The assassination conundrum

I once blogged about the discomfort I felt when a remotely piloted drone aircraft targets an individual for death, or a team of Special Operatives hunts down and kills someone. That’s more akin to assassination than warfare as usually practiced, and I contrasted it with the glee I feel when the US Marines come crashing ashore to accomplish the same deed. Somehow, taking the bad guy out in a full frontal assault is okay, while dispatching a Hellfire missile or killer team seems evil, or anyhow not the work of gentlemen.

So it is with the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai earlier this month. The man abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers, among other activities. Now either what he did in that instance was either an act of war or a cold-blooded murder. If an act of war, then his assassination by what we assume were Israeli agents is no less problematical. And if murder, how can we possibly object to his receiving the same treatment in his turn? It’s not as if Hamas is going to bring him to justice, or the statelet of Dubai, and certainly not the International Criminal Court.

Yet the BBC among other western news outlets report on the assassination as if Mr al-Mabhouh were the victim and his assassins the criminals. Partly this is the result of a reflexive anti-Israel bias, and partly the West’s confusion over how to respond to an enemy who wears no uniform and follows no code of war. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Mr Brown goes to Washington

Congratulations to Scott Brown, who in a single month broke the Democratic death grip on the U.S. Senate and sent his fellow Republicans into orbit for voting “aye” on the latest Democratic stimulus, er, jobs bill. I am opposed to all such trillion-dollar pork projects, but I am heartily in favor of a man who can think for himself, as Mr Brown so clearly does. Besides, as I can testify, he writes a smart and engaging thank-you note to anyone who contributed to his campaign. I hope he serves the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as long as his predecessor did. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

A man who earned his medals

Any follower of this blog knows that I kvetch about the chests-full of medals that American generals wear, 90 percent of them absurd or undeserved. Well, here's a man who also wore a chest full of medals: Colonel Bob Howard. The difference is that he earned them the hard way--at least the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Hearts, and the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He was buried at Arlington on Monday. Blue skies, Colonel! -- Dan Ford

F-22 and a nation in decline

Mark Helprin--novelist and conservative--has written a devastating critique of America's defense meltdown in today's Wall Street Journal. Ostensibly it's a defense of the F-22 Raptor, but in a larger sense it's a broadside at a people and a government that would rather bail out General Motors and the United Auto Workers than properly equip its armed forces. It begins:

Cancelling the F-22 Raptor, the most capable fighter plane ever produced, is yet another act in the tragedy of a nation that, bankrupting itself, embracing moral decline, and apologizing to its enemies, is losing the will to prevail. In pursuit of false prosperities that have failed even the economy, America for three presidencies and an entire generation has diminished its arsenals, unbalanced its military, and forgotten its genius for strategy.

I'm not so sure about that last bit: when did the US ever have a genius for strategy? (Tactics, yes, and even operational art, but grand strategy seems always to elude us.) But for the rest, I think I'd rather live in a country guarded by the F-22 than not. Read it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The face of future air combat

Meet the Sukhoi PAK-FA, which an Australian aviation website terms “the new, younger, tougher kid on the block, and … likely to become the nemesis of the F-22” Raptor, which the U.S. has just capped at 187 aircraft, on the theory that there’s little need in today’s world for an air-superiority fighter. The money thus saved is to go into procurement of the F-35, a smaller, lighter, cheaper, multi-role warplane to be acquired by the USAF and the Navy and Marine air arms. The logic of this move is disputed by the Australians, who argue that the F-35 just can’t stand up against the PAK-FA. India plans to co-produce the Russian plane, and Israel is a likely buyer as well. Concludes the website:

The US would be left with the scraps, producing ineffective combat aircraft that could only be sold by forcing purchases onto the wary and resentful US Armed Services, who would know that they are now ‘second tier’ and likely to be slaughtered en-masse in a shooting war.

