Wars and stupors of wars

One of the multifarious issues with electing a total idiot who predictably stocked his administration with a coterie of simply-flaming-assholes, dangerously incompetent sycophants who are also flagrantly authoritarian-curious (at least), corporate whores, grifters, and outright clowns is that when problems turn up it's extremely difficult to feel confident that these gomers will be able to do something that ranges from "not actively stupid" to potentially useful.

While the bulk of the corporate media organizations circle the drain that is Trump's Twitter feed repeating his nonsense about hordes of invading brownskins, several parts of the globe are getting...interesting, and not in a particularly good way.

One of them is along the Pakistan-India border, where the subcontinental quasi-Trumper Indian PM Narendra Modi has played to his deplorable-Hindu-supremacist base by hammering Kashmiri Muslims. This, unsurprising to anyone who has more than one brain cell, has provoked some nasty posturing from the other subcontinental nuclear power. Trump's contribution was to shove his enormous orange oar (what? You say it's NOT enormous? FAKE NEWS!!!) in back in July blabbering about U.S. stumbling into the dispute and forcing a hasty denial from Modi's people that, no, they hadn't asked the buffoon to do anything.

It's hard to tell whether this will lead to anything more than posturing, but it's already obvious that the Trumpkins' geopolitical shrewdity has effectively neutered much of the U.S. ability to help defuse tensions in this nasty little dispute between two putative allies.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine the political mess is getting messier, with a stand-up comic/president, fascist Ruthenians, Putin-fondlers, and all-around whackjobs all getting involved in a political imbroglio that would make Machiavelli throw his hands in the air.

If Niccolo himself would despair of this twelve-monkeys-fucking-a-football disaster, what hope is there for this Administration, that is, apparently, managed by tweet and whatever bats are looping around whatever is inside the tangerine-hued Tiberius' combover that functions in place of an actual brain? Certainly this would seem to be a place for a judicious consideration of the actual stakes involved and whether there is an actual dog for the United States' foreign policy in this fight and, if so, to what extent.

But, again...who outside of the MAGAt fever-swamps actually believes this congeries of fools and damned fools can do that?

Who'd have thought that Obama's "elections have consequences" line would be repeated so soon as farce?

WASF.

(And let's not even think about the weather.)

Sailor slighted

Came across this article in the on-line Esquire mag yesterday.

The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden...Is Screwed is written by someone named Phil Bronstein and advertises itself as

"...the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family."

It is, as advertised, largely about the raid on Abbottabad on 6 MAY 2011.

That part's just your basic war story, a story about what might be the most famous night raid in recent history, but, still...just another no-knock entry in the thousands the U.S. Army, Marine, and Navy infantry have been doing since 2002. Read it, if you will. It's your bread-and-butter light infantry operation that at least partially accomplished the mission (Just me, but it would have been nice to have hauled ol' Osama back for a Nuremberg-style tribunal, but, whatev'; First Rule of War - Shit Happens).

Hooah, raid team. AAMs for everyone!

Sorry. Army joke.

But, kidding aside, that wasn't really what I got out of it. I've done my share of MOUT, just not with the live rounds and the angry Arabs. Didn't really need the lyrics to know how that song goes.

I did have a strong reaction to the piece, but probably not what the author wanted. What he wanted is pretty clear; to get the reader angry about "...the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives" Between the raid story the article centers around a long litany of complaints that this guy and his fellow Seal team members are getting screwed.

"But when he officially separates from the Navy three months later, where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his résumé? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered? There is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies. And the VA does offer five years of benefits for specific service-related claims — but it’s not comprehensive and it offers nothing for the Shooter's family.

"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked," says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. "They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them." General Myatt believes "the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back." The Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. "These guys are self-actualizers," says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. "Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to. That's how smart they are."

But what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? "Pretty much nothing," says the admiral. "It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'"

I hate to be this way, but...guys? Lemme sing you a little song I know:

"In time of danger or in war
God and the soldier we adore.
Danger past and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

Some British grunt wrote that song in fucking 1645.

Ain't no different three hundred and fifty years later. If nobody told you that in Reception Station?

They should have.

I mean, yeah; it sucks to be this guy. I get that. It sucks to be an imperial grunt in a country that is fiercely pretending NOT to be fighting colonial wars, so much so that it that is practically jamming its fists into its collective ears and shrieking "ICAN'THEARYOUlalalalalala!" rather than accept what it is doing to the legionaries it is sending out to do the dirty deeds it doesn't want to hear about or is pretending are the military equal of storming ashore on the Normandy beaches instead of the vile, ugly business of suppressing foreign rebellions in shitty parts of the world.

