Center for a New American Security

Lots of folks in the broader foreign policy and defense communities have noticed, at one time or another, that the State and DoD regional bureaus don't exactly align. State has bureaus for Near Eastern Affairs, South and Central Asia, and East Asia and Pacific; DoD has Centcom, Pacom, and now Africom. It's not pretty.

So where exactly is the Gulf and Southwest Asia?

Maybe the State Dept briefer can explain.

Does President-elect Obama read this blog, too?!? AM and Charlie are fairly sure that no one loves the SecDef like they do.

Everyone has been talking up David Ucko's new article in Orbis -- Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency. Michael Noonan, Frank Hoffman, and the Insurgency Research Group have all recommended it. On the Small Wars Journal blog, Hoffman had this to say:

In his Orbis article, provocatively titled “Innovation or Inertia,” the author recounts in detail the new directives and initiatives undertaken by the American military since 9/11. He suggests that the reforms point to “a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military.” Yet the Pentagon’s defense strategy and budget suggests otherwise. This leads Ucko to ask “what are the prospects of the U.S. military truly learning counterinsurgency”? Aside from rhetoric, how committed is DoD to the required changes needed to make America’s military as dominant in COIN and other forms of irregular warfare as it currently is in conventional warfare?

Abu Muqawama just printed off the article and is about to read it on his way home. You can do the same either via SWJ or the IRG.

Update: Okay, Abu Muqawama just read this article in his local Algerian coffee shop and can whole-heartedly recommend it to his readers. (The article, that is -- though the Desert Rose in Walthamstow has the best -- and most reasonably-priced -- espresso in London should you be looking for coffee to go along with your COIN.) Man, Ucko's article really gets to the heart of the debates which have raged within the U.S. military and on sites such as this one and Small Wars Journal. Basically, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you should read Ucko's article. Key passages:

...Whether through inertia or conviction, large swathes of the DoD continue to view all ‘‘operations other than war’’ as an afterthought to the U.S. military’s primary mission: major combat operations – and this in spite of the threat of terrorism, the U.S. military’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and the significant difficulties faced in these campaigns. This mindset expresses itself most clearly in the Pentagon’s budgetary allocations and decisions over force structure, which are oriented predominantly toward high-intensity combat. ... Both in force structure and in budgetary allocations, the Army and the Marine Corps are displaying notable continuity with traditional priorities.

...Another tempting, yet misleading, conclusion to be drawn from a negative Iraq outcome would be that counterinsurgency simply does not work and should be abandoned as a priority.

...The DoD is also a highly conformist institution, complicating efforts to introduce a new way of thinking, particularly one that goes against the organization’s prevailing logic and culture.

...emerging opportunities to change force structure or budgetary priorities have not been seized. ... The future of counterinsurgency within the U.S. military thus seems to hang in the balance, dependent on whether the message and cause of the COIN community is accepted and thereby gains momentumor whether it is rejected and pushed off the table.

Great, great article.

Lost in the hubbub over the admittedly ridiculous emo-boy picture accompanying that article in the Kansas City Star on John Nagl was this quote:

Why is the Army having such a hard time holding on to its young officers?

"It used to be that Army officers tended to marry inside the family, the daughters of other officers. But as people become more mobile, they’re doing the wacky thing I did, which was to marry the girl I met at Oxford. The hardest job in the Army isn’t being a soldier; it’s being married to one."

The first time Abu Muqawama noticed anyone write about this was when Andrew Tilghman did in his excellent cover story on the exodus of junior officers in the Washington Monthly. Tilghman wrote:

Perhaps the most powerful new element affecting officers' willingness to stay in the Army is the shifting dynamic of marriage and the roles of men and women in the family. Even in the rather traditional realm of Army culture, fathers now expect to be more actively involved in raising their children, and women tend to be less deferential to their husband's career. Among baby boomers, officers' wives were usually homemakers. Today, however, many officers' wives are doctors or lawyers or have degrees in international affairs, and there are few opportunities for them in places like Kentucky or West Texas.

When Abu Muqawama opined about this, saying he had quite simply never dated a woman that would have accepted the Army wife lifestyle, some people wrote in and told him to stop whining. Okay, fair enough. The Army is a service, we all get that, and if the Army wanted us to have wives they would have issued them. But you certainly can't be angry with a young officer who has already served his country proudly in Iraq and now wants to leave the service so he can go meet some nice, smart girl in law school who will date him now because he's not going to move in the next year. What are you going to tell that young officer? That he's not a patriot? He's done his duty for the country in Iraq when his peers have been drinking beers at the Hawk and Dove and working in some congressman's office, and if he wants to leave the Army to find a nice wife with a master's degree from Cornell and shared interests, let him.

