"What did you do in the Iran War, daddy?"

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. 

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

 "I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk.  Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.

Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like.  In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM.  As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.

Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW?  Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk.  We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.

Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness.  By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)?  Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle.  Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness.  At some point you have to buy that readiness back.

And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul.  Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings.  Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment.  That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable.  You can break a unit, and you can break a force.

 Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)?  Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring.  Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of DefenseWar is not that leader. 

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains. 

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky). 

 

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought. 

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well. 

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence. 

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy. 

Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.   

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right? 

Guardians!

 To Infinity...and Beyond!

From the link above:

"Space Force members have an official new name: Guardians, Vice President Mike Pence announced Friday.

"Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come," Pence said during a ceremony to commemorate the Space Force's 1st birthday, coming up on Dec. 20."

 Oh. OH. Now I'm SO sorry I retired before I got to have fun with this. 

It's perfect as it is, but I know I can make it better. I feel the "Acting 1SG Lawes Reads The Morning Formation Announcements" typing itself already.

Update 12/19: And, yep, here it is.

Naval Gazing

Good discussion here about what the USS Theodore Roosevelt fiasco shows us about the internal mess that is a now an integral part of "the world's most powerful armed force":

"The response to Crozier’s memo, after it was public, was incoherent. Everybody was saying different things. Modly got on the news and told CNN, We’re working on it, we have a plan in place, which was true because he was in communication with Crozier and his staff at that point. That same afternoon, Modly’s boss, Secretary Defense Mark Esper, got on the evening news and said, I haven’t made any decision and I haven’t read the letter in full. They were nowhere near on the same page. It was the beginning of this massive schism that’s happening right now between civilian and military leadership."

"You see a real difference between how the admirals and the political appointees are dealing with this. The admirals are looking for how to get the sailors off and investigate what happened. But the political appointees, specifically Modly and Esper, seemed like they were completely foundering and looking for a political mitigation tactic that might save them face."

And let's not kid ourselves; it wasn't just the flunkies - this clusterfuck goes all the way up to Head of Grifting:

"Last year, the Navy was roiled by Trump’s call for clemency for Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of keeping war trophy photographs of himself with a dead Iraqi captive. So there was already this sense, when Modly came to the job, that you need to anticipate what the White House wants and carry it out. I think that’s an understanding most administration hopefuls have reached. It could be seen as a bit of a proximate factor for what happened with Crozier."

So as far as "most powerful" goes, while I do not question the sheer weight of metal that the U.S. military has and will continue to bring in the near future, it's worth noting that the track record of military organizations that are beaten into a sort of permanent cringe...

...by being forced to suck up to the whims of their dictators...

...is not a good one.

Update 4/25: Innnnnnnn-teresting:

"Pentagon leaders are now at an impasse about how to move forward. While CJCS Milley wants a broader inquiry, CNO Gilday and ASECNAV McPherson want to move ahead with reinstating Crozier. SECDEF Esper may be the deciding vote between the two camps."

Why I say this is interesting is because the CJCS is NOT in Crozier's chain. Remember the little thing I posted about the Navy chain of command?

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ain't on it.

The only reason I can see that Milley is sticking his fucking oar in is that certain Trumpkins want to torpedo Crozier somehow but don't want their tiny little fingers on the firing button.

Like I said; the track record of armed forces who begin sucking up to political despots?

It's not good.

And, given the track record we already have from the U.S. performance in Central Asia?

Yeah.

That.

Ruling the waves..?

Rob Farley has a post up at the National Interest discussing the current expansion of the PRC's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), comparing that to the Great Power navies of the past century.

He asks whether the PLAN can succeed in advancing the PRC's geopolitical ends compared to the Imperial German, Russian (and Soviet), Imperial Japanese, and United States navies.

It's not a bad little article, but I think it asks the wrong question.

I'd start, rather, with the question "Does (fill in the blank nation) need a blue-water navy?"

Two of the four examples Farley picks - Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union - were primarily continental powers and as such the answer seems obviously "No".

As such their fleets were superfluous at best and, for Germany, disastrous at worst; dragging Wilhelmine Germany into a naval arms race with Great Britain that diverted resources that the Reich could have put to better use.

The "good cases" would seem to be the maritime empires, Japan and the U.S.; both depend on overseas trade, both are isolated by oceans, at least partially in the case of the U.S., both had, or have, imperial ambitions.

Oddly, Farley chooses to ignore two other great maritime empires.

The "success" is, obviously, the British. Britain obviously needed a blue-water navy, and, in general, did pretty well with it. Unsurprisingly that naval power disappeared with the Empire, but it had a hell of a good 400-odd-year run.

Spain, on the other hand, needed a fleet but always seemed to find its ambitions were greater than its capabilities.

Someday I should really find a good Spanish naval history to understand why the Dons never managed to figure out what the British seemed to manage so effortlessly. Whatever the reason, lacking a fleet capable of long-range power projection surely helped doom the Spanish colonial empire, whether from foreign enemies like the U.S. or from colonial revolt.

So.

Looking at the historical examples, and the current geopolitical needs of China, I can't really see how putting time, money, and effort into a big fleet helps them.

Anyone willing to take the counterpoint?

Let's discuss.

Trumpot Dome?

The uniquely appalling vision of a "low information" President installed in the highest Executive office in the United States, lying and raging on his cellphone whilst sitting on the toilet in the early hours of the morning is difficult to ignore. But it's worthwhile to recall that, at least in the political sense, the damage that the administration of His Fraudulency is doing has little or nothing to do with Trump himself.

As previously noted on this site, the GOP of 2018 exists to pimp for plutocracy, construct a new Gilded Age where their domestic oligarchs can imitate the sort of open Putinesque kleptocracy so admired amongst the Federalist set, and punch down at the lib'ruls, hippies, poors, and dusky Others.

