When Feudal Fealty Meets Democracy

Quick question.  Who remembers who Eric Shinseki was?

(. . .pause. . .)

Anyone?

(. . .longer pause. . .)

Really? Nobody? *sigh*

Okay, quick recap. Shinseki was an Army general who served from the mid-1960s until 2003.  He had a fairly distinguished career - three Bronze Stars, a pair of Purple Hearts, a handful of combat tours, along with the prerequisites needed to attain the rank of four-star General - but I'm bringing him up because of something that happened at the tail end of his career.

See, Shinseki's final assignment before he retired was Chief of Staff of the Army. For those not familiar with the military's organizational structure, that made him the Army's representative on the Joint Chiefs - which means Shinseki had a fair amount of interaction with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, and the President.  And for the back half of Shinseki's term as Chief of Staff, those three individuals were Richard Myers, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W Bush.

Shinseki and Rumsfeld had a disagreement over a little event known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Specifically, the number of troops that should have comprised the initial invasion force. Rumsfeld thought it should have been between 100K - 150K troops, while Shinseki believed the mission would require several hundred thousand troops.  History eventually vindicated Shinseki, but contradicting Rumsfeld (before Congress, no less) ended up putting him on Rumsfeld's bad side: from then onward, Shinseki was persona non grata with Rumsfeld and the cabal within the Bush Administration who were eager to invade Iraq. Besides making Shinseki a "lame duck," Rumsfeld's very public rebuke had the effect of cowing other senior officers who might have disagreed with one of Rumsfeld's policies, or have given him advice he didn't want to hear.

Okay, you all still with me? You in the back: wake up!

Questions? Oh, you want to know why I'm bringing all this up.  Right, I was just getting to that.

I brought that incident up for two reasons.  First, to illustrate the consequences of politicizing the military.  By undercutting Shinseki, Rumsfeld made it more likely that people would give him advice he wanted to hear, rather than what they believed would work. Look at what happened as a result: the U.S. invaded Iraq with far fewer troops than necessary.  Combined with a handful of other bad decisions, such as bypassing weapons caches and ignoring widespread looting, this meant that the United States lost control of the situation very early on.  Had Rumsfeld gone with Shinseki's recommended troop levels, the U.S. could have had enough personnel to prevent many foreign insurgents from sneaking across the border or maintain civil order.  Now, it's not certain that the additional troops Shinseki recommended would have been enough to contain Iraq, but those troops would have made success more likely. Yet Rumsfeld rejected Shinseki's advice, and that decision came back to haunt the military throughout OIF.  Thousands of people died as a result.

The second reason I brought this up was to tie it to a recent event that probably hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserved.  In the aftermath of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher's court martial for murdering a civilian (quick recap of those events here), President Trump announced on Twitter that he would be instructing the Secretary of the Navy to rescind Navy Achievement Medals for two Navy JAG officers who prosecuted Gallagher's case.

(Quick tangent: before I get to my main point, I want to detour briefly for reasons that will become obvious very quickly.  It looked pretty clear to me that Gallagher used excessive force against an unarmed noncombatant - if I were a juror, I would've voted to convict him - but here's the important part: I think the rumors of excessive force swirling around the case were what caught Trump's attention.  I'm speculating, but based on Trump's past behavior, I think he heard about the case and thought, "That's how we need to start treating enemy combatants. None of this PC, Geneva Conventions bullshit. Brutalize them, kill them, torture them - they're subhuman anyway!")

[Reminder: This is what I think Trump believes. Definitely NOT what I believe.  For an interesting piece on the thought process of people like Trump, click here.]

Okay, now to my main point.  I hope you're all still with me.

It is wildly inappropriate for the president to involve himself with this case, especially by directing the Secretary of the Navy to rescind the prosecutors' awards, which were likely earned for something unrelated to the Gallagher case.  Besides the very blatant micromanaging and flagrant pettiness, it sends a signal to the armed forces: "You get your awards thanks to my generosity.  Make me unhappy, and I'll take them away."

What's that? You think I'm reading too much into this?

I don't think so.  Consider the following:

• Trump's meeting just a few months after his term began, in which the members of his cabinet took turns praising him
• He has a habit of firing any appointee who disagrees with him (Dan Coats) or makes him look bad (Ryan Zinke)
• He's expressed the belief that the heads of government agencies - most notably the Attorney General - exist to serve him, not the country or the agency they oversee
• The USS John McCain incident 

So, if Trump can get away with revoking the awards of someone who displeases him, what's to stop him from doing the same with a promotion or a career-boosting assignment? What's to stop him from meddling with official doctrine or overruling a commander's battlefield decision? What about adding his name to the oath of enlistment, right after the "bear true faith and allegiance to" section?

