INTEL DUMP

Saturday, July 16, 2005

COL Marc Warren

[Jon Holdaway, Saturday July 16, 2005 at 9:57pm ]

Let me begin this by saying that I've worked with COL Warren and worship the ground he walks on. He is everything the JAG Corps ought to be — smart, dedicated, professional. One of the few regrets of my Army career is that I was not able to go to Iraq with his V Corps team. I really envied them and the work they were able to do. Hopefully, one day, the stories of the great work done by V Corps' judge advocates gets told.

Until Abu Ghraib, COL Warren's been on most everyone's short list for getting a star and he probably ought to have been The Judge Advocate General in four years, when the next general officer rotation takes place.

That said, as one who was fairly close to the Abu Ghraib scandal and its players, I've been critical of the amount of legal support that the 205th MI Bde received, most importantly the policy development that took place. The V Corps/CJTF-7 Staff Judge Advocate is ultimately responsible for ensuring that policies which are signed by the Commanding General comport with appropriate legal regimes, including the Geneva Conventions. I echo Phil's comments on this point.

What we don't know is what discussions/staffing took place among his staff when legal issues came out of the 205th MI Bde, but the record shows problems. CPT Brent Fitch was the 205th MI Bde Judge Advocate (with technical chain of command coming through COL Warren's office). He should have been aware of the policy landmines in the Abu Ghraib facility and anticipated them. However, the 205th was responsible not only for the operations of the interrogation facility, but they also had several other battalions conducting other intelligence missions, as well as getting dumped with the force protection mission for Abu G. The non-interrogation-related legal issues that would arise from an organization this big would have given him little time to focus on the problems faced by LTC Jordan and CPT Woods, who were running interrogation ops.

Besides this, policy was being promulgated by CJTF-7's lawyers as they tried to figure out who had what status and what law applied to them. As Phil points out, Fay-Jones, clearly points the finger at COL Warren's staff for developing or signing off on bad policy. The most obvious example is the 14 Sep 03 policy memo which had enough problems that a new one with significant changes had to be issued only one month later.

At its core, the problem was that at the ground level, inside Abu G, there was not sufficient legal support. The responsiblity to provide competent legal support for specific interrogation operations belonged to COL Warren. CPT Fitch was obviously not capable, due to the larger 205th mission, to provide the amount of legal oversight needed by interrogation operations. The Joint Interrogation & Debriefing Center, run by LTC Jordan and CPT Woods, needed its own organic legal support (which it gets today). Furthermore, despite resources outside of CJTF-7 who were familiar with interrogation policy and operations (and who were working day-to-day with interrogators), such as judge advocates at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, COL Warren and his staff ignored those resources and plowed ahead developing policy in an area that the Army JAG Corps has little to no clue. The results were clear.

While the press and others focus on bad MPs, or bad interrogators, or policy discussions at echelons above reality, I am firmly convinced that a lot of what took place could have been mitigated had the JAG Corps paid sufficient attention to the career-ending minefield that is interrogation ops. Until now, that had never taken place. (Oh, BTW, I said "mitigated". The scandal, at its heart, would never had occured, despite legal policy and oversight problems, had a few NCOs and Soldiers been doing their jobs in the first place and not behaving like animals. It ought to be embarassing to regular troops that the Army thinks it takes nitnoid policies and pinhead lawyers to keep everyone flying straight.)

For those reasons, the JAG Corps and COL Warren need to take this one on the chin and pull his name. It is sad that one incident from an otherwise outstanding military career can have such a devastating impact, but Marc Warren was not a lowly Captain when this event occurred. It happened while he was one of the most senior leaders in the US Army legal community. LTG Sanchez's career effectively ended because of what took place; COL Warren ought to go down with the boss, as well.

So what will happen? In mitigation, COL Warren and the JAG Corps could argue that he was set up for failure. Not only was he the CJTF-7 senior lawyer, he was also tapped to serve as a legal advisor to Ambassador Bremer's staff, which took him away from his core duties. Also, if past actions are a tell, MG Barbara Fast got her second star despite the fact that she is probably the most culpable of all the senior leaders. She was driving the interrogators for more information, she brought on LTC Jordan, she was a major factor in the problems with the Detainee Review Board process, and she was responsible for letting MG Miller come into Iraq and "GITMO-ize" Abu G. The fact that the Senate thinks not only ought she still be employed by the Army, but that she should get a raise says a lot.

I would also think that the Pentagon and the White House would not want another re-hash of Abu Ghraib that would certainly take place during COL Warren's nomination hearings.

Related Posts (on one page):

COL Marc Warren
DOD nominates Army lawyer with Abu Ghraib ties to be 1-star general

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DOD nominates Army lawyer with Abu Ghraib ties to be 1-star general

[Phillip Carter, Saturday July 16, 2005 at 6:58am ]

Before giving its advice and consent to this promotion, the Senate must use this opportunity to seek answers about the legal and policy environment which existed at Abu Ghraib.

The Defense Department announced on Friday that the President has formally nominated three colonels for promotion to Brigadier General:

Army Col. Malinda E. Dunn has been nominated for appointment to the rank of brigadier general. Dunn is currently serving as staff judge advocate, XVIII Airborne Corps with duty as staff judge advocate, Multi-National Corps-Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq.

Army Col. Clyde J. Tate II has been nominated for appointment to the rank of brigadier general. Tate is currently serving as staff judge advocate, III Corps and Fort Hood, Fort Hood, Texas.

Army Col. Marc L. Warren has been nominated for appointment to the rank of brigadier general. Warren is currently serving as special assistant to the assistant judge advocate general for military law and operations, United States Army, Rosslyn, Va.

