On the 65th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe in early May, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. His speech was not about America's unprecedented, massive marshalling of resources, men, and materiel to defeat the forces of fascism that threatened to overwhelm the West. Instead, its underlying message was ultimately one of strategic retreat—signaling his and the Obama administration's view that the richest country in the world can no longer afford to sustain the military's current force structure and capabilities.

Channeling his inner President Eisenhower, Gates sought to make this message sound not only reasonable but morally justified by belittling Washington, the town where he has spent most of his career. Pandering to those on the left who always see defense spending as dangerous, he raised anew Eisenhower's overwrought concern about the creation of a "garrison state" and a "military-industrial complex." Pandering to those on the right who see the Pentagon as a gigantic sink hole for tax dollars, he dredged up the old saw about the Pentagon being a "Puzzle Palace" and stated that "the attacks of September 11, 2001, opened a gusher of defense spending."

The secretary—along with the Obama administration—wants Americans to believe there is no choice but to cut the defense budget given economic and fiscal realities. Just as there is no crying in baseball, however, there are no inevitabilities in politics. The administration is indeed squeezing defense spending more and more tightly, but that is a product of decisions made and policies chosen. They can and should be revisited...

More at The Weekly Standard.

When requirements are great and resources limited, setting the right priorities becomes essential. Yet events in recent years - the ineffective government response to the BP oil spill being the latest - have made it clear that US national security priorities are badly out of whack. Last week, President Obama designated the oil spill his "top priority.'' No doubt the president spoke from the heart. For the national security establishment over which he presides, however, pacifying Kandahar continues to take precedence over protecting Louisiana's Grand Isle...

From one administration to the next, the US government has failed to anticipate the threats actually endangering the well-being of the American people. Worse, when those threats materialize - here at home, not in Central Asia or the Persian Gulf - authorities respond belatedly and ineffectually. Even as Washington has fixated on distant wars of dubious necessity, Americans have lost their savings, lost their jobs, and lost their homes. Some have lost their lives, others have lost their livelihood.

A century ago, Americans paid considerable attention to their "near abroad.'' Today they all but ignore it. Compare US policy toward Afghanistan, located on the other side of the world, with US policy toward our neighbor, Mexico. To assist Afghans, Washington will seemingly spare no expense. When it comes to Mexico, Washington builds a chain-link fence. Yet whether the issue is trade, drugs, or security, Mexico's importance to the United States outranks Afghanistan's by orders of magnitude...

More at The Boston Globe.

Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq is an absolutely fascinating read. This book from the National Defense Intelligence College takes both an historical and policy-oriented view of prisoner of war interrogations in three wars. The World War II section examines the Army's use of Japanese Americans -- Nisei -- as interrogators in the Pacific, along with incisive discussions of why Japanese soldiers seldom were taken prisoners, why a relatively high percentage of such POWs cooperated with their interrogators, and why they furnished such a significant amount of intelligence to their captors (the Japanese military hierarchy assumed that their men would not become prisoners and so did not indoctrinate them about the importance of not giving up information if they were.) This part of the book also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the Army and Navy Japanese language training both services provided during the war.

The Vietnam section focuses on profiles of the most able interrogators in World War II (the wonderfully named R.W. G. "Tin Eye" Stephens for the British and Hans Scharff for the Germans) and a number of successful American officers during the Vietnam conflict. Throughout the book, the authors make the point that linguistic ability, a deep understanding of the captives' culture and worldview, and a perception that torture or other violent methods were useless in soliciting information of value are the hallmarks of a successful interrogator of prisoners. This part of the book also describes these individuals' occasional conflicts with the military bureaucracy, such as Sedgwick Tourison's experience in reporting more information about the Tonkin Gulf incident than his superiors wanted to hear.

The final section, on Iraq, focuses on policy issues -- specifically, whether Army doctrine should permit Special Operations personnel to interrogate prisoners. Again, real-world examples from personal experience provide a study that is both gripping and insightful.

Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq is a thoughtful and provocative analysis of what any army confronts in war -- the need to gather intelligence from prisoners, the most effective way to do that, and the ineffectiveness of "harsh methods" in delivering useful information.

You can read the book here or get a copy from GPO here.

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group. The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week...

More at The Washington Post.

Pentagon Told to Save Billions for Use in War - Thom Shanker, New York Times.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered the military and the Pentagon's civilian bureaucracy to find tens of billions of dollars in annual savings to pay for war-fighting operations, senior officials said Thursday. His goal is $7 billion in spending cuts and efficiencies for 2012, growing to $37 billion annually by 2016.

