January 31, 2005

The Latest from George Friedman -- "The Three Power Game"

In his latest article, George Friedman asks:

First, once Iraq holds elections, what will Iran's policy be toward Iraq's new Shiite government? Second, since the Shiite-Sunni split is fundamental to the Islamic world, how will the United States manage and manipulate that divide?

He answers thus:

For Iran, the best outcome of the war would be a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The second best outcome would be chaos in Iraq. Both provide Iran with what it needs: a relatively secure frontier and an opportunity to shape events to the west. The third -- and least acceptable -- outcome would be a neutral Iraq. Neutrality is highly changeable.

There seems to be a fourth possible -- and worst for Iran -- outcome: a stable, US-friendly regime in Iraq.

Friedman has organized Iran's outcomes into these categories because of his take on Iran's strategic goals:

The Saudis cannot afford chaos in Iraq or for the road from Iran to be wide open. They will increase their dependence on the United States and will be forced to do whatever they can to reduce the rebellion in the Sunni region. A united Iraq under a Shiite-dominated coalition government will secure Iran's western frontiers, but will deny it the opportunity to dominate the region. A divided Iraq will give Iran secure borders, an opportunity for domination and serious responses from Arab states. It will drive the Arabs into the Americans' arms. Things could get dicey fast for the Iranians. The United States is letting them know -- via the convenient conduit of Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker magazine -- that it is ready to push back hard on Iran. U.S. President George W. Bush directly warned the Iranians on Jan. 26 to stay out of the Iraqi elections. The Iranians are signaling back that they are a nuclear power -- which is not true yet.

The Iranians have a fundamental strategic decision to make. They can work with the United States and secure their interests. They can undermine the United States and go for the big prize: domination of the Persian Gulf. The first is low risk, the second incredibly high risk.

Looking at the flip side of this logic, what are the fundamental strategic decisions for the US to make? Friedman notes:

Behind this all there is a complex three-power game. There is the United States, in a war with factions of the Sunni.

This much is true. The Iraqi terrorist insurgency is largely Sunni. But is the war on terrorism restricted solely to Sunnis? Is the Bush administration pursuing a policy of detente with Iran? The Iranians are Shi'ite, and their Pasdaran has long supported Hizballah (Party of God -- also Shi'ites). Hizballah are certainly war on terror material . . . does it seem wise to think that the US will discriminate against threats based on their religious origin? Don't Bush's latest remarks in his inaugural imply that whatever his choices with Iran, he would prefer it were a more fully-functioning democracy?

The US is engaged in a game of long-term modernization and alliance construction in the Middle East. it is creating new nation and state-based centers of power to replace religious centers of power. The new centers are allied with the US: Afghanistan, a nation-state, replaces the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which were ethnically and religiously-based. In Iraq, a Sunni and tribe-based power center is replaced with a Shi'ite and Kurd-dominated nation-state (it's a gamble, but can certainly succeed). Whereas the old power centers in the Islamic world looked like this:

1. Sunni Wahabbi dictatorship in Afghanistan
2. Sunni Wahabbi dictatorship in Saudi Arabia
3. Shi'ite clerical dictatorship in Iran
4. Ba'athist Sunni secular dictatorship in Iraq
5. Ba'athist Sunni secular dictatorship in Syria,

the new power centers are so:

1. Aghani-nation state.
2. Mixed ethnicity Iraqi nation-state.
3. Sunni Wahabbi terrorist insurgency in Sunni Triangle, Iraq

If the insurgency is defeated, no longer will the populations of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia see their world solely in terms of religious blocs. National blocs, mainly mixed-ethnicity nations, will have replaced them.

The goal of the Bush administration is to redefine the Middle East in terms of nation-states rather than religion. The key question is, how badly does a nuclear Iran muddle those long-term plans? This is why the question of whether the US sees itself as solely fighting the Sunnis is so important. If the US also sees itself as wishing to influence modernizing change with the Shi'ite portions of the Middle East as well, then a nuclear Iran could scuttle those plans entirely.

The strategic choices vis a vis Iran then become:

1. Let Iran keep its current state of security and influence in order to stabilize Iraq, the goal being that a non-religiously defined Iraq will spark Iran not to religiously define itself. Iran may shortly become a nuclear power. This is low-risk, low-reward.

2. Pressure Iran to keep its influence out of Iraq, and to end its nuclear weapons program. The outcome would be a stable Iraq, and a non-nuclear Iran ready for its regime to be destabilized in the future. This is low-risk, medium reward.

3. Attempt the destruction of the Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to stop the possibility of a nuclear Iran from interfering with long-term democratization and the goal of redefining the Middle East in terms of nations rather than religions. This is high-risk, medium/high reward. The very act of military action in Iran could cause a backlash from those portions of its society which would find themselves in the vanguard of any democratic movement. It has been widely noted that the Iranian nuclear weapons program is seen as valuable to the regime even by those who detest it, because their nationality is stronger than their democratic desire.

4. Attempt the destruction of the Iranian nuclear weapons program and the replacement of the Iranian regime in order not to allow a nuclear Iran to interfere with long term democratization and the goal of redefining the Middle East in terms of nations rather than religions. In fact, to speed up the democratization and redefinition. This is very high risk, very high reward.

The US cannot allow Iran's sphere of influence to increase, giving Iran larger influence internally in Iraq and significantly destabilizing the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.

It seems that a nuclear Iran is a serious setback to regional strategic goals for the United States and US statements have indicated that senior decisionmakers feel as such.

What now?

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???????????

For once I am totally speechless.

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Steven Vincent Video: Fox and Friends

Guest-blogger Steven Vincent was on Fox this morning. In case you missed it, Johnny Dollar has just put the video up.

Great job to Steven by the way.

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Fanfare for the Common Iraqi . . . redux

[I just might repost this every other post tonight to make sure people see it.]

Low res:
http://adamkeiper.blogs.com/comparevideo/files/Iraq_Election.wmv

Hi-res:
http://adamkeiper.blogs.com/comparevideo/files/Iraq_Election_HiRes.wmv

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Going Forward

[This is Chester: This is the final post by our guest-blogger Steven Vincent. We thank him for joining us over this historic weekend. He's welcome back anytime. Be sure to check out his blog here. And don't forget to see the link to his book "In the Red Zone," in the sidebar. I am just getting into it and can already recommend it.]
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As is the wont of things, after the euphoria comes the sobering reminder that a single success does not solve a multitude of problems. Nowhere is this truer than Iraq. With the risk of seeming like dreary chunk of Juan Cole in the Christmas stocking of Iraq's elections, let me outline some of the challenges immediately facing the Land Between the Rivers.

The Kurds. The flashpoint is the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk. Here, Kurds are vying against Sunni Arabs and their Turkomen allies for control of the oil fields of Baba Gurgur. Although Kirkuk technically falls outside Kurdistan, the Kurds have long eyed the city eyed the city as the capital of an independent nation. When the Iraqi Electoral Commission last month ruled that Kurds displaced by the Baath Party's "Arabization" program could vote in local elections, Arab candidates withdrew. Turkey, meanwhile, is registering ominous objections to Kurdish maneuvering for autonomy. Kurdish Democratic Party leader Massud Barzani hardly helped matters when he announced in a recent interview that "an independent Kurdish state is indeed going to be happening."

The Shia. Of immediate interest is the post-election unity of the victorious Party of Ali. As the Los Angeles Times' Ashraf Khalil notes, the United Iraqi Alliance fused together by Ayatollah Sistani comprises a number of religious and secular Shia groups, many of which--such as Dawa Islamiyya and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq--are traditional rivals. As Khalil observes, a splintering of the slate could provide an opportunity to secularists like Ayad Allawi to pick up some dissenting Shia to form a ruling coalition; on the other hand, a collapse of unity risks weakening the prestige of Sistani (the most unifying figure today in Iraqi politics) and alienating Shia from the democratic process.

Other things to look for: The fate of Moqtada "Mookie" al-Sadr. He was a big loser yesterday--especially because his fatwa to boycott the elections was generally ignored. In the Shia world, one's advancement in influence and power is determined by how many people pay attention to your pronouncements (rather like blogging); he may have slid a ways down the marja totem pole. Also, keep an eye on Ahmad Chalabi. While fighting Defense Minister Shaalan over mutual corruption charges and the Arabists in the State Department and CIA, this consummate in-fighter seems posed to play an important role in the new "secular" face of the Shia leadership. He didn't do much for Iraqi unity last week, however, when he seemed to call for Shia "autonomy" over the oil-rich southern provinces.

The Sunnis. We'll have to see their turn-out totals, especially in areas not dominated by anti-Iraqi forces. If it turns out, as I believe true, that Sunnis wanted to vote, but were prevented by fear, the "voter boycott" was in fact "voter suppression." And this, in turn, could erode the legitimacy of the Muslims Scholar's Association's "leadership"--a positive development. The MSA's politics of resentment, grievance and non-participation in democracy (with the telling exception of oil-rich Kirkuk) echo the PLO tactics and could doom the Sunnis to similar cycles of despair and violence. To save their clerical skins, the MSA and their allies will use any sliver of plausibility to decry the elections as illegitimate (especially if voter turn-out results drop below 50 percent). But even they seem to see less room for maneuvering, as evident in their demands that they have a seat at table when it comes time to hammer out a constitution. Sunnis, thy name is chutzpah.

The Anti-Iraq forces. Allah be praised, they were the biggest losers of the day--although there will no doubt be further attacks. But the political, rhetorical and psychological terrain has changed. In the past, the homegrown Iraqi militants got a lot of mileage from their claims that they fought a "foreign occupation." Whatever little merit that argument possessed has vanished with the election: now the ex-Baathist Saddamites appear in their true light--fascists attempting to overturn a democratic government. At what temperature does the legitimacy of reactionaries burn? Fahrenheit 9-11.
As for the foreign jihadists, Z-Man declared war against the elections and then couldn't stop them. History--despite what would-be restorers of the Caliphate might say--is not on his side. The fighting will continue--that's what jihadists do, after all--but the legitimacy of the mujaheddin has been shot by ballots not bullets, and time will bring an end to their nihilistic bloodshed. This isn't Afghanistan, 1990s, Z-Man, and you're not fighting a doomed dictatorial state. Something you will no doubt reflect upon when you're sitting in an Iraqi prison, as you will most surely be soon.

The Left. Hopeless. Shameful. History will record that the U.S. could have saved tremendous loss of life and treasure had we liberated Iraqi with more troops and a proper "after-victory" plan. But the chronicles will also show that America could have saved time, money and--most especially, lives--had the Left contributed its valuable resources to the liberation effort as well. Imagine if feminists, labor leaders, environmentalists, civil rights activists, artists and the media had joined in the struggle instead of sitting on the sidelines--or worse, assisting the fascists? Imagine if the clarion cry of freedom and democracy had arisen from a unified progressive front consisting of conservatives and liberals? Just as we've learned how much succor the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong took from the anti-war protesters of the 1960s, we will someday learn how the parochial, small-minded, narrow-souled opposition to the establishment of democracy in Iraq stiffen the fascist backbone of the "insurgency." But of course, the Michael Moores, Robert Fisks, George Galloways, Ted Kennedys and innumerable Hollywood celebrities and academics of this world will not care--they will always find reporters, voters, fans and tenure committees willing to dull the sting of conscience.

Our soldiers. Job well done. But it ain't over till its over. And it won't be over until Iraq reaches one benchmark: the government has the monopoly on violence. In other words, not until an Iraqi army and police force takes the guns away--literally or metaphorically--from the country too-many armed militias can our men and women go home.

The Iraqi people. From now on, we will identify the true Iraqi Resistance fighter as an average man or woman brandishing the weapon of a blue-tipped index finger.

Bloggers. I can't imagine how the liberation of Iraq would have progressed without the hundreds, the thousands, of blogs that cut through the anti-war bias of the MSM. By giving a voice to people and viewpoints which otherwise would have gone silent, bloggers helped articulate the cause of democracy and civil rights that lies at the base of this conflict. Which make me wonder: how would bloggers have affected the course of Vietnam War?

On that note, I will close out my guest appearance on Chester. I can't thank Josh enough for the opportunity to address you all. I only hope my contributions added something to your appreciation of the war, the election and the Iraqi people. Now, with a wave of my own blue-tipped fingertips, I shall bid you farewell.

Written by Chester at 8:17 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Fanfare for the Common Iraqi

[Got about 5-8 quality posts for you tonight folks . . . here's the first.]

WOW. Amazing. Go see this immediately. You will not be disappointed:

http://adamkeiper.blogs.com/comparevideo/files/Iraq_Election.wmv

Thanks to Alert Reader James for posting that link earlier and emailing it as well. Truly spectacular. Give it a sec to load.

This is private diplomacy at its finest.

UPDATE: There's a Hi-res version too.

http://adamkeiper.blogs.com/comparevideo/files/Iraq_Election_HiRes.wmv

Send Adam Keiper an email complimenting his work if you like.

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This Week at The Adventures of Chester

Here's some of the great stuff lined up for this week:

1. On Monday, Steven Vincent offers his final guest-blogging post, with follow-up thoughts about the Iraqi elections.

2. Monday after midnight: Chester wonders about the future of the Middle East.

3. Tuesday after midnight: Chester examines not one, but two Thomas P.M. Barnett articles.

4. Wednesday: A new guest-blogger offers thoughts about an under-covered topic.

5. Thursday: A MAJOR CONTENT ANNOUNCEMENT

6. This isn't the half of it. There'll still be reactions and commentary on the day's news. Please check back often, and if you are so inclined, any donations would be greatly appreciated.

7. Also: Note a brand new feature in the top of the sidebar: The comic art of Chris Muir is now syndicated in a new page and updated daily. His work is excellent and very entertaining. Check it out.

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DeepBlog

DeepBlog.com: An Easy Guide & Portal to Great Blogs is a great new place to find all kinds of blogs.

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The Latest Good News From Iraq

Chrenkoff has just published the latest in his Good News From Iraq Series.

See it also here.

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January 30, 2005

FLASH: Steven Vincent on Fox and Friends Monday, 6:15am Eastern

Steven Vincent, who's been guest-blogging here over the weekend, will be on Fox and Friends Monday morning at 6:15am Eastern time. Tune in, tape or TiVo!

Steven will be making one more post-election post here tomorrow. He's been a great contributor.

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The "ink of freedom"

An Alert Reader emails:

On Fox News an American Muslim cleric called the ink on the finger "the ink of freedom."  What an awesome thought.  An Iraqi said, "I dipped my finger deep as if into the eye of all the world's tyrants."

Great stuff.

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Great Political Cartoon Site

Day By Day by Chris Muir is a political cartoon site. It is awesome. Check out today's cartoon and some of the past work. Great stuff. Be sure to move your cursor over the blog title too.

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Some actual debate takes place for 40 minutes on the Democractic Underground . . .

. . . and then the posts are pulled off. But they're captured for eternity here. How embarassing for the Dems. Truly Sad.

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Lest The Adventures of Chester be accused of being too partisan, we'll say this: allegations like those made by Maureen Dowd about US interrogation methods need some sounding out. If they are true, it seems that perhaps the interrogators were a bit . . . overzealous.

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Good Election Commentary at the fourth rail

Bill Roggio provides a great roundup of what Al Qaeda said they would do vs. what they did in Iraq on Sunday. See it here. Looks like Zarqawi and AQ just can't quite walk the walk.

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Geraldo on Civilian Casualties: "This makes any civilized person absolutely sick."

Go see now: Iraq, The Vote: 'This Makes Any Civilized Person Absolutely Sick'.

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The Voting Rights Act, 2005

[Chester here: This is another post from guest-blogger Steven Vincent. Be sure to check out his book "In the Red Zone" in the sidebar, and his blog here.]
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Nasir Hasan once told me that on April 9, 2003--the day Saddam's statue fell in Baghdad's Firdusi Square--he learned that "history can actually smile."

Well, my friends, history has just smiled again.

I write this just after the polls have closed in Iraq. Over 70% turnout, we hear. Minimal violence. Election results, of course, are not yet known--except this: the big winners were the Iraqi people. And democracy.

Let us pause to consider: In a week when we commemorated the liberation 60 years ago of the Nazi death-camp at Auschwitz--on the day that, 72 years ago, Weimar president Paul Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler Chancellor of Germany--the forces of democracy and freedom have won their greatest victory since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are few words to describe the magnitude and magnificence of this moment. Just as there are no adequate words to describe the sacrifices of the Iraqi people and American soldiers that brought the world this moment.

Look at these pictures from Iraq (scroll down). No doubt we'll be seeing many more shots like this. Average people. Two years ago few of us (including myself) gave much thought about them; they were unknown, unseen, blotted out by the abysmal shadow of Saddam Hussein. Yet today, they were the focus of the entire world. Today, the course of history pivoted on their fingertips--fingertips stained not with the blood of tyranny, but the ink of democracy.

And their enemies, what of them? What of those who indulged in grandiose fantasies of "blood baths" and "massacres" rather than engage in the quiet, humble process of elections? They--thank God--could not make good their threats in full. Oh, we can guess their next tact will be to claim the elections were "illegitimate" (unlike, of course, their nihlistic "insurgency"). But, as Osama bin Laden once said, history rides with the "strong horse." In the competition between Al Qaeda and democracy, Al Qaeda lost. Big time. Who's the strong horse now?

What to look for in the next few days: Sunni voting results from areas not under threat of terrorism. If we can determine that Sunnis would have voted if not in fear of their lives, then we can gauge the measure of their committment to democracy. If, as I suspect, it is high, then we must immediately replace the concept of a "Sunni boycott" with "Sunni vote suppression." Boycotts are voluntary acts of non-participation; suppression is when you use force to prevent someone from acting. And if terrorists and their clerical allies suppressed voting, then doesn't that "de-legitimize" their claim to represent Sunni Arabs? In this case, contending that Sunnis didn't vote because they supported Zarqawi and the Muslim Scholars Association would be like saying blacks didn't vote in the post-bellum South because they agreed with Jim Crow and the KKK.

And what of our friends on the Left? I'm sorry they can't share in our joy--because there is no reason they should not. Alas, like the Muslim Scholars Association, they, too, decided to "boycott" the elections. For example, here is what the great lefty website Daily Kos had to say yesterday:

The war is long past lost. Time to pack it in, and save the lives of our men and women in uniform that will otherwise face a barrage of bullets and RPG rounds during their extended stay in the desert.

Clearly, Dean-shill Marko Zuniga has an odd perception of liberalism. On a day when millions of Iraqi citizens stood up against the specter of fascism to exercise their rights as free and dignified human beings, Zuniga claims the election is "simply an exercise in pretty pictures." Tell that to the Iraqis who danced and cried for joy at the chance to vote, Mr. Zuniga. Tell that to people who have suffered for decades under a tyrant whose crimes were brutal to the point of madness. Tell that to the men and women who died to make this day a reality.

But Zuniga can't top the outrage posted on TalkLeft. First, the site runs this excerpt from Chris Allbrittion's blog from Iraq:

So far, not as much violence as everybody feared. The question is why? Is the insurgency taking a pass on this one? (It's possible. Our sources in the insurgency say the election will make no difference to them, so why expend a lot of energy?) Is the insurgency much weaker than previously thought? Or is the level of security sufficient to keep it in check? If that's the case, then that is discouraging, too, because the measures that have kept today safe (so far) are truly draconian. No driving, dusk to dawn curfews, states of emergency. If that's what it takes to provide security in Iraq, why erase one police state only to replace it with another?

Beneath this tactless, heartless passage, they post a photo of a U.S. soldier in sunglasses. Message received: the U.S. has formed a police state similar to Saddam's regime. Tell that to the Marines, folks.

But let's let that pass. Today is not for us, it is for the Iraqis. No doubt there will be further victories to enjoy and disappointments to mull over in the days to come. For now, let's contemplate the meaning of democracy and the spread of freedom in a hitherto dark land. And let us celebrate, for today history did more than smile. It cheered.

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Election Followup

10:29 This ends the live-blogging. More coming later today here at The Adventures of Chester. Probably at least two more posts -- more in-depth than the live-blogging. Thanks for stopping by!

10:24 Looks llike Central Command released some new stuff overnight: DECLASSIFIED AERIAL VIDEO FOOTAGE TRACKING INSURGENT ATTACK ON U.S. EMBASSY AVAILABLE, TASK FORCE BAGHDAD TROOPS CAPTURE SEVEN INSURGENTS RESPONSIBLE FOR EMBASSY ROCKET ATTACK, MEDIA ADVISORY: AERIAL VIDEO FOOTAGE OF CENTRAL BAGHDAD DISTRICT RESIDENTS GOING TO POLLING SITES AVAILABLE TO MEDIA, and in Afghanistan, COALITION FORCES RECOVER WEAPONS CACHES.

10:20 Michael Ledeen has this to say on The Corner:

The Iraqi elections are, we can all hope, a lethal blow to the racism of the CIA and the State Dept arabists, all of whom have been saying for decades that democracy just can't work in "that part of the world," because "those people" just aren't capable of democracy. They accordingly saw their role as identifying "our thugs," and getting them into power. The big, brave turnout was an explicit and very dramatic confirmation of the president's view of the war between freedom and tyranny. The Iraqi people want freedom, and they are prepared to risk their lives for it, provided that they get support and half-way decent security.

I hope that the president and his aides draw the obvious lesson: that the other peoples of the region are similar, they are quite capable and fully prepared to govern themselves. If more than seventy per cent of Iraqis voted today, as it seems, imagine how many Iranians would vote. And Syrians, too. And Egytians, and Saudis, and the rest. Think revolution. Please?

In a similar vein, Powerline has this (ht: Instapundit.com):

Somehow, I had missed the fact that Iraqi expatriates are voting in Syria. Thus, Iraqis living in Syria can participate in a democratic process, but Syrians can't. A bit odd, that, but it's another example of the impact this election could have in the Arab world.

10:16 Just caught some of the political commentary at The Corner on National Review Online, where one writer speculates that it will be Kerry vs. Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination. This seems like great news. Most of the dumb things that Kerry said that came back to haunt him occurred in the primaries. Perhaps a repeat will ensue . . . enough about all that . . .

10:11 I'd love to see the ratings stats for Kerry's appearance on Meet the Press this morning. Bet they were low.

10:04 Check out Ali's thoughts at Free Iraqi:

This was my way to stand against those who humiliated me, my family and my friends. It was my way of saying," You're history and you don't scare me anymore". It was my way to scream in the face of all tyrants, not just Saddam and his Ba'athists and tell them, "I don't want to be your, or anyone's slave. You have kept me in your jail all my life but you never owned my soul". It was my way of finally facing my fears and finding my courage and my humanity again.

I slept really late but I woke up at 6.30. I shaved (I do this once every century) and dressed as I was going to a party. The phone rang and I let it ring for a while before I answered. "Hey Ba'athist! Why are you still asleep? Why not go and vote?" a friend's voice came through teasing me.

And, as he leaves the polling station:

As I left one of the guards said to me as he handed me back my cellular phone,"God bless you and your beloved ones. We don't know how to thank you. Please excuse any inconvinience on our part. We wish we didn't have to search you or limit your freedom. You are heroes."

9:55 Looks like a success! 72% turnout is the number being tossed around. Iraqi blogger Hammorabi has this to say:

Today is the day in which the souls of our martyrs comforted!

Today those who were killed in Iraq or wounded among our friends from the USA and other allies, who helped us to reach this day, are with us again to inscribe their names with Gold for ever!

And:

As we expected the enemies of God and freedom send their mentally retarded cockroaches in some suicidal attacks.

On the top of our privileged today are those who were killed in their way for voting. Their names should be perpetuated for ever! Their names should be written in Gold in Al-Fordos Square in Baghdad!

Our thanks go to George W Bush who will enter the history as the leader of the freedom and democracy in the recent history! He and his people are our friends for ever!

At this moment the voting closed and we will see the results then!

God bless Iraq and America.

Written by Chester at 10:03 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 29, 2005

Live-Blogging the Elections -- Refresh Often!

[All times US Central; Add nine hours for Iraqi time.]

4:25 Well folks, I've turned into a pumpkin. Actually that's not true. I could keep on until the polls close, but Mrs. Chester will wake up and see that I haven't slept and then unplug the computer and check me into an internet program. Tomorrow (Sunday) morning, guest-blogger Steven Vincent will be offering another piece on the election, and The Adventures of Chester will continue with commentary on the outcome later in the day. For more election coverage, go to Iraq Elections newswire and use the editor's links there.

Having been inspired by Geraldo Rivera's (now there's a line I never thought I'd type) comparison of the Iraqi elections to the civil rights movement in the US, here's a final quote for you, from LBJ, before he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

I urge every member of both parties -- Americans of all religions and of all colors -- to join me in that cause.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

So it is today in Baghdad.

Good night!

4:09am Meanwhile, in Kuwait, security forces have had a shootout with terrorists.

3:55 Just checked the time-zone map on sitemeter. If you are in Iraq and reading this, any updates you have are welcome. Shoot me an email with your own observations.

3:53 Another new photo is up at Cigars in the Sand. The Iraqis are displaying their inked fingers proudly.

3:50 Fox just reported a new suicide bombing in Baghdad killed two Iraqi policemen.

3:46 The latest update to the BBC Reporters' log: Iraqi elections is from Ben Brown in Basra, who notes,

Turnout here has been extraordinary. We've been to a few polling stations in the city centre and we've seen huge queues of men and women who were searched separately.

Some have had to wait for an hour before casting their ballot.

3:37 I guess that answers the bluefinger question: won't be a security issue if everyone has it.

3:36 Wow. That earlier pic is not the half of it. See Cigars in the Sand for several great election day photos. My favorite is the guy being wheeled to the polls. Ryan also writes this:

So far our team has made three round trips to the polling station. For the record, that's 63 Iraqis voting. Every busload has sang and danced the entire drive home.

After a large numbers of explosions this morning, things seem to have gotten quieter (at least in Baghdad). Let's hope it holds.

3:33 Iraq Elections newswire asks about the security aspect of marking voters' thumbs with blue ink. I wondered about this too. Seems like an easy way to identify voters. Wonder how long it lasts . . .

3:30 Here's a photo of Iraqis lining up to vote in Baghdad (hat-tip: Mudville Gazette, where you'll also find a roundup on the atmosphere in several key Iraqi cities yesterday.)

3:17 Here's an opinion piece in Al-Ahram which asks for greater debate between political parties in Egypt. You've really got to wonder how the Iraqi elections will be perceived in the Arab world . . . Next week's MEMRI translations should be good . . .

3:11 Here's a link to the frontpage of Al-Ahram Weekly, an Egyptian newsmagazine. It features four stories, and the one which I read had a pretty predictable viewpoint about the difficulties surrounding the elections.

3:06 About to start plumbing the depths of the Arab news for stories . . .

3:01 Quick admin note: If anyone out there is interested in being on the email list for The Adventures of Chester, just shoot an email to "terrier_manchester@yahoo.com" with "subscribe" in the subject line. You'll get one email a week with details of what's going on 'round these parts. A couple of folks asked to be unsubscribed and then they got another update anyway -- sorry, I was out of town and couldn't fix. I'll take you off the next one. Though I guess if you want to be unsubscribed, you probably aren't reading this. Oh well. By the way, I don't share email lists with anyone.

3:00am This is the midpoint of election day and all the indicators point to a success so far -- lots can still go wrong, but seems to be going off pretty well so far.

2:50 Chrenkoff has a new post up contrasting two emails he's received, one from an Iraqi describing the family getting ready to go vote, the other from the father of a Marine who was injured for life on New Year's Day.

2:45 Just stumbled upon Ali's thoughts (formerly of Iraq the Model fame). Ali is now blogging at Free Iraqi.

2:32 The Fox ticker just reported that 6 car bomb blasts had gone off outside US and multi-national forces facilities near the Green Zone. Said no US casualties had been reported. Maybe that's cause US forces disrupted the attacks such that they were not successful . . . pure speculation . . .

2:24 When I lived in Diwaniyah in Iraq, we had hired some contractors to rebuild the looted university building we were living in. Every now and then, I'd be in my quarters and the head contractor would come in and measure something or check out the electrical sockets. Stuff like that. Once he had his two sons with them and I gave them some candy (melted) that friends had sent me. I talked him up a little as he spoke English enough to get stuff across. He asked me how old I thought his sons were. I would have guessed about 8 or 9 judging by their size. But before I could answer he told me they were 13 (they were twins) and the reason they were so short is because milk had been hard to come by under the sanctions. But this gentleman wasn't bitter about that. He blamed Saddam. Then, using some hand motions and simple English he told me he wished Iraq could be the 51st state in the union. I bet that guy is voting today.

2:22 This bodes well. Rantburg strikes again:

Many Iraqis living near Saddam Hussein’s hometown said they will vote today because the ballot not violence will end Iraq’s occupation by U.S.-led coalition troops.

The small town of Alam, 10 miles northeast of Saddam’s home city of Tikrit, is relatively quiet unlike other Sunni Muslim areas west and north of Baghdad that roil with militancy and fierce opposition to the national elections.

The local leader of one of Iraq’s largest clans here is bidding for a seat in the 275-member National Assembly that will govern the country and draft a permanent constitution.

Mashaan al-Jbouri, who heads the 37-member Liberation and Reconciliation Front, has said the country can be freed from occupation only through peaceful means.

Hasan Mohammed Khazaal, a 24-year-old university student, backed that notion.

"We will have a new constitution and I can get rid of the occupiers through elections. This is the only way to evict the occupiers,’ said Khazaal, who decorated his car with posters of al-Jbouri, the local chief of the Jbour clan.

Al-Jbouri served as the governor of Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, for a few months after the fall of Saddam’s regime in April 2003. He is now a member of the transitional National Council, a government oversight body.

Maj. Gen. Suleiman Youssef Ahmad, a retired officer who served in Saddam’s army, has gone house to house in Alam explaining to people what elections are and why they should vote.

"I am not only going to vote. I am guiding the people how to do it,’ he said.

Another official, 50-year-old Brig. Gen. Mattar Saleh, said he was voting as a means to get foreign troops out of Iraq.

"We are Iraqis who oppose sectarian division, and our aim is to liberate our country from occupation,’ he said. "I can tell the government that I will elect to ask the occupiers to leave the country through peaceful means.’

2:16 Didn't know Sistani was born in Iran. Interesting:

Although he shaped almost every facet of today’s elections, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani has no plans to vote, one of his representatives said yesterday.

The cleric leads this nation’s 15 million Shiite Muslims, 60 percent of the population, and he may be the most powerful man in Iraq. But Sistani was born in Mashhad, Iran, he is an Iranian citizen, and, according to the rules of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, he is not eligible to vote, the representative said.

"I assure you Sayed Sistani won’t vote in this election, because he doesn’t meet all the required conditions as spelled out by the IECI," said Sayed Murtdha al Kashmiri, Sistani’s representative in London. "He will not vote, but at the same time, Sayed Sistani obliges every Iraqi to vote in the elections."

2:00am Fox now breaking that a suicide bomber hit a polling station/school in West Baghdad, but the reporter is quick to note that it is 4 hours into polling and the terrorists had promised 400 suicide bombers -- only only a handful so far. Maybe some got to their targets and decided to vote . . . Shepard Smith (I think) also notes that 11 hours into the calendar day of Jan 30th, not a single US soldier has been killed. Let's pray it stays that way.

1:53 More on Geraldo's finest hour: Thanks to an Alert Reader for posting a link to the transcript of Geraldo's report. An excerpt:

GERALDO RIVERA [FOX NEWS]: I don't want to overstate, because I'm very emotional right now. Because I was in that town, just behind me. These GIs have done it, they've created an environment, despite the explosions, despite all the news you've heard of the suicide bomber, snipers, this and that. In this town, in this community, with 15,000 registered voters, we have just returned from the polling place. It is absolutely packed. Roll the video. There are men, women, families coming. They are casting their ballot for the first time. It was so inspiring. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life. It really is like the Berlin Wall going down in 1989. It really is like the beginning, like the dawn of the civil rights era, when black people could vote for the first time. It is the most amazing sight. Only a hard-bitten cynic, only a person with absolutely no upside to their feeling of optimism, could look askance at what is happening, truly happening today. People are applauding themselves, they look like Rocky coming out of the polling place. There are women voting for the first time, and it's just the most incredible thing. It's so heartwarming to see it.

Wow. Go read the whole thing: Iraq, The Vote: 'One of the Most Amazing Things I've Ever Seen'.

1:47 The Fox reporter in Mosul just finished a report and the anchor thanked him for his "bird's eye view of this great event." Would a CNN anchor even deign to call this a "great event?"

