Can the COINdinistas Save Iraq from Trump? By Zach Abels, Lawfare

“We have to start winning wars again,” President Donald J. Trump exhorted on February 27. Days later, aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, he pledged to “give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing. You know what that is? Win. Win! We’re gonna start winning again.” The irony is tragic and comedic, in equal measure. In mid-March, Trump released a 2018 budget blueprint that would deprive the military of the exact tools he promised them. He seeks to cripple the civilian agencies—the State Department, USAID, and the United States Institute of Peace—that consolidate combat success into political victory.

The president’s budget betrays alarming national-security parochialism: Military power divorced from diplomacy cannot win conventional wars. In “small wars,” killing is even less decisive.

America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq laid bare the limits of the military instrument. Vicious, resilient insurgencies waged by the Taliban, Iran-backed Shia militias, al-Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State have imprinted haunting images on the American psyche.

Trump rode those very waves of fear and angst into the White House. The public’s hunger for closure pales in comparison with its thirst for blood. Over and over again, Trump bewitched voters with promises of consigning the Islamic State to the fires of hell. “You gotta knock the hell out of them,” he said at an Iowa campaign rally in January 2016. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” But evicting insurgents from their strongholds will not suffice. At this rate, an embarrassing jihadist comeback looms inevitable. The president can’t afford for the next jihadi group to take root on his watch. Remember when candidate Trump accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of cofounding the Islamic State? The attack ads would write themselves.

If Trump were to succeed in budgetarily castrating the civilian agents of U.S. foreign policy, he would harm national security. In Iraq, where the administration has escalated the fight against the Islamic State, he would render the triumphs of servicemen and women fleeting. Killing bad guys is not enough. Without a concerted strategy of security, diplomacy and development, sectarian violence will once again engulf Iraq. Déjà vu of the worst kind—the kind that sucks U.S. soldiers and dollars right back in.

No White House official is more keenly attuned to this dystopian fate than National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. “H.R. knows firsthand the value of diplomacy in bringing conflict to a conclusion favorable to the United States, at the minimum possible cost in lives and dollars,” retired Lt. Col. John Nagl told me. “H.R. knows that in his bones.” A warrior-scholar of the highest repute, Nagl is unencumbered by chain of command. “It must gnaw at his innards,” he said of his friend, “that the administration he is serving is attempting to do this kind of damage to institutions that are so important to the security of our great nation.” He was uninterested in mincing words: “These ideas are asinine.”…

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The American Guts and Grit That Sank Japan at Midway by Robert R. Garnett, Wall Street Journal

Seventy-five years ago this Sunday, some 150 Japanese warships, 250 warplanes and 25 admirals were steaming toward a small atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Oahu. Imminent was the most crucial naval battle of World War II—Midway.

Aboard the Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto retired to his quarters each evening to play chess. He had spent his final nights in port with his geisha, Kawai Chiyoko. Departing, he sent her verses: “Today too I ache for you / Calling your name / Again and again / And pressing kisses / Upon your picture.”

His present concerns were less sentimental. For six months, Japan’s navy had battered Allied forces across 8,000 miles of ocean, from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). Still, Yamamoto worried that the American fleet was wounded but still dangerous. “We have scorched the snake,” as Macbeth had put it, “not killed it.”

His American counterpart, Adm. Chester Nimitz, relaxed by pitching horseshoes. Steady, calm, old-school—his most violent oath was “Now see here!”—Nimitz marshaled his forces for battle, waiting for the unsuspecting Japanese.

Weeks earlier, with strikes expected toward Australia, Washington had ordered Nimitz’s aircraft carriers to the far South Pacific. Others feared assaults on Hawaii, perhaps San Francisco or San Diego. Or the Panama Canal, Alaska . . . even Siberia.

But in a windowless basement near the fleet’s Pearl Harbor headquarters, codebreakers under Cmdr. Joe Rochefort pored over intercepted Japanese radio traffic. Independent, impolitic, single-minded, Rochefort “left the basement only to bathe, change clothes, or get an occasional meal to supplement a steady diet of coffee and sandwiches,” one officer recalled. “For weeks the only sleep he got was on a field cot pushed into a crowded corner.”

Rochefort’s team could decode about one-eighth of an average message, filling in the gaps by educated intuition. For example, the messages called the proximate Japanese objective “AF.” But where was “AF”? Midway, Rochefort concluded. The authorities in Washington scoffed. Why would Japan dispatch a massive armada to seize a tiny atoll?

Nimitz, responsible for millions of square miles of ocean, had scant means to repel the Japanese anywhere, let alone everywhere. With his fleet, and perhaps the entire Pacific war, at stake, “I had to do a bit of hard thinking,” he would recall.

As the Navy’s heavyweights vacillated, Nimitz decided to gamble on the out-of-step Rochefort. He recalled his three carriers from the South Pacific to defend Midway. Time was short. The USS Yorktown had been damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea and had recently returned to Pearl Harbor trailing a 10-mile oil slick. Repair estimates ranged up to three months…

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