Barack Obama, the black Will Smith, has been, is and will be in the news permanently, or at least until Nov. 5, 2008 should John McCain's wet dream (of somehow overcoming the horrendous legacy of his good buddy, George III) become reality.

So there's no shortage of worthwhile reading on all things Obama. Here are four of the most intriguing.

1) Fundraising expertise

David Brooks has spent some useful time poring over the campaign finance statements.

Obama’s Money Class

Op-Ed Columnist | By DAVID BROOKS | Published: July 1, 2008

Barack Obama sells the Democratic Party short. He talks about his fund-raising success as if his donors were part of a spontaneous movement of small-money enthusiasts who cohered around himself. In fact, Democrats have spent years building their donor network. Obama’s fund-raising base is bigger than John Kerry’s, Howard Dean’s and Al Gore’s, but it’s not different.

As in other recent campaigns, lawyers account for the biggest chunk of Democratic donations. They have donated about $18 million to Obama, compared with about $5 million to John McCain, according to data released on June 2 and available at OpenSecrets.org.

People who work at securities and investment companies have given Obama about $8 million, compared with $4.5 for McCain. People who work in communications and electronics have given Obama about $10 million, compared with $2 million for McCain. Professors and other people who work in education have given Obama roughly $7 million, compared with $700,000 for McCain.

So, Senator Obama, as has every presidential candidate in history, a rhetoric/reality gap.

When he is swept up in rhetorical fervor, Obama occasionally says that his campaign is 90 percent funded by small donors. He has indeed had great success with small donors, but only about 45 percent of his money comes from donations of $200 or less.

The real core of his financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators.

What began as seemingly an exercise in "Ha! Ha! Caught you!" turns out to be a pretty interesting analysis of the source of big money for political ends in the first decade of the third millennium.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Op-Ed Columnist - Obama’s Money Class - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Used to be that what was good for General Motors was good for America. Now, with that once great entity in decline (or perhaps I should use the plural?), Brooks feels that one should substitute the name of Goldman Sachs.

Well, when one thinks about it, at least Goldman Sachs knows how to make money without having to convert it from iron ore, coal, rubber, aluminum, copper, silicon, glass, paint, labor, etc.

The perfect captains of industry to steer us in these post-industrial times.

2) Flooded by lies

John Kerry had his Swift Boat. Barack Obama is confronting an entire armada of lies and distortions, and many people are swallowing them without reservations.

In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying

By Eli Saslow | Washington Post Staff Writer | Monday, June 30, 2008 |Page A01

FINDLAY, Ohio -- On his corner of College Street, Jim Peterman stares at the four American flags planted in his front lawn and rubs his forehead. Peterman, 74, is a retired worker at Cooper Tire, a father of two, an Air Force veteran and a self-described patriot. He took one trip to Washington in 1989 -- best vacation of his life -- and bought a statue of the Washington Monument that he still displays in a glass case in his living room.

He believes a smart vote is an American's greatest responsibility. Which is why his confusion about Barack Obama continues to eat at him.

On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

"It's like you're hearing about two different men with nothing in common," Peterman said. "It makes it impossible to figure out what's true, or what you can believe."

Here in Findlay, a Rust Belt town of 40,000, false rumors about Obama have built enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography. Born on the Internet, the rumors now meander freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio -- through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants.

Hitler, Goebbels and Karl Rove were/are all committed followers of the principle of the Big Lie. If you repeat it often enough, it must be true. And, if Findlay, Ohio is any template of what's going on in this country, Sen. Obama's truth-telling team has its work cut out for it.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying - washingtonpost.com

One strains always for faith in the intelligence and clear-headed thinking process of the great majority of U.S. citizens. Of course, history has taught me repeatedly that such intelligence and clear-headed thinking does not much exist (is there anything more uncommon than common sense?).

He looks different than me or my neighbors. Must be a fraud, if not worse.

3) Saluting his flag

The saga of the flag pin won't die. Herr Rove and his minions won't let it (repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat).

So, off went Obama to Independence, Missouri, birthplace and home of veteran and superior (finally, in history's belated estimation) Democratic president, Harry Truman, to attempt to set the nation straight.

Obama Fiercely Defends His Patriotism

Democrat Also Decries Criticism of Rival McCain on Service to Country

By Jonathan Weisman and Michael D. Shear | Washington Post Staff Writers | Tuesday, July 1, 2008; Page A01

INDEPENDENCE, Mo., June 30 -- Dogged by persistent rumors questioning his belief in country, Sen. Barack Obama journeyed to Middle America on Monday to lay out his vision of patriotism, conceding that he has learned in this presidential campaign that "the question of who is -- or is not -- a patriot all too often poisons our political debate."

"Throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given," Obama said in the 29-minute address to about 1,150 people crowded into a gymnasium at the Truman Memorial Building, named for former president Harry S. Truman. "It was how I was raised. It was what propelled me into public service. It is why I am running for president. And yet at times over the last 16 months, my patriotism has been challenged -- at times as a result of my own carelessness, more often as a result of the desire by some to score political points and raise fears about who I am and what I stand for."

Scholar that he is, Senator Obama gave his audience a history lesson.

Obama's speech put the issue in a broad historical perspective, speaking of charges that Thomas Jefferson had sold the nation out to the French and that John Adams "was in cahoots with the British." He also questioned policies enacted in the name of patriotism, including Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans.

"The use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the republic," Obama said. "Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s -- in arguments that go back 40 years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic."

Also Sunday, Wesley Clark, the retired Army general and one-time presidential candidate in is own right, came out criticizing the holiest of holies, John McCain's war record. Can't touch that, guys. The man spent five torturous years in a North Vietnam prison camp.

Obama's speech came on the same day that his rival for the White House, Sen. John McCain, pushed back hard against criticism of his own record as a Navy flier and a prisoner of war. On Sunday, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark questioned McCain's qualifications for the White House. "He hasn't held executive responsibility," Clark said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."

More on Gen. Clark's attack below. Meanwhile, here's the complete story, with a short video.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Obama Fiercely Defends His Patriotism - washingtonpost.com

Gotta love Gen. Clark. There's a lot to respect in John McCain, but it's true, he did get shot down. And there's very much to be disturbed about Sen. McCain, as we've illuminated previously.

But, to the good general.

4) "the grunts hated the flyboys"

Fred Kaplan writes on military matters for Slate.com. As that oddity, a high ranking officer who also is a Democrat, Wesley Clark can't be faulted for his attempt to defend his party's candidate. Obama does not have military experience whatsoever, a comparison that John McCain would like to take great advantage of in this time of war. Clark's background is exemplary. He just went a bit too far on Sunday.

