A Failure in Generalship

By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling

Armed Forces Journal

May 2007

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

The Responsibilities of Generalship

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.

The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.

Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.

However much it is influenced by passion and probability, war is ultimately an instrument of policy and its conduct is the responsibility of policymakers. War is a social activity undertaken on behalf of the nation; Augustine counsels us that the only purpose of war is to achieve a better peace. The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgement in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities.

The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.

To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, “In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly.”

The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.

After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.

Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.

Failures of Generalship in Vietnam

America’s defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America’s general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America’s generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.

Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America’s enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America’s political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of “another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.” In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America’s armed forces for counterinsurgency.

Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America’s generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.” Despite Kennedy’s guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that “the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.” While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called “the Army concept,” a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy’s forces.

Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America’s generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department’s “Blowtorch” Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public’s commitment to the conflict began to wane.

America’s generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in “Dereliction of Duty,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America’s generals.

Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife,” John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

By the early 1990s, the Army’s focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation’s history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army’s National Training Center honed the Army’s conventional war-fighting skills to a razor’s edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America’s swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world’s fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the U.S. military’s post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.

Failures of Generalship in Iraq

America’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America’s generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America’s generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Despite paying lip service to “transformation” throughout the 1990s, America’s armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In “The Sling and the Stone,” T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department’s transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.

Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as “Fiasco” and “Cobra II.” However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise “Desert Crossing” demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.

After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America’s generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America’s generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.

After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that “there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.” The ISG noted that “on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America’s generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.

The Generals We Need

The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller’s “Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure.” Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.

The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army’s senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America’s generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.

Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America’s general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer’s potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer’s advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America’s military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.

To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.

Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.

To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

Mortal Danger

This article began with Frederick the Great’s admonition to his officers to focus their energies on the larger aspects of war. The Prussian monarch’s innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia’s security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick’s successors were checked by France’s ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick’s prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq is America’s Valmy. America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

Source: http://armedforcesjournal.com/article/2007/05/2635198

Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

You’ll probably be hearing about us again. Yesterday, my platoon had six injured and one killed. We had a fire fight that lasted nine hours. We killed a lot of VC on this operation we’re on now, but we also have had a lot killed. I wrote Sue and told her to give you back my ring. It’s still a good ring although it doesn’t work too good. I can always give it to some other chump, I mean girl. Well, Mom, I don’t have much time, and I just wanted you to know I’m all right.

When you go to church, I want you to give all the people you see this address and tell them to send anything they can, like old clothes and anything. I went down to this orphanage the other day, and these little kids are pitiful. They sleep on plain floors and don’t get hardly anything to eat. The reason I want you to tell everyone to help them is because I feel I may have to killed some of their parents and it makes me feel sick to know they have to go on with nothing. Address: Mang-Lang Orphanage, Le-Loi Street Tuy Hoa, Vietnam.

Love, Your son,

Dan

PFC Daniel Bailey was assigned to A troop, 2nd Battalion, 17th Cavalry, 101 st Airborne Division, May 1966 to June 1967 operating in II Corps.

The Inches That Matter

There are plenty of these kinds of videos on youtube and I usually make a point not to watch them. I’m not sure why I made that decision (I’m not in the least squeamish, blood and guts bring it on). I suppose I should be interested in the tactical minutiae of war making. But, maybe because this is the ‘glamorous’ part of war, the action, the people doing the fighting, the human side of war, it can very easily get sentimental, things become subjective – emotional. I try to avoid that.

One thing that I noted from this is the seemingly casual attitude of these marines – just another day at work I suppose. But, that casual inattention got a guy shot in the shoulder by someone they knew was a sniper. Nuff said.

Hands up, I do admittedly have a soft spot for marines (I don’t know why or where it comes from).

If this is a counterinsurgency war (the video was posted in 2010) , then the mistaken killing of non-combatants in the homestead near the target house should be considered a greater failure than the marine who got shot in the shoulder. One, a few inches saved from death, the other several feet too close. A mistake that will have strategic consequences, the worst in a counterinsurgency.

Here Are The Young Men

Marines’ Faces Before, During, and After Serving in Afghanistan

How do life-changing experiences concretely impact the way we look? Does tragedy truly show up in our eyes and brow? These are questions that fascinate Claire Felicie, who photographed the faces of 20 Dutch Marines before, during, and after their tour of duty in Afghanistan. From first photo to last photo, only 12 months passed, but a great deal happened in these young men’s lives.

Yes, some of the shifts in appearance are environmentally induced; there’s nothing other than the scorching Afghan sun to blame for those new freckles and bronzed noses. But there is something else in that third picture; a dullness to the eyes, a stiffness to the jaw. Isn’t there?

What’s interesting about this project is that you can convince yourself that someone changed dramatically from middle to right, only to compare right to left and talk yourself out of it. It must just be angle or lighting, you say. But even after you’ve concluded that wrinkle isn’t really any bigger, it’s undeniable that there is a difference. No this was not a perfectly controlled scientific experiment, but there is no science to walking into a room, looking into a friend’s face, and immediately knowing that something has happened. It’s not about the obvious clues like a frown or matted hair, but something far more nuanced.

Felicie came up with the idea for this project when her 18-year-old son decided to join the Marines. He was eager to go to Afghanistan and she spent lots of time thinking about how the experience might change him. In the end he never went— instead getting stationed in the Caribbean—but she did. Through one of his friends, she connected with a squad that was being sent to Afghanistan. She photographed them first while they were still on base in the Netherlands; a lingering shoot full of stories of their families and eagerness to depart. Nine months later, just six weeks after they lost two of their men to an IED blast, she met up with them in Afghanistan. The photo session was rushed. The men had just returned from patrol, drenched in sweat, and were eager to shower. She had time for just one portrait of each Marine. She caught them again three months later, when they’d returned to the Netherlands. Again, they had plenty of time, but something was different.

