Center for a New American Security

I apologize for not writing on the blog this week. I have a lot of posts in my head but have been busy with other activities -- and writing for other websites.

Judah Grunstein of the World Politics Review commissioned a debate over the future of counterinsurgency and got responses from Steven Metz, Bing West, Michael Mazarr, and Starbuck. I contributed a piece arguing that the debate really misses the larger issue of what the hell our ground forces -- and especially our army -- are supposed to do.

Judah wryly noted that my article was itself textbook counterinsurgency: "Redefine the center of gravity (not COIN, but US Army); secure it from unnecessary collateral damage of kinetic ops; and construct narrative to encourage buy-in from on-the-fencers."

Anyway, I am always proud to participate in such debates, especially with other thinkers I very much admire. My article bears strong resemblance to a talk I gave earlier in the week at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in which I did my best to occupy the middle ground on a panel discussion with Gian Gentile and Max Boot.

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On another note, SEAL Team 6 is doing its very best to make the president immune to Republican attacks that he's Jimmy Carter. My analysis of the hostage rescue operation in Somalia can be read on the website of the BBC.

I turns out there is some interest about this bin Laden fellow and what his death means, so I will be chained to the leg of a chair in a local coffee house, writing on deadline through tomorrow. Expect blogging to be light. (Those who really need their Abu Muqawama fix, though, can tune into C-SPAN this morning a little after nine to watch me sort through questions from callers on Washington Journal.)

Thanks to the excellent work done by the boys from the U.S. Navy's special missions unit, there is a lot of commentary about the development of and role played by special operations forces. I just want to say two things on this subject before going radio silent. First, the success enjoyed by our Naval commandos a few nights ago was directly enabled by other special operations units and capabilities. The special operations aviation capability is the one that jumps in my mind first -- briefly, imagine the rocks on the guy whose helicopter started malfunctioning but put his bird down into the compound anyway; yeah, there is an entire regiment filled with guys like that) -- but other units were involved too, along with our nation's intelligence services. (Who deserve to be praised at a moment like this much more than they deserve to get yelled at when things go all pear-shaped.)

Second, the reason we have some of these special operations capabilities -- specifically, the special missions units, the aviation unit, the headquarters element, and all the units that have not yet made the news and will not -- and the reason they work together so well is because you are witnessing the late stages of an evolutionary process that began in a cold desert base in Iran some three decades ago. You cannot understand why the U.S. military was able to execute this extraordinary operation deep in the heart of Pakistan without first understanding the failures of Iran in 1980. I've got Tim Harford's new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure on my desk right now, and I'm thinking Tim should add our special operations forces as a case study in time for the paperback.

Marc Ambinder and Jeremy Scahill, meanwhile, have primers on the organization and units behind the operations that I can't really comment on, but I will say that whenever people ask me to explain the task force, I don't say a word and simply point them here.

I will end by offering my sincere congratulations to the men of the task force. Well done. Finally got him.

Okay, misquoting me because of my indecipherable accent is one thing. Misquoting something I have written is another. An alert reader catches Tim Heffernan:

Here's what Heffernan writes:

"Indeed, Andrew Exum, an ex-Ranger better known as the blogger Abu Muqawama and one of the leading public experts on counterinsurgency, told Ambinder that his inside take on the 'surge' in Iraq was that it was won not by the increase in U.S. troop levels, but by the elite killers of JSOC — as led by Stan McChrystal." [emphasis mine]

And here's what Ambinder actually wrote:

"Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq, wrote yesterday on his pseudonymous blog, Abu Muqawama, that 'I do know that many policy-makers and journalists think that McChrystal's work as the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command was the untold success story of the Surge and the greater war on terror campaigns.'" [emphasis mine again]

Let me make this clear: JSOC did not "win" the Surge and was not primarily responsible for the security gains in Iraq in 2007. They just played a significant role that has yet to be explored by any of the books and articles written. (We will learn a lot, in fact, when everything is declassified one day.) And I do not have any "inside take" on what happened in 2007, a year I spent in London and not Baghdad. This is sensationalist. I may know many of the planners and strategists responsible for the security gains of 2007, but a) those people disagree among themselves about what happened in 2007 and b) so do about 1,000 other people.