The Grunt vs. the Flyboy

The real reason for Wesley Clark's ill-advised comments about John McCain's military record.

By Fred Kaplan | Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 4:45 PM ET

There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark's politically tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.

First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004 presidential campaign?

Second, and more fundamental, Clark was an Army infantry commander during the Vietnam War while McCain was a Navy aviator. As a rule, the grunts hated the flyboys.

Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of CBS's Face the Nation:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he couldn't hold back some raging impulse, he went on:

He hasn't held executive responsibility. … I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

In a sense, of course, Clark is right.

Kaplan goes the extra mile, and illustrates Wesley's shoulder-chip with a brilliant chart of the casualties sustained by the four services in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not unexpectedly, the guys on the ground (Army and Marines) are taking an outsized proportion of deaths and injuries, despite this enlightened era of joint responsibility.

An Army general might want to take the Navy (fly a lot of planes) and the Air Force to task over this, not to speak of what must have been pretty similar experiences in Vietnam.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The real reason for Wesley Clark's ill-advised comments about John McCain's

With this political faux pas, as the media has joyfully played it, Gen. Clark just might have clobbered any possibility of joining Sen. Obama's ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

But he does get one thinking. John McCain first got famous for getting shot down and taken prisoner. Never commanded a cub scout den so far as we know.

Now, his father, and his grandfather, knew command. Full admirals, the Admirals McCain were distinguished heroes and commanders. A guided missile destroyer, USS John S. McCain DDG56, is named after them.

Yr (justifiably humble svt has actually toured the McCain, since our son, and our future daughter-in-law, served as junior officers on that ship, based in Yokosuka, Japan, some years ago.

Challenging times

The junior senator from Illinois has made history from the moment he stepped into the fray. He has won more primary votes, raised record-setting amounts of money, and beat off a furious charge from the last century's most fearsome political force.

He should be able to bide his time, take advantage of the summer lull between the last primaries and the convention to replenish and rearm for the battle ahead, a presidential election the Democrats shouldn't have any trouble winning, based on what a stinking pile of manure the incumbent has deposited on the office.

Barack Obama is just now learning just how tough it's going to be to win this thing. His foreign name, his race, and of course his intellectual firepower are all unsettling to a large swath of Americans like those in Findlay, who seem to find it easier, egged on by Herr Rove and his hate radio and Fox News colleagues, to focus on those differences as frightening negatives, rather than as simply differences.

So Obama will work very hard 24/7, all summer, and all the way to November 4.

It's going to continue to be a fascinating campaign.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

--MUDGE

1. “It only takes the right leader”, the late Colonel David H. Hackworth (US Army (1 July 2001)
2. "Lessons Learned from the American Expedition to Iraq", this site (29 December 2005)
3. “Fire the Generals!“, Douglas A. Macgregor (Colonel, US Army, retired), posted at Defense and the National Interest (30 April 2007)
4. “A Failure in Generalship“, Paul Yingling (Lieutenant Colonel, US Army), Armed Forces Journal  (May 2007)
5. "The Core Competence of America’s Military Leaders ", this site  (22 May 2007)
6.  "No General as Obama's VP", Douglas Macgregor (Colonel, US Army, retired), Defense News  (30 June 2008) -- "Why a Military Running Mate Isn't Necessary"

Of course, numbers 1, 3, 4, and 6 are the most significant in this list.  Here are excerpts from each article.

I.  “It only takes the right leader”, the late Colonel David H. Hackworth (US Army (1 July 2001) -- Excerpt:

What’s new - and what ratchets up the risk - is that there are no more George Washington’s, U.S. Grant’s, John Pershings, George Marshalls, Matthew Ridgways, James Hollingsworths or Norman Schwarzkopfs in soldier suits. I can’t name a single serving Army, Navy or Air Force senior officer with even a fraction of the true-grit leadership of any of the above men. Our senior military leadership, less the Marine Corps, is bankrupt, kaput, fini. There are no more steel-jawed watchdogs, only slick, sweet-smelling lapdogs.

Our current crop of star-wearers are mostly corporate CEO types, Perfumed Princes who got to the top by a sick system that’s become increasingly entrenched since the Korean War. Too many are mirror images of Gen. Wesley Clark, who strutted his stuff during the recent Serbian disaster. Clark’s now keeping busy blaming that pathetic showing on his former pals in the Pentagon, conveniently forgetting that as the commander in chief of the NATO forces, he had the option of resigning if not allowed to run his war his way.

A George Marshall or Matthew Ridgway could turn our very sick military around before you can say:  OUR KINDER, GENTLER MILITARY WILL LOSE THE NEXT WAR. 

 II.  "Lessons Learned from the American Expedition to Iraq", this site (29 December 2005) -- Excerpt:

The upper echelon of the US military establishment excels at producing industrial grade excuses and shifting blame. Excuses of mass destruction (EMD), they divert pressure that might otherwise lead to reform.

... As a result, we have military leaders that cannot fight and win the most common wars of our era. Despite spending vast sums, many times that of our foes, our post-WWII military performance has ranged from poor to horrible. While analysis and proof of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this paper, these recent - small but telling - vignettes illustrate the nature of our problem.

... The events surrounding the fall of Iraq’s capital are difficult to imagine, even after four years have passed. US forces again proved invincible on the field of battle. They rolled up to Baghdad, occupied it and waited for orders. Then the capitol fell into disorder, with looting and burning of key infrastructure.

Apparently the Pentagon’s senior generals – the best-educated generals ever to lead an Army – failed to prepare for one of history’s most common scenarios. As a result they read reports from their field commanders and watched as victory tipped over to what might become a crushing defeat. Perhaps for the next war our top generals’ briefing books should include DVD’s of War and Peace and Gone with the Wind. Watching the burning of Moscow and Atlanta might remind them to plan for this contingency.

It’s not yet clear why and how this occurred, except in one respect. Our military is a full member of 21st Century American society - no separate military culture here - and its top leaders produce excuses suitable for a Superpower, featuring the new American mantra: “It’s not our fault.”

III.  “Fire the Generals!“, Douglas A. Macgregor (Colonel, US Army, retired), posted at Defense and the National Interest (30 April 2007) -- Excerpt:

It is bitter to contemplate, but Americans now confront issues of the utmost gravity:

1. the lack of character and competence apparent in the most senior ranks;
2. the willingness of the civilians in charge, from the commander in chief to the secretary of defense, to ignore this problem; and,
3. the probability that future American military operations will fail if generalship of this quality persists.

