Center for a New American Security

I am in Paris, working on my French, reading a lot, and using up all my vacation time before I take a leave of absence from CNAS at the end of the summer to spend a year working in the governmnent. You can expect my posting on the blog to be pretty light for the next month. For the past semester, though, we at CNAS have been really lucky to have had Hilary Polak as an external relations intern. Hilary's fluency in Hebrew and familiarity with Israeli politics and society really helped me, in particular, as I worked on our big Middle East report this past spring. Hilary starts at the Institute for the Study of War this month, but before she left, I asked her to help me make sense of the new service law that is causing such a ruckus in Israel.

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More Israeli-Arabs, or Palestinian citizens of Israel, volunteered for civil service through the military than Haredi (also known as ultra-orthodox) Jews in 2011. Of the 2,400 Israeli-Arabs who volunteered, 90% were women, 40% Muslim, 36% Bedouin, 13% Christian and 11% Druze. For those citizens of Israel who are not obligated to serve in the military, the option of civil service in schools, hospitals, community centers, retirement homes and even ministries is available. The fact that more Palestinian citizens of Israel than ultra-orthodox Jews have opted to do national service is a symptom of a much larger, more grave and elusive challenge facing the State of Israel today. Benjamin Netanyahu, who formed and leads the new coalition government that holds a majority of 94 Knesset seats, has the chance to address this national issue and implement formative change, if he chooses to seize the opportunity.

You could say Israel is suffering from a serious “personality disorder.” The nation is undergoing an intense internal struggle to understand and define its current and future identity. The Jewish state that was built on the ideals of pluralism, democracy and liberalism, intended as a haven for all Jews and the majority of whose growth was initially shouldered by nationalist, non-religious kibbutzniks is realizing a greater threat than was ever anticipated is growing rapidly in their midst: the Haredim. What started in 1948 as a few hundred yeshiva students in the holy cities of Israel has evolved into the fastest-growing societal block in the country with an average of 7.6 children per woman, roughly triple the rate for the population as a whole, according to the Israeli government’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The Haredi population is exempt from military service due to their religious convictions, with 11% of 18-year-olds granted exemption in 2007 and a projected 23% in 2019, and they pose a severe strain the economy, challenge the progressive, egalitarian characteristics of the state and hold major sway in electoral politics.

This schism in Israeli society is an incredibly sensitive one, and it can be felt almost everywhere: from the apartment of a Russian Jewish family to an Arab village, from the urban metropolis of Tel Aviv to the agricultural kibbutzim. The atmosphere in Jerusalem is particularly difficult -- the air seems to be almost physically stifling. Popular culture, the news and the internet is swamped with material referencing the growing number of Haredim and the associated tensions. The lack of Haredi participation in the the military, an integral piece of Israeli society and a potential vehicle for upward social and economic mobility, places a huge burden on the backs of secular Israeli citizens. Secular Jews are forced to compensate for their absence in the military realm. In turn, Haredi Jews have their Torah studies financed by working Israelis. The ultra-orthodox who do volunteer typically belong to the Dati Leumi, or Religious Zionism, group, and most of them serve in combat units isolated from other sections of the IDF. There is a concern that these religious soldiers, operating in high-risk areas like Jenin, may choose to obey their religious obligations in place of official military orders.

In this tiny, dynamic country where domestic politics are almost inseparable from foreign and defense policy, how is Israel to address this problem? The new, centrist government coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud and Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz of Kadima, may hold the key to a solution. While the new government might not be able to ease the stress that exists between subsets of Israeli society, they can decide to capitalize on the opportunity to instate new laws and reforms to alleviate some of these issues. However, in order to do this, they must maintain the unity government at all costs.

The February 2012 Supreme Court ruling that the Tal law (the law granting exemption from military service to ultra-orthodox Jews) is unconstitutional has provided a window for action. Netanyahu has a powerful coalition where he does not need to comply with the demands of the religious parties like Shas and United Torah Judaism. It is doubtful that a Haredi draft will be established tomorrow, but the government can take serious steps toward improving the situation by crafting a new resolution that would coerce Haredi Jews to serve in the military. As a result, the Haredim could play a positive role in the economy and pay their dues to society. There has been a great deal of rhetoric surrounding this topic-- the majority of MKs and Israeli citizens are in agreement that Haredim should be subject to military service, and Netanyahu, Mofaz and Barak have all made statements in support for more inclusive conscription laws-- but so far, no one has made any concrete advancements on the matter.

There has been some movement on the settlement issue in the last few weeks. In Netanyahu’s first major move concerning settlements since Kadima joined his coalition government, he instructed his ministers to vote against a draft bill that would have retroactively legalized illegally built settler homes in the West Bank. The settlements are a contentious subject for the Israeli government, the Obama administration and other international powers. While this move might seem insignificant in the scheme of things, it may be the slightest intimation of where Netanyahu and his coalition are heading. How Netanyahu and Mofaz will address the religious, right-wing settlers with their newfound political clout in the long-run remains to be seen.

Netanyahu, with his keen political skills and significant Knesset majority, has the chance to go down in history as an Israeli leader who implemented important legislation at a crucial time. The new coalition has the opportunity to tackle real, serious issues-- like the swelling Haredi population and the burden they place on the whole of Israeli society, migrant workers, the settlements and even the peace process, among other things-- with more ease than many prior governments. Time will tell if he will indeed take on some of the most factious and emotionally charged topics that exist in Israel today, and how he will do so. Mofaz and Kadima must also prove they are players in the game and are crucial actors in the government assuming a more secular and middle position; if they fail, the 2013 elections may be their undoing. Israel desperately needs to look inward and deal with the complex side effects of her “personality disorder.” By focusing on improving Israel’s domestic policies, the unity government can ensure that the nation will be better equipped to face even greater security threats looming nearby and elsewhere in the international community.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's excellent if depressing new book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan comes out today. You may have already read excerpts in the Washington Post. Rajiv wrote much of the book while on leave from the Post and locked away in a cubby hole at the Center for a New American Security, so we are hosting a book event for him tonight to which you are all invited. 

I read the book in two sittings on Friday and Sunday afternoons. Rajiv's first book depressed me because I was close enough to the shenanigans up the road in the Green Zone to be angered by them. This book depresses me because I was even closer to many of the shenanigans in question and know some of the protagonists. I was also forced, in reading this book, to go back and think through my own assumptions in 2009, many of which I got wrong. Rajiv's third book, presumably, will be about how I myself incompetently managed the occupation of Syria and hosted wild parties at the embassy in Damascus while Marines fought mightily in Homs.

A friend of mine has never forgiven me for saying he was a "loser" in Tom's narrative of the Surge in Iraq. (He insists I called him a loser in life, which I didn't do -- I just wrote that he was a "loser" in the narrative Tom presented.) This book has very few winners and very many losers. The winners? A few intrepid U.S. military officers and diplomats. The losers? Pretty much everyone else -- and especially the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. I really hope those two organizations in particular take the lessons from this book and remember them going forward but suspect they will instead go into a defensive crouch.

Anyway ... on to the questions. 

