Eaton fires broadside at Cheney
Some domestic U.S. politics:
Quote:
The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.
"The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy 'experts' have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.
http://www.nsnetwork.org/node/1442
Interesting commentary from one who was
quietly shuffled aside for non-performance directing Iraqi training. Not that I'd suggest sour grapes from one who as Chief of Infantry and Commandant of the US Army Infantry School before going to Iraq was not known for being a COIN expert...
That said, your post is as you said, domestic US politics. If the thread discusses operations, fine -- it it veers into domestic politics, I'll shut it down.
There are plenty of discussion boards that relish that stupidity; this is not one of them.
Somewhere a college professor is Crying
Once again fuchs, you have struck at our American system, and I for one am wounded to the core.
This indeed is a demonstration of what is wrong with America, although perhaps not in the way that you meant to illustrate. My question is, who on earth thought that this was a response to anything? Based upon reading MG Eaton’s statement, he gives no indication that he has even read what former-Vice President Cheney said. Given that his current ‘prominence’ derives primarily from being an outspoken critic of George Bush, I would be fairly surprised if he did. It seems as though this was a hip pocket statement to be whipped out whenever anyone in the past administration dared to voice dissent. Indeed, the provenance of the site on which this ‘response’ was posted is politically interesting, and perhaps relevant.
However, while it is easy to mock MG Eaton, he is not wholly responsible for the piss poor response, assuming that he wrote it. After all he is just following the grand tradition of military argumentation. For those who have not followed the link allow me to summarize “P1: You suck. P2: You Suck. P3: Here is my resume. P4: Therefore I am right.” I have seen this exact argument unfold over everything from work orders to national strategy and it always is the same. In fact, I am fairly sure that every single person in the military has had someone when arguing say “Well, if you had (been in combat/to ranger school/ in SF/ in supply/the right clearance) you would understand.” I have actually seen a conversation where one person was unaware of the resume of the other and they cycled through four of five ‘accomplishments’ before they found one they could rely upon. Indeed, I tell my non-military colleagues, that you know when you have won the argument when out comes the ‘combat’ card.
A real response would have raised points that Dick Cheney had made, and then refuted them with facts. This response is nothing more than an ad hominem attack on Cheney. But it doesn’t matter how wrong someone is, if her facts are right and her logic is sound, odds are in favor of her being right. Instead, in most political discourse, we get sophistry and logical fallacies left and right. It gets even worse when dealing with military issues.
Finally, while I am not defending Dick Cheney at all, my main take away from his speech was that the president should stop pondering his navel and do something. For all the Bush administrations many flaws, it was decisive. I was always taught, and continue to believe, that in war the best thing you can do is the right thing. Then next best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. Put another way, it is hard to correct your course, if you aren’t moving at all.
In other words, get the lead out and make a decision, before someone else makes it for you. Indeed no decision is a decision all to itself. I don’t think that this is an unrealistic request since this is the president who was supposed to have superior judgement, be ready day one, will listen to his generals, and already issued the Afghanistan plan. I don’t buy the ‘we need more time’ thing. If time were such an issue, then perhaps we could put Health Care, Global Warming, The Olympics, Harvard Professors et al. on the back burner for a couple of weeks, and sort this out. After all, soldiers are dying now, and Commander in Chief is actually a Constitutional responsibility of the President.
Abu Suleyman makes a larger point.
I have been concerned for a long time that we make too much of "force protection" in a volunteer armed force. Since 1973 we have all volunteered to fight for our country even unto death for "good" foreign policies or "bad" - but we ceased to be a conscript force at that time (I know it took a number of years for the draftees to flow out of the system completely). So, while casualties are always tragic and more so if they are unnecessary, I have believed that we (the US govt and public) make too much of them. But Abu Suleyman makes an economic argument - a correct one IMHO - that casualties need to be taken itno account in making decisions etc. Thanks for the Econ 101 reminder:cool:
Cheers
JohnT
The case could be made...
...that troops were still at Keating (and other remote locales) because a final decision on strategy/resources had not yet been made. The plan to depart those locations goes back a ways (iirc one year, at least), but the final "do it" button was never pushed. The reason for that has never been clearly stated, though a post-battle WaPo account says it was due to everything but indecisiveness.
