Our Con Man in Iraq

The Rise and Fall of Chalabi: Bush’s Mr. Wrong

For the hard-liners at the Defense Department, the raid came as a surprise. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, got the news from the media. When Iraqi police, guarded by American GIs, burst into the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, looking for evidence of kidnapping, embezzlement, torture and theft, the men who run the Pentagon were left asking some uncomfortable questions. “Who signed off on this raid?” wondered one very high-ranking official. “What were U.S. soldiers doing there?” asked another, according to a source who was present in the room.

I can understand prison abuses not filtering up to OSD level in a timely manner. But how in the world does what amounts to a major policy swing take place without input from the highest levels? Apparently, the infamous Rumsfeld-Bremer feud is the answer:

Moving Day

Phil Carter has moved Intel Dump off BlogSpot to its own domain.

Search for P.M.D.'s

Thomas Friedman [RSS] is perplexed, as am I, by the rise in suicide bombers as a major tactic in Iraq.

My rough estimate is that there have been 50 to 75 suicide bomb attacks in Iraq in the last year. So the first question I have is this: Where are all these suicide bombers coming from? How do you just get these people off the shelf?

I don’t buy it myself, but one can plausibly argue that 37 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank have made Palestinians so crazy that scores of them would have volunteered for suicide bombing missions over the last few years. But the U.S. “occupation” of Iraq is only a year old, and the suicide bombings started there within a few months of U.S. forces’ arriving, to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam’s warped tyranny. So what does that mean? It means that some group or groups have the ability to recruit a large pool of people willing to kill themselves in attacks against American or Iraqi targets on short notice — and we don’t have a clue how this process works.

We don’t know who these people are — although reports suggest they are coming from Europe, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia — how the underground railroad that gets them from their local mosques to Iraq operates, how they connect up with the operating cells in Iraq and how they get wired and indoctrinated for suicide missions.

“I don’t think the P.M.D.’s are really a product of local Iraqi resentment against us,” says Raymond Stock, an expert on Arabic literature and media based in Cairo. “They are mainly imported cookie-cutter killers, created by a combination of Arab mass media, certain extremist elements in Muslim culture, and some very shrewd recruiting by Al Qaeda and its ilk. When young, angry, futureless, sexually repressed people are taught that death is a permanent vacation of guilt-free pleasure, and they see it glorified in countless videos, all you need is a willing truck driver to ferry them over the border from Syria, Jordan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia and presto — a human bomb.”

***

Extremely sophisticated nihilists, able to organize multiple suicide bombings right under our noses — for a year. It’s another sign that we never had enough troops in Iraq, and have failed to train and equip a meaningful Iraqi police force to secure Iraq’s borders or its interior — which is the necessary foundation for any decent outcome in Iraq.

While I agree with Friedman that the source of these bombers is of interest and that they are undermining our efforts in Iraq, I don’t see how “more troops” solves this one. Does Israel not have enough troops? The bottom line is that it’s virtually impossible to stop every would-be suicide bomber if there is a wave of them. One simply can’t put a giant defensive perimeter around everything. And, even if that were feasible, the perimeter simply becomes the target.

Rebels Seem to Have Ceded Karbal

Finally, some positive news out of Iraq:

NYT — U.S. Military Says Shiite Rebels Seem to Have Ceded Karbala [RSS]

American commanders said early Sunday that insurgents loyal to a rebel cleric appeared to have given up control of central Karbala, where they had been shielding themselves at two shrines.

According to the commanders, there were several strong signs that the armed supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric, have abandoned the area and ceded authority to the Americans and their allies after nearly three weeks of urban combat.

A large overnight raid met no resistance coming from a group of buildings where insurgents had been firing at American tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. Civilians were seen returning to homes in central Karbala that they had abandoned during fierce fighting. And in the afternoon on Saturday, tribal sheiks approached American commanders offering to persuade the militia, the Mahdi Army, to lay down its arms and leave the city.