IV.  “A Failure in Generalship“, Paul Yingling (Lieutenant Colonel, US Army), Armed Forces Journal  (May 2007) -- Excerpt:

America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

... Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.

... The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

V.  "The Core Competence of America’s Military Leaders ", this site  (22 May 2007) -- Excerpt:

The German General staff was as perfect a system as we can ever devise, but it could not compensate for the moral flaws of the officers who comprised it.  By 1943 Hitler’s insanity was obvious. Germany’s senior officers should have drawn straws, with the loser to walk up and shoot Hitler. After which would follow his trial and execution for murder and treason. A bad end for him, but the salvation of the Wehrmacht and Germany.  Instead, the small minority that had the will to act — the schwarze kapelle – undertook assassination attempts suitable only for comic opera. All, of course, were unsuccessful.

The Wehrmacht and Germany were almost destroyed by the cowardliness of the Army’s leaders, the inexcusable flaw in an officer.  Scharnhorst and von Moltke the Elder would have despaired to see their descendents’ failure.  I hope our officers prove of higher quality when our time of testing comes. Considering the physical power wielded by the US military, the rest of the world should also pray for this.

The run-up to the Iraq war gave hints of what we can expect - for good and for ill.  On a small scale, we should applaud LtGen Paul Van Riper (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.), who refused to continue with an obviously rigged war game in preparation for the Iraq War.

More importantly, if the rumors are correct, General Eric Shinseki — then Army Chief of Staff — boldly spoke the truth to Rumsfeld about the number of troops required for the Iraq Expedition. This effectively ended Shinseki’s career.  If this story is true, we can speculate about its implications.  Shinseki’s sacrifice was, unfortunately, in vain. His peers failed to support him, so Rumsfeld ignored his recommendations.  An act of conscience by the Army Chief of Staff should not become a career opportunity for a fellow officer.

Our senior generals should understand the importance of collective action. Together they might have, on a matter of military strategy, successfully confronted their political leaders.  Bravery is important when privates are under gunfire, and equally so when generals are under political fire.

 VI.   "No General as Obama's VP", Douglas Macgregor (Colonel, US Army, retired), Defense News  (30 June 2008) -- "Why a Military Running Mate Isn't Necessary" -- Excerpt:

Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration always ex­hibited a marked aversion to ad­vancing men of character to the most senior posts in a way not seen since the days of President Lyndon Johnson's administration. If they had, events might have turned out very differently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps it's be­cause such men would have fought the administration over its culture of torture and abuse in relation to Muslim detainees, be­havior that has betrayed Ameri­can values, cost us our moral au­thority and done us incalculable damage internationally.

Instead, the Bush administra­tion opted for biddable corpo­rate men who followed orders, pushed the party line, lied and dissembled where necessary.

The most disturbing example of moral gutlessness occurred when Ambassador Paul Bremer announced the decision to dis­band the very Iraqi Army which the top U.S. Army generals had planned to reconstitute and use to restore order. A minority of generals - John Abizaid, for ex­ample - who composed the U.S. Army leadership in Iraq knew it was a disastrous decision that virtually guaranteed the most ap­palling consequences.

But did he or any of the generals stand up and oppose the decision or threaten to resign en masse, and speak out publicly? No, they folded - and eagerly accepted the promotions that followed.

Such moral cowardice is inex­cusable. In the final analysis, the generals turned a limited mili­tary intervention to remove the corrupt leadership of a weak, in­capable despot into a destructive war of occupation waged against Iraq's Sunni Arab population.  Then, they replaced Saddam Hussein's regime with a corrupt Shi'ite Islamist Arab government with ties to Iran.

No less disappointing was the readiness of the retired generals to defend the incompetence and failure of their chosen succes­sors by misinforming the Ameri­can people about the true condi­tions on the ground in Iraq.

Thanks to their disinformation campaign on television and ra­dio, the disaster was concealed from the American public until the strategic consequences were so negative the only way to re­duce U.S. losses was to buy off the insurgent enemy with bags of U.S. cash under the guise of the surge.

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please), or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Other articles about this subject

For more information see the full archive of articles about "An army near the breaking point", with reports and studies over the past decade.

Chief of Staff of the Army’s Leadership Survey 2000

Top-down loyalty - DOES NOT EXIST. Senior leaders will throw subordinates under the bus in a heartbeat to protect or advance their career. There is no trust of senior leaders in terms of loyalty because the record is clear. At the highest level, as example, 4 stars will watch our health care erode without taking a stand.

“Challenging the Generals“, Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine (26 August 2007) 

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army's vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army's elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army's second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled "A Failure in Generalship."

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform - most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age - and turned Captain Wignall's question around. "You all have just come from combat, you're young captains," he said, addressing the entire room. "What's your opinion of the general officers corps?"

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling's criticisms.

... Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on obedience and hierarchy. Yet the scene at Fort Knox reflected a brewing conflict between the Army's junior and senior officer corps - lieutenants and captains on one hand, generals on the other, with majors and colonels ("field-grade officers") straddling the divide and sometimes taking sides.

... Colonel Yingling's article gave these tensions voice; it spelled out the issues and the stakes; and it located their roots in the Army's own institutional culture, specifically in the growing disconnect between this culture - which is embodied by the generals - and the complex realities that junior officers, those fighting the war, are confronting daily on the ground. The article was all the more potent because it was written by an active-duty officer still on the rise. It was a career risk, just as, on a smaller scale, standing up and asking the Army vice chief of staff about the article was a risk.

Power. BY FRED KAPLAN. Wiley, 2008, 246 pp., $25.95

It was abundantly clear to anyone watching television on the morning of September 11, 2001. The United States had been attacked on its own soil for the first time since Pearl Harbor and everything had changed; international politics would never be the same from that date forward. Except that it would.

This is the central premise of Frad Kaplan's new book, Daydream Believers, which argues that a number of misconceptions led policy makers to the false conclusion that a new era had dawned after September 11th when the old realities of global politics were, in fact, alive and well. Kaplan, who holds a doctorate from MIT and writes the "War Stories" feature for Slate, takes his cue from T.E. Lawrence's famous missive on the dangers of "dreamers of the day" who are prepared to make real their wild fantasies.

At the root of the illusory world view posited by Kaplan was the fundamental misreading of a very real realignment of world power, the collapse of the Soviet Union. This left the United States the most powerful country in the world and the lesson George W. Bush and his administration drew from this was that they could "do pretty much as they pleased: issue orders and expect obeisance, topple rogue regimes at will, honor alliances and treaties when they were useful, and disregard them when they weren't." However, what the neoconservatives and other backers of the "unipolar moment" thesis failed to consider was that by removing a common threat, the demise of the Soviet Empire left many states throughout the world without the need for U.S. security guarantees and thus less susceptible to American demands. In some ways, the end of the Cold War left America weaker.