One aspect of the Fraudulency Administration that is not often dissected, however, is the Return of the Harding Ethos of "public service"; the brutally open graft and hoovering-up of public largesse not seen since the Roaring Twenties. From the simple and crude quid-pro-quo of holding government functions at Trump's properties to the sort of brutal griftopia of the Whitefish Energy and Tribune Contracting scams run through as Puerto Rican "disaster assistance" and the multiple Trump appointees mulcting the public trough in ways ranging from upgraded commercial flights to ridiculous "security" expenses, the current administration is marching boldly back to the future of "honest graft".

And why is this a subject for a military-geopolitical blog?

Because the Department of Defense is, as Willie Sutton said, "where the money is".

I don't think that anyone here will question the bald statement that there is corruption in the U.S. military procurement process.

Perhaps not the sort of open, hand-out-palm-up sort of corruption on display at Mar-a-lago. But the "military-industrial-congressional-complex" has been a one-hand-washes-the-other since "defense" became big business back in the 1940s. Defense contractors schmooze legislators and Pentagon program managers. Ex-officers and ex-congresspeople slide effortlessly into corporate offices at Boeing, Raytheon, FLIR Systems, Lockheed-Martin, and so on.

Nobody has to do anything so crude as slip a Franklin into some Congressman's pocket. Ensuring that some F-35 sub-sub-contractor is located in his district, cranking out jobs and tax revenue, is often more than enough.

That's...well, let's call it the "usual corruption", red-white-and-blue corruption, the sort of thing that a big, rich, imperial power can tolerate and still survive, and even prosper.

My concern is, rather, that the incredible degree to which Trump, the Trumpenspawn, and his Trumpenproletariat have normalized open, hand-out-palm-up corruption will cause it to slowly, but inevitably, begin to seep into the U.S. military bureaucracy.

Seven years ago, when the arc of the GOP's New Gilded Age Project had become apparent, I wrote a piece over at my personal blog about the blatant corruption I saw in Panama. One of the most visible problems in the armed forces of the various parts of the Third World I saw when I was on active duty was this issue of vicious, endemic corruption that ran from the lowest private up to the big building in the capital that housed the Ministry of Defense or whatever it was called.

Aside from the innate foolishness of trying to Hustle the East, one of the biggest problems with the endless Wars on The Middle East we've fussed with since 2001 has been the ridiculously corrupt armies of our supposed "allies" in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everything from military funding that simply disappears to company officers padding their alpha roster with "ghost soldiers", imaginary people whose paychecks go into the commanders' pockets.

We've never seen that sort of thing. Not in my army.

But.

We haven't swum in the sort of sea of corruption that the Trumpkins swim in, not since my grandmother was a young woman, which is to say that none of us have the slightest experience with how to deal with this kind of venality, or know what will happen if the U.S. government and armed forces are allowed to steep in it for another three to seven years.

I'd like to think that my Army is too honest to become the Panama Defense Force.

But I thought my Army wouldn't torture helpless prisoners, or lie about checkpoint shootings, either. I never thought I'd see my Army march witlessly off into a wilderness of mirrors, wasting blood and treasure in pointless cabinet wars without so much as a whisper of protest. It's like we learned nothing from the wasted years and wasted lives of Vietnam.

What I fear is that the corruption and delusion at the heart of the "wars on terror" have set up the U.S. military to become as physically corrupt as they have made us geopolitically and strategically corrupt.

And what I dread is what I've said before about the rest of the prospect awaiting those of us not in the New Gilded Age; we're going to places that none of us understand, that no American has seen for almost a century. And that what we know of those places is that, well, for most of us, they weren't much fun at all.

What's the English for "freikorps"?

Out old Intel Dump pal Phillip Carter has a piece up at Slate discussing the presser put on by the White House Chief-of-Staff, former GEN Kelly.

Carter says all the usual things that are being said elsewhere about the Kelly presser - that it pretty much told anyone who doesn't have a DD214 that their only role in military affairs is to "support the troops" and STFU - but one line from the Carter piece really struck me.

It was this:

"The burden of our post-9/11 wars has been heavy but not widely shouldered nor shared. The result, echoed in opinion surveys of veterans and military personnel, has been a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and resentment."

Yeah, well, there was another group of veterans and military personnel who held strong feelings of pride and nostalgia about their recent wartime service and deep resentment towards the civilians and political leaders of their nation they held responsible for their failure.

They were the guys from the Kaiserlich Deutsches Heer, the Imperial German Army, after 1918.

And by the 1920s they had given up pretending even notional submission to the civilian government of Weimar and went out into the streets to fight, helping to contribute to the chaos and social unrest that eventually enabled totalitarian rule come to power in Germany.

In the bitterest of ironies, the supposed true German nationalists they helped to power considered them a danger to the fascist state. Many of the ex-freikorps were murdered or disappeared in 1934 when the true believers consolidated power.

Are the situations of interwar Germany and post-modern America very different?

Yes.

Is it good to have a small, self-selecting group within a popular democracy with a monopoly on the use and understanding of armed force and the attitude that that monopoly makes them politically superior to those without it?

No.

You can argue about the iniquities of a draft and I won't argue back. But the Founders of this nation had some strong opinions about the danger to a republic from praetorian treason.

I will suggest that former GEN Kelly's remarks should make you nervous about listening for the sound of the dagger leaving its sheath.

There is more than one way to get stabbed in the back.

March disorder

I'll just leave this here:

"The military convoy spotted on Sunday flying a Donald Trump flag near Louisville belonged to an East Coast-based SEAL unit, a Navy spokesperson told ABC News."

And I always thought that the SEALs were kinda lame only because they tended to get themselves killed uselessly at places like Punta Patilla and Grenada.

Hole in my pocket

One thing that kinda drives me nuts about my Fellow Americans is the ridiculous luuuurve they have for the U.S. Army (and the other uniformed services) that lives only inside their heads.

This isn't the actual Army, the one with the dudes and gals and hosers, the studs and the spuds, the hard workers and goldbricks, the one that can cut you like a knife and then fall over its own feet like a sack of sawdust. You know...the one that is a bunch of Americans wearing the same colored clothes with all the same virtues and all the same vices you see and hear about on the evening news.

