How can he say this stuff with a straight face?

I apologize for not picking up on this sooner. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University on Monday eclipsed most American coverage of President Bush's speech at the United Nations General Assembly the following day:

This great institution must work for great purposes -- to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and disease, illiteracy and ignorance, and poverty and despair. Every member of the United Nations must join in this mission of liberation.

First, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from tyranny and violence. The first article of the Universal Declaration begins, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." The truth is denied by terrorists and extremists who kill the innocent with the aim of imposing their hateful vision on humanity. The followers of this violent ideology are a threat to civilized people everywhere. All civilized nations must work together to stop them -- by sharing intelligence about their networks, and choking their -- off their finances, and bringing to justice their operatives.

In the long run, the best way to defeat extremists is to defeat their dark ideology with a more hopeful vision -- the vision of liberty that founded this body. The United States salutes the nations that have recently taken strides toward liberty -- including Ukraine and Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and Mauritania and Liberia, Sierra Leone and Morocco. The Palestinian Territories have moderate leaders, mainstream leaders that are working to build free institutions that fight terror, and enforce the law, and respond to the needs of their people. The international community must support these leaders, so that we can advance the vision of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security.

Its too bad the Palestinian people tried to vote those Palestinian leaders out of office a few years ago. Its also too bad that U.S. is doing nothing to prevent Israel from declaring the Gaza Strip an 'enemy entity' and closing it off to everything but humanitarian aid. But I digress. The speech only gets better:

Brave citizens in Lebanon and Afghanistan and Iraq have made the choice for democracy -- yet the extremists have responded by targeting them for murder. This is not a show of strength -- it is evidence of fear. And the extremists are doing everything in their power to bring down these young democracies. The people of Lebanon and Afghanistan and Iraq have asked for our help. And every civilized nation has a responsibility to stand with them.

Every civilized nation also has a responsibility to stand up for the people suffering under dictatorship. In Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration. Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma, where a military junta has imposed a 19-year reign of fear. Basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and worship are severely restricted. Ethnic minorities are persecuted. Forced child labor, human trafficking, and rape are common. The regime is holding more than 1,000 political prisoners -- including Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party was elected overwhelmingly by the Burmese people in 1990.

The ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable. This morning, I'm announcing a series of steps to help bring peaceful change to Burma. The United States will tighten economic sanctions on the leaders of the regime and their financial backers. We will impose an expanded visa ban on those responsible for the most egregious violations of human rights, as well as their family members. We'll continue to support the efforts of humanitarian groups working to alleviate suffering in Burma. And I urge the United Nations and all nations to use their diplomatic and economic leverage to help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom.

In Cuba, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom. And as that nation enters a period of transition, the United Nations must insist on free speech, free assembly, and ultimately, free and competitive elections.

In Zimbabwe, ordinary citizens suffer under a tyrannical regime. The government has cracked down on peaceful calls for reform, and forced millions to flee their homeland. The behavior of the Mugabe regime is an assault on its people -- and an affront to the principles of the Universal Declaration. The United Nations must insist on change in Harare -- and must insist for the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe.

In Sudan, innocent civilians are suffering repression -- and in the Darfur region, many are losing their lives to genocide. America has responded with tough sanctions against those responsible for the violence. We've provided more than $2 billion in humanitarian and peacekeeping aid. I look forward to attending a Security Council meeting that will focus on Darfur, chaired by the French President. I appreciate France's leadership in helping to stabilize Sudan's neighbors. And the United Nations must answer this challenge to conscience, and live up to its promise to promptly deploy peacekeeping forces to Darfur.

Maybe these words would mean more if they were spoken before we opened an extra-judicial prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Or before we established secret prisons. Or before the abuses at Abu Ghraib happened. Or before we started torturing people. Or before we enlisted other states to torture on our behalf.

Setting aside the matter of whether all of the above had to happen in order to 'save lives,' does President Bush realize that making speeches like this only hurt America's image abroad? I'll be the first cop to hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy. It is a dirty business full of questions with no right answers.

But must President Bush use such self-righteous and indignant language in front of the whole world when he knows that is the U.S. is adding more 'War on Terror' skeletons to its closet every day? Why didn't he just talk about poverty or women's rights or some other issue that the U.S. is not actively disrupting. Heck, talk about global warming for all I care.

Just stop embarrassing the country with this hollow talk of freedom. It doesn't fool anyone.

Land Warrior in Iraq

Major props go to Noah Schachtman, who took time out of a busy schedule of alternatively living in Ba'athist palaces and sleeping in fetid kitchens to look in on how the tech demonstrators from the now-cancelled Land Warrior are doing:

Captain Jack Moore, the commander of the 4/9's "Blowtorch" company, peers into his Land Warrior monocle. Inside is a digital map of Tarmiyah, a filthy little town about 25 kilometers north of Baghdad that's become a haven for Islamists. Blue icons show two of his platoons sweeping through the western half of the town. Two other icons represent Blowtorch soldiers who have teamed up with special forces and Iraqi Army units to raid local mosques with insurgent ties.

A red dot suddenly pops up on Moore's monocle screen: 3rd platoon has found a pair of improvised bombs -- black boxes, filled with homemade explosives. Other troops will circumvent the scene.

As the other platoons move south to north, green lights blink on Moore's map. Each of these "digital chem lights" represents a house checked and cleared. It keeps different groups of soldiers from kicking down the same set of doors twice.

A year ago, these chem lights weren't even part of the Land Warrior code. But after a suggestion from a Manchu soldier, the digital markers were added -- and quickly became the system's most popular feature. During air assaults on Baquba, to the northeast, troops were regularly dropped a quarter or half-kilometer from their original objective; the chem lights allowed them to converge on the spot where they were supposed to go. In the middle of one mission, a trail of green lights was used to mark a new objective -- and show the easiest way to get to the place.

[snip]

[Capt. Aaron] Miller is still not happy with how much the system weighs. "Look, I need this like I need a 10th arm," he sighs. And all this stuff (Land Warrior does), my cell phone basically does the same at home." But Miller is committed to soldiers being networked. So he's willing to be the digital guinea pig. "It's got to start with someone."

The system has become more palatable to the Manchus because it's been pared down, in all sorts of ways. By consolidating parts, a 16-pound ensemble is now down to a little more than 10. A new, digital gun scope has been largely abandoned by the troops -- the system was too cumbersome and too slow to be effective. And now, not every soldier in the 4/9 has to lug around Land Warrior. Only team leaders and above are so equipped.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised how accurately my concerns about the Land Warrior played out on the battlefield. The blue force tracking and land navigation functions are very popular, while the computing and scope pieces were largely relegated to the rubbish bin.

Complaints that the system would better if it were only a quarter of its current weight also indicate that either the underlying technology is not mature enough or that the designers crammed it with superfluous features. I'm going to bet that the latter is a far more likely culprit than the latter -- especially considering how many weapons systems in the pipe feel disconnected from current needs.