Annoying, these journalists. C'mon, man, just call me and get a quote of your own. It's not like I am still hiding in Beirut. I have an office in Washington and everything.

Seymour Hersh, who has publicly distanced himself from the wack-job conspiracy theory -- promulgated by al-Manar and NewTV in Lebanon -- that the United States was behind the assassination of Rafik Hariri, has nonetheless opened a can of worms with his crazy conspiracy mongering about JSOC being an executive assassination squad headed by Dick Cheney. I blame him for all of this. The man just makes %$#@ up in his old age. Check out this article in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.

The US journalist opined that it might have been done on purpose because the US leadership did not like to declare Usama dead for in the case the justification of the presence of US army in Afghanistan could no more be there, hence no reason for operation against Taliban.

On the other hand, the diplomatic analysts believe that BB murder is still a fable and it is for the reason Asif Zardari and other govt authorities are stressing UN probe in the murder case, also paying huge sums for it.

Another website has disclosed that Benazir was put to death in order to roll back Pakistan nuclear programme and the take over its nukes and India, Israel and the US, were making hectic efforts to deprive Pakistan of its atomic capability so as to bring to under their control.

Did Seymour Hersh teach these journalists the English language as well?

Update: Hersh says he was misquoted. Well, yes, but again, he opened this can of worms.

One of the most experienced Afghanistan hands I know had this to say about General McChrystal in an email to me yesterday:

All the heavy breathing about him being A Killer Man and not right for COIN is way, way off base.

"Dalton Fury" -- the nom de plume of an old Delta commander (and the brother of one of America's most legendary warriors, if I am correct) -- had much more enthusiastic words for McChrystal. Gang, this piece on Small Wars Journal is the only must-read profile to have been written about General McChrystal since his nomination. It's worth about eight times what those features in the Post and Times are worth. Read this, because this is the no-%$#@ Inside Baseball stuff. (In fact, I am a little surprised anyone is allowed to write about this stuff. One of the reasons I have never written about my time in Iraq, for example, was because of the kind of op-sec stuff talked about here.)

I served as a staff officer under McChrystal in the late 90’s before leaving for 1st SFOD-D. My Ranger peers and I had a unique opportunity to see the good and the bad in the 1976 West Point graduate. I think if McChrystal were wounded on the battlefield, he would bleed red, black, and white – the official colors of the 75th Ranger Regiment. He is 110% US Army Ranger, rising to become the 10th Regimental Commander in the late 90’s, and still sports the physique to prove it. Even with a bum back and likely deteriorating knees after a career of road marching and jumping out of planes he doesn’t recognize the human pause button. Maybe by now this is a good thing as the junior officers of today might be able to keep pace with the General.

As the Ranger Regimental commander, McChrystal was considered a Tier II subordinate commander under the Joint Special Operations functioning command structure. The highest level, Tier I, was reserved exclusively for Delta Force and Seal Team 6. This always seemed to bother McChrystal. His nature isn’t to be second fiddle to anyone, nor for his Rangers to be considered second class citizens to the Tier 1 Special Mission Units.

Terms like “kit”, often used by Delta and Seal Team 6 operators to collectively describe the gear, weapons, and equipment an assaulter carries was banned from the Ranger lexicon. The term “assaulter” or “operator” was also verboten speak within the Regiment. The men wearing the red, black, and white scroll were Rangers, not assaulters and not operators. They also didn’t carry kit. They carried standard military issue equipment.

McChrystal also deplored the idea that the Regiment served as an unofficial farm team for Delta Force, or even the US Army Special Forces Green Berets. In his eyes, the Rangers were just as skilled in their primary mission of Airfield Seizures and Raids as Delta was in land based Hostage Rescue or the SEALs were in assaulting a ship underway. All things being equal, McChrystal was right. The Rangers were, and still are, just as skilled in their Mission Essential Tasks as are the Tier I units in theirs. He believed that losing quality officers and non-commissioned officers to what many considered the true tip of the spear outfits – those granted the most funding, most authority, and given the premiere targets - hurt the Regiment.