election (The Guardian) — And the rest of us watch in fascination, hoping Europe doesn’t go down the tubes and take us with it.
  2. House unanimously passes “born alive” bill (?????) — Note the question marks, and the lack of a link. I haven’t seen an MSM story on this. Will Folks is running a press release saying this happened (and as he notes, “The above communication is an email from a politically active organization”), and I received a release from Senate Republicans congratulating the House. No independent news coverage yet. But it seemed like something that would generate controversy, and I didn’t want to ignore it.
  3. Voters to decide if governor, lt. governor should run jointly (thestate.com) — How about that? Voters in SC will actually get to vote on a governmental reform. Columbia City Council, please take note.
  4. Ratko Mladic trial finally begins (BBC) — And the world takes another halting step toward civilization.
  5. Decades Later, Soldier Gets Medal Of Honor (NPR) — It took us far too long, but thank you, Spec. Sabo.
  6. They Moved a Robot With Their Minds (NYT) — “Scientists said a tiny brain implant allowed two people who are virtually paralyzed below the neck to maneuver a robotic arm.” Wow.

I just thought I’d add some elaboration on the Medal of Honor presentation. From the AP story:

Obama presented the Medal of Honor to Sabo’s widow, Rose Mary, and said doing so helps right the wrongs done to a generation that served freedom’s cause but came home to a brooding and resentful nation.

“Instead of being celebrated, our Vietnam veterans were often shunned,” Obama said in a hushed East Room. “They were called many things when there was only one thing that they deserved to be called and that was American patriots.”

Spec. Leslie H. Sabo Jr. of Elwood City, Pa., was serving with U.S. forces near the village of Se San in eastern Cambodia in May of 1970 when his unit was ambushed and nearly overrun by North Vietnamese forces.

Comrades testified that the rifleman charged up from the rear, grabbed an enemy grenade and tossed it away, using his body to shield a fellow soldier. And shrugging off his own injuries, Sabo advanced on an enemy bunker that had poured fire onto the U.S. troops — and then, pulled the pin on his own grenade.

“It’s said he held that grenade and didn’t throw it until the last possible moment, knowing it would take his own life but knowing he could silence that bunker,” Obama recounted. “And he did. He saved his comrades, who meant more to him than life.”

Sabo was 22 years old when he gave his life for his comrades.

Obama definitely deserves bin Laden credit

95 Replies

President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

OK, my Corleone metaphor aside, let’s address the actual political question before us: Does Barack Obama deserve any particular credit for “getting” Osama bin Laden, or would “anyone have done what he did?”

This is actually a very important question. When deciding who should be one’s president going forward, there is no more important question than whether he would be an effective commander in chief (or in the case of the incumbent, whether he is an effective commander in chief).

Republicans, including some who should know better, are essentially saying Obama did nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. They are wrong. I initially thought as they did — not that I wanted to take anything away from the president, but because I thought it was true — but as I read and learned more about the decision-making process leading  to the raid on Abbottabad, I changed my mind.

Last night, I inadvertently saw a few seconds of TV “news.” John McCain was saying that of course Mitt Romney would have done the same thing, or something along those lines.

For his part, outrageously, Mitt Romney has said that “even Jimmy Carter” would have ordered the SEALs into the bin Laden compound. I’m going to pause and count to 10 before proceeding after this latest reflexive GOP expression of contempt toward my man Jimmy. (And while I’m counting, I’ll just share with you this HuffPost headline, “Jimmy Carter, Seven Years as Navy Officer; Mitt Romney, 0 Years in Military, 0 Years Foreign Policy Experience.” Effin’ A.)

Well, as it happens, we have strong reason to believe that Jimmy Carter would have ordered such an operation. He actually did order a roughly comparable one. It failed, as military operations sometimes do. (The one Obama ordered could have failed, too, at a number of critical points. That’s one reason he deserves credit for having the guts to give the order.) But he ordered it. It was a big deal that he ordered it. His secretary of state resigned over it.

But would “anyone else” have done the same? There is little reason to think so. It would have been Bill Clinton’s M.O., for instance, to have flipped a couple of cruise missiles in that direction. And as we saw in Kosovo, he had a predilection for air power rather than boots on the ground. But… and this is a huge “but”… is it fair to make the assumption that the real-life Bill Clinton of the 1990s would have been as reticent, as cautious, post-9/11? It’s impossible to say.