That's the reality. You can hate it. But you can't pretend you didn't know that going in, especially now after ten goddamn years of it.

A couple of other things;

1. The article is full of sad about how the poor dude is getting screwed over because he's getting out with jack shit; "Anyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir."

Ummm.

I know they told you that shit in Repo. You don't do your twenty, I don't care if you're Audie Fucking Murphy; you get squat. Always have, always will. You sing in the choir for 20 years, you get the brass ring. 19.9 years of hard fighting? Bupkis. Them's the rules. You may not like that, but you can't complain you didn't know that.

The article keeps talking about the Shooter "retiring". Dude; this guy ain't "retiring". He's ETSing short of retirement. Get your military terminology straight, Phil. And if you ETS short of your 20-year letter, you get...? C'mon, say it with me now..."jack"...and what else?

"Shit?"

Sorry, man. That's how it works. If the author didn't get that somebody he talked to should have squared him away. It makes the guys in ST6 sound like whiners, and I'm sure they wouldn't want that.

And this guy is described as all jacked up physically (which I believe; 16 years as a grunt would have crocked me up. Hell, they DID, in a way.). Why isn't he getting out on a medical? You CAN retire medically short of twenty. Why no discussion about that?

Next?

2. Here's the thing that completely baffled me; there's a ton of talk in this article about how special these special operators are, how any CEO and Wall Street firm and school district should be killing themselves to get them, how they're the best of the best of the best?

So where the hell was the Navy re-up guy?

The Shooter says he doesn't want to be a shooter any more. OK, fine. I'm not a squid but I'll bet there's tons of jobs in the USN that don't require a guy to bust a cap in Abu's ass. PAC clerk? Third shop? Stores? Chief of the Boat?

Plus, if these guys really were all self-actualizing and entrepreneurial as the article implies, wouldn't you think that the USN would be begging them to stay in and provide all this special leadership as senior NCOs.

Al just talked about the importance of those salty old Navy chiefs; why isn't this guy moving on from the hard-core hooah infantry fun to a cushy job the regular Navy? Beer and skittles aboard a carrier? Why isn't he heading up the path towards CPO? Why doesn't anyone in this article talk about these guys as future Master Chief Petty Officers of the Navy, as the future Kings of the Goat Locker?

Could it be...that for all the stuff in the article about how special these guys are, when you come down to it - with 16 years in the Navy this Shooter has about the same experience with troop leadership and organizational management as an infantry squad leader, an E-6 on his second or even the end of his first enlistment?

And that the sort of senior leadership you need to have to be a good Chief Petty Officer for a big organization - running a division or being Chief of the Boat - or even be a good teacher, or a stockbroker...requires more, and very different, skills than just "a fist to the helmet"?

And that these guys have, in essence, been frozen in place as infantry squaddies for more than a decade?

There's always been tension between the special operations organizations and the line dogs, but one of the reasons for that is this; these guys ARE good. They're among the best light infantrymen in the world. As a former grunt medic, I gotta respect that.

But.

That's ALL they are.

The Regular Army's problem with senior SF NCOs has always been that - short of the supposed-wartime mission of creating indig armies - an E-7 in SF is a nothing more than a super squad leader. He doesn't even get the experience of leading a platoon of grunts, let alone the experience with combined arms and the logistic and operational business of troop-leading in a combined arms battle.

So could it be that the reason the Navy re-up NCO wasn't chasing this guy is that even with 16 years in he's not really considered all that terrific as a potential line Navy chief?

I don't know, but it makes me wonder; is the Navy and, by inference, the other services doing these guys any favors allowing them to, or making them, make a home in these special operations units? If they really don't have any civilian skills, shouldn't we be making it easy for them to do their thirty years in the Navy (or Army, or Marines) and retire full of years, honors, and a fat pension?

Makes me wonder, anyway.

And finally...

3. There's the obligatory hat-tip to the Crazy Mad National Defending Skilz that these wars are supposed to have been All About; "The Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own."

Don't get me wrong. This guy and his teammates have been fighting hard. They've been doing everything they've been asked to do, and more.

But a lot of that fighting has had nothing to do with "keeping us safe."

Everything they did in Iraq?

Not.

A hell of a lot that went down in Afghanistan, that involved chasing angry tribesmen around and around the mountains?

Not.

