Mission Accomplished?
Over the last month, U.S. forces have been steadily drawing down in Haiti. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which arrived three days after the earthquake, left the scene February 1; the 2,300 Marines of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit were released from Joint Task Force-Haiti on February 7; Air National Guard units began scaling back their support for Operation Unified Response in late February; and elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had been operating throughout Port-au-Prince, began to return home in recent days.
As the demand for immediate emergency relief subsided and international organizations and NGOs began to establish a foothold in Port-au-Prince, U.S. commanders in Haiti signaled an eagerness to “right-size” the force in the country for the evolving mission — swapping infantrymen for logisticians and engineers. According to the memorandum of understanding signed by U.S. and UN officials in the first weeks after the quake, American forces in Haiti were only ever expected to facilitate the distribution of relief materials, assess and repair critical infrastructure, and — if requested by MINUSTAH or the Haitian government — provide security assistance. In recent days, Gen. Douglas Fraser, U.S. SOUTHCOM commander, announced that “our mission is largely accomplished.”
There’s little doubt that the presence of U.S. troops in Haiti served as an important check on potential violence and unrest — keeping relative order at aid distribution points and deterring criminal activity. It’s not surprising, then, that residents of Port-au-Prince are reporting uneasiness about the U.S. troops’ departure, doubtful that the nearly 10,000-strong MINUSTAH peacekeeping force can adequately maintain order in the devastated city. The effectiveness of the Haitian National Police is also in doubt; as USIP’s Bob Perito noted last month, “there wasn’t much law enforcement to begin with, and now there’s even less.”
The Voice of Experience
Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser in the Bush Administration who helped to oversee the Iraq surge, has written the so-far best analysis of Iraq’s successful election. Though composed and published on Sunday before the vote itself, her been-there-done-that-got-the-tee-shirt wisdom is a sober assessment of what the surge has done and what the prospect before us is now. This passage is particularly forceful:
On Jan. 4, 2006, days after Iraq’s second election, President Bush announced that two U.S. combat brigades would be leaving Iraq, in addition to 20,000 troops whose tours had been extended for the vote. Some administration officials clearly hoped that a successful election promised greater stability. Instead, the subsequent negotiations over the government became a harbinger of the most violent Iraq since the days of Saddam Hussein. As I watch this new election, recalling the euphoria of those early Iraqi votes and marveling at the resilience of the Iraqi people in the years since, I am also sobered by the knowledge that the hardest work is yet to come.
But the column is also rare in that O’Sullivan’s past experience — and she worked on Iraq issues for a long and often-bleak time — hasn’t been so scarring as to blur her ability to see what the future might be. Iraq is not necessarily headed for bright, sunny uplands, but it’s not really “unraveling,” as my friend Tom Ricks often writes, in the sense of going backward to the conditions of 2006. Even if there is future sectarian conflict, it won’t be the same war as it was. That was an al Qaeda-inspired war and the least-likely future for Iraq is the return of a Zarqawi-style extremism, as the relatively high Sunni participation in the election makes plain.
It’s a good bet that it will take the Iraqis some time to form a new government and that there will be repeated attempts to shape the outcome through violent means, not least by Iranian-sponsored groups. This is also a time when the future of the U.S.-Iraq strategic partnership will be shaped profoundly; Gen. Raymond Odierno, the tactical architect of the surge and now overall U.S. commander in Iraq, has been eloquent in explaining this once-in-a-century point of deflection. Yet for his part, President Obama concluded his remarks congratulating the Iraqis on the election by reiterating his campaign pledge that “by the end of next year, all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq.”
US-ROK OPCON Transfer Should Wait
South Korea has sounded the alarm again over the plan to disband the U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command and transfer of wartime operational control of ROK forces to South Korea by 2012. Defense Minister Kim Tae-young came out for the second time last week and said: “I hope that the U.S.-led defense scheme will remain further, given the North Korean nuclear and missile threat.” While he was careful to appeal to the core U.S. security concerns on the peninsula (nuclear and missile threats), what should really make both countries think twice about a premature transfer is the mounting instability within North Korea and the asymmetric land-based threat the country poses.