1:44 Update from Iraq Elections newswire: Long lines of folks are queued up in Mosul waiting . . . and the Iraqi Election Commission reports that all 5200 polling places opened on time . . .

1:37 Something tells me there are two things wrong with this story in Al Jazeera (Al-Yawer: Most Iraqis won’t vote in Sunday’s elections): 1. Al-Yawer's remarks are out of context, misinterpreted, or mistranslated, 2. Al Jazeera is wrong. Check this out. Apparently it's like Independence Day down in Najaf:

Despite the presence of thousands of special police and Iraqi National Guardsmen, Najaf had the festive air yesterday of a country in celebration.

"This is the glorious day Iraqis have been awaiting so patiently," said Raad Abdali, 26, a police officer standing guard at the al-Shekeri Mosque. "Election day will open like a flower, revealing our future."

The jovial atmosphere offered a marked counterpoint to much of the rest of Iraq, which has been plagued by anxiety and fear, with an intimidation and bombing campaign targeting voters and polling sites.

And we don't read enough of these stories, of which there are no doubt plenty:

Like many of the city’s men, Abdullah spent several short stints in prison in the 1980s for being a member of the Islamic Da’wa Party, one of a handful of opposition groups that fought Hussein’s rule from inside Iraq.

In 1991, Abdullah fought in the short-lived Shi’ite uprising that followed the war in Kuwait. For 19 days, he helped run the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, a revered pilgrimage destination and a funnel for enormous amounts of money tithed by devout Shi’ites.

Hussein’s army quickly quashed the rebellion, and Abdullah proudly displays the scars from the torture he endured in Abu Ghraib prison: a burn mark across his left shin from a heated metal bar, the disfigured muscle above his left knee.

His posture is awkward from being hung from the ceiling by his arms, which were tied behind his back.

The election, he said, offers a powerful salve against those dark memories. "We are thirsty for this day," he said.

1:26 The Fox ticker is reporting that Qatar is speeding up its plans to privatize Al Jazeera due to pressure from the US government . . . good news by my watch. Watch the left cry foul on this one, but shouldn't they rejoice anytime a state gives up control of a media outlet? I bet the US gov't pressure took the form of something like "hey -- we have spent billions to relocate our CentCom HQ to your country and this is the thanks we get?" I bet the Qatari economy gets a pretty nice injection from the presence of a large US installation . . .

1:20 Posted this a moment ago, but lost it: Just had a thought that if only the self-disenfranchising terrorists had gone the political route, they could hire some DNC operatives to plant false exit poll results in another hour or so . . . Imagine the headlines: "Imprisoned Saddam wins as write-in candidate with 100% of the vote."

1:10 Forty-five reasons to care about the elections in Iraq (hat-tip: Iraq Elections newswire)

1:03 This is Geraldo's finest hour. He can't contain his excitement on the ground in Baghdad -- he just said, "I refuse to speak in measured tones. This is truly exhilirating." And he called this, his sixth trip to Iraq since the war started, as the best one yet. Fox is just letting him go. He just compared the election to the fall of the Berlin Wall and 1776.

12:59 While scouring the internet for news, I just stumbled on the thoughts on one expatriate Iraqi who has just voted in the past few days. Very interesting. See here.

12:48 Here tis: The Watchdogs of Fallujah - By Bing West. Lots of down and dirty on UAVs.

12:37 About that Green Zone attack . . . Several observations to make. First the details: at 7:30pm in Iraq yesterday, 30 minutes after the evening curfew began on election eve, terrorists fired a rocket into the Green Zone in Baghdad and killed two US citizens. Now: Fox was playing video released for the US gov't, downloaded from a UAV that watched the terrorists gather in a group of 7, then there's a puff of black smoke -- probably the launch of the rocket -- then the bad guys scatter away -- perhaps because they've learned to be afraid of counterbattery fire. They obviously didn't know the UAV was watching. The overall effect is like one of those police videos out of LA where the criminals have nowhere to run. The US military found 7 people and 5 of them had explosives residue on their hands. The Fox anchor made some comment to the effect that little info about these UAVs and their capabilities had been released before, but loyal readers of The Adventures of Chester may remember a couple of links way back two or so months ago . . . stand by . . .

12:33 On the Fox ticker: Reuters reports a bomb has exploded at a school used as a polling station in Basra . . . just had a flaskback to those Homeland Security alerts over the summer about documents being found in Baghdad detailing the layout of US elementary schools . . . anyway, no word on casualties in Basra or the size and location of the blast . . .

12:27 Yesterday, US soldiers detained two individuals suspected of polling center attacks. Quote from Central Command:

CAMP LIBERTY, Baghdad -- Soldiers attached to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, detained two suspects at 3:50 p.m., Jan. 29, in the western Baghdad district of Mansour. The pair is suspected of plotting attacks against polling centers in the Baghdad area.

The suspects were detained at a check point where their names were matched to a list of suspects.

The two men are being held for further questioning.

12:18 Friends of Democracy carries two audio clips with info from yesterday in Najaf:

Hussein Al Qadi, reporting from Najaf, sent us two audio feeds in English:

1. The police and border forces found caches of weapons on farms west and south of the city.

2. Downtown Najaf was closed for the annual Shi'ite festival at the shrine of Imam Ali

I bet the Friends of Democracy bloggers in Iraq are out and about gathering info, etc and we'll have updates later on the FOD site . . .

12:16 Fox news has removed its breaking news banner about the possible bombings . . . and CNN reports a blast hit behind a polling station . . . (via Iraq Elections newswire).

12:12 Just found a one page roundup of the sentiment among Iraqi bloggers: Try this.

12:08 Just decided to switch the format. Updates now at the top of the post, old stuff at the bottom. . .

12:01 am, Sunday, 30 Jan: Most of the Iraqi bloggers haven't updated since yesterday, but their last posts are worth a visit. All ar dripping with pre-election excitement. See: IRAQ THE MODEL, Hammorabi, Live From Dallas . . .

11:57 CNN and Fox seem focused on Baghdad . . . what about Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk, Najaf? Must find more . . .

11:53 Slightly off-topic, while we wait on word of any bombings in Baghdad: just caught this story on cnn.com about a Marine who has survived nine different bombings intact. Used to be a minot-league baseball shortstop . . .

11:47 The Friends of Democracy site has a great map with the province names of Iraq listed: Friends of Democracy - Iraq Election News - Reports: Iraqi Provinces (Governorates). This is a great quick refresher for anyone who needs some quick situational awareness. Note: as it mentioned often, the four provinces which are not yet declared completely secure are: Al-Anbar, Baghdad, Babil, and Salah ad Din. As can be seen, these are more or less the Sunni triangle . . . great map.

11:43 Check out this post: The Damning "But" (ht: Instapundit.com).

11:42 Fox now says several loud blasts have been reported . . .

11:41 Fox reporting breaking news that a bomb may have gone off at a polling place in Baghdad . . .

Written by Chester at 11:43 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Election Live-Blogging Commences . . .

The Adventures of Chester has just made the executive decision to live-blog the elections for the next couple of hours. Stand by . . .

Written by Chester at 11:38 PM | Link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

T-minus 25 minutes until polls open in Iraq . . .

Just an FYI . . .

Much more to come later tonight and tomorrow here on The Adventures of Chester . . .

Written by Chester at 9:39 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Meanwhile, in that other new democracy . . .

Central Command reports that:

The trend in Afghan citizens and security forces assisting coalition forces by turning in weapons caches has continued to increase over the past two years. In 2003, for example, only 10 percent of all weapons caches were turned in by local Afghan citizens (not including Afghan security forces). In 2004, that number increased to 31 percent.

Since October 2004, for example, 236 weapons caches have been discovered throughout Afghanistan. Of these 236 caches, 99 were turned in to coalition forces by local Afghan citizens, local Afghan government officials, or Afghan security forces.

This trend is important for many reasons – to create a secure environment, to ensure stability and to improve the quality of life for all Afghans. But, it is also important because of an incident on Tuesday.

A local citizen turned in two rocket propelled grenade rounds to Afghan soldiers working with coalition forces. When the Afghan soldiers went to investigate where the rounds came from, they discovered children playing with an even larger cache of RPG rounds. These unattended caches present an even greater danger to innocent people who may come upon them, and it is important that everyone work together to eliminate this hazard.

Another Central Command release notes:

MOSUL, IRAQ – Multi-National Forces from 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team) were able to defuse a roadside bomb following a tip received through the Joint Coordination Center in northern Iraq Jan. 28.

The tip came from an Iraqi citizen who had called the Joint Coordination Center to inform them of the bomb planted in northeastern Mosul. Only four days ago another tip in the same area resulted in a roadside bomb being defused. These types of courageous acts demonstrate the commitment of Iraqi citizens to ensuring a safe and peaceful Iraq.

Looks as though the trend of greater civilian cooperation is on the rise in both countries . . . Central Command has stories like this up all the time . . .

Written by Chester at 11:28 AM | Link | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

A Prayer for Iraqis About to Vote

[This is Chester: Today, guest-blogger Steven Vincent offers a prayer that the many Iraqis he met during his trips to Iraq will prosper under Iraq's emerging democracy . . . check out his blog at www.redzoneblog.com and be sure to click the link in the sidebar to have a look at his book on his travels in Iraq, "In The Red Zone."]
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Tonight, as Saturday in North America moves toward its close, the people of Iraq--most of them, insha'allah--will be preparing to vote. It will be a long night for us, but an even longer day for them, crowded with acts of courage and violence, despair and inspiration--everything we've come to expect in a land that, for some of us, has become more familiar than we could have guessed, or in many cases, wished. There's nothing we can do now, of course, save offer our thoughts to those Iraqis who choose to vote, and anxiously await the course of democracy.

We bloggers intend, or at least hope, that our words are read by as wide an audience as possible. Today, though, I write with but a few people in mind - friends, acquaintances, strangers I met in Iraq during my all-too-brief travels through the country. People whose faces and voices will forever remain with me, who today form the living fulcrum upon which the events of the morrow will turn. People for whom, 10,000 miles away, I offer my prayers.

Like bulky, bearded Esam, whose irrepressible charm disguised the despair most Iraqis feel about their brutal society: recently, I posted a letter from him describing life in a Baghdad bereft of electricity, where nights are broken by the roar of American jets and distant explosions. I pray, too, for Ahmed, perhaps the most easy-going Iraqi I met, who broke my heart last week when he sent me a terse text-message reading "I am OK...not OK...miss you." Perhaps their new democracy will bring, along with accountable government and an independent judiciary, some electricity and heat.

I offer prayers for Zena, the Baghdad housewife who struggles to raise three small daughters in a city where kidnapping children is as common as car bombs. The internet cafe where we met is closed, a victim of the insurgency's targeting of foreigners. She spends her days now in hours-long queues, waiting to fill her car with gas. She is tired, worried, distraught. May the new democracy bring her additional supplies of fuel, along with law and order to the streets.

And Rand, the Christian woman who also worked at the internet cafe. She left the cafe to work for Iraqna, the cellphone company, which provides her the amazing opportunity to travel to Egypt and Syria. Back home in Baghdad, however, the church she used to attend was bombed by Zarqawi. Her Christian friends have begun to fear for their lives. May the new democracy bring the capture of the terror master and his malignant ilk--as well as comfort to the Christians of Iraq.

And Naseer, brilliant, tormented, forever perched on the edge of melancholy and despair. His insights into the Iraqi soul had a profound impact on my own views of his nation. Recently, in a Frontpage essay he expressed a steely resolve to vote and--as he put it--"resist" the paramilitary fascists. He above all the Iraqis I met bears the emotional scars of Saddam and a thirst for justice. May democracy bring an end to the "insurgency" and peace to my dear, tortured friend.

Nor can I forget Nour, my beautiful Basran comrade, guide and protector. For me, she embodied the indominable but endangered spirit of women in a land that treats females as second-class creatures. Her faith that moderate Islam and democracy represent the best hope for her country caused me to re-evaluate my notions of religion and politics. My prayers are never far from her. And by Allah's good grace, she seems to be doing well: an e-mail from her today tells me she is busy working with international journalists covering the elections. May He continue to bring her good fortune, democracy and the freedom she so desperately desires and deserves.

There are others. Mohammad--a good-natured bear of man whose fondest wish was to design books for children; Ahmad, handsome, cosmopolitan, plagued by rumors that he spied for Saddam's secret police; Qasim, the silver-haired, silver-tongued, crypto-Baathist impresario of the Hewar Gallery; Dhia, who took me through the Sunni Triangle at peril to his life; Samir, who rescued me at a religious festival when Zarqawi killed over a hundred people with suicide bombs. May democracy bring them what they never had under the shadow of Saddam, and what the paramilitaries would once again deny them: a future.

Some Iraqis will not vote out of fear, resentment or apathy. Many will not because they are forever beyond the ballot box or the terrorist. They number in the thousands, these men and women, transformed in a flash from living beings to figures on a casualty sheet too long to comprehend. And so I pray for one, an Iraqi woman who worked for the CPA, whom I know only from a faded photograph in a makeshift memorial--although I saw the wreckage caused by the sucide attack that killed her. May democracy bring meaning to her life; may Hadeel not have died in vain.

There are more, many more, enough to tax a reader's patience, and so I will close. But not before I offer a final prayer--for our troops, standing guard over the first stumbling steps of the Iraqi infant America has helped bring into the world. May tomorrow's elections and the democracy it promises bring them something, too: a journey home.

Written by at 10:41 AM | Link | Comments (1) | Print Article

Obsidian Order: Followup

This is a followup to this post, below about a debate on the seeming problems with several different shots of a car bomb in Baghdad.

The conversation in the comments section at Obsidian Order (See The Obsidian Order: A Very Special Effect) mentions the frequency with which two Reuters photographers find themselves near the scene of car-bombings or among terrorists in action. A commenter notes:

A google search of the photographers shows that while Khalid Mohammed has few photos to his name, none of which show an obvious pattern, the same does not apply to the other two.

Both Ali Jasim and Ali Al-Saadi have quite a number of photos of insurgents in action with the Sadr militia and Mehdi army. Also both are credited with photos of the american corpses hanging from the bridge in Fallujah. Ali Jasim's are the most recognized as he has the snap of the people beating the men's ashes with their shoes. This would seem to indicate that they have good contacts with the insurgents and could, I am not saying that they were, have been notified that something would happen there at that time. Ali Jasim does have several pictures of bombs in which the flames are still quite active which seems to indicate the event was recent.

Are these the same photographers who were right on scene when mobs of Iraqis were beating and mutilating the corpses of dead Americans? To be reminded of this horror,[Alert -- it's graphic] see The Memory Hole > images: Iraqi Mob Desecrates Americans' Bodies and if you really want to see the video, there are several links on the site, but be forewarned.

Back in December, Belmont Club asked some probing questions about journalists and how they seem to be in the right place at the right time. Belmont Club reprints a letter sent to Powerline, from a reader, a Mr. O'Brien:

AFP, AP and AP TV had advance notice of the murders of contractors in Fallujah last spring, so that they could position themselves on scene. ... Apparently the reporters were tipped to go to a specific location. They were not told exactly what would take place, but they knew it was going to be a terrorist action of some type. For security reasons, the terrorists give the reporters very little notice -- just enough to get there, if everything goes right. They were told exactly what street corner to be on, where they would be expected by and under the protection of the terrorists. ("If you're anywhere else, we can't guarantee your safety.") ... After the contractors were dead and their bodies looted, the reporters stayed and encouraged the mob that had gathered to mutilate the bodies. I am told by our Arabic speakers that they can be heard egging the youths on during the video of the mutilations. "Go ahead, cut him up. What are you afraid of?"

Belmont Club's analysis continues and is fascinating:

I have no idea if these charges are true; Mr. O'Brien's allegations would surely outrage many journalists working for the Associated Press. But why, in principle, should Mr. O'Brien's allegations be withheld from students where the photos of contractors should not? All of the arguments advanced by Ms. Halperin apply to the Powerline article as well. The obvious response would be that Mr. O'Brien's allegations are 'false' while the the picture of the contractors hanging like meat from the bridge is 'true', though a moment's reflection will show that one does not disprove the other. Yet as Ms. Halperin is at pains to point out, the real truth is not contained in the actual photograph but in is its larger signification. "The image, very reminiscent of the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Somalia, was too important for the editors here at The Morning Call to ignore. It is a powerful photo. I suspect this particular picture will prove to be a historical flashpoint image that helps define the Iraqi conflict and who we are as a people." One could argue that O'Brien is asking equally fundamental questions about who you trust to convey the news. Ultimately, the case for preferring the AP's account and dismissing Mr. O' Brien's rests upon an appeal to the authority of the AP brand name. It rests on trust. The public knows the AP and doesn't know Mr. O'Brien, hence it is the AP's account that represents the canon.

Yet ironically we do know Mr. O'Brien, who at least has a name, while we will probably never know the identity of the "brave Iraqi" photographer who captured the execution of Iraqi election worker on Haifa Street.

I am a blogger. A private citizen. I read and write for the world to see, though only a small, miniscule slice of it does. But information about me is available here on my website.

Who are these photographers? Who are the editors who write captions for these images?

Can the military listen in on their cell phones? It might save some lives. Or at least answer some questions.

Final note: Remember the images above every time you read or hear a reference to the lack of Sunni participation in the election this weekend. Who wants to bet that some of the self-disenfranchising Sunnis are those featured smiling, waving, dancing, and beating the bodies of dead Americans in April? It's worth a thought.

Written by Chester at 1:13 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

GREAT Places to Follow Iraq Election News!

If you click on the topmost BlogAd in the sidebar, you will be taken to Friends of Democracy, a great new site set up with help from Spirit of America. It truly is really cool. Lots of reporting, blogging, interviews, photos, etc, about the election in Iraq. Spirit of America tells Chester this:

The information is not "candy coated" - it simply does more than emphasize terrorism and violence. It provides good news and bad. Please link to the site and check it for news. It will be especially good on election day. We'll have reports and photos coming in from all corners of Iraq.

This site will certainly be one to keep an eye on. More:

We are hosting a small conference in Washington, DC on Sunday (Jan. 30) from 1.30pm to 4pm that will provide a consolidated picture of Iraq's elections featuring prominent Iraqis, special guests (e.g.,Cliff May from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Christopher Hitchens), live call ins from the Friends of Democracy correspondents and bloggers, photos, video and stories. It will provide a picture of Iraq's elections people will not get anywhere else.

Spirit of America also offers a story on their own site: Iraqis Defy Insurgents for Spirit of America. An excerpt:

The background behind this story involves our stellar corporate partner, Triad Hospitals. Triad's CFO, Whitman Burke, who is a Marine Reservist, reponded to a call for medical supplies and equipment to be donated via the Marines to hospitals in Iraq. Triad donated medical gear from 6 hospitals and SoA involved another of our magnanimous partners, FedEx, to ship the medical supplies to a main warehouse in Texas where they were palletized and transported by FedEx to the 1st Marine Division in Iraq.

The 1st Marine Division took posession of the supplies and then arranged to have them delivered to the 2nd Marine Division. No small feat given the intense terrorist activity in the 1st MarDiv area. But, as the Marines always do, they pulled it off! The donated supplies included everything from tubing for IVs to gurneys to EKG machines.

The Adventures of Chester wholeheartedly supports Spirit of America and aks you to consider a donation to this outstanding organization! Read their site, visit Friends of Democracy, and help Iraq on the road to freedom.

UPDATE: More news from Spirit of America:

Great news! We've just received confirmation that C-SPAN is planning to cover Spirit of America's Iraq election event this Sunday from 2pm to 4pm Eastern (11am to 1pm Pacific). Please watch. Your support has made this possible. Please forward this message far and wide and encourage people to tune in.

Well, this is one blogger who knows where he'll be Sunday afternoon. Note: those times are between 11pm and 1am in Iraq . . . maybe they'll have declared a winner? Should be fascinating stuff . . .

Written by Chester at 12:45 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

MEMRI: Part 4 of the Iraq Election Series

The Middle East Media Research Institute has just published its latest election analysis, Iraqi Elections (IV): Platforms and Campaign Strategies. As always, MEMRI makes many interesting points. The conclusions:

There are recurrent themes in the various platforms that were highlighted. The platforms all support:

Creating a democratic, egalitarian, and federal system of government that guarantees the political freedoms of the various ethnic and religious groups.
Ending the occupation (with various degrees of urgency).
Building a strong but non-political army that protects the country's borders.
Preserving the Arab-Muslim identity of the country.
Putting an end to terrorism.
Supporting a bigger role for women in politics.
Assuring non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.
Addressing economic reconstruction with various degrees of specificity and detail.
Fighting growing corruption in government.

Most of the platforms, however, fail to address in specific terms the most burning issues facing the voter: the loss of sense of security; unemployment; shortage of food supplies, electricity, drinking water, and, ironically, gasoline in a country rich with water resources and perhaps with the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. There is hardly any reference to future economic policy with regard to private investment in the oil sector, the role of the private vis-à-vis the public sector, and the privatization of inefficient public entities.

The government that will be established after the elections will face enormous challenges. To succeed it will need to come up with a crash program, a "New Deal," that would provide quick and palpable relief.

Well that's MEMRI's take on things. Interesting. The rest of their piece is good as well, discussing each of the favored political organizations in detail.

Written by Chester at 12:17 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 28, 2005

A new milblog: "I Should Have Stayed Home"

A new milblog has appeared and gotten some good coverage this week. I Should Have Stayed Home... is authored by two individuals working in Baghdad who give little personal info about themselves:

Two guys working in Iraq doing their best to clue you in on the ground truth.

From the content of their posts, they seem to be in a bodyguard role, possibly contracted or US Special Forces. Very interesting on-the-ground info from each. Check it out. [hat-tip: Mudville Gazette]

Written by Chester at 11:34 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Quite an interesting montage . . .

An earlier post alluded to a controversy in the blogosphere about the fortunate presence of wire service photographers at the scenes of terrorist acts in Iraq. Go check this out: The Obsidian Order [hat-tip: Instapundit] today offers an in-depth look at photos from one such scene. The conclusion:

The key and blindingly obvious point: there are at least three photojournalists from different outfits there exactly at the time it goes off! This is not a lucky coincidence. The pictures are clearly taken less than a minute after the original explosion and less than a minute apart. Also: all of the photographers are stringers, not regular staff photographers.

Interpretation: One, this was staged, the particulars of the bomb ensure it will be ineffective and safe from the distance from which it was photographed, but visually spectacular. The people running are most likely also staged. Two, the reporters were invited to see it. Three, they knew it was staged.

One of the comments on the site says:

Fox news had the sequence on the TV tonight. FNC said the Iraq police had shot up the car and stopped it -- the car caught fire -- then apparently a bomb inside went off. When the camera pulled back, the police with their guns raised were in the near filed framing -- as if they had been shooting at the car.

So I am not sure what your point is. Looked to me like the Iraqi police got their man before he could reach the school. FNC said a school was the target, not that it was hit by the explosion.

Ah ha! There we have it! The reason the pictures look funny is because the Iraqi security forces killed the attacker before he could properly position his vehicle and the vehicle then sympathetically detonated. But wait! This is good news right? Iraqi security forces disrupted an attack. Then why does the Reuters caption under each photo read thus:

An Iraqi boy runs past a car just as it explodes in front of al-Nahdha High School which was scheduled to be used as a voting centre in Baghdad, January 28, 2005. Hours earlier in the same area in southern Baghdad, a car bomb exploded next to a police station, killing four Iraqi civilians, police said. REUTERS/Ali Jasim

Not only does Reuters refuse to acknowledge the success of Iraqi security forces in every single caption, but they instead mention a completely different bombing that was successful in killing innocents.

This is truly amazing! And they spit on us lowly bloggers! Obsidian Order rightly asks, who are these photographers and what are their motives? We must ask the same about the caption-writers.

Another chink in the wire service armor falls away.

Written by Chester at 11:11 PM | Link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

The Shadow of Karbala

[MAJOR CONTENT ANNOUNCEMENT: Steven Vincent, the author of "In the Red Zone," has agreed to do some guest-blogging this weekend as the Iraqi elections draw near. See his own blog here. And look for his book linked in the sidebar! The below piece is his, though it says "posted by Chester."]
-------------------------------------------------

Two more days until Iraqi elections, the voting’s already begun in Australia, and, of course, the disloyal opposition is registering their presence, as well.

Meanwhile, you have to admire a people with the ability to alarm kings, sultans, terrorists, military officers, newspaper columnists, CIA officials and State Department panjandrums, not to mention thousands of citizens who once supped at the table of their worst enemy. I’m talking, of course, about Iraq’s Shia population.

Focused as we are on the spread of democracy through the region, we are less attuned to what may be the true revolution in this election. Numbering some 150 million out of Islam’s 1.2 billion adherents, the Shia have always suffered minority status in the Muslim ummah. Only in Iran and tiny Azerbaijan do a Shia majority rule their nation. But now, thanks to American military might and their own astonishing discipline and maturity, the Party of Ali is poised on the brink of achieving what they discarded eight decades ago in their revolt against British mandatory rule: political control of Iraq, the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

And their neighbors are afraid. Along with other observers, I’ve noted earlier ("Our Man in Waziristan") that Sunday’s elections will create a “Shia crescent” running from Lebanon into Syria (where Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect is an off-shoot of Shi’ism), Iraq, Iran and then hooking around to Bahrain, which lies adjacent to Saudi Arabia—where two million more Shia sit atop the Wahhabi kingdom’s richest oil fields.

This fear of rising Shia power lies behind many of the negative comments we read about the upcoming Iraqi elections. For example, on December 8, King Abdullah of Sunni-dominated Jordan warned that a Shia victory in Iraq would “open us to a whole new set of problems” that may destabilize the (Sunni) Middle East, including (Sunni-Wahhabi) Saudi Arabia. Reporting yesterday, Soraya Nelson and Huda Ahmed of the Knight-Ridder News Service quoted a retired Jordanian (Sunni) general “summing up the view of many critics” that the Iraqi elections are “mission impossible…without the acquiescence of the Sunnis.”

And here’s (Sunni) Qatari academic and political analyst Mohammad al-Misfer, quoted on Wednesday by Agence France Press:

[Sunni-dominated Gulf regimes] will not be in a stable situation if the Iraqi elections produce a Shiite leadership, because many Shiites in the region will no longer accept to be subordinate [to the Sunnis] after they see fellow Shiites in control in Iraq in addition to Iran. (my emphasis)

In (Sunni) Egypt, Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif warns that Iraq could plunge into a civil war, while former foreign minister Ahmed Maher cast doubts cast doubts on the real motives for the elections:

What is suspicious is the insistence of the American and Iraqi authorities to hold the elections within the timescale. This arouses fear and doubt over the real intentions of the supporters of the vote. Elections which…impose the domination of the majority, some of whom are bent on vengeance, could have destructive consequences that extend throughout the region.

These fears are not confined to the Muslim world, but exist in Washington, as well. As Fouad Ajami wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Wednesday,

The power of the Arabist view lingers in the State Department and in the ranks of the CIA, which retain a basic sympathy for the Sunni order.

We see these sympathies in the CIA’s support for Ayad Allawi, who—not to overlook the incredible bravery of the man (Shia-born, we should note)—halted the de-Baathification program in Iraq and attempted to bring Baathists into the government, resulting, some argue, in creating a network of insurgent spies and informers within the interim administration. Nor should we overlook ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheurer’s offensive near-idolization of Osama bin Laden (“The Trouble With Hubris”), who seems to be positioning himself as the Sunni-Wahabbi standard-bearer against renascent Shiism.

The State Department also seems to exhibit signs of Shia-phobia. As an observer in a neo-conservative Washington think-tank recently told me, “They want nothing to do with religion—they don’t get, they don’t like to touch it.” After all, it was a Shia theocracy in Iran that burned the diplomatic and foreign intelligence services during the 1979 Khomeini revolution.

Why is this important? Because the news we receive about Iraq and, in particular, the upcoming elections, passes through many filters, not least of which is the difficult-to-understand Shia-Sunni split. Officials in both the Middle East and Washington have their allegiances and biases, which they convey, sometimes unconsciously, to reporters, who in turn pass them to us, often themselves unaware. But they exist, and they are important. Ghosts from the Battle of Karbala, fought 14 centuries ago in Iraq, reach to the halls of Washington, the front pages of our daily newspapers, and the television screens of our homes.

Written by Chester at 8:11 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 27, 2005

Bloggers vs. the Mainstream? Not quite . . .

Monday's San Jose Mercury News carried an interesting article by Frank Bajak about the relationship between bloggers and the established press and news outlets.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The managing editor of The New York Times threw down the gauntlet as she stared across a big O-shaped table at the prophets of blogging.

Did they have any idea, asked Jill Abramson, what it cost her newspaper to maintain its Baghdad bureau last year?

The unspoken subtext was clear: How can you possibly believe you can toss a laptop into a backpack, head for Iraq's Sunni Triangle and pretend to even come close to telling it like it is?

For that you need a bulwark of experience, credibility and financial, medical, legal and logistical support. Not to mention a staff of savvy locals. And that cost Abramson's paper a million dollars last year, she said.

Aside from eliciting questions about the return on investment for the New York Times' vast logistical apparatus, (Did John Steinbeck possess such support when he accompanied allied troops across North Africa and wrote "There Once Was a War"?) Ms. Abramson is largely missing the point. In fact there are several problems here. Let's look a little closer.

How is news created? Perhaps in three or so ways?

1. An event occurs. A journalist is dispatched to write, or take pictures, or record it. Often, these are spontaneous events. Just as often they are carefully scripted events meant for journalistic consumption.

2. A corporation, government agency, civic group, thinktank, or some other organization releases a study in a press release. This is then poured over by journalists and their editors to examine how best to write about it. The resulting product is offered to the public.

3. A journalist attempts to uncover what is really going on in a given locale, subculture, or with a certain person of note or celebrity. This takes the form of interviews, investigative journalism, etc. Thus the phrases, "behind the scenes," "on the ground," "exclusive interview."

4. Often, the above three methods are mixed.

In all of the above mentioned methods, the news is viewed as a product. The raw material is the event, the interview, the document, the press release, the footage. These raw materials are then crafted into what is consumed as news.

The first big change that bloggers have brought to all of this is a relentless examination of the original documents -- events, interviews, press releases, footage, etc -- that was previously unavailable to the general public. The editorial role of the news producer is on the decline. This is why blogs are growing in popularity. No longer does the reader or viewer only get the small, refined bits of news raw material that is dished up in any given old-media outlet. Bloggers routinely link to those original pieces of raw material themselves and their readers are free to examine each in detail.

The vast majority of politics and war blogs, like this one, offer an opinion, not an original piece of raw news material. Every now and then, a blogger will find him or herself in the midst of an event, or scoring an interview, or traveling through a newsworthy place. When that happens, he adds to the overall amount of raw material available for the general public to weigh and judge. But for the most part, bloggers aren't offering original, fresh news pieces.

Instead, a blogger is his own editor, and replicates the jobs of those who manage the content at the New York Times. And blogging is open to anyone. Plenty of blogs are authored by those who have more than established their bona fides in print journalism. The Becker-Posner blog is one example. The Victor Hanson papers is another. Kevin Sites not only shot footage in Fallujah, but also authored a blog while in Iraq.

The second big change that blogging brings to the media is really the kicker: the instant feedback mechanism. Even if some blogger found himself at the site of, say, a car-bombing in Iraq, or a political revolution in Ukraine, if he covered it in a way that did not ring true with others, they are usually welcome to comment on his site. Moreover, depending on the extent of their disagreement, they are free to set up a rival site and write their own interpretations of events there. This is true for anyone. Someone who takes issue with the majority of opinion here is welcome to comment (though please stay on topic and don't use profanity) or to set up, say, www.chesterhasnoclue.com. The corrections and feedback are instant. But not to dwell solely on corrections: the most enjoyable part of blogs is their conversation-like tone. In some blogs, regular readers will even have very robust discussions within the comments section -- sort of like sitting around a table with a vast number who share the same interests, though certainly not the same points of view.

The New York Times has no such feedback mechanism. Its editorials are strangely absent of authorship -- who even to respond to? who to email? Only the Times chooses which letters to the editor to publish. Yet despite all this, it claims objectivity. Objectivity is only worth something if you rely on the polished, refined, news-as-a-product that is the output of the established press -- and if you only rely on one outlet. If you want everything -- the good, the bad, the ugly, the contradictory, the confusing, the outtakes, and the raw materials -- you turn to a blog, you probably turn to several, and you know that you are seeing life as it is, not as it is polished up to be in Manhattan.

