zenpundit.com

Top Billing!:New York Daily News-Dr. John Nagl – We can still win the war: Things are grim in Afghanistan, but victory remains in sight

….The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.

….Counterinsurgency campaigns are not won by killing every insurgent and terrorist. The most committed terrorists have to be killed or captured, but many of the foot soldiers and even the midlevel leaders can eventually be convinced through a combination of carrots and sticks that renouncing violence and becoming part of the political process offer a better chance for success than continuing to fight. American troop reinforcements in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgency is strongest, along with more effective drone strikes and an increasing Pakistani commitment to counterinsurgency, are putting more pressure on the Taliban and giving the Afghan government an opportunity to outgovern its enemies.

I have made a number of harsh criticisms of AfPak policy recently and fairness requires some equal time to a cogent and vigorous defense, which Dr. Nagl mounts in his op-ed. This is most likely just the opening shots in what may be an increasingly heated debate as the US moves into election campaign season this fall.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Hollowing out Afghanistan’s local government and Blast from my past: PNM’s “New Rules for a New Crisis”

The secnd post by Dr. Barnett is good for those readers who are unfamiliar with his influential concepts from The Pentagon’s New Map.

SWJ Blog – Dave Dilegge – The Great COIN Debate in JFQ, Almost… (Updated)

Col. Gian Gentile vs. Dr. John Nagl at ten paces with flintlock pistols….or laptops.

Registan.net  Michael Hancock – Unconscionable Story

A brutal dissection of the ignorance of Ted Rall.

Abu Muqawama – Afghanistan: Graveyard of Assumptions? (Updated)

See Top Billing comments above.

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – The Father Of Us All 

I once saw a professor yell “The Greeks did it all first!”. While not as extreme, this post is a pleasant nod in the direction of constructing arguments about strategic policy based on history, especially military history, instead of on theory.

WSJ.com Shelby Steele – Israel and the Surrender of the West

Unusually firey rhetoric from Steele in defense of Israel.

Max Boot replying to Andrew Exum and Michael Cohen responding to Boot. Then Fabius Maximus responds to Boot.

Michigan War Studies Review John Shy – Review of Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography

…. In 1976, Sir Michael Howard and Peter Paret published the definitive English translation of On War.[1] Strachan admires their work, but takes issue with it in important ways. The nub of his critique concerns the degree to which Clausewitz changed his mind over two decades. Strachan believes that Howard and Paret, by the very consistency of their translation, have exaggerated the continuity of his thought, and that Paret as biographer has done the same, finding traces of every major idea in On War as early as Clausewitz’s writings of 1806. Strachan instead emphasizes that the scope of Clausewitz’s theoretical inquiry shifted with time from an overriding concern with the strategy of near-absolute war as waged by Napoleon to a broader search for a general theory of war. This search culminated late in the author’s life with a unifying stress on policy, Politik, the guiding intention of war itself, whatever particular form the war might take, whether the limited warfare of the eighteenth century or wars of national resistance–the guerrilla war as waged in Spain and as explored for Prussia against France by the younger Clausewitz in a series of lectures in 1810 at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule in Berlin.

Wow! Talk about inside academic baseball! Not only would a reader have to be intimately familiar with the strategic arguments of On War, to evaluate Strachan’s thesis, they would also have to be linguists fluent in formal and colloquial Low German of the early 19th century. Good freaking Lord, was this book written for Moltke the Elder?

Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon – The Agricultural Paradigm

Alvin Toffler would like this post.

Democracy Journal – America 2021: The Military and the World

Some short term defense futurism from the Left, meriting inclusion on the strength of P.W. Singer’s observations. Hat tip to Russ Wellen:

PWS: We don’t seem to understand that strategy is not about identifying priorities, but setting them. In World War II, strategy was setting the priority of Europe first, saying Japan can wait, so we’re going to put more resources into Europe. The current QDR, however, says something like: Europe’s a problem and Japan’s a problem. The same lack of priority-setting happens within areas like personnel and acquisitions. Within the military structure, for example, the problem with the budget is that prices are going up in each acquisition program, which in turn is making acquisitions determine the strategy you’ll have at the end. Costs are driving strategy and doctrine out, which is the opposite of the way it’s supposed to be.

