The intellectual complement to Zinni and Clancy's bestselling Battle Ready (2004), a narrative memoir salted with specific policy recommendations, this volume provides the former US Central Command chief's analysis of America's current global position. Zinni begins by asserting that America's status as "the most powerful nation in the history of the planet" has created a de facto empire. The US has no choice: if it fails to take the lead, nothing significant happens. At the same time, Americans must recognize that, in a global age, there can be no zero-sum games.
The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education - Craig Mullaney
The Unforgiving Minute is the ultimate's soldier's book - universal in its raw emotion and its understanding of the larger issues of life and death. Mullaney, a master storyteller, plunges the depths of self-doubt, endurance, and courage. The result: a riveting, suspenseful human story, beautifully told. This is a book written under fire - a lyrical, spellbinding tale of war, love, and courage. The Unforgiving Minute is the Three Cups of Tea of soldiering.
Great Powers: America and the World after Bush - Thomas P.M. Barnett
In civilian and military circles alike, The Pentagon's New Map became one of the most talked about books of 2004. "A combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Carl von Clausewitz on war, [it is] the red-hot book among the nation's admirals and generals," wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Barnett's second book, Blueprint for Action, demonstrated how to put the first book's principles to work. Now, in Great Powers, Barnett delivers his most sweeping - and important - book of all.
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One - David Kilcullen
A remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa.
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 - Thomas Ricks
Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.
Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned - Rufus Phillips
Phillips details how the legendary Edward G. Lansdale helped the South Vietnamese gain and consolidate their independence between 1954 and 1956, and how this later changed to a reliance on American conventional warfare with its highly destructive firepower. He reasons that our failure to understand the Communists, our South Vietnamese allies, or even ourselves took us down the wrong road. In summing up US errors in Vietnam, Phillips draws parallels with the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests changes in the US approach. Known for his intellectual integrity and firsthand, long-term knowledge of what went on in Vietnam, the author offers lessons for today in this trenchant account.
Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq - Peter Mansoor
This is a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on the Iraq war, analyzing the day-to-day performance of a US brigade in Baghdad during 2004-2005. Mansoor uses a broad spectrum of sources to address the military, political and cultural aspects of an operation undertaken with almost no relevant preparation, which tested officers and men to their limits and generated mistakes and misjudgments on a daily basis. The critique is balanced, perceptive and merciless - and Mansoor was the brigade commander. Military history is replete with command memoirs. Most are more or less self-exculpatory. Even the honest ones rarely achieve this level of analysis. The effect is like watching a surgeon perform an operation on himself. Mansoor has been simultaneously a soldier and a scholar, able to synergize directly his military and academic experiences.
The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq - Bing West
From a universally respected combat journalist, a gripping history based on five years of front-line reporting about how the war was turned around - and the choice now facing America. We interpret reality through the clouded prism of our own experience, so it is unsurprising that Bing West sees Iraq through the lens of Vietnam. He served as a Marine officer there, and he thinks politicians and the media caused the American public to turn against a war that could have been won. Now a correspondent for the Atlantic, West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the "endgame" in Iraq turns out better than in his last war.
Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq - Linda Robinson
After a series of disastrous missteps in its conduct of the war, the White House in 2006 appointed General David Petraeus as the Commanding General of the coalition forces. Tell Me How This Ends is an inside account of his attempt to turn around a failing war. Linda Robinson conducted extensive interviews with Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and spent weeks with key US and Iraqi divisions. The result is the only book that ties together military operations in Iraq and the internecine political drama that is at the heart of the civil war. Replete with dramatic battles, behind-doors confrontations, and astute analysis, the book tells the full story of the Iraq War's endgame, and lays out the options that will be facing the next president.
The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 - Bob Woodward
Woodward interviewed key players, obtained dozens of never-before-published documents, and had nearly three hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush. The result is a stunning, firsthand history of the years from mid-2006, when the White House realizes the Iraq strategy is not working, through the decision to surge another 30,000 US troops in 2007, and into mid-2008, when the war becomes a fault line in the presidential election. As violence in Iraq reaches unnerving levels in 2006, a second front in the war rages at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In his fourth book on President George W. Bush, Bob Woodward takes readers deep inside the tensions, secret debates, unofficial backchannels, distrust and determination within the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the US military headquarters in Iraq. With unparalleled intimacy and detail, this gripping account of a president at war describes a period of distress and uncertainty within the US government from 2006 through mid-2008. The White House launches a secret strategy review that excludes the military. General George Casey, the commander in Iraq, believes that President Bush does not understand the war and eventually concludes he has lost the president's confidence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also conduct a secret strategy review that goes nowhere. On the verge of revolt, they worry that the military will be blamed for a failure in Iraq.
