There is an uppity shopping mall in my city where all the rich people go to let the valet park their car for them and then hang out to show each other how pretentious they are.  When we drive up to this mall (an infrequent occurrence to do brief business given the nature of this mall), the girly-girls see our Marine Corps stickers and paraphernalia, they whisper to their girly-man husbands (surely saying something like, “Eewww honey, make the bad people go away - they scare me”), and then they all cast cold stares our direction.  My oldest son and I have a plan to deal with these people.  We plan to put more Marine Corps stickers on our loud truck, back it up to the mall and rev the engine, blow exhaust into the crowd, play the Marine Corps hymn over loud speakers, and blow our train air horn until all of the “good” people have been scared away.

In response to the Marine Corps being barred from filming a new commercial in San Francisco, I am drafting an amphibious assault plan to reoccupy the Socialist Republic of San Francisco for the United States.  In yet another goofy display of self hatred, the Oakland airport is guilty of poor treatment of Marines.  Michelle Malkin and Michael Ledeen give us the story.

In short: “On September 27th 204 Marines and soldiers who were returning from Iraq were not allowed into the passenger terminal at Oakland International Airport.Instead they had to deplane about 400 yards away from the terminal where the extra baggage trailers were located. This was the last scheduled stop for fuel and food prior to flying to Hawaii where both were based. The trip started in Kuwait on September 26th with a rigorous search of checked and carry on baggage by US Customs. All baggage was x-rayed with a ‘backscatter’ machine AND each bag was completely emptied and hand searched. After being searched, checked bags were marked and immediately placed in a secure container. Carry on bags were then x rayed again to ensure no contraband items were taken on the plane. While waiting for the bus to the airport, all personnel were in quarantined in a fenced area and were not allowed to leave.� Nevertheless, Oakland forbade them from entering its terminal. According to the Marine, a Lieutenant who served in Afghanistan with the same unit in 2006 noted that Oakland had treated troops the same way before. He “was almost arrested by the TSA for getting belligerent about them not letting the Marines into the terminal,� despite more rigorous screening prior to landing in Oakland. Both JFK airport and in Germany had no problem with the Marines entering their terminals.

The solution to this problem certainly lies with the Marine artillery.  Camp Pendleton Marines could be in Oakland in about 8 hours.  Actually, I don’t want to be bad press for the Marines, so I am calling off the artillery.  But the plans for an amphibious assault on San Francisco and the truck deal at the uppity mall are a go.

Marines are us.  They are sons of America, produced by us, nurtured by us, and loved by us, and they now protect our very lives with theirs.  Most of America knows this.  When we reoccupy San Francisco and retrain them according to my plans, they will understand too.

Mattis has been confirmed.

The U.S. Senate confirmed the next commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in a vote here today.

Marine Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who currently serves as commanding general of the I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., and commander of U.S. Marine Forces Central Command, will replace Air Force Gen. Lance Smith, who announced his retirement earlier this summer after a career of 38 years

As USJFCOM’s commander, Mattis will pin on his fourth star and will be responsible for maximizing future and present military capabilities of the United States by leading the transformation of joint forces through enhanced joint concept development and experimentation, identifying joint requirements, advancing interoperability, conducting joint training and providing ready U.S. forces and capabilities - all in support of U.S. combatant commanders around the world. He will exercise combatant command of approximately 1.16 million personnel through his Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps service components.

NATO has also agreed to appoint Mattis as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander-Transformation.

I have been watching USJFCOM from afar for a while, wondering about the value added that their existence brings.  Not denying, just wondering.  With Mattis in responsible charge, I will not wonder any longer.  They could not do any better than to get Mattis.

In the Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Gian P. Gentile published an article entitled Eating Soup with a Spoon.  The entire article is highly recommended reading, but the quotes below fairly well capture the mood as Gentile responds to current counterinsurgency doctrine published in FM 3-24.  He argues that the revised doctrine:

… removed a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency warfare that I had experienced throughout my year as a tactical battalion commander in Iraq: fighting. And by removing the fundamental reality of fighting from counterinsurgency warfare, the manual removes the problem of maintaining initiative, morale and offensive spirit among combat soldiers who will operate in a place such as Iraq … maybe we should stop, in a metaphorical sense, trying to eat soup with a knife in Iraq and instead go back to the basics and try eating it with a spoon. War is not clean and precise; it is blunt and violent and dirty because, at its essence, it is fighting, and fighting causes misery and death. The authors of the Army’s 1986 AirLand Battle doctrine premised their manual on fighting as the essence of war. Fighting gave the 1986 manual a coherence that reflected the true nature of war. The Army’s new COIN manual’s tragic flaw is that the essence of war fighting is missing from its pages.

I cannot possibly hope to recapitulate the breadth or depth of discussion in the thread at the Small Wars Council, but would hasten to point out several things concerning the discussion now that the subject has become a little more ripe and the argument is slowing.  First, I agree wholeheartedly with Gentile’s rebuke of the notion that counterinsurgency is “armed social science.”  Second, concerning Dr. Metz’s statement that “we treat counterinsurgency as a variant of war not because that is the most strategically effective approach, but because we have been unable to transcend Cold War thinking,” I respond that counterinsurgency has been a variant of war since at least the Roman empire (which faced a Jewish insurgency in Jerusalem), or even before.  In recent history, all one needs for proof of principle is the Small Wars Manual, published in 1940, well before the cold war.

