When push comes to shove, US bases remain

WSJ cover story.

Yes, the NIMBYs have at it, and yes, Hatoyama resigns for breaking campaign promise, but the Marine bases remain.

NorKo drove the reaction this time; in the future China's build-up will be the excuse.  

Point is, America never really has trouble locating new bases when the need arises and only occasionally has trouble holding onto old ones.  When the latter happens, new offers to host inevitably flow.

Why?  All these rising great powers are good for the business of alliance-building and balancing.

There is no surpassing the US Leviathan; there is only triggering regional balancing responses that bolster its presence.

Conservatives embrace "new" idea of SysAdmin's responsibility for "expeditionary economics"!

From the panel reports from a conference jointly put on by the Kaufman Foundation (focus on free enterprise) and the Command and General Staff College Foundation (Leavenworth), via John Richardson at Esquire's The Politics Blog (to whom the ideas here are radical and "new").

First, Richardson quoting from the conference and/or report or just feeling like he should italicize:

Too often, in both the military and the international development spheres, there has been a failure to consider the postwar economy is any strategic sense. Military doctrine has usually treated operations other than war as secondary matters to be handed off to other agencies. These agencies, USAID in particular, have rarely conceived of their work as part of  a larger strategy for the country in question or for promoting U.S. interests. One-off projects and bureaucratic delays — due in no part to congressional constraints on USAID - have created the impression that dependence and subsistence are the inevitable future for countries such as Afghanistan. Economic growth is rarely even considered a posible goal ... yet economic growth plainly is a positive force in society and for governments; it is no coincidence that most conflicts today, most of which are civil wars, occur in countries with weak or stagnant economies.

Dare we say, "disconnected" from the global economy?

From the future panel report:

Most people agree that the concept of “expeditionary economics” needs to play a greater role and be incorporated into doctrine in future stabilization and reconstruction efforts in post-conflict countries. The questions are “How do we get there?” and “Who should do it?” Answers to these questions vary. While there is a general consensus that the United States is not adequately nurturing economic development in places where security and engagement requires it and that we are not adequately stimulating the entrepreneurial dynamism that has produced global economic prosperity, there is audible disagreement over whether these responsibilities should fall to the military.

Key Takeaways:

• In an ideal world, economic development in post-conflict situations lies within the purview of civilian organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, USAID, and Department of State. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, these institutions often lack the requisite resources and capacity for post-conflict economic development. As a result, responsibility for the economic dimension has fallen to the armed forces; yet, the military also lacks a guiding doctrine for such work. For future operations, we must develop doctrine for both the military and civilians, as well as consider new ways of implementing expeditionary economics.

• The primary objective of a stability operation is different than that of a development imperative. When you build a water plant, the secondary objective is to bring clean water to people in the town. The primary objective is the psychological change that reduces violence as a result of building the plant. But if we are not measuring for and evaluating the right things, we can’t determine if the $50 billion that’s been spent in Iraq could have been better spent. We’re scratching our heads because we haven’t won over hearts and minds, and we don’t know why. We need to find better ways to measure the psychological impact of stability operations and, more specifically, economic development efforts.

• When assessing the economy of a country in which we might engage, we can’t fall into the pattern of merely looking at the absences. We must pay attention to the assets that do exist—natural, physical, and human assets that can anchor future economic growth. Moreover, our view must be a regional one as opposed to just local or national. In considering how to stabilize failed states, we need to consider what is the right balance between the state, the market, and civil society 

• When considering who needs to lead to economic development in failed states, the tendency is to look to the State Department and USAID. But the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank of the United States also should play a major role in investing in and underwriting risk.

• The U.S. preference is to separate political, economic, and military concerns when dealing with states abroad. An imperial approach is well understood, and less complicated than our democratic approach. However, it’s more difficult when the objective is to leave once enduring conditions are set so we don’t have to intervene again. Rather than continuing our tendency to view things in a two- to three-year thought cycle, we need a longer-term approach.

• In war, just as there are human casualties, there also are financial casualties, and we need to accept this reality. Some dollars will be misappropriated, and some will go to the enemy, to criminal networks, to ineffective local leaders, and to bad projects. This doesn’t make it okay, but we need a productive dialogue to determine what is a reasonable level of these financial casualties.

• The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 defined foreign aid as a State Department function because it was a tool of public diplomacy geared toward poverty alleviation and moral good. But the problem with public diplomacy as an imperative is there’s a need to take credit and ensure people know about it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, however, we’ve learned this can generate ill will and be counterproductive. We need to sacrifice public diplomacy to be more effective at counterinsurgency and long-lasting and effective development.

