In an article at AOLNews.com today, CDS director Tom Donnelly offers his thoughts on last night’s Oval Office address:

President Barack Obama’s elegy for Operation Iraqi Freedom Tuesday night quoted a staff sergeant from the 2nd Infantry Division’s 4th Stryker Brigade, the last U.S. Army “combat” unit to cross into Kuwait: “I know that to my brothers in arms who fought and died, this would probably mean a lot.”

The staff sergeant was Luke Dill, and his words were published in an Aug. 19 Associated Press story. But Dill, an 18-year-old specialist in 2003, made it in a far different spirit than his commander in chief. “It’s something I’m going to be proud of for the rest of my life — the fact that I came in on the initial push, and now I’m leaving with the last of the combat units” is the rest of what he said.

As the president noted, Dill and those he fought with left a lot behind in Iraq. But they left not just what they lost but what they won. And still more important, and as the full quote makes plain, Dill takes much away, beginning with his pride in — yes — a mission accomplished.

Yet the larger American mission in Iraq is not complete or fully accomplished. About this, too, the president was muted and imprecise. He spoke of a long-term partnership with Iraq — a deeply vital strategic interest for the U.S. — yet reaffirmed his intention to withdraw all American troops over the next year. Obama remains hesitant, reluctant to commit, ambiguous, anxious to “turn the page.”

Read the rest here.

(Photo: flickr/The White House)

Yesterday, I moderated a discussion with my AEI colleagues Tom Donnelly, Fred Kagan, and Michael Rubin, held in anticipation of today’s formal conclusion of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq.  A central point to emerge from the briefing was that the United States has entered a new, but no less challenging, period in its relationship with Iraq—one which will demand serious, continued U.S. engagement, so as to guard and build upon the fragile success we and our Iraqi partners have achieved thus far. In the coming year, Iraqi leaders will be watching closely to determine whether the United States intends to remain a long-term committed partner. In his remarks on Iraq this evening, one hopes that President Obama will convey just that.

Audio of yesterday’s discussion is available here; a full transcript will be available shortly.

(U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway)

Last week, CDS director Tom Donnelly appeared on the PBS NewsHour to discuss Defense Secretary Gates’ plans to close the U.S. Joint Forces Command headquarters as well as his efforts to develop a “culture of savings and restraint” within the Pentagon.

The secretary’s campaign to identify overheard savings and efficiencies “signals that Gates is worried,” Donnelly explained. “And he’s right to be worried, because of the political background in which he’s operating.” But “the savings themselves…aren’t going to make that much of a difference.”

Watch the video below, and read the transcript here.

Commenting in The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” on President Obama’s speech at the Disabled Veterans of America Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, CDS director Tom Donnelly argues that the president needs to spell out his post-2011 plans for Iraq. The text is below:

As perhaps befits an address to disabled veterans, President Obama’s “Iraq” speech spent more time discussing veterans care and post-traumatic stress than on describing his long-term plans for securing that country. He even spent more energy describing the state of “his” war in Afghanistan.

The president may not like it, but Iraq is now his war, too–or rather, remains America’s war. And while it’s impossible to assess with precision what’s up in Baghdad or Mosul from the distance of Washington, it does seem clear that there’s reason to worry. Iraq’s domestic politics are unsettled and prone to violence, as is the entire region. America’s security and economic interests in Iraq have never been greater, but Obama’s commitment is uncertain.

The president needs to tell his fellow Americans, too, what his post-2011 plans for Iraq are. Conversely, his ability to sit on the fence is not unlimited, either in Iraq or at home. There will, sooner or later, be a new government in Baghdad, and Iraqis will keep thrashing their way toward some form of new political compact that bridges their own sectarian and other divides and heals the wounds of the Saddam years. The nature and durability of that compact will depend, in a serious way, on how Iraqis assess American constancy.

