Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review Columns writted by Fred Edwards in 2008

Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review
Archive 2008

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Jan 04 2008 What motivates the enemy?

Jan 11 2008 Brother can you spare a dollar for a veteran? -- How about 30 cents for the vet and 70 for me?

Jan 18 2008 Afghanistan -- A new Operation Yo-Yo

Feb 01 2008 Crosshairs on Taiwan

Feb 15 2008 Taiwan update -- The inscrutable Chinese

Feb 22 2008 Satellite shoot-down -- The future is now

May 16 2008 Will it be Myanmar, or Burma?

Jun 06 2008 We owe a debt to the military family caregivers--It's time to heed the VA motto

Jun 13 2008 Why were the top two Air Force leaders fired? Nuclear mismanagement is only part of the story

Jun 20 2008 The firing of the top two Air Force leaders, Page 2

Jun 27 2008 Still more on the firing of the top two Air Force leaders

Jul 04 2008 Let's get Medicare out of limbo: Beneficiaries are counting on it

Jul 18 2008 Let's put the Air Force into perspective

Aug 01 2008 Iwo Jima flag-raising hero becomes an official American

Aug 15 2008 Putin wins a big one

Sep 05 2008 Russia throws down the gauntlet

Sep 12 2008 Russia and United States Posture and Parry

Sep 19 2008 Who's in charge here? The War Within highlights control of the military

Sep 26 2008 Retired Army general paints bleak future of U.S. space supremacy

Oct 03 2008 Afghanistan -- Back to the beginning

Oct 10 2008 Budget foretells continued aging, shrinking of America's airpower. We should pay heed to Billy Mitchell

Oct 24 2008 North Korea won't sponsor terrorism. Trust them

Oct 31 2008 Bush legacy: Speak strongly -- and carry big sticks

Nov 07 2008 A Veterans' Day salute to the new veterans

Nov 14 2008 Facts about Iran for the incoming president

Nov 28 2008 Top eight groups most deserving of a government bailout

Dec 05 2008 Attacks in India sharpen strategic focus of the Islamic jihadists

Dec 12 2008 The pirate plague

Dec 19 2008 Purging the pirates

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What motivates the enemy?

by Fred Edwards

Jan. 4, 2008 -- After discussions with the French Foreign Ministry, officials have cancelled the 7,000-mile,off-road Lisbon Dakar Rally of Jan. 5-20, due to "direct threats" of terrorism from al Qaeda. The concern sprang from the slaying of a family of French tourists on Christmas Eve in Mauritania, a country along the race route. That followed a similar attack on Dec. 28, when three Mauritanian soldiers stationed on the border with Algeria were killed. Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for killing the soldiers, but not the French family.

This latest al Qaeda threat invites a moment to review the enemy's motivation. Let's start with the long-term catalyst of those who have declared global jihad, a term used by Sarah E. Zabel in "The Military Strategy of Global Jihad." She explains that global jihadis share a worldview in which the Muslim world is suffering a prolonged, aggressive assault from the West, in what Abu-Mus'ab al-Suri refers to as three crusader campaigns.

Who is al-Suri? Zabel describes him as a global jihad strategist who served as a military instructor and lecturer in the Afghan-Arab training camps from 1987 to 1992, fought in several jihad campaigns, and held other positions in jihad organizations in Europe and the Middle East. He reportedly was captured in Pakistan in Nov. 2005.

Al-Suri proclaims that the first Crusader Campaign lasted from 1095 to 1291, a fact known to many Christians, Jews and Muslims. Then, his view of history takes a strange turn. He declares that the Second Crusader Campaign began with Napoleon's occupation of Egypt in 1798 and ended with the collapse of Arab nationalism in the 1970s. The Third Crusader Campaign commenced in 1990 and continues to the present time. In the third crusade, the United States leveraged the collapse of the Soviet Union to establish a new world order through which it dominates all aspects of the Muslim peoples' lives, which they find intolerable. All of this might be a mighty stretch of the imagination to you and me, but it represents a huge chunk of world history from the jihadist point of view.

Accordingly, the global jihadists plan to neutralize the superpower guardian of world order, claim land and peoples for Islamic emirates out of the resulting chaos, and bring these emirates together to create a true Islamic state. And the Lisbon Dakar Rally is just one more link in the chain.

Zabel documents that the jihadis have spent more than 40 years refining their philosophy, gaining experience, building their organization, and developing plans to reestablish the international caliphate. The 9/11 attacks set this plan in motion.

If we follow this line of reasoning, we would agree with some non-Muslim extremists who claim that the events of 9/11 were America's fault. Following their line, and that of al-Suri, apparently the United States should have simply capitulated to the Soviet Union early in the Cold War, and Americans would have lived happily ever after--or at least Muslims would have.

As Zabel writes, the global jihadist fervor has sparked the fires of Islamic extremist hatred against the West for more than 40 years. Such hatred won't go away in 2008. America has kept them from our shores since 9/11, so they have searched out easier targets, in Africa, Spain, France, England, the Philippines, and elsewhere. And their tactics have spread to international sports, most recently the Lisbon Dakar Rally. Top | Home

Brother can you spare a dollar for a veteran?

How about 30 cents for the vet and 70 for me?

by Fred Edwards

Jan. 11, 2008 -- Although direct mail advertising is expensive, it can return a decent profit for businesses. But do veterans' organizations have the right to deduct direct-mail costs from what donors might think they are contributing to service members wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan? Unless Congress puts a halt to it, it appears that they certainly do. Here's the background.

The issue surfaced just before Christmas when the American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP) issued a report card on 29 not-for-profit agencies collecting money for veterans and veterans causes. With little oversight by Congress, such charities can spend less than $1 in every $3 they collect for their stated purpose and face no disciplinary action. According to the AIP, 20 of the 29 failed to meet expected standards of efficiency or transparency

Eight veterans charities, including some of the nation's largest, funneled less than a third of the money raised to the causes they champion, far below the recommended standard, says AIP.

This column is not intended to be a finger-pointing episode, but merely to report the information provided by AIP and to advise potential donors to investigate any charitable organization before contributing.

Receiving A grades in the report were: Air Force Aid Society, Armed Services YMCA of the USA, Army Emergency Relief, Fisher House Foundation, Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, National Military Family Association, and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society.

Explaining the Fisher House Foundation's operations, spokesman Jim Weiskopf said his charity does not use direct-mail advertising or the fundraising expenses would jump "astronomically." Without direct mail costs, the organization provides more than 90 percent of its donations to its causes.

Charities listed with failing grades were: American Ex-Prisoners of War Service Foundation, American Veterans Coalition, American Veterans Relief Foundation, AMVETS National Service Foundation, Disabled Veterans Association, Freedom Alliance, Help Hospitalized Veterans/Coalition to Salute America's Heroes, Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation, National Veterans Services Fund, NCOA National Defense Foundation, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and VietNow National Headquarters.

Organizations not listed were graded between A and F, while some were not included in the report.

To explain an F grade, AIP president Daniel Borochoff cited Help Hospitalized Veterans. The organization, which provides therapeutic arts and crafts kits to hospitalized veterans, reported income of $71.3 million last year and spent about one-third of that money on charitable causes, according to Borochoff. In its tax filings, the organization reported paying more than $4 million in direct-mail costs and television advertisements.

According to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service, Roger Chapin, the president, received $426,434 in salary and benefits in the past fiscal year. His wife, Elizabeth, received $113,623 in salary and benefits as newsletter editor.

More than one of the lower graded charities took exception to the tone of the AIP report. For example, an AMVETS official wrote that, "according to AMVETS NSF's Federal Form 990 on file with the IRS, we returned more than 77 percent of our charitable donations directly to programs for veterans. The Form 990 is the established tool for rating charities used by the IRS, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the Better Business Bureau, and a number of charity watchdog groups including Independent Charities of America, of which AMVETS NSF is a recognized member in good standing."

Also, Richard H. Esau Jr., executive director of the Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation, said the cost of fundraising limits how much his group can spend on charitable causes. "Do you have any idea how much money it costs to advertise? It's unbelievable the amount of money it takes to advertise in the print and electronic media," he said. "I'm very proud of what we do, and we certainly do look after everybody. F or no F, the point is we do the right thing by veterans."

The question remains. When somebody asks you if you can spare a dollar for a veteran, how much of that dollar will actually reach the veteran and how much will be siphoned off to fundraising expenses? Congress is looking into it.

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Afghanistan -- A new Operation Yo-Yo

by Fred Edwards

Jan. 18, 2008 -- Just over 57 years ago in Oct. 1950, the First Marine Division was afloat, steaming back and forth in the Sea of Japan. The division had assaulted Inchon, in Korea, and participated in the seizure of Seoul. Then it had been ordered to disengage from the enemy, backload through Inchon, and conduct an amphibious assault on Oct. 20 against Wonsan, in North Korea. Enemy naval mines had complicated the issue, so the invasion force floundered around at sea an extra six days in what had become tagged "Operation Yo-Yo."

Now let's flash forward to 2007. In late November, Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, tossed out another yo-yo by saying that the Marines should take responsibility for Afghanistan and let the Army handle Iraq. His rationale was that the Army is more geared for nation-building than the Marines while Marines are more predisposed to combat operations of the type needed in Afghanistan.

Except for other Marines, Conway got few takers. For instance, why would the Air Force want a Marine air-ground task force taking over its turf in Afghanistan, and using Air Force assets in a supporting role. And why would the Army jump at the chance to stop sharing Iraq with the Marines. It already was stretched so thin that it was being assisted by thousands of Navy and Air Force augmentees on the ground.

The biggest disagreement came from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, and on Wed. Dec. 5, Gen. Conway told reporters that, "After discussion with the secretary and with my colleagues on the Joint Staff, there is a determination that right now the timing is not right to provide additional Marine forces to Afghanistan."

Suddenly the U.S. Central Command (CentCom) launched its own yo-yo. Secretary Gates had complained that too few countries were pulling their weight in NATO's International Assistance Security Force (IASF) in Afghanistan. Furthermore, planners were looking at the probability of another Taliban annual spring offensive in 2009 -- perhaps a decisive one -- and CentCom was the combatant command responsible to see that it didn't happen. So CentCom fired a request to Washington for a Marine combat force to assist IASF.

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. was alerted for a possible seven-month deployment, and on Dec. 15 the Defense Department issued the orders. In addition to the 2,200 Marines from the MEU, some 1,000 Marines from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment based at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif., also were set to deploy perhaps as early as Feb. 1, according to Marine Corps officials.

This deployment will send a signal to the countries that have been laggard in fully supporting the NATO mission. Whether it will shame them into action might be seen during the NATO defense minister summit scheduled for Feb. 7-8 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The U.S. Marines will be joining an ISAF of about 41,700 troops, including 14,000 from American units, that are aiding the Afghan army and police forces in security and stability operations. The Marines will bring with them 16 badly needed utility, transport and heavy lift helicopters. In addition to the NATO force, American-led Combined Joint Task Force 82 of 12,000 U.S. and 1,200 coalition troops also is committed to defeating anti-government extremists. This military strength puts NATO in position to defeat any Taliban offensive while continuing to beef up the Afghan security forces.

In the Operation Yo-Yo of 1950, by the time the First Marine Division landed at Wonsan, South Korean troops had already occupied the port with ground troops. The 2007-2008 version of "operation yo-yo" promises great success by putting the Marines where they are needed, when they are needed.

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Crosshairs on Taiwan

by Fred Edwards

Feb. 1, 2008 -- How did we get here?

When the civil war in China ended in 1949, two million refugees, predominately connected with the nationalists, fled to the island of Taiwan (also called Formosa). In Oct. 1949, Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, and in Dec., Chiang Kai-shek established a Kuomintang capital in Taipei, which became the Republic of China. At first, the U.S. government sent signals that a communist takeover of Taiwan would not be of vital concern, and in 1950 the PRC prepared an invasion fleet for that purpose. The invasion plans were abruptly cancelled after June 28, 1950, when the communist army from North Korea invaded South Korea, and the United States placed Taiwan under a naval umbrella, punctuated by U.S. Navy warships patrolling the PRC's doorstep in the strategic Taiwan Straight.

Where are we?

Thus tension was spawned which won't go away. The PRC (generally called "China" today) sees Taiwan as ultimate Chinese territory and its citizens as subjects of the PRC. Taiwan, on the other hand, has developed into a prosperous democracy during the last three generations, and most of its citizens have little or no interest in unification. Commerce and trade with mainland China might be important to them, but not so political change. The United States, for its part, is stuck between supporting Taiwan and not alienating the PRC. It adopted Taiwan in 1950, and has found that, when you adopt a baby, it tends to grow up and behave in its own way.

Where are we going?