“They were saying they were good; they were fine,” Felicie says. “But then I let them sit and look through the camera. When they sat down they said nothing and I said nothing also, it was then I saw, their faces had changed.”

The series ‘Here are the young men’ is divided in three subseries:

‘Marked‘: black and white triptychs of marines before, during and after their tour of duty to Afghanistan.
‘Armoured‘: black and white portraits of marines back from patrol and photo’s of their good luck charms.
‘Committed‘: colour photo’s of marines on their base Combat Outpost Tabar in Uruzgan, Afghanistan.

Source: http://clairefelicie.com/

The 'Good' Iraqis

The List: Accounting for the Iraqi Allies America Left Behind

For the Iraqis who bravely helped Americans, the war continues. One American is trying to help them find safety.

By Matt Gallagher

Most Americans greeted the end of the Iraq War the same way they responded to the beginning of it—with a shrug and a yawn. The List, a documentary screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a timely reminder of what’s still at stake, and that the war there isn’t over for our allies just because we’ve mostly departed. In many ways, actually, it’s just begun for them, as they flee or hide from their past—from us..

Kirk Johnson (left) in “The List” (Principle Pictures)

For me, the film resonated because of a man named Suge Knight.

For many months in the throes of the Iraq surge, my scout platoon and I patrolled the dusty towns of northern Baghdad province, trying our hand at counterinsurgency and winning over locals’ hearts, minds, and pocketbooks. Sometimes it worked. With us throughout, for every midnight counter-IED mission and every tedious patrol tallying hours of working electricity, was a middle-aged interpreter we called Suge, because of his striking resemblance to the hip-hop entrepreneur.

Suge was more than our translator—he was our only conduit to the foreign land we found ourselves stewarding. He became a friend, confidant, and mentor to my men and me on matters ranging from the nuances of Arabic culture to the nuances of an even more mysterious tribe—women. His English was sometimes choppy, but his loyalty was as relentless as the desert sun. He wasn’t just with us, he was one of us, a subtle but critical distinction.

At the end of our 15-month tour, we went home. Another unit replaced us, and Suge stayed with them.

I think of Suge and his family often, especially as news of car bombs and sectarian strife continues to come out of Iraq. Every time he stepped out of the wire with us, he was risking not only his life but the lives of his family—insurgents’ reprisals against locals working with coalition forces were swift and merciless. He wore a mask in some neighborhoods, but he never once asked to stay on base or inside a vehicle. Suge told us sometimes about his desire to immigrate to the United States, about his fears that some of his family wouldn’t want to move, and about his frustrations with the slow immigration process.

I wrote a character statement for Suge, proclaiming his bravery and dedication to duty. I haven’t heard from him for a couple years, and wish now that I had done more then.

Every time he stepped out of the wire with us, he was risking not only his life, but those of his family.

The List tells the story of a man who did do more: Kirk Johnson, a former USAID worker who served as regional coordinator on reconstruction in Fallujah throughout 2005. Disturbed and disillusioned by his experience there, Johnson returned home hoping to shed his wartime memories. That plan changed after he received a message from an Iraqi with whom he had worked—who had found a severed dog’s head thrown on his front steps with a note: “Your head will be next.” A neighbor had spotted him at a checkpoint leaving the Baghdad Green Zone he had stealthily gone to and from for years to work for America, and now a local militia was out for blood.

The interpreter and his wife needed to leave Iraq, but the U.S. immigration bureaucracy wasn’t sensitive to the immediacy of the appeal, to put it mildly. Rather than wait for the years-long process to play out, they fled their homeland. Shortly thereafter, Johnson wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times detailing his friend’s plight and arguing that the U.S. government had a moral obligation to resettle to safety Iraqis endangered due to their affiliation with our military or government.

Johnson was subsequently inundated with messages from Iraqis, usually former or current interpreters working for the military who were experiencing similar threats. He began documenting the names and whereabouts of these individuals, and enlisted the pro bono legal service of various prominent law firms in his fight to resettle these men and women as quickly as possible. The List was born.

Now a full-fledged nonprofit, The List Project has helped nearly 1,500 Iraqis find safety in the United States. (Full disclosure: my boss at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Paul Rieckhoff, sits on The List Project’s advisory board.) The List’s marketing team is likening Johnson to Oskar Schindler, something that seems a bit melodramatic until one actually sees the film. The joy, fear, and despair for Johnson and former interpreters like Yaghdan and Ibrahim are anything but melodramatic. They are the hard-earned emotions of men and women who have stared at the worst aspects of the human condition and refused to either blink or quit.

Still, the film makes clear that America has yet to live up to its obligations to the great majority of the Iraqis—36,000 working for the Department of Defense alone in 2009—who assisted in innumerable ways in the eight-plus years America occupied the country. Between 2006 and 2009, fewer than 3,500 U.S.-affiliated Iraqi refugees were admitted to America, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Meanwhile, I wonder how Suge and his family are.

The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies: Helping those who helped us...: http://thelistproject.org/

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/24/the-list-accounting-for-the-iraqi-allies-america-left-behind.html#sthash.d2spbJ1g.dpuf

via Matt Gallaghers blog Kerplunk: http://www.matt-gallagher.net/

Operation Homecoming

The two stories I found most poignant were Sangjoon Han's 'Aftermath' and Jack Lewis's 'Roadwork'. Both stories involve Iraqis at the most intimate level, at their deaths, and the aftermath.

