Snowflake Memories

I have written before about my Rummy experiences, but wanted tor revisit after seeing this post yesterday at vox.  I was able to dig through Rummy's website and found the document that spawned a heap of paperwork at my desk on the Joint Staff.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, many allies, partners and others offered to help the US, and since Rumsfeld didn't want allies on the battlefield (with a few exceptions), he wanted to use these offers to get the US out of a variety of commitments around the world.  Backfill refers to finding other forces to fill the gaps after one removes one's troops.

I didn't see this snowflake directly, but it produced a memo with a "wishlist" of a number of missions around the world that Feith thought might be good places to withdraw American troops and have someone else replace them: the Multinational Observation Force in the Sinai, SFOR in Bosnia, KFOR in Kosovo, a handful of folks helping out in East Timor, Korea, and on and on.  It listed pretty much every American contingent in a peacekeeping operation around the world as well as many overseas contingents.

I got to be the "stickee"--that I was stuck with it.  Why me?  Partially because Bosnia was on the list and I was one of two guys on the Bosnia desk.  Mostly, I think it was because I was still learning the job and they didn't want to waste the time of a more productive member of the Joint Staff.  Let''s use Saideman on this--he has not much on his plate, and the other folks are doing stuff that will amount to something.  Just a guess.


I did my job, which was to coordinate with the Joint Staff desk officers responsible for these various missions.  Each one came back with basically the same message: nope, not now.  Our troops in place x were part of a commitment that had politico-military equities that still exist--we did mission x for a reason and that reason has not evaporated--so we should not pull these folks out.  For example, I wrote the Bosnia response to the memo directly (the rest I essentially summarized/cut and pasted/plagiarized from the other JS folks), and I probably wrote something about how we made a commitment to our allies, citing the George W. Bush statement: In Together, Out Together.  That we would not leave our allies behind, handling this thing that we helped get many of them into (France, UK, Canada were already stuck in Bosnia in 1994 before SFOR, of course).  Plus 9/11 made Bosnia a bit more relevant for the US since it was a possible vector through which terrorism may flow--some veterans of the Afghanistan campaign who then fought for Bosnia's Muslims settled there. 

The memo went up and then was sent back down by the two star Air Force officer above me because of Iceland was not on my list... because it was not on the original memo.  The USAF had a desire to get out of the Iceland mission.  What I learned yesterday is that he was not alone as Rummy had asked Feith shortly after the first request about how to get out of Iceland.  Indeed, getting out of Iceland was one of Rummy's first instincts in the first month after 9/11. It just wasn't on Feith's list that I received initially.

The problem is that the Iceland mission had linkages--to Iceland's support of US Navy operations there.  So, we kicked that can down the road.  Indeed, we, the Joint Staff, said no to all of the items on the list.  As a result, I got to respond to that memo two more times, as Rummy didn't like to hear no, and would push and push until he got the answer he wanted.  I kept giving Rummy through the chain the best "politico-military" advice I could, based on the feedback received from the other JS desk officers.  Our answers did not change during my time.  I have no idea how others responded to it after my year was up.

The only real changes that ultimately occurred were:

• The US got out of Iceland as NATO made a commitment to rotate planes through to provide Iceland with some reassurance.  The Iceland Air Patrol became a model for the Baltic Air Patrol, which preceded Putin's moves but is now bigger and with much more visibility.
• The US got out of Bosnia in 2004 when it was changed from a NATO mission to a EU mission.  This betrayed "in together, out together" but it happened anyway.

The rest? Not much, as far as I can tell.  The US is still in Kosovo and still provides troops to the MFO.

Sure, the memo was not as silly as "Fix Pakistan", but my experience in this process was most educational and not just about Rummy's refusal to take no for an answer.  I also learned a bit about these other missions and about the multilateral inclinations of the US military.  They would rather operate with others, helping them out, knowing that they could use some help some day.  One could argue that the Joint Staff was just status quo oriented, but my sense from the experience was that the JS staffers had a clear vision of the long term interests of the US, one that saw cooperation with allies and partners as a key, dare I say it, enabler/force multiplier.  Ah, you can take the academic out of the Pentagon, but not the Pentagon out of the academic. 

Rum and Rummy

I got a band of snarky Canadians to watch the Errol Morris documentary about Donald Rumsfeld while we tried out rum-based drinks: Rum and Rummy!  The rum drinks were far better than the doc, if I do say myself as the bartender.  Oy, Rumsfeld is unreflective, completely lacking in sympathy, largely devoid of insight. 

Here is my storify of the occasion.

Check it out... or not.  We had fun, but that was mostly due to the company, the rum and the rum cake (yes, I baked before being baked). 

One might find this doc to be particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias--that fans of Rummy would find his pedantic take on everything to be perfectly useful and insightful.  His non-fans (a club in which I have long been a member) would see mostly justification for their previous beliefs.  But we did have some folks in the room that were on the fence before watching and found themselves pushed over to the non-fan side as a result of the documentary.

Should I have expected any reflection from Rumsfeld?  Perhaps not.  But maybe, just maybe he could have acknowledged the many contradictions he fudged along the way.  Nope.  I still think he is the worst SecDef in history.  Perhaps that jaded my views, but it is a good thing we did not set this up as a drinking game.  Otherwise, unknown unknowns and other efforts to elide and deny would have gotten all of seriously hammered.

