President Obama said Sunday he will remain skeptical about the need for more US troops in Afghanistan until he is satisfied that the military has the right strategy for winning the war there. In taped interviews on five Sunday morning news programs, Obama said his top generals have completed another review of that strategy, and that he will not act on a further troop increase until he is satisfied that the review has produced a winnable approach.

"What I'm not also gonna do, though, is put the resource question before the strategy question," Obama told NBC's David Gregory on "Meet the Press." "Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy I'm not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there- beyond what we already have." ...

More at The Washington Post.

At the time of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, counterinsurgency theory was about as popular in American military circles as tank warfare is today. An early study by the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division during its first deployment to Iraq reported "a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the US Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it." There was a reason for this. Eager to forget the most painful experience in its history, the army had all but banished counterinsurgency from the lexicon of American military affairs after Vietnam. As a result, the army relied on a flawed strategy in Iraq for a period that lasted, according to author Thomas Ricks, at least "twenty months or more.

As US Army Colonel Gian Gentile has summarized this line of argument, there was a "bad war" in Iraq fought by officers who ignored the theory and practice of counterinsurgency, followed by a "good war" fought by its champions. In Vietnam, however, even the "bad" war was fought by commanders deeply versed in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of counterinsurgency (COIN)—much more, in any case, than their counterparts were on September 11, 2001. The United States may have gone, in James Fallows's memorable phrase, "Blind into Baghdad." It did not march blindly into Vietnam. On the contrary, counterinsurgency theory enjoyed a special vogue in the 1960s: it was certainly more fashionable and better understood by an educated public than it is today. Especially among military officers, COIN was more roundly known during this era than at any time up until the release of Field Manual 3-24 in December 2006...

More at World Affairs. SWJ hat tip to Victor Lamparski, Editor, War News Updates.

Speculation abounds over whether President Obama will authorize a troop increase in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the administration is expected to increase the deployment of American government civilian workers - experts who can help rebuild the country. But there are problems persuading civilians with the requisite skills to go to Afghanistan. When Obama unveiled his administration's strategy for Afghanistan in March, he emphasized that civilian experts were just as critical as the tens of thousands of additional US military personnel he was sending at that time.

"We need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers," he said. "That's how we can help the Afghan government serve its people, and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs. That's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground." To that end, the administration announced it would send about 450 civilians from several branches of the government by March 2010. The timetable was then accelerated to December of this year. But so far, only about a quarter of that number have been deployed to Afghanistan...

More at NPR.

The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, US officials say. When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one US official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

The influx parallels the US military expansion and comes as the nation's spy services are under pressure from Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to improve intelligence on the Taliban and find ways to reverse a series of unsettling trends. Among them are a twofold increase in the number of roadside bombs, a growing sophistication in the kinds of assaults aimed at coalition troops and evidence that a Taliban group has developed an assembly-line approach to grooming suicide bombers and supplying them to other insurgent organizations...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

The future of missile defense in Europe is secure. This reality is contrary to what some critics have alleged about President Obama's proposed shift in America's missile-defense plans on the continent - and it is important to understand how and why.

First, to be clear, there is now no strategic missile defense in Europe. In December 2006, just days after becoming secretary of defense, I recommended to President George W. Bush that the United States place 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and an advanced radar in the Czech Republic. This system was designed to identify and destroy up to about five long-range missiles potentially armed with nuclear warheads fired from the Middle East - the greatest and most likely danger being from Iran. At the time, it was the best plan based on the technology and threat assessment available.

That plan would have put the radar and interceptors in Central Europe by 2015 at the earliest. Delays in the Polish and Czech ratification process extended that schedule by at least two years. Which is to say, under the previous program, there would have been no missile-defense system able to protect against Iranian missiles until at least 2017 - and likely much later...

More at The New York Times.

For 11 days in late August and early September in 1995, US and NATO air power defended Bosnian Muslims, who were being attacked by Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbian Serbs. This was merely the overture to something much more ambitious - a grand concert of nation-building that began when the Dayton agreement reached in December of that year calmed the Balkan furies of revanchism and revenge, for a while.

But agreements, like flowers, last while they last, and today's fraying of Bosnia is not the fault of Richard Holbrooke, whose skill and tenacity produced the Dayton peace. Or perhaps the Dayton pause. Holbrooke, whose diplomatic career began in Vietnam, continues in the Obama administration, where his portfolio is Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the president contemplates an ambitious mission in the former, as a prophylactic measure to stabilize the latter, he should read "The Death of Dayton: How to Stop Bosnia From Falling Apart," in Foreign Affairs.

Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western note that Bosnia was "once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts" and was considered "proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries." Now, however, Bosnia "stands on the brink of collapse." ...

More at The Washington Post.

How to Stop Bosnia From Falling Apart - Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western, Foreign Affairs.

After 14 years of intense international efforts to stabilize and rebuild Bosnia, the country now stands on the brink of collapse. For the first time since November 1995 - when the Dayton accord ended three and a half years of bloody ethnic strife - Bosnians are once again talking about the potential for war.

Bosnia was once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts. It was routinely touted by US and European leaders as proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries. The 1995 Dayton peace agreement divided Bosnia into two semi-independent entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited mainly by Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (Serb Republic, or RS), each with its own government, controlling taxation, educational policy, and even foreign policy. Soon after the war's end, the country was flooded with attention and over $14 billion in international aid, making it a laboratory for what was arguably the most extensive and innovative democratization experiment in history. By the end of 1996, 17 different foreign governments, 18 UN agencies, 27 intergovernmental organizations, and about 200 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) - not to mention tens of thousands of troops from across the globe - were involved in reconstruction efforts. On a per capita basis, the reconstruction of Bosnia - with less than four million citizens -- made the post-World War II rebuilding of Germany and Japan look modest...

More at Foreign Affairs.

SSI September 2009 Newsletter - Strategic Studies Institute's monthly newsletter. Includes new publications, events and an op-ed on national security strategy reform.

Winning In Afghanistan - Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies. The US will fail ... if the Administration and the Congress temporize and delay.

Iraqi Insurgents Take the Offensive as Parliamentary Elections Approach - Ramzy Mardini, Jamestown Foundation. Regardless of the security gains made in Iraq, the country is still riddled with poor institutions, ethnic and tribal rivalries and an absence of genuine reconciliation efforts.

GAO Report on Homeland Defense - September 2009 report to Congress on US Northern Command efforts.

CJCS Speech - Full transcript of Admiral Michael Mullin's remarks Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute.

Arrr! - Today be the day me hearties!

Obama's Afghan strategy - a blank page

According to a Sept. 17 Washington Post article, President Barack Obama stated he is waiting on making a decision about sending more soldiers to Afghanistan until he has "absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be."

This declaration will come as a surprise to those who thought he had decided on his strategy for Afghanistan on March 27th. Are Obama and his advisers preparing to rip up the March strategy and delete this link from the White House Website?

The answer is yes. In his remarks on Sept. 16 to the American Enterprise Institute, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said that the administration was reviewing its strategy for Afghanistan, starting from "first principles." Why would the Obama team feel the need to do that? Mullen had an answer for that -- if Hamid Karzai's reelection to the Afghan presidency is not accepted as legitimate, "hard questions" about the viability of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan would follow.

Obama has undoubtedly concluded that he has little chance of sustaining political support in the United States for the Afghan effort if there is little acceptance of Karzai as the legitimate winner of the election. The best case scenario is a second-round runoff, which would at least give the Afghan election process a chance to redeem its legitimacy. But a final, well-scrubbed result to the first round may be a month away; a hypothetical second could stretch into 2010. Obama will see no point in making a decision on a new strategy, and the resources such a strategy will require, until a basic premise -- the legitimacy of the Afghan government -- is established.

Obama no doubt sees the advantage of waiting as long as possible before deciding anything. But regarding troop deployments to Afghanistan, practical realities intervene. Pentagon logistics planners require long lead times in order to deliver large combat units ready to fight in Afghanistan. As happened with this year's reinforcements to Afghanistan, Presidents George W. Bush and Obama had to make decisions in the winter in order to get large numbers of additional troops into Afghanistan by the start of the summer fighting season. Should Afghanistan prove unable to select a legitimate president this winter, the Pentagon could cancel deployment orders already on their way. But would the administration want to commit in advance to such a fragile situation?

As administration staffers survey the Afghan election mess, the option of simply leaving Afghanistan will inevitably be contemplated. Such a path would shrink America's physical commitment but hopefully not its prestige or influence in the region. Does such a path exist? Obama may ask his staff to find it.

America's spies adjust to the post-al Qaeda era

The U.S. intelligence community has moved into the post-al Qaeda era. That was the subtle message delivered on Sept. 15 by Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. In the frantic years after the September 2001 attacks, the U.S. intelligence community underwent a wrenching reorganization to focus on al Qaeda and like-minded Islamist threats. Blair's latest National Intelligence Strategy document indicates that the intelligence community is now applying the tools and techniques it developed to counter al Qaeda against the generalized problem of non-state and distributed threats. Even more interesting, Blair has promoted counterintelligence and cyber-warfare to the same status as the intelligence community's traditional missions.