Other febrile beliefs under girded this central strategic assumption, and two of the most important highlighted by Kaplan are the efficacy of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). The RMA was supposed to harness the power of information technology to enable the ultimate joint operations. Real-time battlefield intelligence, instant communication, precision weapons, and high mobility forces all enmeshed in a digital network supposedly made the old, dirty, time-consuming methods of war familiar to veterans of Korea or Vietnam obsolete while promising rapid victories with minimal manpower almost anywhere in the world.

If no country on earth could challenge the U.S. in conventional military power, then some might try to deter American adventurism with nuclear weapons. Missile Defense would ostensibly negate this possibility by creating an advanced system of radars and interceptors designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles before they reached American soil. No matter that such technologies has been explored without success since the dawn of the missile age; with the proper investment, we could make it work (or so the Bush administration thought).

Thus, Kaplan argues, an America that thought itself unbeatable in battle, soon to be invulnerable from rogue missile attacks, and with no peer competitors in sight found itself attacked on 9/11. This was the catalyst for the disaster to follow. George W. Bush and his acolytes set out to transform the world, through force if necessary, in a strategy that culminated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush's 2005 inaugural address, in which America's interest in security and its ideal of democracy were supposedly unified in a grand quest to make the world free.

Except that the RMA proved unsuited to nation building and America's military found itself vulnerable to the same sorts of tactics that dogged Napoleon in Spain. We still find ourselves sidling up to dictators in Beijing, Riyadh, and Alma-Ata. We are still forced to negotiate with rogue regimes like Kim Jong Il's. And we are increasingly incapable of exercising influence in world affairs as our power is sapped by war, recession, and the reticence of our allies to aid the administration that so haughtily dismissed their concerns in prior years.

Kaplan ends his book by urging a return to realism (with a small "r", not of the capitalized Kissingerian variety) with a conscience. Taking as his model the strategists of the early Cold War, like Dean Acheson, he believes America must base its strategy on an empirical assessment of the world and develop new institutions and alliances through which to pursue our interests in the world as it is.

While it does not contain much in the way of new or revelatory information, Daydream Believers is a cogent and highly readable account of the false assumptions that led the U.S. to the strategically precarious situation in which it finds itself. It is, by and large, a critique of the second Bush administration and largely leaves Bill Clinton off the hook. While Bush certainly carried the ideas of American supremacy to their extremes, we shouldn't forget that Clinton's Pentagon was the first to embrace RMA, that he was no stranger to the use of force in the name of abstract ideals, and that it was his secretary of state who declared America to be the "indispensable nation." Still, Kaplan's book is worth a read and the lessons he illuminates should be taken to heart by anyone interested in U.S. foreign policy.

Well, most of our robotic forces are air forces these days, but we keep learning about "spiders" and the like that are meant to assist ground troops.

It's not just about protecting precious lives, although heaven knows that should be a sufficient rationale for investing in this sci-fi like technology.

It's about substituting for Army and Marine ground troops that simply aren't available.

Fred Kaplan, who writes most cogently on military affairs for Slate.com, has an intriguing analysis.

The Army's Math Problem

We don't have any more soldiers to send to Afghanistan unless we take some out of Iraq.

By Fred Kaplan | Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 4:56 PM ET

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to send 7,000 more U.S. troops—about two brigades—to Afghanistan, according to the May 3 New York Times. But there's a problem, which the story underplays: We don't have any more troops to send. The Army is in a zero-sum state: No more soldiers can be sent to Afghanistan without a one-for-one reduction of soldiers in Iraq.

Let us recall that Afghanistan is the war that just might be winnable, with some luck, and lots more troops. Not guaranteed, but while Afghanistan is the typical Middle Eastern stewpot of tribal conflicts, it hasn't nearly as much of the religio-political complexity of Iraq.

And there's very little in the way of petroleum to fuel the flames, as it were.

And there may well be something to gain; not the least would be pacifying the provinces that are a continual menace to whatever stability might be feasible in neighboring Pakistan.

The poppy fields I care little about; they'll stay in business forever, regardless of whatever energy we put toward that target. The drug problem of the U.S. isn't about those poppy fields, it's about who we let sell the manufactured drugs on the street. The idiocy of our war on drugs has been exposed here more than once [that's three different links!].

But, we won't have the boots to place on the ground in Afghanistan unless we find them among assets we already have in the field. Take a look at Fred Kaplan's analysis.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

We don't have any more soldiers to send to Afghanistan unless we take some out of Iraq. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

So this is how yr (justifiably) humble svt ties in the robotic discussion. In the short term the troops to win Afghanistan will have to come from Iraq, and from whatever of those allies we may still possess whom we can persuade to increase, or make new, commitments.

Of course the Army's soldiers and Marines can be spared in Iraq, as it's difficult to believe that even a million more U.S. troops could sort out the miserable hash that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brain trust made there.

The next administration should have the mandate and the will to figure out a way to safely extricate U.S. assets, except perhaps enough sufficient to protect Kurdistan from Turkey, Iran and what's left of Iraq, and leave the tribes to figure out what to do with the rest of what is, after all, a wholly artificial construct the British assembled from those disparate tribes after World War I.

Kaplan says the U.S. needs a top to bottom rethink of its global mission. Left-Handed Complement agrees, but also believes that the trend toward letting technology handle the in harms way part is a good development that should be pursued vigorously once the hemorrhaging is stanched in Iraq.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

--MUDGE

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The Zenpundit (25 April 2008):

On a related matter I'm very, very happy with Robert Gates. I think he just gave a 'shape up or ship out' warning to the senior brass. What he said the other day to the cadets regarding John Boyd was akin to a Soviet General-Secretary giving a speech to the Supreme Soviet on the virtues of Milton Friedman. Or Pope Benedict praising Martin Luther.

Fred Kaplan: "Gates Celebrates Dissent", Slate (23 April 2008) -- Opening:

Whoever the next president is, his or her secretary of defense should spend a few hours poring over the speeches of Robert M. Gates. Since he took over the Pentagon nearly a year and a half ago, Gates has delivered a series of trenchant critiques of his department's policies and practices. This past Monday alone, he gave two speeches-at the Air War College and at West Point-that urged tomorrow's Air Force and Army officers to overhaul the foundations of their bureaucratic cultures.