COL Warren, you may remember, served as the Staff Judge Advocate for Combined Joint Task Force 7, the Army headquarters in Iraq commanded by LTG Ricardo Sanchez which exercised command oversight over Abu Ghraib during the time of the abuses there. As I wrote in May 2005 for Slate in "What is torture?", COL Warren played a supporting role in the development of detention and interrogation policy for that prison:

As Sanchez's chief attorney, Warren vetted many of the key detention and interrogation policies used in Iraq, including those specified in memos dated Sept. 14, 2003, and Oct. 12, 2003, that authorized the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, and dogs. Warren also served on the Security Internee Review and Appeal Board, established in August 2003, that decided whether to release detainees who were deemed not to be a security threat or of further intelligence value. Army investigators reported their belief that members of Warren's staff, and possibly Warren himself, knew about potential abuses and misconduct in violation of the Geneva Conventions at Abu Ghraib but did not pass this information up to Sanchez or anyone else.

The investigative report (PDF) completed by LTG Anthony Jones and MG George Fay (the "Fay-Jones report") was somewhat less sanguine about the legal and policy failures of CJTF-7:

(2) (U) Interrogation Techniques Policy.

(a)(U) At Abu Ghraib, the lack of consistent policy and command oversight regarding interrogation techniques, coupled with changing policies, contributed to the confusion concerning which techniques could be used, which required higher level approval, and what limits applied to permitted techniques. Initially, CJTF-7 had no theater-specific guidance other than the basic Field Manuals which govern Intelligence Interrogations and Internment and Resettlement operations.

* * *
b. (U) RESPONSIBILITY ABOVE 205th MI BRIGADE

(1) (U)Findings:

(a) (U) I [LTG Jones] find that the chain of command above the 205th MI Brigade was not directly involved in any of the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib.

(b) (U) I find that the chain of command above the 205th MI Brigade promulgated policy memoranda that, inadvertently, left room for interpretation and may have indirectly led to some of the non-violent and non-sexual abuse incidents.

(c) (U) I find that LTG Sanchez, and his DCG, MG Wojdakowski, failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations.

It should be noted here that staff responsibility for vetting (and indeed, for writing) CJTF-7's policy memoranda on detention and interrogation operations fell to COL Warren and his staff of JAG officers. It should also be noted that Army doctrine places staff responsibility in the hands of the Staff Judge Advocate, COL Warren, for staff oversight of subordinate units' compliance with the laws of war. The Fay-Jones report does not, however, take the next step: it does not conclude that COL Warren's actions warrant any disciplinary or administrative action, as it does conclude for a number of other officers. Indeed, an internal investigation by the Army's Judge Advocate General examining COL Warren's professional conduct concluded that all allegations against him were "unsubstantiated."

Nonetheless, there remain serious questions about what actually happened over there during this time frame — both at the prison itself, and in the CJTF-7 staff process which established policies for detention and interrogation policies in Iraq. COL Warren's promotion presents yet another opportunity for Congress to exercise meaningful oversight of this war's conduct, something it has repeatedly failed to do. Per Art. II, Sec. 2, the President may only appoint such officers with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before giving that advice, the Senate should insist on receiving full, frank and candid answers to all of its remaining questions relating to the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, and the policy environment which surrounded them.

I do not mean to intimate that COL Warren was directly responsible for any of these abuses; I do not believe that he was. I have been told by JAGs who have worked with COL Warren that he is an outstanding attorney — perhaps one of the smartest "op law" guys in the military today. On the merits, COL Warren may well deserve this promotion, given his stellar career and legal credentials. However, COL Warren's office and command played a central role in establishing the legal, policy and operational environment where these abuses occurred. These abuses have had a strategic impact on our conduct of the war on terrorism. Further, these abuses have undermined legitimate U.S. efforts to detain and interrogate prisoners in accordance with the laws of war that Congress is ultimately required (see Art. I, Sec. 8, U.S. Const.) for implementing. Serious questions remain about these abuses, and more importantly, about the policy environment which may have contributed to them. As I've argued both in Slate and Foreign Policy, Congress has yet to live up to its Constitutional duty in this area.

Perhaps the time has come to step up?

Related Posts (on one page):

COL Marc Warren
DOD nominates Army lawyer with Abu Ghraib ties to be 1-star general

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Friday, July 15, 2005

A Qualified Endorsement of the Military Commission

[Dave Glazier, Friday July 15, 2005 at 9:45pm ]

The decision handed down yesterday by the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court in the Hamdan case strikes me as a less than ringing endorsement of the government’s current military commission process. While I do not fully agree with the result, I think the decision is generally well reasoned and reflects a rational application of law to the facts.

Before commenting further, some disclosure about my involvement. Not having heard of military commissions prior to the President’s 2001 order, I promptly began detailed research in order to develop an informed opinion. My first major paper, Kangaroo Court or Competent Tribunal?: Judging the 21st Century Military Commission, was published as a “Note” (law review parlance for a student-written piece) in December 2003 (89 Va. L. Rev. 2005) and cited in the district court opinion overturned today. As a result, I was invited to participate in an amici brief for the D.C. Circuit that Phil Carter formally authored (I wrote the historically focused section 3). I have nearly completed a second paper exploring commission history in more detail, seeking to debunk common “myths” and identify overlooked precedents.

In a nutshell, I believe that a properly conducted military commission is a valid forum for trying suspected terrorists, but there are significant legal flaws impacting the basic fairness of the tribunals as currently being undertaken. Historically military commissions conformed closely to court-martial procedure, essentially differing only in jurisdiction. As a statutory creation, the court-martial can only try those persons and those crimes which Congress subjects to its jurisdiction. The military commission has been a gap-filler, trying persons and crimes not subject to court-martial via a “common law” application of the laws of war.

Yesterday’s decision confirmed that federal courts have the authority to review the military commission process, and rejected the government’s claim that they should abstain from any such review until after trials are complete. The court held that it was proper to review jurisdictional matters upfront, but that procedural questions would properly be considered by the courts after the fact, just as they are for any other criminal trial. And the court held that the Geneva Conventions do not create individual rights enforceable in the courts that could provide the basis for finding that the tribunals lacked jurisdiction.