1. You argue, in this book, that the United States essentially lost the first year of the Surge in Afghanistan because of the way in which it allocated its troops — sending thousands of Marines to Helmand Province instead of, say, Kandahar City. Who was responsible for that decision?

The responsibility rests with several senior U.S. and NATO officers. When commanders at the NATO regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan were asked by their superiors in 2008 to identify how they would use an additional combat brigade, they picked Helmand over Kandahar. Those officers — Dutch Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif and his deputies, among them U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson — identified four reasons to send the forces to Helmand instead of Kandahar.

First, that the Canadian forces who had responsibility for Kandahar province didn’t want to cede more territory to the United States. Some Canadian officials were convinced security in Kandahar was improving; others didn’t want to risk the embarrassment. Either way, U.S. commanders didn’t want to push the Canadians to shrink their battlespace.

Second, Helmand was the epicenter of poppy production.

Third, there were more Taliban attacks in Helmand than any other province.

And fourth, foreign troops needed to stay out of Kandahar city, given its cultural and religious significance.

Our own Abu Muqawama (then a member of General McChrystal’s initial assessment team) was among those to question all four points. As I write in the book, “If the mission were to protect the people, Exum thought, the new troops should be closer to the largest population center in the south, not where violence was worst. The drug argument similarly made no sense to him, since Richard Holbrooke had just announced that to avoid antagonizing farmers the United States would no longer participate in the eradication of poppy fields; a CIA study also claimed that the Taliban got most of its money from illegal taxation and contributions from Pakistan and Persian Gulf nations, not from drugs. And even if the Afghans were right about the psychological impact of foreign forces inside the city—some on the assessment team questioned that logic—the surrounding districts seemed like the best home for the Marines. The Taliban’s surge in Helmand was ‘a feint,’ Exum wrote in his notebook. ‘It draws our attention and resources away from Kandahar.’”

The ultimate decision on where to place the first wave of new troops authorized by President Obama in February 2009 rested with the top U.S. and NATO commander in Kabul at the time, Gen. David McKiernan.

When McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009, he gave thought to moving the Marines. By then, however, it was too late. But even if it hadn’t been, his hands would have been tied, because of a conditions set forth by the Marine Commandant at the time, General James Conway. He insisted that the Marines operate in a contiguous area where they could be supported by their own aviation. That effectively ruled out Kandahar. Conway also insisted that a three-star Marine general at CENTCOM have overall operational control of the Marine brigade. That meant McChrystal couldn’t have moved the Marines to Kandahar without the approval of the Marine high command.

2. And people wonder why I love U.S. Marines but have very little patience for the U.S. Marine Corps. (I really need to burn those notebooks, by the way.) But is it really possible to hold the Obama Administration even partially responsible for a decision related to the order of battle on the ground? Sam Huntington argued that politicians should set the policy and agree on a set of strategic objectives and resources with their commanders but that it was up to the commanders themselves to figure out how to operationalize the strategy. Is it then reasonable to criticize the administration for errors made by field commanders?

I agree that it doesn’t make sense for the White House to manage operational or tactical decisions, but the president and his national security team should be fully aware of how the troops are being used. It’s just a brigade, you might say, so what’s the big deal? Perhaps in the context of World War II or Vietnam, it’s a rounding error, but in the context of Afghanistan, the rationale for the placement of 10,672 Marines out of an initial deployment of 17,000 troops should have been clearer to the White House. A new president, signing off on his first troop deployment, should at least have known — or been told — that a majority of those forces were being sent to a part of Afghanistan that is home to about one percent of the country’s population.

3. You displayed a lot of admiration for the U.S. Marine Corps in your reporting for the Washington Post and again in this book. But you also have some very sharp criticisms toward the way the U.S. Marine Corps protected its own parochial interests at the expense of what you see as the greater mission in Afghanistan. Describe for us why you admire the Marines who fought in Afghanistan but fault the Marine Corps as an institution.

I think the Marines — particularly the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (the first tranche, which was sent in 2009) under the command of then Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson — did an amazing job under very challenging circumstances. The work they did in Nawa and Garmser, in particular, was standout COIN (putting aside questions of whether we should have been engaged in a full-on COIN mission there). Did Nicholson push into some places that USG and NATO civilian advisers -- and his NATO bosses in Kandahar and Kabul -- thought were unnecessary? Yes. But the fault, as I write, did not rest with him. He was given the troops, and he was doing what any good field commander would. He wasn't going to let them cool their heels at Camp Leatherneck.

The problem was tribalism — among the Americans, not the Afghans. Marine leaders did not really want to be joint and interoperable. They wanted their own turf, even to the detriment of the overall war effort.

This is what I write in the book:

"[Political adviser Kael] Weston didn’t think Nicholson was being insubordinate in moving into Taghaz. Taking Kamchatka was a rational act if you had the troops. Weston believed the surge had put too many pieces on the Risk board. The problem had been compounded by the decision to send the Marine brigade to Helmand instead of Kandahar. The blame for those choices lay not with Nicholson but in Washington. To Weston, Nicholson was an aggressive commander who was using the resources at his disposal to secure his entire area of operations. Weston disagreed with some of Nicholson’s moves, but the political adviser understood that the general was playing the generous hand he had been dealt. He wasn’t going to keep his Marines sitting on bases.

"There was no doubt in Weston’s mind — or in mine — that Nicholson had used his forces to transform the central Helmand River Valley, evicting the Taliban from its sanctuaries and giving the Afghans another chance to make something of Little America. By the time they departed in mid-2010, Nawa had grown so quiet that Marines regularly walked around without their flak vests. Much of Garmser was safe enough for American civilians to commence reconstruction projects. Hundreds of families were returning to Now Zad. Even the bleeding ulcer of Marja was starting to heal. Nicholson’s year in Helmand felt like the most dynamic and entrepreneurial period of the Afghan War. After years of drift, momentum was finally starting to swing America’s way."

And this from the last chapter:

“Over drinks with a Marine general in a still gentrifying Washington neighborhood, I compared Afghanistan to a run-down urban street. It seemed, I said, as if the United States were devoting a large share of its community redevelopment funds to transform one tenement at the end of the block into a swanky mansion. What happens, I asked the general, if we win Helmand but lose Afghanistan? ‘That would be just fine for the Corps,”’ he said.”

The 2nd MEB has been awarded the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation. I'm no judge of awards, but their work sounds PUC worthy to me. But what if they had done all of that good work closer to the country's second-largest population center?

4. You're also unforgiving in your description of the civilian effort in Afghanistan (in a chapter bluntly titled "Deadwood"). You've now been witness to incompetent U.S. civilian efforts in two wars. Is there any hope for the U.S. government in this regard? What does observing the U.S. civilian efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan make you think as a taxpayer?

I believe that our nation has the talent to engage in war-zone nation building, if that’s something we decide to do again. (Any policymaker or military leader who thinks that’s a good idea needs to have his or her head examined.) The problem is that those doing the hiring for the civilian component don’t look in the right places. Instead of scouring the United States for top talent to fill the crucial, well-paying jobs that were a key element of President Obama’s national security agenda — they should have brought in top-level headhunters. Those responsible for hiring (often bureaucrats in D.C. with no great sense of urgency or creativity) first turned to State Department and USAID officers in other parts of the world. But the best of them had already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of those who signed up were too new to have done a tour in a war zone or too lackluster to have better career options. Then they turned to retirees and to contractors who had served in Iraq. The right people do exist. We just have to find them, and then convince them to serve their nation.