“It looks like they just packed up and went home,” Col. Peter Mansoor, commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division, said in an operations tent on the city outskirts where he monitored field reports. Referring to Mr. Sadr, Colonel Mansoor said, “I think his days are numbered.”

***

An Iraqi reporter for The New York Times in Karbala said he had seen militiamen putting their weapons in bags in recent days and trying to leave the city. Some residents of the city have distributed fliers denouncing Mr. Sadr and the presence of his fighters.

American commanders said they would press the Iraqi police to do patrols in the old city in the next week. Whether and how the police get attacked will determine how much is left of the insurgency, the commanders said.

If the insurgency in Karbala has truly dissipated, then Mr. Sadr’s six-week insurrection has suffered badly. Though the Americans clamped down on the rebellion, Mr. Sadr had managed to maintain his grip on three towns: Karbala; the nearby holy city of Najaf, where he lives; and Kufa, a town adjacent to Najaf where Mr. Sadr preaches.

This seems out of the blue and my simply represent a tactical decision to mass forces elsewhere. But it could be a sign that the insurgents have less popular support than advertised.

Rescuing Iraq Policy

WaPo — President Plans Drive To Rescue Iraq Policy

President Bush will launch an ambitious campaign tomorrow night to shift attention from recent setbacks that have eroded domestic and international support for U.S. policy in Iraq, particularly the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the escalating violence, and focus instead on the future of post-occupation Iraq.

The president will open a tightly orchestrated public relations effort in a speech at the Army War College outlining U.S. plans for the critical five weeks before the limited transfer of political power June 30. The White House then intends to circulate this week a draft U.N. resolution on post-occupation Iraq, wrap up negotiations with Iraqis on an interim government and begin shoring up the coalition to ensure that other foreign forces also stay after June 30, U.S. officials said.

“There’s a sense that this week is our chance to create some movement in a different direction. We’ll start talking about the future, not the past, by focusing on the U.N. resolution and [U.N. envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi’s transition process. Sure there’ll still be plenty of arguments, but it will be about the future, and that’s a healthy change,” said a senior State Department official who would speak only on condition of anonymity.

The diplomatic campaign is a response to serious reversals over the past two months and to growing turmoil. Last week alone, the U.S.-appointed president of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated and a cabinet official was almost killed in a suicide bombing; in a disputed episode, more than 40 people were killed by U.S. troops at what Iraqis said was a wedding party; and 16 arrest warrants were issued for aides or associates of Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite to help lead postwar Iraq, on charges related to financial issues, leading him to sever ties with the U.S.-led coalition.

***

In the first of at least six presidential speeches on Iraq before June 30, Bush will particularly try to counter growing criticism that Washington has lowered the goal posts for its year-long occupation, U.S. officials said. Critics and Iraq experts have charged that the administration has backed down from its original pledge to create a strong new democracy that would be a catalyst for a broad political transformation in the Middle East and is instead settling on an exit strategy that will leave a fragile government unable to protect itself.

“He will talk about the importance of not lowering our sights and sticking to our goals of a free, peaceful, democratic Iraq, of adhering to our commitment to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, and of an election in a January time frame,” said a White House official who insisted on anonymity.

I hope he says a lot more than that. Indeed, I’m not sure why platitudes need to be off the record.

Fixing things like this would be a good place to start:

WaPo — In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime

It was after nightfall when they finally found their offices at Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace — 11 jet-lagged, sweaty, idealistic volunteers who had come to help Iraq along the road to democracy.

When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.

Occupied Iraq was just as Simone Ledeen had imagined — ornate mosques, soldiers in formation, sand blowing everywhere, “just like on TV.” The 28-year-old daughter of neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen and a recently minted MBA, she had arrived on a military transport plane with the others and was eager to get to work.

They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country’s $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.

Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars. But within their group, inside the “Green Zone,” the four-mile strip surrounded by cement blast walls where Iraq’s temporary rulers are based, their seven months at the CPA was the experience of a lifetime. It was defined by long hours, patriotism, friendship, sacrifice and loss.

