A sad and not terribly unusual case:

An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas. Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family she had to care for her 10-month-old son — her mother — was overwhelmed by the task, already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian attorney, Rai Sue Sussman, said Monday that one of Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care. “For her it was like, ‘I couldn’t abandon my child,’” Sussman said. “She was really afraid of what would happen, that if she showed up they would send her to Afghanistan anyway and put her son with child protective services.”

Hutchinson, who is from Oakland, Calif., remained confined Monday to the boundaries of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, 10 days after military police arrested her for skipping her unit’s flight. No charges have been filed, but a spokesman for the Army post said commanders were investigating.

Kevin Larson, a spokesman for Hunter Army Airfield, said he didn’t know what Hutchinson was told by her commanders, but he said the Army would not deploy a single parent who had nobody to care for his or her child. “I don’t know what transpired and the investigation will get to the bottom of it,” Larson said. “If she would have come to the deployment terminal with her child, there’s no question she would not have been deployed.”

My guess is that the Army will be lenient with Hutchinson, likely giving her nonjudicial punishment under Article 15 of the UCMJ.   Her actions were stupid rather than venal and it would be both unjust and a publicity nightmare to put her in jail.  Indeed, the best course of action here would be a hardship discharge.

The broader question is why the Army allows people to draw paychecks and fill unit slots who are essentially permanently non-deployable.  It’s not just single parents, although there are a lot of them in the service.  There are also large numbers of dual-military couples with children, presenting essentially the same issue.  People with ailments that are treatable and allow them to fulfill peacetime duties but not go off to war are allowed to serve as well.  And when their units go off to the fight, they remain behind.

This makes no sense, if one presumes that the primary function of the military is war-fighting rather than job creation or social welfare.  It was an irrational policy in the 1980s, when the U.S. military was mostly a deterrent. It’s simply crazy given the operations tempo of the past two decades.

Robert Kaplan thinks that it would be a shame if the Fort Hood massacre led to recriminations against Muslims in the U.S. military, arguing we need more of them.

The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with a Marine battalion during the first battle of Fallujah. The battalion just happened to have in the ranks a corporal of Syrian descent who did double duty as the commander’s translator for his meetings with the Iraqis. The young Muslim corporal was arguably the most valuable member of the battalion: simply by his presence he was able to cast the battalion in a different, more positive light among the locals.

The United States military needs more troops of Muslim origin within its ranks. We need a military that looks like the larger world for the global challenges ahead, such as helping to protect the “commons,” the air space and sea lanes. Think of the Navy’s slogan in its new television recruitment commercials: “A Global Force for Good.”

Inevitably, a minute percentage of these Muslim recruits may be influenced by jihadist propaganda, which certainly seems to have been the case with Maj. Hasan. So what do we do?

Better security surveillance and background checks, as well as better coordination within the defense bureaucracy to ferret out troublesome individuals, make sense. But the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, had it right when he said that he was fearful of a backlash against Muslims within the ranks. Behind the scenes the military needs to be extra vigilant; publicly the military needs to be even more welcoming to minorities.

There’s more to the piece but that’s the gist of it.  And he’s right.

But let’s not get too carried away.  Both Spencer Ackerman and Marc Lynch take the title of Kaplan’s post (”Responding to Fort Hood”) and twist the argument into Kaplan claiming “Fort Hood shows we need more Muslim soldiers.”  Which, of course, it does not.

Hasan is an emphatic datapoint against Muslims in the military.  The fact that the potential good that Muslim soldiers can do in our war against Islamic extremists far, far outweighs the danger of more Hasans hiding in our midst does not change the fact that Muslim soldiers are more likely to be sympathetic to the enemy than are their non-Muslim fellows.

Kaplan merely suggests that the proper approach to dealing with this threat is to quietly implement “Better security surveillance and background checks, as well as better coordination within the defense bureaucracy to ferret out troublesome individuals” rather than conducting a loud witch hunt.

President Obama’s speech at yesterday’s memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood massacre was touching and struck the right chords. Marc Ambinder and Taegan Goddard both say it was his best speech, ever, and Chuck Todd gushes that it will be “remembered and quoted from for quite some time.”

He honored the service of the fallen, mentioning each by name.  He directly challenged the extremists who would justify this slaughter in the name of religion (”no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor”).  He also dismissed the notion that we’re at war with Islam (”In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis.  In Iraq, we’re working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.”).