The president needs to tell his fellow Americans, too, what his post-2011 plans for Iraq are. With his support shrinking and with Democratic majorities in Congress in play, it seems unlikely that we’ll get clarification before November. But the president will be judged at least in some measure in 2012 for his performance on Iraq. George Bush’s Iraq surge snatched the prospect of victory from the jaws of defeat–or at least that’s how Republicans will tell the story. If there’s a mess in Mesopotamia then, that, too, will be spun as “Obama’s War.”

(Photo: flickr/Photo by Lee Craker, USF-I Public Affairs)

Col. Paul Yingling is one of the most thoughtful soldiers of his generation.  In particular, his articles in Armed Forces Journal on the failures of military leadership and the compact between the United States and the men and women who fight the Long War have provoked much needed debate.  The second of these pieces, “The Founders’ Wisdom,” a call for a return to a conscript military as the most effective and equitable way to raise forces for this struggle, has merited particularly close attention, rebuttal, and now, thanks to the folks over at Small Wars Journal, an invitation to further discussion. An offer I can’t resist.

Yingling makes three arguments for abandoning the current All-Volunteer Force.  The first argument is based on the experience of the two world wars of the 20^th century and based upon Yingling’s reading of the American tradition.  Both these points are suspect.  Take the analogy between the world wars and the Long War.  The world wars were, relatively speaking, large and short, overwhelmingly conventional and decided by firepower.  The Long War is, well, long, and though it has taxed the current force nearly to its breaking point, it is still rightly regarded as a series of small wars or campaigns.  And the “American tradition” must account for the Civil War as well as the world wars.  While the Civil War marked the first use of conscription in America, both Federal and Confederate armies were volunteers; conscripts accounted for about 6 percent of the total Union army.

But Yingling also extends his reading of this tradition: “[T]his approach demands popular participation in national security decisions and provides Congress with powerful incentives to reassert its war powers.  Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force of citizen soldiers would ensure that the burdens of war are felt equally in every community in America.”  This is a revealing quote, echoing two laments often expressed by American officers.  The first is the belief that, absent a formal congressional declaration of war, an imperial presidency rides roughshod over the people’s representatives in committing long-service regulars to war.  This is a highly corrosive myth (and one of the enduring problems in American civil-military relations) that conveniently overlooks what Congress does do, such as voting its direct approval of the Iraq war (a vote demanded by Democrats in the Senate, most stridently by Joe Biden) by a 78-22 margin, and what it intentionally does not do, namely, directly fulfill its Constitutional war declaration responsibilities.  The convention of war resolutions suits the Congress and the executive, but also the strategic situations a global great power is apt to find itself in.  This is, undeniably, a kind of buck-passing exercise, and it might be preferable in the abstract to have a straight-up declaration of war.  Nonetheless the resolution votes amount to much the same thing: no member of the Congress is in any doubt about what the vote means, and its has been the consistent practice of even the most ardent proponents of executive power in many White Houses—even those named “Bush—to seek approval from Capitol Hill before deploying large forces.  The idea that Congress would want to “reassert” its war powers by committing a conscript force is highly speculative.  It’s also belied by the Vietnam experience—the ultimate in unhappy endings for a conscript force.  The Vietnam experience also undercuts Yingling’s second lament, that the burdens of war would be more widely felt.  If anything, the Vietnam-era conscript force became more demographically unrepresentative even than today’s AVF, more skewed toward the truly poor and the underclass.  And an unfair system of conscription has been and would be a recipe for turmoil at home.

Yingling’s second argument is that conscription will allow for a sufficient expansion of the force to meet its long-term commitments.  Yingling believes that conscription would result in amelioration of the excessive burdens imposed on today’s force: “stop-loss policies or an endless cycle of year-on, year-off deployments.”  As one who has long argued for an increase in the number of U.S. ground forces, I’m entirely sympathetic to the stated goal—the size of the force has not only meant an excessive burden for soldiers and Marines (and unexpected duties for sailors and airmen), but been a confounding strategic and operational constraint—but I am entirely suspect about the means.  What’s needed is something like an active-duty increase of 200,000 to 250,000, both to offset the over-use of the National Guard and Reserve but to ensure that there are sufficient regulars available to do what needs to be done.  A rough estimate, based on U.S. Census data, of the military-service-age population of the United States, would be about 80 million Americans; thus the needed increase represents about a quarter of one percent of the appropriate demographic slice of the population.  That’s a small proportion, but one that could only result in a most inequitable form of conscription.  It’s also bound to result in a loss of military effectiveness.  In a two-year period of enlistment, a conscript can only be expected to do one tour of duty in combat—in a kind of combat that rewards professional competence and experience.  While the price to be paid for tactical misjudgments wouldn’t be as high as in World War II, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be some cost measured both in terms of American casualties and itchy trigger-fingers leading to other casualties.  In sum, a draft isn’t the right way to achieve the necessary increase and would introduce some level of uncertainty about indiscipline and combat effectiveness.

Yingling adds that “a conscripted force would not rely on exorbitant bonuses and reduced enlistment standards to fill its ranks.”  It’s is unclear whether he means to be asserting a moral point or one about combat and cost effectiveness.  What’s “exorbitant” is either in the economic eye of the marketplace or the moral eye of the beholder.  And as to enlistment or recruiting standards, I know of no evidence that the marginal lowering of high school graduation rates and other traditional measures of some recent lean years have been translated into a less effective force, or a less disciplined force.  And we don’t really know what the most expensive military benefits, like TriCare for Life, have meant in terms of the surprising resiliency of the AVF. The moral point is even more obscure: how to fully quantify what the many who don’t serve owe the few who do?

One begins to sense a larger agenda.  Elsewhere Yingling elides these issues. Rebutting a manpower-policy critique of his Armed Forces Journal piece, Yingling argues that “raising and training an army and committing it to war [are not] merely exercises in labor economics, devoid of strategic and political consequences.”  Later Yingling gets to what may well be the underlying point for him: “Does [former Undersecretary of the Army Nelson Ford] believe that the United States would have gone to war in Iraq if doing so had imposed conscription and higher taxes on the public?” It sounds like Yingling’s arguments are as much surrogates for a closet complaint about Iraq than a debate about the AVF per se.

Continue Reading ››

CDS director Tom Donnelly argues today at AOL News that the McChrystal flap has provided the administration an opportunity to recommit to victory in Afghanistan. Doing so, however, will necessarily involve cleaning-house in Kabul:

The real test of Obama’s commitment to success in this war is not whether he rids himself of a troublesome general, but whether he rids himself of all the other troublesome elements of his “team of rivals” — Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, “AfPak Czar” Richard Holbrooke, to name two — and muzzles the vice president.

His breach of civil-military norms aside, McChrystal rendered himself operationally ineffective with his comments in Rolling Stone—there’s no way he could have returned to Afghanistan and sustained a productive working relationship with either Eikenberry or Holbrooke (although for what it’s worth, President Karzai seemed eager to have him back). But it’s critical to note that the U.S. “country team” in Kabul has been in shambles for the past year. For all the talk last December about implementing a “comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign,” there has yet to be a clear articulation of a coalition political and economic strategy to complement McChrystal’s plans for the military. Now is the time to make sure we get the civilian side of the equation in Kabul right.

(Photo: flickr/The White House)

Over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol and CDS director Tom Donnelly have penned a special editorial on this morning’s story about General Stanley McChrystal. The text is below:

If Stan McChrystal has to go—and he probably does—it will be a sad end to a career of great distinction and a low moment in a lifetime devoted to duty, honor, and country. But the good of the mission and the prospects for victory in Afghanistan may well now demand a new commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

While there are obvious issues of civil-military relations exposed by the general’s cringe-inducing quotes in the “Runaway General” article in Rolling Stone—and while his staff appear to be off the leash entirely, a command climate for which McChrystal is responsible—the original source of the problem is above the general’s pay grade.