In the Washington Post today, Laura Dempsey -- currently serving with her husband at Fort Drum (bless) -- has a must-read op-ed on this subject.

I know the challenges that Army wives face. I've been a lawyer and an Army wife for 10 years. In that period, I've moved seven times. I've taken four different bar exams and held five different jobs. My income has been taxed in at least five states. My children have had five different nannies. I think it's safe to say that military wives like me face career obstacles that few civilian wives could appreciate.

Now, America, tell long-suffering Laura Dempsey (currently lost in a snow drift somewhere east of Sackett's Harbor) to stop whining. We dare you. The bottom line is, the U.S. Department of Defense needs to adjust its personnel system and fast. The personnel system was designed -- we are not kidding you -- in the 19th Century. This whole nonsense where U.S. Army officers move every year and a half is crazy. It quite simply assumes the officer's spouse does not work and exists only to support her husband (or his wife -- yet another thing the personnel system didn't somehow anticipate in 1890). And now, the U.S. Army is bleeding is most talented officers by the dozens. Someone needs to get serious about this.

P.S. Abu Muqawama thinks Pervez asked his pal Fidel to resign last night so that it would take the world's eye off of the Pakistani election.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates broke his right shoulder in a fall on an icy step at his home in Washington, D.C., and was being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Pentagon said.

Gates was taken to the military medical center Wednesday morning after realizing that the injury he suffered Tuesday night required medical attention, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

Sometimes we here at Abu Muqawama are guilty of black-and-white characterizations that don't really provide the nuance our readers have come to expect on the issues, and for that we apologize. On the debate over the role of air power in counterinsurgency, for example, you don't have to scour the achieves to figure out what our opinion might be on, say, the arguments of Maj. Gen. Charlie Dunlap.

And so Abu Muqawama himself is wary of this black-and-white narrative that has developed concerning our last two secretaries of defense whereby Donald Rumsfeld was the personification of evil and Robert Gates, his successor, has been a gift from the Lord God Almighty Himself. For one thing, there is an argument to be made that the legacy of Sec. Rumsfeld includes, in addition to the "Charlie Foxtrot" that is Iraq, the vital re-establishment of civilian control over the joint chiefs and the military establishment. The generals, the logic goes, weren't about the reform themselves if left to their own devices. It was always going to take a strong personality like Rumsfeld.

But while Rumsfeld's legacy may be a mixed bag, it has indeed been tough to find many people who have anything bad to say about Sec. Gates. From everything that Abu Muqawama has heard, he is every bit the quiet professional he is portrayed as in Fred Kaplan's profile in today's New York Times Magazine. If you get the chance, read the article and get a glimpse of why his tenure as secretary of defense will be mourned and missed by folks on both sides of the aisle -- and the military itself -- when it ends in a little less than a year.

Of course, it helps Sec. Gates's case with the writers of this blog that he has been a quick and eager student of counterinsurgency...

It was during the panel’s trip to Iraq in August 2006 that Gates was sold on the idea of a surge — though as a prelude to troop reductions. He and the others were briefed by the multinational corps commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli. According to one participant in the briefing, who is still on active duty and not authorized to speak on the record, Chiarelli put forth what would be the principal rationale for the surge that eventually began last February. The main problem in Iraq, Chiarelli told them, was the sectarian nature of the Shiite-led government and its refusal to reach out to Sunnis. Before the factions could reach a political settlement, they needed Baghdad to be secure. Security was also needed for the steady supply of essential services, which in turn might build allegiance to the government and dry up support for the insurgents. Boosting security, though, meant more troops. Without more troops, Chiarelli told them, he could “clear” Baghdad of insurgents, but he couldn’t “hold” the city — he couldn’t keep it secure — much less “build” its infrastructure.

Gates and Chiarelli hit if off so well that after Gates came to the Pentagon, he hired the general to be his senior military assistant. Chiarelli gave Gates an advance copy of an article he wrote for the journal Military Review called “Learning From Our Modern Wars,” which called for a shift in Army doctrine away from large-scale combat against enemies of comparable strength toward “asymmetric warfare,” especially counterinsurgency operations. Last October, in a speech before the Association of the U.S. Army, Gates made a pitch for these ideas. To the Army hierarchy, which is dominated by tank and infantry officers who cut their teeth — and still stack their budgets — on old-style combat, it amounted to a rebel cry. Gates also approved a move to appoint Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq and chief author of the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, as the head of the brigadier-general promotion board this past fall. The move was clearly intended, and widely interpreted, to help ensure the promotion of creative commanders who were previously passed over for promotion from colonel to one-star general — in short, to start the process of institutionalizing the new style of warfare.