Dean Weingarten has a good find at Ammoland.
Judge Eduardo Ramos, the U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, has issued an Opinion & Order that a ban on stun guns is constitutional. A New York State law prohibits the private possession of stun guns and tasers; a New York City law prohibits the possession and selling of stun guns. Judge Ramos has ruled these laws do not infringe on rights protected by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Let's briefly…… [read more]
There are still lessons to be learned from the Battles of Wanat and Kamdesh in the Kunar and Nuristan Provinces of Afghanistan, respectively.
The Executive Summary of the AR 15-6 Investigation into the complex attack at COP Keating has been released. It begins:
On 3 October 2009, Soldiers of Bravo Troop, 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry, repelled an enemy force of 300 Anti-Afghan Forces (AAF) fighters, preserving their combat outpost and killing approximately 150 of the enemy fighters. US forces sustained eight killed in action and 22 wounded, all but three of whom returned to duty after the attack. The Soldiers distinguished themselves with conspicuous gallantry, courage, and bravery under the heavy enemy fire that surrounded them.
Combat Outpost (COP) Keating, originally established as a base for a Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2006, was located deep in a bowl in Nuristan Province, surrounded by high ground, with limited overwatch protection from nearby Observation Post (OP) Fritsche. The mission for COP Keating during the rotation of B Troop was unclear to the Soldiers of B Troop who understood counterinsurgency doctrine and the need to engage with and protect the local population. But owing to limited manpower and tactical reach off of the compound, the mission devolved into one of base defense and by mid-2009 there was no tactical or strategic value to holding the ground occupied by COP Keating. As a result, the chain of command decided to close the remote outpost as soon as it could. (bold added)
But while this summary hints at population-centric procedures, COP Keating was intended to patrol and oversee a stretch of Pakistani border to interdict the flow of insurgents coming into Afghanistan. By any account, being located on a transit route for insurgents brings legitimacy to the outpost. A command decision was made, however, to close the COP due to lack of proper manpower. This delay caused additional problems.
The delayed closing of COP Keating is important as it contributed to a mindset of imminent closure that served to impede improvements in force protection on the COP. There were inadequate measures taken by the chain of command, resulting in an attractive target for enemy fighters. Over time, and without raising undue concern within the US intelligence system, the enemy conducted numerous probing attacks, learning the tactics, techniques and procedures of B Troop, and pinpointing location of weapons systems and key infrastructure and material, such as generators and barracks.
Compounding the situation for the Soldiers on COP Keating, intelligence assessments became desensitized to enemy actions over several months. During the five months of B Troop’s deployment to COP Keating, the enemy launched approximately 47 attacks – three times the rate of attacks experienced by their predecessors. On several occasions intelligence reports in advance of an attack indicated there was a large enemy force that would strike, but the attack that followed generally consisted of a few number of fighters who used indirect and small arms fire for an engagement that averaged five to ten minutes in duration. Owing to this experience with the enemy in vicinity of COP Keating, the perception prevailed that reports of massing enemy forces were exaggerated and improbable.
Approximately eight months ago (and approximately four months before the attack on COP Keating at Kamdesh) I outlined in detail six different battles in Afghanistan where the Taliban has massed between 100 and 400 fighters, or close to half a Battalion size force. There is absolutely no reason to have assumed that massing of enemy forces was improbable. In fact, there is never again a reason to assume that in any engagement in Afghanistan. As for the intelligence failures, John Brookins notes of previous testimony on Capital Hill about Kamdesh:
Gen. Burgess explained in testimony to the committee that the military had three intelligence reports on the issue, but that the reports were among many human-source reports that had not been verified by other means, such as electronic intelligence. As a result, the reporting was not deemed “actionable” intelligence, said defense officials familiar with the testimony. We don’t trust our human intelligence people to make a call. We rely way too much on sigint more than anything. If it’s not in a signal some don’t think it’s real. It’s as if someone can’t lie over the radio or phone.
Recalling our analysis of the Wanat engagement, intelligence failed the 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company by ignoring the signs of an imminent attack by massed Taliban forces. The Vehicle Patrol Base (COP) Kahler was located in low terrain, and worse still, the insufficient force protection at Observation Post Top Side took eight of the nine who perished that fateful night (including Soldiers who attempted relief of Top Side). The video below (from approximately 1:00 to approximately 2:00) shows the terrain and natural features of the location at Wanat.
Military Historian Douglas R. Cubbison has written an extensive and smart study of the Wanat engagement, and provides some useful insight into the circumstances surrounding the battle. But as smart as his study is, I diverged from his conclusions when he pointed towards the lack of nonkinetic engagement with the population as a significant contributor to the failure at Wanat. Rather, I see this counsel being implemented at a different phase of the campaign for Eastern Afghanistan, with the problems being more directly related to combat tactics. Marine officer and commenter Slab noted of my remarks concerning terrain:
The platoon in Wanat sacrificed control of the key terrain in the area in order to locate closer to the population. This was a significant risk, and I don’t see any indication that they attempted to sufficiently mitigate that risk. I can empathize a little bit – I was the first Marine on deck at Camp Blessing back when it was still Firebase Catamount, in late 2003. I took responsibility for the camp’s security from a platoon from the 10th Mountain Div, and established a perimeter defense around it. Looking back, I don’t think I adequately controlled the key terrain around the camp. The platoon that replaced me took some steps to correct that, and I think it played a significant role when they were attacked on March 22nd of 2004. COIN theorists love to say that the population is the key terrain, but I think Wanat shows that ignoring the existing natural terrain in favor of the population is a risky proposition, especially in Afghanistan.
