The View from Right Field

A Few Comments on Where We Are Going With Our Defense Policy

An article in last week’s Economist, “Bringing out the big guns,” described the shift in direction that is taking place in the U.S. military as it “prepares for life after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Some of the changes are good and necessary.  Others are more questionable.  Let me quote some sections from the article and then comment on them.

“In January 2018 the Trump administration published its National Defence Strategy (NDS).  Officials lamented that nearly two decades of whack-a-mole against insurgents and jihadists had eroded the country’s military edge, resulting in exhausted and under-trained units armed for the wrong enemy.  So the NDS decreed that America would henceforth focus on ‘long-term, strategic competition between nations’ – namely, China and Russia.”

If the military was “exhausted and under-trained,” it was because it wasn’t big enough and was not given enough money for the task(s) it was being asked to do under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.  It is understandable that the military can be stretched for some period of time.  Emergencies happen and the military has to respond.  But to be stretched for almost two decades is a choice – a choice to not properly fund the military.  And to continually ask the people in the military to do more than they should have to do because you don’t want to spend more money on defense is wrong.

Donald Trump. Barack Obama. James Mattis. Syria and Afghanistan.

Donald Trump has unilaterally, and apparently without consultation with our local allies, decided to pull all of our forces out of Syria, where they were helping local Kurdish forces fight ISIS.  And to do so almost immediately.  We are doing this, President Trump says, because ISIS has been defeated in Syria, but then people say lots of things 

There are also reports that President Trump has decided to cut our presence in Afghanistan by up to half and, once again, to do so quickly.  This will take a little longer because Afghanistan is a NATO fight and we have to do some consultation with our NATO allies before pulling our troops out – unlike Syria where we can leave our Kurdish allies high and dry and tough luck on them.

George H.W. Bush, RIP

I have written a lot about George Herbert Walker Bush over the years, and while I am saddened by his passing, I am sure that he, and his family, are glad he is with Barbara once again.  Our longest presidential marriage is an example for us all.  As was his sense of duty, honor, and decency, something that is too often missing in politics today.

But George H.W. Bush was more than a good man.  He was a good president.  Many of the obituaries talk about how President Bush went back on his pledge at the 1988 Republican Convention: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”  What they didn’t mention is why President Bush felt he needed to agree to a tax increase in the fall of 1990.  In October of 1990, there was a short government shutdown over the Columbus Day weekend.  By then, however, and following on President Bush’s statement of August of 1990 that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “will not stand,” U.S. troops were already beginning to deploy to the Middle East.  President Bush explained his decision to agree to a tax increase in order to avoid a further government shutdown as follows: “When push came to shove and our troops were moving overseas, we needed a fully functioning government.  I simply had to hammer out a compromise to keep the government open ….”¹  This is obviously an approach to government, and responsibility, that not many people in Washington, at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, seem to have today.

America’s Future Foreign Policy: “The Jungle Grows Back” – Do We Care?

Dr. Robert Kagan has written a fascinating book on the future of American foreign policy: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.  His main points are laid out in this excerpt available at Amazon.com:

“The American-led liberal world order was never a natural phenomenon.  The past seven-plus decades of relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively peaceful cooperation among nations – the core elements of the liberal order – have been a great historical aberration. … Our own era has not lacked its horrors …. Yet by historical standards…, it has been a relative paradise. … The great Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully, a historical rarity. … Since the end of the Second World War the world has also enjoyed a period of prosperity unlike any other …. Since 1945, some four billion people around the world have climbed out of poverty. … But all this has been an anomaly in the history of human existence. The liberal world order is fragile and impermanent. Like a garden, it is ever under siege from the natural forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten to overwhelm it. …

“We’ll Be Coming Out of Syria, Like, Very Soon.” Not a Good Idea.

Donald Trump probably wouldn’t like being told that any of his policies are like Barack Obama’s, and former President Obama probably wouldn’t like it either.  But last Thursday, President Trump said, in what was apparently an unscripted aside, during a speech/campaign event in Ohio, that “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS” and that “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.  Let the other people take care of it now.”  All of which sounds an awful like President Obama’s policy in Iraq (and, especially with respect to the last part, Syria). 

