Deceptive Numbers, 473th Edition

Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont, has been raising a stink about how the veterans have been treated.  And good for him for doing so.  We need to take care of those who were put in harm's way.  But he is getting his numbers wrong:

The six trillion dollar estimate for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars include not just the salaries from 2001-2016 (or whatever), the fuel, the logistics, and all that, but also .... the cost of taking care of the veterans from now until they die. 

I was at a talk at a recent APSA by Linda Blimes who presented a series of graphs depicting the costs of wars.  It turns out, if I remember correctly, that the U.S. is still paying some of the costs of World War I, and the annual costs peaked in the 1970s (I think).  That the costs of WWII are still quite significant, as the U.S. is paying the medical care of the veterans of that war.  The costs of Vietnam will be with us for quite a while.  The veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan will be living for another sixty years at least.  So, the six trillion dollar figure is based on the costs of the wars AND the costs of taking care of the vets. 

The key point may be that we are not treating the vets well right now (the VA controversy is a mess of conflicting reports, but this quote is just deceptive.  If Sanders does not know the source of the estimate, then he is not doing his job.  There are good arguments to be made about the treatment of vets, but $6 trillion vs a few billion is not one of them.

Blame Aplenty

The Dutch have lost a lawsuit--some Bosnian Muslims were suing the Dutch for failing to protect them when the Bosnian Serbs overran the UN safe area of Srebrenica.  The Dutch already blame themselves in a 2002 report that led to the fall of the government for events in 1995.  This is most striking for a variety of reasons.

1. The Dutch were under UN command at the time, so one could blame the United Nations for failing to give the Dutch the necessary support to defend the sector.  Specifically, the Dutch called for air support, which NATO was willing to provide, but the UN leaders said no.  As a result, the Dutch now always bring their own air support with their own rules so that their troops on the ground never are left with such dire choices.
2. Ratko Mladic is now at the The Hague for instigating, planning, and leading the attacks and the killings.  So, the timing is interesting and raises questions of who should get the blame: the international community or those who commit the crimes?  The answer apparently is: both.  I would weight more heavily the guilt of the guy driving the car directly into a crowd than the police officer who fails to get the crowd out of the way.  Yes,  a gross simplification, but the Bosnian Serbs led by Mladic are the folks who are most responsible.  But, yes, this was a failure of the international community as well.  But suing the Dutch may only discourage other countries from joining UN operations since they, too, may be left hung out to dry.  
3. The Canadians deftly escaped responsibility.  They had peacekeepers initially deployed in Srebrenica but re-deployed to another part of Bosnia because they knew the situation was fraught with peril.  The Dutch were in place to face this horrible situation--fight despite having no UN support or surrender the Bosnian Muslims--because the Canadians could see further down the road (or game tree). 
4. The Canadians were not alone.  Lots of other countries could have done more and acted earlier.  So, should everyone be sued?  Should the Belgians be sued for their failures on Rwanda?

The one striking thing in all of this is that the court did recognize something that the Dave and Steve project on NATO and Afghanistan emphasizes--the key decisions are in the national capitols, not within international organizations.  BUT, to be fair, the Dutch decisions in 1995 were critically constrained by the lack of UN support.  The Dutch could have fought in a hopeless situation rather than essentially surrender to the barbarians.  Might not made much of a difference, except where we point the finger.

Drones Overboard

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have become very prominent over the past few years and very much so over the past few days.  Erica Chenoweth does a great job of reviewing the state of scholarship on the effectiveness of Drone strikes.  And now an unarmed UAV has been downed over Libya.

I tweeted that perhaps folks were overreacting as the one of the key reasons to have UAVs is to put robots in harm's way rather than people.  I got a bit of a pushback from NATO's friends via https://twitter.com/#!/NATOSource/.   The counter-tweet noted that losing technology to the bad guys is not a good thing and, given that UAVs are a scarce commodity (in military jargon: low density, high demand), losing one is pretty significant.  So, I apologize for being flippant about this.  I realize that these UAVs are expensive and scarce.  Moreover,  we do not want to share the technology with the Libyan government who can learn how to counter these systems and/or sell the parts to countries that might not be friends of ours. 

I guess my tweet was due to frustration--that losing a helicopter in Afghanistan is not really news these days but losing a UAV in Libya is.  While this is the first downing of a UAV in Libya, we have lost UAVs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so this is not a unique event or the first time we may have lost some technology that could be exploited by other folks.

I guess the media got more excited (or I have exaggerated the media's excitement) because it happened over Libya.  Why?  Because the media tends to obsess about stuff that is being hotly debated in national capitols, and Libya certainly is a hot issue in DC, Ottawa, London, and elsewhere.  Afghanistan comes and goes, but Libya is the show right now, so one UAV and one errant strike get far more play than their strategic significance would suggest.