COP Keating at Kamdesh suffered from the same sort of force protection and terrain problems. The best video I have found of COP Keating has been removed, but another useful one can be seen below (the video is obviously being taken from Observation Post Fritsche.
This is an issue for all such Combat Outposts in this part of Afghanistan.
The military does not release figures on disciplinary actions taken against field commanders. But officials familiar with recent investigations said letters of reprimand or other disciplinary action have been recommended for officers involved in three ambushes in which U.S. troops battled Taliban forces in remote villages in 2008 and 2009. Such administrative actions can scuttle chances for promotion and end a career if they are made part of an officer’s permanent personnel file.
The investigations are a departure for the U.S. military, which until recently has been reluctant to second-guess commanders whose decisions might have played a role in the deaths of soldiers in enemy action. Disciplinary action has been more common in cases in which U.S. troops have injured or killed civilians.
In response to the recent reprimands, some military officials have argued that casualties are inevitable in war and that a culture of excessive investigations could make officers risk-averse.
“This is a war where the other side is trying, too,” said one Army officer who commanded troops in Afghanistan and requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
As many as five battlefield commanders have received letters of reprimand in the past month or have been the subject of an investigation by a general who recommended disciplinary action. A sixth commander received a less-severe formal letter of admonishment. None of the investigations or letters of reprimand has been released publicly.
Regarding COP Keating, leaving Soldiers garrisoned at an ill-defended outpost that (contrary to claims, did serve a purpose) is intended to be abandoned is a huge error in judgment and points to inept logistics and planning. Regarding COP Kahler, poor terrain, poor force protection, poor intelligence and a delay of almost 12 months (allowing the Taliban to do their own intelligence work and mass forces) again points to horrible errors in judgment. But the idea of using smaller, less defended Combat Outposts to put Soldiers and Marines more in touch with the population comes from counterinsurgency doctrine, and it is here that the failure is occurring.
When a particular location has not been subjected to intensive kinetics to place the insurgents on the defensive and reduce their influence and power, it is naive to plan population-centric tactics and procedures. We are attempting to employ the later phases of the campaign in earlier phases (contrary to the claims of the certainly still grieving David Brostrom, father of 1st Lt. Jonathan Brostrom). Counterinsurgency is being practiced absent a conventional mindset, leading to poor force protection. We can wish for the utmost in contact with the population. But winning hearts and minds won’t work unless and until the insurgents’ control over their hearts and minds is challenged with kinetics. The enemy is certainly telling us that when they can mass forces of nearly half a Battalion against platoon size U.S. forces. The population has no reason to side with the U.S. when the Taliban are stronger.
Four important lessons can be learned from the deadly engagements at Wanat and Kamdesh. First, terrain is of critical importance to far flung Forward Operating Bases and Combat Outposts in the rugged, mountainous regions of Afghanistan (or anywhere else there is undulating terrain). Second, the Taliban have shown the propensity and capability to mass troops to near half a Battalion size force. The proper force protection must be planned and implemented to prepare for such engagements. Third, as a corollary to the second, FOBs and COPs must be properly manned with U.S. combat forces to accomplish the mission. Thus far, U.S. command has demonstrated a predilection to underestimate proper manning of smaller outposts. Fourth, our intelligence apparatus has shown a predilection to intransigence. The response time and sensitivity of our intelligence must improve or more lives will be lost due to inept analysis.
Every Marine infantryman and parent or spouse of a Marine infantryman knows the value of a Navy Corpsman and the high esteem in which they are held by the Marines. They are technically in the Navy (while the Marines are only part of the Department of the Navy). They have had extensive medical training, and essentially serve as the doctors for the Marine infantry. But these doctors aren’t just there for medicine. They carry a rifle, they engage in combat, and they do all of the things that Marine infantrymen do. When the Marines go on twenty mile humps with full body armor, backpacks and weapons, the Corpsmen do all of that and more. The Corpsmen take all of their medical gear in addition to their other load. In many units they carry the nickname “doc.”
One such Corpsman I know returned from Iraq with my son’s unit, 2/6 Golf Company, in 2007. His last name was Prince, and he was a prince of a guy. He was very kind and friendly, well trained, in excellent physical condition, and had absolute commitment to his fellow Marines. He showed me his wound from Iraq within several days of returning. A round from an AK-47 had entered through the front part of his lower thigh, ricocheted up his thigh, and exited out of the very upper part of the back of his thigh. Entry and exit wounds (now scars) were at least a foot apart.
Corpsman Prince stayed in Iraq and did his own rehabilitation during the deployment. The hardest thing about the experience, he told me, was getting enough pairs of clothing after each successive pair became blood stained. The more interesting thing about what happened that day with Corpsman Prince was what happened to his fellow Marines. He wasn’t the only one who was wounded in that engagement. Several other Marines were also wounded, and Prince had to treat them before he could treat himself. He did so while bleeding out.
Navy Corpsmen are worth their weight in gold, and even if the Commander in Chief isn’t smart enough to know how to pronounce their billet, we have the utmost respect for them.