This is some sort of shiny, perfect Army populated by heroes and supermen, driving dinosaur-powered tanks that shoot laser beams from their eyes and have the sorts of powers found typically in comic books. This Army is composed of A-students who were the #1 in their Bible Study class and can deadlift 300 pounds while putting all thirty rounds into a two-inch square 300 meters away on full automatic.

I've never once seen this Army, and I kinda wish I could just to see what it'd be like.

I suspect I'd feel completely inadequate.

Anyway, the real Army managed to lose 6.5 trillion back in FY15.

Not steal. Not spend. Not waste. Just...lose. As in "...the fuck? It was...I know I had it. Where...let me look under the desk. Goddamn it..."

The Inspector General's report lays it out pretty clearly; the Army just flat-out has no idea where this jack is, or what it did with it. It wasn't criminal, it probably got put to some sort of use, possibly good use...but nobody knows. The accounting at DFAS and the associated Army financial agencies was bad enough that if a private company had done it that badly it'd have gotten its nuts thoroughly rapped by the IRS.

The IG concludes that due to a waterfall of errors and fuckups:

"As a result, the data used to prepare the FY2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated deadline of September 30, 2017."

The really frustrating part of all this is that you'd think, with 6.5 trillion just kind of lost somewhere the Army could have slipped a hardworking old platoon sergeant a couple of casual hundred thou. on the downlow. Y'know? Kind of a "thank you for your service" kinda thing..?

But, noooooo.

Collateral Damage

Back in October our barkeep P.F. Khans asked: "...Who is Responsible for the Hospital Bombing?" about the then-current speculation over the U.S. armed forces actions during a bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders (Medicins san Frontiers, or MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

One of the persistent questions was how could the U.S. and U.S.-advised Afghan forces have targeted what was a very distinctive hospital compound, one that should have been recognizable even from the air as a no-fire zone.

The U.S. higher responsible for the area of operations, Central Command (CENTCOM) released its report in April, and it contains some information on how this could have happened. From the blog Lawfare:

"Two mishaps that were clearly not criminal in nature occurred early on in the night mission, and those mistakes paved the way for the tragedy to follow in Kunduz. First, the attacking aircraft—an AC-130U with extensive firepower on board—took off early because of a report of U.S. troops being attacked. Due to the haste of the aircraft’s departure, there was no time to upload the “No-Strike List” (NSL) to the aircraft’s computers.

This question came up repeatedly in the original discussion. In his post, PF said:

"There's a Fire Direction Chief (sorry FDChief) that's got an AFATDS computer which should have had all hospitals/other sensitive areas restricted, so that you are warned if you are shooting there. Someone has to manually enter that data, was that data input into the system? Was the hospital in this AFATDS computer?

I don't see a reason that it wouldn't/shouldn't have been. I get that an AC-130 gunship may have to cover a lot of territory, but it's the 14th year of the war. Someone has managed this data. Someone spent a boring deployment porting this data to all the systems. This should have been done by now, that hospital didn't spring up when the Taliban attacked.

So if that wasn't there, the FDC is in trouble.
If it was there and the FDC overruled it without higher approval, the FDC is in trouble."

In the comments section I noted that the USAF didn't use the U.S. Army FA fire direction system, but that while

"...(a)ir fires are neither controlled nor coordinated thru the FA direct support elements. That includes the firing battery and battalion FDCs as well as both the FO elements attached to the maneuver platoons and the FSEs at the maneuver company and battalion HQs. The FSEs may liase w USAF control teams to clear potential CAS target areas of friendly forces but have no role in CAS missions beyond that. So the responsibility for CAS mission direction would be on the USAF FACP (forward air control party - at least that was the term when I was still in ten years ago...). The FAC should have, as has been noted above, been advised of NFAs ("no fire areas") as well as RFZs ("restricted fire zones") established by the maneuver commander."

Well, it turns out that the control party - which consisted of U.S. Army Special Forces troops - had more problems than just missing overlays. The Lawfare article goes on to report:

"Second, well before the attack on the MSF facility began, the U.S. aircraft’s satellite radio—its data link—failed. While the aircraft still had radio contact with ground forces, it could not send or receive emails or upload data, such as the NSL. Special Operations forces on the ground wanted to target a prison overrun by the Taliban, formerly run by the Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security (NDS). However, because of the lack of a data upload capacity and imprecise descriptions at both ends of communications, the aircraft crew mistook the MSF facility for the former NDS prison."

To make matters worse, the commander of the maneuver forces was working with a combat controller - or, more specifically, a "joint terminal attack controller" or JTAC (since a combat controller is a USAF-specific occupational specialty and the JTAC may be from any service branch...). The report says that the aggressive maneuver commander and the cherry JTAC turned out to be a combination lethal for the patients and staff of the MSF hospital:

"...ground forces informed the crew that the intended target had an “arch-shaped gate.” While this description matched many buildings in the area, the crew took it as a match for the MSF facility. The ground force commander (GFC) did not seek clarification, and had no independent visual ability to confirm the crew’s judgment. In other words, the GFC and the aircraft crew were actually labeling entirely different structures as being one and the same. (T)he (air)crew repeatedly asked the GFC to confirm that the intended target was a “large t-shape building.” The GFC (or his inexperienced subordinate, the...JTAC...confirmed this description, which matched many buildings in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the crew and the GFC were still unknowingly talking about two different buildings: the crew “had eyes” on the MSF facility, which was marked with MSF emblems but not the more familiar red cross or red crescent symbols used globally to label medical sites, while the GFC believed that the crew was describing the intended target: the NDS prison held by the Taliban. The JTAC did not help matters with instructions such as “soften the target,” which did not correspond to the situation the crew was viewing in real time."