We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam - Harold Moore and Joe Galloway
In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries - often with surprising results. It would be a monumental task for Moore and Galloway to top their classic 1992 memoir. But they come close in this sterling sequel, which tells the backstory of two of the Vietnam War's bloodiest battles (in which Moore participated as a lieutenant colonel), their first book and a 1993 ABC-TV documentary that brought them back to the battlefield. Moore's strong first-person voice reviews the basics of the November 1965 battles, part of the 34-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Among other things, Moore and Galloway (who covered the battle for UPI) offer portraits of two former enemy commanders, generals Nguyen Huu An and Chu Huy Man, whom the authors met - and bonded with - nearly three decades after the battle. This book proves again that Moore is an exceptionally thoughtful, compassionate and courageous leader (he was one of a handful of army officers who studied the history of the Vietnam wars before he arrived) and a strong voice for reconciliation and for honoring the men with whom he served.
In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point' Class of 2002 - Bill Murphy
The West Point cadets Murphy follows through their baptism by fire are an admirable sample of young American men and women: intelligent, ambitious and intensely patriotic. Most come from career military families and hold conservative opinions. Murphy describes their four years at West Point with respect even when discussing their love lives and marriages. All yearn for battle, and most get their wish. The book's best passages describe the confusion of moving to Iraq or Afghanistan and fighting insurgents, for which they lack both training and equipment. All feel something is not right but concentrate on the job at hand; some inevitably die or are grievously wounded.
Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy - Steven Metz
Today the US military is more nimble, mobile, and focused on rapid responses against smaller powers than ever before. One could argue that the Gulf War and the postwar standoff with Saddam Hussein hastened needed military transformation and strategic reassessments in the post--Cold War era. But the preoccupation with Iraq also mired the United States in the Middle East and led to a bloody occupation. What will American strategy look like after US troops leave Iraq? Metz concludes that the United States has a long-standing, continuing problem "developing sound assumptions when the opponent operates within a different psychological and cultural framework." He sees a pattern of misjudgments about Saddam and Iraq based on Western cultural and historical bias and a pervasive faith in the superiority of America's worldview and institutions. This myopia contributed to America being caught off guard by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, then underestimating his longevity, and finally miscalculating the likelihood of a stable and democratic Iraq after he was toppled. With lessons for all readers concerned about America's role in the world, Dr. Metz's important new work will especially appeal to scholars and students of strategy and international security studies, as well as to military professionals and DOD civilians. With a foreword by Colin S. Gray.
I see the Taliban as a loose confederation of shifting tactical alliances of convenience, and there's a lot of opportunity for negotiation and for splitting that Taliban alliance. But we've got to do that from a position of strength so that we are not negotiating for stay of execution (for Western forces), but we're negotiating for genuine national reconciliation.
More at Reuters.
Combined Arms Center Senior Leader Conference
Fort Leavenworth, KS, 3 February 2009
Earlier this month, I was invited to address the senior leaders of the U.S. Army's Training and Education community at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This event, hosted by LTG William Caldwell, brought together the commandants of the Army's training and education centers to discuss issues of importance to their community. LTG Caldwell asked me, along with Beth Cole of the U.S. Institute of Peace, UK LtCol. Mike Redmond, of the U.S. Army's Stability Operations Office, and retired French LTG Raffenne to discuss how to operationalize the "Comprehensive Approach," which is the guiding theme of the Army's new Field Manual, FM 3-07 Stability Operations. Although I did not have formally prepared remarks, the following is an attempt to transcribe my messy handwritten speaker notes from my little brown book into something more concrete to share with the SWJ readership.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. Thank you LTG Caldwell for your leadership and passion for this important topic -- the Comprehensive Approach. CAC is doing some amazing and innovative things. From student blogging at CGSC to the latest doctrinal manuals, you have been leading the way in adaptation and learning. Operationalizing the comprehensive approach will be a great interagency challenge. Your efforts here, and with your latest civil-military center for security force assistance and stability operations will be a valuable resource for the Army -- and the government as a whole -- to continue to learn and adapt.
You might wonder how a former Air Force cargo pilot became interested in these topics -- counterinsurgency, stability operations, and he comprehensive approach. Well, about six years ago, I came to DC on a Brookings pre-doctoral fellowship. On the very first day, at the welcome reception, I met the Army fellow, a Colonel with a PhD in military history, who asked me about my planned research. I told him that I had been frustrated as an AF pilot when I kept finding myself doing "non-traditional" missions like humanitarian operations, disaster relief and peace operations support in the Balkans. It wasn't the missions, per se, but rather the resistance of my leadership to those missions. Instead of embracing them and organizing in ways to support them, we kept treating them like aberrations. This approach treated every contingency like an emergency and effectively kept us on alert 24/7. Given that experience, I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on why the military can't or won't focus on peace operations, which from my perspective seem to be the main effort for the foreseeable future.
Dave nodded sagely and said, "I think I can help you with that..."
The next day when I got to my office, there was a 1994 copy of Military Review on my desk. On it was a little yellow sticky note that read: "Janine, take a look at the article tagged here and maybe you will see that the Army has not been flat on its ass when it comes to peace operations!"
Inside was an article by then-LTC Dave Gray and Colonel Charles Swannack relating their experience in training for peace operations at the new Joint Readiness Training Center, in Fort Polk Louisiana and how it related directly to their missions in Haiti. This was the beginning of my education about Army training -- and Army organizational learning. I discovered that there was a large part of the institution that had begun to "get it." Their institutional experience in the 1990's, combined with the Army's post-Vietnam organizational learning culture, would serve them well when the time came in 2004 to adapt the rest of the organization for counterinsurgency in Iraq.
The following year, in the fall of 2004, Dave invited me to Fort Campbell, KY to interview his soldiers for my research. Dave was the Brigade Commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st. They were preparing for their second tour to Iraq. Many of the soldiers had fought in the initial invasion and then with MG Petraeus in the post-conflict phase in Mosul. It was this stabilization and reconstruction, post-combat phase I was most interested in.
In one of my group interviews with junior officers and NCO's, I asked the soldiers what it was like to try to work with civil affairs officers from other units. I was surprised to hear that many generally felt it was that it was more trouble than it was worth. CA officers rarely brought any 'stuff;' no money, no vehicles, etc. etc., making them a net "drain" on the unit. Plus, they hadn't trained together so there was a lot of wasted time familiarizing them into the unit. As an outsider, it sounded to me like these fellow Army officers were viewed as an entirely separate organization -- as far apart culturally as the military might be with someone joining their team from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or an NGO. When I offered that comparison to the young officers I was shocked by their response... "What is USAID?"
Military vs. Civilian Capability and Capacity
We have come a long way in just a few short years. Today, the question from soldiers is not What is USAID, but Where is USAID? The military's new doctrine for both stability operations and counterinsurgency makes it perfectly clear that the military cannot do this stuff alone. As Mike Redmond pointed out, the comprehensive approach requires complimentary efforts by a large variety of civilian and military experts. But as Beth Cole clearly related, the civilian side of our national security structure is vastly under-resourced and, despite calls from Secretary of Defense Gates, Chairman Mullen, and others, it is going to be a very long time before this imbalance is remedied.
Mike Redmond's predecessor, Colonel Simon Wolsey, used to have a clever power point slide. It had two arrows -- one coming from the left, depicting civilian capacity development; and the other from the right, depicting the Army's stability operations capability development. When people asked him how far the Army was going to go on that vector, he would always say, "until these two arrow heads meet" -- which everyone knew meant that the Army was going to be getting a lot better at this stuff before the civilians caught up.
So, if the nation is to succeed in the short and maybe the medium term, the military will continue to need to fill this gap. But in the medium to long term, the military will need prepare itself for the eventual arrival of more civilian partners. I think this will be much harder than we actually think it will be.
