The Atlantic asks a number of pundits if the U.S. will win in Afghanistan.  More specifically:

"The Obama administration's stated objectives in Afghanistan are to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven, prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the government, and build up Afghan security forces in order to transition U.S. combat forces out of the country by 2014. Based on the current strategy, do you think that the Obama administration will achieve its goals?" 

Admittedly, I'm cherry-picking some of the statements, but you can read their full context at the original article.:

Andrew Exum

I believe Afghanistan may be a case in which the president's policy will succeed but not the strategic goals associated with that policy. 

Jamie M. Fly

If the war is lost, it will be lost in Washington, not on the battlefield. Our men and women in uniform can succeed, but only if they are given the resources and time to do so.

Gian Gentile

That botched strategy has sought to achieve very limited policy aims--the reduction of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan--with a maximalist operational method of armed nation building. It represents the death of good American strategy and a waste of good American blood and treasure.

Candace Rondeaux

The Taliban are unlikely to overthrow the Afghan government wholesale but they don't have to for the White House strategy to fail--it already has.

Peter J. Munson and Nathan K. Finney argue at Adam Elkus's Rethinking Security blog that there is nothing revolutionary about the anti-access/area denial problem.

Militaries have always had the requirement to be able to project power into areas where access and the freedom to conduct operations were challenged.  The capabilities this concept discusses are nothing new.  The unmatched capabilities of the U.S. military in recent years, however, have created a conceptual environment where the traditional concerns of operational art and strategy – that being how to balance significant risks to the force against the requirement to attain ends determined by political masters – have receded from the institutional memory and even imagination.  These concerns have been replaced by those of postmodern warfare:  first seeking to mitigate every last friendly casualty, second improving the precision and narrowing the effects of our fires in order to avoid civilian casualties – but not at the cost of the first imperative (e.g., a drone delivered low-yield precision-guided weapon over a well-aimed bullet), and third seeking transformational socio-political change rather than domination within the limits of the first two constraints. While these points may be seen as a bit of a caricature or at least an anomaly guided by the experiences of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, it is of critical importance that we delineate whether we expect to operate in an A2/AD environment under similar constraints, presumably driven by limited levels of national commitment, or if we expect that we will forgo limited interventions when faced with such a threat and only contemplate a much higher level of warfare and national investment.

 Here, it is important to remember the A2/AD environments of the past.  We can fast forward past the innovations that brought the Persians to Europe and the Greeks to Asia, that propelled various European powers across the seas and the steppes, and the asymmetric development of firearms and armor to get to some more familiar examples.  Can we truly say that any A2/AD threat faced today or in the mid-term is truly more robust than the aviation, surface, and subsurface patrols that sought to deny American access to the European or Pacific theaters?  Can we say that today’s cyber challenges present a more daunting task than crossing the open ocean the air or on the sea with only a wet compass and perhaps celestial navigation? Was the island-hopping campaign of the Pacific or the assault on Normandy any less daunting of an A2/AD challenge both from the loss of aircraft carriers and troop ships in the blue water to the incomprehensibly deadly fire at the water line?  Are distributed operations with the aid of advanced communications and navigation more challenging than the maneuver of massive sea-landed, aviation, and airborne forces based almost solely on a single plan?  Finally, are current and prospective threat weapons any more asymmetric or smart than the Kamikaze planes that targeted ships in the Pacific or the fanatical Nazi storm troopers that defended the beachheads of Europe? 

There is more at Elkus's blog.

Dave Maxwell testified last week before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.  The topic was "Understanding Future Irregular Warfare Challenges."  The prepared testimony transcript can be found here and a video of the testimony here.

In reaction to public criticism that the military was unprepared for what followed after the defeat of the Iraqi military and destruction of its government, the military embarked on a rapid doctrinal development effort that resulted in the famed FM 3-24 as well as new concepts and forces laid out in the 2006 and 2010 Quadrennial Defense Reviews. By 2008 the Secretary of Defense issued an instruction (DODI 3000.07) that brought together Unconventional Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Foreign Internal Defense, Counterterrorism, and Stability Operations under the umbrella of Irregular Warfare.