Coding Crises in US Civil-Military Relations

Tom Ricks argued recently that there is a fundamental problem in American civil-military relations: “we need presidents willing to listen and learn from dissenting generals -- and generals who know how to dissent in strategic discussions, and are willing to do so.”  Folks on twitter pushed back, arguing that the biggest problem is the perception of veterans as powder kegs, likely simply to explode in rage or become white supremacists.  My friends on twitter were outraged by a NYT column that drew some shaky connections between veterans and white supremacists.  While I don’t entirely agree with Ricks, I think he is closer to the real crisis than my twitter friends.

Why?  Because I care about foreign policy and outcomes in the field.  The frustration with the NYT column is important, to be sure, and we need to be careful about overreacting and under-reacting to the challenges of reintegrating those who engaged in combat (as well as those who served in other capacities) back into civilian life.  Part of the problem here is that we often get confused about what we mean by civil-military relations.  While the general issue of how do the civilians in a society relate to the military can be important, scholars and analysts of defense issues are more concerned with how civilians in government manage the military. 

Government officials have to manage all kinds of government agencies, but traditionally the armed forces are the most critical because they are the most misunderstood and because they happen to have the ability to remove the government.  In advanced democracies, we don’t worry much about coups d’etat.  Indeed, it is a defining characteristic of stable democracy.  Still, managing the military is important and difficult because bad military performance can be catastrophic.  Just as the French in 1940. 

The challenge is that militaries consider themselves experts at the use of force and everyone else as amateurs.  This may be mostly true (less true than it used to be with the development of civilian expertise).   However, because war is politics by other means, to rely on a classic quote by Clausewitz, the decisions made during wars have great political significance.  Which leads to another maxim: war is too important to be left to the generals.  The traditional division of labor of the civilians deciding when to fight and with whom and the military deciding how simply does not work that well in practice.  This can lead to all kinds of tensions between the civilians and military officers, and that is actually quite normal.  The question is how to handle the tensions, which leads us back to Ricks and what he misses.

The job of handling the military in the U.S. does not really belong to the President but to the Secretary of Defence.  Sure, the President chooses the SecDef and is the ultimate commander in chief, but the SecDef is the key conduit between the President and the military.  I worked in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon for a year, and I am now reading Robert Gates’s memoir so I have some opinions about recent SecDef performance.

In short, Rumsfeld was a disaster for American civil-military relations.  He did not listen to his officers much at all, and was not at all willing to “listen and learn from dissenting generals.”  So, the U.S. went to war without a plan for how to deal with success (the missing Phase IV after the fall of Baghdad), the U.S. fired the Iraqi army which was counter to pretty much everything we know about post-war politics, and so on.  Most famously, he got upset at General Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff when he respond honestly to questions in front of a Congressional committee about how big of a force would it take to manage a post-invasion Iraq.  Rummy’s time could clearly be viewed as an on-going crisis in American civil-military relations, and it greatly affected outcomes.

Gates was far more willing to take seriously the feedback he received from American generals.  He reports in the memoir that he consulted the officers and noticed when there were dissenting opinions.  Still, he complains in his memoir of the times that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen would say things in front of Congress that were not in concordance with the messages preferred by the administration.  The difference here is that Gates did not punish Mullen (Rumsfeld essentially sent Shinseki to the doghouse for the rest of his term), although he did admonish him. 

To be honest, I am still trying to figure out Gates.   I think he made a huge mistake: when the Afghan surge happened, he let the Marines up-end much of what had been accomplished to improve unity of command.  They chose to report directly to Central Command rather than ISAF headquarters.  He also let the Marines deploy to the wrong place—Helmand—which was counter to the President’s decision to engage in population-centric counter-insurgency, and the population really was in Kandahar, not Helmand.  So, Gates lets the military do a bit too much, compared to Rumsfeld’s micro-management.

So, to return to Ricks, Secretaries of Defense vary in how they manage the generals under them.  Rummy was obviously at one end of the spectrum of imposing too much.  Gates was perhaps a bit too far the other way.  There is no right way to do it—the armed forces tend to know best how to do what they do but what they do is deeply political with huge implications.  So, Ricks’s advice is right but partially mis-targeted.  The military needs to give its unvarnished views to the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Defense must listen and then make up his or her own mind.

One last thing: in the American case, there is another actor involved—Congress.  The Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate have an important role to play via oversight.  Which means that generals have to speak truth to that power when asked, even when it is inconvenient for the President and the Secretary of Defense.  Of course, Congressional oversight works best when those on the committee are not just engaged in partisan feuding.  In the not so distant past, Democratic Senators and Representations would hold generals feet to the fire even if the President was a Democrat, and Republicans would do the same even when the President was a Republican.  These days?  Not so much.  And that might just be a real crisis in U.S. civil-military relations. 

Turning a Do Not Do List into a Checklist

Here is what Rumsfeld anticipated in October 2002 with my thoughts in color:

SUBJECT: Iraq: An Illustrative List of Potential Problems to be Considered and Addressed
Following is an illustrative list of the types of problems that could result from a conflict with Iraq. It is offered simply as a checklist so that they are part of the deliberations.

1. If US seeks UN approval, it could fail; and without a UN mandate, potential coalition partners may be unwilling to participate.