Every modern defense secretary has declared war on Pentagon waste and redundancy. And there have been notable, but relatively narrow successes, in closing and consolidating military bases or in canceling a handful of weapons systems. But if Mr. Gates's sweeping plan is fully enacted, none of the armed services or Pentagon civilian agencies and directorates would be immune from the pain of annual cost-cutting, which would become institutionalized across the Defense Department...

More at The New York Times.

The United States has a growing strategic interest in Africa at a time when the security landscape there is dominated by a wide range of irregular, nonstate threats. Militia factions and armed gangs are ubiquitous in the conti¬nent's civil wars, fighting both for and against African governments. Other security challenges include terrorism, drug trafficking, maritime threats such as piracy in the Indian Ocean, and oil bunkering in the Gulf of Guinea. Organized criminal activities, particularly kidnapping, human smuggling and trafficking in persons, weapons smuggling, and environmental and financial crimes, are increasingly brazen and destructive. These are not isolated phenomena. Rather, they create a vicious circle: Africa's irregular threat dynamics sustain black markets directly linked to state corruption, divert atten¬tion from democratization efforts, generate or fuel civil wars, drive state collapse, and create safe havens that allow terrorists and more criminals to operate.

International consensus is growing on the best way forward. African governments and their international partners must craft more appropriately structured and better resourced security sectors to address emerging threats. This means balancing emphasis on professionalizing Africa's military forces with an equally serious and long-term commit¬ment to modernizing law enforcement, civilian intelligence, and border security agencies. It also means enhancing African governments' legal capabilities to monitor and regulate finan¬cial and commodity flows across their borders, and to prosecute those who transgress the law. National coordination and regional coopera¬tion are needed to overcome "stovepiped" responses, share information, and address threats that are multidimensional and transna¬tional in nature. Finally, there is agreement that much more needs to be done to address the root causes of these threats by reducing poverty, building peace in conflict-ridden societies, and curtailing the general sense of alienation many Africans feel toward their governments.

Engaging African states as reliable part¬ners to confront irregular security challenges will be a complex process requiring a three-pronged strategy. First, there must be substan¬tial, sustained, and continent-wide investment in capacity-building for intelligence, law enforcement, military, prosecutorial, judicial, and penal systems, not to mention their par¬liamentary, media, and civil society counter¬parts. Second, until such African capabilities come online and are properly utilized by polit¬ical leaders, the United States and other for¬eign partners will need to deploy more of their own intelligence, law enforcement, and spe¬cial operations personnel to Africa to address terrorist and criminal dynamics that pose a direct and immediate threat to U.S. strategic interests. Third, further efforts are required to harden the political will of African leaders to actually deploy their maturing security sec¬tor capabilities in an aggressive manner that abides by the rule of law.

Full article at the Institute for National Security Studies.

An article in the latest issue of the Army War College's official journal, Parameters, fires a shot across the bow of the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan with its call for "Counterinsurgency 3.0." Authors James Gavrilis, a retired lieutenant colonel, and Peter Charles Coharis, an international consultant, bluntly state that "massive international development assistance" to Afghanistan -- over $225 billion from the U.S. alone since 9/11 -- has "failed" to win hearts and minds because "policy-makers have incorrectly assumed that international development aid is inherently beneficial... and invariably leads to a grateful populace." Instead, the article argues, "aid is inherently disruptive and potentially destabilizing, and development does not necessarily translate into pro-American or pro-Afghan government sentiments." ...

More at The National Journal.

U.S. intelligence agencies have obtained a Chinese military book that will provide new insights into the Chinese military's information-warfare plans. The book is being translated, but Inside the Ring obtained its table of contents, which reveals Beijing's priorities for high-technology warfare using computers and electronic-warfare weapons. The 322-page book, "Information Warfare Theory," was published in May 2007 and written by Wang Zhengde, president of the People's Liberation Army Information Engineering University.

Like other military and Communist Party writings, such books are not often made public, and when they are, they provide U.S. intelligence and military specialist with valuable clues to the military thinking and plans of China's secretive military. The book states that information warfare is the "core" of China's high-tech military-reform efforts, which are referred to as "informationized" warfare - what the U.S. military has called the "revolution in military affairs." It involves integrating various weapons and intelligence with advanced command-and-control systems and mobile, combined-arms forces...

More at The Washington Times.

Israel should be sensitive to the fact that its actions directly affect U.S. strategic interests in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and it must be as sensitive to U.S. strategic concerns as the United States is to those of Israel.

and

...Israel should show enough discretion to reflect the fact that it is a tertiary U.S. strategic interest in a complex and demanding world.

A quick read here and well worth it. I am confident we have folks deeply entrenched in both extreme camps. Does this reflect the pragmatic middle ground?