Having said all that, Mrs. Abramson appears equally wrong about the logistics required to produce journalism. Consider Robert Kaplan, who started as a travel writer, and has authored in-depth works on the future of the world, based on his many travels. He will admit that writing such work certainly requires a patron of some kind -- but he is also on the record as saying that when he travels to a place, he often does so with nothing more than the clothes he's wearing, and a backpack with a book or two and paper to write on. Hard to see how this cannot be replicated by just about anyone with either independent means or free time.

In fact, it already has been. Consider Steven Vincent, author of the book, "In the Red Zone." [See Vincent's blog here.] Vincent went to Iraq alone and with little or none of the massive logistical support which Mrs. Abramson describes, and created an excellent work about the experience.

Returning to the Mercury News article, let's examine a bit more:

The best single war story I've seen out of Iraq, a piece on the fight for Fallujah by Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lassiter, I learned about from a blog's RSS feed.

(Note to bloggers: You've got to build credibility and respect before you'll be allowed like Lassiter to accompany soldiers into combat. I don't doubt that will happen in the future, but for now at least, bloggers do very little original reporting).

But how to gauge a blogger's authority and reliability? Easy: reputation management, something eBay does well. Reputation tools for bloggers are needed and one of the most respected voices in tech journalism, Dan Gillmor, is looking to technologists to develop them.

Bajak makes several errors. He confuses credibility with original authorship. Certainly we can all agree that there are many credible judges who didn't author the case law on which they render opinions.

Bajak doesn't seem to understand the issue of the correspondent either: in the future -- and it might be a bit off -- journalist-bloggers won't accompany troops into combat in places like Fallujah. The troops will BE the bloggers, in one way or another. Perhaps the journalists will just be in a sort of facilitating role. Who knows? The technology won't be quite like it is today. It will be better. But whatever its form, it will allow more of the raw news material than ever to be in the public domain.

As to his need for a technology-based reputation management tool, this is laugh-out loud funny. Bajak clucks his tongue at those of us who don't get paid to write -- and are therefore presumably untrustworthy. Yet somehow, an organization like the New York Times, which had a huge false-story scandal not long ago, is immune from the need for a reputation watch. Can the public post comments below a New York Times editorial? Is the Times' regular readership offered the opportunity to view such comments? Certainly this is unwieldy for the print version, but perhaps something like it could be avaialable online. The online version is free after all.

But that ignores the bigger issue, mentioned earlier: bloggers do have a reputation management tool. It's our readers. If a blogger started publishing rants about a given topic with little evidence of raw material to back it up, it won't take long before few will read anymore. [Eventually though, he'll get a lucrative deal to replace Maureen Dowd when she finally goes completely bonkers . . . but that's neither here nor there.]

One of the best analogies for the blogosphere phenomenon is that of open-source software. A friend in the tech industry mentioned this yesterday. Rather than producing a finished piece of software, programmers create something that can be edited by users to suit their needs. Much is the same with the blogosphere. The follow-up question, is how anything is interesting if it only fits the needs, preconceptions, and tastes of a single person. The answer is that the market for ideas continues to exist. It's just been rapidly expanded.

Hugh Hewitt discusses many of these ideas in his new book, "Blog." He likens the effects of the technological advances that have created the blogosphere to those of Martin Luther's time. In this case, established media are the go-betweens, who are employed to be arbiters of truth, just as the Catholic Church was once employed to dispense pardon and pennance.

So, to answer the question, "Are bloggers more reliable than the mainstream press?"

Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and it's up to you to sort it out. Just like life itself.

Some follow-up thoughts:

Note that Howell Raines, in an interview in The Atlantic in the first half of 2004, stated that if the New York Times did not exist, nothing like it would be invented to take its place. [Sorry -- can't find the link -- should be a cover story for the April to June timeframe.]

Don't miss the discussion on this topic over at Belmont Club last week. Wretchard always has some interesting things to say. In this case he asks whether the media is truly merely a polisher/refiner of raw news material, and whether or not traditional media isn't occasionally complicit in the production of the raw material itself -- as in the case of the recent assassination of Iraqi election workers in Haifa street in Baghdad and the serendipitous presence of AP photographers in the exactly correct place in the exactly correct time.

Written by Chester at 11:14 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Various Updates and Clarifications

Thanks to all for tuning in today, and for the many comments and emails. Here are a few things to know:

First off, the site I mentioned on TV is the Central Command home page, available at: www.centcom.mil. There you will find press releases in the lower right of the page. They are updated as news happens, and not according to any publishing schedule. No updates are given on the weekend. This is the list of stories that I mentioned on the air.

Next, an Alert Reader emails this:

When, oh when, are you going to note that the MSM's continual drumbeat
of pessimism about Iraq is reaching a veritable crescendo in advance of the vote. It's become too obvious to ignore. Just today alone in
online versions:

NYT (not to mention editorials, general violence stories and AP/Reuters pickups):
"Iraq Insurgents Unleash More Attacks as Election Day Nears"
"Anti-Vote Violence in Iraq Is Intensifying, Latest Data Show"
"Across Baghdad, Security Is Only an Ideal"
"Iraqis Abroad Seem Reluctant to Vote, Too, Sign-Up Shows"
"New Election Issues: Electricity and Water"

WaPo (same):
"U.S. Troops' Role in Iraqi Elections Criticized"
"Iraqi Sheik Struggles for Votes, And Against Religious Tradition"

Reuters:
"Iraq Election May Worsen Ethnic, Sectarian Tension"
"Saudi Rulers Eye Iraq Election, Shi'ites Discount Fears"
"Insurgents Strike at More Iraq Election Targets"
"Investors nervous as Iraq election approaches"
"Iraq election campaign dirty as well as dangerous"
"Fear shrouds Iraq election"
"Attacks turn Iraq election into "stealth" campaign"

Here's a positive one: "Iraqi exiles sign up to vote, want peace,
democracy"

"Iraqi Elections Likely 'Less Than Perfect' - U.S."

AP:
"Insurgents step up violence ahead of vote"
"Baath backers, extremists slip into Iraq"
"Election tensions in Kirkuk could spread"
"Iraq conditions make for unusual election"

neutral at best: "U.S., Iraqi forces secure election sites"

"Bush's stake is huge in Iraqi elections"
"Oil prices up amid Iraq election worries"
"Vote tally may take awhile in Iraq"
Trust me, not neutral: "Arab media give Iraq election center stage"
"Top U.S. commander: Iraq forces not ready"

This is all true of course. Just by looking at headlines alone, one can see a sort of meta-narrative of the coverage of Iraq. It doesn't matter whether there is any bias in the media or not: the predominant story-line is obvious.

If you are jonesing for more "good" news from Iraq, then you absolutely must go check out the work by Arthur Chrenkoff immediately. He writes a "Good News from Iraq" column every two weeks which is featured on the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com, and Winds of Change.net on Mondays. To see all of the archives from this series, go to Chrenkoff's blog, scroll down the sidebar, and click on the links to the good news series. Don't miss his "Good News from Afghanistan" and "Good News from the Middle East" posts either!

Next, you should really check out the rest of the Milbloggers for more. Just scroll down the sidebar to your right and find the "Milblogs" logo and see the links under it and click on "List." Then enjoy. Milblogs was founded by Greyhawk at The Mudville Gazette. Be sure to pay him a visit.

Next, to answer a few admin questions, if you email me, I'll do my best to respond, but please be patient. And, if you'd like, I'll add you to the mailing list here at The Adventures of Chester. I send out one update a week just letting folks know what we've been discussing here of late. I don't plan to share this list with anyone for any reason.

Next, when we hear of tragedies like yesterday's helicopter crash, it is natural to want to help. Here are three great ways you can support the war effort:

1. Give a donation to The Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation, whose mission is to give aid

to children of Marines or Federal law enforcement personnel who were killed on duty or died under extraordinary circumstances while serving our country at home or abroad.

2. Consider giving to Spirit of America, which supports the war effort in a whole slew of ways. A great example is their Iraq Election News program. Check it out.

3. USA Cares is another program that offers a variety of support to troops and families. Check them out too.

Next, I'd like to thank Fox for having me on. All of the folks I spoke with were highly professional and it was a pleasure. And thanks to the technician who hooked me up at the remote site. His son is a Harrier pilot in Iraq. Seems like everyone knows a Marine.

One final note about the TV appearance and then on to other things: First two phone calls I got afterwards in rapid succession were from my father and then mother who asked the same question, "Was that your jacket? Why did you look so big?"

Well, apparently, it's not a good idea to wear a white shirt when on TV, so my streetjacket is what we went with. Somehow, it seems I looked like I had just left the gym or had gained 30 pounds or something. So in the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I am 5 foot 7 and a buck forty-five of blogging power. I'm the small, quick, wiry version of Marine, not the large, brute-squad version.

Oh! Mrs. Chester says hello to any new readers.

Enough of all that . . .

Later tonight: Are bloggers more reliable than the mainstream media? An interesting question and it needs some examination . . .

Written by Chester at 6:26 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Thanks for tuning in!

If you are new to The Adventures of Chester, feel free to poke around the site a bit . . .

New posts coming tonight . . .

(And there might be an increase in bandwidth coming as well . . .)

Cheers,
Chester

Written by Chester at 12:22 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 26, 2005

FLASH: CHESTER TO BE ON FOX NEWS LIVE--THURSDAY 12:45P ET

Chester will be interviewed on Fox News Live by anchor David Asman on Thursday, Jan 27th at 12:45p eastern time. He will be discussing Iraq, blogging, and many of the other topics featured here at the Adventures of Chester. Hope you can tune in!

Written by Chester at 7:10 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 23, 2005

Conservative Critiques of the War, Part II: The Lone Realist

[This is Part II of "Conservative Critiques of the War." See Part I, the Introduction, here.]

Consider this, written in the autumn of 2003, as US forces had completely defeated Saddam's regime:

America has approached the war on terrorism as if from two dreamworlds. The liberal, in which an absurd understanding of cause and effect, the habit of capitulation to foreign influence, a mild and perpetual anti-Americanism, reflex allergies to military spending, and a theological aversion to self-defense all lead to policies that are hard to differentiate from surrender. And the conservative, in which everything must be all right as long as a self-declared conservative is in the White House—no matter how badly the war is run; no matter that a Republican administration in electoral fear leans left and breaks its promise to restore the military; and no matter that because the Secretary of Defense decided that he need not be able to fight two wars at once, an adequate reserve does not exist to deal with, for example, North Korea. And in between these dreamworlds of paralysis and incompetence lies the seam, in French military terminology la soudure , through which al-Qaeda, uninterested in our parochialisms, will make its next attack.

Or this:

The unprecedented military and economic potential of even the United States alone, thus far so imperfectly utilized, is the appropriate instrument. Adjusting military spending to the level of the peacetime years of the past half-century would raise outlays from approximately $370 billion to approximately $650 billion. If the United States had the will, it could, excessively, field 20 million men, build 200 aircraft carriers, or almost instantly turn every Arab capital into molten glass, and the Arabs know this.

Or this:

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over.

And finally, this:

But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

Although the critiques of the war from the left are well-documented, and even well-"documentaried" if one considers Michael Moore's oeuvre, conservative critiques of our current war receive scant coverage in the mainstream press.

Continue reading "Conservative Critiques of the War, Part II: The Lone Realist"

Written by Chester at 8:17 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) | Print Article

The Latest from Al-Hakim

Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim is popping up more and more as the mainstream press begins to realize that he will win Iraq's election. Today's Sunday Times (in the UK) features a story quoting him in short bursts on a variety of topics. Here is what he said:

“No people in the world accepts occupation and nor do we accept the continuation of American troops in Iraq,” said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

“We regard these forces to have committed many mistakes in the handling of various issues, the first and foremost being that of security, which in turn has contributed to the massacres, crimes and calamities that have taken place in Iraq against the Iraqis.”

***
[speaking of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Kuwait] “These countries have past experiences and good security forces and with good relations we can solve this problem together,” he said.

“Should the security problem continue, it will not end at the border of Iraq but extend to their countries.”

***
“Iraq can rely on itself and its people and it does not want foreign troops in its country.”

***
“Iran is a friendly neighbouring country that stood by Iraqis of all sects in the past, something that will not be forgotten by the Iraqi people,”

"However, this does not entitle it to interfere in Iraq and its people or to impose itself on us. We even told the Iranians this when we last visited them and got their reassurance that they, too, believe in the principle of non-interference.”

***
[Asked to comment on the idea of stepping aside for Allawi]: “One should not predict intentions in advance.”

It seems difficult to reconcile the two most glaring statements of Hakim (to Western eyes):

“Should the security problem continue, it will not end at the border of Iraq but extend to their countries.”

and

“Iran is a friendly neighbouring country that stood by Iraqis of all sects in the past, something that will not be forgotten by the Iraqi people. However, this does not entitle it to interfere in Iraq and its people or to impose itself on us."

Here we witness a glimpse of a new foreign policy, never before seen or imagined: the democratic state of Iraq's relations with its neighbors. It is a shame that the Times chose to summarize Hakim's remarks, rather than publishing them in full. [They have yet to learn from the blogosphere . . .] Hakim could mean many different things in these statements:

1. If security problems persist, Iraq will look to its neighbors for assistance.

2. If security problems persist, Iraq's neighbors will have to assist because the same forces that seek to undo the government of Iraq are a threat to the neighbors as well.

3. If security problems persist, Iraq will closely examine the role its neighbors are playing in those problems.

Hakim, a man who spent years in exile in Iran, pursues a wise course here. Rather than making the statements US officials are wont to do, blaming "Iran" or "Syria" for interference in Iraq's security, Hakim leaves open the possibility of working with those governments while at the same time fighting against the terrorists who operate within their boundaries, and fight against the Iraqis. In short, he gives his neighbors face-saving ways to support his internal security requirements. Expect further such statements from Hakim, since they are rhetorically deft. He says, "Of course, Iran and Syria wouldn't support anti-Iraq terrorists, and of course Iran and Syria will assist us in chasing down any terrorists who appear to be based in their countries." A more famous example of this rhetorical device is thus:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here under leave of Brutus and the rest --
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men --

What role for the US in Iraq, post-election? We are the bad cop to Hakim's good one, the big stick to his soft-spokenness, and shortly, the Caesar to the Brutus of his immediate neighbors.

Written by Chester at 6:40 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 22, 2005

Latest Iraq Prognostications from George Friedman

George Friedman, the founder of Strategic Forecasting (or Stratfor), has issued his latest thoughts on the future of Iraq, "After the Election." he believes that the election vote will be certified, and that the Shi'ite groups will win, after which time, a sovereign Iraqi state, with an elected Shia leader will be the result. He believes the Shia will take advantage of this opportunity to completely crush the terrorist insurgency. Says Friedman:

The Shia understand they cannot simply remain in a defensive mode. They have been passive in the run-up to the election, but after the election their credibility as the government of Irraq will depend on how they deal with the guerrillas. They must either suppress the guerrillas or negotiate a deal with them. Since a deal is hard to imagine at this time, they will have to act to suppress them. If they don't, the government will either be destroyed by the insurgents, or Iraq will split into two or three countries, an evolution unacceptable to the Shia or to Iran.

Therefore, the Shia will fight. The Shiite leadership has made it clear it wants the United States to remain in Iraq for the time being. This does not mean it wants a long-term American presence. It means it wants US forces to carry the main battle against the Sunnis on its behalf. In the same way that al-Sistani wanted the Americans to deal with Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr during the An Najaf affair, he wants the Americans to carry the main burden now.

The United States is prepared to carry a burden, but it is not prepared to single-handedly deal with the Sunnis any longer. The Shi hav substantial armed militias. It is these forces -- not the failed Iraqi army the US has tried to invent -- that will be the mainstay of the regime. The Shia don't want this force ground up because it is the guarantor of their security. The United States is not going to protect the regime without these forces engaged.

At this point, something interesting happens. The Shia have a greater vested interest in the viability of this government than even the Americans. The Americans can leave. The Shia aren't going anywhere. For the first time, the United States has a potential ally with capabilities and motivation. Most important, it is an ally that is not blind on the ground. Its intelligence capability is not perfct among the Sunnis, but it is better than what the Americans have.

All of this raises several interesting questions.

First of all, what are the capabilities of the Shi'ite militias? The most well-known of the Shi'ite militias, the Badr Brigade, was founded by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the head of which is Abdul-Aziz Al Hakim, the top candidate of the Unified Iraqi Alliance, one of the groups running in the upcoming election. Hakim has offered to commit his Badr Brigade to security tasks for the elections, and his organization has in the past "declared war on Al-Qaeda," whom it sees as being behind the assassination of its founder, Hakim's brother Mohammed. [See a previous post about this, here.] But now it appears the the Badr Brigade has been retooled into a policing organiztion, as this PBS interview with Al-Hakim reveals:

[Interviewer:]You have your own army, the Badr Brigades. How large a force are they, and what role will they play in the future of Iraq?

AH: The Badr Brigade is no more an army, because it has turned [from] an army into an organization. Before, the major task of this brigade was to eliminate or to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. But now that the government, the ex-regime, is no more in place, the Badr Brigade has been turned into an organization that is entrusted with keeping law and order and--

Interviewer: Policemen--

AH: Yes. As regards [to] the actual number of the Badr Brigade, I don't know that, because there are members and there are supporters. There was a grand parade for the army or the brigade...where 100,000 fighters paraded. That number does not represent all the number . . .

The retooling of the Brigade is mentioned by the Council of Foreign Relations:

Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College . . . [says,] The Badr Brigade [a militia tied to a Shiite political group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is now the Badr Reconstruction Corps, and they have licensed their weapons.

What of the Mahdi army, disbanded in August, at the order of Muqtada al-Sadr? Does it retain any capability at all?

Perhaps the true clout that a newly-elected Shi'ite government could bring to coaltion efforts against the terrorist insurgency is better reflected as a call to arms than as trained and ready military forces. Perhaps the newly elected leadership will be able to convince Iraqi citizens to join the upstart national security forces in more numbers than has been the case thus far. Or, if the idea of armed forces rooted in the concept of Iraqi nationality does not appeal to Iraqis, or does not seem to work, perhaps a more entrepreneurial security force might be obtained: both the US Coalition Provisional Authority and Iyad Allawi's interim government outlawed militias which were not affliliated with political parties, and which were not in the process of being rolled into national military organizations. The new Iraqi government could encourage private citizens to raise their own forces and then integrate them into the new security apparatus -- similar to the raising of armies as it happened in the US in the American Revolution. So long as these forces are integrated into a national force, could this be a possibility . . . Al Hakim may be a Shi'ite, and believe in the primacy of Islam, but he has been characterized as a nationalist above all else by former CIA officer Marc Reuel Gerecht. [and commented upon by Belmont Club, though Steven Vincent takes a more ambiguous view as to Al-Hakim's rejection of theocracy, and to the motives of the Badr Brigade.]

Whatever the role of hereto under-employed militias, in what ways will they interact with US troops? There is much chatter in the mainstream press that the halls of power have all but decided that it is time for the US to leave Iraq. But at the same time, stories have surfaced about integrating US troops more with Iraqi forces in advisor-like roles . . . Troops as advisors, expanded Iraqi security forces, and a sovereign Iraqi government that wants the US gone as soon as possible all point to a drawdown of US forces . . .

Friedman's essay does not consider another point about the effect of a sitting elected Iraqi government on the security situation in Iraq. Most of the speculation about whether the US will take military action in Syria has focused on whether the US views Syria as a threat. But these questions should actually ask whether a new Iraqi government views Syria as a threat. If the Iraqis have good intelligence of Syria's involvement, harboring, or support of the terrorist insurgency, it is entirely possible that the Iraqis will tell the US that Iraq will do something about Syria with or without the Americans . . .

Could it be that the Shi'ites, who are the most feared for their supposed theocratic predilections, will in the end hold Iraq together by defeating the terrorists, integrating the Kurds, and subordinating their religious beliefs to the idea of Iraqi nationalism instead? returning to the interview with Al Hakiim:

Interviewer: One of the fears that Ambassador Bremer and this U.S. administration have is the establishment of an Islamic government in Iraq. What is the nature of the Islamic government you are calling for?

AH: I think this is a question to be asked to Ambassador Bremer.

As regards [to] the government that we want, we don't want an Islamic government. We want a constitutional government that preserves the rights of everybody and a government that believes in the public rights; a government that works for the interest of the Iraqi people, and believes that the people are the source to derive all the important decisions that concern the future of the Iraqi people.

Interviewer: You have, though, called for a government that holds Islam supreme, where Islam would be the guiding force behind the government, without real separation of church and state. Am I incorrect?

AH: The conference in London was attended by all the sects of the Iraqi people including the Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis, and the secular people. They all agree that the major religion of the state should be Islam. But to respect Islam is one thing, and to establish an Islamic government is something else.

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January 20, 2005

Iraq Elections Newswire

The Iraq Elections Newswire has frequently updated links to all mainstream stories dealing with the elections. Check it out.

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January 19, 2005

In today's bombings . . .

Today in Baghdad, 26 people were killed and 21 were injured in 5 separate car bomb attacks.

What is unreported in most versions is that coalition troops repelled the attacks in every case, causing the attackers to detonate their bombs outside from their intended targets. From Central Command:

Despite loss of life, a spokesman with the 1st Cavalry Division said none of the suicide bombers hit their intended targets.

All of these car bombers were stopped by security forces before they could reach their intended targets, said Lt. Col. James Hutton, the divisions public affairs officer. While the any loss of life is tragic, it could have been a lot worse.

Now, 26 people dead it seems would be enough to make the headlines so bad, that this small nugget of good news could certainly be inserted to show a silver lining of some kind . . .

But of four of the major US dailies, only one makes mention of this tidbit.

See versions from:

The New York Times,
The AP (via the Washington Times),
The Washington Post.

Incredibly, only the LA Times carried the news that coalition troops fought off the attackers, thwarting the intended lethality of their plans. Perhaps this can be excused given that the silver lining is near the end of a short Central Command press release. Yet all four of the stories seem to quote it, as though someone who was involved in the production of the stories actually turned to Central Command for details. All four stories have this line:

Four vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices detonated in the Iraqi capital in the span of 90 minutes this morning. Initial reports indicate 26 people died in the blasts, with at least 21 more wounded.

The Times: "The American military reported that 26 people were killed and at least 21 were wounded . . ."

The Post: "The U.S. military said 26 people were killed in 90 minutes of morning rush-hour violence . . ."

The LA Times: "Four car bombs exploded within 90 minutes here today, killing at least 26 Iraqis and injuring 21 other people, the U.S. military said."

The AP: "The U.S. military put the death toll from the day's Baghdad bombings at 26, saying the number was based on initial reports at the scene. Iraqi officials gave a lower toll - 12 people killed in the bombings and one at the Kurdish office.
Sunni Muslim insurgents have threatened to disrupt the elections, and the five car bombings - four within a span of 90 minutes - underscored the grave threat facing Iraqis at this watershed in their history."

So, we can conclude that someone in each of these news organizations is reading Central Command press releases.

So here's what was not in today's headlines:

23 Iraqi Intelligence Soldiers Graduate

Commando Brigade Detains a Dozen in Night Raids

And the press chose to ignore one bad news story as well:
Two Iraqi Civilians Killed After Trying to Speed Through Military Patrol

Certainly 23 intelligence troops graduating doesn't merit top billing like a coordinated carbomb strike. Neither does the detention of a dozen suspects after a raid. But taken collectively, and over, say, three or four months worth of time, the cumulative effects of smaller positive stories -- of which Central Command releases several a day, right along with the big bad ones -- do in fact constitute news, though they must struggle to reach the horizon of those would deem them so.

Writing in 1961, in his book, "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," historian Daniel Boorstin noted that pseudo-events have the following four characteristics:

1. It is not spontaneous but comes about because someone has planned, planted or incited it . . .

2. It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced . . .

3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous . . .

4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. [his example:] The hotels' thirtieth-anniversiary celebration, by saying that the hotel is a distinguished institution, actually makes it one.

The car bombings were not pseudo-events, they were real. Real people died. but those who orchestrated them did so in the manner exactly prescribed by a careful reading of Boorstin's definition of how to make news.

UPDATE: "The Image" is now linked in the sidebar.

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Ukraine's Intelligence Services Prevented an Anti-Protest Crackdown

An amazing article in the New York Times: Back Channels: A Crackdown Averted: How Top Spies in Ukraine Changed the Nation's Path.

Throughout the crisis an inside battle was waged by a clique of Ukraine's top intelligence officers, who chose not to follow the plan by President Leonid D. Kuchma's administration to pass power to Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich, the president's chosen successor. Instead, these senior officers, known as the siloviki, worked against it.

***

The officers funneled information to Mr. Kuchma's rivals, provided security to opposition figures and demonstrations, sent choreographed public signals about their unwillingness to follow the administration's path and engaged in a psychological tug-of-war with state officials to soften responses against the protests.

Ultimately, the intelligence agencies worked - usually in secret, sometimes in public, at times illegally - to block the fraudulent ascension of Mr. Yanukovich, whom several of the generals loathe. Directly and indirectly, their work supported Viktor A. Yushchenko, the Western-oriented candidate who is now the president-elect.

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MEMRI: Captured Terror Leader Admits Syria and Iran Ties

MEMRI is on a roll. This is a transcript of the confession of "Muayed Al-Nasseri, who commandedSaddam Hussein's "Army of Muhammad" throughout 2004." A video of the confession, as it was broadcast in Iraq, is available at the site for download. Highlights:

Interrogator: "How is the Army of Muhammad related to the Ba'th party?"

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "The Army of Muhammad is militarily independent. After Saddam Hussein's capture in December 2003, for a period [of] four months, the Army of Muhammad had no connections with the party, but after April 2003, there was a meeting with the party and we are currently coordinating with them.

"In addition, Saddam Hussein distributed a communique via the party, back then, instructing all his supporters or whoever wants to fight the Jihad for the sake of Allah, to join the Army of Muhammad because it is the army of the leadership."

On Syria:

Interrogator: "Who are the leaders of the Ba'th Party in Iraq?"

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "Today, the leader of the party is 'Izzat Ibrahim. He is the leader of the party in Iraq. Next in line is Fadhl Al-Mashhadani, who is responsible for the local organizations within Iraq. Then, there is Muhammad Yunis Al-Ahamd, who is responsible for the organization outside Iraq. He is currently in Syria."

On Iran:

Interrogator: "Did you get support from the countries of the region?"

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "Yes, sir... Many factions of the resistance are receiving aid from the neighboring countries. We in the Army of Muhammad - the fighting has been going on for almost two years now, and there must be aid, and this aid came from the neighboring countries. We got aid primarily from Iran. The truth is that Iran has played a significant role in supporting the Army of Muhammad and many factions of the resistance. I have some units, especially in southern Iraq, which receive Iranian aid in the form of arms and equipment."

Interrogator: "You're referring to units of the Army of Muhammad?"

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "Yes. They received money and weapons."

And:

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "As for other factions of the resistance, I have reliable information regarding the National Islamic resistance, which is one of the factions of resistance, led by Colonel 'Asi Al Hadithi. He sent a delegation to Iran from among the people of the faction, including General Halaf and General Khdayyer. They were sent to Iran in April or May and met with Iranian intelligence and with a number of Iranian leaders and even with Khamenei."

Interrogator: "You mean they personally met with Khamenei?"

Muayed Al-Nasseri: "According to my information, they met with him personally, and they were given one million dollars and two cars full of weapons. They still have a very close relationship with Iran. They receive money, cars, weapons, and many things. According to my information, they even got car bombs."

Finally, this bombshell:

"Through the Ba'th party - the Arab Socialist Ba'th Party operates in Syria with complete freedom. It maintains its relations and organizes the Ba'th members outside Iraq. The Syrian government is fully aware of this, and the Syrian intelligence cooperates fully, as well as the Ba'th Party, in Syria.

Some thoughts:

1. Whether this is all true or not, it has now been broadcast in Iraq for Iraqi viewing. While some of it seems sensationalized -- and a colonel under interrogation certainly knows many tricks to shift blame -- it still clicks with other reporting streams examined on this site. In the video he does not appear to be under extreme stress -- he speaks without prompting -- or it has been edited -- and he seems at ease, considering the circumstances.

2. While possible US action in Syria is always examined from the perspective of US interests, little thought is given to the interests of the Iraqis in seeing the end of the insurgency. Soon, there will be an elected Iraqi parliament, not a sovereign appointed by the US. The elected parliament members will find themselves in the security accountability hotseat very quickly. There will be pressure for *Iraqi* action against any perceived Syrian involvement in the insurgency.

3. The US will not let that action happen without its help, whether US policy-makers would prefer to act in Syria or not. Syria therefore remains an excellent candidate for low-level raids, infiltrations, intelligence-gathering activities by combined US and Iraqi forces.

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January 18, 2005

Another example of good stuff circulating among vets via email

Wow. Go see this:

http://www.clermontyellow.accountsupport.com/flash/UntilThen.swf

It was put together by this firm.

Excellent. Favorite is the hitchhiker.

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Tuesday Admin Update

1. Email issue still not resolved. Thanks for your patience in responding to your questions.

2. The archives are now available in the sidebar. Thanks to Bill Roggio at the fourth rail for hooking this up.

3. All commenters will be added to Chester's email list. Email is sent out once a week with updates. You may also email Chester at terrier_manchester@yahoo.com with "subscribe" in the subject line.

Thanks for your continued readership!

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Grassroots Election Coverage in Iraq: From the Friends of Democracy Project and Spirit of America!

Another message from Spirit of America:

We've been helping the team at Friends of Democracy with their project to provide countrywide, ground-level news and information on Iraq's upcoming elections. The goal is to provide a more complete picture of Iraq's elections from the perspective of the Iraqi people. This effort is a direct result of the funds you helped raise in December. Your support made this possible.

Friends of Democracy is creating a grassroots correspondent network that they expect will provide information about the elections from Iraq's 18 provinces. Friends of Democracy is also seeking information from the people of Iraq via blogs and email. This part of the project is described here.

The information coming from Iraq will be gathered and published in Arabic using the Arabic blogging tool Spirit of America developed and provided to Friends of Democracy. More on that here. The election information from Iraq - reports, photos and hopefully some video - will be available on the Web and will be presented at the National Press Club in Washington on Sunday, January 30 after the polls close in Iraq. We hope C-SPAN will cover the conference. (More here.)

We all expect that the major newspapers and networks in the U.S. and elsewhere will focus on the expected violence in certain areas of the country. Friends of Democracy seeks to provide a more complete picture. The elections are an historic event. Many Iraqis, Americans, Brits, Aussies and others have died to make them a reality. We think that people deserve more than the standard "if it bleeds it leads" approach.

We'd appreciate your help with this project. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Blog about this project when the English and Arabic websites are ready on Monday.

2. If C-SPAN covers the Jan. 30 Washington, blog about the broadcast and encourage your readers to tune in.

3. Provide a pro bono blog ad for the next two weeks.

4. Help us find people we need (see below):

We need a site editor/producer for the English language Web site.

And, we are looking for people who can develop election coverage graphics for the FoD website and Jan 30th event. People with experience developing graphics for the web and for broadcast would be especially helpful.

Please let us know if you can provide a BlogAd for this project. Tell people you think can help to contact jim@spiritofamerica.net

[Chester adds: You can politely contact CSPAN and ask that they carry this coverage. The contact info is here. The Adventures of Chester has offered a free blogad to Spirit of America and recommends other bloggers to do the same.]

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It's Official: Chester takes 4th Place in Spirit of America Blogger Challenge

Thanks to all of you loyal readers and contributors who made it happen!

A message from Spirit of America:

First, I want to thank you for participating in the Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge. The Challenge raised $93,869 for Spirit of America and projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is OUTSTANDING, just
wonderful. I know the benefits of your efforts extend well beyond the direct funds contributed via the Challenge. Overall, in December we received $409,133 in donations. I'm sure many of those donors learned about us and were inspired to give because of you and your fellow bloggers.

I can't fully express via email how much we appreciate you going to bat for Spirit of America and for those we are working with in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the participating bloggers have never met me or an SoA staff member. Your leap of faith is something we take very seriously. I think we understand well the responsibility that comes with raising money. I assure you, we do not measure our success by funds raised. Our commitment is to do our best to create results with those funds that all of us will be proud of. Fundraising is hard but is comparatively easy and sexy compared to getting things done in places like Iraq.

