The only thing I can recall hearing, this whole time, that connects the State Dept. with Iraq, is the whole Joe Wilson going to Niger brew-ha-ha, his pathetic attempt to discredit the Bush Administration, which only discredited himself. That’s the image that State has projected, that they’re a bunch of clowns who are trying to subvert the Administration’s policies.

So, again, I do respect anyone from DoS who actually is in Iraq and doing useful things. We just don’t hear about them.

1. Strange that Tony Snow can give a straight “yes” to a question that General Pace felt the need to waffle on. I can understand General Pace not wanting to get out front of the President on announcing something like this, which as you say could count as an act of war. However, my patience has worn pretty thin with supposedly “leadership” people giving weasely, legalistic answers to questions when they darn well know the right answer and it’s pretty simple. That’s not leadership, it’s just abuse. When did talking plainly and truthfully become forbidden?

2. Wouldn’t one think that we ought to have some kind of language in our mutual defense treaties with NATO countries and other allies, to give some kind of diplomatic cover to covert operators doing (or attempting) legitimate security operations across borders? I could understand hostile countries prosecuting CIA agents. But countries with extensive security-sharing agreements with us, I’d think there’d be a more co-operative arrangement already in place. We don’t have agreements to cover this kind of contingency in place with Germany and Italy? Did we miss a step?

3. Reading Col. Parks’ article, I’m again astonished that modified versions of ROE are written willy-nilly by military lawyers, and not subjected to the type of testing in controlled experimental conditions I have outlined in a previous comment, but rather are just promulgated with a “let’s see what happens” attitude. Nobody would field a weapon system without testing it under controlled conditions first, but according to the lawyers, its perfectly okay to field a set of ROE without having tested it first under controlled conditions, and compared to other competing ROE sets. This is part of the legal way of thinking, gumming things up again, in this case specifically, relying on retrospective studies to determine the outcomes of their work, and apparently not realizing that nearly every other profession under the sun uses prospective studies to predict the outcome of their work, and looks askance at retrospective studies as tools of the sloppy and the lazy.

Name me a medication that was marketed before being tested for effectiveness and safety with prospective studies, rather than just thrown at patients without testing, and with only retrospective studies to “see what happened” afterwards. There aren’t any. Sure, there are still mistakes and things withdrawn from the market after retrospective studies. But how many more mistakes would there be, if prospective studies weren’t required before new medicines were marketed?

But I’ve already described how I think ROE could be scientifically developed and evaluated, I won’t rehash it again. The problem is not one of thinking up the experimental methods, a few cognitive psychologists could do that. The problem is that the lawyers who inflict untested ROE on our troops are coming from a worldview (legal process of legislation combined with agencies and departments writing regulations, and courts following up afterwards) in which it is acceptable to inflict untested rule sets on populations (legislation, or regulations, written almost entirely ad hoc), and then only after people have suffered under them for a time, evaluate their efficacy and side effects (court cases which challenge the rules introduced by the legislation or regulation). It is this mindset of putting out their product (rules) untested, and then later looking backward to see if it worked, and insisting that because this is “how the legal system does things,” that that makes it somehow acceptable, that just boggles the mind. How they get away with it, more than three centuries after the scientific revolution showed the need for experiment to separate good ideas from wrong ideas, what works from what doesn’t work, is nothing short of astonishing. The ROE problem is just a microcosm (and a tragic one) of this larger human struggle to emancipate ourselves from nonsensical ways of thinking.

4. I’m sure DoS workers are present in Iraq, and have suffered there. I’d be interested, however, in hearing how many DoS workers are in Iraq, and what exactly they’re doing. We have somewhat over 130,000 military people there, and we hear a lot of them are doing civil affairs. How many DoS people are on scene? How many Peace Corps people? And what do they do? The Peace Corps started as an outfit that would actually install plumbing and so forth. In more recent years we hear they’ve gone upscale. “What, a village school needs plumbing? I’ll have my people talk to your people. We’ll make up a slideshow and see if we can put together some financing. Run it up the flagpole. Let’s schedule some meetings. Maybe bring in some NGO’s too, work up some proposals. Then take bids, get some contractors to come in, look at it, present schedules and budgets. Great. Let’s do lunch sometime.” How many DoS people (let alone Peace Corps) are turning wrenches and pulling cable in Iraq, and how many are pushing paper or making slideshows? And when the Marshall Plan was helping rebuild Western Europe, how many people were assigned to make up and present slideshows back then? As opposed to sorting out Displaced Persons and cleaning up the rubble?