The most ironic bit of Capt. Miller's comment about how his cellphone back at home does many of the same functions as the Land Warrior. That sounds a lot like the result of this JASONS report issued two years ago, which theorized that adapting commercial communications platforms to military use might be a better method of improving situational awareness at the lowest levels.

This brings us to something I have been thing about since I read this Defense News piece on how the DoD is effectively hiring a lead system integrator to support their counternaroctics efforts. If there is little evidence that DoD bureaucrats can successfully plan and develop successful weapons platforms for the U.S. military, why shouldn't we be outsourcing large chunks of the acquisition process?

You can at least terminate contractors when it is clear they cannot deliver on the terms of their contract. The same cannot be said about the thousands of 'acquisition professionals' who are barely doing their job right now.

Air Force going out of business?

My one-sentence interpretation of Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne's speech last week:

My service made bad force planning decisions in the mid-to-late 1990s that have made it increasingly irrelevant. I blame everyone but the Air Force.

I love how Wynne focuses his lamentations on the Air Force's offensive air-to-air capabilities, but doesn't mention its other roles -- specifically strategic airlift and close air support.

In a way, the Air Force is paying for its role as the dominant military service in the 1950s and 1960s. It took a much larger portion of the budget back then, which allowed it to fund some of their most impressive and enduring aircraft: B-52, C-5, C-130, AC-130, A-10, and F-15. Fortunately, it looks like the Air Force invested in airframes that have withstood the test of time, both in terms of performance and utility.

It makes one wonder whether the F-22 or F-35 will still be relevant as long as the B-52 has.

They did it again

First of all, I can't believe I totally scooped the ExportLawBlog on this story. Clif Burns runs a tight ship over there, so I'm assuming this is the one and only time I will beat him to an export control story.

What is left for an administration that has secretly signed and negotiated a treaty with India that punches a huge hole in our nuclear export control regime and another that punches a hole in defense export procedures for Great Britain? Go for a hat trick by steathly negotiating and signing a similar arms trade treaty with Australia!

In a very low-profile meeting on September 5th, President Bush and long-serving Australian Prime Minister John Howard did just that. The State Department issued a fact sheet on the subject that is pretty light on the details, but I would bet that the Aussies are getting the same deal with gave the Brits a few months ago.

Both Bush and Howard mentioned the treaty at their 'joint press availability' that day. Howard's statement danced around the details and as usual, Bush's statement was so inarticulate that he didn't need to do the same.

Frankly, I am a little surprised by this latest defense trade treaty on two accounts. Some of the folks in the defense cooperation community of the Pentagon were at least aware of the British DTCT a few months before it was signed. The Australian treaty, on the other hand, came as a complete surprise.

Moreover, I am surprised that the Bush administration signed a second DTCT before securing the first one. They have no conception of how the Senate will react when the first DTCT comes up for Congressional review. It is also my understanding that the U.S.-UK implementing arrangements are still being hammered out between State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the British Ministry of Defence.

Bringing the Aussies to the table right now is probably going to spread our already over-tasked U.s. negotiators out even more -- and I would know, they are about 2 months behind on approving some agreements my office has negotiated.

I hear one OSD lawyer is so busy that he has to come in on Saturday and Sunday just to do his regular office work. If I was in his position, I would just walk away from that job. Life is way to short.

FCS Follies, Part 1

In a fit of boredom a few months ago, I wrote a briefing paper outlining what I saw as handful of critical issues related to network-centric warfare that need to reconciled before the Army starts fielding Future Combat Systems. I was planning to hold it until right before I left for the State Department, mostly to avoid becoming persona non grata at PM FCS.

One of my coworkers stumbled upon my two-pager back in May and unbeknownst to me, passed it up to the FCS folks with his name on it. After straightening out the plagiarism issue, FCS sent me a polite, but dismissive 'mind your own business' e-mail. Needless to say, I think I was taken off their Christmas card list.

During this whole affair, my boss was sent a copy of the paper and his reaction was much more positive. He suggested expanding the paper by including some solutions to these issues. I've decided to test each of these expanded ideas on my readers. Here is part 1:

"Lit up like Christmas Trees"

Soon after the summer 2006 skirmish between Israel and Hezbollah concluded, claims surfaced that Hezbollah managed to hack into the IDF's U.S.-made SINCGARS radios. It turned out that Hezbollah hadn't actually hacked the radios, but instead used a bank of modified radio scanners to track the electromagnetic emissions of IDF units.

This example points to a key vulnerability of the network-centric model, namely its vulnerability to electronic warfare support. In order to provide the kind of real-time data exchange and blue force tracking capabilities envisioned in FCS, the density of wireless communication will have to expand manifold.

Individual units and soldiers will not only be swapping a wider variety of tactical information, they will also be giving off a constant amount of positional data. They will be lit up like Christmas trees adorned in intense, but invisible lights. Each tank, truck and soldier will be a beacon of electromagnetic radiation that can be intercepted, triangulated and tracked.

Since it was playing defense on familiar territory, Hezbollah didn't need to crack the IDF's radios to carry out effective operations. They knew where their resources and units were located, so it was only a matter of triangulating IDF locations and feeding the information to nearby assets.

A future reduction in the cost and complexity of compact anti-radiation guidance packages for indirect-fire munitions would pose an even bigger threat to a network-centric force. If a simply seeker package just doubled the accuracy of the simple artillery rockets and mortars favored by insurgents, it could lead to serious casualties. Tactical network hubs will be easy targets at the very least.

There is no easy solution to this problem because it exploits the most indispensable part of network-centric warfare, the network itself. Lasers are the only wireless media that do not 'leak' a traceable amount of electromagnetic radiation, but it requires line of sight. DARPA has been contemplating a laser-based work-around for blue-force tracking called 'Dynamic Optical Tags' or DOTS for short.

In the DOTS system, each vehicle and soldier would be equipped with a tag that functions as a passive light modulator. When the tag's receiver is struck by an encoded laser signal, it modulates the beam to pack it with new information and reflects it back at the point of transmission. A powered version of this process could be used as a two-way interface between the tag and the light source.

This system would still be limited to line of sight and would have to mounted to an UAV (a blimp maybe?), but it would very difficult to intercept and track.

The problem with the phrase 'evil-doer'

I had conversation with a friend over lunch last week that got me thinking about how the word 'evil-doer,' specifically how use of the word has become more common in foreign policy discussions. This friend has been working for Program Executive Officer Soldier since he finished undergrad in 2005. He had limited exposure to politics or history as an accounting major, so he was picking my brain about the 'surge' and the War on Terror more broadly.