And the maneuver commander seems to have been a real wild man:

"This communications failure was compounded by the inappropriately aggressive posture of the GFC, whom the military report described as having “willfully violated” the ROE. The US ROE restricted the use of air power, except in response to a hostile act by the Taliban directed at U.S. forces. However, the GFC ordered the attack on the MSF facility although the GFC “could not have reasonably believed” that the attack was justified by an ongoing hostile act. While the GFC asserted to military investigators that he saw what he believed to be an attack on a friendly military convoy, the Centcom report viewed that assertion as inconsistent with other sources, including aircraft video, radio transcripts, and tracking data. Moreover, the military’s report indicated that the GFC, because of distance from the convoy, could not have had the line of sight that he claimed. In sum, even an attack on the “right” target—the NDS facility—would not have been a response to hostile fires, as the ROE required. Because of the GFC’s aggressive posture and the mutual misidentification of the MSF facility as the “right” NDS target, the attack commenced."

Once the bombardment started the commo problems interfered again;

"Shortly after the attack started, MSF representatives contacted U.S. commands, imploring them to stop the fires. However, the communications failure and the ground-air misunderstandings severely impeded a timely U.S. response. About 12 minutes into the attack, personnel at the U.S. Special Operations Task Force inquired about the coordinates of the target being engaged. Two minutes later, U.S. personnel contacted the crew and sought to confirm that the attack had not harmed the MSF facility. The crew stated that the MSF facility hadn’t been touched, reporting that the only structures affected were the “T-shaped building” or adjacent structures, which the GFC had earlier mistakenly identified as the NDS prison, although in reality the crew was still describing the MSF hospital. It took several more minutes to ascertain that the building being attacked was in fact the MSF facility. Once that awful realization took hold, the attack ceased."

The military’s report details the errors that dogged each step in this appalling episode. Not unlike the critical moments of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, missteps and misunderstandings at several junctures paved the way for an unspeakable tragedy.

In other words; war.

The usual suspects are saying the usual things. "Conservatives" are draping themselves in yellow ribbons, "liberals" in loathing of the licentious soldiery and distrust of the "official story". Regardless of opinion, the business is done, now, except for in the grave, or the twisted bodies of the injured, or the anger of the survivors and families.

My original point in the comments stands; that regardless of whether this was a deliberate attack or a mistake, the failure of the U.S. command authority in Afghanistan to quickly and publicly discipline the individuals involved sent a clear message that Afghan lives didn't matter, not as much as American servicepeople's lives, or even of their careers.

When suppressing rebellions there is a tried and true method. Unfortunately, it is also unspeakably savage, the Roman Way - make a silence and call it peace.

The West wants and hopes that hearts and minds can be won, that the "Afridis where they run" can be wooed rather than butchered, that there is a kinder, gentler way to suppress revolts. Unfortunately, to do that the suppressor's troops have to be held to a standard that admits no such lethal errors as these, and that every drop of blood spilled with the sword is payed for with a drop of blood drawn by the lash.

We choose not to lash ourselves, and therefore should not be surprised that our means and methods are not embraced by those we slash.

American Military Weakness!

In the comment section to the previous post Sven from Defence & Freedom makes some good points. He notes that, while in overall power projection the US armed forces may be unmatchable that the force structure itself (and many of the elements therein) have some issues. Among those he includes:

- infantry strength
- partially obsolete field artillery (L/39 field howitzers and SPGs with low RoF)
- few high-end fighters
- USN using plenty quite obsolete munition concepts
- questionable anti-tank defences (overreliance on Javelin)
- inability of services to design and introduce all-new combat aircraft, battlefield helicopter, armoured combat vehicle or even only all-new assault rifle since the mid-1980's (F-22 being the little-produced exception and F-18E/F if you consider it as all-new)
- lack of truly silent submarines (SSI instead of SSNs)
- poor mine countermeasures at sea
- naval AEW&C is painfully slow and hardly survivable
- sluggishness and incredible hunger for supplies of the U.S.Army
- lots of support aircraft (Boeing 707/ XX-135 series) are about to fall apart due to old age

Some of these I would consider more problematic than others. Infantry end strength, for example. The US hasn't had anything like sufficient infantry strength to fight an extended conventional war for decades now. That, however, doesn't suggest to me that the US needs more infantry maneuver units. It suggests to me that the US Army has neither the plans nor the intentions to fight an extended conventional infantry war. The problem I see with that is that the only real need for mass infantry would be in 1) a major land war with a peer foe. That would be the major powers, Russia, or China, and the probability of someone panicking and going nuclear makes such plans effectively suicide, or 2) a LIC/rebellion-suppression-type action. If we haven't learned from Iraq/A-stan that those are a mug's game for Great Powers, well...

Or take the low-rate-of-fire legacy FA systems like the M109 Paladin series (which is what I'm assuming Sven refers to as the "L/39"; the 155mm L/39 calibre system mounted on the M109 and its variants). Again, while I'm sure that the FA would have loved to field the Crusader system I'm not sure that rate-of-fire is a serious issue. Even when I was in the FA branch a decade ago the US was moving away from high-volume fires outside of the MLRS batteries to lower round-count FFEs based on first-round FFE. The need for putting a shit-ton of rounds downrange was already on the way out, and that was the LAST generation of fire direction software.

Infantry antitank weapons? Again; a peer conflict would be no more thinkable than it would have been in 1985, and everyone else's AFVs are a generation behind. Frankly, our ATGMs have sucked since we lugged around the M47 Dragon back in the 1980's. Total effect on US ground operations? Zero.

But...after that Sven gets to what I would consider real problems.

But not real problems that are the result of some sort of deliberate neglect of the US armed forces as opposed to the ridiculously awful procurement process. In other words it's not some sort of "the (Blank Administration) has gutted our military" problem. It's something that observers have noted since the Fifties that has gotten exponentially worse, and largely due to the Congressional need to get a piece of the action and defense contractors' needs to ensure unkillable programs. It is, as Sven points out in his comment, largely not an issue of pure budget SIZE but, rather, the increasing lack of the political process to make critical decisions about budget priorities.

