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This strikes me as an exceedingly unwise media strategy for General McChrystal:

(AP)  WASHINGTON (AP) – The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan told an interviewer he felt betrayed by the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.An article out this week in “Rolling Stone” magazine depicts Gen. Stanley McChrystal as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration and unable to convince even some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the war.A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides are quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.McChrystal himself is described by an aide as “disappointed” in his first Oval Office meeting with an unprepared President Barack Obama. The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops.“I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.”Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

The profile, titled “The Runaway General” emerged from several weeks of interviews and travel with McChrystal’s tight circle of aides this spring….

Jesus.

If this story sounds eerily familiar, it is.

The general has a reputation as a straight shooter and a workaholic commander who is 100 % committed to his mission. Anyone even casually paying attention to Afghanistan is aware of the strain between McChrystal’s HQ and the US Embassy in Kabul under Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, himself a retired lieutenant general with tours of duty in Afghanistan in charge of state and military building programs. The leaking of a confidential cable from the Ambassaador that was extremely critical of US strategy under McChrystal most likely poisoned their relationship for good ( though the leak could easily have been from State Department, White House or NSC officials eager to engage in slimy intrigue and ingratiate themselves with the MSM, rather than from the Embassy itself).

I also agree that the timetable and resources that McChrystal must labor under have been deliberately mismatched to the strategic objectives by the Obama administration to a degree best described as “asinine”.

That said, frustrated, straight shooting, honest to a fault and zealous Army commanding generals should not be encouraged to vent their grievances on the record to reporters. Especially about their civilian political superiors. Good things are not going to happen.

Still less should their intensely loyal inner circle and brain trust staff officers come across as “A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides ” mocking the Vice-President of the United States. While there’s no shortage of things to mock about Joe Biden, active-duty military officers should not be doing it in major media publications. These are the guys who should be running interference for their boss with the press, not making him look worse.

I have sympathy for General McChrystal. There are people in DC who do not have to be accountable as he does, but possess enough authority to get in his way, demand information, waste his people’s time, leak criticism, impose restrictions or whisper in ears and they do not have to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the results of their machinations. It must be intensely aggravating.

But going out and handing these folks knives ain’t smart.

ADDENDUM:

Danger Room reports McChrystal has issued an apology.

ADDENDUM II.

SWJ has a round-up.

ADDENDUM III.

Rolling Stone – The Runaway General

ADDENDUM IV.

Tom Barnett says this interview is not like what Admiral Fallon did

ADDENDUM V.

Dr. James Joyner is reporting this morning that General McChrystal is out after his meeting with President Obama.

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.