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DRONING ON ABOUT IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Wonder what is going on about the war of words between Teheran and Washington over the use of UAV spy drones ? Check out a post at The Adventures of Chester !

SOUTH KOREA’S ANTI-ANTI-COMMUNIST REGIME

Dr. Judith Klinghoffer has a good article up at HNN on North Korea this week. I found the subtext about South Korean politics more interesting though. Professor Klinghoffer wrote:

“I am sorry to admit that the news did not surprise me. As Korean University professor, Shin-wha Lee, has recently informed me, any mention of North Korean atrocities is politically incorrect in South Korea because it is seen as unwarranted anti-Communism. Apparently, history has taught Seoul nothing. In South Korea we are back to the good old days when the Stalinist atrocities were meticulously covered up. The Moscow trials were treated as just. Robert Conquest was dismissed as hard line anti-Communist, and Noam Chomsky airily dismissed evidence of the Cambodian genocide.

And let us not be sidetracked by all the talk about crazy/not so crazy indeed, artistic leader. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a willful all powerful tyrant (the son of a tyrant) may be the primary world concern but it cannot be expected to the primary concern of South Koreans or human rights activists. For there a Holocaust is going on in North Korea and I am not using the term lightly and neither are those you will find if you click on. “North Korea’s Auschwitz” — the inside story on the No. 14 detention center. There you will find Kim Yong-sam’s report…”

If Americans are puzzled by South Korea’s recent rise in anti-Americanism they really shouldn’t be. It was stirred deliberately by former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, a former leftist dissident who suffered at the hands of South Korea’s old, right-wing, military regime. It was Kim who patiently refashioned South Korean nationalism, away from opposition to North Korea and defined it in opposition to the United States. In all fairness, Kim succeeded easily because his policy was cost-free and the Clinton administration questioned neither his ” Sunshine Policy” nor Kim’s crackdown on criticism of North Korea’s lunatic regime, finding both to be politically helpful cover for their own appeasement policy.

The United States will probably find China to be a more helpful de facto ally in taming Kim Jong-Il’s mad nuclear ambitions than our de jure ally in Seoul

UPDATE: Dan at tdaxp identifies the driver in China’s desire to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

A GENERAL REBUTTAL

Armchair Generalist responded to my critique in the comments and crossposted on Liberals Against Terrorism:

“I think you miss my point – I’m not as concerned about the cost of fabric (although you do, I think, underestimate the price differences of DLA’s ordering millions of fatigues a year and their point of view on economies of scale) as I am the mindset.

You say “Jointness is better expressed in such elements as communications equipment and military doctrines that cultivate interservice teamwork while letting each unit do what is designed to do well.” Well, here’s the thing – the services don’t like joint, they write joint doctrine to be all-encompassing of all four services’ unique views and practices instead of refining it from a top-down, slimmer joint aspect.

Here it is, what, 20 years after Grenada and we still can’t get the four services to use one version of GCCS or use one standard logistics reporting format. I merely meant that this uniform issue is indicative of the deeper feelings within the four services. I don’t fault Rumsfeld for not forcing them to go standard, just that Rumsfeld’s goal of going joint appears to be weakening as a result of this symptom.”

Let me say that, in general, I do not disagree that the armed services could use a healthy dose of ” slimmer jointness” particularly on such things as a logistics reporting format and even bigger ticket items like aircraft. It would be far more economical both in money and use of military assets to increase the genuine adherence to the concept.

On the uniforms issue, lets say we save, say, $ 450 million – a not insubstantial sum – by imposing a joint uniform on the services. You would not only affect morale of active duty personnel up to the general officer rank in what would be the black beret debacle x 10 but you also enrage the veterans groups and members of Congress with prior military service. My guess is Congress reverses that decision with alacrity and – should you prevail – important people who might have helped you on more substantive and less controversial jointness reforms are looking to settle a score with you on round II. A very poor cost to benefit ratio for expended political capital, no ?

My thoughts on Rumsfeld is that he will use the war as an excuse to leapfrog over a lot of service objections to concentrate on restructuring the services organizationally in terms of mission execution. Elevating SOCOM to an independent command will eventually be seen as one of his more conservative reforms, assuming he gets as far as I’m speculating he wants to go.

Thomas Barnett has written in terms of a ” Leviathan ” and ” System Administration ” division of labor. Even if you don’t buy into PNM theory as I do I believe Iraq has taught a hard lesson that counterinsurgency, counterterrorism operations, stabilization and reconstruction and peacekeeping cannot be done by the seat of our pants in the wake of major conventional operations. We have to retool to carry out these tasks well because they will determine if intervention efforts ultimately bear fruit or lapse in to a different kind of problem.