I know it's a bit of a cliché but it's true: the point of this was getting a group of us working together toward a common aim and to have some fun doing it. The "winners" are not the point. That said, we've allowed a month for checks to come in and be processed. Here are the official, final results. Our top fundraiser was Iraq the Model whose fundraising was done for the benefit of Friends of Democracy. Iraq the Model was a come-from-behind surprise. Some last minute donations just before the December deadline pushed them into the lead, surpassing the Northern Alliance (hope you're staying warm!) and Little Green Footballs (I know you're warm, it's 80 degrees in LA).

TOP 5 BLOGGER TEAMS
Northern Alliance: $12,293
Castle Argghhh! Fighting Fusileers for Freedom: $7,305
Team Pajamahadeen - Operation Viral Freedom: $5,060
TTLB EcoTeam: $1,837
Lizardoid Nation: $1,180

TOP 5 INDIVIDUAL BLOGGERS
Iraq the Model: $17,240
Little Green Footballs: $16,706
Roger Simon: $11,192
Adventures of Chester: $2,163
Chrenkoff: $1,485 (go Aussies!)

The complete results are here.

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MAJOR CONTENT ANNOUNCEMENT - The Whole Truth Series

Did you already see this? Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan takes the press to task for its poor and lopsided coverage of events in Iraq:

Just read yet another distorted and grossly exaggerated story from a major news organization about the "failures" in the war in Iraq. Print and video journalists are covering only a small fraction of the events in Iraq and more often than not, the events they cover are only the bad ones. Many of the journalists making public assessments about the progress of the war in Iraq are unqualified to do so, given their training and experience. The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq. The result is a further erosion of international public support for the United States' efforts there, and a strengthening of the insurgents' resolve and recruiting efforts while weakening our own. Through their incomplete, uninformed and unbalanced reporting, many members of the media covering the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy.

How does this make you feel? Disagree? Knew as much all along?

Well, it made this blogger angry. Call it a well-worded straw to break the camel's back. Read the whole post. I have received several emails just like this one. Some I've posted on the site here. Each tells a story you don't read in the papers or see on the news. Maybe a story of heroism, or of successful interaction with the locals, or a critique of a media article by someone who was there and saw the way it went down.

So, today The Adventures of Chester announces The Whole Truth Series. Here's how it works:

If you are in the US military and in Iraq, and have:

1. Witnessed an event that is notable, but not reported;
2. Been interviewed by a reporter, yet feel he didn't quite get it right;
3. Been present at a reported event, and have quite a different take on it than was reported;
4. Had someone in your unit awarded a Silver Star or higher for valor;

. . . then this is the series for you. Email what really happened to Chester, and include a link to any news stories you reference, or at least a headline and date, or a citation excerpt if a decoration was awarded. Be specific: who was there, what went wrong, what went right, etc. Don't just send emails with general comments like, "Everything is going great here! The media is horrible." We want details.

Let's see what other stories are out there . . . The Adventures of Chester will compile and publish weekly.

FAQ

Q: Chester, how will you know you aren't being sent made-up stories?
A: You'd be surprised how smart the blogosphere is. Someone will probably figure it out. I'll be the initial filter.

Q: Chester, doesn't Arthur Chrenkoff already do this?
A: Not quite. He rounds up published news stories that slip under the radar -- and does an excellent job. I'm not out to best him or compete. This series should be complimentary to his.

Q: Chester, what if nobody writes you?
A: Then we'll give it another week. Might take a bit to get the word out, so if you want to link to this post or email it, feel free.

Q: Chester, what's in this for you?
A: The same thing for you: Victory! I want to know if we are winning against the terrorists.

As is said on the rifle range, "Don't be afraid to make bold adjustments." So here is one for The Adventures of Chester. Let's see what happens.

UPDATE: As an Alert Commenter noted, LTC Ryan's thoughts were picked up by Drudge today, and his article is published in The World Tribune as well. The Tribune article carries an added paragrah by LTC Ryan:

Postscript: I have had my staff aggressively pursue media coverage for all sorts of events that tell the other side of the story only to have them turned down or ignored by the press in Baghdad. Strangely, I found it much easier to lure the Arab media to a "non-lethal" event than the western outlets. Open a renovated school or a youth center and I could always count on Al-Iraqia or even Al-Jazeera to show up, but no western media ever showed up ever. Now I did have a pretty dangerous sector, the Abu Ghuraib district that extends from western Baghdad to the outskirts of Fallujah (not including the prison), but it certainly wasn't as bad as Fallujah in November and there were reporters in there.

UPDATE 2: Here is an example of the kinds of things in mind for this series, received in email over the past few weeks. From a Marine gunnery sergeant in Anbar Province, Iraq:

As you know, I asked for toys for the Iraqi children over here and several people (Americans that support us) sent them over by the box.

On each patrol we take through the city, we take as many toys as will fit in our pockets and hand them out as we can. The kids take the toys and run to show them off as if they were worth a million bucks. We are as friendly as we can be to everyone we see, but especially so with the kids. Most of them don't have any idea what is going on and are completely innocent in all of this.

On one such patrol, our lead security vehicle stopped in the middle of the street. This is not normal and is very unsafe, so the following vehicles began to inquire over the radio. The lead vehicle reported a little girl sitting in the road and said she just would not budge. The command vehicle told the lead to simply go around her and to be kind as they did. The street was wide enough to allow this maneuver and so they waved to her as they drove around.

As the vehicles went around her, I soon saw her sitting there and in her arms she was clutching a little bear that we had handed her a few patrols back. Feeling an immediate connection to the girl, I radioed that we were going to stop. The rest of the convoy paused and I got out the make sure she was OK. The little girl looked scared and concerned, but there was a warmth in her eyes toward me. As I knelt down to talk to her, she moved over and pointed to a mine in the road.

Immediately a cordon was set as the Marine convoy assumed a defensive posture around the site. The mine was destroyed in place.

There's no reason why several stories like this one can't be collected into a published piece, either on this site, or by a news organization.

Written by Chester at 1:58 AM | Link | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Admin Update

A few updates on the new site:

1. The email issue is not yet resolved. So please send email to my old address: terrier_manchester@yahoo.com, until you hear otherwise. An hour on the phone with Microsoft tonight did not help.

2. Part 2 of the Conservative Critiques of the War will be out later this week -- best to err on the side of caution and make sure it is up to snuff before putting it out there.

3. All the old Blogger Archives should be migrated within a day -- maybe even today.

4. Stand by for a major content announcement . . .

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MEMRI: Iraqi Elections (III): The Islamist and Terrorist Threats

The Middle East Media Research Institute has published its third installment examining the Iraqi and Arab press reactions to the upcoming Iraqi elections. MEMRI articles are always worth a look. Among other things, this one details the organization and leadership of the National Council of the Iraqi Resistance [go to their site to view the sources]:

The National Council of the Iraqi Resistance, also known as the United Council of the Iraqi Resistance, was born in June 2003, and comprises Ba'th activists (referred to as militants), remnants of the Iraqi army, and the Republican Guard, and what are described as the "heroes of the national security apparatus." [12]

The structure of the leadership of the Council remains secret, although in an interview by the Jordanian weekly al-Majd with the former Iraqi vice president, Izzet Ibrahim al-Duri, he was identified as the leader of the resistance. General Abu Mu'tassim ( nom de guerre ) was also identified as "a leader of the Resistance" and "a field general" of the now defunct Republican Guard. [13]

Unlike the previous terrorist groups, the National Council is a secular organization made up entirely of Iraqis and its opposition to the elections is grounded more in political ideology than in theology. The group shares a common loyalty to Saddam Hussein and a belief that Iraq should continue to be run by the Sunnis. [14]

Donations from Gulf countries and Iraqis overseas finance the activities of this group. According to General John Abizaid, the Chief of U.S. Southern Command which oversees the military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is a level of tactical coordination originating from Syria and from Saddam's former birthplace, Tikrit. The U.S. is seeking the detention of 34 former Ba'th officials who are reportedly running the rebellion from Iraq and Syria [15]

The military arm of the National Resistance Council is Jaysh Muhammad (Muhammad's Army), established by Saddam Hussein shortly before the invasion of Iraq. It was led by Colonel Mu'ayyid Ahmad Yaseen, a former officer in the Republican Guard. Yaseen was arrested in Fallujah in November and so was his successor Ra'ad al-Duri as well as the leader of Saddam's Fida'iyyoun, Hassan al-Saqlawi. The arrest of all three leaders was announced by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at a press conference in Baghdad. [16] In a document found in Fallujah after its invasion by the multinational forces, Jaysh Mohammad offered advice to the other terrorist groups about field security. It advised them to avoid contact with anyone from the "enemy side even if he wore the cloak of the Pope or al-Sistani." [17]

In a video played before journalists by the Iraqi Minister of Defense Hazem al-Sha'lan, Col. Yaseen confirms receiving considerable amount of assistance from Iran and Syria. [18]

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Marine, Navy Engineers Making a Difference in Sri Lanka

From this story:

U.S. Marines from the 9th Marine Expeditionary Support Battalion and sailors from the 7th Seabee Battalion are providing engineering support in various parts of the country. U.S. officials in Sri Lanka explained the engineers started at a point on the southwestern edge of Sri Lanka and have been moving northeast, repairing what they can in terms of infrastructure and demolishing and clearing what's unsalvageable as they go.

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January 17, 2005

Professional Reading

[Have searched high and low for notes on this topic, but four moves in five years forces it to be posted from memory. After reading the below, if you buy any books, consider using Chester's amazon portal in the sidebar. Chester will receive a very small fee.]

At the Basic School, Brigadier General (then Colonel) Allen detailed methods to use for professional reading success. While the context was professional military reading, the same methods apply for any body of knowledge. They are actually quite simple.

1. You cannot control the age of your body -- you may be 20 or 60, but there is no excuse for a military officer not to have a 5000-year-old mind. General Allen was quoting the military historian Jay Luvaas.

2. Have a general and broad knowledge of military history from ancient times to the present, but:

3. Choose one single campaign and make that your focus. Choose a campaign about which there are sufficient resources for in-depth, maybe even lifelong study. Make yourself an expert on that campaign. For this reason, it is often best to choose one in which one or both sides spoke and wrote in English. When one side is in another language, sufficient translated resources can be hard to come by. Choose a campaign such that the battlefields are easy to visit. Your learning will be enhanced if you can walk the terrain. General Allen recommended the Civil War for these reasons. He chose Lee's invasion of Maryland because he knew that as a Marine officer, he would return to Quantico several times in his career and be able to visit the battlefields a good bit. General Allen emphasized that by studying a single campaign in-depth, no question of maneuver, tactics, logistics or communications would be left a mystery. By becoming a specialist in the campaign, all of these fields and their interaction would become clear.

4. General Allen recommended reading for two purposes: to understand combat decisionmaking, and to human factors in combat.

On decisionmaking: What did key leaders think they knew at given points? What choices did they make given that knowledge and why?

On human factors: How did the troops deal with being tired, hungry, cold, sick, injured, mentally exhausted, dehydrated, etc? Understanding how human beings react in extremely stressful situations is part and parcel of leading them.

5. When taking notes, use Patton's method: on passages that are of interest, draw one line in the margin, perpendicular to the text. For those that offer great insight, draw two. For those that are the key to understanding the overall message and tone of the book, and which are the key points to be distilled, draw three lines and underline. This way, when you return to a book, you will see what you thought was important at the time and see how your thinking may have changed, and also be reminded quickly of the most important points in the book.

6. Return to books. Find key texts and re-read them every year. Soon they will have shaped your thinking more than you can imagine.

7. Don't force a book. If it is not interesting you, don't force yourself to read it. It will in time. Choose something else. [Another instructor, at another school described a method of leaving five books on his night-stand: three on military topics, two on completely different topics. Every night he switched books. In this way he accustomed his brain to keeping track of various self-contained situations -- much as a commander must in combat.]

8. When choosing a book, examine it closely. Ask yourself: why did the author write this book? There are many reasons for authors to write: prestige, tenure, and to make money are among them. Those books can be good as well, but be forewarned.

9. A life spent reading certain texts again and again will have profound effects on your thinking, writing, and even the way you speak. Choose carefully.

10. General Allen's recommended authors: Tuchman, Fuller, Luvaas, S.L.A. Marshall, B.H. Liddell Hart [and some others. This list is incomplete.]

***
How did this work for Chester?
A personal anecdote:

Early on, I decided to choose a campaign. Vicksburg was an easy choice, as one of its battles was fought in my hometown. I read Shelby Foote's "The Beleagured City" to start and found it a great overview and fascinating. Next I planned to read "Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer's View of the Vicksburg Campaign," by Walter Grabau, a retired geologist. Grabau's maps alone are worth the cost of the book. He created all 68 of them himself and they are perfect: show terrain and even contour lines, but are not too busy; excellent descriptions of maneuver and the units involved. And get this: he used his knowledge of geology to model what the terrain was like during the campaign, not as it is now. Fascinating.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it far in Grabau's book. September 11th happened, and as the writing on the wall became clear, my focus shifted to reading everything I could get my hands on about the Gulf War. Every book in the Camp Pendleton library got a good skimming. As such, the Gulf War soon became by de facto campaign of focus. My Marines no doubt still hate me for forcing passages of Desert Storm books on them. The most frustrating thing about this effort was that it was very difficult to find any writing about engineering or logisitcs. I soon found myself searching through the command chronologies of my own battalion -- and these were a good source.

I could soon see the division-level maneuvers happening in my head. When I got to Kuwait, I felt as though I had been there before.

As I learned about the war plan, a very interesting thing happened: I discovered that the Vicksburg campaign was valuable after all. Grant had to operate in a theater at a great distance from his own country. He had to worry about very long supply lines. He had to cross a very large river and not get pinned down in the process (he tried seven times and only succeeded on the seventh). He then had to sustain his forces on the other side of the river, which he did by abandoning his supply lines and ordering his men to forage -- reasoning that if they kept moving, they would not run out of food. Next he bypassed immediate strongpoints in his march toward the center of gravity of the theater. Finally, he laid seige to a heavily fortified city and starved it out. The similarities to the invasion of Iraq are not quite perfect, but near enough. The study of Vicksburg had been very valuable indeed.

As far as note-taking, I still use the system described above, though I am not quite disciplined enough to only underline the MOST important passages.

One critique of military histories in general is that they are fine if you are in a combat arms force, or a maneuver unit. But it is very difficult to find good historical data about logistics, or engineering -- at least at the level of detail I wanted. Also, it is very general to find information about tactical logistics at all -- even current military publications and doctrine. Every Marine lieutenant learns the basics of fighting with a rifle company -- and this is as it should be. But there is very little out there about the techniques of resupplying several rifle companies in different combat environments. Combat service support personnel often downgrade themselves because they have no great war stories. But these techniques of supply, engineering, logistics, and communication are crucial to success and those who have expertise in them should consider recording tips, tricks, and hints -- you may even find yourself with a book at the end of it.

Finally, having five or more books going at once works well for raising transitional thinking skills, though the tradeoff is that you don't get the pleasure of complete immersion in one. So you must decide that for yourself.

Hope this post was helpful. Several readers asked for it.

Written by Chester at 11:04 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

WELCOME TO THE NEW ADVENTURES OF CHESTER!

Welcome to the new and improved Adventures of Chester!

This is the first in a series of exciting changes and announcements here at The Adventures of Chester. There will be one a day or so this week.

Here are some things you need to know about the new site:

1. New features: A bio of Chester; a better blogroll; syndication via XML; better news links; full-fledged Milblogs membership, and a new image for the Milbloggers to boot. Chester's new email address is chester@theadventuresofchester.com. The site is published with Movable Type and hosted by Hosting Matters.

2. Improvements to the new site are continuous. There will be several added features in the coming week (RSS, more news and blog links, etc).

3. There are some outstanding issues: migrating archives from Blogger has not worked as planned, and only posts from January, 2005 have been added. The remainder, from October through December, 2004, will be added in time. If you post a comment, there is a chance that it will be lost when the rest of the old site posts are moved. But comment away -- the discussions will be lively while they last. Another issue is email. Chester can send via MS Entourage, but can only receive through the web. So his responses will still be a bit slow until this is resolved.

4. This move has been in the works for some time and would not have been possible without the technical support of Bill Roggio from the fourth rail, and the design assistance of Brian Scott from The Blue State Conservatives, a brand-new group blog. These are both great guys and they run excellent blogs. Please check them out.

5. This new site would also not have been possible without the contributions of readers -- which have now been exhausted. Thanks very much and if you like what you see, any donation will be gratefully accepted. A Paypal link is new, and the Amazon link is still available.

6. While the changes go on, the content will continue. Tomorrow night we will discuss professional reading, as promised. And Tuesday morning, Part 2 of Conservative Critiques of the War will be published. And of course, all of the reactions to the day's news that you've come to expect will continue unabated.

Thanks for your patience and understanding as the changes are implemented. Please email Chester with feedback.

Written by Chester at 12:09 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 15, 2005

Scenario Planning at the National Intelligence Council

A long, long time ago – maybe in November -- an Alert Reader asked for more info about strategic planning and/or jointness.

Don't know if that Alert Reader is still out there, but there are some interesting things about this floating around the blogosphere today.

The International Futures Model (IFs) website, (ht: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner via Instapundit), run by the National Intelligence Council, allows anyone in the public to model their own version of what the world will look like in the future.

This powerful tool allows users to generate in-depth, year-by-year projections through 2020 for a large number of variables. Topics covered include demographic, economic, energy, sociopolitical and environmental factors.

IFs can be displayed at the country specific level, and results can be aggregated for regions of the world. Users can display forecasts in tables and on maps or graphically. pre-computed forcasts exist foor the Ifs base case and for the four scenarios of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project. users can also easily create their own scenariso. The forecasts of Ifs should be treated as illustrations of possible futures rather than predictions.

In addition to enabling its users to look forward, IFs also contains data on 160 countries stretching back more than forty years.

This is fascinating stuff for several reasons. First, just having an online forum for the general public to use this info and this tool is a great way to foster discussion. Second, the existence of a tool like this, geared toward modeling alternative futures and not just predicting the correct one, means that the ideas of "scenario planning" are getting to be in vogue in the National Security Community.

These ideas have been "popularized" by Philip C Bobbitt, who holds a PhD in Strategy from Oxford, and a JD in Law from Yale, and teaches Constitutional Law at the University of Texas in Austin. I first discovered Bobbitt when reading this opinion piece he wrote in the New York Times last in 2003:

For nearly 50 years, American decision-makers could rely on forms of "strategic planning" — a method that begins with choosing a desired result and then plotting the decisions that will have to be made to reach that goal. Strategic planning worked well in the two-power world because we were able to extrapolate from a relatively stable and familiar security environment, relying on more or less agreed-upon intelligence estimates. Governments sought the likeliest linear future, and planned accordingly.

Unfortunately, in an increasingly decentralized world, in which previously insignificant actors and factors can play a decisive role, strategic planning can leave decision-makers flat-footed. In its unidimensional reliance on a single future, strategic planning hardens the "official future" agencies internalize, and thus prepares them poorly for appreciating rapid changes in circumstance and for making agile adaptations.

Bobbitt then explains "scenario planning" as an alternative:

In this new era of uncertainty, not only must we must accept that simple forecasting is not going to be very useful to us, we must sharpen our skills of forethought. One way will be to augment traditional strategic planning with "scenario planning," a strategy that has long been a staple at the largest multinational corporations. Scenario planning involves the creation of alternative narratives about the future based on different decisions — by many players — as each scenario progresses.

As opposed to the classic strategic method of applying the past to the future — coming up with a single, likeliest story about how things will turn out — scenario planning is about applying the future to the present, creating a learning framework for decisions. The idea is not so much to predict the future as to consider the forces that will push the future along different paths, in order to help leaders recognize new possibilities, assess new threats and make decisions that reach much further into the future.

Scenario planning can also exploit the changes under way in intelligence collection — especially the greater emphasis on human sources. Unlike strategic planning, which tends to rely on quantitative and technical information like population figures and productivity reports, scenario planning tends to use more qualitative and dynamic data. It depends in large part on studying economic, political and social trends.

Scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell, where I am a senior adviser, helped the corporation become one of the most profitable oil conglomerates. In the early 1970's, its scenario planners worked on hypothetical futures involving an oil boycott against the West; when political events finally brought about the Arab oil crisis, the company not only wasn't taken by surprise, it was in a position to capitalize. In the 1990's Shell analysts were scenario-planning a potential backlash against global companies, long before the antiglobalization movement took off. Thus, while most companies reacted to the new movement with corporate disdain, Shell was courting nongovernmental groups and decentralizing its global operations so that decisions in foreign divisions could be made by people living in and sensitive to the countries affected.

Getting the government to emphasize scenario planning will not be easy. To be successful, the approach depends on well-organized dialogue between decision makers at many levels, which would be culture shock for the rigidly hierarchical executive branch. (Indeed, despite the efforts of advocates like Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, to get Washington interested in scenario planning, only one country, Singapore, has made extensive use of the practice.) Our various national security agencies may not be competitive businesses, but they often behave toward each other as if they were. Intelligence is often "stovepiped" — when analysts refuse to share information and sources with interagency rivals working on the same problems — and mutually distrustful cultures abound.

Also, scenario planning requires a political culture that is tolerant of uncertainty. Contingencies of uncertain probability tend to be of little interest to politicians, who are confident they know the future. Similarly, competing scenarios are anathema to bureaucrats whose careers are threatened by answering questions like, "What would it take for this estimate to be dramatically wrong?" — which translates to, "What arguments can you give me that undermine your own recommendations?"

To change this culture, we need an interagency working group that can organize scenario planning for a new era. It should be headed by the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, and should include the director of policy planning at the State Department, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the political-military director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the assistant secretary of Defense for strategic and threat reduction, and a senior representative of the Treasury secretary. This body would be charged with coordinating the work and circulating the results of scenario planning by a team made up of veteran government analysts and, perhaps, experienced people from the private sector.

Being an advocate of "jointness," The Adventures of Chester would like to point out the inherent joint nature of this type of thinking about the future. Bobbitt argues that without a joint commitment to its success from various parts of the federal government, such planning will fail.

If any readers use the scenario planning site to model the future, send an email with the results. Remember, it's about creating different scenarios that could be true, not seeing whose is the best prediction.

More on "jointness:" here: The Failure of the Intelligence Reform Bills, here: "Jointness" is catching on, here: A Colonial Corps? and here: Colonial Operations and Strategic Communication.

Written by Chester at 2:45 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

The Story Behind the Story: The Crash of the USS San Francisco

Back in December, The Adventures of Chester criticized several US Senators and the New York Times for outing the government's plans to build and launch a new series of spy satellites:

Today, the New York Times has outed the program as a spy satellite, meant to add to the existing capabilities of two others launched in the 1990s, under the program name "Misty." The Times then goes on to offer one hundred reasons, via various Democratic observers, why the new satellite is a bad idea.

This is what The Adventures of Chester had to say:

I ask you: is this a useless capability? Only if we believe our enemies are non-state actors hiding in caves, or North Korea, building nukes in underground caverns. Doesn't it seem that of all the various types of imaging and imagery our satellites are capable of producing, that high-resolution photographs are among the most basic and fundamental? Doesn't it seem that it might actually be quite useful to have high-resolution photographs of a particular piece of terrain. The natural contours and makeup of an expected battlefield can be reconnoitered over a long period of time -- say several weeks -- and can be just as useful if gathered at day as at night. I know this for certain -- I have been the recipient myself of such intelligence products. Moreover, a great deal of information can be gleaned, inferred, and deduced from careful examination of such images. The US employs entire legions of experts with PhDs in imagery, topography, geology, etc etc etc to analyze such images. Their collective salaries are miniscule compared to the loss of one American life due to an unprepared battlespace.

Moreover, these images are often used to create military maps, which is a fundamental, yet not very sexy part of any successful military operation. And maps have a half-life. Roads can be moved, new buildings put up, bridges added, marshes destroyed, fields burned, forests -- deforested. Having the ability to create an imagery update to an existing map can change entire battle plans. And this update can happen over the course of several weeks before the battle -- when weather will allow, if that is truly a concern.

Well today, we learn that the lack of satellite-based intelligence gathering is one of the principal causes for the recent death of one US sailor. The New York Times reports, Submarine Crash Shows Navy Had Gaps in Mapping System:

But the older navigation charts provided to the Navy were never updated to show the obstruction, they acknowledge, in part because the agency that creates them has never had the resources to use the satellite data systematically.

Now the Times does its best to show that the reason the charts weren't updated is poor human decision-making, not a lack of technical information available:

The officials said the main chart on the submarine, prepared in 1989 and never revised, did not show any potential obstacles within three miles of the crash. They said the incident happened in such a desolate area - 360 miles southeast of Guam - that updating their depiction of the undersea terrain was never considered a priority.

Why might it not be a priority? Perhaps because our satellite-based mapping capabilities are so short that the government is forced to prioritize on other tasks. If that's true, then the New York Times should republish its December article criticizing new satellites right alongside this one. More:

Chris Andreasen, the chief hydrographer for the Office of Global Navigation at the intelligence agency, acknowledged in an interview that on the chart, "there's nothing shown that would be a hazard" at the crash site.

But since the accident, Mr. Andreasen said, his office has examined commercially available images taken by a Landsat satellite in 1999, and at least one image indicates that an undersea mountain could rise to within 100 feet of the surface there. Analysts say variations in water color can sometimes indicate a land mass below.

Mr. Andreasen said his agency had not normally used satellite imagery to update sea charts, though it recently began using the images to help pinpoint the boundaries of islands and other land masses. He and other officials said that the charting office's staff had shrunk in recent years, and that the Navy never asked it to focus on the area south of Guam, where it began basing submarines in 2002.

The tone of the Times' narrative here is one of government incompetence: The Navy is incompetent for not asking Mr. Andreasen to look at that area of the world. Mr. Andreasen is incompetent for not doing so without being asked. The Bush Administration is incompetent for allowing the mapping office to shrink. But even if any of this is true – and The Adventures of Chester takes issue with all of it – none of these things would have made any difference if there is a shortage in our satellite-based intelligence-gathering or mapping capabilities, the spending for which several Democratic Senators and The New York Times -- their proxy -- were so quick to condemn back in December.

Written by Chester at 1:15 PM | Link | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 14, 2005

Upstart Saudi Al-Qaeda Leader's Threat Means Navy Supply Ships Don't Use Suez Canal

As a precautionary measure, the US Navy has diverted at least 12 massive supply ships from the Suez Canal and sent them around the Cape of Good Hope instead.

In the past few months, however, U.S. and British authorities have cautioned of threats to shipping in the Middle East. One U.S. warning in mid-December said significant attacks could take place in the Suez Canal and other "choke points" -- narrow channels where vulnerable ships, if damaged or sunk, would significantly disrupt commerce. Analysts took particular note of the recent rise of Saud Hamud al-Utaibi in al-Qaida's leadership. He is a maritime terror expert believed to have been responsible for the attacks on the USS Cole and the French supertanker MV Limburg. "Al-Utaibi is the new head of al-Qaida on the Arabian peninsula, and that heightens the threat to shipping certainly within that region," Dominic Armstrong, head of intelligence and research for Aegis Defense Services, an international consulting firm, said in a telephone interview from London.

UPDATE: The Close-In Weapons System, sporting two 20mm fully automated heavy machine guns, is an example of the type of self-defense weapon with which the supply ships are not equipped. More:

Phalanx is a point-defense, total-weapon system consisting of two 20mm gun mounts that provide a terminal defense against incoming air targets. CIWS, without assistance from other shipboard systems, will automatically engage incoming anti-ship missiles and high-speed, low-level aircraft that have penetrated the ship primary defense envelope. As a unitized system, CIWS automatically performs search, detecting, tracking, threat evaluation, firing, and kill assessments of targets while providing for manual override. Each gun mount houses a fire control assembly and a gun subsystem. The fire control assembly is composed of a search radar for surveillance and detection of hostile targets and a track radar for aiming the gun while tracking a target. The unique closed-loop fire control system that tracks both the incoming target and the stream of outgoing projectiles gives CIWS the capability to correct its aim to hit fast-moving targets, including ASMs.

Could this system be effective against speedboats as well? A question for you Navy readers out there.

Written by Chester at 4:45 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Colonial Operations and Strategic Communication

[This is yet another post in response to Belmont Club's discussion of the adequacy of the US force structure.]

Perhaps the first issue in any plan to reform the strategic communications efforts of the US should begin with the correct definition of what it is that US forces are being tasked to do in the 21st century. One of Wretchard's readers is right that the word "colonial" is so freighted with historical baggage as to render useless any policy using it. Major Mike says:

Additionally, I cringe a bit with talk of re-organization to “colonial” style forces, or a variation thereof. The post World War I explosion of nationalistic movements throughout the world can be attributed directly to the occupation of nations by colonial forces. Fighting an insurgent nationalistic force would be logarithmically more costly than fighting a disgruntled band of malcontents and outsiders . . .

In the interests of heading off the globalization protesters at the pass, a better definition must be identified and put into use. This is not spin. Far from it. Colonialism smacks of zero-sum trade, the "white man's burden" and even slavery. These are vastly different goals than those of the US today. Robert Kaplan says:

"The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging global civilization that, the more it matures--with its own mass media and governing structures--the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very troops who have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it."

In a similar vein, Thomas Barnett, the oft-quoted author of "The Pentagon's New Map," who defines the world into the Functioning Core and the Non-integrating Gap, uses the terminology of systems administration to describe the tasks set before the US military:

U.S. national-security strategy would seem to be: 1) Increase the Core’s immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-like system perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, 3) Shrink the Gap.

Barnett gives a roundabout reference to the possible force structure of the US military, given this daunting task:

Making this effort means reshaping our military establishment to mirror-image the challenge that we face. Think about it. Global war is not in the offing, primarily because our huge nuclear stockpile renders such war unthinkable—for anyone. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state wars are becoming fairly rare. So if the United States is in the process of “transforming” its military to meet the threats of tomorrow, what should it end up looking like? In my mind, we fight fire with fire. If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, we field a military of Super-Empowered-Individuals.

Whether you prefer Kaplan's "security armature for an emerging global civilization," or Barnett's theories of the Core and the Gap, both point to US-provided collective security as an international public good – a far cry from the conquests and coffer-enriching schemes of colonialism.

Returning to the strategic communications problems of a US military confronted with such a wide-ranging mission . . .

Wretchard points to a recent study by the Defense Science Board which states:

Strategic communication -- which encompasses public affairs, public diplomacy, international broadcasting, information operations, and special activities -- is vital to America’s national security and foreign policy. Over the past few decades, the strategic communication environment and requirements have changed considerably as a result of many influences. Some of the most important of these influences are a rise in anti-American attitudes around the world; the use of terrorism as a framework for national security issues; and the volatility of Islamic internal and external struggles over values, identity, and change. ... America needs a revolution in strategic communication rooted in strong leadership from the top and supported by an orchestrated blend of public and private sector components.

Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has gone a long way to define the strategic communication problem as one of "soft power:"

Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important in the war on terrorism, but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.

Yet Nye's prescriptions for implementing such a soft-power campaign are vague at best and whimsical at worst:

The U.S. government should not try to control exports of popular culture, but State Department cultural and exchange programs help to remind people of the noncommercial aspects of American values and culture. Similarly, government broadcasting to other countries that is evenhanded, open and informative helps to enhance American credibility and soft power in a way that propaganda never can. Yet the billion dollars spent on public diplomacy is only one- quarter of 1 percent of what is spent on defense. Congress should support measures like Representative Henry Hyde's proposal to bolster the State Department's public diplomacy and international broadcasting efforts.

The other way the government can make a difference is in the substance and style of foreign policy. With a military budget larger than those of the next dozen countries combined, the United States looms so large that it engenders negative as well as positive reactions. The biggest kid on the block always provokes a mixture of admiration and resentment.

To the extent that America defines its national interests in ways congruent with others, and consults with them in formulating policies, it will improve the ratio of admiration to resentment. President George W. Bush

No need to read further. You know where he's going.

[Quick aside: Here we witness the Harvard Dean version of hand-wringing over "why they hate us." Nye doesn't seem to understand that the ultimate soft power is when your soft speaking is backed by a big stick. Or perhaps he's forgotten. Hard to tell on the left these days. Has the Rhodes scholarship program ever produced a conservative?]

The goal of strategic communication as discussed here is something akin a sense of feel-goodism: that other peoples in the world agree to our actions because they understand our intentions.