It is difficult to discuss U.S. foreign policy towards the Near East in the abstract, so before delving into my views, I asked him about how much he knew about the region. Not surprisingly, his response was 'very little,' so I refined my question to 'Do you know why a guy like OBL is a terrorist'? The response to that was 'He hates America and wants to take over the Near East. I don't know why he uses terrorism though. Evil is kind of hard to understand.'

At this point, I gave him a 20 minute primer on the origins of linkage between Islamic fundamentalism and grand terrorism -- starting from Sayyid Qutb's Milestones to today. He was particularly surprised to hear that even though Osama bin Laden and Saddam are not explicitly linked, al Qaeda's existence and mission are deeply intertwined with the 1991 Persian Gulf War and its aftermath.

[Explainer: Part of bin Laden's hatred towards the Saudi royal family comes from the fact that they chose American support over his offer to wage an Afghan-style guerrilla war in defense of Kuwait. Bin Laden's 1996 fatwah states that the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil as an affront to Islam. It also claims that the U.S. is culpable for the deaths of the millions of Iraqi children due to sanctions.]

We need to move away from terms like 'evil-doer' because they allow people to paper over the murky elements of politics and war. We're not facing-off against an opaque, cartoonish foe, such as Cobra Commander or Skeletor. Bin Laden and his ilk more like Tony Soprano or even Tony Montana. They ruthlessly pursue a set of fairly clear objectives in a manner that is bounded by their own twisted sense of right and wrong.

After mentioning this conversation to another friend, she suggested that I photoshop Cobra Commander into the photo of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein shaking hands in the 1980s.

Update: SG has just been brimming with great ideas. Here is a rough breakdown of what goes into G.I. Joe's definition of the "The Battle":

Memo to BG Mike Brogan

In response to Marine Brigadier-General Mike Brogan's comment that press coverage is inflaming insurgent interest and turning the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle into a 'symbolic target,' I have the following response:

BG Brown is forgetting one issue, namely that dead soldiers are the 'symbolic targets' that the insurgents are actually after. Getting the insurgents to concentrate their attention on the handful of MRAPs that will enter the arsenal over the next year will take some pressure off targeting the more plentiful up-armored HMMWV.

That will undoubtedly save lives and saving lives is the only reason why the public is allowing the Pentagon to grossly mismanage the MRAP program with few consequences. What he is really concerned about is looking bad when we drop $20 billion on a gas-guzzling monster of a wheeled transport that only offers a marginal advantage in protection.

In a sense, the MRAP is symbolic -- it is a symbol of the military's complete inability to recognize that peace-enforcement and peacekeeping have been very common military operations since the end of the Cold War. In order to make up for the two years we spent in Iraq without a cogent counterinsurgency manual or effective military strategy, they are dropping a huge wad of cash to field a weapons system at the 11th hour that isn't even really ready.

Don't get me wrong, I feel strongly that we should issue our troops with gear that will provide them with a generous amount of protection. My heart is always crushed when I see those poor wounded vets that come by the Pentagon every week.

I just think the Pentagon's acquisition strategy over the last six years has been to schizophrenically jump from one technology to the next in search of silver bullets. As a result, we let the insurgents set the technological tempo in Iraq, forcing the U.S. military to expend a premium of blood and treasure playing catch-up.

Why am I so incensed by this issue? Because I know that folks in the Army Secretariat periodically examined the issue of mine-protected vehicles going back to at least 2002. Instead of dusting off the concept in 2003 or 2004, the Pentagon blindly focused on IED jammers instead of simple armor issues.

But hey, I'm the crazy one, remember. Someone get me a straitjacket and a comfy padded room.

Seeing power and rubles

I want to apologize for not updating recently. My office's sister organizations in the Air Force, Navy and Office of Secretary of Defense agreed recently to engage some Lean Six Sigma gurus in pursuit of 'business process improvement.'

The whole thing feels like it is some sort of pyramid scheme. I just have this sneaking feeling that nothing will get done until four or five of my civilian coworkers get their 'green belt' or 'black belt' certification.

Anyways, I wanted to offer an alternative narrative for recent Russian military exercises and pronouncements. One might see the Kremlin's decision to dust-off its strategic toys and its participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as demonstrations of Russian power, but I tend to see ruble signs as well.

My thinking on this issue goes back all the way back to Peace Mission 2005, which was a series of joint Russo-Chinese military exercises ostensibly aimed at counterterrorism operations. The counterterrorism theme didn't stop Russia from rolling out its strategic bombers for the occasion.

This idea was reinforced the following year by reports of Putin crowing over record-breaking arms sales figures in 2005. My curiosity was peaked, so I tracked down the most recent copy of the Congressional Research Service's "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Countries" report. I prefer the CRS report to other surveys of arms sales when it comes to French, Russian and Chinese sales. This is because sales to the developing world generally constitute 80-90% of total sales for each country.

The information on Russian sales since 1998 is very revealing, particularly relating to combat aircraft. Russian R&D spending on aircraft technology bottomed out after the transition from communism in the early 1990s. As a result, Russia's last new aircraft (the Su-34) had its maiden flight in 1990 and took almost 15 years to go into production. Sukhoi is supposedly pushing a fifth-generation fighter (the PAK FA) into production by 2012, but even with Russia's influx of foreign currency, I wouldn't hold by breath for it.

In order to complete with increasingly advanced U.S. and European designs, the Russians have agreed to riskier payment structures and more deferential production terms. That will only so far though. Another way for Russia to keep sales up is to demonstrate that its aging equipment is still relevant on today's battlefield.

The People's Liberation Army Air Force generals didn't bite back then, so the Russians may be upping the ante. What is a better selling point than 'these bombers are serious enough to scare Europe's NATO members'?

The same could be said about Russia's decision to put the Admiral Kuznetsov back to sea. Showing the Chinese what their Varyag hull could do when completed might quiet some of their complaints about cost and schedule overruns.

If market penetration in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia has dipped in recent years, joint military exercises can be an effective way to showcase what they've been missing.

I'm not saying the prospect of sales is the only motivation for these decisions, nor am I discounting the argument that arms sales in and of themselves can be a power play. My point is that many of the recent Russian military activities I highlighted also have clear monetary motivations.

What an idiot

The following paragraph was plucked directly from Rudy Giuliani's essay in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs:

Another step in rebuilding a strong diplomacy will be to make changes in the State Department and the Foreign Service. The time has come to refine the diplomats' mission down to their core purpose: presenting U.S. policy to the rest of the world. Reforming the State Department is a matter not of changing its organizational chart -- although simplification is needed -- but of changing the way we practice diplomacy and the way we measure results. Our ambassadors must clearly understand and clearly advocate for U.S. policies and be judged on the results. Too many people denounce our country or our policies simply because they are confident that they will not hear any serious refutation from our representatives. The American ideals of freedom and democracy deserve stronger advocacy. And the era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end.

That statement makes the inconsistencies in Mitt Romney's piece from the last issue look relatively minor.

