Another Israeli/Hezbollah War Brewing?

Okay, so I've been lax about posting new entries the last eleven days.  Sorry about that - life happens sometimes.  Anyway, I wanted to fire off a quick post about a Tweet that caught my attention earlier today.  Kudos to Sulome Anderson, a freelance (?) combat journalist, for catching this. 

I posted a pic of the Tweet because it's easier to show it than paraphrase it, but Sulome suggests it might be related to an increase in aggression toward Hezbollah forces in Syria.  Her contacts have mentioned that the US has taken a more confrontational stance toward Hezbollah forces in Syria, and some of them (her contacts) believe it's a signal that a war with Israel (with America's backing) may be coming.

So could this be a sign that something's brewing? Maybe. On one hand, if the Tweet is connected to elevated hostilities toward Hezbollah, it meshes neatly with one of Trump's main reasons for not certifying the JCPOA: Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations - which, although likely true, is not an issue the JCPOA covers, and thus not a valid reason for decertification.  Second, go read the official White House statement regarding the decertification; I just read it for the first time, and holy shit does it sound like Trump's making a case for war.  Third, the Israeli Defense Minister accused Hezbollah of deliberately firing rockets at the Golan Heights yesterday, but those accusations were later walked back. 

On the other hand, Trump's Tweet could be entirely about him carrying out one of his duties as Commander in Chief by remembering 241 fallen American service-members; or trying to salvage his reputation with the troops, military families, and veterans after the recent fiasco.  I don't believe the former scenario is plausible based on Trump's past conduct, but the latter one makes a bit of sense.  Trump isn't known for thinking ahead, either - meaning, sometimes a Tweet is just a Tweet.  He's also known for pushing decision-making authority down to his subordinate commanders; so the obvious question is, who is behind the increasingly hostile posture toward Hezbollah? Trump and the White House, or the ranking ground commander? Either answer is bad, but for different reasons.  If Trump is authorizing the hostility, it may be another sign he's itching for a war, somewhere/somehow.  If it's the ground commander, it's possible Trump doesn't know this is happening.

A lot of the signs of impending war are conjecture, I'll admit.  It's a pretty flimsy case, and Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one - which is that this is another one of Trump's random Tweets.  I think it's a situation worth keeping an eye on, though.

Lessons (not) learned from Vietnam

The recent PBS series on the Vietnam War and the recent debate over the national anthem got me thinking about the parallels between then and now, and I'm putting my thoughts into this stream-of-consciousness post about how little has changed since the end of the war.  Specifically, how little we (as a country) have learned since then.  Let's look at the lessons we thought we learned, but then discarded.

First, the US government (the White House and the Pentagon) fell back into the habit of sending troops to fight wars for flimsy justifications, vaguely-defined objectives, and inadequate equipment and resources.  This hasn't happened all the time, but more often than not, the troops went in without what they needed for victory: a coherent plan, resources that matched the objective, and a valid reason to fight.  When it comes to smaller, shorter conflicts, the score is about even.  Grenada and Panama didn't become quagmires, but Somalia and Lebanon did.  In regard to large-scale conflicts, the tally is pretty one-sided.  The 1990-91 Gulf War had a clear mission and sufficient resources, if a rationale that was more about economics than security; but on the other side of the ledger, we have Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq Part II.

There was supposed to be a deep discussion about America's use of military power in the wake of Vietnam, but it never really got off the ground.  Not enough to lead to any meaningful changes, anyway.  The senior officers who hoped to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam quagmire succeeded for a few years, and during that time they managed to implement meaningful reforms.  For example, when Colin Powell served in the White House as a military assistant to Secretary Weinberger, he helped craft the "Weinberger Doctrine", which acted as a litmus test for when to commit US troops.  The war hawks eventually outmaneuvered those senior officers, though, and critics who charged that the Doctrine was so narrow that it practically guaranteed US troops would never be deployed anywhere.  Vaguely-defined missions began to come back into favor in the 1990s, and became standard procedure after 9/11.

Washington also ably deflected any deep discussion by transitioning from a draftee military to an all-volunteer force.  Richard Nixon wisely calculated that halting the draft would deflate anti-war protests, and he was right.  Once the overall population stopped having a stake in America's wars, they stopped worrying that they might someday get dragged into a quagmire conflict.  This weakened the bond between the military and the general population, and gave military leadership much more license to send the military anywhere they wanted.  Somewhere along the way, Congress (which holds the power to declare war) stopped holding the president accountable in any meaningful way.  How it got there is a story about a lot of boring political maneuvering, but the moral of the story is that "accountability" was a sham.  Political appointees and mid-level staffers took the fall for military failures, partisan bickering replaced debate, and nobody asked the questions that should have been asked after Vietnam.  Which brings us to the present, where history is repeating itself.

I'm almost done here, but I'd like to make one more point.  To me, this isn't an academic debate.  I served in the Army for four years and spent five years after that as a defense contractor.  During that time, I made several trips to combat zones and deployed locations.  My experiences have made me very skeptical of how the government employs the military, to the point where I oppose a military intervention by default unless I see a very good reason for it.  I'm probably not evaluating a military intervention impartially, but I don't really care if I'm being fair or not.  I think being extremely skeptical is preferable to not being skeptical enough.  Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is someone's child/parent/sibling/friend, and if the president and the senior generals put them in harm's way, they need to be absolutely certain that the sacrifice is worth it.  Anything less is morally repugnant in my opinion.