OPERATION HOMECOMING is a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of servicemen and women and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Through interviews and dramatic readings, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America’s armed forces. At the same time it provides depth and context to these experiences through a broader look at the universal themes of war literature.

The writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING covers the full spectrum — poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America’s current conflicts.

At the core of the writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Throughout the film the servicemen and women, young and old, express a profound hope that people will listen to their stories and try to understand what they have seen.

Memory Lapse

Memory…  is nothing else than a certain concatenation of ideas…

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

 I.

A while ago, I was going through my files when I came across a cache of partly crumbled photographs. One was of me holding the sight box for the M252 mortar in Garden City, N.Y., parking lot. In another, I sat with Oum in the open hatch of a UH-1W at Camp White Horse, outside Nasiriyah, Iraq. There was another of me and the guys at the 2003 Marine Corps birthday ball. I looked like a boy in those photos. At the bottom of the stack I found one photo of us standing with First Sgt. Allen. I was wearing a set of borrowed Alphas; she wore a black evening gown, First Sergeant stood adorned in dress blues, everyone was smiling, teeth shining. I stared at it and whispered to myself, “very different times.”

I’d forgotten about these photos, until one night when I was at her house searching a shoebox and I came across the mangled photo album that had stored them for years. They were all there, near the letters we had sent each other while I was overseas. The photographs were wrinkled, crushed and forgotten like the discarded notions that had once been the impetus for “us.”

Very soon after, a sentiment of resentment splashed with a bit of melancholy began to rise within me so I gathered them and took them when I left.

The parking lot photo showed me standing gaunt and blank wearing woodland camouflage the afternoon I left Garden City for Camp Lejeune to prepare to go to Iraq. This was a picture of a young man who was anxious about war but too indoctrinated to acknowledge it. My photo was taken by the woman whom I had married months before, certain that we would grow old together. The day she took my photo she had worn indigo sweatpants, a canary yellow hooded sweatshirt and plain white Converses. Her hair only lightly grazed her shoulders. As I looked at myself in the photo, I began to remember that as the bus departed Garden City that evening, what she had been wearing that day would become my singular unaided recollection of her. From then, I would need a photograph to remind me of the contours of her face. I was puzzled why but time was too precious then to ponder such things. So I let the question slip, promising myself to ask again at another juncture.

 II.

I had forgotten her facial features as soon as the bus started rolling. As much as I tried to recall her face, it was as if I had never stored it in the infinite expanse of my long-term memory. But this of course is not true. I recall her face with ease now and I would describe it as round, with high cheekbones and eyes brown and intensely intelligent. She was then and is now quite beautiful. But the evening I left, remembering such details became an exercise in both frustration and futility.

Garden City, N.Y., 2003.

As I began thinking about the answer to my question, I thought that it would be helpful to first define what memory is, so I consulted a text for an answer.

According to “Psychology,” a textbook by Schacter, Gilbert and Wegner, “memories are the residue of [those] events, the enduring changes that experience makes in our brains and leaves behind when it passes.” According to the authors, “if an experience passes without leaving a trace, it might just as well not have happened.”  In a sense, our memories define who we become.
Socrates describes memory “as a block of wax.”

Let us say that the tablet is a gift of memory, the mother of the muses; and that when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in the material receive the impressions of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know. 

While Aristotle, speaking on memory and recollection, notes:

      It is obvious, then, that memory belongs to that part of the souls to which imagination belongs; all things which are imaginable are essentially objects of memory and those which necessarily involve imagination are objects of memory incidentally. 

      The lasting state of which we call memory- as a kind of picture; for the stimulus produced impresses a sort of likeness of the percept, just as when men seal with signet rings. 

      Hence in some people, through disability or age, memory does not occur even under a strong stimulus, as though the stimulus or seal were applied to running water; while in others owing detrition like that of old walls in buildings, or to the hardness of the receiving surface, the impression does not penetrate. …  

      We must regard the mental picture within us as both an object of contemplation in itself and as a mental picture of something else. 

But we did have experiences that left behind traces that I could recall easily. The trip we took around lower Manhattan on the Circle Line. The day we were married. Us walking to the subway to take the No. 2 train the afternoon of the West Indian Day parade in 2002.  These were all pleasant days that come to mind with out any retrieval cues and I believe that the idea of a pleasant day has much to do with why it was so difficult for me to remember her face that other day.

State dependent retrieval is defined by Schacter, Gilbert and Wegner as the tendency for information to be better recalled when the person is in the same state during encoding and retrieval, or more simply when I tried to retrieve an image of her face from that day filled with uncertainty and angst, I found it hard to do so because for the most part, my most vivid memories of her face up until that point included some sort of cheerful experience. Certainly, that day my state of mind, and I suppose hers too, was not the same as the day we were married. Still eight years since, even as our relationship and marriage have collapsed, I find it hard to remember more than what she wore for my grand sendoff and maybe it is O.K. that that day an image of her face was not imprinted on my block of wax.

 III.

Kuwait, 2003.

After the initial weeks of settling into Nasiriyah, the sergeants had devised a structure for the platoon’s day to day operations. One day of guard. One day spent patrolling. The third day spent as quick reaction force a k a, the rest day. This cycle was repeated until the morning that we left Iraq for Kuwait. That morning, Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” streamed from our Humvees, moving us along like running cadence. That morning I smelled the smoke from our burn pit which rose from the desert like a date palm, for the final time and saw the men of the Italian carabinieri sitting in front of the compound without cover but not without cheerfulness. We waved to each other and I wondered how they would manage the monotony and defend against complacency.