So McChrystal should not be the only one to go.  Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and “AfPak” czar Richard Holbrooke should likewise either submit their resignations or be fired by President Obama.  Vice President Biden and his surrogates should be told to sit down and be quiet, to stop fighting policy battles in the press.  The administration’s “team of rivals” approach is producing only rivalry.

Most of all, the commander-in-chief must take command.  Barack Obama’s commitment is famously and publicly uncertain.  No one—not his lieutenants, nor his cabinet, nor his generals, nor the American people, nor our allies, nor the Afghans, nor our enemies—can be sure whether the president wants to win the war or just to end the war.

The McChrystal contretemps creates an opportunity to right many of these wrongs; the White House should not waste this crisis. Anything less than a clean sweep will leave the war effort impaired.

The imposition of a troop-withdrawal deadline, in particular, has poisoned our Afghanistan strategy. McChrystal has, understandably, behaved like a man under pressure to produce quick results to get good marks in the administration’s December Afghanistan strategy review.  Even the timetable for the review is premature and therefore transparently artificial: the last “surge” brigade won’t be deployed until November.

The shortage of time is also compounded by the shortage of forces.  McChrystal’s cardinal achievement to date has been the re-wiring of the dysfunctional ISAF structure, but it’s also required him to deploy forces in places such as Kunduz, north of Kabul but still a Pashtun area where the Taliban have been more active, because the German forces there are insufficient.

If the United States fails in Afghanistan, it won’t be because Gen. McChrystal or his staff were indiscreet or insubordinate (which, strictly speaking, they were not).  Indeed, if the war can’t be quickly won in Afghanistan, it won’t be quickly lost there, either. And in fact it can be won, though it will take some time. The war can, however, be lost rapidly in Washington.

(Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

With much of the current commentary on the U.S. defense budget emphasizing the inevitability of constraints and reductions, Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt set out to examine a number of the faulty assumptions apparent in Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ campaign to streamline Pentagon spending in a must-read piece for the Weekly Standard:

Gates’s speech at the Eisenhower Library was off the mark in many respects. The United States never became the “garrison state” many feared at the start of the Cold War, and even in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the re-balancing of civil liberties and security has been minimal. Nor is the “military-industrial complex” a real problem. Defense companies now amount to less than 2 percent of Standard & Poor’s total market capitalization for the country’s 500 largest companies—hardly the dark and dangerous behemoth many on the left imagine.

But Gates was right in one respect: The nation is at a critical juncture when it comes to defense resources. The problem is the administration’s response. If Obama and his team prevail, they will have created a spending dynamic that puts the United States on the same road as the countries of Europe, where domestic welfare crowds out all but minimal spending for defense. America’s role in the world will decline, not because we have tried to do too much abroad, but because we have chosen to do too much at home. For less than a nickel on the dollar of U.S. GDP, we can maintain our preeminence in the world and, with prudent taxing and spending at home, revive America’s economy as well. This shouldn’t be an either/or choice. It hasn’t been in the past, and America and the world have been the better for it.

In a related article, Dan Blumenthal outlines how our failure to invest in the proper defense capabilities and to take serious steps to strengthen partnerships and alliances will hinder our strategic position in what may be the most vital region of the coming century:

Our strategic requirements necessitate more military investment in the Asia-Pacific on an expedited schedule, as well as creative strategic thinking about building alliances with countries that are already funding their own military modernization programs. Investing properly in air supremacy, undersea warfare, and missile defenses will be costly. But the cost is nowhere near the price we will pay if the region — which has enjoyed a long run of peace, stability, and prosperity — descends into chaos or conflict.

(Photo: flickr/U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos)

Last week on PBS’s “Ideas in Action,” Tom Donnelly debated the prospects of the administration’s Afghanistan strategy with Andrew Exum of CNAS and Matthew Hoh, a former State Department officer in Afghanistan (3161) whose resignation caused a small stir within the Beltway last fall. Check it out: