China Makes The Predictable Play in South China Sea

Back in 2011, we wrote about the web of problems that could be expected from the U.S. failure to sign the Third UN Law of the Sea Treaty, and about our foreign policy with no vision or principles, beyond climate change.

We recently wrote,

"China is probably glad to see that the West doesn't have any teeth in assertions about rolling back territorial grabs like it contemplates in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Japan has to wonder how it could go it alone were territorial disputes with China turn into armed conflicts. Our Saudi friends have already expressed their displeasure at our "leading from the back." "

Now, the Chinese has served their notice to Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines that it intends to press its uniquely conceived territorial claims in the South China Sea.  Our hollow claims of some sort of right to free military passage won't pass muster, but worse they won't change Chinese behavior.

The Chinese have also made it clear from 2011 that any challenges to their territorial claims which they say date back to 1947 will be viewed as attacks on Chinese sovereignty.

Coming home in the car today, I heard a report on Vice President Biden's speech visiting Ukraine where he reportedly said that the U.S. won't recognize any Russian annexation of Crimea and that Russia must stop fomenting violence through proxies in masks.  This kind of speech is one the President should have made, but it's good to put something clear, fundamental and principled on the table.

German Chancellor Merkel, who had been very visible during the long, drawn on European currency crisis is conspicuously absent on the world stage.  She must be ruing her ill-conceived energy policies.  Mothballing the German nuclear power industry, creating expensive, inefficient renewable targets, and selling out to Gazprom--a trifecta of policies to play into Russia's hands.

President Putin continues to pull the strings in the Ukraine, but market disciplines through the flight of capital are the only clear signal the Russian President is getting that he may have to tack from his full speed ahead attempts to recreate the Russian empire.

Cutting Military Pay: Don't Play Politics With The Troops

"You can't expect this country to maintain a strong military if we aren't maintaining some kind of common-sense budgeting," Leon Panetta, the former Defense secretary in the Wall Street Journal. 

Of course, this is a complete red herring, as Secretary Panetta is a career politician operating in an arena where common sense is completely absent.  Government budgeting has nothing to do with budgeting or common sense.

"We have the analytic tools that potentially we didn't have before." General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also in the WSJ. 

What tools are those?  Countless commissions of the armed services, think tanks and legislatures have identified the problems over decades.  

These kind of grandstanding comments give cover to focus on relatively small pieces of the puzzle, because the biggest barriers to efficiency, real cost controls and a better military are the political and military elites themselves.

Where does it begin?  According to Professor Andrew Bacevich, Professor of History at Boston University the problems lie at home with our own policies and failed assumptions.  Professor Bacevich retired from active duty in the Army with the rank of colonel. 

Our all volunteer army concept is at the root of our problems that have building for decades, as Bacevich writes in the compelling, "Breach of Trust."  Most observers know that we have too many military bases here at home and worldwide.  Domestic base closures have been identified and recommended, but Congressional leaders always fight to keep their own state's facilities free from right sizing.  Congress members and Presidential staff all agree that development of duplicative weapons systems and aircraft must be stopped, until it comes to closing down research and manufacturing in their home states. The big dollars are here in these issues, and if action is taken here, then headcount reductions follow and compensation would be significantly reduced, but through lower staffing levels and not by pay rates alone. The latter are blunt instruments.

Over time, our military were called on to invade and control Iraq in a traditional style, tank, artillery, aircraft and ground troop invasion, and this was carried out in exemplary fashion.  Then, we asked our military to become 'nation builders,' and we overstayed our welcome. In Afghanistan, our troops were put into absolutely untenable positions with no clear military objectives.  This situation is vividly described in Jake Tapper's "The Outpost." Trained soldiers and their commanders were asked to fight an enemy who couldn't be differentiated from the tribal leaders whose support they were supposed be garnering by winning hearts and minds.  Tours of duty were too long, and farces like "the surge" made us all at home feel safe and sound that things were going well. 