In my previous job in the Pentagon, I worked with Simon on stability operations capability development. We constantly ran into the same competing objections to change. The military experts would say they could not possibly estimate what type of new military capabilities were needed unless and until they knew exactly what the civilians were bringing to the game. That is a pretty fair question. From a taxpayer perspective, we do not need the military duplicating what already exists or is being developed elsewhere in the U.S. national security tool kit. Unfortunately, the civilians would claim that they could not possibly answer that question unless and until they knew what, exactly, the military meant when they said "military support to..." civilian partners.
Indeed, answering that question -- really unpacking what we mean when we say the military is the "enabler" in such operations -- is the key intellectual question for this community if we are to truly operationalize the comprehensive approach.
"Military Support To..."
If you are a civilian in Afghanistan or Iraq, you have skills and knowledge, but you have very little support. You don't have the same life insurance, health care, logistics, or security training your military counterpart has. We cannot overestimate how much of a difference that makes. Civilians are not trained to carry weapons and in many cases are not issued body armor and helmets. Indeed, many civilians in Iraq's green zone had to purchase their own body armor. Some of these problems are being solved in the field, but are they institutionalized for the next generation?
Does 'military support to..." mean that civilians sleep on military fobs and military outposts, fly on military planes, ride in military vehicles? Or do all of these things belong to the USG anyway? When these civilians -- including contractors -- return from their long dangerous deployments, are they greeted with gratitude by the American people? Do they have health benefits and support structures to help with their PTSD? Do they have a lessons learned or after-action review system to capture their experience?
Many of these problems cannot be solved by the military, but need congressional intervention and budgeting realignment. DoD leaders can continue to advocate for their civilian counterparts, as Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates have done, but developing more empowered expeditionary civilians means taking a different tack with respect to authorities and funding. For example, USAID officers on PRT's have complained that they don't even have the same spending authority that a soldier with CERP funds has. This quote by a FSO on a PRT is telling:
"The military has the control of fairly vast resources in the form of CERP [Commander's Emergency Response Fund] monies, while the PRT has no money. If the military's vision of how these funds might best be used fits in well with the PRT's vision, it's great. On the other hand, if the military thinks it can do something we believe won't work or doesn't think what we want to do is important, we're up a tree."
Who is supporting whom in this example? If, as our doctrine suggests, the critical "lines of operation" are those associated with governance and economic development, then "military support to..." might mean the expert USAID officer tells the soldier how, when, and where to spend that CERP money. Taking direction from a civilian is not in the cultural DNA of the military officer and will take more than just bumper stickers about "enabling" and new doctrine to internalize this idea. Of course, if we are truly trying to enable civilians, we might wonder why it is the soldier and not the civilian who has the checkbook in the first place.
Some people claim that the State Department needs its own couple combat brigades to provide them support. Others might rightly point out that State Department already has them -- they are in their U.S. military. The trick is operationalizing the comprehensive approach; actually defining and internalizing a new understanding of the military's role as an "enabling force." Until we can do this, we will not be able to unlock the true power and potential of the rest of the U.S. government (and others).
In a recent article on his experience with the drug problem in Afghanistan, former Ambassador Tom Schweich describes his frustration in trying to work with the military. The military policy was to "have someone else clean up the drug business" in Afghanistan. The military agreed it would play a supporting role. In the end, however, the promised support (e.g. helicopters and ramp space in Kabul airfield) were not delivered.
In contrast to the many poor examples such as Ambassador Schweich's Afghanistan story, there are plenty of other areas where mid-level civilians and military have worked it out. One example is the new Army Stability Operations Manual. FM 3-07 was a truly innovative, whole of government effort. LTC Leonard, the chief author, went beyond interagency vetting and reviewing of the manuscript. Instead, he developed the manual in an interagency forum from the start. Through workshops and roundtables with thought leaders and practitioners from myriad other agencies and non-governmental organizations, LTC Leonard was able to get to ground truth about what needed to be done in these operations and what we might actually expect from each other on the ground. The process of developing this manual reflects a sincere whole of government effort that, if emulated in other areas, will go a long way to operationalizing the comprehensive approach.
Reading the manual, one realizes, however, how much more intellectual work there is to do. The manual reflects the military's preference to operate as an enabling or supporting entity; but stops short of the nitty-gritty detail of what that means for commanders on the ground. This is where the intellectual leadership of the Army, through its education, training, planning, and concepts efforts can provide a great service by intellectually, and even doctrinally, unpacking this role.
