Center for a New American Security

Couldn't we have let Mark Lippert do his reserve duty in the White House? I know SEALs need good intelligence officers (insert your own joke about SEALs and intelligence in the comments), but is an intelligence officer for a SEAL team as strategically important as the "deputy national security adviser for operations and chief of staff of the National Security Council"? Am I the only one scratching my head here?

My CNAS colleague Bob Kaplan has an op-ed in the New York Times today on -- what else? Aargh! -- pirates. Bob thinks this running fiasco off the Horn of Africa doesn't reflect well on U.S. naval power.

This is crazy. The New York Times is reporting that the U.S. Navy and the pirates are sending more ships to the standoff.

The U.S. Navy is defenseless against semi-naked, trash-talking Chinese:

Maritime experts were given a rare glimpse of the underlying capabilities of the Chinese navy on Sunday, when crewmen involved in a stand-off with a US surveillance ship in the South China Sea revealed the fleet's previously hidden firepower.

As I understand it, navies exist to do four things:

1. Protect seaborne commerce.
2. Protect movement of armies and their supplies.
3. Deny enemy trade and commerce.
4. Deny movement of enemy armies and supplies.

A Navy officer testified in federal court in Washington yesterday that she moonlighted as a call girl for Deborah Jeane Palfrey's escort service for six months, starting in 2005, when the military says she was assigned to the Naval Academy

Really, Thomas P.M. Barnett? Because the consensus over here at Abu Muqawama is that if one of us had written a piece in Esquire that had helped end a good man's career, we might have at least something to say in either defense of ourselves or of Admiral Fallon. But maybe we're just old-fashioned or crazy or something.

WASHINGTON — Adm. William J. Fallon, the top American commander in the Middle East whose views on Iran and other issues have seemed to put him at odds with the Bush administration, is retiring early, the Pentagon said Tuesday afternoon.

"These sort of gestures do not work around here," says Timur Goksel, a university lecturer in Beirut and former United Nations official in Lebanon. "Last time they shelled the Druze mountains. What are they going to shell this time? Dahiyeh?"

While the Air Force has responded to the current operational environment by stonewalling change, the Navy has embraced it.

In a multimillion-dollar television, radio and online ad campaign, the Navy is presenting itself largely as a humanitarian rather than a warfighting organization. Several of the ads give more emphasis to the Navy's prowess in delivering relief supplies than its ability to deliver bombs.