Trump is under the impression that the armed forces belong to him, not the country or the office of the president.  He's thought so for a long time, and while there's nothing wrong with thinking that, his recent actions subtly bring that thought closer to reality.  It's another tiny crack he's made in the country's democratic foundation - namely, that the military belongs to the office, not to the person occupying it.

So to sum up: yes, I think Trump is gradually trying to make the military loyal to him and him alone. No, I don't think that's a fringe idea anymore.

Class dismissed.

. . . And the Zen Master Says, "We'll See."

Gust: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. The boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "How terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight..Except the boy can't cause his leg's all messed up. and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie: And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

Gust: So you get it.

Charlie: No.  No, 'cuz I'm stupid.

Gust: You're not stupid, you're just in Congress.

Charlie: Send 'em money. . . 

Gust: Gonna start with the roads, move on to the schools, factories -

Charlie: Gust, now, it's a party.

Gust: - restock the sheep herds.  Give them jobs, give them hope.

Charlie: I'm trying. I'm trying.

Gust: Yeah, well, try harder.

Charlie: I'm fighting for every dollar.

Gust: Yeah.  Yeah.
Charlie: I took you from five million to a billion.  I broke the ice on the Stinger and the Milan.  I got a Democratic congress in lockstep behind a Republican president.

Gust: Well, that's not good enough.  Because I'm gonna hand you a code-word classified NIE right now, and it's gonna tell you that the crazies have started rolling into Kandahar like it's a fucking bathtub drain.    -- Charlie Wilson's War

You can't solve complex problems with simple fixes.

I don't like Donald Trump. Anyone who reads my blog, who follows me on social media, or who knows me in real life knows this. I haven't been shy about expressing my dislike.  And it's not hard to understand why - he's given people countless reasons to despise him.  The problem is that it's easy for that dislike to become an instinctive response - to reflexively say "Trump's screwing up again" when events call for a more nuanced analysis. When that happens, your criticisms become contradictory yourself ("Trump did A Thing which is wrong and stupid", and a few days later, "Trump did the opposite of A Thing, which is also wrong and stupid.") At that point, you've basically become a robot that squawks "Trump sucks" whenever he does anything.  You begin to overlook nuance and exercise critical thinking, and you're completely blind to the possibility of anything good coming out of his decisions.

For example, Trump and the recent NATO summit.  Since becoming president, Trump has repeatedly accused other NATO members of not paying their fair share.  That's a flagrant distortion of the facts, but it's not what I want to write about.  

It's not much of a secret that Trump isn't a big fan of international alliances - trade, military, or otherwise.  He's slammed NATO several times, among other international partnerships.  Here's the plot twist, though: I've never been a big fan of international military alliances and America's global military presence, so you'd think I'd be celebrating someone's efforts to disentangle the US from these commitments.  That's what Trump seems to be doing, little by little, so you'd think I'd be celebrating what he's doing.  Yet, I'm not.

So, why is that?

Is it because I despise Trump so much that I automatically oppose his position, no matter whatever it is? My opinions on a handful of issues have changed so significantly since Trump took office, that some people probably think so.  I've asked myself that more than once, and it's possible.

But it's much more likely that it was obvious from the start of his presidential campaign that Trump wasn't up to the task.  Even overlooking his history of corruption (much of which only came out after the 2016 election), Trump never exhibited the ability or the desire to understand the complexities of any of the issues he would grapple with as president.  

Being president is, obviously, hard.  Every decision the president makes is restricted by a number of factors: economic consequences, domestic and international political considerations, precedent, long-term policy goals, and on and on and on. Seriously, go read any book about a president finding a solution to any given issue, let alone a serious crisis, to see just how many variables they have to consider when tackling the problem. You begin to see just how little room a president has to maneuver.

So back to NATO. For the sake of argument, let's treat it as a given that it's one of those entangling alliances the Founders warned us about. (Whether it really is is a discussion for another time.) How does the United States extract itself from the organization? That's the big question.  NATO has been around since not long after World War II ended, even though the Soviet Union - the adversary it was created to counter - dissolved in the early 1990s. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been four US presidents besides Trump: Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama.  Why didn't any of them address the question of NATO, and lay the groundwork for scaling back America's involvement? All of them seem to be fairly capable and competent, at least enough to get the ball rolling on this.