He even took the politically risky step of rebutting the Greatest Generation nonsense:

For history is filled with heroes.  You may remember the stories of a grandfather who marched across Europe; an uncle who fought in Vietnam; a sister who served in the Gulf.  But as we honor the many generations who have served, all of us — every single American — must acknowledge that this generation has more than proved itself the equal of those who’ve come before.

We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in the time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.  They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places.  They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains.  They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war.  They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and all stations — all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

In today’s wars, there’s not always a simple ceremony that signals our troops’ success — no surrender papers to be signed, or capital to be claimed.  But the measure of the impact of these young men and women is no less great — in a world of threats that no know borders, their legacy will be marked in the safety of our cities and towns, and the security and opportunity that’s extended abroad.  It will serve as testimony to the character of those who served, and the example that all of you in uniform set for America and for the world.

I would, however, quibble with Obama’s characterization of the fallen as having given their lives for their country.  The line was not in the prepared remarks, so perhaps it was off-the-cuff.   But the fact of the matter is that these people and their loved ones are tragic victims of senseless violence, no more heroic than others who are randomly killed.

This isn’t a criticism of Obama per se.  General George Casey did the same thing in his remarks.  We have a natural, understandable tendency to want to elevate people killed in these nationally unifying events as heroes.   We did it for the 9/11 victims.  But most of those who died working in their offices in the Twin Towers — or even the Pentagon — were just ordinary Joes trying to earn a living, who had no inkling of the danger they were in.

The people aboard Flight 93 who took on the hijackers to prevent them from crashing into an unknown target?  Heroes.  The people in the Towers and the Pentagon who responded to crisis by trying to help others?   Heroes.  The firefighters and police officers who rushed into the burning buildings at great personal risk to save others?  Definitely: Heroes.

Similarly, police Sergeant Kim Munley, who shot and captured Major Nidal Malik Hasan, doubtless preventing him from killing more people, was a hero.

Most of those who died, on both 9/11 and that day at Fort Hood, by contrast, had no opportunity for heroism.  They were taken by surprise while going about their daily routine and murdered. They did not “give” their lives; they were robbed of them.

Now, as President Obama noted in his roll call, many of them were genuinely heroes in how they lived their lives.  Some were decorated veterans of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and they were all serving their country.  But getting gunned down by a psychopath isn’t an act of heroism.  It’s a senseless tragedy.

In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg’s Justin Blum:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, called the war on terrorism “a war against Islam,” said a doctor who was in a graduate program with him.

While studying for a masters degree in public health in 2007, Hasan used a presentation for an environmental health class to argue that Muslims were being targeted by the U.S. anti-terror campaign, said Val Finnell, a classmate. “He was very vocal about the war, very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second,” said Finnell, 41, a preventive medicine doctor in Los Angeles, in an interview yesterday. “He was always concerned that Muslims in the military were being persecuted.”

[...]

Finnell said he remembered Hasan “vividly” and said of the shooting: “I’m not surprised, based on the things he said in the past. I’m shocked that it happened, but not surprised.”

In conversations, students challenged Hasan on his statements and he would become “visibly upset, sweaty, nervous,” Finnell said. Toward the end of the program, in 2008, Hasan gave a presentation that was billed as a survey of the climate for Muslims who serve in the U.S. military, Finnell said. “It wasn’t really very objective,” Finnell said. “It was like he was trying to prove a point.”

One witness claims Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting.  Another witness says, “He didn’t say a word.”

Clearly, Hasan was unstable and, at very least, not fit to serve as an Army officer, much less an Army psychiatrist treating returning veterans from a war he hated.  So, why was he still serving?

As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports,

The vital facts of Hasan’s life do not suggest a man determined to kill dozens of his fellows as they sat unarmed in a crowded waiting room. He was born in Arlington, Va. His parents were immigrants, but so are millions of other Americans. His heritage was Palestinian, but he didn’t even speak Arabic. He went to Virginia Tech and in 1997 joined the Army. It was through the Army that he got his medical training. He was due to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Those who look for a ready explanation for the murderous rampage at Fort Hood can choose between two broad narratives: Maybe it had to do with the travails of an Army psychiatrist, dealing with soldiers who had been traumatized, even disfigured, by their war experience; or maybe it had to do with being Muslim.

[...]

The portrait of Hasan as a Muslim radical doesn’t entirely make sense to those who knew him well. Imam Faisal Khan, whose D.C.-area mosque Hasan attended over a 10-year period, never got the idea he was ashamed of his Army service.

“He would come in his uniforms many times,” Khan said. “He would come in his uniform and pray. And then I knew he was in the Army. He liked his job. That’s what he was trained for, you know, to serve in the military.”