So.

Here's my question: can these problems be fixed, in the current political and geopolitical climate?

If so, what should happen? When you look at Sven's list, do you see anything that should be an immediate priority? What? And what should we do to go about solving the problem?

Or do you think that this is something that is just beyond effective solution at this point?

So he picks up his bowling ball and puts it in the sink...

Gee. I can't imagine how anything connected with this slice of genius pie could possibly go wrong in any way.



What the hell is the matter with the New York Times, giving this moron space on the editorial page?

"China’s role in a potential war on the Korean Peninsula is hard to predict." Gee, we can't figure out which way the large Asian nuclear superpower will react to an aggressive act of war on our part...so let's bomb some of their allies' shit and see what happens?



What sort of goddamn fool thinks that way? Wait, wait...I already know - the sort that thinks that invading a crapped out ethnically chaotic former Ottoman Empire Third World kleptocracy will result in candy and flowers?

Haven't we seen what happens when you listen to that sort of mouthbreather?



"This is the kind of pre-emptive action that would save lives and maybe even preserve the uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula." Because we've seen how well bombing things without a sensible geopolitical plan for dealing with the fallout and blowback works in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan?



Why, why, WHY can't we have a better press corps?

And UT-Austin...WTF, guys? You PAY this moron? For teaching this kind of stuff? And yet I couldn't get on full-time at the local community college?

Christ, UT, for the money this guy makes I promise - seriously, no shit - I could at least produce something smarter than this. I'll bet there are Aggies who could, too.

Aggies, guys. Fucking Aggies.



Just sayin'.

Quis Custodiet?

I kinda hate to keep hammering on this nonsense.



It probably bores the hell out of you like any other family feud and I admit that it really is a sort of military "inside baseball"; of interest only to the sort of people who keep stats and obsessively squirrel away bizarre trivia about obscure minor leagues.

But, like jock itch, this story gets to me in particularly tender places.

And, kidding aside, I think it says some things that concern me about my country and my armed forces. So I apologize, but I'm gonna vent a little here.

One is the irritating nature of the "Global War on Terror" as presented to, and accepted by, the U.S. public.

Ever since 2002 I've thought that the most ominous part of the various wars and quasi-wars and secret wars we've been fighting (largely in the unpaved portions of Asia and Africa) is the way they have been almost completely removed from and independent of public opinion and public purview. The U.S. public as a whole neither pays a price nor has an interest in what their soldiers are doing in the less paved parts of the world under the auspices of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.

I could go over why this isn't a good idea, the multiple reasons that cabinet wars and imperial expeditions are not in the best interests of a democracy. The inevitable erosion of liberal governance and the expansion of executive power that occur in wartime. The moral and intellectual hazard of accustoming a people to continual, low-grade expeditionary wars (without immediate costs or consequences to the people bankrolling the wars). The bad habits that governments, troops, and citizens pick up whilst committing mayhem in places to other peoples without either seeing or feeling the effects of the mayhem themselves.

We've effectively turned these damn wars into a third-person shooter game, complete with it's own fucking music video and all, for God's sake. And - although largely unwilling to join the fight ourselves and uncaring about the real people who do - we've turned our pixellated images of them into cartoonish heroes, ridiculously inflated and lionized "warriors" for what should be a warrior-free zone: an industrial democratic republic.

So this "Shooter" has become, for me, a living version of the crayon-drawing of a modern American "warrior" that We the People seem to want; imputed with unlikely and improbable virtues, excused all critical assessment, feted and fetishized and blown up beyond the reality of what soldiers have always been. Your neighbor's idle brother, the smart kid behind the counter at the convenience store, the nice guy your sister dumped because "he was boring", the knucklehead who cut you off at the freeway on-ramp.

What especially got to me on this subject was the fawning reaction this Shooter got when he and his cronies stopped off on Capitol Hill (see the first link above), where the people who should have been his fellow citiens and notional governmental superiors treated him like a bunch of gushing fangirls and fell all over him to praise his work which is, at bottom, no more than any other infantryman has been asked to do in this endless farkling about in central Asia only with fancier kit and more secrecy.

This basically irks the shit out of me, this whole business about fellating the "warriors" and bumper-sticker patriotism and endless painless videogame wars. I don't think it's healthy for a republic and I don't think it's a smart thing for us as the notional sovereigns of the United States to be doing to ourselves.

And this "Shooter" has become the poster child for all of my irritation with my fellow citizens.

The other problem I have with this story is what I think it says about a troubling development within my Army and the U.S. ground troops in general, by the way one of the guys from one of the Navy's Special Operations outfits feels about the rest of the Navy and (by inference) the other military outfits he is forced to share the battlefield with.

The magilla with this Shooter has been his loud complaints about how tough it is to be him, how tough the Special Operations outfits have it, and how - because of that - he and they deserve special consideration; early retirement pension vestment and special benefits if they ETS before they earn their retirement.

By publicly agitating for special privileges for the Special Operations forces - and only the SOF - this Shooter is taking a fire axe to this weak join between the SOF and the line units. By publicly demonstrating his contempt for the guys in the Navy Choir, for the line squids on the carrier decks and in the Stores warehouse at Norfolk this Shooter is fueling the fire of resentment and irritation that these guys, many of them, probably feel for him and his high-speed brethern.

One of the reasons that the U.S. Army and the other U.S. services have been so competent and successful tactically is that they have always been good at working together as a team. Every element in the team; the combat, combat support, and combat service support units, and individuals, recognize their mutual dependence. The guy who kicks down the door depends on the helo driver overhead who depends on the avionics tech back at the FOB who depends on the guy loading the supply truck back at the Corps rear who depends on the PAC clerk working the computer back at Ft. Ben Harrison back in the States. Who, for God's sake, depends on the guy in the 82nd Chorus singing at some fucking high school in Cornhole, Iowa to get the kids all excited about volunteering for the Army.

