Wolf in Sheik's Clothing
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the Marine Corps association about his most embarrassing moment -- it has to do with Nixon, the Pope and a cigar -- then moves to a more serious topic: what America is doing right and needs to do better, in the War on Terror. First the cigar. It seems that Henry Kissinger tried to keep Melvin Laird from attending a meeting between Richard Nixon and Pope Paul VI. But Laird showed up anyway smoking a cigar. Kissinger was furious but contented himself by saying "Well, Mel, at least extinguish the cigar." Laird stubbed out his cigar and put it in his pocket. You can guess what happened next.
The American party a few minutes later went in to their general meeting with the pope. Pope was seated at a little table in front, Americans in two rows of high-backed chairs. Back row, Kissinger on the end; Laird next to him. A couple of minutes into the Pope’s remarks, Kissinger heard this little patting sound, and he looked over, and there was a wisp of smoke coming out of Laird’s pocket. [Laughter] The Secretary of State thought nothing of it. A couple of other minutes went by and the secretary heard this patting sound, slapping going on, and he looked over and smoke was billowing out of Laird’s pocket. The Secretary of Defense was on fire.
Then Gates turned to reflecting on the current world crisis.
In the years since September 11th, hundreds of thousands of our troops have done all these things and more in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the globe. There are the Marines who set up a daily news report over loudspeaker – “the Voice of Ramadi” – to counter the hostile propaganda blaring out of some of the mosques. Then there is an Army staff sergeant, a field artillery radar specialist, who was elected a sheik by Iraqi village elders for his work in their communities. He was given white robes, five sheep, and some land; he was advised to take a second wife – a suggestion frowned upon by his spouse back in Florida.
But in these campaigns, the men and women wearing our nation’s uniform have assumed the roles of warrior, diplomat, humanitarian, and development expert. They’ve done so under the unblinking, unforgiving eye of the 24-hour news cycle while confronting an agile and ruthless enemy. And they’ve done it serving in a military that has for decades been organized, trained, and equipped to fight the “big wars” rather than the small ones. They have shown what General Victor Krulak later wrote was the “adaptability, initiative and improvisation [that] are the true fabric of obedience, the ultimate in soldierly conduct, going further than sheer heroism.”
For the next 10 minutes or so, I’d like to offer some thoughts on where our military – and our government – must apply the lessons that we’ve learned from the ongoing conflicts to build the capabilities we will need in the future. These points are clear:
- Our military must be prepared to undertake the full spectrum of operations including unconventional or irregular campaigns – for the foreseeable future.
- The non-military instruments of America’s national power need to be rebuilt, modernized, and committed to the fight.
- And third, we must think about, envision, and plan for, the world, the future – of 2020 and beyond.
All of these points will be familiar to the readers of this site. And it's eerie how close the wording Secretary Gates uses is to the ideas expressed, even by commenters, in this forum. Only a few days ago, commenting on Michael Yon's dispatch of political action in Baquba, I wrote:
This is all good news, but there is something wrong with this picture. The diplomats, the aid-workers, professional information warriors, the "nation-builders" are all missing from the scene. Yon describes how the military had been forced to discover hidden political and administrative skillsets within themselves. It was not something they had signed up to do when they joined the Armed Forces. This involuntary retooling probably occurred because they had no choice but to learn it and kept at it like a man learning to hammer tacks for the first time, however sore his thumb got. And the retooling was necessary because the State Department, the aid agencies and other civilian agencies, for reasons related to their organizational culture and inability to provide their own organic security, were unable to do the job.
In the long run it might best if the West evolved some other way to deploy "all the sources of its national power" other than the modes provided by traditional diplomacy and aid-working. Those modes may work just fine when operating in a functional nation state. Then diplomats can meet with the counterparts in the capital; aid workers can fan out to the countryside in comparative safety and things can proceed more or less as before. But in the places where terrorism is mostly likely to be rooted -- in failed or failing states, in places wracked by ethnic conflict, sown with mines, infest with assassins and snipers, crawling with infectious diseases, etc -- the military is the only agency of government which is organically able to survive.