I’m hoping the story is a distortion of reality. Surely, we don’t have the equivalent of Peace Corps volunteers running major programs? The fact that the reporter calls Michael Ledeen, a rather well credentialed scholar and experienced foreign policy advisor, a “pundit” makes me rather suspicious.

Axis of Evel Knievel

AP: Bush Suffers Cuts, Bruises While Biking

President Bush suffered cuts and bruises early Saturday afternoon when he fell while mountain biking on his ranch, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Bush was on the 16th mile of a 17-mile ride when he fell, Duffy said. He was riding with a military aide, members of the Secret Service and his personal physician, Dr. Richard Tubb.

“He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees,” Duffy said. “Dr. Tubb, who was with him, cleaned his scratches, said he was fine. The Secret Service offered to drive him back to the house. He declined and finished his ride.”

***

Earlier this month, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry took a spill from his bicycle while riding with Secret Service agents through Concord, Mass., about 18 miles north of Boston. Kerry fell when his bike hit a patch of sand. He was not injured.

Told about Bush’s mishap, Kerry said, “I hope he’s OK. I didn’t know the president rode a bike.”

Matt Drudge has a somewhat cryptic note atop the page:

Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, ‘Did the training wheels fall off?’… Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record… Developing…

Hardly a big deal, either way.

And what’s with these guys falling down all the time, anyway? First, Bush falls off his Sedgway. Kerry falls off his bike and down the bunny slopes while skiing. And now this? Clearly the Secret Service is going to have its hands full regardless of who wins in November.

Update: Responding to the CNN version of the story, Smash has similar thoughts, Tim Blair and Blackfive both note that Bush didn’t blame the fall on the Secret Service, and Josh Marshall wonders if the bike fall won’t become “iconic” in the way that Bush 41’s vomiting on the Japanese PM was.

Bush Graduation Flip-Flop

Back in October, Brett Marston and I had a discussion about President Bush’s forcing NATO to reshuffle this month’s summit meeting in order to accomodate his attendance at his daughters’ graduation ceremonies at Yale and Texas. Now, he’s decided that he and Laura have decided not to attend to avoid disrupting the proceedings and taking the attention away from the girls.

Now, I can argue this one either way, but I wish he’d make up his mind!

Sarin Shell: Arsenal or Artifact?

Joe Carter sent me a link last night to a CSM column by Scott Ritter, in which he argued that, in all likelihood, the sarin shell detonated in Iraq last week was not part of a stockpile but rather a dud that had been fired at some time in the past and squirreled away for some reason. While Ritter’s conclusions struck me as strained, my knowledge of the mechanics of cannon artillery is cursory and largely faded. Don Sensing has a rather convincing rebuttal this afternoon, however, which effectively refutes most of Ritter’s technical arguments. Whether there is some large stockpile of chemical munitions where that one came from is a matter still to be seen, of course.

Kerry May Defer Nomination

WaPo: Kerry Ponders Delay in Party Nod

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) may take the unprecedented step of delaying formal acceptance of his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president this summer in an effort to reduce President Bush’s financial advantage for the general election campaign, Kerry advisers said Friday.

Campaign officials confirmed that they are actively considering an extraordinary plan, under which Kerry would not be formally nominated at the Democratic National Convention in late July and instead would be designated as the party’s nominee weeks later, around the time of the Republican convention at the end of August.

The plan, one of several ideas that campaign and party officials said are being discussed to level the financial playing field with the Republicans, is fraught with political complications — maintaining excitement at the convention and countering Republican criticism among them — and some legal questions. But it underscores again the extent to which fundraising and financial considerations are driving campaign strategy in this election cycle.

Aboard his campaign plane en route to a fundraiser in Connecticut on Friday evening, Kerry declined to comment. Asked whether he would accept the party’s nomination in July, he replied with a grin, “I will accept the nomination.”