Accordingly, President Chen Shui-bian has taunted the PRC by continually asserting Taiwan's sovereignty. His latest effort will be a nation-wide referendum in March, during the presidential election, on Taiwan's membership in the United Nations. Even if the referendum should pass -- which most analysts say is not likely -- it would have no practical impact because the U.N. and the Security Council would be expected to reject the idea. Nevertheless, observers view the referendum as provocative and downright dangerous.

The election results of Jan. 13 for Taiwan's legislature might appear to have quashed Chen's plans. After all, the opposition party -- the KMT -- won a super majority of more than two-thirds of the assembly's seats, thus crushing Chen's Democratic Progressive Party. But Chen has collected enough signatures to put the matter to a vote, and, after the DPP's losses in the legislative elections, he needs to generate a large turnout for the presidential election.

This idea infuriates the PRC, which is seeking hegemony in a large hunk of ocean that contains a chafe next to its eastern underbelly. According to U.S. Defense Department analysts, China has deployed 900 miss[les across from Taiwan, and is adding about 100 a year.

Taiwan, which historically has counted on defense weaponry for use against its goliath neighbor, is also upping the ante with offensive weapons. It already has successfully tested a Hsiungfeng 2E cruise missile that could carry a nearly 900-pound warhead more than 600 miles. Such a range would include Shanghai, the financial center of the country, as a target.

As a signal of American displeasure with Chen's actions, the United States held up the sale of 66 multirole F-16C/D Block 52 fighters to Taipei. Notwithstanding, it agreed in September to sell 12 surplus P-3C maritime patrol aircraft with T-56 turboprop engines, data terminals and a mobile operation command center. And it announced in mid-November that it would upgrade anti-missile batteries around Taiwan's capital of Taipei.

To continue this dangerous chess game, Beijing cancelled port calls in Hong Kong for the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, its five escort ships, two minesweepers and a scheduled Christmas port visit of a frigate. In a presumed retaliatory move, the United States sent the ships steaming through the Taiwan Straight. So here we are again -- or still -- just like in 1950.

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Taiwan update

The inscrutable Chinese

by Fred Edwards

Feb. 15, 2008 -- In my column of Feb. 2, (Crosshairs on Taiwan), I referred to the interplay between the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan as if the PRC were solely a military monolith whose actions are inscrutable. Consequently Edward Van Court, an international affairs researcher, reminded me that, based on foreign trade information from basic sources such as the CIA Factbook, Taiwan is essential to both U.S. and foreign trade. Consequently, the PRC's military option might lie somewhere down the list of Chinese priorities.

Noting that China is less than a century out of feudalism, he pointed out indications that the current situation is a hybrid of geographical and functional feudalism under the leadership of the Central Party in Beijing. This suggests a feudal melange among several ministries and agencies, with residual warlord tones. To carry Chinese inscrutability a step further, just overlay the PRC's Military Regions on an ethno-linguistic map of this disparately populated land mass. Now compare the bios of the leaders of the Central Military Commission and it becomes evident why the MRs are established "for centralized control and decentralized operation."

Now let's take another look at why an American aircraft carrier battle group and other U.S. warships resorted to steaming through the Taiwan Straight -- scarcely 100 miles wide at its narrowest--after China cancelled a planned holiday Navy warship visit to Hong Kong. Susan Shirk, a China expert at the University of California in San Diego, and a former State Department official dealing with East Asia, agrees that the cancellation probably signals dissatisfaction with U.S. actions concerning Taiwan.

But look how it played out. According to the White House, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi first told President Bush the port-visit reversals were due to a "misunderstanding." Then later, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said such reports were not true. So the Foreign Ministry might simply have been out of the loop. That seemed to be the case in January when -- without forewarning the United States -- the Chinese launched a missile that destroyed an aging weather satellite. The Chinese Foreign Ministry seemed unaware of that action.

So is the Chinese government conducting uncoordinated foreign policy, or is it sending signals, or is it just being inscrutable? A great deal depends upon the answer to these questions, because wars too often are started by mistake.

For example, although the circumstances were different in the early 20th century, just look at how the treaty dominos were set up during the summer of 1914. The Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian militant. Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia came to Serbia's aid and mobilized for war against Austria. Germany, Austria's ally, declared war on Russia. When France showed signs of supporting Russia, Germany declared war on France. Shortly thereafter Britain declared war on Germany. Now all of Europe was at war. In late 1914, Turkey joined Germany and Austria, spreading the conflagration to the Middle East. Then the United States sent their boys "over there." After millions of casualties on all sides, a new world order emerged.

Now transfer to 2008. According to Van, if the PRC uses the military option to bring Taiwan to heel, the infrastructure that makes it worth taking will be destroyed. Taiwan has become an economic power by virtue of its transportation infrastructure (ports), its manufacturing sector, and its information infrastructure. A rain of bombs, artillery shells, and missiles would devastate what makes Taiwan so valuable. Compounding this, in the event of a war, the brain drain out of Taiwan to the United States and other western democracies would reduce the quality of human capital of the island drastically. It seems doubtful that the Chinese would want to gain a "lost province" that offers no gain. So in the scheme of Chinese inscrutability, let's place trade before out-and-out military aggression. Top | Home

Satellite shoot-downs

The future is now

by Fred Edwards

Feb. 22, 2008 -- China used a ballistic missile on Jan. 11, 2007, to shoot down one of its aging weather satellites. It seemed that the Chinese Foreign Ministry was unaware of this. Or did Chinese officials want to keep their intentions hidden in case of failure?

U.S. officials, on the other hand, openly declared their intention to shoot down a disabled American satellite before it could re-enter the earth's atmosphere, and that's exactly what happened. On Feb. 20 of this year, a single SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis-class cruiser, hit the dead satellite at 10:26 p.m. Eastern Time. The missile struck the satellite about 150 miles above earth while it was traveling more than 17,000 miles per hour. Military officials said they had hoped to rupture the satellite's fuel tank to prevent 1,000 pounds of hazardous hydrazine from crashing to earth like a deadly bomb. Or did they want to prove to powers like China and Russia that the United States can destroy satellites -- or missiles -- at will?

Just how did we get here? Perhaps it began when a human being first grabbed a rock or a club to attack a fellow human. This launched humankind through multiple evolutions in warfare. Max Boot, in War Made New, cites four technologies that determined the course of warfare over the past 500 years: the Gunpowder Revolution, from 1500-1700; the first Industrial Revolution (from single-shot rifles to machine guns 1750-1900); the second Industrial Revolution, from biplanes to missiles (1900-1940); and the Information Revolution (from 1970 through today).

Colin S. Gray, however, proposes in Another Bloody Century, that, for the past two hundred years, "Revolutions in Military Affairs" produced the following ever-increasing lethal methods of warfare: mass participation by nations in arms (1792-1991); exploitation of the tools of the industrial revolution (1861-present); aerial warfare (1917-present); mechanization (1918-present); and development of nuclear weapons (1945-present).

With the nuclear capability came a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that, madly enough, assured the former Soviet Union that any nuclear attack would result in its own destruction. And on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan presented a speech in which he proposed the United States develop a system to "intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our own soil or that of our allies." Although critics dubbed Reagan's plan "Star Wars," hoping to discredit it, one can make the case that China rehearsed its Star Wars in Jan. 2007 and the United States held a dress rehearsal in Feb. 2008.

During the Cold War, some 1,000 nuclear missile silos had sprouted in America's heartland. They, along with American cities, were fixed targets. Today, think of a fleet of U.S. ships strategically located on the world's oceans, poised for offensive or defensive warfare in space.

Some critics may carp about planning for warfare in space. Well, no matter how Boot and Gray describe it, warfare has inexorably transitioned from a single rock thrown a few millenia ago through adaptation of every technological increase in power projection that has been produced by human ingenuity. And today, space is a strategic arena affecting the national interests of the United States. In military terms, space is critical terrain, and the power that controls critical terrain has the strategic advantage. Whether the U.S. shot down the disabled American satellite for aggressive display or for humanitarian reasons, or both, it brought us face to face with the future. And the future is now. Top | Home

Will it be Myanmar, or Burma?

by Fred Edwards

May 16, 2008 -- Since 1989 the military rulers in Burma have promoted Myanmar as the name for their state. No sitting legislature in Burma approved it, and the U.S. Government has not accepted it. Some of the U.S. national media, like the Washington Post, refer to the country as "Burma." Others, such as the New York Times, have accepted the name, "Myanmar." Myanmar? It's a derivative of the Burmese short-form name Myanmar Naingngandaw.

Old World War II Americans who flew "The Hump" to provide supplies from India over Burma into China in order to help defeat the Japanese, certainly know about Burma. So do those who built the 1,100-mile Burma Road and trucked supplies over it to China.

The country had a constitution in 1974, but it was suspended Sept. 18, 1988. On April 23, 1992, the chief of state became Sr. Gen. Than Shwe, whose title was Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council. In 2007, Lt. Gen. Thein Sein became prime minister. He and his fellow generals kept the country closed to the outside--until Cyclone Nargis hit on May 3. By May 12, the storm had claimed 32,000 lives, and left 30,000 missing. The United Nations expects the death toll to reach as high as 127,900. Some 1.6 to 2.5 million other victims urgently need aid, and only 270,000 have been reached. Just imagine that in a country smaller than Texas.

The question is whether a natural catastrophe and world opinion can turn the country's leaders around. The dictatorial government knows it will invite change if it opens its borders to humanitarian aid. Will it let its people die of thirst, starvation and disease or will it open up and take the chance of losing its power?

The United States, which has dealt with Burma at arms length because of its civil rights record, has turned its attitude around and offered aid. But the Burmese government leaders hemmed and hawed until Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pressed the junta on May 13 to accept international assistance. In an unusually strong statement for a U.N. leader, he expressed "deep concern and immense frustration" with "the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis." He added: "This is not about politics; it is about saving people's lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose."

The U.N. reports that the regime has blocked the distribution of most deliveries of international relief supplies to the most badly affected parts of the country. The United Nations World Food Program said that it needed to move 375 tons of food a day to keep up with the urgent needs, but that it was shipping less than 20 percent of that.

Finally, the generals allowed an unarmed U.S. Air Force C-130 loaded with tons of supplies to land at Yangon, Burma's main city. The first of many from several countries, it also carried Adm. Timothy J. Keating, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command. To emphasize the importance, Admiral Keating said it had been years, if not decades, since an American military officer of his rank had visited the country. He said a dozen medium- and heavy-lift military helicopters are standing by in Thailand to assist. He also said a three-ship naval task force with another dozen transport helicopters was on call 24 hours away.

As of May 14, outside sources were still offloading supplies at the airport and leaving them in the hands of government authorities. Police were still preventing "foreigners" from helping deliver them into the stricken areas, and reports surfaced that the army was circumventing them for their own use. Dictatorial military governments like that of "Myanmar" do not give up power easily. With the human tragedy of the cyclone victims in the balance, will the country remain Myanmar, or might it actually become Burma again?

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We owe a debt to military family caregivers

It's time to heed the VA motto

by Fred Edwards

June 6, 2008 -- During President Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, just over a month before the Civil War would end and he would be assassinated, he presciently established what would be the motto of today's Department of Veterans Affairs: "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan."

The U.S. government, through the VA, has come a long way toward fulfilling Lincoln's edict. But the agency can carry out its mission only with direction and funding from Congress. And somewhere between the VA's motto, Congress, and the Department of Defense lies a deficiency that needs correcting now.

Retired Navy Vice Adm. Norb Ryan Jr., the president of the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA), pinpointed this problem in the June 2008 issue of Military Officer magazine. He wrote: "I've had numerous experiences that have touched my emotions to the core, but not many like today." He explained that he had just visited a young Army NCO and his mother in the Washington, D.C., area. He had met them earlier at the VA's polytrauma center at James A. Haley VA Medical Center in Tampa, Fla., where the NCO was being treated for severe traumatic brain injury.

His mother had been her son's caregiver 24-7, and had received a small amount of per diem from the Army. When he was at the Tampa center, she benefited from some help provided by MOAA's Tampa Chapter's award-winning Operation Helping Hand (OHH). Volunteer officials at OHH operate with donations of everything that family members will need when they leave home to be with their severely injured wounded warriors at the Tampa center. According to the OHH Web site at http://www.moaatampa.com/operation_helping_hand.htm, they need such items as rental or leased cars; bus or taxi fare coupons; cell phones or phone cards; gasoline coupons; amusement park, movie, and dinner tickets; restaurant or food market gift certificates; and "any comfort or recreation items that will make (family members') stay here in Tampa more enjoyable, or checks for the purchase of needed items."

When the Army medically retired the NCO after two years, the per diem payments stopped. Furthermore, the VA does not provide such financial assistance. By the time Admiral Ryan saw this dedicated mother in Washington, she had been reduced to the following situation:

* She had left her job.

