Military Bureaucracy

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. ...

BRAC, Ft. Belvoir, and Northern Virginia Traffic

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 ...

Predator vs. Terminator

This xkcd comic is indeed "More Accurate." via Andrew Exum

Biden Right on AfPak

Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan.   The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas' Newsweek piece on "A Day in the Life of Joe Biden" (HTML title: "Joe Biden, ...

Military Recruiting Sets Records

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 ...

War and Peace Prizes

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 ...

Jim Jones, Republican Whipping Boy

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. A friend emails to point out that Jones is "finally ...

Obama vs. the Generals

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 ...

Fighting the Taliban by Lowering Taxes

Matthew Yglesias suggests that one thing that could aid the fight in Afghanistan would be to lower tariffs against Afghan goods and motivate our allies to do the same.If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly ...

McChrystal and MacArthur

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 ...

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 ...