And I think that with variations in emphasis and wording, my screed is very similar what Secretary Gates is saying. And more importantly, the similarity is not due to any particular aptitude on my part at reading anyone's mind but because the idea itself has now become obvious to a wide group of people. The old received wisdom is passing away. A new paradigm is taking its place. Gates goes on to explain why the other non-military sources of national power have been absent from the scene. Many capabilities had simply been abolished by a leadership confident the Cold War was over, that the world was at "the end of history" and nothing remained except to perfect the machinery of multilateralism. The nonkinetic instruments of national policy were dismantled and the kinetic instruments were drawn down.
We’re still struggling to overcome the legacy of the 1990s, when so many of the key non-military capabilities in the American government – in diplomacy, strategic communications, international development, and intelligence – were slashed or eliminated following the end of the Cold War.
During the 1990s, the State Department froze new hiring of Foreign Service officers. I was in the White House in the Carter administration after the fall of Iran, and we had a group called the political intelligence working group and we examined what had happened. And among other things, we determined that in 1979, in the embassy in Riyadh, we had two Foreign Service officers who spoke Arabic and they spent 40 percent of their time squiring around CODELs.
The United States Information Agency, which had been an enormously successful organization for communicating America’s values and message around the world, was abolished in the 1990s as an independent entity and folded into the State Department – a shadow of its former self. The Agency for International Development saw deep staff cuts – its permanent staff dropping from a high of 15,000 to 3,000 today, becoming essentially an outsourcing and contracting agency.
Today, the total number of U.S. government civilian employees working in the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan is approximately two hundred.
So, the goal for us must be an integrated effort, a reinvigoration of all elements of national power. It will require a serious commitment of resources and priorities from the Congress and the country. I believe we have little choice if we are to secure our nation and our freedoms in the years ahead.
I might disagree that the Cold War capabilities, had they not been dismantled, might have been adequate to fight the nonkinetic portion to today's war on terror. But from a bureaucratic point of view their retention might have been an advantage. They would have provided a kernel around which to build new capability. And maybe as things Washington go, Gates wishes there were someone he could call as a place to start. But the numbers have been disconnected, consigned to history. Yet looking on the bright side, perhaps it's best that the Cold War information warfare arms were dismantled. Their abolition means they can be built from scratch, without the bother of tearing down old and obsolete organizational structures.
21 Comments:
And the rest of the cigar story:
... The American party heard this slapping, and thought they were being queued to applaud. And so they did. [Laughter]
And Henry later told us, “God only knows what his Holiness thought, seeing the American secretary of defense immolating himself, and the entire American party applauding the fact.” [Laughter, Applause]
It seems to me that equally bad, at least in the American system, is that government bureaucracies have the bit between their teeth and are actively refusing to do as the elected President commands them to do. We have seen the State Department, the Justice Department and the CIA all leaking national secrets and doing their utmost to overthrow the duly-elected government of the United States. The only branch of American government that *is* doing what it's told to do - more or less - is the military.
And that also includes the American Senate and House who are so locked in bitter battle that ever since the impeachment of Bill Clinton, they have accomplished literally nothing except for the increasing stuffication of personal pork barrel projects.
We also see these runaway bureaucracies elsewhere around the world with the worst examples being found in the UN. But I would submit that Britain's BBC is a close runner-up when it comes to obdurate treason, and France is also slowly starting to wash down its bidet because it can't get its government to function either.
Thus, America isn't the only country in the world having difficulty getting anything done, but what does it mean and where do we go if the only arm of government that is accountable and does things is the military?
