War, the military, COIN and stuff

The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army

 

The three and four star generals who have run the war in Iraq have received quite a bit of ink over the past several years, with General David Petraeus leading the pack in column inches dedicated to following his performance. He’s even had two books written about him, following his progress during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and during the Surge in 2007-2008. But the focus on him has come at the expense of a crop of other top generals who have also felt the pressure of leading American troops in combat—and reading The Fourth Star, the illuminating new book about the four generals who have led the fight in Iraq over the past six years, one is reminded of just how neglected these men have been.

The quick histories that have come out of the war thus far have largely painted George Casey as something of a Dostoevskian character, an uncreative, one-dimensional foil to the dash and artistry of Petraeus and his team, and while this book doesn’t flip that on its head—nor is Casey’s lack of creativity given a pardon—it does breathe some life into the rigid portrayal of Casey, a man whose leadership will likely be treated unkindly by history. But it must be said that Casey did “get” counterinsurgency, doing things like setting up a COIN academy at Taji to train incoming officers, among other initiatives. The problem is that the direction he received from Washington was at times confused, and the political infighting in the

West Wing

didn’t give him the political space to do anything but focus on training the Iraqi Security Forces, something he often did blindly and with too much emphasis on raw numbers at the expense of truly focusing on the population. By contrast, Petraeus, whose skills and political talent are undisputed, assumed command at a time when the White House finally took a decisive stand on the direction of the war. Also, by 2007 the Sunnis were already successfully fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province; many of the militias in Baghdad had essentially fought themselves into exhaustion; and Baghdad neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed to a significant degree. Easy, hagiographic Surge narratives often gloss over these salient facts, and future historians must be careful not to ignore the social landscape Petraeus inherited.

The book expands its focus from these two men—who unfortunately have already begun to descend into caricature in the popular imagination—to include two other pivotal characters, generals Peter Chiarelli and John Abizaid, men who also played a critical role in the war in Iraq. Chiarelli and Abizaid are as complex as any other character in the Iraq saga, and despite their long and distinguished careers, will be invariably be lumped in to the Pre-Surge era of failure in Iraq. Neither can be excused for the failures of judgment, but Jaffe and Cloud do the men a service in giving us a more complete picture of their careers from young officers to the most powerful field commanders in the U.S. Army. Chiarelli in particular—who is currently Vice Chief of Staff of the Army—emerges as something of a tragic figure who agonizes over the failures of his beloved Army to make any significant progress in Iraq, despite his zeal in tackling public works projects that fail repeatedly. He was also bitterly disappointed not to be given command in Iraq in 2007, after leading the 1^st Calvary Division in Baghdad, then commanding Multi-National Corps-Iraq, before being sent back to the Pentagon in favor of Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno.

Significantly, all four of these men shared the struggle of taking the “broken” Army of the 1970s and rebuilding it into the unparalleled fighting force it is today. The book is a welcome contribution to the literature of the war, and is an eminently readable long-form character sketch—broken up among four protagonists—that traces the history of the post-Vietnam U.S. Army as well as any other book of recent vintage.

The most illuminating aspect of the book is the look inside “Sosh,” the Social Sciences Department at the West Point Military Academy. The department played a critical and often overlooked role in the formation of Army culture following Vietnam, fostering unfettered debate about the war and the Army’s way forward following the American pullout. But there are also dangers for officers who wish to move back into combat arms after a sojourn in the department. Chiarelli and Petraeus both had an extraordinarily hard time moving back into the ranks after their time in Sosh, because in taking an intellectual retreat, they failed to punch their infantry commander tickets, something that is still the mark of a leader in the service. The book does just as much to explain the politics of moving up in today’s Army as it gives us some much-needed perspective of the culture that fostered the leadership that oversaw the darkest days of the war in Iraq.

