It is hard to believe that President Obama and his staff will be able to continue to work with McChrystal after the revelation of the Rolling Stone affair. President Obama will have to defend his commander-in-chief powers under Article II of the Constitution and that will almost certainly require McChrystal's swift retirement. To allow McChrystal to apologize and stay on would set a bad precedent, send the wrong signal regarding civil-military relations to the rest of the military, and would cause great uproar among Obama's civilian staff.

Who will replace McChrystal? For the sake of continuity in the midst of the critical Kandahar operation, the elevation of LTG David Rodriguez would seem logical. Regrettably, the contemptuous attitude toward Obama and the White House staff apparently extends throughout McChrystal's staff. As a McChrystal deputy, Rodriguez may be suspect. In any case, several staff officers will also have to go, with a broad investigation likely to follow. Thus someone from the outside may be necessary. Probably not Gen. James Mattis -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates apparently passed him over for Commandant of the Marine Corps so Gates could hardly support him for ISAF. My guess would be someone currently working on the Joint Staff or on Gates's personal staff, someone already well known to Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen (which, ironically, is how McChrystal and Rodriguez got to Afghanistan).

Finally, how did this fiasco with Rolling Stone magazine happen? Field commanders and their staff officers talk to the media in order to get their stories out. In the case of McChrystal and the Afghanistan campaign, the need to do so has lately been even more urgent than usual. McChrystal and his staff were seeking to "add time to the Washington clock." They hoped to get their message out to media audience segments that would soon be putting the most pressure on the Obama administration to terminate the campaign. The theory was that delivering their message -- through a channel like Rolling Stone -- would short-circuit, at least for a time, growing political pressure against the war. Unfortunately for McChrystal and certain members of his staff, the inflammatory bits of the article apparently show a commander and staff frustrated and exhausted by an intractable task -- the very opposite of the message they intended to send.

Obama, Gates, Mullen, and Gen. David Petraeus will get an opportunity to make a decisive shake-up. But counterinsurgency is all about inspiring confidence in the cause among the many actors inside the host nation, not to mention the soldiers and Marines who are ordered out on patrol every day. What remains of that confidence after the shake-up remains to be seen.

"I am pleased to announce that I have recommended to the President that Gen. James F. Amos be nominated as the next commandant of the United States Marine Corps. Gen. Amos' combat experience includes command of a Marine aircraft wing and a Marine expeditionary force during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He went on to lead the Marines' Combat Development Command and serve as deputy commandant for combat development and integration. If nominated and confirmed, Gen. Amos will be the first aviator to attain this post.

"I am also recommending that Lt. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford be promoted to replace Gen. Amos as assistant commandant. Lt. Gen. Dunford is currently the commander of I MEF and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Central Command, with responsibility for all Marines serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.

"Gen. James Conway will complete his term as commandant this fall and retire from the Marine Corps after four decades of outstanding service. On behalf of the American people, I want to thank Gen. Conway for his faithful and selfless service that included tours as a battalion commander in Operation Desert Storm, a Marine expeditionary force commander in Iraq, and director of operations for the Joint Staff. We will properly recognize Gen. Conway's extraordinary service at an appropriate time.

"I came to these leadership decisions after a thorough process that considered several outstanding candidates. I am convinced that Gen. Amos and Lt. Gen. Dunford are the right team to lead the U.S. Marine Corps at this time, especially as it balances the capabilities needed to support current operations, its unique maritime heritage and its future role defending America."

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Gates Recommends Amos, Dunford Lead Marine Corps - North County Times

Gates Announces Choice for Marine Corps Chief - Associated Press

General James F. Amos - USMC Official Biography

General James F. Amos - Wikipedia

Lieutenant General Joseph F. Dunford - USMC Official Biography

Lieutenant General Joseph F. Dunford - Wikipedia

A Battle Against the Odds - Mark Moyar, Wall Street Journal book review.

On Sept. 11, 2006, exactly five years after 9/11, the Washington Post divulged a classified U.S. intelligence report under the headline, "Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says." According to an anonymous American source, the report said that "we haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically—and that's where wars are won and lost."

It is true that the situation in Anbar Province, a hotbed of Sunni Muslim resistance in western Iraq, was dire at the time. Three years earlier the Americans had arrived intent on winning over the population through democratic governance and economic development. But most local civilians—out of support for Sunni insurgents or fear of them—had rejected U.S. requests to serve in the government or participate in development projects. American units ended up spending most of their time battling swarms of guerrillas.

In A Chance in Hell, Jim Michaels, a military reporter for USA Today, deftly explains how the so-called Anbar Awakening emerged from this seemingly hopeless set of circumstances, saving the troubled province and the rest of Sunni Iraq. Whereas many accounts of the Awakening have portrayed it as an American creation, Mr. Michaels shows that it was largely the handiwork of Iraqis, particularly a local leader named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. Mr. Michaels details how Sattar, a sheik of a minor tribe, formed a robust tribal alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) before striking a deal with the Americans...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

Author David Kilcullen on Troop Withdrawal, the Influence of Wikileaks and Corruption in Afghanistan.

... in today's Conversation, David Kilcullen, a senior advisor to the U.S. military on counterinsurgency, war strategy and counterterrorism, tells ABC's Diane Sawyer that the president's goal might be too ambitous. According to Kilcullen, if the U.S. leaves before stabilizing the region, it will leave power in the hands of a corrupt and instable government. The Taliban was born in Afghanistan and has deep ties to the region -- Kilcullen argues that pulling the troops too soon would leave the government, and its people, once again vulnerable to the Taliban's control.

Kilcullen's latest book titled Counterinsurgency lays out his plan for a stable withdrawal from Afghanistan. A former lieutenant colonel in the Australian army, he has spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan and advised General David Petraeus and the U.S. State Department on counterinsurgency strategy...

More at ABC News.

On a stretch of clean, white Southern California beach, thousands of young Marines this month charged forward from the sea, leaping from helicopters and landing craft, echoing the exercises conducted decades before when Marines trained for Iwo Jima and Inchon. It was the largest and most complex amphibious exercise since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It also could be one of the last...

But the Marines have not stormed a hostile beach since Inchon during the Korean War. And influential military thinkers - including, most notably, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates - have begun to question whether the Marines will ever do it again.

In a speech last month, Gates said rogue nations and nonstate movements such as Hezbollah now possessed sophisticated guided missiles that could destroy naval ships, forcing them to stay well away from shore and making any sort of beach landing by Marines extremely dangerous. Countries including China and Iran have guided missiles and other defenses to deter a beach landing, said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who has written skeptically of traditional amphibious landings...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

Recent reports from Afghanistan paint a dark picture of the counterinsurgency efforts in the Taliban-infected south and east of the country. This spring's operation in Marja, initially proclaimed a military success, sputtered when the Afghan "government in a box" failed to show up. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, after a positive visit to Washington, has demonstrated erratic behavior, including forcing the resignation of two of his best ministers. And the critical offensive in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the historical cradle of the Taliban, has been postponed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of our efforts there. Some are suggesting that the "Afghan surge" announced by President Obama in December at West Point has failed even before all of the planned 30,000 reinforcements have arrived in the country.

Those skeptics may have forgotten that counterinsurgency is always slow and grinding - "like eating soup with a knife", in the words of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), a man who knew something of this most challenging kind of war. Defeating an insurgency requires the patience to implement the classic "clear-hold-build-transition" counterinsurgency strategy. Efforts to clear the enemy from an area require large numbers of well-trained and usually foreign troops; hard as it is, clearing is the easy part. Success requires local troops to hold the area so that the insurgents cannot return to disrupt the process of building a better life for the population in the cleared area, which can then be transitioned to local control. Setbacks are likely at each stage of the process, but there are no shortcuts; defeating insurgents is hard, slow work.