Even James Fallows is jumping on the bandwagon, raising "strategic communication" in one of the cover stories of the January/February Atlantic, "Success Without Victory," and showing the supposed importance of "intention perception" to our target audience:

An amazing lack of interest in how life looks to those we are trying to persuade, deter, or capture accounts for many of America's difficulties in the past three years. People in the anti-terrorism business talk about our need to wage a decades-long struggle for the future of Islam, in which the United States has a vital stake. But consider the mini war of ideas we have already fought. America's approach to the Muslim world since 9/11 has made sense—to the Americans who designed it. First we would rout the Taliban from Afghanistan and deny al-Qaeda the sanctuaries and training camps that were important to its growth through the 1990s. Then we would take the war to Iraq, solving the immediate problem of Saddam Hussein and whatever weapons he had, and fostering a long-run example of a prosperous, democratic Arab-Islamic state . . .

That was the intention. Somehow the results looked different to the people this strategy was supposed to influence . . .

Fallows, a journalist, seems not to think his own profession was complicit in that failure. More:

Instead one can turn to the Pentagon's own Defense Science Board, which submitted a 102-page internal report in November about how America was doing in the global war of ideas.

Fallows mentions studies by RAND, in addition to the Defense Science Board piece itself as having similar themes:

Through these studies runs the idea that the United States could make an authentic and appealing case to the Muslim world—if it took the time to understand which parts of its argument are most likely to register with the person in the street. For instance, in much of today's Muslim world "justice" is a more compelling ideal than individual "liberty." "This really is a war of narratives in a battlefield of interpretation," Marc Sageman says. "We need to promote a positive vision to substitute for the vision of violence. And that vision has to be justice. It is no accident that these groups are always calling themselves 'The Party of Justice' and so on. In the time of the Suez Canal the United States stood for 'justice' against the Brits and French, and we were the toast of the Middle East. We need to be pushing a vision of a fair and just world, with us in harmony with the rest of the world, as opposed to at war with the rest of the world."

This is in a sense, a Hail-Mary all-channel marketing campaign to re-brand the foreign policy of the United States. Does it really help our effort that much to rename the Marine Corps, "The Justice Corps?" Muslims are smarter than that. Moreover, Fallows makes the mistake expected of a mainstream journalist: he thinks in terms of the masses, wants a branding campaign that smacks of mass media, and relies on semantics rather than fundamental considerations of substance to spin his message. The blogosphere teaches that Fallows' top-down method of image control is increasingly impossible. Moreover, what metric can be used to judge positive perception change toward the US; or positive reception to the ideas that the US advocates? And perhaps "individual liberty" doesn't appeal to Muslims in general because they have had such a small taste of it. Perhaps the goal is not to repackage our efforts to appeal to existing ideas in their culture, but instead to introduce radical new ones.

The most-cited lesson of the blogosphere is of the segmenting of traditional mass-markets into micromarkets – indeed, the same Atlantic has another story entitled, "The Massless Media." But less mentioned is the idea that whereas traditional media is faceless, monolithic and short on interaction, the blogosphere influences the world through millions of tiny interactions daily in which readers exchange views and create perceptions of each other. While we all sit at our desks reading this alone [and our wives and husbands give us that certain annoyed get-off-the-computer-now look], we are engaged in a dynamic process of figuring out whom we trust and whom we don't. Hugh Hewitt mentions this in his new book, "Blog." These interactions can be controlled from above only with great difficulty and expense. This lesson does not just apply in the world of high-speed broadband. Hundreds of newspapers have sprouted in Iraq, and the post-totalitarian residents of Iraq will be highly skeptical of attempts to influence their opinion from institutional platforms.

Such is the nature of the thousands and millions of interactions by US troops with Iraqis, and other folks all over the world daily, as well. These interactions speak for themselves and are difficult to manipulate. In the case of Iraqis, they are on an individual basis largely positive. In a sense, mass media acted as a go-between, handing out legitimacy between strangers via institutional trust. But the institutional go-between is no longer technologically necessary, and people interact like free radicals. Thus, since the military can control its troops' interactions with mission-type orders, centuries-old traditions, and esprit de corps -- in fact, precisely because of the tradition-bound nature of the military and the fact that it instills or brings out similar traits in vastly different people -- these interactions are one of the only mass-influence campaigns left in the world. Consider the 1st Marine Division's use of the slogan of "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy," through the course of its two deployments to Iraq. It takes a military unit to broadcast such a message, and General Mattis, the former commanding general of the division, did so from the get-go, starting with his invasion kick-off message on March 20th, 2003. It is simple to remember and more importantly, easy to translate. Thucydides said it this way:

We have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor; and we have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and our enmity."

Aside from the millions of interactions though, the Pentagon has no idea how to control the media image its troops give off during deployments. Consider this New York Times story of last month, perhaps spawned by the DSB report [link is the abstract: the story is only available for a fee, and who's going to pay for a story with a half-life of 12 hours?]:

THE REACH OF WAR: HEARTS AND MINDS; PENTAGON WEIGHS USE OF DECEPTION IN A BROAD ARENA ABSTRACT - Pentagon said to be engaged in bitter, high-level debates over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad; missions, if approved, could take deceptive techniques endorsed for use on battlefield to confuse adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations; critics say such program would shatter Pentagon's credibility; question is whether Pentagon and military should undertake official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad; efforts under consideration risk blurring traditional lines between public affairs programs in Pentagon--whose charter calls for giving truthful information to media and public--and world of combat information campaigns or psychological operations; critics see proposal as Pentagon's effort to resurrect its Office of Strategic Influence, short-lived operation to provide news items, including false ones, to foreign journalists in effort to influence overseas opinion; office was closed by Defense Sec Donald H Rumsfeld under intense criticism.

Perhaps abstracts are the way to go when reading the Times . . .

Before the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force deployed to Iraq for the second time, a retired colonel, and veteran of the Combined Action Program , was invited to speak to a gathering of MEF officers. He asked anyone in a public affairs specialty to stand. He then asked for those in the psychological operations specialty to stand. He then asked them, "You've both been warned in all of your professional training not to have anything to do with each other, haven't you?" Their heads nodded. The Colonel explained that in small wars, integrating the images given off by US forces is a necessity to success. It is this dilemma – how to do so without creating spin, propaganda, or conspiracy theories – that is being debated in the Pentagon.

While these debates are ongoing, solutions will sprout organically. The decentralization of media raises the potential that the goal of the big-budget public diplomacy programs can be accomplished on a shoestring: those in other countries can interact with, meet, and debate with Americans at will, and make up their minds for themselves if we are truly free, and if our way of life is better.

While this works itself out, the very least the Bush Administration can do is better publicize the atrocities of Saddam, troops decorated for heroism, and the thousands of little victories via interaction that occur every day.

***

Parting thoughts on force structure and the occupation

1. Sources inside the Marine Corps tell The Adventures of Chester that one of the MEUs slated to deploy soon will employ an artillery unit as the battalion landing team, instead of an infantry battalion. Sounds alarming, but when extra infantry units are needed, artillery Marines are often the first to be tapped. And the MEU training will be the same for them before they deploy. Moreover, the Marine Corps is about to push up against the 2-year time-limit for activating reservists.

2. Here is a past post comparing the occupations of Japan and Iraq. It does not address troop numbers, just the overall picture and mood of each.

3. Here's the reaction of The Adventures of Chester to James Fallow's last Atlantic article, about Iran.

4. See the US State Department's newly-created Office of Policy, Planning and Resources for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Fallows doesn't seem to know about this . . .

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January 13, 2005

Belmont Club

Tonight's post will speak to the strategic communication issues recently raised by Belmont Club. The post will hopefully be out before midnight.

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US warns Russia on selling missiles to Syria

More to consider here.

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Rummy on Syria Again

Here's the link to the transcript of Rummy's comments about Syria on Tuesday. Thanks to an Alert Reader.

This transcript is absolutely hilarious. Has a who's-on-first quality to it. Provides no help whatsoever on Syria, but made my day to read the account of Rummy and the reporter. Start with this line:

SEC. RUMSFELD: We'll take -- we'll take one last question.

and keep reading. Hilarious.

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A Colonial Corps?

[This post is in response to Wretchard's latest atBelmont Club.]

A Colonial Corps? Thoughts:

Last fall, an article appeared in the New York Times entitled, "Pentagon Weighs Contentious Peacekeeping Plans," detailing discussions of creating what could be called a "peacekeeping division:" [the article is probably only available for a fee now]

. . . defense officials are quietly examining proposals including a small joint-services unit of a few thousand troops that could be assembled in as little as a year to perform policing, civil affairs, engineering, medical and other duties in hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan . . .

Defense experts in Washington say proposals for a standing U.S. stabilization force has gained currency mainly among civilians at the Pentagon.

Already, opposition has surfaced among U.S. military officers, including some army officers with experience in U.S. peacekeeping operations.

The Army has long viewed peacekeeping as a threat to combat readiness and is suspicious of any plan to maintain a standing in-house unit devoted to post-conflict duties. ``No one in the Army is seriously considering establishment of a constabulary unit,'' said one U.S. expert on peacekeeping.

The term "peacekeeping" is incorrect for the type of operations that the above-envisioned force would undertake. "Peacekeeping" implies blue-helmeted conscripts, shackled to the whims of UN committees – troops that arrive late, perform little, and perchance leave things in a worse state than when they started. And it also implies humanitarian missions that have little in the way of national interest to recommend them. "Colonial corps" is much more accurate, though perhaps a tough sell.

Understanding how such a colonial corps could be used is key to dissipating the skepticism with which it would be greeted. The mention that the Army has thought peacekeeping a threat to combat readiness betrays both its prejudices against the term "peacekeeping" itself, and the misunderstanding of how such a force of police, engineers, and medical experts could actually be used. As you quote in your post, "To be fully effective the United States will need to have some of its people continuously abroad for years, so they become familiar with the local scene and the indigenous people come to trust them as individuals -- tours of duty that we imagine to be far longer than traditional assignments today."

In that sense, "colonial operations" would not be a detractor from combat readiness – instead, troops meant to perform colonial operations would have their necessary skills degraded when they are NOT deployed. Hard to practice civil affairs operations in your own country, where you know the customs and language.

Robert Kaplan has written of the operating environment of such a force here, describing it as "Indian country," and taken in the context of a colonial corps concept, these notes from one of his discussions more or less show that a colonial corps already exists in all but name. Rather than being organized as such though, it consists of the outposting of US forces in all corners of the globe, in small pockets, having operational, and sometimes even strategic impact.

That is because the U.S. military as a whole is still organized for fighting an industrial-age war. The deployment constellation of bases around Iraq is better suited for Korea or World War II, while the adversary that we’re fighting has been fighting like the Indians or the Viet Cong. In the future, we’re going to have to operate in the Middle East the way we’ve been operating in the horn of Africa, which is more like Lewis & Clark in the French- Indian Wars than it is like World Wars I and II and Desert Storm combined. You send out small groups of highly trained officers to go into small villages here and there and just explore. Find out what the citizenry wants, needs, and fears, any foreigners who have been taking up residence, you drum up intelligence even as you draw up plans for humanitarian aid projects.

The best, most actionable intelligence is generally obtained when some form of humanitarian assistance is involved, Kaplan remarked. People will tell a lot to someone who is treating their children for malaria, scabies, and other diseases and establishing a positive social relationship with them. The main point is that you use small units, forward deployed, making decisions on their own, finding things out, totally immersed in the local environment, because the enemy is no longer ten thousand troops with tanks.

But what the New York Times article above mentions is much greater in scope than what Kaplan has observed – it would be a standing force, ready to undertake such missions. But again, perhaps this is wrong in conception. A standing force? Ready to undertake these missions? Where is it standing? Such a force would seem to be useless if it is always at home. And if it is supposed to undertake such missions in any given locale, how do you decide what language its troops will learn, and what culture they will study? A better answer would be to embed the headquarters -- or multiple headquarters -- for such forces within each combatant command, and surge troops and capabilities to it as seen fit.

An excellent example of this technique can be seen in the creation of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa. "Combined" means it has forces from more than just the US, and "joint" means it employs members of all US forces. This task force has in the past had responsibility for military training and operations, sometimes diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and intelligence collection in the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania, though not all of these are currently listed on its website. Its subordinate units are the 1st Provisional Security Company (composed of parts of a Marine tank battalion), an Expeditionary Medical Unit (for humanitarian medical aid), HMH-461 Det B (REIN), which is part of a medium helicopter squadron, the 823rd RED HORSE Squadron, which is a battalion-sized unit of Air Force civil engineers, and Team Alpha, 1-294th Infantry (Light) – a company-sized infantry unit from the US Army.

It must be noted that these ad hoc colonial operations efforts incorporate the concept of "jointness" in a much greater way than has been the case in the past. Though jointness is only mandated by law amongst the military services, it has now expanded to include the incorporation of subject-matter experts from a variety of government agencies – the State Dept, the Treasury Dept, the FBI, the CIA, etc. – within military units. Jointness concepts continue to expand – the consultation of foreign military advisors by Central Command has recently been in the news. In this sense, jointness means using existing agencies, personnel, and capabilities in cross-functional and interdisciplinary ways to tackle complex problems (like reconstruction, or colonial operations). The Adventures of Chester has discussed jointness before here, as it relates to intelligence reform.

So perhaps the colonial corps conundrum can be solved through some savvy changes to the employment of existing forces – along with some smart changes to their training and incentives and career structures. Take foreign assignments. In the Marine Corps, it is generally viewed favorably for an officer to have a billet in embassy security. But this is a security job and has little to do with interacting with local populations. On the other hand, putting oneself in the running for the Foreign Area Officer program can be the kiss of death to your career as a field-grade officer – and the result of that program is fluency in a strategically significant language, along with a year of travel in one of its native countries – much more useful to future deployments in "Indian country." This must change if the US is to expand its human intelligence and colonial operations capabilities. Also, perhaps billets in other agencies, like the State Department, or the CIA, could be instituted and viewed more favorably in career progression.

Another policy that stands in the way is the current compensation structure. Without going into details, pay schedules currently offer economic incentives for enlisted personnel to get married. Marriage is a significant impediment to encouraging young troops to deploy for extended periods, and compensation should be neutral to its existence.

Part and parcel of a discussion of colonial forces is the question of whether it is possible to expand special forces without diluting their specialness. This is an interesting debate. Can the US increase the number of Green Berets by a factor of two without lowering the standards of entry? Maybe, maybe not. Green Berets bring several things to the table: extreme physical stamina, linguistic skill, expensive and rigorous training, and the wisdom of members who are older than 25 on average and sport IQ's in the 95th percentile. Can the US pick an entire infantry battalion and give it rudimentary classes in Arabic such that the troops aren't fluent, but can be incredibly effective on a deployment? Yes, absolutely. Slight shifts in training and incentives can create immense efficiencies. Doubling the size of the 10th Special Forces Group is only one way to go about things.

On an even bigger scale, (Army folks are going to hate this) consider the Marine Corps as one quasi-special forces unit. Rather than train individuals for multiple and varied colonial operations tasks, the Corps trains entire units – Marine Expeditionary Units (Special Operations Capable). Over time these skills spread throughout the Corps as troops go on multiple MEUs then go on to other units and practice what they've learned. The "thee-block war" concept, developed by the Marine Corps, is really preparation for the "Indian country" environment a la Kaplan, and the colonial operations missions to be undertaken within it. Could the number of Marines be increased quickly? Yes, absolutely.

Niall Ferguson supposedly argues in his work "Colossus" not only that the US is already a global empire in fact, if not in name, but also an empire with clay feet given Americans' lack of desire for long-term and large troop deployments abroad. An empire without colonists. Perhaps these sentiments are changing.

If so, please, let's not junk our Cold War hardware and technological dominance-seeking completely. . . the Middle Kingdom dragon is waking in Asia . . .

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January 12, 2005

U.S. mulls strikes on Syria - (United Press International)

Thanks to an Alert Reader for pointing us to this article. It would be interesting to read the exact transcript from that press briefing in which Rummy denied Syria actions. He might not have said what the reporters would have us think . . .

Bush administration hard-liners have been considering launching selected military strikes at insurgent training camps in Syria and border-crossing points used by Islamist guerrillas to enter Iraq in an effort to bolster security for the upcoming elections, according to former and current administration officials.

Pressure for some form of military action is also coming from interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, these sources said.

***

Recently, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that senior Baath Party officials from Iraq are operating from Syria where they provide financing and direction to the cells of Iraqi insurgents killing Americans, sparking new discussions within the administration about possible measures against Syria.

"There are all sorts of discussions going on, the White House, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs," said former CIA counterterrorism chief, Vince Cannistraro.

He felt the talk of strikes "is part of a general plan of intimidation."

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Navy Not 'Correctly Balanced' For Future, Clark Says

Can't give a link cause it's subscriber-only, but check this out:

The Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Adm. Vern Clark, said Jan. 11 that the Navy is not "correctly balanced and optimized for the world of the future," and that it faces a three-decade-long effort to fully reform its forces to accommodate national security needs such as anti-terrorism and homeland security.

Reiterating his call for a "new strategic construct" for the Navy, Clark said the days of major naval engagements are past - at least for now - and that concerns such as missile defense and close-shore operations are driving structural changes in Navy force sets.

"Building a force set that is designed only to deal with ... major combat operations ... is the incorrect approach," he said in the keynote address to the Surface Navy Association's national symposium in Arlington, Va.

***

Where once he believed the country should work toward 375 Navy ships, new methods and technologies such as "sea swapping" crews among ships at sea have led Clark to re-evaluate even that number. "We're not walking around with our heads in the sands," he said.

How can we possibly know what the threat will be in 30 years? And it will take that long just to fix the force for the current mission? Perhaps some effort should be spent on fixing the ways that we fix the force. Ships and subs are capital-intensive and all, but 30 years? Wow.

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Abrams Destroyed

Rather than assuming the bomb was enormous, one might think it was an anti-tank mine, command-detonated. The question is, how old was the mine? Most Iraqi inventories were old stuff. If they are getting their hands on newer generation AT mines, that is not good news.

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Marines Disarm to Aid Tsunami Victims -- II

I'd just like to stress again for the record how incredibly dumb this is. Don't care how good the Indonesian military is.

Anyone ever heard of Beirut?

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Marines Disarm to Aid Tsunami Victims

Can't believe this. Just plain dumb. Who cares if they are intimidated while they eat our MREs?

Dumb. And now it's in the news. Hello, force protection.

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New York Daily News: "Rummy rips Iraq rumors"

Donald Rumsfeld can't deny incursions into Syria and then announce them later. There will be high dudgeon all around. So either there are none, as he says, or they will be completely covert.

Rumsfeld also dismissed a magazine report that the U.S. was training Iraqi commandos for raids into Syria against terrorist supporters blamed bythe U.S. for financing insurgents.

"Somebody has been reading too many spy novels," Rumsfeld said, speaking at a Pentagon news conference with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.

The Debka story is looking fishier by the moment.

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Belmont Club Comment

Belmont Club has a great discussion going on about force structure if anyone has missed it (probably not, knowing this crowd). Just tried to post the below and failed. Thought it might be interesting here, though out of context:

Wretchard,

Your "Update 2" and its description of "capabilities" vs. numbers is right on the money.

When I was a combat engineer, every time I worked supporting other units, the same thing happened. Someone would come into the headquarters and say, "we need a bulldozer" or "I need some plywood" or "can you spare an electrician for a few hours?" Then it was up to us to unravel what the "requirement" was, and what exactly the work was, then to place a "capability" against that -- and the capability is a set: people and their equipment. A squad of engineers is more or less useless without tools (although just listening to enlisted Marines BS in their spare time is highly entertaining).

The same logic applies in your description: critics think, "I need three more infantry brigades on the ground -- cough them up!" not "there is an enemy force coalescing in and around the city of xxxx. Please respond as you deem appropriate." It is the same logic writ strategically.

As to the excellent question by one commenter about who is going to train spies when universities don't do so -- this is a difficult point. The answer lies somewhere in the fact that Renaissance men are a dying breed. Look at what British lieutenants, or subalterns, would do independently, and with little supervision at all, back during the days of the Great Game: they fought, they dabbled in statecraft, and they spied. What one man used to be able to accomplish with his Victorian-bred wits and an ear for languages, now we have three separate government bureaucracies with different career tracks to do. The ultimate in stovepiping. The Geneva convention prohibits officers from spying as well. Radical changes will be necessary to prevent ossification of these agencies. On my blog, I've referred often to the concept of "jointness" and how it needs to move beyond a mere DoD-internal concept and be mandated into law throughout the national security apparatus. This is one thing I refer to. I'll explore further as my series on Conservative Critiques of the War continues.

Cheers,
Chester

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January 11, 2005

Asia News Roundup

A handful of interesting pieces from the other side of the world today:

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan

Taipei Times - archives

US congressman meets N.Korean leaders

From Sparta to Nicaragua, disasters alter political history | csmonitor.com

Separatist conflict poses risk to relief effort in Aceh | csmonitor.com

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How soon to Syria?

What is afoot in Syria?
[An attempt at aggressive pattern-spotting.]

Belmont Club had an interesting post yesterday, examining the status of the counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq. Wretchard used several mainstream sources to raise the following (paraphrased) possibilities:

1. A senior State Dept official, who was present in Algeria for their violence-ridden elections in the mid-1990s, which were successful, says the security situation in Iraq is comparable or better.

2. Insurgent attacks against the US have halved since six weeks ago, though the size and ferocity in some cases has increased.

3. A major terror network has been rolled up in Mosul (previously reported by Chester here.)

4. Diplomacy is focusing on Syria as the new center of gravity of the insurgency.

5. Signs indicate a possible shift in US tactics, to include incursions into Syria.

Last night, we responded to all of this here, noting especially the advantage of a small force, like a “hit squad,” in gaining strategic surprise (or operational surprise, depending on how it is viewed – note: the US seems to always achieve tactical surprise).

Today, the plot thickens: DEBKAfile reports explicitly what Wretchard implied: US action in Syria in imminent. Normally, we take anything from Debka with an entire shaker of salt. But in this case, their coverage seems to be mirroring news reports trickling out of the mainstream press.

Debka reports that the recent diplomatic trips to Syria by US officials have given the following demands to the House of Assad:

1. Start repealing Syria’s 40-years old emergency laws. 2. Free all political prisoners from jail. 3. Abolish media censorship. 4. Initiate democratic reform. 5. Speed up economic development 6. Cut down relations with Iran. 7. Announce publicly that the disputed Shebaa Farms at the base of Mt. Hermon are former Syrian territory. This would cut the ground from under the Lebanese terrorist Hizballah’s claim that the land is Lebanese and must be “liberated” from Israeli “occupation.” DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that the Iran-sponsored Hizballah’s attack on an Israeli convoy patrolling the disputed Shebaa Farms sector, killing an Israeli officer, on Palestinian election-day, Sunday, January 9, was addressed as much to President George W. Bush as to the new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as a foretaste of what it has in store. 8. Hand over to US or Iraqi authorities 55 top officials and military officers of the former Saddam regime, who are confirmed by intelligence to be established in Syria and running the guerrilla war in Iraq out of their homes and offices. (An address, telephone number and cell phone number were listed beside each name). But the punchline was in the last demand. 9. Syria had better make sure that none of the Kornet AT-14 anti-tank missiles which it recently purchased in large quantities from East Europe turn up in Iraq. [Chester says: VERY INTERESTING: read this.] US intelligence has recorded their serial numbers to identify their source. DEBKAfile’s military sources add: Because he cannot afford to buy advanced fighter planes and tanks, Assad purchased massive quantities of the “third generation” Kornet AT-14 anti-tank weapons. Just in case any are found in Iraq, General Casey, commander of US forces in Iraq has already received orders from the commander-in-chief in the White House to pursue military action inside Syria according to his best military judgment. Number 9 therefore incorporates a tangible threat. The American general has the authority to launch military action against Syria as he sees fit and without delay if Damascus continues to meddle in Iraq’s affairs.

The first thing to note here is that these demands constitute much more than an attempt to gain some cooperation in stopping the Iraqi insurgency. Just the second and third demands alone seem to indicate that the US is seeking major change in Syria – one might even say – gasp! – regime change! But let's not get hasty. More from Debka:

The Syrian ruler protested to Armitage that he is doing everything he can to hold back the flow of guerrilla fighters and weapons into Iraq. As proof, he ordered Syria’s chief of staff General Ali Habib to establish a forward command center on the Syrian-Iraq border to oversee efforts to control border traffic on the spot.

The fact is that General Habib is one of the few Syrian officers which the Americans have trusted. He commanded the Syrian units dispatched to Saudi Arabia in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq and made friends with the US commanders and officials conducting the war, including vice president Dick Cheney and the then head of joint chiefs of staff, Colin Powell. However, even Habib’s old American buddies do not rule out the possibility that he was posted to the border not to restrain the traffic but to take command of Syrian units posted there and prepare them for the contingency of an American military offensive.

Assad and General Habib are both aware, according to our sources, of the near carte blanche handed down to General Casey to pursue military action against Syria as and when indicated by US military requirements in Iraq.

A wise, but transparent move by Assad isn't it? Sure, let old Dick Cheney think kindly Assad is dispatching Cheney's old Gulf War tea-drinking buddy, Habib, out to the border area to "control border traffic." The fact is that Habib's expertise in the way Americans think and fight would serve Assad well. If any of this is true, Habib's role is at best ambiguous. He could be attempting to control the border as stated, or he could be positioning himself to control the border from US-Iraqi incursions, or he could be setting up a new defense of the border. He could even be readying to assume command of the insurgency if its leadership is neutralized. Fortunately, if this is obvious to us, dear readers, surely it is to the Pentagon.

Debka’s analysis, with Chester’s thoughts:

1. It will not take place before President Bush is sworn in for his second term on January 20 or Iraq’s general election ten days later.

We’re not sure we agree that the trigger for Syrian incursions is the inauguration. If Gen Casey has been given free reign, then he will not take the US inauguration into consideration. And if the incursions are to be relatively small and low-key, what is their relation to the inauguration anyway? The inauguration is not a decision point of any kind. It is merely a media event.

As to the second part of this point, why would the military wait until after the Iraqi election to act in Syria? Does acting in Syria dissuade Iraqis from voting? Most Iraqis have probably decided at this point whether they will vote or not. Seems as though taking the fight to the command and control or logistics nodes of the insurgency might dismantle some pre-election, or election day attacks to boot . . .

2. The Americans will not start out with a large-scale, orderly military offensive, but rather short in-and-out forays; small US and Iraqi special forces units will cross the border and raid bases housing Iraqi guerrillas or buses carrying them to the border. If these brief raids are ineffective, the Americans will upscale the action.

What Debka is trying to say is that seizure or control of key terrain will not be an objective of the raids. Instead, destruction of enemy forces will be paramount. Aside from US and Iraqi special forces, what other units might partake? Certainly some close air support would be helpful – and a large team of task-organized intelligence specialists could be set up safely within Iraq to exploit any captured documents or personnel – possibly near the border town of Q’aim, the largest city along the Iraqi-Syrian border, and a major thoroughfare, as it sits astride both a highway and the Euphrates. If planes or helicopters are too overt, artillery could be fired from within Iraq into Syrian positions – given specific targeting information. There will be more to this than a small ground contingent. Combined arms will play a part.

3. The Allawi government will formally request the United States to consign joint Iraqi-US forces for action against Syrian targets, so placing the US operation under the Baghdad government’s aegis. In other words, Iraq will be at war with Syria without issuing a formal declaration.

Who’s to say that Iraq even considers a formal declaration against Syria? Or Iran for that matter? Those two certainly have their own meddlesome schemes in Iraq and were not kind enough to forewarn with a declaration of war. Besides, a declaration of war, must by necessity be preceded by a great deal of uneventful diplomacy – completely ineffective in this case – Iraq has little to threaten Syria with, except the good graces of the US.

4. It is fully appreciated in Washington, Baghdad and Jerusalem that intense American military warfare against Syria could provoke a Hizballah backlash against Israel. Damascus may well activate the Lebanese Shiite group to open a second front on Israel’s northern border. The Syrian ruler is expected will tolerate a certain level of American low-intensity, low-profile action. But, because of his reluctance to strike back directly at American or Iraqi targets, he will field the Hizballah – and not just for cross-border attacks but to galvanize the terrorist cells it controls and funds in the West Bank and Gaza Strip into a stepped-up offensive against Israeli targets. These Palestinian cells have proliferated over the years, particularly in the Fatah and its branches, encouraged by Yasser Arafat’s cooperative pact with the Hizballah which remains in force after his death.

Just one question: If this is correct, who’s to say that the Israelis will wait for Hizbollah to start things off? One would think they know one way or another what the US is up to and how it will affect them.

If you were Assad, and knew that the US, with minimal force, could completely wallop your own country – think punitive strike or expedition, not even anything akin to what we're attempting in Iraq – how would you react to the 9 demands above if you knew there were American forces operating with impunity within your borders? Perhaps US incursions into Syria are aimed toward the dual goals of defeating the insurgency leadership, and intimidating the Syrian government. Perhaps a kind of "soft" regime change is being sought here . . .

While all of this is turning in your mind, consider that according to the World Tribune, Allawi is supposedly asking for a postponement of the elections.

Iraq's interim government has met U.S. officials and Iraqi politicians regarding a postponement of the Jan. 30 elections.

Iraqi officials said Prime Minister Iyad Alawi and Defense Minister Hazem Shalaan have determined that insurgents would torpedo Sunni participation in the elections, a move that could split the country.

"Alawi sees no point in the elections, but doesn't want to do anything without a consensus that would include the United States," an Iraqi official said. "He has been talking to everybody to ensure that any delay would be limited and agreed by all."

***

So far, Alawi has proposed a postponement of the elections for about one month. Officials said coalition and Iraqi forces have made a dent in the violence and over the next few weeks could be utilized for an intensive effort against Saddam loyalists and the Tawhid and Jihad group headed by Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi. One option, they said, was the formation of a joint U.S.-Iraqi squad to hunt down and kill insurgency leaders.

Officials said Shi'ite politicians have also been considering a delay in the elections, a proposal urged by European Union and Arab states. They said the United States does not oppose a delay as long as Shi'ite leaders, particularly Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Kurdish politicians, announce their consent and Sunni leaders pledge to participate in rescheduled elections.

Several thoughts here:
Maybe Allawi thinks he will lose the election, and knows that US/Iraqi counterinsurgency action in Syria is imminent. Maybe he knows that security conditions will improve after that action and thinks that if the election is held afterwards, he'll have a better chance of winning.

Read this article about the growth of Iraq's security forces. It doesn't give the numbers of men per battalion, so it is difficult to gauge. but this line is interesting: "By late February, nine additional military battalions were scheduled to become operational, officials said." That certainly makes for a much more secure election . . . nevertheless, The Adventures of Chester continues to predict that elections will be held on schedule. Another thought: if in fact, the elections are postponed, the US will have surrendered the initiative to the terrorists. A Syrian incursion to regain it and put offensive pressure on them might counteract this . . .

Final thought about Syria: a long time ago, when The Adventures of Chester was a wee toddler in the blogosphere, and only about a week old, we thought that the 1000 Arabic-speaking Green Berets that supposedly were deployed in mid-October from the 10th Special Forces Group in Fort Carson, CO, (as reported in the Observer) were not going to be heavily involved in the Battle of Fallujah. From all reports, we were right – only a handful of SOF teams – mainly integrated with Iraqi forces, were in the fight.

Does anyone know where the rest of the thousand went? Was this just a routine rotation? We don't know, but suspect not.

[Here's the original quote from the Observer:]

The 10th Special Forces Group has for years been catapulted into action from its base in the Colorado mountains. Now, according to US reports, more than 1,000 of them are heading for the Middle East, amid official reluctance to discuss where they are going or what they will be doing.

Speculation has been mounting, however, that such a large movement of the Green Berets, with their specialist snipers, linguists, civil affairs specialists and military intelligence officers, could only be headed for two places - for Afghanistan and an attempt to capture Osama bin Laden or, more likely, to spearhead the fighting inside Falluja, acting as forward air controllers on the ground for US bombers and strike helicopters, and leading the hunt for al-Zarqawi.]

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Conservative Critiques of the War -- Followup

For those who want more info about the portion oftoday's earlier post dealing with the readiness of the Army Reserves, GlobalSecurity.org has LTG Helmly's memo about the readiness of the Army Reserves posted on their site.

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John J. Tkacik Jr. on China and Taiwan on National Review Online

This article on China is very much worth your time:

Although the actual text of the draft "law" has yet to be published, it appears to be a watered-down version of a truly fanatical "Unification Law" advocated by at least one Chinese professor, Yu Yuanzhou of Wuhan University, whose proposed legislation requires the Chinese People's Liberation Army to attack Taiwan as soon as it is able. Yu's legislation, which has been circulating on the Internet for over two years, calls for the PLA to immediately start bombarding Quemoy and Matsu — and it "would not be limited to conventional weapons."