Does Giuliani know what the Foreign Service does on a day-to-day basis? Most spend their time issuing visas, helping U.S. citizens abroad, conducting intergovernmental business and most importantly, maintaining an understanding of the countries they are working in. We are in the second decade of the Information Age and the Hypertext Markup Language is more than 15 years old. The president can present U.S. policy to the world in a thirty minute press conference. He doesn't need drones to mindlessly repeat U.S. policy ad nauseam.

This brings us to the fact that Rudy Giuliani's approach to foreign policy demonstrates the savvy and depth of in a high school boy who goes to debate club meetings to cruising for girls with low self-esteem issues. Members of the international community don't disagree with us simply because we haven't explained our position well enough. They disagree because they don't like some (or all) aspects of U.S. policy.

Despite what a neoconservative will tell you, there is no such thing as objective moral high-ground in international relations. The U.S. can't just state its foreign policy to the international community and assume that anyone (short of the British and Australians) will blindly follow suit. Leadership is not just stating policy, but instead, its haggling and cajoling allies, friendly and even hostile countries needed to get everyone on board with a policy.

Giuliani's approach feels like it will be all talk, but no action. I mean, how exactly does he propose raising of the cost of anti-Americanism abroad? Imposing sanctions? Ending diplomatic relations? Punitive military action? Get real...

One last thing: Does anyone else remember the News Hour interview with Condi Rice from late 2002 where she almost says 'leadership breeds followership'? It was such a classic demonstration of the Ameri-centric worldview that is becoming popular among baby-boom generation politicians and foreign policy elites.

Dunlap is right, but does his point matter?

For my readers who don't feel like reading through the recent essays written by Air Force Major General Charles J. Dunlap, I can summarize his point in two sentences:

Advocates of traditional counterinsurgency doctrine argue that air power is not as effective as ground presence when fighting an insurgency. They are wrong because ground troops can cause just as much collateral damage to the local population.

He's right to a certain degree. Ground troops can easily harm just as many civilians as a pilot in an F-18. If you abstracted Dunlap's logic to its furthest extent, ground forces should actually be causing the preponderance of civilian casualties because there are more of them and operate closest to them. I'm even willing to accept that statement on its face value.

The only problem with Dunlap's argument is that it is missing one key element: The objective of counterinsurgency is to establish and maintain public order, not merely fight off insurgents. Just read this statement:

Consider, for instance, this astonishing statement from a ISAF spokesman: “I am assured by uniformed colleagues in NATO that there is a marginal difference to the potential for civilian casualties between using a 500lb bomb and a 2,000lb bomb."

If military people really believe that there is only a “marginal” difference between a 500 lbs. bomb and a 2,000 lbs. bomb, then the depth of misinformation is truly disturbing. Accordingly, my article will examine the technologies and processes that operate today to limit collateral damage from air-delivered munitions.

What does collateral damage matter when you accidentally bomb a wedding? Or someone's home? Does an Iraqi care whether the Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb in his neighborhood or is a quarter-ton okay?

Setting aside accidents and collateral damage, how would General Dunlap feel if bombs rained down on his hometown at random intervals? Does he think he could live a normal under such conditions?

The key to winning a counterinsurgency is understand both the military and the social dimensions of the conflict. An aircraft can attack insurgents, drop leaflets and provide humanitarian relief, but it can't establish trusting relationships with the locals, gather intelligence, or ensure basic order like ground troops can.

Unless the Air Force is willing to get out of its collective cockpit and spend some serious time working with the locals, it will never be flexible enough to play anything more than a supporting role in stability operations.

AEGIS to Taiwan, not a stretch

The top story at TaiwanSecurity.org a few days ago was about possible Taiwanese plans to buy AEGIS cruisers of the U.S.:

Taiwan wants to buy at least six Aegis-equipped destroyers from the United States at a cost of more than $4.6 billion, a newspaper said on Monday, a plan sure to anger China which claims the island as its own.

The United Daily News quoted unnamed sources as saying Deputy Defense Minister Ko Cheng-heng and Chief of the General Staff Chen Yung-kang would travel to the United States this month to try to secure the deal.

The defense ministry declined to comment.

The navy could eventually buy an additional two destroyers after the initial six depending on the circumstances, the newspaper said.

The Aegis air defense radar and weapons system is capable of tracking and attacking dozens of missiles, aircraft and ships all at once.

The United States, the island's main arms supplier, in 2001 put off a request from Taipei to buy four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis system, but kept the option open should China pose a sufficient threat.

Sudden announcements of Taiwanese intent to purchase major arms packages from the U.S. is certainly not unheard of. The Armchair Admiral over at Information Dissemination is correct to greet this news with a healthy dose of skepticism. He is also right to point out that the Navy doesn't exactly have surplus Arleigh-Burkes to sell the Taiwanese.

Normally, I would agree with the assessment that this AEGIS announcement is just another example of Taiwanese politicians playing politics with their defense budget. Not on this though. I think the Taiwanese want to get their hands on two of the four U.S. Block I AEGIS cruisers stationed in the Pacific. Armchair Admiral dismisses them because they have been reconfigured for ballistic missile defense, but I would argue that is the core reason for Taiwanese interest in the ships.

What is my basis for defying conventional wisdom? A conversation that emerged during a Presidential Management Fellows job interview I had at the Missile Defense Agency. Here is a rough dramatization of the conversation:

Robot Economist: So what would you think is the major drawback of working for the MDA? The political sensitivity of the work?

Female MDA Official With Too Much Eye Shadow: That is problematic to a certain extent, but right now, I would say being BRAC'd to Huntsville. We've been having trouble keeping young people who want to stay in the DC area.

RE: Are you going to staff any embassies or international field offices? Possibly some in Asia?

FMDAWTMES: Yes, we definitely will. The only one we have planned for the Pacific will be in Taipei.

RE: Wait, you mean Tokyo, right? The Japanese should get one since they are going to be such a big partner.

FMDAWTMES: No, I meant Taipei, in Taiwan.

After stifling a double-take, I let the issue drop -- but as you can imagine, those words have been stuck in the back of my mind for months. I can't find any specific evidence to support this odd conversation, but this March 2006 briefing by MDA chief Lt. General Trey Obering does indicate that Taiwan is on their radar (pardon the pun).

This is one thing that I am definitely going to keep my eye one.

Dump the 'Thayer System'? Yeah, like 100 years ago...

I normally don't read the Weekly Standard, but Op-For's John Noonan wrote an interesting piece about reforming the current professional military education (PME) system by dumping the 'Thayer System':

FOR NEARLY 200 years, cadets at the United States Military Academy have been guided by the "Thayer System," a rigid structure of unyielding regulation, austere discipline, fierce loyalty, and strong emphasis on math, science, and engineering. The method is calculated to produce Army officers of the highest caliber. And the system has worked. West Point graduates constitute some of the most celebrated, highly decorated officers in American history. No doubt if you traveled further back in time, West Pointers would rank amongst some of the finest combat leaders in the history of warfare.