Charlie, "If you flatter him, you betray him", posted at Abu Muqawama (22 April 2008):

After pistol whipping the Air Force (and assorted other services), he spoke to the Cadets at West Point yesterday and offered a inspired call for dissent, wrapped in some brilliant bedtime stories from the life of George C. Marshall and a recognition of the complexities of modern warfare.

... Charlie has two reactions:

1. Can we please keep Gates on through the next administration? No, seriously. Please?
2. Put your money where your mouth is, Bob. No, seriously. Please. Make the Army safe for the next Yingling.

The last point is the key, imo. How wonderful it would be if speeches could cure the problems at our famously reform-proof Department of Defense! How odd that near the end of this Administration we get speeches. Just speeches.

Gates invoking the spirit of the late John Boyd (Colonel, USAF) seems bizarre to me. In a speech at the Air War College (Maxwell, AL) on 21 April the Secretary said the following.

Let me illustrate using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps Commandant and a Secretary of Defense for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War. Boyd's contributions will resonate today. Many of you have studied the concept he developed called the OODA loop- and I understand there is an "OODA Loop" street here at Maxwell near the B-52.

In accomplishing all these things, Boyd - a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character - had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote:

"one day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go [one] way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go [the other] way and you can do something - something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself .

.. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself ... To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do?"

Secretary Gates invites these officers to burn their career away fighting senior officials -- like himself. Kaplan notes the contradiction.

But speeches are one thing. It's not at all clear that today's senior officers are listening. They know that, in nine months, Gates will be gone, and they'll still be in power. The trick, they've learned over the years, is to hang tight till the storm passes.

... Gates didn't mention Yingling by name in his speeches on Monday, but he certainly had him in mind when he said at West Point,

"I have been impressed by the way the Army's professional journals allow some of our brightest and most innovative officers to critique -- sometimes bluntly -- the way the service does business, to include judgments about senior leadership. ... I encourage you to take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent when the situation calls for it. And, agree with the articles or not, senior officers should embrace such dissent as a healthy dialogue and protect and advance those considerably more junior who are taking on that mantle."

So, what has happened to Yingling in the past year? What lessons can the West Point cadets derive about their own future prospects should they choose to follow in Yingling's footsteps?

Every Army officer I've ever spoken with -- junior and senior -- read Yingling's article. But, to say the least, the senior officers did not "embrace" it as "healthy dialogue." Nobody stepped up to "protect and advance" him for his boldness. Quite the contrary. Soon after the article was published, Yingling was put in command of the 1-21 Field Artillery battalion, but that move had been scheduled months before. The real story lay in what happened next. His battalion was assigned not, say, to fighting insurgents but rather to prison-guard detail. Yingling himself has just been redeployed to Iraq, where he will assist in rehabilitating Iraqi detainees. This could be an interesting, potentially important job, but it's hardly in the center of things, and it's the very opposite of a career enhancer.

Not too inspiring. It would have been inspiring if Gates dedicated himself to using his remaining months in office to insure that future Boyd's are respected and supported by the US military. In life, not just posthumously. A follow-up announcement of the promotion of Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling would have suggested that he was serious.

Of course, this would have been a declaration of war against some of the most powerful forces in America. Al Qaeda might be broken, but the institutional resistance to reform in DoD -- uniformed, civilian, and the vast array of defense contractors -- remain triumphant.

Let us hope than many listened to the Secretary's closing words and work to reform their services despite the opposition of senior Defense officials -- even those that make pretty speeches.

As you graduate from your respective courses and leave Maxwell, you too will eventually face Boyd's proverbial "fork in the road." You will have to choose: to be someone or to do something. For the good of the Air Force, for the good of the armed services, and for the good of our country, I urge you to reject convention and careerism and to make decisions that will carry you closer toward - rather than further from - the officer you want to be and the thinker who advances air-power strategy in meeting the complex challenges to our national security.

Please share your comments by posting below, relevant and brief please (max 250 words). Too long comments will be edited down (very long ones might be deleted). Or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Other posts on this topic

An Army near the Breaking Point - an archive of links

From the BBC:

More than 130 people have been killed and 350 injured since a clampdown on militias began in Basra on Tuesday.

Today, the Iraqi government extended the deadline for disarmament they placed on the insurgents a few days ago from 3 days to 10.

According to BBC analyst Magdi Abdelhadi, the extension shows either the fighting is proving more difficult than the Prime Minster predicted, or there are behind-the-scenes peace negotiations. The former seems more likely--the Iraqi government can't put down the armed rebellion themselves, and they don't know where to proceed after the deadline expires, so they're extending it in the hopes a solution will somehow present itself.

Iraq's progress in the 5 intervening years since the start of the war has been absolutely abysmal. The Iraqi government and military are nowhere near prepared to deal with the deep sectarian divisions in their country, and this most recent uprising shows it. Predictably, when the efforts by the Iraqis did nothing to stop the violence, U.S. forces had to intervene:

American military forces conducted air strikes on targets in Basra late Thursday, joining for the first time an onslaught by Iraqi security forces intended to oust Shiite militias in the southern port city.

Two American war planes shelled two targets in Basra, entering the battle at the request of the Iraqi Army, which asked the American and British forces to make the strikes, according to Maj. Tom Holloway, a spokesman for the British Army in Basra.

The air strikes are the clearest sign yet that the coalition forces have been drawn into the fighting in Basra. Up until Thursday night, the American and British air forces insisted that the Iraqis had taken the lead, though they acknowledged surveillance support for the Iraqi Army.

More from The Washington Post:

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad.

This has been the story of Iraq, day in and day out, for years. Whenever things get tough, the Iraqi government leans on the United States to solve their problems for them. It's been five years since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government--five years to negotiate, to build a military, to stabilize the country and begin making progress. Unfortunately, due to George W Bush and the Republicans' disastrous policies, the Iraqi government hasn't made nearly as much progress as they should have. And now, whenever violence breaks out, American soldiers end up getting caught in the middle.

That's why this war needs to end as soon as possible. As long as we're there propping them up, the Iraqi government and military will never need to actually deal with their country's problems. They'll never be independent problem-solvers. And whenever things get tough, they'll use us as a crutch.

That's why I'm glad to see that 42 Democratic Congressional candidates have signed onto "A Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq." Iraq needs independence, not co-dependence. Iraq needs to be able to stand up and lead on their own, without the United States holding their hands every step of the way. The sooner we start to withdraw our troops, the sooner we can send a signal to the Iraqi government that we're serious about leaving and the sooner we can begin preparing them to be independent once and for all.

