What I'm reading - December '06 part 1

As you may have noticed, I've neglected miserably this portion of my blog, and since the cigar shop closed at 9, the lovely ladies of casa de sillyperson are out of town for the week, and the mid-weekly installment of the Mo-Facky Poker Club was pre-empted by the host's attendance of a gig for his son's buddy's band, I guess I'll dust off the ol' keyboard and do a small handful of book reviews.

The first is one I picked up after reading a book I consider required, Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan (review here). Kaplan often referenced "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malay and Vietnam" by John A. Nagl in "Grunts", and given the current situation in Iraq, I figured a primer on counterinsurgency would be a useful volume to grab and read. I was right.

Published in 2002, the book is an edited-for-general-consumption version of Nagl's doctoral thesis at Oxford (Lieutenant Colonel Nagl is a Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, a West Point grad, and a Rhodes Scholar - he also led a tank platoon in the 1st Cavalry Division in Desert Storm and was Operations Officer of Task Force 1-34 Armor during the current Iraq war), and while you can sense the roots of an academic paper, it's actually quite readable (one of the great things about well-written academic papers - especially doctoral ones - is that they start with the very foundations of the theories they're working from and build from there). Nagl uses two differing but similar constructs of what defines a "learning organization" in the corporate/organizational world, and marries them into his own model to deconstruct the US's experience in Vietnam and Britain's experience in their own counterinsurgency (CI) ops in Malaya in the 1950's. The model essentially boils down to two sets of five questions - the second, and to me, more useful set is:

1. Did the [CI] doctrine adopted achieve national goals in the conflict?
2. Did the army contribute to the setting of realistic national goals in the conflict?
3. Did the military accept subordination to political objectives?
4. Did the military use the minimum amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission?
5. Did the military structure itself in an appropriate manner to deal with the threat at hand?

Nagl's deconstruction makes a case that the Brits could answer 'yes' to all five questions (on both models) by the end of their (successful) CI campaign; the US in Vietnam would answer 'no' to all. The only qualified exception is #4 above - but the problem, as Nagl puts it, was that the overuse of heavy firepower in Vietnam instead of a more unified approach with the South Vietnam resistance was counterproductive, both politically AND militarily. And that's essentially the issue that's leading to the bleak outlook in Iraq today: our military was designed for nation-to-nation, army-to-army combat, and was (and largely is) led by generals who see warfare only in those terms. The political infighting between Rumsfeld/Bush and the joint chiefs like Peter Schoomaker (who, incidentally, wrote the foreword to the paperback version of Learning to Eat Soup...), is a microcosm of the issues the US military is confronting in trying to change the organizational culture of our military to lead successful military campaigns against non-state actors, which, Iran and North Korea aside, is the type of operation the US will likely be faced with in the coming years.

I'll leave the details of the history, tactics, and conclusions out here, because there is no way to do justice in such a small space. There are, however, two passages that I want to pass along that stood out as particularly relevant to today's CI struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan (and brewing elsewhere, too). The first is a quote from an anonymous (no!) senior US Army officer circa 1968, as the US was realizing that their efforts in Vietnam were less than fruitful: "I'll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war." Read that quote again. This pigheaded man helped shape policy that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of our troops, but was unbending in his unwillingness to cede operational and political authority to platoon leaders and/or South Vietnamese leaders in order to accomplish the country's stated goals.

Now, those of you left-of-center-type readers, I know what you're thinking. You want to draw comparisons to the "stay the course" politico-babble of Bush and Rummy. But get real. There have been numerous instances of top leadership changing tactics and policies to adapt to the political climate. My take: the problem is, they're adapting their stances to the domestic political climate, not the Iraqi socio-military-political climate, which ultimately is what needs to be done (in the interest of time and my blood pressure, I won't get into the more publicized recommendations from the Iraq Study Group here).

The other highly memorable passage from the book actually comes from the preface (which was written in 2005 and speaks directly to the book's application to the Iraq situation), and is gloomy when you apply it to the domestic socio-political climate we see daily in mainstream media:

The 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review specifically evaluates the ability of the Department of Defense to prevail in irregular warfare. However, the fight to create a secure, democratic Iraq that does not provide a safe haven for terror is not primarily a military task. Counterinsurgency requires the integration of all elements of national power - diplomacy, information operations, intelligence, financial, and military - to achieve the predominantly political objectives of establishing a stable national government that can secure itself against internal and external threats.

