Mark Lippert Leaves NSC for SEALs

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 ...

NATO’s Future

I've been busy at the Atlantic Council today covering two huge events. First, Senator Richard Lugar delivered a speech on the Future of NATO.  In addition to the usual niceties about the important of transatlantic cooperation, Lugar argued that we need "boots on the ground" in Eastern Europe to assuage their fears about Alliance commitment and that NATO should consider unconventional ...

C6ISR

Kevin Coleman ends an interesting post on the difficulties facing the new Cyber Command with the observation that: As everyone knows C4ISR stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. It appears the time has come to add collaboration and coordination to C4ISR and update it to C6ISR. If that happens, we must make every effort to streamline the ...

Obama Lowering Afghanistan Ambitions?

Obama administration officials are now admitting what has been apparent for weeks: that they are giving serious consideration to radically downsizing the Afghanistan mission.  Peter Baker and Elisabeth Bumiller break the story in this morning's NYT, noting that a combination of factors have President Obama strongly reconsidering the Biden Plan, which he rejected as recently as March, which calls for ...

The Neuroscience of “Enhanced Interrogation”

Wired reports that studies show that "enhanced interrogation", far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain:“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress ...

Does Foreign Policy Community Love War?

Glenn Greenwald revisits an old debate, arguing that "Our war-loving Foreign Policy Community hasn't gone anywhere." Building off of Marc Lynch's blog post yesterday pointing out that General McCrystal's strategic review calling for more troops in Afghanistan was written by "a dozen smart (mostly) think-tankers," Greenwald writes,"What would a group of people like that ever recommend other than continued and escalated ...

Debating Afghanistan

An interesting sidebar to the debate sparked by the leak of General McChrystal's Afghanistan strategy review is the question of how such debates should take place to begin with. Peter Feaver complains that the president has been rushed by leaks.  Pat Lang is irked by the fact that the likely leaker wore a military uniform, possibly even a general's stars. Meanwhile, ...

Poland and Czech Republic Don’t Feel “Abandoned”

Via Steven Taylor, we note that neither Poland nor the Czech Republic feel "abandoned" by Obama's decision to scrap missile defense replace an expensive, ineffective boondoggle "missile defense system" with a less expensive, mobile, effective land and sea-based SM-3 interceptor force. Here's the Polish Prime Minister: Tusk said that Obama's "proposal of an alternative strategy should not affect the security ...

Did Obama Break Promise on Missiles?

I've been critical of the optics of President Obama's decision to abandon missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic on the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland. But I disagree with Jim Geraghty's assertion that it also represents breaking a promise made in April. Here's what he said in Prague: So let me be clear: Iran's ...

NYT and the Farrell Rescue

[caption id="attachment_41922" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Corporal John Harrison (left) was killed in the SAS-led operation to rescue British journalist Stephen Farrell (right), which was launched after officials received intelligence that he was about to be moved into Pakistan's tribal areas"][/caption] Tunku Varadarajan argues the New York Times has a moral obligation for getting two people killed by sending Stephen Farrell into ...

Obama: Violating Habeas Corpus Okay When It’s Not At Gitmo

This must be some of that "change" that Obama is always talking about: a change of names, anyway. The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan’s Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there — a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility’s more noxious functions — to an end. What ...

Commemorating Anniversaries

Today, as you've doubtless realized, is the 8th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the thwarted attack on a destination we'll likely never know.  It is, for those of us too young to recall the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor, the most significant public event of our lifetimes.  We'll all remember "where ...

‘Free’ Medical Care for Military

Amongst the many stories circulating about the suddenly-famous Rep. Joe Wilson (who once used caffeine!) is that he's opposed to government provided health care for non-citizens in the United States in violation of our immigration laws* yet he and his son shamelessly take it just because they're in the National Guard!  Indeed, this is apparently their "dirty little secret." He's passionate! ...

An FBI Interrogator on the Effectiveness of Torture

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and an expert on al-Qaeda operations who has interrogated al-Qaeda members reviews the claims that the Bush Administration's torture techniques were effective and finds them wanting:The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the ...

NATO Can Survive Afghanistan Failure

In my latest for The National Interest, I argue that, despite the constant urging otherwise by former  Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO can survive failing in Afghanistan. [T]he fact of the matter is that NATO went to war in Afghanistan, invoking Article V’s declaration that an “attack against one” shall be “considered an attack against them all” in the ...