* She had spent her life savings.

* She had lost her home.

* On days that she had food, it was peanut butter and crackers.

* A charity had offered her a free rental car, but she couldn't buy gasoline.

The admiral said: "MOAA is pushing Congress, DoD, the VA, and anyone else who will listen to continue at least three years of active duty-level benefits to the wounded upon medical retirement and to authorize VA compensation for full-time family caregivers. We must recognize that severe, military-caused disabilities sometimes impose truly awful changes on the lives of wounded warriors' spouses, children, parents, and siblings who are forced into becoming full-time caregivers for months, years, and in some cases for life."

He added: "It's all too easy for leaders and citizens to slip into an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" mentality after the severely wounded transition from honors and headlines to the hard, long-term reality of this young NCO lying in his bed with his poverty-stricken family providing 24-7 care."

He concluded: "Our nation owes these families more than gratitude and sympathy. We owe them -- owe them -- immediate and substantive financial support.

Note his use of italics to emphasize that we owe them, that we must "care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan," and his other family members. Top | Home

Why were the top two Air Force leaders fired?

Nuclear mismanagement is only part of the story

by Fred Edwards

June 13, 2008 -- Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley were forced to resign after an inquiry found "a pattern of poor performance" in securing sensitive military components, said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Newsworthy events included allowing an aircraft to fly within the United States with six armed nuclear weapons, and accidentally shipping nuclear triggers to Taiwan. But that's only the surface of the story. Let's look deeper.

How lax was the Air Force? On June 6 the president of the Air Force Association, retired Air Force Lt. Gen Michael M. Dunn, wrote, " The Air Force has taken more than 100 steps to improve nuclear surety since last year. And � while we have not seen the investigative report that presumably led to the firing, according to every press release on the subject, it was the Defense Logistics Agency which released the ICBM parts to Taiwan - not the Air Force."

Of course we can take no chances with weapons that can destroy cities and regions. Listen to a retired senior Air Force officer who lived with nuclear weapons for 18 years, including 2,000 hours in B-52s, command of a Titan II ICBM launch crew, and other command positions in Titan II and Minuteman III ICBM wings: "When you are dealing with nuclear weapons and systems, you must be as strict as you can be." He agreed that in case of serious security lapses it's okay to fire the "top guys," but added that we also should fire the "wrench benders" (senior maintenance officers). When the problem first surfaced, a wing commander and a maintenance commander were fired, "but that's not enough," he asserted. "There's an institutional attitude which we must purge."

On the other hand, a retired Air Force major general with more than 30 years of service, who had broad experience with strategic planning, operations and intelligence, suggested that the overflight of the United States should be viewed in context. He recounted that the Air Force flew hundreds of missions with nuclear weapons over the United States before, during, and after the Cuban missile crisis, with no more real positive control than "the integrity and guts of SAC crews."

But a violation is a violation. Who besides the "wrench benders" should be fired? Should it be the Air Force chief of staff? General Dunn of the Air Force Association wrote on June 6 that Gen. Moseley has no subordinates in the Air Force for which he is responsible. Dunn stated, "General Moseley is not in the chain of command -- his principal role is to provide military advice to the President, Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council."

Then why did Gates fire his Air Force secretary and chief of staff? The retired major general previously quoted said it resulted from differences over procurement objectives and the overall security posture of the United States. "I believe that Dr. Gates cashiered (Wynne and Moseley), not because of admitted lapses in nuclear security, which they were correcting, but over differences in how hard to push for greater spending for national security," he said.

He explained that the United States needs more F-22's, C-17's and new tankers than the Department of Defense is willing to push Congress for. Meanwhile the Chinese Air Force is applauding the limitation on F-22 production, while it continues to increase its SU-30MK fleet.

"The real issue today is whether we should devote all our effort and resources to a nebulous terrorist threat, or should we have some concern about a growing Chinese capability, a resurgent Russian military, an unpredictable Iranian nuclear threat, and an irrational North Korea."

Aircraft facts provided:

* In 1972 the average age of an Air Force aircraft was about eight years. Today it is 25.

* The Air Force's number one procurement priority is a replacement tanker for the KC-135. The oldest KC-135 flying today was delivered in 1957.

* The oldest F-15 flying today was delivered in March of 1975 - more than 33 years ago. "Now they're falling out of the sky from fatigue."

Financial facts provided: The DoD budget request amounts to 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Compare this with:

* The Vietnam war -- 9 percent.

* The Reagan buildup -- 6 percent.

* The Korean War -- 14 percent.

* WWII -- almost 40 percent.

* The year prior to the start of WWII -- 1.7 percent.

Thus we are at the lowest percentage of GDP since Pearl Harbor.

General Dunn describes it this way:

* "Like Billy Mitchell, both Secretary Wynne and General Moseley have been outspoken in pointing out the Air Force needs to recapitalize and modernize the fleet."

* "Pilots are now flying aircraft their fathers and grandfathers flew. Airplanes are breaking in half in-flight. More airplanes have been grounded with age-related maintenance problems than ever before."

* "Secretary Gates has accused the Air Force (and all the Services) of planning for the next war, but that is what you have to do with air forces because you cannot produce the aircraft needed when you need them. History is replete with lessons of air forces that failed because they did not plan ahead. Like Billy Mitchell, America should heed the message of Secretary Wynne and General Moseley."

It appears that, when Defense Secretary Gates fired the "top guys," he fired the messengers.

Top | Home

The firing of the top two Air Force leaders, Page 2

by Fred Edwards

June 20, 2008 -- My last column (June 13, 2008) concluded that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley because of basic differences with them over how to recapitalize the Air Force, and not specifically over laxity in nuclear security. Here is Page 2 to the story.

First, thanks go to a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel from Florida who wrote me, stating that the six nuclear weapons that were flown across the United States were not armed.

"Excellent article, Fred, and I agree wholeheartedly, with one exception. The nukes onboard the B-52 were not armed and I doubt that the crew had the codes to arm them. There were nuclear warheads onboard, which, if dropped or jettisoned, would have yielded small amounts of nuclear radioactive material, but not a nuclear detonation. Having said that, it does not diminish the severity of the situation and the huge screw-ups that occurred."

He added that his general impression is that the Air Force, which has gotten away from placing crews on nuclear alert in aircraft, has become very lax in its treatment of nuclear weapons (with the possible exception of the missile field, which he said he knew nothing about; see next paragraph). Strategic Air Command (SAC) drilled every day with nuclear weapons and procedures, but when SAC was disbanded, the weapons went to Air Combat Command (ACC). And the emphasis in ACC has always been, ever since it was Tactical Air Command, on conventional missions rather than nuclear missions. He concluded: "I'd like to think that in the SAC that I knew and served for 13 years of my 20 year career, such a screw-up would not have occurred."

A retired Air Force colonel who had extensive experience in the missile field, explains it this way: "For all these years we have been fighting conventional wars, and we let the emphasis on nuclear war slip. We once had Tactical Air Command and Strategic Air Command. Then we found that we were using SAC to fight tactical wars, so we de-emphasized things we were doing in the nuclear (SAC) arena.

Meanwhile, Marcus Weisgerber of Inside the Air Force wrote on June 11 that Wynn and Moseley were thinking of creating a new command somewhat like SAC to establish centralized control over the Air Force's nuclear arsenal. This would directly address the problem Secretary Gates spoke of on June 9 when he told airmen at Langley Air Force Base, Va: "The Air Force does not have a clear dedicated authority responsible for the nuclear enterprise who sets and maintains consistent, rigorous standards of operation." Weisgerber said that, "Very few senior general officers were aware of the plan," and added that Gates told the airmen he has no plans to go back to a SAC-like structure.

To wrap up Page 2, I'll turn to George Friedman, founder of StratFor (www.stratfor.com). He wrote on June 11 that, when the firings were announced, some jumped to the conclusion that they stemmed from Wynn and Moseley being unwilling to go along with plans to bomb Iran, which Friedman called an "urban legend" that bounces around some of the media and through the blog circuit. Friedman pointed out the fallacy of this theory by writing that top Air Force leaders likely would welcome a chance to bomb Iran because that kind of a mission fits the Air Force's raison d'etra.

Putting it all together, my opinion given in the last column remains unchanged: the firings sprang from a deep schism over recapitalization between the Defense secretary and the two Air Force leaders. As the president of the Air Force Association, retired Air Force Lt. Gen Michael M. Dunn, explained, the issue was over whether the Air Force should concentrate on the ongoing war and type of warfare. Paradoxically, the services have often been accused of planning for the last war, while Secretary Gates has cashiered the top Air Force leaders for wanting to plan for the next war. Top | Home

Still more on the firings of the top two Air Force leaders

by Fred Edwards

June 27, 2008 -- A slew of Air Force officers have sent e-mails about the firing of the Air Force's top two leaders -- Air Force Secretary Michael Wynn and Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley. For example, a retired Air Force field-grade officer who was a B-52 pilot contacted me about a controversy little known outside of the Air Force and the Congress. He was concerned about whether it indicates the tip of a bigger iceberg than I discussed in the last two columns. I'll first recap the controversy, then will add more "iceberg" comments from other sources.

The situation surfaced with Air Force IG report 200600870H-24-FEB-2006-30LV-B2. My copy shows it was originally stamped "For Official Use Only," then released Jan. 30, 2008, with numerous names blacked out. The report found that in 2005 a contract (now defunct) had been awarded to a preferred vendor for Thunderbird Airshow Production Services (TAPS). Consequently, Secretary Wynne imposed administrative discipline on Maj. Gen. Stephen Goldfein and a group of undisclosed officers.

But that didn't satisfy several senators. In an article of April 28 titled "Rolling Thundervision," John A. Tirpak, executive editor of Air Force magazine, stated that on April 21, Senators Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., wrote Pentagon Inspector General Claude Kicklighter that his investigation into the TAPS contract "raises some serious questions about the role played by other more senior current and former Air Force officials." They asked him to "review the conduct of current and former senior Air Force officials" named in the IG's report, "not only as to criminal conduct, but also for ethical violations and failures of leadership."

And on April 24, according to Tirpak, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., wrote to Secretary Wynn, questioning why Moseley hadn't been punished: "it is incomprehensible to me that no action has been taken to reprimand General Moseley, or to evaluate his continued fitness to lead the Air Force." She added that "his command authority has been compromised."

The Air Force responded April 25, noting that Wynne himself had ordered the IG investigation, and, after reviewing the report, "directed a thorough review of contracting processes and institution of a robust training program targeted to correct issues raised by this investigation."

Nevertheless, the former B-52 pilot told me: "I think this situation played a key role in the dismissing of Secretary Wynne and Gen. Moseley. It received very little notice in the press but it indicated that, along with their more publicized problems, they didn't have good control over things."

Some of the "things" he referred to might have been under their control but some weren't. Another retired senior Air Force officer wrote me: "I agree with you that the recapitalization issue was a factor in the firings (see two previous columns) but I think that it was only one of the reasons." Others he listed:

* The nuclear weapons mis-steps are in the equation;

* Add the possible irregularities by general officers with the Thunderbird contracts;

* Include the low morale caused by Air Force personnel performing Army jobs and losing their proficiency in their primary jobs, thus reducing their promotion competitiveness;

* Mix in the uncertainty caused by numerous deployments and the decrease in the size of the Air Force;

* And add Moseley's introduction of an unnecessary and costly new battle uniform and another new dress uniform with vintage styling (fitted coat with Sam Brown leather belt) that young airmen can't relate to, at a time when our emphasis should be on the war.

He concluded that another factor is the speech that Gates made recently to the Air War College and Air Command and Staff College students in which he said that he's had trouble getting the Air Force senior leadership to get more UAVs to the battle front faster and sooner. "Once you say that publicly to mid-grade officers you almost have to do something to back up your comments."

If all of this isn't enough, on June 18 the Government Accountability Office sustained the Boeing Company's protest of the Department of the Air Force's award of a multi-billion dollar contract to Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation for KC-X aerial refueling tankers. This could set back the long-overdue new tanker fleet years. It makes one wonder just how big the iceberg is.

The new secretary of the Air Force and the new chief of staff have their work cut out for them in spades. Top | Home

Let's get Medicare out of limbo

Military beneficiaries are counting on it

by Fred Edwards

July 4, 2008 -- As Medicare goes, so goes military TRICARE because TRICARE payments to doctors are tied to Medicare. And the doctors are being yanked around for a second year with cuts to Medicare payments they will receive. The law slashed Medicare payments 10.6 percent July 1, and Congress failed to correct it before taking their Independence Day recess.

Oh, they tried. First, the House overwhelmingly passed H.R. 6331 and left town. With a vote of 355 to 59, the House could easily overturn a threatened presidential veto. Why a veto? Because, in order to "pay" for canceling the 10.6 percent cut, the bill would have cut payments to the insurance companies that administer Medicare Advantage. Those payments currently run an average of 13 percent more than regular Medicare payments. The president would have none of that.