In a rare break from traditional military secrecy, the U.S. and its allies are announcing the precise target of their first big offensive of the Afghanistan surge in an apparent bid to intimidate the Taliban.
Coalition officers have been hinting aloud for months that they plan to send an overwhelming Afghan, British and U.S. force to clear insurgents from the town of Marjah and surrounding areas in Helmand province, and this week the allies took the unusual step of issuing a press release saying the attack was “due to commence.”
Senior Afghan officials went so far as to hold a news conference Tuesday to discuss the offensive, although the allies have been careful not to publicize the specific date or details of the attack.
“If we went in there one night and all the insurgents were gone and we didn’t have to fire a shot, that would be a success,” a coalition spokesman, Col. Wayne Shanks, said before the announcement. “I don’t think there has been a mistake in letting people know we’re planning on coming in.”
The risks could be substantial, however. By surrendering the element of surprise, the coalition has given its enemy time to dig entrenched fighting positions and tunnel networks. Perhaps worse for the attacking infantrymen, the insurgents have had time to booby-trap buildings and bury bombs along paths, roads and irrigated fields. Such hidden devices inflict the majority of U.S. and allied casualties.
[ … ]
At times, the U.S. took a similar tack in Iraq, signaling in advance that the 2007 troop surge there would focus on Baghdad. Likewise, Pakistan’s military telegraphed its intention last year to attack insurgents in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.
“It is a fascinating tactical decision to advertise an assault openly before it commences,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Analysis & Commentary
Let’s not overdo the surprise and offer too many superlatives at announcing the Marja offensive. A similar strategy was taken for Operations al Fajr and Alljah, both in Fallujah. The U.S. Marines have a rich history of using intimidation as one of the many tools in their bag. My problem isn’t with announcing the offensive. It comes at a more basic level than that.
Taking a quick detour through another perspective, Joshua Foust weighs in with a nonplussed reaction.
… there is some logic to the focus on Kandahar. It isn’t the most important city evar (sic) (after all, the Taliban would have stopped there in 1994 if it were), but the city does have a lot of significance, if only because most Kandaharis are pissed off at our mismanagement of the place. So why do we have such a laser-focus on Helmand? Why spend all the time, resources, money, and most importantly lives to secure something no one in charge can describe as important apart from assertion? I fear the real answer is opium.
I have also spoken strongly against targeting the poppies. I cannot speak directly to whether the Marines are targeting poppy in Helmand at the moment, but my objections to the handling of the Marja offensive are much more basic and foundational. If there is no one in charge who can explain why we are in Helmand, let me do it (sigh) once again.
The argument to control the streets of Kandahar makes sense if that argument doesn’t also hinge upon removing the Marines from Helmand where the fighters recruit, train, raise their support, and get ingress to and egress from Afghanistan. In Now Zad Taliban fighters have been so unmolested that they have used that area for R&R. The city of Now Zad – with an erstwhile population of 30,000+ civilians – is deserted with only insurgents remaining to terrorize the area so that inhabitants don’t return. The Marines are so under-resourced that they can only fight the Taliban to a standstill. It is so dangerous in Now Zad that the Marines deployed there are the only ones to bring two trauma doctors with them.
It is a strange argument indeed that sends Marines to Kandahar while the insurgents in Now Zad have separated themselves off from civilians and invited a fight. So send more Marines to Kandahar to control the streets. The Taliban bullying will stop once a Regimental Combat Team arrives. This should not be too difficult to pull off. As I have said before, there are so many Marines at Camp Lejeune that some units are not even in the same barracks, and more barracks are being built. Not since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom has the Corps been so large with so many Marines garrisoned in the states. Furthermore, if they aren’t in the states they are on board amphibious assault docks doing nothing. Entire Battalions of Marine infantry – doing nothing for nine months.
The only limitation on troop levels in Afghanistan comes with logistics. But more to the point, we could put the entirety of every Army on earth in Kandahar for the next two years, and upon leaving, the Taliban who have slithered away into parts of Kandahar and Helmand would simply come back, intimidate their way to power once again, and create safe haven for globalists. Is this so heady and difficult that someone in charge cannot explain it as Foust charges?
I do not now and have never bought into the idea of population-centric counterinsurgency (when applied as an exclusive-use procedure). Intimidating the Taliban out of Marja (so that you can protect the population and create governance) will only displace them to somewhere else. Their fighters must be killed if we are ever to be able to leave Afghanistan. Playing whack-a-mole in Helmand (or Kandahar – or anywhere else) only prolongs the agony, for Afghanis and for us.
There is more logistical trouble with the supply lines through Pakistan (lines which supply approximately 85% – 90% of our needs in Afghanistan). The first report has to do with a bridge near Peshawar.
Suspected terrorists on Thursday blew up a bridge on a link road connecting Peshawar’s Badbher village to Khyber Agency’s Bara town, officials and locals said. A police official said the blast took place at around 1:30am. The bridge over the Frontier Road was blown up as police personnel travelled through the area, the official said, adding that the terrorists escaped the scene. He said that a search was being conducted to trace the perpetrators of the blast.
The second report pertains to a tanker attack near Peshawar.
Taliban blew up a tanker carrying oil supply to NATO forces in Afghanistan on the ring road in the Chamkani police precincts early on Monday, police said. Chamkani police officials told Daily Times that an Afghanistan-bound tanker carrying oil supply for NATO forces was attacked by armed men on Monday morning. They said the assailants fired at the tanker and destroyed it with a magnet bomb.