5. Despite the criticisms, there are some real heroes in this book. Kael Weston and Carter Malkasian stand out in particular. What makes guys like that special, and who are some other heroes?

Kael spent seven years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Carter spent two years in a hot and dusty forward operating base in Garmser. They built trust with the Marines they served with, and the Afghans. I really respect Kael and Carter, and I wish I could say they are two-of-a-kind, but the truth is that many civilians working for the government could be just like them. If they agreed to spend real time on the ground. If they took the time to build relationships, and, in Carter’s case, learn the language. If they were willing to flout stupid rules set down by the embassy’s security officer.

Most importantly, they were willing to define their jobs in ways to give them maximum influence. Kael called himself a political commissar, not a political adviser. He constantly reminded the Marines that they had been deployed in support of the Afghan people — and as an extension of civilian diplomatic policy, not the other way around. Carter also saw his role as more a proconsul than an adviser. He single-handedly cajoled influential tribal leaders and mullahs to return to Garmser district, correctly betting that their presence would lead others to follow. He won the trust of skeptical residents through countless meetings and roadside conversations, convincing them to reject the insurgency and support their government. He also shaped the Marine campaign in Garmser in a way no civilian had in other parts of the country. He served as a counselor to five successive battalion commanders, influencing decisions about when to use force and helping them calibrate it with a political engagement strategy. He built such credibility with the Marines that if he urged a different course of action than the one they were planning, they almost always complied. Larry Nicholson was among his biggest fans. He thought the Americans needed a Carter Malkasian in every district of Afghanistan.

They weren’t the only ones. State Department officer Marlin Hardinger spent three years working at the provincial reconstruction team office in Helmand. He’s just finished a year of Pashto study and will be heading back for another year or two. That’s dedication. There are/were others like them. But the problem is they are the exception, not the rule.

6. I always end with a question about food or drink. What are the top three most memorable meals you have enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan -- and why?

a. Eating chicken enrobed in an inch-deep layer of oil on the roof of the police station in Garmser with district governor Abdul Manaf. We spent a while joking about his deputy’s virility — the man had two wives and more than twenty children. But then the conversation moved onto the future of Afghanistan. It was then I wondered whether men like him — in whom the U.S. military and diplomatic corps had invested so much — would be able to survive once the Americans leave.

b. The First Strike MRE I cracked open after spending nine hours walking, kneeling, crawling and worming on my belly on the first day of the Marine operation to clear the Taliban from Marja. I was cold, wet, tired and miserable. Food never tasted better, even if it was processed junk with a ten-year-long shelf life.

c. The lunch that never was. I was on my way to have lunch with Ahmed Wali Karzai when I received word that he had been killed.

Ha. I sometimes test intelligence officers by asking them about local power brokers and who they had lunch with yesterday. It turns out a safe answer is "Rajiv Chandrasekaran." Buy his book here.

Military cyberpower is everywhere in the news. But is also still tremendously invisible. Take Misha Glenny's recent op-ed, "Stuxnet Will Come Back to Haunt Us"

THE decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet. Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon. If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory.

The phrase "militarization of the Internet," does not seem to mesh with the fact that military-funded research played a major role in developing the Internet. To go back even further, Alan Turing and Norbert Weiner, two monumental figures in the history of computing and robotics, were originally World War II-era military researchers in cryptography and command and control. We owe ubiquitous location-based mobile services, one of the drivers of today's emerging "post-PC" information ecosystem, to global positioning systems---also a military invention. It is good that most of what we associate as cyberspace can be exploited as public goods, but computing and information technologies have always been strongly associated with military command and control, targeting, and weaponry.

Glenny's focus on the Internet is part of a common fixation on the Internet as cyberspace, when in fact cyberspace is actually something far larger. As the National Defense University iCollege's Samuel Liles and Dan Kuehl have both argued, the invention of the "Victorian Internet" in the form of the telegraph and its order-of-magnitude improvement in military command and control marks the real beginning of military cyberpower. Cyberspace is, as Kuehl has written, a global domain within the information environment whose distinctive and unique character is framed by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to create, store, exchange, and exploit information via inderdependent and interconnected networks using information-communication technologies. The Internet is certainly part of cyberspace, but there was cyberspace long before anyone began to seriously discuss the idea of computer network operations. As Bob Gourley tweeted, superior American exploitation of cyberpower won the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II and exposed the Zimmerman Telegram in World War I.

Stuxnet itself is a curious candidate when one looks for a point at which a Rubicon has been crossed that would fundamentally change contemporary warfare. Stuxnet targeted centrifuges rather than human beings. Yet, the United States military uses cyberspace for instrumentally lethal military purposes every day. Drones? They operate on the network, which is part of cyberspace. The Tomahawks we lob at Yemen? And so on and so on. We based the Offset Strategy on the idea that we could exploit superior computing technologies to engineer conventional weapons with superior combat effectiveness against Soviet second echelons--weapons that would obviate the need for tactical nuclear weapons to compensate for raw Warsaw Pact armor. To focus on computer network attacks alone is to ignore the massive structure of military power and coercion built around cyberspace and how crucial it has been to warfare for decades. Cyberspace has been one of the many drivers behind US military hegemony, a fact that has not been lost on aspiring military competitors. Just like focusing on remotely piloted aircraft as uniquely dangerous weapons of war renders invisible the fact that manned aircraft are the actual "grunts" of the targted killing missions, regarding Stuxnet as uniquely horrible is only possible if other, more substantial, military uses of cyberpower are normalized.

There is a tremendous need to conceptualize cyberspace as a kind of pristine, Edenic realm corrupted by the Satan's Apple of Stuxnet. Just like space, cyberspace is seen as a zone that is beyond--or should be beyond--geopolitics.  But space began with explicitly military origins and military spacepower facilitates Earthbound military operations. Operational domains have always been zones of conflict and contestation. Glenny's use of the phrases "monster" and "come home to roost" in his op-ed also reveal a framing of Stuxnet as a Frankenstein narrative, a kind of cyber version of the karmic theories of foreign policy and strategy Dan has criticized. But military cyberpower is not a monster cooked up by a mad scientist in a dreary castle, and "coming home to root" is a phrase that implies a kind of divine retribution more appropriate for a Old Testament prophecy than a security assessment.

Glenny's implicit comparison between a stable world of nuclear weapons and an unpredictable world of "advanced cyberwar" is also interesting because those nuclear weapons were part of a global American military command and control network enabled by exploitation of cyberspace. And in comparison to nuclear weapons, Stuxnet only inficted kinetic damage on the target--the Iranian nuclear program. As Thomas Rid observes, the collateral infection of other computers commonly cited in analysis of Stuxnet were not actually damaging: 

Cyber-weapons with aggressive infection strategies built-in, a popular argument goes, are bound to create uncontrollable collateral damage.The underlying image is that of a virus escaping from the lab to cause an unwanted pandemic. But this comparison is misleading. Stuxnet infected more than 100,000 Windows hosts to increase the chances of reaching the targeted system – yet the worm did not create any damage on these computers. In the known cases of sophisticated cyber-weapons, collateral infections did not mean inadvertent collateral damage.