How to rescue the situation? Easy: just cancel the F-35 program (actually, there are three such programs, since the Air Force, Navy, and Marines each have different requirements for their “joint” fighter.) Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Helping hands

I haven't yet blogged about Haiti, in large part because I find the international aid effort as horrifying as the underlying natural disaster. I kept thinking of my dentist, who for years has taken his vacation in Haiti, pulling teeth and filling cavities. While Bill Clinton and the UN stumbled around, the 900-pound gorillas who must have confused the aid effort more than they helped, where were the private-sector volunteers who could actually get things done? Well, Tom Ricks has an account by and about Team Rubicon, which nobody has ever heard of, and which for that reason probably did more good than Mr Clinton could ever have done, had not a medical emergency fortunately removed him from the scene. Team Rubicon consisted of two US Marines (not on active duty, but it's considered bad form to refer to anyone as an ex-Marine), two doctors, a physician's assistant, two firemen, and a Jesuit brother. They write:

At every turn, big aid organizations not only rejected our team's offers of assistance, but even attempted to dissuade us from going to render assistance in Port au Prince. With creativity and conviction, Team Rubicon, as we came to be called, found a way to put our original eight members into the devastated city, found a partner eager for our helping hands, and found that, contrary to everything the big aid bureaucracies were saying, small and skilled teams of military combat veterans and seasoned first responders were exactly what could render immediate, life-saving assistance in this situation.

They also paid their own way. An inspiring story. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

You are being watched

You probably won't want to watch the whole of this Dubai television program--it's nearly half an hour--but it's a fascinating glimpse of how closely we are being watched as we go through life. I trust the United States is not as advanced in this activity as is Dubai--or Britain, for that matter. But I find it positively creepy that even a government television station can put together such a detailed video of the assassins from the moment they arrive at the airport, and through their various taxi rides, hotel rooms, and disguises. (I particularly liked the videos of the guy who enters his hotel room bald and leaves it with a fine head of hair.) Is there any place in Dubai without a surveillance camera? In London? In Washington? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Eight fall guys

When I read that eight Army officers might be reprimanded for failing to notice that Major Nidal Hasan was a certifiable Islamic nutter, I wondered if, in the end, they'd be the only ones punished in connection with the Fort Hood massacre. The administration's fumbling over the trial venue of Khalid Sheik Mohammed is hardly reassuring, nor is a legal system in which Major Hasan--paralyzed from the waist down--seems better positioned to sue the government than the government is to convict him of murder.

So I was much taken by Bret Stephens's counterfactual history of the Fort Hood shooting, published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Mr Stephens imagines an Army in which the eight fall guys were on their toes: they saw in Major Hasan a man about to explode with religious rage, and they duly reported him to the authorities. The mentally unbalanced psychiatrist would have been denied promotion and given an "unsuitable" discharge from military service. Thirteen soldiers would be alive today, in that case--and meanwhile, Mr Stephens persuasively speculates, the Good People would have come down upon the Army in force, crying racial intolerance from a "Christianist" military culture. (The late lamented Ted Kennedy was among those demanding a full investigation of the arrest of the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo for espionage; the charges were dropped, the ex-chaplain wrote a book, and he became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) In this parallel universe, Major Hasan would have written a much-praised book, and the eight fall guys would now be accused of racial profiling. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The good war in Iraq

I just got around to reading the transcript of Joe Biden’s appearance on Larry King Live. It’s priceless:

I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

I spent -- I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months -- three months. I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

This is the same Joe Biden who told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in 2007 that neither Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama was fit to be president because:

Look, the fundamental disagreement I have with my colleagues up here [Ms Clinton and Mr Obama] is that they seem to cling to the fundamental strategic mistake that everyone on both sides plays to, and that is that there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together.

That will not happen, George. It will not happen in the lifetime of anyone here.