I also tweeted that folks were overreacting to the NATO strike that killed some civilians.  Again, this is a serious issue, but it, by itself, should not really raise that many questions or change that many minds about the mission.  Any military campaign will inevitably kill bystanders.  The difference is that for NATO, these unfortunate people were unintended casualties and not targets, whereas Qaddafi's force continue to aim at the civilians.  The ratio of civilians killed by the Libyan government vs NATO forces must be starker than the Taliban/NATO ratio.  Yes, hitting civilians can undermine the effort, but NATO is doing as much as it can to avoid that.  Hard to do without having ground troops providing intel, but that is where UAVs fill (partially) the gap.  So, we risk losing UAVs not just to avoid NATO casualties but also to limit "collateral damage."

So once again, I will say that losing a UAV is an acceptable (and expected) price for doing this kind of business.  We don't have to be happy about it, but nor should we fret that much.  I am reminded of a classic scene in M*A*S*H: "Rule number one of war is that young men die.  Rule number two is that doctors cannot change rule number one."  Times have changed, so it is now young people with women now playing greater roles in combat; AND because now we have found some ways to beat rule number 1--with technology and via political restrictions (no boots on the ground).  Perhaps in the future, rule number one will be: in war (and hostility like events), machines die.  Again, I may be sounding flippant, but war is destructive and we are spoiled if we think that only the other side is going to pay the price.

Rock On, Libyan Fighters

“When it got really quiet, we’d play guitar and sing ‘Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?’” said Abdulfatah Shaka, 22, his rocket-propelled-grenade launcher at his side. “The snipers would get furious and start shooting everywhere.”

From this interesting Atlantic piece,* thanks to a Current Intelligence re-tweet.

* The Atlantic has really been bringing the heat lately.  Some very good reads the past few months.

The good news is that these guys quickly dumped the Backstreet Boys (even though that is what a good urban insurgent is, ironically enough) for Pink Floyd, Metallica, Nirvana, Iron Maiden, and, the Canadians will be pleased, Neil Young.

Still, this article presents the darkness of war pretty well:

For Bozaid, a machine gunner who put his body count at more than 25, preparation for battle meant listening to Slayer on his smart phone. “Some of my friends said that I should be reading the Koran. But I needed my drug.”

D-Day, 67 Years Later

With NATO engaged in a half-hearted effort to take down a relatively lame dictator, today's D-Day anniversary reminds us that the guys back then paid a huge price so that we can be far less committed today.  Um, that is perhaps not the right lesson of D-Day, but it is one lesson.

The other thought that has occupied me today on the anniversary of the Day of Days is that this is the first one without Dick Winters, the leader of the Band of Brothers.  He is just one of the many folks who made such a difference who are passing from the scene.  The good news is that we will still have some of these guys for a while longer--the last vets from World War I recently died.  The bad news is that we are losing folks who knew what it mean to sacrifice it all for their buddies and beyond.  We still have those folks around today, as we have seen a Nepali get a medal from the Queen and Obama honoring of a living Congressional Medal of Honor winner.  But as a country, we refuse to raise taxes to pay for these wars, making our children pay not just in debt payments but in declining government support for education and other programs.  We did far better sixty years ago with the investments made in education and elsewhere.

Where is our Marshall Plan?  Oh yeah, tied up in Congress.  Still, we must remember that we had common cause in 1944, and perhaps it is a sign of progress that no threats today are so great as to provide us much glue today.

So a very ambivalent D-Day anniversary, I guess.

Progress On One Front

Despite what I said yesterday about not liking change, arresting Ratko Mladic, who commanded the troops at Srebrenica (biggest case of mass murder in Europe since World War II), is change I can believe in.  Indeed, as the tweets of the morning indicate, not a bad May (Bin Laden, Mladic) and not a bad 2011 with Mubarak and others losing power.

Mladic was THE most wanted war criminal from the Bosnian conflict.  And his arrest, along with that of Karadzic, means that the folks in ye old Balkan Pit of Despair (the J-5's desks on the Balkans) will have to change the talking points about the "redlines" of engaging Serbia.  Serbia has satisfied a crucial set of conditions--picking up the most wanted PIFWC's (Persons Indicted for War Crimes).  I have not been following Serbia closely to see how it is doing otherwise, but this is a big, big step, probably more so than Karadzic since Mladic had strong ties to Serbia's military.  Indeed, this is a real test/accomplishment for civilian control of the military.  Being able to do this (and hopefully not getting shot for it) shows that President Tadic is in command and not the military.

I can only ponder a world in which Serbia seems far more functional than Pakistan.