Routines have a way of creating the impression of security. But in Nasiriyah one had to be hypervigilant. One’s weapon had to remain serviced and accessible. One never left the compound without a helmet or an interceptor vest or an interpreter. One stayed on edge awaiting that rare skirmish.

To relieve stress and pass time we would often pontificate about how different life would be once we returned home. For inspiration most of us relied on pictures of wives or girlfriends to ignite recollections or to stimulate dreaming. I taped the picture of her I’d fished from my cargo pocket in Garden City to the roof of my Kevlar and over the months my sweat and the sun’s rays quickened its fading. The morning that we left Nasiriyah, I shared this photo with an Italian who shared with me his talisman, a picture of his small daughter. He asked whether I had children and I said no, but we still joked about how in the future my son would marry his daughter.

There was scuttlebutt about Britain’s Royal Marines habitually burning all traces of home before going into combat and I remember thinking how stoic of them, but I could never bring myself to do it. I correlated her fading image with my tenuous conception of home. I wanted to get home; therefore I wanted to get to her. The photo was my talisman. I sealed it inside a Ziploc bag to stave off continued deterioration and there it stayed until I lost it.

In October I saw on the news that a suicide bombing had occurred in Nasiriyah, not far from where we had been relieved by the Italians, and that the bombing had killed more than a dozen of them. Maybe the Brits had it right all along. What good is sentimentality in the face of circumstance? I had not learned that Italian’s name but that night I got on my knees and prayed for all of them and for him and his family. I haven’t spoken with God in a while but I truly hope that he heard that prayer.

 IV.

The author and Oum, a fellow Marine, in Iraq, 2003.

The problem with writing from memory is the problem of truth.

There is a concern when writing nonfiction, autobiography, memoir etc…about truth and relating truth to one’s readers. Truth, of course, is paramount. The reader expects it and it is the writer’s obligation to remain truthful to experience and memory but this notion of truth is not truth with a capital T. It can never be.

In fact, the notion of what is true will be colored by the author’s experience, perception of that experience, his biases and his own fading memories. Stories regardless of genre should be read with these parameters in mind.  A piece of nonfiction can never be truly devoid of untruths. What is important is the author’s intention to relate the facts as he truthfully recalls them and the readers’ acceptance of the limitation imposed by nonfiction. Because our memories define who we become, when writing from memory subjectivity though not ideal will color the writing. How one perceives the self will undoubtedly inform how introspective a piece of writing culled from traces of experiences will be.

 V.

Several days ago we sat at a diner to talk a few things over and she looked at me squarely and asked, “Did we not have good times?” As I spread jam on my toast, I thought back to the day we took the Circle Line, how at ease she had looked. I thought to myself, “Yes, sometimes.” When the bill came she insisted on paying her share, then we went our own ways.

The next day, I bent to scrub soap scum from my bathtub, half kneeling, half praying. I wanted to inter the unshaven face I regarded in the mirror. I turned the tap and water splattered about the sink and a few drops splashed haphazardly into the cup I was holding. Off.  Water from the cup rinsing the loosened soap scum was an earsplitting contrast to life’s insufferable silence.  If I succumb to the stillness, I thought… but there is not a soul to talk to in the house except, me.

It was late and the day had slipped unhurriedly by. I walked back into my bedroom and looked down at the chaos of papers and photos strewn across my bed and decided it was time to put it all away.

Maurice Decaul served in the Marine Corps for nearly five years. He deployed to Nasiriyah, Iraq, in 2003 as a squad leader with Weapons Company, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. He lives in Brooklyn and is studying at Columbia University.

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/memory-lapse/#more-111043

The AK-47: 'The Gun' That Changed The Battlefield

Her grandson Denis hands Aleksandra a Kalashnikov. Aleksandra (2007)

Taking aim, she pulls the trigger, click. "It's so easy".

The AK-47 was designed after World War II by the Soviets, who issued the guns to the communist army's conscripted forces. In the past few decades, the AK-47 has become one of the weapons of choice for many groups — and one of the most commonly smuggled weapons in the world.

One of the first true assault rifles, the AK-47, or Kalashnikov, was designed for soldiers who have to endure terrible conditions on the battlefield: It's light, it can carry a lot of ammunition, and it can withstand harsh weather and poor handling. The gun's design and ubiquity also have made it popular among small-arms dealers — as well as insurgents, terrorists and child soldiers.

C.J. Chivers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for The New York Times, has encountered the Kalashnikov while reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq. His new book, The Gun, traces the migration of the AK-47 across the world, detailing the consequences of its spread.

"It's pretty hard in many parts of the world, particularly in Afghanistan, to go [into] territory under insurgent control, and not be ambushed by Kalashnikovs," says Chivers. "Their numbers are so outsized that this is quite a common experience."

One estimate by the World Bank suggests that 100 million of the 500 million total firearms available worldwide are variations of the Kalashnikov.

"There's a lot of measures of a weapon, and one of them is how they work against a conventional foe, like the United States military," he says. "That's not the best measure. The best measure is how they work against a larger set of victims: how they work against civilians, how they work at checkpoints [and] how they work in the commission of crimes for all of these things. It's a [terribly effective] weapon."