And the other stuff? The secret wars in places like Yemen and Somalia?

Who the hell knows? But probably some yesses, some noes.

Look. I was a soldier for years. In a lot of ways I'm still stuck inside the Green Machine. I want my soldier brothers - and that includes this guy, who for all that he wore blue, has fought as a grunt for more than a decade - to get the best life they can out of the nation and the People who employ them.

But I think that a big part of that means that the People should get the whole story about our guys; good, bad, and indifferent. And told straight out, without the attempt to "sell" the guys to the Public. I think that the Public might, just might, for one thing, start wondering why these guys have been doing this for twelve years, and whether it is really "keeping us safe", and whether there might be better ways to do this both for us and for them.

And I don't think that a big part of this article really helps with that instead of just turning it into another war story.

So; question - what do you think? Am I reading too much into this? Is this sort of article part of the problem, part of the solution, both, or neither?

Worst Case Planning

"Relax," said the night man,

"We are programmed to receive,

You can check out anytime you like...

but you can never leave" 

--Hotel California, The Eagles

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends 

--The Minicipal Gallery Revisisted, 

W. B. Yeats 

______________________

The recent murder of U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats along with the release of Mark Bissonnette's book No Easy Day prompt further thought:

The Special Forces Son Tay raid was an Act of War into a hostile nation to retrieve United States Prisoners of War.   It was a high-risk operation, just as was the SEAL team assassination party's incursion in Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden.  The difference is, Pakistan is an ostensible ally, and allies do not invade other allies; the idea is, a nation runs hostile operations in hostile countries.

If Son Tay had failed, the U.S. could accept that fact and the resultant loss of friendly lives, but what would a botched job have done to America in the case of the OBL raid? Could we have accepted a Black Hawk Down scenario, in which U.S. dead would be dragged through the streets of a friendly nation in hideous glee?

Would the U.S. have fought any Pakistani troops sent to establish Pakistan's control of their sovereign territory?  Did anyone wargame these questions?  Were the risks worth the payoff?  Was the killing of OBL worth taking these risks?

Since the inception of the Phony War on Terror the military logic of operations has consistently been composed of pie-in-the-sky planning and ignoring worst-case scenarios.

What strategic value attended this operation?  If the intel was as good as Bissonnette's book suggests, why not just JDAM the target area?  If indeed killing was the object, why not simply put a precision target on the compound?

Maybe the fix was in, and the Pakistanis had been read into the scenario and had agreed to avoid and contact with U.S. troops, but this seems unlikely. If this were true, then they are a duplicitous bunch of opportunists sans straight-talk or straight-dealing. Whatever the situation, the operation lacked any semblance of military logic.

These thoughts pose further questions, "What is 'hostile'?"  Are Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan allies or even friendly, or are they hostile to the U.S.?  How does the U.S. treat enemies, and how, friends?  Can we even distinguish the difference these days?

It is hardly credible that Iraq and Afghanistan are friendly to the U.S.  It is readily believable that they will suck every dollar that we will throw their way, but they will never love or befriend us, and to believe so is delusional.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

Interesting sort-of contrast to the bin Laden raid; Bosnian Serb ex-commander and war criminal Ratko Mladic has been arrested by Serbian police agencies hiding in a relative's home in the little Serbian town of Lazarevo, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northeast of Belgrade.

The guy was obviously well known in town. I love the quote from one of his fans; "They didn't even wake us up," said a resident who identified himself only as Zoran. "I'm furious. They arrested our hero."

You'll note that this didn't require an elite team of Belgian commandos, helicopters, cross-border insertions, or diplomatic furor. A little group of local coppers showed up at his door - undoubtedly with the help of the Serbian national intel agency as well as Euro intel types - handcuffed his ass, and drove him away. He even had a couple of hoglegs on him, but didn't manage to get a double tap through the head for his pains.

Now there's a LOT of dissimilarities between Ratko and Osama, the single biggest being the lack of ideological fervor in the Serbian community. But you'll also note the immense dissimilarity between the countries where they were hiding.

Serbia desperately wants into the EU; it wants a piece of the lovely lolly that comes from being a First World nation and having all that economic development n' stuff. Despite there being a solid core of "fuck-the-Euros" Serbian irredentists, the government and much of the population of Serbia wants shut of the bad old days of Pan-Serbian war and atrocity. Generally speaking, the goals and objectives of most Serbs are fairly close to most other nations and peoples in the EU.