Thayer's system has changed little since it was implemented shortly after the War of 1812. Like war itself, West Point traditions and culture slowly evolved over time to meet and conquer the new challenges that the profession of arms demanded. But today we stand at a point in history where technology, the decentralization of military force, and the abandonment of the established, traditional law of armed conflict is changing warfare in such a swift and profound way that the U.S. Armed Forces will either have to adapt or face a slow creep towards irrelevancy.

[snip]

The core of the Thayer system--discipline, honor, and ferocious loyalty to the Constitution--must never change. That's precisely why the system has stood as it is for so long; America will always need men and women who live by the stoic creed of duty, honor, country. However, one of the cornerstones of Slyvanus Thayer's system, his dated academic infrastructure, no longer meets the needs of the mission. The same can be said for nearly identical curriculums at Annapolis and Colorado Springs.

West Point and all of the service academies promote math and engineering above all other disciplines. Thayer wanted math savvy artillery officers. The Navy sought officers with a firm grasp of engineering to keep their ships running and navigate the seas under the harshest of combat conditions. And the Air Force desired officers capable of operating the service's cutting-edge technology. It's the perfect academic infrastructure for a young cadet, if we expect him to fight the Cold War.

I completely agree with Noonan and what's more, there is plenty of evidence to show that adherence to the engineer and math-heavy French tradition of PME has enabled a number of military disasters. First, a brief history lesson on PME:

Despite the sizable number of British-trained military officers in the Continental Army, the U.S.'s first military academy at West Point has been largely modelled on French PME traditions since the 16-year (1817-1833) superintendency of Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer was an engineer and mathematician by trade and his views of PME were heavily influenced by the two years he spent studying at the French military academy E'cole Polytechnique.

The French institution itself was founded by a pair of Revolutionary-era mathematicians. They established a curriculum that emphasized the sciences, civil engineering, and Vauban's classics on fortifications and siege warfare -- which ironically contrasts with the French army's exploitation of maneuver warfare under Napoleon.

Thayer's West Point curricula reflected much of what he had learned in France. His influence over the school was extended by Dennis Hart Mahan, a graduate during Thayer's reign who spent 40 years teaching from the French tradition at West Point.

Mahan emphasized the ideas of Antoine-Henri Jomini, a French-Swiss military theorist who attempted to capture Napoleon's genius by reducing it to elements of geometry. Having taught virtually every Union and Confederate commander of the Civil War, Jomini's emphasis on interior lines and strategic bases is fairly evident in many Civil War engagements. For those who have picked up Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appamattox, you can imagine that many of the trenches around Petersburg resembled the teachings of Vauban.

It would not be a stretch to argue that the French PME tradition and French conceptions of strategy and maneuver factored two of the bloodiest, least decisive land wars in history: the American Civil War and World War I. American commanders in the 1860s were so indoctrinated by Mahan's teachings that Abraham Lincoln to turn to a drunk and someone who had had a nervous breakdown in order to wage total war against the South.

The French commanders that presided over the meat grinders that were the Battle of the Somme, the Great Retreat and the first Battle of Ypres were also students of Ecole Polytechnique and disciples of Jomini.

The take-home message of all of this history is that the French PME tradition has a poor history of success and should have been abandoned a long time ago. Understanding the science and engineering of warfare is important, but as Sun Tzu aptly put it, so is understanding your potential adversary. It is high time West Point (and the other military academies for that matter) offer more robust curricula in the social sciences, history and (gasp!) the humanities.

Military doctrine under 'informatization'

Despite my earlier jab, Barry Rosenberg's cover article from this month's Armed Forces Journal is really fantastic. His thesis? The U.S. military must be prepared to make some enormous cultural changes if it really wants to embrace network-centric warfare:

Until recently, collection assets would feed information up the line to divisional commanders and they would pass it up or parcel it down on a need-to-know basis. However, today, many war fighters have access to the same data as their commanders and are being given the opportunity to not only critique that information but also to act upon it independently of commanders' orders.

As a result of everyone having access to the Global Information Grid (GIG), leaders are faced with the challenges of commanding young men and women who have been plugged in to communications and entertainment devices since they were kids, while at the same time respecting the traditional pyramid model of command. In many instances, the growing pains are obvious.

"There's no way to run a military without a hierarchical structure," said retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan. "When you hook everyone up to the Internet and give them processing capability, you are essentially flattening the chain of command. If everybody is making independent decisions, the likelihood they will be coordinated to a mission goes down."

Odom said that what we're experiencing today are "constipated information channels" and "diarrhea of the e-mail." Both have increased the capability and propensity of senior leaders to micromanage from afar. The question now is whether the military can develop senior commanders who will allow lower commanders to make decisions — and then stay out of their hair and live with the results.

In the broadest sense, LTG Odom is right -- the military requires a certain amount of hierarchy that is irreducible. If the general knew his history though, he would know that the idea of 'hierarchy' is sometimes flexible.

I imagine a guy like Field Marshal Donald Haig back in 1915 would have rejected the idea of using fire teams to infiltrate enemy trenches. He would have argued that giving foot soldiers enough autonomy to maneuver on their own would reduce the 'likelihood they will be coordinated to a mission' as well. Two years later, Germany's stormtroopers mostly proved him wrong.

[On an interesting historical note, stormtroopers weren't actually a German idea, but were instead based on the writings of a French Army captain named Andre Laffargue. He proposed this strategy of small units and infiltration to the French General Staff in 1915 and they dismissed it out of hand. In response, Laffargue self-published the operational concept as a pamphlet, which the Germans captured and translated in 1916.]

So how should the military resolve this issue of autonomy? Rosenberg gives commanders a simple four-point plan: 1) Clearly articulate the objective, 2) provide your troops with operational boundaries, 3) set their rules of engagement, and 4) take a very hands-off approach. Frankly, I couldn't agree more. U.S. troops are smarter and better trained today than at any point in the military's history. Sure, they will probably need more classes in anthropology and foreign languages, but changing that is easy enough.

Rosenberg also converges with Marine General Charles Krulak's idea about the strategic corporal. Krulak argues that future battlefields and future missions will be so complex and fluid that troops on the ground will rarely have time to reach up the chain of command for orders. In response, the military should be prepared to devolve leadership to the lowest level, the squad leader, who is typically only a corporal.

Krulak's position seems reasonable enough, but there is a tension between his "strategic corporal" thesis and what is referred to as the "7000-mile screwdriver" -- a term coined to describe Donald Rumsfeld's micromanagement of the Iraq War. Improvements in headquarters-level situational awareness have encouraged commanders to micromanage their troops at a time when they need a greater amount of autonomy.