Glenny worries that Stuxnet and Flame will precipitate constant penetrations of networks in order to gain target intelligence for attacks during the initial period of war, but somehow has missed the fact that this has been a basic element of Chinese and Russian military doctrines for some time. The phrase "Advanced Persistent Threat" is commonly used as a euphemism for nation-state attackers seeking to conduct "long-range cyber recon" of United States military and defense networks to steal military secrets and develop a better understanding of their dynamics and vulnerabilities. And the United States has not been the only victim of long-range cyber recon, and the Chinese and the Russians are far from the only culprits. Glenny worries that Stuxnet will prompt nation-states to develop cyber weapons and use them, but neglects to provide strategic rationales or scenarios for such development and use. South Korea, for example, is developing cyber capabilities to deal with the North's development of computer network and electronic warfare capabilities. Cyberpower is an outgrowth of the South's existing national security policy rather than a special effort somehow prompted by the use of Stuxnet and Flame.

Military cyberpower, once invisible to all but a few defense specialists, is slowly becoming visible. In some ways the current wave of commentary on Stuxnet is simply a delayed reaction to what should have been apparent once the electromagnetic spectrum was utilized by Abraham Lincoln to command the American Civil War: a new operational domain has military as well as civilian purposes. The civilian use of cyberspace, like the civilian use of the ocean or space, provides commercial and cultural value, but there is also a power-political context that simply cannot be wished away.

Update: Mike Tanji wrote a far more concise (and hilarious) critique of the op-ed here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter has decisively demonstrated why she is one of America's most valuable public intellectuals with this thought-provoking cover story in the Atlantic. I recommend this article to any Washington professionals -- male or female -- looking to balance work and family over the course of a successful career. This article deserves to be read and debated collectively by couples over the weekend.

A few points:

1. I would love to read a companion piece to Anne-Marie's article by Andrew Moravcsik, who is not the only guy out there married to a woman whose intellectual gifts and professional promise often overshadow his own. How does he, as an accomplished and gifted professional, enable his wife? What went through his own mind as his wife took on positions of ever-increasing responsibility that placed more of the burden for parenting on him? For some of us, these questions are not hypothetical, and I suspect I am not the only one out there who would love to hear his perspective.

2. It might be because I know so many theologically orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but I know a lot of really well educated and professionally promising women out there for whom being a full-time mother is the acme of career success. These women, who do not necessarily think they have "lost" anything by choosing to raise children full time, are not represented in Anne-Marie's article. There is a starting assumption that positions of high authority in government and in corporations should eventually be split 50-50 between men and women because well educated women, if given the chance, want to be both mothers and high-profile executives. That is not necessarily the case, though. I know a lot of ridiculously talented women out there for whom their highest professional aspiration is to be a stay-at-home mother. I'm related to some of those women and go to church with others, but I suspect that there are women out there outside conservative faith communities for whom this is also true.

3. Don't forget the boys. Every conversation we have about women and their careers and families should be accompanied by a discussion of what we want for our boys who are growing up. What should it mean, for these young men, to be fathers and working professionals? Should their roles in families and at work precisely mirror those of women or should we have different expectations for their roles and responsibilities? When I was growing up, the only expectations for me that differed from those for my sister related to manners and the military: I was expected to hold doors open for women and stand up when they left the table, and I was also expected, by my mother and unlike my sister, to serve in the military. But that was about it. Only when I was in my twenties did I start having conversations with older men and women about what my role as a husband and (potentially) a father should be.

4 (counterpoints). Dan and Barbara's amazing kids criticize the article both directly and indirectly in Salon. I didn't think Rebecca's somewhat knee-jerk reaction to the piece really wrestled with much of its content, even though she is, in my mind, one of the brightest women writing on women's issues. Aaron's article, by contrast, wasn't about Anne-Marie's article at all. But Aaron starts to explore #3 on my list of points in a really interesting and oblique way that I appreciated. Read them both.

While re-reading John M. Collins' text on grand strategy (written in 1973), I'm struck to the degree to which US strategic thinking has not adapted to the systemic shift brought on by the end of the Cold War. Yes, this might seem to be a pretty banal insight--it's beyond cliche to claim that US strategy is oldthink. I've heard that magazine editors also (rightly) summarily reject article pitches beginning with "since the end of the Cold War." But hear me out for a few minutes.

One of the major points of Thomas Schelling's Arms and Influence is that strategic conventional and nuclear forces enabled punishment as a strategic tool. Granted, looting and pillaging of a foe's countryside was commonplace in ancient times but was not instrumental in the way, say, punitive bombing or a countervalue attack would be. Moreover, Soviet punitive strikes could also entirely bypass US fielded military forces. In the past, as Schelling noted, defeat of an enemy army was necessary before one could ravage its civilian infrastructure and population. But distance and conventional forces offered scant protection. Ravaging of German and Japanese infrastructure occured long before Axis armies completely eroded. Under such circumstances, the distinction between national and personal security significantly blurs.

Under such circumstances, national security policy entered radically new territory. Yes, as Colin S. Gray pointed out, Clausewitz still governed nuclear war and even wars of mass destructions could have theories of victory. But the existence of weapons of mass destruction, while not altering war's eternal nature, radically shifted American perceptions of security. It's common to claim that globalization and irregular warfare has completely eroded the stopping power of water, but only when we talk about strategic warfare does this supposed truism really make sense. Lazy claims about the death of distance in fact originate from thinking about the airpower and nuclear revolutions.

Pushing other powers out of striking distance has been a longtime American strategic preoccupation. Hegemony over the Americas ensured that European powers could never use the oceans to burn down the White House again, and the United States was one of the few powers that did not suffer numerous attacks on its territory during World War II. The Cold War was fought entirely in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. And aside from the September 11 attacks, the global war on terrorism has been primarily fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The idea is that American citizens should be spared financial and personal security costs of warfare, an objective that has had its own unintended civil-military consequences. "America is not at war," one Marine famously lamented. "The Marines are at war. America is at the mall."

The gap left by an existential Soviet strategic nuclear threat to US existence has fortunately not been filled. Not only is irregular warfare not an existential threat, but it also is affected by geographic considerations in ways nuclear operations are not. Terrorism may not respect national borders, but power projection has costs. In their backyard, the Iranians are fearsome irregular adversaries. But when the action gets farther out, they rely on used car salesmen and blow off their own legs in failed bombing attempts. This isn't to doubt the power of Iranian intelligence and paramilitary organizations, but it's important to note the degree to which projecting power is generally easier when you are operating closer to your own political and logistic sources of power. US offensive military and intelligence efforts abroad and domestic intelligence have also substantially raised the cost for al-Qaeda to execute successful strikes against US territory. Violent non-state actors do pose threats to the US, but instruments of national power can at least theoretically strengthen the state against them in ways that were not possible within the context of Cold War nuclear strategy.

