Tom Mahnken's blog

By Tom Mahnken

Surprises?

I'm surprised that the Obama administration hasn't tackled the reform of U.S. national security institutions. Before assuming office, many of the administration's top officials -- to include Jim Jones and Dennis Blair -- argued persuasively for the need to update the organization of the national security community to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Since assuming office, the administration has been largely silent on the issue. There's still time to act, but the momentum for change appears to be slipping away.

Praiseworthy?

Easy. The decision to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and a handful of his advisors onboard was a wise one.

Predictions?

I predict that a year from now we're likely to be involved in a crisis that the administration either hadn't foreseen or for which it hadn't adequately prepared. I can't tell what that crisis will, be of course; merely that the unexpected is to be expected.

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By Thomas G. Mahnken

This week's news that, for the first time in 35 years, the U.S. military met all of its annual recruiting goals is testimony to the patriotism of America's sons and daughters and a reflection of the durability of the U.S. armed forces.

The economic downturn surely has something to do with the healthy recruiting figures, but there have been other periods of recession in the three and a half decades since the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force after the Vietnam War. The fundamental fact remains that large numbers of American 18- and 19-year-olds, who were 10 or 11 when al Qaeda on 9/11, continue to choose to join the military in large numbers, even though they will almost certainly deploy into combat in Iraq (remember Iraq?) or Afghanistan.

The recruiting numbers offer a strong rebuke to those who have argued that the U.S. military cannot bear the strain of waging two wars. They also refute periodic calls to replace an all-volunteer military with conscription. Indeed, they show that the means to wage the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq exists; whether the will to employ these forces to achieve victory exists, remains to be seen.

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By Thomas G. Mahnken

The surprising selection of President Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize says more about the decline of that venerable institution than it does Obama's achievements as president. Gone are the days when one actually had to do something to be seen as worthy of the Nobel Prize; now it is sufficient merely to be (or, in this case, not be, as in George W. Bush).

The Nobel Committee, which once honored Theodore Roosevelt for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War and Woodrow Wilson for the Versailles Conference, has more recently used the Nobel Peace Prize as a platform for making political statements. Hence the decision, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchu, a 33-year-old Guatemalan Maya Indian activist and author of the fraudulent eponymous autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu. In this case as well, the prize seems to be a condescending attempt to reward America for correcting its past "bad" behavior.

Barack Obama is an honorable man, who weeks ago emphasized the value of hard work in a speech televised throughout America's schools. What does the act of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for merely being say to America's sons and daughters? In my view, there was an honorable way forward: The president should have turned down the Peace Prize. He should have thanked the committee for its flattering award, but declined to accept the prize on the ground that he has not (yet) earned it. Not in the week and a half between his inauguration and the closing of nominations for the prize. Not in his nine months in the White House. Not in his four years in the Senate.

Perhaps Barack Obama will achieve the stature of a TR, or a Woodrow Wilson; all Americans should hope so. That, however, is but a future possibility.

By Tom Mahnken 

With U.S. forces heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, irregular warfare has become the marquee mission of the Defense Department. But, despite calls by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for a balanced force posture, advocates of irregular warfare often appear eager to downplay the possibility that the United States could find itself at war with a technologically capable adversary.

In fact, the debate that is playing out now over the relative merits of high-technology weaponry is the third to occur since the end of World War II.  As I chronicle in my Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945, similar debates occurred in the 1950s between advocates of nuclear weapons and those of conventional systems -- and in the 1970s and 1980s between the "military reform" movement, which sought to buy more, cheaper and less-advanced weapons, and advocates of high-technology systems.

The current transformation debate has its roots in the 1990s. In the wake of the unexpectedly lopsided outcome of the 1991 Gulf War, scholars and practitioners in the United States and elsewhere began arguing that the world was experiencing a revolution in military affairs (RMA) brought on by the development and diffusion of information technology. For three administrations (it was under Bill Clinton that "transformation" got underway), the leadership of the U.S. Defense Department has sought to increase the battlefield effectiveness of the U.S. armed forces by combining advanced technology with innovative operational concepts and organizations. Gates has notably retained transformation as a top goal.