The third report is even more important for where it occurred – the port city of Karachi.
A NATO convoy came under assault Thursday while carrying supplies through Pakistan to Afghanistan in a rare ambush inside Karachi, the relatively secure port city from which 300 to 400 of the coalition’s trucks leave each day.
Any assault on the Pakistani supply route is worrisome to the US-led forces in Afghanistan, who use it to ship three-quarters of their materials and will need it even more as the surge of 30,000 US troops progresses.
But the attack in Karachi – which is the commercial capital of Pakistan, and has largely escaped the bomb attacks troubling other major cities and the northwest – raises particular concern, especially if it marks the beginning of a trend.
From the beginning to end of the supply lines, logistics is under attack. It still isn’t too late to do the right thing, and engage the Caucasus.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the military would follow the 1993 law known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Nonetheless, he said, his personal views were firm.
“Speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do,” Mullen said …
“No matter how I look at the issue,” he said, “I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” he said.
An impassioned plea, it was. Of course, this is technically incorrect. Don’t ask don’t tell (DADT) means that no one lies. You aren’t asked, and you don’t discuss it. I have been loath to weigh in on the issue as it has come to the forefront over the last couple of years, and I will do so only tangentially now (not weighing in on the merits or lack thereof in a particular lifestyle choice). I have many things for which I want to be an advocate, and many notions I wish to deconstruct (such as the unproven and unsubstantiated doctrine that softer ROE necessarily wins hearts and minds). Hot button social issues such as DADT can tend to cloud one’s judgment, making the reader dismissive to other arguments about very different and very important things. So I don’t want you to dismiss my views on other important things because we don’t see eye to eye on DADT.
But in the end, DADT has been a mainstay of operations for a while now, and revoking this policy might mean more than a little change to the military. It’s appropriate to convey the thoughts of at least a few contacts active in the military. My contacts – who by the way aren’t opposed in principle to the idea of gays serving alongside them – seem to pan the idea pretty much across the board.
DADT is the perfect policy, they say. It doesn’t prevent gays from serving in the military. That’s just a mythical talking point of those who advocate its revocation. DADT only prevents open discussion or practice of such things. It is, by the way, similar to the way heterosexual relations are treated as well. Men stay away from women altogether in uniform. It isn’t practiced, it isn’t discussed, it is frowned upon – in theory. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen, any more than DADT would imply that gay sexual relations don’t happen. It does mean that there are certain requirements in the military that comport with good discipline, and they are enforced to the extent possible. For a branch like the Marines which has as their cornerstone removing differences and enforcing sameness (or at least relegating them to unimportant status – e.g., no one can remove language barriers), it probably will have a significant affect.
Now for my own views. I thought about this position within the context of the only exception that I can think of, namely, marriage. Men and women are allowed to be married in the military. But marriage is not performed by the Marine Corps or Army. It is performed and recognized within and by states which have laws that govern such things. Imposing homosexual marriage on a branch of the service just to say that there is no exception to the way gays and heterosexuals are treated under DADT is a false dilemma. It is imposing a foreign problem on the military – a consideration that should be irrelevant to the conversation.
In a republic such as ours, laws are changed by legislative process which usually begins with advocacy. One group or another wants a law changed or enacted, and that group presses the issue. If gays want to marry, changing DADT isn’t the way to go. Changing laws is the way to go. No gay marriage (insofar as DADT applies) in the military (similar to no gay marriage in most states) is an output (or outcome) of the debate, not an input to it.
In summary, DADT is the perfect solution to the issue. There is to be no sexual relations with other service members, and no discussion of it. This is true regardless of orientation. DADT is a subset of that regulation, not an exception to it. It doesn’t prevent gays from serving in the military. Its revocation would serve no useful function, and therefore TCJ opposes its revocation unless someone can come up with something better than the false mantra that some service members must “lie about who they are.”
Are the rules of engagement making any difference? They are with the Marines in Helmand.
On a base near Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand province, Marines are grieving the deaths of a sergeant and corporal killed by the remote-controlled bombs that have become the scourge of the long-running conflict.
Commanders try to keep the men’s rage in check, aware that winning over an Afghan public wary of the foreign military presence and furious about civilian casualties is as important as battlefield success.
“It causes a lot of frustration. My men want revenge – that is only natural,” says First Lieutenant Aaron MacLean, 2nd Platoon commander of the 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment Charlie company.
“But I keep telling them that the rules are the rules for a reason. If we simply go crazy and start shooting at everything, in the long run we will lose this war because we will lose the support of the population.”
He too is frustrated, accusing the Taliban of manipulating the rules of engagement by using women and children as shields and shooting from hidden positions before dropping their weapons and standing out in the open.
To regular readers of The Captain’s Journal, this isn’t news. Recall that we said:
Based on recent communications with enlisted Marines (of various ranks), a perspective is developing around the current rules of engagement for Afghanistan. There is no such thing as air or artillery support any more. The ROE General McChrystal has set in place is killing Marines. Sure, there was the ROE in Iraq, but Marines were genuinely encouraged to think for themselves, assess the situation, and ascertain the best course of action independently. This is not being done in Afghanistan, where rules are micromanaging the tactical situation. Many Marines with combat experience in Iraq are leaving the Corps for various reasons, but at least one reason for the exit can be traced to a lack of willingness to deploy to Afghanistan under the current circumstances. Deploying Marines to Afghanistan are mostly inexperienced.
