North America

By Peter Feaver

I had some sympathy for the Obama folks when I read this newspaper account of yesterday's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Apparently, it was a solid, business-oriented meeting. And since President Obama has reportedly stopped holding regular video-teleconferencing with Maliki (a staple of US-Iraqi relations under the last Administration), this meeting was especially important.

What caught my eye was President Obama's comment at the end of the story: ""Overall," Obama said, "we have been very encouraged by the progress that has been made."

This statement struck me as both honest and misleading. Honest, because if you start with a January 2007 frame of reference -- say then-candidate Obama's claim that surge was going to have no impact on violence -- then the progress has been remarkable and very encouraging. But it also struck me as misleading in the sense that it did not also say that the recent spike in violence, and even more the recent flare-up of Arab-Kurdish tensions, is undoubtedly discouraging, and I would be surprised if the Obama team did not feel the same. Of course, as the Post story related, Obama also acknowledged that there are "tough days ahead" in Iraq. But the overall message was one of progress, a word he invoked 6 times in the prepared remarks and 3 times in the answer to the first question and that is the lede for the story.

That got me wondering: would those folks (say the mainstream Bob Woodward or Tom Ricks, let alone other people in the nuttier fringes of the Bush-bashing chorus) who established a cottage industry lambasting Bush Administration rhetoric as "happy talk" rise up and start calling a foul on President Obama? President Bush regularly caveated his statements of progress with reminders that there were "tough days ahead" and, if memory serves, Rumsfeld was the guy who coined "long, hard slog." In their coverage of Bush, sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and qualify their lede accordingly; sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and yet stick to a "happy talk" lede; and sometimes the reporters would simply omit any mention of the caveats, perhaps the better to advance the "happy talk" lede. Regardless of how many times President Bush presented carefully caveated assessments, the Bush-bashers could always rest their indictment on one or two off-the-cuff uncaveated remarks.

At what point will Obama's rhetoric on Iraq suffer this same fate? I hope never and, even more, I hope it never deserves to. It is appropriate for President Obama to balance "if it bleeds, it leads" coverage with mention of developments that are not getting as much press attention. And it is appropriate for President Obama in public to exhort the Iraqis towards greater progress by emphasizing the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. In fact, President Obama has talked so little in public about Iraq I would welcome virtually anything he said. Of course, I also hope that President Obama is as candid and clear-eyed about the challenges in private as his predecessor was, and I hope he continues to offer appropriate caveats even if he is stressing a publicly optimistic message. If the "happy talk police" give him the free pass they never gave his predecessor, so be it. The Iraqi challenge is hard enough without having to duck "police" brutality, even if it is only rhetorical.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Catching up on some reading after multiple trips, I have just waded through Secretary Clinton's Big Speech -- capital letters are warranted because of the breathless promotion that attended it before, during and after.

I found the speech more familiar than newsworthy. The section on priorities read like the table of contents to President Bush's 2006 National Security Strategy: terrorism, regional peace efforts, trade, development, energy, supporting and encouraging democracy, etc. Even the caveats were familiar: democracy is more than elections (check), foreign policy must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be (check), no nation can meet the world's challenges alone (check), no challenge can be met without America (check). Her Five Pillars are also remarkably evocative of the goals laid out by both of the administrations immediately preceding Obama's.

This is not a criticism of the speech. Indeed, as anyone who has worked on a top-level speech or document will understand, it is rather like pop music: there is a basic I-IV-V chord progression that is detectable in almost every "new" effort. Some do it better than others, to be sure, but it can't really be hidden from the attuned ear.

It would be unfair to label Clinton's speech a  "Heart and Soul" effort, but it would be a reach to credit it as transformative.