And one reason all those people work together is the understanding that they're all in the same Army; they all - although some get a little more money and some get to wear some cooler uniforms - get the same basic deal.

They HAVE to work together to win, and the way the service treats their service recognizes that fact. The door-kicker doesn't succeed if the PAC clerk fucks up his pay, his allotment doesn't get to his family, their e-mails get him all fucked up and so that night he's thinking about his sick daughter's not getting TRICARE instead of the people who might be behind the door with a nasty surprise for him and his team.

But the Shooter doesn't care, or probably doesn't even know, about this. And because of that he's busy kicking in a door that I don't think, either as a soldier or a U.S. citizen, we want to open. It does and will do us no good to make our special operations units a sort of Special Republican Guard, and the example of the originals should tell us so.

There's always an entropy in military organizations that works around eliteness. The elites can easily start looking down on everyone else with contempt and everyone else starts envying and resenting the elites.

In Third World armies this can cripple the organization; the Iraqi Republican Guard was a classic of the genre.

The Guard was vastly expanded in the Eighties to ensure the loyalty of an Army fractured by the war with Iran. After the defeat in the Second Gulf War of '91 the Special Republican Guard was created to provide even more "eliteness" loyal to the regime. Each time it was the best guys, the most loyal, the smartest and most technically proficient who were pulled into the "elite".

By 2003 the bulk of the Iraqi Army was just fucking incapable of modern military operations and the U.S. Army went through it like a dose of salts. All that "eliteness"? As useless as a tampon in a typhoon.

The U.S. military is nowhere near as big a jugfuck as the Iraqis were and U.S. society is nothing like the trainwreck that Iraqi society was and is.

But this "Shooter" represents something I haven't seen before in the U.S. military; an elite-unit guy willing to just come out and flat-out say; I'm better than you, I work harder than you, this war (the way it's being fought and my role in it compared to yours) means that I deserve more and better stuff than you.

And those are exactly the sorts of things that led to the Special Republican Guard. We just don't have a Saddam here willing to use them to MAKE a Special Republican Guard.

But there's nothing in human nature or U.S. society that says we can't find one.

And between that and what this "Shooter" nonsense says about our country and our soldiers I can't help but worry at least a little.

Zerks

OK, I admit it; I picked the title for this post mostly because I've always wanted to use the word "zerk" in a blog post title.

But bear with me, because I do have a cunning plan here.

The origin of this post came from something Ed posted over at Gin & Tacos about a USAF Class A mishap. Seems that the zoomies lost a V-22 "Osprey" tilt-rotor transport down in Florida the other day and Ed was harkening back to the halcyon days of his blog-youth when he called down fire and rain on the V-22 for being a massive boondoggle.

It got me thinking to the military kit I've encountered that smelled suspiciously like the someones involved in getting a hold of it had more in mind than getting there fustest with the mostest.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the M782 GAMA Goat ambulance.

I've never really figured out who thought these big bastards were a good idea. They were ginormous, slow, and clumsy. The motor was decent - a three-cylinder Detroit diesel - but the rest of the contraption was a mechanic's nightmare.

They were supposed to be amphibious, so the entire bottom was sealed outside of a couple of screw-in drain plugs. Which made any maintenance that required access to the bottom of the vehicle a frigging huge pain in the ass. The main wiring harness ran underneath the engine block, so if you ever developed a problem with an electrical line you had to pull the entire fuckin' power pack! To make matters worse it didn't float, really; the rubber seal on the tailgate split or tore within hours of leaving the factory, so the thing was always a danger of going to Davy Jones' Locker, while it "swam" by spinning it's tires as paddlewheels which worked about as well as you'd think.

The thing had no spare (the tires and wheels were too freaking huge to carry one) and if you flatted the idea was that you dragged out this "bridge kit" which locked the back part to the front - though it looked like a truck-and-trailer the Goat was actually one vehicle that had a universal joint in the middle - took off one of the back tires from the tractor to replace the flat, put the tractor in 6WD and drove away.

But damn GAMA Goat's the worst feature was the carrier bearing.

The bottom is sealed, remember? So the driveshaft to the rear wheels ran in a channel in the bottom of the trailer from the universal joint to the rear differential. It had a single bearing between the U-joint and the diff, mounted in a metal housing that stuck down below the trailer floor.

The bearing was just a regular old bearing of no particular distinction, and being underneath a tactical truck it tended to get filthy dirty. It was hard to reach - you had to crawl under the trailer to get to it. So drivers doing PMCS tended to skip lubing the carrier bearing. Even if you took the time to get under the damn trailer the grease fitting - the proper name for those little nipple things are "zerks" - tended to be caked with glaur, or had been banged on something and wouldn't take the grease gun nozzle. So the bearing tended to get dry and crusty. And then...

That was brought home to me in a particularly painfully embarrassing way when the carrier bearing of HQ-52 burned up like a vampire under a sunlamp and locked the entire rear driveshaft up tight just as I was crossing the swing bridge at Pedro Miguel Locks one lovely winter afternoon in 1986.

Well, THAT sucked.

The truck was stuck, and so was the bridge, and the entire crew of the Polish freighter waiting for the locks to open ambled over to laugh at the imperialist Yankee scum and his broken-down Goat. The lock-keeper went berserk in Panamanian, and the convoy commander detailed me to wait with the vehicle until the battalion's five-ton wrecker could drive all the way over from the Westside to tow me home.

Because, you see, military equipment tends to live a hard life; it's called upon to go places and do things no sensible civilian equipment would think of. So it makes sense to try and keep that equipment as simple and robust as possible. The M782's carrier bearing violated that rule. And I payed for it that day. Imagine if I'd been racing to pick up wounded men in combat. It doesn't pay to think about. Men would have died because of that damn carrier bearing, the operators who didn't maintain it, and the people who designed and fielded that vehicle.