Ya think?  While I tend to poo-poo the UN, not getting support from major allies (Canada, France, Germany) was very problematic.  Made the war's legitimacy suspect from the get-go.

2. A failure to answer this question could erode support: "If the US pre-empts in one country, does it mean it will pre-empt in all other terrorist states?"

Indeed, the Iranian proliferation problem is in part due to questions in Iranian minds about US intent.

3. US could fail to restrain Israel, and, if Israel entered the conflict, it could broaden into a Middle East war.

This problem didn't happen. Ok.  Israel is unrestrained in other ways (settlements) that are more very counter-productive to American interests.  Plus there is the gathering sense that Israel is trying to provoke an American attack on Iran.

4. Syria and Iran could decide to support Iraq, complicating the war.

Well, they supported insurgents that did heaps of damage to Americans (I raised a question in class yesterday--did Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq kill/maim more Americans than Pakistani support for insurgents in Afghanistan?).

5. Turkish military could move on the Kurds or the Northern Iraqi oil fields.

Yes, no.

6. The Arab street could erupt, particularly if the war is long, destabilizing friendly countries neighboring Iraq—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, GCC states, Pakistan, etc.

A little bit.

7. While the US is engaged in Iraq, another rogue state could take advantage of US preoccupation—North Korea, Iran, PRC in the Taiwan Straits, other?

How about China?  And Iran didn't have to take advantage--it got handed predominance in the region by the US.

8. While preoccupied with Iraq, the US might feel compelled to ignore serious proliferation or other machinations by North Korea, Russia, PRC, Pakistan, India, etc., and thereby seem to tacitly approve and acquiesce in unacceptable behavior, to the detriment of US influence in the world.

Well, the war in Iraq did make the war in Afghanistan harder (doing more with less), which increased reliance on Pakistan ....Not a good thing.

9. Preoccupation with Iraq for a long period could lead to US inattentiveness and diminished influence in South Asia, which could lead to a conflict between nuclear armed states.

See previous comment

10. Oil disruption could cause international shock waves, and with South America already in distress.

Oil prices did go up.  Not great, but not horrible besides empowering Putin's Russia and Chavez.

11. Iraqi intelligence services, which have a global presence, including in the US, could strike the US, our allies, and/or deployed forces in unconventional ways.

No, we did most of the damage to ourselves.

12. Countries will approach the US with unexpected demands in exchange for their support (an Israeli request for us to release Jonathan Pollard, Russia asking for free play in the Pankisi Gorge, etc.), which, if the US accepts, will weaken US credibility.

Well, sure.

13. US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.

There you go.  So, then it looks a lot like a war for oil.

14. There could be higher-than-expected collateral damage—Iraqi civilian deaths.

Much more, but that's ok. Americans do not care so much.  The rest of the world?  A bit more.

15. There could be higher-than-expected US and coalition deaths from Iraq’s use of weapons of mass destruction against coalition forces in Iraq, Kuwait, and/or Israel.

No WMD, no problemos.

16. US could fail to find Saddam Hussein and face problems similar to the difficulty in not finding UBL [Osama bin Laden] and [Mullah] Omar.

Nope, we got him. Weee.

17. US could fail to manage post-Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East and the benefit of Iran.

Oh boy.  Indeed, we could fail to manage Iraq successfully.  Indeed, I am pretty sure the lack of planning had something to do with this and Rummy blocked most of the planning.

18. The dollar cost of the effort could prove to be greater than expected and the contributions from other nations minimal.

Indeed, two trillion dollars perhaps?  Wasted dollars, wasted lives.

19. Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require two to four years, it could take eight to 10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military, and financial resources.

Eight is about on target.

20. US alienation from countries in the EU and the UN could grow to levels sufficient to make our historic post-World War II relationships irretrievable, with the charge of US unilateralism becoming so embedded in the world’s mind that it leads to a diminution of US influence in the world.

Lost influence?  Yes.  Irretrievable?  Only kinda, sorta.

21. US focus on Iraq could weaken our effort in the Global War on Terrorism, leading to terrorist attacks against the US or Europe, including a WMD attack in the US that theoretically might have been avoided.

Well, it did harm the war on terrorism but no WMD on US.  Woot!

22. World reaction against "pre-emption" or "anticipatory self-defense" could inhibit US ability to engage in the future.

Hmmmm.  

23. Adverse reaction to the US could result in the US losing military basing rights in the Gulf and other Muslim countries.

Nope, no lost bases.  Just lost credibility.

24. Recruiting and financing for terrorist networks could take a dramatic upward turn from successful information operations by our enemies, positioning the US as anti-Muslim.

Indeed.  Glad Rummy thought of it.  Too bad it did not dissuade the administration

25. The US will learn, to our surprise, a number of the "unknown unknowns," the gaps in our intelligence knowledge, for example: Iraqi WMD programs could be several years more advanced than we assessed; Iraqi capabilities of which we were unaware may exist, such as UAVs, jamming, cyber attacks, etc.; others one might imagine!

Or they might not have any capabilities at all.

26. Fortress Baghdad could prove to be long and unpleasant for all.

Nope, twas quick.

27. Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Sunni, Shia, and Kurds.

Ya think?  Just a bit?  

