Topic: laser

Evening Commentary

Alana Goodman 12.12.2010 - 6:35 PM

Secret recordings were released this week showing Nixon and Kissinger callously dismissing the plight of Soviet Jews. But Seth Lipsky argues that leaders should be judged by their actions — such as Nixon’s appointment of Jews to high-level posts in his administration and support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War — as opposed to their private prejudices: “Is it better to have a president who loves African Americans and Jews and disappoints them strategically? Or one who privately voices prejudice but defends their rights and supports them strategically?”

There was a time when Ehud Barak could have made this call. Bibi kindly points out that now is not that time.

Reports this week that 25 percent of Gitmo alums have already returned to the battlefield further highlight the necessity of keeping the detention center open: “Contrary to the Gitmo myth, innocent teenagers and wandering goat herders do not fill the base. Last May, an administration task force found that of the 240 detainees at Gitmo when Mr. Obama took office, almost all were leaders, fighters or organizers for al Qaeda, the Taliban or other jihadist groups. None was judged innocent,” write John Yoo and Robert Delahunty in the Wall Street Journal.

Mitch Daniels is known for his laser focus on the economic crisis, but values voters shouldn’t discount his solid track record on social issues, writes Mona Charen.

With Rahm Emanuel gone, Joe Biden will begin playing a much larger role in the Obama administration, reports the New York Times. (Could this translate into even more inside access for Bad Rachel?)

Even as the controversy over Juan Williams’s firing dies down, Republicans are still preparing to battle NPR over public funding next year, reports Politico.

Debating the Middle East Debacle

Jennifer Rubin 11.23.2010 - 10:08 AM

Politico devotes part of its Arena discussion to Ben Smith’s compelling report on Obama’s Middle East blunders. What is interesting is that, aside from the executive director of the notoriously anti-Israel group the Jerusalem Fund, no one from this ideologically diverse bunch differs with the premise of the article (Obama has made things much worse) or cheers the president’s latest desperation move.

From David Aaron Miller: “[I]n the face of this difficult situation, the administration came out loud, hard and fast — focused largely on a settlements freeze it had no chance of producing or sustaining. Twenty months in, the president — a wartime leader with a Nobel Peace Prize (only the second in American history) finds himself with no freeze, no negotiations, no agreement and no process to get there.”

Bob Zelnick adds: “It takes some effort to mess things up as quickly and completely as the Obama team. But if you let settlements — a final status issue — put in a position to queer the whole deal, if it takes 20 fighter planes to make sure Netanyahu shows up for class, and if you have no coherent plan to build on the diplomatic path plowed by George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the chances are you will not get the parties to move much beyond their opening positions and that those at the table will begin to view your opinions as having little more than nuisance value.”

James Carafano reminds us: “Figure out the right thing to do, do the opposite … that pretty much defines the Obama Middle East strategy. The White House fell for the most obvious trap — that negotiating peace between Israel and Palestine is the ‘easy button’ and that a settlement will make that whole part of the world blossom into a land of milk and honey. The White House should have started at the other end — standing tall as a firm friend of Israel and focusing like a laser on the key problem Iran. Trumping Iran and backing Israel marginalizes Hamas and makes peace possible, not the other way round.”

The Obami remain impervious, however, to the near-unanimous criticism of their approach. It is among the Obama team’s most curious undertakings. As faulty as many of Obama’s foreign policy gambits may be, there are few (perhaps human rights is another) that have been so universally panned as his Middle East maneuvering. There is no pivot and no recognition that he is sowing additional discord and reducing America’s stature. Why do we suppose he is so immune to advice? I suspect it is because this particular policy is near and dear to the president’s heart and nearly entirely the product of his own ego and mistaken diagnosis of the region’s problems. He is tragically and completely lacking in an appreciation for the political realities, and apparently not an aide in his entire administration is willing or able to dissuade him. At most, the mission now is to try to spare him a personal humiliation.

You wonder what Dennis Ross, peace-processor extraordinaire, is telling himself. Things would be worse without him? Hardly seems possible. If you just keep processing, the peace “momentum” will build? It’s hard to fathom. But history’s judgment will be especially severe, both for him and for others who should know better. A heck of a way to end a career in Middle East diplomacy, no?

Saudi Arms Sale: Which War in View?