Of all the policy problems the US currently faces, only the global financial crisis and the prospect of biological contagion negates the power of distance and effects Americans individually in the way Soviet nuclear weapons could. As John Robb noted in December 2011:

When the histories are written about his era, this word may prove to be central: contagion.  Why?  We're all connected -- on every level between the physical and logical -- for the first time in history.  We see contagion everywhere, from the financial markets that spread fear and panic over default globally to viral rumors/pictures that spread across the Internet in a flash.

The contagion Robb discusses is financial and virological. Both, in some way, feed off human-built devices--massively integrated financial markets and global commerce, transport, and travel networks. Both also break down the distance between national and personal concerns the way nuclear weapons did. Financial ruin can open a pandora's box of health and safety issues, and deadly viruses have far less indirect effects on personal welfare.  But neither are the deliberate design of a malicious state or non-state actor. Rather, they are emergent phenomena formed by aggregations of state decisions and individual behaviors by humans, nonhumans, and things. Adam Smith's metaphor of the "invisible hand" was one of the first serious looks at how complex adaptive systems function in human society. The markets are an aggregate of human decisions, organizational policy and behavior, and computational trading algorithims. Pandemics are a consequence of human interaction, but also can be spread by animals as well. 

Financial and virological contagion, while terrifying, do not rise to the level of global nuclear warfare and atomic annihilation as threats to our personal safety and interests. Remember that the next time someone tries to tell you that the current international security environment is more dangerous than the Cold War.

Of course, the tricky part is that such a state of (relative) safety is rooted in a set of geopolitical, financial, and military arrangements that do not sustain themselves in perpetuity. We should not make the mistake of believing that the US is on a teleological path to greater and greater levels of security. The policy choices we make matter too, as do those of allies, competitors, and other states.  Additionally, 90% of threats are not existential but still necessitate strong tools of national power. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and threatening of Saudi Arabia did not challenge American national survival. But the prospect of Hussein gaining strategic control of the Persian Gulf was enough to trigger the Carter Doctrine tripwire. And while terrorism does not pose an existential risk, it is still the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens from terrorists and imprison or destroy irregular enemies.

My discussion of finance and health is not an argument that US national security policy should be revamped around preventing market crashes or virological outbreaks---that's the proper place for economic and health instruments of national power rather than the Pentagon or the FBI. But we should be more aware, especially, when contemplating the idea that the world is more interconnected, that only in distinctly nonmilitary areas such as finance and health does interconnection pose a significant danger for the United States and individual American citizens. When it comes to everything else, we must acknowledge our good fortune to have two oceans, a strong military and intelligence apparatus, and diminished but nonetheless powerful allies. The Soviet nuclear threat was the only time that neither distance nor military and intelligence strength could grant us protection from existential risk, and the fact that this threat no longer exists should arguably be more explicitly recognized. 

... U.S. Army LTC and CNAS Military Fellow Tony DeMartino, who was awarded the French Order of Merit for his service in Afghanistan. I got through about eight lines of La Marseillaise in the staff meeting this morning before Ellen told me to be quiet.

Last week, the president of the University of Virginia was fired. Although the reasons for Teresa Sullivan's dismissal are still unclear, there is evidence to suggest that the Board of Visitors believed she should be behaving less like an academic professional and more like a chief executive officer of a major corporation. Sullivan lacked, one board member complained, the "strategic dynamism" necessary for a person in her position. 

I have spent all but a few months of my adult life in either the U.S. military or in institutions for higher learning. I was commissioned as an officer in the infantry two days before graduating from college, and I started graduate school three months after leaving active duty. I then began teaching about six months after earning my Ph.D. In my work for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, I spend a lot of time with corporations. I am sometimes asked to meet with corporations with interests in the Middle East, for example, to help them think through the business environment and to talk about trends in the region.*

So I think I know something about universities and the military and a little bit about the way in which corporations function. Which qualifies me to say this: Not-for-profit universities are not corporations, and neither is the U.S. military. Neither organization should be treated like a corporation.

Smarter people than me have patiently explained why it makes little to no sense to treat an established, esteemed university like the University of Virginia as one would treat a corporation. As one Virginia professor put it:

I agree with all of this but want to extend this professor's worry to another institution I hold dear: the U.S. military. Over the weekend, I began to wonder why so many professional military reading lists contain business books that you would be less surprised to find on sale in an airport bookstore's "Management Excellence" section. Some of these books -- no disrespect to the authors -- can be summarized in a five-slide PowerPoint presentation. They probably were once a five-slide PowerPoint presentation but now push other, worthier books -- like Paret's Makers of Modern Strategy -- off the list of books we're telling military officers to read. The result is an officer class raised to believe their role in life is to manage organizations rather than, as the late Sam Huntington would have said it, to manage violence. I guarantee you we have officers running around Fort Benning, for example, who cannot tell you anything about Huntington's model for soldier-state relations and do not know the difference between the Moltkes elder and younger but can sure as hell explain the difference between spiders and bleeping starfish.

One can argue that businesses have a lot to teach universities because the former are more accountable to the cruel realities of the bottom line. Fair enough. But the price of victory and the costs of failure are more keenly felt in military organizations than they are in businesses, which is why some business writers study military organizations rather than visa versa. And which is why it makes good business sense for businesses to recruit military professionals.

But the military is not a for-profit corporation. It is a public organization that is specially recruited, trained and equipped to achieve the political objectives of elected policy makers through force. Can it learn something from studying the performance of businesses? Absolutely. I wish, for example, the U.S. Army officer corps had half the appetite for risk as entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But at the end of the day, the U.S. military, as results oriented as it should be and is, is not about turning a profit or rewarding shareholders, and its leaders should rein in their love affair with business models and the mostly execrable "literature" we force on our students in business schools.

Besides, this craze to make our universities and military organizations mirror our businesses is ironic. While the American model of capitalism is generally strong and often admired, it is by no means seen by the world as the undisputed model for how other businesses and business environments should look. Other successful capitalist economies often look at U.S. business culture and find much to criticize. U.S. institutions of higher education, though, are the undisputed model for others to follow and are universally admired outside the United States. The same can be said for the U.S. military, which for at least two decades has been the world's strongest and most admired military organization. Even before the financial collapse, meanwhile, during which your average second lieutenant could have taught most U.S. banks something about risk management, most businesses in the United States failed. 

That's a luxury military organizations are rarely allowed.

P.S. One final bit of irony? The decision made by Virginia's business-minded Board of Visitors is seriously hurting the university's bottom line. The decision to remove Teresa Sullivan may in fact end up a Harvard Business School case study. But not in a good way.

*Any compensation I am eligible to receive for this work I either decline or turn over to the Center for a New American Security in order to preserve the intellectual integrity of my work. The list of corporate or institutional sponsors for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, can be found here. Unlike all but a few think tanks, we make no effort to hide our sponsors. I join my colleagues in thanking them for their support. 

Uncle Jimbo of Blackfive highlighted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago arguing that women should not be allowed to attend U.S. Army Ranger School. There might well be some very good reasons for not allowing women to attend Ranger School, but this op-ed neglected to make any of them. 

I graduated in Class 5-01 (that a 22-year old me, right below the N in RANGER, which stands for "Nowledge"). I then went on to serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment. 