We wind up fighting as a foreign invader against trained foreign jihadists and guerrilla fighters from Chechnya and Pakistan tribal territories while engaging in nation building.  These are tasks that are impossible to carry out simultaneously by troops without the proper military intelligence and support. It's not a matter of pay.  

Further, the illusion of fighting wars with contractors makes no sense, budgetary or otherwise.  So, as the defense budget continues to shrink as a total share of Federal spending, we are staring at an abyss in the future. Having National Guard regiments serve in ways that were never in their traditional terms of reference does nothing to strengthen this service, but it does demoralize troops who have to serve multiple tours abroad. 

Demands on our capability to project our power and to defend our citizens and way of life will grow greater and more complex.  We can do this in an intelligent way, but cutting military pay as a first step is an insult to those who serve and it is shameful posturing by the legislative and military elites who know very well where the big dollar savings lie.  

Jake Tapper's "The Outpost" : A Must Read

Jake Tapper graduated from Dartmouth College with an A.B. in History.  This grounding in history and his story telling skills serve the reader well in his meticulously researched, compelling book, "The Outpost." At its core, the book is about scores of brave, disciplined, creative, resourceful, and committed soldiers whose lives were ended or irrevocably changed by their experiences in Afghanistan.  The fulcrum of the story is the creation, defense and ultimate destruction of Combat Outpost Keating in the remote Kamdesh district of Afghanistan.

Several American administrations have fostered continuing illusions about Afghanistan. Academics have similarly fallen under the same spell, and they still talk about defining "success" in Afghanistan.
The last paragraph of Tapper's 673 page book sums it up perfectly,

"All that I can tell you with certitude is the the men and women of 3-71 Cav, the 1-91 Cav, 6-4 Cav, and especially 3-61 Cav deserved better.  They are heroes, and they have my appreciation and eternal gratitude.  I wish they had a command structure and a civilian leadership that were always worthy of their efforts." 

The story begins with the sentence, "It was madness."  Somehow, undefined levels of the U.S. military command structure decide that they want to build outposts in the province of Nuristan in order to stem the flow of insurgents crossing over the Pakistan border.  The previous brigade commander in the region didn't think Nuristan was of any strategic value, and nothing was known about the ethnic Nuristanis, who stood removed from even the ethnic power structure in Kabul. The command decision was to place the outpost at the bottom of a bowl, surrounded by 10-12,000 foot mountain peaks.  When the sentry post was designed for the outpost, it didn't have a clear, full view of the outpost itself.

Soldiers described the experience of COP Keating as hunting deer from a deer stand---except that our soldiers were the deer.  Supplying the outpost was problematical, except by helicopter transport and even then the landing pad was dangerous.  "Sir, this is a really bad idea. A. Really. Bad. Idea. Anyone we drop off here is going to die."  (Jacob Whittaker, intelligence analyst to his superior officer in the summer of 2006)  Slowly and inexorably, the small contingent at COP Keating was overrun some five years later. 

The command structure in Vietnam and in Afghanistan proved to be remote, uniformed, capricious, subject to political whims on the part of the General staff, and their ideas were not vetted by senior officers who had some first-hand knowledge of the territory.  The Generals are supported by a foreign policy apparatus which is itself out-of-touch and dominated by NGO-types, State Department lifers and consultants. Thus, the role of Pakistan's ISI in supplying men and materiel, including sheltering them over the winter, was ignored until it was too late.  This command structure learned nothing from our war in Vietnam.  As Tapper says, our soldiers deserve better.

Our celebrity Generals like Petraeus and McChrystal are really politicians, except they wear uniforms rather than suits.  Like egomaniacal CEOs, they eventually believe their own press releases. They are too remote from their troops, and they spend their time using the media and trying to manage a President, his National Security Council, and Senators on Capitol Hill.  Seeing people with acres of medals on their chests makes the American public feel....confident that our conflicts are in good hands.  They are not. 

Even when it became clear that COP Keating should be closed, it remained open for political reasons and for the conclusion of the Afghan Presidential election.  