J. E. Dyer 09.14.2010 - 3:22 PM

The sheer size of the proposed $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia makes it worth critical reflection. The types of weapon systems in the Saudi shopping list are even more eye-catching. News outlets report that the sale is to be understood as a means of bolstering Saudi defenses and security confidence in the face of the threat from Iran. But the weapon systems in question don’t support that theory.

Other Persian Gulf nations like Bahrain and Kuwait have been loading up on missile-defense systems and air-defense fighters. The proposed Saudi sale, however, is weighted heavily toward strike aircraft (F-15s configured for ground attack) and anti-tank attack helicopters. The proposed sale includes 84 strike-configured F-15s along with the retrofit of the Saudis’ 72 existing F-15s, more than doubling the Royal Saudi Air Force’s (RSAF) inventory of medium-range strikers. Significantly, the purchase extends the range at which the RSAF can conduct ground strikes beyond the shorter, defense-oriented range of its British Tornado force.

The Saudis will also buy 70 Apache Longbow helicopters with laser-guided Hellfire missiles and 72 Black Hawk helicopters for combat transport. It’s not clear if any of these aircraft will supplant some of the 150 attack and multi-purpose helicopters the Saudis negotiated to buy from Russia a year ago. If all are delivered, the Saudis will have increased their heliborne ground combat capability by 500 percent.

The question is what they plan to do with all these aircraft. During the Saddam Hussein years, the threat of land attack against Saudi Arabia was obvious. Today, it’s not. The Saudis are buying for a major armed conflict on land, but nothing indicates that Iran presents a threat of that kind. Iran isn’t prepared militarily to invade the Arabian Peninsula, either by land or sea, nor is it making the effort to be. Iran is building up its navy, missile forces, and nuclear options; its regional “power projection” effort on land is accomplished through sponsoring terrorism. But the counterinsurgency warfare model (e.g., the U.S.’s in Iraq) is inapplicable in this case: population numbers and terrain inhibit the rise on the Arabian Peninsula of insurgencies with the profile of Hezbollah or the Taliban. The number of modern systems the Saudis propose to purchase outstrips such a requirement considerably.

They can’t be contemplating the invasion of Iran, even as a counter to an Iranian attack. Numbers and terrain are decisively arrayed against that as well. Riyadh is buying an unusually large number of weapons with which to project power and fight a land campaign at a greater range than ever before – but the weapons are a mismatch for the likely dimensions of a confrontation with Iran.

Perhaps the Saudis see a potential need to fight Iran on Iraqi or Kuwaiti territory in the future. It would certainly have to be a distant future, given the substantial U.S. military presence in those countries. This expeditionary concept would also be highly uncharacteristic in Saudi strategic thinking.

But Riyadh may be arming as a regional rival to Iran – not for the defense of its own territory but as the leader of an Arab coalition, formed to gain ascendancy over Iran as the power broker in the Levant. Western analysts tend to miss the fact that Iran’s moves against Israel constitute a plan to effectively occupy territory that the Arab nations consider theirs to fight for. The concerns on both sides are more than ethnic and historical: they involve competing eschatological ideas.

The resurgence of Turkey, erstwhile Ottoman ruler, only accelerates the sense of powerful regional rivals polishing up their designs on the Levant. The Saudis’ military shopping list doesn’t match their defensive requirements against Iran, but if the strategic driver is a race to Jerusalem, it contains exactly what they need. Congress should take a critical look at the numbers involved – and the U.S. should take one at our disjointed and increasingly passive approach to the region.

What if They Got Away?

Jennifer Rubin 02.15.2010 - 9:00 AM

Eli Lake reports:

U.S. and allied counterterrorism authorities have launched a global manhunt for English-speaking terrorists trained in Yemen who are planning attacks on the United States, based on intelligence provided by the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day bombing after he began cooperating. . .

Said one official: “It’s safe to say that Abdulmutallab is not the only bullet in the chamber for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the Islamist terrorist group based in Yemen.

“Farouk took a month to get operational. Once he left [training in Yemen], it did not take very long,” the official said.