The disparity between the goals and objectives of Pakistan and the United States could hardly be greater. They barely share a common interest. Pakistan is treated as a battleground by the U.S., its government and people seen as objects or targets or, at best, pawns to be manipulated. Is it any surprise that the U.S. government couldn't trust the ISI and the local Abbotabad coppers to knock on Osama's door and whisk him off to an appointment with the ICC?

I'm not going to go back to second-guessing the OBL raid. I'm just observing; given the differences visible between Serbia and Pakistan that makes treating a war criminal like a war criminal possible in one but not the other...is it any wonder we have a scalpel available in Serbia but nothing but a hammer in Pakistan? Or that it looks like the West is likely to get a favorable-ish resolution to the Balkan morass but seem unlikely - barring an imperial-level commitment of troops, time, and money - to get one from southwest Asia?

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

As sheerah noted, the Diabolical Mastermind of 9/11 sleeps with the fishes.I've been turning this over in my mind, and just wanted to jot down my thoughts in no particular order.

1. The eternal 14-year-old who lives in the top bunk inside my head is doing a manic little happy dance shouting "Ha! Last taps! Gotcha last, motherfucker! (I was a rude boy even at fourteen) How do you like that, bitch! Who's your daddy now, asshole?"

2. The Army sergeant down the hall hears the commotion but just shrugs, albeit with a certain grim satisfaction. While it's satisfying that the author of the current troubles bides safe in a ditch, after ten years and a mountain of corpses he seems...well, kind of an asterisk. Just another fucking body. Another day at the office. Oh, well.

3. The guy who thinks about geopolitics and strategy (a pipe-smokingish sort of pseudo-intellectual who occupies the flat below the other two and bangs irritably on the ceiling when they get loud up there) enjoys a certain moment of pleasure in the pure professionalism of the USN takedown team. In a decade of highly publicized gaffes and blunders this op went off like water off a cat's ass. Nice work, SEALS.

And he feels like wagging his professorial finger in the face of the neo-cons and the liberal interventionsts; THIS is how you do it, dumbfucks. John Paul Vann told you decades ago but you didn't want to listen. No drone strikes, no invasions, no smart bombs. A double-tap to the skull.

But then he thinks (because he's just that sort of a dick) that in a REALLY slick op ol' Osama would have been lured into the bed of a Karachi he-whore and found, shall we say, not leaving his boy's behind? The only long-term way to discredit a guru's teachings is to discredit the Guru. The Baghwan Rajneesh looks like an idiot today because he lived long enough to outlive his legend. J. Edgar Hoover isn't a laughingstock because he broke all kinds of domestic laws but because he's got a rep for prancing around in a dress.

This way the mook has what he wanted; martyrdom, with the entry wounds in the front, dying in the midst of the chaos he wanted to foment by a U.S. bullet. Seventy-virgins, here I come, baby!Instead of in bed shouting "drill, baby, drill!" with just one Pakistani man-whore.

And the other thought that occurs to him is that the location of the final day of OBL's life says something, and not anything particularly positive, about the so-called "Global War on Terror". Abbotabad is a Pakistani army cantonment, very close to the capital. It is impossible to believe that either the Army, or ISI, or both (and by inference the military players in Pakistani politics) didn't know the SOB was there. This kind of reinforces the theme that there really isn't much of a "global" war here, especially in the hunting grounds of SW Asia, but rather a JUSWOSKT: a "just-U.S.-war-on-some-kinds-of-terrorism".

And his other-other thought is; what does it say about our national mindset that we're all "USA! USA!" about this...that nobody (yet, at least) has publicly regretted that the fucker wasn't snatched to stand up in front of the ICC or a U.S. court with the rest of the dog-rapers? That by giving him a fully metal-jacketed 5.56 all-area pass to Hell means that the radio is playing his song, not ours; that this is a "war", that he was a "soldier" instead of a skeevy little bitch who struck from behind and never faced a U.S. troop in anger. Well, now he has and, yeah, this ain't the Special Olympics and there's no second prize. But, still...

4. The wanna-be comedian living in the cardboard box in the alley out back (hey, comedy doesn't pay all that well for most of its practitioners...) wishes he'd thought of jim's "long-form-death-certificate" joke; it definitely wins the prize for best comment. Because you KNOW that this will show up on FOX as "Bush's long-time goal finally attained!". Because among the Limbaugh/Beck Right the Kenyan Usurper will never get credit for his Great Commander-in-Chiefyness. Because...well, he's just a foreign Negro.So adios, Osama. I wish I thought your death would be the game-changer we thought it'd be when we were trying to slot you ten years ago. But right now, you just seem like one more dead guy reaped from a place which grows dead guys like a cash crop.