Next Steps:
If and when the civilian experts that the military is hoping for do show up, the military will need to be prepared. Specifically, they will need to have internalized what they mean when they say they will "support" the other elements of national power to accomplish the key lines of operation (e.g. governance, rule of law, economic development, etc). Supporting these efforts will not mean staying in the purely 'kinetic' or security lane. These civil-military lines are overlapping and intersecting. Coordinating all elements of power will require civilians and military actors to understand the complex environment and have agreed upon frameworks for action.
The following are a few suggestions on how the intellectual leadership of the Army might ensure that the next generation of soldiers is ready to fulfill their "supporting" roles.
Conops: Interagency concepts of operation that operationalize the latest doctrine (including FM 3-07 and the U.S. Institute of Peace's forthcoming civilian counterpart) will more clearly articulate who will do what and how. It is important for the institutional learning process that these conops and any exercises associated with them, be developed through an interagency process by experienced soldiers and civilians currently in these agencies. From here, memorandums of agreement, if needed, can be crafted or otherwise replaced by interagency doctrine that describes how civilian efforts will be supported by military assets and expertise. This process will also help uncover legal or policy barriers to coordination that can be targeted for change.
Terminology: We can no longer pretend that words do not matter. "Diplomacy" and "development" for instance lose some of their meaning when re-crafted as "conflict prevention" or "shaping." Thus we cannot expect diplomats and aid workers to be amenable to having their missions recast as such. But the most toxic and possibly counterproductive term in the current military lexicon is "irregular warfare." While our allies frown at the intellectual confusion and ambiguity of the term, our own diplomats have more serious problems. Although the term has been useful in generating a paradigm shift among warriors who bristled at sissy terms like "peace operations" or even "stability ops," diplomats and aid workers rightly resist having their missions cast as a type of "war." This is not just a failure for these national security professionals to get with the program. For them, it is just bad business to try to develop and maintain peaceful relations with countries around the world if those countries (whose leaders do read our concepts and doctrine) think that the embassy is supporting or conducting war -- however "irregular" -- in their country. If we are serious about adopting a comprehensive approach for the challenges of the 21st century conflict environment, then we should seriously reconsider our current passion for this term.
Integrated training and education: Civil-military operations are like a symphony in which each musician has a unique skill and a different instrument. Each learns to play and practice alone; but then comes together to practice for the real performance. Unlike a symphony, however, in stability operations and counterinsurgency, we have had neither the same sheets of music nor a conductor in the field. Thus, it is critical that people from various agencies and organizations are able to practice together before deployment. This does not mean that military and civilian need to have completely shared educational institutions and professional development; but rather that they have the opportunity to come together to learn and train many times throughout their careers -- and especially before and after deployment.
Information Sharing: As the stability operations manual makes clear, a comprehensive approach requires a "3C's" approach to "coordinate, collaborate, and cooperate." None of this can occur without a 4th C: "communicate." Unfortunately, a competing imperative for cyber security has meant that our ability to communicate with each other within the government -- much less with outside agencies -- has been stymied. In the Pentagon, flash drives are outlawed and encrypted messages are sometimes blocked by the State Department. This can send frustrated government workers to their personal emails to get their jobs done, thus undermining the efforts of the IT professionals. Although the cyber threat may be real, if we cannot find ways to communicate in these civil-military environments, our efforts to operationalize the comprehensive approach will be for naught.
In sum, we rightly look to Congress and the other leaders in Washington to enhance capacity on the non-military sides of our government. Much work remains in order to field truly expeditionary civilians, including providing these professionals with the tools they need to succeed such as health care, life insurance, and security training equipment. Meanwhile, the military should not be sanguine about how much easier their job will be once more civilians show up. While more civilians with diverse expertise and skill sets on the ground will greatly enhance our ability succeed; this will not occur without the military doing its job in supporting and enabling these civilians. The military must prepare now for the steady increase in the numbers of non-military partners. The first step for the military to operationalize the comprehensive approach will be to do the hard intellectual work to define, teach, and internalize what "military support to..." actually means.
About Janine Davidson:
Ashton Carter is expected to be named soon as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics.