During the 2008 campaign, Messrs Obama and Biden argued that the good war in Afghanistan had been scanted because of the demands of the bad war in Iraq. Now that Mr Bush’s “surge” in Iraq has proved to be a qualified success, while the ‘Stan has gone from bad to worse, Mr. Biden has simply switched the wars around: Iraq good, Afghanistan bad. Worse, it's even possible he believes it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Think COIN but practice FID

The more ingrained an institution, the more impenetrable its jargon. The U.S. Army that I reluctantly served in the 1950s was bad enough, but today's military has a language of its own. Take the headline above: It's inaccessible to most of the world, but it happens to be very good advice. It comes from a Green Beret colonel who argues that the Army's current fascination with counter-insurgency (COIN) is all very well, except that most of what American troops are called upon to do isn't countering insurgency at all. COIN, as we read on the Foreign Policy website, is what a government and military do when they are threatened within their own borders. So the COINsters in Iraq are the Iraqis; in Afghanistan, the Afghans. What the Americans and other outsiders are trying to do in those countries is better defined as Foreign Internal Defense--hence the FID. The colonel argues:

Tactically, the indirect approach requires clear-eyed recognition that U.S. capacity will be applied through -- and not around -- the host nation. This paradigm seems simple, but it runs counter to U.S. military "can-doism" and requires a long-term view and immense operational patience. The indirect approach does not satisfy appetites for quick, measurable results.

Robert Haddick of Foreign Policy adds that this is a hard sell to an administration that has already announced the date when the troop drawdown is to begin. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Only Thing Worth Dying For II

The deeper I go into this book, the more impressed I am. For three years I studied War in the Modern World, reading almost everything my tutors threw at me, but The Only Thing Worth Dying For says so much more, and says it so well! Here we have a Special Forces sergeant sitting in the back of a Toyota truck with his laptop, calling in air strikes upon a Taliban column that not only hugely outnumbers the eleven-man A Team but also the ragtag Afghan force that Hamid Karzai has gathered to help them. Without firing a shot, the Green Berets have destroyed much of a battalion-sized force and sent the rest reeling back to regroup. And all this is so ordinary in November 2001 that Mr Blehm doesn't find it necessary to tell us how Alex recharged his laptop, nor very much about the antenna that enables him to talk to the F-18s, which at 30,000 feet are invisible to the Taliban until they come down to strafe. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Only Thing Worth Dying For

Wow. This is a splendid book. It reads like a novel but seems true to life. (I'll say more about that later, when I've finished the book.) Eric Blehm tells the story of the Special Forces A-Team (now unfortunately known as ODA, for Operational Detachment Alpha) that took Hamid Karzhai into Afghanistan set him on the path to become leader of the Liberation and eventually president. (The only thing worth dying for is not Mr Karzhai, of course, nor even Afghanistan, but the individual soldier's deeply held belief.) I've been a sucker for the Green Berets since traisping with them to Tan Hoa in 1964. Mr Blehm tells us that they have lost nothing of their unorthodox style and stubborn loyalty to one another. Get it (here it is on Amazon). Read it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On reforming a Nobel Peace Prize winner

Actually, I wasn't thinking of Mr Obama, but the alphabet-soup agency that once shared the Prize with Al Gore. (Mr Pachauri is the gent on the right.) Says the Guardian, which used to be my dowdy morning paper when I was a student in Manchester, but which has since gravitated to London and to the left:

The IPCC and its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, have come under unprecedented pressure following a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 and the controversy over the hacked climate science emails at the University of East Anglia. Yet before that, the IPCC was credited with having settled the debate over whether human activity was causing global warming, sharing the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore. Here, the Guardian asks experts around the world what needs to change to enable the IPCC to continue to play a central and positive role in enabling the world's governments to take the right action against climate change.

"The Nobel prize was for peace not science," said one of the agency's former writers. The report, he said, "is not a scientific analysis of climate change." He thinks a name change might do the trick! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Storms sweep Channel; the Continent isolated

So read the famous Times headline of the 1920s, regularly quoted to show the insularity of the British. In much the same vein, the New York Times reports with a straight face this morning:

But as the storm cleared, the Eastern seaboard was left to struggle through its lingering aftermath: snowbound airports, federal agencies in the nation’s capital closed, roads coated in sleet and schools seemingly everywhere but New York City still shuttered or set to open hours behind schedule.

