A Fine Whine

Seems like ten years into the Global War on (Some Kinds of People Using Some Forms of) Terror, at least one jet-jockey isn't feeling the love:

"The last time we bought this few aircraft was in 1916, when we were still the Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps. In just FY13, the Army and the Navy will buy more aircraft than the Air Force will buy in the entire FYDP [Future Years Defense Plan]! Everything I see indicates that senior leadership doesn’t understand, or worse, doesn’t care, why we have an independent Air Force."

Heavens to Key West! Is there rebellion in the hangars? Anyone out there know whether this is a good indication of the condition of the USAF, or just one fighter jock feeling miffed?

Libya Redux

"Libya has no army. It has no government. These things exist on paper, but in practice, Libya has yet to recover from the long maelstrom of Qaddafi’s rule. The country’s oil is being pumped again, but there are still no lawmakers, no provincial governors, no unions and almost no police. Streetlights in Tripoli blink red and green and are universally ignored. Residents cart their garbage to Qaddafi’s ruined stronghold, Bab al-Aziziya, and dump it on piles that have grown mountainous, their stench overpowering. Even such basic issues as property ownership are in a state of profound confusion. Qaddafi nationalized much of the private property in Libya starting in 1978, and now the old owners, some of them returning after decades abroad, are clamoring for the apartments and villas and factories that belonged to their grandparents. I met Libyans brandishing faded documents in Turkish and Italian, threatening to take up arms if their ancestral tracts of land were not returned."

I know this is not news, but; you cannot bomb a place into civilization.

The reason I didn't want my country getting involved in Libya's problems was not because I hate Libyans.

It's because through thirty-odd years of adulthood I have never seen military force "solve" problems.

Weapons can, sometimes, if everyone involved is smart, and cautious, and above all, lucky, kill people who are causing problems and destroy objects that are threatening lives, liberties, or security.

But without some sort of willingness, capability, and the resources to employ both to either rebuild or construct something better than what was killed and destroyed the result is madness:

"We’re the national army, we want to go to the front line.’ They didn’t stay one hour. One of them pissed his pants. They say 35,000 men have joined the national army. I tell you, if all 35,000 came here, they could not get past our 200 men. Until there’s a true government, no one will give up power.”

No shit?

Because - and the post-civil-war Libya should remind us, again, that military force simply replaces one set of problems with another.

We had a very impassioned debate here back in March a year ago, about our ideas, and ideals, concerning the West's part in the Libyan civil war.

And yet here we are, a year later but largely silent, as Libya devolves into the sort of terrifying half-civilized ruin that sounds more and more like the aftermaths of the other disastrous internal collapses that are Somalia, and Liberia, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Chechnya...

And yet...I listen to the rhetoric that occasionally fountains up regarding Iran and think; who ARE these people who seem to think that "more rubble, less trouble"? And why do they not tremble when they look at Libya today?

I did then. Back in March 2011 my summation to seydlitz was:

"1. I think that the U.S., and Obama, will get absolutely zero political or military capital out of this. If it works, it will be treated like Kosovo was, or Gulf II was, and will be overwhelmed by domestic events.

2. I think the rebels will turn out to be more shambolic, less competent, and more vicious that we think. I think Libya will, in the long run, turn out to be the same mess it has been since independence. In other words, I think that all this will mean a cup of warm spit (see above).

3. I think the very best that will come of this is that some people who would have died won't. But that's a very dim prediction, and it might just end up the other way around, if Gaddafi's people turn out to be more tenacious, and the rebels more vituperative, than they look right now."

Well, Gaddafi's people were a little more tenacious but we flattened in the end. But from the linked article above it seems that the rebels are, if not more vituperative, at least as incompetent, shambolic, and vicious as they seemed to me then and still do.

Second Guangzhou 1841

This month's "battle that changed history" over at GFT.

Siege engines of love,

mad dogs, Englishmen, and no Chinese allowed.