The Good Soldiers

There is no bigger temptation, or greater mistake, a journalist can make when covering troops in combat than to insert him or herself into the narrative. The best reporters—like Dexter Filkins and C.J. Chivers to name just two—hover somewhere in the background, giving a first-hand account of the daily lives of the troops and the world they inhabit while remaining invisible in the overall narrative they construct.

This narrative approach is one of the reasons that The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is so effective, and so devastating. He doesn’t so much tell the stories of the men of the 2/16 “Rangers”—an infantry battalion sent into Baghdad in 2007 for a 15-month tour during the “Surge”—as let their story spill out onto the page in a proud, anguished, and confused roar. Quite simply, there hasn’t been a book by a journalist about the war in Iraq quite like this one.

This isn’t an anti-war book. It is simply a book about what men experience when their political leaders commit them to combat, and the ways those men find to try and complete their mission. It is also a book about the uncountable ways, both small and large, physical and mental, that young men and their leaders force themselves to perform feats of heroism, gut through acts of sheer will, and show moments of real love while fighting a war that only exists at the level of what they can see at any given moment. Daily headlines, bland casualty reports, political disagreements and large geopolitical questions tend to fog the intimate, personal realities of combat, but Finkel compassionately yet bluntly catalogs them in amazing detail, steering clear of making any political statements while novelistically playing the political fights in Washington against the roadside bombs and mortar attacks the 2/16 experienced on a daily basis in Baghdad.     

Finkel spent a total of eight months with the 2/16 during their deployment, living with them, talking to them before, during and after missions, heading out of the gate of their small Forward Operating Base and capturing the feelings and coping mechanisms of everyone from the lowliest private to the Lieutenant Colonel who led them. It is an absolutely brutal book—one of the few must-reads of the war—and beautiful in its own way. It is a book about war and its costs, and what men do when placed in impossible situations.

Bradley Graham Book Salon

You can read the whole thing at Firedoglake here. My intro started off like this:

In the spring and summer of 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld busied himself putting together a detailed briefing for Congressional leaders and national security officials that would outline where he saw threats in the post Cold War world. In many respects, he was on the money, focusing his presentation on terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyberwarfare, and rogue nations. The plan was to alarm Congress enough to give Rumsfeld the political backing he needed to undertake a massive overhaul of how the Pentagon did business, and to drag the American military out of its Cold War mindset and into the realm of complex 21^st century threats.  

It was to be Rumsfeld’s blueprint for his tenure as Secretary of Defense, the “next Mr. X article” as one of his aides said, comparing it to the famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article by George F. Keenan that laid out the policy of containment that the United States would largely follow until the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

But the briefings were never presented as Rumsfeld had planned. The first one was scheduled for September 17, 2001, but by that point the case that Rumsfeld wanted to present had already been made in the form of jetliners used as missiles aimed at American civilian and military targets. While the 9/11 attacks in one sense interrupted Rumsfeld’s plans for the transformation of the American military from a heavy force structured to fight two near peer competitors simultaneously into a lighter, networked force that uses the latest technologies to move quickly across several theaters; in another sense the technological revolution spurred by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped to bring the Rumsfeld dream into reality—though he never seemed able to fully grasp how to manage this change.  

Rumsfeld is a study in infuriating contradictions. An intelligent, driven, energetic man who was successful both in a previous stint in government—he was a Congressman, then Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense in the Ford administration—as well as in the private sector, he seemed to fall apart as Bush’s SecDef. During the critical years from 2001-2006, Rumsfeld is revealed in Bradley Graham’s book to be a bullying micromanager who complains about the number of water glasses on the table for Pentagon lunch meetings and sends so many needling memos—some of them about how to write memos—that underlings in the Pentagon referred to them as “snowflakes.” He becomes involved in so many of the mundane staffing decisions at the Pentagon, and forces his way into so many beuracratic turf battles with other members of the Bush administration and Congress, that you wonder where he found the time to plan two wars. To take on all these tasks while continuing to push for transformation of the Pentagon’s culture, hardware, strategic concepts and daily operations is a nearly impossible task, and Rumsfeld’s ultimate failure is that while pushing in so many directions, he rarely seemed interested in answers, instead confining himself to keep pushing for more ideas, and asking more questions. He was a micromanager who also was fond of asking the big questions, but never actually got around to doing the heavy lifting of answering them. Robert Soule, the Pentagon’s chief program analyst at the time, told Graham that “Rumsfeld had the reputation coming in as a really decisive guy, but he wasn’t at all.” 