Every successful counterinsurgency operation in the Anbar Province has at least begun with heavy kinetic operations.  Examples of kinetic and security operations preceeding reconstruction and rebuilding could be cataloged for weeks, but in the interest of brevity, only three will be given.

1. When asked by Michael Totten what the battles in Ramadi were like near the first of the year, Lt. Col. Mike Silverman stated that “It would only be a mild exaggeration if I compared it to the battle of Stalingrad. We engaged in kinetic firefights that lasted for hours. Every single day they attacked us with AK-47s, sniper rifles, RPGs, IEDs, and car bombs … I expected a huge kinetic fight, and that’s what we got.”
2. Before Operation Alljah could fully engage Fallujah, approximately two months of kinetic operations producing many dead and detained insurgents was necessary in the outlying areas.  Only after robust kinetic operations were completed could gated communities and biometrics be implemented.
3. RCT-6 is still actively attempting to rid Karmah of insurgents with kinetic operations, tie communications and relations back to Fallujah, and from Fallujah to Ramadi.  “Capt. Quintin D. Jones, the commanding officer of Company L, said ’We are transitioning away from the kinetic fight and trying to help the local governance.  On one end I’m fighting, and on the other end I’m disputing between tribal leaders. The other part (is) trying to stimulate the economy. So, it’s a three-block war here and it’s very, very dynamic’.”  The tribal leaders in Karmah say that the Marines are the “glue holding things together,” and they are hoping that the ”Marines will stick around until all the bad guys are captured.”

The Small Wars Manual has no such weakness (i.e., failing to consider warfare as part of war).  There are so many references to infantry patrols, cash disbursements for intelligence gathering, distributed operations (independent patrols operating without communication with command), census information and knowledge of prominent citizens that they are too numerous to list.  To have discussed distributed operations (although not called that by name) so early in doctrinal development of small wars is remarkable indeed!

While dated (discussing the use of mules for transporting materiel), the Small Wars Manual proves itself to be perhaps more contemporary than the currently in vogue counterinsurgency doctrine, because after all, conducting war still means invoking warfare.  Lt. Col. Gentile knows this; is he trying to bring the professional counterinsurgency community back from the brink of complete irrelevance with Marines and Soldiers who are fighting in their own battle space by moderating the influence of the “armed social scientists?”

There is yet another discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal that convinces me that I must try one more time to explain the involvement that coalition forces should have with culture and religion in a counterinsurgency campaign.  Much confusion swirls around this issue because, in part, people reflexively respond (a) by assuming that you are calling for a holy war, or (b) assuming that your mindset is one of a social scientist hunting for another lever to pull or button to push to cause certain reactions.  The former category reacts to my modest proposal by denying that religion should have any role in how one man relates to another, with the later category honestly attempting to engage the issue, but as counterinsurgency professionals using ideas such as center of gravity and societal power structure.  Neither camp really gets it yet.  So let’s use two simple examples that might show how religion and cultural understanding might aid the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq.  These examples are not meant to be sweeping or comprehensive, nor am I constructing doctrine in a short, simple little article.  I am attempting to make this simple rather than complex.

In the first example, I will imagine that I am a chaplain in Iraq serving U.S. troops.  I will endeavor to ensure that the spiritual and life issues of the men under my responsible charge are squared away, but along with this, I approach my Commanding Officer and ask to arrange a meeting between the local Imam and me.  The meeting is arranged, and begins with me thanking the Imam for meeting with me, and telling them that even though I am Christian, I am very impressed by the ’smartness’ of the Kalam cosmological argument, and that the Islamic scholars who teach this have reason to be proud.  We share food and talk about family, and then I request that he teach me something of his faith.  The reason, I share with him, is that I want to ensure that the men who represent the United States act with honor.  There will be many cultural and religious things of which they are unaware, and families, the man of the house, and women might take offense to actions behind which there was no intention of causing such a reaction.  He can tell me things that he would not say to the Commanding Officer, I tell him, and he can trust me with confidentiality.  I will work with the CO or simply with the men, but work I will, very hard, to ensure that no offensive action is taken that would violate the religious sensibilities of his people.  I know that this can work, since a national religious conference has already occurred, put on by the Department of Defense at the request of Muslim clerics who approached our Chaplains as fellow holy men.  I am but a single Chaplain, but I believe that I can take the intent behind the national conference and apply it at a local level.  Finally, I end my meeting with the Imam by requesting a series of meetings so that I can learn his faith and work with him and his people to ease their suffering to the extent that I am capable.