With the House out, the Senate had no chance to hammer out a conference bill, so its only choice was to take up the House bill as written. It needed 60 votes to pass, but only could scrape up 59. Even if it had gotten 60, that number would not survive a veto.

On June 27, the Military Officers Association stated "They blew it. All of them. The President. Congress. House and Senate. Republicans and Democrats," and said they were "playing political chicken" with senior's care.

For a temporary fix, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said the pre-July 1 prices will continue until July 15. If the hiatus continues and the cuts begin, he plans to repay doctors retroactively. In addition, Department of Defense officials have announced that TRICARE will continue to process claims under the old rates at least through the end of the summer. Both agencies are assuming that Congress will fix the problem when it reconvenes.

If it doesn't, a significant percentage of doctors have stated they will no longer accept new Medicare patients. How long they would retain existing Medicare patients is uncertain, but they can't be expected to operate at a loss indefinitely. This is the second time Medicare cuts have been imposed -- although reinstated retroactively the first time, in 2006 -- if Congress does fix it this time, one wonders just how long doctors will put up with such yanking around until they decide that Medicare is not worth the hassle. This means that military TRICARE families as well as elderly American civilians would suffer.

As Medicare goes, so goes military TRICARE. We can do better for the troops and their families. Top | Home

Let's put the Air Force into perspective

by Fred Edwards

July 18, 2008 -- First, the media battered us with the problems that surfaced when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates forced Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley to resign (see my previous columns at http://www.milmat.net/archive2008.htm).

Next the press peppered us with more than we really wanted to know about the tanker selection process. Then came a piece by R. Jeffrey Smith in the July 18 Washington Post titled "Terrorism Funds May Let Brass Fly in Style." That article describes "comfort capsules" being installed in certain Air Force transport aircraft for use by senior general officers. One wonders if the media expects top leaders to operate from fold-down nylon jump seats alongside troops in the belly of a C-130.

Sometimes we forget that senior military leaders come to the table with two and three score years of hands-on experience and enough graduate-level schooling to qualify for tenure in many a university. So before we are tempted to believe that the Air Force is riddled with incompetent leadership, let's put all of this into perspective.

Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, president and CEO of the Air Force Association, laid it out in a note on July 11. He wrote that the other services have had their own bad press, and checked off, without identifying the service: "Tailhook, Haditha, the cancelled A-12 program, cancelled Comanche, Abu Ghraib, nuclear sub running into a mountain in the Pacific, sub surfacing under a Japanese yacht, rapes or torture in Iraq, rapes in Okinawa, sexual assault by the Command Sergeant Major, Pat Tillman, etc., etc."

Then he focused on five points of vital importance to the Air Force:

First, addressing the advanced age of the Air Force fleet, he reported that some airplanes "have literally broken in half in flight." He advised that, "Some airplanes today are being flown by the grandchildren of those who flew them over 50 years ago," and to keep the average age of such aircraft from going higher, the Air Force needs to buy about 150 aircraft per year. Yet for fiscal year 2009, the Defense Department requested only 93, and 52 of them were unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Doing the numbers, he concluded that, at the present rate, it would take 140 years to replace every airplane in today's fleet.

Second, he countered the accusation by Defense Secretary Gates that the Air Force was too busy planning for the next war to carry out its responsibilities for the present war. Again going to the numbers, he tabulated the Air Force's contribution to the troop surge: air sorties up 85 percent, air strikes up 400 percent, a 2,000 percent increase in ordnance dropped, and perhaps airpower counted for as much as 90 percent of the terrorists killed. And when it's time to bring the troops home from this war, who will do it? The United States Air Force. But who will stay behind? The United States Air Force -- to bring the Iraqi air force on line.

Third, Dunn rebutted the allegation that the Air Force was biased against UAVs by saying that the Air Force adopted and modified the Predator after the Army refused to field it. The Air Force then added anti-icing capability to it for service over Bosnia, and modified it to carry Hellfire missiles. He added "Every Chief of Staff in the last 10 years has sought increased numbers of UAVs - and it was the AF which fielded both the Global Hawk and the Reaper." He produced numbers to show that the Air Force has deployed more UAVs to the area of responsibility than the Army.

Fourth is the F-22 issue. Although it can be as complicated to an outsider as the tanker procurement situation, here are three of the points he made.

* All four of the Joint Chiefs of Staff non-concurred in a DoD position that short-changed the possibility of conventional wars, thus excluding a need for the F-22.

* Compared to costs of the F-35, the F-22 is a "bargain" because of its advanced capabilities and downstream production costs.

* The theater commander has requested the F-22, but Secretary Gates has refused the request, "reportedly for fear of scaring Iran, but more likely because the value of the F-22 would become very obvious."

Fifth, is the nuclear issue. Dunn admits that the overflight of the United States with six nuclear weapons was an Air Force responsibility, but adds that the Air Force took disciplinary measures. He says that the shipment of nuclear triggers to Taiwan -- although the report is still highly classified -- appears to be the responsibility of the Defense Logistics Agency.

I thank General Dunn for putting the Air Force into perspective. Because he is retired, I don't expect him to be fired for leveling with the American people.

In closing, we might consider paraphrasing one of Sun Tzu's maxims by replacing "the sovereign" with "the media" as follows: "He whose generals are able and not interfered with by the media will be victorious." Top | Home

Iwo Jima flag-raising hero becomes an official American

(Letter to the editor from a military widow in Florida: "Fred, just wanted you to know how moved I was by your article this week. It was very meaningful for me to read the account of Sgt. Strank and his accomplishments. Several "boys" from my hometown left school early to become Marines and had been in the Pacific. Two were killed there. I plan on getting a copy of Bradley's book "Flags of our Fathers." Thanks for all the great write ups you provide for us."}

by Fred Edwards

Aug. 1, 2008 -- On July 29, Marine Sgt. Michael Strank was posthumously awarded a certificate of U.S. citizenship. Jonathan Scharfen, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, presented the certificate to Mary Pero, 75, Strank's younger sister. The ceremony took place in front of the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, often called the Iwo Jima Memorial. Sculptor Felix de Weldon crafted it from the famous photograph snapped by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal Feb. 23, 1945. De Weldon's work reproduced Strank -- and the other five men who raised the flag -- so meticulously that you can see their sweat and smell their grime.

Strank, or Sergeant Mike, as his men called him, was the third from the left in the photo, and was barely visible. Two of the six men would live to walk off the island. A third man would be carried off with shrapnel wounds. The other three would be buried in the sands of Iwo. This reflects the same casualty rate of the invading forces. During the 36 days of fighting, the United States suffered almost 26,000 casualties, nearly 7,000 of them killed. Only one of every three who hit the beach left the island unscathed.

Until this year, the Marines listed Strank's birthplace as Pennsylvania. According to Scharfen, a Marine security guard at the American Embassy in the Slovak Republic was researching Strank's background and found no record that he was a U.S. citizen. So he filed an application for posthumous naturalization.

So who was Michael Strank? In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley fills in details from interviews of Strank's family, friends, and fellow Marines.

He was born Michal Strenk on the Marine Corps birthday, Nov. 10, 1919, in Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia. His father, Vasil, emigrated to the United States in 1920 and changed his name to Strank. Vasil worked in the Pennsylvania mines for three years, and saved enough money to bring his wife and 3-year-old son to America. In 1935, he became a naturalized American citizen, which made Mike a citizen, but Mike never received a certificate.

When Mike sailed for Iwo Jima, he was a 25-year-old sergeant and combat veteran of the Pavuvu and Bougainville island campaigns. He shunned the sergeants' mess and ate with his troops, who he called "his boys." His company commander had recommended him for platoon sergeant, but he refused, saying, "I promised my boys I'd be there for them."

Indeed he had promised. Often he would tell his squad, "Follow me, and I'll try to bring all of you back safely to your mothers."

Joe Rodriguez, a member of one of the three fire teams Mike led as squad leader said, "Everybody idolized Mike. He was a born leader, a natural leader, and a leader by example."

After Bougainville, Mike was exhausted from combat and couldn't shake a case of malaria, so he was sent home on leave to recover. He also couldn't shake the feeling that he had used up his share of survivability. One evening when he was out to say goodbye to friends Mike and Eva Slazich, he told them, "I doubt if I'll ever see you again. I don't think I'll be coming back."

He let slip his premonition to his family, and his father pleaded with him to seek a stateside assignment. Mike replied, "Dad, there's a war going on out there. Young boys are fighting that war. And Dad . . . they need my help." So he went to Iwo Jima with his boys.

Bradley describes the aftermath of the flag-raising as follows: Mike and a group of Marines had come under Japanese sniper fire, and he pulled them into an outcropping that was protected from all sides except the sea. He was drawing a diagram in the sand of the tactics they would use to break out when a shell "tore a hole in his chest and ripped out his heart."

Many accounts describe it simply as an artillery shell, and some describe it as an "enemy" shell. Bradley, on the other hand, states: "Almost certainly, the round had come from a U.S. destroyer offshore; it sliced through the only unprotected side of the outcropping. The Czech immigrant to America, born on the Marine Corps birthday, serving his third tour of duty for his adopted country, the sergeant who was a friend to his boys, was cut down by friendly fire."

No matter the source of the shell, Sergeant Mike died as a combat leader. He was a Marine's Marine. Now he's an official American. Semper Fidelis. Top | Home

Georgia -- Putin wins a big one

by Fred Edwards

(For letters to the editor about this column, scroll to the end.)

Aug. 15, 2008 -- In 1956, revolutionaries in Hungary revolted against their Soviet rulers and leader Imre Nagy appealed to the United Nations and the United States for protection. The United States and the other Western powers were involved in the Suez crisis and simply weren't prepared to risk nuclear war over a revolt in one of the Soviet Union's satellites, so they left the freedom-seeking Hungarians on their own. Soviet armored divisions crossed into Hungary and eliminated hopes of freedom for another generation.

In 1968, the Czechoslovakians launched a drive to lessen the yoke of Soviet Communism, which -- as in 1956 -- would have spread unrest to the other satellites. Known as the "Prague Spring of 1968," it turned into a frigid winter when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and shut down the movement.

The Soviet Union eventually imploded and Russia became a separate power, and not even a "superpower." Then, in August 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet satellite, Georgia, which had embraced democracy and the West. As the saying goes, "the more things change, the more they remain the same." Here's why:

* In each case, a dictator directed action against a nation committed to democratic rule.

* In each case, the dictator acted from geopolitical motives rather than pure ideological grounds.

* In each case, the dictator correctly calculated the inability, or unwillingness, of democratic governments to respond.

Ostensibly, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin began the Georgian invasion to aid separatists in the Republic of South Ossetia, a region in the South Caucasus that declared its independence from Georgia in the early 1990s. According to some estimates, in 2007 the population comprised 45,000 ethnic Ossetians and 17,500 ethnic Georgians. But, by the time Russia attacked, more than 70 percent of the South Ossetians who hadn't fled South Ossetia held Russian citizenship. How can this be? Because Russia had been issuing citizenship papers and passports to virtually all adult Ossetians willing to remain.

Russian warships also landed troops in Abkhazia, another separatist region, while armored columns, supported by air attacks, cut Georgia in half. Even after a cease-fire agreement between Russia and Georgia, a loophole in the agreement allowed Russian forces to take "security" actions as they saw fit, which they did.

So what does Putin Want?

* He intends to annex both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

* He wants the United States to stop training and equipping the Georgian army, 2,000 of which were serving in Iraq when he ordered the invasion.

* He expects to replace Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili with a puppet ruler in order to eliminate a Georgian government that is pro-West.

* He hopes to control the strategic BTC oil pipeline that bypasses Russia by running from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi, Georgia, to Ceyhan, a port on the southeastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey.

* He plans to show the world that, for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is a relevant power because it has accomplished a decisive military action.

* He is warning the other former Soviet satellites that seek democracy -- beginning with Ukraine -- that they had better not look to the West for support because they cannot count on "the world's only superpower" to protect them.

And where does the United States stand?

In the throes of a diplomatic debacle. During the early days of the war, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted that the United States would take no military action. This of course was what Putin was counting on when he invaded. On August 13, after the cease fire didn't bring a cease fire, the White House sent American troops to Georgia to oversee a "vigorous and ongoing" humanitarian mission. By then, Russian soldiers had moved into two strategic Georgian cities. Bush and Georgian officials called it a violation of the cease-fire, and Bush demanded that Russia withdraw its forces or risk losing its place in "the diplomatic, political, economic and security structures of the 21st century," whatever that means in diplomat-speak.

And what about Georgia?