There are a couple different explanations for why they didn't.  Maybe it turned out that NATO was in America's interest - that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. That's the simplest explanation, right? Or maybe it was impossible to examine the partnership with NATO independent of a multitude of other factors, such as international economics, to name just one. Maybe those four presidents looked at the intricate web of connections between America and the other members of NATO, realized that cutting one thread would affect countless other threads, and concluded the sheer complexity made doing so difficult, if not impossible.

Does that mean some sort of "cutting the Gordian knot" solution is the only way out of an otherwise unsolvable problem? I guess in this situation would mean just up and leaving NATO.  How would that play out? Well, here are a few questions that it would raise: 

• What happens to all the US troops stationed in NATO countries? Do they get redeployed to the United States, or stay on US bases in Europe? 
• What happens if they're redeployed - where do we station them, and what do we have them do? Can we muster them out of the military, and can the economy handle the sudden influx of separated troops? 
• What about the bases themselves - do we turn them over to their host nations? Do we need to negotiate new SOFAs with each NATO nation?
• How will this affect current military operations? How will the US get troops from CONUS to the Afghanistan or Iraq theaters? What about supplies? 
• Will this affect trade relationships with the other NATO nations, and if so, how? 
• How will NATO fill the vacuum left by America's withdrawal or downsizing? That is not an insignificant question, and answering it could require enough research to complete a book.

My point here is that, even if you're not a fan of foreign entanglements (which I'm still not), getting out of them is not an impulsive decision.  It will have to be done some day, and it will be painful - and like ripping off a Band-Aid, waiting only makes it hurt worse.

However, it's a decision that should absolutely not be entrusted to someone like Donald Trump - a person who isn't smart or interested enough to understand the scope or consequences of his decisions, who doesn't have any concern for the people who get hurt by his decisions, and whose loyalty to the United States is under heavy suspicion.

So, to recap: making complicated decisions, including ones about America's involvement in NATO, are not off-the-cuff decisions.

Also, Donald Trump is an idiot.

A Few Thoughts on Weaponized Patriotism

So, it's been a long time since my last post.  Sorry about that, it's been hard to write anything lately.  I haven't had the time to crank anything out, or to mull ideas over the way I like to as part of my creative process.  Also, and this may surprise you, but I haven't had many blog-worthy ideas the past few weeks.  I finally came up with something worth writing about, though; so here we go.

The NFL/national anthem/kneeling controversy was back in the news about a week ago.  It coincidentally resurfaced a few days before Memorial Day, when there's an uptick in patriotic displays.  In a way, I find that convenient, because I see the holiday and the debate over kneeling as being somewhat related.  Memorial Day is meant to acknowledge and honor this country's fallen servicemen and servicewomen, and one of the main criticisms of kneeling during the national anthem is that is disrespectful to those same fallen.

Anyway, the issue made headlines again because the NFL recently released its revised policy concerning kneeling and other forms of protest during the playing of the anthem.  Naturally, President Trump weighed in and the media ran with it, because neither of them can pass up an opportunity to generate sensational clickbait.  I posted a link and a few sentences about it on Facebook (see the screenshot below), but I'd like to expand on it a little.

 

Here are my thoughts.

First, if your opinion resembles Trump's on this issue (or just about any issue, really), you may want to rethink that opinion.  Trump has no concept of things like selflessness, sacrifice, loyalty, duty, courage, or any of the other qualities that make a good soldier; and he doesn't have any interest in showing any respect to the armed forces. (Trump isn't a good human being for that matter, and if someone can't figure that out after ten seconds of hearing him speak, that person is a horrible judge of character.) He has made that clear on countless occasions: he belittled a POW, he disrespected a Gold Star Widow, he still hasn't visited any troops in active combat zones, he made his commencement speech at the 2017 Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremony about him--to name a few examples.  He does not give two shits about the flag, the troops, or the country, so he's not someone anybody should look to when it comes to what is or isn't patriotic.  Which leads me to my next point.