Update 5/2 p.m.: This article in the New Yorker makes a good point:

"The initial circumstantial evidence suggests that...bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on."

Which sums up pretty concisely why U.S. policy in the Middle East is so tortuous. The friends of our enemies are our "friends"...or, at least, people and places we need for other, often more compelling reasons.

The Middle East has been a cockpit - and a snakepit - since the days when Ramses marched up out of the Nile Valley to Kadesh. The inhabitants cannot change their skies, but for outsiders like the U.S., it would seem that the way to win the Game of Thrones in this place is not to play.

The Bourne Stupidity

I'm a middle-aged American guy; I was raised on "spy thrillers". And don't get me wrong - I enjoy the celluloid adventures of spies and counterspies as much as the next guy.It's just kind of irking when my country's spies don't seem to have watched those flicks or have forgotten the plot.

Take the case of Raymond "Not Jason Bourne" Davis.

Remember this guy? The "diplomat" who shot his way out of the holdup in Lahore, Pakistan?Okay; first off - I have no idea what the hell happened in the streets of Lahore on January 27th. It seems very plausible to me that the guys Davis slotted were robbers, bazaar badmashes intent on at least holding him up and possibly murdering him.

But.

This discussion by a BBC reporter reports that

"investigations by the police, forensic labs and the local and international media suggest that the two men were driving away from Mr Davis when they were shot. That "no fingerprints had been uncovered on the triggers of the pistols found on the bodies of the two men. Furthermore he said that tests had shown that the bullets remained in the magazines of their guns, not the chambers."

Even more damning, far from the bad guys the U.S. has suggested,

"...the men have no criminal records as such. Both...were carrying licensed pistols (and) security sources in Lahore say that they were part-time or low-level operatives for the local intelligence services. Although reports are sketchy about what they were doing in relation to Mr Davis, security officials believe it could be the case of a surveillance operation gone horribly wrong."

Well, damn. So maybe it really was the case of a guy getting flaky at the wrong time and busting a cap on a couple of local snoops from the Lahore ISI Nose Patrol.

But, whatever, you've seen the movie and you all know what happens now, right? Our hero disappears into the crowd, makes his way to the "safehouse" where he changes his appearance and his identity cards and then slips out of the country one step ahead of the dictator's secret police (or his own agency, whichever is cooler...). Every spy has seen this part and knows what to do now.Or not.

Seems that the guy gave himself up on the spot, and was thrown into the local carcel.

Now this is the part where the CIA activates its cunning plan, sends its mole into the Lahore cop shop while the suave State Department spokesmodel spins a seamless web of denials and diversions that baffles the locals, enemies, and reporters alike. Our boy is whisked out of the country as if he had never existed, right?

Or not.

Of course this gentleman was not a "legal" CIA officer, accredited as a U.S. diplomat; he was another damn contractor, more of what appears to be the "secret" side of the war in central Asia which is about as secret as Lady GaGa's underwear. Instead of a cunning plan the U.S. government began by loudly beating the stupid drum by demanding his release AS a diplomat, despite the fact that it seems that both the State Department and the Pakistanis knew from the get-go that he was not.What's worse, the U.S. has insisted in doubling-down on this lie from almost immediately after he was arrested until just this past week after everyone from The Lahore News and Advertiser to the Onion published the truth. Finally, after several British news outlets stated the truth, the U.S. 'fessed up.

Well, damn.

So now what?

I doubt whether this guy is going to rot in a Pakistani jail; he'll get some public spankings to placate the Paki mobs and then quietly slip out of the country.But in the meantime, again, the U.S. ends up looking both foolish and deceptive, reinforcing the Dubya image of the idiot cowboy, shooting up the surroundings and bagging nothing but a couple of cottontails and the local schoolmar'm. And looking incompetent; the bumbling spy is a classic staple of movie comedy from Buster Keaton to Peter Sellers.

Don't get me wrong; I'd prefer that my country not be sneaking around other people's countries unless there was a hell of a good reason for it. But I'm realist enough to understand that all sorts of spying happens for all sorts of reasons, and many of those reasons are too secret for me to know. So I know my country is going to spy all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons, good and bad.But is it too much to ask that if we're gonna sneak around the globe making real-life spy films my country tries to spy more like Jason Bourne and James Bond than Phil Moskowitz and Inspector Clouseau?