Chivers has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya and served as the Times' Moscow correspondent from June 2004 through mid-2008. He also served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps from 1988 to 1994. He received the Livingston Award for International Journalism for his coverage of the collapse of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130493013

CJ Chivers Blog: http://cjchivers.com

Aleksandra (Alexandra) 2007

There are some incredibly moving scenes in this film between the protagonist Aleksandra and her grandson Denis. As a film, I still don't know what to make of it and I'm not sure it works as a whole. But, the small subtle movements and words between the young Russian soldiers, the Chechens in the war ridden town and this elderly woman says much more about war than many mainstream films today.

Requiem - By The Photographers Who Died In Vietnam and Indochina

ROBERT CAPA
Nam Dinh, South of Hanoi, Vietnam
May 25th, 1954 Last roll of film, the road to Thai Binh.
This was the last black and white frame Robert Capa shot. With his next footstep he detonated a land mine.

This is an online version of the monumental photo book Requiem. The audio clips are missing sadly, this would have been incredible to listen to, especially from those who were there in-field. I'm going to try and contact these guys and see if they would make the audios available again, but it seems the site is a bit out-dated and in much need of an overhaul.

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue9711/req1.htm

U.S. Military Leadership In Decline

Another one from Tom Ricks, this time on his book 'The Generals'. Q&A is as usual equally thought provoking.

Designing Demons

EYE Magazine

Steven Heller, 2001

The rhetoric of hate provides \'a new kind of meaning\'

A dirty secret about graphic design is that it can promote hatred. The graphic language of loathing is every bit as pervasive as the International Style. While the aesthetic of enmity may not be rooted in any one particular typeface or composition, the rhetoric is consistent: verbal and visual hyperbole, caricature and stereotype, threat and agitation, all given concrete graphic form by designers and illustrators. Derogatory messages are not only the product of extremist and fringe groups: the vast majority of hate propaganda is government sanctioned and professionally produced.

Propaganda precedes technology as a means to soften otherwise rational minds into malleable clay. Hot and cold wars on a battlefield or in hearts and minds cannot be fought without the collaboration of people of conscience. Therefore, the process of demonic manufacture, wherein the object of abhorrence must be thoroughly stripped of its human characteristics is essential in securing mass hostility towards one group or another. ‘In the beginning we create the enemy,’ writes Sam Keen in Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (Harper and Row, 1986), about the art and psychology of state coercion. ‘We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to kill them.’

‘The war of icons, or the eroding of the collective countenance of one’s rivals,’ noted Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media in 1964, ‘has long been under way. Ink and photo are supplanting soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier than the sword.’

Since the sixteenth century when Martin Luther, the father of propaganda, was portrayed as the devil in church-sanctioned cautionary prints, the archetypes of visual terror have progressed unabated. Summoning the Prince of Darkness may now seem outdated, particularly since devil worship is accepted as pop style, yet Satan, say its adversaries, appears in numerous guises. Vilification is often accomplished in the twentieth century by references both banal and nefarious. Through the visual lexicon of hate artists and designers employ the devil as the main or sub-text in allegories, transforming individuals and groups into beasts, criminals, torturers, rapists, defilers, and even death itself. The clichéd predictability of these unnerving symbols is what gives them sustained power. Even those who believe that Lucifer is little more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo are somehow conditioned to revile deadly sins and sinners, in part, because they represent our repressed personal transgressions. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said: ‘We have seen the enemy, and he is us.’

Fear triggers hatred and inflames ignorance, which the skilled propagandist converts into manifestations of terror. Whether in picture or word, the spectre of unspeakable harm cannot help but wreak havoc on the psyche. When wed to a particularly repellent depiction of a foe it is impossible for the susceptible to avoid being dragged into a state of antipathy, much in the way that well crafted villainous literary or film characters evoke intense animosity. Repetition becomes the artist’s primary tool in this process. The more an image or epithet (or visual epithet) is repeated the more indelible it becomes. The big lie is synthetic truth.

Of course, real truth is necessary to bolster extreme exaggeration. Wicked political leaders are expedient and justifiable prototypes, and violent organisations beg to be exposed as such. But purveyors of hate imagery routinely latch on to the lowest denominator and over-generalise a particular people or nation on the basis of a characteristic or trait already lurking in the minds of the audience. In us propaganda of the 1950s, Joseph Stalin, a genuine scoundrel, represented all Soviets – not merely the regime over which he lorded – because the US was engaged in a cold war against the entire Soviet system and by extension its citizenry. Not surprisingly, in Soviet propaganda Americans were portrayed as corrupt, corpulent money-grabbers often given the composite features of ‘typical’ capitalists. In the litany of hate everyone is tarred with the same brush. When seen as a mass of faceless types the enemy becomes more terrifying. In the design of hate condemning the guilty demands slandering the innocent.

At the outset of World War II, US propagandists, including designers and illustrators from the advertising industry, were drafted into the paper war against Axis Germany, Japan, and Italy to create and propagate odious stereotypes that subverted tenets of peacetime civility. The Office of War Information in Washington DC helped define the parameters of the depictions being fed to civilians at home and soldiers overseas. The methods were similar but the goals were different. Civilians had to be reminded of the ruthlessness of the enemy, while soldiers had to be encouraged to kill them without remorse. This was only accomplished through relentless dehumanisation. Yet the harshness of caricature was insidiously different between German/Italian and Japanese representations.

While both approaches were justifiably harsh, the propaganda showing white Europeans was less vicious than that for yellow Asians who were depicted as having exaggerated sinister, racial features. The Nazis and fascists were alternately illustrated as buffoonish (Hitler and Mussolini as clowns) or menacing (sabre-rattling warriors), but the Japanese, whether presented as buffoon or menace, invariably appeared more sub-human. In war, racist depictions are more endemic to the rhetoric of hate than any other form – the more stomach-turning the better.