28. Iraq could use chemical weapons against the Shia and blame the US.

No WMD

29. Iraq could successfully best us in public relations and persuade the world that the war is against Muslims.

Well, it was, kind of.

Note: It is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq.

 I don't think I ever said Rumsfeld was dumb.  Just incredibly arrogant.  He knew what the risks might be.  He just didn't think that they were that important.  Or that he would pay the costs if the gamble did not pay off.  Just those missing brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children, or just missing limbs, headache-free existences, and so on.  The costs for this war will continue to accrue for the Americans who went and for the Iraqis for generations.

I have long argued that the Bush folks took the list of things not to do and turned them into a check list of things to do.  This list that Rummy came up with is very much what I had in mind, as the Invasion and Occupation decisions made all of the bad things on this list more possible, rather than less, except for that whole WMD thing.  Oops.

Iraq in Retrospect: What Was I Thinking

I was asked on twitter today about my stance ten years ago.  The preparations for the Iraq war were underway, and it was clear that the U.S. was going to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.  Looking backwards, it is easy to point out mistakes and perhaps more people today think they opposed the war ten years ago than actually did.  But what was my stance?  I did not have a blog way back when so I cannot search to find what I was thinking as opposed to what I think now about what I think I was thinking.  It is hard to separate the things I believed at the time from what I know believe about the war, but let me re-construct.

To be clear, I was opposed to the invasion. I do remember that the year on the Joint Staff definitely shaped my views, but I probably would have opposed the war anyway. I clearly remember a few things, and then I am not sure about the rest. 

• I remember thinking that the global war on terrorism [GWOT] was the first and foremost priority and that attacking Iraq was unrelated to that war on terrorism.  Sure, Hussein supported some groups in Lebanon and elsewhere, but Bin Laden was not a friend and Hezbollah was an adversary.  Moreover, in the midst of a conflict where the US would want to reduce support for terrorism, invading Iraq seemed to be something that might just increase hatred/fear of the US and abet AQ recruitment.  One of my frustrations at the time and since was that fighting terrorism was a multidimensional effort, with public diplomacy playing a significant role.  Antagonizing the region with a sketchy war was not going to be good for the big fight. 
• I had just spent a year observing Rumsfeld and the folks under him from up close, and I had just a bit of contempt for them--that Rummy had created a climate of fear so that his underlings would not question him.  This seemed like groupthink in its purest form.  As a result, when I learned that Rummy and his guys had responsibility for running the effort, I knew it would be mishandled.  I did not think that they would consider the list of "don't do's" and turn that into a check list.  So they underperformed even compared to my low expectations.
• Chief among the don't do's were: do not disband the Iraqi military.  I spent much of my year on the Joint Staff participating in an effort to downsize slightly the Bosnian armed forces by a thousand or two soldiers since unemployed former soldiers are a recipe for bad stuff (such as insurgency).   To this day, I think firing the Iraqi army was the single worst decision in American foreign policy history.  That invading Iraq had some plausible justification, pro's and con's, but firing hundreds of thousands of young men who were trained to use weapons and knew where the stuff was?  Awful cubed.  
• A second don't do: do not rely on emigres who might seem friendly to you but have little political power back home.  Of course, little did I know that the one that they wanted to rely upon (Chalabi) was not only corrupt (which we knew) but probably an Iranian agent!
• Occupation was going to be hard.  All one had to do was consider what Dick Cheney said in 1992.  Iraq had ethnic divisions with an aggrieved, oppressed majority (the Shia),and so on.  So, why do something that is so very difficult?  The flowers in the street stuff did not convince me, although I did not expect a heap of suicide bombing either (again, I didn't expect firing the army or cutting off pensions for widows).

So, my primary reasons in 2003 for opposing the war, as I put it at the time: the wrong war (not Afghanistan), by the wrong people (Rummy and his friends [a group of oil men meant for bad optics as well]), at the wrong time (Afghanistan first).

I think I might have also been sufficiently trained in balance of power dynamics to ponder whether attacking Iran's enemy might have been a bad idea, but I am not sure now if that is something that was in the forefront of my mind back then. 

I did understand that the Bush administration faced a challenge--that the sanctions regime against Hussein was breaking down.  I just didn't think that the possibility that Iraq might have a weapons program was worth war.  Similarly, I don't think it is worth war to stop Iran from developing weapons of mass destruction.  I am not happy that more countries have WMD, but I do prefer containment and deterrence to occupation.  Still, the Iraq war seemed to be too much work with too much risk and too little support.

Known Knowns and All That

I saw this tweet today.

And I have so many reactions to it.  First, Rumsfeld would probably say that it was true from a certain point of view.  That the war, in terms of a conventional land campaign, was indeed over in weeks.  The US toppled the Iraqi government later than the impatient would have expected but still pretty quickly given how few forces were deployed to Iraq.  But, of course, the problem is that Rummy and his pals thought that they could easily handover Iraq to Chalabi and other emigre pals and then the US forces could run back home.

Which gets to the known knowns as Rummy would say: we knew in 2002 that the Office of the Secretary of Defense was broken.  That is the military term for a dysfunctional organization, and OSD was quite dysfunctional.  The people there lived in fear of Rummy--I saw it on a regular basis during my year on the Joint Staff.  And these folks were given the job of running the "post-war" phase.  I knew they would screw it up, which is one reason why I argued at the time that this was the wrong war at the wrong time by the wrong people.  But little did I know that they would use the list of things that they should not do and use it as a checklist instead.  Disband the army and free up 400,000 or so men who were trained in fighting and knew where all of the guns and explosives where?  Check!