What we do know is that in real life, there was sharp disagreement and debate in the Obama administration over how to proceed — whether to believe the assumptions based on incomplete intelligence (for doing that, George W. Bush earned the never-ending “Bush lied” canard), whether to act on them at all, whether to send in troops at all or simply bomb the compound, whether to send a joint force or a coherent Navy team, whether to notify the Pakistanis or just go in, whether to try to capture bin Laden or go in intending to kill him, whether to bring back his body or send it to sleep with the fishes.

And when I say debate within the administration, I don’t mean between what the Republicans would characterized as the Democratic sissy politicos, but among the professionals — the generals and admirals and Sec. Gates.

And at critical stages, the president and the president alone seems to have made very tough calls. And the right ones. Most importantly, he decided to send in men rather than just bombs. That way, he could make sure, he could minimize collateral damage — and the U.S. could reap an intelligence bonanza.

That took nerves not everyone would have. So many things could have gone wrong doing it this way — and nearly did. In what had to feel like a replay of Jimmy Carter’s debacle, we lost a helicopter. But having learned that lesson, we had backups.

Some Republicans would have you believe that giving Obama credit would take away somehow from the superb, almost superhuman job that the SEALs and the rest of the military and CIA team did. Nothing could be further from the truth. It stands as one of the most amazing coup de main operations of the past century. They performed as brilliantly as the Israelis did at Entebbe, for instance. But they had their roles to play, and the commander in chief had his. And all involved did their jobs remarkably well.

I refer you to two posts I wrote last year, as I came to the conclusion that Barack Obama personally deserved credit for the leadership calls that led to our killing bin Laden. Here they are:

In invite you to go back and read them, to see how I reached a conclusion very different from the line we’re hearing from Republicans now.

There is no way of knowing whether Mitt Romney would have made the same calls. I suspect that he might have erred on the side of caution, but I could be completely wrong about that. He might have acted in exactly the same manner. But what I know is that Barack Obama did — and that what he did is not just “what anyone would have done.”

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Were any of these “members” female?

20 Replies

Note how self-restrained I am. I held myself back from using as my headline, “I got your ‘member’ right here!” Even though that would have better expressed my exasperation.

Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo as Secret Service 'members' in 'In the Line of Fire.'

We used to have “servicemen” in our armed forces. Or, more broadly, military personnel. Now, we have this horrendous construction that drives me nuts every time I hear it: “military members.” That’s the best we seem to be able to come up with as a way of referring generically to soldiers, sailors, marines, and that least ideologically correct of all designations, airmen.

What are we saying? That the military is a club? Like belonging to Rotary, or the Elks? To me, it sounds vaguely insulting to those who serve us in uniform, to refer to them as “members.” Like fingers or toes, or perhaps some even less presentable member.

With the scandal over the weekend involving both Secret Service and military personnel, this linguistic absurdity has been taken to new depths.

To begin with, one assumes that all the agents sent home for consorting with prostitutes were male. And if you read non-American news sources such as Agence France-Presse or the Daily Mail, they go ahead and refer to them as male. That’s because in those countries, the fact that men tend to do certain things that women tend not to do (such as, bring hookers to their rooms) is confronted somewhat more directly, and not treated like a secret of which we must not speak. (Someone is inevitably going  to contradict me by pointing to U.S. sources that do mention gender. But the fact remains that, after having read U.S. sources that did not mention gender, the first ones I found that did were foreign. It’s a tendency thing, not an absolute rule.)

I haven’t yet found any stories that tell the gender of the five “military personnel” who were also implicated, but not sent home, supposedly because their skills were too much in demand in protecting the president (rooftop snipers, perhaps?). If anyone has seen such a reference, please share it, if only to satisfy my morbid curiosity.

But whether they are male or (against the odds) female, there are better ways to refer to them than as “military service members,” as the NYT does here in its own stilted fashion:

Five United States military service members who were working with the Secret Service and staying in the same hotel are also facing an investigation because they violated a curfew and may have participated in the misconduct.