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Conservative Critiques of the War, Part I: Introduction

[This post started out as an update on the feud between Rumsfeld and his generals in the Army, but I've decided to turn it into Part I of what we envision to be a four part series on conservative critiques of the war.]

In a recent intelligence report from Strategic Forecasting, the premier private intelligence agency, George Friedman draws attention to a memo by Lt Gen James R. Helmly, the head of the US Army Reserve.

Addressed to the chief of staff of the Army, the memo stated that the Army Reserve was in danger of becoming a "broken force," due to personnel policies adopted by the Army and the Department of Defense. Helmly wrote, "The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of the Army Reserve's inability . . . to meet mission requirements associated with Iraq and Afghanistan and to reset and regenerate its forces for follow-on and future missions."

When a three-star general writes a memo containing these words to the chief of staff, and then leaks the memo to the press (it did not arrive at the Sun through telepathy), what you have is a major revolt by senior Army commanders. Helmly may have been more incautious than others, but he is far from alone in his view that the force in general is broken. More directly, if the Army Reserve is unable to carry out its mission, the same can likely be said for National Guard units. This means that the Army in general, which is heavily dependent on both to carry out its mission, won't be able to do so. What the generals are saying is that the Army itself is unable to carry out its mission.

A little background is necessary here to understand why Friedman concludes that if the Reserves are broken, the Army on a whole is as well.

After Viet Nam, the nation's military leadership decided that in the future they did not want to fight another unpopular war. They therefore restructured the US Army such that nearly all of its combat support and combat service support units were transferred to the Reserves. We've heard various figures but for some specialties, close to 90% of the personnel needed for some key support missions are reservists. The thinking on the part of the Army leadership, specifically Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, was that since any large scale deployment of Army combat forces would require combat service support personnel to be activated, that politicians would be hesitant to commit the Army to a large-scale conflict unless they were sure that it would be supported be an electorate totally fine with watching its citizen soldiers deploy and possibly die. This situation continues today. One reason why such a large number of the Army personnel deployed in iraq are reservists is because there simply are no active-duty troops who do their jobs. These are the unglamorous jobs that do not make headlines, but without which an Army grinds to a halt: bulk fuel operations, motor transport, military police, civil affairs specialists, supply specialists, etc. (Certainly our Army vet readers will correct our mistakes here, but we're pretty sure this is the case.)

The second constraint that the military runs up against is that reservists by law can only be activated for two years at a time, after which there is some minimum period when they must return to civilian life.

It is these two constraints of force structure to which Lt Gen Helmly refers. Thus, when he speaks of an inability to regenerate his forces, this is what he means. There could be other concerns as well, such as unexpected, unplanned for, and unfixable wear and tear on equipment and such. But the central part is force structure.

Friedman continues:

Rumsfeld believes that there is a revolution in warfare under way. As the author of The Future of War , I completely agree with him. However, as I stated in that book, the revolution is just getting under way and will not be mature for generations. It is not ready to carry the warfighting burden of the United States, although it can certainly support it. Until that revolution matures, traditional forces, particularly the Army, will need to be maintained and, in time of war, expanded.

Rumsfeld's view is that the revolution is more mature than that and that warfare can now be carried out with minimal Army forces. In some ways, Rumsfeld was right when he focused on the conventional invasion of Iraq. A relatively small force was able to defeat the main Iraqi force. Where he made his mistake, in my opinion, was in not recognizing that the occupation of Iraq required substantial manpower and that much of that manpower was in the reserves.

He compounded that mistake enormously when he failed to recognize that an organized insurgency was under way in Iraq. Counterinsurgency operations is one area in which the revolution in warfare has made little progress, and Rumsfeld should have hit the panic button on Army force structure when the insurgency picked up steam. In Iraq, Rumsfeld was going to fight a guerrilla war, and he was going to need a lot of infantry and armor to do it. If, in addition to fighting the guerrilla war, Rumsfeld planned to carry out other operations in the region and maintain a strategic reserve, he needed to expand the Army dramatically.

Rumsfeld made three mistakes. First, he overestimated the breadth and depth of the revolution in warfare. Second, he underestimated the challenges posed by counterinsurgency operations, particularly in urban areas. Mistakes are inevitable, but his third mistake was amazing: he could not recognize that he had made the first two mistakes. That meant that he never corrected any of the mistakes.

There is another way to look at this. The United States is in a global war. Personnel policies have not been radically restructured to take into account either that the U.S. needs a wartime force structure or that that force structure must be congruent with the type and tempo of operations that will be undertaken. Not only doesn't the force stretch, but the force is not built to stretch. Hence, Helmly's memo.

Friedman's thesis is thus:

1. Rumsfeld is correct about the changing nature of war, but wrong about the tempo of the change.

2. The US needs drastically more troops in Iraq.

Friedman even mentions that the US' personnel policies "have not been radically restructured to take into account either that the U.S. needs a wartime force structure or that that force structure must be congruent with the type and tempo of operations that will be undertaken." But he doesn't quite go the whole nine yards and say what is left unsaid:

The US cannot commit more troops to Iraq because it has no more troops to commit. Troops must be cycled and rotated on a manageable schedule. We have maxed that out. Any further increase in troop rotations would leave us strategically vulnerable in other theaters. 150,000 or so at a time is the best we can do. That should give one pause. Is that enough to defeat China? We've said this before, here. But Chester's theories on force structure is not quite the purpose of this post and we digress.

The questions that all of this raises are numerous. Who is right, Rummy, or his generals? Or could both of them be right?

Four documents help us untangle this mystery to get to the heart of what Rumsfeld's thinking is.

The first is the book, "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait," by Midge Decter, who is married to the eminent conservative Norman Podhoretz, and is a personal friend of the Rumsfeld. While she has been charged as being an apologist for Rummy, that certainly means that she knows her stuff as well as anyone else about what he thinks. We read this book last week and found it to be similar to "Rumsfeld's War" which we've previously recommended, but with differing details [links to both in the sidebar].

In Chapter 6 of her book, Decter offers us this view of the Pentagon as it was when Rummy came to rule:

. . . on the other hand, while the military was no longer sunk in the post-Vietnam atmosphere of failure and depression of the 1970s and had long since come to be at ease about presiding over an all-volunteer force, they were still very far from being in as vibrant and feisty a condition as their twenty-first secretary.

One of the reasons for this was that little by little over the years, and to a truly marked degree during the Clinton administration, Congress had in effect replaced the executive branch in the job of looking after the Pentagon. There were now hundreds of people working in the building whose only role was to serve members of Congress" answering their inquiries, tending to their interests, and doing them favors. And the favors done for congressmen were only too duly reciprocated: it seemed that virtually every special budgetary request, along with every new weapons system, not to speak of many a no-longer-needed military base, had its advocates in the House and Senate. An inevitable – and for Rumsfeld a most trying – corollary was that there were now many members of Congress who expected that he, too, along with his new appointees, would be offering them his full attention.

The way of life of the Pentagon had also been very much influenced by the fact that, again, most particularly during the Clinton administration, a number of appointees in the Department of Defense had themselves once been members of Congress. Legislators being people who are – and who are in the nature of things required to be – dependent for their effectiveness on the building of consensus, they tend to be more forgiving of one another's weaknesses than would, say, most business executives. The result was a notable falling off of something essential to both the makers of war and the keepers of peace: a willingness to give an accounting of onself.

Aside from the sheer organizational differences created in such an atmosphere, the serious abdication of authority over the military by Bill Clinton (and inevitably, therefore, also of the secretaries of defense who had served under him) led to certain other problems. I had for one thing, become virtually impossible to keep any military secrets: Legislators who had the run of the Pentagon also often had friendly – and information-hungry – contacts in the press.

Then, too, without civilian control the military, especially the staff of the joint chiefs, inevitably became the managers of their own affairs. This came more and more to mean that military promotions were determined on the basis not of ability but of congeniality with one's fellows. And this in turn meant that some of the most capable people, discouraged, in such an atmosphere about what a future with the armed forces might hold for them, were leaving the military for greener pastures.

This was the situation into which Rumsfeld now entered . . .

Under these circumstances, Bush and Rumsfeld agreed – to what would be the dismay of the Pentagon brass – not to request any increase in the military budget, at least no until the new secretary had completed a full-scale assessment of the country's military doctrine. In addition to military doctrine, Rumsfeld would also be required to undertake a top-to-bottom review of the current state of the country's military capabilities.

Now Midge Decter could be more or less right or wrong about the state of affairs in the DoD upon Rummy's arrival, but the important thing is that she documents the perception of that state among the new Bush administration. This goes a long way toward background in explaining the ease with which Army generals now "rebel" against Rummy.

So Rummy thought he would freeze budget (and therefore troop) increases until he had a chance to take a good sizing-up of the place. And he made success in increasing the number of warfighters available from the same pool of personnel. As noted in the National Review, in an article advising readers not to throw out the transformation bathwater with Rumsfeld if and when he goes,

. . .the pressure of transformation Rumsfeld has exerted on the Army has caused it to reorganize so that it can send more soldiers to the field than before. Theoretically there are even more troops available from the same pool than when the secretary took over the Pentagon.

So, while Rummy may be slow in recognizing or asking for increases in the size of the military, he has made the existing force much more effective as a warfighting organization.

This still leaves the question unanswered as to who is right bout Iraq, Rummy or the generals? We believe both. In fact, the most cogent part of Friedman's analysis above is that Rumsfeld has misjudged the pace of "transformation."

What do we think of transformation? Well . . . that is a big question. Assuming that you mean Rummy's version of it (there are several versions, many contradictory), we agree with him that information technology can make the armed forces dramatically better at killing people and destroying things on the battlefield, and that this will mean a smaller, lighter, faster force can do much the same as the larger forces of yesterday.

But at the same time, we can't help but think that we mustn't think that war will become a standoff, sterile activity, conducted by computers, robots, and UAVs. Man makes war and man will alays have an integral role to play not only in its conception, but in its execution as well.

A long time ago, in 1994, when maneuver warfare concepts were going mainstream, H.J. Poole, a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant, wrote a book called, "The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO's Contribution to Warfare." In it he notes that the United States has a history of relying upon technology rather than tactical prowess, for its victories. Consider this statement, which Poole quotes, from retired Army General A. Collins:

In my judgment our forces were not as well trained as those of the enemy, especially in the early stages of the fighting. After the buildup of forces, when we went on the offensive, we did not defeat the enemy tactically. We overpowered and overwhelmed our enemies with equipment and firepower.

Maneuver warfare is a doctrine that attempts to out-think the enemy. To the extent that "transformation" enables this – defeat by ruse, strategem, or superior thinking – we wholeheartedly support it. To the extent that "transformation" promises cleaner battles through the use of better and more networked lethal technology – well, we'll take our victories anyway we can get them, but show us where it is written that the US will always be technologically dominant over other countries. Perish the thought, but it just ain't so.

And this technological dominance carries within it the seed of its own undoing, excellently described in a letter to the editor to the Weekly Standard, published on Monday, and written by Stuart Koehl, a senior fellow in Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Mr. Koehl notes the following:

I've written at great length, mainly for internal government consumption, on some of what I see as the logical and strategic fallacies of the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA). From my perspective, the most serious of these can be characterized as follows:

First, it is an attempt to reduce war to an engineering problem through the use of information technology to eliminate uncertainty. That one does not know where the enemy is, or what the enemy intends is the source of that uncertainty, and the fact that the enemy is an intelligent and dynamic adversary allows him to exploit that uncertainty to undermine one's plans and objectives. Under RMA theory, now generally called "Network Centric Warfare" (NCW), myriad streams of information are brought together through digital networks to present the commander with a God's eye view of the battlefield: in theory he knows were all of his forces are, and all of the enemy's forces, their status and what they are doing or intending to do. He can then allocate precision strike systems to attack the

enemy before he can mass or close to attack friendly forces. However, this reliance on distributed sensor networks creates the seeds of its own undoing, for the enemy can not only attack the networks directly ("cyber-attack"), but can also resort to various deception measures to create a false picture upon which the commander would act. More simple still, he can flood the network with so much spurious data (noise) that the battle command system never manages to catch up; under the torrent of inaccessible information, the enemy can move at will. More insidious still, it creates a "scope dope" mentality in which "reality" is what appears on the situational display screen, not what is actually happening on the battlefield.

Second, the RMA is still rooted in the 20th century paradigm of armored-mechanized warfare between sophisticated nation-states. Its origins can be found in the deadlock of the NATO Central Front in the 1980s, when the US was looking for ways of destroying Soviet second echelon forces, and the USSR was exploring ways of breaking through NATO's front lines. The convergence of several technologies--remote sensors, high speed computers and networks, and long-range, precision-guided weapons--allowed in theory for the creation of what the USSR called "reconnaissance strike complexes" that would have the potential to break up or destroy conventional formations of tanks and armored vehicles from hundreds of miles away. This in turn would force the dispersion of forces into small packets, attempting to dominate spaces by fire rather than by physical occupation. In a situation where one has reconnaissance strike complexes and the other does not, any attempt by the enemy to concentrate his forces results in their destruction, while one can concentrate freely against the enemy's weakest points. We saw something very much like this during Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the US actually deployed primitive reconnaissance-strike complexes.

Faced with this situation, the enemy has only two choices (other than surrender): to develop his own reconnaissance-strike capability, or to respond asymmetrically. If both sides have reconnaissance-strike capability, then both sides disperse, and war becomes a matter of trying to find and destroy each other's reconnaissance strike systems, after which one side or the other has an insurmountable advantage. However, in reality no country other than the US has the economic wherewithal to develop such a capability.

Thus, the US has become effectively invincible in conventional warfare: regardless of the adversary, the result would have been much the same as Iraq (though a few armies might have given us a run for our money). Anyone wishing to oppose the United States militarily must therefore resort to asymmetrical warfare.

And therein lies the third flaw of the RMA: for network centric warfare to be relevant, the enemy must employ conventional forces. Guerrillas, terrorists, economic warfare, cyber-warfare--in all of these cases, the enemy does not present the sensor network with the kinds of readily detectable, high-contrast targets that can be engaged by precision strike weapons. Instead, the enemy blends into the background, and gets within close combat range of US forces, where much of the firepower advantage is negated.

Having been perfected by the US, our conventional capabilities have bred their own obsolescence, since adversaries will attempt to circumvent rather than engage them head-on.

Does this mean, then, that there is no need for defense transformation, or that all of the RMA has been a dead end?

By no means. The Army inherited by the Bush Administration in 2000 was not at all suited for the kind of war we find in Iraq and Afghanistan today. It wasn't even suitable for the operations we undertook in Bosnia, Kosovo or Somalia. It was organized, equipped and trained to fight the Warsaw Pact on the plains of central Europe, and not much more. Radical transformation was necessary, and the issue then should have been, What kind of transformation?

The enhancement of high-intensity capabilities as was demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq, while not suited for the predominant form of war in the 21st century, does serve a useful purpose: by so overshadowing the capabilities of potential adversaries, it deters them from competition in the conventional arena, and thus reduces the likelihood of high-intensity conventional war (which being the most destructive of all forms of war short of nuclear, should be avoided when possible).

On the other hand, that very success increased the probability of asymmetrical responses such as terrorism and guerrilla warfare, and even the development of WMDs, which are the poor man's response to the overwhelming materiel capability of the US.

Thus, a second transformational path was also required, one which focused on this "low end" warfare and its unique operational requirements.

In contrast to conventional war, this type of warfare requires more emphasis on human factors--training, tactics, psychological warfare--than on high technology. It is a war fought by relatively small numbers of elite troops whose weapons are lighter, and far more discriminating than even the precision guided bombs on which we have come to rely. The enemy is hunted down in his lair, or out-thought in the realm of ideas. It is war where the main weapon might be a dagger, or a water pump, depending on the situation, since much of this kind of war involves civil-military affairs.

[As our series, "Conservative Critiques of the War" continues, readers will please excuse the many and varied topics which are touched upon. We'll make things as clear as possible but this is a tough onion to peel. Here are the future installments, each to come out on Monday of the next three weeks:

Part II: Neo-realism
Part III: Clash? More Like the Total War of Civilizations
Part IV: Whither Fourth-Generation Warfare?]

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January 10, 2005

Various Updates and Clarifications

Earlier today, we stated:

We’d like to make a prediction: the United Iraqi Alliance will win the election and ask US troops to speed up their timetable for departure. The US will reduce its presence dramatically, but not its influence, and its involvement in the training of Iraqi security forces will continue apace. Iraq may fail, splitting into three separate “states” but a Shi’ite theocracy will not be one of them.

A quick update, lest this be taken for something we didn't intend. We think that Iraq failing and splitting into three states is a possibility, but a remote one. We are actually optimistic for the long run for the state to hold together. Our main point was that we don't expect a Shi'ite theocracy. The Iraqi Shi'ites believe imams belong in mosques, not government. And as has been pointed out much more eloquently elsewhere, nationalism seems to be a stronger force than religion -- which trumps worries of the Iranians having undue influence in the new state. No, we are optimistic.

As to the reader who asked our thoughts on incursions into Syria, discsussed today in Belmont Club: If we're going to do this, small teams would be the way we'd go about it for several reasons:

1. They can operate for weeks independently.

2. With Iraqis joining them, they can blend into the populace, or at least hide themselves more effectively.

3. Why waste time with a long diplomatic gamble to influence the Syrian government to "turn the insurgent leadership over?" Damascus may have little ability to do so anyway.

4. More importantly, loud and public diplomacy gives the bad guys time to move, plot, and counterplot. It absolutely kills any strategic surprise we might have in our attempt to find and kill or capture them. Better if they don't know we're coming. And if we don't want them to know we're coming, best to keep the force that's going small and elite.

Toppling Syria's government doesn't seem nearly as important right now as stopping the insurgents that have sanctuary in its borders.

Who's to say that we haven't culled a few diehards from the ranks of the fledgling Iraqi security forces and turned them into spies, ready and willing to work with our Green Berets inside Syria? If all is as it is reported, an Iraqi passing himself off inside Syria as a sympathizer with the insurgency does not seem farfetched, or even difficult.

***

An Alert Reader has asked about our use of "we" rather than "I." We got tired of using "I" so much, because it seems so self-centric and the imperial, or editorial, or authorial "we" seemed better -- especially after noticing how James Taranto uses it in "Best of the Web" on Opinionjournal.

The fact that we must use either pronoun is continued proof of our poor writing skills. If readers request, we'll switch back.

***

The planned post on the Army vs. Rummy has morphed into part one of a series. It's not quite done yet, but will be tonight, so if you're on the east coast, check back in the am.

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The Rummy - McCain Split

The Washington Times has an interesting article about the Rummy-McCain differences.

Rummy vs. the Army later tonight!

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Monday Morning Update

Mark Steyn’s latest column on tsunami relief is worth a read.

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This article mentions every possible reason why Bill and W seem to get along well except one: could it be that W’s Christianity inspires him to try to get along with everyone?

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Washington is abuzz with statements by Brent Scowcroft last week in which he indicates that Iraq is on the verge of civil war.

"We may be seeing incipient civil war at this time."

When reading this, we immediately thought, “what access does he have that gives him some inside scoop?” It was only in reading Maureen Dowd’s latest bit of extreme vituperation that we learned that Scowcroft sits on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. We also learned that he has been asked to leave his position there. Hmmm. Might make one a little upset. Scowcroft’s statements must therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

The New York Times (same article above) also reports that the corridors of power are considering how best to withdraw from Iraq. The article concludes that the most likely way for a quick withdrawal from Iraq would be if the Iraqis asked us to do so. Note that requesting US troops withdraw from Iraq is one of the main platforms of the United Iraqi Alliance, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of the leading candidates in the election.

We also read yesterday that many think the only possible outcome in Iraq is a Shi’ite theocracy.

We’d like to make a prediction: the United Iraqi Alliance will win the election and ask US troops to speed up their timetable for departure. The US will reduce its presence dramatically, but not its influence, and its involvement in the training of Iraqi security forces will continue apace. Iraq may fail, splitting into three separate “states” but a Shi’ite theocracy will not be one of them.

Later today, the Army vs. Rummy, and more!

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Admin Update

The Major Site Renovations that we announced last week are going swimmingly, but won't be ready for Monday, as we promised. Two reasons: major blogging work on the tsunami effort, and the fact that the renovations are a little more in-depth than we realized. So they'll come soon but not Monday.

On another note, we'll keep blogging about the US tsunami relief effort here at The Adventures of Chester, but it will no longer be our primary topic as it was this past week. As things develop we'll continue to cover them though.

Since we're renovating the site, feel free to comment or email with recommended changes. We appreciate all feedback and input.

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January 9, 2005

Captain Chester

Just found out I was promoted to a Captain in the reserves on January 1st. I'll have to get the wife to pin some bars on me.

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Cobras and Harriers

A friend who is a Cobra pilot on the 15th MEU reports thus:

The most action the Cobra and Harrier guys are seeing is the duty desk. They won't let the cobras break skids within 12 miles of the coast.

So we suppose that answers the question of how the Cobras are being used. They're not.

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Venezuela to seize aristocrat's cattle ranch

We're keeping half an eyeball on things afoot in Venezuela here at The Adventures of Chester. Quick update: the place continues to go down the tubes. Wonder how much pull this "aristocrat" has in Britain. Margaret Thatcher would have already taken Caracas with a Royal Commando Brigade by now.

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Singapore Tsunami Relief Effort

A few days ago, we posted an entire story by an Alert Reader about the Singapore tsunami relief effort. Well, since then he sent us several more stories and we encouraged him to start his own blog. It has come to pass. Read in-depth reporting about ths efforts of the Singapore military at: Singapore Tsunami Relief Effort.

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January 8, 2005

More Super Dumb Tsunami Quotes

Chrenkoff strikes again!

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The last 15 years without America?

Victor Davis Hanson asks us to imaginea world without America in his Friday column:

"Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well %u2014 the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear."

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Leadership of Mosul Terror Network Has Been Rolled Up

Centcom reports that three of the top four leaders of the Zarqawi network's branch in Mosul have been captured in the past few days:

-on December 23rd, Abu Marwan was captured

-on December 22nd, Abdul Aziz Sa'dun Ahmed Hamduni was captured. This information is being released today.

-"Security forces also recently captured another senior Talha member whose name cannot be released due to operational security reasons." Perhaps this is what generated the Zarqawi rumors earlier in the week?

Interesting bit on the future of these detainees: "The Central Criminal Court of Iraq is committed to providing a fair trial to those allegedly engaging in terrorist activities. Those found guilty will be punished accordingly, and thus lose the ability to provide for the future of their families."

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Rummy Gets a "Directed Telescope"

According to a story in yesterday's New York Times,

The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual "open-ended" review of the military's entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

The extraordinary leeway given to the highly regarded officer, Gen. Gary E. Luck, a former head of American forces in South Korea and currently a senior adviser to the military's Joint Forces Command, underscores the deep concern by senior Pentagon officials and top American commanders over the direction that the operation in Iraq is taking, and its broad ramifications for the military, said some members of Congress and military analysts.

First of all, we think this is an excellent idea. Second, we think it is not unusual, as portrayed by the Times. Retired generals and other officers often play both prominent and behind-the-scenes roles in various Pentagon efforts, from weapons and tactics development, to even heading up part of the Pentagon.

When we were in Iraq, our unit was visited by a three-man team of Majors who were traveling to every battalion-sized unit in Iraq to prepare an after-action report for Lt Gen O'Hanlon, who was then the head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

The Majors were an aviator, a combat engineer officer with extensive experience in ground units, and a reservist who was a historian and was writing the official Marine Corps history of the invasion. They were traveling together with a driver and were operating independently, with a mandate from the General to report on anything and to report directly to him.

The term for a mission, and an individual, or team like this is "the directed telescope." In "Command in War," the Bible of command and control, Martin Van Creveld examines the role of the directed telescope at length. Here is an excerpt from his chapter on Napoloeon:

. . . To guard against this danger and to keep subordinates on their toes, a commander needs to have in addition a kind of directed telescope – the metaphor is an apt one – which he can direct, at will, at any part of the enemy's forces, the terrain, or his own army in order to bring in information that is not only less structured than that passed on by the normal channels but also tailored to meet his momentary (and specific) needs. Ideally, the regular reporting system should tell the commander which questions to ask, and the directed telescope should enable him to answer those questions. It was the two systems together, cutting across each other and wielded by Napoleon's masterful hand, which made the revolution in command possible.

As organized from 1805 on, Napoleon's system for cutting through established channels and for directly gathering the information he needed consisted of two separate parts. The first was a group of between eight and twelve adjutant generals; these were men selected unsystematically from among colonels who caught the emperor's eye, usually carried the rank of brigadier or major general, and were between ages thirty and forty and thus in the full flower of their mental and physical powers. Their duties varied enormously, from reconnoitering entire countries (Savary in 1805) to negotiating a surrender (Rapp in the same year) to spying out enemy headquarters under the cover of a truce (Rapp again, on the eve of Austerlitz) to commanding the cavalry or the artillery reserve in battle, (Druot, Lauriston) to governing a province and commanding a garrison far from the main theater of operations. Such responsibilities called for practical savoir faire as well as diplomatic ability, the knowledge and talents of a military commander, and, last but not least, sheer physical stamina.

So to sum up, General Luck will be acting as Rummy's directed telescope. He is there to gain insight into that which is not being reported through normal channels, probably inadvertently. And also to offer the opinion of a military expert who has not been heavily involved in the war and can gain a fresh perspective. it will be interesting if his trip results in changes in US policy . . .

[We HIGHLY recommend Van Creveld's book, by the way. Link in the sidebar.]

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Vote now or later?

The Washington Times reports: "Bush resolute on Iraqi elections" but also has an opinion piece guessing that the elections may be postponed after all, and that the US is floating rumors of this to gauge the public's reaction.

Chester continues with his prediction of some time ago that the elections will be held January 30th as planned.

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Pentagon to embed U.S. trainers in Iraqi units

[The next three posts will deal with Iraq.]

This is good news. The World Tribune reports:

Under the proposal, U.S. advisers would serve as mentors to military and police units that proved unreliable in 2004. They included Iraqi forces that have operated in such cities as Faluja, Mosul, Ramadi and Samara in the Sunni Triangle.

And

"Iraqi security forces are increasing their capability [and] their capacity for security operations daily," Lt. Gen. Tom Metz, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 7, said. "They have proven themselves in operations throughout Iraq in recent months in places like Najaf, Samara and Faluja."

This news means that the US trusts the ability of the Iraqis enough to being turning more and more of their security over to them. Take this:

Since Nov. 10, Sunni insurgents have tried 13 times to capture police stations in Mosul, including six attempts last week, Middle East Newsline reported. Iraqi and U.S. forces have repelled all of the attacks.

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China to outlaw sex-selective abortions

We suppose this is good news in some sort of twisted way. Like saying, "I decided to stop beating my wife today." Similar.

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India's Brain Drain to US Continues Apace

Brain drain from the Indian perspective.

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Japan may upgrade defence agency to ministry

[Next few posts will deal with East Asia.]

This story is the latest in a long string which show that the Japanese are getting serious about greater contributions to regional security. Perhaps far down the road, a US presence in Okinawa won't be necessary -- or Okinawa will be staffed with a token staff, but have the ability to host a large US force at a moment's notice if a crisis develops, as has been the stated goal of Pentagon troop-positioning reforms. Says the article:

The defence chief hinted that his influence was growing, boasting of his victory over the finance ministry in recent budget negotiations. The ministry had wanted to cut the number of ground troops from 150,000 to 120,000 to help pay for new priorities, including missile defence, but the agency got away with a reduction of just 2,000 men, he said.

Takao Toshikawa , a political commentator, said there was a growing momentum to upgrade the defence agency’s power. He said it was possible the ruling Liberal Democartic party would bring the issue to parliament in November in conjunction with proposals for constitutional amendments, a process that will be even more crucial in determining the future role of Japan’s armed forces.

Aggressive pattern-spotting is not necessary to see the future here. Tha days of Japan's Article 9 restrictions are fading, and whether they do so in a de fact or de jure sense, only time will tell, but the result will be the same: a Japan unafraid to flex its muscles. As the Japan-US security arrangement is among the oldest and strongest treaties we have, this is excellent news.

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The Diplomad Declares War on the UN

The Diplomad is single-handedly taking on the UN "aid workers" in tsunami countries. Check it out:

The Chief Diplomad is just back from the office. It's 4 am. Mosquitoes are everywhere. The internet is painfully slow. Your "friendly" Chief Diplomad's plan to move on to another set of duties, for now, has fallen by the roadside. He must remain in the current job for now. The local Guardian correspondent has called the Embassy; he is doing a negative story on the US relief effort based on "information" provided by the UN at a press conference. The Diplomad is in a dark, dark mood. So, of course, just as anyone else would do in such circumstances, The Diplomad writes about the UN.

It's the UN and Guardian vs. the US and the blogosphere. This has potential to be like the Powerline-Minneapolis Star Tribune slugfest. Read how that one started here (and here's the Google Search: Powerline Nick Coleman).

The Diplomad already has 153 comments and 27 trackbacks as of this writing, so it seems that he's got the attention he needs for the upcoming battle. We'll see what the Guardian comes up with.

UPDATE: We were referring to a figurative war of course, a war of rhetoric. But it appears that someone has tried to shut up a number of bloggers by conducting a "distributed denial of service attack" on the Hosting Matters Website yesterday. Hosting Matters is used by a number of premier bloggers. What does this portend?

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January 7, 2005

Latest Update from Pacific Command (Jan 7th)

The latest Pacific Command press conference on the tsunami relief effort, Operation Unified Assistance, has been released.

Highlights:

GEN. BLACKMAN : We are at a point, I believe, where we are able now to see the top of the crisis curve. And so our priority here over the next, say, 96 hours is to determine what our sustained requirement will be for disaster relief in each of the three countries where we're focusing our effort. And each one of the countries day by day develops unique requirements that we are assessing in the best way to fulfill them in a sustained way, if you will, on the back side of that curve.

More:

1. Insight into the order of battle of the US forces in each country. We mentioned the other day we'd love to see a wire diagram of the organization, so this is pretty good: " . . . And we overcame that by building what we call a starter kit of capability: a rotary-wing aircraft for distribution; water-making, water-production, storage and distribution capability; some general engineering capability to clear roads and facilitate the relief effort by the host nation or other agencies."

2. Considerations of sea-basing are driving the US concept of operations: " It can just -- the Mercy -- I believe that the Mercy was used, for example, after 9/11 in New York. Somebody here corrected me; it was the Comfort, very -- you know, the same class ship. The Comfort was berthed in New York and was used by relief workers as a sanctuary, if you will; where they could get a little bit of rest, a hot shower, a hot meal, and then get back to their duties. It can be uniquely loaded with a variety of supplies and capabilities.

And I would also like to add that, as a ship, it allows us to sea base our medical capabilities. It allows us to not put a significant footprint and presence on the ground in, for example, northern Sumatra. There are great benefits associated with sea basing our medical capability."

Note: The Marine Corps and Navy are using this opportunity to show their doctrine of sea-basing – and Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare as well. This is a great idea. Few other operating areas or situations represent such a textbook example of "Chaos in the Littorals," [this links to Chapter 1 Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 3, "Expeditionary Operations"] which is one way of describing the driving considerations behind the development of seabasing and expeditionary maneuver warfare.

3. Spontaneous, unorganized, (and note to the UN: uncoordinated too) efforts to assist US personnel have occurred: "We don't necessarily have to focus on pounds and gallons and numbers all the time. They had 14 Marines there today with shovels who were digging a trench on the beach to drain a four-kilometer-long stagnant pool of water that had been captured inland after the tsunami receded. In their efforts to drain that pool with hand shovels, they were joined by Sri Lankans who weighed in and helped them do that. And we have found that just manual labor type cleanup efforts of debris, where we have started those kinds of operations, we have had Sri Lankans in particular just join the effort and begin a teamwork- like effort to begin to recover from this disaster."

4. General Blackman is impressed by speed of strategic lift: " . . . after 34 and a half years wearing this Marine uniform, I have been extraordinarily impressed by the incredible speed with which we have moved capabilities into this region."

5. US relief effort to the Philippines in early December was an excellent dress rehearsal for a disaster like this: "If I can go back and just mention one thing, this kind of operation is not entirely unique. We -- 3MEF, it was Joint Task Force 535 -- conducted a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operation in the Philippines here in the first couple of weeks of December. And certainly not anywhere near on the scale of the operation we're conducting right now, but we gained some -- we learned some very valuable lessons from that . . ."