I stated that the ROE was causing a deleterious affect on morale in November 2009. So as for whether the ROE are having their desired affect and winning hearts and minds of the locals, there is this report.
NANGARHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — As his commander greeted a local leader in a district government building recently, Air Force Technical Sgt. Tyler Woodson, 20, scurried past them and ran up three flights of stairs to the roof.
There, Woodson, of Macon, Ga., surveyed the town. He saw children playing soccer in an adjacent field, trucks traveling on the main highway and, several hundred yards away, a glorious range of mountains.
He was looking for the best place to drop a bomb from an F-16, where there was no chance of striking anyone or anything.
“See over there,” he said, pointing. “It’s flat, so there’s no chance of debris falling on anyone.”
This is the new U.S. air campaign in much of Afghanistan.
Six months after Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S commander in Afghanistan, issued a directive urging troops to walk away from a fight rather than risk killing civilians, the Air Force is engaging in a campaign of restraint.
Instead of airstrikes, airmen increasingly are searching for places they can drop bombs that can be heard and felt, but where they’re unlikely to damage buildings or hurt people.
It isn’t a universal effort. In Afghanistan’s Khost and Helmand provinces, Afghanistan’s most violent, U.S. jets more frequently drop bombs that are intended to maim and kill.
In less-conflicted areas such as Nangarhar, however, soldiers are increasingly seeking tactics other than air attacks to get them out of hairy situations. Among the alternative uses of air power: buzzing enemy positions in a show of force and shooting flares or dropping warning bombs instead of directly engaging the enemy.
Privately, ground troops see that the restraint is putting them in greater danger, and they aren’t seeing results.
Afghans seem no more willing to provide information to U.S. forces, the troops say, despite U.S. efforts to minimize civilian casualties, even in a province such as Nangarhar, where education levels are relatively high.
Dropping bombs on unoccupied terrain to make loud noises, walking away from fire fights. But the population is no more willing to help than before. Remember that we have discussed the unintended consequences of less robust ROE, and even recently in the context of events in Garmsir, Afghanistan.
… the Taliban feel utterly protected by being amidst the population. While it may be backed with all of the nice intentions mankind can muster, the unintended consequences of less robust rules of engagement are that more noncombatants die. Many, if not most, of these townsfolk would never have been there if they had believed that they were in mortal danger, and the Taliban wouldn’t have been there to instigate the event(s) if we were giving chase to them and they were running for their lives.
When townsfolk can pelt the Marines with rocks and Taliban fighters can run amok in the crowds, U.S. forces are not respected. It’s an ominous sign – that the most feared fighting force on earth, the 911 forces of America, the most deadly, rapid and mobile strike forces of any nation anywhere, can be pelted with rocks and hit with sticks without any fear whatsoever. This isn’t likely to ensure belief by the population that they will be “protected” by our forces.
In order to believe that the ROE is beneficial, one must believe that the higher casualties suffered now will redound to less in the future. But this is unproven doctrine, with the ROE is Iraq more robust than it has been thus far in Afghanistan.
Loss of troop morale and no resultant benefit with the population. You heard it here before you saw it in the battle space.
Glenn Reynolds links Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, who infers that a crisis has been averted in Iraq.
I wrote here about the disturbing prospect that the disqualification of hundreds of Sunni candidates in the unpcoming Iraqi elections would degrade those elections and perhaps prompt a surge of sectarian violence. But now, as Max Boot reports based on statements by General Petraeus, it appears that, not for the first time, Iraqi politicians have averted the crisis through a compromise. According to Petraeus, the disqualfication list is no longer weighted against the Sunnis. (There are no doubt many Iraqi figures who richly deserve to be disqualified).
But the Fadhil brothers who write for Iraq the Model are as good of Iraq political analysts as can be found anywhere. Mohammed writes:
Feeling the need to provide an explanation, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki asserted that the decision to ban 500 candidates from general elections is not targeting Sunni Arabs. He said that Sunni Arabs are more than necessary as partners in the political process and that their participation in the March elections is even more important than it was in 2005.
Maliki told al-Iraqia TV on Tuesday night that although the list of banned candidates includes many Sunni names, it also includes Shiites, perhaps in greater numbers, according to Maliki. He also pointed out that 70% of the Ba’ath Party members were Shiite.
Maliki might be right in saying that more Shiites were banned than Sunnis. However, it is obvious now that, unlike with Sunni candidates, none of the banned Shiite candidates is a prominent political figure. In fact, the media so far has not mentioned the names of any of those disqualified Shiite candidates. I suspect that even of the names are made public no one would recognize them nor would I expect their disqualification affect their blocs in any significant manner.
The other important and suspicious point about the ban is that the banned politicians have been part of the political process for several years. This and the timing raise suspicion about the intentions of the Maliki government and the “justice and accountability commission.” While major existing partners in the political process are banned over alleged ties to the Ba’ath Party, the government is at the same time making deals with hostage killers like the group known as Asaib Ahl Al-Haq and is trying to persuade them to join the political process.