Much of the discussion of the RMA in the 1990s was predicated on opportunity: advocates argued that the United States should pursue new ways of war because they would allow it to win victories faster, more decisively, and at lower cost. And although there was considerable rhetorical support for transformation from both senior civilians and military officers, they tended to mouth transformation without making any hard choices. No major acquisition programs were terminated. Instead, advocates put old wine in new bottles labeled "transformation."

The election of George W. Bush and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks saw a refocusing of transformation away from the potential advantages of new ways of war toward the costs of remaining wedded to the status quo, away from the aspirational and toward the practical. The rhetoric of the 1990s was replaced by the reality of war.

Transformation skeptics are right to dismiss some of the more breathless predictions of technophiles. We should not, however, ignore the very real impact that information technology has had on the face of war, including the "irregular" or "hybrid" wars that we are currently fighting. 

This impact can be seen in four areas:

1. New Ways of War. This is perhaps most apparent in the growing use of precision guided munitions (PGMs): whereas 8 percent of the weapons employed during the 1991 Gulf War were guided, 29 percent of those used over Kosovo in eight years later, 60 percent of those used in Afghanistan ten years later, and 68 percent of those used in Iraq twelve years later were guided. Precision is now routine.

Another sign of the changing character of war is the growing use of unmanned systems, both for reconnaissance and surveillance and, increasingly, for strike missions. The U.S. military had only two operational types of UAVs in the year 2000, but at least 12 different systems are expected to be in active service by 2015. Gates has had to push to get these systems fielded in numbers big enough to meet the demand of warfighters.

2. Changing Structure and Identity of Military Organizations. The availability of PGMs has allowed air forces to substitute increasingly for artillery.  This has, in turn, changed the historical relationship between ground and air forces.  In Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, ground forces have served to fix enemy forces for engagement from the air.

These changes challenge the identity of parts of the armed forces.  Because GPS-guided weapons require much less operator involvement, they threaten to transform attack aircraft pilots into nothing more than glorified truck drivers.  The widespread employment of UAVs and armed UCAVs presages an even more dramatic challenge to the identity of the pilot. Many of the UAVs operating over Afghanistan and Iraq are controlled not from the theater, but by operators located outside of Las Vegas: officers who fight the war as their day job and then go home to their families. 

3. Changing Perceptions of Military Power. Although predicting the course and outcome of future wars is difficult, military experts have done a generally poor job in recent years. It may be that the quality of expertise in the military field is declining, but a more compelling explanation is that the character of war is changing in some significant ways. As John Keegan forthrightly admitted in 2001, "Warfare is undergoing some strange transformations. Outcomes are becoming increasingly difficult to predict." He noted that, "In the last 20 years, I have been required professionally to comment upon, to analyze, and to predict outcomes in five wars: The Falklands, the Gulf, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo and now Afghanistan. The task has become progressively more difficult."

4. Changing Balance of Power. Mastery of advanced technology has given the United States a substantial conventional advantage over the range of plausible adversaries. The experience of recent conflicts contains ample evidence that the United States can defeat conventional militaries handily. The U.S. advantage in anti-armor warfare is such that it is difficult to imagine an armored force that could threaten U.S. forces. It is also difficult to imagine a surface fleet that could compete with the U.S. Navy. 

Adversaries have, of course, adopted countermeasures to America's conventional edge. Some states, such as North Korea and Iran, have sought or are seeking nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in an effort to deter the United States or level the playing field should war come.  Others have adopted terrorism or guerrilla warfare strategies. Still others, such as China, are acquiring advanced weaponry, such as anti-satellite weapons and anti-ship ballistic missiles, to exploit what they perceive as U.S. vulnerabilities. These developments will pose considerable challenges for the U.S. military for the foreseeable future.

As the Defense Department conducts its Quadrennial Defense Review, planners cannot ignore the need to continue to invest in advanced technology and to employ it in innovative ways. Although it would be wrong to see in advanced technology the key to victory in the wars of today or tomorrow, it would be foolish to ignore the very real advantage that technology has given, and continues to give, the United States. One would be at pains to find a single soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan who would trade away his body armor, night-vision goggles, and intra-squad communications, or support from UAVs, and PGMs. 