Second, anybody who tries to frame patriotism as an in- vs out-group thing should be treated with skepticism.  They usually have an ulterior motive.  It could be an attempt to derail a discussion--calling someone unpatriotic tends to put them on the defensive and reframe the debate really quick. For example, remember the backlash against the Dixie Chicks after they criticized former president Bush in 2003? Or how Joe McCarthy exploited anti-Communist fervor for political gain? You'd think this would be obvious, but there seem to be a lot of people out there who don't get it.  

Third (and last), here are two things that patriotism should not be.  It should not be coercive, and it should not be unquestioning.  You can express your patriotism however you wish, but you should not expect others to express it in the same way.  You should also not shy away from asking the hard questions--particularly to how the armed forces are employed, since "respecting the troops" is at the core of this debate.  Disagreement is not disloyalty, and citizens should be automatically skeptical when the civilian leadership calls for the troops to be committed somewhere around the globe.  American troops are deployed in a number of places that, despite doing work to improve the local conditions, have very little to do with protecting America and its citizens.  Why, for example, are we in Afghanistan some seventeen years later? And how does getting involved in the Syrian civil war make us all safer? These are the questions people need to ask - no, demand - of their elected representatives, and it's not unpatriotic to do so.  

That's all I've got.  I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day weekend, and is enjoying what remains of it.

Thoughts on North Korea

So. . .some recent news stories prompted me to write a military news-themed post - one of the main areas I had originally planned to focus on, before this blog went slightly off the rails.  But that's water under the bridge.  Now, before I dive into this post, I want to make a disclaimer.  My Army service gives me some insight into the military's planning and warfighting processes, but I'm hardly the Second Coming of General Patton.  Truth is, I only scratched a little bit below the surface when it comes to knowledge of those areas.  This is only a collection of somewhat educated guesses, so take them with a grain of salt.  Moving on to the main topic. . .

There have been a handful of news stories over the past two or three days reporting that North Korean hackers acquired a huge chunk of classified data from a South Korean government database, in the neighborhood of 235 gigabytes, last September.  South Korean officials aren't sure what North Korea acquired, but the stolen information reportedly includes joint American-South Korean war plans and proposals for decapitation strikes meant to assassinate Kim Jong Un. To me, that's incredibly important, since tensions remain high and President Trump seems hell-bent on locking the US into a war with North Korea.

I can't emphasize how much of an advantage this gives the North Korean military.  Let's use football as an analogy. When a team is trying to move the ball into the end zone, it generally has two options available: passing or running. Now, the team can develop any number of plays to run or pass the ball, but it essentially has two main options.  It might pull a trick play from time to time, but it won't base its entire offense on wacky strategies like (to take this idea to the absolute extreme) playing two quarterbacks simultaneously or using the kicker to move the ball downfield.

The same thing holds true for warfighting plans.  Any contingency plans the US military develops will share the same basic similarities, because that is just the reality of war.  For example, the military's options at the start of the conflict would be to charge across the DMZ or secure a foothold somewhere else in North Korea.  A frontal charge across the DMZ would incur a lot of casualties, because North Korea expects that and has rolled out countermeasures for it. We could - maybe - create an opening by conducting a massive aerial bombardment/artillery barrage, but I don't know how effective that would be.  It does have the option of letting the military assemble troops and supplies in a safer environment, though.  The other option would be securing a foothold somewhere in North Korea.  That option carries risks of its own.  But assuming it works, once the first wave of troops secures a foothold, it will need a way to deliver supplies, vehicles, additional troops, and other important items.  That means airstrips and/or deep-water ports are prime pieces of real estate, because ships and cargo aircraft are the best ways of transporting supplies in huge quantities.  Those are basically the military's only two options, and they both have pluses and minuses.  Then, if you start thinking about what the military needs in order to fight and win the war, while keeping the supply pipeline flowing, and it becomes clear how few options are really available.

There are also other limitations, such as the number of troops and quantities of supplies available (assembling an invasion force would mean pulling some troops out of somewhere else, such as western Europe or Afghanistan), and equipment capabilities and limitations (our tanks and aircraft are far superior than Korean War era ones; but those are evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes). Additionally, North Korea can correctly anticipate how the US and South Korea will fight based on joint exercises and how the US has fought in the past.  Whatever the US did at the start, a massive bombardment and/or artillery barrage would probably precede any ground assault.  That's just my prediction, but the US is kind of predictable.  There's also the fog of war: things tend to go wrong in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times.