In light of these facts and suspicions, the ban is perceived by some in Iraq as a systematic targeting of the Sunni political class. Others think the target is nationalist non-sectarian blocs. I agree more with the latter in that the targets are actually blocs that identify themselves as nationalist/anti-sectarian.
This is yet another example of the limits of the power of nation-building and alignment with corrupt politicians who have their own power as their first priority. My opposition to Maliki is well known, and although Iraq is not falling apart, it is still suffering from the same sectarian struggles with which it began.
Support of sectarian leaders in positions of national power is a path fraught with many problems. This is a lesson that should not be learned again the hard way in Afghanistan in our haste to build a nation-state suitable for our departure.
We previously noted that Obama campaign rhetoric on nuclear weapons relied on ending the global threat via negotiations rather than refurbishment and development. In a reversal of that rhetoric, the administration is targeting nuclear refurbishment with new dollars.
President Obama is planning to increase spending on America’s nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them.
In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal – £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year.
The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security.
The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.
The Nobel committee was attacked at the time for bestowing the accolade on a new president whose initiatives are yet to bear fruit – which included reducing the world stock of nuclear arms.
The budget is higher than that allocated by George Bush – who was seen by many as a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003 – during his premiership.
During his 70-minute State of the UNion speech on Wednesday, which marked his first year in office, Obama said: ‘I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them.’
This represents an important reversal of position regarding the nuclear weapons stockpile. His supporters (who don’t realize – or admit – the half century of deterrence and peace that nuclear weapons have afforded) must surely feel betrayed, but before heaping scorn on him from the left or accolades from the right, it’s best to recall the state of nuclear weapons in the U.S.
… quite unlike the United States, Russia maintains a fully functional nuclear weapons design, development, test and manufacturing infrastructure capable of producing significant quantities of nuclear warheads per year. For a variety of reasons, Russia has explicitly placed increased emphasis on nuclear weapons in its national security policy and military doctrine, and has re-incorporated theater nuclear options into its military planning …
… the current path for sustaining the warhead stockpile—successive refurbishments of existing Cold War warheads designed with small margins of error—may be unsustainable in the future. Specifically, the directors of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories have expressed concern about the ability to ensure confidence in the reliability of the legacy stockpile over the long term, without nuclear testing.
Successive efforts at extending the service life of the current inventory of warheads will drive the warhead configurations further away from the original design baseline that was validated using underground nuclear test data. Repeated refurbishments will accrue technical changes that, over time, might inadvertently undermine reliability and performance. The skills, materials, processes, and technologies needed to refurbish and maintain these older warhead designs are also increasingly difficult to sustain or acquire. Some of the materials employed in these older warheads are extremely hazardous. Moreover, it is difficult to incorporate modern safety and security features into Cold War era weapon designs.
As a consequence, the stockpile stewardship program is expanding its range of component and material testing and analysis, and is likely to identify more areas of concern. However, without nuclear testing, at some time in the future the United States may be unable to confirm the effect of the accumulation of changes to tested warhead configurations. As the United States continues to observe a moratorium on underground nuclear testing, certification of the safety, surety, and reliability of the existing stockpile of weapons (with their narrow performance margins) will become increasingly difficult. In the near-term, the United States has no choice but to continue to extend the life of these legacy warheads.
However, the Departments of Defense and Energy are pursuing an alternative to this strategy of indefinite life extension; namely, the gradual replacement of existing warheads with warheads of comparable capability that are less sensitive to manufacturing tolerances or to aging of materials. The generic concept is often referred to as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). The RRW concept promises other attractive benefits such as improved safety and security, production processes that are less complex, elimination of many hazardous materials in existing warheads, and production of less hazardous waste. The directors of the nuclear weapons laboratories believe that modern scientific tools developed for the stockpile stewardship program, including advanced computer modeling and experimental facilities, will enable design and certification of the RRW without nuclear testing.
In addition to the technological problems associated with maintenance of older nuclear weapons, the Air Force and Navy have both treated nuclear weapons billets as second class occupations, and have allowed the doctrinal understanding (and availability of the fraction of nuclear weapons that are deployable) to atrophy over the last couple of decades.
Obama has spent approximately what Bush did on nuclear weapons refurbishment. In order to ensure a viable nuclear deterrent into the 21st century, much more needs to be done. The U.S. must restart the manufacture and design of a new generation of nuclear weapons. Without this, the RRW program cannot go forward. That will be the test of Obama’s vision and fortitude. This allocation of money is just kicking the can down the road. The left will want to heap scorn upon him, the right will want to praise him for his wise decision. He deserves neither.
We have discussed before the notion of the Pakistani pathological preoccupation with India, coupled at least in part with its negligence to see the existential threat to its own state by the Taliban. But every once in a while a report comes along that almost needs no other data, commentary or elucidation in order to demonstrate the point. The Sri Lanka Guardian has such a report.
Waziristan is a rugged mountainous area in the remote part of Pakistan. Its inhabitants, tribal people, have been devout Muslims. Over the years they learnt to blend their centuries old tribal traditions with Islamic teachings and thus their life was shaped both by Islam and tribal traditions.
As fiercely independent people they maintained their own legal system based on tribal traditions for centuries and the Pakistani laws do not apply there. However their loyalty to Pakistan remain unquestioned .Under such circumstances the question is how come these peace loving people suddenly became radicals and militants to fight their own country’s armed forces killing their own Muslim brothers and sisters.