A Federal Election Commission spokesman, Ian Stirton, would not say whether the strategy of delaying acceptance of a party nomination was acceptable under federal election law, adding that it would be “up to the commission” to decide.

The Democratic convention begins on July 26 in Boston, while the Republican convention opens Aug. 30 in New York. Under federal law, each major-party nominee will receive a check for $74.69 million from the U.S. Treasury to finance the general election campaign. Receipt of the money is triggered by formal acceptance of the nomination, and after that no money raised for the primaries can be used on behalf of each nominee’s general election campaign.

Because of the timing of the two conventions, Kerry would have to start spending his $75 million at the end of July, while Bush could wait five weeks to begin spending his. Between the two conventions, Kerry would be spending public money while Bush could continue to tap the record-breaking campaign treasury he has amassed this year.

I can see the ads now: “I rejected the nomination before I accepted it.”

The current spending rules are rather silly, frankly. This is especially true this season when the Democratic primaries were wrapped up so early and the Republican primaries were pro forma. Still, this is an odd move. The main rationale for moving the Republican convention to September, as I understand it, was to get the convention “bounce” later than usual. As low rated as conventions have become in recent years, I can’t imagine anyone would bother to watch if Kerry made it known he wouldn’t accept the nomination. Indeed, if that’s the case, the networks shouldn’t even bother to cover it.

Worst Abuses on a Single Day

AP — Many Iraq Prison Abuses Occurred in Nov

any of the worst abuses that have come to light from the Abu Ghraib prison happened on a single November day amid a flare of insurgent violence in Iraq (news - web sites), the deaths of many U.S. soldiers and a breakdown of the American guards’ command structure.

Nov. 8 was the day U.S. guards took most of the infamous photographs: soldiers mugging in front of a pile of naked, hooded Iraqis, prisoners forced to perform or simulate sex acts, a hooded prisoner in a scarecrow-like pose with wires attached to him.

It was unclear Friday whether most or all of the new pictures and video published by The Washington Post depicted events on Nov. 8. At least one photo, showing Spc. Charles Graner Jr. with his arm cocked as if to punch a prisoner, is described in military court documents as having been taken that day.

When Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits tearfully pleaded guilty Wednesday to abusing prisoners, he described fellow soldiers committing an escalating series of abuses on eight prisoners that included stamping on their toes and fingers and punching one man hard enough to knock him out.

Sivits is likely to testify about the events of Nov. 8 at courts-martial for other soldiers charged with abuse. Three of them declined to enter pleas at hearings Wednesday: Sgt. Javal Davis, Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick II and Graner.

The abuse came during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting and reflection. The abused Iraqis, Sivits said, had been suspected of taking part in a prison riot that day. They were held at Abu Ghraib on suspicion of common crimes, not attacks on U.S. forces, said Col. Marc Warren, the top legal adviser to Iraqi commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

The day of abuse — a Saturday — capped what had been the worst week for U.S. troops in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Nearly three dozen had been killed in a surge of attacks that left some other soldiers frustrated and frightened. Insurgents had attacked the Abu Ghraib prison and other U.S. bases in the area with mortars several times in previous weeks.

This would make a lot of sense if the abuse was primarily violent. It doesn’t explain the sexual abuse and the apparent enjoyment the tormenters were taking in it in the photos we’ve seen. That’s not the type of thing one does out of frustration or anger.

Beltway Traffic Jam

The end-of-week Traffic Jam:

• Venomous Kate is accident prone.
  
• James Owens tried to buy more booze than the law would allow.
  
• Kevin Aylward has the Wizbang Weekend Caption Contest up.
  
• Various Crooked Timber bloggers got together. Photos ensued.
  
• Dodd Harris has a Weekend Caption Contest, too.
  
• Bill Hobbs has an excellent roundup of all the news about blogs.
  
• Ogged is very concerned about commercial masturbation.
  
• Jen Speaks about evil noodles.
  
• Jeff Goldstein has the ultimate five word movie review.