• One proposal is to create a FEMA-like agency with a very modest staff, 100-150 people, that would spring into work when there’s a stability operation. The office would report jointly to the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State and would have a limited, circumscribed role. It would coordinate with the chief of mission on the ambassador side and the commander general on the military side.

• It’s important to concentrate planning efforts before a crisis arises. If you are not engaged in long-term strategy and planning, you will not get it right.

• How does the military put expeditionary economics into practice? Meeting the economic needs of the populace in an area of operations is an essential task in stability operations, and the best way to do that is with business formation. An example: If a neighborhood lacks dependable electricity, a commander could provide generators to local entrepreneurs, and give them the ability and responsibility to keep them running. This eliminates the insurgent’s ability to generate public support by attacking municipal power grids and then blaming the government or occupational forces; any attack on the power supply thus becomes an attack on individual families and locally owned businesses.

• It is essential to tie the concept of expeditionary economics to the military security mission. How can the military foster economic growth to establish security? The military needs competence with expeditionary economics tools to get through the “golden hour”—the early days of a conflict when the civilian agencies have minimal or no presence, and it’s up to the military to execute.

• Some disagree that economics is not a soldier’s job. Yet, economics is required to win, and a soldier’s job is to win. The military has no choice but to use economics as a weapon in stability operations, so let’s be as good as possible at it. What we need to be thinking is, “What are the appropriate economic principles we can teach military leaders so they can use them to accomplish their mission?”

• The military lacks a doctrine to use economic development in conjunction with other elements of a counterinsurgency effort—information, security, and stability operations. The easiest way to change doctrine is by Department of Defense or commander’s mandate, but there are other requirements: A new doctrine must be proven workable and should demonstrate added value, longevity for application, and it must foster those traits the military sees as important.

• One area of debate is over the constraints on the use of Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) Funds. Those on the ground maintain that a ten-day approval process makes CERP less useful—commanders need to make investments on the spot or at worst within twenty-four hours. This assumes commanders have a high level of ability and economic literacy that sometimes isn’t there because it’s such a complicated task that requires complete attention.

• Economic development and stability is also an intelligence problem. Almost no attention is given to economic intelligence analysis. Threat Finance Cells are for threat targeting—a different function—but if you don’t understand the economies and then intervene, you are not going to be successful.

• USAID and the State Department staff are not properly trained—there is poor investment in level- and role-specific training and education, and senior leaders could be selected for their qualifications in economic development and entrepreneurship.

A call for a Department of Everything Else-like entity that reports to both SECDEF and SECSTATE and somehow bridges the "expeditionary economics" responsibilities that bind them in failed-state or postwar interventions.  

Plus, an almost exact description of Enterra's diagnostic approach in Kurdish Iraq (a focus on critical assets, creating entrepreneurial opportunities and counterparty capacity locally for deal-execution), right down to the regional focus we used in bringing in the Monitor Group to do a competitive assessment. This is Development-in-a-Box in a nutshell.  That's why I penned the self-promoting (for Enterra) section on DiB in "Great Powers."

In short, none of this is new, and much was proven our or templated in the field by Steve DeAngelis.

The SysAdmin's economic responsibilities; the need for a Department of Everything Else that focuses on the postwar reconstruction; the market-based diagnostic focus of Development-in-a-Box, which lives on in Enterra's collaboration with Pacific Command's Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance--all good stuff.

At first the ideas are ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as conventional wisdom.

Patience and perserverance are the keys, and a willingness to be told to your face--for years on end--that your ideas are bullshit, naive, and completely impracticable--never gonna happen!

Because these are not theories but inevitabilities.  There are only questions of who and when.

There is no credit sought because there is no credit to be assigned.  Everybody comes around to these realities eventually, and until enough do, it's just vision without a budget--otherwise known as an hallucination.

But yes, there is a useful role for consistent hallucinators.

The SysAdmin's civilian-soldier ratio climbs

WAPO story on Army's deputy assistant secretary for procurement, Edward Harrington.

The government's contracting out for services is nothing new, as Harrington's office notes. Its "Contractors on the Battlefield" chart outlines the number of contractors compared with the number of soldiers since the American Revolution. Back then, the ratio of contractors to soldiers was 1:6. World War I, 1:20. Vietnam, 1:6. Gulf War, 1:60. Iraq, 1:1. Afghanistan, 2:1.