At some point, the Afghanistan strategy changed over to "counterinsurgency," which meant that our troops were to win hearts and minds over to the notion that an American presence was more in the economic and cultural interest of the local population.  The carrots included local development projects which were approved by the Karzai government in Kabul, like bringing mountain waters down to the villages for cooking and drinking.  Local councils, or shura, would guide and oversee the projects.  This all sounds good and is straight out of the NGO and academic playbooks.  Unfortunately, the real specifics of how counterinsurgency was to be carried out were not obvious.

In the case of Kamdesh certain commanders figured out, through their own awareness, emotional intelligence and moxie, how to make counterinsurgency work.  The stories of Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda, Captain Joey Hutto and 1-91 Cav are inspiring. They were succeeded by Captain Rob Yllescas who created the "Hundred Man Shura," and convinced his superiors that spending money to support this organization would provide returns in goodwill and safety for the locals and our soldiers. Yllescas forged great relationships with the locals. As a result, he was targeted for assassination by Taliban insurgents and their foreign sponsors. Why?  Because the opposition knew if an American soldier was succeeding in breaking down the propaganda walls about American motives and methods in Afghanistan, then the village elders would become effective partners in an alliance against outside Taliban interests.  

After the death of Captain Yllescas, both the Afghan National Army and the shuras were co-opted and compromised by insurgent infiltration.  The Taliban proposals were simple.  "The Americans will be gone soon.  After their departure, when we return we will remember those who cooperated with them and we will exact a price from you and from your families."  The way out for the locals was to look the other way when strangers infiltrated the village and when insurgents took up new positions on the mountainsides.  The book captures the fact that the fifty odd soldiers assigned to the outpost were intuitively aware of these developments.  As much as they tried to ferret out the truth directly from the ANA and the shura, they were inevitably told lies.  

After the collapse of  COP Keating, the Army inevitably called for an investigation in which it totally absolved its own highest leadership, who were not in the terms of reference of the report.  Instead, several soldiers were to be publicly reprimanded for not taking adequate measures to shore up the outpost's defenses as the threats increased.  Never mind that they didn't have the soldiers, material or time to do this, as they were under steadily increasing attacks.  The bureaucracy always moves to cover itself in its Kafkaesque world.  

In 2006, at the beginning of the book, when soldiers are entering villages introducing themselves as working in partnership with the Karzai government in Kabul, the villagers ask, "Who is Karzai?"  Time in the remote provinces of Afghanistan has stood still.  Villagers were unaware of World War II. They had never seen or felt any influence of a central government in Kabul, except around the time of the Presidential election, in which both sides wantonly stuffed ballot boxes.  

Jake Tapper has recently been elevated into the pantheon of emerging media pundits, taking a high position at CNN as Chief Washington correspondent and taking the time slot of the insufferable Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room.  It's good for Mr. Tapper and his professional career, and well deserved.  However, in this situation, it's not likely that he will be able to do the independent, in-depth work produced in this fine book.  

Our Troops Continue to Pay the Price in Afghanstan

Credit: Gul Elham for the Associated Press



This photo appeared on the front page of the print edition of the New York Times, but for some reason didn't appear in the Web edition.  It's 10:30 am, on a bright, sunny day in the northern Afghan city of Maimana. The scene shows the outskirts of a public park where a video was being made of an outdoor vegetable market, perhaps symbolizing the return to normalcy in this war-torn region of Afghanistan. 

As American soldiers and Afghan police were involved in filming interviews, a motorcyclist turned his bike into the soldiers and police, killing three G.I.'s  and six Afghans as the Times reports.  I can't get the image of these two soliders, contorted in pain, out of my mind.  The soldier on the left is holding his head, probably concussed from the exlplosion, while the soldier on the right has had his helmet torn from his head completely.  Neither can stand up, even as one of the soldiers looks with concern at what's happening with civilians and the Afghan police. These two soliders are paying the price for our continuing presence in a conflict zone where we appear to have lost our purpose and resolve.

As Christian Holy Week moves towards Easter, let's remember and pray for all those caught in this web of violence, especially our troops and their families.