So in the five weeks of silence, did the other English-speaking terrorists go into hiding? Are the leads still good? We don’t know, but it is precisely this concern and the danger of leads gone cold that strike at the core of the Obami’s approach. They are concerned about extending constitutional principles to terrorists (and gaining convictions); they should have been focused like a laser on getting all the actionable data as soon as possible to prevent future attacks. Now it seems as though we are scrambling to catch up — and the Obami are trying to prepare us in the event we can’t catch up:

The data about the additional terrorist plots is thought to be one factor behind alarming congressional testimony two weeks ago from senior U.S. intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

Mr. Blair said he was “certain” that it was al-Qaeda’s priority to attempt an attack on the United States within three to six months.

The increased threat of terrorism emanating from Yemen was outlined in a majority staff report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made public last month. The report warned that U.S. criminals were migrating to Yemen for terrorist training.

A smart national security observer makes an additional point: “Enhanced interrogation is something also envisioned by Obama and it need not be torture. The HIG–high value interrogation group–was chartered for this kind of non torture/enhanced interrogation. It was not set up. So getting to him need not have meant waterboarding.” Conservatives would dispute whether waterboarding is torture, but the point is correct: even under the Obami’s own interrogation rules, it is hard to condone this missed opportunity.

So the question comes down to this: what if in the five weeks of the Christmas Day bomber’s Mirandized silence other terrorists got away? And if the unimaginable happens and one of these should strike, what then? Even the potential for such a calamity should convince all but the most hardened Obama sycophants that we are in danger now, greater danger than we would otherwise be, had the search for mass-murders-in-training begun weeks earlier.

There is no excuse for such malfeasance. Those officials who came up with this cockeyed scheme and have now put Americans in greater danger should be sacked. And the American people, once the full account comes out, may well conclude that this includes Obama. He is commander in chief after all.

Smart Diplomacy — Watch Out!

Jennifer Rubin 01.12.2010 - 10:38 AM

Watch out when the Obami use the word smart — or even worse, smarter. It usually means something very silly is in the cards. And it denotes an air of condescension — as if others who came before them practiced dumb or dumber diplomacy and their critics are opposed to being smart. “Smarter diplomacy,” however, brought us such dumb ideas as downplaying human rights, engaging Iran for a year, bullying Israel, backing Hugo Chavez’s lackey in Honduras, and pulling the rug out from under our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic. But the Obami aren’t done being smart. Hillary Clinton tells us what’s in store on Iran sanctions:

”It is clear that there is a relatively small group of decision makers inside Iran,” she told reporters traveling with her on the first leg of a nine-day trip across the Pacific. ”They are in both political and commercial relationships, and if we can create a sanctions track that targets those who actually make the decisions, we think that is a smarter way to do sanctions. But all that is yet to be decided upon.” …

Clinton mentioned that the meeting, of representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France — plus Germany would meet at the end of the week in New York. She did not cite a specific day. ”They will be exploring the kind and degree of sanctions that we should be pursuing,” she said. She was not specific about those inside Iran who might be targeted with new international sanctions, but her allusion to Iranian leaders with political and commercial ties suggested that she was referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite group that is separate from the Iranian military and is charged with protecting the Islamic revolution that brought the clerics to power in 1979.

So with all this time, they haven’t quite decided what would be smart. But they’re positive they can focus like a laser on just the right bad guys, because bad guys rarely know how to set up middle men and third-party relations to evade detection. And even smarter yet, we don’t have any date in mind. Brilliant, huh?

Actually it’s appalling. And it suggests that the Obami were never serious about crippling sanctions to begin with. Apparently they were interested in stringing engagement along until no one could quite keep a straight face. Now it seems that the Obama administration has no interest in regime change and no interest in exacting meaningful sanctions that might alter the mullahs’ nuclear plans. But maybe we all aren’t smart enough to figure out how this is going to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Because it sure looks like the next declaration of “smart” diplomacy will be an admonition that we have to live with Iran in the club of nuclear powers.

Abe Rosenthal Is Spinning in His Grave

John Podhoretz 04.24.2008 - 11:32 AM

The lead story on the New York Times homepage today: “As Economy Slows, So Do Laser Eye Surgeries.”

Battle For The Narrative

Jennifer Rubin 04.08.2008 - 3:32 PM

Barack Obama supporter Senator Jay Rockfeller comes out with this:

McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.

The comment is not only shocking but factually wrong to boot. (Later in the day Rockefeller was forced to apologize.) This follows the drum beat of “100 year” comments from Obama and the “warmonger” jibe from another supporter. If the Obama appeal in the primary was to a different kind of politics and to the public yearning for bipartisan civility, the campaign may have some message confusion going on. The storyline is supposed to be: Clinton is the mean, nasty prevaricator; he’s the nice, uplifting one. Got it?