CONGRATS !

To Dr. Barnett who seems to have set the world land speed record for hammering out his next book on PNM grand strategy. First draft, I realize but can’t wait for it to hit the bookstores Tom ! Oh, and he’s lecturing to a Congressional study group at the invitation of GOP foreign policy heavy-hitter Senator Dick Lugar.

I’m feeling rather lazy in comparison…….

KIBBITZING ON THE POSTS OF OTHERS

I thought as a blogging warm-up I’d make a few comments on what caught my atttention today.

Over at Liberals Against Terrorism, Armchair General lives up to his moniker, faulting Rumsfeld for failing to force the armed services to adopt a common uniform as a symbol ( or evidence) of commitment to ” jointness”. AG wrote:

“Now you might say, “So what? they’re adapting to specific environments in which they expect to operate.” Maybe. My viewpoint is that the services have always hated to be joint; they will always tell you that they can determine what’s best for their own service interests, and they’re partly right. However, this independance in the selection of their combat uniforms indicates two things – first, they don’t care about the costs of developing, purchasing, and maintaining four different sets of fatigues, as opposed to the generally lower costs of having one type of uniform. Good news for overseas textile companies, bad news for people that have to buy their own uniform. More seriously, I would think that this just inspires the idea that each service is unique and special, and that fosters more interservice rivalry and infighting.”

Even a great blog can have an off day. This post was simply foolishness. While it is indeed true that you would have lower marginal costs with a common field dress for all the services the cost in esprit de corps would be extremely high while acheiving a savings of pennies. I’m sure the Army was going to save a few nickels by giving the black beret of the Rangers to all the cooks, secretaries and buck privates on K.P. but the near-revolt of the elite trigger-pullers demonstrated how damaging to morale such McNamaraesque parsimony can be.

Unit cohesion and a sense of sacrifice are built around such martial distinctions as patches, stripes, chevrons, heraldric symbols and the like. Men will fight and die because of the idea that their service, their division, their brigade, their company ” is unique and special”. Military history is replete with examples of units from the Spartans at Thermopylae to Navy SEALS in Iraq that fulfil that role and distinguishing them from the herd is a part of the warrior culture. ” Jointness” is better expressed in such elements as communications equipment and military doctrines that cultivate interservice teamwork while letting each unit do what is designed to do well.

The second thing that caught my eye was that militant centrist Purplestater at Centerfeud and edgy libertarian ( and fellow Rule-Set Resetter) TM Lutas hit the same point today.
TM was more concise so here’s his post in full:

“Progressive Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals

TCS is running a neat article called Anti-Powerfulism examining the strange reactive stance of the Left to President Bush’s “almost revolutionary program”. It seems to me that we’re facing a very new phenomenon, the phenomenon of the reactionary left and the progressive right. Whether it’s going to be sustainable is a big question. Either the progressives on the left will come up with a competing positive agenda to Bush’s or they will leave the left, loving progress more than the label. That fracture would geld the left and stick them in permanent minority status. The right has fracture issues to as Patrick Buchanan has shown with his championing a reactionary paleoconservatism that is downright grumpy.

The rest of the world must be horribly confused. “

Purplestater developed his argument at length so you should go read his post in full but here is a snippet:

“We live in a strange age in which the elections held in a country recently liberated from a monstrous and barbaric dictatorship were criticized because they resulted from an “imperialist intervention” by the “fascist US regime” – but terrorists attempting to destabilize that country and prevent popular elections through threats of violence are called “freedom fighters” and “Minutemen” by voices of the Left like last year’s international media darling, Michael Moore.

The Left used to claim to be on the side of democracy and the will of the people (as long as those people weren’t under Soviet domination), and against fascism and oppression. Now that the post 9/11 Right has taken up the cause of liberation (for admittedly self-interested and pragmatic reasons), the Left is suddenly on the side of “stability”, even as dictatorships around the world are being shaken to their foundations.”

The Left has become, at least psychologically, a vanguard movement. Millionaire Hollywood socialists, tenured radicals and activist lawyers from law schools steeped in histories of WASP white shoe privilege. What does George Soros or Cass Sunstein have in common with anybody trying to raise kids in a modest three-flat bungalow in Chicago or a double-wide in some Georgia hamlet ?