Now the MV-22 is a just a VSTOL transport; in effect, a sort of quasi-helicopter. The way I see it the only real advantage it has over the current fleet of USMC rotary-wing aircraft is the in-flight speed.

But in my opinion the in-flight speed requirement is the weakest argument for the aircraft. I don't see that it has ever really been proven to be critical to the design – i.e., the USMC has never really explained why the 100-knot increase in maximum speed over the helos is that important.

Supposedly it's because it allows the V-22 to keep pace with fast movers, but since when in the past sixty-some years have our transport aircraft required fighter escorts?

Seems to me that this is really a macguffin. The guys want this thing because it's just flat-out, stomp-down fuckin' COOL.

And that's when I start thinking about carrier bearings.

Because I think the other issue - the bigger, eventually murderous issue - about the MV-22 that's going to bite the USMC and the aircraft's other users in the ass is that the tilt-rotors are going to prove to be a maintenance nightmare that will become a monster as these airframes age. Mission capable rate is already low – below 60% between FY09 and FY12 for the USMC, and combat equipment gets used hard, and fiddly bits like the tilt-rotors tend to age poorly. The maintenance estimates for the V-22 fleet has just been bumped up over 60%, and IMO this is waaaayyyyy too optimistic.


And that's just now, when everything is all shiny and new and all the grease fittings are clean. The dark days are to come, as these airframes age and the tilty bits in the rotors get worn and need more and more fixing. And we go years and years without a combat mission that required fighter escort for these transports to make everyone wonder why they seemed so important. And the cost of each aircraft goes up and the numbers of the mission-capable units go down and...

In the end it isn't that the USMC and the USAF and their contractors are jonesing for these things. I was a GI, and GIs, even and sometimes especially commissioned GIs, even admirals and generals, get a hard-on for cool shit, and what's cooler than an aircraft that's like a real-life Transformer?

Nope. The thing that rings my bell is that nobody in Congress seemed or seems willing to question the entire NEED for them, or the supposed missions that can't be performed without them.

After all, it's the Congress that's supposed to be the gatekeeper for all things warlike in our country. They're supposed to debate the weighty issues of going to war and making peace, of supplying the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen with the equipment, training, and geopolitical cunning they need to fight and win.

And it should have been the Congress to ask the hard questions; why is this aircraft necessary? What missions can it do that others cannot? Why is THIS aircraft necessary? What makes the need for speed so critical? What does this aircraft provide that another machine, or a combination of others, cannot - as, say, a helicopter can not - that will require the troopers riding in them to hope that everything works as designed and that the designs are good, that the tilt-rotors work just so all the time, every time, and that every single zerk is perfectly clean and shiny and new and smooth and full of grease.

De Morituris

I have a post that has been my standard for Memorial Day for years. But this year I'd like to think less about those gone than those still here.

Since 2003 the U.S. seems to have slipped into a bizarre schizophrenia. Our attitude towards the expeditionary wars we have ginned up since the end of the punitive campaign in Afghanistan has varied between a cynical resignation to a hesitant distaste. Meanwhile, our attitude towards the ridiculously small, self-selected group of people who have fought them "for" us has varied between a sort of passive bumper-sticker patriotism to an exaggeratedly disproportionate "gratitude". Charlie Pierce has a fairly good summation of this;

"Now, for the veterans of the two wars of the past decade, we're giving them all kinds of favors and goodies and public applause, and maybe even a parade or two, overcompensating our brains out, but, ultimately, what does all the applause mean at the end of the day? We are apparently fine with two more years of vets coming home from Afghanistan, from a war that 60 percent of us say we oppose. But we support The Troops. Will we become a more skeptical nation the next time a bunch of messianic fantasts concoct a war out of lies? Perhaps, but we support The Troops. Will we tax ourselves sufficiently to pay for what it costs to care for the people we send to one endless war and one war based on lies? Well, geez, we'll have to think about that, but we support The Troops."

The Army I joined, the post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan Army of the early Eighties, had a pretty cynical attitude. We'd seen our brothers, the men who were our platoon sergeants and First Sergeants, used up and then tossed away in RIFs after the end of a war that we tried desperately to pretend that we'd "won" because we were never beaten in the field. We referred to the Army as "the Green Machine" and had a pretty good understanding what the priority of "accomplishing the mission" meant to the "welfare of the troops" if the mission meant that a lot of those troops would die for and in the usual ratio of "pointless" to "contributing-to-the-accomplishing-the-mission".

We understood - because we'd seen it or lived through it - that our "leaders" both civilian and military would "lead" us into unprofitable wars, lie to us about their cunning plans to "win" them, and then toss us aside like used contraceptive devices after the inevitable ugly mess ensued. We had heard the rhetoric about "freedom" and "peace" and knew that as often as those terms meant their face value they were a happy-face sticker for "whatever advances our policy" and "make a wasteland". We were ready to do the things our government told us to do while being pretty cynical about the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that determined the way our government would decide what those things were and how they would sell them to the herd.

This stands in fairly dramatic contrast to the current volunteer force, where supposedly: "Six out of seven soldiers and Army civilians, [a new study] reveals, trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for the Army, and 90 percent of those surveyed remain willing to put the Army’s needs above their own."

This trusting and sacrificing seem both disproportionate and inappropriate after the concatenation of lies, damn lies, and statistics that have characterized the "War on Terror". It would seem to me that having watched one administration lie it's way one war and another continue a second long after it's sell-buy date that it would behoove my country and all Americans to pause on the day we set aside to honor those killed in wars and consider just exactly what it means to "trust" their "leaders" with the lives of their fellow citizens absent any indication that that government, and those leaders, are willing to do the hard calculus to ensure that the exchange of those lives in return for the advancement of the national interest is a transaction that justifies the cost in wrecked lives and shattered bodies.

So. I'd like to think that this Memorial Day that my fellow citizens would do more than just pat the yellow-ribbon magnet on their bumper in a hat-tip to those of my fellow soldiers who went to do their nation's bidding and never returned. I'd like to think that those citizens would remember that the intent of the Founders and Framers was that We the People are supposed to be sovereign.

