Center for a New American Security

Would you mind going do the

Would you mind going do the hall and telling Ricks that? He's the one pushing "dithering" all over the TV.

There's an interview with

There's an interview with David Kilcullen on the subject of dithering, and the risk of fudge, in the Guardian. Very quotable:
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He noted that Obama, in a speech to troops in Jacksonville, Florida, a fortnight ago, had said he would never lightly put them in harm's way.

"That's not the situation we are in. As an analogy, you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm's way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house. That is my analogy of where we are. Either of those approaches could potentially work."

He added: "If you have 40,000 troops it would be do-able. Anything less than 25,000 is throwing good money after bad."
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"Our way out is to go to Karzai and say 'We are done here'. We will be leaving in two to five years. If you do not want to be left hanging from a lamppost, like Najibullah [the former Afghan president hanged in Kabul in 1996 when the Taliban took control], this is what you need to do. I think that would work," Kilcullen said.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/12/obama-us-troops-afghanistan-...

"Now Team Obama is wrestling

"Now Team Obama is wrestling with even bigger choices, about what the hell to do with the Afghanistan mess. Minutes after meetings are over, Spencer Ackerman has detailed descriptions of what went down. Supposedly-secret cables from Ambassador and former top commander Karl Eikenberry are related to the Washington Post. And Gates, for one, has had it."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/gates-to-war-strategy-leakers-stfu/

I thought the above excerpt at Danger Room interesting. Mostly, for this: "Gates cemented his reputation in Washington in the early 90s, when he ran the Deputies Committee, an interagency group responsible for the nuts and bolts of national security policy. The committee was a rambling, inconclusive mess. Gates reined it in, ensuring no meeting lasted longer than an hour and that every one ended with a decision."

He made meetings run on time? Please let every faculty room be infiltrated by such like-minded people. Please, please, please!

My worthless 2 cents take on the dithering question? Taking time, or changing strategy, isn't a problem - it's the public and undisciplined nature of it, or, at least, the appearance of a too public and undisciplined deliberation process that seems confusing to this particular layperson. And, of course, I have no idea if it is undisciplined and how public it is. In a vacuum, people tend to make stuff up.

At this point, I'm expecting a reality show with subsequent proponents 'voted off the island,' week by week. Kidding! Good luck, Mr. President, it's not an easy decision.

Andrew, you are the coin

Andrew, you are the coin expert, what is the difference between 25,000 and 40,000 troops as Kilcullen suggests the committment of the former would be a mistake? Um, 15,000 soldiers of which probably only at best half would be combat forces equaling maybe 2 brigades or three at best is a decisive difference?

Can you explain why this is the case?

Does anyone have any book

Does anyone have any book recommendations of military doctrine of "Exit Strategy". This seems to be a new military term to me. It also seems to be one of the pillars of this administration planing. Maybe in the the past it went under a different name. I just want to do some reading to see how this worked in the past and how this may be implemented in the near future.

David Kilcullen’s analogy

David Kilcullen’s analogy of Afghanistan to a building fire seems inappropriate. A building fire with firefighters inside who cannot put it out conveys a sense of urgency that really doesn’t seem to be present in Afghanistan. If there is a fire analogy at all, Afghanistan appears to be more like a forest fire after a heavy rain. It’s smoldering in more and more spots, you’ve got a few people (not enough) fighting it, but you don’t know exactly what is going to happen. Afghanistan is not a five alarm fire, at least not yet.

Another thing about Kilcullen’s analogy that doesn’t match is this: when you’re fighting a fire, you don’t have to go to the City Council and ask it to fund the training and deployment of additional firefighters. In the case of Afghanistan, the President needs to get funding.

The firefighting analogy also fails because all of the people involved know how to fight a fire. Not all fires are the same, but fires in similar settings behave in the same way. Firefighters and their commanders train constantly and acquire on-the-job training every time they fight a fire. Thus, over time, fighting fires becomes almost an immediate action drill. Afghanistan, whatever else it is, cannot be fought with immediate action drills. Our commanders don’t have immediate action drills for this kind of warfare. If they had them, and if they worked, we probably wouldn’t be there still.