His psychological evaluations were apparently well within normal range, with “No signs of physical or mental problems in examinations as recently as September,”  according to Army records obtained by WaPo.

And yet there were strong signs that things were not right.   His alleged comments while away at a civilian* school would likely have escaped military attention.  But other officers noticed troubling behavior, too.

Col Terry Lee, a retired officer who worked with him at the military base in Texas, alleged Maj Hasan had angry confrontations with other officers over his views.

[...]

“He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans,” Col Lee told Fox News. “He said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place.” He said that Maj Hasan said he was “happy” when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June. An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings.

Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square” in New York.

He claimed he was aware that the major had been subject to “name calling” during heated arguments with other officers.

Federal law enforcement officials have said Maj Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats. The officials said the postings appeared to have been made by Maj Hasan but they were still trying to confirm that he was the author.

He was a daily attendee of a radical, Wahhabi mosque and there are numerous reports that Hasan was harassed because of his views.

Hasan, 39, told relatives he’d been harassed by other soldiers for his faith. Last month, soldier John Van de Walker, 30, was arrested for scratching Hasan’s Honda with a key, police said.

The manager of the Killeen, Tex., apartment complex where Hasan lived said the vandal had returned from Iraq and targeted Hasan because he of a Muslim bumper sticker. “No one should have to deal with that kind of hate. Maybe he snapped,” said Alice Thompson, 53.

One hesitates to psychoanalyze crazies but, rather clearly, Hasan harbored rage years before his car was keyed.  And the Army took appropriate action in response to that incident.

In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Army didn’t do the same with regard to the signs that Hasan was unfit.  But it’s not at all inconceivable that “the Army” had no idea.  The fact that several of his colleagues had heard him say highly inflammatory things doesn’t mean that these things were reported up through the chain of command.  Further, it’s not entirely clear what his superiors could have done with these reports, aside from confronting and counseling him.

While highly constrained in terms of time, place, and manner, military officers are allowed to disagree with official government policy in casual conversation with one another.  Plenty of officers, including those currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, have no doubt expressed bitterness at missions they don’t believe in.  Lord knows, a large number of them did so about the various deployments ordered by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  And, while it may not have made Hasan a popular guy on base, one doesn’t have to be a Muslim or want Americans killed to hold the view that citizens have a right to “rise up” against an invading force.

Beyond that, there’s a natural reluctance to be overly aggressive in challenging a Muslim soldier as an enemy sympathizer.  Being accused of racial profiling can be damaging to one’s career.  Further, it can feed natural resentments against Muslim soldiers, almost all of whom are just as loyal to the country, the uniform, and their fellow soldiers as the next guy.

I’m of course reminded of Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who went into a religious-inspired rage and murdered two 101st Airborne Division officers in 2003.   But, as Spencer Ackerman reminds us, Sergeant John Russell, who killed five soldiers in a shooting spree at Camp Liberty back in May, was not a Muslim.  So, outlandish claims that “the enemy is infiltrating our military” are unhelpful.

We have a natural desire to want to make sense of tragedy.  Unfortunately, we seem to have lone psychopaths going on shooting sprees and committing mass mayhem every now and again.  And we only see the “obvious” clues in hindsight.

*UPDATE:  A more recent AP report points out that the graduate school where Hasan made the comments was run by the military and adds further fuel to the fire that his seniors should have been aware of that they had a problem.

“I told him, `There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.” Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.

“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”

[...]

Danquah said he was so disturbed by Hasan’s persistent questioning that he recommended the mosque reject Hasan’s request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood. But he never saw a need to tell anyone at the sprawling Army post about the talks, because Hasan never expressed anger toward the Army or indicated any plans for violence.  “If I had an inkling that he had this type of inclination or intentions, definitely I would have brought it to their attention,” he said.

Finnell said he did just that during a year of study in which Hasan made a presentation “that justified suicide bombing” and spewed “anti-American propaganda” as he argued the war on terror was “a war against Islam.” Finnell said he and at least one other student complained about Hasan, surprised that someone with “this type of vile ideology” would be allowed to wear an officer’s uniform.   But Finnell said no one filed a formal, written complaint about Hasan’s comments out of fear of appearing discriminatory.  “In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”

Hasan received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. And while he was an intern at the suburban Washington hospital, Hasan had some “difficulties” that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.

Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2008, the same year he graduated from the master’s program. Bernard Rostker, a military personnel expert at the Rand Corp., said Hasan’s advancement was all but certain absent a serious blemish on his record, such as a DUI or a drug charge. “We’re short of officers, particularly at the major and lieutenant colonel level because of the war, and we’re short of psychiatrists,” said Rostker, who served as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Clinton administration. “There would have had to be something very detrimental in his record before there would have been a banner that would have said, ‘No, we don’t want to promote him.’”

If senior military leaders knowingly kept quiet about Hasan’s incompatibility for service in order to meet personnel quotas, they’ve aided and abetted the murder of thirteen soldiers.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Congress passed a $680 billion appropriation? Well, don’t worry–the military will be getting still more money:

The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.

The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.

The military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not say how much additional money would be needed, but one figure in circulation within the Pentagon and among outside defense budget analysts is $50 billion.

Link via John Cole, who says:

Personally, I think it would be supremely irresponsible to act on this legislation without seeing the CBO score. I’m hoping Max Baucus and the blue dogs will get on that, because I’d like to know how this legislation will pay for itself. I suggest we put this off a few months to talk about the costs and how we are robbing future generations.

Oh, wait. This is for the military. Never mind.

That’s pretty much the Washington attitude.

(cross posted to Heretical Ideas)

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days.

Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.

Two separate reviews of The Fourth Star, a new book by David Cloud and Greg Jaffee, touch on a theme that has fascinated me since I wrote a dissertation on the subject.

NYT foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins (via SWJ):

“The Fourth Star” paints wonderfully dramatic portraits of the four senior officers highlighted here, but at its heart it’s a story about bureaucracy. As an institution, the United States Army has much more in common with, say, a giant corporation like General Motors than with a professional sports team like the New York Giants. You can’t cut players who don’t perform, and it’s hard to fire your head coach. Like General Motors, the Army changes very slowly, and once it does, it’s hard to turn it around again.

Actually, it’s arguably easier to “cut” bad soldiers than bad football players nowadays, since the latter often have huge signing bonuses and hold teams hostage in a salary cap era.  But, otherwise, Filkins is right.  While the military is relatively efficient, it’s not only a bureaucracy but the very thing bureaucracy was modeled after.  Which makes it amusing when conservatives simultaneously rant about the inefficiency of bureaucracy while extolling the virtues of military efficiency.  (The military, along with their brethren in the intelligence community and foreign service, does tend to be more motivated and obedient to orders from above than your average bureaucracy.)

New Kings of War blogger “Captain Hyphen.”

One of the most trenchant discussions of these wrong “lessons learned” post-Vietnam is General David Petraeus’ PhD dissertation, which the review of The Fourth Star mentions tangentially. While Petraeus might have “irritated many of his fellow officers on his way up,” he also identified an important bureaucratic reality, noting it in his dissertation: any serving officer who writes a PhD dissertation critical of the US Army as an institution and publishes it as a book will not rise to the ranks of the general officer corps. Petraeus, of course, heeded his own advice, as his dissertation remained safely tucked away in the Princeton library (until the age of scanning and posting to the Internet; h/t to Paula Broadwell for sharing the link). He was able to continue his upward trajectory, unlike such recent soldier-scholars as Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) John Nagl, whose Oxford DPhil became Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, arguably a self-inflicted career wound as an Army officer because of its coherent, incisive critique of the Army’s failures as a learning organization.

Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, however, is the exception that proves the rule, because it was only the patronage of General Petraeus that made him a general officer after twice being passed over for promotion from colonel to brigadier general. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty was the oft-cited, seldom-read mantra of senior officers in the last decade and appeared to be part of the hold-up for his advancement. Further compounding the delay, his successful counterinsurgency campaign as the commander of an armored cavalry regiment in Tall Afar made his conventionally-minded brigade commander peers look bad (or at least that’s one interpretation of how it was viewed within the Army).

How a bureaucracy without lateral entry promotes and selects its leaders is a vital issue with implications measured in decades, dollars, and lives. I look forward to reading how Cloud and Jaffe capture this dynamic in the US Army today.

One could argue McMaster exemplifies, rather than serving as an exception, to the rule. Generally, being passed over — let alone twice — for promotion pretty much indicates that you’re done.  Certainly as a prospective general officer.   Conversely — and I don’t claim to have any inside scoop here — Nagl certainly seemed to be an officer on a fast track who left the Army voluntarily to 1) so his family could settle down and 2) to take advantage of a flood of opportunities to apply his expertise in the think tank center.   It seemingly proved a wise choice, as he soon wound up as president of CNAS.

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran argues that the Defense Department ought to step up and pay for the increased traffic BRAC is about to bring to his district:

The latest round of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing) moves is poised to create a daytime nightmare of traffic congestion for Northern Virginia.

Over the next two years, the on-base population at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County will double, to more than 47,000 people. In a location difficult to reach by bus and impossible by rail, the addition of approximately 24,100 personnel is poised to grind the region’s already notorious traffic — consistently ranked second-worst in the nation — to a halt, adding hours of backups on Interstate 95 and Route 1.

This outcome could be avoided, or at least mitigated, if transportation upgrades were part and parcel of the BRAC relocations. Unfortunately, the Office of Economic Assistance, the Defense Department agency that is responsible for aiding communities affected by BRAC, can only help hire planners and consultants to perform studies identifying infrastructure needs, not fund the projects they identify. At Fort Belvoir, they have done neither.

The other way to meet federally imposed transportation needs is through the Defense Department’s Defense Access Road program. The program can and does pay for roads in communities affected by BRAC, but only if the projects meet very narrow criteria. One such requirement is that traffic on any given roadway must double because of specific federal activity, measured over 24 hours. But when the “roadways” in question are I-95 and Route 1, the principal north-south highways on the East Coast, this is an impossible qualification.

The Pentagon’s narrow application of Defense Access Road eligibility, however, is not what Congress intended. The program was created to provide a means for the military to pay its fair share of the cost of highway improvements related to the post-World War II buildup of domestic military installations.

Presumably, the point of the op-ed is to get recognition from his constituents for fighting this fight. As a practical matter, there are two U.S. Representatives directly interested in this issue (Full disclosure: I’m in the neighboring Congressional District and the Fort Belvoir/Rt. 1 corridor is quite literally the dividing line) and several other Representatives and United States Senators live in the area and are personally effected by this issue.  I’m actually befuddled that they haven’t stepped in before now, since the BRAC announcement on Fort Belvoir came out several years ago.

Moran’s argument is rather weak, however:

It’s common sense for the military to help pay for these improvements. For our men and women in uniform, and the civil servants and the contractors who assist them, time spent in traffic is time not spent providing for our country’s national security.

That’s not how it works. These people will have to put in as much time as it takes to do their job and then waste a lot of time sitting in traffic.  The more logical response to the traffic issue, frankly, is that Fort Belvoir should be closed and its activities moved to a larger base in a much less densely populated area.  It would be much cheaper for the taxpayer and provide an economic boom for some part of the country that almost surely needs it more than the National Capitol Region.

Since that appears not to be an option — indeed, the Powers That Be are doubling down on the base — then it seems perfectly reasonable to have the DoD pay a large part of the cost of transportation upgrades (perhaps extending the Yellow or Blue Metro lines to Belvoir, a Rt. 1 bypass, or the like rather than simply widening Rt. 1 as Moran suggests).   Then again, since I’d directly benefit from this (my house is less than 1/4 mile from Rt. 1 and less than 3 miles from Ft. Belvoir) my analysis is biased.

This xkcd comic is indeed “More Accurate.”

via Andrew Exum

Armed forces recruiting is at its highest levels in the all-volunteer era, Ann Scott Tyson reports for WaPo.

For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, as hundreds of thousands of young people have enlisted despite the near-certainty that they will go to war.

The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as bonuses and other factors, had led more qualified youths to enlist.

The military has not seen such across-the-board successes since the all-volunteer force was established in 1973, after Congress ended the draft following the Vietnam War. In recent years, the military has often fallen short of some of its recruiting targets. The Army, in particular, has struggled to fill its ranks, admitting more high school dropouts, overweight youths and even felons.

This opening is misleading, giving the impression that the Army has mostly struggled with recruiting over the last 36 years. It hasn’t. Recruiting naturally rises and falls in opposite cycles with the civilian economy and the combination of easy availability of jobs in the private sector and the near-certainty of deployment to an unpopular war made it difficult from roughly 2004 to 2008. The decline in casualties in Iraq combined with the economic slowdown has reversed that trend.

We’ve had numerous periods where recruiting has been pretty easy. So, if this is actually the first time we’ve reached all our goals across-the-board, it’s quite likely a technicality. Maybe we’ve previously fallen short a few people in one of 500 recruiting categories. Perhaps we’ve got fewer goal categories now. Or maybe our goals are in perfect harmony with the incentives for the first time ever. (I suspect we’ve not quite raised our high school graduation, weight, and drug standards to the levels they were during our most recent flush period.)