The use of such a slightly off-sounding construction has a bad effect on journalists. They become jaded to awkwardness, and therefore their radar doesn’t go off when they inadvertently type something that is not just awkward, but downright nonsensical:

Mr. Obama’s comments came several hours after Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, suggested that more Secret Service personnel members may have been involved in the incident.

Did you catch that? “Secret Service personnel members”? Really? Not “Secret Service members,” which would sound awkward enough, or “Secret Service personnel,” which would have been fine, but the entirely redundant “Secret Service personnel members”!

Why not take it to another level, or two? Why not “Secret Service personnel members people employees,” while you’re at it?

Or… and excuse me for getting radical here… how about if the reporter covering this for you just went ahead and asked the question, “Are any of these people female?” Because if not, you don’t have to perform any of these acrobatics, and can just go ahead and refer to the “men.” And if they are, even an awkward construction like “servicemen and -women” would be less jarring than referring to them as “personnel members.”

Or how about just scraping your fingernails on a blackboard? That would probably get on my nerves less…

My theory about the end of the draft and its relationship to political polarization

67 Replies

On a previous post, we got into a discussion of the importance of character in political candidates. (I have come over time to believe that it is paramount, to the point of paying far less attention to policy proposals by comparison. And of course, as you know, I am positively inimical to ideologies.)

We had a good discussion, and achieved some degree of synthesis. Along the way to that, Phillip happened to mention the fact that many in politics use military service or the lack thereof as a shorthand marker for character. This is certainly true. But as we discussed the relationship of such service to character, I went on a tangent… and decided it would be worth a separate post, as follows…

I believe that our politics started becoming dysfunctional, in the ways that I decry (hyperpartisanship, adamant refusal to listen to, much less work with, the “other side”), when we ended the draft.

Before that, you didn’t find many men (most officeholders today are men, and it was more true then) who had not spent at least a portion of their youth in the military. That certainly exposed them to having to work with all sorts of people from different backgrounds (as Phillip noted here), but it did something else: it forged them into something larger than those differences.

The WWII generation in particular may have had its political differences, but those guys understood that as a country, we all share interests. They may have been (in fact, were) liberals or conservatives or Northerners or Southerners or what have you, but they understood that they were Americans first. For those who served after the war, when the military was on the cutting edge of integration, it helped give black and white a sense of shared identity as well. (Indeed the shared experience of the war, even though it was in segregated units, helped lay the groundwork for the next generation’s gains toward social justice.)

As the first wave of young men who had NOT served (starting with those who were of an age to have served, but had not, such as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich) arrived in the top echelons of political power in the country, they brought with them a phenomenon that we hadn’t seen among their elders… a tendency to see fellow Americans who disagreed with them politically as the OTHER, even as “the enemy,” and a practically dehumanized enemy — one that must be opposed at all costs.

That said, Bill Clinton does deserve credit for rising above that new partisanship in many cases (welfare reform, deficit reduction) in order to accomplish things. And Newt Gingrich often worked with him to accomplish such goals.

But below them, among the young guys coming up in politics — the ones hustling around statehouses and working in campaigns — there was a generation rising that really could not think of the OTHER SIDE as someone to be communicated with, much less worked with.

I really believe that if those young guys had had the experience of being thrown together, outside of their communities, their cliques and their comfort zones, their heads shaved and put into uniforms, and required to work together in a disciplined manner toward common goals — THEY would be different, and consequently our politics would be different.

Mind you, I’m not saying we should reinstitute the draft in order to make our politics more civil (although there may be other reasons to have one). But I am saying that I believe today’s extreme polarization is in part an unintended function of that development in our history.

Maybe you consider the end of the draft to have been a good thing. What I’m asking you to do is consider that even good things can have unintended ill effects. The opposite is true as well. Y’all know how deeply opposed I am to abortion on demand. But it seems reasonable that it would have the effect claimed in Freakonomics of reducing crime over time (by instituting a sort of pre-emptive capital punishment of unwanted children, who are more likely than the wanted to become criminals). Just as it has had the undesirable effect in parts of Asia of drastically reducing the number of females in society.

Good actions have good and bad consequences; so do bad ones. It’s a complicated world.

Post: Why should troops die in Afghanistan this year if we’re leaving next year?

17 Replies

The Washington Post had a thought-provoking editorial this morning. Excerpts:

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta floated an entirely different plan: an end to most U.S. and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan by the second half of 2013, a year earlier than expected, and a substantial cut in the previously planned size of the Afghan armed forces. So much for “fight.” Though Mr. Panetta didn’t say so, this strategy implies another big U.S. troop reduction in 2013, beyond the pullout of about one-third of troops already planned for this year. U.S. commanders have lobbied to keep the troop strength steady from this coming autumn until the end of 2014 — the current endpoint for the NATO military commitment.

The new timetable may sound good to voters when Mr. Obama touts it on the presidential campaign trail. But how will the Taliban, and its backers in Pakistan, interpret it? Before negotiations even begin, the administration has unilaterally and radically reduced the opposing force the Taliban can expect to face 18 months from now. Will Taliban leader Mohammad Omar have reason to make significant concessions between now and then? More likely, the extremist Islamic movement and an increasingly hostile Pakistani military establishment will conclude that the United States is desperate to get its troops out of Afghanistan, as quickly as possible — whether or not the Afghan government and constitution survive….

But if President Obama has decided to pursue that course, there’s an inevitable next question. If the goal of a stable and democratic Afghanistan is to be subordinated — if timetables are to be accelerated, regardless of conditions — why should U.S. ground troops fight and die this year?

That’s always the question, when timetables are given for withdrawal: If we’re going to withdraw at a certain time regardless of conditions, what’s the point of fighting now?

It’s a brutally tough question whether you come at it from the direction of a hawk or a dove.

This is a job for… SEAL Team Six, the closest thing to superheroes that real life offers

11 Replies

They’re not the Justice League of America, or even the Avengers (although the name sometimes fits). They don’t wear colorful tights. But SEAL Team Six is the closest thing we’re likely to see in real life to a band of superheroes.

First bin Laden, now this:

KHARTOUM, Sudan — American Navy Seals swooped into Somalia early on Wednesday and rescued two aid workers, an American woman and a Danish man, after a shootout with Somali gunmen who had been holding them captive in a sweltering desert hide-out for months.

Under a cloak of darkness, the Seals parachuted in, stormed the hide-out, killed nine gunmen and then whisked the aid workers into waiting helicopters, Pentagon officials said. The Seals were from the same elite Navy commando unit — Seal Team Six — that secretly entered Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden in May, senior American officials said, though the rescue mission in Somalia was carried out by a different assault team within the unit…

I'm pretty sure this is NOT what SEAL Team Six looks like...

They just keep doing these amazing things that no one else seems able to do anymore, outside of the IDF and Mossad, and what have they done that seemed quasi-superhuman since the raid on Entebbe?

You know what else? We don’t know their identities. They could be named Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, for all we know.

OK, I’ll stop with the riffing on the superhero thing. But I like that we don’t know who they are. It allows us to see them as an extensions of all of us, however unheroic most of us may be.

The fact that they’re out there, doing this stuff without any personal fame, makes us think that The Onion was wrong: Steve Jobs was NOT “The Last American Who Knew What the F___ He Was Doing.”

Very good to know.

Only one dark lining in this silver cloud: Ron Paul might get the notion that with these guys active, we can just do away with the rest of our military, and still be fine. And the idea could catch on…

Graham or DeMint? Or, to put it another way, Reagan or Ron Paul? Whither goest the GOP in the world?

40 Replies

Charleston’s City Paper records another skirmish in the internecine battle between Republicans over America’s role in the world:

After the Republican presidential debate in Myrtle Beach last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News, “I hope people in the country understand that we’re Ronald Reagan Republicans in South Carolina. We believe in peace through strength and we’re not isolationists.”

In an interview the next day, Graham’s fellow South Carolinian Sen. Jim DeMint said on Fox Business,”If we spread ourselves too thin around the world we’re not going to be able to defend the homeland, particularly with the level of debt that we have right now. It’s foolish for us to think that we can have military bases all over the world, spend billions of dollars when we’re going broke back home. It just isn’t going to happen.”

Austerity may be a bad word to Graham when it comes to Pentagon spending, but for DeMint it’s the very definition of conservatism. When Republicans like DeMint and his Senate ally Rand Paul say that Pentagon spending cuts must happen, Republicans like Graham and his Senate ally John McCain call such actions “isolationist.” When Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, McCain said he was worried about the “rise of isolationism” in the GOP. When Paul later led the charge against President Barack Obama’s military intervention in Libya, both Graham and McCain trotted out the isolationist label again…

I’m sure you don’t have to ask where I stand.

“Eisenhower of our generation” visits Columbia

21 Replies

Some guy who needs a haircut, the general in mufti, and our senior senator./photo by Christy Cox

Gen. David Petraeus, now of the CIA, spoke today in Columbia, at the Riley Institute’s David Wilkins Awards for Excellence in Legislative and Civic Leadership luncheon.

Rep. James Smith and former Blue Cross CEO Ed Sellers were the recipients. It was James (a.k.a. Capt. Smith) who, in his acceptance speech, called Petraeus “the Eisenhower of our generation.” I concur. There’s no general officer in recent years who combines Ike’s strategic vision, diplomatic skill and leadership qualities to the extent that Gen. Petraeus does.

For his part, Petraeus praised not only James and Ed, but the troops he has felt privileged to lead before joining Central Intelligence. He called them “our new greatest generation.”

Those who serve certainly deserve that sobriquet. The difference is that they are only a tiny sliver of an actual generation, unlike the one that overcame the Depression and beat Hitler and Tojo.

Which only underlines how much the rest of us owe to them, each of them, from the commanding general to the lowliest buck private.

I didn’t know they had a sense of humor

4 Replies

Maybe we can work something out with the Iranians after all:

Iran says it will send the U.S. government a toy model of the CIA drone the Islamic Republic captured last month. The announcement, made via state media, comes in response to the White House’s request for the return of the unmanned aircraft.

The U.S. drone, a RQ-170 Sentinel dubbed “the Beast of Kandahar,” is one of the most technologically advanced surveillance crafts in the world. The toy model, the Associated Press reports, will be 1/80 the size and retail for the equivalent of $4 in Iranian toy stores.

There’s still no conclusive explanation for how the drone got into Iranian hands in the first place. As the Slatest has previously noted, the U.S. and Iran have offered conflicting versions of pretty much every detail of the story. Iran claims to have noticed the drone in their airspace and then hacked it down electronically. The U.S. says it malfunctioned, but they’re not exactly sure how.

Where there is a sense of humor, there’s a chance for common sense — right? I thought it was quintessentially American, something we had a patent on, when Gen. McAuliffe answered a German demand for surrender by saying “Nuts.”

But this is like a page from our own book. So maybe we’re not so different…

This is NOT the “end of the war in Iraq”

16 Replies

I was pleased when I heard, on the radio yesterday, President Obama saying this at Fort Bragg:

As your Commander-in-Chief, I can tell you that it will indeed be a part of history. Those last American troops will move south on desert sands, and then they will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high. One of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of the American military will come to an end. Iraq’s future will be in the hands of its people. America’s war in Iraq will be over.

I appreciated it because he said “America’s war in Iraq will be over.” At another point in the speech, he referred to the “end of our combat mission,” which was even better, and emphasized that what was happening was that responsibility was being handed over to Iraqi forces.

I was grateful that he had not said this was “the end of the war.” (I was also gratified that he, only slightly grudgingly, spoke of the troops accomplishment: “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” Something that, of course, we would not have done had Mr. Obama had his way.)

This was, unfortunately, about the only place where I would be so gratified. Elsewhere in the speech, he said “end of the war” over and over and over again. But I don’t blame the president. The news media were worse:

And on and on. Among those I saw in a quick survey, only NPR got it right, in a headline that said “Iraq Mission Ends.”

Maybe I’m the only one who cares. But I became hypersensitized to the matter over all these years of antiwar folks saying “end the war,” when what they meant was that they wanted the U.S. forces to withdraw. Which is an entirely different thing.

The “end of the war in Iraq” is either something that happened several years in the past (the interpretation I prefer), or, more ominously, has yet to occur. There are a number of ways that you can speak, legitimately, of “the end of the Iraq war:”

  • You can say it ended with the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, as that was when “war” in the Clausewitzian sense of armies clashing on battlefields with battle lines, and the control of a government at stake.
  • You can say it ended with the Surge, which settled down the various insurgencies that erupted after the fall of Baghdad, leading most people speaking of a “war” continuing to that point.
  • You can say it never ended, because Iraq’s security is far from that, say, of a Switzerland.

