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
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Monday, 25 June 2012
A few interviews: Andrew Bacevich
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
Friday, 22 June 2012
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:
Krepinevich has written:
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.
Thursday, 21 June 2012
The American Way of War
By Jeffrey Record 2006
Cato Institute
Exceprt:
...
The American Way of War
Much has been written about America’s strategic culture and way of war, beginning with historian Russell F. Weigley’s seminal 1973 book, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Both strategy and policy derive from a variety of factors, including national political culture, geography, historical military experience, and comparative strategic advantages and preferences. Particular factors shaping America’s strategic culture include geographic isolation from Europe, success in subjugating a vast continental wilderness, hemispheric domination, an ideology of democratic expansionism and national exceptionalism, and a persistent isolationist impulse. Those and other factors, argues the highly respected British strategist Colin S. Gray in an exceptionally insightful 2005 essay, have produced a strategic culture—more specifically, an “American way of war”— that has 12 specific characteristics:
1. Apolitical: “Americans are wont to regard war and peace as sharply distinctive conditions. The U.S. military has a long history of waging war for the goal of victory, paying scant regard to the consequences of the course of its operations for the character of the peace that will follow.”
2. Astrategic: “Strategy is, or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy. When Americans wage war as a largely autonomous activity, leaving worry about peace and its politics to some later day, the strategy bridge has broken down.”
3. Ahistorical: “America is a future-oriented, still somewhat ‘new’ country, one that has a founding ideology of faith in, and hope for, and commitment to, human betterment. It is only to be expected, therefore, that Americans should be less than highly respectful of what they might otherwise allow history to teach them.”
4. Problem-Solving, Optimistic: “The American way in war is not easily discouraged or deflected once it is exercised with serious intent to succeed. . . . The problem- solving faith, the penchant for the ‘engineering fix,’ has the inevitable consequence of leading U.S. policy, including its use of armed force, to attempt the impossible.”
5. Culturally Ignorant: Americans are not inclined “to be respectful of the beliefs, habits, and behaviors of other cultures . . . the American way of war has suffered from the self-inflicted damage caused by a failure to understand the enemy of the day.”
6. Technologically Dependent: “America is the land of technological marvels and of extraordinary technology dependency. . . . American soldiers say that the human beings matter most, but in practice the American way of war, past, present, and prospectively future, is quintessentially and uniquely technologically dependent.”
7. Firepower Focused: “It has long been the American way in warfare to send metal in harm’s way in place of vulnerable flesh. . . . Needless to say, perhaps, a devotion to firepower, while highly desirable in itself, cannot help but encourage the U.S. armed forces to rely on it even when other modes of military behavior would be more suitable. In irregular conflicts in particular, . . . resorting to firepower solutions readily becomes self-defeating.”
8. Large-Scale: “Poor societies are obliged to wage war frugally. They have no choice other than to attempt to fight smarter than rich enemies. The United States has been blessed with wealth in all its forms. Inevitably, the U.S. armed forces, once mobilized and equipped, have fought a rich person’s war. They could hardly do otherwise.”
9. Profoundly Regular: “Few, if any, armies have been equally competent in the conduct of regular and irregular warfare. . . . As institutions, however, the U.S. armed forces have not been friendly either to irregular warfare or to those in its ranks who were would-be practitioners and advocates of what was regarded as the sideshow of insurgency. American soldiers . . . have always been prepared nearly exclusively for ‘real war,’ which is to say combat against a tolerably symmetrical, regular enemy.”
10. Impatient: “Americans have approached warfare as a regrettable occasional evil that has to be concluded as decisively and rapidly as possible.”
11. Logistically Excellent: “Americans at war have been exceptionally able logisticians. With a continental-size interior and an effectively insular geographic location, such ability has been mandatory if the country was to wage war at all, let alone wage it effectively. . . . A large logistical footprint . . . requires a great deal of guarding, helps isolate American troops from local people and their culture, and generally tends to grow.”
12. Sensitivity to Casualties: “In common with the Roman Empire, the American guardian of world order is much averse to suffering a high rate of military casualties. . . . Both superstates had and have armies that are small, too small in the opinion of many, relative to their responsibilities. Moreover, well-trained professional soldiers, volunteers all, are expensive to raise, train, and retain, and are difficult to replace.” American society, it is said, “has become so sensitive to casualties that the domestic context for U.S. military action is no longer tolerant of bloody adventures in muscular imperial governance.”
Cato Institute
Exceprt:
...
The American Way of War
Much has been written about America’s strategic culture and way of war, beginning with historian Russell F. Weigley’s seminal 1973 book, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Both strategy and policy derive from a variety of factors, including national political culture, geography, historical military experience, and comparative strategic advantages and preferences. Particular factors shaping America’s strategic culture include geographic isolation from Europe, success in subjugating a vast continental wilderness, hemispheric domination, an ideology of democratic expansionism and national exceptionalism, and a persistent isolationist impulse. Those and other factors, argues the highly respected British strategist Colin S. Gray in an exceptionally insightful 2005 essay, have produced a strategic culture—more specifically, an “American way of war”— that has 12 specific characteristics:
1. Apolitical: “Americans are wont to regard war and peace as sharply distinctive conditions. The U.S. military has a long history of waging war for the goal of victory, paying scant regard to the consequences of the course of its operations for the character of the peace that will follow.”
2. Astrategic: “Strategy is, or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy. When Americans wage war as a largely autonomous activity, leaving worry about peace and its politics to some later day, the strategy bridge has broken down.”
3. Ahistorical: “America is a future-oriented, still somewhat ‘new’ country, one that has a founding ideology of faith in, and hope for, and commitment to, human betterment. It is only to be expected, therefore, that Americans should be less than highly respectful of what they might otherwise allow history to teach them.”
4. Problem-Solving, Optimistic: “The American way in war is not easily discouraged or deflected once it is exercised with serious intent to succeed. . . . The problem- solving faith, the penchant for the ‘engineering fix,’ has the inevitable consequence of leading U.S. policy, including its use of armed force, to attempt the impossible.”
5. Culturally Ignorant: Americans are not inclined “to be respectful of the beliefs, habits, and behaviors of other cultures . . . the American way of war has suffered from the self-inflicted damage caused by a failure to understand the enemy of the day.”
6. Technologically Dependent: “America is the land of technological marvels and of extraordinary technology dependency. . . . American soldiers say that the human beings matter most, but in practice the American way of war, past, present, and prospectively future, is quintessentially and uniquely technologically dependent.”
7. Firepower Focused: “It has long been the American way in warfare to send metal in harm’s way in place of vulnerable flesh. . . . Needless to say, perhaps, a devotion to firepower, while highly desirable in itself, cannot help but encourage the U.S. armed forces to rely on it even when other modes of military behavior would be more suitable. In irregular conflicts in particular, . . . resorting to firepower solutions readily becomes self-defeating.”
8. Large-Scale: “Poor societies are obliged to wage war frugally. They have no choice other than to attempt to fight smarter than rich enemies. The United States has been blessed with wealth in all its forms. Inevitably, the U.S. armed forces, once mobilized and equipped, have fought a rich person’s war. They could hardly do otherwise.”
9. Profoundly Regular: “Few, if any, armies have been equally competent in the conduct of regular and irregular warfare. . . . As institutions, however, the U.S. armed forces have not been friendly either to irregular warfare or to those in its ranks who were would-be practitioners and advocates of what was regarded as the sideshow of insurgency. American soldiers . . . have always been prepared nearly exclusively for ‘real war,’ which is to say combat against a tolerably symmetrical, regular enemy.”
10. Impatient: “Americans have approached warfare as a regrettable occasional evil that has to be concluded as decisively and rapidly as possible.”
11. Logistically Excellent: “Americans at war have been exceptionally able logisticians. With a continental-size interior and an effectively insular geographic location, such ability has been mandatory if the country was to wage war at all, let alone wage it effectively. . . . A large logistical footprint . . . requires a great deal of guarding, helps isolate American troops from local people and their culture, and generally tends to grow.”
12. Sensitivity to Casualties: “In common with the Roman Empire, the American guardian of world order is much averse to suffering a high rate of military casualties. . . . Both superstates had and have armies that are small, too small in the opinion of many, relative to their responsibilities. Moreover, well-trained professional soldiers, volunteers all, are expensive to raise, train, and retain, and are difficult to replace.” American society, it is said, “has become so sensitive to casualties that the domestic context for U.S. military action is no longer tolerant of bloody adventures in muscular imperial governance.”
