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.

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. …

“The Post,” Richard Nixon, and an Historical “What If”

As a movie, The Post is going to be a blockbuster.  But you expect that with any movie starring both Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep (in alphabetical order).  As history, however, it leaves a little to be desired.  First, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that had the scoop on the Pentagon Papers, and it was the Times, not the Post, that was sued by the Nixon administration.  The Supreme Court case is, after all, New York Times Co. v. United States.  However, it could be that the Times’s newsroom did not have a role for Ms. Streep, while the Post did.

Second, I have yet to see the movie, but I hope it makes it clear that the Pentagon Papers were about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations misled the public about the Vietnam War.  The Pentagon Papers were not about Richard Nixon.  In fact, according to Henry Kissinger,¹ there was sentiment among some political types in the Nixon White House to let the Pentagon Papers be published to show how Kennedy and Johnson had messed up Vietnam.  Obviously, President Nixon did not take that approach.

Could the Vietnam War Have Made a Difference? Consider South Korea and Taiwan.

We returned from a trip to Southeast Asia earlier this month.  Vietnam was on the itinerary, and things seem to be going well in Vietnam from an economic point of view.  According to The Economist, Vietnam has moved into the ranks of “middle income” countries.  There has been quite a change in Vietnam since 1995 when relations with the U.S. were normalized.  Given everything that has happened, people may wonder if the Vietnam War really made a difference.  The U.S. and Vietnam have reasonably close relations.  (We’re pretty much on the same side vis-à-vis China in the South China Sea.)  Vietnam’s economy is growing.  Maybe it really didn’t matter how the war ended.  Especially since the South Vietnamese government back then was a corrupt dictatorship.

But is that true?  Consider another way of looking at things.  Maybe it’s not so much where South Vietnam was, and what kind of government it had, in 1972 that is the question.  Maybe it’s where South Vietnam would be today if it had survived – and succeeded in its fight against the North Vietnamese.

Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem: A Bit of Baseball History

I am a little late on the Colin Kaepernick brouhaha, but then it is perhaps not too late to bring a little history to questions like this.  The question, of course, is standing for the National Anthem before sporting events – or, rather, the playing of the National Anthem before sporting events.  The National Anthem is always played before sporting events.  Baseball games.  Football games.  Just about everything.¹  So it is a big deal when some player won’t stand or pay attention during the Anthem.²

But the point is the Anthem hasn’t always been played before baseball games.  I remember the Chicago Cubs didn’t play the Anthem before games in late 1950s and early 1960s.  (I can’t speak to before the late 1950s; I wasn’t there – or at least I don’t remember.)  They would play it for holidays, like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, but not for regular games.  It was only when our involvement in Vietnam started to increase in the mid-1960s that Philip Wrigley began having the National Anthem played before all games.  Obviously, it is standard now (and Wayne Messmer always does a fantastic job when he sings for the Cubs), but it is perhaps useful to remember that it wasn’t always so.
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¹ It’s not played before high school or college tennis matches; at least not at the ones I have been to.
² I am always impressed by the respect that foreign baseball players show while the National Anthem is played.  I mean, if you are from the Dominican Republic, etc., it’s not your anthem.  But they always stand there respectfully.

Will Sending 450 More Advisers to Iraq Do Any Good?

The Obama administration announced Wednesday that the United States will be sending more troops to Iraq.  The news reports about the announcement made it sound like this is a big deal.  It’s not – at least in terms of making a difference in what will happen in Iraq.  Even if it was double the 450 additional advisers and trainers we’re sending, it still wouldn’t make much of a difference.  There are several reasons for this.

First, in terms of the training we will be providing, it looks like what we are giving Iraqi recruits is a few weeks or months of training.  That’s not enough time to make a new recruit into a reliable solider.  In any case, the key to an effective fighting force is leadership, and leadership takes more than weeks or months to develop.  It takes years.  One of the reasons the Iraqi forces fled Ramadi is that their leaders left first.  (Also, exploding Humvees could be pretty scary.  Before anybody talks about somebody not having a “will to fight,” I would suggest they stand up to an exploding Humvee with no way to stop it or fight back.)

Vietnam and Iraq: 40 Years On From April 30, 1975

Forty years ago Thursday, the United States left Vietnam.  The pictures of people climbing up ladders to helicopters on the roof of the American embassy are iconic.  It was a triumph for some, and a disaster for others.  I am not going to get into that argument today.  Rather, I wanted to present a tentative thought on our approach to wars like Vietnam – and Iraq.

I think there is, arguably, some symmetry between our experiences in Vietnam and Iraq.  In Vietnam, the policies and strategy of President Johnson and General William Westmoreland did not work.  General Westmoreland thought we could beat the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese by firepower.  We could win a war of attrition against an enemy who didn’t seem to care about the number of its casualties.  (Sigh.)  President Johnson both exercised too much control over things like how we bombed of North Vietnam and didn’t pay enough attention to how things were going in South Vietnam.