Outside the Blue Lady's newsroom, there are many Americans who regard the closing of Federal offices as a blessing, especially if they included the US Congress. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Teach us to sit still

"I'm not a big fan of the population-centric approach," says a Marine colonel in Afghanistan, as reported in the Washington Post. "We can't sit still. We have to pursue and chase these guys. I haven't seen any evidence [that the strategy of protecting the population is] working. The only thing that's working is chasing them."

Fascinating stuff. In Vietnam, the Marines pioneered the Combined Action Platoon, in which a handful of Americans and a larger number of Vietnamese worked together over the long haul to protect a community. Bing West memorably wrote about the project in The Village. I was so impressed by it that I used the experience in my concluding thesis at King's College London: Let the Americans Live in the Village, in which I apply the thinking of military theorist John Boyd to the problem of counterinsurgency. (The thesis is available only as an e-book for the Kindle reader, but you can read Kindle editions on your PC by downloading the free software.)

Meaning no disrespect to the colonel, but he ought to pick up a copy of T.S. Elliot's Ash Wednesday and ponder the lines: "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still". They're especially appropriate right now, with Ash Wednesday falling on the 17th. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On joining the ballistic missile club

As a reason to worry about Iran's nuclear and space ambitions, note this story from the India Times:

India on Sunday successfully test-fired its indigenous Agni-III ballistic missile, which has a range of over 3,500 km and can even strike targets deep inside China. This paves the way for induction of the nuclear-capable missile into the armed forces and consolidates India’s position among a select group of nations having intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) capability.

We don't worry much about India's nuclear arsenal, because, well, India is a democracy and the people do speak English, Muffy. Anyhow, a 2175-mile IRBM is more China's problem than ours, or Europe's.

The situation looks rather different if you put a missile similar to the Agni-III in northwestern Iran. Berlin, Stockholm, and Rome are all within its range, and it wouldn't take much of a boost to add Paris and London to the list. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The well-written war

Says the teaser line on the New York Times website: 'A new group of soldier-writers explore the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support.' What's with that but? Well, if you work for the Blue Lady, you just can't believe that a soldier might believe in what he's fighting for.

That said, Elisabeth Bumiller's story is worth a read. I too have been astonished at the literary outpourings from Iraq and Afghanistan, though most of what I've encountered take the form of blogs and full-length books, and most of the books written by journos, not soldiers. Ms Bumiller zeroes in on a book of poems, the title verse being:

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh,
... because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Not bad! Here, Bullet is available on Amazon.com, and I hope that the NYT story will sell hundreds of copies, if not thousands. Still, I suspect that Norman Mailer and Ulysses Grant, to cite two of the old-time soldier-writers mentioned by Ms Bumiller, also supported the wars that engaged their attention. Perhaps Tim O'Brien did, too, at least for a time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Why isn't that man smiling?

From left to right: Scott Brown, the newly seated Junior Senator from Massachusetts; Mr Brown's wife, Gail Huff; and Vice President of the United States (and President Pro Tem of the Senate) Joe Biden, who does not look exactly delighted to be standing where he is. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

My goodness, a deficit!

The New York Times this morning takes note of a surprising feature of Mr Obama's proposed budget: it's not in balance!

In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

Who knew? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trillion-dollar Barack II

I underestimated the president's ambition: the projected deficit for the current fiscal year is now $1.6 trillion, meaning that he will easily break $5 trillion in his first term. That equals the cumulative debt of all American presidents from George Washington to Bill Clinton. What it took 42 presidents to accomplish, Mr Obama will have done in just four years. (In its admirable manner, the New York Times today manages to give us this information in a story emphasizing the president's steps to reduce the deficit.)

A trillion dollars, recall, is what federal income taxes raised in 2006. Write five checks equal to what you owed in 2006, and you will be square--but only until 2012. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford