Center for a New American Security

I am at my wit's end. I re-read this post from yesterday and have no idea how it used "Cheneyesque tactics to delegitimize dissent." Yet that's what one reader accuses me of doing. In fact, there is a chorus of people out there -- some of them quite smart -- who accuse counterinsurgency proponents of stifling the debate on everything from the war in Afghanistan to defense policy. To read the comments section of this last post -- go ahead, read it -- you would think that we "COINdinistas" (as one of my readers named us) are wrecking people's lives, turning them down for jobs, poisoning their dogs, raping their cattle and stampeding their women.

The reason this frustrates me is because -- if you have been reading this blog since it started, in February 2007 -- I kinda thought I had been doing more than my fair share to publicize those critical of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine. I figure a guy like Gian Gentile, for example, gets an extra few thousand readers every time he writes something on account of links from this blog. Do I disagree with what he often writes? Sure. But I link to it and engage with the subject matter. And I firmly insisted upon an open comments thread when this blog moved to the cnas.org site because the comments from readers are what makes this blog worth reading. So in my mind, I am not stifling any debate. But maybe I am like the King Arthur character in this scene -- on the one hand, maybe I am presiding over an unfair and oppressive system and have been too stupid and intellectually incurious to have realized it. On the other hand, maybe these people are %$#@ing nuts. (Or maybe the answer lies somewhere in between?)

Since I have no interest in being the subject of Walt and Mearsheimer's next book, I am inviting readers to write in to the afghanstrategy@gmail.com address and answer whether or not proponents of counterinsurgency doctrine are stifling a debate. If the answer is yes, then you can't just use shorthand like "COINdinistas" -- you have to define who, exactly, you are talking about and then how, exactly, they are stifling debate. ("Being good at arguing policy" or "running witty blogs" are not acceptable answers.) If the answer is no, then explain -- in your own words -- why some critics think debate is stifled, why they are wrong, and offer evidence to support your claims. 

Okay, now if your initials happen to be "BF" or "GG", I'm not going to publish your submissions if you write one. It's nothing personal -- but I am trying to determine whether or not this complaint of yours is one advanced by just a few people or one that is more widely felt. (And also, you guys -- like me -- have made your points already. Though, please, participate in the comments threads.)

[For those in the readership who have no interest in this debate, here's one for you: should Ricky Ponting remain Australia's captain after this past weekend?]

Abu Muqawama debates his critics:

From today's Washington Post:

He bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build more F-22s. Lockheed Martin's chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, told employees he supported Gates's call "to put the interests of the United States first -- above the interests of agencies, services and contractors." That left the powerful lobbyists to sit on their hands.

I highly recommend this article on how the Obama Administration -- and Sens. McCain and Levin -- killed the F-22 program. While I was away in Afghanistan, I read the text of Sec. Gates's speech in Chicago and his comments to the press afterwards regarding the F-22. I had no idea the speech and his comments were so coldly calculated and part of a larger, well-organized effort to undermine support for the F-22. Silly me.

Also in the Post today, my boss has an excellent review of a new biography of Donald Rumsfeld. Within the halls of 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, I take it upon myself to be the one to make the most merciless fun of Nate and John, but one has to give credit where credit is due, and Nate's review is really quite good:

During the summer of 2003, a squall of snowflakes and counter-snowflakes blew through the offices of Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, the newly appointed head of U.S. Central Command, about the definitions of "insurgent" and "guerrilla warfare." Rumsfeld, over Abizaid's objections, resisted acknowledging the enemy in Iraq as an organized force because doing so would have suggested that the U.S. presence there was likely to be long and costly. But his denial merely delayed the inevitable, and, as in a real snowstorm, the cleanup began only after the last flake fell.

A new CNAS program, and a great opportunity for some of the under-35s who read this blog. Folks with "downrange" experience are especially encouraged to apply.

Abu Muqawama will be offline all tomorrow as we take part in the annual CNAS conference, kicked off by General David Petraeus and expected to attract a ridiculous 1500 guests. YOU can watch the conference LIVE at the comfort of your desk.

http://www.cnas.org/live

Nate Fick and I take the stage with our paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan around 1100.

On a somewhat related note, I apologize to all whose emails have gone unanswered over the past few days. I count over 700 unanswered emails on my Blackberry alone. I promise my schedule will slow down a bit after this week.

For those who missed it, the Politico had an interesting and lengthy feature today on defense policy debates. (And John Nagl answered questions from the Politico's readership on Afghanistan and the future of the military.)

General Mattis has a vision.

I have been in a meeting for the past hour and a half and returned to read my comments and discover that John McHugh, a Republican congressman from upstate New York, will be the next Secretary of the Army pending confirmation. My initial thoughts on this are, first off, relief that a defense industry executive such as Arnold Punaro was not named. (No disrespect to Mr. Punaro, by the way -- for all I know he is a great American. I am just very wary of putting executives with responsibility for weapons systems like the Future Combat Systems in charge of the services trying to decide whether or not those weapons systems are good investments.) Second, I am really excited about this particular choice. McHugh is the latest of many pragmatic, centrist Republicans and Democrats to be installed or retained in President Obama's Department of Defense, and I have first-hand experience of Rep. McHugh's knowledge of defense matters and concern for our nation's fighting men and women. (I was once stationed at Fort Drum, near Rep. McHugh's hometown, and closely followed the degree to which he served as an advocate for soldiers in the Congress.) Third, this seems like really smart politics. The odds favor McHugh being replaced in his district by a centrist Democrat, wouldn't you say? Or at least a Republican set to get rolled by redistricting? (These are crafty folks, these Chicagoans occupying the White House.)

In the end, I think this is a good choice for both the U.S. Army and the country.

Well, how is this for a motley crew? From left, that would be Gian Gentile, Celeste Ward, John Nagl, and myself. This picture was taken about five minutes ago -- and about ten minutes after Gian, Celeste and I had lunch together and debated the Surge, Afghanistan, and counterinsurgency doctrine without weapons being brandished or blood drawn. Incredibly, Gian and John had never before met, so I invited both Celeste and Gian up into the Lion's Den of all things counterinsurgency, where pleasantries were exchanged under a sign of truce. It was Christmas 1914 all over again, really.

My man Yochi Dreazen (C '99) has just been cold interviewin' the Secretary of Defense lately. Here is the SecDef on weapons cuts, and here he is on Afghanistan.

American public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview.

Mr. Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country.

The defense chief has been moving aggressively to salvage the war in Afghanistan, signing off on the deployments of 21,000 American military personnel and recently taking the unprecedented step of firing the four-star general who commanded all U.S. forces there. Mr. Gates, speaking in his cabin on an Air Force plane, said the administration is rapidly running out of time to turn around the war.

"People are willing to stay in the fight, I believe, if they think we're making headway," he said. "If they think we're stalemated and having our young men and women get killed, then patience is going to run out pretty fast."

I made only my second trip to the Pentagon today to have lunch with General George Casey and about seven other defense policy wonks and a few journalists. I was probably the youngest guy in the room by 10 years, and I'm guessing the mean age was around 58. But true to form, that didn't stop me from asking my usual array of pesky questions.

The entire lunch was on the record, so I will write down what I wrote in my notes. A lot of the discussion had to do with force structure and the QDR -- as one would expect, given that Gen. Casey's role these days is running the U.S. Army as an institution. So my notes are not all-inclusive because I did not write down every question and answer. And apologies in advance to Gen. Casey's PAO team -- if I wrote something down incorrectly, write in and correct me.

Gen. Casey said his single biggest concern was the long-term health of the commissioned officer and non-commissioned officer corps.

He said his mission was four-fold:

1. Sustain soldiers and their families.
2. Prepare them for combat.
3. Reset the force upon return.
4. Transform the force.

He said the Army's challenge is also four-fold:

1. Win the wars we're in.
2. Train and support other nations and their militaries.
3. Embrace the full spectrum of combat.
4. Deter and defeat hybrid threats.

Gen. Casey said he is trying to move the U.S. Army toward a rotational force which -- by 2011 -- deploys its active duty units for one year and then brings them back for two years of dwell time.

That said, Gen. Casey said repeatedly -- and stressed repeatedly that this was his own estimate and not policy -- that he thought the U.S. Army would be engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan for at least the next decade.

Opening the floor to questions, people smarter than me asked about the budget and the QDR. I was more interested in current operations, so my ears perked up when Ralph Peters asked whether or not counterinsurgency warfare is causing younger officers to "lose their killer instinct." Gen. Casey responded by talking a little bit about how he has seen the pendulum swing from too kinetic to too non-kinetic and then back again but that he does not worry about the younger officers not knowing how to kill. He said he is "not worried about the long-term impact because it is a combat-seasoned force." Not unreasonably, he explained that his generation learned to "fight" at NTC and JRTC. This generation, by contrast, has learned to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I then asked him about Afghanistan. It is obviously difficult to carry out the same tactics in Afghanistan as we did in Iraq. Those urban patrol bases we used in Iraq, for example, do not translate into Dari. So we're left with a strategy that looks a lot like the one Gen. Casey tried to implement in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Does he look at Afghanistan and have worries about that theater based on his experiences in Iraq?

Gen. Casey responded that the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan are two-fold:

1. They need a government that will be broadly representative of the population.
2. They need credible and effective security forces.

Gen. Casey worries, though, that we do not have nearly enough trainers on the ground in Afghanistan and that the police are falling way behind the Afghan Army in terms of its development. He also noted that he thought Afghanistan had no organization comparable to MNSTC-I. We have, simply, invested more in training Iraqi security forces than we have doing the same in Afghanistan.

I then asked if Gen. Casey was worried that his goal of 2:1 by 2011 might be endangered by events on the ground in Iraq. (What happens if Arab-Kurd relations flare up, I asked?) He said contingencies worried him, so I asked at what phase do U.S. forces in Iraq cease to be a decisive factor? Gen. Casey said he thought the residual force would be between 35,000-50,000 but that he honestly did not know if such a force would continue to be decisive. He said it would be a factor on the ground but did not know if it would be the decisive factor. (Obviously, this is Gen. Odierno's problem more than it is Gen. Casey's. I was just curious to hear his thoughts given his time in Iraq.)

Toward the end, someone asked about DADT and what the soldiers thought about gays in the military. He said it was a "mixed bag" but that all his evidence was anecdotal since the U.S. Army has not formally surveyed soldiers on the issue. I then asked what he thought about the State Department extending benefits toward same-sex partners and whether or not it was only a matter of time before the U.S. military followed suit. Gen. Casey responded that it was clearly the policy of the president to end DADT and that he and the U.S. Army would become engaged when and if the Congress and the president took action. (I don't know, maybe it's just me, but if I were the Chief of Staff, I would probably commission a study and surveys in advance of a request considered to be inevitable -- rather than wait to hear from Congress and then irk the president by taking my time on study and implementation.)

Finally, Gen. Casey talked a little about the strides made by Military Intelligence during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said, first of all, that the fusion cells had really had an impact. He then said that in contrast to before the war, commanders now understood how to train and use their S-2s and G-2s. A month in Kosovo, he said, had taught him more about intelligence than all his rotations to the NTC.

And then the lunch ended and we all shook hands with the general. And that's about it. Overall, Gen. Casey was candid and forthright. And the chicken caesar salad was nice as well.