When General Creighton Abrams took command in March of 1968, things changed.  General Abrams’ “One War” strategy started to work.  General Abrams understood that security of the population was the key and that going after the enemy’s supplies was an important part of winning this kind of war.  By 1972, the situation in South Vietnam had improved.  The North Vietnamese launched a three-pronged offensive in late March, the so-called Easter Offensive, but the South Vietnamese, with U.S. advisers and bombers, beat them back.  The South Vietnamese held.

Electing Presidents With Foreign Policy Expertise

Megan McArdle writes that “America rarely chooses presidents from among its ranks of foreign policy experts.”  I don’t disagree with her.  Our last several presidents have been good examples of this.

However, we have, in recent memory (or at least in my memory), at least twice elected presidents who knew what they were doing in foreign policy and succeeded in it.  First, Richard Nixon.  He opened the door to China.  He secured arms limitations agreements with the Soviet Union.  And he just might have succeeded in Vietnam if his own failings in Watergate had not enabled those who wanted us out of Vietnam, regardless of what happened to our South Vietnamese allies, to get what they wanted. 

Second, and even a better example: George H.W. Bush.  He drew a line in the sand when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and he followed through on it.  But he also knew when to stop, and he did.

More importantly, George H.W. Bush, along with people like Helmut Kohl, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, helped achieve something that nobody expected or even seriously dreamed of before they did it.  As Ms. McArdle notes:

Vietnam; Iraq; Now Afghanistan: “It's in our national character that we turn our back on our allies.”

With Joe Biden, et al, pushing for a total withdrawal from Afghanistan this year (in effect) and President Obama having already done that in Iraq, I thought this quote seemed appropriate:

“Zach Iscol was a Marine captain in 2004 when his platoon – a combined unit of 30 Iraqis and 20 Americans – seized the railroad station on the first night of the bloody battle of Fallujah.

They spent a week kicking in doors and fighting house to house, block by block, in some of the toughest urban combat of America's eight-year war in Iraq.  Half a dozen of Iscol's men were wounded, but dozens of Marines in other squads were killed. …

“‘We used to plant the flag in the ground and say, “These are our allies,”’ said Iscol …..  ‘Now I'd say it's in our national character that we turn our back on our allies.’”

Once more on that last sentence:  “Now I'd say it's in our national character that we turn our back on our allies.”  If we do leave Afghanistan as Vice President Biden wants, is there any reasonable way to argue that Zach Iscol’s statement is not true?  How many of us care?

Defense Cuts Are Here and More Are Coming. It’s Okay, If We’re Smart. Which Means I’m Worried.

Last week Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the results of a four-month assessment of how the Pentagon should respond to reductions in spending in the next decade.  The Obama administration has already directed $487 billion of reduced spending over the next ten years.  The sequester, or other congressional action/inaction, could result in even more cuts.  The question is:  What should be cut and by how much.

This is from Thom Shanker’s report in The New York Times on Secretary Hagel’s report:

“Under the largest cuts the Pentagon is considering, Mr. Hagel described a trade-off: The military, he said, could maintain its size – as measured in the number of Army brigades, Navy warships, Air Force fighter squadrons and Marine expeditionary units – but not buy the most advanced new weapons.  Or, he said, the Pentagon could shrink the force and put money into the next generation of weaponry.

A decision to trade numbers for capability would involve a large drop in the size of the active-duty Army, which could shrink to between 380,000 and 450,000 troops.  The Marine Corps would drop to between 150,000 and 175,000 personnel.  (Under current budget orders, the Army already is set to fall over five years to 490,000 from a peak of 570,000, and the Marines are to drop to 182,000 from 202,000.  The ground forces still would be slightly larger than they were before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the beginning of a decade-long military buildup.)

The largest Pentagon cuts would also require a concurrent reduction in aircraft carrier strike groups to 8 or 9 from 11.  In addition, some number of Air Force squadrons could be retired.

‘This strategic choice would result in a force that would be technologically dominant but would be much smaller and able to go fewer places and do fewer things, especially if crises occurred at the same time in different regions of the world,’ Mr. Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference.

The other option – to maintain a sizable military to assure an overseas presence and project global power – would require the cancellation or curtailment of weapons programs, while slowing the development of cyberwarfare tools and reducing the number of Special Operations forces, Mr. Hagel said.”

Here are my thoughts/concerns:

1.   Modernization is good, but quantity matters, too.  As I said here, when it comes to weapons, “You can’t use what you can’t afford to lose.”  The theory is simple.  If you have so few of a particular weapon, that your capabilities are significantly hurt if you lose one (or a few) of them, then you can’t really use the weapon, at least to its full capability, because you will be so worried about losing it.  Having the most up-to-date and capable weapons is important, but it is more important to be able use the weapons you have.  It is entirely probable that you will get more value, on the battlefield (or wherever), out of a larger number of slightly less capable weapons than you would out of a smaller number of the most advanced weapons.