UPDATE: Fred Kaplan puts the present strife in perspective:

The fighting in Basra, which has spread to parts of Baghdad, is not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate government and an outlaw insurgency. Rather, as Anthony Cordesman, military analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, it is "a power struggle" between rival "Shiite party mafias" for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country.

Yesterday, President Bush portrayed the intense fighting in Iraq as a return to 'normalcy.'  While I agree that massive  amounts of violence and bloody sectarian fighting have become the norm in Iraq, that's not exactly the kind of progress I would tout if I were him.

Time and Reuters both provide great timelines.

The New York Times focuses on the costs of the war, which have been far greater than (almost) anyone expected them to be.

Juan Cole, who is consistently one of the best informed people on what is happening in Iraq, writes about the annual lies of the Bush Administration in Salon. He summarizes on his blog:

I posit that each year of the war has been characterized by a central lie by the Bush propaganda machine.

Year 1: "There is no guerrilla war."
Year 2: "Iraq is a model democracy."
Year 3: "Zarqawi is causing all the trouble."
Year 4: "There is no Civil War."
Year 5: "Everything is calm now."

I also suggest that John McCain is pushing for:

Year 6: "Total victory is around the corner."

In Slate Fred Kaplan explains how, in the grand scheme of international politics, Iraq is not a war we should have started:

A civilized nation should never decide to go to war simply because a stable peace is hard to maintain. Yet that is what we did in the spring of 2003…

If we are going to fight a war essentially by ourselves, as we have done in Iraq, our vital interests must clearly be at stake. If we are going to fight a war that does not involve vital interests, as has also been the case with this war, we must form a genuine coalition—to share the burdens but, more than that, to provide legitimacy to the cause. And if we can't do that, we shouldn't go to war at all.

And Spencer Ackerman, writes in the American Prospect about an interview with Air Force colonel Donald Bacon who gives a profile of the average member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whom he calls Mr. AQI.

So what brought Mr. AQI to Iraq? At the mosque, he met a man who could tell Mr. AQI just wanted to belong to something. That man told Mr. AQI he had something Mr. AQI needed to see. Very often, according to Colonel Bacon, it was an image from Abu Ghraib. Or it was a spliced-together propaganda film of Americans killing or abusing Iraqis. The narrative that weighed heavily on Mr. AQI, Colonel Bacon said, was that it was his "religious duty go to Iraq," where he would serve as "an avenger of abused Iraqs."

But Iraq wasn't what he thought it would be. Mr. AQI wasn't an infantryman, where he'd bravely stand and fight Americans, he was pressured into being a suicide bomber. Nor were his targets the Americans he wanted to hit -- they were the Iraqis he came to avenge. According to Colonel Bacon, in some cases, Mr. AQI was happy to be in American custody, where he would no longer cause Iraq any more pain.

I can’t offer this kind of analysis. I don’t have Ackerman’s access to colonels or the Times’ ability to look at data, or Fred Kaplan’s wisdom to offer any great global perspective. I just have my memories of a war that has been going on for almost a quarter of my life.

The Iraq War, whether we realize it or not, is the war of my generation. The war, the Bush presidency, and the post-9/11 paradigm have defined the last seven years of my and my friend’s lives. And for someone my age, 21, those are probably the most formative ones. Iraq probably doesn’t hang over my teenage years the way Vietnam did for my father, but it’s been there.
I remember “shock and awe”. I remember that first terrible night of war. I was at a concert and the band came out and said, “Well, our country is at war,” and it just ruined the whole show. I went home that night and watched bombs explode in the green sky like fireworks. For four nights I watched that green sky on CNN.
I remember the elections and the purple ink on the fingers. That January was probably the only time I felt good about the war. But it was exciting. I bought into it for a few weeks. The whole Hegelian thing, the idea of history is a movement towards progress and freedom... almost made sense for a few weeks.

I remember Abu Ghraib. That image of the hooded man with the wires, standing on a box, looking like some sort of bat-creature is indelible. That is one of the lasting images of our generation. It represents something about America during the first decade of the twenty-first century. That photograph will be a cultural turning point in America, the darker side of iPods and An Inconvenient Truth.

I remember Haditha. I was at home that summer while the story developed. I was taking a geology class at Montclair State University and one of the guys in my class was in the National Guard. He had just gotten back from Iraq. During breaks we would stand in the hot sun and smoke cigarettes and he would tell me about the energy drinks and the sweating and the war. In the afternoon I would go home and read the latest on the Haditha investigation in the newspapers and think about my new friend.

I could go on through to 2008, through when I was in Jordan, of course. I won’t. You get the point. The Iraq war doesn’t animate people of my generation the way other wars have in the past. I’m not working hard as a member of any organization to stop the war. I oppose it vocally, but that requires little sacrifice. Because of this, I think that people, especially older people, assume that Iraq isn’t important to us. I see how they can think that, but I feel like it is an unfair assessment.

The war in Iraq has left a serious mark on the last quarter of my life. It began when I was sixteen and will probably continue through when I graduate college. I am not unique.

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.

Seriously? Did he really say romantic? Isn't this the guy who joined the Texas National Guard during Vietnam? I guess we all knew that George lives in a fantasy world where tax cuts help the economy and the war in Iraq was a good idea, but this quote is just a little too ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous, actually. It's insensitive. It just demonstrates his utter lack of understanding of what it is like to be anything but privileged.

Oh Mr. Kaplan, how right you are!

I’m an American working in Baghdad right now. It is a staggering scene of waste and stupidity all based on fictions propagated by fools. After eight months here, I realized Catch 22 was a non-fiction novel! A bittersweet revelation indeed.

Enjoying your blog Jon, keep up the good work.

In contrast, Bush's strategies neither succeeded nor endured--not even through two terms of his presidency--because they did not fit the realities of his era. They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith, and a willful indifference towards those affected by their consequences.

Those in charge of his policies cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thoght through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere.

 People, Ideas, and Hardware. “In that order!” the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.

The US military's personnel system is deeply dysfunctional.  The problem seems worst in the Army.  That is unfortunate for us, as modern warfare increasingly means close contract land combat.  Two recent articles discuss this crisis at length.

• Challenging the Generals, Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine (26 August 2007)
• The Army's Other Crisis:  Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving (Andrew Tilghman, Washington Monthly, December 2007)

Kaplan describes symptoms of a long illness deeply established in our military, and his article describes several ways in which the Iraq War has exacerbated these internal systemic flaws.  Tilghman describes the conflict between military service and the needs of young officers in America's Army.