Sadly, the construction of a mobilized effort will be a lot more challenging than simply reviving some moribund agencies. First, there is the matter of the four divisions Clinton abolished for the peace dividend. The proposals to enlarge the military are narrow-minded and modest, rely on crushing the national guard. And there is no evidence the DOD has given up its gigantism in weapons acquisitions. There is need for a complete overhaul, including closing the Pentagon. The CIA, the one agency untouched, should be demolished, taken down to its historical memory and reconstructed. This will have the benefit of retiring a few soviet moles holding over. Homeland Security has to be abolished, the ports and airports put under the control of new agencies not beholden to banks and their debtors, the airlines. The FBI has to be taken out of this game entirely and a new national intelligence agency created which does not have powers of arrest; an agency which THINKS, has great investigative authority -- it can look at everything and anything, BUT it may not arrest or prosecute anyone on its own. What has to happen in the second year of reform will follow.
jono39,
All the targets you mention are by now Sacred Cows. That they may or may not give milk is an almost unaskable question.
We are the most reluctant empire ever in history. We're embarrassed and shy. Our power is a byproduct of a remarkable society. Our resources, collective intellect, never say die and never say enough attitude have created an economic engine that begets a host of side effects. We leave prosperity in the wake of our consumption. Our military might, which was conceived a dizygotic twin with the republic, today lives in symbiosis with industry. The Anglo-American, or just Anglo if you prefer, economy requires stability to function without waste. Currently, our military might creates that stability. That is not the historical model. The civilian governmental agencies are the traditional managers of transition and administration. The USA has a habit of radically improving tradition and this may be another of those events. If so, the agencies become anachronisms and are best not kept on life support.
Why Nahncee --
That answer is obvious. The Military expands to do all the things that the CIA and State and AID and VOA and all those other organizations used to do.
And the better question is WHY does the military work and the other institutions actively oppose any effort to fight against Jihad?
Simple. The Military is made up of mostly middle/working class white guys with patriotism and nationalism of course but also the view that fighting brings them career advancement.
State, CIA, VOA, Congress, Law, etc. find the prospect of sharing power with the ordinary working class/middle class white guys a horror. You can also say the NYPD and FBI have done fairly well in what they've done post 9/11. Because they institutionally and with their members benefit from fighting terrorism.
All you have to do to figure out the ferocity of the fight against responding to terrorism is figure out who loses some power and who gains it.
Maybe we need to revitalize the Peace Corps and redirect its efforts into Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps the next President can challenge the young and idealist Americans to work with the Afghan and Iraqi people. "Even if you don't want to fight, you can help in the effort to combat terrorism by bringing hope to a troubled region of the world and show its people the generous and caring nature of the American people." Of course, sending the Peace Corps in would require that the military effort would have broken the back of the "insurgency".
And the better question is WHY does the military work and the other institutions actively oppose any effort to fight against Jihad?
Simple. The Military is made up of mostly middle/working class white guys with patriotism and nationalism of course but also the view that fighting brings them career advancement.
State, CIA, VOA, Congress, Law, etc. find the prospect of sharing power with the ordinary working class/middle class white guys a horror.
I think the problem is that employees in all those bureacratic departments cannot be fired. They simply cannot be removed from their posts unless they are proven to be treasonous, pedophiles or kitten-torturers.
The military at least has court martials and forced retirements. There's nothing like being held accountable to put a little spring in your step and as far as I can see, no state OR federal employee is ever accountable, no matter who's been elected to whatever seat.
Everyone says it was a very bad thing that after we went into Baghdad, all the tenured Sunni bureaucrats were summarily fired, and the Iraqi's still haven't managed to get their state up and running again for lack of leadership. But to me, firing everyone on the state and federal payrolls and starting all over again certainly does have a certain temptation factor.
"All the targets you mention are by now Sacred Cows. That they may or may not give milk is an almost unaskable question."
True, but they make excellent hamburger.
Nahncee -- it's true that the permanent bureaucracy fears no one, but the generals and such have little to fear either.
What penalty did Sanchez or Casey or Franks pay? Lucrative book deals?
I don't think the absence of penalties is what drove the permanent bureaucracy to be MIA while the military is performing.