Before the cease fire was signed, President Saakashvili wrote ". . . above all, it is a war over the kind of Europe our children will live in. Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe." After the cease fire was signed, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., presumptive Republican nominee for president, wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal:

"The Georgian people have suffered before, and they suffer today. We must help them through this tragedy, and they should know that the thoughts, prayers and support of the American people are with them. This small democracy, far away from our shores, is an inspiration to all those who cherish our deepest ideals. As I told President Saakashvili on the day the cease-fire was declared, today we are all Georgians. We mustn't forget it."

For now, Putin has won a big one.

Letters to the editor:

From RB -- Fred: Good summary of the Georgia debacle. Very incisive. I hope that Bush listens to his Secretary of Defense and maintains his patience. The last thing the United States needs at this time is another war!

From PD -- Fred: I find your latest publication interesting and accurate. I think there are a couple of things we have to face up to. One, Russia is a nuclear and military power with a leader who yearns for the good old days of KGB rule. Combine that with the traditional xenophobic Russian attitude and drawing the line with him is a real challenge. Second, Russia is the most important source of non-Islamic oil on the world market. While it would not be rational for the Russians to cut off supply and deprive themselves of currency to finance their adventures, dictators don't always act rationally. (If Saddam Hussein had permitted unimpeded access to UN inspectors he would still be alive and in charge of Iraq). The United States must not lead countries like Georgia and the Ukraine to think we will go to war for them. We cannot. We need to exploit our own oil resources until alternative energy becomes a reality and not just a politician's dream. Top | Home

Russia throws down the gauntlet

by Fred Edwards

Sept. 5, 2008 -- Speaking on Russian television from the Black Sea resort of Sochi Aug. 31, Russian president Dmitri A. Medvedev proclaimed five strategic operating principles for Americans to evaluate. First, Russia observes international law. Second, it rejects U.S. dominance of world affairs in what he calls a "unipolar" world. Next, it seeks friendly relations with other nations. Fourth, it will defend Russian citizens and business interests abroad. And fifth, it claims its own sphere of influence in the world.

The idea of obeying international law would be commendable if Russia hadn't just invaded Georgia in August and asserted it intended to annex the Georgian separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Its cloak for the Georgian operation was to prevent "genocide" in the two regions. This shifted any blame of international law violation to the Georgian government. Such Russian doublespeak continued with its insistence that it seeks friendly relations with other nations. Such Russian platitudes reminds one of the constitution of the former Soviet Union. To a reader who didn't know about Soviet terror against its citizens, it might look just like the American Constitution wrapped in extra flowers of freedom.

The old Soviet Constitution guaranteed the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the right to religious belief and worship. In addition, the constitution provided for freedom of artistic work, protection of the family, inviolability of the person and home, and the right to privacy. The document also granted the rights to work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education, and cultural benefits. Of course it was all a sham. And it sprang from the same source as President Medvedev's speech -- a Russian dictatorship.

Americans might accept Russia's right to defend its citizens and business interests if the Russian policy wasn't coupled with a direct threat against American dominance on the world scene, and a statement by President Medvedev that Russia reserves the right of privileged interests in nations within its sphere of influence, which it does not restrict to border states.

Russia's actions and Medvedev's ultimatum are eerily reminiscent of the German re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. This was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany agreed to keep troops out of the Rhineland. The United States, Britain, and France did nothing about the occupation, and subsequently Germany overran Austria and Czechoslovakia. As the juggernaut continued, Germany and Russia sliced up Poland in 1939, and World War II began.

Considering the gauntlet that Medvedev threw down August 31, a look at twenty-first century maps shows Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, some of the Central Asian states, and even Poland at risk. The best that can be said is that the West was warned.

On Sept. 1, the leaders of the 27 European Union nations ended a three-hour special summit, and declared that relations with Moscow are "at a crossroads" because of the Russia's invasion of Georgia. Despite pressure from Poland and other former Soviet bloc nations, the statement made no mention of diplomatic or economic sanctions against Russia. NATO also has dithered from the beginning. And the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left America's armed forces too extended to move combat troops into Georgia. Because the United States and the world bodies are speaking in whimpers, the past is peeking over our shoulders and breathing heavily into our ears. It is reminding us of 1938 when UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced "peace for our time," while Adolph Hitler was carrying out his own strategic operating principles he had outlined in Mein Kampf. Top | Home

Russia and United States posture and parry

by Fred Edwards

Sept. 12, 2008 -- In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia last month, Russia and the United States have postured and name-called like two children daring each other to knock a block off each other's shoulder. Unfortunately, they are not children, and such international grandstanding is not child's play.

Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev began on September 2 by declaring that Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, no longer exists, calling him a "political corpse." He then jumped into American politics by speculating that the United States had instigated the war in Georgia to benefit one of the candidates in the presidential election, almost certainly a reference to Senator John McCain.

Turning from Georgian and American politics, he lashed out at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), asserting that Russia was not the one "broadening the borders of military presence, it's NATO." He added that they "are not the ones creating new bases, it's NATO." He capped it off by asserting that they "are not deploying the missile defense system, it's NATO."

The following day, U.S. President George Bush proposed $1 billion in humanitarian and economic assistance to help rebuild Georgia. The amount would dwarf the $63 million the United States provided to Georgia last year. Except for Iraq, the funds would make Georgia one of the largest recipients of American foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. The United States has not said whether any of this money would help rebuild the crushed Georgian armed forces.

As an exclamation point to Bush's announcement, the flagship of the U.S. Navy's Mediterranean fleet anchored outside a key Georgian port September 5, carrying tons of humanitarian aid. The USS Mount Whitney was the first Navy ship to call at Poti since the Russian invasion. During the war, Russian warplanes bombed Poti and sank eight Georgian naval vessels in the harbor, and hundreds of Russian soldiers were still camped just six kilometers from the port. The Mount Whitney unloaded its aid supplies at Poti's commercial port, located adjacent to Poti's badly damaged naval base. A U.S. military spokesman vowed that the Russians would not be allowed to inspect the cargo, even though Russian officials claimed that it included military aid.

After the arrival of the Mount Whitney, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on September 6 denounced the Russian invasion as evidence of a pattern of "troublesome and unhelpful actions" that threatened peace from Central Asia to the Middle East to Europe. Cheney, who was visiting Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine to express American support, called the war a new test for NATO that required a unified response. He said that Russia's actions "cast grave doubt" on Russia's international intentions.

In response, the Russian president defiantly dismissed the criticism and mocked the inability of the international community to pressure Russia. He insisted that Russia was a state to be reckoned with, and that his country would not accept political pressure. He repeated that the United States could do nothing about Russia's intentions for Georgia and its neighbors.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, responding to the reactivation of the U.S. 4th Fleet committed to Latin American waters, said September 7 that Venezuela could engage in naval exercises with Russian ships in the Caribbean before the end of the year. His announcement followed reports that four warships from Russia's Pacific Fleet could take part in a training exercise in November off Venezuela's coast. "Go ahead and squeal, Yanquis," mocked the Venezuelan president.

The Russians are not posturing in the Caribbean just to be big brothers to the Venezuelan regime. They have expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the presence of NATO and American ships in the Black Sea. After the Mount Whitney completed its delivery of humanitarian aid to Georgia at Poti, the Russian president complained that the United States was encroaching on Russia's sphere of influence. So he is proclaiming that if the United States is going to sail in their waters, Russia will sail in ours. Top | Home

Who's in charge here?

The War Within highlights control of the military

by Fred Edwards

Sept. 19, 2008 -- If we accept Bob Woodward's' latest book, The War Within, as factual -- and there's no reason we shouldn't since it sprang from interviews he made with more than 150 top-level sources, including nearly three hours with President Bush -- then we need to carefully evaluate who is running the war in Iraq and why.

First, here are the facts as reported:

* In September 2006, the Joint Chiefs of Staff convened a team of colonels to recommend options for reversing the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The group recommended commencement of a withdrawal and turning the country over to the Iraqi government. On the other hand, on November 20, the Joint Chiefs learned that the White House was considering a surge of five additional brigades.

* The top U.S. general in Baghdad, George W. Casey Jr., insisted on the withdrawal, and was supported by his boss at Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid.

* Nevertheless, on Jan. 10, 2007, the president announced the surge. In February, Casey was replaced by Gen. David H. Petraeus, and was moved up to become Army chief of staff. In March Abizaid retired and was replaced by Adm. William J. Fallon. The president was changing the policy on prosecution of the war.

* By late summer of 2007, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane was visiting Iraq and providing advice to the president, via the vice president. Keane went to the White House Sept. 13, 2007, to tell Vice President Cheney that the Joint Chiefs and Fallon, Petraeus's boss at Central Command, were sandbagging Petraeus' requests for assets in Iraq. The president got the report directly.

* The Joint Chiefs blocked further visits by Keane to Iraq, asserting that he was not accountable for his recommendations, while they were. In response, both the president and the vice president sent messages to the chiefs, directing them to allow Keane to travel to Iraq.

* Bush had Keane deliver a personal message to Petraeus, expressing his full support. In March 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates approved Fallon's request to retire.

* By recent accounts, the surge -- coupled with Petraeus's new strategy of making the streets safe for Iraqis, along with covert actions to neutralize insurgent leaders -- had worked.

Here we have honorable men operating at cross-purposes. The Joint Chiefs took their stance for two reasons. First, they argued that five additional brigades actually would mean 15 -- five going, five returning, and five getting ready. This would deplete any strategic reserve for trouble spots like North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Since then, let's add Russia to the list because the Medvedev/Putin team quickly diagnosed the American military illness and expedited a move to establish Russian hegemony in Georgia. Second, the chiefs conjectured that a 15-brigade increase would "break" the Army, forcing the United States to return to the draft.

The president, on the other hand, judged the idea of a drawdown as counterproductive to America's political and strategic interests. In emphasis, during a videoconference he told Casey, "George, we're not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we all understand this." Then, when preparing his message to Petraeus, he told Keane, the messenger, "I don't want my commander to think that they're dealing with a president who's so overly concerned about the latest Gallup poll or politics that he is worried about making a decision or recommendation that will make me feel uncomfortable."

So who's in charge here?

Article Two, Section Two, of the Constitution names the president commander in chief. Under the law, the Joint Chiefs operate and maintain the armed forces and provide advice to the secretary of defense and the president, but they are subject to the strategic command authority of the president. This places the president in charge.

This is not the first time a president has overridden his advisors. During the Civil War, for example, President Lincoln could not get George B. McClellan, general-in-chief of the Union Army, to conduct offensive operations, because McClellan asserted that he was outnumbered. Most historians agree that McClellan, a military engineer, was paranoid about this, and insisted upon digging defensive positions instead of attacking. Lincoln was quoted as saying, finally, "If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time." Eventually, Lincoln bypassed his Department of War and replaced McClellan with Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside.

Military historian and theorist Carl von Clausewitz perhaps was referring to episodes like Bush's surge when he wrote that people who complain about harmful political influence should understand that "their quarrel should be with the policy itself," because war is an instrument of policy. This is the case with the surge, for it created a change in presidential policy.

A president who rejects the advice of his top military leaders runs a great risk when he plays his last card, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Bush about the surge. Perhaps the ultimate outcome in Iraq for the short term -- and the other trouble spots for the long term -- will determine Bush's place in history.

Top | Home

Retired Army general paints bleak picture of future U.S. space supremacy

by Fred Edwards

Sept. 26, 2008 -- Fifty-one years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union surprised the West by launching Sputnik I into orbit. This created a frightening scenario where the Cold-War adversary had placed a surreal piece of hardware into orbit overhead, perhaps looking right into our backyards. It propelled the United States into a crash mission to overtake the Soviet Union in space technology, which it did.

Since 1957, space systems have become critically important to the United States. For example, our service members in Iraq and Afghanistan capitalize upon space technology for everything from locating themselves to killing the enemy. Furthermore, the United States routinely counts on satellites to monitor threats, provide advance warning of missile attacks, and confirm treaty compliance. But the frenetic buildup of American space superiority that began with Sputnik is peaking out. How much longer can we use space for our own private, national interests? The time is short.

In a September report of his visit to the Air Force Space Command, retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey laid out a future of U.S. space capabilities that was even more frightening than Sputnik. Unless American legislators and decision makers revamp their attitude toward the international race for space, and take a fresh look at the current $10 billion Air Force space budget, the future of U.S. space supremacy is bleak. Unfortunately, as McCaffrey, adjunct professor of international affairs for the U.S. Military Academy, noted, space tools such as satellites, UAVs, cyber warfare, and sensors lack the immediacy, visibility and pure military glamour of high-performance aircraft zooming overhead or flashing across the TV screen.

The financial situation clouds when we think of a $700-billion bailout that Congress is debating as a result of the ongoing financial crisis. On the one hand, after doling out $700 billion or so, doubling the space budget is peanuts. On the other hand, some might want to slash space and defense spending to help pay the financial bill.

In the meantime other nations as well as commercial organizations are moving into space. The list to date includes Russia, China, India, Japan, the European Union, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Satellites are now being launched from at least 12 foreign launch sites. Furthermore, Russia, the United States and China have all demonstrated that they can kill satellites. To complicate matters, the technology has become cheaper and the space products smaller.

Not long ago, the United States prided itself on being able to "see" enemy concentrations in unclouded skies in the daytime. Today foreign commercial satellites can image day and night through any weather condition, with a ground resolution of three feet. They truly can look right into our backyards. Just Google around to find imagery of your own home, and think about what American special operations forces must do to launch a clandestine mission from a house or vessel of the same dimensions without being seen.

What possibilities does McCaffrey see for the future?

* As a flashback of the Sputnik revolution of 1957, Russia will become the international leader in military space capabilities.

* The European Union will develop a commercial satellite capability that will rival that of the United States.

* Criminal organizations and terrorist groups will acquire from third parties the capabilities to destroy, deny and neutralize U.S. space systems.

* More countries will gain the capability to threaten American orbiting systems.

* The United States will be hard-pressed to conduct covert military operations without them being seen from space.

* Unless the United States invests in defensive technology, terrorists and other organizations will be able to conduct electronic attacks against American satellites.

* Terrorists and others could attack U.S. ground satellite controls.

* There is a combined opportunity and threat when international commercial, civil, military and government organizations cannot operate without global satellite communications and GPS systems.

McCaffrey gives the next administration no more than a year to analyze strategic and financial space decisions before U.S. global superiority becomes a thing of the past. Senators McCain and Obama, please take notice. Top | Home

Afghanistan

Back to the beginning

by Fred Edwards

Oct. 3, 2008 -- In a July report to the U.S. Military Academy (USMA), retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey made a bleak assessment of Afghanistan. First, he noted that "Afghanistan is in misery," with citizens who have a life expectancy of 44 years, 68 percent of whom have never known peace. They have suffered a 34 percent increase in violence so far this year, while battle casualty counts for U.S. troops have surged beyond those in Iraq. In addition, the following facts are predicted to worsen in the next 24 months: 2.8 million refugees, unemployment at 40 percent, poverty at 41 percent, acute food shortages, inflation at 12 percent, an illicit $4-billion opium and heroin industry, and mostly corrupt governments at province and district level.

McCaffrey, adjunct professor of international affairs at USMA, added that the Afghanis reject the Taliban but have no faith that their government will protect them or provide basic services. Although they trust U.S. military forces, they have less confidence in America's NATO allies. The employable NATO forces, however, and the Afghan National Army are undefeatable in battle. Consequently, the Taliban will commit more terrorism against the people and the Afghan National Police. This means that military force must be strongly augmented by economic and political support from the United States and other nations. And the time is now because 2009 promises to be a year of decision.

To complicate matters, effective coordination of political and military organizations in the theater is nonexistent. No single military headquarters exists in practicality. NATO military forces are fragmented because different countries interpose different operational restrictions. An accepted combined NATO-Afghan military headquarters has not been formed. U.S. forces report to varying headquarters. In addition, no body exists to coordinate Afghanistan's government with the many agencies of the United Nations, NATO, the 26 allied nations operating within Afghanistan, and the hundreds of non-governmental organizations and private contractors.

How did we get here?

The attacks of 9/11 sprang, in part, from al Qaeda's leadership and its training camps in Afghanistan, so President George W. Bush determined to destroy or neutralize al Qaeda before it could strike again. Timeliness and lack of staging areas precluded an invasion, so the United States cobbled together several hundred special operations troops and CIA personnel, along with tremendous air power, and millions of dollars, to enlist the support of various insurgent troops. The initial goal was to unseat the ruling Taliban in order to ferret out the al Qaeda that operated under their wings. Within two months, the Taliban had left the cities, dispersed, and planned to hold enough of the countryside to maintain their political influence. It appears, however, that the command cell of al Qaeda escaped and slipped across the border into Pakistan. So the United States and NATO maintained a presence in Afghanistan to prevent al Qaeda from returning. In response, the enemy has become more than just al Qaeda or Taliban. The new U.S. commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General David McKiernan, calls it a "nexus of insurgency," while other officers describe it as a syndicate of insurgents and criminal groups.

Where are we going?

Helmand Province produces half of Afghanistan's illegal opium poppy crop. To combat this, Gulab Mangal, the governor, plans to halt the problem before the poppies are planted, grow, and have to be eradicated. The simple-sounding solution is to give the farmers a food crop to cultivate. They might be influenced to make the change, but the governor's task is formidable. He has to get the seeds, and he also has to find funding to build new roads to get the legal crops to market. And he must strictly enforce the laws against poppy growing. Most important, he must eliminate the official corruption that has energized the drug trade. The plan has succeeded in more peaceful parts of the country, but five districts of 13 in Helmand Province are controlled by insurgents, and three more have a minimal government presence.

Unlike the war in Iraq, the majority of U.S. military and civilian officials -- and even much of the mainstream media -- see the struggle in Afghanistan as a must-win situation. One assessment, for example, proposes a military campaign plan of five to 10 years. Gen. McKiernan has said that he needs three more combat brigades, in addition to an extra brigade already promised for early next year. As mentioned above, a powerful force being built is the Afghan army, which is scheduled to double from 66,000 to 134,000 in the next three years. Growing the army will require up to 2,300 more American trainers.

Also as mentioned above, McKiernan calls for additional military forces, but in addition he wants to build governance, develop the economic infrastructure, and increase coordination at all levels, including closer liaison with neighboring Pakistan.

General Dan K. McNeil, the outgoing ISAF commander, said counterinsurgency doctrine would require 400,000 troops to pacify the country. With 32,000 American service members, 47,000 other coalition troops and trainers, and 66,000 Afghani army soldiers, his successor, McKiernan, is short some 255,000 troops.

Perhaps technology can reduce the need for so many troops. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has proposed to spend an extra $1.3-billion on ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) to precisely target enemy leadership. Gates wants increased employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and inexpensive manned aircraft to watch the roads and passes to spot insurgents before they strike. Other ISR sensors can spot enemy infiltrators coming across Afghanistan's borders so that special operations teams can kill or capture them.

Although some of the media say that the Air Force is sand-bagging over increasing the number of UAVs, daily Predator patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past year have more than doubled, from 12 to 28, and are scheduled to rise to 55 by the end of 2009.

Moreover, retired Air Force Major General Earl C. Peck told me that the criticism is unfounded. He said: "The Air Force has been deploying UAVs as fast as the required supporting cast and structure will permit. The controllers must have aviation skills and a thorough knowledge of air traffic control procedures. You can't just fly those things without coordination with all the other air vehicles competing for the same air space. The budget is also a factor but I am told that thus far it has not been inhibiting." He added that General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which produces the Predator and the Reaper is not keeping up with the workload for its contracts.

Meanwhile, McCaffrey says that the use of UAVs, along with U.S. air power, has "narrowly prevented the Taliban from massing and achieving local tactical victories over isolated and outnumbered [friendly] forces in the east and south {of Afghanistan]."

It is obvious that the war in Afghanistan, which the Marine Corps commandant calls a "battle" in the long war against Islamic extremism, is going to last a long, long time. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September: "I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan," but added, "I am convinced we can." Top | Home

Budget foretells continued aging, shrinking of America's airpower

We should pay heed to Billy Mitchell

by Fred Edwards

Oct. 10, 2008 -- Billy Mitchell, often called "The Father of the Air Force," proved in 1924 that an aerial machine could sink a battleship when his crews sent the "unsinkable" German prize-of-war Ostfriesland to the bottom. In Mitchell's vision for a nationwide air force, he wrote that there is no lead time for procurement of military aircraft: "The country that is ready with its air force and jumps on its opponent at once will bring about a speedy and lasting victory." He warned that "Once an air force has been destroyed, it is almost impossible to build it up after hostilities commence." Mitchell, whose farsightedness prepared the United States for victory at the Battle of Midway, should be heeded today.

So fast forward and listen to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn's October 2008 update of Mitchell's warning. According to the Air Force procurement budget for this year and the coming five years, the Air Force would buy 750 aircraft, or 125 per year. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, says that such a rate would take 46 years to replace every airplane in the inventory. This would raise the average age of the planes in the Air Force fleet to 46 years.

But if you consider that 270 of the 750 platforms would be unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the remainder would total about 80 new piloted aircraft per year, and their replacement rate would spike to 72 years. Dunn concedes that perhaps not every airplane must be replaced, and says that, if the force replaces only about two-thirds of its fleet, it will still take 50 years.

Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in order just to maintain the fleet's average age, the service would need to acquire some 160 aircraft per year. This would be about 50 more than it is buying now. And to reduce the average age would take 200 new platforms a year.

To exacerbate the problem, the aircraft in the aging fleet have been operating on a wartime basis since Desert Storm in 1991, and some are "falling out of the sky from fatigue," as a retired Air Force general officer recently told me. Furthermore, the Air Force had hoped to help finance its aircraft procurement by sharply reducing the size of the personnel force, thus trading people for hardware, but planners have found that they must jack the end strength back up in order to sustain Air Force commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and back up contingency commitments in other danger spots.

Dunn says: "We, as a nation, need to wake up to the extent of this recapitalization problem. This is not rocket science. If we want to have a world-class Air Force in the future, we have to fund it."

The men of Billy Mitchell's air crews who sent the Ostfriesland to its grave were many years older than the planes they flew. Do we want to put today's crews into aircraft that their fathers flew -- or maybe even their grandfathers -- and send them into an enemy environment dominated by 21st-century technology? Top | Home

North Korea won't sponsor terrorism

Trust them!

by Fred Edwards

Oct. 24, 2008 -- The axis of evil lost a charter member Oct. 11 when the United States scratched North Korea off the State Department's list of terror-sponsoring states. But the State Department's verification expert had nothing to do with it. In fact less than two days before the agreement was announced, Paula DeSutter, the department's assistant secretary for the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, said she had "no clue" about it. Looks like the administration bypassed its own expert. So what happened?

Officials from North Korea promised to let international inspectors return to North Korea's declared nuclear sites -- which the International Atomic Energy Agency has inspected over and over again. They even pledged to allow the IAEA to look anywhere else by "mutual consent." In other words, if the North Koreans are producing nuclear materials elsewhere, they simply don't have to consent to an inspection.

The Bush administration apparently trusts this regime, but should we? Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, for one, says absolutely not. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, wrote: "North Korea has never kept an agreement that it has signed. Never in history. As a guy who has spent hundreds of hours across the negotiating table from them, who has traveled to Pyongyang, and who has been on Fox News as a commentator on NK, I believe we look at North Korea wrong." Referring to a piece he wrote for the September-October 2005 issue of Military Review, titled "10 Misperceptions about North Korea," he said the article applies as much today as it did the day it was published. The following is a compendium from the article.

First, North Korea is not run by a government. It's run by a dictator (Kim Il Sung, who likes to be called "Dear Leader"), his family and his close personal friends. Do not expect North Korea to change, because the survival of regimes like this depends upon the dictator's unwavering control of the population, coupled with rewards for the elite.

Next, the notion that North Korea's economy has failed, and that it cannot conduct a war against the south is in error. The economy is being held hostage by Kim, who uses the people to produce luxuries for the ruling elite. He counts on international aid to keep his Army and elites well-fed and to help the people survive. In 2004, for example, the economy produced about $1 billion in hard cash. Much of it went to the army, while the elite spent $100 million of it on luxury automobiles, imported liquors, and expensive china. Dunn adds that the regime also gets hard cash from "sale of illicit drugs, counterfeiting, ROK bribery, resale of international aid, remittances from abroad, and the sale of military equipment."

Meanwhile, the military buildup consists of "production lines running to produce tanks, artillery, aircraft, subs, surface ships, and missiles," writes Dunn. Additionally, he states that North Korea has concentrated on "low-tech" ways to defeat the ROK-U.S. forces, including "100,000 special operations forces troops, mini-subs, ballistic missiles, and chemical and biological weapons." But why does North Korea keep dithering about nuclear weapons? Because it has never renounced its objective of uniting the Korean peninsula under its rule, and it considers nuclear weapons to be a non-negotiable part of its war making arsenal. Finally, Dunn asserts that time is not on our side because "North Korea can spread weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to a receptive world." He adds that, "in 1990 we predicted North Korea would collapse by 1995," and we were wrong.

Do not count on random events happening in North Korea because the regime maintains tight control. It holds military rehearsals before major provocations. It negotiates as part of an information operations strategy designed to turn ROK public opinion toward North Korea and away from its alliance with the United States. And its negotiators arrive at meetings loaded with papers containing detailed talking points. By all indications, states Dunn, every important action must be approved from the top.

Dunn also debunks the myth that North Korea is a closed society, and that we do not know what its leaders are thinking. North Korea continuously spreads its Communist message to the people. Furthermore, it often announces its plans in "coded" language. In addition, the leaders clearly demonstrate what they think about U.S. and ROK leaders by the nouns used in their news announcements, such as "bastards, cannibals, criminals, stooges, militants, and puppets," and the adjectives such as "imperialist, babbling, fascist, murderous, war mongering, colonial, and perfidious."

Just before U.S. officials announced that North Korea was going off the terror list, the regime's media published the first photographs of the "Dear Leader" released since rumors circulated that he had been taken ill. He was smiling.

Note: For the complete Military Review article, visit http://merln.ndu.edu/archive/MilitaryReview/dunn.pdf Top | Home

Bush legacy: Speak strongly -- and carry big sticks

by Fred Edwards

Oct. 31, 2008 -- Teddy Roosevelt updated the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 when he used the phrase, "Speak softly, and carry a big stick," in a speech Sept. 2, 1901. The original doctrine warned European powers not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere, and it proclaimed that the upstart United States -- not fifty years old -- reserved the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of its neighbors. Twelve days after Roosevelt's speech, President William McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt became president and chief enforcer of the doctrine. American presidents continued the Monroe-Roosevelt legacy all the way through the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001, President George Bush launched an even more important doctrine when he stated that if a country harbors or supports terrorists, the United States would hold it accountable. This became the focal point of The National Security Strategy of September 2002. That document says nothing about speaking softly; it announces strongly that the United States will take preemptive action any time it feels it should. And that is exactly what America is doing. Examples follow.

U.S. commanders had charged that Pakistani forces were not policing militants in Pakistan's remote border areas, which were possible hiding places for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. Consequently, U.S. and CIA UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that patrol the frontier region reportedly have launched at least 15 missile strikes across the border since mid-August. The strikes killed at least two senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. In response, the Pakistani government summoned the U.S. ambassador October 29 and demanded an immediate halt to the strikes.

In the other war zone, a foreign fighter network has been sending militants from North Africa and other Middle East locations to Syria. From there, they slip into Iraq, aided by Syrian military members sympathetic with al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Baath party, according to U.S. military sources. A senior U.S. commander in western Iraq described the border as an "uncontrolled" gateway for entry into Iraq.

The infiltration of foreign fighters had been reduced to an estimated 20 a month in July, according to a U.S. military official. This represents a substantial reduction from 40 fighters a month six months earlier, and an enormous cutback from 100 per month a year earlier. Nevertheless, the foreigners form a force multiplier for the militants because they are highly trained experts in bomb-making and employment of small arms, and are dedicated to suicide bombing. Furthermore, the cash they carry with them has been the major source of income for al Qaeda in Iraq. So consider the following three-day sequence of events.

* October 26. Four U.S. helicopters flew some five miles into Syria, where special ops troops landed to target a suspected Iraqi insurgent leader at the Sukkariyeh Farm near Abu Kamal. Syria's foreign ministry lodged a protest with both the U.S. and Iraqi charges d'affaires, said a ministry spokesman.

* October 27. Senior U.S. officials said the administration was operating under an expansive new definition of self-defense. The policy reinforces the doctrine providing for conventional strikes on militant targets in a sovereign nation without its consent, if the nation is either unwilling or unable to neutralize the threat itself.

* October 28. To hammer the Bush Doctrine home, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said, "Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group or other nonstate actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction - whether by facilitating, financing or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts."

The Bush administration has spoken strongly and given the incoming administration big sticks. It's up to the new administration to use them. Top | Home

A Veterans' Day salute to the new vets

by Fred Edwards

Comments:
From LL in Virginia: "Fred - A great column. One of your best."

From WFG in California: "Fred, quite an eye-opener with this well-researched piece. Your writings are on target and deserve wide dissemination."

Nov. 7, 2008 -- Too many of our wounded warriors underwent abysmal treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center until the problem got fixed. And too many others have suffered poor follow-on treatment because of the portability problem. VA Secretary, Dr. James Peake, saw it when he was hospitalized during a trip to Iraq: when wounded soldiers were evacuated, somebody would scrawl their diagnosis on a card or a piece of paper and pin it or tape it to their clothing or to their body.

The VA, on the other hand, has been fully computerized for years. But the Army simply couldn't transfer soldiers' medical records to VA computers. Such problems just might be coming to an end. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared November to be "Warrior Care Month." The declaration includes four pledges:

1. To provide the highest quality of care to all wounded, ill and injured service members and their families as long as necessary;

2. To continue medical and non-medical assistance throughout the recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration periods;

3. To simplify access and establish channels for reporting problems through the Wounded Warrior Resource Center at www.WarriorCare.mil; and

4. To transform care as the wounded move into the civilian community. This will include a new partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and establishment of a single Disability Evaluation System. And, finally, the Army and the VA have started a pilot program for portability of military records.

Partly because of the portability problem, it's been difficult to even count the number of wounded. Let's try it this way:

Generally about 16 service members are wounded for every one killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. So, based upon recent casualty figures showing that 4,775 members serving in one of the two wars have been killed, we might conclude that some 76,400 new veterans have been wounded.

If the severely wounded represent 5 percent of all those wounded, then 3,820 severely wounded new veterans will be in our society for the next 10-to-50 years. They aren't asking for our help, but they will need help as long as they live. Since only 1 percent of the population is fighting this war, let's hope that the other 99 percent will support them, when needed, for the rest of their lives.

Now here's a more optimistic bit of demographics. The two-million veterans who have returned so far represent three generations. First, are the 17 and 18 year olds who enlist for active duty, deploy, and get out. Second, are the older guard and reserves who serve and return to all walks of life. And third is the generation that is retiring after serving 20 or more years. This represents a cross section of America which we haven't seen since World War II.

These new veterans know what is going on over there. Many of them are attending universities, and are influencing liberal academia to move more to the center. Many simply don't want to cogitate upon social theories because they've transformed social theories into action where the rubber meets the road. Now they want to learn how to make a living, take care of their families, and be of value to American society.

Some of these new vets will become school teachers, and will insist that the schools teach American military history so that the other 99 percent of the population will understand what 1 percent have done for their country.

Many of these new vets are entering politics. For example, the following veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom were victors in the November 4 elections:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., re-elected.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., re-elected.

Rep. Chris Carney, D-Pa., re-elected.

Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., re-elected.

Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn, re-elected.

Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, Senate.

John Boccieri, D-Ohio, House.

Duncan D. Hunter, R-Calif., House.

Mike Coffman, R-Colo., House.

Not all who ran succeeded. For example, In Pennsylvania, Republican William Russell, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, was defeated by the controversial 17-term Democrat John Murtha, a retired Marine Reserve colonel. Murtha, Chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, had misguidedly (to be kind) accused Marines in Haditha in 2005 of killing Iraqi citizens "in cold blood." Russell intends to run next time with a bigger support base and war chest -- and win.

Even though new veterans like Russell may be having a tough time trying to overturn entrenched politicians, the incumbents just aren't going to be around too much longer. And that will leave a large number of new veterans -- with new ideas -- to help run our country.

A group of new vets have formed a nonpartisan organization called "Vets for Freedom." Their mission is "to educate the American public about the importance of achieving success in these conflicts by applying our first-hand knowledge to issues of American strategy and tactics in Iraq." In short, they want us to win.

They "support policymakers from both sides of the aisle who have stood behind our great generation of American warriors on the battlefield, and who have put long-term national security before short-term partisan political gain."

This is not a splinter group of glazed-eyed crazies. Their Board of Advisors includes Marine Maj. Gen. James Livingston, who holds a Medal of Honor; First Class Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell, retired SEAL, author of Lone Survivor; an eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL Team 10. Also on the board is Bing West. West, co-author of The March Up and author of The Strongest Tribe, is a Vietnam combat vet who accompanied the Marines into Baghdad. He is former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Also S. Sgt David Vellavia, who has been recommended for a Medal of Honor. Learn more about the organization at www.vetsforfreedom.org.

The longer the war against Islamic Fascism lasts, the more new veterans will be coming back to help reshape America. Welcome home. Top | Home

Facts about Iran for the incoming president

by Fred Edwards

Nov. 14, 2008 -- During his campaign, now president-elect Barack Obama indicated that, as president, he would talk with the Iranians about their nuclear programs and other issues with no pre-conditions. George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, wrote November 10 that just before the elections it was leaked that President George W. Bush might open diplomatic relations with Iran after the election regardless of who won. This would leave a sort of legacy for Bush while taking the burden off Obama for such a decision. But it would open a Pandora's Box that could give Obama his baptism by fire. Consider remarks by Michael Ledeen, author of The Iranian Time Bomb, during a presentation on August 4.

Ledeen, a former White House national security advisor and official in both the Defense and State Departments, explained the difference between what the Iranians say, what they do, and what Americans might think they mean.

What do they say and do, and what do they mean? For example, the head of Iran's armed forces announced recently that they have produced a new missile with a range of at least 300 kilometers. He claimed it uses technology heretofore unseen anywhere in the world. But -- no photograph, no particulars.

Then we saw another photograph not long ago. You might remember the one they published that showed four supposed intermediate missiles being launched almost simultaneously. Ledeen says that a close examination disclosed that the two-year-old photograph showed only one actual missile, a short-range one.

And that's not all. Not long afterward the Iranians floated a photo of a "new" fighter airplane. It was indeed a new model -- a plastic toy made by Mattel, with Iranian markings placed on it.

Ledeen says, "So the first thing to understand about Iran is that it is a country where lies and deception are a way of life." He adds that the Iranians have been at war against us for 30 years, and prior to 9/11 the Iranian regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of more Americans than any other country or organization in the world."

How closely are the Iranians tied to Hezbollah? In the fall of 1998, the U.S. government indicted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Part of the indictment reads that Al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group, Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. The indictment still stands.

But how could Iran support al Qaeda when Iran is Shiite and al Qaeda is Sunni? Here's the logic.

The Shiites (Iran) normally believe that religious leaders cannot function in government, while the Sunnis believe they can. But, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over (Shiite) Iran in the revolution of 1979, he decreed that it was not only allowable for religious leaders to govern civil society, but indeed it was mandatory. And so it remains.

Ledeen calls the regime begun by Khomeini "Islamofascist," and compares it to those created by Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and '30s. And, although the press might portray things differently in Iran, the dictator makes all key decisions. The dictator is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, but Ali Khamenei, who is called "Supreme Leader." Even the Revolutionary Guard Corps reports to him.

Israel, which considers Iran to be the biggest threat to its existence, has already weighed in on this issue. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who could become prime minister after Israel's general election in February, said November 6 that Obama should not talk to Iran so soon after taking office, warning that such dialogue could project "weakness."

So what happens if Obama does talk with the Iranians? It would be great to be optimistic, but Ledeen reminds us of what happened during the Clinton administration. The United States dropped sanctions against Iran, opened America's borders to Iranians for the first time since the 1970s, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright made several public apologies to Iran. Then Ali Khamenei announced that Iran was in a state of war with the U.S. and that settled that. Will this happen again? Top | Home

Top eight groups most deserving of a government bailout

by Fred Edwards

Nov. 28, 2008 -- This week the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) published the legislative update that follows. If the U.S. federal government can afford to throw out a few hundred billion dollars here and another few hundred billion there, it certainly can afford to fix the long-standing inequities for our service members, their families and survivors that MOAA has listed.

"MOAA's Top 8 Groups Most Deserving of a Government Bailout

If our country can afford almost $1 trillion in bailouts for firms whose financial troubles were caused by their own mismanagement or recklessness, what about those in the uniformed services community suffering grievous circumstances imposed on them by the government through no fault of their own? Here are MOAA's nominees for those most deserving a government bailout.

8. Currently serving uniformed services families - the only large group of employees denied use of Flexible Spending Accounts to deduct out-of-pocket health and dependent costs from income and payroll taxes. Who needs a child care tax break more than a family whose sponsor has been deployed?

7. Employers of Guard/Reserve personnel -- who deserve tax breaks to help ease the burden of hiring temporary replacements for ever-more-frequently deployed staff members. The government that imposes these requirements on them, and expects them to keep hiring Guard/Reserve members, needs to do more to assist them.

6. Guard-Reserve members deployed since 9/11 - whom the government has acknowledged deserve a reduced retirement age in return for frequent active duty callups, but has denied credit for those called up (for multiple combat tours in hundreds of thousands of cases) between 2001 and 2008.