This problem is neither new nor does it result solely from the Iraq War.  Kaplan and Tilghman have discovered it, in the sense that Christopher Columbus discovered Madrid.  They ignore the large literature describing its causes and possible remedies in favor of a dramatic story focused on bad guys and heroes.  As parents learn when telling bedtime stories, this is the format most easily understood by children.

This also illustrates the mainstream media's almost amnesiac ability to discover the same phenomenon over and over again. These problems were earnestly described in the 1999-2000 news cycle, grave fodder for many articles - only to be quickly forgotten, as those articles in turn had ignored similar stories from the previous cycle in the late 1970's.

The following list gives only a smattering of high-quality studies on this problem, focused on the last cycle, which ended with the post-9/11 and Iraq War mobilizations.

As usual, the definitive work on this was done early on by Martin van Creveld in his 1990 book The Training of Officers: from Military Professionalism to Irrelevance. His deep analytical insights suggest that many of the current proposed solutions are either useless or counter-productive.

Especially cogent - and disturbing to the status quo - is his analysis on the utility for officers of civilian university degrees. He shows how the current situation evolved, what are the forces maintaining it, and what constitute the barriers to change. He gives practical recommendation based on military history and modern needs.

For a combination of deep analysis and a detailed program for implementation see the many works of Donald Vandergriff (Major, retired, US Army). He summarizes both the need and path for change in his 2002 book The Path to Victory:  America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs:

When I began to outline a plan to "fix" the army, my starting point was simple: why did the army leadership preach terms like selfless service, decentralization and trust, but practice careerism, selfish service, and centralized control? Finding the why before coming up with the fix was complicated, especially as my research and writing exposed more questions than answers

... However, as long as senior leaders and elected officials are happy with the current force and its culture, many of the officers who represent the army's future will continue to leave, The personnel management system and the laws that influence it must be reformed into a system that discourages careerists and courtiers while creating a professional corps based on the principles of selfless service.

Some of the many previous studies of this problem

Here are additional articles worth reading for anyone interested in reforms that can give America a military capable of winning in the age of fourth generation warfare - and preventing more disasters like the Viet Nam and Iraq Wars.

Chief of Staff of the Army's Leadership Survey 2000

Top-down loyalty - DOES NOT EXIST. Senior leaders will throw subordinates under the bus in a heartbeat to protect or advance their career. There is no trust of senior leaders in terms of loyalty because the record is clear. At the highest level, as example, 4 stars will watch our health care erode without taking a stand.

Captain Attrition at Fort Benning, Mike Matthews (January 2000)

• Family issues and dissatisfaction with Army job/life are most frequently given primary reasons for leaving,
• Pay is not a major factor in career intent.
• A strong civilian economy enables career change, but does not cause it.

Sayen Report (July 2000)

If we put the Pentagon's personnel managers in charge of the Sahara Desert, they would run out of sand in five years.

Generations Apart: Xers and Boomers in the Officer Corps, Leonard Wong, Strategic Studies Institute (October 2000)

In less than 2 years, the Army shifted from denial of a junior officer retention problem to a situation where the most senior Army leadership became involved in seeking help to staunch the flow of captains out of the Army. How could Army senior leaders miss the signals of an attrition problem? How could the Army's senior leadership not see junior officer resignation numbers increasing or hear the growing discontent at the junior officer level?

Briefing by LTG Timothy J. Maude, Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, US Army Commander's Conference (19 October 2000)

Officer attrition is continuing at a rate that will not allow full manning of the force structure...

The Army Training and Leader Development Panel's Officer Study Report (2001)

Army Culture is out of balance. There is friction between Army beliefs and practices. Over time, that friction threatens readiness. Training is not done to standard, leader development in operational assignments is limited and does not meet officer expectations, and officers and their families elect to leave the service early. Army Culture is healthy when there is demonstrated trust that stated beliefs equate to actual practices. Such a balance is vital to the health of the profession of arms and to the Nation it serves. Officers understand that there always exists a level of imperfection caused by normal friction between beliefs and practices. This is the Band of Tolerance. However, officers expressed the strong and passionate feeling that Army Culture is outside this Band of Tolerance and should be addressed immediately.

The Army must narrow the gap between beliefs and practices. It must gain and sustain itself within the Band of Tolerance.

The Army Transformation Meets the Junior Officer Exodus, Presentation to Security for a New Century (a bipartisan study group for Congress) by Mark R. Lewis (August 2001)

A lot of people have spent a great deal of effort advocating that the Army ought to take bold steps to correct this cultural schism for the simple reason that it's the right thing to do. I can only judge the emphasis the Army puts on this situation through evidence of their efforts to address it, and so far, those efforts do not reveal any meaningful attempt at understanding and addressing the deeper issues.

... I have tried to show trends in officer experience, skill and quality in the preceding slides. Separately, these trends concerning, but when taken together as an overall sort of "Effectiveness Index," I think they have significant implications for the future of the Army. ...Clearly, these trends are at odds with what the designers of the future Army have in mind. It is certainly tough to reconcile them with the idea that Army will produce future leaders with a "higher level of doctrine-based skills, knowledge, attitudes, and experience." In fact, there is no evidence to indicate that the downward trends are slowing, let alone reversing. ...

(Update) -  "Army Officer Shortages:  Background and Issues for Congress", Congressional Research Service (5 July 2006)

It presently takes 10 years to "grow" a major (from lieutenant to promotion to major), and 14 years if that major is an academy or ROTC graduate. Therefore, the projected shortage appears to be a significant long-term challenge especially as the Army continues to transform and maintain a significant role in fighting the Global War on Terror (GWOT). 

This report analyzes a number of potential factors contributing to the shortfall, especially the impact of reduced officer accessions during and after the Army personnel drawdown of the early 1990s, and the significant increase in Army officer requirements caused by the Army force structure transformation to a modular, brigade-centric force through its Modular Force Initiative. At this time, the high deployment tempo associated with Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) does not appear to be associated with these shortfalls.

Although the Army has already introduced several new programs to enhance officer retention, other possible options exist that could help address the Army's officer shortages. They include the possibility of officer retention bonuses. The Army does not pay any officer continuation or retention bonuses, with the exception of Aviation Career Incentive Pay.

Conclusions

The Army will not be able to develop experienced and skilled officers until it is able to hold them in positions longer and provide them with a deeper set of training opportunities.

It cannot be discriminating about whom it promotes until it can retain enough officers to allow for some process of selection.

These trends will not be slowed, let alone reversed, until the Army's senior leaders understand the full nature of the problem.   There are few signs it has done so.  Everything else -- new doctrines, new equipment, added manpower -- is secondary to that, boosting its ability to attract, retain, and train the numbers and kind of people needed.  When that becomes the Army's top priority the problem might be half way to a solution.