Monday, 11 June 2012
The Future Of The World Rests On America
‘Americans misperceive the world and their role in determining its evolution’
Andrew J. Bacevich
Boston Review Jan/Feb 2010
This article is a response to Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
Nir Rosen is rightly skeptical of the counterinsurgency campaign the United States seems hellbent on pursuing in Afghanistan. Yet the problems highlighted by U.S. military action in that unfortunate country go much further: Americans misperceive the world and their own role in determining its evolution.
The bedrock assumption to which all of official Washington adheres, liberal Democrats no less than conservative Republicans, is that the United States itself constitutes the axis around which history turns. We define the future. Our actions determine its course. The world needs, expects, and yearns for America to lead, thereby ensuring the ultimate triumph of liberty. For the United States to shrink from its responsibility to lead is, at the very least, to put at risk the precarious stability to which humanity clings and in all likelihood would open the door to unspeakable catastrophe. Alternatives to American leadership simply do not exist.
Reject these propositions and your chances of working in the White House, securing a cushy billet at some Washington think tank, or landing an invitation to pontificate on one of the Sunday-morning talk shows are reduced to just about zero.
This self-image, combining grandeur with insufferable smugness, both energizes and perverts U.S. foreign policy. It inspires American policymakers to undertake breathtakingly bold initiatives such as the Marshall Plan—Harry Truman setting out to rebuild a Europe laid prostrate by war. Yet it also inspires the likes of George W. Bush to pursue his Freedom Agenda—an expressed intent to transform the entire Islamic world, providing a rationale for open-ended “global war.”
The conviction that the United States is history’s prime mover also blinds Washington to forces that may well exercise a far greater impact on the course of events than do the actions of the United States itself.
During the Cold War, for example, U.S. policymakers viewed events through the lens of bipolarity. The world, they insisted, broke neatly into two camps divided by an iron curtain. In the 1950s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that neutrality was immoral and impermissible. Governments had to choose: you either sided with the free world (led, of course, by the United States) or you aligned yourself with the communists.
This oversimplified with-us-or-against-us mentality made it difficult, if not impossible, for Dulles and other U.S. leaders to comprehend the eruption of third-world nationalism triggered by and feeding off of the collapse of the old European empires after World War II. In Washington “non-aligned” became a synonym for “fellow traveler.” Faced with expressions of self-determination that did not fit neatly into the prevailing East-West paradigm, U.S. officials assumed the worst and acted to enforce conformity to Western—i.e., American—requirements. This misperception—that self-professed nationalists in places such as Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam were actually agents of the Kremlin—produced a penchant for U.S. intervention, both overt and covert, that yielded disastrous consequences, many of them still dogging us today.
Had U.S. officials accurately gauged the wellsprings of postcolonial nationalism, the United States might have demonstrated greater self-restraint when faced with third-world recalcitrance. The insistence that Egypt’s Nasser or Cuba’s Castro toe some line dictated from Washington turned out to be neither necessary nor productive.
Yet appreciating the new nationalism might also have offered Washington an insight into the profound internal weakness of the multinational, multiethnic Soviet Empire. Poles, Afghans, and Chinese had no interest in taking their marching orders from Moscow. Nor, as events would show, did Ukrainians, Georgians, and Kazakhs. The post-1945 Soviet Empire was as obsolete as the empires of Great Britain and France. Its collapse was a bit longer in coming, but was equally foreordained.
A similar misperception afflicts U.S. policy today. In the wake of 9/11, a with-us-or-against-us mentality once again swept Washington. “Terrorism” assumed the place of communism as the great evil that the United States was called upon to extirpate. This effort triggered a revival of interventionism, pursued heedless of cost and regardless of consequences, whether practical or moral.
The tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.
In the Pentagon, they call this the Long War. With his decision to escalate the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama—effectively abandoning his promise to “change the way Washington works”—has signaled his administration’s commitment to the Long War.
Yet, as with the Cold War, the Long War rests on a false premise. To divide the world into two camps today makes no more sense than it did in Dulles’s time. Rather than creating clarity, indulging in this sort of oversimplification sows confusion and encourages miscalculation. It allows Americans to avert their eyes from the gathering forces—largely beyond the control of the United States—that are actually reshaping the international order. Sending U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan sustains the pretense that we ourselves, exercising the prerogatives of global leadership, are somehow shaping that order.
Violent anti-Western jihadism—a cause that has about as much prospect of conquering the planet as Soviet-style communism—is not going to define the 21st century. Far more likely to do so is the transfer of power—first economic, then political—from the West to the East, from the Atlantic basin to the heartland of Asia. In that regard, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.
Complicating this transfer of power and creating conditions from which a new era of violent conflict may emerge is the challenge of dealing with the detritus created during the age of Western dominance now ending: weapons of mass destruction; vast disparities of wealth; the depletion of essential natural resources; massive and potentially irreversible environmental devastation; and a culture ravaged by the pursuit of “freedom” defined in terms of conspicuous consumption and unbridled individual autonomy.
The Long War that President Bush began and that President Obama has now made his own provides an excuse for Americans to avoid confronting these larger matters. A policy of avoidance will not make the problems go away, of course. It will merely advance the day of reckoning that awaits.
Andrew J. Bacevich
Boston Review Jan/Feb 2010
This article is a response to Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
Nir Rosen is rightly skeptical of the counterinsurgency campaign the United States seems hellbent on pursuing in Afghanistan. Yet the problems highlighted by U.S. military action in that unfortunate country go much further: Americans misperceive the world and their own role in determining its evolution.
The bedrock assumption to which all of official Washington adheres, liberal Democrats no less than conservative Republicans, is that the United States itself constitutes the axis around which history turns. We define the future. Our actions determine its course. The world needs, expects, and yearns for America to lead, thereby ensuring the ultimate triumph of liberty. For the United States to shrink from its responsibility to lead is, at the very least, to put at risk the precarious stability to which humanity clings and in all likelihood would open the door to unspeakable catastrophe. Alternatives to American leadership simply do not exist.
Reject these propositions and your chances of working in the White House, securing a cushy billet at some Washington think tank, or landing an invitation to pontificate on one of the Sunday-morning talk shows are reduced to just about zero.
This self-image, combining grandeur with insufferable smugness, both energizes and perverts U.S. foreign policy. It inspires American policymakers to undertake breathtakingly bold initiatives such as the Marshall Plan—Harry Truman setting out to rebuild a Europe laid prostrate by war. Yet it also inspires the likes of George W. Bush to pursue his Freedom Agenda—an expressed intent to transform the entire Islamic world, providing a rationale for open-ended “global war.”
The conviction that the United States is history’s prime mover also blinds Washington to forces that may well exercise a far greater impact on the course of events than do the actions of the United States itself.
During the Cold War, for example, U.S. policymakers viewed events through the lens of bipolarity. The world, they insisted, broke neatly into two camps divided by an iron curtain. In the 1950s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that neutrality was immoral and impermissible. Governments had to choose: you either sided with the free world (led, of course, by the United States) or you aligned yourself with the communists.
This oversimplified with-us-or-against-us mentality made it difficult, if not impossible, for Dulles and other U.S. leaders to comprehend the eruption of third-world nationalism triggered by and feeding off of the collapse of the old European empires after World War II. In Washington “non-aligned” became a synonym for “fellow traveler.” Faced with expressions of self-determination that did not fit neatly into the prevailing East-West paradigm, U.S. officials assumed the worst and acted to enforce conformity to Western—i.e., American—requirements. This misperception—that self-professed nationalists in places such as Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam were actually agents of the Kremlin—produced a penchant for U.S. intervention, both overt and covert, that yielded disastrous consequences, many of them still dogging us today.
Had U.S. officials accurately gauged the wellsprings of postcolonial nationalism, the United States might have demonstrated greater self-restraint when faced with third-world recalcitrance. The insistence that Egypt’s Nasser or Cuba’s Castro toe some line dictated from Washington turned out to be neither necessary nor productive.
Yet appreciating the new nationalism might also have offered Washington an insight into the profound internal weakness of the multinational, multiethnic Soviet Empire. Poles, Afghans, and Chinese had no interest in taking their marching orders from Moscow. Nor, as events would show, did Ukrainians, Georgians, and Kazakhs. The post-1945 Soviet Empire was as obsolete as the empires of Great Britain and France. Its collapse was a bit longer in coming, but was equally foreordained.