An evolution toward SysAdmin operations that has created a rule-set gap:

These days, Harrington points out, the job is tougher because the government's workforce to write, manage and oversee the contractors has shrunk dramatically. The office estimates that as the workload has increased 1,000 percent since 1987, the government's contracting workforce has decreased by 25 percent.

It's why I believe it inevitable that a new bureaucratic center of gravity is created between Defense and State--the Department for Everything Else notion.

It's a serious requirement that's yet to be treated seriously in a bureaucratic revamp.

Long war planning: for when Obama decides to re-engage--or the world decides to re-engage Obama

Gist of Mazzetti piece in NYT:

The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.

The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.

In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.

General Petraeus’s order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.

But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen — which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation — or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.

The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.

Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.

The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country’s nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.

Doesn't signify anything other than our military plans to be ready, no matter what the leadership decides.  The alternative is to do nothing and then suffer the headlines about how, "Prior to the intervention, the Pentagon didn't even have maps for the areas in question!"

After all, this is why you have Special Ops guys.

Get ready for US-Russian joint military production

Center of Economic Planning site story via Charles Ganske of Russia Blog.

Unbelievably to many, inevitable to me.

The United States is considering a Russian proposal on the joint production of An-124 Condor heavy-lift transport aircraft, a Russian deputy prime minister said.

The An-124 was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in 1982, and was produced in Ukraine's Kiev and Russia's Ulyanovsk plants until 1995. Although there are no An-124s being built at present, Russia and Ukraine have reportedly agreed to resume production in the future.

"We have discussed a full-scale project, which includes the joint production of the plane, setting up a joint venture, shared rights, sales to Russian and American customers - both civilian and military - and the creation of a scheme for post-production servicing," Sergei Ivanov told reporters in Washington.

The An-124 is similar to the American Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, but has a 25% larger payload.

The aircraft has a maximum payload of 150 metric tons with a flight range of around 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles).

An-124s have been used extensively by several U.S. companies. Russian cargo company Volga-Dnepr has contracts with Boeing to ship outsize aircraft components to its Everett plant.

Why inevitable?

Simply the rising costs associated with big platforms.  There ain't enough Leviathan work to go around that justifies great powers each producing their own major platforms--the old Norm Augustine bit.  Russia itself is only producing 20 through 2020 for its own military, and the platform has a long and good history with US customers, including our own Pentagon on a leased basis (currently through 2016).  

This proposal simply ups the cooperation to joint production.

Trying to drive a wedge between Gates and Obama

Arthur Herman column in NYPost via James Riley.

Per my "Awakening of Robert Gates" piece in Esquire earlier this year, you start to see the right going after Gates obliquely while trying to keep the bulk of the blame on Obama (Obama is purposefully condemning America to losing its superpower status and Gates is letting him do it).

Everyone and his brother has long predicted the end of the post-9/11 defense "gusher" that saw plenty of spending for both the Leviathan and SysAdmin sides of the house, meaning we kept buying the Big War platforms and used the small wars force like crazy in Iraq and Afghanistan.  So long as Bush-Cheney set no spending limits, all was fine.

Then the financial crisis hits, Obama does his stimulus/bail-out spending there, and we're back, to no one's surprise, talking most about debts and deficits and reining in spending.

So Gates goes around telling the military, like in the recent "Ike" Kansas speech, that the same old approach to force structure (same big platforms, just more pimped out and supremely costlier) cannot continue, and too many in the audience sit there, mouths agape, wondering what hit them.

What this signals?  The Committee on the Present Danger is reforming and will seek to paint Obama as the second coming of Jimmy Carter.  I don't think this is a bad thing, per se, and I truly believe Obama needs to offer a strong defense against the charge. But what comes next, in terms of a progressive revitalization of the military post-Iraq, cannot be some mindless return to the Leviathan force structure of the past.

So we need more than brain-dead whining like this.

Jaffe portrait of the quintessential SysAdmin officer

Nice piece by Greg Jaffe in WAPO that explores what it means to be a frontline SysAdmin-style officer: part-warrior, part-diplomat, part-anthropologist, part-nationbuilder . . . just a lot more moving parts than the usual Leviathan role of ass-kicker-and-then-leave.  Focus is Lt. Col. Robert Brown.

Story comes in two parts.

The career background is classic:  This guy has been SysAdmin his entire career, just missing out on the Leviathan's last great romp.

Brown was commissioned as an armor officer in 1991 just months after U.S. tanks sliced through Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard in a demonstration of the post-Vietnam Army's raw power.