Disarming Space

Gordon G. Chang 02.16.2008 - 12:56 PM

This morning the New York Times came out in favor of a treaty banning all weapons in space. “The United States, as the nation most dependent on satellites, should be working to ban all anti-satellite weapons,” the paper said. “That is the best way to protect America’s security and its credibility.”

The Russians and Chinese introduced a draft space treaty this Tuesday at a disarmament conference in Geneva, and the Times thought they did not go far enough toward the cause of bringing peace to the heavens. I generally am in favor of multilateral treaties to get rid of weapons, but I want to tell you that Moscow, Beijing, and New York’s paper of record are all wrong on this one.

Prohibiting space weapons sounds like a good idea, but promises to do so are utterly meaningless because they are virtually impossible to verify. There is one overriding reality: any object in space can be used as a space weapon if you can maneuver it to arrange a collision. The Russians and Chinese know this and are only trying to make us look bad because they know we will never accept their proposed deal. Moreover, they have no intention of implementing their idea either because they will never allow international inspectors to examine every satellite they launch and sit at every control panel they have. Unfortunately, it’s easier to conceal a space weapon than a nuclear warhead.

So this is all you have to know about a space treaty: If you want to ban all weapons in space, you will have to do away with every maneuverable object in space. And if you like the Times’s idea that a treaty should cover ground- and sea-based weapons too, then you will have to do away with every rocket, missile, and powerful laser. Unless you are willing to do all this, you are not serious about completely disarming the high ground of space.

The Chinese and Russians, of course, are not. The Times, unfortunately, is.

Don’t Worry, North Korea Really Means Well

Gabriel Schoenfeld 01.24.2008 - 7:54 AM

Today’s Washington Post carries good news about the Hermit Kingdom. David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Jacqueline Shire, a former State Department official, tell us there’s no reason for us to worry about the lack of North Korean progress in meeting its obligations under the various agreements it has signed. Indeed, the “finger-wagging, told-you-so naysayers in and out of the Bush administration should take a deep breath.”

To begin with, they argue, North Korea’s full declaration detailing the scope of its nuclear program, due on December 31, and now 24 days late, is not really late at all: “After some tail-chasing, it emerged that North Korea had quietly shared an initial declaration with the United States in November.” The North Koreans there admitted came clean about their plutonium stockpile but they denied having “a uranium enrichment program.”

Albright and Shire acknowledge the “ample evidence that North Korea acquired components for a centrifuge-enrichment program” but they explain that few observers now believe that it actually managed to enrich any uranium. In any case, their efforts in this area are nothing to worry about: “The success or failure of this latest agreement with North Korea must not hinge on the uranium issue,” even if the full declaration was not really full at all.

Then there is North Korean cooperation with a covert Syrian nuclear program. This is “troubling,” Albright and Shire tell us, but “must also be kept in context.” What is the context? The necessity of keeping North Korea engaged in dialogue. In the face of Pyongyong’s provision of “sensitive or dual-use equipment to Syria,” the main imperative is “keeping the deal together.” This will help bring “North Korea into the fold, bit by bit, making it harder for it to slip back into the arena of illicit deals and keeping a bright light on its activities.”

As for the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel bombed in September after a North Korean shipment of some unknown sort arrived there, this also must be kept in context, and in any case “it is gone now and whatever has replaced it is almost certainly not a reactor.” Reports that North Korea provided plutonium to Syria “are baseless.” The evidence: “The transfer of such material for weapons would be a casus belli with dire consequences for both countries, and this surely is understood by both Kim Jong Il and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

Albright and Shire complain that the advocates of the “the six-party process” have been “unfairly maligned.” Perhaps. But perhaps they are maligning themselves. In their op-ed, these advocates of the six-party process are adducing evidence that is not really evidence to explain away every North Korean transgression, large and small. Where they have no evidence, not even the tissue-paper-thin kind, they adapt a slightly different approach: they simply tell us to close our eyes to the North Korean violations in order to keep “a laser-like focus” on the talks.

Connecting the Dots has asked readers the same question before: What is the best word to describe such an approach to the North Korean nuclear problem?