So has Blair declared victory over al Qaeda? Not exactly. Indeed, combating violent extremism remains Blair's Mission Objective #1. But during the press briefing introducing the new National Intelligence Strategy, he seemed to express some satisfaction in progress made against the terrorist organization:

What has really made all the nations safer has been the accumulation of knowledge about al-Qaida and its affiliate groups, which enables us to be more aggressive in expanding that knowledge and stopping things before they happen. And so, I'd say we are more aggressive. And the ability to be more aggressive is founded upon the much larger and more sophisticated understanding of the adversary that we have gained across various administrations in recent years.

Blair has promoted counterintelligence, protecting the U.S. against adversary intelligence penetration, to one of his six Mission Objectives. Why? This decade's rapid expansion and reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community to confront a wide variety of exotic non-state threats has meant that the intelligence community has had to rush to add people and information channels that in a previous era may have received more thorough vetting. From a technology perspective, there remains much uncertainty about the government's computer and communications security.

Regarding counterintelligence, Blair has assigned the following tasks: "penetrating and exploiting adversaries, mitigating the insider threat, providing input to strategic warning, validating sources of intelligence, contributing to cyber defense, and evaluating acquisition risk." Among his worries, Blair is concerned that adversaries may have compromised the hardware and software that the U.S. government and government contractors buy.

Cyber-security, another of the top six Mission Objectives, ties in very closely with counterintelligence. Of note, Blair, in his press conference, stated that both China and Russia are "very aggressive in the cyber-world." With this, Blair strongly suggested that the Chinese and Russian governments, and not just free-lancing hackers on Chinese and Russian territory, were developing aggressive cyber warfare capabilities that could threaten the United States.

The National Intelligence Strategy shows that the U.S. intelligence community is in the post-al Qaeda era. As it was for the intelligence community during the Cold War, computer and communications technology will play a major role in this new era. The difference this time is that the United States won't always have the technical edge. U.S. spies will often be playing defense and scrambling to keep up.

Stability Operations Definition: For the purposes of this Instruction, stability operations is defined as an overarching term encompassing various military missions, tasks, and activities conducted outside the United States in coordination with other instruments of national power to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief.

Key Excerpts: Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct with proficiency equivalent to combat operations. The Department of Defense shall be prepared to:

(1) Conduct stability operations activities throughout all phases of conflict and across the range of military operations, including in combat and non-combat environments. The magnitude of stability operations missions may range from small-scale, short-duration to large-scale, long-duration.

(2) Support stability operations activities led by other U.S. Government departments or agencies (hereafter referred to collectively as "U.S. Government agencies"), foreign governments and security forces, international governmental organizations, or when otherwise directed.

(3) Lead stability operations activities to establish civil security and civil control, restore essential services, repair and protect critical infrastructure, and deliver humanitarian assistance until such time as it is feasible to transition lead responsibility to other U.S. Government agencies, foreign governments and security forces, or international governmental organizations. In such circumstances, the Department will operate within U.S. Government and, as appropriate, international structures for managing civil-military operations, and will seek to enable the deployment and utilization of the appropriate civilian capabilities.

The Department shall have the capability and capacity to conduct stability operations activities to fulfill DoD Component responsibilities under national and international law. Capabilities shall be compatible, through interoperable and complementary solutions, to those of other U.S. Government agencies and foreign governments and security forces to ensure that, when directed, the Department can:

(1) Establish civil security and civil control.

(2) Restore or provide essential services.

(3) Repair critical infrastructure.

(4) Provide humanitarian assistance.

Integrated civilian and military efforts are essential to the conduct of successful stability operations. The Department shall:

(1) Support the stability operations planning efforts of other U.S. Government agencies.

(2) Collaborate with other U.S. Government agencies and with foreign governments and security forces, international governmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and private sector firms as appropriate to plan, prepare for, and conduct stability operations.

(3) Continue to support the development, implementation, and operations of civil-military teams and related efforts aimed at unity of effort in rebuilding basic infrastructure; developing local governance structures; fostering security, economic stability, and development; and building indigenous capacity for such tasks.

The Department shall assist other U.S. Government agencies, foreign governments and security forces, and international governmental organizations in planning and executing reconstruction and stabilization efforts, to include:

(1) Disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating former belligerents into civil society.

(2) Rehabilitating former belligerents and units into legitimate security forces.

(3) Strengthening governance and the rule of law.

(4) Fostering economic stability and development.

The DoD Components shall explicitly address and integrate stability operations-related concepts and capabilities across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and applicable exercises, strategies, and plans.

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SWJ Hat Tip to Dave Maxwell.