Regardless, the big takeaway is that all-volunteer has survived its first truly big test.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are considered by experts to be an unprecedented test of the volunteer military’s resilience. Its ability to bring fresh recruits into the force is critical not only to increasing the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps, but to ensuring that additional units are available to rotate into conflict zones. Some Army units sent overseas recently have been deployed at less than full strength.

As lengthy, multiple combat tours place U.S. forces under enormous stress, the willingness of young people to enlist has surprised even military leaders, experts said.

The military is suffering “strains that are tragic in personal lives, but institutionally the ground forces have held together and are not broken. They are even recovering a little bit as we speak,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Still, it is difficult to predict how much stress the volunteer military can take as it navigates uncharted waters, experts said. “There is no way to tell at what point the Army will break in the sense of mass desertion, or people unwilling to stay in, or not meeting recruiting quotas,” O’Hanlon said.

That’s because the idea that the Army personnel system will suffer calamity if pushed hard enough, long enough is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. The fact of the matter, though, is that we’ve managed to slog on through some pretty difficult periods for sustained periods without it happen.

It is indeed surprising. During the 1990s, I took it as a given that the Reserve and National Guard would not stand up to the heavy rotations they were suddenly being subjected to. After all, it was essentially free money for decades. Why, joining the National Guard was essentially a Get Out of Vietnam Free card. That has changed radically in recent years and, shockingly, the system stood up. Indeed, most studies I’ve seen show retention is actually higher in the units that got deployed to war than in those who stayed home.

Partly, of course, this is a function of the military — especially the Army — adjusting standards, bonuses, and the like according to the recruiting economy. Mostly, though, it’s because the Services, especially the Marines and Army, do a tremendous job of institutionalizing service. While people of course get tired of constant rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan and the strain that puts on their family, most nonetheless see it as important work and take considerable pride in having undertaken it.
ssss

Continuing the delayed reaction to news that is the permanent fate of columnists in an instant analysis world, both Tom Friedman and David Von Drehle have similar and counterintuitive ideas on who the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to, instead of a United States president with two weeks in office.

The former suggests Obama accept the award “on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps” for their contributions to fighting tyranny and providing humanitarian assistance over the last seven decades.

“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, to liberate Europe from the grip of Nazi fascism. I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers and sailors who fought on the high seas and forlorn islands in the Pacific to free East Asia from Japanese tyranny in the Second World War.

“I will accept this award on behalf of the American airmen who in June 1948 broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin with an airlift of food and fuel so that West Berliners could continue to live free. I will accept this award on behalf of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who protected Europe from Communist dictatorship throughout the 50 years of the cold war.

“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who stand guard today at outposts in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan to give that country, and particularly its women and girls, a chance to live a decent life free from the Taliban’s religious totalitarianism.

“I will accept this award on behalf of the American men and women who are still on patrol today in Iraq, helping to protect Baghdad’s fledgling government as it tries to organize the rarest of things in that country and that region — another free and fair election.

“I will accept this award on behalf of the thousands of American soldiers who today help protect a free and Democratic South Korea from an unfree and Communist North Korea.

“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American men and women soldiers who have gone on repeated humanitarian rescue missions after earthquakes and floods from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia. I will accept this award on behalf of American soldiers who serve in the peacekeeping force in the Sinai desert that has kept relations between Egypt and Israel stable ever since the Camp David treaty was signed.

“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American airmen and sailors today who keep the sea lanes open and free in the Pacific and Atlantic so world trade can flow unhindered between nations.

“Finally, I will accept this award on behalf of my grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived at Normandy six weeks after D-Day, and on behalf of my great-uncle, Charlie Payne, who was among those soldiers who liberated part of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald.

“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers.

The latter thinks even more outside-the-boxand suggests awarding the prize to nuclear weapons.

During the 31 years leading up to the first atomic bomb, the world without nuclear weapons engaged in two global wars resulting in the deaths of an estimated 78 million to 95 million people, uniformed and civilian. The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age.

[...]

Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high. A world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about. The industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell. The science and technology of nuclear weapons is widespread, and if nukes are outlawed someday, only outlaws will have nukes.

Obviously, these suggestions would not win much favor from the five random Norwegians who actually award the prize.  But either would be a more serious ode to peace than the actual awardee.

Michael Goldfarb wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard blog with the provocative title “Rent-a-General Jim Jones,” arguing that the man who spent four decades serving his country as an officer in the Marine Corps, rising to Commandant and then Supreme Allied Commander, is a partisan stooge for the Obama administration.