For other posts in this series

• The Army is losing good people. That is only a symptom of a more serious problem.
• An Army near the breaking point, chapter 3

Washington Poster Karen DeYoung has the skinny on the departure of Richard J. Griffin, the State Department's Director of Diplomatic Security since June 2005, which confirms my surmise that

It was [John] Negroponte who carried to [Condoleezza] Rice the team's recommendation -- and his own -- that Griffin be fired. Rice agreed and sent Negroponte to carry it out.

Now Griffin has until November 1 to clear out. According to DeYoung, his departure is "widely seen as a positive move within [DS]," where he arrived from the Secret Service then proved utterly unequal to supervising the huge increase in private contractors. But of course, Griffin is neither the only nor the highest sorry manager at State:

As she has concentrated on the Middle East peace process, Iran and Russia, Rice has increasingly turned major responsibility for hot-button issues -- including North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq -- over to Negroponte. He has taken the lead on management problems, such as the contractors, along with his longtime Foreign Service colleague Patrick Kennedy, a senior management official who served as Negroponte's management deputy when Negroponte was director of national intelligence, before he took the No. 2 post at the State Department.

The White House has nominated Kennedy to replace Henrietta H. Fore as undersecretary of state for management. That shift took a major step forward yesterday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to send Fore's long-delayed nomination as director of foreign assistance to the Senate floor. Senate aides said the committee may act on Kennedy's nomination as early as next week.

But the changes in security policy for Iraq and in her team are unlikely to temper rising criticism of Rice's management style. She is due to testify today before the House oversight committee, whose chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), has accused the department's prime security contractor in Iraq, Blackwater Worldwide, of tax evasion; charged the department with papering over evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraqi government; and accused the State inspector general of failing to monitor shoddy work and overspending in construction of a new, $600 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Though nothing near as wretched as Condi's State Department, the New York Times must be glad that its reputation doesn't rest on John M. Broder's Griffin story. Broder can report only that the guy resigned "abruptly," offering a single quote, Henry Waxman's “Mr. Griffin’s resignation is another indication that the State Department’s efforts in Iraq are in disarray.” Then he twits the Maliki government's announcement that it will scrap Order 17, the Paul Bremer decree that gave private contractors' immunity under Iraqi law:

That would be a first step toward taking it off the books, though the process would probably be plodding in Iraq’s typically sluggish government and Parliament, with no immediate effect on the operations of private security contractors. In a sign of the importance of the issue for the Iraqis, the national security committee in Iraq’s Parliament is considering similar legislation, though no bill has yet been passed to the full chamber for a vote.

The United States administration in Iraq wrote the provision into Iraqi law soon after the invasion in 2003. Since then, the number of security contractors has mushroomed and the question of their impunity has grown more pressing. After a drunken employee of Blackwater shot a man to death, for example, the employee was flown out of Iraq, docked pay and fired.

Mr. Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement saying the government would draft the law revoking immunity before the next cabinet meeting. The statement did not say when the next cabinet meeting was scheduled.

Much more interesting at NYT is Paul von Zielbauer and James Glanz's visit (with camera) to Blackwater's compound in the Green Zone. And yes, it does look like exactly like a minimum-security prison -- with maximum-security walls. They get a few of the inmates to talk (mostly the company line, though one or two stray a mite):

“Some guys are thinking that it [Nisour Square] was not a good shoot, that it was not warranted,” said one Blackwater contractor, using military jargon for an episode that results in a wrongful death. “I don’t think there was criminal intent involved. I just think it was the application of the use of deadly force gone horribly wrong.”

He added, “To mitigate one threat, 17 people had to die?” ...

[A] growing number of Blackwater guards here believe that the federal investigation may result in criminal charges against some of the four to six members of the team believed to have fired weapons on Sept. 16. Most of the men who fired are former Marine infantrymen still in their 20s, said one Blackwater contractor with a military background.

The talkative ones also tell NYT that the leader of the Nisour Square convoy, a guy named Hoss, and two or three other members of that team have returned to the States, either because their tours of duty or their Blackwater contracts have ended or, in Hoss's case, to get shrapnel removed from a pre-Sept. 16 wound.

Well, 'twasn't Blackwater's assignment to guard the British computer engineer kidnapped (with his security team) from the Ministry of Finance office last May. But according to WaPo's Walter Pincus, those kidnappings halted a $38 million U.S. effort to create a computerized accounting system for the Iraqi government. The Brit was trying to install it, but now the whole project has been suspended

because the Ministry of Finance there has continued to use a paper system, according to the latest report of Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

"Nobody noticed" when the computerized Iraq Financial Management Information System was inoperable for a month, and no one relies on it to produce reports, Bowen said in a report released by his office yesterday.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office reported that, $8 million having been spent to train about 500 Iraqis in various ministries to use the system, the Finance Ministry has refused to drop its paper spreadsheets. Now, might the fact that most of Iraq's techies are now either dead or, like Riverbend, exiled have something to do with this? In fact, might the Ministry be making paper records not because it liked the early 20th-century but because it has no other choice? And might we not be long overdue to get the hell out of its way?

"Get the hell out of my way" is not only Blackwater's message to Iraq but seems once again the U.S. military's too. In Slate today, Fred Kaplan tracks some good-news-thanks-to-bad-news. The good is that, so far in October, the number of U.S. troops killed -- 29 as he wrote -- equals less than half the death rate of any previous month this year. The bad-news reason for that, according to Fred, "is almost certainly a shift in U.S. tactics from fighting on the ground to bombing from the air."

An illustration of this shift occurred on Sunday, when U.S. soldiers were searching for a leader of a kidnapping ring in Baghdad's Sadr City. The soldiers came under fire from a building. Rather than engage in dangerous door-to-door conflict, they called in air support. American planes flew overhead and simply bombed the building, killing several of the fighters but also at least six innocent civilians. (The bad guy got away.)

... in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.

More telling still, the number of airstrikes soared most dramatically at about the same time that U.S. troop fatalities declined. (Click here for month-by-month figures.)

So the shift-to-zoomies that means greater safety for our ground troops involves killing more innocent Iraqi bystanders -- whose relatives hunger for vengeance and whose neighbors further doubt that Americans assure their safety: unless I'm much mistaken, a result the exact opposite of our announced aims.

Okay, let's take stock here: an overseer who couldn't oversee squat, security guards who live as prisoners, a computer system that sends a government back to paper records, a counterinsurgency performance that generates only more insurgents.

If we can see what all this means, why can't Washington?

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