The U.S. armed forces both need to wage a protracted war against jihadist extremists while also preparing for the possibility of a high-intensity conflict against a capable adversary. Indeed, balancing the very different capabilities required to confront near-term and far-term threats is one of the central challenges that U.S. defense planners face.

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By Tom Mahnken

Journalists have produced many caricatures of Donald Rumsfeld, but no portraits. Until now, that is. Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules (PublicAffairs) offers a nuanced portrayal of the former defense secretary that is likely to serve as the definitive work for years to come. Those who dislike Rumsfeld will find plenty to stoke their anger; those who admire him much that is praiseworthy. Those few with an open mind will learn a great deal about the man, his gifts and his flaws.

The product of years of thorough research, Graham's book is journalism at its best. The anonymous "former senior defense official" makes a few appearances in the book's eight hundred pages, but as a rule he cites his sources by name, and everything contained in quotation marks is a direct quote.  He presents the story, but ultimately gives the reader the opportunity to make his own judgments.

By His Own Rules busts many of the stereotypes of Rumsfeld.  My top three:

1. Rumsfeld the Micromanager. Well, sometimes. By His Own Rules paints a complex picture of Rumsfeld as the head of the Defense Department. His probing, sometimes abrasive style have been chronicled elsewhere. The book shows Rumsfeld playing an active, sometimes hyperactive, role in examining and revising processes, including those that had traditionally been the purview of the military leadership, including senior officer assignments and the deployment of forces. But Graham also shows that on substance, Rumsfeld often deferred to military leaders. On sensitive matters such as contingency planning, he tended to work directly with combatant commanders and exclude his own staff. Too often he deferred to military leaders when he should have questioned them and scolded them when he should have held them accountable.
   
2. Rumsfeld the Decisive. More often, Rumsfeld the ponderer. As Graham puts it, "Rumsfeld was at its best - and seemingly most comfortable - when he was questioning things.  Decisions came harder."  Although Rumsfeld made the transformation of the U.S. armed forces a top priority, he proved reluctant to cancel any major weapon systems.  In the end, he only cancelled two: the Crusader artillery system and the Comanche helicopter. Rumsfeld's aides had to push hard to get him to cancel the Crusader, a heavy, expensive legacy of the Cold War that was the poster child for everything Rumsfeld opposed. And it was the Army that put the Comanche on the chopping block. Similarly, Graham reports that it was Rumsfeld's deputy, Gordon England, who pushed for a rapid response in the wake of Hurricaine Katrina, while Rumsfeld temporized.
3. Rumsfeld the Neocon. No, Rumsfeld the traditional conservative.  As Graham shows, Rumsfeld was, as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary, and as George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, a conservative of the traditional variety. Rumsfeld was, for example, dubious of the proposition that the spread of democracy was a praiseworthy or feasible goal. 

Graham's book also sheds light on a number of Rumsfeld's unheralded successes. For example, he led an effort to realign the U.S. armed forces' basing structure across the globe away from a structure optimized for the Cold War past in order to position the United States better to respond to current and future threats. And Rumsfeld, confronted with a war planning process that was cumbersome and unresponsive to strategic direction, championed the Adaptive Planning Initiative, which has led to plans that are developed more rapidly, feature more options, and benefit from greater guidance from senior leaders. 

History will render its verdict on Donald Rumsfeld's second tenure in the Pentagon, but By His Own Rules contains mountains of evidence for both the prosecution and the defense. 

By Tom Mahnken

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' decision to replace General David McKiernan as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan was an unusual, though hardly unprecedented move. The relief of a general in wartime is a serious matter, and doubtless Gates thought long and hard before making the decision. Change was, however, needed.

A number of stories in today's newspapers drew the inevitable comparison to President Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. Such an analogy is profoundly unfair to General McKiernan, an officer who has served his country loyally for almost four decades. MacArthur pursued a strategy that was at variance with U.S. policy and was ultimately insubordinate; no such charge has been leveled or even implied in McKiernan's case. He was replaced not because he did something wrong, but rather because, in the eyes of his superiors, he did not do enough right.

