To what extent is Iran's current political upheaval catalyzed, or even instigated, by sharply deteriorating economic and financial conditions inside the country? I pose the question but have no way of answering it.

Some observers believe the two earth-shaking political upheavals that occurred two decades ago -- the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Tiananmen Square revolt in China -- were closely tied to financial crises. Yegor Gaidar, who was Russia's economics minister and acting prime minister in the immediate post-Soviet period, asserted in an essay he wrote for the American Enterprise Institute that Soviet financial mismanagement related to grain purchases and fluctuating global oil prices led to the Soviet Union's (literal) bankruptcy. In China, some analysts have linked the countrywide uprising in the spring of 1989 to rapidly accelerating consumer price inflation.

What about Iran today? A table produced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency shows a rapid acceleration this decade in Iran's inflation-adjusted per capita oil revenue, followed by a painful crash. These revenues are obviously not distributed equally. Is the emerging polarization of Iran's clerical elite into Ahmadinejad and Moussavi camps a consequence of these elites attempting to preserve their shares of a rapidly shrinking financial pie?

As for the masses now protesting in the streets, the energy they displayed during the election campaign, the expectations they imagined, and the anger they are displaying over their dashed hopes may be a replay of what occurred in China in 1989. As with China in 1989, Iran's accelerating consumer price inflation may be a catalyst for street protests by the middle class.

In an essay I wrote last year for The American, I argued that a cutoff in foreign investment in Iran's oil and gas sector would be the last best hope for the international community to achieve leverage over Iran's nuclear program. According to an academic study I cited, Iran's oil export revenue could dry up by the middle of next decade if Iran does not receive foreign technical assistance to maintain and expand its oil production.

When I wrote that essay, I envisioned the necessity of U.S. and European diplomatic pressure to achieve a cutoff in foreign investment in Iran's oil industry. But Iran's internal political turmoil may do the trick -- foreign investors may now deem the political risk too great.

So what are the economic and financial sources, if any, to Iran's political turmoil? Should the U.S. government indirectly add to these pressures in the hope of defunding the current regime? Or of inducing its replacement by a more friendly one? More likely, the most the U.S. government will be able to do is watch like everyone else and adjust to whatever happens.

General McChrystal's New Way of War - Max Boot, Wall Street Journal opinion.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander in Afghanistan to shake up a troubled war effort. But one of his first initiatives could wind up changing how the entire military does business.

Gen. McChrystal's decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.

Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan or Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what's going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don't have a grip on local conditions...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

The Pentagon's public affairs office has a new monthly report: a tally of the Army's suicides.

This new report, issued on June 11, listed Army suicides (confirmed and potential) by soldiers on active duty and reservists not on active duty for May, April, and for 2008 and 2009 year-to-date. By implication, the Army intends to release monthly updates of its suicide statistics, joining other regular statistical releases such recruiting and retention and mobilized reservists.

The Army's leadership appears to have succumbed to pressure to do something" about its suicide problem." All of the military services should vigorously fund and implement suicide prevention programs. Commanders at all levels should give sincere attention to the issue. And as a general matter, the Congress should fully fund Secretary Gates's priorities to improve the welfare of the troops and their families. Gates is right to express his concern about the potential fragility of the all-volunteer force and the imperative of preserving it. Attention to suicide, its causes and prevention, is part of this.

The Army's response is typical for any bureaucracy: collect the statistics, slice them up, and tabulate them in a recurring report. Regrettably, on the matter of suicides the Army's bureaucratic response is misguided.

First, by collecting up these individual tragedies into summary statistics, the Army is showing disrespect to these soldiers and the personal circumstances that led to each dreadful ending.

Second, by submitting to the pressure for regular reporting on suicides, the Army is ratifying the entirely false notion that those who volunteer for military service are victims, and that suicide is one of those terrible ways that these ostensibly misguided volunteers occasionally pay for their victimhood. The Army apparently won't dare defend the notion that military service may have saved some of its soldiers from suicide by affording them a meaningful life they may not have found in their civilian youth.

Finally, the Army's summary statistics on suicide are presented without any attempt at context. For example:

1. What is the suicide rate (suicides per 100,000 per year)?

2. How does this rate compare to the 18-24 year old civilian cohort?

3. What are the suicide rates of those who have deployed compared to those who have not? Combat action versus no combat action?

4. What is the Army's suicide rate in 2009 compared to 1999, 1989, and 1979?

The Army's monthly suicide watch" report reflects a bureaucracy entirely on the defensive. It is disrespectful to the slain soldiers and ratifies a false narrative about military service. Most tellingly, it shows an Army leadership un—to defend its institution.