In the next example, it is the year 2004 and Sadr is in the custody of U.S. Marines (the Marines of 3/2).  I know that there is a large group of Shi’a who are moderate, and in fact, many Sunni look upon them as uncommitted Muslims.  I also know that many see the Sunni as hardened Muslims who follow the Salafist or Wahhabist jihadist traditions.  But as a religious man who has his attenna up with these things, I know that these generalized views can lead to very wrong conclusions.  I know that the Sunnis of Western Iraq are much more secular than the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, and want none of the radicalism of the hard line schools.  Recently slain Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha was a chain smoker whose hands would have eventually been cut off by the jihadists to stop him from his smoking.

On the other hand, I know that Sistani has not yet met with coalition forces or representatives of coalition forces because we are the “great Satan.”  Likewise, Sadr is a believer in a form of radical Shi’ism that comes from the Mullahs in Iran, and can be trusted only to subvert a stable Iraq that allies with the West against religious extremism.  I manage to convince coalition authorities not to release Sadr.  In this example I manage to use my knowledge of religion to diagnose which sect can be trusted and which cannot.

Such can be the results of a religious understanding between coalition forces and the people of Iraq.  This understanding can be there if it is not contrived or forced, as some sort of tool of counterinsurgency appealing to societal power structures or centers of gravity in order to persuade the Iraqis to do something or be a certain way for us.  I am in favor of honest and open dialogue in military matters concerning the enemy, and likewise in matters religious and cultural.

Chaplain (CPT) William Johnson, the 1-8 Combined Arms Battalion chaplain, gives candy to Iraqi children on the streets of Balad.

See also Chaplains as Liaisons with Religious Leaders: Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Osprey V-22 flies off the coast of North Carolina

On September 20, 2007, in V-22 Osprey Deploys, I linked a Marine Corps Times article on the Osprey deploying.  Actually, much earlier, on one of my many trips to Jacksonville, N.C. and Camp Lejeune, I had considered contacting the Osprey program manager for an article on the (at that time) soon-to-be-deployed aircraft, and perhaps catch a ride on one of them.  I regret not having taken advantage of the proximity to this aircraft to get a ride in one, but perhaps I would not have been allowed to anyway.

Around the time that I published this little article, W. Thomas Smith, Jr.,  published on the Osprey at The Tank, and then it took literally days for main stream media outlets to pick up on the story.  It is with some humor that I read the subsequent reports.  Thomas Smith and I published on this well before any other outlets.  Milblogs beat them to the punch.

Time has an article entitled V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame that slams the V-22.

Now the aircraft that flies like an airplane but takes off and lands like a chopper is about to make its combat debut in Iraq. It has been a long, strange trip: the V‑22 has been 25 years in development, more than twice as long as the Apollo program that put men on the moon. V‑22 crashes have claimed the lives of 30 men — 10 times the lunar program’s toll — all before the plane has seen combat. The Pentagon has put $20 billion into the Osprey and expects to spend an additional $35 billion before the program is finished. In exchange, the Marines, Navy and Air Force will get 458 aircraft, averaging $119 million per copy.

The saga of the V-22 — the battles over its future on Capitol Hill, a performance record that is spotty at best, a long determined quest by the Marines to get what they wanted — demonstrates how Washington works (or, rather, doesn’t). It exposes the compromises that are made when narrow interests collide with common sense. It is a tale that shows how the system fails at its most significant task, by placing in jeopardy those we count on to protect us. For even at a stratospheric price, the V-22 is going into combat shorthanded. As a result of decisions the Marine Corps made over the past decade, the aircraft lacks a heavy-duty, forward-mounted machine gun to lay down suppressing fire against forces that will surely try to shoot it down. And if the plane’s two engines are disabled by enemy fire or mechanical trouble while it’s hovering, the V‑22 lacks a helicopter’s ability to coast roughly to the ground — something that often saved lives in Vietnam. In 2002 the Marines abandoned the requirement that the planes be capable of autorotating (as the maneuver is called), with unpowered but spinning helicopter blades slowly letting the aircraft land safely. That decision, a top Pentagon aviation consultant wrote in a confidential 2003 report obtained by Time, is “unconscionable” for a wartime aircraft. “When everything goes wrong, as it often does in a combat environment,” he said, “autorotation is all a helicopter pilot has to save his and his passengers’ lives.”

There is much more at the link above.  The trouble with this article, though, is that it is old news.  It simply rehashes known and tired information to make a new opinion piece.  The better approach would have been to plan a true investigative article by following the V-22 to the Anbar province, board the aircraft along with the Marines, and write stories from Iraq about its failure or success.  I would do it (i.e., go to Iraq and get the story).  As I said in my first article, the proof of the aircraft will be in its deployment.  Advocates and critics alike should wait for the data.  It will succeed or fail, and no article can change the field data.

I am ambivalent at this moment.  I love the A-10.  I believe that helicopters are dangerous and always have been, lumbering through the battle space while vulnerable to fire (it isn’t by accident that the helicopter in Vietnam was called a “flying coffin”).  The Osprey has its advantages (speed, altitude) and its disadvantages (it needs a secure landing zone, which means that helicopters will probably not go away in the near future).

The fact that the Osprey program was problematic and expensive is old news.  Predictions of failure in deployment are premature.  The goal should be to avoid sensationalism and get the real story.