The Yom Kippur War—for Kids!

Eric Trager 10.30.2007 - 2:05 PM

Video games loosely based on historic wars are nothing new. But the recently released “October War,” which invites children to “fight the Israeli Air Force starting from Swais [sic] til Barliv [sic] Line,” offers a new twist to the genre: it is available exclusively on the Anwar Sadat website’s “Kids Corner,” thus making it the first war-themed video game to be released on the official website of a former head-of-state. Indeed, dedicated gamers will be disappointed to find that the Harry S. Truman Library’s kids page lacks similarly inappropriate atomic bomb video games, while other typically dry former head-of-state websites won’t even arouse their curiosity.

Compared to far bloodier video games, “October War” might seem harmless. In the two-dimensional game, players command a tank across various swaths of the Sinai Desert, shooting at an assortment of Israeli bombers, helicopters, trucks, and warships. The game seems deliberately unrealistic: the Egyptian tank is able to arm itself with nuclear weapons and laser beams, while a Star-of-David-clad, King Kong-like gorilla confronts players at the end of the fifth level. (On the other hand, just like in 1973, the Egyptian tank is severely overpowered and destined to lose.) Were it not for the Israeli insignias prominently displayed on every enemy vehicle, “October War” would seem like a more colorful version of Space Invaders.

Learning to Love Anthrax

Gabriel Schoenfeld 09.05.2007 - 11:17 AM

Who was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001? The FBI has still not solved the case and, at this rate, it probably never will. But even if we never solve the mystery, we still were taught a terrifying lesson in the perils of biological terrorism. We really do need to worry about biowarfare (BW) agents like anthrax and botulinum falling into the hands of groups like al Qaeda.

Or do we? Perhaps not as much as we think. Last year, Christian Enemark, a national-security expert at the Australian National University in Sydney, prepared a comprehensive evaluation, “Biological Attacks and the Non-State actor: A Threat Assessment.” Focusing on the use of salmonella bacteria by the Rajneesh cult in Washington State in 1984, the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Japan in the early 1990’s, and the U.S. anthrax attacks, it offers a complete balance sheet of the pros and cons of using BW agents for terrorist purposes.

On the pro side from the terrorist’s point of view, one of the attractive features of using biological weapons is the effect on the “worried well.” Even small attacks, like the 2001 anthrax episode, which sickened seventeen people and killed five, play upon “the visceral human fear of infection” so that even a modest attack generates a huge impact:

Read More

The Star-Wars Fantasy

Gabriel Schoenfeld 09.04.2007 - 10:51 AM

Back in June, the Democratic-controlled Congress was reported by Aviation Week to be planning to cut funding for the Airborne Laser (ABL), an essential element in American efforts to develop a shield against missile attacks. I wrote at the time in Anti- Anti- Anti- Missile Defense that “if the U.S. or one of its allies falls victim to a nuclear-missile attack that we are unable to avert, it will be much too late for finger-pointing at the people responsible for delaying–or killing–our defensive capabilities. It is better to do the finger-pointing now.”

The good news now is that prudence has prevailed and the program continues fully funded.

The even better news is that on August 31 the Airborne Laser completed one of its most significant test to date. A Boeing-747 was rigged up with a low-power laser and used to detect, track, and then engage a target–in this case, another aircraft.

America is From Mars, Iran is Not

Gabriel Schoenfeld 08.01.2007 - 11:00 AM

How worried should we be about Iran and its raging president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Can developments on Mars or in other locations in outer-space help us ward off the danger? This is not a facetious question.

It is quite clear that the ayatollahs are determined to acquire nuclear weapons. In the face of this challenge, and assuming that diplomacy fails to stop them, we are likely to have two non-exclusive options: strike at their nuclear facilities or build defensive systems like the Airborne Laser.

But from time to time, it helps to step back from the intricate problems connected with either option and remind ourselves of the essential nature of this conflict. That essential nature is asymmetric, and here is where Mars and outer space come in.

Anti-Anti-Anti-Missile Defense

Gabriel Schoenfeld 07.30.2007 - 11:31 AM

As always in the realm of national security, we do not know what we do not know. But one thing we do know–perhaps not to a certainty, but to a high degree of probability–is that next year, or in the next few years at most, unless it is stopped by diplomacy or force, Iran will develop a nuclear weapon. We also know, or should know, that if we permit this catastrophe to happen, we will urgently need defensive weapons to protect ourselves and our allies.