That it is supposed to be in our names those lives are given or taken, and that if we allow - or, worse, encourage - those who we elect to throw those lives away in the pursuit of lies, or impossibilities, and then once those lies and that nonsense are exposed, do not hold those people and ourselves to account, then we have failed to honor our pledge to them, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, hey; I like tradition as much as the next guy.

Operation Random Name

James Wolcott finds the name of our Wings Over Libya adventure pretty funny:

"Isn't Odyssey Dawn part of the fab Carnival Cruises fleet?" tweets Tom Watson.

To me, Odyssey Dawn suggests the name of a Seventies porn star, one of those spacier ones who made a couple of films until the prospect of working again with Ron Jeremy sent her back into the soap bubble from whence she came, and off she floated.

Yes, I can almost hear it now, the voice of coming attractions announcing: "Odyssey Dawn in Harold Lime's Hot Dog Girls II, starring Leslee Bovee, Desiree Cousteau, and introducing Sandy Melons as the Surfer Chick..."

Other talking heads had other ideas, including "a Carnival cruise ship", "a Yes album", "a stripper", "a Stephenie Meyer novel", "a Tom Clancy novel", "a Philip K Dick novel", (that's a lot of novels!), "a Cabbage Patch kid", "The name of one of Frank Zappa's kids", and "a straight-to-video movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme".

Personally, I kind of like the idea that the name the DoD has tagged this thing with is just two random words. The fakey "code names" that had been ginned up to make the little wars they designated sound cooler and funn-er than they really were, like "Just Cause", "Desert Storm", "Iraqi Freedom" were making me throw up a little in the back of my mouth.

But either way, we've come a long way from the days of "Operation Killer" and "Operation Ripper".

I'm still not sure whether that's good, bad, or just...different.

Men at Work

While the world watches Japan and Libya, the daily business of war in central Asia grinds on. Good glimpse of it here, from David Axe at Danger Room.Every day I'm amazed and humbled that we have young men and women ready to do our country's bidding in the hard and unforgiving places without protest or demur. Regardless of what you believe about their mission, there is no mistaking their quality.

Friendly Skies

Speculation is rife in the chilly precincts of Washington D.C. about the prospect of showing Charlie-Sheen-level-nutzoid dictator Muhammar Gadaffi how no-fly-y a U.S.(U.K./NATO/EU???) no-fly zone might be.I happened to catch "Good Morning America" the other day and, just before changing channels to prevent gouging out my own eyeballs with a grapefruit spoon to stop the horror that is American network "news" I caught the male talking head "interviewing" U.S. ambassador to the UN Sue Rice and I thought the man was going to pop an actual testicle with the vehemence he used to squeal "But are you ready NOW to enforce a no-fly ZONE!"

Rice's response was, sadly, the worst sort of diplospeak and made her sound both confused and deceptive, an Ann Coulter parody of a timid liberal. She kept replying that the Administration was "...examining the options..." and "...had the situation on the front burner..." and asking "Can do that squeally thing again for me, bitch?"

OK, she didn't actually SAY the last one. But I'll bet she wanted to.

What's frustrating, to me, anyway, is the way this entire business is like living 2003 over again.

Again we're being bombed with rhetoric that seems disconnected from reality. Again we're being presented with a binary solution; the neocon/liberal interventionists are shrieking "go", almost everyone else is sitting back mumbling "ummm..."

But it seems to me that this is as perfect an illustration of the sort of thing that jim likes to hammer on; a vast confusion of what U.S. military power CAN do with what it needs to or SHOULD do.

David Axe points out the obvious; we bitchslapped the Libyans in the Eighties and their technical and tactical capabilities are, if anything, worse now. Could we ground the Libyan aircraft?
Sure.

But's that not the important question. That question would be; what then?

Because, in effect, by sending warplaces ovr Libyan airspace we would be buying a piece of the anti-Gadaffi...whatever the hell is going on on the ground there. Which nobody, including the U.S. intelligence agencies, to judge by the variety of witless prosody emerging from U.S. government figures, has anything but the vaguest idea. So we'd become associated with whatever ends up in Benghazi after the star of Two-and-a-half-Whackos gets his pink slip.

And we have no flippin' idea what or who that will be. Sending U.S. aircraft over Libya would be nice for the Libyans, but it would be the geopolitical equivalent of John Travolta's ration plan from "Look Who's Talking": "Could be lunch meat, could be peaches. Who knows? Just cause it's garbage don't mean it don't taste good."

Sadly for the Libyans, the overriding mission of U.S. military aircraft is to defend the U.S., its interests, and its citizens.

(Interestingly, Spenser Ackerman thinks that someone in the Pentagon (either the SecDef or the CJCS) doesn't like the idea, either.)

Are we ready to deal with what would come after Gadaffi? And are we ready to up the ante if the no-fly zone doesn't "work? Bob Farley explains:

"As such, advocates of a no fly zone have to answer two difficult questions. First, to what extent do we really want to be responsible for installing the next regime in Tripoli? This is what we’d be doing, because a no fly zone is a military intervention intended to help one party win. Second, what if Gaddafi wins in spite of the enforcement of a no fly zone? There was a point at which Saddam Hussein seemed utterly dead in 1991, with a no fly zone appearing to be the coup de grace. Committing the United States to regime change in the form of enforcing a no fly zone made 2003 radically more likely, if not inevitable.

Advocates of a no fly zone, even those I respect, haven’t answered these questions to my satisfaction."

Hey, I loves me some blowing shit up - I was a cannon-cocker, after all. And blowing Libyans up? No sweat-di-dah.

But, frankly, without knowing what is to come after the Insane Clown Posse, or how far we would be willing to go to stop the clown act, why would I want, or the U.S. want, or ANY sane Western individual want to intervene militarily in another Islamic country?Because the first couple of tries worked so friggin well?