The court’s refusal to abstain from jurisdictional questions is completely consistent with past Supreme Court decisions but a pleasant surprise for those who thought it might take this “easy” way out of deciding the issue, Since I’ve come to conclude that a properly constituted military commission should logically have jurisdiction over terrorists, I find it hard to argue too strenuously with the court on this point. I would have liked them to find that in a nation of law, treaties bind the government’s actions and that the habeas statute itself, not the Geneva Conventions, provides a cause of action for an individual to challenge a deprivation of liberty resulting from a violation. But I recognize that my view on this is a minority one, particularly when alien “combatants” are the victim. To me, the most important point of today’s decision is that even if the Supreme Court cannot be persuaded that the military commissions lack jurisdiction, the Circuit Court left the door wide open for traditional post-trial challenges on the many procedural issues with the commissions’ conduct.

Of course, the government still has several options within its control to largely head the whole issue off. First, DOD can promulgate new regulations restoring the historic procedural commonality between court-martial and military commission prior to resuming trials. And second, Congress can codify military commission procedures to resolve the significant ambiguity in the current law. Despite broad claims of executive authority by this Administration, the Constitution clearly commits the power to define and punish offenses against the law of nations to the legislative branch, and courts are quite likely to uphold any reasonable rules that Congress might enact.

P.S. The SCOTUS blog which Adam White points out in his post immediately below offers some additional insights and a different perspective well worth reading.

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A Civilian Jumps Into The Fray

[Adam White, Friday July 15, 2005 at 5:26pm ]

Thanks to Phil's kind invitation of a couple of weeks ago, I am proud and pleased to join the team here at ID. I won't be able to post anything substantive for another couple of weeks due to other committments, but I thought I'd at least offer you, kind readers, my own "hello."

As the rest of the new team has started the intro posts with some bio, I will, too. First thing first:

I'm a civilian — zero military experience.

Before you rush to worry that I'm entitling you all to my own unfounded opinions on military strategy, I'll assure you that I've got nothing to substantive to contribute to this site on anything regarding military strategy. I may ask some questions, and poke and prod a bit, but I certainly know my role.

Instead, I'll opine once a week or so on matters regarding Constitutional law, international law, the laws of war, and maybe some diplomatic matters. Maybe more often, maybe less, depending on what circumstances present themselves. (I'll also be writing once or twice a week on legal matters at Southern Appeal.)

Of course, given that my take on the Geneva Convention and many other legal issues runs almost directly contrary to Phil's, I may be a busy guy around here. (For example: I think -- at least at first glance -- that the D.C. Circuit panel correctly decided the Hamdan case today. I strongly suspect that Phil does not.)

As for my personal bio: I'm a still-recent graduate of Harvard Law School. I live in Northern Virginia with my family. I recently completed a year's clerkship in a federal court of appeals. Come autumn, I'll be a practicing attorney. My blogging schedule (or my decision to blog at all) may change at that time; it may not.

I offer my sincere thanks to Phil for the opportunity to join the team. I look forward to contributing to this, one of my favorite blogs, and I look forward to reading Phil's own posts from abroad.

Kind regards,
Adam White

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Classifying Private Military Companies

[R. Stanton Scott, Friday July 15, 2005 at 2:30pm ]

My experiences in Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia brought me face to face with only one type of PMC.

In a study that appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of Parameters, Thomas Adams defined three types. The first, which Adams calls "traditional," consists of "individuals with military skills directly applicable to combat or immediate combat support." These are the guys we usually think of when using the word "mercenary." They are almost always trained veterans of one army or another, and they usually operate in ad hoc groups, though some have formed corporations or other business organizations. Executive Outcomes, now defunct, was an organization of this type that actually fielded combat forces, including attack helicopters, for the government of Sierra Leone against Libyan-trained RUF rebels in 1995. Though many of these groups, including EO and Sandline (Cached), have developed corporate-like structures, most have disbanded, and the type of civilian operation that provides combat related military services remains for the most part more loosely organized and shadowy.

Adams defines a second classification which has become more ubiquitous since the middle nineties. These more organized companies fill a role similar to that of a general staff in a Western Army, providing strategic advice and planning related to force structure, training, procurement, and deployment of military forces. They employ retired senior military leaders from larger nations, including noncomms and general officers. The best example of such a company is Military Professional Resources Incorporated. MPRI's best known operation was their development of the nascent Croatian Army into a capable fighting force in late 1994. By the summer of 1995, the formerly incompetent Croatians were good enough to drive the Serbs from the Krajina. MPRI went on to spend 13 months training the Bosnian Army to use surplus US equipment delivered under the "Equip and Train" program.

Specialists make up the third type of classification Adams defined. These companies offer services such as personal protection, signal intercept, informational technology support (including "hacking") and technical surviellance. Adams cites AirScan (Airborne Surveillance and Security Operations) as an example. AirScan conducts airborne surveillance operations for the US government and private companies in the extraction industry. Another example is DynCorp, a company that conducts demining and narcotics eradication operations, and provides security for Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.

The edges of these classifications are very blurry, and many perform operations of broad enough scope to fit into more than one (e.g. MPRI). Further, I would add a fourth classification. Though a company like Kellog, Brown and Root conducts the types of specialized operations that would fit it into Adams' third group, I would argue that they fit as well or better into a "base support" category. Services offered by companies in this category replace functions formerly performed by soldiers so that governments can field units that at least appear to have a smaller logistics tail. Such services include those I spoke of in my introductory post, such as operation of mess facilities. More importantly perhaps, at least for the purposes of analyzing the impact of these firms on military effectiveness, such companies also perform routine maintenance in garrison and operate training facilities such as gunnery ranges.

This is a growth industry, and military people are innovative, so we can expect to see new companies form to provide services that military organizations would like to outsource but as yet have not. This makes these classifications--each of which presents unique political puzzles and problems--a work in progress. Over the weekend I will begin to examine some of these puzles, and perhaps to comment on other subjects as well.