A similar misperception afflicts U.S. policy today. In the wake of 9/11, a with-us-or-against-us mentality once again swept Washington. “Terrorism” assumed the place of communism as the great evil that the United States was called upon to extirpate. This effort triggered a revival of interventionism, pursued heedless of cost and regardless of consequences, whether practical or moral.
The tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.
In the Pentagon, they call this the Long War. With his decision to escalate the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama—effectively abandoning his promise to “change the way Washington works”—has signaled his administration’s commitment to the Long War.
Yet, as with the Cold War, the Long War rests on a false premise. To divide the world into two camps today makes no more sense than it did in Dulles’s time. Rather than creating clarity, indulging in this sort of oversimplification sows confusion and encourages miscalculation. It allows Americans to avert their eyes from the gathering forces—largely beyond the control of the United States—that are actually reshaping the international order. Sending U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan sustains the pretense that we ourselves, exercising the prerogatives of global leadership, are somehow shaping that order.
Violent anti-Western jihadism—a cause that has about as much prospect of conquering the planet as Soviet-style communism—is not going to define the 21st century. Far more likely to do so is the transfer of power—first economic, then political—from the West to the East, from the Atlantic basin to the heartland of Asia. In that regard, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.
Complicating this transfer of power and creating conditions from which a new era of violent conflict may emerge is the challenge of dealing with the detritus created during the age of Western dominance now ending: weapons of mass destruction; vast disparities of wealth; the depletion of essential natural resources; massive and potentially irreversible environmental devastation; and a culture ravaged by the pursuit of “freedom” defined in terms of conspicuous consumption and unbridled individual autonomy.
The Long War that President Bush began and that President Obama has now made his own provides an excuse for Americans to avoid confronting these larger matters. A policy of avoidance will not make the problems go away, of course. It will merely advance the day of reckoning that awaits.
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
Sunday, 3 June 2012
Afghanistan: a war we cannot win
The threat posed by al-Qaeda is exaggerated; the West's vision of a rebuilt Afghanistan ultimately flawed, says former soldier, diplomat and academic Rory Stewart
London Review of Books (originally titled: The Irresistable Illusion) / The Telegraph
July 2009
By Rory Stewart
We are accustomed to seeing Afghans through bars, or smeared windows, or the sight of a rifle: turbaned men carrying rockets, praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.
Barack Obama, in a recent speech, set out our fears. The Afghan government
It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions. None of the experts in 1988 predicted that the Russian-backed President Najibullah would survive for two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal. And no one predicted at the beginning of 1994 that the famous commanders of the jihad, Hekmatyar and Masud, then fighting a civil war in the centre of Kabul, could be swept aside by an unknown group of madrassah students called the Taliban. Or that the Taliban would, in a few months, conquer 90 per cent of the country, eliminate much corruption, restore security on the roads and host al-Qaida.
It is tempting to assume that economic growth will not make Afghanistan into Obama’s terrorist haven or Brown’s strong democracy but rather into something more like its wealthier neighbours. Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at various points under the same Muslim empires. There are Persian, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik populations in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Pushtun are only arbitrarily divided by the Durand Line from their Pakistani kinsmen. The economies are linked and millions of Afghans have studied and worked in Iran or Pakistan. There are more reasons for Afghanistan to develop into a country like one of its neighbours than for it to collapse into Somalian civil war or solidify into Malaysian democracy. But Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan present a bewildering variety of states: an Islamist theocracy, a surreal mock-tribal autocracy, a repressive secular dictatorship, a country trembling on the edge of civil war, a military dictatorship cum democracy. And it will be many years before Afghanistan’s economy or its institutions draw level with those of its neighbours.
Pakistan, which is often portrayed as a ‘failed state’, has not only the nuclear bomb and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence but also the Friday Times and the National College of Arts. Progressive views are no longer confined to the wealthy Lahore elite: a mass commercial satellite television station championed a campaign to overturn the hudud ordinances, which conflated adultery and rape; 1500 women were released from jail as a result. There is no equivalent in Afghanistan of the Pakistani lawyers’ movement, which reinstated the chief justice after his dismissal by Musharraf.
London Review of Books (originally titled: The Irresistable Illusion) / The Telegraph
July 2009
By Rory Stewart
We are accustomed to seeing Afghans through bars, or smeared windows, or the sight of a rifle: turbaned men carrying rockets, praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.
Barack Obama, in a recent speech, set out our fears. The Afghan government
is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency … If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can … For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralysed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people – especially women and girls. The return in force of al-Qaida terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions. None of the experts in 1988 predicted that the Russian-backed President Najibullah would survive for two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal. And no one predicted at the beginning of 1994 that the famous commanders of the jihad, Hekmatyar and Masud, then fighting a civil war in the centre of Kabul, could be swept aside by an unknown group of madrassah students called the Taliban. Or that the Taliban would, in a few months, conquer 90 per cent of the country, eliminate much corruption, restore security on the roads and host al-Qaida.
It is tempting to assume that economic growth will not make Afghanistan into Obama’s terrorist haven or Brown’s strong democracy but rather into something more like its wealthier neighbours. Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at various points under the same Muslim empires. There are Persian, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik populations in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Pushtun are only arbitrarily divided by the Durand Line from their Pakistani kinsmen. The economies are linked and millions of Afghans have studied and worked in Iran or Pakistan. There are more reasons for Afghanistan to develop into a country like one of its neighbours than for it to collapse into Somalian civil war or solidify into Malaysian democracy. But Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan present a bewildering variety of states: an Islamist theocracy, a surreal mock-tribal autocracy, a repressive secular dictatorship, a country trembling on the edge of civil war, a military dictatorship cum democracy. And it will be many years before Afghanistan’s economy or its institutions draw level with those of its neighbours.
Pakistan, which is often portrayed as a ‘failed state’, has not only the nuclear bomb and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence but also the Friday Times and the National College of Arts. Progressive views are no longer confined to the wealthy Lahore elite: a mass commercial satellite television station championed a campaign to overturn the hudud ordinances, which conflated adultery and rape; 1500 women were released from jail as a result. There is no equivalent in Afghanistan of the Pakistani lawyers’ movement, which reinstated the chief justice after his dismissal by Musharraf.
Friday, 1 June 2012
U.S. Civil-Military Relations in the 21st Century
Following my post on the gap between the military and civilian society, heres the second half of a lecture given at the University of Berkeley by Nathaniel Fick - marine veteran and CEO of CNAS (Center for a New American Security). He touches on a lot of issues which I'm still digesting. I'm not so naive to think that this guy is some sort of authority on Afghanistan, the military or US foreign policy. He points this out himself, which in my book gives him some merit.
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Afghanistan: The Great Game - A Personal View by Rory Stewart
I just caught this today on BBC2. I don't know Rory Stewart, but I will certainly be looking out for him now. A refreshing look at the 10 year 'war' - the old adage 'history repeating itself' not so much describing the Afghans, but the sheer arrogance of the invading forces - whoever it may be - British, Russian or American.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 1
Part 2
Wednesday, 16 May 2012
The Widening Gap Between Military and Society
This may have been written 15 years ago but it seems as revelant today as it was in 1997. Hence the previous article post.
U.S. military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically active than ever before. Do they see America clearly?
The Atlantic July 1997
By Thomas E. Ricks
After following a platoon of Marine recruits through eleven weeks of boot-camp training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see, when they went home for postgraduation leave, how alienated they felt from their old lives. At various times each of these new Marines seemed to experience a moment of private loathing for public America. They were repulsed by the physical unfitness of civilians, by the uncouth behavior they witnessed, and by what they saw as pervasive selfishness and consumerism. Many found themselves avoiding old friends, and some experienced difficulty even in communicating with their families.
One typical member of Platoon 3086, Craig Hoover, reported that the Amtrak ride home to Kensington, Maryland, was "horrible." The train was "filled with smoke," he said. "People were drinking and their kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some people." (An article I published in The Wall Street Journal in July, 1995, mentioned many of the recruits quoted here.) Hoover also found the train ride a sad contrast to the relative racial harmony of Parris Island. "It felt kind of segregated by race and class—a poor white car, a poor black car, a middle-class white car, a middle-class black car." Even McDonald's—which had become a fantasy-like symbol to the recruits as they ate military rations, particularly during a week of training in the woods-proved to be a letdown. "You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight, and a little sloppy," Hoover said.
Jonathan Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile, Alabama. "We played pool and drank," he reported, in a typical comment. "It seemed like everyone there was losers. All they want to do is get smashed. They're self-destructive. They're not trying. They're just goofing around."
In the wealthy Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, Eric Didier felt the same way. "There are some friends I've stayed away from," he said. "They're not going anywhere, and I don't want to be around them. We don't have any common ground." Though they are in their early twenties, he said, "they're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not studying."
In Pittsburgh, Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday-night party where he saw two old friends as "losers." "Everything feels different," he said. "I can't stand half my friends no more." Frank DeMarco attended a street fair in Bayonne, New Jersey. "It was crowded. Trash everywhere. People were drinking, getting into fights. People with obnoxious attitudes, no politeness whatsoever." But, he said, "I didn't let it get to me. I just said, 'This is the way civilian life is: nasty.'"
Yet the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was Daniel Keane, whose background was probably the most privileged. The son of a Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain when I interviewed him in the living room of his parents' house, in Summit, New Jersey. When he first got home from Parris Island, he said about being with his family, "I didn't know how to act. They said, 'What do you want to do?' I'd say, 'I don't know.' I didn't know how to carry on a conversation."
He found his old peer group even more difficult. "All my friends are home from college now, drinking, acting stupid and loud," the eighteen-year-old Marine said. He was particularly disappointed when two old friends refused to postpone smoking marijuana for a few minutes, until he was away from them. "They were getting ready to smoke their weed. I said, 'Could you just hang on for a minute? Can't you wait till you get to the party instead of smoking in the car?' They said, 'Then we'd have to give it out.'" So, he recalled, they lit up in front of their Marine friend. "I was pretty disappointed in them doing that. It made me want to be at SOI [the Marines' School of Infantry]."
Like many other members of 3086, Keane felt as if he had joined a cult or religion. "People don't understand," he told me, "and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to explain when the only thing that really impresses them is how much beer you can chug down in thirty seconds."
I think the Marines of Platoon 3086 were experiencing in a very personal way the widening gap between today's military and civilian America. To be sure, their reaction was exaggerated by the boot-camp experience, during which the Marine Corps especially among the services tries to sever a recruit's ties to his or her previous life. But because of the nature of American society today, the re-entry shock upon leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor said, "When I got out of boot camp, in 1946, society was different. It was more disciplined, and most Americans trusted the government. Most males had some military experience. It was an entirely different society—one that thought more about its responsibilities than its rights."
Similarly, Sergeant Major James Moore, now retired but at that time the senior sergeant on Parris Island, commented, "It is difficult to go back into a society of 'What's in it for me?' when a Marine has been taught the opposite for so long. When I look at society today, I see a group of young people without direction because of the lack of teaching of moral values at home and in school. We see that when we get them in recruit training. The recruits are smarter today—they run rings around what we were able to do, on average. Their problems are moral problems: lying, cheating, and stealing, and the very fact of being committed. We find that to get young people to dedicate themselves to a cause is difficult sometimes."
The idea of a gap between the military and civilian America is hardly new. For much of the nation's history, Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State (1957), the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged minority." A decade ago the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained civilian-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure—America's Armed Forces (1986) he defined this as "the less-than-amicable separation of the military from the financial, business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly from the last two."
The fact that most Americans pay attention to the military only when they see news of a sexual-abuse scandal, such as the one at Aberdeen Proving Ground, underscores that separation. As far as media coverage is concerned, the U.S. military has fallen to the level of a mid-sized Asian nation that breaks onto the front page with a large disaster but gets just a few paragraphs for bus plunges and plane crashes. The estrangement appears to be more complete now than it was in the past, for, I think, two overarching reasons. First, more than twenty years after the end of conscription the ignorance of American elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War the United States has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the Cold War is indeed considered to have been a kind of war, then for the first time in American history the nation is maintaining a large military establishment during peacetime, with 1.5 million people on active duty and millions more serving in reserve and supporting civilian roles in the Defense Department and the defense industry.
Several trends already under way in civilian society and in the post-Cold War military threaten to widen the gap in the coming years, further isolating and alienating the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional Soldier, Morris Janowitz concluded confidently that there would not be "a return to earlier forms of a highly self-contained and socially distinct military force; the requirements of technology of education and of political support make that impossible." But the conditions that shaped the military of which Janowitz wrote no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but likely that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a society and subculture. "Today," says retired Admiral Stanley Arthur, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War, "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
U.S. military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically active than ever before. Do they see America clearly?
The Atlantic July 1997
By Thomas E. Ricks
After following a platoon of Marine recruits through eleven weeks of boot-camp training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see, when they went home for postgraduation leave, how alienated they felt from their old lives. At various times each of these new Marines seemed to experience a moment of private loathing for public America. They were repulsed by the physical unfitness of civilians, by the uncouth behavior they witnessed, and by what they saw as pervasive selfishness and consumerism. Many found themselves avoiding old friends, and some experienced difficulty even in communicating with their families.
One typical member of Platoon 3086, Craig Hoover, reported that the Amtrak ride home to Kensington, Maryland, was "horrible." The train was "filled with smoke," he said. "People were drinking and their kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some people." (An article I published in The Wall Street Journal in July, 1995, mentioned many of the recruits quoted here.) Hoover also found the train ride a sad contrast to the relative racial harmony of Parris Island. "It felt kind of segregated by race and class—a poor white car, a poor black car, a middle-class white car, a middle-class black car." Even McDonald's—which had become a fantasy-like symbol to the recruits as they ate military rations, particularly during a week of training in the woods-proved to be a letdown. "You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight, and a little sloppy," Hoover said.
Jonathan Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile, Alabama. "We played pool and drank," he reported, in a typical comment. "It seemed like everyone there was losers. All they want to do is get smashed. They're self-destructive. They're not trying. They're just goofing around."
In the wealthy Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, Eric Didier felt the same way. "There are some friends I've stayed away from," he said. "They're not going anywhere, and I don't want to be around them. We don't have any common ground." Though they are in their early twenties, he said, "they're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not studying."
In Pittsburgh, Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday-night party where he saw two old friends as "losers." "Everything feels different," he said. "I can't stand half my friends no more." Frank DeMarco attended a street fair in Bayonne, New Jersey. "It was crowded. Trash everywhere. People were drinking, getting into fights. People with obnoxious attitudes, no politeness whatsoever." But, he said, "I didn't let it get to me. I just said, 'This is the way civilian life is: nasty.'"
Yet the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was Daniel Keane, whose background was probably the most privileged. The son of a Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain when I interviewed him in the living room of his parents' house, in Summit, New Jersey. When he first got home from Parris Island, he said about being with his family, "I didn't know how to act. They said, 'What do you want to do?' I'd say, 'I don't know.' I didn't know how to carry on a conversation."
He found his old peer group even more difficult. "All my friends are home from college now, drinking, acting stupid and loud," the eighteen-year-old Marine said. He was particularly disappointed when two old friends refused to postpone smoking marijuana for a few minutes, until he was away from them. "They were getting ready to smoke their weed. I said, 'Could you just hang on for a minute? Can't you wait till you get to the party instead of smoking in the car?' They said, 'Then we'd have to give it out.'" So, he recalled, they lit up in front of their Marine friend. "I was pretty disappointed in them doing that. It made me want to be at SOI [the Marines' School of Infantry]."
Like many other members of 3086, Keane felt as if he had joined a cult or religion. "People don't understand," he told me, "and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to explain when the only thing that really impresses them is how much beer you can chug down in thirty seconds."
THE GAP
I think the Marines of Platoon 3086 were experiencing in a very personal way the widening gap between today's military and civilian America. To be sure, their reaction was exaggerated by the boot-camp experience, during which the Marine Corps especially among the services tries to sever a recruit's ties to his or her previous life. But because of the nature of American society today, the re-entry shock upon leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor said, "When I got out of boot camp, in 1946, society was different. It was more disciplined, and most Americans trusted the government. Most males had some military experience. It was an entirely different society—one that thought more about its responsibilities than its rights."
Similarly, Sergeant Major James Moore, now retired but at that time the senior sergeant on Parris Island, commented, "It is difficult to go back into a society of 'What's in it for me?' when a Marine has been taught the opposite for so long. When I look at society today, I see a group of young people without direction because of the lack of teaching of moral values at home and in school. We see that when we get them in recruit training. The recruits are smarter today—they run rings around what we were able to do, on average. Their problems are moral problems: lying, cheating, and stealing, and the very fact of being committed. We find that to get young people to dedicate themselves to a cause is difficult sometimes."