"History" can bite you in the ass

Back in late Summer, 2002, a retired flag officer friend from our yacht club returned from DC with an interesting tidbit. He said that an invasion of Iraq was inevitable. When pressed for more, he said that his former colleagues at the Five Sided Building sorrowfully told him that the decision was made, and that all that was remaining was to take care of was the "justification". When one of those in the group asked him if the military was counseling against it, he said that any opposing view was to be submitted with a request for retirement as the cover sheet. Interestingly, he noted, the number of flag officers requesting retirement "earlier than normal" had risen significantly in the preceding months, an occurrence that the various Military Times newspapers had already commented on. IIRC, the Times had simply suggested that it was as a result of Rumsnamara's efforts to reshape the military. One of the great "mysteries" (to me) of that time was Colin Powell's seeming complicity in the whole thing. Whether you like him or not, he spent too many years in uniform to be so easily misled. All I could attribute it to was his previous 30+ years of obeying the lawful orders of POTUS inhibiting the ability to be a lone voice that stands up and says, "This is bullshit, Sir, and I cannot be a party to it". Now I wonder if he was just being "trusting" of the crap fed to him as a sort of coping mechanism? A pathetic coping mechanism, at that, considering the wasted treasure, both US and Iraqi, that resulted. Powell has now written his memoirs, and joins the ranks of those who state, without reservation, that the decision to invade Iraq was done without discussion or debate. What he says is pretty damning, not just to GWB , Cheney, Rice and Co, but to himself. Whether Powell's admission lifts any blame from his shoulders, I am appreciative that he has added to the growing body of evidence that supports exposing the reckless behavior of GWB and Co. Carl Rove said that he could create a "reality" of his choosing. What Rove and his disciples fail to understand is that when their "created reality" passes into history and is subjected to objective analysis, it can easily bite you in the ass.

"Intimate History of an Attitude", 1942 . . .

From Howard K Smith's classic Last Train from Berlin:

A few months before, the Germans had, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, marched in the Rhineland. A friend of mine and I bicycled to Worms to see what we could see. The town was not in war, yet, but it was the best imitation of a town-in-war I have ever seen. The streets were filled with soldiers. On every corner forests of new sign posts told the way of parking ground for motorized units, regimental headquarters, divisional headquarters, corps headquarters, field hospitals. We elbowed our way the length of the main street and saw not another man in civilian dress. That evening we spent in a beer-hall, in whose upper stories we had rented rooms. The beer-hall was packed with fine-looking young officers, drinking, shouting, singing. The tables were wet with spilled beer and the air hazy with blue cigarette smoke.

I do not know what it was, except that the turn of this reaction was logically due - it was perhaps partly that the beer had loosened up my imagination - but watching the faces of these men, my own age, my own generation, caused me to think of their military culture, for the first time, in terms of me and my culture. For the first time I thought of Germany, not as an academic subject studiously to gather facts about for discussion at home, but as a real, direct and imminent threat to the existence of a civilization which gathers facts and discusses. A schism deeper than the Grand Canyon separated my world from that of the young man across from me, whose face bore fencing scars and carried a monocle over one glassy eye. The fetishes of my world, the values it worshiped, if it did not always attain them, were contained in words like "Reason", "Think", "Truth". His fetishes and his values were "Feel", "Obey", "Fight". There was no base of pride for me in this involuntary comparison; rather, a terror like that which paralyses a child alone in the dark took hold of me. For, my world, with all the good qualities I thought it had, was in terms of force, weak; his was mighty, powerful, reckless. It screamed defiance at my world from the housetops. One had to be deaf not to hear it. (Summer 1936)

The title is the chapter heading from HKS's book. Attitude. That seems to be the main problem. There is something quite different about HKS's perspective as well. Notice there is no hint of the American exceptionalism that runs riot among US pundits today, that forms that basis for everything that follows. Why? Two reasons I think. First off let's look at the cultural component. HKS was from the South, Louisiana to be exact. Why should that make a difference? Because he knew what happened to a culture/political community when "history happened" . . . C. Vann Woodward wrote about it in his essay "The Irony of Southern History". There is no trace of American exceptionalism here:

. . . It explains in large part the national faith in unlimited progress, in the efficacy of material means, in the importance of mass and speed, the worship of success, and the belief in the invincibility of American arms.

The legend has been supported by an unbroken succession of victorious wars. Battles have been lost, and whole campaigns - but not wars. In the course of their national history Americans, who have been called a bellicose though unmartial people, have fought eight wars, and so far without so much as one South African fiasco such as England encountered in the heyday of her power. This unique good fortune has isolated America, I think rather dangerously, from the common experience of the rest of mankind, all the great peoples of which have without exception known the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation. It has fostered the tacit conviction that American ideals, values, and principles inevitably prevail in the end. That conviction has never received a name, nor even so much explicit formulation as the old concept of Manifest Destiny. It is assumed, not discussed. And the assumption exposes us to the temptation of believing that we are somehow immune from the forces of history.