5. Hearing that the M-16/M-4 system is still plagued by jams all these decades after the M-16 was originally plagued by jams, is just heartbreaking. Blaming jams on troops not cleaning them often enough is shameful. Another excuse I have heard is that America’s M-16’s and M-4’s jam because they’re more precisely made (tighter tolerances), in accordance with our philosophy of minimizing colateral damage. The H&K 416 seems to debunk that excuse, I can’t imagine either H&K making a low-accuracy gun, nor SOCOM accepting one. So we don’t field high-jam-rate M-4’s in the name of accuracy. One canard put to rest, anyway.

So now they’re back to blaming dirt, and blaming America’s highly professional troops who follow the ROE even under the worst circumstances, but who, according to the Generals, are just too darned lazy to clean their guns as often as they’re told to. Are they KIDDING? Who would believe that? And are we to believe that in wars America fought prior to the introduction of the M-16, there wasn’t dirt, dust, sand, and/or mud present in large quantities on the battlefield? Apparently a transformation second only to the Fall from Grace occurred when the M-16 was fielded, suddenly battlefields became dirty places. What a coincidence! All this is just another shameful refusal to admit the obvious, and buy and field a better gun for the troops. No disrespect for Mr. Stoner, but come on, enough is enough. The original design, if I recall, was to be a lightweight survival rifle for aircrews, not a main battle rifle, the M-16 became that more by expedience than true suitability. (Go ahead and flame me, I am far from an expert in this area, and I know the M-16 family has its fans. People come to love a weapon that they have trusted their lives to, even if it has obvious flaws when viewed objectively. It’s probably a basic psychological instinct, like loving your family members despite their flaws.) But come on, sentiment aside, it’s a machine, it’s supposed to work right in the expected environment and conditions.

I do understand the advantages of the varmint-class .223, or 5.56, whatever; a veteran of WWII of my acquaintance told me he definitely preferred the M-1 Carbine over the M-1, due to being able to carry more rounds of ammunition for the same weight, in addition to the gun itself being lighter. That experimental gun mentioned in the article, that weighted 18 pounds due to having some kind of 1000-yard grenade launcher built in, makes me think we have the wrong guys working on this problem. Likewise, the nonsense that we would have to change out all one million rifles in the inventory at the same time. Of course you’d want to change over entire units at one go, possibly up to Brigade level. But that’s closer to maybe 4000 or fewer, rather than a million, at a time. And it’s not like the US has never fielded multiple types of infantry rifles at the same time. Even more, it’s not like the H&K 416 (or Colt re-design using similar piston system) uses a new caliber of ammunition (I understand why that would be a much bigger deal).

I recall reading somewhere that during the Indian Wars, the Native Americans frequently had better rifles than the US troops, repeaters even, because the Indians would buy what they could get on the market, and the Federal troops were issued relics from the Civil War. Maybe we could have some staff officer make up a powerpoint slide set on “Lessons Learned from the Indian Wars” to get the ball rolling. Nothing happens without a good slide set to help make the case. Nobody will believe the troops, but put something on a slide, suddenly it has credibility.

Joking aside, to not even have a competition at this point, just seems like an error due to pridefulness or something related; we can’t admit we need a new rifle, because that would validate the criticism the old one has gotten for the past 40 years. With that attitude, the Pentagon will still be buying M-16/M-4 family guns a hundred years from now. It’ll never be the right time to admit they really do jam. This is an occasion that demands actual leadership. Not the kind of “leadership” that gives weasely, legalistic answers to questions when they darn well know the right answer and it’s pretty simple. But I’m back to where I started.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/23/AR2007022302049_pf.html

Begin quote:

In Diyala, the vast province northeast of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shiites are battling for primacy with mortars and nighttime abductions, the U.S. government has contracted the job of promoting democracy to a Pakistani citizen who has never lived or worked in a democracy.

The management of reconstruction projects in the province has been assigned to a Border Patrol commander with no reconstruction experience. The task of communicating with the embassy in Baghdad has been handed off to a man with no background in drafting diplomatic cables. The post of agriculture adviser has gone unfilled because the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided just one of the six farming experts the State Department asked for a year ago.

“The people our government has sent to Iraq are all dedicated, well-meaning people, but are they really the right people – the best people – for the job?� asked Kiki Skagen Munshi, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who, until last month, headed the team in Diyala that included the Pakistani democracy educator and the Border Patrol commander. “If you can’t get experts, it’s really hard to do an expert job.�

Almost four years after the United States set about trying to rebuild Iraq, the job remains overwhelmingly unfinished. The provincial reconstruction teams like those in Diyala are often understaffed and underqualified – and almost unable to work outside the military outposts where they are hunkered down for security reasons. Today, there are just 10 of the 30-person teams operating in all of Iraq.

That has got to be the funniest thing I’ve heard all day long. You embarrass yourself, Koyuavci.