Center for a New American Security

My friends Laura Rozen and Michael Cohen are way off base if they think the report written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn on the failure of military intelligence in Afghanistan constitutes a crisis in civil-military relations.

You think there is tension between the U.S. military and its civilian leaders? I wouldn't want to be in charge of political-military relations in the Bundestag:

Yet politicians in Berlin, including Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, dispute that Germany is fighting a "war" in Afghanistan.

 

I think Gen. McChrystal erred in talking publicly about the war in Afghanistan because he is a man who, constitutionally, cannot not tell the truth about his assessment of the war and what we need to do differently. And now that he's the ISAF commander, he can't go on making public speeches because what he says has political import. But I have not been able to get all worked up over this or have sympathy for those trying to make this out to be MacArthur '51.

Flight Lieutenant Victoria Anderton, step right up.

[Watch McChrystal's full remarks here.]

...at the same time, I don't want to imagine the alternatives to "Senator" and "ma'am" that were running through this brigadier general's head:

This was a difficult week for me, so I apologize for not posting very often. A bunch of stuff, over the course of the week, piled up in my inbox. Here is a sampling:

Well. The place to see and be seen in the defense policy set was certainly tonight's book launch for Tom Ricks, Pol-Mil, COIN

Shinseki, as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported the war plan. The head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks, and his planning staff presented their approach to the Joint Chiefs and their staffs during the development of the plan. There was ample opportunity for the chiefs to express concerns and propose alternatives. There is no record of Shinseki having objected.

Shinseki also met with the commander in chief himself to discuss the plan.

In advance of Gen. Petraeus's testimony, we here at Abu Muqawama have put together a list of questions we would ask the good general if we were important. Or, failing that, U.S. senators.

Dave at Small Wars Journal encouraged everyone to read the article by Richard Kohn on the coming crisis in civil-military relations, and Abu Muqawama seconds Dave's recommendation for this passage alone:

In the civil-military arena, the consequences of even a slowly unraveling debacle in Iraq could be quite ugly.