Janine Davidson as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy / Planning.
Theresa Whelan staying on as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa.
Phillip Carter as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Issues.
Craig Mullaney as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Central Asia.
To the crew at Small Wars Journal:
I'm a pretty religious reader of your site but have not been a commenter or contributor to date. This morning, an Army officer friend sent me this short article, which he had received from a mutual friend in the State Department. I thought it might create some interesting discussion on your site.
The piece, which was published in the February issue of the Foreign Service Journal (Improving the PRT-Military Professional Relationship by Captain Sean Walsh), offers suggestions from an Army Captain on how foreign service officers can work more effectively as part of PRTs. In a nutshell, his recommendations are 1) recognize that the military is in charge; 2) shape your priorities accordingly; 3) learn our lingo; and 4) don't bum rides from us. It struck us all as an extraordinarily narrow and counterproductive mindset, especially coming from a young officer. At any rate, perhaps you can use.
Hat tip to Mark for sending this along.
CNAS is thrilled to announce that Michele Flournoy, our President and Co-Founder, was confirmed by the Senate and sworn-in last week as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. While we will miss Michele's leadership, drive, and deep knowledge of national security issues, we know she will do great things for the country and the Department of Defense.
Michele's appointment underscores the transition that CNAS itself is undergoing, and so we wish to take this opportunity to make several announcements about our organization and its ongoing mission of developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security policies.
Staff Changes
Dr. John Nagl, acclaimed author, West Point graduate, Rhodes scholar, retired Army officer, and Bronze Star recipient, will replace Michele as President of CNAS. John is widely respected for co-writing the U.S. Army's counterinsurgency field manual, for his book Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, and for his willingness to guide and mentor members of the younger generation of national security leaders.
Nate Tibbits, our former Chief Operating Officer, has accepted a position in Presidential Personnel dealing with national security personnel. We are pleased to announce Nathaniel Fick as our new Chief Operating Officer. Nate Fick, author of the New York Times bestseller One Bullet Away, is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq before attending the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School.
In addition to John and Nate, we've also added a distinguished senior fellow to our ranks: Thomas Ricks, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq 2006-2008, published this week.
Board Moves
We are pleased to announce that with the completion of former Secretary of Defense William Perry's tenure as Chairman of the Board of Directors, the Honorable Richard J. Danzig has taken the helm as Chairman of the Board. We thank Secretary Perry for his leadership and guidance as Chairman, and look forward to continuing to work closely with him as a member of the Board. Richard Danzig, one of this nation's premier defense and national security practitioners and most committed public servants, will help build on the strong foundation Secretary Perry established.
We are pleased to announce that the Honorable R. Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, has joined the Board of Directors of CNAS. We could not be more excited to have such a fine public servant as part of the CNAS family.
It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
I spent a good part of last night corresponding with COL Gian Gentile -- an Army officer I greatly respect and consider a dear friend. While we often find ourselves on the opposite poles of the COIN -- conventional warfare debate -- I relayed to him that this debate is a worthy debate -- critical to the future of our armed forces. He deserves the highest credit for pushing this debate into the public domain.
Gian did this, all the while opening himself up to both warranted and unwarranted criticism. He stood in the arena while others either cheered or jeered from the sidelines. I cannot express how impressed I am with those who actually take a stand -- those who stand tall in that arena.
Gian, as I said in at least two e-mails -- you done good and have everything to be proud of. I salute you sir -- as a brother in arms and as a loyal friend.
Semper Fi,
Dave
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decision to make Asia the destination of her first official trip sends a positive signal to the region. It indicates the Obama administration's realization that Asia will become the center of gravity of international politics in the decades ahead. Assuming Asian countries resume their strong economic growth after the current recession, within decades they will account for more of the world's economy than do Europe and the United States combined. In addition, Asia simmers with political and security competition...
More at National Review.
With three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new "Mumbai model" of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.
While it's true that the assaults in Kabul seem to be echoes of Mumbai, the fact is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using these sorts of swarm tactics for several years. Jemaah Islamiyah - the group responsible for the Bali nightclub attack that killed 202 people in 2002 - mounted simultaneous attacks on 16 Christian churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve in 2000, befuddling security forces...
More at The New York Times.