President Obama never wanted to be in Iraq.¹  And so, once he got into office, he used the agreement George W. Bush signed with Iraq in 2008, which required the United States to get all of its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011, as the reason (aka excuse) for leaving.  President Obama could have tried to get the agreement changed.  In fact, the expectation probably was that the United States would do so – and that Iraq would agree.  But President Obama didn’t really try.  He wanted out. 

Is Afghanistan Ever Going to “Get Better”?

In December, I wrote a post, “Afghanistan: It Seems to be Getting Better,” which now looks as ill-timed as a January prediction that the stock market wouldn’t go down.  Since my post, the Taliban has launched attacks all over Afghanistan.  In the last ten days of January, three attacks in Kabul killed more than 130 people.  “Getting Better”?  “Back into the Quagmire” some would say.

Donald Trump has reversed Barack Obama’s reduction in our forces in Afghanistan, yet things seem to be getting worse.  We had over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan under President Obama.  Why do we think the 15,000 troops we have there now (with 1,000 more going), up from 8,400 when President Obama left office, will succeed when so many more didn’t before?

Several reasons, maybe.  First, of course, is that 2018 is not 2009.  Things are different now than they were then, and maybe the number of troops we need is different.  Second, Afghanistan is not the country it was in 2009.  Maybe it can do more for itself as long as we know better how to help them.  Third, this time we haven’t pre-set a date for when we are going to leave.  The date we leave is the date the job gets done.

Mosul and Hillary Clinton’s Campaign: Winning, Losing, and Figuring Out Why

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported on an assessment prepared by U.S. and British military officers of the successful effort to take Mosul back from Islamic State forces.  The top U.S. general in the effort, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, ordered the review.  The Journal noted:

“It is common for the military to analyze the lessons of its operations, but its examination of the hard-fought Mosul campaign has particular relevance.  The battle was a test of a new type of warfare the U.S. has employed in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in recent years – one in which most ground combat is done by indigenous forces with Americans providing advisers and firepower.”

While the campaign was successful, the report looked at not only what worked, but also what didn’t.  For example:

Afghanistan: It Seems to be Getting Better

The Wall Street Journal had a lengthy article in Monday’s paper¹ about the success Afghan and U.S. forces are having in and around Achin, southeast of Kabul, near the border with Pakistan.  ISIS (aka Islamic State²) fighters moved into Afghanistan, and especially this area, in 2014, as ISIS was expanding in Syria and Iraq – and as the U.S. was leaving Afghanistan, per President Obama’s timetable.

In the last year, however, the U.S. has moved away from President Obama’s idea of fixing a timetable for departure.  Instead of leaving based on the calendar, we will be leaving based on results.

Does It Count As a Lie, If You’re Just Doing What Your Predecessor Did?

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that we have 11,000 troops in Afghanistan, not 8,400 they had claimed since back in the Obama administration.  Foreign Policy explains:

“The accounting issue had long dogged the Obama administration, which established a troop cap of 8,400 in Afghanistan, as well as Trump defense officials who inherited the policy.  The force levels chosen by the Obama White House[,] which capped troop numbers at 5,200 in Iraq and 503 in Syria, were handed down with little regard for the size of individual units, who were forced to deploy in bits and pieces. …

Military commanders bristled at having to break apart units to fit within the arbitrary caps, and sent thousands of troops on temporary assignments to fill holes.  Those deployments pushed the deployments over their approved limit, but Pentagon leaders said since the additional troops were only there for weeks or a few months at a time, they didn’t count against the cap.”

Barack Obama and the Return to Afghanistan

Here’s something I noticed just before the Fourth of July:  On June 29, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO announced, after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, that NATO would be sending additional forces back to Afghanistan to provide training for Afghanistan’s special operations forces and air force.

What was different this time, however, was this (from The Wall Street Journal):

“Mr. Stoltenberg refused to put a timetable on the 16-year-long Afghanistan war.

‘I don’t put timelines on war, it is that simple, war is a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon.  Every effort to create a pat answer to that is probably going to fail,’ Mr. Mattis said.  ‘You can’t say I got tired of it so I am going to come home and wonder why you get hit again.’”