The idea of a gap between the military and civilian America is hardly new. For much of the nation's history, Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State (1957), the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged minority." A decade ago the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained civilian-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure—America's Armed Forces (1986) he defined this as "the less-than-amicable separation of the military from the financial, business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly from the last two."
The fact that most Americans pay attention to the military only when they see news of a sexual-abuse scandal, such as the one at Aberdeen Proving Ground, underscores that separation. As far as media coverage is concerned, the U.S. military has fallen to the level of a mid-sized Asian nation that breaks onto the front page with a large disaster but gets just a few paragraphs for bus plunges and plane crashes. The estrangement appears to be more complete now than it was in the past, for, I think, two overarching reasons. First, more than twenty years after the end of conscription the ignorance of American elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War the United States has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the Cold War is indeed considered to have been a kind of war, then for the first time in American history the nation is maintaining a large military establishment during peacetime, with 1.5 million people on active duty and millions more serving in reserve and supporting civilian roles in the Defense Department and the defense industry.
Several trends already under way in civilian society and in the post-Cold War military threaten to widen the gap in the coming years, further isolating and alienating the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional Soldier, Morris Janowitz concluded confidently that there would not be "a return to earlier forms of a highly self-contained and socially distinct military force; the requirements of technology of education and of political support make that impossible." But the conditions that shaped the military of which Janowitz wrote no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but likely that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a society and subculture. "Today," says retired Admiral Stanley Arthur, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War, "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
An Army Apart: The Widening Military-Civilian Gap
Mark Thompson
battleland.blogs.time.com
10 November 2011
The U.S. military and American society are drifting apart. It’s tough inside the civilian world to discern the drift. But troops in all the military services sense it, smell it — and talk about it. So do their superiors. We have a professional military of volunteers that has been stoically at war for more than a decade. But as the wars have droned on, the troops waging them are increasingly an Army apart.
This is the topic of my cover story in the dead-tree edition of Time out today – Veterans’ Day eve. It’s an important story, one that needs to be widely told. But because TIME keeps its print edition off the web for awhile, what follows is sort of a director’s cut of what’s in the magazine.
(READ: Rehabilitating America’s Wounded Warriors — An Inside Look)
The civilian-military gap has taken on an edge recently, driven by the lack of sacrifice — either in blood or treasure — demanded of the rest of us compared to what the troops are giving. Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry recently earned the Medal of Honor for saving Ranger buddies from certain death in Afghanistan. He grabbed a live grenade and tossed it away as it blew up. It cost him his right hand. It happened on his seventh combat tour (he has since pulled an eighth). A roadside bomb killed Sgt. 1st Class Kristoffer Domeij, husband and father of two, in Afghanistan Oct. 22. He was on his 14th combat deployment.
“There’s no challenge for the 99% of the American people who are not involved in the military,” says Army veteran Ron Capps, who served as an intelligence analyst in Afghanistan. “They don’t lose when soldiers die overseas, they’re not being forced to pay, for the wars, and there’s no sense among the vast population of what we’re engaged in.”
Military leaders know the gap is widening, which leads to important questions: is this a bad thing? If it is, should we care? And if we should care, what can be done to reverse it? “I have this deep existential angst about a military organization within a democratic society that’s as isolated from the rest of that society as our military is becoming,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist and military expert at Notre Dame. “The gap can make civilian control of the military harder to achieve.”
That may be a reach, but senior officers sense the parting. “I have been struck in my travels at the lack of what I would call in-depth understanding of what we’ve been through,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Time before he retired last month after 43 years in uniform. It’s almost like the American Foreign Legion. “We come from fewer and fewer places — we’ve BRAC’ed our way out of significant portions of the country,” Mullen said, referring to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission process that has shuttered hundreds of military posts across wide swaths of the nation. “Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”
(PHOTOS: America’s Other 1% — The Army Apart)
More evidence of the military’s growing separateness: it is becoming a family trade. Mullen has had two children on active duty. His successor, Army General Martin Dempsey, has had three. General Ray Odierno, the new Army chief of staff, has a son who lost his left arm to an RPG in Iraq in 2004. Of course, there are other ways of looking at it. “It is truly inspiring to see the same commitment to serve this nation passing to a new generation of leaders who will follow in the footsteps of their fathers,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said as Mullen handed off the baton to Dempsey Sept. 30. Fair enough. But what about the rest of us?
Call it the law of unintended consequences.
Former defense secretary Robert Gates raised the topic last month at the U.S. Military Academy. “In the absence of a draft that reaches deeply into the ranks of the citizenry, service in the military — matter how laudable — has become something for other people to do,” the former defense secretary told the West Point cadets three months after leaving office.
The U.S. never had a standing peacetime army until after World War II, and until 1973 it was filled with conscripts. The nation has been fighting its longest war on the backs of the smallest slice of its population in more than 200 years. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” a Pew study noted last month, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.”
We used to call them “soldiers,” and that was good enough when they were one of us. But now civilians call them “warriors” or “war-fighters,” as if the label proudly and honorable worn by their fathers and grandfathers is somehow inadequate. “There is a small subset of our population that is bearing the burdens of service in uniform for all,” then-Army general Dave Petraeus told Time before shucking his Army uniform to run the CIA. “But it is also important indeed that all citizens be acquainted with what it is that our men and women in uniform do for our country.”
But that’s not happening. Steven Blum, a retired three-star Army general who ran the National Guard from 2003 to 2008, fears the wars have become “a constant background noise, because so few of U.S. citizens really are engaged in this conflict.” Except for hometown reservists heading off to war, he warned a congressional committee last month that the U.S. military could “become viewed by the American people as a foreign legion, or a mercenary unit.”
(PHOTOS: Returning Soldiers’ Tattoos — Battle Scars)
Neither the U.S. military nor civilian society is to blame for the drift. In fact, fundamental changes in each have made it inevitable. Only 1.5 million of the 240 million Americans over 18 – about half of 1% — are in uniform today. Without a draft or a good civilian economy, they tend to stay in uniform longer, further isolating them from the American mainstream. During the Vietnam War, fewer than 20% of Army grunts had more than four years in uniform; today it’s more than half.
The military is no longer – if it ever were — a last resort for poor young Americans with no other options; nearly all are high-school graduates and most come from the working and middle classes. Yet it is self-selecting, and increasingly well paid. Average cash compensation per troop is $57,400, and the annual total personnel-related cost per troop, including health care, is more than twice that: $121,600, according to a recent accounting by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Part of the problem – surprise! – is Pentagon penny-pinching. Trying to save money, the Defense Department has been shutting bases down across much of the nation for the past generation, and concentrating them in military-friendly southern states. “Where [troops come from] gets more and more away from the general population,” ex-Guard chief Blum said. “What they do behind those gates is pretty much, `Who cares?’ to the general population, unless they make their living off of what goes on in there.”
Even as the military has changed dramatically over the past generation, so has the country in which it is rooted. Without any skin in the game, Americans are detached from the conflicts and those waging them, with the exception of Memorial Days and the magnetic yellow ribbons that cling to the rump of their SUVs. There are no advertisements tied into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as there were in World War II. Even Vietnam, an unpopular war, generated songs (“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?”) because we all, more or less, had a stake. Today, every man and woman wearing the uniform of the U.S. military is a volunteer, we tell ourselves (although hireling might be a more apt word).
Following the debacle that was Vietnam, creating the all-volunteer force seemed brilliant: delinking the military from an inconstant public gave the President a stronger hand in sending forces into harm’s way, especially given Congress’ cravenness when it came to being spattered with GI-positive blood. But it also carries with it a risk: that it will too often been seen as a convenient hammer to deal with vexing international problems. “A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people,” Samuel Adams of the American Revolution (and beer fame) warned. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens…Such a power should be watched with a jealous eye.”
(WATCH: Reunion and Recovery After an Iraq Injury)
The makeup of today’s force misses the heart of American might: the common bond between the U.S. military, and the citizens who supply and fund it, is the fulcrum that leverages U.S. power. Divorced from society, the military runs the risk of becoming little more than rent-a-cops with bigger weapons. And, in fact, as the U.S. pursued two wars post-9/11, it became clear quickly that it could only wage them if it hired costly contractors to do most everything except pull triggers in the war zones (although they did some of that, too). The CIA increasingly is killing purported terrorists with drone-launched Hellfire missiles around the world, with no public acknowledgement or accountability.