Put all of this together and what do you get? A complex problem with seemingly multiple solutions, each of which will demand a different mix of resources. Send not enough resources or too many resources or the incorrect type of resources in the incorrect sequence at the wrong time and the problem doesn’t go away. Even if you resource it as appropriately as you know how, even if you do everything right, the problem may not resolve itself in the way you want. That’s why they call it war and not firefighting.

Personally, I’m happy that the administration is taking whatever time the President believes is appropriate to examine this issue. That’s what I as a voter hired him to do. If I wanted immediate shoot-from-the-hip responses to difficult issues, I would have voted for the other guy. I live in Virginia, a hotly contested state in the last election. I’m a veteran from Senator McCain’s war. I’d characterize myself as a slightly right of center independent. Most of my friends are Republicans. When they ask me why I voted for Obama, my answer is simple: I voted for the smartest guy, believing that his process-oriented method of decision-making offered a better prospect of dealing appropriately with complex problems. So far, I haven’t been disappointed, at least on this issue.

Kilcullen is a very knowledgeable person — certainly more knowledgeable than me on this issue by multiple orders of magnitude — but he appears to be wedded (without any responsibility for the outcome) to a particular methodology. Tom Ricks is is also a very knowledgeable guy, but he’s a journalist and journalists generally have a pronounced bias toward action; after all, if nothing is happening, it’s pretty tough to write a story about it. He also has no responsibility for the outcome here. In my mind, if the guy who DOES have the responsibility for the outcome wants to take more time and be sure he takes the most appropriate action then, by all means, he should do so but when he finally makes a decision, I will want him to hit the ground running and not change his mind later.

From the Guardian interview

From the Guardian interview with David Kilcullen: "As an analogy, you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave"

As a firefighter, I'd like to make a couple of points. First, we're not "firemen." We're "firefighters," (Firemen are the guys who used to shovel coal on trains). Small point, but you'll sound more knowledgeable to firefighters (ditto for calling everything red a "fire truck"; there are machines, engines, ladders, trucks, pumps depending on the lingo of any particular department).

There are more options than to "send in more" or "leave."

On the strategic level, the incident commander might decide to pull everyone out to "go defensive" and just contain the fire and protect the exposures. Or perhaps you could change your tactics. For example, ventilate the building to let the smoke and heat out, use a bigger hoseline to get more water on the fire, approach the fire from the windward side, etc.

The number of firefirefighters by itself is usually not the key consideration if proper tactics are in place. Numbers of firefighters, by itself, are usually not the key consideration. If everyone is going what needs to be done and the fire is still out of control, then it's probably time to get out.

Forget dithering - how about

Forget dithering - how about the fact we're going to wind up with just about as crappy and incoherent a strategy as we went in with.

Because that's the reason for the long 'pause' - they have no clue what to do.

Perception-wise, the main

Perception-wise, the main problem is that he seemed certain about Afghanistan when he was Candidate Obama and earlier in his presidency, and that doesn't fit with his present uncertainty about Afghanistan.

It's not that we're doing nothing in Afghanistan right now; at minimum, Obama is continuing the status quo mission and COIN adjustments he inherited from Bush. I think it's fair for President Obama to work through the problem for himself rather than simply accept the answers that have been presented to him. Although it'd be silly to believe the previous president didn't think at least as thoroughly about the Afghanistan problem, it'd even be understandable if Obama hoped to find something that Bush missed. That's natural and expected with any change of command.

There just aren't any easy answers or good choices - the only reason for optimism is that COIN made a difference in Iraq and it might make a difference in Afghanistan. Eventually, I suspect President Obama will circle the block and arrive at the same or similar conclusions as President Bush did.

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