If an analogy is to be drawn, it should be to Lincoln's shuffling of Union generals during the early campaigns of the Civil War. Like Lincoln, Gates wants to win, and he is looking for a general who can deliver it. Many of the generals Lincoln fired were good, solid officers; they just lacked the qualities needed to prevail in a war quite unlike the ones they had studied and experienced earlier in their careers. Gates is similarly engaged in the difficult process of sorting out which generals possess the qualities necessary to succeed in today's complex conflicts. His decision raises the question of where we would be today if his predecessor took that task as seriously as he does.

The new team in Kabul bears the indelible imprint of Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. In Stan McChrystal, Gates has turned to a skilled and innovative soldier who has spent much of the last eight years in the field. As Director of the Joint Staff, the most powerful three-star position in the Pentagon, he understands how the machinery of the Defense Department works. He also has the ear of Mullen.

For McChrystal's deputy, Gates tapped another skilled commander, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, who currently serves as Gates' Senior Military Assistant, knows the Pentagon well, and will have the ear of its leadership. Above McChrystal and Rodriguez are two of the brightest officers in the U.S. military. General David Petraeus, the Commander of U.S. Central Command, is well known. Less well known, though no less impressive, is the new military head of NATO, Admiral Jim Stavridis.

With these appointments, Gates has thrown some of the best U.S. officers into the fight in Afghanistan. Whether Gates has indeed found his Grant remains to be seen. We should hope he has.

By Tom Mahnken

As someone who has spent the better part (in both senses) of my career educating U.S. military officers, I read with great interest Tom Ricks's opinion piece in Sunday's Washington Post. In it, Ricks makes a bold proposal:

Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time? Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, and use some of the savings to expand ROTC scholarships.

He argues that officers who graduate from the academies are no better, though more expensive to educate than those who come from ROTC programs. To save money, the United States should shutter its military academies and commission its officer corps entirely through civilian colleges and universities.

Ricks's proposal highlights the sad fact that too many of the nation's best universities refuse to host ROTC programs due to their faculties' disagreements with U.S. government policy -- first opposition to the Vietnam War, and more recently over the "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding homosexuals in the military. (It is equally true that many of the nation's finest universities did not bow to such pressure and retain vigorous ROTC programs). Getting ROTC programs back on campus is highly desirable, and has indeed been pushed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, himself a former university president. But don't hold your breath.

The fundamental question, however, is whether it would be desirable to close our military academies. It is not. The mission of the academies differs from that of civilian colleges and universities. The latter seek to educate the nation's sons and daughters, to turn them into well-rounded individuals. The service academies seek to educate as well, but in the service of the military profession. This results in curricula and faculties that differ from those of civilian schools.

Ricks criticizes the military academies, and West Point in particular, for its lack of instructors with Ph.Ds: "Although West Point's history and social science departments provided much intellectual firepower in rethinking the U.S. approach to Iraq, most of West Point's faculty lacks doctorates."

Ricks is correct in noting that West Point's history and social science departments have a tradition of excellence, both in educating students and in producing soldiers/scholars who apply their insights not only during their tours as professors, but also throughout their careers. But service academies also mandate participation in organized sports and teach subjects not commonly found in civilian universities, such as leadership and military doctrine. To teach leadership you need instructors who know how to, well, lead. Doctoral research is by definition a solitary endeavor. There are clearly those who possess Ph.D.s who know how to lead, but getting a Ph.D. doesn't make one a leader. Similarly, to teach doctrine you need instructors with operational, preferably combat, experience -- but not necessarily academic credentials.

It is not that the service academies are without flaws. Given the wars we are fighting now and those we may face in the future, it makes sense for cadets and midshipmen to devote more of their studies to the humanities and social sciences and less to the hard and applied sciences. To equip future officers better to interact with other cultures, cadets and recipients of ROTC scholarships should be required to take four years of a foreign language. And it would be worthwhile to expand opportunities for cadets and recipients of ROTC scholarships to spend semesters abroad, immersed in a foreign culture.