The military performs because from top to bottom (where most progress comes) it's people WANT to perform. Want to badly.
Yes Jono the 4 division cuts of Clinton-Bush (G HW Bush set it in motion, let's be honest) need to be restored. If anything our roughly half a million US Army active duty soldiers needs doubling. The US Navy has only 300 ships and about 400K sailors. That also should double. Marines have about 150K men, that should not double but TRIPLE since our need for amphibious assault troops is likely to be high.
The Air Force needs to be quite a big bigger, with more A-10's but also transitioning to the Raptor etc. Heavy airlift also needs to be sorted out, we clearly don't have enough.
whiskey 199:
The military performs because from top to bottom (where most progress comes) it's people WANT to perform. Want to badly.
Or, perhaps it's because the military generally goes where Congress tells it to and enjoys popular support.
Non-military agencies are controlled from top-down and their leadership consist of political hacks and thinktank impresarios; the rank and file get sent on missions that have little if any popular support.
Our intelligence agencies have a history of getting sent on bullfeather errands by presidents and our diplomatic staff gets sent to promote business interests that have little to do with anything ordinary Americans can relate to.
And then there was the infamous hiring freeze at the State Department in the 1990's. The institutional memories of the State Department, USAID, USIA, and the CIA were gutted. And institutional memory, sadly, does make a difference and does affect morale.
And actually, our diplomatic staff in Beirut recently did something heroic. Through leaking their concerns to ABC News, they prevented a new American Embassy in Lebanon from getting built in the middle of Hezbollah territory in south Beirut.
With our diplomatic staff in Beirut essentially being told to fall on their swords for a bureaucratic snafu, they leaked word to the press. Events like this one make government leaks look good and operational security look like treason.
I would not gainsay the patriotism of men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, or Hamilton Fish. Yet, compare that to the adulation accorded Andrew Jackson or U.S. Grant!
In America, generals become famous and soldiers are accorded prestige. (Now, are diplomatic or spy pensions anywhere near as good as military pensions?) Being a great diplomat or spy is not the most effective means to achieve such acclaim. And much of this comes not from a lack of ambition from diplomats, spies, and bureaucrats, but from a certain latent Boulangerism within the American electorate.
I think one reason for the militarization of necessary tasks is because prestige attaches itself to nation building by a soldier in a manner that is not accorded to the most courageous academic. I have yet to see a modern political campaign based upon the myth of Indiana Jones, as Americans don't seem to be inspired by adventurer spies, bureaucrats, and academics. Never mind, of course, that victory against al-Qaeda may very well depend on such adventurers.
Iraqi leader tells Bush: Get Gen Petraeus out
Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country's prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush.
Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general's moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa'eda.
One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general's signature strategy to be scrapped. "He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias," said the official. "Bush told Maliki to calm down."
HT Deuce at the Elephant Bar
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As U.S. Rebuilds, Iraq Won’t Act on Finished Work
Iraq’s national government is refusing to take over thousands of reconstruction projects, a report shows.
It certainly becomes difficult to reconstruct our overseas government support organizations when so much of the budget is tied up in social programs and congress is so disposed to limit "foreign adventures". However some call for intervention in Darfur without realizing that the major part of the effort would not be the military portion, but the moving, rebuilding of infrastructure and resettling of the displaced people unless we just want to stop the killing and turn these people into wards of the West; see how well we have succeed with the Palestinians. Those societal and infrastructure efforts, as in Iraq, are not very glamorous and don't make the evening news for long, if at all, and are slow to show success.
Wretchard, the bureaucratic capabilities that you and Sec. Gates are desrcibing are those of the "humanitarian" and "development" worlds grafted onto (or reattached) to our military. These are the very sort of "nation-building" skills that Rumsfeld disdained and the larger conservative political movement has been so opposed to for so long. Indeed, Bush campaigned against such a role for our military and Condi Rice skoffed at Clinton missions consisting of "escorting schoolchildren". At root, we are talking about social and infrastructural programs that are intended to provide the Iraqis -- and Afghanis -- with bureaucratic capacities that they have not generated themselves. This is, at base, an attempt at liberal social engineering . . . of a foreign culture. Do you see any contradiction between these international political and bureacratic goals and the domestic political coalition that the President is attempting to win the Iraqi and Aghani war with?