That’s it!

An important upcoming blogging roundtable this summer at Chicago Boyz. Now a word from our moderator, Lexington Green:

Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050

Voices from many quarters are saying dire things about the American-led campaign in Afghanistan. The prospect of defeat, whatever that may mean in practice, is real. But we are so close to the events, it is hard to know what is and is not critical. And the facts which trickle out allow people who are not insiders to only have a sketchy, pointillist impression of the state of play. There is a lot of noise around a weak signal.

ChicagoBoyz will be convening a group of contributors to look back on the American campaign in Afghanistan from a forty year distance, from 2050.

40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.

This exercise in informed and educated imagination is meant to help us gain intellectual distance from the drumbeat of day to day events, to understand the current situation in Afghanistan more clearly, to think-through the potential outcomes, and to consider the stakes which are in play in the longer run of history for America, for its military, for the region, and for the rest of the world.

The Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.

The ChicagoBoyz blog is a place where we can think about the unthinkable.

Stand by for further details, including a list of our contributors.

The justification keeps changing for a cap-and-trade bill, but the target is gas at $ 7 a gallon.

Can you afford that?

Hundreds of billions stand to be made by Wall St. firms in trading carbon credits. A market that can only exist by government fiat. These firms are major donors to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. They are also quietly hedging their bets with the GOP. If everyone just pitches in and does with a few thousand dollars less, executive bonuses can continue to grow through government subsidies.

They play, you will pay.

Is looking for a few good men. Or women.

SWJ commencing phase 2 or our nefarious plan

….These are roles rather than job descriptions; each has a bit of an up-front project flavor to it with an enduring execution tail.  We expect you to bring some insight and vision to the position, and expand it in a win-win way.  We’re trying to frame these in terms where a palatable chunk of 10 or so hours per week is ample for success, though we realize that’s a wild guess and it is recon pull –  we’ll  evolve together to further lump, divide, or build out the cast of characters. 

The big roles we’re framing now are:

• Advertising Manager (Banner King/Queen) – run our advertising operations:  rethink our ad inventory as we go through site redesign; enhance our advertiser kit and the whole flow; outreach to, discussions with, and inking deals with advertisers; monitor campaign execution. You have audacity, tact and hutzpah, with the business, people, and operations sense to put it all together.
• Merchandise Manager (Schwag Tsar) – think up some nice small wars stuff that our folks would like to have, and find a way to get it to them.  Not at a loss, but we’re more interested in building a brand and a community than we are at selling cheap stuff to make an extra buck.  Deal with vendors, figure out some realistic inventory, and get ‘er done. Should have a keen eye for the difference between stuff and junk, and think end to end as far as the logistics goes. Amateurs talk t-shirts & coins, professionals talk fulfullment.
• Social Networking Manager (Grand Twit) – so we’ve got a token Twitter and Facebook presence, but we aren’t doing much with it.  There are some untapped capabilities there and in our user profiles in vBulletin. We haven’t done much in the way of facilitating local get togethers.  There’s tons we could do but aren’t because we just don’t have the time. You have the vision and execution ability to do more smart stuff to help more people get SWJ their way, and get together in ways that are meaningful to them.

We’ve also got some more focused gaps where folks with some specific talents can help us:

• Developer – if you’re competent on a LAMP box, we’ve got a few office workflow things we’d like to have our system do more nicely.  These are distinct from our in-process migration to Drupal and we hope they are discrete, interesting projects that can be feathers in your cap and arrows in our quiver.  If you’d like to drop a shoulder on some of it, send us a note for a short list of specific things we’re interested in.
• Graphic Design (Style Guru) – so with all this redesign and rework we’re doing, we need someone with a better eye than us fashion disasters.  We’ll soon be doing the CSS work with our site development team, and then there are a couple of collateral things that should synch up for that clean, consistent, simple, functional, good looks.  More Filson than Guggenheim, but we want some restrained flair and perhaps you’re just the person to dope slap us with it.  We’ve got to make our 2009 Rolling Stone hotness even hotter.  Maybe this design gigs stops at the look & feel, maybe you drive through that to be more of a brand manager than a designer with excursions into content and the whole IO thing – e.g. who knows what kind of junk that merchandise person is going to try to schlep that is just inconsistent with our “look”?  Your call.  But it starts with a sense of style.