The country that has come nearest to approximating the American legend of success and victory is England. The nearness of continental rivals and the precariousness of the balance of power, however, bred in the English an historical sophistication that prevented the legend from flourishing as luxuriantly as it has in the American climate. Only briefly toward the end of the Victorian period did the legend threaten to get out of hand in England. Arnold J. Toynbee has recalled those piping days in a reminiscent passage. "I remember watching the Diamond Jubilee procession myself as a small boy," he writes. "I remember the atmosphere. It was: well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there - forever! There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all that. I am sure, if I had been a small boy in New York in 1897 I should have felt the same. Of course, if I had been a small boy in 1897 in the Southern part of the United States, I should not have felt the same; I should then have known from my parents that history had happened to my people in my part of the world."

The South has had its full share of illusions, fantasies, and pretensions, and it has continued to cling to some of them with an astonishing tenacity that defies explanation. But the illusion that "history is something unpleasant that happens to other people" is certainly not one of them - not in the face of accumulated evidence and memory to the contrary. . .

This perspective is something HKS actually had in common with those German officers in Worms. They too knew that history "could happen". What made HKS different is that he was not willing to put his faith in a "great man". One who was thought destined to lead the nation to glory, to revenge over their enemies. This leader would lead and take on the responsibility for the entire people, the army acting as executer of his will, with the responsibility his alone. A pre-modern notion to say the least, but common to all sorts of notions of human perfection requiring blind, unquestioning faith. Something to be rejected by a product of the Enlightenment who also understood tragedy such as HKS.

The second reason for HKS's "realism" that precluded the current virus of American exceptionalism, was historically based. He had come of age during the Great Depression, having been born in 1914, so he knew that the US as "the greatest economy in the world" had a hallow ring to it. In fact being a man of his times with critical faculties he could not but notice a strong connection between corporate control and fascism. The Nazis were not anti-capitalist at all, but supported the cartels. Assuming a firm link between democracy and corporate capitalism would have been ludicrous for HKS and many others who considered themselves unclouded by ideology.

This brings up the question as to whether there were any similarities between HKS's view and the view he assumed of the German officer sitting across from him at the Worms beer hall. I think we can make an argument that there was a very strong common view. That is in the instrumentality of technology, of the technological approach. That technology was essentially value-less and could be adopted by whatever ideology without being affected or affecting that ideological view. Thus later in his book, HKS advocates the use of strategic bombing to destroy the will of the German people to fight on, in fact he advocated mass destruction of a culture and people to whom he had much affinity.

Taking a broader view was Lewis Mumford writing in 1944:

Unlike his liberal and democratic opponents, Oswald Spengler drew the inevitable conclusion from this situation. If values are unreal and if humane purposes are chimerical, then even scientific technique must ultimately become subservient to brute force: the need for rational restraint and self-discipline of any kind disappears. Thus technicism leads directly to irrationality - and the cult of barbarian power salvages the technician's otherwise growing sense of frustration and futility. It is no accident that Germany produced both the most mechanized type of personality in tis robot-like soldiers and civilians, and the most unrestrained reaction against humane discipline, in the form of an exultant sub-animality.

Spengler ignored all the creative tendencies in modern life, except those associated with the machine: little though he relished the thought, his essential creed favored Russia and the US even more than it did the fascist countries. Spengler accepted as "real" only those elements which emphasized modern man's automatism, his deflation of values, his subservience to mechanical organization, and the savage irrationality which takes the place of reason in other parts of the personality. And because these forces cannot be confined within their original frontiers, Spengler predicted, far more accurately that hopeful philosophers, the disastrous downward course that modern civilization is still following at a steadily accelerating pace. Through its emotional impact, Spengler's word as a whole constitutes a morbid Sage of Barbarism. It began as a poem of defeat; it finally became an epic justification for the fascist attack on the very humanity of man - an attack that has already gone so far that even democratic peoples have torpidly swallowed as their own, without retching, the fascist doctrine of totalitarian air warfare: one of the deepest degradations of our age.

Spengler's day is not yet over. These are ominous times and Spengler is like a black crow, hoarsely cawing, whose prophetic wings case a shadow over our whole landscape. The democratic people cannot conquer their fascist enemies until they have conquered in their own hearts and minds the underlying barbarism that unites them with their foes. In the passive barbarism that the US now boasts under the cover of technical progress, there is no promise whatever of victory of even bare survival. Without a deep regeneration and renewal, the external triumph of American machinery and arms will but hasten the downfall of the Western World. Only those who are ready for that renewal with all its rigors, its sacrifices, its hard adventures, and entitled to celebrate even our temporary victories.