Two Iraq tours in 2004 and 2007 opened Brown's eyes to the limits of his Army and himself. He avoided "we can do the impossible" pep talks that other commanders used to fire up their troops. His goal was to build the Afghan government and bring his soldiers back alive.

The vast majority of his time was spent quizzing Afghan elders and officials on decades-old tribal disputes and intrigues. In the evenings he scoured the Internet for information on the HiG and its history in Nurestan province during the Soviet era. "There is so much here that is opaque to us," he said.

The dances-with-wolves isolation and vulnerability:

The outpost, surrounded by soaring mountains on all sides, was isolated and hard to defend. "It felt like we were living in the bottom of a Dixie cup," one of Brown's soldiers said.

Brown eventually decides that his unit's presence is uniting two wings of an insurgency that could otherwise be split.  He asks to close the outpost and the decision to do so takes a while.  In the meantime, his unit suffers a massed attack by local insurgents:

Eight U.S. troops were killed in the Oct. 3, 2009, battle at Combat Outpost Keating, making it one of the deadliest fights for Americans of the Afghan war. For soldiers, the harsh reality of combat has scarcely changed in the decades since Vietnam. To survive, the outnumbered Keating grunts relied on their mutual devotion and marksmanship.

What makes Keating different from past battles is what happened afterward. A decade of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has forced battlefield commanders to accept that victory in today's wars is less a matter of destroying enemies than of knowing how and when to make them allies. This new kind of war has compelled midlevel officers such as Brown to take on new roles: politician, diplomat, tribal anthropologist.

"My goal is to get people to stop shooting at my soldiers and support government," said Brown, a wiry, quick-talking officer whose three combat tours have imbued him with modesty, skepticism and a little self-doubt.

After the Kamdesh battle, an insurgent leader known as Mullah Sadiq sent word to Brown that he wanted to drive his more radical Taliban rivals from the area around the Keating outpost. Sadiq, who had been on U.S. kill-or-capture lists for five years, needed money and Brown's help brokering a peace deal with Afghan government officials in Kabul. The offer was Brown's chance to ensure his eight soldiers didn't die in vain.

"We don't think Sadiq is a Jeffersonian Democrat," Brown wrote of Sadiq in a February e-mail from Forward Operating Base Bostick in Naray. "But he is rallying public support to the Afghan government and against the Taliban. . . . And frankly, that may be good enough."

From part two:

Sadiq wanted 50 assault rifles, $20,000 and a promise that U.S. forces would not kill him. In return, he promised to turn against more-radical Taliban insurgents and to begin to work with the Afghan government.

Sadiq's proposition gave Brown a chance, however tentative, to achieve a victory of sorts in his corner of Afghanistan and redeem the loss of his men.

"This has the potential to work," Brown told his commander.

It has become a given within the U.S. military after nearly a decade of grinding battle in Afghanistan and seven years in Iraq that U.S. forces cannot kill their way to victory. Enemies must be persuaded to lay down their weapons through a mix of negotiation and force. Grievances must be understood and wherever possible addressed. These principles are at the core of the military's coming campaign in Kandahar, which U.S officials are touting as the most important battle of the nine-year war.

Brown is a firm believer in this new American way of war, one that has forced him to puzzle through dauntingly complex tribal feuds and to overcome a fractured Afghan government that often prefers to fight enemies, such as Sadiq, rather than cede influence to them.

Brown, 41, has struggled to make sense of Sadiq, who insists on dealing with the Americans solely through intermediaries. Some Afghans describe Sadiq as a religious scholar and brave commander. Others maintain that he is a warlord and extremist.

"The bad guys aren't bad because they were born bad," Brown said from his base in Naray. "What no one ever teaches you is how to get to the bottom of the story. No one ever teaches you to ask, 'Why is Mullah Sadiq the way he is?' "

 The deal struck sounds right out of Anbar in Iraq:

Every few nights, one of Sadiq's deputies telephoned Brown to work out the terms of the deal. By March, the insurgent commander had assembled an informal police force of about 230 locals, some of whom had probably taken part in the Keating attack. Brown arranged for the United States to pay the men about $25,000 a month until the Interior Ministry formally accepted them as police.

But the problems are two-fold: 1) does the Afghan government really want to broker such deals? and 2) what's the nature of US staying power?

In early April, the deal with Sadiq began to fall apart. Senior Afghan officials in Kabul banned Zaman (local PD chief) from sending any of his forces to meet up with Sadiq's fighters.

"They are worried that we are trying to give Kamdesh district to the HiG," Zaman said. "They don't want us to give these guys a say in the government."

The hedging in Kabul also unnerved Sadiq, whose representatives immediately called Brown. "We are surrounded by 1,000 Taliban, but our government doesn't accept us!" one of Sadiq's deputies screamed over the satellite phone. He demanded Brown's help in acquiring 600 assault rifles, 16 Ford Ranger pickup trucks and two dozen machine guns and grenade launchers for the new Kamdesh police force.

Brown explained that the weapons had to come from the Afghan Interior Ministry, which was refusing to send any arms to Kamdesh. Sadiq's representative hung up on Brown in mid-sentence.

To get the deal back on track, Brown and George pressed the Afghan officials to write a letter to the central government in Kabul detailing the need to move forces into the valley and to better arm Sadiq's police force.

"After much cajoling, we have gotten all the Afghan players supporting the resources for the police in Kamdesh," Brown wrote in an e-mail in early May. Sadiq didn't get all the weapons he wanted, but he got some.

A new U.S. unit was scheduled to replace Brown's cavalry squadron at the end of May. He knew the next U.S. commander wouldn't have the same incentive to close the deal with Sadiq. Brown also had ample reason to question Kabul's commitment to working with Sadiq.

"We want this to happen more than the Afghans do," he said he often worried.

The reconciliation ceremony has not been held, but in recent days hundreds of Afghan army and police forces have been inching along the perilous road to Kamdesh to link up with Sadiq. Taliban commanders have been assembling a force to stop them.

Brown said he does not know exactly what to make of the maneuvering, although he detects signs of progress. "The momentum change has been significant," he wrote in an e-mail.

He expects to be home in Colorado in about two weeks. Kamdesh will be a new commander's fight.

The usual problem of being there only so many months, learning enough to start working the situation, and then being yanked out just as things might mature into something better.  Here, they don't for reasons beyond Brown's control.

Nice reporting by Jaffe, showing the great difficulty and complexity of the task, but also highlighting, in an anecdotal way, how Afghanistan probably won't work out, COIN-wise, like Iraq.  Just too many competitors fighting for influence in a zero-sum manner.

Private contractors as spies? Welcome to the frontier

The gist from the NYT story:

Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

The private players were organized under a Lockheed Martin contract.  Why resort to this effort?

The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.

So a classic improvisational response to a frontier integration situation:  normal bureaucratic channels don't work (bit too "out there" for the CIA, apparently) and the lack of full-up connectivity (i.e., technically, our military cannot operate there) pushes the Pentagon to outsource the function to the private security sector.

Simply put: the frontier lies just beyond the normal rule-set, so you get this working-for-the-gov-but-not-belonging-to-the-gov result.  Read your history of the American West, it happened all the time.

China's rise must be stopped! In fact, our entire military should be shaped to this end!

Mark Helprin in the WSJ by way of James Riley, plus a couple of NYT pieces on Gates fighting his budget battles with Congress, which, for some reason in this day and age, seems desperate to outspend his wishes.

Here's a projection from the National Intelligence Council's 2020 look-ahead report. If you go with the high-estimate line (always a safe bet with such a secretive government), then you come up with a number in the same range as Helprin's ($115-120B). By 2025, then, we're looking at a PLA that spends about a quarter-trillion dollars a year.

For comparison, check out US spending over the past decade, by way of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

My point here: our baseline spending grew almost as much as China's total budget should be in 2025:  $220B. Our top-line budget grew $373B, but you have to consider the war-spending as more subtractive than additive, even as it means our military now has a long recent combat experience base while the PLA really hasn't fought a conflict of any length since the early 1950s, or almost six decades ago.

What are we likely to spend in 2025? Probably in the range of a trillion a year, or still 4X China's total.

Now, if you follow the great projections on China, you would likely have their defense budget catch ours sometime before 2050, but that stuff gets awfully iffy, because it assumes that China will keep up the build-up despite the stunning aging of their population--to wit, in 2050, we'll have a relatively young total population of 400m and China will have 400m-plus over the age of 60.

That's just the background. Now, on to Helprin's scare-mongering piece.

He says we rationalize our growing weakness relative to China's growing strength, telling ourselves that we'll never fight two major adversaries at the same time (our dream of a WWII-redux). Okay, who else are we going to fight at the same time as China? He doesn't say.

Helprin says we delude ourselves by thinking conventional war is a thing of the past, citing "the growth and modernization of large conventional forces throughout the world." That line is just pure bullshit based on nothing.  

Here's the SIPRI numbers:

Note two things:  1) It took the world 20 years to get back to the peak spending at the end of the Cold War, and that was across a time period in which wars declined dramatically while numerous great powers rose, a trend that historically results in greater defense spending; and 2) the great growth from the trough of the late 90s to now is about $400B. Well, guess who did most of that additional spending? Duh! The United States. No one is modernizing like we are or racking up huge operational experience at the bleeding edge.

Helprin goes on to say that "appeasement and compromise" isn't turning our enemies into friends. Really? Seems like we just went through a rerun of the start of the Great Depression and what kind of cooperation did we get from all our "enemies" around the world? Actually, pretty damn nice.

Then we get the usual decline-of-the-Roman-empire stuff. Impressive.

So we're told that we've ceded the Western Pacific to the Chinese, meaning, at the very least, we're supposed to hold it ad infinitum. Why? Taiwan could be absorbed by China militarily. And if that happens, "America's alliances in the Pacific will collapse."  

Brilliant logic there. China forcibly invades a country it's trying to sign a free trade deal with it and you expect the rest of Asia to suddenly want nothing to do with America. Is this guy high?

From that domination of the Western Pac, China will soon begin to dominate all of Latin America, says Helprin--our China station replaced by China's America station.  

Why will China make this supreme effort? I have no idea. China doesn't seem to have any problem buying whatever it wants from Latin America, but apparently the Chinese people will want this more than environmental cleanups or old age pensions. They will go along with any government push to propel China into constant military standoffs with the US on the other side of the Pacific, because Chinese history is so full of such examples.

Me?  I see China logically building a naval presence and power-projection capability in the direction of its energy supplies--i.e., the Persian Gulf. I don't see them wasting time and money on regions that are stable suppliers. Of course, if China pushes its way into the Gulf military, pretty soon they'll find themselves involved in all the same Leviathan-SysAdmin work we do there now. And frankly, that would make some sense, given that Asia takes out the bulk of the oil the Gulf provides, while the US can get along without it easily (the PG ranks behind Africa, Latin America, Mexico and Canada, and the US itself as our 5th most important supplier of oil). 

And how threatening will a China be that bears this incredible burden? How many costly wars will the Chinese people support in distant lands? Hmm. We shall see.

But this is all silly conjecture on my part. Clearly, the Chinese will do whatever it takes to drive us completely out of the Pacific. Helprin says, we have "perhaps five or ten years" in which we can accomplish a "restoration."

Get used to this logic. Gates is working hard to get the Pentagon and Congress realistic about what we can and cannot afford in the future. We can either pull out of the world and stockpile our brilliant, uber-expensive Leviathan weaponry in anticipation of getting it on with China or we can be more realistic about our Leviathan hedge given our SysAdmin workload. Mr. Helprin believes we can have it all and do it all, and I think that's truly nutty.

But again, the quickest way to bog down the Chinese would be to abandon the Middle East and let them manage it on their own. Any takers on that score?

The Chinese give every indication of wanting to secure their trade networks with the world and no indication of being willing to fight for anything beyond that. Hell, they don't give any indication of wanting even to fight for their trade networks. All they really give as an indication is that they will not tolerate Taiwan declaring independence--their own, whacked-out mania.

We are deep into an age in which our old friends will spend less on their militaries and rising new competitors will spend more on theirs. We can either seek cooperation with these rising powers on mutual economic interests or we can try to hedge against them all, demanding that only America can decide such things.

The fixation with China is convenient for US military hawks, because the Chinese Communist Party will rule in a single-party state, with no serious challengers, for the next two decades or so. Of the other rising great powers, we don't really fear any of them, because they're close enough in their political pluralism--save demographically collapsing Russia--to avoid such suspicions on our part. Now, we can pretend that this crew of rising great powers will prefer a world run predominately by the PLA over one more dominated by the US military, but I think that's a paranoid assumption. I think the alleged Beijing consensus only works so long as China stays out of wars, which is why I'd love to see them sucked into a few.

Mr. Helprin sees a clear and clean route to the top of global military domination for the Chinese. I don't. I see a surfeit of hidden domestic debts and a public with no stomach for military adventure. I also see a single-party state that could not politically survive a single military defeat, and hence it will risk none. China cannot free-ride its way to the top and then dominate with no resulting exposure to draining wars. To believe in such a trajectory is, in my mind, truly ahistoric.

Helprin likewise sees China's defense rise as a pure zero-sum---as in, they gain and we lose. I do not. I see the Chinese arriving just in time.

We will either convince the Chinese to cooperate with us on global security or we will cede the burden to them. Either way, China is going to get dramatically bogged down by all its burgeoning global network connectivity. To believe otherwise is sheer fantasy.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. We've never gotten one, and neither will the Chinese.

US-Afghanistan: trying to hold the US-Afghan endgame together

WAPO, FT and Economist stories.

As in Iraq, I don't see the Obama administration doing much of anything to regionalize what comes next.  This remains completely a US/NATO show, as improved as it may be.  And so we are reduced to emphasizing publicly to the world how strong our bond is with the Karzai government--a sure sign that it is weak.

Karzai remains committed to a personality-based rule, because it's what he knows and he knows it's more popular than the Americans.  The Americans remain committed to building up institutions, because it's what we know works best, and yet, as in Iraq, there is this sense of having our eye on the door.

And so we are left with our great faith in the Kandahar campaign and the notion that, as one American general put it, the Afghans will "shura their way to success."

I personally would put more faith in a regionalization scheme that engaged the Iranians, Turks, Russians, Indians and Chinese far more explicitly and deeply.  Instead, we seem intent on relying on the kindness of the Pakistanis going forward--or maybe it's backward.

The requirement to "fight through" a cyberattack = reasonable planning

Keith Alexander is confirmed as the first head of U.S. Cyber Command, a sub-unified command under Strategic Command.

What caught my eye was his previous sensible testimony (see the other WAPO story) on the subject of war during conditions of cyber attack:

In his written responses, Alexander said that clandestine, offensive actions in cyberspace -- such as dismantling a Web site used by jihadists overseas -- are "traditional military activities" and should not be considered covert operations.

In the event of a cyber attack, the military must still be able to carry out conventional operations.

"Even with the clear understanding that we could experience damage to our infrastructure, we must be prepared to 'fight through' in the worst case scenario," he said.

I know, I know.  The right virus and everything goes back to the Dark Ages and we're all completely helpless.

But indulging in nightmare scenarios isn't planning, it's escapism. As always, the military has to plan on functioning even as comms are degraded.  There's nothing new in that.

Chart of the day: drawing down in Iraq

A trio of stories (WAPO, NYT, WSJ--the last providing the chart) exploring the feasibility of the drawdown trajectory, all projecting the usual fears (meddling neighbors, political gridlock in Baghdad, stubborn insurgent activity, fears of an Arab-Kurd conflagration).

Bases will shrink and disappear, as will vast amounts of gear.  What gets left behind is primarily small units for training and support to the Iraqi army.  Besides the usual counterinsurgency stuff, the big focus is on controlling Iraq's long borders--especially with Iran.  U.S. troops will likewise be stationed along the line separating the Kurdish Regional Gov provinces and the rest of Iraq.

Naturally, backfilling with contractors will occur, and by the end of the summer, they should outnumber the troops by 50% (75k to 50k).

The footprint of the Special Ops forces will remain basically unchanged across the coming months--the focus on killing the worst insurgents.  I wouldn't be surprised if "zero" is never reached but never acknowledged either. The SOF guys aren't usually counted.

I would comment on the administration's strategy here, except I can't really see any--other than leaving. Iraq-the-outcome seems no more regionalized now than it ever was under Bush-Cheney.  I feel like we're pushing the foster kid out the door on his 18th birthday no matter what.

And yeah, the neighborhood is making plans.

The sub-divisioning of AFRICOM proceeds logically according to regional economic schemes

Harkening back to my "The Americans Have Landed" piece for Esquire in 2007, this piece (via WPR's Media RoundUp) revisits the five geographic sub-divisions pursued by AFRICOM, a staple concept I used in the brief for a couple of years following my reporting. It was the source of my prediction in the piece that the US could one day have two dozen little forts around the vast continent like the one I visited, and reported on, along Kenya's coastline.  Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, the star of the piece, is the model for four other sub-regional units (north, south, west and central.  At the time I visited, HOA had Djibouti as the sub-regional command site, plus "contingency operating locations" in Ethiopia (3, with one just closed in connection with Ethiopia's intervention into Somalia) and Kenya (1).  That's one mini-HQ and 4 COLs for a total of 5 facilities. Replicate that four times and you've got roughly two-dozen little forts, albeit spread across a landscape roughly triple the size of the United States.  HOA's HQ was 2k, and the COLs were more like 50 a pop, so let's say 2,200 total.  Replicate that four more times and you're talking a whopping total of 10,11-000 personnel (with lots being civilian contractors).  As presence goes, this is a tiny force for such a huge continent, so it can only be about leveraging local capacity.