Long story short, the US is boxed in here.  Any new war plans it develops will be constrained by logistical, technological, and tactical limitations, to the point that they look a lot like the old war plans.  Creating wholly new war plans is unlikely, in my opinion, because there's a lot of painstaking, time-consuming, and possibly dangerous work involved.  And given Trump's unhelpful rhetoric, time might be in short supply.

Again, though, I'm hardly an expert military tactician; but this is just my $.02.

"Train like you fight" - an old army saying

"There's an old saying in the Army that you should 'train the way you fight.' For the most part, the Army ignores it.  That's why regular Army units almost always get their asses kicked in their initial battles, unless they have a long train-up period before their first taste of combat.  Under those conditions, units will develop training programs that actually prepare men for combat.  But for some strange reason, the generals and other senior officers see to it that peacetime training has little resemblance to reality." - CSM (Ret.) Eric Haney, Inside Delta Force

I saw a news story a few days ago that caught my attention, about how SECDEF Mattis wants the military to cut away some of the non-combat related training requirements.  Here's a decent summary from the Air Force Times: "Notably, Mattis has ordered a review of the 'requirements for mandatory force training that does not directly support core tasks' – the many hours soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines spend prior to deployment meeting the Pentagon-required tasks that sometimes have little to do with the role they will actually fulfill when deployed."

I have a couple different takes on this development. . .

Here's why I support what Mattis is doing: I served a four-year hitch in the Army.  I suffered through my share of unnecessary, useless training, and naturally I complained about it.  Loudly and often.  My position hasn't changed in the years since I separated from the military.  I once heard someone say that the military's purpose is to "break things and kill people." That's stark, but it's absolutely right.  The military needs to spend more time training for war and less time waxing floors, marching in parades, and parking Humvees in a perfectly aligned formation.  Support troops should go to the range more than once every 2 - 3 months.  Riflemen should go to the range at least once a week.  Intelligence analysts should be reading up on every intelligence report related to their unit's future Area of Interest months in advance, not just weeks - all the analysts, not just the officers and senior NCOs.  And because of the nature of the current conflicts the US is waging, there needs to be thorough training on the area's culture and history, and some level of language proficiency.  That's not touchie-feeley nonsense: asymmetric warfare requires a lot of direct interaction with locals, so the troops need to understand them to keep from alienating them.  It helps them do their jobs better, and ultimately keeps them alive.  If Mattis wants to move the armed forces closer to that objective, I could support it - with a few caveats.  Read on. . .

Here's why I'm wary about this new policy: the US military already has 800-something bases in various foreign countries.  Not all of these are full-blown military posts like the ones in the United States, of course, but 800 installations is a lot.  The United States already takes a lot of criticism for its interventionist military posture: besides the overseas bases, it conducts a lot of counter-terrorist missions (mostly drone strikes and SOF raids) and espionage operations in other countries.  It's not farfetched to think that a more highly-trained military force would lead to more interventions, and I don't think that's a good thing.  Military interventions anger the locals, encourage retaliation, and increase the odds of a terrorist attack on US soil.  To paraphrase George Washington, the military would seek out bigger and meaner foreign dragons to slay.

Here's why I think Mattis will have an uphill battle: Mattis is up against a lot of entrenched interests, including defense contracting companies, Congress, and the military itself to some degree.  Not to mention the bureaucratic realities of budget and material constraints.  I say defense contractors and Congress because the military is like a house that looks like a mansion on the outside but a tenement on the inside.  It has plenty of sexy-looking hardware such as tanks, fighter jets, and aircraft carriers; but is sorely under-equipped when it comes to day-to-day items: cleaning supplies, office supplies, computers & printers, training materials, tools, spare parts, and so on.  There's definitely not enough money for the intensive training I'd like to see happen, probably not even for the modest increases in training Mattis envisions.  To implement the kind of training that could really be helpful, Mattis would have to spike some of that costly hardware; and neither the contracting companies nor Congress will allow that to happen.  Congress controls the purse strings, and defense contractors bring jobs to Congressional districts.  Do the math on that one.

Ultimately, I think Mattis will be lucky to accomplish a few incremental changes.  A tiny bit of improvement here and there, at the fringes.  But a decent-sized overhaul is unrealistic.  And I'm kind of glad.  I think the inadequate training helps put the brakes on overseas military operations, or at least from expanding further.  If the military retrenched and only worried about the continental US + Alaska and Hawaii, then I'd be a huge cheerleader in Mattis' corner.  But seeing as how we haven't had a military like that since about before World War I, I can't really get enthusiastic about it.