If current problems any indicator, giving troops more autonomy will probably be far more difficult than suiting them up for network-centric warfare. On the one hand, you have politicians who would rather blow millions on a pie-in-the-sky global strike program than take risks or ask for sacrifice. On the other, you have an inbred generation of military leaders who prefer to go into battle unprepared over providing civilian leaders with objective (but sometimes unpalatable) advice.

Matching doctrine to technology is definitely possible, let's just say I'm not confident about the prospects.

Getting old before getting rich?

I apologize for pushing my promised C4ISR article off, but I received some questions from Chris M. about demographics, development and China:

I have a question that I would like to run by an actual East Asian specialist. Much is made about how China will be the new world power- the one to replace the US. I just don't see how it is possible. China is in a demographic coffin corner and in 50 years they are going to be totally screwed. Look at the age/sex curve projected by the Census bureau for 2050. Sure, in 2050 they will have 70+ million young males of military age, but they are going to have 450 million people 60+ (they are going to have a population 60+ larger than the entire US!). How can an economy grow, a country afford a military (especially the opportunity cost of those productive young males), and the country be expected to do anything with that much population that old? Short of inventing robots to take care of all those old folks, who will? Indonesians? Who will pay for all of this? Their ratio of workers to 60+ people will be less than 2:1. That will be a severe problem, right?

What happens when a country that is somewhat poor per capita, but has a pretty industrialized economy, goes gray really rapidly? The closest I can think of is Russia and some of the old Communist countries, who have aged tremendously in the past 15 years, but isn't a lot of that due to immigration and economic distress, not totally broken birth rates (leaving the huge sex-ratio disparity in the PRC completely out of the picture)? We also can see what happens when a rich country (per capita) grays- we have Japan and Western Europe to show us the way, but I can't think of a good model for this sort of thing. They would have to fix a lot of problems in their universal education system to be able to follow the path that Japan and Western Europe are blazing.

No one who predicts that China is the coming threat to the US, or that China will soon be the world's economic engine seems to ever mention this problem. Why is that? Am I missing something that people who have actually studied the issue understand? I'm somewhat afraid that this is a kooky position, as I haven't seen it discussed in the popular press.

In answer to your first question - yes, the Census Bureau's figures on Chinese population growth should be considered a fairly accurate prediction of the future. Their country summary shows that Chinese fertility rates are well under the replacement rate. The projections show that China's population growth rate will go negative around 2035, which means their total population will peak at about 1.46 billion. By all accounts, Russia's total population peaked around 1995, Italy and Japan's peaked around 2005. In fact, if you look at the Global Population at a Glance report the Census Bureau issued in 2002, the human population growth rate peaked somewhere around 2000 and the mean global fertility rate is expected to drop below the replacement rate around 2050.

Now we get to the question, "So what does this mean for China?" Before I answer that, I want to dispel the myth that population aging is always a bad thing. Declines in population growth over time will push a country's demographic composition away from a traditional pyramid shape to something more akin to a paper lantern.

Chris is right to point out that this means this will tip the population balance away from the young toward the old, but it doesn't say much about who will work. Japan and Europe have been pretty lucky because they were able to transition their economies from manufacturing towards services, which is far more friendly to older workers. Older workers are generally better at service jobs because their experience and knowledge generally adds the most value. Service jobs are also less physically intense, which allows older workers to stay on the job longer.

This does not come without cost though. Older workers require a higher degree of medical attention and at some point that cost will outweigh their contribution to the economy. This will be particularly problematic if the inflationary trend in the price of medical care in the United States -- 7.9% in 2004 according to the Economist (sorry, subscription only) -- spreads to other countries. All is not lost though because there are two effects that may mitigate the medical care crunch Chris sees over the horizon. First, older workers save more because they don't have to care children. Second, spending on health care generates fairly high margin service jobs.

The key question is, can China fill those jobs? Maybe. The Chinese economic miracle is largely predicated on a delicate balance of fertility, development and migration. The reasonably well-educated middle class that has grown in coastal provinces would not be able to meet demand without the constant flow of unskilled workers from China's interior.

If migration slows down before the Chinese economy moves further up the product life cycle, growth may come to a screeching halt. China could mitigate this by accepting greater flows of immigrants from the poorer states of Southeast Asia (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, etc.), but it is not clear whether they would make such a dramatic policy shift before the foreign direct investment starts flowing somewhere else.

This structural movement is certainly possible. The Japanese and Europeans pulled it off in the 1950s-1960s and the Asian tigers did the same in the 1970s-1980s. So the take-home message on this subject is that population decline could seriously derail its economy, but shouldn't if the Chinese manage it correctly.

As for what things will look like after 2050, I don't know. At that point, the predictions of statisticians and economists are about as certain as fiction novels on the subject. One thing is for sure, China will probably have to get a lot more comfortable with accepting immigrants from the last few high fertility spots in the world (Africa, South Asia and the Near East).

The real question is what will happen to Russia. It looks like the boom in commodity prices and Russia's shrinking population are turning it into a full-blown rentier state. There are definitely indications that the Dutch disease's 'spending effect' is hollowing out parts of the Russian economy.

So why Azerbaijian and does it matter?

I imagine that by now, most of my readers have had a chance to read Noah Shachtman's piece on FCS and Azerbaijan. For those who have not, I will summarize: As part of the Operational Requirements Document used to justify the efficacy of Future Combat Systems, the Army prepared a summary mission profile for a hypothetical set of missions. These hypothetical missions just happen to take place in the oil-rich former Soviet state and now Republic of Azerbaijan.

At this point, some of my readers are probably asking themselves: "Azerbaijan, is that like where Borat goes for summer vacation or something? Why did the Army pick that place?" To be certain, Azerbaijan wasn't selected for political reasons. Azerbaijan isn't exactly the most democratic ex-Soviet state, but the government of President Ilham Aliyev is pretty friendly with the United States. Plus, the U.S oil firm Unocal (now part of Chevron) also owns about a 9% stake in the $3.6 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

Azerbaijan may be a friend, but is one of the roughest and most volatile neighborhoods in the world. The Azeris and the Armenians fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgians and the Russians fight over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Armenians and the Turks fight over whether the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against ethnic Armenians in 1915-1917 (I am definitely not going to wade into that one). To top that off, all of this strife crammed into a small mountainous region sandwiched between Iran and Chechnya. Sometimes I'm surprised that countries stopped bickering long enough to allow the 1776 kilometer Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline get off the drawing board.

Small, U.S.-friendly, oil-producing state locked in a far-off, volatile region of the world. Doesn't that sound like another country in the Near East, one that we've successfully liberated before? Kuwait perhaps?