Related Posts (on one page):

America's private military
Outsourcing War
Classifying Private Military Companies
Counting contractors, and their dead, in Iraq
New rules proposed for private military contractors in Iraq
The problems with private military corporations

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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Uzbekistan and the New American Basing Strategy

[Jonathan Caverley, Wednesday July 13, 2005 at 10:25am ]

Quick. What do Japan, Germany, South Korea, Djibouti, Qatar, and Kyrgyzstan all have in common?

Not much, except that they are all host nations to United States military bases. The first three have hosted massive numbers of American service members since early in the Cold War, while the smaller, poorer countries only recently acquired their contingents. This development in American global basing, and the resulting tensions, are well illustrated by the current spat between the US and the autocrat in charge of Uzbekhistan. Some key grafs:

For now, Washington has not gone along with a European proposal to issue an ultimatum to Karimov to agree to an international inquiry with a deadline to reply, or face new sanctions in the form of an arms embargo and a visa ban for diplomats, European envoys said. U.S. officials said they believe that backing Karimov into a corner is not an effective way to win cooperation (emphases mine).

The stakes are high, since the United States has relied on the Uzbek base at Karshi Khanabad, known as K-2, for military and humanitarian missions in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan, which was one of the first republics to ask Russian troops to leave after the Soviet Union collapsed, has reflected new U.S. influence in Central Asia.

Uzbekistan also symbolizes the central dilemma in U.S. foreign policy over whether democracy or fighting terrorism takes precedence. The Pentagon, facing limited alternatives, wants to keep access to the base; the State Department has advocated a tougher line on political change as the key to prevent further unrest.

The tensions between Washington and Tashkent have offered Russia and China an opportunity to squeeze the United States out of Central Asia. Russia, China and four Central Asian nations — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — demanded this month that the United States declare a date for withdrawing troops and aircraft from bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Analysis: The fact that the US does not want to “back Karimov into a corner” (and Europe apparently does) contrasts with its strategy for North Korea and Iran. It’s an inevitable side effect of a completely revised US basing strategy that deserves more attention. For multiple reasons--containing China, protecting oil supplies as well as prosecuting the War on Terror--United States bases have mushroomed throughout the world in recent years, with more to come.

Cold War bases were located in large countries destined to be economic and geopolitical powerhouses, where the US had vital interests in stability, prosperity and alignment with the United States. Service members and their families moved to the equivalent of medium-sized American towns (replete with schools and bowling alleys) for years at a time. They represented a nice convergence of realpolitik, democratization and economic development in one strategy.

The newer host countries present a stark contrast. Many are practically city-states with little economic potential, non-democratic or unstable governments, but in strategic locations. The bases are extremely spare, where six month tours with no family are the rule and therefore requiring very few “hotel services” to help drive a sizable local economy (the hosts are so poor that bases still represent a windfall; Kyrgyzstan's accounted for 5 percent of its entire gross domestic product last year). The bases are likely to be removed from host populations and heavily fortified, and are unlikely to do much to increase stability, democracy or familiarity with Americans in their hosts.

The Cold War bases’ primary message was long term commitment, a presence so large and permanent that any attack on the host (i.e. Warsaw Pact on Western Germany) would guarantee a United States response. The current basing strategies' intention appears to be the precise opposite; ephemeral, multiple staging points for neo-Mahanian “coaling stations” that help avoid a repeat of the Turkish rejection during the Iraq War (small countries are easier to bribe, and if Kyrgyzstan won’t play ball perhaps Uzbekistan will). We're not there to defend Djibouti, we're there to conduct offensive operations in Yemen, Somalia, etc. Small wonder the Chinese and Russians are worried about the 'Stans.

So these bases give American forces tremendous strategic flexibility with little commitment, but at what cost? Without assurance that the U.S. is in for the long haul and knowing the U.S. has other basing options, states are unlikely to democratize, exhibit much stability, or resist pressure from powerful neighbors (not to mention terrorist attacks). Consider the embarrassment if a coup takes place in a host state and the U.S. does little about it. Couple this with the potential for damage in relations with major powers whose cooperation we require in the War on Terror (and who will not a direct threat to U.S. interests for a long time coming), and the deal may not look so good anymore.

Part of the problem is the attempt to commingle two important American conservative foreign policy instincts, preponderance and isolationism. This bipolar desire for overwhelming power everywhere while sticking our necks out nowhere is exemplified by the new basing strategy (more to follow on this).

U.S. bases can be a source of regional stability; we should remember the many ancillary advantages to long-term military basing in large countries with economic and democratic potential, rather than simply creating disposable launching pads. If you are going to antagonize Russia, antagonize it from the Ukraine and Romania, rather than the ‘Stans. Or at the very least, build a McDonalds on every new base.

Related Posts (on one page):

Exiting the American Sector of Baghdad…Entering the Iranian?
Disposable Bases Redux
Uzbekistan and the New American Basing Strategy

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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Relearning old lessons the hard way

[Phillip Carter, Tuesday July 12, 2005 at 4:10pm ]

Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda

In the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, you can find my review of Sean Naylor's brilliant book "Not a Good Day to Die" — a chronicle of Operation Anaconda, the largest battle fought thus far by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As I say in the review, I think the book is a damn good read. If you're interested in military affairs or national security policy, this book belongs on your bookshelf. But there's a lot more here than a breathtaking story about combat in a foreboding place — there are also many lessons to be learned (or relearned) about warfare against a tenacious foe:

In the weeks leading up to Anaconda, intelligence officers thought they had learned everything they could about the Shahikot Valley from satellite and other aerial surveillance. But disturbing rumors persisted that there might be more. One source picked up by the military said that the enemy was not in the valley but actually, Naylor writes, "living up on the ridgelines and coming into the villages to get supplies." Satellite photography caught one RPG, which, warned one officer, probably meant there were more, but no one knew just how many. A thousand enemy fighters were estimated to be in the valley. As it turned out, there may have been 10 times as many, and they weren't just in the valley but on the tactically crucial high ground above.

But U.S. commanders refused to change their plan. It was, according to the 10th Mountain Division's chief of operations Lt. Col. David Gray, "unreasonable to expect wholesale changes based on a single source." But, writes Naylor, "[chief planner Maj. Paul Wilie] acknowledged that writing the plan had been such a painful process of compromise and negotiation that nobody could face the prospect of tearing it up… simply because the enemy might not be where they were supposed to be."

Perhaps the biggest problem was the Rube Goldberg command structure created by Gen. Franks. The war was run from Tampa, Fla., 7,000 miles and 10 time zones away by video teleconferencing. Decisions were made by committee and on Eastern Standard Time, often with an eye towards how the decisions would be briefed to the press at the Pentagon. Naylor quotes a deputy commanding general's priceless description of the SecDef's daily press briefing:

"When SecDef started having a [press] briefing every day, it meant that for hours of that day you could not talk to the CENTCOM staff… . For hours of the day you were unable to get to a senior person to make a decision at CENTCOM because they were tied up prepping themselves for the SecDef's briefing. The SecDef called CENTCOM every morning. They had a morning telephone call and I believe they had an afternoon telephone call. And, for a couple of hours before that telephone call, you could not get [Gen. Franks's directors of operations or intelligence] and therefore you couldn't get a decision. … Numbers became so important that if the SecDef went to a briefing and we had reported that we had captured 14 Al Qaeda and it really turned out to be 12 or 16, then it would be easier to let two go or go back and capture two more rather than to try to change the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] number."
At least some of the failures might have been averted had Franks and his team tapped the right field commander. Naylor clearly thinks that choice should have been someone like Delta Force Lt. Col. Pete Blaber, whose elite teams reconnoitering the area provided the first hints that enemy forces might be larger than estimated. Instead, the Pentagon chose Air Force Brig. Gen. Gregory Trebon, who had never before commanded a ground operation, with Navy Lt. Cmdr. Vic Hyder as his deputy. Though the military has worked hard at what it calls "jointness," trying to get services working in tandem with one another, there was not much evidence of it under Trebon and Hyder. Hyder went so far as to communicate with his subordinates using a radio frequency he knew Blaber would not be monitoring. Trebon and Hyder were convinced that satellite feeds from Predator drones delivered to Navy and Air Force bases hundreds of miles away would be sufficient to run things. "The battle would," in Naylor's withering words, "be 'controlled' by officers watching video screens on a desert island and 'commanded' by a man who had made his name flying transport aircraft."

Two years after Anaconda, military analysts are still debating why those choppers on Takur Ghar never got close air support, and whether the Air Force provided enough firepower for the conventional infantry that followed the commandos. The Air Force, according to Army Special Forces troops, had promised to "soften" enemy targets with a 55-minute aerial bombardment while Air Force officers at Bagram Air Force base say they were aware of no such plans. Having left their artillery at home, the Army's conventional infantry depended on aircraft for heavy firepower. As often happens in combat, the best-laid plans went awry, leaving hundreds of infantrymen to fight with only the weapons they had carried in on their backs.

Al Qaeda, of course, fought with no such bureaucratic limits on their organization; intelligence moved among the enemy as fast as a cell phone call. Having seized the high ground, al Qaeda fighters were able to rain mortar rounds and rifle fire down on the Army's conventional infantry virtually at will, subject to occasional harassment from the limited number of aircraft that made it into the fight.

When I wrote that last paragraph, I had one of Martin Sheen's monologues as CPT Willard in Apocalypse Now in mind:

Charley didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R; was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory.

Likewise, today's adversaries in Afghanistan are skilled and tenacious fighters; they also see death or victory as their only exit strategies. They may not fight with unmanned aerial vehicles or cruise missiles, but they have a spectacular capacity to improvise, adapt and overcome. Al Qaeda's tactical intelligence moves as fast as their social networks and cell phones can move it, and that's pretty damn fast. They don't worry about parochial chains of command or the long-term budgetary impact of giving the mission to a certain unit from a certain branch of service; they just fight. We have come a long way from Anaconda, but not nearly far enough. Our conventional forces must continue to evolve if they are to win. The U.S. military must continue to work at "jointness"; to work at dissolving parochial boundaries between services, branches and units; to work at becoming a truly agile force. To quote some experts from RAND and the 4GW community, it takes a network to fight a network.

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My Introduction to Private Military Companies

[R. Stanton Scott, Tuesday July 12, 2005 at 9:33am ]

My first encounter with workers for a private military company came at the end of a long train ride from Conn Barracks, in Schweinfurt, Germany, to Taszar Air Base near Kaposvar, Hungary. I had moved military equipment by rail a hundred times in Germany, and was accustomed to finding local rail workers monitoring the loading and unloading process. But we also expected someone from a parent unit, so it surprised me when American Civilians greeted us at the railhead without a representative from G3.

I deployed to Bosnia with the staff of the 2nd Brigade, First Infantry Division in October 1996 as a part of SFOR, the stabilization force sent to relieve the troops who had enforced implementation of the Dayton Accords the previous year.

By the time we arrived, the former Yugoslavia had become relatively stable, and construction of more permanent facilities was well underway. Brown and Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, but not yet merged with M. W. Kellog, performed the great majority of this work, which included some rather impressive, if ugly, plywood-and-two-by-four infrastructure.

Over the next six months, with my time split between staff work and running a tank platoon, I saw that these guys did everything from handing out basketballs at the fitness center they had built to delivering food, water, and spare parts. Other civilians taught college classes, ran the PX, and even conducted aerobics sessions. Soldiers were not operating mess halls, running supply convoys, or managing base operations.