Gen. David Petraeus, a man with some personal experience in counterinsurgency and the architect of our strategy in Afghanistan, testified during the darkest hours of our counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq that "hard is not hopeless." Hard is not hopeless in Afghanistan, either. Success there - defined as an Afghanistan that does not provide a haven for terror or destabilize the region and is able to secure itself with minimal outside assistance - remains a vital national interest of the United States...

More at The New York Daily News.

With an average of an assassination a day and a suicide bombing every second or third day, insurgents have greatly increased the level of violence in Afghanistan, and have become by far the biggest killers of civilians here, the United Nations said in a report released publicly on Saturday. The report also confirms statistics from the NATO coalition, which claimed a continuing decrease in civilian deaths caused by the United States military and its allies. At the same time it blames stepped-up military operations for an overall increase in the violence.

Especially alarming were increases in suicide bombings and assassinations of government officials in a three-month period ending June 16, and a near-doubling of roadside bombings for the first four months of 2010 compared with the same period in 2009. "The number of security incidents increased significantly, compared to previous years and contrary to seasonal trends," the report said, adding that most of this was a consequence of military operations in the southern part of the country, particularly Helmand and Kandahar Provinces, where increased NATO military operations have been under way since February...

More at the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Voice of America.

Report of the Secretary-General - United Nations

Update:

Time for the Deconstruction of Field Manual 3-24 - Colonel Gian P. Gentile

The principles of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) have become transcendent in the U.S. Army and other parts of the greater Defense Establishment. Concepts such as population security, nationbuilding, and living among the people to win their hearts and minds were first injected into the Army with the publication of the vaunted Field Manual (FM) 3--24, Counterinsurgency, in December 2006. Unfortunately, the Army was so busy fighting two wars that the new doctrine was written and implemented and came to dominate how the Army thinks about war without a serious professional and public debate over its efficacy, practicality, and utility...

Constructing the Legacy of Field Manual 3-24 - Dr. John A. Nagl

In late 2005, then--Lieutenant General David Petraeus was appointed to lead the Army's Combined Arms Command at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After two high-profile tours in Iraq, the posting to Fort Leavenworth was no one's idea of a promotion; the dominant local industry is prisons. But to his credit, General Petraeus recognized that this supposedly backwater assignment presented an opportunity to help revamp the Army's vision of and approach to the wars that it was struggling with in Iraq and Afghanistan. He called on his old West Point classmate, Dr. Conrad Crane, to take charge of a writing team that within just over a year produced Field Manual (FM) 3--24, Counterinsurgency, in conjunction with a U.S. Marine Corps team under the direction of Lieutenant General James Mattis...

Freeing the Army from the Counterinsurgency Straightjacket - Colonel Gian P. Gentile

In October 2006, while in command of a cavalry squadron in northwest Baghdad, I received an email with an attached document from my division commander, then--Major General James D. Thurman. General Thurman sent the email to all of the division's brigade and battalion commanders asking for input on the important document attached, which was a draft of Field Manual (FM) 3--24, Counterinsurgency. Over the next couple of weeks, I tried to read the draft manual closely and provide comments to the commanding general. Alas, though, like probably most of the other commanders, I was so busy carrying out a population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign on the ground in west Baghdad that I never found time to get to it. While anecdotal, my experience suggests a microcosm of the U.S. Army. The Army has been so busy since FM 3--24 came out 4 years ago that it has been unable to have a Service-wide dialogue on the manual...

Learning and Adapting to Win - Dr. John A. Nagl

Admiral Mullen highlights Clausewitz's dictum that war is not essentially "about death and destruction" but is fundamentally an instrument of policy designed to achieve political aims. It is this understanding of war that must drive how military strategy and doctrine are developed, and the metric against which they must be judged. The counterinsurgency field manual must therefore be evaluated against its record in assisting in the accomplishment of national objectives...

H/T to redactor, Robert Jordan Prescott and Dave Maxwell.