Quote:
KABUL, Oct. 4 -- U.S. commanders had been planning since late last year to abandon the small combat outpost in mountainous eastern Afghanistan where eight U.S. soldiers died Saturday in a fierce insurgent assault.
The pullout, part of a strategy of withdrawing from sparsely populated areas where the United States lacks the troops to expel Taliban forces and to support the local Afghan government, has been repeatedly delayed by a shortage of cargo helicopters, Afghan politics and military bureaucracy, U.S. military officials said.
The issue isn't how many troops will die
if it takes longer to decide on strategy but rather what the risks are to achieving our objectives. We know - as much as can be known - what it takes to defeat an insurgency. We have solid quantitiative and qualitative evidence. We know, for a fact, that a strategy built around a purely (or mainly) enemy centric approach will fail in Afghanistan on numerous counts. We can predict, with reasonable accuracy, what will happen if troop strength is not increased and we rely more and more on targeted drone strikes - and it is not a positive outcome. With a little less assurance, we can predict a negative outcome if additional troops are fed in too small increments over too long a time - we fail. So, the presidential decision is really whether the strategy GEN McChrystal has proposed meets the Acceptability component of the FAS test. Essentially, if it does not - if President Obama chooses not to resource it properly - then we must choose not merely a different strategy but a totally different objective and build a strategy to achieve it. I, for one, am not sure that any other objective is acceptable, nor am I sure it would be feasible. In the end, if we want to achievethe objective stated by President Obama, we really need to give GEN McChrystal the resources he says he needs. So, this debate over resouces is the wrong debate. The debate needs to be over ends/objectives. IMO changing the objective means accepting defeat.
On that cheery note...
JohnT
Hmm. How sad. Hopefully you'll not be stuck long.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Shek
Oops, need to change the location. Gravitation pull has pulled me closer to the Beltway :eek:
Sometimes the system pays back with a decent tour after building or ancillary time. :D
No really good COINista...
Hi Mike--
Some of the argument about how to fight COIN - enemy v population centric - is simply nonsense. You can't win a COIN without defeating the insurgent whether he is the Continental Army and Congress (yes Marc, it was an insurgency;)), Sendero Luminoso, the FMLN, the Taliban, or AQ. That point was well made by Sir Robert Thompson reflecting on Malaya. COIN is, after all, war and war is messy, as Gian Gentile keeps on reminding us - correctly, I might add. Wingate, therefore was absolutely right, for both insurgents and counterinsurgents. The critical tactics of the ESAF fight against the FMLN were the GOE (Special Operations Group) intelligence driven raids against specific FMLN targets. Those raids were high pay off actions compared to the equally necessary 24/7 patrols of the Immediate Reaction Battalions, and the fixed site defenses of the regular brigades. What makes COIN different is that the purpose of all these actions is to provide room and time to develop legitimate governance in an environment that is secure for the population. In other words, you can't conduct a population centric COIN without waging an enemy centric fight. It isn't a question of either/or but of how you integrate both.
Cheers
JohnT
Unquestionably correct, John but I think he was cueing on
strategic raids for those nations like Afghanistan and Somalia where the disadvantages to intervention in the conventional sense and / or a COIN effort outweigh the advantages. That per your earlier comment:
Quote:
But if there is no real govt - Somalia and Afghanistan in 2001 - then you are playing by different rules. Deterrance is a real policy when there is a govt - it is indeed an option for say Iran. But deterrance is not an option for an Afghanistan or a Somalia.
Thus he, I believe, is referring to raids in lieu of, as opposed to an adjunct in, COIN efforts
Ken, the mind reader (almost)
Not necessarily "raids in lieu of, as opposed to an adjunct in, COIN efforts", since one portion of a larger country may be more suitable for raiding and another may not - the latter perhaps more suitable to "best practices COIN". I'll attempt to explain.
The overriding concept is that "best practices COIN" requires an emphasis on the political effort (the DIE effort, if you want an acronym); and that effort must be mounted by indigenous civilian forces (call them civic action teams, if you want). Those teams need a secure area in which to operate. That security preferably would be provided by indigenous military forces; but could be provided by external forces (so long as they can integrate their efforts with the political efforts, as JTF correctly concludes; e.g., ES).