PS Doug, thanks for the article on the Malik-Petraes friction. What if Maliki is, as the Saudi's claim, an Iranian tool? Is there an social/political base among the Shiites and Sunnis that we can really trust in the mid-term?
The drawdown of the 90’s was much larger and deeper than the vast majority of people realize. We possessed a senior military leadership that focused on maintaining the then-current capabilities over those that would be needed in the future. That was a problem, and then there was the Federal Civilian Drawdown.
Completely over and above the 40% reduction in DoD’s capabilities, VP Al Gore brought forth a breathtaking new idea: the Reinventing Government Initiative. Conceived by one of Gore’s Ivory Tower Professor friends, it was not just a new buzzword. The idea was stunning in its simplicity and stupefying in its impact. The civilian workforce of the Federal government would be reduced by 30%. This would obviously result in instant efficiency improvements.
And Reinventing Government was implemented in the classic Washingtonian manner: the hard decisions about who to fire and what capabilities to cut were flowed down using an approach called the Peanut Butter Spread. Everybody got cut by the same amount – except Congress, who exempted themselves.
So FBI, CIA, NASA, DoD, DoS, etc, all had to take the same cut, and DoD’s were in addition to the 40% drawdown cut. The investigation of the loss of the Shuttle Columbia noted that NASA’s inspectors had been cut by 25% - which was 5% LESS than what Gore wanted.
Meanwhile, outside observers noted at least three NEW levels of management created by Clinton-Gore, in other words, more Deputy Undersecretaries for Right Handed Widgets on Alternate Wednesdays In Months Without an R in Them.
Regarding military gigantism: There has always been a question of how we are to maintain a strategic edge when others can outdo us in terms of size and even of military spending as a percentage of GDP. Our political system ensures alternating periods of lean and fat years for the military. How do we respond to that?
The main competitive advantage that we have is the extravagant productive capacity of our civilian economy. One resulting decision made tacitly long ago was to pursue high technology solutions, necessarily very expensive, that cannot be easily duplicated by others, with careful planning to prevent any premature cuts by Congress. There have certainly been some white elephants over the years, and lost opportunities, but for the most part the strategy has paid off. Even the white elephants paid off in terms of provoking foolhardy expenditures by our enemies, who can't really afford it.
If we have made a strategic mistake over the years it has been on the civilian side -- excessive entitlements and unwarranted corporate subsidies have sapped our economic, and, I believe, our moral strength. On the whole, though, I think we have done very well.
There has to be a better answer than right-wing and Neocon zealots idea of destroying all other branches of the US government concerned with international affairs so that they can all be folded under their Glorious Military that will Give Us Empire.
Particularly given the US military's awful mishandling of the Iraq Postwar, which rivals military incompetence that was allowed to exist for years in Vietnam....
We need a massive staffing of State Department, CIA and redoubled efforts to get the FBI away from Special agents and # of criminal convictions they get to counterespionage /counterterror or give that up and go with a MI-5 type organization.
Same with the people that tell us that we don't need no stinkin' gummint that Gods Hayek and Freidman have assured that the genius of the Free MArket assures we have all the Arabic and Chinese speakers the country needs and Indonesian and Khazakstan experts "as soon as the market knew the demand exists".
Wrong.
We need many years, decades to develop such skills prior to any wonderful big bucks people deciding that major conflict rewards speakers of the Sumatran dialect or a lifetime commitment to understanding Yemen.
That is why the hated gummint needs to establish mass scholarships and stipends as they did in the Cold War for education and skill maintainence subsidies.