Now this was not a war zone, exactly, although many of the Bosnian Serbs had not quite accepted the new order, and gave us a bit of heartburn. For the most part, supply convoys needed no escorts, and civilian contract workers could operate without heavy risk. Still, it made me wonder how we could have accomplished our mission without them, and what sort of political incentives this dependence would create. What if, for example, no private company had come forward to do this work? This would have forced deployment of a much larger force, and quite likely made the mission politically impossible for President Clinton. The existence of Brown and Root removed possible disincentives for military action in the Balkans.

Further, given the huge potential profits (by September 2003 over $2 billion), it also provided incentives for some political actors to support a mission they would otherwise philosophically oppose. Does privatizing military operations--even just logistics--make war more likely?

These puzzles stayed with me when I retired and began to study politics, so I started looking at the domestic political implications of using civilian contractors to support military forces, during training, peacekeeping operations, and on the battlefield. Does it make the decision to deploy more difficult, or less? What effects does it have on force structure and retention? Does dependence on PMCs strenghten military forces by increasing the ratio of combat to support troops, or weaken armies by encouraging too much specialization?

My experience with Brown and Root in Bosnia sparked my curiousity, but it is important to remember that B&R; is only one of many types of companies providing military services. Some perform tasks with both civilian and military applications, such as signal interception and information technology, and others provide military staff work such as operations planning and training supervision. A few actually field combat forces, often very effectively.

These other types of PMCs raise different, but no less interesting, questions about their effects on both domestic and international politics. Soon I will suggest a classification of these companies, and begin to discuss my views on the answers to some of the puzzles they present.

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A Call to Curiosity

[Kris Alexander, Tuesday July 12, 2005 at 7:01am ]

Today we have the pleasure of another guest blogger. Tanya is a college student who is well on her way to being an asset to this country. Read and you’ll agree that “the kids are all right”.

Here's Tanya:

“Cultural understanding” is not a topic which comes up often in the United States. We may talk about the “culture wars” when it comes to our own domestic politics, and we may make references to a “clash of civilizations” when we speak about the Global War on Terror, but it wasn’t until recently that cultural understanding began to enter into public discourse. Now, according to Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist and defense policy fellow at the Office of Naval Research, cultural understanding is a matter of national security.

McFate has written an article entitled, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” for the latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly, a magazine published by the National Defense University. She might as well have called it, “Why we should understand the enemy.”

It seems like common sense, really. McFate makes a reference to Sun Tzu’s famous saying, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Considering the centuries between Sun Tzu’s writing and today, you would think that we would have managed to internalize the lesson, but as McFate makes clear in her article, today’s military lacks “the programs, systems, models, personnel, and organizations to deal with either the existing threat or the changing environment.”

I’m not an expert on military matters, but it’s not difficult to see that our lack of investment in cultural education is harming us in Iraq, and is likely to hurt us still more in the future. Everything from differences in body language to a different framework for social connections takes on a new importance when a misunderstanding means that someone gets shot.

We’ve all heard about the lag in translating Arabic language information. I can tell you that the hot language to be studying in college right now is Arabic. Give it three or four years, and we’re going to have a whole slew of International Studies majors with minors in Arabic or Islamic studies. And that’s a very good thing.

But it’s not enough. McFate mentions in her article that the military equivalent of an area studies specialist, the foreign area officer (FAO), has rarely experienced “deep cultural immersion totally outside the military structure, [so] most do not develop real cultural and social expertise.” It’s all very good if we have Arabic speakers who can translate, but translation does not necessarily imply understanding. The kind of immersion that we need in order to achieve understanding, at least in higher education, means that American students should be studying abroad.

And they do. Many colleges are proud of the percentage of their students who venture abroad for a semester or more. The problem is that the top destinations for American students are English-speaking countries (the UK, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand), with Western European countries (France, Italy, and Spain) as second choices. It’s better than nothing, but not by much. The Institute of International Education publishes statistics which show that as of 2003, the Middle East is the last destination of choice for students studying abroad, right behind Canada and significantly behind Africa.

This means that we’re getting Arabic speakers who have never been anywhere in the Arab world. And while you might read about differences in social interaction in a classroom, there’s very little that compares to actually venturing into a marketplace and trying to bargain for your breakfast. Cultural understanding becomes much more imperative when a lack of it means you might not get fed (especially for a college student).

So we need programs to encourage American students to study outside of the Western, English-speaking areas of the world. One such program is the National Security Education Program(NSEP), which blogger Kris Alexander mentioned at one point with a, “Who’s heard of this?” comment. I’m actually involved with NSEP, and it’s a quality program. In exchange for a scholarship to study abroad for a semester or more in a non-traditional destination country (think Egypt, China, Uganda, and Romania), college students are asked to work for the government for one year in the Department of Defense, intelligence community, or Department of Homeland Security. The top destinations for scholarship recipients this year were Egypt and mainland China. The NSEP is an excellent program, a little bit like ROTC for languages, but it’s too small. Before September 11th, it was in danger of getting shut down for lack of funding.

Along the same lines, the National Defense University conducted a study on the feasibility of a Linguist Reserve Corps. The main conclusion reached was that such a program is indeed feasible, and very necessary. But we haven’t got it yet. And what languages are you most likely to study in high school, anyway? Spanish, French, maybe German. You’re probably more likely to study Latin than Arabic. If we’re going to have a Linguist Reserve Corps, we first have to train the linguists.

I attended a conference at Stanford University this past spring called the Forum for American-Chinese Exchange at Stanford(FACES). It brought together twenty students from the United States and twenty from China to speak on issues ranging from politics and economics to karaoke. What struck me most during the week-long conference was the caliber of the students from China. They didn’t just speak enough English to order food in a restaurant. They spoke enough English to stand up and ask top American scholars, lawyers, and businessmen complicated questions about finance, intellectual property law, and human rights. Did you get that kind of vocabulary from your high school French class? Or are you still stuck asking the direction to la Tour Eiffel?