I know there are many readers here who are techies who like the subject matter of COIN, national security and strategy, so I thought I would try to help amplify the message in my own small way.

Those who are “deadly serious” are encouraged to contact SWJ publisher Bill Nagle.

The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture by Ishmael Jones

A former clandestine officer of the CIA who operated overseas without benefit of diplomatic cover, “Ishmael Jones” has painted one of the most damning insider accounts of a puportedly self-serving and risk-averse CIA’s management culture that has ever been written. Jones’ description of a mendacious and incompetent CIA headquarters bureaucracy has less in common with critical documents like the 9/11 Commission Report or the legendary Church Committee hearings than it does with the literature produced by Soviet dissidents and defectors during the Cold War.

Jones, who quotes from the iconic 1990’s film Glengarry Glen Ross, yearned to be in an aggressive covert intelligence service whose case officers would “Always Be Closing” . Instead, he finds a Central Intelligence Agency topheavy with career managers averse to approving operational approaches to potential sources, eager to recall effective and productive officers permanently home on the slightest pretexts, comfortable with padding their incomes through familial nepotism and not above lying to Congress or political superiors in the Executive Branch. Jones navigates successfully through three consecutive overseas assignments via a strategy of keeping HQ in the dark about his activities, never becoming known as an “administrative problem” to HQ paper-shufflers and advancing operational costs from his own pocket, with the CIA eventually in arrears to Jones to the tune of $ 200,000.

CIA management in The Human Factor resembles nothing so much as the Soviet nomenklatura crossbred with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Even if we were to allow for exaggeration for humorous effect, or frankly discount 50 % of Jones’ examples outright, the remainder is still a horrifying picture of Langley as an insular bureaucracy that excels far more at Beltway intrigue than at foreign espionage or covert operations. Jones also discusses the tenure of CIA directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, the Valerie Plame story and the post-9/11 intelligence “reforms” that aggravated the CIA management culture’s worst tendencies. Jones concludes by stating flatly that the CIA cannot be fixed and should be abolished, with its useful operational personnel transferred to the Departments of State and Defense.

ADDENDUM:

An excellent – and more detailed – review of The Human Factor by  by fellow Chicago Boyz blogger, James McCormick:

Mini-Book Review – Jones – The Human Factor

….Other reviews of this book have proclaimed Human Factor a rather boring recollection of examples of institutional ineptitude and better as a guidebook for potential employees than a useful description of the CIA but I feel this is in fact the most useful book on the CIA’s clandestine service since:

Orrin Deforest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam, Simon & Schuster, 1990, 294 pp.

David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, Atheneum, 1977, 309 pp.

which covered clandestine case officer activities, first person, in Vietnam and Latin America.

Like these two aforementioned titles, Human Factor focuses on the day-to-day challenges of being a covert case officer … the “teeth” in any intelligence organization. It is noteworthy that the Director of Central Intelligence has rarely, if ever, been one of those covert (non-State Department) officers. It’s as if your dentist was being overseen by experts in small-engine mechanics.

Ishmael recounts the minutiae of what reports he needed to write, the porous e-mail systems he had to manipulate, and the permissions he needed to gain. The timing and delays of decisions from Langley … the phrasing and terminology that was necessary to get anyone back in the US to allow any activity whatsoever. As a former stock broker, Jones was entirely comfortable with the challenges of “cold-calling” and dealing with “No” over and over again. But this wasn’t the case for his fellow trainees or for any of his superiors. At every turn, he was able to contrast his experience in the Marines (and military culture), and with Wall Street’s “make the call” ethos, with what he was experiencing as one of the most at-risk members of the Agency