But Ricks does not stop at undergraduate military education. Instead, he argues that we should consider shuttering the services' war colleges (he is silent on the National War College), where, in his view:

colonels supposedly learn strategic thinking. These institutions strike me as second-rate. If we want to open the minds of rising officers and prepare them for top command, we should send them to civilian schools where their assumptions will be challenged, and where they will interact with diplomats and executives, not to a service institution where they can reinforce their biases while getting in afternoon golf games.

I don't know how much time Ricks has spent at any of our war colleges, but questioning assumptions and interacting with those with different views and experiences is precisely what the war college experience is all about. I've taught at civilian and military education institutions and served in government, and my time teaching strategy at the Naval War College was among the most challenging and intellectually rigorous experiences of my career. Students going through the Naval War College's strategy curriculum average 500-600 pages of reading a week and must examine questions such as whether civil-military relations impeded the conduct of the Vietnam War and whether economic sanctions were a viable alternative to the use of force against Iraq in 1991. Being a war college student is a full-time job, one that doesn't permit afternoons on the links, I'm afraid.

In fact, the study of strategy in the United States owes a lot to the service war colleges, and to the Naval War College in particular. Many of the nation's top civilian graduate programs -- those at SAIS, Harvard and Yale are but three examples -- owe a deep intellectual debt (one their faculty members would readily acknowledge) to the Naval War College. The Strategy and Policy courses that are taught at those institutions bear the strong imprint of the course of the very same name that is taught at Newport.

Of course there is room for improvement. Particularly in time of war, the services need to ensure that they are sending the best and brightest to the war colleges. Too often it seems as though the leadership of the services do not fully appreciate the treasures they possess. And it would be good to provide opportunities for more scholars from civilian universities to join the war college faculties, even temporarily, to increase interaction between military and civilian educational institutions.

Ricks is right that we need to be sending more officers to study at civilian graduate schools for both master's degrees and Ph.D.s. But such programs do not, and cannot, substitute for a strong and vigorous war college system.

By Tom Mahnken

The seizure of the merchant vessel Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia shined a spotlight on a problem that has been spreading in the shadows for years. Piracy has grown in the waters bordering the Horn of Africa because states have failed to act like states and leaders have failed to lead. Whether military force is permitted as a response to piracy is, as my lawyer friends say, settled law. International law has recognized pirates as outlaws who may be killed on sight since the Roman Empire. More recently, and more precisely, late last year the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1851, which permits operations against pirates in Somalia. Even with such authorization, it has proven more expedient to many to buy off criminals than to enforce international law. The non-response to piracy has sent a dangerous signal to all those who oppose international order. As William S. Lind noted in a recent essay, "Piracy not suppressed represents history lifting its leg on the whole state system."

The Obama administration's reaction to piracy in general, and the seizure of the ship in particular, betrays muddled thinking about the nature of the threat posed by piracy and the proper response to it. At least implicitly, the Obama administration appears to be treating pirates as if they were insurgents. Criminals (including pirates) represent a challenge of an altogether different sort. Whereas a mixture of political and ideological motivations drives insurgents to violence, it is the search for profit that fuels criminality. It is true that both terrorists (in the form of the Islamist insurgent group Al Shabab) and the pirates that prey upon merchants in the waters off Somalia thrive off the fact that Somalia lacks a government capable of bringing order to that benighted land. However, it is hardly necessary to "fix" Somalia in order to deal with piracy. Addressing Somalia's role as an ungoverned area will take time; addressing piracy in Somalia need not.

What the United States and those who wish to join us need to do is to drive up, rapidly and decisively, the cost of engaging in piracy. The successful operation to free Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates is a good start, but it is just a start. More will be needed to remove this threat to the global commons. Specifically, President Obama should give on-scene commanders permission to shoot pirates on sight. He should also authorize punitive strikes against the bases from which Somali pirates operate. Such actions, over the course of days or weeks, should be sufficient to drive the pirates off the seas. Of course, punitive strikes will not turn these criminals into law-abiding citizens; they will still be free to smuggle qat or steal relief aid. Nor will military action bring order to Somalia; it will still be a troubled and troublesome land. But military action can ease the threat of piracy to international commerce and to world order.

The United States is the most powerful state in the world and possesses the most powerful navy in the world. It is high time that we began to act like it.

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