The timing of the transfer couldn’t be worse, as North Korea ramps up for 2012, the year that marks the 100th birthday of Kim Il Sung (the country’s founding father and “Great Leader”), as well as the year Pyongyang projected it would become a “strong and powerful nation” — a projection the regime could seek to manifest in shows of force. Growing domestic instability, as seen in unprecedented public protests and a hike in hunger-related deaths, along with a looming succession crisis, will also make the next three years a particularly bad time to experiment with a hasty reconfiguration of South Korea’s command and control, potentially putting allied contingency operations at stake. Three years is also not enough time for the South Koreans to fill the existing gaps in their defense capabilities (in terms of missile defense, command and control systems, critical logistical capabilities, etc.), especially with a shrinking defense budget.
Civil-Military Relations, c. 2030
Raphael Cohen, a former Army intelligence officer and friend of the Center for Defense Studies, now pursuing a PhD at Georgetown, has penned an excellent piece in World Affairs on the prospective course of the civil-military (and inter-service) dialogue over the next twenty years. He’s taken a creative tack in doing so. Here’s the introduction:
The year is 2030 and four leaders-two military, two civilian-sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon, perhaps, or at a military headquarters or embassy halfway around the world. One is an Army general, an infantryman by trade, who has spent his entire thirty-year-plus career rotating to and from the war zones of what was once called the Global War on Terror and then changed during the Obama administration to the more anodyne Overseas Contingency Operations. The second is an Air Force general, a former fighter pilot who has spent his recent years focusing on more conventional threats, among them how to deal with rogue states via airpower. The third is a Foreign Service officer who has spent much of his career engrossed in the political and economic side of irregular warfare, sometimes embedded with the military, other times manning a remote diplomatic outpost in some hostile precinct. The fourth is a more traditional political appointee: well educated and well connected, he has spent most of his career outside government, but very much inside the Washington world of policy debates.
The participants in this hypothetical meeting exemplify four very different types of leaders, who, if current trends continue, will all be coming to prominence and power by 2030. All come to the table with institutional biases; all boast strong, Type A personalities. None of them come from the same background; none of them speak the same language.
Read the rest here.
Nuclear Spin
The Obama Administration has moved from the rinse to the spin cycle in its efforts to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal without scaring the pants off America’s allies. The first rotation came from Vice President Joe Biden in a February 18 speech at the National Defense University. But the tempo has increased with a Sunday New York Times piece, written from White House sources by David Sanger and Thom Shanker previewing the hotly debated and delayed Nuclear Posture Review.
As my friend Tom Mahnken pointed out over at Shadow Government, there is a yet another contradiction at play in Obama’s nuclear policy. A year ago in Prague, the president revealed his commitment to a nuclear-free world. Those were the headiest yes-we-can days, and the speech talked of deep nuclear force reductions, formal ratification of a global test ban and a renewed and expanded nonproliferation treaty; it was all about arms control.
If the Sanger-Shanker piece is a preview of what the White House hopes the NPR headline — that’s Nuclear Posture Review, not National Public Radio — will be, many of the Prague themes have been muted, if not entirely obscured. According to the Times, administration “aides say [the president] will permanently reduce America’s arsenal by thousands of weapons.” But while that sounds like a lot, most of the weapons in question will come from those in storage, not those still active and deployed. Sanger and Shanker also made a big deal of the White House’s rejection of a hard “no-first-use” policy, something long desired by arms control advocates. “We’re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,” one source told the two reporters. And they quoted Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association that retreating from the no-first-use pledge “wouldn’t be consistent with what the president said in Prague.”
