Center for a New American Security

Man, the speed with which the neo-cons can write! One day after the North Korean nuclear test, the Washington Post and the New York Times feature commentary from Robert Kagan and John Bolton, respectively. To be fair, Bolton's piece isn't about the North Korean test, but still, someone in the AEI public relations shop should get a medal.

Anyway, if you're looking for North Korea analysis, you would probably do better reading what my office mate has to say.

From Inside Defense:

Last month, Gates directed the formation of a QDR Red Team to provide an alternative to the assessment Flournoy and her office are leading. The Red Team is being led by Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment, and Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command, with participation from experts outside the government.

“The primary purpose of this Red Team effort is to introduce a different range of scenarios, some of which actually are very high-end and very intensive, and they are beyond the scenario set that has been developed inside the [Pentagon],” she said.

You guys have all read this Robert Draper piece on Rumsfeld, right? Just checking.

Great, great news for both Phil and the country. I knew this was coming, but now that it is official, I am very proud of my friend and think he is almost uniquely qualified for this important job:

The Obama administration has chosen a lawyer and Iraq War veteran who has denounced U.S. detention policy to direct detainee affairs at the Department of Defense.

Until starting at the Pentagon this week, Phillip E. Carter, 33, was an associate at New York's Park Avenue law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge. He specialized in government contracting and national security regulation.

A former Army captain, he also blogged on national security issues at a Washington Post website, Intel Dump.

Her testimony from the House yesterday (.pdf).

The problems, as she (and Old Boy Vikram, I guess) sees them:

1. Threat perception.
2. A trust deficit.
3. A lack of COIN/CT capabilities on the Pakistani side.

The solution? Something called the PCCF -- the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund. This sounds a lot like a CERP in that it would give a lot of funds to the combatant commander -- with very little oversight.

And while I understand the need to not have to ask Congress for money for each and every expense, I have some reservations:

1. The American people have already invested $10 billion in the Pakistani Army since 9/11. What do we have to show for our investment? (Answer: very little.) So maybe oversight provided by representatives of the U.S. tax-payer, while undesired, is warranted.
   
2. Is the Department of Defense asking for this money to fund military-military partnerships because it doesn't have the authorization to do military-police partnerships? Or because this is, honestly, where we see the most pressing need?

Personally, I think we need to be investing more in the Pakistani 5-0 than in a military that has proved incompetent -- when not, you know, HELPING THE OTHER SIDE. So there are a few things -- aside from Admiral Mullen's weird man crush on General Kiyani -- that I cannot figure out. And I worry that the reason OSD is asking for this money to fund the military is because they know they cannot do anything aside from what they are allowed to do under 1206 authorization and don't trust State or whoever to get the job done vis a vis the Pakistani police.

The retired flag officers who wrote the op-ed in today's Washington Post arguing that homosexuals should not be allowed to serve in the military were born in 1934, 1936, 1935, and 1930. Their average age is 75.5 years.

One of the things I have noticed in some pretty extensive conversations on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" with both my fellow veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and the older generation of veterans who won the Cold War is the tremendous generational gap between the two groups of warriors on the issue of homosexuals in the military. Honestly, I cannot speak for all my peers, but I could personally care less whether or not openly gay persons serve in the military. There are so very few who stand up to be counted when their nation is at war that we could use as many brave and patriotic men and women as we can get. I would personally have no problem serving with, under the command of, or in command of someone who was openly homosexual. I just don't freaking care. And I knew several good soldiers with whom I served who came out of the closet once they left the service.

I will miss this older generation of warriors when they are no longer with us. I am under no illusion that my limited experience of war in Iraq and Afghanistan is a substitute for the kind of hard-won experience earned in Vietnam, Korea, and in the peacetime military at home and abroad. These men deserve our especial thanks for rebuilding the broken military after Vietnam. But I will not miss their attitudes on gays in the military. Those I will not miss.

For an example of what some of the younger generation thinks, be sure to check out what my friend (and card-carrying Republican, Marine, married father of two, and Iraq War veteran) Owen West wrote in the New York Times a few months back.

...six years of war have clarified priorities. The battlefield has its own values, starting with courage. Sexual orientation falls somewhere below musical taste. What a person chooses to do back stateside, off-duty, in his own apartment is irrelevant in a fight. For months I lived with 12 other American advisers on an Iraqi outpost. There was a single pipe shower next to a hole that masqueraded as a sewer. But the reality of combat dominated personality quirks — nobody wondered about sexual orientation.

David Cloud has a piece up on Politico on the way in which Sec. Gates is using the budget to prepare the military for what he sees as the conflicts of the future.

The chances of a U.S. military strike against Iran has certainly diminished since Obama took office, and Gates himself has made clear that he favors exhausting diplomacy, sanctions and other nonmilitary steps as the U.S. searches for a way to halt what it contends is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Yet the Pentagon also sees its job as planning for the worst-case scenario, which a hybrid war with Iran might well be.

It has a conventional military, which though considered mediocre in many respects, possesses high-tech weapons, including cruise missiles and air defense systems. But Iran also has the ability to strike using unconventional tactics, including terrorist strikes around the globe, stepped-up support for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with waves of small speed boats attacking U.S. naval ships in the Persian Gulf.

In a war with Iran, “you would have to destroy the Iranian air force and negate the missile threat. You’d also have to deal with Iranian small boat attacks, and you’d also have to be prepared to deal with terrorist attacks,” said Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, and a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gates also grew concerned that the lessons the military was learning in Iraq about what it took to succeed against an insurgency would be shunned as those wars wound down. He worried that the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and major defense contractors would return to what they felt most comfortable doing — preparing for large-scale conventional war.

If future wars are likely to be hybrid wars, the Pentagon has to prepare for fighting conventionally and unconventionally at the same time, Gates says. He is quick to point out that the budget recommendations he laid out this week hardly represent a radical shift away from buying large high-tech weapons systems.

At the end of the piece, though, Donnelly argues how this budget's primary aim is to hold down defense spending -- and not to set different spending priorities that reflect future threats.

It's YouTube Day here at Abu Muqawama. And if you're going to watch the Heritage Foundation's "scary" new video about missile defense, it's only appropriate to watch it as a double feature.

The first is an interview with Judy Woodruff of PBS.

And what I'm trying to put at the table are representatives of those who spend about 10 percent of the budget. Their work has been funded principally through supplementals over the last six or seven years. I want to get that capability into the base budgets so that it will continue and we don't forget, as we did after Vietnam, how to do what we're doing right now so successfully in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second is with a round table with journalists (.wmv). (Thanks, Noah)

There are one or two decisions that did not leave smiles on the faces of the services. ... But I have made it clear that I do not want to see any guerrilla warfare on these programs.

If you missed the David Kilcullen event last week, we at the Center for a New American Security have your Australian fix covered. Those of you in the DC area should join us on Thursday for an event with the Australian defense minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, who is sure to both flame and galah to the delight of we assembled Yanks. RSVP here.