Shifts in how the U.S. wages its wars are always subtle. But as the military and society drift further apart, the three-way debate — with Congress representing the body politic – has withered. Instead, it has turned into a tug-of-war between the White House and the Pentagon. Without the ballast provided by a substantial public investment in how military force is used, it becomes easier for both sides to game the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers: forcing the public to act as an industrial-strength flywheel on military excursions.
So what’s the solution? What about a return to the draft? The public doesn’t like the idea. In last month’s Pew poll, 68% of veterans and 74% of the public oppose its return (interestingly, 82% of post-9/11 veterans feel that way, but only 61% of Vietnam-era vets do). The military agrees. Asked by Time what steps the Pentagon is considering to trim its budget, Marine General James Cartwright, until recently the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed personnel as a big target. “We have to look at everything,” he said three weeks before he retired, including “the dirty word, `draft.’”
But if this growing gap is something we need to fix before it becomes a chasm, there are several things the nation needs to do. The first is to stop fighting war on the cheap, both fiscally and politically. Borrowing money to wage war is a false economy (wars tend not to age well; imagine how you’d feel if you were paying for Vietnam today).
Politically, Americans should insist their elected representatives stop passing the buck. They don’t want to make the tough calls when it comes to budget cuts, so they appoint a super-committee to do the dirty work. They don’t want to target military bases for closing following the Cold War, so they commanded special outside panels to do it.
Most importantly, they’ve subcontracted out making war to the President, despite Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives only Congress the right “to declare war.” The latest slip down this slippery slope: on Oct. 14, the White House simply informed Congress, by letter, that it is sending 100 U.S. troops to aid in the central African war against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
War is the most extraordinary enterprise in which the national government engages. It’s long past time the public to engage in it, as well.
battleland.blogs.time.com
10 November 2011
 |
| November 2011 Cover |
The U.S. military and American society are drifting apart. It’s tough inside the civilian world to discern the drift. But troops in all the military services sense it, smell it — and talk about it. So do their superiors. We have a professional military of volunteers that has been stoically at war for more than a decade. But as the wars have droned on, the troops waging them are increasingly an Army apart.
This is the topic of my cover story in the dead-tree edition of Time out today – Veterans’ Day eve. It’s an important story, one that needs to be widely told. But because TIME keeps its print edition off the web for awhile, what follows is sort of a director’s cut of what’s in the magazine.
(READ: Rehabilitating America’s Wounded Warriors — An Inside Look)
The civilian-military gap has taken on an edge recently, driven by the lack of sacrifice — either in blood or treasure — demanded of the rest of us compared to what the troops are giving. Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry recently earned the Medal of Honor for saving Ranger buddies from certain death in Afghanistan. He grabbed a live grenade and tossed it away as it blew up. It cost him his right hand. It happened on his seventh combat tour (he has since pulled an eighth). A roadside bomb killed Sgt. 1st Class Kristoffer Domeij, husband and father of two, in Afghanistan Oct. 22. He was on his 14th combat deployment.
“There’s no challenge for the 99% of the American people who are not involved in the military,” says Army veteran Ron Capps, who served as an intelligence analyst in Afghanistan. “They don’t lose when soldiers die overseas, they’re not being forced to pay, for the wars, and there’s no sense among the vast population of what we’re engaged in.”
Military leaders know the gap is widening, which leads to important questions: is this a bad thing? If it is, should we care? And if we should care, what can be done to reverse it? “I have this deep existential angst about a military organization within a democratic society that’s as isolated from the rest of that society as our military is becoming,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist and military expert at Notre Dame. “The gap can make civilian control of the military harder to achieve.”
That may be a reach, but senior officers sense the parting. “I have been struck in my travels at the lack of what I would call in-depth understanding of what we’ve been through,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Time before he retired last month after 43 years in uniform. It’s almost like the American Foreign Legion. “We come from fewer and fewer places — we’ve BRAC’ed our way out of significant portions of the country,” Mullen said, referring to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission process that has shuttered hundreds of military posts across wide swaths of the nation. “Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”
(PHOTOS: America’s Other 1% — The Army Apart)
More evidence of the military’s growing separateness: it is becoming a family trade. Mullen has had two children on active duty. His successor, Army General Martin Dempsey, has had three. General Ray Odierno, the new Army chief of staff, has a son who lost his left arm to an RPG in Iraq in 2004. Of course, there are other ways of looking at it. “It is truly inspiring to see the same commitment to serve this nation passing to a new generation of leaders who will follow in the footsteps of their fathers,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said as Mullen handed off the baton to Dempsey Sept. 30. Fair enough. But what about the rest of us?
Call it the law of unintended consequences.
Former defense secretary Robert Gates raised the topic last month at the U.S. Military Academy. “In the absence of a draft that reaches deeply into the ranks of the citizenry, service in the military — matter how laudable — has become something for other people to do,” the former defense secretary told the West Point cadets three months after leaving office.
The U.S. never had a standing peacetime army until after World War II, and until 1973 it was filled with conscripts. The nation has been fighting its longest war on the backs of the smallest slice of its population in more than 200 years. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” a Pew study noted last month, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.”
We used to call them “soldiers,” and that was good enough when they were one of us. But now civilians call them “warriors” or “war-fighters,” as if the label proudly and honorable worn by their fathers and grandfathers is somehow inadequate. “There is a small subset of our population that is bearing the burdens of service in uniform for all,” then-Army general Dave Petraeus told Time before shucking his Army uniform to run the CIA. “But it is also important indeed that all citizens be acquainted with what it is that our men and women in uniform do for our country.”
But that’s not happening. Steven Blum, a retired three-star Army general who ran the National Guard from 2003 to 2008, fears the wars have become “a constant background noise, because so few of U.S. citizens really are engaged in this conflict.” Except for hometown reservists heading off to war, he warned a congressional committee last month that the U.S. military could “become viewed by the American people as a foreign legion, or a mercenary unit.”
(PHOTOS: Returning Soldiers’ Tattoos — Battle Scars)
Neither the U.S. military nor civilian society is to blame for the drift. In fact, fundamental changes in each have made it inevitable. Only 1.5 million of the 240 million Americans over 18 – about half of 1% — are in uniform today. Without a draft or a good civilian economy, they tend to stay in uniform longer, further isolating them from the American mainstream. During the Vietnam War, fewer than 20% of Army grunts had more than four years in uniform; today it’s more than half.
The military is no longer – if it ever were — a last resort for poor young Americans with no other options; nearly all are high-school graduates and most come from the working and middle classes. Yet it is self-selecting, and increasingly well paid. Average cash compensation per troop is $57,400, and the annual total personnel-related cost per troop, including health care, is more than twice that: $121,600, according to a recent accounting by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Part of the problem – surprise! – is Pentagon penny-pinching. Trying to save money, the Defense Department has been shutting bases down across much of the nation for the past generation, and concentrating them in military-friendly southern states. “Where [troops come from] gets more and more away from the general population,” ex-Guard chief Blum said. “What they do behind those gates is pretty much, `Who cares?’ to the general population, unless they make their living off of what goes on in there.”
Even as the military has changed dramatically over the past generation, so has the country in which it is rooted. Without any skin in the game, Americans are detached from the conflicts and those waging them, with the exception of Memorial Days and the magnetic yellow ribbons that cling to the rump of their SUVs. There are no advertisements tied into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as there were in World War II. Even Vietnam, an unpopular war, generated songs (“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?”) because we all, more or less, had a stake. Today, every man and woman wearing the uniform of the U.S. military is a volunteer, we tell ourselves (although hireling might be a more apt word).
Following the debacle that was Vietnam, creating the all-volunteer force seemed brilliant: delinking the military from an inconstant public gave the President a stronger hand in sending forces into harm’s way, especially given Congress’ cravenness when it came to being spattered with GI-positive blood. But it also carries with it a risk: that it will too often been seen as a convenient hammer to deal with vexing international problems. “A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people,” Samuel Adams of the American Revolution (and beer fame) warned. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens…Such a power should be watched with a jealous eye.”
(WATCH: Reunion and Recovery After an Iraq Injury)
The makeup of today’s force misses the heart of American might: the common bond between the U.S. military, and the citizens who supply and fund it, is the fulcrum that leverages U.S. power. Divorced from society, the military runs the risk of becoming little more than rent-a-cops with bigger weapons. And, in fact, as the U.S. pursued two wars post-9/11, it became clear quickly that it could only wage them if it hired costly contractors to do most everything except pull triggers in the war zones (although they did some of that, too). The CIA increasingly is killing purported terrorists with drone-launched Hellfire missiles around the world, with no public acknowledgement or accountability.