To me the best part was its frank acknowledgement that the core of the challenge of achieving better multilateralism was in overcoming collective action problems -- a familiar insight to anyone who has taken an introductory international relations course, but one that is all-too-often ignored in the partisan commentary on foreign policy. While there were the now-ritualistic swipes at those boors in the Bush administration, the Secretary did not, in fact, pretend that the problem was simply Bush (or even American) arrogance. I would have liked to see more discussion of how, in fact, she will overcome those collective action problems, especially in achieving a global architecture that met these desiderata, which she summarized so pithily: "one in which states have clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division."

This has been a priority challenge since before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, a colleague of mine at Duke, Bruce Jentleson, has repeatedly talked about the "September 10th agenda," and uppermost on that was the mismatch between what the world asked of international institutions and what those  international institutions were capable of doing.

Coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- Bruce Jentleson is coming on board the State Department to serve as a senior advisor to Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Director of Policy Planning. With Slaughter, her deputy Derek Chollet, and now Bruce Jentleson, Secretary Clinton will have at her disposal an impressive cadre of experts who have thought long and hard about this mismatch. I am hoping that the Secretary's speech was just the opening salvo and that in the coming months we will learn more about what her brain trust has in mind for addressing this serious problem. 

PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images

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.

By Peter Feaver

The Obama administration has just been Woodwarded, as in Bob Woodwarded. If his Washington Post report is accurate, General Jones, the National Security Advisor committed a serious civil-military relations mistake that could haunt the administration over the coming year. Up until now the administration has been nearly pitch-perfect on the issue of how to talk to the military about securing military advice in high command decision making and how to talk about the military advice they get. But this report, which seems authoritative because it reads like a verbatim transcript of the meeting (is Bob Woodward on the trip?), sounds a very discordant note.

The note came during a meeting General Jones had with U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan. He was talking about the importance of the non-military aspects of the strategy -- we can't win in Afghanistan by force of arms, and that sort of thing. So far so good. Then there is this extraordinary exchange, as reported by Bob Woodward:

During the briefing, [Marine Brigadier General] Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?"

Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get."

There is nothing wrong from a civil-military relations point of view for President Obama to decide that he is not going to approve any more troop deployments to Afghanistan. That is absolutely within his rights as commander-in-chief and, indeed, he alone has the political-military competence to adjudicate across all of the risk trade-offs that such a decision would entail.  It is his right to make that call even if his judgment is wrong about whether the new troops are in fact necessary to carry out the strategy. The president has a right to be wrong about commander-in-chief decisions.

But it is wrong for him, or his senior staff, to tell (or signal, or hint, or suggest to) the military that they, the military, should censor their advice and judgments based on what they think the President ultimately will decide. If it is the BGEN Nicolson's military judgment that he needs more troops to execute the mission, he should -- no, he must -- convey that information up his chain of command and the President must be made aware of that piece of military advice. Nicolson's military judgment could be superceded by a more senior military commander (say, General Petraeus) who may have a bigger-picture military perspective.  But a wise commander-in-chief wants to at least know about the perspectives of the lower ranking officers.

And, above all, a wise commander-in-chief does not want the military hearing from civilian presidential advisors (and in this context, retired General Jim Jones is a civilian presidential advisor) that they should not be candid in their advice lest it tick off the president or the secretary of defense. If Woodward's (and others) earlier reporting on the Bush years is accurate, the military got that impression, at least from Secretary Rumsfeld, and this had a deleterious effect on civil-military relations and on policymaking. In my judgment, the notion that President Bush did not want to hear whether the battlefield commanders believed they needed more troops was false; he did want to hear that advice and would have been appalled if one of his advisors had told the military, "don't ask for this because it will make the President angry."

According to Bob Woodward, that is exactly what happened recently in Afghanistan. I expect the Obama team will have to go into some serious damage control to deal with this story. If accurate, what is needed is an unambiguous statement from the President himself: "Give me your candid military advice, even or especially if you think the advice runs counter to what you think I will decide. Let me make the decisions. I will not always approve every request you send my way, but I will never approve of you trying to hide bad news from me because you think it will make me mad."