So, the first moves by the US as the Iraqi government fell was to insure that "war" would last for years rather than months. Not providing enough troops meant that the infrastructure needed to run Iraq was decimated by looting.  Disbanding the army and extreme de-ba'athification gave a weak insurgency heaps of oxygen to burn brighter.  I could go on.

The biggest known known of 2003--that Rumsfeld was incredibly arrogant.  What was unknown at the time that he was so arrogant that he was willing to use his war strategy as a tool for domestic political purposes: using only a small number of troops and having the Marines go further inland than in their entire history was designed less with victory in Iraq in mind and more about fighting a bureaucratic battle against an Army he disliked (that would be the US Army).  While Rumsfeld was not the only one responsible for the debacles of 2003-2006, he certainly bore a heap of responsibility that he continues to deny.

Worst SecDef ever?  Almost certainly.  McNamara made poor decisions due to his arrogance, but had a learning curve.  His mistakes were not nearly as profoundly ... stupid as Rumsfeld's.  I guess the question is whether failing in Vietnam did more or less damage to American interests than the Iraq war.  Both wars raised concerns about American decline, caused loss of political capital around the world, did heaps of damage to the American military, and significant harm to the US economy (and world economy as a result).  It would be a toss-up, I guess, if not for the fact that Rumsfeld's focus on Iraq meant that the US did not reinforce victory in Afghanistan, wasting a huge amount of time that gave the Taliban a chance to recover.  Afghanistan may not have been winnable anyway, but the turn to Iraq made failure in Afghanistan far more likely. 

Or is there a SecDef that did a better job of undermining US national security?

Thin Benches and Who Thinned Them

Ironic quote of the month (and it is only December 2nd):

“It is ludicrous,” said Eliot Cohen, a historian and senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “The military’s bench was appallingly thin.”+

Cohen wrote one of the most important books on civil-military relations, arguing that civilians occasionally have to intervene pretty deeply into military affairs since war is too important to be left to the generals.  He uses cases of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion to prove his point.  The irony is this: Cohen served in the Bush Administration which took the lessons of his book way too far.  Rumsfeld's deep and dangerous micromanagement was far more than what was needed and pretty destructive to civil-military relations.  The exodus of key officers as the Iraq war approached might have been exactly those generals who would have been on the bench for key jobs a few years later.

Whether these particular generals would have been terrific or not, having Rummy and his crew for six formative years definitely shaped who got promoted, who got the plum assignments, who did not and who left.  There  are certainly other explanations for a shallow bench so we cannot all blame Rummy and his crew.  But Cohen was very much involved in an administration that had a hand in the shaping of today's military and who was available to run ISAF when McChrystal ran his mouth one too many times.  Petraeus was the right candidate at the time not just because there was a shallow bench but he was seen as both good at the task--counter-insurgency and played well to the domestic audience.  Not too many three star generals around anyway, not too many of them had extensive experience thinking and then doing COIN, and how many of those actually had good reputations in the US so that the switch would be relatively easy at home?

Maybe Petraeus was not the perfect guy to run ISAF, but it is not clear that the US armed forces would have had plenty anyway given the circumstances and given the conventional aversion to COIN.  So, there is something to what Cohen suggests, but we have to keep in mind ... you go to war with the military you have, not the one you want to have.  But we also have to keep in mind who is responsible for the military you have....

The No 2nd Order Effects Government

I have had a running twitter battle with some folks who are defending various parts of the US invasion of Iraq.  As any dedicated reader of my blog (that would be three of you) would know, nothing could irritate me more.

Anyhow, the concept of tradeoffs has been raised so let me just illustrate the complete lack of concern about tradeoffs in 2002 in the Rumsfeld Pentagon (so, I can be clear that many of us saw that Iraq would be a trainwreck--not just in hindsight).

In the summer of 2002, the US was busily trying to get ICC [International Criminal Court] exceptions written into every UN mission in which the US was involved.  I was on the Bosnia desk so I got to type up the documents concerning this issue.  The idea was that the US did not want its peacekeeping soldiers charged for war crimes while working in Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.  While this played well with the folks in Congress who were ICC-averse, it was not that real of a problem since Bosnia would not turn folks directly over to the ICC and even the ICC would give the country the first chance to try folks.

The key thing here is this: the US was antagonizing its allies because they cared about ICC a great deal when the US was planning a war at the time (Iraq) and would clearly like to have the allies involved or at least not opposed.  So why antagonize the French and the Germans over an issue that really, really, really was never likely to be a significant problem when it posed potential harm to a war the US was about to launch.  I raised this at the time with my military colleagues and obviously was not the only person in the building to think of it.  But still, full steam ahead on OPERATION ALIENATE ALLIES.

This was one of many examples where this administration, with Rummy playing a big role, where the side effects were ignored (such as empowering Iran).  As long as Saddam Hussein was dead, big victory.  Nothing else mattered.  Well, wrong, everything else mattered a great deal.  The list of the consequences that will be ever-lasting are huge.  But I have a student waiting so that is a blog post for another day.  Or perhaps just later today.