It's only my opinion, and I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but I see no compelling reason why women should not be allowed to attend Ranger School. As far as I am concerned, if a woman really wants to run around a sawdust pit at two in the morning screaming "Ranger!" while periodically stopping to low-crawl for 50 meters, we have a constitutional -- nay God-given -- responsibility to allow her to do so.

The only thing about which I feel strongly -- quite strongly, in fact -- is that women and men be held to the same very strict physical standards. The U.S. Army always screws this up, and it's unfair -- to women. Unequal physical standards for men and for women encourage men -- and women themselves -- to think of women as lesser soldiers. It may be true that men, on average, have a significant advantage over women in terms of testosterone and muscle mass. My wife, for example, may be a far superior athlete to me, but, when we play sports together she, being the competitor that she is, is constantly frustrated by my natural advantages in terms of size, strength and speed. 

But here's the thing about people, on average: they don't, on average, tend to volunteer for or graduate from Ranger School. Only people who are mentally and physically tough to begin with volunteer for Ranger School, and only the most physically and mentally tough people among those people end up graduating.

I may be older and more injury-prone than I used to be, but I am a lot stronger today than I was when I attended Ranger School. And you better believe there are women who are stronger and physically tougher than me. I know there are women out there who, if given the chance, could attend and graduate from Ranger School. 

The U.S. Army will screw this up only if it relaxes the physical standards to lower the bar for admission. The last time I checked, for example, you had to be able to do six strict chin-ups to attend Ranger School. That's pretty easy for a reasonably fit man, but even very physically fit women have trouble doing strict chin-ups. The temptation will be to relax the standard, because only a very select group of women would be able to do six strict chin-ups.

But that, of course, is exactly the point. When I was selected for service in the Ranger Regiment, the Regimental psychologist told me, "Well, the bad news is, you are not normal. The good news is, we're not interested in normal people."

Only a very select group of mental and physical freaks volunteer for and graduate from the toughest military training programs, and that is how it should be. If a female freak of nature can meet the same physical standards that we male freaks of nature can meet, she should be afforded every opportunity to attend the toughest schools and courses. If the U.S. Army -- Happy Birthday, by the way -- relaxes the standards to allow more women to qualify to attend, though, which it has a habit of doing, the Ranger tab will mean a lot less in the future.

Now, "normal" women might prefer to stay home and do normal girly stuff like bake cookies in the kitchen and overhead squat their body weight 15 times consecutively. And hey, if they want to do that instead of attending Ranger School, fine. I don't judge. 

But just as surely as we need to be honest about the real physical differences between men and women and how those differences should inform defense policy, we should also be honest about the fact that there is a very small minority of women out there who can kick my ass and yours and ought to be allowed to sua sponte their way to Ranger School.

DARPA is looking to alter the military's reliance on global positioning systems (GPS) lest it be felled by enemy jamming and denial capabilities. The solution? The All Source Positioning and Navigation System (ASPN), an all-in-one system that will incorporate a host of GPS alternatives ranging from radio beacons to stellar navigation systems. W.J. Rue, howerver, tweeted an alternative solution: a map and compass. While this should be contextualized within the perspective of the writer (Rue served with the Marines, a service that places less stock in complex technology than the other services), the GPS to ASPN issue deserves wider comment.

Why is the idea of a map and compass such an radical idea, as opposed to another set of sensors? The answer lies in technological autonomy, a well-known concept in science and technology studies. No, I'm not talking about autonomous killer robots. Rather, the idea, as popularized by Langdon Winner, is that technology is not solely a neutral tool. As the good folks at Cyborgology noted, Winner argues that technology creates networks of dependency:

Technological autonomy is a shorthand way of expressing the idea that our technologies and technological systems have become so ubiquitous, so intertwined, and so powerful that they are no longer in our control. This autonomy is due to the accumulated force of the technologies themselves and also to our utter dependence on them.  …Advanced technologies require vast networks of supportive technologies in order to properly function. Our cars wouldn’t go far without roads, gasoline, traffic control systems, and the like. Electricity needs power lines, generators, distributors, light bulbs, and lamps, together with production, distribution, and administrative systems to put all those elements (profitably) into place. A “chain of reciprocal dependency” is established, Winner says, that requires “not only the means but also the entire set of means to the means.”

Each successive layer of technology creates another layer that locks an actor, organization, or nation to further dependence on mutually interlocking technological assemblages. Each new technological innovation (especially complex military platforms!) rest on a supportive network that is simply difficult to uproot. GPS and other similar systems for mapping, targeting, communication, and coordination are the root of present American military advantage. As previously noted, even new technologies that seem fairly simple when compared to capital-intensive platforms, such as drones and cyber, are underpinned by complex technological and organizational networks. From counter-IED efforts to high-end conventional warfare, we are wedded to network-enabled C4ISR.

But this isn't any different from the variety of ways we experience technological autonomy and implicit trust in complex systems in everyday life. Let's  take a more mundane point of reference--the car. Very few people understand all of the inner workings of their automobile, but find themselves placing a great deal of implicit trust in its operation when they take to the highway. We commit to trusting various complex systems in life, basing our activities around the assumption that they will work the way they are designed. When trouble occurs, we ask experts (the Apple "Genius Bar," for one) to fix them. Technological autonomy and the reality of dependence gradually crowd out alternatives. Netflix, for example, has along with Hulu so dominated the rental market that it displaced brick-and-mortar stores. The remaining physical rental services, like Redbox, have incredibly limited selections.

When facing less technologically advanced enemies, complex technological systems can limit freedom of maneuver. In the Millennium Challenge wargame, Red Team commander Lt. Gen Van Riper reacted to electronic warfare platforms frying his comms by relying on motorcycle messengers and coded messages broadcast from mosque minarets. Van Riper was not rejecting technology, but relying on technologies less vulnerable to adversary disruption. But complex technology also has its benefits against less advanced foes: both manned aircraft and drones entered into American service the same way: intelligence, surveillance, and reconaissance against violent non-state actors. The way Airland Battle-era technologies demolished Iraqi ground and and anti-air forces in 1991 may be exaggerated but still deserves some credit.

We can't undo the set of technological networks our precision-strike and network-centric operations are based on, nor would it be wholly advisable to forgo the advantages such systems bring us. However, one future factor to consider when investing in military technologies is whether increased complexity (and thus layers of dependence) is worth the qualitative edge provided. The suite of technologies we utilized to build the Offset Strategy yielded ample military benefits from 1991-2003. It is less clear, as Bernard Finel observes, whether we can gain similarly disruptive qualitative advantages with new platforms today. Moreover, increased complexity, particularly in tightly coupled systems, brings increased operational risk.

The debate between Henry Kissinger and Anne-Marie Slaughter about intervention in Syria rests on interpretations of sovereignty and world order that are more complex than popularly depicted. By properly contextualizing sovereignty and intervention in the world system, we can come to a better understanding of what is at stake in the current debate. Post Cold War interventions are part of a great continuum of intervention that goes back at least several centuries.