But are programs to develop such weapons on track, or are they being held back by those who would prefer to keep us defenseless?

What is MTHEL?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 06.26.2007 - 2:40 PM

What should be done about the “the ignominy of Sderot”? That is Hillel Halkin’s term for the fact that a “reasonably prosperous city of some 20,000 inhabitants, an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, [has been] reduced to a state of shell-shocked panic by scattershot Qassam attacks from the Gaza Strip, its life paralyzed . . . while the country’s government and army seem powerless to do anything about it.”

How can the Qassam rockets be countered?
Read More

Striking Iran: Cakewalk or Slam-Dunk?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 05.14.2007 - 1:10 PM

In 1981, Israel hit Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Eight F-16 fighter-bombers and eight F-15 fighters swooped in to carry out a precision strike that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by more than a decade.

As the whole world knows, Israel now faces a similar challenge from Iran, which has an ambitious nuclear program of its own, and whose president has threatened to wipe Israel from the map. Unlike Osirak, however, the Iranian program is housed in multiple sites, with the most critical ones hardened against attack from the air, and all of them situated much further away from Israel than Osirak was.

A key question therefore is whether Israel possesses the military means to attack the Iranian facility on its own, or whether it would depend upon the far mightier United States to help it or do the job in its entirety. This question is being analyzed in defense ministries and intelligence agencies around the world. But the central issues have been laid out for the public in great detail by two MIT military analysts, Whitney Raas and Austin Long, in a paper that appears in the spring issue of International Security.

One of the problems entailed in such a raid would be dealing with the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, which Raas and Long call “one of the most difficult and important targets.” It is 23 meters underground and covered by multiple layers of concrete, such that “only a very robust strike could hope to destroy or at least render unusable” the centrifuges that it houses. Read More

Boot and Hanson, Round Three: Just Enough to Stave Off Defeat

Max Boot 01.31.2007 - 4:50 PM

Dear Victor,

There is a sense of urgency within the armed forces—especially within the Army and the Marine Corps—but it’s hard to see it in the rest of the country or in Washington. Even the Pentagon seems to be, in many respects, on a peacetime footing.

While our soldiers and marines are fighting and dying in Iraq, it’s rather amazing to see that repair depots needed to fix badly damaged vehicles are still not operating on a 24/7 schedule, that armored vehicles (such as the Cougar, designed to deflect bomb blasts) are only now being ordered in substantial numbers, that promotion remains as slow as ever even for many of those soldiers who have proven their merit in combat, and that vital pieces of gear (ranging from PDA’s to identify insurgents to laser deflectors to warn civilian motorists in front of checkpoints) are still MIA. Not to mention the difficulties of setting up new Provincial Reconstruction Teams because of insufficient resources and undercommitment at the State Department and other civilian agencies.

Only a handful of politicians—notably President Bush and Senators McCain and Lieberman—seems to realize that we need to exert ourselves to the utmost to avoid a catastrophic defeat. Yet even Bush’s last-ditch effort—sending 21,000 more troops—bespeaks a lack of complete commitment.

If we’re truly on the verge of disaster—and I think we are—is a force of 150,000 troops (most of them rear-echelon support personnel) the most that a country of 300 million people can muster? Why not mobilize the reserves and the National Guard and raise new units of volunteers as was done during the Spanish-American War?

Based on the traditional formula laid out in the new Army-Marine counterinsurgency manual of one counterinsurgent per 40-50 civilians, we need at least 260,000 troops and police to pacify Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle (population: around 12 million). We’re not even close, unless you put more stock than I do in the ability of Iraqi Security Forces to carry on the fight. (They have some good units, but, given their leave policies and other shortcomings, the number of effective soldiers at any one time is probably well under 50,000.) I realize that more troops do not necessarily guarantee more success (as Vietnam proved), but a sound counterinsurgency strategy is manpower-intensive. The Boer War and other successful counterinsurgencies have shown that victory is more likely if more troops are sent and employed intelligently.

My fear is that, even at this late date, all we’re willing to do is just enough to stave off defeat for the time being—not enough to win. I hope I’m wrong.

Cordially,
MB

Boot I • Hanson I • Boot II • Hanson II • Boot III • Hanson III • Boot IV • Hanson IV

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