My War

--h/t Deryle

"Quit smiling. What are you smiling for?
This is an arrest." This is your mug shot,
not your prom photo. I was smiling from happiness;
my government will not disappear me
--Peace Demonstration
Maxine Hong Kingston

Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it
--George Santayana

Lt. Stanley McChrystal enters an army in the late 70's
that is broken, riddled with drugs and race problems.
The soldiers aren't very good:
a collection of drunks, dirtbags,
junkies and scammers.
--The Operators, Hastings (171)
___________________

Ranger has noticed a dismissive attitude toward the United States Army that fought in Vietnam, particularly at the Bad Boy lad's sites. He is not sure the reason for the snitty attitudes, but it seems like the lads doth protest too much. Their attitude ranges from supercilious to dismissive, implying that the U.S. experience in Vietnam is passe, and today's ranks are far superior in technology, doctrine, etc.

This arrogance of dismissing the recent past as Old School and no longer relevant is short-sighted and dangerous. Wars are not fought ex nihilo, and that certainly holds for today's supposed efforts at Counterinsurgency (COIN) or Counterterrorism (CT) .

Today's military can focus on Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC) and pretend that it is a real war, when it is actually (fill in the blank.) In fact, today's Army has slack that we did not have in the 1960's and 70's, despite the rhetoric of how the last decade's stress has been so professionally addressed.

The U.S. fought a war in the Republic of Vietnam while also being deployed to address the Warsaw Pact. My service in Vietnam was preceded by a line Infantry assignment facing this threat on the German border -- these were real threats. Today, the U.S. faces no such opponent.

As for combat ability, today's Army (USMC) has not fought any battles against hardcore enemy Battalions, Regiments or Divisions. The RVN battles against enemy units with organic artillery and severe unit discipline are legend. Enemy supply columns actually rolled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail like rush hour traffic in downtown Baghdad. The enemy had the "division slice" of support for their operations, to include timely and accurate intelligence on U.S. intentions and capabilities.

The enemy in Vietnam had the will, the capability and the intent to prepare the battlefield at higher echelons, something unheard of in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©). The threat faced in Vietnam was real and vicious ... what equivalent did we see after the fall of Baghdad or the months following the invasion of Afghanistan? The Taliban has no Regimental or above combat capabilities.

Per U.S. forces, we had one echelon above Corps, meaning we had a real Theatre Army scenario, to include a Theatre Army Commander with Corps supporting. This means not only did we have Theatre - Corps - Division assets, but we also had the on-call abilities of the RVN forces including all of the usual suspects: Artillery, Aviation, Combat Support and Combat Service Support. We operated as an Army, not as door-kicking combat Brigades sans higher assets.

So what's the reason for the dismissive attitude toward my Army as being anything less than professional? Where is the evidence that any draftee fought less professionally than did the forces in the PWOT? From whence this lack of fraternity?

The troops in the Vietnam War were largely draftees and they earned their battle streamers with the same valor as did troops in all previous U.S. wars. What battles in Afghanistan or Iraq demonstrated the level of violence experienced by the Infantry units in the Vietnam War?

Further, there is a logical fallacy built into the argument of the Old Army detractors who say the 60's and 70's Army was "amateurish". If that is so, then we must accept that the Warsaw Pact was neutralized by a bunch of quacks. The next illogical step is to believe that today's professional volunteer force is totally responsible for the defeat of al Qaeda, despite the fact that less than 200 al Qaeda operatives exist worldwide (per former Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta.)

Framing the argument qua the Andrew Exum crowd, a crowd of amateurs defended the U.S. against Warsaw Pact with thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and millions of soldiers, while we are now ably protected against a laughable threat by the New Warriors.

Taking their argument to its logical ends, one must also believe the military leadership during the 60's was also incompetent, though carrying experience from two wars before assuming leadership in Vietnam. Contrast that with the present day Professional Army which sports a dearth of combat experience at the highest levels. The depth of experience was greater in Ranger's time frame than it is today, contrary to the hype.

And this is why we need poppy eradication programs in Afghanistan (though the Bushmills tap will always flow.)

Arlo Guthrie

I went to see Arlo last night for a couple of hours and a bit of intermission.

He did this song and I thought I'd share it with you all.

Next July 14, Woody turns 100 and in the same month Arlo turns 65.

Enjoy!  :)

bb