Strange Interpretation of Dumb Decisions

Tom Ricks took Peter Feaver to task for a variety of assertions Feaver makes in this International Security piece.  I addressed some of the big questions at the Duck of Minerva.  In the course of reading this piece, I was stunned, shocked and amazed (but not awed) by Feaver's assertion in a footnote (fn 30 for those counting at home):

My view is that the situation is considerably more complex than that. Rumsfeld had an assertive style, but his assertions do not correlate closely with military failures; the parts of the war plan he focused on—phases I, II, and III—went well, whereas the part that he did not scrutinize—phase IV—had the most serious flaws. Arguably, what was needed was more civilian supremacy, not less.

This is so wrong on so many levels.  First, let me state that I am a big fan of Feaver's work, and it has significantly informed my teaching and research on civil-military relations.  Second, I respect that he spent considerable time doing government service--working on the National Security Council.  I did one year in the Pentagon--it was exhausting.  Two years would have been very tough.  And I think Feaver went to Iraq as part of his job--that took guts.  Third, I appreciate that he is writing a piece that builds on his policy experience.  I am trying to do the same with my current book project.  So, let me attack the assertion itself, and consider it an aberration from Feaver's usual standard of excellent analysis.

Ok, what is wrong with this assertion--that the quality of US defense policy during the Rummy year's, especially the phases of the Iraq war varied with Rummy's notoriously selective attention span?

Civ-Mil Relations in the 21st Century--Back to the Past

I was invited to guest post at Duck of Minerva, and I was deeply honored.  The folks over their are incredibly smart and post very sharp takes on all stuff that is IR.  I grabbed the opportunity and spewed at length about one of my favorite targets: Rumsfeld.  Actually, the point of the exercise was to make sense of a debate between Peter Feaver and Tom Ricks on the proper role of the civilians in managing the military.  Check it out and comment there or here.

And comeback later today for a super-spew: why Feaver is wrong in his footnote where he asserts that Rummy attention is correlated with success and Rummy distraction is correlated with failure.

Tell All of the Week

So, the former Bush speechwriter who has made big news with his new book, Matt Latimer, was interviewed by Salon. He turns out to be a Rumsfeld buddy. Yuck! So, now I have to take everything he says with a bigger hunk of salt.

The rest of the piece is an interesting take on speech-writing, but I have such complete and total contempt for Rumsfeld that it is hard to see past that. Other than killing the Crusader artillery system, I have a hard time thinking of one decision that Rummy made that didn't suck.

Rice and Rummy Follow Up

Just a quick link to add another reason to regret the Rice/Rummy era. According to Salon, they are both members of the Torture 13, responsible for creating the torture regime. In other words, war criminals.

While I disagree that the latest news exonerates the folks who got the early blame (BG Karpinski and the other folks in Baghdad), it is relatively clear where most of the accountability resides. This piece names the names and places the blame where it should be. Those under them can take satisfaction that they were doing things that were approved at the highest level of government, but following an illegal order is following an illegal order. Nuremberg did away with that defense, as far as I can tell.

On a personal note, I was glad to see that the JS lawyer trying to do the right thing:

In October 2002, when the legal counsel for the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff attempted to conduct a thorough legal review of the techniques, Haynes ordered her to stop, because "people were going to see" the objections that some in the military had raised.

We had to get legal approval from the JS lawyers on pretty much everything we did (guidance cables, policy documents, etc.) and it was not a pro forma process.

Anyhow, the Salon piece is disturbing as it is quite clarifying.

Running Down Rummy

My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

I was going to continue the weekend's theme of light-hearted posting, but Frank Rich's column, which linked to a GQ piece (cited above and quoted below as well--a very sharp article on the damage Rumsfeld wrought) on former Secretary of Defense Donald "No Mistake is Too Large" Rumsfeld, has got me going this morning. In past postings, I have briefly addressed The Worst Secretary of Defense in US history in past posts (here, here, and here).

I spent a year in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, but never interacted directly with him. Instead, I felt tremors in the dark side of the force via the behavior of those under him and through snowflakes. First, a bit of scene-setting. I always react a bit whenever I hear "Pentagon" being used to describe some sort of position coming out of the Department of Defense. Why? Because the Pentagon really does have five sides to it: the Office of the Secretary of Defense (mostly civilians who directly advise the SecDef), the Joint Staff (mostly military who advise the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who then advises the SecDef and the President), and the Army, Navy and Air Force Staffs. In my time, there was often very little consensus, at least over the Balkans (I had no opportunity to see how things were playing out in other regions or issues), between OSD and the JS. But I did see that the folks in OSD lived in fear of Rumsfeld, so much so that they often would let the JS take the lead on writing a policy paper rather than risk being criticized for having their own ideas.
Second, the snowflakes referred to the memos that Rummy would send down that needed an immediate response (before they melt). This was his way to get the bureaucracy moving, I suppose. But he was not really looking for the best advice unless "best" meant what fitted with his preconceptions. I personally was responsible for replying to the same snowflake three times, as we did not give him the answer he desired. We were pretty stubborn, I suppose. Clearly, others in defense bureaucracy were less so (suitable spot here for another jab at Tommy Franks).

But why does Rummy vex me so?