Abu Ghraib Video

The long-anticipated video of abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is now available at the Washington Post.

Videos Amplify Picture of Violence

The video begins with three soldiers huddled around a naked detainee, his thin frame backed against a wall. With a snap of his wrist, one of the soldiers slaps the man across his left cheek so hard that the prisoner’s knees buckle. Another detainee, handcuffed and on his back, is dragged across the prison floor.

Then, the human pyramid begins to take shape. Soldiers force hooded and naked prisoners into crouches on the floor, one by one, side by side, a soldier pointing to where the next ones should go. The video stops. But there is more.

In a collection of hundreds of so-far-unreleased photographs and short digital videos obtained by The Washington Post, U.S. soldiers are shown physically and emotionally abusing detainees last fall in the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.

The new pictures and videos go beyond the photos previously released to the public in several ways, amplifying the overt violence against detainees and displaying a variety of abusive techniques previously unseen. They show a group of apparently cavalier soldiers assaulting prisoners, forcing detainees to masturbate, and standing over a naked prisoner while holding a shotgun. Some of the videos echo scenes in previously released still photographs — such as the stacking of naked detainees — but the video images render the incidents more vividly.

Defense Department spokesman Lawrence T. DiRita said the photographs, by description, sounded like those the Pentagon has exhibited to members of Congress and that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had warned might yet become public. “There are a series of investigations going on as a result of the disclosure of the activities depicted on photos,” DiRita said last night.

The new images do not shed light on who directed the abuse, a question central to the court cases of the 372nd Military Police Company soldiers charged in the abuse scandal. But the pictures do show soldiers appearing to delight in the abuses, and they starkly reveal several detainees cowering in fear.

In other words, it has absolutely no news value but is quite titilating and will keep the scandal on the front pages for a few more days.

Caption Contest

Just for Meryl Yourish (although anyone can participate), it’s time for another OTB Caption Contest^TM:

Write your caption in the comments below.

« Nothing more to see here.

Like Kryptonite to Stupid

Oliver Willis has managed to get a job blogging with David Brock’s new Media Matters site. It sounds like a good fit. (Hat tip: Jim Henley)

BlogAds Survey Results

Henry Copeland has made the data from the survey available online. The self-selected sample responding to what is acknowledged to be a small subset of the blogosphere is decidedly different than a random sample of the U.S. population—which isn’t all that surprising, really.

Some interesting results:

Blog readers are media-mavens: 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly.

They are also far more male — 79%! — than I expected, versus 56% of NYTimes.com’s readers.

***

Likewise, blog readers are united in their apathy about traditional news sources: 82% of blog readers say that television is worthless or only somewhat useful as a source of news and opinion. 55% percent say the same about print newspapers. 54% say the same about print magazines.

Meanwhile, 86% say that blogs are either useful or extremely useful as sources of news or opinion. 80% say they read blogs for news they can’t find elsewhere. 78% read because the perspective is better. 66% value the faster news. 61% say that blogs are more honest. Divided on so much else, blog readers appear united in their dissatisfaction with conventional media and their rabid love of blogs.

What conclusion do I draw from this week’s effort to articulate the demographics of blog readers… as women or men, lawyers or programmers, Californians or Floridians, Republicans or Democrats?

I conclude that blog readers are, themselves, a distinct and important new demographic cohort: blog readers.

Much more at the link, including statistical charts and such.

Elections and Markets

Paul at Wizbang, Sean Hackbarth, and Kevin McGeehee ponder the presidential polls and whether the advent of election betting markets don’t provide a better predictive device.

It’s an interesting point, although this specific market mechanism doesn’t have enough of a track record to really evaluate at this point. Indeed, one would guess that polls and these markets are rather interrelated, as people betting large sums of money on an election outcome likely follow the polls rather closely.

Saddam Relative Arrested in Berg Beheading

AP: Iraqis Arrest Four in Berg Beheading

Four people have been detained in the killing of American Nicholas Berg, whose decapitation was captured on videotape, an Iraqi security official and a U.S. military official said Friday. The Iraqi official said the group that killed Berg was led by a relative of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).