In my view, Azerbaijan was picked because its size, terrain, and political environment fit the assumptions that shape FCS. They picked a relatively small country to accentuate the ability of a single FCS Brigade Combat Team to rapidly achieve "decisive maneuver" against a larger opposing force in 48-60 hours. Azerbaijan is also a relatively remote, mountainous area bordered by few U.S. allies. This reflects the Army's emphasis on performing combat operations on short notice and without pre-positioned equipment. Finally, there is the potential (however remote) that the Army may be called upon to one day liberate the Azeris from an encroaching neighbor. Remind anyone of an incredibly successful "left-hook" the Army pulled off a little more than 15 years ago?

My main concern with the Azerbaijan scenarios is that they highlight a fundamental flaw of FCS. This billion-dollar force recapitalization project is focused on refining existing capabilities at a time when the Army needs to develop entirely new capabilities. To me, being able to successfully conduct stability operations campaign the day after a 72 hour blitzkrieg is worth far more than shaving that blitzkrieg down to 48 hours. Does the Army honestly expect a brigade of 4000 troops trained and equipped for maneuver warfare against a modern opposing army to manage 8 million people spread over a country the size of Maine? We have multiple brigades in Baghdad (a city of 7 million) and they can't even keep the peace without support from the Iraqi military.

At the very least, one would hope that as soon as images of the National Carpet Museum in Baku being looted by anonymous brigands are splashed across CNN the hypothetical Secretary of Defense overseeing one of these imagined combat operations would have something more conciliatory to say than 'Stuff happens.'

I'm not saying the Army doesn't need to recapitalize the force and I'm not exactly opposed to the idea of network-centric warfare either. I'm just arguing that the Army's vision of the future force is shackled by a set of overly narrow assumptions about what kind of wars it will fight. As Colin Gray asked in a great monograph published by the Army War College back in 2005, if the Army is putting all of its development dollars into FCS, is FCS robust enough to counter the broadest set of future war scenarios? In terms of fighting a major urban counterinsurgency campaign (Iraq) or managing a fractured, poor state (Afghanistan), I think the evidence is pointing towards 'no.'

A memo to Vlad and George

To:
George W. Bush, President of the United States of America
Vladamir Putin, President of the Russian Federation

From: The Robot Economist

Subject: Missile defense and arms control -- a grand bargain

It is clear that the United States and the Russian Federation are at an impasse over two issues related to the proliferation of missile technology and nuclear weapons. The first conflict is over the United States' plan to implement a missile defense system, some of which will be based in Europe. The second conflict is over the future of the U.S.-Russian arms control regime that evolved during the Cold War.

This impasse can be easily broken with a grand bargain designed to satisfy each nation's concerns and put U.S.-Russian cooperation on a strong, institutionalized footing. As part of the the bargain, the United States would agree to build both its planned interceptors and radar station within Russian territory. The Russian Federation will participate in managing the system's day-to-day operations, but will also allow the U.S. to protect sensitive technology in a U.S.-only facility on Russian soil. The Russians will also be given access to missile defense technology as part of a U.S.-Russian missile defense development program, but it will only be allowed to sell the resulting technology as part of U.S.-Russian joint ventures. The United States will reserve the right to expand its missile defense system outside of Europe.

The United States will agree to at least a 15-year extension of both the Strategic Ordnance Reduction Treaty (SORT) and the inspection provisions of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). In exchange, the Russian Federation will drop its threats to abandon the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and defer discussions of additional arms control agreements for at least 10 years.

This bargain delivers what each country desires most. The United States is allowed to have a missile defense system that can shoot down missiles coming from the Near East without threaten Russia. Russia gets to keep the Cold War-era arms control regime around for another generation.

It is by no means a solution to U.S.-Russian strategic relations. Instead, it is designed to tackle the one obstacle that prevents such cooperation, a lack of trust on strategic issues stemming from the Cold War. This lack of trust is an antiquated notion because the quest for national power is no longer a zero-sum game. It is both nations to realize that fact and build a relationship that will ensure both American and Russian strategic power for another generation.

Another paradox of American power

Stephen Biddle summarizes in one paragraph the point I've been trying to make on the Iraq War since late 2003:

If the surge is unacceptable, the better option is to cut our losses and withdraw altogether. In fact, the substantive case for either extreme -- surge or outright withdrawal -- is stronger than for any policy between. The surge is a long-shot gamble. But middle-ground options leave us with the worst of both worlds: continuing casualties but even less chance of stability in exchange. Moderation and centrism are normally the right instincts in American politics, and many lawmakers in both parties desperately want to find a workable middle ground on Iraq. But while the politics are right, the military logic is not.

The United States should either pony up significant amount of blood and treasure that it will take to fix the Bush administration's broken endeavor in Iraq or it should go home. Half measures, including phased withdrawals or "strategic redeployments," will only waste resources and perpetuate an issue that has led to sharp divisions on foreign policy. End of story.

The situation in Iraq highlights another Joseph Nye's paradoxical element of American power, something I like to call the impatient enormity factor. Americans are willing to make enormous sacrifices and take on a significant amount of risk on foreign policies. In return for their sacrifice, however, they expect rapid results to match the scope of that sacrifice. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was George C. Marshall who said that the U.S. public wouldn't abide more than five years of fighting against Germany and Japan. This contrasts significantly with the degree that we celebrate U.S. involvement in World War II as popular and even noble ('greatest generation' anyone?).

Contrast this with the United States' response to the Cold War. Rather than contest Soviet power directly, we picked the relatively low-cost, low-risk route of basing U.S. troops in friendly nations, funding proxy wars and backing tinpot dictators. Sure, we funded an expensive reconstruction programs in post-WWII Europe, but it only lasted four years. The only deviation from this pattern was in Vietnam, but like Iraq, we went in thinking the endeavor was going to be relatively easy and come at a low cost.

We get ensnared in the impatient enormity problem when promise of an easy, low-cost effort does not pan out. The administration of the sitting president takes it as an affront to his re-election prospects and/or legacy. I think we can guess how these scenarios end -- the word 'badly' comes to mind. But that is not the only problem with impatient enormity.

The flip-side of the costly overcommitment is the marginal mission creep. This is a scenario where a low-cost policy (frequently sanctions) is applied to a briefly fashionable cause (Burma, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, Venezuela, etc.). Once the policy is put in place and the now-sated populace and the media loose interest, control over it is ceded to one of three groups: (1) members of Congress on the far left or far right (the activists), (2) members of Congress with a vested in the policy outcome (the lobbied), or (3) fanatical mid-level political appointees (assistant secretary and below).

These groups tend to come into office bent on expanding the current set of policies, but not always. I may complain about the Bush administration's efforts to slowly dismantle the arms control institutions of the Cold War more often, but it is no worse than our mindless sanctions against Cuba and Burma.

But hey, I hear that superpowers don't do windows, so I'm probably just illustrating a useless point.

Arkin on defense posture: "Toys speak louder than words"

My readers will rejoice at this temporary reprieve from the impending post on export controls. I just have to respond to Bill Arkin's latest blog post celebrating the symbolic meaning of Ohio-class Trident submarines:

This officer's unhappiness, I submit, is not with the submarine but with our overall predicament: the way the war in Iraq has inflamed so much hate and put so many Americans in harm's way with no decent strategy for victory. In reality, we are involved in an ancient man-to-man battle with a well-motivated enemy. This is a battle we cannot win, at least the way we are fighting it, because our technologically oriented, electronically agile, modern nation is not willing to commit the same manpower -- that is, to sink to the level of barbaric attrition.

Still, this officer's Trident is doing more to counter terrorism than the boots on the ground are. Not because it can lob nukes at anyone, and certainly not because it can counter terrorists under some Strangelovian WMD scenario. Its power is more symbolic: It represents the true superpower. It is a quiet and unobtrusive behemoth that no one else can hope to own and everyone is a bit in awe of -- even if they won't admit it.

Think of the sub as a kind of "mansion on the hill." We drive by it and wonder what it would be like to live there, to have that amount of money. If its owners are good neighbors and not too ostentatious, if they contribute to the community and don't swagger around town arrogantly, we don't get too jealous. If someone breaks into their house, we don't say they deserve it (nor do we call out the Army to rid the county of all house thiefs). We may even shake our heads when the mansion's owners decide not to press charges, and feel a little sad when we see contractors installing a new security system.

My correspondent's submarine is that mansion. The struggle for hearts and minds that we all pay lip service to is not some distant and high-tech information war. It begins at home.

Before 9/11, I would have never thought the military needed more Trident submarines. Now, however, I see their value: Quietly patrolling, threatening no one directly, occupying no one's soil, they help to keep order. And they send a powerful message that says we all have no choice but to play by certain rules and respect each other.

Arkin is on to something, but I think his concluding argument is slightly off the mark. The Ohio-class does have an awesome symbolic power about it, but it is not the benevolent masion on a hill to our allies.

To Arkin, the United States is a hegemony that commands the attention and friendship of its neighbors simply because it is powerful and benevolent. This makes it easy for countries to bandwagon with U.S. policy because the U.S. is both strong and non-threatening. The problem is that this is a false image. Even before the birth of American internationalism after World War II, the intentions of U.S. foreign policy have rarely been benevolent.

So why do we have so many allies? In most cases, our long-standing alliances are the result of a substantial sacrifice on the part of the U.S. Those Tridents that Arkin has fondly meditated on are part of that sacrifice. They represent how much the United States was willing to expend to ensure the security of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. They not only represent the cost of the U.S. was willing to pay in their defense (nuclear holocaust), it also represents the billions we sacrificed to 'deter' Soviet aggression with a superior fighting force.

The problem is that those days are long gone and despite its quiet majesty, the Ohio-class is still a waste of money. In the age of the Internet, the easiest and cheapest way to generate the same sense of sacrifice is to invest in peacekeeping forces. The culturally-adroit, lightly-equipped peacekeeping force that we need to win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan is exactly the same kind of force that would generate good will in the post-Cold War/post 9-11 world.

The aggregate level of threat to the U.S. and its allies are quantitatively lower today than during the Cold War. Ponying up the cash needed to build fancy weapons platforms and operate them far from home is no longer enough to impress allies and friendly nations. The sacrifice needs to be bigger. We now need to show we're laying American lives on the line for international security.

Bottom falling out of the freedom agenda?

First off, I apologize for the lack of a substantive post in about a week. The Army saw fit to leave me in charge of a skeleton crew at the Pentagon while everyone and their mom from the Army security cooperation program went to the Paris Air Show. I know, you're probably asking yourself "What are a bunch of groundpounders doing at some flyboy convention?" Well the Army does have its fleet of combat helicopters and cargo planes to think about.

Anyways, I examine how recent events in the Palestinian territories and the United States' policy responses have hammered the final nails in the coffin for the Bush administration's "freedom agenda":

It has been almost two weeks since Fatah's security forces lost Gaza to Hamas gunmen. Not long after the Presidential compound was seized by Hamas, President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert moved firmly behind Palestinian Authority (PA) President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas. They also agreed, along with the EU and UN, to release millions in Palestinian tax revenue and international aid that had been embargoed since Hamas joined the PA government after winning a majority on the Palestinian Legislative Council back in January 2006.

The Arab states neighboring also met with Abbas and Olmert for about 45 minutes today in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to throw their weight behind the Fatah government in the West Bank. All of these theatrics have apparently encouraged Hamas to return to dialogue with Fatah, but it is way to early in the game to know whether this opening will be big enough to drive the 18-wheel power-sharing agreement needed to stem future violence through it.

The problem is that, as Robert Malley and Aaron D. Miller so aptly point out, Hamas's electoral victory can't be undone through the intervention of foreign powers into Palestinian politics. The Quartet has a legitimate reason for denying foreign aid and maybe even Palestinian tax revenue to a government led by an unrepentant Hamas. Palestinian finances and bureaucracy are often so opaque it would be very difficult to guarantee the cash wouldn't be used to fund suicide bombings or Qassam rocket attacks.

Trying to use such funding to create a reinvigorated Fatah party to muscle Hamas out of the political scene, on the other hand, is an incredibly short-sighted policy. It says to the average Palestinian that the U.S. is only interested in electoral democracy, as long as it produces governments with policies that are compatible to U.S. interests. As the disintegration of Fatah-Hamas relations in Gaza demonstrated, attempting to create a winner in Palestine will only serve to undermine what is left of the U.S.'s image as a well-intentioned mediator. It will also push the Palestinian people straight into the open arms of the extremists that we are seeking to undermine, while at the same time, allowing Fatah to become more corrupt and factionalized.

Think I'm crazy? Just look at how unflinching U.S. support for Jiang Jieshi's leadership of the Kuomintang turned out for Chinese democrats. If the Bush administration honestly thinks it can turn Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah into a winner in the West Bank, they need to think again. It is time to get Fatah and Hamas at the table and bang some heads together.

The best documentary I've seen in years

If you have a free hour this evening, watch Frontline's documentary "Endgame" (its available for free on the website). It is quite possibly the most detailed and even-handed account of what went wrong in post-invasion Iraq I have ever seen. It really plumbs the depths of how the Bush administration's desire to play politics with the war and prioritize photo-ops over strategy sessions has created the quagmire we are in today.

On the flip-side, the documentary also makes an excellent case for supporting the "surge/escalation/bananaphone" being carried out by counterinsurgency and peacekeeping nerd Gen. David Petraeus. To be honest, I'm inclined to support the new counterinsurgency strategy if it means we might be setting the Iraqis on a future path that is not marred by violence. Its sad that the Bush administration has politicized the conduct of this way so much that writing what I writing the previous sentence leaves me with mixed feelings and a bad taste in my mouth.