Summary

In 2004, the Department of State created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to coordinate U.S. planning and implementation of stabilization and reconstruction operations. In December 2005, President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44 (NSPD-44), charging State with improving coordination, planning, and implementation of such operations and ensuring that the United States can respond quickly and effectively to overseas crises. GAO was asked to report on State's efforts to improve (1) interagency planning and coordination for stabilization and reconstruction operations, and (2) deployment of civilians to these operations. To address these objectives, we conducted interviews with officials and reviewed documents from U.S. agencies and government and private research centers.

The office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) is developing a framework for planning and coordinating U.S. reconstruction and stabilization operations. The National Security Council (NSC) has adopted two of three primary elements of the framework--the Interagency Management System and procedures for initiating the framework's use. However, the third element--a guide for planning stabilization and reconstruction operations--is still in progress. We cannot determine how effective the framework will be because it has not been fully applied to any stabilization and reconstruction operation. In addition, guidance on agencies' roles and responsibilities is unclear and inconsistent, and the lack of an agreed-upon definition for stabilization and reconstruction operations poses an obstacle to interagency collaboration. Moreover, some interagency partners stated that senior officials have shown limited support for the framework and S/CRS. Some partners described the new planning process, as presented in early versions of the planning guide, as cumbersome and too time consuming for the results it has produced. S/CRS has taken steps to strengthen the framework by addressing some interagency concerns and providing training to interagency partners. However, differences in the planning capacities and procedures of civilian agencies and the military pose obstacles to effective coordination. State has begun developing three civilian corps that can deploy rapidly to international crises, but key details for establishing and maintaining these units remain unresolved. First, State created the Active Response Corps (ARC) and the Standby Response Corps (SRC) comprised of U.S. government employees to act as first responders to international crises and has worked with several agencies to create similar units. However, these efforts are limited due to State's difficulty in achieving planned staffing levels for ARC, a lack of training available to SRC volunteers, other agencies' inability to secure resources for operations unrelated to their core domestic missions, and the possibility that deploying employees to such operations can leave units without sufficient staff. Second, in 2004, State began developing the Civilian Reserve Corps (CRC). CRC would be comprised of U.S. civilians who have skills and experiences useful for stabilization and reconstruction operations, such as police officers, civil engineers, public administrators, and judges that are not readily available within the U.S. government. If deployed, volunteers would become federal workers. S/CRS developed a plan to recruit the first 500 volunteers, and NSC has approved a plan to increase the roster to 2,000 volunteers in 2009. In May 2007, State received the authority to reallocate up to $50 million to support and maintain CRC, but it does not yet have the authority to obligate these funds. In addition, issues related to volunteers' compensation and benefits that could affect CRC recruitment and management would require congressional action. Furthermore, State has not clearly defined the types of missions for which CRC would be deployed. State has estimated the costs to establish and sustain CRC at home, but these costs do not include costs for deploying and sustaining volunteers overseas.

GAO-08-39 Highlights

GAO-08-39 Full Report

... In the Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intuitive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say.

It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition, leaving the Army little time and few resources to prepare for new threats...

Future Combat Systems - Official U.S. Army Web Page

Video Analysis of Army's Modernization Program - Washington Post

Future Combat: The Wireless War - Online Discussion with Washington Post's Alec Klein

Discuss - Small Wars Council

Abu Muqawama in DC -- Abu Muqawama. Nice meeting you AM, now I've met both of the dynamic duo. Also, the book drive is still going strong for the Afghanistan COIN Academy.

Abu Muqawama writes this post from Charlie's office.* We're about to head to the Afghanistan event as soon as she's done with a meeting. Abu Muqawama is sick with a wicked head cold and jet-lagged something fierce but quite happy all the same -- Dave over at Small Wars Journal loaded your humble blogger down with free books and DVDs today. Quite the "Welcome Back to America" present. Thanks, Dave! Speaking of free books, Abu Muqawama/Small Wars Journal readers have donated a total of 54 books (44 books + ten copies of FM 3-24) to the Afghanistan COIN Academy thus far. You guys are amazing! (You can still give, here.)

Also, a great big Hat Tip to Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap for his nice donation towards books for the Academy.

Iran's Ramazan Corps and the Ratlines into Iraq -- The Long War Journal. Bill Roggio offers up the most detailed description and analysis I've seen so far on Iran's support to Iraqi insurgents.

The issue of Iranian complicity in the Iraqi insurgency has been contentious since US and Iraqi forces began heavily targeting the Iranian networks in late 2006. While news reports have touted Iran's role in reducing the violence, US military officers believe Iran still serves as a source of weapons and fighters in Iraq.

The Long War Journal has spoken to several mid-level and senior US military and intelligence officers, all of whom have declined to go on the record due to the sensitive nature of the Iranian issue. Based on these conversations as well as other information, The Long War Journal has learned the nature of the Qods Force operations in Iraq and how they move resources into the country...

Window on a War -- From an Anthropological Perspective. Dr. Marcus Griffin on the Human Terrain System in Iraq and the CORDS program in Vietnam.

I've been trying to shake a chest cold brought on by the dramatic fluctuation in temperature from mid day to mid dawn in Baghdad. Since I don't want to share my germs in a humvee, I am largely reading and thinking about our effort. I re-read some of Gerry Hickey's Window on a War: an Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict. I was struck by the parallel I see between the war here and the war back then and how some things just don't change...

The Culture Warriors -- Anna Mulrine, U.S. News and World Report. More on the Human Terrain System and the importance of a cultural knowledge base to act on by counterinsurgents.

... The Army began training social science recruits for Iraq this year, christening the teams with a classic military appellation—human terrain system. The name may not be an attention-grabber, but the mission has been: The teams act as advisers to brigades, mapping the relationships (human terrain in military parlance) of the power players and the local people. "How do they tie into each other? It's not always obvious," says Verdon. The teams also examine how tribal leaders relate to U.S. troops, she adds. "How are they leveraging what they have to maintain their power, to be able to get what they need from coalition forces?"

The military has come late to appreciate the role that social connections play in Iraqi society, where divisions are not just geographic or religious but also familial and tribal. Understanding those kinds of connections, a key aim of anthropology, can be critical to forging alliances, assessing intelligence—and, military officials add, avoiding unintended consequences...

Tom Barnett dissects Iran's decision not to pursue nuclear weaponization at his must read blog.

The fact that Iran stopped its weapons program on nukes back in 2003 indicates the Iranians felt the same fears that Libya faced in light of our invasion of Iraq, so message received.

But it's also clear that pursuing the enrichment of uranium is not simply about getting access to nuclear-powered generation of electricity. If Iran wants that, it can achieve that under conditions more acceptable to the global community. By pursuing the enrichment on its own terms, Iran sends the strong signal that it retains the right to pursue nuclear weapons under whatever conditions it sees fit...

Max Boot deconstructs the Iran National Intelligence Estimate over at Commentary's Contention blog.

... I agree with the conclusion reached in Gabe's second post that there probably was political calculation behind the NIE, and if so it comes out in the language chosen by its authors. As pointed out by reader Ben Orlanski, and quoted by Gabe, the wording of the NIE is hardly neutral. The lead sentence—"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program"—is designed to convey an impression that we don't have to worry much about Iranian nukes.

The second sentence, claiming that Tehran's decision was "directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure" is designed to convey the impression that diplomacy is sufficient to keep Iranian ambitions in check and that no bombing is needed—even though, if Iran really did halt its weapons program in 2003, it must surely have done so in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, not to any diplomatic gambit on our part...

Turning to Africa, Clay Varney discusses a clash between State and Defense on Somalia policy at ThreatsWatch.

With the backdrop of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visiting American forces in Djibouti, the Washington Post is reporting on an internal debate among administration decision makers regarding the course of American policy in Somalia and in the Horn of Africa more broadly. The violence and instability currently taking place is a major threat to the region as it may offer the possibility of al-Qaeda gaining a safe haven in Somalia. According to the report, the Pentagon is agitating toward moving to support Somaliland, the more stable northwestern portion of Somalia that declared its independence in 1991, though this has not been recognized internationally. As a contrast, the State Department supports the continued backing of the Transitional Federal Government based in Mogadishu...

Westhawk has more on the Gates trip and on more problems for the nation-state.

During his tour this week of the front lines of the Long War, in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Gates has no doubted asked for some creative thinking from his subordinates about how to make progress on the intractable problems found there. It seems as if his military officers on the front lines have an answer for him, an answer not at all pleasing to career diplomats at the State Department, or anyone else favoring the Westphalian nation-state tradition...

Dr. David Betz on Frank Hoffman on civil-military relations over at Kings of War.

Frank Hoffman is the clearest thinker on contemporary security matters that I know. He has a piece in the latest Armed Forces Journal on US civil-military relations which will I'm sure get a few people lathered up. While Iraq and Vietnam are very different conflicts, there is a chance that their respective aftermaths may conform to similar patterns of scapegoating, blame-avoiding, and willful institutional refusal to recognize and act on the sources of defeat. Hoffman doesn't pull any punches...

All for now.

With a hat tip to an alert SWJ reader who sent this in via e-mail, we downloaded Intelligence Required for Counterinsurgency from the Central Intelligence Agency's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room.

A bit of history and an insight on how some things concerning COIN remain unchanged (excepting the focus on Communist insurgencies) is offered up in this United States Intelligence Board, Office of the Chairman, Memorandum for the Military Representative of the President dated 13 August 1963. The linked SWJ document contains the jpg images of the 11 original pages and includes the cover letter, memorandum from JCS, summary, essential elements of information for counterinsurgency actions enclosure, and countries to be considered appendix.

Other recently added items at the CIA FOI site that may be of interest (see What's New at FOIA?):

Review of Insurgency Problems - 1966

U.S. Intelligence and Vietnam - 1984

Record of Paramilitary Action Against the Castro Government of Cuba - 1961

... or search the FOI database using insurgency or counterinsurgency as a keyword for much more.

The State Department is leading an effort to issue a draft version of a counterinsurgency guide in the next four to six weeks to help Washington-based government agencies and departments defeat future subversive movements. A final doctrine is expected next year.

The effort follows last year's Army and Marine Corps manual on the same subject.

The new guide -- "Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policymakers: A Work in Progress" -- is an educational, strategic-level primer for senior policymakers, according to a State Department official in the bureau of political-military affairs.

He spoke with Inside the Pentagon this week on condition of anonymity.

The guide is different from the military manual, which is used at the operational-tactical level, the official said.

"It's inspired by that but we found that we needed to do some counterinsurgency 101 across the entire government including within State," the official said. He added the draft guide speaks to the importance of coordinated interagency assistance to the affected governments, "to help them provide security and effective governance," and spells out what planning and assessment tools are available.

The United States and its allies are fighting two counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, prompting the establishment of new doctrines based on lessons gained from these battles...

Encouraging news on a much needed addition to our COIN doctrine database. That said, there is still much work to be done before we have a workable Interagency process in place.

Update: Greg Grant, Government Executive, has more on the new Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policy Makers: A Work in Progress manual.

State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs led the effort, which was informed in part by the counterinsurgency experiences of Australia and the United Kingdom. Former Australian Army officer David Kilcullen, who recently served as an adviser to U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, is overseeing an interagency effort to produce a civilian counterinsurgency doctrine, which is due out in early 2008.

The guide is the first serious government-wide effort to create a national counterinsurgency framework since the Kennedy administration tried to stem the spread of communism in Vietnam in 1962. At that time, there was extensive interagency involvement in rural development and security efforts, particularly by USAID, which at one point had nearly 15,000 officers serving in Vietnam.

The manual combines current counterinsurgency theory with lessons learned by personnel from State, USAID, the military and other agencies. Drafters emphasized that it is not an academic document, but aims to fill a hole that exists because there is no civilian agency publication on counterinsurgency to complement the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual.

According to the guide, insurgency is "armed politics," and while military action is essential to establishing security, only political resolution will lead to ultimate success. The guide recommends that civilian and military efforts join in an integrated "clear, hold and build" strategy that focuses on first on securing the populace, then on long-term economic development assistance -- a clear reference to the counterinsurgency strategy being applied in Iraq under Petraeus.

The guide also emphasizes the importance of providing information in counterinsurgency operations to create a narrative enhancing an embattled government's legitimacy. Such a narrative, it says, "must resonate with the population and be based upon verifiable facts and measurable progress rather than promises." The primary effort must be seen by the local population as indigenous, because only a local government can mobilize the support of its people against an insurgent movement, the drafters wrote.

More at Government Executive.

In early November, Lazam was in a contingent of Iraqi Police traveling from their own city in Anbar Province to another station in Salah-ad-Din Province. Sitting in jail in the other station was the most wanted man for their own city: a very dangerous terrorist, responsible for many Iraqi and American deaths. They were going to attempt to retrieve him and return him to their city, where he could be further (and lawfully) interrogated by those with a more vested interest in the information he might provide than his jailers in the other province, where he had gone to ground.

When the police arrived at the station, they soon found their man and took photos of him in jail, proving that he was there. Unfortunately, they could not obtain his transfer because the paperwork had become fouled at some higher level in the police bureaucracy. So they departed to return to their city.

The road between these two cities is not a pleasant place. The US and Iraqi forces have been so successful in pushing terrorists out of populated areas that many have taken up refuge between them. The police convoy came under automatic weapons fire from another vehicle, which then sped away. The police, in several Ford F-350s with mounted PKC machine guns, began a flanking movement to pursue and cut off their attackers. At this point, Lazam, riding in the bed of one of the trucks, was struck by a shot to his left lung. He began to cough up a great deal of blood. His vehicle stopped the pursuit in order for his fellows to render first aid, while the rest of the convoy continued their pursuit. Just as they were maneuvering to cut off the enemy, a US Army convoy came down the road, blocking their fields of fire. The enemy slipped away. The police halted the convoy and tried to explain what had happened, but both were without a translator. One thing was clear to both though: Lazam was in bad shape, and needed help fast.

The Army offered to evacuate him to the closest US medical facility, at FOB Summerall, provided a second man go with them so Lazam would not be alone. When they arrived at the FOB, Lazam was rushed to medical care and separated from his buddy. Shortly thereafter, the buddy, in full police uniform, with a police ID, was escorted off the FOB and told to get home the best way he could. He holed up for a few days with a distant relative, then eventually made his way back to his hometown and the rest of the police force.

Not so for Lazam. The US military has lost all track of him. Even attempts by high-ranking medical officers to find him at any of the US medical facilities surrounding Baghdad have come to naught. No one knows the answers to simple questions: what was his status upon arrival at the FOB? Who operated on him there? Was he sent to a higher level of care within the US system? Or was he transferred to the Iraqi medical infrastructure? The rumors have swirled, through both Iraqi and US channels: "He is in Balad (a giant US base)!" "We've found him! He had a kidney removed!" "He was transferred to an Iraqi hospital!" "Our surgeon has spoken on the phone to the US surgeon who worked on him!" Or: "There is a man with a similar name who died in a Tikrit hospital . . ."

Lazam's family is, understandably, frantic. His wife is always asking the Iraqi Police force and the local sheik for any news on her husband. At this point, even if he has died, just the news of his fate would give them closure.

Tragedies happen in war, but this one is especially difficult because it is extremely preventable. After over four years in Iraq, the US has excruciatingly detailed and mandatory methods of reporting for ordnance caches found, detainees arrested, escalation of force procedures taken, and the like. But we have no organized method of tracking Iraqis who enter the US medical system. This transforms state-of-the-art US medical care for wounded Iraqis -- however well-intentioned it might be -- into a nightmare game of guessing, waiting, and sometimes despair for their families. In this particular case, it is especially frustrating as Lazam was one of those who chose to join the Iraqi Police in its infancy, risking his own and his family's lives. The US is spending large sums of money and time to build police forces like his, and events like this directly (and noticeably) impact their morale. Our own Small Unit Leaders' Guide to Counterinsurgency notes that "building up the morale and confidence of host-nation security forces should be the primary strategic objective." Instilling the concept of "leave no man behind" only becomes more difficult when one man has been left behind and the US seems powerless to find him.

We can do much better.

Two solutions offer themselves, though others might be advisable as well. First, when a US unit medevacs an Iraqi national, it should be required to send a report of his full name, tribal affiliation, nature of injures, place and time wounded, and a method and point of contact for his relatives, and so forth, to higher headquarters. This mirrors existing casualty reporting, but with an emphasis on the identity of the individual. This reporting must be standardized; if not, it won't be used, or will be easily confused. Next, there should be some sort of clearinghouse for information on Iraqis in the US military medical system. It could be staffed by contractors if necessary and would not have to be very large. The report would go straight to their door and they would then be responsible for tracking his progress through our system. Every time his physical location changed, medical staff would be required to send an update to the clearinghouse, which could then appropriately update the casualty's family until he is released to them.

The second solution is equally simple: the US should sponsor, or at least encourage, the formation of Arabic-language internet sites which would help Iraqis find lost or missing relatives. This type of website developed spontaneously after both the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and a number of people were able to find their family members just through online networking. Given the explosion of internet cafes and satellite-based home connectivity in Iraq, this could prove to be an equally effective means of bringing either reunions or closure to thousands of Iraqi families.

Such measures might seem more like social work than military activities, and that might be true. But conditions in Anbar Province now are much more analogous to those that prevailed in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad than they are to the full-on counterinsurgency combat of 2005 and 2006. We already fumbled one postwar rebuilding phase. Best to learn from our mistakes. We owe it to men like Lazam, who are the lynchpin of a successful Iraq and a drawdown of US forces.

Captain Josh Manchester is a platoon commander in 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines, and wrote this from Iraq.

There are three things on the plate: The New Republic, National Review Online, and Bilal Hussein.

I will start with the first, and simplest, observation. Several months ago I wrote about my doubts about the veracity of a young man named Scott Thomas, who was then writing for Franklin Foer's The New Republic. The short version of what I wrote was that his stories seemed really fishy to me, and I cautioned about wholly believing these purportedly true stories, and I left it at that. About a week later it was revealed that his real name was Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and bloggers on the right side of the aisle took off in a howling pack, hunting for more information. They found some. Foer and TNR, meanwhile, went into what can only be described as a journalistic full defensive crouch.

Beauchamp's unit returned from Iraq at the end of last month. I do not know, nor does it appear that anyone knows, where he is now. (Presumably on leave with his bride, whom he married while on his mid-tour R&R.) But what I do know is that as of this past Friday, TNR pulled the plug on their support of him. Unfortunately, even as they did so, they buried the lede. The last two paragraphs should have been the first. Here they are:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity -- which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

That is the bottom line, and TNR would have been better served to put it up front. Here is the whole 14-page-long version.

But there is a broader issue at play here, and it's a theme common to a couple of the stories I will link to in a minute. What really grinded on me about the Beauchamp issue (and TNR's 14-page non-confessional confession) was something that rests between the lines in Foer's admission. Foer makes the point about how nobody at TNR knew anything about the military in general or the Army in specific over and over, though he does not apparently know that he is doing so. He goes on talking about how hard it is to fact-check in Iraq, how they felt they had to give the writer anonymity so he could write "the truth" (maybe if they had not assigned Beauchamp's wife to be his fact-checker...?), how their own investigation was so difficult ... oh, bull.

Essentially, what unnerved me is that a magazine like TNR was so completely divorced from the military that they did not even have one person on staff -- one single person -- who was personally connected to a career professional in the military (and Elspeth Reeve, an intern at TNR who is now married to Beauchamp -- himself not a career professional in the military -- doesn't count), who could have A. helped them screen what was being sent in the first place, and B. helped them figure out how to fact-check the guy, let alone, after the fact, help them figure out what was really going on. I mean, seriously, how is it that at this point the best de facto depictions of life in-country come ... in Doonesbury?! (The very liberal cartoonist Gary Trudeau is, in a strange twist of journalism, apparently far better wired in to real soldiers on the ground than is the editor of a major magazine? How did this happen?)

Folks, we are six freaking years into a war now. Regardless of how you or I or anybody feels about the causality of these wars, the fact of these wars remain important for all of us to understand. We are six years into a period in which the military and issues of war have been, like, you know, sort of central. How could TNR remain so divorced from anyone in the military for so long that they eventually fell for this?

But they are not alone. Now the folks on the right -- indeed one of the central actors on the stage in the uncovering of Beauchamp -- have major problems because one of their own turns out to have been fabulist as well.

The short version of that story is that there is a blogger on the National Review Online website named Thomas Smith. I do not know the guy from Adam, but apparently he was an enlisted Marine a decade or two ago. He writes for the NRO blog "The Tank." In that capacity, he seems to get around.

Several months ago Mr. Smith was in Lebanon; while there, he wrote that he had seen 200 heavily armed members of Hezbollah camped outside the parliament buildings of the Lebanese government. He also wrote that 4,000 to 5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had been tramping through the Christian areas of Beirut. These, apparently, were things that he either made up or did not check in the slightest way. At best he printed rumors as facts, then claimed a scoop. The postings were also (and this may just be to my eye) apparently tied to the idea that the "mainstream media" had missed these stories. Well, they missed them because they did not happen. In the latter case, at least, you would have seen war in Lebanon on the front pages the next day, everywhere, if it was true. Reporters -- real old-fashioned actually-there-on-the-ground reporters -- called BS on that one. NRO, it seems, is now "looking into things."

From where I sit, this whole thing is just amazing. I mean, you know things are really messed up over at the National Review Online when both Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and Michelle Malkin freaking agree on something. That, I am moderately sure, is one of the signs of the Apocalypse, is it not? To complete the trifecta, Andrew Sullivan notes that NRO was informed of their "fabulist" more than six weeks ago. Oh, this is going to get really ugly.

But again, what seems to have happened at the core of this issue was an editor's —suspension of disbelief because fact-checking was either "too hard" or because the storyline fit within their own vision of reality. Either way, both NRO and TNR are now covered with muck, and in my opinion that is not good for the nation. We can only hope that both incidents lead to a renaissance of skepticism among editors at these and other publications. That, not personal partisan storylines, is how the nation is best served in the reporting one reads about wars and international relations.

On a final note, I had a column come out over on another site where I write, the Committee for Concerned Journalists. I was writing about the fact that the AP hired for their Iraqi employee who is being investigated by an Iraqi court about events which took place in Iraq ... a New York city lawyer who specializes in white-collar crime and libel law. Now, as anyone who has written to me here knows, I enjoy responding to mail. But this 5,600-plus-word letter, from a woman named Gayle, was just too good not to share at least in part.

Because Gayle closed her letter with the threat "PS: Don't misquote this invited email response to your column either, anywhere, or I will use the Judicial Branch of our Government to sue your ass off, :o)" I will try ever so hard to be precise. I won't "misquote" her at all. I will only reproduce her exact words. So, without ado, a few of my favorite lines. (This sort of stuff, by the way, is fairly typical from both the right and the left, depending upon what I have written that week. But the only way to deal with it, really, is to let this stuff see the light of day.):

It is a no wonder that you are the sweetheart of the extremist right wing-nut bloggers and media. If you lie down with dogs, you may get fleas. And respectfully, dear sir, your column is infested with them. I can only guess that you not only need to be debriefed but now you also need to be deloused now. Thank GOD your opinions are your own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Armed Forces because if they were, we certainly would even more knee-high in crap disinformation.

You know, after my various criticisms of Oliver North, and Rush Limbaugh, I guess I should be reassured. In speaking of the Constitution (and my lack of knowledge thereof) Gayle writes:

Don't be afraid of it like your friends in the extremist media. It will make you a better American and a better member of the military.... and the bonus is, you wouldn't need those bully extremists bloggers as friends anymore. Fascism hates intelligence and also what Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States, Commander and Chief of the U.S. Military, and author of of Declaration of Independence said about the free press and its necessity to America's citizen's and their government which includes the military.

Ah, yes, my "bully extremist blogger" friends. Uh, but in this context, I cannot really tell if she is talking about those friends of mine who are on the Right, or the Left. Oh well. The last several lines (lashed together here so you get only the fun parts, but each part exactly quoted) are worth their weight in gold.

Incidentally the background and meaning of the U.S. Constitution is also taught in every public school in this land. I am very surprised you missed it there as well, guess you grew up in an Arabic State, because (God love 'em!) they don't usually teach U.S History and Constitutional Government there...Either that or try any journalism class taught at any State sponsored public school in the good old U.S.A,. and not somewhere in Iran or China....If you don't respect the Constitution then get out of our military, because we citizens don't want you in it according to OUR Declaration of Independence...Good Luck now, sonny, with your school studies and don't neglect them anymore, because it sounds like you have been subject to some sort of programmed Anti-American type baloney.. probably from your extensive time spent outside of the United States speaking Arabic, and inside of it speaking conspiracy theories with right wing-nut extremists.

After I responded (and those who have written to me know that I always respond), Gayle came back with these lines:

Just because you have a grudge against the AP only colors your argument for the worse just as it has with the Military in this particular case. The Military needs to learn that they cannot control a free press for their own agenda. I'm stopping here now and not going to waste my time reading nor answering the rest of the crap after a quick skim because is just more blathering Anti-American extremist right-wing propaganda.

Last month people were telling me about how Victor Davis Hanson was calling me a liberal extremist performing a "hit job" for the "left wing site" Media Matters while in the pay of George Soros. This month I am a "blathering Anti-American extremist right-wing" type.

Ahhhh, the truthiness of America. Dontcha love it?

You can write to LTC Bateman at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com. If you're interested, he would be happy to pass you on to Gayle.

The fight between the Army and academics over the military's social science projects has taken a strange, ugly new turn.

On Thursday, Zenia Helbig, a former researcher with the Army's "Human Terrain System," took the stage at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists. The executive board of the organization had already spoken out against the program, to embed social scientists into combat units as cultural advisers. And so when Helbig began taking the the military to task for its "inept management and execution at every level" of the Human Terrain effort, audience members nodded their heads in approval. (Here is the text of Helbig's talk.)

But as Helbig started answering questions, the mood turned ugly. Turns out Helbig still backed the idea of boosting the military's cultural IQ -- she just didn't think the Human Terrain program was doing a particularly good job at making it happen. That set some in the audience off...

Coal in all their stockings.