A postcard issued in 1942 by the US Forest Service cautioning campers against accidentally igniting forest fires was typical of how the racist approach was introduced in all manner of public media. In this textbook study of visual enmity, Smokey the Bear is replaced by the quintessential Japanese demon: he was a buck-toothed, four-eyed (as though thick lens glasses somehow indicated inferiority), low-browed and pointy-eared soldier threateningly holding a lighted match. When placed in a number of other cautionary scenarios this archetype underscored the duplicity and savagery ascribed to the ‘yellow’ race. The marriage of the grotesque to the immoral in this portrayal was as powerful as a planeload of bombs and left similar scars. The ‘Japs’ could not be made to look any more preternatural. But since war is hatred run amok it gives licence for pent-up atavistic animosities that surge like a shot of adrenaline through the body politic. Extreme caricatures of the Japanese plumbed the depths of fear.

Designers and artists who perpetrated these stereotypes were themselves caught up in mass hysteria and their work reflected prejudices born of indoctrination. Some were opportunists while others were patriots. Some worked to fight evil, some perpetuated it. When Arthur Szyk, a Polish-born illustrator working in the US, produced various horrifying caricatures of Japanese emperor Hirohito and war minister Tojo during World War ii for mass-market magazines such as Collier’s, he believed that he was justly attacking the principal scourges of war through ridicule and derision, for which racism was a tool. When Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, ordered his German Propaganda Studio to twist vulgar anti-Semitic stereotypes into sub-human [Untermensch] depictions his motive was to incite callous treatment and justify extermination.

A now infamous poster for the pseudo-documentary film Der Ewige Jude, [The Eternal Jew], directed by the Nazi’s ‘anti-Jewish expert,’ Dr Eberhard Taubert, portrays a heinous caricature of a generic Chasidic Jew in long coat and skull-cap (the garments that for centuries distinguished this devout sect from more assimilated Jews), presented as an avaricious, cowardly fiend poised to devour the world. When pitted against high German culture the obvious message was that the Jew was a defiler, and therefore the target of permissible malice. Hitler expounded, ‘The Jew has destroyed hundreds of cultures, but built none of his own.’ Goebbels’ (1) propagandists derived certain Jewish stereotypes from myths such as The Golem taken from Jewish lore, in the same way as many derogatory racial stereotypes were inspired by venerable and indigenous tales and stories elsewhere. The Jew was portrayed as barbarous and perverted in the most infamous of all Nazi hate propaganda: an SS booklet called The Subhuman, a manual of hatred and loathing that viewed its victims as vermin.

‘Civilisation is a constant struggle to hold back the forces of barbarism,’ writes Sam Keen. ‘. . . The barbarian, the giant running amok, the uncivilised enemy, symbolise power divorced from intelligence . . .’ So the graphic lexicon of hate abounds with metaphor and allegory in which the barbarism of any opponent is made concrete through images of vicious anthropomorphic beasts – polemical werewolves – the embodiment of bloodthirsty wickedness. Never mind that in wars, each side resorts to barbarism. Never mind that the vocabulary of hate invariably uses barbarism to ‘fight’ barbarism. In the propaganda war the victor is the nation that claims God is on its side and invents the most mnemonic and horrific image of its enemy. In World War I the US artists and designers under the watchful art direction of Charles Dana Gibson at the Committee on Public Information invented images (bolstered by rumours of German savagery against civilians) that depicted German troops as even more venal than those later in World War ii. The ‘Hun’, an ape-like beast with blood soaked canines clutching young female hostages (implying that rape was an instrument of policy), was the veritable poster child of hate. This model existed until the 1960s when, ironically, superhero cartoons such as X-Men turned similarly frightening creatures into sympathetic anti-heroes.

War is not the sole rationale for institutional, graphic hatred. In fact, there is no greater motivator than apprehension of ‘otherness’, and no more effective imagery, once again, than ethnic and racial stereotypes that exacerbate the suspicions of insecure people. Absurd racial stereotypes have historically been (and still are) used as benign commercial symbols in comics, advertisements and packages, even logos, but when similar caricatures are tweaked with just a hint of menace, such as a lustful gaze or dramatic shadow, they switch from benign comedy into vengeful attack. It takes very little effort on the part of designers to open the Pandora’s box of offensive graphics. In recent years, given oil crises and terrorist bombings, Arabs have been caricatured in the US in a manner recalling anti-Semitic cartoons of earlier times. Such images have doubtless influenced a common view of these people as a whole. The single derogatory picture often negates a thousand positive words.

‘Hate-driven imagery cannot, by definition, be produced by groups open to debate or transparency,’ says Dan Walsh, director of The Justice Project, which uses graphics to teach freedom and tolerance. Yet not all images designed to elicit hatred are lies or exaggerations. Though always odious, in certain paradoxical instances hate messages can expose reality in order to elicit protest against evil. Depending on where one stood along the ideological divide in the late 1960s for or against the Vietnam War, the graphics that offered evidence of US atrocities toward civilians provoked enmity towards American leaders (and sometimes even soldiers in the field). The famous news photograph by R. Haeberle of the aftermath of the massacre of 21 women and children in the remote hamlet of My Lai, vividly showing lifeless bodies lying in a ditch after troops led by Lt William Calley cut them down, was produced as an anti-war poster with the headline, ‘Q: And babies? A: And babies.’ Because it so totally contradicted the civilised image that Americans held of themselves, the poster became a call to pity the victims and hate the perpetrators of the war. Similarly, photographs coming from Vietnam and published in underground periodicals showing soldiers holding severed Viet Cong heads as trophies were intended to foster as the same rage as did the pictorial evidence of World War II atrocities. These visuals of demonic acts did not have to be designed or manipulated in any way – supposedly the camera did not lie. Yet designers had to intervene with the material so that there would be no ambiguity in the message.