That is why we must have streamlined bureacracy so we can get reasonably trustworthy Americans to work in weeks as translators of Pashtun, Baluchi, Burmese - if a crisis happens rather than wait 6-18 months for "security vetting apparachniks" to process paperwork.
We actually need a doubled in size State Department and 1,000 additional FBI/MI-5 type people assigned to Rising China and it's agents more than we need 4,000 new high tech special ops supersoldiers assigned to 30 million-dollar a day missions playing "evildoer terrahist whack-a-mole".
We need a robust US agency to begin strategic communications because Bush and other "government is always evil and incompetent" except when it comes to "the heroes" and Coservative pork have singularly failed in assumptions that the "beloved free market" would generate private market media that looked after America's vital national interests with critically needed communications from Albania down to Peru.
We need a government program to establish true "country experts" - if we had only had a dozen that truly knew Iraq and it's tribes rather than rely on a delusional religious Soviet refugee like "democracy is the answer" Sharansky or con-men like Chalabi - perhaps our military wouldn't have run around for three years as clueless, money-burning soldier-squandering idiots.
Not so much "CIA" or State Dept flunkies with their days solidly tied to "Services to visa seekers, business men with clout" and so on - America does horribly compared to China, Japan and the Brit and French colonial offices in just stocking foreign countries with people whose job it is to ;earn the country and it's people and establish linkages and connections and understandings that helps their own nation. 181 countries. 80 that no one gives a rat's patootie about but one day might be important but our presence and understanding is adequate through just an embassy - a place like Grenada. 60 that we know well, but need lots more US people & work in keeping relations good, smoothing over frictions - places like France, Brazil, Japan.
20 we need solid manpower boosts of several hundred experts and agents serving our nation in public or private employment based on countering emerging threats or turning relations towards friendship and mutual progress - KSA, Yemen, Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Vietnam, Bangladesh. And dramatically augmented American agent/experts serving in 10-11 critical nations or offering solid advice here to policy-makers. China, Iran, India, Russia, Iraq, China again, Pakistan, the Koreas, China again..
That would cost as much as one carrier battle group to fund.
That is a deal.
America cannot be a military superpower alone - dependent "really cool high tech toys" and on volunteer soldiers to die for more powerful and wealthy people's dream's of Empire or dominance - while it remains a bumbling, understaffed pygmy in other organs of international awareness, communications, and relation-building.
Don't discount the possibility that Gates reads this blog. When he left his post as President of Texas A&M, he revealed on a popular A&M sports forum (www.texags.com) that he frequented the site and that he regularly posted comments under a pseudonym. Who knows - maybe he has posted to this site already and we don't even know it?
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Since when it is amazing the US demobilizes after a war/conflict? Only in recent history can it be argued things were different.
After all of our conflicts the military and structures to support it are downsized. The military after the wars to end all wars was consigned to playing polo and little fraternal spats over doctrine.
After WWII the USSR threat was apparent quick enough to stop this general demobilization but when that threat mostly disappeared what happened?
People bemoaning the loss of certain offices in the post-Cold War unwinding should realize new agencies can be created & built purpose built to the current situations rather than trying to bend unwieldy bureaucracies to the new situations.
Regarding C4's call for more regional/nation/language experts in our various cabinets (state etc). Good idea, but those agencies & academia are afflicted with the problems others note here.
The US government some years ago set up the Middle Eastern Studies Association with the goal of creating the expertise you call for. However:
Incredibly, the massively increased government subsidies to academic "area studies" programs authorized by Congress in the wake of September 11 are being used to line the pockets and promote the work of the very people most bitterly opposed to the war on terror. And the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), whose scholars stand to benefit most from the funding windfall, is led by Stanford historian, Joel Beinin, an unrelenting radical left-wing opponent of American foreign policy — a man whose position on the war is quite like that of Noam Chomsky himself.
See Stan Kurt'z full article (and others).
The people churning out of these programs are unlikely to join the State Department (or any other Federal Dept.) and to gravitate to academics.
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