The answer lies in the shocking discovery by the Pakistani armed forces of sophisticated weapons, besides large amount of foreign currencies, from United States, NATO, Israel and India following recent military operations to flush out what the West describe as Pakistani Talebans. However the most startling discovery was the presence of uncircumcised, non Muslim, Talebans among those killed raising eye brows though everyone knows who they are and what they were doing in South Waziristan.
An Islamabad datelined report by Akhtar Jamal on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 disclosed that hundreds of militants from Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other associated groups are equipped with most sophisticated American, Indian and German weapons.
The weapons in their possession included U.S. made M249 automatic machine guns, and Glock pistols, Indian hand guns, FN Browning GP35 9mmx19mm, Indian automatic machine pistols GLOCK 17 9mmx19mm, Indian machine guns Heckler & Koch MP5A3 9mmx19mm, Indian made Sterling L2A1 sub machine guns, Israeli licensed Indian made UZI 9mmx19mm sub machine guns and German Walther-P1 pistols.
Pakistanis in general believe that the “Americans are not interested in Pakistan or its people despite their so called generous aid packages. The American strategy in Pakistan is to put Pakistani government against Pakistanis, provoke civil war and plunge the country into chaos to neutralize its nuclear arsenal that has been US neoconservatives’ urgent priority”.
Under the circumstance Pakistanis consider America to be the greatest threat, worse than the arch rival India, to their sovereignty and independence .They are aware that already a map showing a truncated Pakistan has been in circulation and the ever growing collaborations among India, Afghanistan US, Europe and Israel …
Recently, in the officer’s mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani Army is tied down fighting the militants, one officer told a visiting journalist that” Osama bin Laden does not exist”. It was something extremely exaggerated by Anglo American war mongers to justify their conspiracies to destabilize Muslim countries and loot their wealth. This is the reason why Pakistanis suspect that the wave of disappearances, torture and death squad assassinations in Pakistan are also “made in the US”.
Meanwhile American mercenaries were accused of bombing and killing innocent Pakistanis in their drive to put the Pakistani armed forces and the people of South Waziristan against each other in their design to do what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan-aggravate the conflict.
It is worthy to note that ,according to a former employee, Erik Prince, the founder and the boss of Blackwater, world’s most powerful mercenary army, accused in court papers of seeking to wipe out Muslims, views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the planet. These Blackwater mercenaries are in Pakistan and many suspect that they were behind most of the deadly attacks blamed on the Pakistani Taleban who promptly denied responsibility.
Thus the name of the game is same-destabilize Pakistan in the way Anglo American warmongers destabilized and virtually turned Iraq and Afghanistan into wastelands under the guise of fighting terrorism.
Meanwhile in a report presented to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday 26 October 2009, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston described US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law …
It is common knowledge that India wanted to destabilize and partition Pakistan from the day it came into being in 1947.India played a crucial role in breaking up Pakistan and creating Bangladesh in its eastern wing exploiting the blunders of the Pakistani’s ruling elite.
Three decades later today India, hand in glove with American installed Hamid Karzai’s puppet regime, has 14 consulates in Afghanistan from which RAW operates The US has turned a blind eye. Pakistan has stockpiles of evidence against Indian consulates in Afghanistan used to fund terrorism in Pakistan through Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP as well as Brahamdagh Bugti and his Baluch Liberation Army-BLA.
According to Pakistani daily DAWN, a dossier containing proof of India’s involvement in “subversive activities” in Pakistan was handed over by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh during their meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh in July 2009.The dossier, broadly covering the Indian connection in terror financing in Pakistan, is also said to list the safe houses run by RAW in Afghanistan where terrorists are trained and launched for missions in Pakistan. The dossier also mentions an India-funded training camp in Kandahar where Baluch insurgents were being trained and provided arms and ammunition for sabotage activities in the Pakistani province.
Confirming the Indian support to TTP in Pakistan the Foreign Policy magazine said: “the Indians are up to their necks in supporting the Taliban against the Pakistani government in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The same anti-Pakistani forces in Afghanistan also shoot at American soldiers getting support from India which should close its diplomatic establishments in Afghanistan and get the Christ out of there.”
“Afghan officials have also confirmed that India is using Afghanistan to stir trouble and destabilize Pakistan and Afghan security agencies are unable to stop Indian intervention due to absence of centralized government mechanism”, said Afghan Government’s Advisor, Ehsanullah Aryanzai on sidelines of Pak-Afgan Parliamentary Jirga at a local hotel on April 2, 2009.
The RAW is operating out of U.S. bases, Erik Prince is a Christian crusader on a mission to kill Muslims (rather than a clever businessman), the U.S. is funding the Mehsuds (while we also killed Baitullah by a drone strike), the U.S. (who already has quite enough nuclear weapons) is after Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, UBL doesn’t exist but is a fabricated figment of our imaginations as a surrogate for a war that is really designed to destroy Pakistan – and so on – and on – and on.
One wonders when the author is going to claim that he was abducted by Martians and taken for interrogation by green men with big heads. This is so bad that it should be embarrassing, and I actually wonder why the Sri Lanka Guardian published it, except to demonstrate the extreme pathologies that reside just next door in Pakistan.
Matthew Potter has penned a very important article at BNET concerning the F-35. I will cite it at length.