The suspects were former members of Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen paramilitary organization, the Iraqi security official said on condition of anonymity. Iraqi police arrested them on May 14 in a house in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad. The province includes Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a U.S. military official in Baghdad confirmed four people were in custody. The official did not say who was holding the suspects.

Hollings at it Again

Ron Gunzburger:

US Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (D-SC) is under fire from Jewish leaders for comments he expressed about the role of Israel and Jewish voters in the US decision to go to war with Iraq. In a column Hollings wrote for his state’s leading newspapers, “[F]or years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel’s security is to spread democracy in the area … [President Bush] came to office imbued with one thought: re-election. Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats. You don’t come to town and announce your Israel policy is to invade Iraq. But George W. Bush […] started laying the groundwork to invade Iraq days after inauguration.” Rabbi Philip Silverstein — a leader of South Carolina’s Jewish community — denounced the remarks: “The whole foreign policy of the United States is based on Israel? What kind of ridiculous statement is that? … It’s anti-Semitic [and] dangerous.” Anti-Defamation League National President Abe Foxman also called for Hollings to apologize: “This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.” For his part, Hollings refuses to apologize or retract the statement. In a written statement, he said that he has a lengthy record of supporting Israel and any characterization of his column as “anti-Jewish stereotyping or scapegoating is ridiculous.” In the past, Hollings has been forced to apologize for insensitive statements about African-Americans, Jews, Japanese, and other minorities. Hollings is retiring from his Senate seat this year.

Only a couple decades too late.

Army Reorganization

StrategyPage reports a major rethinking in the way the Army is organized, along lines many of us have advocated for years:

The U.S. Army is now experimenting with allowing troops to apply for jobs via a web site. The army is currently undergoing a major reorganization, transforming its combat divisions to units with five combat brigades, instead of the usual three, and putting more support troops in the brigades. The division headquarters will now act more like the traditional corps headquarters, and will control as many brigades as are needed for an operation (like from two to eight or so.) Someone got the idea of taking all this reform a little further and using a new term for brigades; “Units of Action.” Division headquarters will now be called a “Unit of Employment.” These two terms will most likely be widely ignored by the troops.

Some of the most useful changes underway have to do with how the careers of soldiers are handed. The new brigades (er, “Units of Action”) will keep most of their troops for at least three years before undergoing a large scale departure of troops whose enlistments are up or are retiring, or going off to long term schooling. Then new troops would come in and start the three year cycle all over again.

A goal is to try and keep as many troops as possible in the brigade for their entire 20-30 year careers. This would provide a core of regulars who would, in effect, represent the living memory of the brigade. In past centuries, troops usually joined a regiment for long periods of time, and this group of regulars did wonders for morale and a sense of continuity in the unit. Psychological and sociological studies in the last few decades have revealed that these “regimental veterans” had a large positive effect on the combat effectiveness of the unit. Given the way military careers go in the army, it would not be difficult to have, after 10-15 years, most of your senior NCOs being men and women who had spent their entire careers with the brigade. This means your key supervisory people all know each other, and have worked together, for years. This makes these NCOs more effective. The new plan also seeks to bring officers back to their original brigade as much as possible. Thus after twenty years, an officer whose first assignment was as a platoon leader in the brigade, could end up as the brigade commander. This helps as well. In combat units, such psychological items can give you a life saving edge on the battlefield.

The latest wrinkle among the many army reforms is the use of a web site that allows soldiers, who have sufficient time left in the army, to volunteer for available jobs in the new brigades that are forming. While everyone in the army volunteered to get in, the act of volunteering again brings with it some stature. It means you are committing yourself still more. Thus Army Rangers will point out that they are triple volunteers (for the army, for airborne training and to be in the rangers.) Having more “double volunteers” in these brigades builds morale and cohesion and makes the units more effective and deadlier in combat.

