Michí¨le Flournoy, President and Co-Founder of CNAS, will moderate the discussion on the nature of duty, sacrifice, and officership in a time of war, to take place on October 1, 2008, from 4:00pm to 7:00pm, in the Willard's Crystal Room. Join these Iraq war veterans and the author of an important new book on the sacrifices of young American Army officers for a discussion about country, service, and officership in a time of war.

Date/Time:

October 1, 2008

Panel Discussion: 4:00 pm to 5:45 pm

Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres: 5:45 pm to 7:00 pm

Location:

Willard InterContinental Hotel's Crystal Room

1401 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C., 20004

RSVP:

Online Registration, Click Here

Or, RSVP by phone: (202) 457-9427

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is an independent and nonpartisan research institution that develops strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies that promote and protect American interests and values. CNAS leads efforts to help inform and prepare the national security leaders of today and tomorrow.

The Iraq war has faded as an item of interest to the national press because the violence has plummeted, while a consensus has formed that the American military learned from experience and now knows what it's doing. In 2006, we were losing the war; today, the military trajectory is encouraging, and US forces are slowly withdrawing. During my 15th trip to Iraq in August, for the first time I didn't hear a shot fired. In several cities, I walked into markets with only a few American soldiers, and was immediately surrounded by Iraqis eager to talk about the economy, security, politics, whatever.

Normality? Nowhere close. Concrete barriers (designed to restrict the flesh-ripping radius of suicide bombers) were still in place, enclosing neighborhoods in Baghdad and a dozen other cities. Car bombings and criminal kidnappings persisted, as did battles against disparate al-Qaeda cells and Shiite insurgent gangs incited by Iran. Still, Iraq was not engulfed in civil war. The Sunni resistance had largely collapsed.

A sure sign that the war in Iraq has turned around has been the rush to take credit. Victory has a thousand fathers. This would seem a harmless parlor game, were Afghanistan not looming. Military success in Iraq is sure to lead to lessons to be applied in Afghanistan. Let's make sure we pick the right lessons.

What did cause the turnaround since 2006? Three competing explanations have popped up. Some have claimed that covert operations, involving the use of top-secret technical devices, are what drove the insurgency's leaders from Iraq. Others attribute the turnaround to Bush's decision in January 2007 to add 30,000 more troops. And still others suggest that it is the brilliance of General Petraeus, who took command in Iraq in February of 2007, that we have to thank for the improvements.

Much more at The Atlantic.

Background

In this work, Patrick Kelley interprets the intelligence environment of political, military and information empires. His contribution sheds light on the cause of enduring intelligence collection deficits that afflict the center of such empires, and that can coincide with their ebb and flow. Alert intelligence practitioners, present and future, can note here just how useful a fresh interpretation of the intelligence enterprise can be to a coherent understanding of the global stream of worrisome issues. The long-term value of this work will be realized as readers entertain the implications of Churchill's comment that "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

The manuscript for this book was reviewed by scholars and intelligence practitioners, and was approved for public release by the Department of Defense's Office of Security Review.

Selected Review Commentary Excerpts

Good intelligence, in both senses of the word, has been notably missing in U.S. foreign policy over the past several years. Skillfully moving from the Roman to the Ottoman to the British empires, adeptly applying ideas from a wide range of Eastern and Western philosophies, Patrick Kelley has produced a remarkable set of lessons-yet-to-be-learned for the United States. Full of trans-historical and cross-cultural insights, this is the perfect supplement and essential sequel to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counter-Insurgency Field Manual. Francis Bacon said knowledge is power: Kelley makes it so.

Patrick Kelley is that rare scholar-soldier who has dared to be self-reflexive. His monograph on "Imperial Intelligence" is carefully researched and lucidly written. Considering how crucial the question of intelligence gathering is, an understanding of its history should be of great interest to scholars, to statesmen, to intelligence gathering departments, and to interested non-specialist readers as well.

As Patrick Kelley observes near the close of this book, "all intelligence is fundamentally historicized." One of the main reasons we study history is to escape the insularity of the present, to overcome the unwarranted exceptionalism that so oft en afflicts our sense of ourselves, to remind us that the problems we face can be found to echo those of our predecessors. Kelley brings an historical perspective brilliantly to bear on contemporary America's intelligence capabilities and limitations, identifying its "way of knowing" as a distinctively imperial one and demonstrating that it shares much in common with the intelligence challenges of the Roman, the Ottoman, and the British empires.

Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire

Nathaniel Fick is a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to joining CNAS, he served as a Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance officer, including operational assignments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. In 2007, Fick was a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, among other publications, and he is a frequent contributor to CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

Vikram Singh is a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He works on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Asia Initiative '09, and a range of CNAS defense strategy and planning projects. Prior to joining CNAS Mr. Singh worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Security Affairs, where he was responsible for strategic initiatives to improve the US military's work with partner nations including the policy oversight and management of a joint Department of Defense and Department of State program to train and equip foreign military forces around the world.

Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, also called Obsession, is a 2006 documentary movie about Islamist teachings and goals which uses extensive Arab and Iranian television footage.

Obsession compares the threat of radical Islamism with that of Nazism before World War II, and draws parallels between radical Islamists and the Nazi Party during the War, specifically Adolf Hitler's relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as an inspiration for radical Islamic movements in the Middle East today.

The film features analysis by counter-terrorism figures such as Nonie Darwish (the daughter of a Fedayeen soldier), Alan M. Dershowitz, Steven Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel, Martin Gilbert, Caroline Glick, Alfons Heck, Glen Jenvey, John Loftus, Salim Mansur, Itamar Marcus, Khaleel Mohammed, Daniel Pipes, Tashbih Sayyed, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, Robert Wistrich and interviews with Israeli officials and a former PLO operative.

Recently (September 2008) the Clarion Fund distributed DVDs of the film by mail, and in newspaper advertising supplements, predominantly in swing states for the upcoming presidential election.

The Huffington Post on the Clarion Fund: A shadowy organization is financing the delivery this month of millions of DVDs of the controversial video Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. The video, which has been widely criticized as hostile to Muslims, has been inserted in numerous national and major-city newspapers.

Newspapers reported to have carried the DVD included the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald, and Raleigh News and Observer

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) calls Obsession "a well-planned con."

The video above is a 12-minute abridged version. Trailers and clips can be viewed here and the full 77-minute version on DVD can be purchased here.

Sources for the above include Wikipedia, CAIR, and the official Obsession web page. This posting was prompted by various news services citing outrage over recent distribution of Obsession, bringing this 2006 video to our attention, once again.

From Use Anthropology in Military Planning by Wired's Noah Shachtman:

... Traditionally, the military has relied almost solely on so-called hard sciences like nuclear physics and electronics. But as a simple regime-change operation in Iraq descended into a baffling counterinsurgency, it became clear that you can have the most advanced sensors, the toughest armor, the most precise GPS-guided munitions, but without any insight into the civilian population - or at least some sense of how they'll react to your moves - your war effort is sunk.

By 2004, McFate had made her way into the national security establishment as a researcher at Rand. (This despite an unusual background — she grew up on a barge in the San Francisco Bay and had hung out with well-known beat poets.) McFate's ideas (shared by a growing number in the military) caught the attention of the science adviser to the joint chiefs of staff. She then codified them in a pair of landmark articles in Military Review outlining a rationale and strategy for integrating the social sciences into national defense. Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology, and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. "What you're trying to do is understand the people's interests," she says. "Because whoever is more effective at meeting the interests of the population will be able to influence it."...

More at Wired and at Shachtman's post on Wired's Danger Room blog.

Discuss at Small Wars Council.

... The objective was to assess whether the planning framework was "able to incorporate and account for" civilian and military relationships, roles, responsibilities and authorities, and that the framework can support the execution of the "strategic interagency planning process"...

The LOE replicated a joint staff tasked with developing policy and an operations plan for responding to an insurgency. This included using a country reconstruction stabilization group to conduct interagency planning.

JFCOM also created an integration planning cell that looks at a strategic plan that has been developed or as it's being developed... and "actually deploys down to the combatant-command level to help harmonize the civilian and military plans."

JFCOM concluded that the planning framework used during the LOE provides the necessary guidance but further work has to be done to hammer out the details on how the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff will participate as each has its own unique strategic planning process.

While DOD has its own strategic planning systems, until now it lacked one that spanned across numerous government agencies...

ITN also reported on the three documents JFCOM plans to produce dealing with the issues raised by the LOE.

One is a companion "practitioner's guide . . . kind of a how-to book" that will be released in the October or November time frame...

The second document will be a joint force commanders' handbook outlining "their role in the system," he said, adding it will be ready in January or February.

The third document will be a LOE report on the experiment's findings. The last officially released Unified Action related document by JFCOM was the US Government Draft Planning Framework for Reconstruction, Stabilization, and Conflict Transformation dated December 2005.