5. Military families (again) - who've suffered terrible family separations because of past government resistance to manpower increases, despite predictions of a long war. Now, some congressional leaders have proposed cutting back on manpower increases, when the only possibility for relief is to accelerate them.

4. Severely disabled retirees with less than 20 years of service - who forfeit most or all of their military retired pay to fund their own VA disability compensation. Congress passed legislation to assist the combat-disabled, but a glitch in the law stymied relief for many. And a 100% non-combat disabled retiree has no relief.

3. Military widows whose sponsors died of service-related causes - thousands of whom must live on an annuity of $13,000 a year because their VA survivor benefits are deducted from their Survivor Benefit Plan annuities. Congress' "first-step" relief action provided a mere $50 extra per month.

2. Separated wounded warriors - Thousands of wounded or potential PTSD/TBI victims were separated with low-balled disability determinations, "personality disorder" or disciplinary discharges that limited or denied benefits. Programs are changing now, but those already separated since 9/11 deserve reconsideration.

1. Caregivers for wounded warriors - hundreds of mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, and other loved ones have had to quit their jobs, sell homes, and cash in retirement funds - to provide full-time care to severely wounded servicemembers. The government owes training, respite, and compensation to those who never dreamed that a loved one's wounding could put their own livelihood at such risk."

The preceding eight initiatives show that the Military Officers Association of America cares deeply about active duty troops, veterans, military retirees, and their families and survivors, regardless of rank. Members of Congress, do you? The ball is in your court. Top | Home

Attacks in India sharpen strategic focus of the Islamic jihadists

by Fred Edwards

Letter to the Editor from JB in Arkansas, Dec. 5, 2008 As usual, an Excellent, Excellent article. I can only imagine the hours and hours of research that such a well researched article must entail!

Dec. 5, 2008 -- In Mumbai, India, on November 26, a small group of well-trained and technologically savvy terrorists attacked two luxury hotels, a train station and peripheral targets, killing 173 victims, torturing or mutilating some of them, and wounding hundreds of others. They departed from Karachi, Pakistan, and arrived by a pirated boat. Their strategy parallels the attacks against the United States Sept. 11, 2001, as will be shown.

A gunman who was captured has identified the terrorist sponsors as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Lashkar), which is believed to have its training networks in Pakistan's tribal areas. According to Bruce Riedel's new book, The Search for Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden collaborated with Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence agency (ISI) in the late 1980s to create Lashkar. It was subsequently officially banned.

How will India react? It must do something because its citizens are enraged and are demanding action against Pakistan. In a statement similar to President Bush's preemptive doctrine against countries harboring terrorists, Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee has warned that "every sovereign country has its right to protect its territorial integrity."

India and Pakistan have fought four wars since the British decolonized them -- in 1947-1949, 1965, 1971, and 1999. When considering that both countries have nuclear capability, no sane-thinking person wants these two countries to go to war again.

A Pakistani security official commented that Pakistan cannot afford to deploy to two fronts. This suggests that Pakistan will divert some 100,000 troops from the tribal border region adjoining Afghanistan to the Indian frontier. Such a redeployment would leave the Taliban free to operate, unless the United States has the assets and the will to increase its clandestine operations exponentially in the region. This is mathematically and geographically impossible. The shifting of Pakistani troops also would remove pressure on the Taliban for talks. Furthermore, it would signal that if the United States doesn't support Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani confrontation, it cannot expect Pakistani cooperation in the Afghan war.

What will India want? For one thing, it might insist that Pakistan's ISI be cleaned up and leashed. But the Pakistani civilian government has little control over the military, and therefore over the ISI. India also would want a guarantee against future terrorist attacks, which neither Pakistan nor the United States can promise.

What might come next? India could deploy more troops to the Indo-Pakistani border, place its nuclear forces on the alert, and perhaps begin artillery attacks into Pakistan. If past wars are any indication, Indian and Pakistani troops might even make cross-border thrusts. After that? Think tanks and airpower. Don't even think about nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, if Pakistan's civilian government falls, it would open the door to an Islamist military government at best, or to a rogue nuclear power at worst.

This sharpens the strategic focus for the United States, and should make Americans acutely aware of the scope of the enemy's strategy. Looking at the situation from the radical Muslim point of view, we find that the length of the Long War remains unchanged -- war to the finish. Fifteen years ago in July 1993, the jihadists planned a virtually identical attack on Manhattan -- dubbed the "Landmarks" plot -- which was blocked only because an informant had infiltrated the group. Analysts Fred Burton and Ben West of Stratfor gave the following details in a report on Dec. 3 , 2008.

U.S. counterterrorism agents arrested eight militants who were linked to al Qaeda, and who were later convicted of plotting a multi-pronged attack against key sites in Manhattan. Their mission had been to kill as many people as possible in the Waldorf-Astoria, St. Regis, and U.N. Plaza hotels, to block the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and to destroy a midtown Manhattan waterfront heliport. Why the hotels? Because the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the U.S. secretary of state, or other prominent persons might be there. Why the tunnels? To cripple the transportation infrastructure. Why the heliport? Because that's where prominent persons arrive.

Burton and West pointed out the following similarities in the "Landmarks" plot and the Mumbai attack:

* Both New York and Mumbai are financial centers that house their countries' major stock exchanges.

* In both cities, the targets were high-profile with relatively low-levels of security.

* Both targets allow access by waterborne craft.

* Both plans included peripheral targets to "cause confusion and chaos and thus create a diversion from the main targets."

* In addition to adapting water transportation for movement to the objectives, both plots included the use of familiar-looking wheeled vehicles that would blend in with other city traffic.

Burton and West state flatly: "Ultimately, the biggest difference between the Landmarks plot and the Mumbai attack is that the Mumbai attack succeeded."

The radical jihadists used a new plan to attack the United States on 9/11, but they dusted off their old plan for the Mumbai operation. They have a long memory. Do we? Top | Home

The pirate plague

by Fred Edwards

Dec.12, 2008 -- By the close of the 18th century, the Barbary States of Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis were extorting protection money from ships that crossed near their shores. The newly born United States of America went along with this to the tune of more than $2 million, until Tripoli jacked up the price in 1801. The U.S. government refused to pay more, and the pasha of Tripoli declared war against the United States.

This made Americans realize that a maritime nation could not hide behind isolationism with impunity. It also nailed down the concept of freedom of the seas. So the fledgling U.S. Navy spread its sails and thrashed Tripoli in 1805, and defeated the others after the War of 1812. This put a dent in piracy, but it didn't eliminate it.

Today it's back, in places like Tanzania, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Brazil, Peru, Nigeria, the Malacca Straits, and Somalia. Most operations are hit or miss, but in Somalia, piracy has become the national industry of a failed state that uses its 2,000-mile coastline for a national resource. And piracy has gone high tech. Mother ships go offshore and launch speed boats containing boarding parties of seven-to-ten. They may carry assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Their electronics inventory includes radar, GPS, and satellite phones.

By last count, Somali-based pirates had seized more than 35 ships, and held 280 crew members hostage. Two had been killed. The prize trophies have been a Saudi tanker carrying two million barrels of crude oil and a Ukrainian freighter carrying tanks and other heavy weapons. Billions of dollars worth of cargo have been hijacked and millions have been paid in ransom. As a result, shipping companies' operating expenses are surging; insurance premiums have spiked 10 percent, and ship routes have become 10 percent longer, raising costs by 20,000 to 30,000 Euros a day.

BBC's Africa analyst Mary Harper wrote that when pirates have taken a ship, the port of Eyl, where most of the ships are brought, springs to life. It's time for coats and ties as the pirates' accountant and the chief negotiator arrive. Special restaurants open up to feed the crews of the highjacked ships. Jonathan Clayton of UK's The Times adds that clan elders arrive to broker a deal between their young clansmen and shipping companies eager to pay ransom. The money sometimes goes into accounts in the United Arab Emirates as well as Western Europe. The activity in turn has spawned more pirate gangs, equipped with higher technology weapons and attack boats.

Officials in the United States and other countries are concerned that pirates will partner with international terrorists. Considering that the West's economy is a strategic target of al Qaeda, think what a ship sunk in a chokepoint such as the Strait of Hormuz would do to the worldwide energy supply. And, remembering the attack on the USS Cole by a small craft in 2000, think what al Qaeda could do if its operatives gained access to a port by using a hijacked ship or tug boat that had been flagged under a new name.

Piracy on the high seas mostly ended during the latter part of the 19th century because the United States with its tiny navy dared to go to war against the Barbary Coast, and because ship's masters knew they had the right to simply hang pirates they captured on the high seas -- no courts needed. Considering the bitter criticism aimed at the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo. What would happen to a ship's captain who was lucky enough to catch a pirate today -- and hang him?

In a column on November 25, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal warned that, "A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it."

Next issue: Purging the Pirates Top | Home

Purging the Pirates

by Fred Edwards

Dec. 19, 2008 -- The column of December 12 outlined the piracy problem in stark terms. This issue explores solutions.

From the military point of view, defense of the more than 2.5 million square miles of the western Indian Ocean reminds one of the quandary T. E. Lawrence faced during World War I. He was tasked to find a way to defend up to 140,000 square miles of desert between the Levant and Medina. His answer was by insurgency, but almost a century later, the pirates are the insurgents. So the United States and other nations must conduct counter-pirate warfare.

Can security vessels help? More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States already have tried. But the mathematics show that they can't easily protect the 20,000 ships a year that transit 2.5 million square miles of ocean. A simple solution is not to protect ships but to attack the pirate strongholds.

In the Wall Street Journall on December 9, Max Boot wrote about the 19th century, when colonial powers simply planted their flag in a pirate hotbed, claimed it for their own, and cleaned it out. Today, a world or regional body could provide legitimacy for such action--like NATO and the European Union did in Bosnia and Kosovo. But it takes will, and Boot reminds us that NATO doesn't even have the will to fully support the Afghanistan war.

All the same, on December 16, the 15-member United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing force. Under the resolution, nations may take "all necessary measures" to stop anyone using Somali territory or sea to plan or carry out piracy. This could include attacks on the port cities of Eyl and Haradheere, but that might involve unacceptable collateral damage. Nevertheless, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that, if the United States develops "adequate intelligence" to identify and locate the clans involved, a U.N. air strike might be a future option.

Under the U.N. resolution, we could simply occupy the ports and any other lands that support piracy. The U.S. Marines carried out that mission in Haiti with the Gendarmerie d'Haiti in 1916. The gendarmerie was commanded primarily by Marine non-commissioned officers who were commissioned into the gendarmerie. The gendarmerie thus became the de facto occupying force for stabilization operations in the country. Looking at the pirate plague, if the United States and allies had the assets and the will, they could occupy key parts of the country until a lasting government could be hammered together. But, too many Americans remember the days of Oct. 3 and 4, 1993, when American special operations troops were mauled and disfigured in Mogadishu.

What about defensive measures by the individual ships? Officials have advised shipping firms that pirates tend to attack between 4 a.m. and 6 p.m., and they can't board ships steaming faster than 15 knots, so their ships should try to pass through dangerous waters at night at higher speeds. Other ideas include searchlights to blind boarders, high-pressure hoses to drive them into the sea, and electrical fences on deck. Even if security vessels are in the area, pirates can reach a slow-moving ship and board it in about 15 minutes, leaving virtually no response time available to the protective vessels.

Nevertheless, an international force did defeat pirates who attempted on December 17 to seize a Chinese cargo ship off the Somali coast by launching two attack helicopters that forced the pirates to abandon the vessel they had boarded. In that episode, nine armed pirates in speedboats overtook the Chinese ship and boarded it. The 30-member crew sent a distress signal when they saw the pirates approach, and barricaded themselves within their living quarters. The international naval force dispatched the two helicopters and a warship. The helicopters arrived first and disposed of the pirates. Nonetheless, this was an exceptional case, when rescuing forces were near enough to act.

Some problems come from the shipping companies themselves. If they form World War II-like convoys with warship escorts, it lengthens their schedules, which sometimes can cost more than paying ransom. Private contractors have offered security services, but again the cost becomes prohibitive, along with legal problems involving weapons.

Furthermore, in "Buccaneers are back: The challenges of modern piracy," in the December issue of Armed Forces Journal, Peter Brookes wrote that "many shipping companies don't report hijackings out of concern for increased insurance premiums or lengthy investigations, which could hold their ships pier-side, despite an estimated $10 billion to $20 billion in annual industry losses to piracy."

It is tempting to tell such shippers, therefore, that it is their problem. But it's not. If pirates link with terrorists, a sunken ship in the strait of Hormuz, for example, could cripple world energy supplies.

All in all, security shipping and the onboard security measures discussed can help. But it seems that, unless we strike at the source, and establish a viable government in Somalia, we can only fight the symptoms and not the cause. It doesn't take a doctor to tell us that you can't cure a plague that way.

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