Kissinger begins by noting the role that the Treaty of Westphalia allegedly played in putting an end to Europe's wars of religion, and goes on to suggest that humanitarian intervention in the Middle East is undermining the norm of state sovereignty: 

The modern concept of world order arose in 1648 from the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. In that conflict, competing dynasties sent armies across political borders to impose their conflicting religious norms. This 17th-century version of regime change killed perhaps a third of the population of Central Europe. To prevent a repetition of this carnage, the Treaty of Westphalia separated international from domestic politics. States, built on national and cultural units, were deemed sovereign within their borders; international politics was confined to their interaction across established boundaries. For the founders, the new concepts of national interest and balance of power amounted to a limitation, not an expansion, of the role of force; it substituted the preservation of equilibrium for the forced conversion of populations.

While Kissinger's conclusions are very reasonable, the problem is that interventions in the Middle East represent the endpoint of a spectrum of intervention that the United States substantially contributed to with Cold War actions many realists supported. Furthermore, there's also a big empirical problem with the Westphalia-centric interpretation advanced in the op-ed.

First, in a critique of the then-dominant trend of New Medievalism, Lt. Col. Michael Phillips observed that Westphalia was more a metaphor for an at best imperfectly observed world order than a transformative shift in international relations. The treaty itself was silent on the concept of sovereignty, and served only to codify an informal set of arrangements that had already evolved in Germany. More relevant to the balance of power in the oft-idealized pre-Napoleonic European system was the political, financial, organizational, and military difficulties involved in levying decisive war. Warfare before Napoleon is so distant to us as to be alien--a time when the public had little to do with the making of war and conscripts could not biovac near forests lest they desert. Certainly, aggressive men and women existed, but lacked the means to realize their dreams of domination. European warfare in the Americas, however, was waged as if the Thirty Years War never ended. Women and children were targeted, crops and settlements were laid to waste, and irregular forces, pirates, and militias were decisive combatants. Wars in the Americas were wars of annihilation.

As would be demonstrated during the 19th century, intervention in the international system came to take several divergent forms. First, intervention in internal affairs was countenanced when a given state's ideology made it threatening to other actors. Revolutionary France was the Iran of its era, never fully trusted because of its fanaticism, ideological crimes against its own citizenry, and desire to export its ideology abroad. Second, intervention against transnational irregular actors--often in defiance of sovereign boundaries--occured because of the threat pirates and bandits posed to travel and commerce. These actors were viewed as criminals and enemies of all mankind. Finally, non-European powers that mistreated Europeans or populations Europeans were sympathetic to were targets for humanitarian intervention.

During the 20th century the Nazis and Soviets forced a merger of all three categories of intervention. Enemies that sought to wage global ideological war, who inverted Clausewitz--as Lenin did-- to conceptualize politics as war by other means had to be fought everywhere. As Dan has observed, these struggles were if anything much more invasive than the drone wars. The US and Britain routinely violated neutrality and sovereignty, assaulting Iceland to deny it to the Nazis and invading Iran to logistically support the Soviets. The US rightly regarded the Nazis and Japanese as war criminals, but did so in a manner that legal circles viewed with a skeptical eye.

During the Cold War, this logic was taken to another extreme through covert operations against governments and movements deemed to be sympathetic to Communism. It is easy to condemn such activities today, but it is worth noting why they were undertaken. The United States had internationalized its national interest, viewing Communism itself--a borderless ideology--as a national security threat. Hence Soviet influence in states once seen as peripheral to international security became probable cause for viewing these environments as battlefronts. Some of these interventions--particularly in Europe--were justified. Others were tragic failures with devastating humanitarian consequences. It is also interesting to observe that the tools being proposed for intervention in Syria--air and weapon support to rebels--are Cold War vintage. Countless movements--most notably the Cubans and the Contras--were supported by private American air forces and/or weapons support, enabling operations in environments the United States did not view as important enough to devote ground troops to.

Today we have come full circle. Post-2001, authoritarian states are simultaneously viewed as breeding grounds for dangerous ideologies, humanitarian criminals, and supporters of threatening irregular actors. Arguments about US policy towards those states blur all three categories of intervention justification together into a formless blob. While we live in a world that is in some respects safer than ever, debates about intervention still sit implicitly within the framework of global war. It made sense to consider Fascism and Soviet Communism--idious ideologies backed by overwhelming military and political power--mortal threats to international order. But does what happen "over there" really matter "over here" in the same way today? It is difficult to argue that the same relationship exists, but many implicitly do when discussing authoritarian states in international security.

A more difficult problem for sovereignty is the threat posed by transnational groups with absolute aims. Their aims in and themselves may not be strategic threats to the United States, but they certainly pose tactical threats in the form of mass-casualty attacks. The United States usually acts in cooperation with partner states in launching airstrikes and ground raids, but has acted unilaterally when circumstances demand decisive and preemptive operations. When not launching kinetic strikes, the United States has also taken on sovereign responsibilities rightfully performed by host governments in an effort to build host nation capacity. While kinetic strikes pose some risk of blowback, capacity-building arguably poses a moral hazard by enmeshing the United States in the domestic politics of local actors who see Uncle Sam as a walking ATM. When the US tries to make unruly local clients reform, it only deepens American involvement in their domestic politics and further threatens their sovereignty.

The problem is not simple and should not be viewed as "drones bad" and "foreign aid good." Rather, it's a problem of how far the United States can go in managing threats that emerge from troubled states without either making those threats worse or making the US another party in a local civil war or violent elite dispute. Whether firing Hellfire missiles or delivering aid, the US is becoming an actor in a political system it is not institutionally well-equipped to understand or alter. How this problem will be resolved is an important question for 21st century security.

We are still struggling to figure out how we will manage our own national security without either threatening others' sovereignty or performing sovereign responsibilites that they have, for domestic reasons, failed to exercise. While precedents exist in 19th and 20th century history for American diplomatic, political, and military efforts to create domestic security either by intervening in the Western hemisphere or globally, our situation is in many ways unique. The anarchist wave of terrorism was not as cohesive as al-Qaeda and Affiliated Movements (AQAM) are today and lacks AQAM's global reach. It is difficult to see how America could have avoided striking into Pakistan to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, a move criticized by international organizations as a violation of sovereignty despite the manifold opportunities Pakistan had to bring him to justice. History is important, but there is a limit to how much historical context can shed light on a political-military problem.

To answer the title question: no one lost Westphalia, because Westphalia is a useful myth for international relations theorists seeking a shorthand for systemic change in the international system. Drones didn't kill Westphalia, and Libya--while injurious to sovereignty--has really principally demonstrated that dictators in coastal regions without nuclear weapons, Russian-supplied integrated air defense systems, or basing agreements with the United States Navy might do well to explore alternative career options. But beyond Syria polemics, the real challenge of sovereignty lies in moving beyond the framework of global ideological war that World War II and the Cold War set in place. A different international environment requires a course correction towards security policy inclined, as a rule, towards skepticism on whether or not local security problems have international implications. 

Earlier today Shadi Hamid set off something of a minor conflagration on Twitter by asking why, in the face of clearly horrific and mounting violence in Syria, should think-tank civilians advocating intervention be expected to come up with detailed military plans for an intervention?