Shifts in how the U.S. wages its wars are always subtle. But as the military and society drift further apart, the three-way debate — with Congress representing the body politic – has withered. Instead, it has turned into a tug-of-war between the White House and the Pentagon. Without the ballast provided by a substantial public investment in how military force is used, it becomes easier for both sides to game the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers: forcing the public to act as an industrial-strength flywheel on military excursions.
So what’s the solution? What about a return to the draft? The public doesn’t like the idea. In last month’s Pew poll, 68% of veterans and 74% of the public oppose its return (interestingly, 82% of post-9/11 veterans feel that way, but only 61% of Vietnam-era vets do). The military agrees. Asked by Time what steps the Pentagon is considering to trim its budget, Marine General James Cartwright, until recently the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed personnel as a big target. “We have to look at everything,” he said three weeks before he retired, including “the dirty word, `draft.’”
But if this growing gap is something we need to fix before it becomes a chasm, there are several things the nation needs to do. The first is to stop fighting war on the cheap, both fiscally and politically. Borrowing money to wage war is a false economy (wars tend not to age well; imagine how you’d feel if you were paying for Vietnam today).
Politically, Americans should insist their elected representatives stop passing the buck. They don’t want to make the tough calls when it comes to budget cuts, so they appoint a super-committee to do the dirty work. They don’t want to target military bases for closing following the Cold War, so they commanded special outside panels to do it.
Most importantly, they’ve subcontracted out making war to the President, despite Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives only Congress the right “to declare war.” The latest slip down this slippery slope: on Oct. 14, the White House simply informed Congress, by letter, that it is sending 100 U.S. troops to aid in the central African war against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
War is the most extraordinary enterprise in which the national government engages. It’s long past time the public to engage in it, as well.
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Cultural Sensitivity?
This made me chuckle. The words 'Cultural', 'Sensitivity' and 'Marine' together in a sentence. Needs, Must.
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Tell The Truth...
A condensed version of an 86 page report by light bird Daniel L. Davis published on the Arms Forces Journal. What I found interesting was the comments (or full debate/convo) below this article on FP (Foreign Policy) website discussing Davis' report. I couldn't stop reading until the end.
The title of this report is Dereliction of Duty II. I wondered if there was a part I, but then found that this was infact named after a book written in 1997 by Army major H. R. McMaster titled Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. This may be another one for the reading list.
On Davis' website he says he's unable to publish this report, but it seems to be everywhere else I looked. Download the full report here.
How military leaders have let us down
By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
From Bad to Abysmal
Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.
And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.
In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.
As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.
On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:
Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”
Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.
“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.
“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.
“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”
That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.
In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.
As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.
Credibility Gap
I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.
A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.
“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.
I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.
A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
A nonclassified version is available at http://www.afghanreport.com/. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]
Tell The Truth
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.
The title of this report is Dereliction of Duty II. I wondered if there was a part I, but then found that this was infact named after a book written in 1997 by Army major H. R. McMaster titled Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. This may be another one for the reading list.
On Davis' website he says he's unable to publish this report, but it seems to be everywhere else I looked. Download the full report here.
How military leaders have let us down
By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
From Bad to Abysmal
Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.
And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.
In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.
As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.
On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:
Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”
Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.
“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.
“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.
“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”
That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.
In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.
As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.
Credibility Gap
I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.
A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.
“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.
I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.
A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
A nonclassified version is available at http://www.afghanreport.com/. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]
Tell The Truth
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.
Monday, 9 April 2012
Friday, 6 April 2012
To The Fallen
Sergeant John McCary
At some point during their deployment, many servicemen and women understandably become overwhelmed by the unrelenting strain of living in a combat zone. Twenty-seven-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant John McCary was serving in a HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Team attached to Task Force 1-34 Armor, 1st Infantry Division in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq. Almost halfway through his one-year deployment, McCary reached a boiling point.
On January 31, 2004, he vented in an email to his family back in North Carolina about the increasing ruthlessness of the insurgents and the random, horrific violence claiming the lives of his fellow soldiers. But despite his palpable sense of anger and frustration, McCary emphasized that he knew more than ever what he was fighting for amidst the chaos of war.
To the Fallen (email)
Dear all,
We are dying. Not in some philosophical, chronological, 'the end comes for all of us sooner or later' sense. Just dying. Sure, it's an occupational hazard, and yeah, you can get killed walking down the street in Anytown, USA. But not like this. Not car bombs that leave craters in the road, not jeering crowds that celebrate your destruction. We thought we had turned the tide, turned the corner, beaten the defensive rush and were headed upfield, striding into the home stretch. But they are still here. They still strive for our demise. It's never been a fair fight, and we haven't always played nice.
But not like this. No one leaves the gate looking to kill, or looking to die. No one wakes up in the morning and says, "I sure hope blowing up a whole group of Iraqis goes well today." You may be worn out, hounded by hours on end of patrols, investigations, emergency responses, guard shifts, but you never wake up and think, today's the day we'll kill a whole bunch of 'em. There's no "kill 'em all let God sort 'em out." That's for suckers and cowards, people afraid to delve into the melee and fight it out, to sort it out like soldiers.
They've killed my friends. And not in some heroic fight to defend sovereign territory, not on some suicide mission to extract a prisoner or save a family in distress. Just standing out directing traffic. Just driving downtown to a meeting. Just going to work. All I can think is, "Those poor bastards. Those poor, poor bastards."
And the opposition, they've damned anyone with the gall to actually leave their homes in the morning, because they've killed their own, too. Indiscriminate is one word. 'Callous' does not even suffice. What battle cry says "Damn the eight year old boy and his little sister if they're in the area! Damn them all!?" What do you say to your men after you've scraped up the scalps of an entire Iraqi family off the road, right next to the shattered bodies of your soldiers, held together only by their shoelaces, body armor or helmets? "We're fighting the good fight?" I don't think so. We're just fighting. And now we're dying.
It's nothing new, not really. I know what that look is now, the one on the faces of WWII soldiers coming back from a patrol, Vietnam vets standing at the Wall. But now it's us. You know the little blurb from Connie Chung that says "2 Coalition Soldiers were killed at a checkpoint today after a car bomb exploded while waiting in line?" And you think, "ah, just two. At least it wasn't like thirty. At least it wasn't in a movie theatre, or the town square."
Yeah… I changed my mind about that one. When you sit at the memorial service, gazing down at the display: a pair of laced tan combat boots, a hastily printed 8"x10" photo, their service rifle, barrel down, their Kevlar helmet set on top of the buttstock, and you hear their friends say, "he talked about his son every night. He's two. He can hardly talk but his Dad just knew he would be a great linebacker." Or, "his wife is currently commanding a platoon elsewhere in Iraq. She will accompany the body home but has chosen to return to her own flock, to see them home safely though her husband will not join her. Our thoughts go out to their families." WHAT THOUGHTS?! What do you think? What good will you do knowing this? What help will you be, blubbering in the stands, snot drizzling from your nose, wishing you could have known beforehand, wishing you could have stopped it, pleading to God you could have taken their place, taken the suffering for them?
What do you say to the fathers of the men responsible, when you find them relaxing in their homes the next day, preparing for a meal? Should you simply strike them down for having birthed such an abomination? Or has the teeth-shattering punch in the face crunch of seeing a fallen comrade laid to rest sated your lust for blood and revenge?
Resolve, resolute, resolution, resoluteness. You feel… compelled, to respond. To what? On whom? Why? Will your children someday say, "I'm sure glad Dad died to make Iraq safer?" No. They died standing with their friends, doing their jobs, fulfilling some far-flung nearly non-existent notion called duty. They died because their friends could've died just as easily, and knowing that… they would never shirk their duties, never call in sick, never give in to fear, never let down. When you've held a conversation with a man, briefed him on his mission, his objective and reminded him of the potential consequences during the actioning of it, only to hear he never returned, and did not die gracefully, though blessedly quickly, prayerfully painlessly… you do not breathe the same ever after. Breath is sweet. Sleep is sweeter. Friends are priceless. And you cry. There's no point, no gain, no benefit but you are human and you must mourn. It is your nature.
It is also now undeniable, irrevocable, that you will see your mission through. You will strive every day, you will live, though you are not ever again sure why. Ideals… are so… far, far away from the burnt stink of charred metal. I, we, must see it through to the end. They have seen every instant, every mission, every chore, every day through, not to its end but to theirs. How can you ever deny, degrade, desecrate their sacrifice and loss with anything less than all you have? Their lives are lost, whether as a gift, laid down at the feet of their friends, or a pointless discard of precious life… I doubt I'll ever know.