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OpinionJournal - Taste

Here's an interesting story about women who suffer from "phone text stress" in London.

Sounds like information overload.

Even though the concept of "information management" is already alive and kicking in the corporate and military worlds, it hasn't really hit private life yet. RSS feeds for news aggregators is a small start, but the potential for this technology is enormous. Imagine if you had a custom website, or something else easily accessible, that went out and found the things you normally need and displayed them all in one place -- not just news, as it stands today, but personal finances, your schedule, your contacts -- something which aggregated all of this info into one place. A step further would be if it was smart and could come to customize web search results for you. The final step would be if it had a human-seeming interaction method, like a voice-recognizing digital assistant with a personality of its own.

Such ideas are prominent throughout the book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" which we read about 4 years ago. Kurzweill, the author, even goes so far as to say that eventually humans will come to love their human-like information concierges more than they do other humans, since the concierges will be strictly attuned to their needs. Kurzweill's book was interesting and on the whole far too optimistic. But you never know . . .

This Opinionjournal article a few weeks ago askis what will become of publishing when all books are online and google-searchable. Very interesting.

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January 6, 2005

Answer to an Alert Reader

An Alert Reader asks for an exposition on reading and professional development. We'll address that next week -- hope you can wait until then!

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January 6th Pacific Command Update

Today's update has been published on the PACOM site.

Highlights:

1. International contributions: "I want to start with international cooperation this morning. The current multinational support efforts are considerable and significant. Currently 12 other countries -- to include Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Germany, New Zealand, France, India, Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, China and the United Kingdom -- are contributing anywhere in the neighborhood of 46 fixed wing aircraft, 56 helicopters, and 36 naval vessels. Additionally, 18 medical teams, one logistic team, and a couple of engineering teams are either en-route or there."

2. Great story: "A hospital in the vicinity of Banda Aceh was without power. That facility's power was provided by a diesel generator. Mechanics from the USS Abraham Lincoln flew ashore and joined with the other mechanics from four to five other countries to make an assessment of the problem and send a repair list, if you will, back to Lincoln. The parts that were needed were in fact built on Lincoln and sent back out to the hospital facility and that diesel generator was up and operating within hours."

3. Some of the Maritime Prepositioning Ships are on station and providing drinking water near the Straits of Malacca.

4. No word yet on the staffing of the USNS Mercy with NGO or other civilian personnel. Planning is continuous.

5. The airspaces above affected areas, much of it primitive from an air traffic control point of view, are being organized and this has increased the capacity for aid flights, especially at night.

6. A logistics conundrum: "There are folks on the ground that are making an assessment to contract aircraft out, to move stuff from some -- I mentioned 12 and 13 countries involved, but some 40 or 50 countries all over the world actually have come forward with some sort of assistance. So how do you move that? Is the U.S. military the best way or is contract the best way, et cetera? Not all of this assistance is military assistance." This is an interesting question of strategic lift vs. speed of contracted lift. Tough decisions to make there, we think.

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The world is still skeptical about Burma

The Asia Times pays further attention to the tsunami effects in Burma.

Here's the US State Dept page about Burma for further background info. Excerpt:

Burma (Myanmar) is an underdeveloped, agrarian country ruled by an authoritarian military regime junta. The country's military government suppresses all expression of opposition to its rule.

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The Politics of Being an Aid Recipient

The Christian Science Monitor writes that some countries "don't want the "deserving poor" label - and the associated baggage of colonial paternalism. They prefer a more dynamic, self-reliant image." The article notes that Thailand "is turning down Europe's offers of debt relief for fear it could hurt its credit rating."

As far as the donor countries go, Bill Roggio has an excellent post at the fourth rail about the psychology of disaster relief donations.

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The Tsunami was a punishment from Allah for _________ (insert reason here)

The Middle East Media Research Institute has published a roundup of Middle Eastern reactions to the tsunami, entitled, "Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Tsunami: It was a Punishment from Allah for Celebrating Christmas and Other Sins; It was Caused by the U.S., Israel, India." Here are the headlines for the individual stories:

Palestinian Friday Sermon by Sheik Mudeiris: The Tsunami is Allah's Revenge at Bangkok Corruption

Advisor to Saudi Arabia's Justice Minister: The Nations were Destroyed for Lying, Sinning, and being Infidels

Saudi Professor Sheikh Fawzan Al-Fawzan: Allah Punishes for Homosexuality and Fornication at Christmas

Saudi Cleric Muhammad Al-Munajjid: Allah Finished Off the Richter Scale in Revenge of Infidel Criminals

Egyptian Nationalist Weekly: U.S.-Israel-India Nuclear Testing May have Caused Asian Tsunami; The Goal: Testing how to Liquidate Humanity

MEMRI does a great job again.

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Tsunami Aftermath and Geopolitical Strategy

Ralph Peters argues in today's New York Post that "The Indian Ocean and its adjoining seas and gulfs form one crucial, integrated strategic theater. The region has been critical to Western dominance for five centuries. Yet, when our intelligence services or military planners consider this vast, densely populated region at all, they poke at the different parts and miss the whole."

We disagree with the majority of his other assertions, but the idea that the Indian Ocean should be seen as one unified theater raises many questions. Currently, military operations in the littorals around the ocean are handled by three separate US combatant commands, European Command (most of Africa) Pacific Command, and Central Command. Mr. Peters does not go so far as to say that there should be an independent Indian Ocean command, but that is perhaps the most intriguing corollary to his thoughts.

We've thought for a while that Indonesia and its environs, with its disparate island-based Muslim population and rebellion, mght be a good candidate for a SE Asian version of something like the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa that was created after September 11th in order to:

disrupt and defeat international Terrorist groups posing an imminent threat to the U.S., its allies, or their interests. CJTF-HOA will focus on denying safe havens, external support and material assistance for terrorist activity within The Horn of Africa region. Additionally, CJTF-HOA will be prepared to counter the re-emergence of transnational terrorism in the region by providing security assistance in support of civil-military operations (CMO) and support of international organizations working to enhance long-term stability of the region.

CJTF-HOA has one of the more interesting missions in the War on Terrorism thus far, but receives very little press coverage.

After the tsunami, an ad hoc task force for operations in SE Asia is in the news. Could the Combined Support Force morph into something else – a fully staffed and semi-permanent US presence in one small part of the overall Pacific Theater? Surely the task force itself will be there for a long time . . . and working with the Indonesian and other local governments could provide in-roads for US influence . . .

As Central Command now has three principal subordinate commands with differing, but complimentary missions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Horn of Africa), the Pacific Command now has at least two (US Forces Korea, Combined Support Force in SE Asia). Moreover, other US agencies account for other similar enterprises. The Pan Sahel Initiative

is a State-led effort to assist Mali, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania in detecting and responding to suspicious movement of people and goods across and within their borders through training, equipment and cooperation. Its goals support two U.S. national security interests in Africa: waging the war on terrorism and enhancing regional peace and security.

As Robert Kaplan has argued in Opinionjournal, developments like these seem to point to the shepherd-like role of the US military in providing the collective good of international security in the coming years:

The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging global civilization that, the more it matures--with its own mass media and governing structures--the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very troops who have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it. And as the thunderous roar of a global cosmopolitan press corps gets louder--demanding the application of abstract principles of universal justice that, sadly, are often neither practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest--the smaller and more low-key our deployments will become. In the future, military glory will come down to shadowy, page-three skirmishes around the globe, which the armed services will quietly celebrate among their own subculture.

Kaplan also argues that US deployments will get smaller and smaller:

n months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation. One good soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat--regardless of one's position on the war.

In Indian Country, the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished. It simply isn't enough for units to be out all day in Iraqi towns and villages engaged in presence patrols and civil-affairs projects: A successful forward operating base is a nearly empty one, in which most units are living beyond the base perimeters among the indigenous population for days or weeks at a time.

Will the Combined Support Force become a permanent organization with different missions? We don't know but would be surprised if it lasted less than 6 months, judging from the extent of the damage and the statements of our leadership . . .

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Iran boosting air defenses, aiming missiles at Israel

This link to the Jerusalem Post story is just an abstract but today's Early Bird carries the whole article. Excerpt:

Concerned that the US or Israel may be planning an air strike against its nuclear facilities, Iran has beefed up its air defenses around various nuclear sites, Israeli security sources have told The Jerusalem Post. Iran is also said to be intermittently pointing its Shihab rockets in the general direction of Israel . . .

Ra'anan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, confirmed that Iran is maintaining "a secret program, corroborated also by American intelligence, to produce enriched uranium." This clandestine "fuel-cycle" effort, he said, is the "critical element... the one factor that will determine when the program comes to fruition, when you can build a bomb."

If the international community, led by the US, maintains its diplomatic focus on the "fuel-cycle effort,' he said, "then that could... perhaps delay the necessity to use any other option.

"At this stage," Gissin stressed, "we don't think that the military option is the option that should be used. There are still sufficient measures that can be taken and must be taken before you come to the conclusion that everything's lost... You still have time," he said, though "not much."

And even if all else failed, Gissin added, "we are not going to lead" any resort to military force.

Rather than missile delivery of a nuclear warhead, Gissin said the more immediate "nightmare scenario," if Iran did obtain "nuclear-upgraded material,' is that it would be "able to assemble a dirty bomb, strap it to a couple of suicide bombers... and send them."

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The 12 Most Stupid Tsunami Quotes

From Chrenkoff down under.

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Blogs of War: The Saudi Connection - To Just About Everything

The Mosul bomber was the son of a Saudi diplomat.

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Nothing But Good News in Iraq

If you've missed it, the US Central Command web site has about 5 or so new stories per day, under the "Latest Press Releases" category. For the past few days, these have been very positive, detailing attacks foiled, successful raids by Iraqi forces, etc.

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Financial Times: Bush quake aid group to be dissolved

This will probably have little effect on the Combined Support Force and its mission. There will just be a bunch of UN yahoos running around coordinating things. We think this is just a semantic shift. As a frequent poster and Alert Reader has stated, "whose boots are on the ground?"

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Another Press Briefing

Here's another press conference from earlier in the week.

When Chester was a Second Lieutenant at the Basic School, the Commanding Officer was Colonel John Allen. The entire staff seemed to be more or less in awe of him. It was said that when he commanded an infantry battalion on a MEU, and the group that tests MEUs before they deploy would test his battalion, it would solve the problems in one-sixth of the time alloted. He's also a civil war aficionado, to say the least, and part of our training was trips to Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Southern Maryland. Also a very engaging public speaker. He pushed professional reading a great deal -- showing us how to pursue a program of personal professional development via reading. He often quoted one of his favorite civil war historians who said, "There is no excuse for not having a 5000-yr-old mind." And he also introduced us to Kipling, specifically his poem, "Tommy," which contrasts how warriors are viewed by a civilian society at peace versus one at war:

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy
that, an' "Chuck him out, the
brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country,"
when the guns begin to shoot;

Colonel Allen is featured in Tom Clancy's book "Marine," linked in the sidebar.

Anyhow, Colonel Allen is now Brigadier General Allen, and is the Principal Director for Asia and Pacific Affairs, and had a hand in planning the current disaster relief:

BGEN ALLEN: Within minutes of our being notified of this crisis, military planners went to work and began to plan how the U.S. military might support the U.S. Government in the process of reducing the suffering and providing relief. Within hours, U.S. military forces were underway and moving to the region.

A Marine Corps officer's world is truly a small one. Folks we know keep turning up all over . . . This is probably not interesting to many others, but thought we'd post anyway.

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Today's Pacific Command Brief Highlights

Here are some highlights from today's Pacific Command brief:

1. The name of the US effort is Operation Unified Assistance.

2. "Regarding the international military cooperation, currently 11 countries -- Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Germany, New Zealand, France, India, Korea, Pakistan, Singapore and the United Kingdom are contributing as many as 26 fixed wing aircraft, 41 helicopters, and 26 naval vessels." Moreover, "there are about 85 U.S. military aircraft working continual daily operations," along with "20 [US] naval vessels -- 13 U.S. Navy ships; six maritime prepositioning ships and one Coast Guard vessel."

3. Here's the chain of command for the Combined Support Force:
Commanded by LtGen Blackman
Three subordinate Combined Support Groups: one each in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, commanded by Brigadier General Cowdrey, Brigadier General Gluck and Brigadier General Panther.
The article does not specify the command relationships with afloat forces, though we suspect that the Lincoln Battle Group and Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (containing the 15th MEU) are operating as adjacent forces to the Combined Support Force, and still probably under the command of the Pacific Command CINC, Admiral Fargo.

4. Some more insight into the nuts and bolts of the logistics: "In both Sri Lanka and Thailand we have transitioned to a pull vice push situation. This means that in those countries we are responding specifically to requests for supplies and personnel rather than just flowing in those and stockpiling them. We have not transitioned quite to that situation in Indonesia, but I anticipate that coming soon."

5. The situation is dynamic and fluid: "this is very dynamic. Even by the time I finish these remarks, those numbers have changed. Helicopters move in and out of the theater, they go above and below the flight deck, they land. Missions may be one sortie to one place and it may be a four or five our sortie executing multiple lifts. So just keep that in mind when you reference our web site and you see this data. Especially if you see some of the numbers not agreeing with each other."

6. More on the logistics details: "As I kind of mentioned earlier, the initial push was to get people to the field and then to find the places to best act as distributing points. That takes time. Then once those people are in the field and flowed to those points it takes time to set up a coordinating mechanism, and an architecture, if you will, inside that country because the intent once again is to support that host nation's effort. So who's in charge there and who can run it?

Once you do that you have to figure out a way by which to receive not only aircraft but supplies, and then a way by which to distribute it. So all of those things combined add time to execute."

7. And more on coordination with NGOs: "The answer is, there is a structure where somebody's in charge. These are coordinators, these one star flag officers I mentioned. They're not necessarily commanders because they don't have command authority, if you will, over other government agencies. Once again, the lead is the host nation. Whoever they designate in each place is the lead element.

We bring both our military organization capacity and structure and our other government agency capacity and structure to fall in on that requirement. The NGOs then can coordinate through us. The UN shows up, they coordinate through us and with us, so what we provide is that architecture as I talked about, that structure that people can fall in on and we can connect them to the right people at the right places. Not necessarily direct or control what they're trying to do, just providing them with that information."

And that's it from the brief.

Returning to Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1-0, "Marine Corps Operations," that we referenced earlier in the week --Here and here -- we've found another tidbit that illuminates the role that the three Brigadier Generals are playing in the respective countries of Indonesia, Thailand, and Sir Lanka:

CIVIL-MILITARY COORDINATION
Military Operations Other Than War [MOOTW] are normally joint and multinational operations set in an interagency environment. In many cases, nongovernmental agencies, media concerns, and other nontraditional influences will affect decisionmaking. Coordination with NGOs, international organizations, and interagency operations allows the MAGTF [Marine Air Ground Task Force] to gain greater situational and cultural awareness. A technique to build unity of effort and conduct liaison with nonmilitary organizations is the establishment of a civil-military operations center (CMOC). Members of CMOC may include representatives of adjacent and allied military commands, US government agencies, other countries' forces involved in the operation, and civilian organizations. Civil affairs units should be the core of the CMOC. Through a CMOC, the MAGTF can gain a greater understanding of the roles of civilian organizations and how they influence mission accomplishment. Although formal agreements are not always necessary, such agreements between military and civilian organizations may improve coordination and effectiveness.

MOOTW can involve other US non-Department of Defense departments and agencies. Within the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency normally leads the response to a natural disaster, while the Departments of Justice or Transportation could be expected to lead in a counterterrorist operation. Effective liaison with the lead agency enables the MAGTF to support thepolitical objectives of the operation. Outside the United States, the lead agency will normally be the Department of State, and the US ambassador will coordinate activities through an established country team with representation from all United States departments and agencies in that country. A non-Department of Defense lead agency does not alter the military chain of command.

Seems that most or all of this is applicable to the tsunami relief mission, Unified Assistance.

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Financial Times: Bush quake aid group to be dissolved

This will probably have little effect on the Combined Support Force and its mission. There will just be a bunch of UN yahoos running around coordinating things. We think this is just a semantic shift. As a frequent poster and Alert Reader has stated, "whose boots are on the ground?"

Written by Chester at 12:32 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Today's Pacific Command Brief Highlights

Here are some highlights from today's Pacific Command brief:

1. The name of the US effort is Operation Unified Assistance.

2. "Regarding the international military cooperation, currently 11 countries -- Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Germany, New Zealand, France, India, Korea, Pakistan, Singapore and the United Kingdom are contributing as many as 26 fixed wing aircraft, 41 helicopters, and 26 naval vessels." Moreover, "there are about 85 U.S. military aircraft working continual daily operations," along with "20 [US] naval vessels -- 13 U.S. Navy ships; six maritime prepositioning ships and one Coast Guard vessel."

3. Here's the chain of command for the Combined Support Force:
Commanded by LtGen Blackman
Three subordinate Combined Support Groups: one each in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, commanded by Brigadier General Cowdrey, Brigadier General Gluck and Brigadier General Panther.
The article does not specify the command relationships with afloat forces, though we suspect that the Lincoln Battle Group and Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (containing the 15th MEU) are operating as adjacent forces to the Combined Support Force, and still probably under the command of the Pacific Command CINC, Admiral Fargo.

4. Some more insight into the nuts and bolts of the logistics: "In both Sri Lanka and Thailand we have transitioned to a pull vice push situation. This means that in those countries we are responding specifically to requests for supplies and personnel rather than just flowing in those and stockpiling them. We have not transitioned quite to that situation in Indonesia, but I anticipate that coming soon."

5. The situation is dynamic and fluid: "this is very dynamic. Even by the time I finish these remarks, those numbers have changed. Helicopters move in and out of the theater, they go above and below the flight deck, they land. Missions may be one sortie to one place and it may be a four or five our sortie executing multiple lifts. So just keep that in mind when you reference our web site and you see this data. Especially if you see some of the numbers not agreeing with each other."

6. More on the logistics details: "As I kind of mentioned earlier, the initial push was to get people to the field and then to find the places to best act as distributing points. That takes time. Then once those people are in the field and flowed to those points it takes time to set up a coordinating mechanism, and an architecture, if you will, inside that country because the intent once again is to support that host nation's effort. So who's in charge there and who can run it?

Once you do that you have to figure out a way by which to receive not only aircraft but supplies, and then a way by which to distribute it. So all of those things combined add time to execute."

7. And more on coordination with NGOs: "The answer is, there is a structure where somebody's in charge. These are coordinators, these one star flag officers I mentioned. They're not necessarily commanders because they don't have command authority, if you will, over other government agencies. Once again, the lead is the host nation. Whoever they designate in each place is the lead element.

We bring both our military organization capacity and structure and our other government agency capacity and structure to fall in on that requirement. The NGOs then can coordinate through us. The UN shows up, they coordinate through us and with us, so what we provide is that architecture as I talked about, that structure that people can fall in on and we can connect them to the right people at the right places. Not necessarily direct or control what they're trying to do, just providing them with that information."

And that's it from the brief.

Returning to Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1-0, "Marine Corps Operations," that we referenced earlier in the week --Here and here -- we've found another tidbit that illuminates the role that the three Brigadier Generals are playing in the respective countries of Indonesia, Thailand, and Sir Lanka:

CIVIL-MILITARY COORDINATION
Military Operations Other Than War [MOOTW] are normally joint and multinational operations set in an interagency environment. In many cases, nongovernmental agencies, media concerns, and other nontraditional influences will affect decisionmaking. Coordination with NGOs, international organizations, and interagency operations allows the MAGTF [Marine Air Ground Task Force] to gain greater situational and cultural awareness. A technique to build unity of effort and conduct liaison with nonmilitary organizations is the establishment of a civil-military operations center (CMOC). Members of CMOC may include representatives of adjacent and allied military commands, US government agencies, other countries' forces involved in the operation, and civilian organizations. Civil affairs units should be the core of the CMOC. Through a CMOC, the MAGTF can gain a greater understanding of the roles of civilian organizations and how they influence mission accomplishment. Although formal agreements are not always necessary, such agreements between military and civilian organizations may improve coordination and effectiveness.

MOOTW can involve other US non-Department of Defense departments and agencies. Within the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency normally leads the response to a natural disaster, while the Departments of Justice or Transportation could be expected to lead in a counterterrorist operation. Effective liaison with the lead agency enables the MAGTF to support thepolitical objectives of the operation. Outside the United States, the lead agency will normally be the Department of State, and the US ambassador will coordinate activities through an established country team with representation from all United States departments and agencies in that country. A non-Department of Defense lead agency does not alter the military chain of command.

Seems that most or all of this is applicable to the tsunami relief mission, Unified Assistance.

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January 5, 2005

Use of Cobras

Two Alert Readers respond to our query yesterday about the use of the MEU's Cobras. Perhaps they've been flown to a landward site to clear deckspace?

And an excellent point about the lack of funding for the MV-22: "I guess those 40 year old CH-46s will have to last a little longer, carrying our most precious assets around in the back..." As every CH-46 pilot will tell you, if the bird isn't leaking somewhere, something's wrong. Many of the CH-46s have patches over old bullet holes from Viet Nam. The V22 is probably way off anyone's radar screen now.

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USNS MERCY DEPLOYS FROM SAN DIEGO

The Mercy has deployed from San Diego.

Highlights:

The United States Naval Ship Mercy has deployed to Southeast Asia to provide medical services to victims of the tsunami. USNS Mercy is currently configured with 250 patient beds, but has a capacity to be expanded to 1,000 beds if necessary . . .

Although it will take 3 to 4 weeks for the USNS Mercy to arrive, it is expected that the timing of her arrival will aid in the treatment of patients with illness or infections as a result of the tsunami . . . USNS Mercy sailed with a staff of 275 aboard.

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Throughput, Breakbulk, and the Iron Mountain in Tsunami Aid

Via the ESG5/15th MEU Families - Float News site, we learn that U.S. Marines airlift supplies back to ship to take to hard-to-reach areas. An "iron mountain" of supplies, as it were, has built up in certain airfields and it probably hasn't been sorted and is difficult to identify. Anyone who's ever had to search through an offload area for that one special piece of gear -- humvee, quadcon, pallet, etc -- knows exactly what we mean. So this is good news. The logistics specialists in the 15th MEU will be able to sort things out and redirect. The key to fast logistics these days isn't the iron mountain -- vast stockpiles of supplies. Instead, the key is what's known as "throughput" -- how quickly you can move supplies through key nodes. This is a direct result of the "just-in-time" set of ideas that has radically changed the civilian logistics industry.

So by carrying supplies out to sea, perhaps the MEU is creating more nodes for throughput.

Another consideration is packaging. In the military you have to designate certain logistics nodes as "breakbulk" areas -- this means that when you get, say, 200 truckloads of food and 100 truckloads of water, someone has to break each pallet down, and put them together in the right mix before they can be delivered to the end user. Not rocket science, but little of these details seem to be reported. It's doubtful that the Marines have time to get real pretty with their packaging. Or the breakbulk capability could be right on the ground in the receiving areas on the islands -- but that would mean it is extremely decentralized, and all reports thus far say the majority of US personnel remain afloat.

Another consideration for returning to ship is that given the distances in the region, doing so might be the best way to refuel enroute to final drop-points.

It would be really neat to see a map of relevant nodes and drop-points . . .

Just some random logistics thoughts to keep in mind . . .

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North Korea Armed Terrorists in Philippines...MILF Ordered Mini Submarine

The Word Unheard has found a story that the North Koreans have armed the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines over several years.

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The EU continues to irk Chester

As has been much blogged upon, the EU is concerned that the rapid, effective, and enormous US military response to the tsunami is designed to circumvent the United Nations in potentially damaging ways. Javier Solana said as much in meetings with Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley, and Jacques Chirac is "concerned that the U.S. tsunami aid operation had sidestepped traditional UN channels."

Let's see here:

1. US military begins planning for relief efforts, literally minutes after tsunami and is working on aid within 48 hours (more on the minutes bit later).

2. Kofi finishes up his ski trip to Jackson Hole while his subordinates call the US stingy.

3. As has been well-covered in The Diplomad, the UN officials have shown themselves to be a group of compassionate thumb-twiddlers, their only true capability being death by coordination, and have issued calls for aid in drive-by press conferences during a TWO-DAY visit to the region.

4. France and Germany: completely out of the game militarily, from what we can tell, though we admittedly haven't looked very hard. Why should we? Let's have an info push on this one, instead of an info pull.

5. An EU humanitarian official is now complaining of the intentions and agendas of those countries who give aid:

The European Union's humanitarian commissioner says the escalating aid offers may become a "beauty contest," where nations compete for the title of biggest donor.

So if we aren't stingy, our intent is suspect. Reminds us of the thousands of "activists" who complained about Saddam's regime, then were and are silent about its removal, or switched gears and now wish for his return -- since we removed it not purely out of compassion but out of self-interest. What moral hypocrisy.

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North Koreans Issued Invasion Guidance back in 2003

Apparently, Kim was pretty scared of "being the next Iraq." This fits in well with one of our personal mottos here at The Adventures of Chester: "I'd rather be feared in Pyongyang than loved in Paris."

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North Korea Armed Terrorists in Philippines...MILF Ordered Mini Submarine

The Word Unheard has found a story that the North Koreans have armed the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines over several years

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Zarqawi?

Still no follow-up stories on Zarqawi, but several Alert Readers have given examples of why the US might stay mum:

1. To roll up the rest of a network -- basically to exploit his capture. This reader also notes that two senior aides to Zarqawi were reported captured over the weekend -- they could have used them to find him.

2. Out of concern that announcing his capture will trigger new pre-planned attacks. We don't think this is the case: the terrorists don't seem to be the types to plan an attack just right, then sit on it and wait -- unless it is a balls to the wall, Gotterdammerung style final throwdown.

UPDATE: There seems to be a delay in the release of capture stories: This article reports the capture of a senior Zarqawi aide on Dec 23rd -- but the article didn't come out until Dec 31st, and The World Tribune seems to have no shyness about publishing stories as soon as possible.

It is tempting to go back and examine the chain of events in Saddam's capture -- but there are many different factors in play now. now we have a sovereign Iraqi government, not the CPA. And Zarqawi seems to be much more of an operational commander than Saddam -- who was really a figurehead for the former regime loyalists. We'll continue treating Zarqawi's capture as a rumor until more comes out.

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The US is testing Iranian Air Defenses

Read it here.

The U.S. aircraft said to have entered Iranian air space included F-16 multi-role fighters and F/A-18 attack jets, the reports said. The Iranian media said the aircraft appeared to have been sent on reconnaissance missions over Iran's nuclear sites, particularly in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.

Our geography is rusty -- but southwest Iran sounds like close to Bushehr. We welcome comments from those more familiar with US aircraft and their reconnaissance capabilities. We think any US fighter platform can perform in a reconnaissance role, with Forward-Looking Infrared Radar, but could be way off on this.

(ht for this story to orbat.com)

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Singapore Military Tsunami Relief

[The below post is entirely the work of an Alert Reader, who used the website of the Singapore military at http://www.mindef.gov.sg/index2.asp?cat=SAFTsunamiReliefEfforts ]

As part of Singapore ’s relief efforts in Indonesia following the earthquake and Tsunami of 26 Dec, the Singapore Navy’s LST (Landing Ship, Tank) RSS Endurance sailed for West Sumatra on 31 Dec and arrived off the coast of Meulaboh on 2 Jan.

The RSS Endurance was sent with a humanitarian assistance task force on board, comprising a medical team, an engineer team and a logistics support team on board. Two Super Puma helicopters that are part of the same task force left separately for Indonesia on 30 Dec.

The LST will serve as a helicopter staging area and co-ordination centre for the task force’s operations. The two Super Pumas will assist with disaster relief operations and the transport of supplies and personnel, while the engineer team will assist with the clearing of roads and debris. The engineers will operate heavy equipment such as excavators and bulldozers. The medical team includes five civilian volunteers, and it will be providing healthcare and medical treatment to victims. The logistics support team will perform general duties, such as setting up shelters and assisting the other components of the task force. There are 472 personnel in the humanitarian assistance task force.

Since arriving at Meulaboh, the task force has established two landing sites. This constitutes a major breakthrough as Meulaboh had been cut off since the earthquake a week ago and could only be supplied by helicopters. With the landing sites, heavy engineering equipment and vehicles and significant loads of humanitarian supplies can now be brought from the RSN’s landing ship into Meulaboh. The heavy equipment is urgently needed to clear roads, and possibly prepare landing strips for aircraft. The establishment of the landing site was a difficult operation as the entire shoreline of Meulaboh had changed drastically due to the tsunami and severe flooding.

The medical team has also deployed ashore to set up a field hospital and have begun providing medical treatment to the people there. The team has treated about 200 patients so far. The SAF has also assisted the TNI to set up its field hospital in Meulaboh.

A second LST, RSS Persistence, with medical and engineer teams on board, set sail for Sumatra the afternoon of 4 Jan and is expected to arrive off Meulaboh on the evening of 6 January. She will serve as another helicopter staging area for the SAF humanitarian assistance task force’s operations. RSS Persistence carries 203 personnel and other heavy equipment such as cranes, and 4 BRONCO All Terrain Track Carriers (ATTC), as well as four container loads of food and medical supplies from the Singapore Red Cross.

Note: The Endurance class of LST is a designed and built by Singapore Kinetics Marine; it is 140m; about 8000+ tons full load and is able to take 2 helicoptors.

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Free Burma Coalition

This BBC News piece discusses the effects, both stabilizing and not, that disasters and their aftermath can have on affected governments.

Interestingly, the article notes the Sri Lankan and Indonesian rebellions and the possible effects there (though we think Sri Lanka is better described as a place of civil war). What's left out is any discussion of Myanmar or Burma, which is supposedly downplaying the damage to its citizens and infrastructure. If Burma is truly in dire straits and the people see the government as turning away aid from the likes of the US et al., then it could have negative affects on the Burmese dictatorship.

Some background on Burma's government here.

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Oustanding Graphic of US Force Laydown

This map is worth a very careful viewing. not only does it show the locations of all the US transport helicopters and C-130s, but it also shows the ETA for differing ships as they come on station.

Question: The MEU has quite a few Cobras -- maybe a half dozen. Wonder how these are being employed . . . perhaps cargo can be slung under them . . .

By the way, not sure if "laydown" is a doctrinal term or not, but it is shorthand for "where are all these troops going to be located."

Since Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change.net has thrown down the gauntlet of challenge for us to cover the military efforts of coalition countries as well, we'll attempt to get that started tomorrow. Email links if you've got them.

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Operation Garron, the British, the Dutch, and a silly writer at the Guardian

Here's an overview of the British military effort, which they've dubbed Operation Garron. Excerpt:

Operational Liaison and Reconnaissance Team personnel have been deployed by the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood to Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand, able to provide expert advice across the full range of military assistance likely to be needed. These are working very closely with the local authorities, FCO and DFID officials, and other aid agencies to ensure that UK military assistance is provided where it is most needed.

The frigate HMS Chatham and the repair ship Royal Fleet Auxiliary Diligence were directed into the disaster area. Chatham arrived at Colombo in Sri Lanka on 3 January, while Diligence has embarked humanitarian stores in Cochin, south-west India, and is expected to reach Colombo on 5 January. The ships offer a broad range of capabilities - Chatham has two Lynx helicopters embarked, which will provide much needed air mobility, as well as excellent communications, while Diligence has extensive workshops and the ability to provide emergency electrical and fresh water supplies, as well as transport stores and act as a mother-ship to small craft engaged on relief work along the coastline.

Royal Air Force air transport have also been heavily involved, including a C-17 heavy airlifter delivering equipment to allow the United Nations to establish relief operations in Aceh, Indonesia.

So the Brits have sent their two ships to the Indian area. Seems like most of the European countries are concentrating on areas of their own former colonies. Already much-blogged upon today, the Dutch are aghast at the absence of European aid in Indonesia, and the abundance of US aid (the Aussies are there too of course) (ht: The Diplomad):

US helicopters fly to places which haven't been reached for the whole week and drop food. The impression it makes on the people is also highly positive; finally something happens in the city of Banda Aceh and finally it seems some people are in control and are doing something. No talking but action. European countries are until now invisible on the ground. IOM staff (note: this is a USAID-funded organization) is very busy briefing the incoming Americans and Australians about the situation.

The European press is reacting to this news by pitching in for the relief effort by doing what they do best -- whining:

Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq.