...and you can read the rest over at FDL.

Book Salon on Sunday

If on Sunday afternoon you decide that you’re sick of being outside in the sunshine, come on over to Firedoglake.com at 5pm, where I’ll be hosting a Book Salon with Bradley Graham, author of By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a pretty solid first draft of history and all that. Rummy and his wife sat down with Graham while for the book, but so did lots of people who have a “less charitable” view of the former SecDef. It’s a pretty balanced work, without being stenographic. In the end though, the song remains the same: the guy was a complete failure as Secretary of Defense.

Channel Surfing in Riyadh

Whatever else you can say about Neil MacFarquhar’s new geopolitical travelogue about his years in the Middle East, you have to give the book its due for what might be the best title in recent memory.

This semi-comical mouthful comes from an e-mail that the crack Hizbollah media shop sends to reporters on their birthday, and MacFarquhar uses it as a jumping-off point for his at times depressing exploration of the myriad ways in which politics and religion define all aspects of life throughout the region. Sprinkle into the pot a variety of longstanding grievances against the West (particularly Israel and the United States), and the end result is a dangerous, contradictory brew of inferiority and xenophobia. This is the world that MacFarquhar, who served as Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times from 2001 to 2006, tries in his own quiet way to untangle.

The Middle East that MacFarquhar sketches in the book is in the midst of a grudging, sometimes painful transition—the latest in a chain of fitful eruptions that have repeatedly shifted the balance of power in the region. There were the early, freewheeling decades of the last century; the secular pan-Arabism of the 1960s; the decadent oil-boom years; and the moral rot of nepotistic police states that have simultaneously nurtured and suppressed a variety of Islamist movements. At the moment, the Middle East appears to mingle all these ingredients in a combustible mix...

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review...

Drones, Civilians, and Propaganda

The increasingly contentious American drone strikes in Pakistan and the climbing civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan moved front and center this week with the publication of an op-ed by counterinsurgency think tankers David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who called for an end to the predator strikes, and an incident in Afghanistan where at least 30 Afghan civilians were killed during a firefight turned airstrike in which Taliban fighter used civilians as human shields—until an American B-1 bomber dropped two 2-ton bombs on the problem.

The civilian casualties and the drone strikes—which are killing and wounding civilians in Pakistan as well—are both harming the American effort while giving the Taliban and other insurgent groups fodder for propaganda and information ops campaigns, not to mention seriously pissing off the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. I’ve come across a few bits recently that on some level speak to the problem, and I think they’re worth reading.

In Nicholas Schmidle’s new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, he talks about an October 2006 Predator drone attack on a madrassa in Bajaur, Pakistan, that missed al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, but killed forty students, who were then “featured in countless propaganda speeches and leaflets distributed by Pakistani jihadi groups:

Rather than eliminating enemies, each missile strike only created more. “The government thinks it can persuade people to its side through development,” the Bannu journalist said. “And you know what? The people might thank the government. But revenge will never leave their minds…The day you forget your revenge, you are not a proper Pashtun.”

Pir spoke up and added, “People here are keeping score.”

Also check out Christian Bleuer’s post from a few years back where he recounts the example of a Soviet army Captain who apparently was a COIN expert (link via Josh Foust). Captain Zakharov’s troops were in involved in a complicated cat-and-mouse game with a mujahideen commander named Gayur, and Zakharov later explained the strategy he employed when Gayur tried to force him into killing or wounding Afghan civilians:

“Then the rascal thought of something else. As a way of forcing the peasants [who were friendly with Zakharov] to leave Afghanistanhe began to fire at my position straight from the neighboring kishlaks [villages] in an effort to draw our return fire. The provocations were repeated every day, but our guns remained silent. I refused to fire on peaceful civilians.”

