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Bob Gates’ Sacrificial Lambs: Thrown Aside To Preserve Perpetual Pentagon Overspending

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We should reject Bob Gates’s pre-emptive effort to lock in future defense budget growth with his PR statement declaring $100 billion in DoD out year budget cuts. Don’t fall for the flare off the back of the jet. He’s throwing Congress and the public a few meaningless sacrifices. His admitted long term goal? It’s not to cut costs per se but justify permanent 1% increases from this year’s already record defense outlays. This stunt is political kabuki intended to head off real defense cuts by offering a Potemkin facade of budget discipline.

Will Americans be deceived by his PR sleight of hand? Probably.

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Rise And Slow Fall Of Another American Army – And Friends

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Years ago, when writing a book actually meant something, Shelby Stanton’s Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces Vietnam 1965-1973 offered incisive insight into how the U.S. Army conducted operations battle by battle, battlefield by battlefield and how the institution itself devolved in parallel with U.S. political and strategic incompetence.

It’s fashionable across the Interwebs to proclaim as Les Gelb does, in his now SNL-parody worthy fin de siecle world weary sort of way, there’s nothing terribly new in the Wikileaks material. With a smug eyeroll they type, ‘*everyone* knows’ the war is going badly and the ISI is untrustworthy. Which is not really the point.

Here, at a basic mid-level (some secret, some confidential, classified but not compartmentalized) is an incredibly rich data trove revealing how the relevant U.S. institutions acted and perceived themselves as acting in the moment. Which is a macro version of what Stanton did for the U.S. Army in Vietnam. The weight of minute detail and quantity about the institutions and their interactions is itself the story. Regardless whether the data changes the ‘picture’ whether we’re ‘winning’ exchanged as common wisdom in a Dupont Circle, er, circle jerk time loop with [take your pick, Kagan, Pillar et al.].

What emerges is not some magic revelation that the U.S. is unsuccessful per Obama’s speech macro in ‘halting the momentum of the Talleeeeban’. The granular detail makes clear military, diplomatic and other institutions are utterly incapable of accurately assessing their environment and calibrating accordingly. On it’s own, the cumulative impact is serious enough, being — predictably — a slow but accelerating disintegration of internal coherence and ethos. Anyone who knows the military as a concrete living entity (as opposed to just an abstraction ala the Neocons or NotSoBright) also knows collapse of ethos and internal coherence leads to nihilistic operations and follows a trajectory potentially ending in institutional death spiral. Apart from overall strategic failure.

This admittedly limited data dump – while massive — remains just a straw’s view. Much remains out of public view. Still, one gains clear snap shots of consistently unanchored institutional failure across the years calling into question their very ability to offer trustworthy, meaningful input towards a rational American strategy going forward.

Yes, we all ‘know’ it ‘all’ already. But consider the difference between listening to a piece of music and investing the time and neurological training to play an instrument – to understand the music from that internal perspective – let alone being able actually to play it. The difference seems small. That gap is enormous. The historical and practical impact from this data’s release has real meaning. More than some equally dysfunctional ‘thought leaders’ as they speak *at* each other while cradling stale tuna sandwiches at a Think Tank event manufactured for CSPAN.

Draining The Swamp, Hopey Changey Style (Slightly Revised)

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One thing many people forget about Donald Rumsfeld: he didn’t really want to do Iraq. Oh, he did in the sense that Cheney did, and for many of the same reasons. But he was never a Neocon. Securing The Realm and subjugating the Arab/Islamic self-esteem not his primary concern.

His two big priorities were what has now degenerated into a pathetic bureaucratic joke – defense ‘transformation’ – and special operations/forces. He was afraid Iraq would derail his transformation agenda by strengthening conventional force mindset. We know Rummy’s effort to make Iraq a transformative showcase war turned Tommy Frank’s unimaginative plodding into an incoherent ‘fiasco’. Tommy Franks wasn’t the only bungler.

On the plus side of the ledger [from his point of view], Rumsfeld and his coterie tried to unleash SOCOM (and parallel contractors) first. Like another historical figure before him, Rummy found that rather than having to fight to control the mastiff’s leash, he found merely a moribund, sleepy dog and a depressingly slack chain. Oh, the special forces people reporting to him might sit and roll over. If pressed. But spontaneously chase a ball or squirrel with vigor? With joy of the hunt? Nope.

Rummy eventually radicalized the special forces community to his liking. But he had to overcome alot of conservative military inertia. Only after years of careerists seeing that there really are no consequences in America anymore did they fully join the game. Initially with a ‘Why the f**k not?” and now with gusto. It’s all true what critics say: Rumsfeld’s passive aggressive style of maximizing control and seeming paralytic inability to make decisions proved catastrophic. Yet he understood before DoD and most in the White House (except for Wayne Downing) that a militarized ‘Long War’ would be fought and ‘won’ [in some vague sense] by special forces. It was Rummy first, not this White House, who tempted special forces with the Faustian offer of a blank powerpoint slide: ‘What do you need?’ That was 8 years ago.

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OK, Cameras Rolling People, And . . . ACTION!

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The American military colossus arrives in a fleet of helicopters which British lack. When US Marines air assaulted into a notorious Taliban stronghold in the south of Helmand Province – far south of positions the British have struggled to hold for three years – they arrived in a fleet of Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters . . .

The US military colossus has moved into Afghanistan’s most dangerous and turbulent province, moving troops, aircraft and armoured vehicles in numbers which British commanders could only dream of through their years of frustrating battle against a determined and deadly enemy . . .

The well-supplied Americans are in stark contrast to their British brothers-in-arms, whose shortages of armoured vehicles and helicopters are the subject of political arguments at home. . .

Then on July 2, the US Marines arrived – launching their biggest helicopter-borne assault since the Vietnam War . . . After replacing British troops in central Helmand districts such as Garmsir, the American Marine commanders were careful to praise their predecessors – and the sentiment is genuine.

Commanders say they did a “great job” or they were “fantastic”. But the praise is qualified by an acknowledgement they didn’t have enough resources. “The Brits did a phenomenal job,” said one senior officer. “They didn’t have a lot of people, they were a force of maybe three or four thousand I think, and we are coming in with 10,000 Marines, so we got a lot more to do a lot more things. We just have a lot more people.”

If only it were true. It’s all nostalgic in a way. How re-assuring to have Brits marveling once again at ‘Over here, over paid and over sexed’. Very Churchillian in a pico sense. The Austrian Corporal History Channel knows how to program this narrative. Plucky Anglo-Americans riding together a wave of (relative) American tactical material abundance in one far off province to . . . victory.

Except we all know, like Col. Kilgore, ‘Hamid don’t surf, Sir!’ This elaborate military theater and psychological manipulation is aimed at both the local populace and the Mayor of Kabul’s emissaries. Most of the Taliban, especially their most valuable foreign operatives, have already withdrawn or melted away. Intentionally for both sides. We remain skeptical that once all the theatrical sturm und drang fades the ‘central government’ [sic] can exert consensual civilian control over the region to engender meaningful loyalty.

More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.

“The population is not the enemy,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the Marines in southern Afghanistan, told a group of troops this week. “The population is the prize — they are why we are going in.”

To realize their goals, the Americans and their allies want to capture the area with a minimum amount of violence. American commanders say the attack on Marja is intended to be nothing like the similar size assault on the city of Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. In that case, Falluja, under the control of hundreds of insurgents, was largely destroyed. The Americans killed plenty of guerrillas, but they did not make any friends.

“We don’t want Falluja,” General McChrystal said in an interview this week. “Falluja is not the model.”

At least there’s that.

Shareef: ‘What r U wearing now?’ Cambone: ‘Hey ! Get off my drone. I’m telling Rummy!’

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So Shareef’s been hacking into our business. Doing more than changing Petraeus’ Facebook page status to ‘backed up’.

Naturally, many of us (us meaning the Stiftung and an unholy consortia of military industrial, networking, technology and software ‘patriots’) spoke openly about the dangers of easily hacked tactical airborne intelligence (video and otherwise) to anyone who would listen in OSD, including Ron Sega among many others. To paraphrase ‘Apocalypse Now’ ‘we warn you long time.’ It wasn’t even mostly altruism. For contractors and government sales reps it’s always mercenary – there be gold in dem der hills, me buckos. Especially in selling worst case scenarios. Although to be fair, even if the contractors had been on the the level more than 50% of the time it wouldn’t have mattered. Rummy’s OSD culture was insultingly impatient and contemptuous for ‘planners’ talking about ‘consequences’. No coordination. Everyone wanted in the game. Fast action/fast kill. Warnings? Clintonian, Democratic (CIA, too) defeatism. Pre-911 wimps.

Pwned! Allah Akbar! Pay Up! A New Humvee With GPS And An iPod!

We have to laugh. Iraqi insurgents seeing what Uncle Sam saw in real time for about $30 – and we doubt they bothered with licensing issues. That $30 probably covered software for a province or two and all of China. So many people scrambling post 9/11 trying to get COTS (commercial off the shelf) tech to the warfighter. No understanding that COTS leveled the playing field. Or that the enemy likely could get and use COTS faster than DoD. At least in meetings we attended various entities pleaded to meet the smallest, newest, oddest (to them) start ups. And weaponize the shite out it yesterday. It’s no wonder Iraq turned into the nightmare Radio Shack. You know, the one where all the 8 year old boys try to fly their radio controlled helicopters on the same channel? While the ten year olds 2 aisles over swamp the frequency with their Optimus Prime voice changers, etc.

Encryption we learn didn’t *start* until April of this year. It’ll take years to sort out and debug the frequency spectrum utilization issues. Meanwhile, we’ve been operating this particular unit while knowingly compromised. It defies — no, wait, in fact it is perfectly believable and par for the course. Rest assured that all platforms and all frequencies and all data networks are ‘fixed’. A long time ago. You’d be a normal American if you asked ‘ Why should they be any more competent in this particular case?’ It does make one feel a little less like Festivus.

Inept U.S. planning, execution and operational security since 2001 have allowed the Russians, Indians, Iranians and Chinese to go to school against us tuition free. In many ways. This drone matter gave them an open seat along side part of our our decision loop, shoulder to shoulder. This breach was low level. The Russians, Iranians, Chinese et al. would attack the riotous other less than secure targets in more sophisticated ways. One must presume Al-Qaeda least audited the drone hacking course. Not to mention Iraqi high school kids. God help us when we reap the whirlwind.

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Some personal Bunker administrative notes follow. If that’s extraneous arcana then by all means punt.

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