But in that last case — if you believe the “war” has continued up to this point — then withdrawing U.S. forces most assuredly does not “end” that war. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to make fighting flare back up dramatically.

I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope that President Obama (and Bush before him) are right in their projection that things are sufficiently stable for Iraq to deal with the security vacuum created by a U.S. departure. I don’t know whether they are or not.

But I know this: Speaking of what is happening this month as “the end of the war” is highly inaccurate.

The few, the proud, the 23 percent

8 Replies

On a comment thread recently, we had another one of our periodic discussions of who (among political types) served in the military when and who did not, with all the attendant side comments about how those fellas on the other end of the political spectrum (whichever end you happen to be on) are a bunch of duty-shirking cowards, etc.

At some point, of course, I got into the thing about how I never had the chance to serve because of the rather minor problem of chronic asthma (for which I’m taking prednisone again this week, and it’s working fine, thanks).

I was reminded of this today, because Maj. Gen. James Milano spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club, and he once again mentioned a statistic that boggles his mind and seldom fails to impress others…

What percentage, he asked Rotarians, of Americans aged 17-24* can meet the basic qualifications to serve in the U.S. Army today?

The answer: 23 percent. “And we’re not looking for astrophysicists and Olympic athletes,” he elaborated.

So… more or less, that means that 77 percent of young Americans are what previous generations described as 4-F.

We have an all-volunteer military, and with the economy the way it is, the Army can kind of pick and choose among recruits, but only 23 percent are up to snuff.

He didn’t break it down in terms of how many were due to this or that cause, although he listed some disqualifiers:

  • Asthma. (So no point in my stepping forward.)
  • Having been on anxiety medications.
  • Basically, being on any medications as of the day you report. If you can’t do without, you can’t join the Army.
  • Criminal record (which the general broadened, saying “any type of immoral behavior,” but no one asked for an elaboration and he didn’t offer one).
  • Lack of a high school diploma. The Army was taking GEDs before, not now.

Bottom line, he seemed mostly worried about general lack of physical fitness. You can be 4 percent over the weight limit when you show up for basic, because they’ll work that off of you with little trouble. But beyond that, forget it.

Once the Army’s got you, you’ll probably make it, though. The general said recruits are treated these days like professional athletes in training — zero fried foods, with drill instructors looking at what you put on your tray and letting you know if you’re not picking the right items in the chow line. Physical trainers work to prevent injuries, and help soldiers overcome them when they occur. Consequently, there’s only about a 7 to 8 percent washout rate due to physical problems.

The general worries a great deal about our out-of-shape country, sitting around eating at least one fast-food meal a day, watching TV, gaining fat and losing bone density. Among 12-19 year olds today, he said, one out of five are obese and soon it will be one in four. In 1970 (when, ahem, yours truly was in that demographic group), it was one in 20. “What are we doing? Where are we going? What are our priorities, here?”

He also worries about the fact that more than half of kids today are born to single moms. He was careful to say he wished to cast no aspersions, but he worries about it. Over a third of his female drill instructors being single moms themselves (and 7 percent of the male DIs having sole custody of children), and the Fort operating a child care center from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, he’s had plenty to worry about.

Anyway, there’s a sampling of what’s on the mind of  the modern major general.

* Kathryn and others who were there: I wrote down 17-24 percent, but later, when he talked about taking people up to 35, I wondered whether I had misheard, and maybe it was supposed to be 17-34. What did you hear? In any case, a lot of out-of-shape young folks.

Combat ‘sensitivity training’

9 Replies

Can’t say I was crazy about the headline, which aside from the awkwardly split infinitive seems to presume aberration as the norm (probably unintentionally). But I found the idea intriguing:

Can soldiers be trained to not become war criminals?

Halfway through a 15 month, high-intensity combat deployment in Iraq,  soldiers were shown videos of ethically dicey situations they might encounter with civilians. The question researchers wanted to answer was: can soldiers who are already suffering enormous amounts of stress — literally fearing for their lives — be trained to stop and think long enough to prevent unethical behavior?