I’m not saying that this is the way to go—even if Zakharov was successful in his approach, he was acting on his own, and in a very limited capacity. As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this week, “we cannot succeed ... in Afghanistan by killing Afghan civilians,” But how, or when, this is going to happen is a tough to answer, even as civilians die, and the Taliban continues to rack up propaganda victories.

(Pic: U.S. Air Force)

Wired For War

 

You can talk all you want about network-centric warfare, P.W. Singer says in his new book, but right now the real revolution in military affairs is not the all-nodes-communicating-with-each-other-in-real-time model that program managers and military contractors can’t get enough of. Instead, it’s happening in the field of robotics where huge strides are being made in developing drones and weapons and unmanned vehicles that—yes—can talk to one another, but “history will care far more about what these linkages enable. That is, these new digital links are important, but hot as much as the platforms they now allow. What will stand out, what is historic for war, and human history in general, are the robotic weapons now playing greater roles on the battlefield.”

 

Along with the increasing use and sophistication of these ‘bots comes a host of ethical and legal concerns that the military hasn’t yet begun to fully grapple with. Chief among them, in Singer’s engaging analysis, is the thorny issue of culpability that arises when these systems malfunction, or as all too often happens in the fog of war, engage the wrong targets, leaving to civilian or friendly casualties.

 

As an example, Singer brings up the infamous incident in Afghanistan where an American Air Force pilot dropped a 500-lb bomb on a group of Canadian soldiers, mistaking them for Taliban or al Qaeda fighters making their way across the desert at night. In the inquest that followed, the American pilot was rightly found guilty of disregarding orders and the rules of engagement. But what would happen if the Canadians were attacked by an autonomous UAV on a preprogrammed course capable of identifying and engaging targets with limited human supervision? Who would be responsible for the mishap? The military or civilian contractor who wrote the wrong target identification software? The squadron’s commanding officer? The commander who sent the drone out on a mission in the first place? These are issues that we will have to face in the near future, and not ones that have been given a lot of thought.

Singer says that we need to start thinking about the consequences of using autonomous robots to do our fighting for us, and we need to start doing it now.

 

Before establishing a chain of responsibility however, the military first needs to begin writing doctrine for the use of robotics. The ad hoc way that robotics are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan is not sustainable in perpetuity, and as systems grow in complexity, and are able to act more and more autonomously, rules are increasingly needed. Just as the Brits had no doctrine for how to use tanks in WWI, and thus at times failed to use them to their full potential, no one as yet as devised a doctrine for how to handle increasingly complex robotics on the battlefield, which in the future will rely less and less on a human being “in the loop.”

 

One official at DARPA told Singer that with the increasing sophistication of robotic systems and the ever-expanding autonomy with which they operate, “the human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems.” While that might be true in terms of surveillance or in the simple brute terms of putting steel on target, it also ignores the more complex situations that will arise on any battlefield that require a certain level of emotional intelligence—something only human beings possess. While a robot is great at sensing a threat and taking it out with no hesitation, it’s not as good as assessing the pros and cons of using force to achieve its objectives, something that is crucial in stability and counterinsurgency operations.

 

Given all this, when things do go wrong with unmanned systems—and they will—it’s critical that a chain of causality be established beforehand to ensure that someone, at some level, is responsible for the actions these systems take, since, as Singer writes, “by establishing at the start who is ultimately responsible for getting things right, it might hopefully add a dose of deterrence into the system before things go wrong.” As theorist J.F.C. Fuller once wrote, “the more mechanical become the weapons with which we fight, the less mechanical must be the spirit which controls them.”