I’m vacationing in Ixtapa, Mexico this week and have been mostly ignoring the news since Friday afternoon. Via memeorandum, I see that the underground fight between General Stanley McChrystal and the Obama administration that I blogged on last week has kicked into high gear and that a new player has joined the fight: General David Petraeus.

Alex Spillious of The Telegraph reports under the headline “Barack Obama furious at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan” that,

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week. The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Gen James Jones, the national security adviser, yesterday did little to allay the impression the meeting had been awkward. Asked if the president had told the general to tone down his remarks, he told CBS: “I wasn’t there so I can’t answer that question. But it was an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. I am sure they exchanged direct views.”

An adviser to the administration said: “People aren’t sure whether McChrystal is being naïve or an upstart. To my mind he doesn’t seem ready for this Washington hard-ball and is just speaking his mind too plainly.”

[...]

Some commentators regarded the general’s London comments as verging on insubordination. Bruce Ackerman, an expert on constitutional law at Yale University, said in the Washington Post: “As commanding general, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.” He added that it was highly unusual for a senior military officer to “pressure the president in public to adopt his strategy”.

A piece by Scott Wilson in today’s WaPo continues that theme under the more benign headline “McChrystal Faulted On Troop Statements.”

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested Sunday that the public campaign being conducted by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan on behalf of his war strategy is complicating the internal White House review underway, saying that “it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

[...]

A U.S. military official said Sunday that Pentagon leaders were alerted that McChrystal was speaking in London and were not concerned by his remarks. “General McChrystal was simply speaking to the situation on the ground as he sees it and how he would execute the president’s current strategy — the mission he has been assigned,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter. “He was not pushing his views or in any way trying to influence policy.”

As I noted last week, I both think McChrystal has exactly that defense — he’s just defending his mission as it was outlined to him when he took the job a mere three months ago and yet went too far — intentionally putting his commander-in-chief in an awkward position knowing damned well that the policy is under serious rethinking within the administration.

This gets even more complicated, as Elisabeth Bumiller reports in a NYT story titled “Voice of Bush’s Pentagon Becomes Harder to Hear,” as Petraeus — the uber political general of this era — is a factor in this dispute.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the face of the Iraq troop surge and a favorite of former President George W. Bush, spoke up or was called upon by President Obama “several times” during the big Afghanistan strategy session in the Situation Room last week, one participant says, and will be back for two more meetings this week.

But the general’s closest associates say that underneath the surface of good relations, the celebrity commander faces a new reality in Mr. Obama’s White House: He is still at the table, but in a very different seat. No longer does the man who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have one of the biggest voices at National Security Council meetings, as he did when Mr. Bush gave him 20 minutes during hourlong weekly sessions to present his views in live video feeds from Baghdad. No longer is the general, with the Capitol Hill contacts and web of e-mail relationships throughout Washington’s journalism establishment, testifying in media explosions before Congress, as he did in September 2007, when he gave 34 interviews in three days.

The change has fueled speculation in Washington about whether General Petraeus might seek the presidency in 2012. His advisers say that it is absurd — but in immediate policy terms, it means there is one less visible advocate for the military in the administration’s debate over whether to send up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

[...]

How much General Petraeus’s muted voice will affect Mr. Obama’s decision on the war is unclear, but people close to him say that stifling himself in public could give him greater credibility to influence the debate from within. Others say that his biggest influence may simply be as part of a team of military advisers, including General McChrystal and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The men are united in what they see as the need to build up the American effort in Afghanistan, although General Petraeus, who works closely with General McChrystal, said last week that he had not yet endorsed General McChrystal’s request for more troops.

Back when an unpopular President Bush was hanging his defense on the war on the prestige of his top general in the theater, I warned of Petraeus Fetishism. While I continue to respect and admire the general, it violates every tenet of our system to have the generals making strategic policy decisions. The president and his team should make those calls — preferably with the input of the Joint Chiefs and appropriate theater commanders, who can advise them on logistics, timetables, and matters of feasibility — and the generals should then be left alone to run the tactical level operations within the broad parameters of the assigned political objectives. And that’s just as true in periods, like the current one, when the president is someone for whom I did not vote.

Speaking at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, Stanley McChrystal, the general in charge of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, said the Obama administration needs to make up its mind on quickly on a strategy — and rejected the idea of lowering the bar.