1. Because he ruled his fiefdom with fear and intimidation and only sought information that concurred with his views, I left the Pentagon in 2002 expecting his people to mess up the war in Iraq. I just didn't realize that he/they would take the list of things not to do and turn it into a checklist.
2. This was bad enough, but he was determined to control, or at least prevent the influence of others, areas he perceived as belong to him: “I’m not saying State could have done any better,” this official says of the bungled reconstruction efforts. “But he owned it [GQ piece again].”
3. His selective attention span yo-yoing created uncertainty and policy shifts. He micro-managed the war in Afghanistan (well-document in a good book on the Anaconda battle), but then completely ignored it after the Taliban fell and as Iraq heated up. He then shifted attention back when he realized that his commander there (Gen. Barno) was doing more than counter-terrorism but counter-insurgency as well (Auerswald and Saideman paper to be submitted somewhere soon). Rumsfeld seems to have done the same thing in Iraq, micro-managing the lead up to the invasion and the several months that followed "the end of military operations," and then he checked out again. While micomanagement can be and often is counter-productive, extreme shifts from one end of the spectrum and back can be even more detrimental.
4. He had the temperament of a spoiled eight year-old. He was quite talented at blocking the efforts of others, even if he had no constructive alternative: “No one,” says another former official, “threw sand in the gears like Rumsfeld.”
5. He sought to confuse, rather than clarify, to avoid accountability. Unknown unknowns, indeed.
6. I didn't know that he was also partly responsible for messing up the government's reponse to Hurricane Katrina.
7. There are rumors that he is writing a memoir that paints himself as an opponent of the war.
   

The only good news in this story is that Bush's refusal to fire Rummy before the midterm elections in 2006 might have been partly responsible for the Republicans losing the Senate.

The money quote that captures it all is:

“I want to know if the president knows what a @$## a-hole Don Rumsfeld is.”

And being an a-hole would not be such a horrible thing--plenty of excellent leaders have been obnoxious, arrogant, etc. But that his a-hole-ness had a direct impact on the quality of the decisions he made and on the implementation of US foreign and defense policy. And not in a good way.

Given that there have only been Secretaries of Defense since 1947, being the worst SecDef in US history is not as impressive as, say, worst President since 1900 or ever (hmmm).

Something Old, Something New: Shifting Defense $$

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is attempting cut and shift some of the hundreds of billions of $$ the US spends on defense, and is, unsurprisingly, running into some opposition. Neither the effort nor the obstacles should be much of a surprise. The wars of this decade have revealed, once again, that the US prepares for the wars it wants to fight, not so much the wars it is going to fight, to paraphrase the worst Secretary of Defense in US history (that would be Rumsfeld). Gates wants more spending on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can loiter over the battlefield, and less on super-advanced fighter planes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plane. He would like to spend less on the planned next generation of army vehicles and more on those that can resist roadside bombs (improvised explosive devices---IEDs).

To be fair, these are not so simple tradeoffs. The US is fighting insurgents because its opponents cannot fight and win a conventional war. The US supremacy on the conventional battlefield does deter opponents and is worth continued investment. So, opponents have to avoid American strengths and fight guerrilla wars.

This guns vs guns debate is complicated by a couple of other dynamics. One of the big lessons learned during my year in the Pentagon was that there is a fetish for having the very, very best equipment. At the time, Rumsfeld sought to cancel the Crusader artillery system--perhaps one of the few good decisions he made. Well, most of the Army guys in my office on the Joint Staff had backgrounds in Artillery since their planning expertise/experience worked well for serving in the Directorate of Strategic Planning and Policy (J-5). So, I engaged these officers in discussions about the Crusader debate. The more senior officers argued, almost convincingly, that in battle you want to have the most capable weapon system possible. That any additional feature that had some added value in war was extremely desirable. But the problem is that it cost $25 millions a gun, five times as much as the reasonably similar German arty system and 3 times as much as the British system. So, there is often a real quality vs quantity debate. The desire to have absolutely the best means having a smaller number. This has significantly limited how many fighter planes the US has.

The second dynamic is the resistance of the defense contractors, who often fight through a variety of strategies to maintain their systems and their profits, including the famous example of the B-1 bomber. It had components built in nearly every state and in over 400 congressional districts--that is an outcome produced not by a desire for optimal production but for the political survival of a contentious project (Ironically, the B-1 is now better suited, thanks to smart weapons systems, to do the work that is planned for the next generation of fighters). And the same continues today with the new weapons systems. Interestingly, in the NYT piece linked above, it appears that these folks are sitting out this debate. Perhaps it is because Gates is not really cutting that much from the big projects but shifting priorities to other things that defense contractors can build.

The third dynamic is Congress. This is where much of the resistance is based, and where it is most significant. Congress has kept alive programs and bases that Presidents and SecDefs have tried to kill. Partly, there may be an honest difference of opinion about how to weigh the present war concerns with the threats (China, China, China, Russia) down the road. Partly, this is an avenue through which Republicans can fight the Obama Administration--an area of party strength at a time where it is declining everywhere else. But there are Democrats who are also pushing back.

Congress's ability to resist depends on its ability to find allies within the military, and those will always exist. The US Air Force has already faced much criticism for downplaying UAVs, which have been a much greater force multiplier than the F-22. The traditional and likely corrrect story is that the USAF is run by pilots who see their livelihoods, egos, missions, power and future budgets at risk, threatened by UAVs--where the U stands for Unmanned.