The answer, happily, is yes. In a study published in the Lancet, researchers concluded that a combination of videos and leader-led discussion groups led to “significantly lower rates of unethical conduct of soldiers and greater willingness to report and address misconduct than in those before training.”

From the paper:

For example, reports of unnecessary damage or destruction of private property decreased from 13·6% before training to 5·0% after training, and willingness to report a unit member for mistreatment of a non-combatant increased from 36·0% to 58·9%. Nearly all participants reported that training made it clear how to respond towards non-combatants.

You wouldn’t think “sensitivity training” or its equivalent would work in the highest stress environment on the planet, but apparently it does. One caveat: soldier’s ethical or unethical behavior was self-reported, so it’s possible that soldiers who had the training were simply reporting less of it because they had been made aware that it was wrong. But isn’t that exactly the mechanism by which ethics training works?

Of course, it sort of militates against the training of U.S. soldiers since the Korean War — training in acquiring targets rapidly and firing immediately and accurately (which makes our soldiers deadlier than any since the introduction of firearms, but leads to a lot of PTSD, since it leads to shooting first and thinking about it later).

But with the kinds of conflicts we face these days, it’s more important than ever to be sure to shoot at the right targets — not only morally, but in terms of eventual effectiveness. One of the greatest pitfalls in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is alienating the civilian populace through mistakes.

So while I’m not entirely convinced that such training works, I hope it does. We need soldiers to shoot straight, but they have to be more sure than ever it’s the bad guys they’re shooting at. For their sakes and the sake of the country as well as for the innocent bystanders.

Obama to Pakistan: I’ve got your ‘sorry’ right here

25 Replies

OK, so it wasn’t that dismissive.

Still, it’s interesting that the administration — which apologized for killing that other American (Samir Khan, from North Carolina) who was with Anwar al-Awlaki — doesn’t want to say “sorry” on this one:

WASHINGTON — The White House has decided that President Obama will not offer formal condolences — at least for now — toPakistan for the deaths of two dozen soldiers in NATO airstrikes last week, overruling State Department officials who argued for such a show of remorse to help salvage America’s relationship with Pakistan, administration officials said.

On Monday, Cameron Munter, the United States ambassador to Pakistan, told a group of White House officials that a formal video statement from Mr. Obama was needed to help prevent the rapidly deteriorating relations between Islamabad and Washington from cratering, administration officials said. The ambassador, speaking by videoconference from Islamabad, said that anger in Pakistan had reached a fever pitch, and that the United States needed to move to defuse it as quickly as possible, the officials recounted.

Defense Department officials balked. While they did not deny some American culpability in the episode, they said expressions of remorse offered by senior department officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were enough, at least until the completion of a United States military investigation establishing what went wrong…

Increasingly, we see signs of the U.S. just writing off Pakistan. This appears to be another such sign.

Or, you could go with this explanation, I suppose:

Some administration aides also worried that if Mr. Obama were to overrule the military and apologize to Pakistan, such a step could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign, according to several officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly…

Graham pushes for Guard to join Joint Chiefs

43 Replies

I thought this was a sort of constitutionally interesting item:

Senate Passes Graham Amendment Making National Guard Part of Joint Chiefs of Staff

WASHINGTON – The United States Senate last night approved an amendment introduced by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) giving the National Guard a seat on the nation’s highest military council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I’m very pleased the Senate has voted to allow the Chief of the National Guard Bureau to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Guardsmen and Reservists are citizen-soldiers,” said Graham.  “Since 9/11, the National Guard and Reserves have done tremendous work at home and abroad in defense of our nation.  They have been called up to duty, taken away from their work and families, and sent to far-away lands for long tours to protect our nation.  They have earned a seat at the table where our most important military decisions are made.”

South Carolina Adjutant General MG Bob Livingston said, “This is a great day for our nation and our military. We face difficult times in terms of the variety and magnitude of foreign threats while dealing the reality of limited resources. The inclusion of the Chief of the National Guard Bureau on the Joint Chiefs of Staff brings the Citizen Soldier to the discussion. The Citizen Soldier has proven himself to be the innovator with civilian skills, the tie to the community and the proven hardened combat troop that is so critical in these tough times. This tradition of citizen responsibility is one of the essential threads in the fabric of our nation. It has made our nation great and will propel us into the future.  The appointment of the Chief of the National Guard is a return to the basic values of our county and will pave the way to great innovation in the defense of our nation.”