‘Hate / rage / revolt imagery is often the most graphically charged because there is no operational code of conduct in place between the combatants – no taboos are recognised,’ argues Dan Walsh. Nor is there any mystery, allusion, or subtlety in this form of address. The language of hate leaves no room for interpretation. It is good or bad, black or white. It is never neutral. ‘Propaganda allows us to exteriorise the battle,’ writes Sam Keen, ‘project the struggle within the psyche into the realm of politics.’ The design of demonic representations is a battle rooted in obsession, and perhaps more insidious than what Marshall McLuhan had called ‘the old hot wars of industrial hardware.’

First published in Eye no. 41 vol. 11, 2001

Thomas Ricks Talks at Pritzker Military Library: Iraq

Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: Fiasco 2006
Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: The Gamble 2009

Two incredibly illuminating talks by writer/journalist Thomas Ricks on his books Fiasco and The Gamble about the Iraq war. Q&A in the second half. I'm still digesting this.

The U.S. Military & Counterinsurgency

U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency from Cato Institute on FORA.tv

Military Ethics & Leadership - Tom Ricks

Question: Why on earth did the phone-in have to divide people by their politics? Being a Brit, this is completely alien to me and would never have been done in the UK. It sets the tone of the whole discussion and invites division and encourages the extremists on both sides of the polarised coin. Both caller no.3 and 4, demonstrate this. Bad, bad CSpan. Ethics has nothing to do with your politics, or should not.

Honoring the Warrior, Not the War

by Aidan Delgado

I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name, commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In America, Veterans Day is now associated with honoring US war dead and remembering the sacrifices of veterans in all our conflicts. This is good and very much in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday; for remembering the terrible cost of war is the best way for us to appreciate the peace we now enjoy. For me, Veterans Day embodies two moods at once: somber reflection on the sacrifices of soldiers and gratitude for the blessing of peace.

Yet these days, Veterans Day often makes me sad. It seems that this holiday in particular almost can't help becoming politicized, particularly in the midst of a controversial war. This is a holiday about celebrating the end of war; I don't want to see it become something like a "Support the Troops" bumper-sticker. I want people to look at all the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans and draw the right lesson from them: that war is terrible and we must do everything we can to prevent it. In honoring the warrior, we should take care not to honor war in itself. Remember that beneath the memorials to individual soldiers, the laurels for their courage, there is a subtle message to the younger generation: you should grow up and become soldiers too. I don't think that's the message that should be sent on Veteran's Day. This should be a holiday about remembering the price of peace, for no soldier joins to perpetuate war. All veterans served and fought in the expectation of eventually regaining the peace, and enjoying a measure of it themselves. If we want to truly thank veterans, then we should not only honor them as individuals but honor the thing they fought and died for: the return to a peaceful society. We should remember that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day.

Charlie Speaks

As usual I can't recall how I came to find this. It's from a blog that hasn't, since 2007, been added to or updated. I hope Charlie is still with us.

The Observation Post - Observations of a Marine infantry officer and participant in the Global War On Terror. 

Thursday, August 24, 2006

President Bush pessimistic about Iraq?

Bush Shows Pessimism on Iraq

For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realized. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favor of the contention that things could be even worse.

Obviously I am limited to what I can say on this subject, being a professional Marine officer, but this article screams out for some commentary. 3 and a half years ago, I believed whole-heartedly that we were doing the right thing in ousting Saddam Hussein, and I still do.

Hindsight being 20/20, now I would say that we should not have made the alleged weapons of mass destruction the linchpin of our case against Saddam, but I never believed that was the administration's primary motivation. I still believe that the policy-makers latched on to that issue because it was the easiest to sell to the American public. After all, I believe most of us thought that the hardest thing about the war would not be fighting it, but getting the American public to support it.

Most of the Marines I talked to in February and March 2003 expected a somewhat difficult fight followed by a quick and easy occupation. I differed from many of them in that I thought the occupation would be longer, but I never thought a full-fledged insurgency would break out. There was a general sense of optimism, that we would steamroll the Iraqis just like we did in 1991. However, when I was trained to be a platoon commander, I was told to plan not only for what I believed to be the enemy's most likely course of action, but also his most dangerous course of action. I believe we either planned for the wrong most dangerous course of action, or ignored it outright. Once the war became an all-out insurgency, it should have been obvious to everyone that it would continue for several years. Counter-insurgency campaigns are never short or easy, and anyone who expected this to be over by now was misguided at best and delusional at worst.

One of the most frustrating things to me has been the talk of immediate withdrawal. If we withdraw and the Iraqi government fails or is taken over by anti-American fundamentalists, then our enemies will all know that they can beat us by using insurgent tactics and outlasting us. Whether you wanted this war or not, it has happened and we must deal with it and continue to fight until we have achieved our goal of a completely self-sustaining Iraqi government.

I will tell you that in just the short time I have been here, this Iraqi Army battalion has made significant progress in securing the nearby villages. Their performance leaves plenty to be desired, but the civilians who live near the COP have said on numerous occasions that they feel much safer around their homes than they did just 4-5 months ago. Progress is being made here, and it will continue to be as long as we are allowed to do our jobs.

There are some echoes of another Marines words from Iraq at this time - Maj. Ben Connable who I've posted about here: Perceptions from the Ground

And some skepticism (no, downright mis-trust) on Connable here: Digging a little deeper

A few interviews: Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich on Changing Our Military Mindset from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo. 