Interesting. We’ll see how this all shakes out. But moving away from the outmoded divisional structure to a more task force oriented system makes sense—and reflects the way the Army actually fights.

I’m less sure about the personnel management aspect of this experiment, at least as applied to the officer corps. We’ve tried some variation of regimental manning several times without much success. Talent and desire to stay in the military aren’t uniformly distributed among lieutenants, so it wouldn’t make much sense to penalize a unit that happened to be staffed by a number of hard chargers by having them compete against each other for command in the unit while rewarding those that come from weaker units with near-automatic promotion.

Buzzwords That Matter

From StrategyPage: THE WAY THINGS REALLY WORK: Buzzwords That Matter

New buzzwords (or “milspeak”) are constantly coming out of the Pentagon. Rather than use plain English, words that are “more descriptive” (as the perpetrators put it) are invented. Some current examples (which their English translation in parenthesis) are;

Functional Capabilities (stuff we can do, and that is meaningful). It’s another way of saying, “we have capabilities (things that sort of work), and then we have functional capabilities (things that really, really work and get the job done.)

Battlespace Awareness (knowing where our guys, and the enemy, are in the area where the fighting is going on.) In the old days, you could just say you had, “good intelligence and communications.” But the Department of Defense wants billions of dollars for new communications equipment (especially communications satellites) and UAVs that will give commanders a real time view of the battlefield (or “Battlespace.”) Whenever the Pentagon wants a lot of money for some new stuff, they try to invent new words for the same old stuff they are buying. This makes the proposals easier to sell to Congress.

Force Application (attacking the enemy). What this bit of milspeak implies is the need for “precision force application” so as to minimize civilian casualties. This has been a radical innovation, for in all previous wars, the approach of enemy troops always triggered a horde of refugees. People knew that they were in for a hard time if caught in the middle of a war. But by 2003, Iraqis just stayed home. They knew the American bombers would just hit military targets, and it was safer to stay home than get out on the road. Naturally, the U.S. gets little credit for this, and any civilian casualties are portrayed as, “needless slaughters of innocents by bloodthirsty Americans.” It is true that no good deed goes unpunished.

Force Protection (defending our troops.) But this term implies a special form of “defending the troops” that the United States has pioneered. It means keeping your own losses down to rates never before seen in history. In the past, there have always been senior American commanders who went to extraordinary lengths to minimize casualties among their troops. This has become more and more widespread an attitude over the last century. One of the less well known achievements of General Douglas MacArthur during World War II was getting American combat, and non-combat, losses down to very low levels. It was no accident. MacArthur developed new tactics and techniques that made this possible. Several generals followed this philosophy in Korea and Vietnam. But it was after Vietnam that things really got rolling. Well defended base camps, and more equipment and tactics that minimized American casualties appeared. This approach had some useful side effects. Troops were now less terrified about combat. Morale went up, and combat troops continued to re-enlist after a combat tour (in the past, many more preferred not to.)

Focused Logistics (getting the right stuff to the troops when they need it.) Keeping American troops well protected and in a good mood has required an increasing weight of supplies per man per day. Not just more weight, but more different items. Moreover, with all the new technology, it’s become harder to predict the need for spare parts and supplies (especially batteries.) So “Focused Logistics” is another way of saying, “logistics have got harder and we’re really, really going to deal with it.”

Network-Centric Operations (battlefield Internet, which doesn’t really describe just how really important all this is for the troops). It’s long been considered Science Fiction, the idea of troops all networked in an easy to use system that allowed quick exchange of voice, data (including photos or video), plus a system that showed on a screen where all friendly troops were. All of a sudden, in the late 1990s, the technology began to appear, from commercial firms, not military labs, that did it all. The troops are still figuring out how best to use all this new communications technology. Afghanistan and Iraq are providing plenty of opportunities to find out what works, or doesn’t, under actual battlefield conditions. The battlefield Internet makes the troops who have it much more lethal, and better protected from enemy fire.