The Anatomy of the Long War's Failings - Frank G. Hoffman, Foreign Policy Research Institute.

What we now sometimes refer to as the Long War began much earlier than the 9/11 attacks on America. But that day was seared into our collective national consciousness and animated our collective response. That sunny morning in Manhattan marked the second most violent day in U.S. history, exceeding Pearl Harbor and even D-Day in fatalities. Only Antietam's bloody wheat fields have witnessed more carnage in a single day. Since then, our country has mobilized for a global conflict against extremism with a multidimensional approach that has relied heavily on our military forces.

Just what have we accomplished to date in the Long War? Any ledger is going to identify some clear gains. Our campaign in Afghanistan quickly toppled the Taliban, and as a result al Qaeda no longer enjoys any sanctuary in Afghanistan. A major multinational invasion of Iraq led by the United States sliced though the remnants of the Iraqi Army and destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime. We have generated and exploited a degree of international cooperation and intelligence sharing—much of it very discrete—to foil several plots against ourselves or our partners. We have substantially reduced al Qaeda's infrastructure around the world, including its leadership, training facilities, and financial networks. And the nation has begun to shore up our home defenses. Notably, no similar attacks have occurred here at home.

But the ledger has both black and red ink. Bin Laden is alive and apparently well, although al Qaeda is a more diffuse organization. The core leadership of al Qaeda itself has probably been weakened, but its cause has been amplified and a generation of Muslims has been mobilized if not radicalized.

Afghanistan remains a key campaign in this war. Our initial campaign was brilliantly conceived by the CIA. An American force of CIA operatives and special forces aided no more than 15,000 Afghan troops to drive out some 50,000 Taliban and foreign fighters in late 2001. But six years later, Afghanistan remains a troubled land. The Taliban, once vanquished, is resurging.

Like the early phases in Afghanistan, the early military operations in Iraq were also conducted in accord with the U.S. military's preferred style and exploited its overwhelming conventional military superiority. The early successes were ephemeral and temporary. The early occupation of Iraq went well for six months, but then turned sour as political enemies vied for national and local control. What Tom Ricks has called perhaps the worst war plan in American history" failed to secure victory as defined by our political leaders. The planning shortfalls helped create the conditions for the difficult occupation that followed. For two years, American commanders and diplomats looked for a way out, and tried to nurture along a weak government in Baghdad and shift the fight to the slowly developing Iraqi Army.

The cost for what has been accomplished to date is completely disproportionate to the limited gains. How did we get to this point?

Much more at FPRI.

From Wings Over Iraq - Starbuck finally gets his copy of Rolling Stone's 2009 Hot List...

Near the end of his presentation last Thursday at the annual CNAS conference, General David Petraeus contrasted the 2008 battle for Sadr City with the 2004 battles for Fallujah. General Petraeus left the impression that if a U.S. commander is given a sufficient quantity of enablers," especially in the form of overhead surveillance assets, the U.S. will dominate urban terrain nearly as easily as it dominates open terrain.

Small Wars Journal grew out of work Dave and Bill did early this decade on the problems posed by military operations in urban terrain (MOUT). A decade ago U.S. ground forces realized that they could no longer ignore urban terrain as had been doctrine during the Cold War -- irregular adversaries had displaced to cities for concealment.

But is General Petraeus's implied assertion correct? Has the U.S. solved the urban combat problem, thus denying irregular adversaries perhaps their best redoubt? If so, how will these adversaries adjust?

Readers, please give your views in the comments.

Here are excerpts from General Petraeus's remarks to the CNAS conference, as delivered:

And so briefly, this is what we did in Sadr City, by the way. And we created this slide to capture an incredible moment: how we did Sadr City in contrast to how we fought Fallujah. Fallujah in 2004 was a bit more of the old -- because we didn't [have] all these enablers. We had to clear street by street. We used tanks. We used every enabler we had but we had nowhere near the number of platforms that we were able to put up over [Sadr City].

[...]

What we did over time as we -- to support one great brigade commander Colonel John Hort, 3rd brigade, 4th infantry division. He had the world at his disposal: 11 unmanned aerial vehicles include two [P]redators, armed full motion video with Hellfire missiles, special intelligence birds, special [SOF] bird and then these other Shadows and Ravens, three each, 24 hours a day, blimps with optics looking into the city, towers with optics looking into the city, ringed it with radars to tell us precisely where the rounds were coming from, and then everything even above it all the way up to national technical means, and all the way down to sniper, SEAL snipers, tanks, Bradleys, [Strykers], infantry and certainly Iraqi security forces.

