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Shane Deichman has an outstanding reflection up at Wizards of Oz:

Armistice/Remembrance/Veterans Day

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in the year 1918, “The Great War” ended.

Of course, it couldn’t have been known as “World War I” at the time — because that would mean the insanity of wholesale slaughter and wanton destruction would happen again.  What a difference a generation makes….

92 years after the poppy has come to signify remembrance of those who fell in defense of the State, whether in Flanders Fields or France or the coral atolls of the Pacific or the rolling hills of Korea or the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq or the river valleys of the Hindu Kush, today we are living off the interest earned by their blood.

Read the rest here.

Thank you to all who have served and who are serving now.

From the auspices of The Warlord, an interesting paper:

UK Ministry of Defence – The Future Character of Conflict (PDF)

Deductions from Themes in Future Conflict

• Future conflict will not be a precise science: it will remain an unpredictable and uniquely human activity. Adversaries (state, state-proxies and non-state) and threats (conventional and unconventional) will blur. The range of threats will spread, with increased proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), cyberspace, and other novel and irregular threats.
• Even during wars of national survival or the destruction of WMD, conflict will remain focused on influencing people. The battle of the narratives will be key, and the UK must conduct protracted influence activity, coordinated centrally and executed locally.
• Maintaining public support will be essential for success on operations. Critical to this will be legitimacy and effective levels of force protection.
• Qualitative advantage may no longer be assumed in the future. Some adversaries may be able to procure adequate quality as well as afford greater quantity, whereas we will be unable to mass sufficient quality or quantity everywhere that it is needed.

I have a great fondness for the British.

They are culturally our close cousins and are a greater people than their recent governments would imply ( the same can largely be said of Americans as well). The current and former administrations have not nurtured the “special relationship” as they should have.

This is of course, an gross understatement: the Obama administration has been at special pains to kick British Prime Ministers in the groin in public ever since they came in to office in 2009. Now, in a fit of ill-considered budgetary niggardliness,  the British are merging part of their military power projection capability with that of France, in order to form something that will be, in case of “future conflict”, completely undeployable. Great.

Just wait, by 2012-2014, the cry in American politics will be ” Who Lost Britain?”

Perhaps we will be too consumed with Mexican narco-insurgency in Texas, Arizona and California  by then to care.

National security, or some of the inside-baseball politics thereof, is shifting.

Within hours of the polls closing and buried in the noise over politics:

Control of intelligence budget will shift

NEW ORLEANS – Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Tuesday that he has won a “conceptual agreement” to remove the $53 billion national intelligence budget from Pentagon control and place it under his purview by 2013, as part of an effort to enhance his authority over the U.S. intelligence community.

“To me, it’s a win-win,” he told an audience at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference here. Clapper’s deal with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would take “$50 billion off the top line” of the Pentagon budget and give the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “more authority and oversight” of the budget. The $27 billion military intelligence budget would remain under the Defense Department, Clapper said.

….With his trademark wry humor, he also said he is bringing back “a certain unnamed intelligence officer from Afghanistan” who wrote a report critical of intelligence gathering there; this officer will help improve intelligence sharing among federal agencies and with state and local agencies. “Hey buddy,” Clapper quipped, “you can help me fix it.” The “buddy” is Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who wrote his report for the Center for a New American Security. He will become an assistant director at the ODNI

The DNI, who garnered a colossal $ 50 billion in budgetary authority over the IC that formerly resided with Defense, gave up turf on “cybersecurity”, seen as a future gold mine by Pentagon contractors.

It is noteworthy, that among the Democratic fallen in the House yesterday was Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a true expert in military affairs with a passion for strategy. Exiting with him are three other moderate Southern Democrats, putting the minority Democrats on Armed Services most likely under the leftist Pelosi ally, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, as new GOP members take over.

Presumably, this intel agreement moves oversight over a vast chunk of sensitive IC activity away from Armed Services to the House Intelligence Committee. Hard to say now exactly to what extent. It would also take defending these programs off of Secretary Gate’s plate when the budget knives come out and into the lap of the DNI and the White House.

Finally, I will add that CNAS is emerging as the equivalent of the RAND of the 21st century.

 For national security buffs, this is definitely worth a look:

Congressional Research Service – Richard Best :The National Security Council: An Organizational Assessment (PDF)

The NSC has a few fundamental tasks, not all of which are mutually compatible:

1. Honest broker on policy options and steward of the inter-agency coordination process.

2. Enforcement of bureaucratic accountability for PDD/NSDD orders from the President.

3. Analysis of bureaucracy-generated “options” ( usually artificially restricted to suit departmental interests) and proposing policy alternatives for the President.

Historically, most NSCs can do at least one of these tasks well, though sometimes not even that. Eisenhower’s NSC, in sync with the rest of his administration, was much more effective than most. However, this case was due not only to Ike’s oorganizational preferences as a former holder of supreme military command, but the close working relationships of his SECSTATE, John Foster Dulles, DCI Allen Dulles and Chief of Staff Sherman Adams.

Eisenhower ran a very tight ship. Most presidents come into office not knowing what they do not know and their NSC is seldom structured to compensate, being redesigned in the first national security directives to suit the preconceptions of the incoming POTUS and his political advisers. Presidents get what they ask for in an NSC, not what they will actually need.

Interestingly, “operational control” sometimes is covertly lodged in the NSC when a POTUS attempts to outflank a hostile bureaucracy rather than confront blatant insubordination from five levels below an ineffectual or indifferent Cabinet member. This usually has had very mixed results, permitting both brilliant tactical moves and ill-considered cowboyism from policy types attempting to “wing” directing delicate intelligence, diplomatic or military actions.