Speaking as a civilian writing on a think-tank affiliated blog, this struck me as a very distressing position. If one is going to advocate for a military intervention - of any kind - serious analysis of a military plan is absolutely vital, and think-tanks - unlike, say, service members or policymakers, have a unique position to publicly weigh in on such debates with candor. Let me be blunt: if an analyst or the think-tank she or he represents cannot offer a plausible military strategy for an advocated intervention, then it is difficult to treat that advocacy with weight or authority.

It is a cliché to note that war is too important to be left to the generals because it's also absolutely true - and it would also be unfair to single out Hamid or the issue of Syria. Similar arguments have been trotted out by commentators, analysts and public figures on a variety of military issues, although more often as excuses to defer responsibility to military staffs for decision-making, or arguments to wrest away decision-making from policymakers with undesired views. As Adam has noted, basic victory definition is inseparable from policy prerogatives. Think-tanks, like other public institutions and figures engaging in policy debates, have a role in offering informed advice, even on matters might not be the professional domain of civilians, that can help shape those prerogatives. If an organization advocating intervention lacks access to civilians, veterans or military fellows with sufficient expertise such that it cannot confidently and cogently substantiate its case for military intervention, that's a problem for the organization to rectify, not for the audience to accept.

Nobody is expecting a think-tank to elaborate a full OPLAN – although there are some which probably could. But an ends, ways and means analysis subjected to the scrutiny of those with defense experience and expertise is all too often lacking in our public discourse. At a point when “leaving it to the generals” has become a rhetorical stoplight to paper over strategic aimlessness in debates over Afghanistan, it is not simply a necessary component of argument but something of a civic responsibility to ensure that the public have a chance to assess the likely costs and outcomes of the use of force - something that the government, by virtue of political and operational concerns, will be reluctant or unable to do without restriction.

Hamid has argued it is unreasonable to demand this since analysts can’t predict what actors would be in play - but the beauty of an ends, ways and means analysis would be that it could formulate what was necessary to achieve objectives, and then determine what combinations of actors, resources, and techniques would be necessary to make the executions of those plans a reasonable choice. Obviously, analysts, which are not psychic, cannot be expected always either to predict the future or read the minds of those privy to militarily relevant information they lack. But they can offer plans that relate the ends, ways, and means of their course of actions, with their assumptions made explicit so that effective debate and critique can be offered - and they should respond to those critiques by examining what kind of resources or strategies would be necessary to address the risk that those assumptions might be false.

War is a grave matter, and discussing war on its own terms is hardly an unfair expectations of advocates who would wish the U.S. participate in it. Similarly, as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has noted, advocates of non-intervention should be frank about the consequences of the status quo and the feasibility of alternatives. What is dangerous, however, is advocacy without substantive engagement in the subject matter of its aim - whether about Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or anywhere else. Policymakers and publics alike need voices outside the military capable of assessing military subjects, at least so long as we live in a society that exercises civilian control over the armed forces.

During the American Civil War, the U.S. was lucky enough to be led by perhaps our finest self-taught strategist ever, Abraham Lincoln. If today, a coterie of officials were able to claim a monopoly on military knowledge and operational practice as McClellan attempted to, it would be difficult for the public and policymakers alike to effectively resist the charm of their authority and expertise. Not only, then, does military uninformed civilian debate make it more difficult for a policymaker to undertake militarily-reasonable operations, it can also create space for the military to resist civilian policies. Strategy (and even passing familiarity with operations) should not be cult knowledge kept by an anointed caste, they should be published in vulgate and nailed to doors. Not every policymaker, let alone every voter, can be Lincoln. Hawks and doves alike must endeavor to ensure that their policies and critiques have enough strategic fluency to be worthy of informing laymen and advising leaders.

Update: While I was pounding away at this, Jason Fritz wrote a far superior post. Check it out.

Up at Information Dissemination, Owen Cote Jr. of MIT has an interesting take on the future of naval warfare. Those interested in the future of US defense strategy should pay attention to these two grafs, from which I quote at length:

The next major change in naval warfare caused by U.S. submarines will likely result from the marriage between the submarine on the one hand, and precision, land attack, tactical ballistic missiles (TBMs) and small, long endurance UAVs on the other.In general, fast weapons and small UAVs would give submarines a capability to find and strike high value, mobile targets ashore. Specifically, in the context of the new Air-Sea Battle strategy, they would enable a submarine-based capability to destroy rather than merely suppress modern, ground-based air defenses, or in the DOD vernacular, DEAD. A submarine-based DEAD capability would close a major capability gap against modern A2/AD networks.  The systems that form these networks often seek to use the sanctuary provided by mobility in the cluttered environment ashore as a base from which to launch missile strikes against fixed targets necessary for power projection like air bases, or more ambitiously against ships at sea. 

DEAD? I suppose someone had some fun with that one. Of course, Cote observes that air defenses under this scheme are also assumed to be mobile, which presents a set of different problems:

Ever since the failed “SCUD Hunt” of Desert Storm, persistent airborne surveillance has been identified as key to the rapid identification and precise geo-location of mobile targets, as has been a source of precision weapons for attacking those mobile targets in time urgent fashion when they are found. Everything learned during the decade-long war on terror in operations against IEDs and terrorist leaders has amplified that message. This means that persistent airborne surveillance and time urgent weapons will also need to play a central role in defeating the mobile targets that form the heart of an A2/AD network. ... At the heart of any DEAD capability against a modern air defense system is the need to destroy relatively small numbers of expensive, phased array engagement radars. Without them, SAM batteries lack the ability to track targets with the accuracy needed to guide missiles against them. These radars need only emit intermittently during an engagement and can be quickly moved afterward. Thus, traditional radar-homing weapons like HARM will not work because they require a continuous signal to home on, and traditional single-platform, angle-of-arrival (AOA) ELINT techniques cannot provide accuracy sufficient to target coordinate-seeking weapons.

Cote goes on to look at how an alternative ELINT/COMINT technique called Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA). At this point, I fear that my acronym limit has been reached. The point, overall, is something Dan and I have highlighted in the past. These are major conflict capabilities, but will most likely find operational use in humanitarian interventions, offshore counterterrorism operations, and missions in the Persian Gulf. As Robert Caruso observed about the Afloat Foreward Operating Base, naval ships that enable light projection of special operations forces, Marines and allow dominance over onshore battlefields without the need for large infrastructures are indispensible for current American strategy. A DEAD (OK, bad pun) giveaway is the way Iraq and Afghanistan experiences with improvised explosive devices and high-value targeting has influenced the design of counter-shore capabilities for conventional warfare.

When coupled with operational cyber capabilities for missions against state opponents, what you begin to see is the shape of a military building a capability for decisive onshore intervention. Granted, it is important to qualify this (as we have with drones). The US could, with sufficient investment, destroy Syria's air defense system with existing technologies. But even so, the real problem is the postwar situation and regional effects. Weapons do not make war, and the ultimate determinant of US intervention will be the way these innovations mesh (or do not) with policy discussion in Washington.

* * And because I promised ADTS in the comments of my Stuxnet post, a Lana Del Rey link. It's got alligators in a pool and stuff. Make some kind of crackpot analogy to US naval strategy, Internets.