In my writeup for New Atlanticist, “McChrystal: Biden Afghanistan Plan ‘Short-Sighted,” I observe that,

This isn’t exactly Douglas MacArthur territory.  Obama has yet to outline a competing strategic vision and McChrystal is essentially just making a full-throated defense of the doctrine he was sent to carry out.  But it does put his commander-in-chief in a rather awkward position.

His approach is at stark contrast to that of Kip Ward, commander of United States Africa Command, who repeatedly deflected questions about strategic priorities in his Atlantic Council appearance earlier in the week.  Each time such a query was posed, he simply noted that he takes his orders from the president and the secretary of defense.

Somewhere in between these tacks strikes me as the proper mode for four-star commanders. They should work within the commander’s intent — which in McChrystal’s case means that of CENTCOM chief David Petraeus as well as the president and SECDEF  — but also use their professionaljudgment in how best to carry out their mission.  When it’s obvious that the president and his senior advisors are seriously considering a major policy change, however, it’s probably best for the generals to provide their inputs in private to avoid giving the appearance of undermining civilian control of policy.

But maybe that’s outdated thinking in the age of Petraeus?

Now here’s something you don’t see every day:  Mark Lippert, chief of staff of the National Security Council and a close friend of President Obama, has decided to leave the administration to return to active duty in the Navy.  George Stephanopoulos reports:

When Barack Obama came to the Senate, Mark Lippert — a veteran Senate aide and newly-minted Naval Reserve officer — was the first foreign policy adviser he hired. Now, Lippert — currently serving as Deputy National Security Adviser and Chief of Staff to the NSC — is becoming the first senior member of the President’s foreign policy team to leave the Administration.

Lippert had even more influence than his lofty, dual title would suggest, a product of his long service and determined work ethic. While it’s unusual for someone with his level of power and proximity to the President to leave the Administration so early (and there are some reports of clashes with NSA Jim Jones), Lippert associates say he is answering to a higher calling: returning to active military service as a Naval Intelligence Officer.

[...]

ALSO- a response from President Obama: “I will miss Mark and his counsel, his excellent work at the NSC, and his good cheer. At the same time, I was not surprised when he came and told me he had stepped forward for another mobilization, as Mark is passionate about the Navy. I support his decision. He is a close friend, and I admire and respect his devotion to our country and answering the call to active duty service. He will always have a senior foreign policy position in this White House, when he chooses to return to civilian life.”

Wikipedia has this short backgrounder:

Lippert grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Stanford where he received his degree in international relations. He started out as a policy advisor to Senator Patrick Leahy and a Vermont political organizer. He worked for five years in the Senate Appropriations Committee Foreign Operations Subcommittee. He also handled foreign policy and defense issues for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. In 2005, he both became a senior foreign-policy aide to Senator Obama and joined the Navy Reserve. From 2007 until the summer of 2008, he served about a year in what had been scheduled as a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Navy SEALs; as of 2008 he is a lieutenant junior grade.

And this from WhoRunsGov:

He thought about enrolling in Officer Candidate School, but instead earned a master’s in international relations from Stanford University before moving to Washington to become a Hill staffer. Lippert worked for Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) before moving to become an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). on the Foreign Operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations panel.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Lippert decided to take the plunge and join the Navy Reserves. He was commissioned in Jan. 2005, serving one weekend a month at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland, Md.

[...]

Lippert was called up to active duty in the fall of 2007 and went to Iraq as an intelligence officer in the Navy SEALs.

It’s remarkable for a senior policy official to leave for military service; it’s even more extraordinary that he’s doing to serve in such a junior position, especially given that he’s already done a combat tour.

Corrected opening sentence, as it implied that Lippert is a Navy SEAL rather than an officer who supported SEALs in his last deployment.  Nothing in Lippert’s bio leads me to believe he went to BUDS.  Most likely, as a Reserve Intelligence officer, he was assigned to a SEAL squadron headquarters.

UPDATE: Andrew Exum thinks this doesn’t make sense.

Couldn’t we have let Mark Lippert do his reserve duty in the White House? I know SEALs need good intelligence officers (insert your own joke about SEALs and intelligence in the comments), but is an intelligence officer for a SEAL team as strategically important as the “deputy national security adviser for operations and chief of staff of the National Security Council”? Am I the only one scratching my head here? C’mon, folks, have the dude throw on a uniform and sit back down at the same desk. If you want to, you can just ask Lippert to spend a little more time sleeping, eating and lifting. And he can talk in some outrageous surfer-dude accent if it will make the Navy happy.

I gather from the sketchy reports on this that Lippert volunteered. But, if he was instead called up, that’s the nature of Reserve duty.