Let's dissect those 5 elements of national power and the impact on them that the political left and the mainstream media (MSM) has had recently:

Diplomacy: John Kerry gives a speech to already-fiery imams in Saudi Arabia where he (unfoundedly) accuses troops of "terrorizing" Iraqi women and children by ransacking their homes in the dead of night. The Iraq Study Group asserts that Iran and Syria are our partners in being committed to building a stable Iraq, and their interests in that regard supercede their hatred of America (which, lest ye forget, Ahmadinejad still refers to as "the great Satan"). You can boast the "bi-partisanship" of the ISG all you want, but regarding all cultures as equal, even when one culture has every-Friday pep rallies in which "Death to America!" is the cheer du jour, is largely a leftist belief.

Information Operations: The only information the MSM seems to have an interest in disseminating are our own tactics at executing the Global War on Terror, whose primary front is currently in Iraq, like it or not (pace the disclosure of the financial transaction monitoring program, the disclosure of domestic wiretapping of international calls, and the disclosure of call-pattern data mining by our domestic intelligence services). When do we get the scoop on enemy information ops? Oh yeah, when our journalists are actually allowed to (a) see something other than the balconies of their hotels, (b) tag along with troops other than coalition forces, or (c) do some investigative journalism of enemy info-ops that aren't spoon-fed by the local regimes or government-controlled media outlets of those countries.

Intelligence: There are hundreds of boxes of untranslated documents seized from the Hussein regime's catacombs, and the government's response is to have their appalingly low number of translators skim them to see if there's anything really juicy in them, and if there's not, they post them on the web for the world to see, and for good-hearted Arab-speaking volunteers to translate them for us. I won't pin this shortcoming entirely on the political left, but Reagan and Bush I were largely pre-occupied with Communism-containment, not the Arab threat. Clinton, what were you pre-occupied with? Never mind. Again, being pre-occupied with one obvious threat is no excuse for the failure of Reagan/Bush to foresee the rising Islamist threat (which, for all intents and purposes, began with Khomeni's rise to power in the late 70's), but the Clintonian slashing of defense and intelligence budgets prevented us from making up for lost time in training a few hundred people in the fine art of translating the language of our smoldering enemies (note to self: learn Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and the Venezuelan dialect of Spanish).

Financial: See information ops, above. Also think about the fact that some of the loudest rhetoric you hear about energy policy is the failure of the Bush Administration and Attorney General Gonzalez to prosecute and/or investigate price-gouging at the pumps. Then think about the Dem-led kibosh of drilling for our own oil in ANWR. Now consider the fact that we've pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars (that's trillion, with a t) into the Saudi economy for their oil, because we're too worried about inconveniencing caribou to realize that the primary source of all our Islamo-fascist problems is really the Saudi-funded Wahabbi sect of Islam, whose radicalism is Saudi Arabia's true chief export - their export of oil merely bankrolls the radicalism.

Military: It remains to be seen how committed Robert Gates is to the re-vamping of our military to be better at fighting so-called "small" wars, as Rumsfeld was. The other thing Gates should probably keep in mind is that the Department of State should be viewed as a partner in small and/or long wars, not a rival. As Nagl's book illustrates (and as Kaplan pointed out often in Imperial Grunts), too often, the State Department is viewed as having goals that conflict with the military's goals, but ultimately that's a fallacious and dangerous chip to have on a nation's metaphorical shoulder. The goal is to assist in the building of a stable Iraq, to the larger end of providing a Muslim anchor to a more stable Middle East (Israel is stable, but obviously unable to assert much will over its religio-socio-economic enemies). The Departments of State AND Defense are mere tools on the way to that end, not ends in themselves. This, also, is not a left- or a right-problem, but tying the hands of the military and forcing the State Department to pursue meaningless cease fires all in the name of "troop withdrawal deadlines" and "exit strategies" is a left-of-center push.

So 3 of the 5 elements are largely being undermined by the political left, and the other 2 have underpinnings of leftist undermine...ment. And all 5 are equally critical to successful counterinsurgency operations... Stalin had a phrase to describe this phenomenon we're seeing from America's and Europe's political left: "useful idiots".

Verdict: good book, and certainly an interesting read. If you're interested in improving your grasp of America's military history in Vietnam, and/or want to begin an understanding of a small component of British military , it's a fantastic place to start. If you're interested in more modern application of military history to the Iraq problem, this is a great addition, but it's hardly the place to start.

OK, so I have 3 more installments of "what I'm reading - December" to do, but it's 11:30 now, this post is way, way longer than I ever intended it to be, and I need to sleep. More in the next few days...