My best guess is that Gates will win some of these battles but not all of them. When Americans are dying due to vehicles that are poorly designed for a counter-insurgency campaign, it will be tough for the Army to argue that it needs weapon systems that can only operate in a conventional battlefield. The SecDef does have the power to micromanage, as we saw to great misfortune in 2003-04, so that he can send specific units to Afghanistan even if the USAF resists, such as more helos as ambulances. But on the big projects, the chances of eliminating projects are low as long as the systems are built in a majority of Congressional districts.

At least Gates is confronting the reality that the US does not have unlimited $ to throw at the military and has to face tough choices. Up here in Canada, the tradeoffs are more stark, as the much more limited defense budget means that Canada can really only afford one or two branches if it wants to have quality Forces, but not all three. It needs to choose having an Army or a Navy or an Air Force or two of the three, but it cannot do all three very well. As a result of trying to ignore the difficult tradeoffs, Canada buys used submarines from the UK which break down on their way to their new country. The new focus on Arctic Sovereignty and spending money on ships and planes that can operate way up north (although the new icebreaker may only be ready after global warming eliminates its raison d'etre) should mean that the Canadian Army comes home in 2011 and never goes out in the field again. To be clear, I am an Arctic Sovereignty skeptic since Canada will never be able to buy enough stuff to deter the two likely violators--Russia or the US. But it should be obvious that Canada cannot have it all and must make the hard choices, just as Gates is trying to do. Instead, the Canadian Forces often show up around the world willing to do the hard work but having to rely on others to provide much of the stuff they need.

So, ultimately, Rumsfeld was right--you go to war with the army you have, not the one you would like. But, then, perhaps you should spend more effort thinking about whether one should go to war if it means being unprepared.

Piling on Condi?

Condi Rice has been getting a fair amount of attention lately, including an embarrassing incident on her old home court--Stanford. She is currently trying to defend some indefensible behavior--particularly torture.

Before going on, I must admit a couple of things:

• on 9/11, I was in the Pentagon before and after the attack, but not during (for my 9/11 story, click here), so I do have a somewhat visceral action to that event, and wanted to see the people who were responsible put on a plane that would crash into a convenient ocean.
• during my fellowship on the Joint Staff, I did take part in a process through which terrorists were sent from Bosnia to Gitmo--the first non-Afghan combatants to be sent there.

So, I do understand only too well some of the pressures and difficult decisions that faced the Administration after 9/11. The problem is that President Bush, as advised by Rice, made pretty much every bad decision possible. Indeed, after my year in the Pentagon, I knew that Rumsfeld and his shop would screw up the Occupation (largely because of his fearsome, groupthink management style), but I didn't realize then that they would consider the list of things not to do as a checklist of things to do: fire the Army, get rid of the entire senior and middle level strata of the civil service, use only the fewest possible troops, keep all experts away from the process, etc.

[See Ricks, Fiasco; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II; Packer, Assassin's Gate; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in an Emerald City; among others. I read but do not recommend (except for those doing research or seeking to lose brain cells) Bremer, who seems to be lying to himself, and Franks, who was well-suited for interacting with Doug Feith, as both were the dumbest @#$#@$ers and makes me both curious and sad that the Army could allow him to rise so far. I do plan to read LtGen Sanchez's book this summer as he ran the military side of things while Bremer was running the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA was said to stand for Can't Produce Anything); and Rick's new book, The Gamble, on Gen. Petraeus and the surge.]

The best evidence, in my mind, for Rice's epic failure to serve as an adequate National Security Advisor is that Jerry Bremer fired the Iraqi Army despite the decisions taken by the President and others to choose a more reasonable course of action. The damning evidence is really the fact that we do not really know today whether Bremer or Rumsfeld really made this decision. Since Rice's job as NSA was to coordinate foreign policy, she should have put in place a process so that Bremer's big decisions would have to be vetted by the relevant agencies--State, NSC, the Office of the SecDef, and the Joint Staff. In my time in DC, nearly all decisions of any consequence in the Balkans went through each agency at the appropriate level (at a lower level after 9/11 when the Balkans moved to the back burner of US foreign policy) with lawyers for each agency "chopping", that is assessing their legality. That Bremer, Rumsfeld and others can point fingers at each other (see No End in Sight, a great and depressing documentary) for perhaps the single dumbest decision in US foreign policy since ..... supporting the French in 1945 when they wanted to get back into Vietnam.

One can debate whether invading Iraq was a good or bad idea, but firing several hundred thousand young men with guns and training and knowledge of the locations of arms/explosive caches, at a time where folks in the interagency (Joint Staff, State, etc) were trying to find ways to reduce the Bosnian militaries by a few thousand without creating a pool of resentful young men, was incredibly dumb. This single decision lead to many unnecessary deaths--Iraqi, American, British and others. And the blood is on the hands of Bremer, of Rumsfeld, of Bush, and of Rice. While the focus today is on torture, and deservedly so (see my friend Steve's blog for an on-going discussion of the torture discussion), if we calculate the numbers of people directly harmed (as opposed to the damage to American influence or values), the number of torture victims must pale in comparison to the casualties after June 2003 on all sides.

Of course, the best is yet to come as Rummy is apparently writing a book where he says he was against the war in Iraq.