I'm ok, Mom. I'm just a little… shaken, a little sad. I know this isn't any Divine mission. No God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha or other divinity ever decreed "Go get your body ripped to shreds, it's for the better." This is Man's doing. This is Man's War. And War it is. It is not fair, nor right, nor simple… nor is it over. I wish the presence of those responsible only to dissipate, to transform into average citizens, fathers, sons and brothers. I don't care about bloodlust, justice or revenge. But they… they… will not rest until our souls are wiped from this plane of existence, until we no longer exist in their world. Nothing less suffices. And so we will fight. I will not waiver, nor falter. Many of my fellows will cry for no mercy, no compassion. For those responsible, for those whose goal is destruction purely for effect, death only as a message, for whom killing is a means of communication, I cannot promise we, or I, will give pardon. With all, we will be harsh, and strict, but not unjust, not indiscriminate. And we will not give up. We cannot. Our lives are forever tied to those lost, and we cannot leave them now, as we might have were they still living.
We have… so little time… to mourn, so little time to sigh, to breathe, to laugh, to remember. To forget. Every day awaits us, impatient, impending. So now we rise, shunning tears, biting back trembling lips and stifling sobs of grief… and we walk, shoulder to shoulder… to the Call of Duty, in tribute to the Fallen.
- john
Excerpted from Operation Homecoming, by Andrew Carroll, editor. Copyright (c) 2006 by Southern Arts Federation. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
McCary survived his tour of duty and returned home in September 2004. He was honorably discharged from the Army in April 2005, and is now getting his Master's in Security Studies at the Georgetown Center for Peace and Security Studies.
At some point during their deployment, many servicemen and women understandably become overwhelmed by the unrelenting strain of living in a combat zone. Twenty-seven-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant John McCary was serving in a HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Team attached to Task Force 1-34 Armor, 1st Infantry Division in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq. Almost halfway through his one-year deployment, McCary reached a boiling point.
On January 31, 2004, he vented in an email to his family back in North Carolina about the increasing ruthlessness of the insurgents and the random, horrific violence claiming the lives of his fellow soldiers. But despite his palpable sense of anger and frustration, McCary emphasized that he knew more than ever what he was fighting for amidst the chaos of war.
To the Fallen (email)
Dear all,
We are dying. Not in some philosophical, chronological, 'the end comes for all of us sooner or later' sense. Just dying. Sure, it's an occupational hazard, and yeah, you can get killed walking down the street in Anytown, USA. But not like this. Not car bombs that leave craters in the road, not jeering crowds that celebrate your destruction. We thought we had turned the tide, turned the corner, beaten the defensive rush and were headed upfield, striding into the home stretch. But they are still here. They still strive for our demise. It's never been a fair fight, and we haven't always played nice.
But not like this. No one leaves the gate looking to kill, or looking to die. No one wakes up in the morning and says, "I sure hope blowing up a whole group of Iraqis goes well today." You may be worn out, hounded by hours on end of patrols, investigations, emergency responses, guard shifts, but you never wake up and think, today's the day we'll kill a whole bunch of 'em. There's no "kill 'em all let God sort 'em out." That's for suckers and cowards, people afraid to delve into the melee and fight it out, to sort it out like soldiers.
They've killed my friends. And not in some heroic fight to defend sovereign territory, not on some suicide mission to extract a prisoner or save a family in distress. Just standing out directing traffic. Just driving downtown to a meeting. Just going to work. All I can think is, "Those poor bastards. Those poor, poor bastards."
And the opposition, they've damned anyone with the gall to actually leave their homes in the morning, because they've killed their own, too. Indiscriminate is one word. 'Callous' does not even suffice. What battle cry says "Damn the eight year old boy and his little sister if they're in the area! Damn them all!?" What do you say to your men after you've scraped up the scalps of an entire Iraqi family off the road, right next to the shattered bodies of your soldiers, held together only by their shoelaces, body armor or helmets? "We're fighting the good fight?" I don't think so. We're just fighting. And now we're dying.
It's nothing new, not really. I know what that look is now, the one on the faces of WWII soldiers coming back from a patrol, Vietnam vets standing at the Wall. But now it's us. You know the little blurb from Connie Chung that says "2 Coalition Soldiers were killed at a checkpoint today after a car bomb exploded while waiting in line?" And you think, "ah, just two. At least it wasn't like thirty. At least it wasn't in a movie theatre, or the town square."
Yeah… I changed my mind about that one. When you sit at the memorial service, gazing down at the display: a pair of laced tan combat boots, a hastily printed 8"x10" photo, their service rifle, barrel down, their Kevlar helmet set on top of the buttstock, and you hear their friends say, "he talked about his son every night. He's two. He can hardly talk but his Dad just knew he would be a great linebacker." Or, "his wife is currently commanding a platoon elsewhere in Iraq. She will accompany the body home but has chosen to return to her own flock, to see them home safely though her husband will not join her. Our thoughts go out to their families." WHAT THOUGHTS?! What do you think? What good will you do knowing this? What help will you be, blubbering in the stands, snot drizzling from your nose, wishing you could have known beforehand, wishing you could have stopped it, pleading to God you could have taken their place, taken the suffering for them?
What do you say to the fathers of the men responsible, when you find them relaxing in their homes the next day, preparing for a meal? Should you simply strike them down for having birthed such an abomination? Or has the teeth-shattering punch in the face crunch of seeing a fallen comrade laid to rest sated your lust for blood and revenge?
Resolve, resolute, resolution, resoluteness. You feel… compelled, to respond. To what? On whom? Why? Will your children someday say, "I'm sure glad Dad died to make Iraq safer?" No. They died standing with their friends, doing their jobs, fulfilling some far-flung nearly non-existent notion called duty. They died because their friends could've died just as easily, and knowing that… they would never shirk their duties, never call in sick, never give in to fear, never let down. When you've held a conversation with a man, briefed him on his mission, his objective and reminded him of the potential consequences during the actioning of it, only to hear he never returned, and did not die gracefully, though blessedly quickly, prayerfully painlessly… you do not breathe the same ever after. Breath is sweet. Sleep is sweeter. Friends are priceless. And you cry. There's no point, no gain, no benefit but you are human and you must mourn. It is your nature.
It is also now undeniable, irrevocable, that you will see your mission through. You will strive every day, you will live, though you are not ever again sure why. Ideals… are so… far, far away from the burnt stink of charred metal. I, we, must see it through to the end. They have seen every instant, every mission, every chore, every day through, not to its end but to theirs. How can you ever deny, degrade, desecrate their sacrifice and loss with anything less than all you have? Their lives are lost, whether as a gift, laid down at the feet of their friends, or a pointless discard of precious life… I doubt I'll ever know.
I'm ok, Mom. I'm just a little… shaken, a little sad. I know this isn't any Divine mission. No God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha or other divinity ever decreed "Go get your body ripped to shreds, it's for the better." This is Man's doing. This is Man's War. And War it is. It is not fair, nor right, nor simple… nor is it over. I wish the presence of those responsible only to dissipate, to transform into average citizens, fathers, sons and brothers. I don't care about bloodlust, justice or revenge. But they… they… will not rest until our souls are wiped from this plane of existence, until we no longer exist in their world. Nothing less suffices. And so we will fight. I will not waiver, nor falter. Many of my fellows will cry for no mercy, no compassion. For those responsible, for those whose goal is destruction purely for effect, death only as a message, for whom killing is a means of communication, I cannot promise we, or I, will give pardon. With all, we will be harsh, and strict, but not unjust, not indiscriminate. And we will not give up. We cannot. Our lives are forever tied to those lost, and we cannot leave them now, as we might have were they still living.
We have… so little time… to mourn, so little time to sigh, to breathe, to laugh, to remember. To forget. Every day awaits us, impatient, impending. So now we rise, shunning tears, biting back trembling lips and stifling sobs of grief… and we walk, shoulder to shoulder… to the Call of Duty, in tribute to the Fallen.
- john
Excerpted from Operation Homecoming, by Andrew Carroll, editor. Copyright (c) 2006 by Southern Arts Federation. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
McCary survived his tour of duty and returned home in September 2004. He was honorably discharged from the Army in April 2005, and is now getting his Master's in Security Studies at the Georgetown Center for Peace and Security Studies.
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