Chester has this to say about such paleolithic socialist drivel: (imagine a one-fingered salute inserted here)

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Australian Military Contribution Overview

There is not yet any reporting on the command and control relationships that are tying together the US and its coalition allies in military tsunami relief, but the Australians have a great overview of their own efforts at Operation Tsunami Assist. An excerpt:

ADF personnel and assets contributing to Operation Sumatra Assist include:

* Four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, augmented by a Royal New Zealand Air Force C-130 attached to the ADF task force, transporting equipment, stores and personnel
* Two C-130 Hercules and one Boeing 707 transport aircraft, transporting equipment, stores and personnel between Australia and Indonesia.
* One Beech King Air 350 light utility aircraft
* Four UH-1H Iroquois helicopters
* Water purification plant
* Engineering personnel
* Logistics/loading personnel
* Medical teams and aero-medical evacuation specialists
* Field hospital, providing
* 55 beds
* Surgeons
* Intensive care
* Resuscitation
* X-ray facilities
* Pathology

* About 350 ADF personnel currently assisting with humanitarian relief efforts

And on the way to assist are:

HMAS Kanimbla, scheduled to depart Darwin on 8 January 2005, carrying equipment and capability including:
* Two Sea King helicopters
* Two large landing craft (LCM8)
* Medical facilities and personnel
* Engineering personnel and equipment
* Accommodation
* Communications
* Stores
* Self-sustaining floating base

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Saudis Triple Aid; Canadian Buddhists Sell Their Temple

The Saudis are mandating a telethon.

These folks selling their temple.

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India, Nepal and Al Qaeda?

Something crossed our radar screen in the last 72 hours that the Nepalese insurgency has been co-opted by Al Qaeda. Can't find this tidbit now -- could have been in our internet travels or from an Alert Reader -- but it seems to be even more interesting when put in the perspective of this story about US-Indian relations:

India's defense establishment is sending distress signals to sections of the country's media over what it considers inordinate United States interest in the affairs of India's sensitive, insurgency-infested northeast. Military officials are deeply unhappy over the ever-growing access US diplomats and military personnel are getting to disturbed areas in the region.

An Asia Times Online investigation has revealed that the disquiet is almost a decade old, though it has grown exponentially since US ambassador to India Robert Mulford wrote to the chief ministers of Assam and Nagaland directly offering help in counter-insurgency operations in the wake of terrorist violence in October, 2004. He did not bother to go through the proper channels; that is, through the ministry of external affairs. This raised a lot of questions and controversies in the media; the central government, too, was not happy about it. But the matter rests there, and no further explanations have emerged as to why the US ambassador chose to go over the heads of the central government.

Perhaps the Ambassador wasn't just off his cork but had some detailed information from DC explaining our increased interest in Nepal and its rebellion?

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Asian Press Coverage Roundup

More on the situation in Burmafrom the BBC.

This is not good: Rapists, kidnappers prey on tsunami survivors- The Times of India.

And an update from the Asia Times.

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The Tsunami and the Blogs

This Asia Times Online article examines how bloggers in SE Asia reacted to the tsunami, and blogging in SE Asia in general.

Sumankumar is one example of a SE Asian tsunami blogger.

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January 4, 2005

Press Conference with Admiral Fargo Today

Here is a link to today's press briefing with Admiral Fargo, the Commander of the US Pacific Command.

Highlights:

1. JTF-536 has been renamed the Combined Support Force. In military parlance, a "combined" unit means it consists of troops from more than one country. Utapao Airfield in Thailand is indeed the headquarters for the Commander, LtGen Blackman.

2. The US is considering deploying the hospital ship AH-8 USS Mercy, though perhaps with some sort of creative staffing arrangement -- like crewing it with civilian NGO personnel. If memory serves, this vessel is kept in reserve and does not routinely deploy. Furthermore, it is usually staffed by reserve medical personnel (again, if memory serves).

3. The USS Fort McHenry and USS Niagara Falls are inbound to the area of operations. Both ships will add to the numbers of helicopters deployed in the region – and Admiral Fargo notes that these are a force multiplier. The Niagara Falls is a combat stores ship – aka a supply vessel – and will probably have a great deal of materiel on board for relief operations.

4. Of the 13,000 or so US personnel involved in the operation, 1000 are on the ground in Thailand, and 100-200 are ashore at any one time in each of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. The rest are afloat. Admiral Fargo reports that the number of US forces will increase, but it is important to remember capabilities, not numbers. [Quick thought: what about Burma? The government there has been criticized by residents for playing down the extent of destruction there. Being a dictatorial regime, it is probably none to willing to accept US aid . . . Too bad for the Burmese.]

5. Admiral Fargo says he is confident that we are not creating an unmanageable risk for ourselves in Korea by deploying any of these forces.

6. This operation is the result of standing multinational standard operating procedures that have been developed over years with the cooperation of over 31 different countries. [Quick editorial aside: take that, Kofi.]

7. When asked about the seeming lack of plans to increase US naval forces around Sri Lanka, Admiral Fargo notes that the key in that country is the restoration of infrastructure and that NGO's have taken care of many distribution concerns. He says that Seabees could be a candidate for rebuilding operations on the island. [Thought: Each Naval Mobile Construction Battalioin (NMCB, or Seabees), has a company-sized Air Detachment, that is supposed to be able to deploy within 24 or 48 hours or something like that – but of course that is dependent on strategic lift capabilities, and those are probably at a premium right now, especially given the troop rotation in the Middle East.]

8. When pressed about the need to surge more helicopters to the region given their high value in these operations, Admiral Fargo says that the number of US helos will probably double from the 46 where it currently stands. When pressed further, he notes that more helos are being fielded by other nation's militaries, and that NGOs will probably contract many more in the coming days.

9. Finally, Admiral Fargo acknowledges that the MV Westpac Express, one of two of a new kind of high-speed prepositioning vessel, has been used and will continue to be used throughout this operation. They were testing these when Chester was back in Camp Pendleton.

Admiral Fargo notes several times how this operation would not be possible without the investment in the military that the US taxpayers have made, or without the years of cooperative coalition exercises the US has conducted in SE Asia, like the annual Cobra Gold exercise.

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15th MEU Operational Planning Change

An Alert Reader, whose son is in the 15th MEU, has posted in the comments section of a previous post further insight into the 15th MEU's activities. He notes that the USS Pearl Harbor has not deployed this time around, but the USS Rushmore (LSD-47) has instead. Moreover, he has links to every ship in the Expeditionary Strike Group 5 at For ESG5/15th MEU Families - Ship Info.

Quick note: What role might the regular surface ships -- the non-amphibs -- play in a mission like this? Certainly the USS Pasadena, the fast-attack sub, could provide a reconnaissance or force protection function. And certainly the USCGC Munro, the Coast Guard Cutter, will be quite busy. But what about the Bunker Hill (cruiser) the Milius (destroyer) and the Thach) (missile frigate). We'd welcome the comments of those with more naval knowledge. Certainly any water-producing capability those ships possess, along with their medical personnel, will come in handy.

The Alert Reader goes on to mention that the concept of operations has changed for the MEU:

And they've just changed their plans. Sri Lanka won't take all those Marines because of political concerns. (sheesh) So the BHR and Duluth are going to the sourthen coast of Sumatra (the Lincoln group is on the northern coast). And only the Rushmore is going to Sri Lanka.

More info as it develops . . .

[is anyone having browser problems with this site -- like the sidebar appearing in the wrong place? If so, please email us and let us know: terrier_manchester@yahoo.com ]

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FLASH: ZARQAWI CAPTURED?

Drudge is reporting that both a news story out the UAE, and a Kurdish radio station are reporting that Zarqawi has been captured in Iraq. The White House is thus far denying this . . .

Thoughts:

1. The news agency in UAE is Russian, Itar-Tass. Interesting . . .
2. The Kurdish radio network also was among the first to report the capture of Saddam in 2003.
3. Could be that the news cycle has beaten the command and control cycle and the White House doesn't know what it knows yet.
4. Could private citizens have captured Zarqawi for the $10m reward?

Chester's position: this story looks like a dud. If the White House didn't know, they wouldn't deny, they'd just not say anything yet. You never know though . . .

This week, the majority of our posts are about the massive US relief operation in SE Asia under JTF-536, but we'll keep our eye on the Iraqi ball too. While we're on the subject of Iraq, the Middle East Media Research Institute recently released the second part of its series on Arab press coverage of the upcoming Iraqi election. It's worth a read.

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Tsunami News Roundup

US intensifies its role in relief | csmonitor.com

Relief Transcends U.S.-Indonesia Divide (washingtonpost.com)

The New York Times > South Asia Earthquake & Tsunami

Honolulu Star-Bulletin: Hawaii-Based Pacific Command Spearheads Massive Relief Effort

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15th MEU Concept of Operations Insight

Upon arrival in the Indian Ocean in the next three days or so, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit will begin what is known as "split-ARG operations." ARG stands for Amphibious Ready Group and represents the ships that the MEU is embarked upon.

The ARG that the MEU is inhabiting consists of the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6), the USS Duluth (LPD-6), and the USS Pearl Harbor (LSD 52).

"Split ARG" means that the battle group will split into two parts and conduct separate missions independently of each other.

According to this article on the 15th MEU site, the USS Bonhomme Richard will head toward Sri Lanka, while the USS Duluth will stay near Indonesian waters. The article doesn't mention where the Pearl Harbor is headed, but we think it will stay with the Bonhomme Richard. Perhaps the Bonhomme Richard is headed to Sri Lanka because there are few operable airfields on the island and its deck will have to do, or perhaps because it has a greater command and control capability for operating independently. We'll see when things develop.

The subordinate elements of the MEU are being split between these two parts of the ARG. The Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, along with the Air Combat Element, HMM-165, and the MEU Service Support Group-15 (MSSG-15), or the combat service support element, are all more or less halving themselves and their equipment and figuring out how to divvy up what they possess.

While 2200 Marines in a MEU sounds like a lot, they are spread extremely thin in many areas, like maintenance, supply and engineering. As a combat engineer, I participated in a number of exercises meant to simulate planning for deploying on a MEU with an Engineer Support Detachment, part of the MEU Service Support Group. The entire detachment is only around 35 Marines, and the entire MSSG is only about 250, though headed by a Lieutenant Colonel. The MSSG is by far the most thinly spread of all the embarked commands and figuring out how to accomplish what needs to be done with the assets at hand is one of the trickier aspects of planning. MEU staffs usually become very creative in accomplishing different objectives.
Interestingly enough, the Commanding Officer of MSSG-15 this time around, LtCol Hatton, is a veteran of the LA riots and Operation Sea Angel.

The CO and XO of 1st Bn, 1st Marines have equally interesting resumes.

More on the upcoming operation as it develops . . .

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The US has its work cut out

Here's a photo-essay from Time: TIME: The Drowned World (1).

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15th MEU Operational Planning Change

An Alert Reader, whose son is in the 15th MEU, has posted in the comments section of a previous post further insight into the 15th MEU's activities. He notes that the USS Pearl Harbor has not deployed this time around, but the USS Rushmore (LSD-47) has instead. Moreover, he has links to every ship in the Expeditionary Strike Group 5 at For ESG5/15th MEU Families - Ship Info.

Quick note: What role might the regular surface ships -- the non-amphibs -- play in a mission like this? Certainly the USS Pasadena, the fast-attack sub, could provide a reconnaissance or force protection function. And certainly the USCGC Munro, the Coast Guard Cutter, will be quite busy. But what about the Bunker Hill (cruiser) the Milius (destroyer) and the Thach) (missile frigate). We'd welcome the comments of those with more naval knowledge. Certainly any water-producing capability those ships possess, along with their medical personnel, will come in handy.

The Alert Reader goes on to mention that the concept of operations has changed for the MEU:

And they've just changed their plans. Sri Lanka won't take all those Marines because of political concerns. (sheesh) So the BHR and Duluth are going to the sourthen coast of Sumatra (the Lincoln group is on the northern coast). And only the Rushmore is going to Sri Lanka.

More info as it develops . . .

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Written by Chester at 1:19 AM | Link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

This is why they've picked Utaphao

Utaphao Air Base in Thailand is centrally located from all of the areas of devastation. Here's a map from the US Pacific Command showing the distances.

Written by Chester at 1:08 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 3, 2005

MPSRON Supplies

An Alert Reader asks in the comments section if the provisions aboard the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons have been restored since 2003. Here at The Adventures of Chester, we believe the answer is a resounding yes. We are willing to bet:

1. That only one MPSRON worth of equipment is being used currently in Iraq, if any -- though this should be classified, so if you know for sure, don't tell us.

2. That MPSRON-3 out of Guam has probably been completely replenished at this point. After the invasion, the ships were cycled back to Blount Island and all of the gear was completely refitted and the stocks of Class I, III, IV, V, (water, fuel, construction supplies, ammunition) and so forth were regenerated, from what we understand. MPSRONs are a strategic asset: they have the highest priority for such things . . . which brings up another point . . . North Korea had better not get any funny ideas while MPSRON-3 is tied up in Thailand and Indonesia . . . but they probably won't. [Mrs. Chester and I have an understanding about this. If the north invades the south, I'm going. That's for another day though and I digress . . . ]

Written by Chester at 11:25 PM | Link | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Humanitarian Assistance III: General Zinni's Rules

When the 24th MEU deployed and participated in Operation Provide Comfort, the Commanding Officer was then-Colonel James L. Jones, who later became the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and is now serving as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Then-Brigadier General Anthony Zinni was the Deputy Commanding General of the Task Force for the overall operation. General Zinni went on to be the Commander-in-Chief of Central Command, and became very highly regarded for his experience in military operations other than war, including humanitarian assistance. Here are his rules to keep in mind when participating in these operations, and they, or a version of them, are no doubt being carefully followed on board many ships even as we speak. In a way, this operation is still in the planning stages as forces move into the correct positions . . .

1. Each operation is unique. We must be careful what lessons we learn from a single experience.

2. Each operation has two key aspects: (1) the degree of complexity of the operation, and (2) the degree of consent of the involved parties and the international community for the operation.

3. The earlier the involvement, the better the chance for success.

4. Start planning as early as possible, including everyone in the planning process.

5. Make as thorough an assessment as possible before deployment.

6. Conduct a thorough mission analysis, determining the centers of gravity, end state, commander's intent, measures of effectiveness, exit strategy, and the estimated duration of the operation.

7. Stay focused on the mission. Line up military tasks with political objectives. Avoid mission creep and allow for mission shifts. A mission shift is a conscious decision, made by the political leadership in consultation with the military commander, responding to a changing situation.

8. Centralize planning and decentralize execution of the operation. This allows subordinate commanders to make appropriate adjustments to meet their individual situation or rapidly changing conditions.

9. Coordinate everything with everybody. Establish coordination mechanisms that include political, military, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and the interested parties.

10. know the culture and the issues. We must know who the decisionmakers are. We must know how the involved parties think. We cannot impose our cultural values on people with their own culture.

11. Start or restore key institutions as early as possible.

12. Don't lose the initiative or momentum.

13. Don't make unnecessary enemies. If you do, don't treat them gently. Avoid mindsets or use words that might come back to haunt you.

14. Seek unity of effort and unity of command. Create the fewest possible seams between organizations and involved parties.

15. Open a dialogue with everyone. Establish a forum for each of the involved parties.

16. Encourage innovation and non-traditional responses.

17. Personalities often are more important than processes. You need the right people in the right places.

18. Be careful whom you empower. Think carefully about whom you invite to participate, use as a go-between, or enter into contracts with since you are giving them influence in the process.

19. Decide on the image you want to portray and keep focused on it. Whatever the image, humanitarian, or as firm but well-intentioned agent of change, ensure your troops are aware of it so they can conduct themselves accordingly.

20. Centralize information management. Ensure that your public affairs and psychological operations are coordinated, accurate, and consistent.

21. Seek compatibility in all operations; cultural and political compatibility and military interoperability are crucial to success. The interests, cultures, capabilities, and motivations of all the parties may not be uniform, but they cannot be allowed to work against each other.

22. Senior commanders and their staffs need the most education and training in nontraditional roles. The troops need awareness and understanding of their roles. The commander and the staff need to develop and apply new skills, such as negotiating, supporting humanitarian organizations effectively and appropriately, and building coordinating agencies with humanitarian goals.

Written by Chester at 11:15 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Humanitarian Assistance II: Further Reading

We've just added Amazon links in the sidebar to Tom Clancy's fine book "Marine," which not only gives in-depth information on a typical Marine Expeditionary Unit, it also has a great deal more about the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons (MPSRONS) that we mentioned earlier.

Also, we added a link to a Congressional Budget Office study of Operation Sea Angel in Bangladesh. Can't vouch for this one.

Though Amazon doesn't seem to stock them, you can find some excellent publications in the Marine Corps section of the Government Printing Office homepage. We will vouch for "Humanitarian Operations in Northern Iraq, 1991: With Marines in Operation Provide Comfort," and "Angels From the Sea: Relief Operations in Bangladesh, 1991," both of which give detailed nuts and bolts type info about conducting humanitarian assistance operations. If you are interested in tactical logistics in general, "Combat Service Support in Desert Shield and Desert Storm" is an excellent publication and went with us to the desert. Finally, haven't read it, but "Skillful Show: United States Marines in the Caribbean, 1991-1996, United States Marines in Humanitarian Operations," is probably pretty good.

Written by Chester at 10:50 PM | Link | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Humanitarian Assistance Basics I

Since Operation Golden Vision is just getting started, here are some basics from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1-0, "Marine Corps Operations," to help us interpret the news as it develops.

[We predict that this story is going to get bigger, and will be better covered, not the opposite, which is counter-intuitive, given the way disaster coverage usually goes.]

From Chapter 10, Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), here is a very basic overview of Humanitarian Assistance Operations. It is a little dry, but useful tidbits can always be found:

Humanitarian assistance operations relieve or reduce the results of natural or manmade disasters that might present a serious threat to life or result in extensive damage to or loss of property. Humanitarian assistance provided by United States forces is generally limited in scope and duration. The assistance provided is designed to supplement or complement the host-nation civil authorities' efforts.

The United States military provides assistance when the relief need is gravely urgent and when the humanitarian emergency overwhelms the ability of normal relief agencies to effectively respond.

Humanitarian assistance operations may be directed by the National Command Authorities when a serious international situation threatens the political or military stability of a region considered of interest to the United States or when the humanitarian situation itself may be sufficient to and appropriate for employment of United States forces. The Department of State then requests Department of Defense assistance from the National Command Authorities.

Humanitarian assistance operations may cover a broad range of missions. A humanitarian assistance mission could also include securing an environment to allow humanitarian relief efforts. In 1991, 24th MEU provided security, shelter, food, and water to the dissident Kurdish minority in northern Iraq. United States military forces participate in three basic types of humanitarian assistance operations: those coordinated by the United Nations, those where the United States acts in concert with other multinational forces, or those where the United States responds unilaterally. The Marine Corps can respond rapidly to emergencies or disasters and achieve order in austere locations. This response could include providing security, logistics, engineering, medical support, and command and control and communications capabilities. Marine Corps forces can provide sea-based humanitarian assistance. The 5th MEB (Marine Expeditionary Brigade) during Operation Sea Angel in 1991, assisted Bangladesh in the aftermath of a devastating tropical cyclone by distributing food and medical supplies and repairing the country's transportation infrastructure.

We would add that humanitarian assistance is one of the few cases wherein the Combat Service Support element of a given Marine Air-Ground Task Force is usually made the "main effort" of the operation. Usually, the CSS element is supporting the ground combat and air combat elements, but given the logistics command and control, and distribution capabilities of the CSS element, it can often be the main effort in a humanitarian assistance operation.

Written by Chester at 10:35 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Utapao Air Base

Since Utapao Air Base seems to be playing a large role in Operation Golden Vision, here are some useful links:

From globalsecurity.org: Utapao Air Base

And here, an entire page devoted to the airbase.

Looks like Utapao is located about 40 minutes from the city of Pattaya, and it seems to be on the Gulf of Thailand, on the opposite side of that damaged by the tsunami, if our geography is right. Perhaps its proximity to the sea will allow it to be used as what is doctrinally known as an SPODS (surface point of debarkation) for the flow of logistics that will arrive with the MPSRONs and the Expeditionary Strike Group. As an airfield, it has probably already been named as an APODS (aerial port of debarkation). We're a little rusty on these terms, but think they're right.

Written by Chester at 10:14 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

Mission name nomination!

Since we just complained that this mission seems to have no publicized name yet, we nominate . . . drumroll . . . OPERATION 'GOLDEN VISION' which should be quite a slap in the face of Mr. Jan Egelund, who criticized the US for its stinginess, then said its helicopters were worth their wight in gold. Loyal Readers and fellow bloggers! Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts . .

Written by Chester at 9:55 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

The Diplomad speaks

The Diplomad is an excellent blog that we've visited before and happens to be in SE Asia. Quick thought on the death of the old media and the old institutions, like the UN: the Diplomad reports that the primary concern with the staff of the World Food Program was to ensure 24-hour catering is available at the 5-star restaurant where they are staying. Can you imagine how these houses of cards will come tumbling down when photo-blogging really takes off?

Written by Chester at 9:51 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

US ORDER OF BATTLE: TSUNAMI RELIEF

Thanks to an alert reader for pointing my attention to this piece from last week. Marine Lieutenant General Conway, the Director of Operations or J-3 for the Joint Staff, sayeth thus:

We have committed at this point six C-130 aircraft for airlift support. They will be operating out of the airbase at Utapao. We have committed nine P-3 aircraft, four of which will operate out of Utapao. The other five will operate out of Diego Garcia. As we speak, there are at least two P-3s in the air, conducting that initial observation and reconnaissance of some of the damage sites to further the assessment. The Lincoln Carrier Strike Group was in Hong Kong. It has been diverted now to the Gulf of Thailand. It has aircraft in the air doing a reconnaissance of the Molucca Straits to check for debris before it would transit. If it's clear, and early reports indicate that it might be, the five ships associated with that carrier strike group will take position off the island of Sumatra. It has embarked aboard 12 helicopters, which we find extremely valuable in these types of scenarios, that will be employed depending upon the results of the assessment team. The Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group was in Guam. It is foregoing port visits there and in Singapore to move rapidly to the Bay of Bengal. It's estimated to be on station sometime on or before 7 January. It has seven ships associated with the strike group, carries 25 helicopters, which will be valuable to us again in disaster relief. There are four additional Cobras that will also be instrumental, we think, in reconnaissance efforts. Twenty-one hundred Marines, 1,400 sailors embarked aboard the Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group and 15th MEU. The commander has also opted to move five of his prepositioned ships out of the squadron located in Guam. These five ships have fresh-water-producing capability. Each ship can produce 90,000 gallons of fresh water a day, and of course that'll be extremely valuable as we have a number of requests already for fresh-water supply. There is a sixth ship that has a field hospital embarked aboard that can be phased ashore, again, dependent upon the results of the assessment teams and the need. Just before I stepped over I discovered or was told that there are two additional ships out of the squadron located at Diego Garcia that Admiral Fargo is also ordering to action. They will embark as soon as possible and get under way, again, for assignment in the affected region. Those two ships also have a 90,000-gallon fresh- water production capability.

Quick thoughts on this:

This will be a major test of the Expeditionary Strike Group concept, which is a marriage of seven or so Navy ships and subs, with a full Amphibious Readiness Group, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. This marriage first started in the fall of 2003 with the deployment of the 11th MEU. It is the latest incarnation of the centuries-old Navy-Marine Corps team and we'll see it in action.

The 15th MEU was headed in that direction anyway for Iraq. it has just been expedited in its journey [quick aside: wonder what it was like to be on a large ship in open water when the tsunami struck? haven't heard much about this . . .]

Next thought: the five prepositioned ships from the squadron located in Guam is Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadron Three, or MPSRON-3 to those in the know. The US possesses three of these squadrons and they are truly an awesome capability: each squadron carries enough equipment for an entire Marine Expeditionary Brigade – 17,000 personnel, give or take, and can sustain such a force for 30-60 days or so with no follow-on logistics.

[Interesting bit of trivia: each MPSRON ship is named after a Medal of Honor recipient. Take the MV 1st LT Baldomero Lopez for example, named after a Korean War hero. 1st Lt Lopez was famously photographed right before he died, leading his Marines in the invasion of Inchon.]

Also, while this squadron is based in Guam, it is unlikely that they were all there. The ships usually "go from port to port" to use a gratuitous Austin Powers reference.

So while for now the US is making do by flying in supplies on C-130s into Thai airfields and ferrying supplies from the Lincoln battle group with the few helicopters aboard, the real action will start in about three or so days when the Expeditionary Strike Group gets on station and its helicopters, especially its CH-46s and CH-53s are on hand. MEUs are also trained for humanitarian relief before they deploy . . . while the Lincoln can do a little, this is really the bread and butter of an expeditionary force like the Expeditionary Strike Group.

Still more to come tonight . . .

Written by Chester at 9:42 PM | Link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

U.S. Copters a "Golden Vision"

Today's New York Daily News carries a story quoting Jan Egeland, the head of the UN's emergency relief coordination:

The U.S. Navy helicopters flying to the rescue of devastated villages in Sumatra, Indonesia, are "worth their weight in gold," a grateful United Nations official gushed yesterday.

The fleet of Seahawk choppers flying from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and other ships in the battle group clattered for a second day into Sumatran villages that have not seen any help since the tsunami struck the Indonesian island a week ago.

Aid workers had been dismayed over the prospects of getting clean water, food and medicine to the thousands of survivors stranded when the tidal wave wiped out roads and docks throughout the remote region.

Without the supplies, they feared another wave of death from starvation and disease.

The Abraham Lincoln arrived off the coast Saturday and immediately began launching the Seahawks inland to deliver the goods.

"Those helicopters are worth their weight in gold now," said UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland.

Now this is certainly newsworthy. A higher-up in the UN has just paid the US military a compliment – or if not the troops then at least their armaments. Yet today on the way home while listening to NPR, the only mention of Mr. Egelund was from his recent criticism of the US for its stinginess: ". . .$350million dollars, which some critics have said was far too little . . ." But that story is already a full week old. [It is tempting here to begin referring to NPR as Radio Beijing, as a good friend once did, but we'll refrain.] Perhaps Mr. Egelund has changed his mind when faced with the incredible power of American arms, or maybe just had a weak moment when he strayed from the party line in the midst of the chaos wherever he happens to be (note, though, that the story doesn't say he is in SE Asia – remember, as we just witnessed from Kofi, UN leaders can lead from anywhere, even while vacationing in Wyoming.)

[Later tonight, some basics of humanitarian and other relief operations . . .]

Written by Chester at 9:05 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) | Print Article

U.S. Copters a "Golden Vision"

Today's New York Daily News carries a story quoting Jan Egeland, the head of the UN's emergency relief coordination:

The U.S. Navy helicopters flying to the rescue of devastated villages in Sumatra, Indonesia, are "worth their weight in gold," a grateful United Nations official gushed yesterday.

The fleet of Seahawk choppers flying from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and other ships in the battle group clattered for a second day into Sumatran villages that have not seen any help since the tsunami struck the Indonesian island a week ago.

Aid workers had been dismayed over the prospects of getting clean water, food and medicine to the thousands of survivors stranded when the tidal wave wiped out roads and docks throughout the remote region.

Without the supplies, they feared another wave of death from starvation and disease.

The Abraham Lincoln arrived off the coast Saturday and immediately began launching the Seahawks inland to deliver the goods.

"Those helicopters are worth their weight in gold now," said UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland.

Now this is certainly newsworthy. A higher-up in the UN has just paid the US military a compliment – or if not the troops then at least their armaments. Yet today on the way home while listening to NPR, the only mention of Mr. Egelund was from his recent criticism of the US for its stinginess: ". . .$350million dollars, which some critics have said was far too little . . ." But that story is already a full week old. [It is tempting here to begin referring to NPR as Radio Beijing, as a good friend once did, but we'll refrain.] Perhaps Mr. Egelund has changed his mind when faced with the incredible power of American arms, or maybe just had a weak moment when he strayed from the party line in the midst of the chaos wherever he happens to be (note, though, that the story doesn't say he is in SE Asia – remember, as we just witnessed from Kofi, UN leaders can lead from anywhere, even while vacationing in Wyoming.)

[Later tonight, some basics of humanitarian and other relief operations . . .]

Written by Chester at 9:05 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

JTF-536?

Note to Pentagon: Please, please unlock the basement door and talk to those guys who come up with mission names! JTF-536 is not easy to type, not easy to remember, and not good for PR. We need a "Valiant Rescue" or a "Golden Water" or something for the largest US military relief operation in nearly 30 years. We can do better. Forgive me if it has a name and I just haven't heard it yet -- if that's the case, it's a problem of a different kind . . .

Written by Chester at 8:45 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

KOFI SKIES WHILE ASIA DROWNS

[Until these stories get further coverage in the mainstream press, the US/Coalition relief operations in SE Asia will be the main focus of The Adventures of Chester. There will be a handful of other topics as well though.]

While the press criticized President Bush for not speaking about the tsunami for two days while finished his vacation, scant attention has been paid to the fact that Kofi Annan spent the next four days after the tsunami continuing his ski-trip in Jackson Hole, hobnobbing with the likes of James Wolfenson, head of the World Bank. From the Telegraph:

UN officials went to great lengths to conceal the whereabouts of Kofi Annan, the organisation's general secretary, who was on holiday when the tsunami struck and did not surface in New York until Thursday.

In fact, it was revealled that, Mr Annan spent Christmas at the holiday home of James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank and a critic of the Bush administration, who owns a 160-acre ranch in the resort of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Only a handful of Mr Annan's most trusted advisers were allowed to know his location. One official said: "He did not want to be seen frolicking in the snow. It wouldn't look good." So anxious were UN staff that his first interview, which was with the CNN cable news channel almost three days after the tsunami struck, was conducted by telephone, via the UN's headquarters, and producers of the show were not told where Mr Annan was speaking from.

Newsmax also reported on this story, though the article has been pulled from their page:

"I think a lot of people are asking exactly why you waited three days on vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, before you decided to fly back to New York in the face of this extraordinary crisis," Hunt asked during a Thursday press conference in New York.

"Could you give us a full explanation of your thinking on that?" Hunt continued. "Secondly, what kind of signal does that 72-hour delay send to the nations to which you are now appealing for greater help?"

Obviously irked by the inquiry, Annan replied:

"First of all, there was action. It wasn't inaction. We live in a world where you can operate from wherever you are. ... You don't have to be physically here to be dealing with the leaders and the governments I have been dealing with. You don't have to be physically here to be discussing with some of the agencies; that we have done."

The angry secretary-general then barked: "I don't have to be sitting in my office to take action. I think the same goes for you in your profession."

Two thoughts: Wow! the Secretary-General sure does believe in leading from the front. What a prince! i will use this on my boss soon. "I can do my job just fine from the slopes thanks! No need for me to come in to the office." What a moron. First Oil-for-Kojo and now this. It just keeps on coming.

Written by Chester at 8:40 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

JTF-536 STANDS UP IN ASIA

The US military has created and staffed Joint Task Force 536 in SE Asia, which includes 600 personnel on shore and 11500 afloat. Their mission will be humanitarain relief in tsunami-affected areas and they will use past such efforts, especially Operation Sea Angel in Bangladesh as a template.

It appears that there are US Support Groups in place in several countries, and these are shifting from a disaster relief assessment role to one of providing relief. Each USSG is headed by a one-star flag officer.

The overall JTF is headed by the Commanding General of the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force, LtGen Rusty Blackman. The fact that a 3-star general is in charge means:
a. the US participation will be large
b. expected coalition participation will also be large.
c. the US is placing enormous emphasis on this task.

More can be found on the US Pacific Command website.

We'll cover this as best we can here at The Adventures of Chester. It looks like the major media is giving it scant attention.

Written by Chester at 7:44 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article

January 2, 2005

COMING SOON: MAJOR RENOVATIONS

Loyal Readers, thanks very much for your patience over the recent holidays. We've been visiting the in-laws and had little time for blogging . . .

However, we must first ask for your patience for a bit longer. Blogging will be very light until January 10th as we make MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS to The Adventures of Chester which will totally change your reading and commenting experience here for the better.

The all-new Adventures of Chester will be revealed on Monday, January 10th -- we've been planning this for over a month and think you'll like what you see!

Until then, we've added a donate button in the sidebar for assisting those affected by the South Asian Tsunami. And since we are renovating the site, feel free to comment or email with recommendations.

Mark your calendar for January 10th, when Chester will return with a vengeance!

Written by Chester at 1:57 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article