Podcast interview with Tom Enggelhardt (TomDispatch.com) discussing Bacevichs book Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permenant War, 2010. Listen Here

Podcast inerview with Richard Fidler, ABC Local Australia, 2008. Listen Here

READY FOR WHAT AND MODERNIZED AGAINST WHOM?

A prescient warning? Unfortunately unheeded...

By Jeffrey Record 1995

Strategic Studies Institute

United States Army War College
 
Excerpt:

....p.10

Bacevich, contend that the United States will seek to avoid direct involvement in unconventional conflicts, and if unable to avoid involvement, will inevitably perform poorly. In his view the culprit is a Pentagon still so petrified by the prospect of another Vietnam that it has deliberately blocked attempts to prepare effectively for unconventional conflict—and this, says Bacevich, at a time when the age of conventional military practice is drawing to a close.

I tend to believe that we are entering an era in which the predominant form of conflict will be smaller and less conventional wars waged mostly within recognized national borders. State disintegration in much of Africa, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the potential decomposition of Russia itself, and the likely spread of politically radical Islam—all portend a host of politically and militarily messy conflicts. They also portend a continuation of strong pressures to participate in operations other than war, especially in peace, humanitarian relief, and nation-building operations.

But whether I am right or wrong, I think most would agree with the proposition that a military establishment dedicated almost exclusively to preparation for conventional combat, and strongly averse to dealing with violent challenges that cannot be effectively dealt with by conventional means, is a military establishment that is not ready for unconventional conflict. Our own military performance in this century reveals a clear correlation between the type of combat we faced and how successful we were. Almost all of our military victories were gained against conventionally armed states that in the end failed to match either the quàlity or quantity of U.S. (and allied) manpower, materiel, and raw firepower. Wilhemine Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Baathist Iraq were simply overwhelmed.

In contrast, our military failures and humiliations for the most part have been at the hands of opponents having little or nothing in the way or sea and air power, or even ground force other than light infantry. Most of them could not hope to prevail over U.S. forces conventionally. But they did prevail because they employed a combination of unconventional strategy and tactics and had a greater willingness to fight and die. U.S. military power was stymied by Philipppine insurrectos, stalemated in Korea, defeated in Vietnam, and embarrassed in Lebanon and Somalia by opponents who succeeded in denying to U.S. forces the kind of targets most vulnerable to overwhelming firepower, while at the same time demonstrating superior political stamina in terms of enduring combat’s duration and cost.

To be sure, there were factors on our side other than our military conventionality that contributed to these failures, including excessive micromanagement of military operations from above, an absence of interests worth the price of the fight, and an underestimation of enemy political will and fighting prowess. But the fact remains that military forces designed primarily for one type of warfare are inherently ill-suited for other kinds of warfare. Race horses perform poorly at rodeos and behind plows.

Of the Pentagon’s commitment to conventional military orthodoxy and aversion to the unconventional, Andrew Bacevich has written:

Adversaries as different as Mohammed Farah Aideed and Radovan Karadzic have all too readily grasped the opportunities implicit in this fact. No doubt they respect the American military establishment for its formidable strengths. They are also shrewd enough to circumvent those strengths and to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in the rigid American adherence to professional conventions regarding the use of force. As long as U.S. military policies are held hostage to such conventions, those vulnerabilities will persist. The abiding theme of twentieth century military history is that the changing character of modern war long ago turned the flank of conventional military practice, limiting its application to an ever narrowing spectrum of contingencies.

Far more of a challenge than Iraq presented 4 years ago will be forthcoming from Iran, which in its continuing campaígn against American power and influence in Southwest Asia has relied not on direct conventional military challenges, but rather on more successful, indirect, unconventional instruments such as terrorism, hostage-taking, and subversion. Add to these ingredients weapons of mass destruction and a keen attention to surreptitiously exploiting U.S. conventional military weaknesses, such as mining Gulf waters, and you have what Andrew Krepinevich has called a “Streetfighter State.” Such a state relies on unconventional acts of violence, and is prepared to wage a protracted struggle. Iran, and nations like it, are willing to absorb what the United States would consider a disproportionate amount of punishment to achieve its goals. The Streetfighter State exploits American social weaknesses, such as impatience and aversion to casualties, while at the same time denying U.S. firepower decisive targets or at least easily attackable ones. It’s not that the U.S. military is preparing for the wrong war. It’s just that there is more than one war—any single “right” war—to prepare for in the post-Cold War world. Stuffing money into the defense budget readiness accounts prepares us for conventional warfare but not for much else, and that “much else” may come to dominate the international military environment.

Krepinevich has written:

It would seem that, rather than maintaining a force structure for two ‘last wars,’ the Defense Department might consider expending some additional resources, especially intellectual capital, examining how the United States military might explore innovative operational concepts that help it cope with the Streetfighter State. Such conceptual innovation need not break the budget . . . [D)uring the 1920s and 1930s the U.S. military successfully engineered a number of conceptual, or ‘intellectual,’ breakthroughs in response to dramatic changes in the geopolitical and military technical environment. The military services did it through a mixture of good fortune and farsighted leaders, both military and civilian, who were sufficiently adaptive and innovative to nurture the ‘intellectual breakthroughs’ that led to the rise of carrier aviation, strategic aerial bombardment, and modern amphibious assault operations. They accomplished this sea change while military budgets were extremely tight. Wargaming and prototyping were emphasized, as opposed to full-scale production of systems. In essence, the services benefitted from a relatively small force structure, which allowed them to move more quickly into the new form of warfare once it was identified and the nation found itself confronted with great power rivals.