Robin Burk:

You are already not as much fun as shooting guppies in a barrel with a .45 automatic.

In the interest of giving you the opportunity to get some political education, I am going to post below a website by people who actually have a clue what they are talking about when it comes to the US military (since they work at the Pentagon):

Defense in the National Interest: http://www.d-n-i.net

Just read the articles, starting with #1.

Tom Cleaver

Gee, Tom, I guess you really don't like my point of view.

That's okay, but just for the record, a few corrections to your comments on both my articles.

Gen-Y? Try an older generation. I'm a semi-retired technology executive with experience in both defense and commercial markets. Ten years ago I did write a few books that Gen-X and Gen-Y techies used to learn Unix and networking, though. The technologies have moved on and now there are more current books, but these sold pretty well here and abroad & were translated into 5 languages.

Really know something about the military? I think I can claim to know some things first hand: I've served as program manager (senior executive) for military technology development programs, both in the US and with several overseas allies including one in the Middle East. I work with Army officers daily and have spent the last two years as a visiting instructor at West Point. My husband is a retired Air Force officer with extensive experience in space-based reconnaisance systems who has worked with members of the intelligence community for many years.

My first job after undergraduate school was working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. E-ring Pentagon, second basement down, in a secured computing facility which supported the National Command and Control Center, i.e. the war room.

Indeed there are controversies about Rumsfeld's vision for a transformed military. The Army more than any other service has its concerns, which are understandable given the culture that has served them well for traditional conflicts. Rumsfeld feels that that culture and the Army's organizational structure needs to change rapidly in response to asymmetric conflicts like the war on terror. I think he's right. Reasonable people, including some of my colleagues in the Army, disagree.

What they all DO agree on, though, is that we are facing what will probably be a long, difficult struggle both to dismantle the terror networks that are based in a distorted Islamic fundamentalism and also to help promote free, prosperous and stable countries across the Middle East and South East Asia.

And that means that ordinary Americans will be challenged to sift through the news to make their own judgements about what is going on. That will be hard, because a lot of information will never be made public. Winds of Change and similar sites play an important role in helping us piece together what we can know, however, which is the main reason I've come out of lurking to post publicly.

I would argue that military transformation has largely occured already; Rumsfeld is just purging the remnants of the old school...but if this allows him to cut some of the fat out (cough, Joint-Strike-Fighter, Crusader, missile defense, cough), that's a good thing.

What I worry about is whether Iraq has taught Rumsfeld that merely desroying the enemy's military is not the strategic objective of any conflict. The strategic objective involves the end political result; in this case, a stable and somewhat democratic Iraq. And I haven't seen Rumsfeld articulating how exactly the Pentagon will do better in the future.

Praktike, you raise some good points, although I'm not as sanguine as you that transformation has already occurred. The people I know who are working to switch from individual soldier rotations to unit rotations, for instance, expect that will enable a lot of other changes.

Re: wider objectives, I'm not privy to DOD or White House discussions, but I can say from personal experience that in Afghanistan and Iraq both, there is definitely attention to wider issues. That isn't something Rumsfeld needed to be taught - he's been preaching that to the defense and national leadership for years now. However, knowing those things doesn't automatically translate into successful execution.

I helped to write software being used to capture and measure our progress with respect to social, political and economic objectives as well as traditional military objectives. This is the broadest application of a military doctrine called Effects Based Operations. EBO and its corrollary Effects Assessment lies behind the decision to let commanders use money locally to get things done in Iraq, for instance. However, EBO/EA is a fairly new doctrine at the strategic level and not all senior officers are skilled at its use. Furthermore, easy success using EBO requires (among other things) excellent and detailed intelligence. Without that, we take the harder road of doing what we can and adjusting tactics in response to facts on the ground.

I do think the strategic objectives are very clear and clearly articulated in Iraq. It's the tactical level that is the problem right now and even there, there is far more progress than is apparent in the media. Or so I am told by Army officers I know who are over there, including Reservists who have little reason to parrot the command chain's words if they don't believe them. Their biggest gripe is that they need more solid intel, which mostly must come from the Iraqi people themselves. And that is beginning to happen, although not as often or as much as these guys would like.

I realized just now that I've been posting comments under my usual signature 'rkb'. Just to clarify, that's me.

Robin Burk

Robin, you make a good point. Interesting about EBO, by the way, although it seems like the kind of thing that this administration is pre-disposed to sneer at.

As for the strategic question, it's a question of now versus then. I realize that the Bush administration now realizes that nation-building is tough and they seem to have their eyes on the prize.

However, I worry that force transformation, while well-suited to kicking ass on the battlefield, is extremely ill-suited to post-conflict operations. There's a RAND report that found that casualties under peace-keeping operations are inversely proportional to troop levels. On the other hand, "guerilla war" may be a more accurate characterization of our current predicament, so other peace-keeping scenarios may not apply. If this is true, it is reasonable to assume that more troops would lead to more casualties.

What I would like to see (other than Tom Petraeus in charge of the whole thing), is a blueprint for future wars that draws upon the lessons of Iraq. Either special civil affiars units need to be developed, and given the capability to get in fast after military conflict, or existing forces need to be taught what to do in this situation.

The essential realization needs to be that if they're wedded to this strategy of taking out rogue states, they need to get serious about nation-building. It logically follows that if failed states or aggressive dictators are the problem, nation-building is the long term solution. We've seen proof in Iraq that assuming you'll be welcomed with open arms and a civil society is waiting in the wings is naive and foolish.

In other words, praktike, you want to see the modern equivalent of the British colonial administration offices.

Not a bad idea if we're getting into the nation-building business, but it's going to be a tough sell to the entire American policial spectrum. We just aren't cut out to be imperialists.

Rob, I have news for you: we are imperialists. We might as well do it right.

Re: sneering at EBO, Rumsfeld is quite at home with this sort of approach, even if some of the generals he inherited aren't.

It's worth keeping in mind that, for better or (and?)for worse, Donald Rumsfeld was the youngest of McNamara's Whiz Kids. He has a strong respect for analytic approaches. At the same time he saw up close how prosecution of the war in Vietnam was distorted by a single measure of success (I remember inflated body counts) and by the lack of clearly articulated political, social and economic goals there. So from before the time Bush was elected, he has been arguing that our policies in the Middle East needed to be coherent and explicit and needed to be sufficiently bold to address the huge structural problems there.

The EBO/EA software I helped to write was deployed for Afghanistan prior to our entry into Iraq, but all indications are that for Iraq great care was given to those sorts of considerations as well. However, EBO is only as good as the intelligence model that forms the basis of decisions - it is perhaps even more sensitive to the quality of intelligence than more traditional forms of planning.

So those who say the Administration had no plans for post-war Iraq are wrong, IMO. There were plans, but they were based on intelligence that in some cases was inadequate or even outright wrong.

That is a risk inherent in any offensive planning. But in this case it has become a really hot issue because of the wider questions regarding the performance of the CIA and the FBI prior to 9/11. You and I and all of us here are watching part of a fierce debate going on in Washington regarding the effectiveness - or lack thereof - of those agencies. OSP was Rumsfeld's way of bypassing what he has long considered politically biased and inadequate performance by the CIA. The Agency in return has been fighting him and Bush on several fronts.

This is not new - Casey had the same problem with his subordinates when he headed the CIA during the Reagan years. His solution was to give Reagan his own best estimate in private. But with the unprecedented attack on US soil, that gentleman's compromise is no longer sufficient as a way to do business in DC.

rkb, so what you're saying is that the idea that we would be greeted as liberators was based on faulty intelligence? Was dismissing the Iraqi Army based on faulty intelligence?

Seems like faulty analysis and assumptions due to ideological blindness to me. There was plenty of contrary information out there, not to mention the vast bulk of our accumulated knowledge about the politics of the Middle East.

---
Or, are you saying that we didn't know that a guerilla resistance would develop? Or that we didn't anticipate its ferocity?