The amendment, also sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) attracted 71 cosponsors, and was added by voice vote to the annual Defense Authorization bill.  The Senate continues to debate the measure and a final vote is expected later this week.

“The Senate vote last night was a long-overdue recognition and fitting tribute for our citizen-soldiers and the sacrifices they have made on behalf of our nation,” said Graham.  “The Guard and Reserve is indispensable to fighting the War on Terror and protecting the homeland.  Their voice needs to be heard.”

The legislation was endorsed by the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the National Governors Association, the National Guard Association of the United States, the Adjutants General Association of the United States, and the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States.

#####

I always have trouble explaining the degree to which the Guard is our state militia, versus the extent to which it is part of national Total Force structure (does that still exist? not sure; references on Web seem few and far between). Seems like this is another tip in the direction of the federal. If so, he makes it sound like it’s noncontroversial, with all those groups supporting him.

Nor should it be. Controversial, I mean. States have no business having separate militaries, with the Recent Unpleasantness well behind us. Still, though, this is South Carolina, so I thought I’d take note…

Anchors Aweigh: Bud and his son, the sailor

4 Replies

Last night, Bud wrote this:

Brad and I have gone round and round on US military deployments over the last few years. Yet I can fully understand with a son in the naval resere how the sound of anchors away can stir up some goose bumps. With a son in the naval reserve I can attest to how inspiring those dress white uniforms are.

And he also shared this with me via email (along with the picture above):

All this talk of dress navy white uniforms reminded me of this special occassion recently at my son’s graduation from the Great Lakes training center.  That was a very special week that I’ll never forget.  Seeing my son grow up and my second grandchild come into the world.

Congratulations to Bud on having both a new sailor, and a new baby, in the family. And may his son have smooth sailing wherever his voyages take him.

‘War in the name of democracy,’ 1775-style

3 Replies

On this Veteran’s Day (I prefer “Armistice Day,” but whatever), the WSJ had an op-ed piece headlined, “America’s Distinctive Way of War,” by Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University. The headline doesn’t quite give away the topic. The thesis is that much about U.S. military doctrine evolved from our encounters with an enemy that to modern minds may seem unlikely: Canada. While much of it is largely forgotten now, over a 200-year period there was a lot of nasty business along “what Indians called ‘the Great Warpath,’ the 200-mile route of water and woodland paths that connected Albany and Montreal…”

There was a lot in the piece that was interesting, whether you fully accept the Canadian premise or not. Such as this:

War in the name of democracy? In 1775, the rebelling colonies—not even yet the United States — launched an invasion of Canada. The Continental Congress ordered the covert distribution of propaganda pamphlets in what is now Quebec province. The opening line: “You have been conquered into liberty.” Congress subsequently sent Benjamin Franklin north with a few companions to consolidate the conquest of Montreal, spread parliamentary government, and familiarize the baffled habitants of Canada — ruled for over a decade with mild firmness by a British governor—with the doctrines of habeas corpus and a free press.

The American way of war is distinctive. If the armed services have an unofficial motto, it is “Whatever it takes”—a mild phrase with ferocious implications. All that those words imply, including a disregard for military tradition and punctilio, the objective of dismantling an enemy and not merely defeating him, and downright ruthlessness, can be found in the battles of the Great Warpath.

It is often a paradoxical way of war. “Conquering into liberty” sounds absurd or hypocritical. In the case of Canada, it failed (though of course Canada took its own path to free government). In the cases of Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II, it succeeded. In the case of Iraq, who knows? In all of these episodes American motives were deeply mixed — realpolitik and idealism intertwining with one another in ways that even the strategists conceiving these campaigns did not fully grasp. What matters is that the notion of conquering into liberty is rooted deep in the American past, and in the ideas and circumstances that gave this country birth…

There is nothing new, apparently, under the sun.

A little music for this very moment

2 Replies

Something about this moment, as I write this — the still-hot coffee I’m drinking, the slight remaining chill from the night in my office, contrasting with the crisp mid-morning light coming in the window — brought this song to mind.

So I thought I’d share it, a few minutes before the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in the 11th year.

A luminous slice of peace on this Armistice Day.