Please bear with this little dialogue piece between two French officers during the First Indochina War, after their unit (6th Spahis) had spent much of a week clearing a village and adjacent area of Viet Minh (well, not quite completely, as the dialogue suggests). It makes a point as the two officers discuss a five person civic action team, all Vietnamese, who had just joined them and who now had to "hold and build". The conversation is from Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy, pp.154-155):
Quote:
MAJ Derrieu: Funny, they just never seem to succeed in striking the right note with the population. Either they come in and try to apologize for the mess we've just made with our planes and tanks; or they swagger and threaten the farmers as if they were enemy nationals which - let's face it - they are in many cases.
LT Dujardin: That may be so, but I wouldn't care to be in his shoes tonight when we pull out. He's going to stay right here in the house which the Commie commander still occupied yesterday, all by himself with the four other guys of his administrative team, with the nearest [military] post 300 metres away. Hell, I'll bet he won't even sleep here but sleep in the post anyway.
MAJ: He probably will, and he'll immediately lose face with the population and become useless.
LT: And if he doesn't, he'll probably be dead by tomorrow, and just as useless. In any case, there goes the whole psychological effect of the operation and we can start the whole thing all over again three months from now. What a hopeless mess.
The bottom line is that the civilian political effort requires a secure area, or at the least a semi-secured (semi-denied) area - where its success is far from insured. The Indochina episode was from Operation Camargue (1953), which had no lasting effect.
So, the civilian political effort does require military support and the military capabilities to force the guerrilla forces from their requisite offensive tactics into a defensive mode. The answers on how to do that (e.g., disrupt the snipers, prevent the ambushes and IEDs) are military matters beyond my ken (non-capitalized ;)).
As to raids, my logic suggests their primary utility is in denied areas. That may be a nation or a region, where national governance (and local governance, except by the guerrilla-connected "shadow government) are FUBAR or near-FUBAR. Somalia and parts of Astan are good examples (noted by both Ken and JTF). Of course, raids and patrols (the two constructs tend to merge at the small unit level) can also be offensive tools in a semi-secured (semi-denied) area.
In short, raids and a limited "COIN" effort by us (a limited FID effort by us, as in El Salvador, appeals to me more) are alternatives to full "nation building". In Astan, "full nation building" is beyond our capabilities (and a sci-fi jump for the Astan national government). In fact, for a limited "COIN" effort to have a decent probability of resulting in an "acceptable" outcome, the 60-80K force enhancement is probably realistic.
My own position is currently of the "We are there, dammit" school (applies to both Iraq and Astan), which requires an answer to whether political and military cababilities exist to reach an "acceptable" outcome and then withdraw. If the answer is negative to either the political or military cababilities, then withdrawal should be ASAP.
My position in general - that is, do we intervene in a country at all - is of the "Never Again, but" school, where raids (and limited FID) are often more acceptable options - than intervention via large military GPFs. Neither of my positions was popular during the Vietnam War, and I took flak from both sides of the coin (couldn't resist :) ). So be it.
Since John mentioned Robert Thompson, a brief aside (but relevant). I usually read non-fiction books by looking at the ToC and then jumping to chapters that look interesting. If the book is good, I then read it through. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I happened to read Thompson's Preface to Defeating Communist Insurgency. There I found his reading list started with:
1. Jim Corbett's The Man-Eating Leopards of Rudraprayag (1947) and Man-Eaters of Kumaan (1944). I read both from the library eons ago - and quite a few others about man-eating animals (which intrigue me for some reason). Anyway, the bottom line there consists of "raids and patrols", but also common-sense self-defense measures by the locals.
2. Philip Woodruff's The Men Who Ruled India (2v. 1953 & 1954). I haven't read that, but Thompson finds it corresponds to his concept that the administrative and other non-military efforts outweigh the military efforts, even though military efforts are often first addressed and attain a primacy in many "COIN" efforts. Of course, you have to have an administrative structure for that to even begin to work.
A long explanation, but that is where I am coming from.
PS: JTF - my assigned homework project re: flag officers and the Appointment Clause is coming along. In due course, as they say. :)