The Power India is Building
It’s hard not to marvel (or shudder, more likely) at the complexity of India’s security environment: from edgy nuclear neighbors and determined jihadists to indigenous Maoist insurgents, the country faces an unenviable array of threats. It’s not surprising, then, that Delhi has seen fit to expand its defense budget for 2011 by 4 percent — following on the heels of last year’s massive increase, which raised Indian defense spending by more than a quarter.
A significant portion of the additional funds will be dedicated to personnel costs, of course, but India is also investing aggressively in capabilities to address threats from across the spectrum — expanding the country’s paramilitary and police forces, procuring UAVs and other updated C4ISR systems for each of its armed services, and modernizing the country’s air force and undersea capabilities.
India, as I’ve noted previously, is also refining its warfighting doctrine and defense posture in an effort to adapt to what it perceives, rightly, as the new strategic reality in Asia. That reality, as my colleague Dan Blumenthal points out in today’s Wall Street Journal, is dominated by an increasingly ambitious and militarily capable China and a strategically ambivalent United States: “President Obama’s accommodating stance toward China and his apparent lack of interest in cementing partnership with Delhi have focused Indian minds, as have his failure to invest in resources his Pacific commanders need,” Dan argues.
No less important, however, is India’s ongoing rivalry with Pakistan. Relations between the two hit yet another rough patch in the wake of last month’s bombing in Pune, and the subsequent bilateral talks in New Delhi between the countries’ foreign secretaries — the first since the 2008 Mumbai attacks — were predictably unfruitful. According to Pakistani officials, the new Indian defense budget the proposed “two-front war” doctrine only stand to further compromise stability in the region.
One for the Cyber Set
For all the cyber buffs out there, make sure to check out and bookmark The Cyber Loop. Among other things, the new blog keeps its finger on the pulse of recent developments and potential future trends in the arena of cyber security and cyber strategy. The site’s self-proclaimed goal is to “further the development of strategic thought in the cyberspace domain.” A worthwhile endeavor if you ask us. Here is a brief overview of its mission and purpose.
Coming Soon from CDS: Lessons for a Long War
In the coming month, the Center for Defense Studies will release a new collection of essays, edited by Tom Donnelly and Frederick Kagan, titled Lessons for a Long War: How America Can Win on New Battlefields. The volume features contributions from a series of national security luminaries: Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, Peter Feaver, Mac Owens, Major General Charles Dunlap, and Colonel (Ret.)Bob Killebrew. More details are available here.
UPDATE: The table of contents from Lessons for a Long War is available for download here.
Gates’ Call to Arms
At NATO’s recent Strategic Concept Seminar in Washington, the fourth and final one before the Group of Experts chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begins to draft its recommendations for the new Strategic Concept, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates outlined his ideas for NATO’s future structures, forces, and capabilities. In his opening remarks, Gates pointed out that most of the defense planning assumptions enshrined in NATO’s 1999 Strategic Concept are still valid today. The same holds true for NATO’s core functions. First, the alliance remains a military alliance focused on protecting the territorial sovereignty, political integrity, and security of its members. Second, the alliance remains committed to deterring potential enemies and, should this become necessary, fighting them collectively. Lastly, NATO continues to operate on the premise that member nations will fulfill their Article 5 collective defense commitments and obligations. While these fundamental tenets are presumed to hold true today, the new task for NATO is to recommit itself to the common defense of its members and sharpen the core missions and purposes of the alliance.
From a strategic perspective, according to the secretary, the most important institutional development has been NATO’s transition from a “static, defensive force” premised on Cold War defense planning assumptions to an expeditionary fighting force that can project military power and provide security in complex out-of-area operations. This, of course, was first evidenced by the Balkan wars in the late 1990s and now confirmed by NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan. It is now a truism that alliance security and interests are no longer solely a function of territorial sovereignty. Turmoil and upheaval in remote areas of the world can have serious effects on alliance members in Europe and North America. More concretely, Gates argued that the new concept must aim to strengthen the credibility of Article 5 and enhance NATO’s strategic deterrence through improved contingency planning, military exercises, and force postures.