There’s been quite a bit of alarmist language in the news today about China’s rise. The newspapers tend to focus on their military build-up vis-à-vis Taiwan, but occasionally you’ll hear mention of how many engineering and hard-science majors China, and Asia in general, is turning out in comparison to the U.S.. The National Defense University rolled out a paper on this as well. If there’s a real China threat for the U.S., I think it’s going to come from a new generation of highly educated, multi-lingual, motivated Chinese young people who will do the job better than Americans. And that’s not something we can meet or beat by putting more money into missiles.

So what do we need? There’s a certain arrogance in America that says, “I don’t need to learn another language, because everyone else is learning English.” Maybe they are, but don’t believe for a second that it follows that you’ll understand them, or that you’re actually speaking the same language. I think that, as a matter of national security, we need a revival of education in this country. And I don’t mean testing, and I don’t actually mean more money, although programs like NSEP could definitely use it.

We need to teach new languages in our high schools. We need to encourage students to study abroad in countries which don’t speak English. We need to send them where Americans aren’t necessarily welcome. And believe me, a lot of that is going to start with parents considering the possibility. I’ll be studying Mandarin in Beijing next spring on an NSEP scholarship. I know my parents would rather have me home, but all my dad is doing is sending me articles on the avian flu.

Keeping up starts with the realization that, if we believe we’re the center of the world, and that all roads lead to English and western culture, we’re not going to get to be on top for long. Mandarin Chinese is the second most-spoken language on the internet. Does anyone really believe that it’s going to stay second for long? And what language will it be after Mandarin? Let’s get ahead and stop playing catch-up.

We need a call to curiosity.

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Running with Eagles

[Phillip Carter, Tuesday July 12, 2005 at 6:21am ]

FORT CAMPBELL — I arrived at oh-dark-hundred on Monday morning at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after a long weekend of goodbyes with my friends and family in Los Angeles. Everything went smoothly during my travel, from check-in at LAX to touchdown at Nashville and the drive to Fort Campbell. I spent most of yesterday attending to all the administrative minutiae which accompany a return to active duty, and will spend most of this week doing the same thing.

It certainly feels different to be back on active duty; BDUs and boots wear different than business casual clothes, and there are no billable hours or long commutes on the 10 Freeway to worry about. Notwithstanding the differences, it's amazing how fast it all comes back, and it feels great to be back on active duty. This morning, I went for a run on Wickham Ave, which is the official post PT route. All of the cadences came back quickly, and I soon found myself mouthing the cadences as I ran near formations of soldiers moving up and down the street. It helped that the post was blanketed this morning with a light rain; there's nothing better than running in the early morning rain. Morning PT was always one of my favorite things about being a soldier, and it hasn't changed much since the time I spent at Camp Casey, Fort Irwin and Fort Hood. I'm already stoked about tomorrow's run.

I'll post updates when I can — more to follow.

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Monday, July 11, 2005

June Recruiting: The Truth, But Not the Whole Truth

[Dave Glazier, Monday July 11, 2005 at 3:40pm ]

The Department of Defense “officially” released June recruiting statistics today for each of the services and reserve components. (The Army numbers were actually reported by the New York Times almost two weeks ago). The good news is that all four services, including the Army, and four of the six reserve components met or exceeded monthly goals. The two groups with the shortfalls were the Army National Guard, which accessed 4,337 out of a goal of 5,032 (86%) and the Navy Reserve which obtained 1,233 of a planned 1,336 (92%); the latter hardly seems a matter for concern. This was the first time the active Army had met a monthly goal this year, implying things are getting better and that perhaps discussion of such ideas as a new draft, or increased foreign recruiting, both previously highlighted by Phil on Intel-Dump, are premature.

But what the monthly numbers don’t say is that the Army’s June goal was actually the lowest so far this year, despite the fact that this month of high school graduations traditionally marks the start of prime recruiting season. As the graphic from the New York Times’ June 30th reporting shows, the number of Army June accessions, 6,157 would not have met the goal of any month to date this calendar year. And the problem looks even worse when viewed by fiscal year, the military’s actual counting period. To date, the Army has managed to attract 47,121 new soldiers out of a stated requirement for 80,000. With just three months remaining, that means the service must bring in approximately 11,000 men and women each of the next three months, almost twice the June goal. This at a time in which events in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to generate adverse publicity and unemployment has just been reported to be at nearly a four-year low.

It’s still too early to declare a full-blown crisis, but DOD does the nation no favors by failing to present the full picture. If changes to the current all-volunteer force should become necessary, they ought to result from mature, informed debate over the various options, each of which has significant potential costs for our society and our armed services, associated with it. Obscuring the problem until the last possible moment only seems more likely to result in a poorly chosen option.

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Sunday, July 10, 2005

If it's broke, fix it

[Phillip Carter, Sunday July 10, 2005 at 7:12am ]

Foreign Policy just published a new essay of mine on their website titled "A Guantánamo Exit Strategy", describing a number of practical steps to put the U.S. on firmer legal ground with respect to detentions, interrogations, and adjudications in the war on terrorism. Like others, including Juliette Kayyem, I think the problem is much larger than shutting down Guantanamo itself -- although I think that must now be done for strategic and political reasons. We are now nearly 4 years into the war on terrorism, and it is time to adopt a sustainable policy architecture which can support our long-term strategic goals in this struggle. Here's a brief excerpt from my piece:

The most extreme criticisms of Guantanamo—that it has become a modern-day gulag, with egregious acts of torture practiced there at your direction—exaggerate matters greatly and ignore the legitimate and legal imperative to harvest intelligence. On the other hand, there have been significant abuses documented there. Perhaps more important for those who justify the facility on grounds of necessity, the U.S. intelligence community does not seem to have gotten much bang for its buck. Most reports paint an underwhelming portrait of the detainee population, thanks largely to decisions to hold the most sensitive al Qaeda detainees at secretive facilities elsewhere. In the final analysis, it appears that the United States is running a facility that costs a great deal and provides very little.

Outlined below are several policy recommendations for navigating the ambiguities in the war on terror and placing U.S. detention policy on firmer ground than Guantánamo Bay:

Get Congress off the Sidelines: The Constitution envisions power sharing in times of war. As commander in chief, the president (working through the secretary of defense and others) must wield his executive power to hunt down, interdict, arrest, or kill the nation’s enemies. Further, the president must direct the interrogation of those captured, consistent with the laws of war, and gather intelligence to prevent another attack. But congress has constitutional responsibilities as well, including to "make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" and "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations." If the United States faces a new kind of threat from global terror networks such as al Qaeda, then congress must create the legal architecture to address it. As chair of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees respectively, you must take the lead. Further, if the administration is far-sighted, it should welcome congressional involvement, both because it is better to have congress engaged than sniping from the side, and because the Supreme Court is more likely to endorse presidential power when it has congressional authorization.

Clarify the President’s War Power: The current authorization for the use of military force was introduced in the Senate a mere 72 hours after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with the Pentagon still smoldering across the Potomac. It contains broad, sweeping language of the sort one would expect at such an uncertain moment in American history. The predictable result has been litigation over its exact meaning, particularly in the area of detention. The Bush administration has argued that the law authorizes all wartime measures, including the detention of foreigners and U.S. citizens captured on foreign and domestic battlefields as unlawful enemy combatants, without charges or process, for the duration of hostilities. (In June 2004, the Supreme Court circumscribed this power with its Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, but the exact contours of that decision remain uncertain.) Congress should act now, with the benefit of four years of hindsight, to define and limit the president’s power in the war on terrorism. Ambiguity begets abuse, and we now know enough about the nature of the war to start making wise, detailed policy choices.

* * *

Embed Reporters at Guantanamo: The Pentagon’s "embedding" experiment during Operation Iraqi Freedom was perhaps the greatest success of the war. The reporters traveling with U.S. and coalition units brought an unprecedented level of transparency to the war, enabling the world to see both the humanity and the effectiveness of American combat forces. If there is one thing in short supply at Guantánamo, it is transparency. That, coupled with the administration’s obfuscations about torture, interrogations, detention policies, and other matters related to the island base, has completely destroyed any credibility the United States has regarding this facility. Embedding reporters at Guantánamo, and in military prisons generally, may be the only way to tell the American side of the story with any credibility. These journalists will undoubtedly uncover problems, because problems exist in any military unit or facility. Additionally, measures will have to be taken to ensure the journalists do not violate the 3rd Geneva Convention’s prohibition on subjecting detainees to public humiliation. But, on balance, that is a risk the United States must take to get its story told. This measure will be particularly important as a preemptive step if the United States chooses to eventually shut down Guantánamo and release a group of detainees who will be sure to tell their stories.

And the list goes on -- I make 5 other recommendations in the FP memo. I think the time has come to take a new tack in this area, both because what we are doing now has major legal problems, and because what we are doing now is not working well.

Related Posts (on one page):

Determine Who’s Who:
If it's broke, fix it

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Do We Need a Marine Corps?

[Jonathan Caverley, Sunday July 10, 2005 at 4:59am ]

I said I would return to this question in my intro post, and why I think it’s an important one. Put simply I think we do need the Marines, and almost everyone else in the country agrees. This, I argue, is the problem.

This post is based not on recent news but, like Jon’s, on a lack thereof. There have been few reports of tension between the Army and Marines in the current conflict (two earlier, great examples are here and here). This occurred to me as I was flipping through General Victor Krulak’s excellent book First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps for another project (as one commenter guessed). It’s a book on institutional survival that could be read profitably by defense planners, business executives and government lobbyists alike.

Gen. Krulak observes that the Marine Corps is not needed per se (i.e. its missions could be absorbed by the other services). Indeed he suggests this to be a crucial factor behind its constant evolution (coupled with an obsession with tradition), its aggressive attitude towards risk, and its brilliant PR machine. The Marines are a 207-year-old startup, and the results have generally improved the security of the U.S. and the quality of its military.

After every major war the existence or at least the robustness of the Marine Corps has been challenged (post-WWII most famously, but some worried about it post-Cold War as well). However, I think the threat has declined over time due to a past record of excellence, the general calcification of Defense appropriations and organization, and the Marines’ canny lobbying of Congress and the public.

The Corps' survival as an independent service in the 20th century depended on two strategies: develop a core competency not found elsewhere (counter-insurgency before the 1930’s, amphibious warfare up through WWII and Korea, and expeditionary warfare today) and/or fight harder or differently than the Army in protracted conflicts (WWI, Korea, and Vietnam).

So what will happen to the Corps as the result of this current war? I can think of three options:

Convergence: With the Army shifting to a more rapidly deployable brigade organization and the Marine Corps performing occupation and stabilization missions; technology, the pressures of counterinsurgency/reconstruction, and general overstretch will force the Marines and the Army to adopt each others’ best practices and will to look increasingly similar.

Same Mission/Different Approach: As in Vietnam, the Marines and the Army will fight the same war with different tactics. The Corps will continue to seek out means of doing the same job better and will make sure everyone knows it. Perhaps this is going on right now, but will not be publicized until the inevitable post-conflict drawdown.

Niche Warfare: The Marines find a new core competency, perhaps positioning themselves as the bridge between the tiny Special Operations Forces community and the massive Army on the spectrum of special to conventional warfare (rather than expeditionary vs. heavy/campaign warfare); given that special ops are a growth industry.

I’m not saying that we shall see (or should discourage) Option 1, but the lack of existential threat may help slacken a valuable tension that encourages Options 2 and 3 and has historically raised the standards of U.S. defense. I want to see the Marine Corps around for another 200 years. I just wonder if it should be a given.

There is plenty more to say on this, but in the interest of brevity I’ll conclude with a question to which I would love to hear answers from those more knowledgeable than I: Are the differences between the Army and the Marines growing or declining under the stress of conflict in Iraq?

I promise to post on the type of current stuff that brings people back to Intel Dump from now on. This post is meant to be a sample of what interests me and the type of discussion I’d like to join.

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