2.   The size of our military is obviously dependent on the resources available.  You can’t spend what you don’t have – or at least, not for long.  We don’t have unlimited resources to give to the Pentagon.  There are budget restraints on them, just like everybody else.

     However, in spite of what the Obama administration seems to think, defense comes first – or at least very close.  It’s not green energy subsidies first, high-speed rail second, and then defense.  We have enough money to spend what we need to spend on defense.  We just need to do it.

3.   To say that we have enough money, does not mean we should waste it.  The purpose of the Defense Department is to defend our country and protect our interests.  It is not to provide jobs by keeping open bases we don’t need or producing unnecessary weapon systems in somebody’s congressional district.  It’s defense, not pork.  Congress – and the people – need to understand that.

     In addition to looking at how many servicemen and women we need, we need to look at all of the civilian employees there are at the Pentagon and elsewhere.  According to Gordon Adams, “the ‘big money’ is in the [Defense] department’s overhead.”  Secretary Hagel said:

“‘Unlike the private sector ... the department simply does not have the option of quickly shutting down excess facilities, eliminating entire organizations and operations, or shedding massive numbers of employees.’”

     Why not?  Is it that the Defense Department can’t – or that it won’t?  Gordon Adams notes that the number of independent contractors at the Pentagon is almost equal to the number of civil service employees.  Similarly, we have more civil servants and independent contractors than active-duty combat forces.  Companies are cutting middle managers all the time.  Why can’t the Pentagon?

     The point is that the Pentagon needs to cut staff, bases, and politically-driven weapons systems, so it has the money it needs for important things, like troops and quantities of weapons.  And Congress needs to support these efforts, not hinder them.

4.   MOST IMPORTANTLY (and I put this in all capital letters because I want to scream it), when we determine the proper size of our armed forces, and especially our Army and Marine Corps, we cannot assume that there will be no more Iraqs or Afghanistans – or that there won’t be any ground wars.  We have thought that before.  After World War II, many people thought that, because of nuclear weapons, we would not have to fight conventional wars again.  General Matthew Ridgway disagreed.  Korea showed he was right. 

     After Vietnam, the country said, “No more Vietnams.”  The military agreed, and they turned their focus and their training to fighting wars in Europe against the Soviet Union.  Fortunately, that war never happened, though the training for it was of use when we kicked Iraq out of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991. 

     The problem came later in Iraq and then Afghanistan.  After Vietnam, not only did we focus on fighting big wars in Europe, we also forget what we had learned about fighting insurgencies in places like Vietnam.  General William Westmoreland did not fight the right war when he was in Vietnam form 1964 to 1968, but General Creighton Abrams did when he took over in 1968.  His “One War” philosophy focused on protecting the people and disrupting the Communists’ supply lines.  (For more on this, see here.)  What General Abrams accomplished, and what the Army learned from it, was forgotten in the reaction to our failure in that country.  “No more Vietnams” not only meant never fighting another such war.  It also meant forgetting what we learned there.

    As a result, we had to learn how to fight insurgencies all over again, when the insurgency started in Iraq.  Even though we now say “No More Iraqs,” we need to make sure that we do not forget what we re-learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We do have The Counterinsurgency Field Manual that General Petraeus, et al, wrote, but the book by itself is not enough.  We need the training and the capabilities to go with it.  While we may not want to fight another Iraq-type war, we don’t get to decide that by ourselves.  Our enemies get a vote, too.

    The Administration seems to think that counterterrorism and Special Operations forces are the way to go.  That may be true, which is exactly the point.  It “may” be true, but it may not.  We have to prepare not only for how we want to fight in the future, but also for how our enemies want to fight against us.

    Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno made that point in May of this year:

“As the United States implements a new defense strategy that de-emphasizes land wars in the Middle East and increasingly casts an eye on the watery expanses of the Pacific, Odierno warned against the assumption that United States has sworn off land wars for good.

‘The thing I worry about is that in everybody’s declaration that there’s going to be no more ground wars, we need no more ground forces, that we’re going to make the Army too small,’ he said.  ‘I see nothing on the horizon yet that tells me that we don’t need ground forces.’ …

Odierno said he joins those who hope for an end to land wars – but not those who suspect the United States no longer needs a large Army capable of fighting them.

‘In order for us to deter our adversaries and have the right capacity to protect this nation, you’ve got to have the right number of ground forces,’ he declared.”

     As we figure out how much to spend on the Defense Department over the next ten years – and beyond, we need to remember that the cheapest military is one that is strong enough to deter our enemies from ever fighting us.  The most expensive military is one that isn’t ready to fight the wars it needs to fight.