One of the seminal papers in EBO was written by the Rand Corp. In it they analyzed the surrenders by Iraqis during the first Gulf War. US military doctrine at that time required battalion commanders to synch up with one another rather than to push ahead agressively when units surrendered, or to encourage them to do so. As a result, Iraqi units fought longer than they might otherwise have and suffered higher casualties with little hope of actually winning.

Those battles were re-fought in war games and simulations, with the difference that battalion commanders were given the objective to move forward aggressively and collapse enemy morale. Under several different scenarios, with the Iraqi side played by tough Red Team members, the results were always the same: far fewer Iraqi casualties (civilian and military), greater preservation of the country's infrastructure etc.

That study heavily influenced planning for this war. Most critics of the war don't focus on the really crucial wins that happened before a single tank went over the Kuwaiti border. CIA agents and special forces negotiated surrender agreements with a number of key Iraqi generals beforehand. A very senior member of Hussein's innermost circle was turned and provided specific, timely information that nearly got him killed early on. Special forces recruited Iraqi help in several parts of the country, including among the Shia in Baghdad and special forces were dispatched to guard important assets. As a result, the oil infrastructure, dams and other key assets were protected from Iraqi demolition. And the 5+ million people in Baghdad were not subjected to the urban warfare that critics were sure would occur - and that Hussein was planning on.

Moreover, battalion commanders were given objectives and allowed to use their best professional judgement in reaching them, without having to form up standard massing formations. That's how we got to the outskirts of Baghdad so quickly, which convinced a number of wavering generals and regular Iraqi army units, and even some of the Republican Guard, to surrender or melt away rather than fight for the city.

There were two areas of failure, I think -- and remember, this is just arm-chair generalling by someone who was not there and doesn't know the intel we had. First and foremost, it was key to our strategy that we be able to come into Iraq on two fronts. Had we been able to come through Turkey as well as Kuwait, the Fedayeen, Baathists and infiltrating al-Qaeda etc. would not have been able to withdraw fairly intact into the Sunni Triangle. Inability to come in on two fronts, and the resulting delays, have cost both us and the Iraqi people greatly.

We knew there would be resistance in the Triangle. There were press reports in February that Hussein had called together the tribal leaders and dispensed money, weapons and instructions to them. We just didn't get there in time and in sufficient timely force to intervene before they were able to entrench themselves.

And secondly, I don't think any of us really understood just how brutalized the Iraqi people were and how reluctant they would be to risk cooperating. It amazed me that the southern Shia were willing to do so in any degree, given that they had been abandoned after the first gulf war. I think we were misled by the example of the Kurds, for whom we preserved more independence and a bit more security with the no-fly zones and their semi-autonomous zones.

And finally, I think Rumsfled had hoped for a larger militia of ex-pat Iraqis. If I understand correctly, it was the State Dept. who convinced Bush to veto that before the war started. A big mistake, I believe, because even though they would not be embraced as locals, their knowledge of the language and the culture is just the sort of thing we are sorely lacking right now.

Second that motion re: Petraeus. All indications are that he's doing one hell of a job. If that's true, however, you've got to give his superiors credit too for letting him do it his way.

Re: civil affairs units, etc. Praktike has heard me talk about this before, but my model isn't the British - it's the Cubans. We don't have to be imperialists just because we use it (although the Cubans were)... it's simply a better model for rendering aid and assistance in failed or collapsed states, and has proven itself in similar situations.

We're going to be doing a lot of that in the coming years, and since neoliberals (vid. "The Coming Anarchy" in The Atlantic) and neocons agree on that fact, it's time we faced up to it and began discussing what it would take.

I do not believe that either the U.S. Army as currently constituted, or the transformed force, will be well suited to this mission.

Which means we're going to have to add some new ideas and maybe sdome new structures to that mix. I happen to believe that the quality of the job we do in this area and the structures we set up will play a big role in how well America (and to some extent, what remains of Western Civilization) deals with the chalenge of 4th Generation Warfare. al-Qaedist Islamism won't be the last example of the phenomenon.

Thanks, rkb, for adding your valuable perspective, and thanks, joe, for recruiting such a variety of enlightening contributors to this site.