Of course, Serbia has other problems than this, but it is a good day for Serbia, for Bosnia, and for the international community after way too many bad days in the first half of the 1990s.  I'll leave it to the real experts on Bosnia to judge whether this matters anymore for Bosnia's present and future.

One last thought--just before the G8?  Is this timing accidental?  Or does Serbia want to get on major powers' agenda in a good way for a change?

Warrior Dogs: Woof?

The mission to raid the Bin Laden compound has focused a lot of attention on the one dog apparently involved.  The use of dogs in Afghanistan and Iraq is not so much news, thanks in part to Rebecca Frankel's posts in Tom Rick's column.  Now the NYT has the warrior dogs featured on its website.

On the one hand, it is pretty cool that dogs and their noses bring heaps of talent to the fight, helping to deal with the various improvised explosive devices that riddle Afghanistan.  The idea of dropping a dog with its Special Operator into the compound is just inherently interesting.  And not just because following SealDog6 on twitter is nearly as amusing as following Drunken Predator.  But that does not hurt either.

The problem, of course, is that the dogs can and do get hurt and killed.  They may enjoy their training, but they have no free will in terms of choosing combat.  Perhaps this is no different than the good old days of using horses as part of the cavalry, but attitudes about animals have changed over the decades.  We mind that children are used as soldiers (a relatively new cottage industry has developed to study this phenomenon), and I am guessing that we will see a smaller but still passionate literature develop to address the dogs in combat. 

It is not that I am a card-carrying member of PETA.  I like to eat dead cows, pigs, and chickens; I wear leather shoes; and I have gone to circuses and zoos and seaworlds with only the occasional twinge of guilt.  I would love to swim with a dolphin (the Spew kid got to do that while I was busy conferencing in Hawaii a few years ago).  So, I am not automatically opposed to using dogs as assets in war, but I am squeamish.  Indeed, I am far more squeamish about using dogs in combat than about killing Bin Laden.  The latter chose his occupation--as leader of non-state violent actor in war against the U.S.  One of the risks of making that choice is a bullet in the head.  But dogs do not elect to join the all-volunteer professional army of the present day.  They are drafted. 

I do not know what to think.  Your thoughts?

Work and Tourism Collide

I spent much of today driving--to get from The Hague to Brunssum where the NATO base is that serves as the operational command for the Afghanistan mission in between the hq in Afghanistan and the folks in Brussels.  After that, I drove to Margraten where there is a cemetery where the Americans who died during World War II in the Netherlands are buried.  These two experiences collided. 

Focusing on how countries influence their missions in Afghanistan inevitably gets to casualty aversion, as countries go to different efforts to limit the risks their troops face, even if it means putting the mission at risk.  And then I see the cost of war with thousands and thousands of crosses marking the sacrifices paid by the World War II generation.  Given that a good number these were lost in Operation Market Garden, an incredibly poorly conceived plan, I was thinking today about risks and costs.  On the one hand, this one cemetery (there are many American ones and then many, many more for other countries) holds more killed in action than twice the American and allied lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  So, perhaps our focus on the casualties in Afghanistan is excessive.  War involves death--if you want to achieve something through the use of force, there is a price to be paid.  Excessively worrying about the casualties can undermine the mission (and has very much done so in Afghanistan), making it more costly perhaps in the long run.  On the other hand, there was a much clearer means to ends connection back then--sacrificing to defeat Germany and Japan and those were worthwhile goals. 

What kinds of costs are worth it in support of the Afghan government?  oooh, that stacks the deck.  Ok, is what we are paying in costs in Afghanistan worth it in terms of helping the Afghans?  Here, there is something about responsibility.  The US walked away from Afghanistan after the Soviets left, and only returning after paying deeply for the consequences--the rise of AQ.  The terrorists are largely gone from Iraq and have found plenty of other places to hang out, so why stick around in Afghanistan?  Because we might owe the Afghans a decent effort.  Only in the past few years, have we, the US and its allies, really tried at all to create a better (not perfect, but better) place.  And, despite the surge in violence, it is certainly a better place than it was in August 2001.  It is probably better than it was in 2002 or 2003 and so on.  Every year, as one interviewee put it, is a pivotal year, but I think 2011 is especially so.  This upcoming summer will measure the effort as only now for the past year have there been enough troops to do the kind of COIN that needs to be done. 

I still don't know if it is worth it.  I just know that leaving precipitously is a bad idea.

Underestimating the Costs of War, part 2

The NYT is continuing to document the costs of war and how to mitigate them.  It includes video that shows the treatment of a severely wounded soldier.  I tend not to watch TV news, so I have missed stuff like this, but we need to watch occasionally so that the flippant folks (that would be me) are less flip.