Veteran newspaper reporter George C. Wilson asked in a recent column that appeared in CongressDaily why rush the F-35 into production? In that gentleman’s eyes the program is experiencing delays in testing and development as well as overall cost to product and operate. In Wilson’s view it might make sense to save the whole $298 billion planned to procure the F-35 since there may not be the necessary threat to justify its purchase.
Wilson compares the F-35 to a similar program from the 1960’s where an attempt was made to develop one aircraft for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. This TFX program did result in the F-111 supersonic bomber used by the Air Force and Australia. The Navy rejected the aircraft and went on to purchase the F-14 Tomcat long range fighter. The F-111 had a drawn out development and the desire to have it due multiple missions for different services increased this and the cost increases reflected this.
In the upcoming 2011 defense budget the F-35 program will be restructured again to delay production and extend development. Money will have to be reprogrammed from buying aircraft to paying for this development extension. Lockheed Martin (LMT) the lead contractor on the program has offered up taking some money out of its fee from the development phase but the extended production run will only add money to the back end. Lockheed will make up some of the money lost in 2011 – 2013 through these quantities.
Of course the question to ask if Wilson’s suggestion was acted on would be what to do for a new fighter? The F-35 is it. It will replace F-16, A-10, F-18 and AV-8 aircraft in service with the U.S. Air Force, Marines, Navy and allied inventories. The F-22 is a purer, long range fighter that was supposed to replace the F-15. Now less then 200 will be built and they cannot supplant the large numbers of other aircraft. It also doesn’t exist in a carrier based version so it cannot do the F-18 or AV-8 mission. There had been attempts to restart the F-15 production line in the early part of this decade but nothing came of that. Perhaps the F-18E/F/G could be built for the Air Force as well as the Navy and Marines?
So if an existing aircraft cannot be produced to replace the aging F-16, F-18 and AV-8 force then a new replacement program will have to be started. Even if there are no advanced requirements but a straight replacement there will be the great cost of beginning again a development program and ramping up a production capability. It would also make little sense in building a new aircraft without adding advances in sensors, weapons, survivability and electronics. This will increase the cost to both produce and operate the aircraft.
I know one officer whose way was paid through the Air Force Academy, who trained other fighter pilots for several years, and who now wears shorts and a polo shirt and works on finish carpentry every day for his base because the Air Force has no fighter for him to fly and nothing else for him to do. The existing fleet of aircraft is aging. This means that stress corrosion cracking and fatigue on structural members and rotating parts has begun to take its toll. Aircraft cannot fly forever, and while it was in vogue to bash the F-22 several months ago, remember what The Captain’s Journal said.
Basically, this amounts to crafting a model of hybrid wars as the primary mission (along with jettisoning the two-war paradigm under the QDR), and telling the Air Force to plan for it. This is circular, and proves little if anything regarding whether the F-22 is needed. It may not matter, since Obama has apparently won this victory, calling the F-22 wasteful and threatening a veto of any legislation that includes more F-22s …
The Captain’s Journal would feel better about the F-35 as the next generation all purpose fighter aircraft if it had seen production and flying hours. But it is inferior in air-to-air combat and yet to be flown by U.S. AF pilots. Also note that in spite of what the QDR might conclude, we have recommended replacement of the sea-based expeditionary model for forcible entry with a combined sea-based and air-based approach that doesn’t rely on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.
We have recommended heavier reliance, not less reliance, on manned air power both from land bases and sea-based craft as an important leg of conventional, expeditionary, counterinsurgency and hybrid warfare. We will grant the point that the VTOL F-35 will be a mainstay in the Marines’ model rather than the F-22, but if the skies are controlled by rockets and enemy aircraft, the sinking of an Amphibious Assault Dock with an entire Battalion of Marine infantry on board would end whatever expeditionary entry that was planned. Air power is critical to the success of every form of warfare mentioned above.
It may be that the F-35 will come along in time to contribute to interim needs, and that its inferiority to the F-22 won’t do harm to the conduct of its mission. But this hasn’t been proven to our standards.
I sounded the alarm, but Mr. Potter is placing meat on the skeleton. Listen carefully to what he is saying. This will become an urgent situation without action. The F-35 is behind schedule, so the DoD is rearranging the deck chairs.
The U.S. Defense Department is slowing Lockheed Martin Corp’s $300 billion F-35 fighter jet program, a multinational effort, to stabilize its schedule and costs, according to draft budget documents obtained by Reuters.
The department’s fiscal 2011 budget will request $10.7 billion to continue the F-35’s development and to procure 42 aircraft, a budget overview shows.
Overall, the plan is to cut planned purchases by 10 aircraft in fiscal 2011 and a total of 122 through 2015.
The Pentagon “has adjusted F-35 procurement quantities based on new data on costs and on likely orders from our foreign nations partners and realigned development and test schedules,” the document said without giving details.
“Stabilize its schedule and costs …” This is a euphemism to indicates that the DoD won’t outspend the development capabilities of the program, and since the program is behind schedule, the development dollars will decrease.
All the while, aircraft are being retired, trained pilots are busy doing carpentry work on board their base, and as The Captain’s Journal pointed out, the F-35 has yet to log a single flying hour – even though it is supposed to be the cornerstone of the U.S. air fleet. There is trouble in the air, and it isn’t of the sort that can be solved by wishful thinking about future weapons systems or flying gadgets that have yet to be designed or tested. We told you so.