To compare, we sent 10k personnel to Haiti for the earthquake.  Think about that:  Haiti versus Africa!

And let's just say, we didn't exactly control Haiti on the basis of 10,000 personnel.

Anyway, here's what this piece in the Geopolitical Monitor says:

The month before AFRICOM began its one-year incubation under U.S. European Command in 2007, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry said, “Rather than three different commanders who have Africa as a third or fourth priority, there will be one commander that has it as a top priority.” [2]

The Pentagon official also revealed that Africa Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five ‘regional integration teams’ scattered around the continent” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO,” particularly France, a member of both, which was “interested in developing the Africa standby force”. [3]

The Defense Department official identified all the key components of Africa Command’s role and adumbrated what has transpired in the almost three-year interim: By subsuming nations formerly in the areas of responsibility of three Pentagon commands under a unified one, the U.S. will divide the world’s second most populous continent into five military districts, each with a multinational African Standby Force trained by military forces from the United States, NATO and the European Union.

Later the same month, the Pentagon confirmed its earlier disclosure that AFRICOM would deploy regional integration teams “to the northern, eastern, southern, central and western portions of the continent, mirroring the African Union’s five regional economic communities….”

The Defense News website detailed the geographic division described in Defense Department briefing documents issued in that month:

“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….

“A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara, according to the briefing documents.” [4]

The five areas correspond to Africa’s main Regional Economic Communities, starting in the north of the continent:

• Arab Maghreb Union: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.
• East African Community (EAC): Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
• Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
• Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS): Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe.
• Southern Africa Development Community: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

The piece, with snippets of snarky editorializing here and there ("Pentagon Builds Surrogate Armies To Control Africa Region By Region"  Oh really!  That's all it takes?  My, that was easy!), lays out a lot of references and gets the facts basically correct (although I think it misidentifies HOA as--in effect--a sixth separate effort, as it basically correction to the EAC layout + Ethiopia).  It also explores my colleague Harry Ulrich's similar networking effort in the naval realm (something I also wrote on for Esquire:  "Sea-Traffic Control").

But like I say in the post headline, a fairly natural breakdown by geography:  a local precinct effort by the US to encourage regional integration in the security realm that buttresses that which is already unfolding in the economic realm.  Every neighborhood gets its community cop (locally-derived peacekeeping units) with an attendant mentor (AFRICOM sub-regionals).

Naturally nefarious to some, but who else is making the effort?  Especially when our economic interests are marginal beyond oil, and the oil will flow no matter how many brushfires were to happen anyway.

Nonetheless, the piece ends on this note, however unsubstantiated it is by the actual text:

The U.S. is not dragging almost every nation in Africa into its military network because of altruism or concerns for the security of the continent’s people. AFRICOM’s function is that of every predatory military power: The threat and use of armed violence to gain economic and geopolitical advantages.

Yes, yes. Making Africa safe for Chinese mercantilism.  So selfish of us!

Worth reading for the facts, just understand that the editorializing is both hyperbolic and unsupported.

Gates stands firm on Navy's self-inflicted budget woes

Dreazen WSJ story.

Gates was fairly explicit in a recent speech about the Navy's continuing penchant for multibillion-dollar platforms being the real cause of its declining numbers, making clear (as Dreazen writes) that "he thought the Navy was buying too many big-ticket items, such as aircraft carriers, while failing to devote enough resources to unmanned submarines and other relatively inexpensive systems."

The Leviathan prefers the few and the expensive, but the SysAdmin demands the many and the cheap.

The numbers stagger:  $3-6B for a destroyer, $7B for a top-line sub, and $11B for a carrier.

Gates:

You don't necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s.

Naturally, Gates is accused by industry cheerleaders as "utterly misreading the strategic landscape."

My argument remains the same:  Buy fewer of the biggest platforms but keep the technology advanced and intimidating, accepting that the per-unit cost will suck.  But you will inevitably shift toward the many and cheap and the unmanned if you want to keep playing worldwide.  Violence has migrated downward from the system to states and now primarily to individuals.  So yes, keep a decent hedge against any possible resumption of system-level warfare, but do not pretend that's enough to manage the system.

Nobody forces the Navy to shrink its numbers except the Navy itself.