But with this came the proliferation of new terms and concepts that were (and remain) redundant and of little additional value. Examples of such terms include Security Force Assistance (SFA), Building Partner Capacity (BPC), Train, Advise, and Assist (TAA), Organize, Train, Equip, Rebuild/build and Advise (OTERA), Stability Security, Transition, Reconstruction Operations (SSTRO), Provincial (originally provisional) Reconstruction Teams (PRT), and Military Transition Teams (MiTT), again, just to name a few. In addition, re-establishing Irregular Warfare as one end of the spectrum of conflict has also led to the rise of new terms to describe conflicts other than state on state high intensity maneuver warfare. Although a number of these terms were being put forth prior to 9-11 examples of the names for war and conflict included not only Insurgency but also Asymmetric Warfare, 4th Generation Warfare (and 5th as well), Hybrid Warfare, Network Centric Warfare, and a host of other rather esoteric terms such as “post-heroic warfare,” “matrix warfare,” and “holistic warfare.” And we should not forget the Chinese “Unrestricted Warfare.”

If Clausewitz were alive today he would repeat what he wrote in the 19th Century:

“Again, unfortunately, we are dealing with jargon, which, as usual bears little resemblance to well defined, specific concepts.”

But Clausewitz also wisely remarked that before you embark on war you have to determine the type of war to be fought. Unfortunately this wise counsel has been focused on naming rather than understanding the war.

Small Wars Journal continues to get a great assortment of submissions from a varied crowd of academics and practitioners of small wars.  In the interest of continuing to improve the product we deliver to our readers, I would like to provide our readers and prospective authors with a few observations and a call for papers on an expanded set of topics.

First, we continue to get extremely long, unedited research papers from undergraduate, graduate, and professional military education students.  It is important to note that writing for a grade is often quite different from writing for a professional audience.  For class assignments, you are often working to get to a specified word count and demonstrate to your professor what you learned about a topic.  For publication, you should be working to condense your thoughts to a lower word count.  There are a few different goals you should consider when writing an article.  1) Summarizing a wide body of existing literature to give a non-specialist a background in a specific topic.  2) Researching a specific topic to fill a gap in the existing literature (this means you have reviewed the literature and determined that the gap exists).  3) Providing commentary and policy prescription on a current issue, which requires giving just enough background to support your analysis and recommendations.  In each of these genres, you should strive to keep your word count as low as is consistent with your goal, shedding extraneous verbiage and interesting but tangential issues to keep your reader engaged in your topic.  If you wrote a research paper for a class, please at least go through it again to edit it down.  Better yet, write a summary of your own paper, which will both greatly benefit you while also keeping your readers engaged.

Second, as an online journal, we are trying to move away from footnotes and to hyperlinks embedded in the text.  For any news articles or any other online resource, simply embed a hyperlink somewhere in the referenced material, whether that is a quote or perhaps a pointer statement like “according to the Small Wars Journal…”  For academic journal articles, hyperlink to an abstract of the article at the press that puts it out, JSTOR, or any other online database.  Include page numbers parenthetically.  For books, link to a page for the book at the press website, Amazon, Google Books, or any other resource.  Again, you use parentheses to indicate a page number.

Third, please edit your work, edit your email, and include a brief query statement telling me what your work is about in the email.  The quickest way to have your work pushed to the bottom of the queue is to provide me a 20+ page document filled with misspellings or formatting anomalies in the first paragraph.

Finally, most of us are exhausted and exasperated with the same material on Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam.  For that reason, I am including a list of topics that I think would broaden our horizons and help get you past the fatigue on the part of readers in threshing out the same topics over and over.

• I invite our academic and subject matter expert audience to submit a brief summary of the state of the literature in their field, that is what is important for a generalist to know about their field and what are the latest developments in that field.  This should be a brief (2500 words or less) summary along with a brief reading list of the most important few papers or books to read in the field.
• We are seeking papers on security and economic developments in Latin America to build our El Centro site.
• More generally, we would like to see more brief essays on socio-economic developments and trends that will underpin change in emerging markets in South and Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.  These need not be explicitly focused on war or insurgency, but rather should seek to set a baseline understanding of salient issues in these areas.
• Socio-economic developments in Europe and the U.S. will greatly affect the power balance of the world and the capability of leading states to conduct military operations and diplomacy in the near and mid-term.  This is important for professionals in our field to understand and we would like to see papers that tackle these issues.
• As the U.S. begins its “strategic pivot” to Asia, many of us who have been steeped in issues of the Middle East and Afghanistan have a lot of catching up to do.  We welcome backgrounders on political, cultural, and socio-economic issues with regard to China and Southeast Asian states.
• In keeping with this thread, we welcome papers on security issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific islands.  In keeping with our charter as a Small Wars Journal, please avoid the major order of battle and theater war issues, focusing instead on economic, diplomatic, security cooperation, and ongoing insurgencies or unrest in this area.
• We welcome papers on security and socio-economic issues in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Turkey.
• Issues of Mediterranean trade and cooperation feed into security issues in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and southern Europe.  These would be of interest.
• Drug and criminal trade flows in the Americas are relatively well known, but updates are welcome for our El Centro section.  We would like to see more on other flows, including South America to Africa, Africa to Europe, and Asia to Europe.
• We welcome more historical studies of insurgencies and small wars other than Vietnam.  We welcome well written contributions on Vietnam, but please ensure that you have reviewed the literature and are presenting something new.
• Security cooperation and security force assistance is the new vogue in the Department of Defense.  These missions face significant statutory challenges, as well as the requirement to meet extremely high expectations for building partner capacity in the face of significant limitations on the part of our partner forces.  Papers dealing with these topics are encouraged.
• The U.S. military has and will continue to publish a profusion of studies, concepts, and reports meant to guide our transition to a post-OEF/OIF world and to deal with the coming fiscal constraints.  We welcome papers that deal with these fiscal constraints, the validity of concepts and the strategic assumptions that underpin them, and the training and equipping that will be required to deal with these challenges.

From the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

The military was once a central pillar of authoritarian dictatorships
in Latin America. Now, democratic governments are relying on them to
restore law and order, bypassing failing police forces. This is a
high-risk strategy, policymakers need to ensure that civilian control
of militaries remain paramount.

Read more at: http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C4F7477C049F92/

My Foreign Policy column discusses how Australia will help the U.S. Navy with its challenges in the South China Sea. But the Navy has deeper problems to fix.

A March 26, Washington Post article discussed a new expansion of the military relationship between the United States and Australia. According to the piece, the U.S. Navy is seeking to expand its ability to operate in the Indian Ocean from Western Australia, which would require a major expansion to a naval base in Perth. The Pentagon also hopes to establish a long-range air reconnaissance base on the Cocos Islands, a remote Australian atoll midway between Perth and Sri Lanka.

This expansion of U.S. military capability into the northeast Indian Ocean quickly follows last year's agreement to permanently station a small force of U.S. Marines near Darwin on the north coast and to expand U.S. access to Australian bases and training ranges.

At the time, I noted that U.S. military power in the western Pacific is concentrated in Japan and South Korea (a legacy of the Cold War) while the emerging area of great power contention -- the South China Sea -- lies 2,000 miles to the south. The U.S. agreements with Australia, combined with a major expansion of military facilities on Guam, are an attempt to bolster the Pentagon's capacity to sustain a larger ongoing presence in the South China Sea and Southeast Asia.

The U.S. interest in the South China Sea is in maintaining free navigation through what is arguably the most important commercial shipping passage in the world. The agreements with Australia and the buildup on Guam are helpful in this regard but insufficient. Ultimately, the Navy will need to provide a sufficiently reassuring presence to the countries bordering the South China Sea in order to prevent various disputes over the sea from threatening routine commerce through it. It remains to be seen whether the Navy will have the capacity and realistic plans to accomplish this mission over the long run.

This week, the Navy sent Congress an update of its 30-year shipbuilding plan, which would continue the trend of an ever-shrinking maritime force. The new plan foresees an average of 298 ships operating over the next 30 years, down from last year's forecast of a 306-ship average. And the plan foresees the Navy buying fewer new ships per year, reinforcing another unfavorable trend. The Congressional Budget Office's evaluation of Navy shipbuilding found those plans underfunded and over-optimistic. A few years ago, the Navy had plans for a 313-ship fleet. The bipartisan Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel called for a fleet of 346 ships. There are no plans to reach either of these targets.

Under Secretary of the Navy Robert Work, in a January 2012 speech to the Surface Navy Association, dismissed concerns about the Navy's shrinking ship count. Work asserted that the Navy's robust plans for long-range air reconnaissance, conducted by new aircraft such as the P-8A Poseidon and a Navy version of the Global Hawk drone, will do much of the routine maritime patrolling previously done by ships. Bases in Australia, the Cocos Islands, and elsewhere in the southwest Pacific would support surveillance of the South China Sea. If ships were required to respond to problems, admirals could send them in as always. But under Work's assumption, fewer ships will be needed for routine patrolling. And with less routine steaming, the Navy will save money and keep its ships better maintained.

The question is whether more aerial maritime reconnaissance and fewer ships making fewer port visits around the South China Sea and elsewhere will provide the reassuring and stabilizing presence that the visible presence of Navy ships has heretofore provided. Work's air reconnaissance doctrine and the Navy's slumping fleet size combine to form a new theory for providing a stabilizing presence in global commons such as the South China Sea. We will know that this theory is not working if the leaders of U.S. allies increase their diplomatic hedging behavior. Regional arms races, another response to a perceived decline in U.S. military power, would be another indication of failure. China's ongoing annual double-digit increases in defense spending and a looming submarine arms race in the region are not good signs.

The Navy's task of providing a stabilizing presence in the South China Sea and elsewhere is further complicated the growing anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile threats. These threats are forcing the Navy and the Air Force to develop new ways of operating against adversaries from longer ranges, where ships and aircraft will be less vulnerable to adversary missiles. The missile threat is also encouraging the Navy and Air Force to rely more on out-of-sight platforms, such as submarines, and long-range stealthy aircraft, which purposely stay as hidden as possible. All of these trends work against the concept of a visible forward presence, which the Navy has used to deter threats to the global commons but which may increasingly become untenable due to adversary missiles.

Ships assigned to "presence duty," for example patrolling the South China Sea and making port visits in the region, will be most at risk from missile attack at the start of a conflict. This fact will increasingly encourage the Navy to hold the most capable and prestigious surface ships, such as its aircraft carriers, out of sight of allies located within adversary missile range. As the missile threat matures, the Navy's new and modestly capable Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), a few of which will be stationed in Singapore, may perform the forward presence mission, showing the flag during peacetime and serving as expendable "trip wires" if shooting breaks out. Meanwhile, the main fleet and other long-range striking power will wait over the horizon and out of sight.

In this case, policymakers in Washington will be counting on the small, fragile, and lightly armed LCSs to inspire awe in U.S. military power. With the new expansion in its relationship with Australia, the Pentagon is groping toward a way to bolster its presence in the South China Sea. As it does so, it will have to figure out how to continue to provide a reassuring naval presence -- something the Navy has done for decades -- while the missile threat to that presence grows. Compounding the problem is a Navy shipbuilding budget under pressure and inadequate for even the now-reduced plans. The Navy's leaders are attempting to devise new tactics and new structures to adapt to a deteriorating situation. But will those measures be sufficient to reassure allies and deter potential adversaries?

RAND recently published the findings from a conference it hosted on long-term and strategic analysis (“Making Strategic Analysis Matter”).

Much of the report focused on the cultural differences between intelligence analysts and the policymakers who are the consumers of the analysts’ work product. The cultural gap is especially wide between the producers of long-term and strategic intelligence and policymakers, who, with their inevitable focus on day-to-day problems, often find long-term and strategic analysis an entertaining luxury that they simply can’t fit into their hectic schedules. Many of the participants at the conference seemed focused on a marketing problem – how to convince policymakers to pay attention to their long-term and strategic research.

A table from page 19 of the report (which I adapt) tries to summarize the cultural differences between analysts and policymakers:

Has the recent appointment of two policymakers/operators (Leon Panetta and David Petraeus) to CIA had any effect on the transmission or reception of long-term and strategic intelligence from analysts to policymakers? A hypothesis would be that experienced operators like Panetta and Petraeus, once at CIA, would have a better grasp of what strategic intelligence was most useful to top policymakers and would have better credibility convincing their bosses to pay attention to that intelligence. If this hypothesis is true, it might say something about how to get top policymakers to pay more attention to long-term and strategic intelligence.

Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired Army brigadier general and a psychiatrist and founder of the Center for Translational Medicine asks and opines on “Who is fit to fight?” in a Washington Post opinion piece.

Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, and after nearly nine years of war in Iraq, we know that the defining injuries of these conflicts for our service members include traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. We also understand that the all-volunteer force is stretched thin and that multiple deployments to combat zones are routine.

What military physicians don’t have a good sense of, however, is how to tell whether a combat veteran is still qualified for the battlefield…

The NY Times has posted a 5:35 video on Afghanistan through the eyes of LTC John Darin Loftis, a public information officer, Pashto speaker, and victim of the ministry shootings on 25 February 2012.  The video can be found at this link.  Highly recommended.

From Defense.gov:

The 2009 War Supplemental Appropriations Act established Retroactive Stop Loss Special Pay (RSLSP), providing $500 for each month/partial month served in stop loss status. Service members, veterans, and beneficiaries of servicemembers whose service was involuntarily extended under Stop Loss between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 30, 2009 are eligible for RSLSP.

To receive this benefit, those who served under stop loss must submit a claim for the special pay. Throughout the year, the services have been reaching out to servicemembers, veterans and their families through direct mail, veteran service organizations, and the media. But there is still money left to be claimed, and the deadline is approaching. The average benefit is $3,700.

Individuals who meet eligibility criteria should submit an application by October 21, 2012. By law, there is no authorization to make payments on claims that are submitted after the deadline.