And over time, in the course of a two to three-week campaign, we destroyed 77 rocket teams in the act of shooting rockets [which] were going back to their cache, because we had very good intelligence over time on this including folks inside the city, I might add, from various intelligence organizations sources. And then, also took [out] 780 militia members during very tough fighting because we had to clear and hold about one quarter to one third of the city just to deny one particular spot from which they had zeroed in with 107-millimeter rockets.

This is how we fight when we can with all of the assets that we have. And we are in fact shifting -- augmenting substantially the numbers of these kinds of assets in Afghanistan while still maintaining what we have to a large degree in Iraq so that we can indeed accomplish the tasks and the responsible drawdown policy strategy that has been established for Iraq and which is on track, I might add. So this is the answer.

So what do I mean in a contemporary context by solving the urban combat problem?"

1) The same end-state achieved from traditional" urban combat -- control of the geography and population,

2) No need for coalition ground forces to go house-to-house, wrecking the city in the process,

3) Much reduced risk to coalition forces, resulting in few friendly casualties,

4) Much reduced non-combatant casualties and refugee flows, resulting from persistent observation and precision fires,

5) Perhaps most important, no climactic drama and resulting media attention.

So was the 2008 battle for Sadr City a one-off, the result of unique circumstances? Or is it a model for future U.S. MOUT operations? If U.S.-led coalition forces can dominate urban terrain almost as cleanly and cheaply as open terrain, what are the consequences for irregular adversaries? And how might they adapt?

Readers, I welcome your comments.

Small Wars Journal is very happy and proud to welcome aboard Robert Haddick. Robert joins SWJ as a regular blogger -- he already has 20 Small Wars Journal This Week at War posts at Foreign Policy under his belt -- and as our managing editor.

From 1988 to 2006 Robert was Director of Research, investment portfolio manager, and later a consultant to The Fremont Group, a large private investment firm and an affiliate of Bechtel Corporation. He established the firm's global proprietary investment operation; led a research and trading network spanning the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia; and was president of one of Fremont's overseas investment subsidiaries. Robert frequently advised the Board of Directors and other top level committees on geopolitical, macro-economic, and investment market trends.

Robert was an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in the 3rd Marine Regiment, deployed with a Marine Amphibious Unit, and participated in numerous exercises with host nation military forces in Asia and Africa. He was a staff officer in 1st Battalion, 12th Marines and later commanded a rifle company in the 23rd Marine Regiment.

Robert's writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The American, New York Post, and TCS Daily. He started the blog Westhawk in 2005. He has been interviewed on CNBC and NPR.

AFRICOM Building Research Center - John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes.

A social science research center is under development at US Africa Command headquarters, where researchers from the academic world are being recruited to help map the complicated human terrain on the African continent.

The research center, which falls under AFRICOM's knowledge development division, will be designed to focus on the long-term with an eye toward forecasting potential flashpoints and preventing them from developing into conflicts.

But mixing military and social science has long been a source of controversy, going all the way back to the Vietnam era when information collected by researchers was used for targeting people.

More recently, the Army's Human Terrain System, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been met with resistance from groups such as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, made up of social scientists opposed to the mingling of academia and the military.

Though defenders of the Human Terrain System argue that social scientists are providing information to commanders that potentially can reduce levels of violence, opponents say human terrain mapping benefits the US military, not local populations...

More at Stars and Stripes.

'Mindless' Basic Training Gets Some Smarts - David Wood, Politics Daily.

When seasoned combat soldiers began returning from the war to help train new recruits here, the first thing they did was to stop training for what the Army called "convoy live fire.''

Nobody actually does that in Iraq or Afghanistan, they explained.

In fact, they said, much of what the Army was teaching its new recruits at this premier training center was wrong or irrelevant to actual combat...

That it took five years to get this stopped says something about the Army.

It also provides a glimpse into a struggle inside the Army and, indeed, across the entire U.S. military. Let's call it the combat military versus the "garrison'' or "headquarters'' or "always done it this way'' military.

This is the dynamic behind Defense Secretary Robert Gates' effort to refocus the gigantic defense budget on real combat needs for today's wars -- and the resistance from the bureaucracies and defense contractors entrenched around lower priority budget programs...

Much more at Politics Daily.