White House budget treats troops like 19th-century British Tommies

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by Fred Edwards
Feb. 17, 2012 – In the late 19th century Rudyard Kipling published “Tommy” as part of Barrack-Room Ballads, about the way he saw England treating her troops between campaigns. The following is an excerpt:

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep,
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit,
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

After some 10 years of warfare, America’s all-volunteer force hasn’t broken; the 1 percent of Americans who served and are serving are heroes in hero families. Of course administration and defense leaders have begun planning for strategic budgetary cutbacks. But when they reached the “uniforms that guard you while you sleep,” rhey decided they could buy them at “starvation cheap.”

Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta delivered the military a Valentine’s Day card when he presented the defense budget. See if it sounds like bait and switch. Continue reading →

Three disparate views of the defense budget: The Administration, the Congress, the public

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by Fred Edwards
Feb. 10, 2012 – In the Pentagon on Jan. 26, President Barack Obama and a pair of supporters, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin  Dempsey, laid out a new defense strategy. This presentation from an apparently united civil-military front might make it seem like a done deal, but it’s not a done deal, nor should it be. It should be analyzed from three different perspectives: what the administration and the Defense Department want; what the Congress will buy; and what the public thinks about it. Continue reading →

The outrageous mathematics of sequestration

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by Fred Edwards

Carrier Strike Group - Before sequestration

Jan. 28, 2012 – Several readers who receive Crosshairs by e-mail asked how the pending sequester would affect the Navy’s super carriers discussed in the post “The Future of the Flattops.” The sequester of $1.2 trillion is set to begin 2013 with half of it targeted against the Department of Defense. This would be $6 billion on top of the $450 billion that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has already built into his budget. Here are two ways to look at it:

  1. Consider a funeral service for an Air Force pilot where the ceremony includes a missing man flyover. In one variation, four aircraft approach and one veers off to fly into the sunset. In another, only three airplanes make the approach, with a noticeable vacancy for the fourth. Perhaps future combat flights would be reduced by one sequestered aircraft.
  2. Or consider visiting the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery and finding no guard there, because the Army’s sentinel for that watch has been sequestered.

    Sound ridiculous? That’s just the tip of the sequestering iceberg. Secretary Panetta wrote Nov. 14 to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), that reductions would require “equal percentage cuts in every weapons program, research project, and military construction project.” Panetta added, “You cannot buy three quarters of a ship or a building.” Continue reading →

The future of the flattops

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by Fred Edwards

Loaded for Bear: USS Ronald Reagon CVN-76 (Courtesy USN)

Jan. 21, 2012 – Although naval warfare technology has changed, the same type of administrative budgeting decisions that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s are creating the U.S. Navy of the future. Back then, battleship advocates were fighting tooth and nail against proponents of aircraft carriers (flattops). An airplane, after all, was simply a reconnaissance device to be launched from a battleship. Then came Dec. 7, 1941. Six Japanese carriers launched 360 aircraft against Pearl Harbor, sinking or rendering useless eight American battleships, three destroyers, and three cruisers. Three American aircraft carriers and seven heavy cruisers not at Pearl Harbor remained unscathed to spearhead American counterattacks in the Pacific. The “day of infamy,” as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the surprise attack, foretold the emergence of the carrier as a replacement for the battleship.

During the ensuing 70 years, the American aircraft carrier became the president’s strategic signature, projecting America’s might from shows of force, to reconnaissance, to aerial interdiction and suppression, to tactical and operational warfare. But what happens next?

Some say the Navy’s fleet of 11 active aircraft carriers is safe from budget slashers because it is codified in law. They add that the mandated cut of $488 billion from the Pentagon within 10 years will not require scrapping a single carrier because the president’s military strategy focuses on two regions that will demand carrier deployment: Asia, to counter China’s emergent navy, and the Persian Gulf, where Iran threatens to block oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Nevertheless, the days of the super carrier may be numbered. Sources say that, although the fiscal 2013 budget may show 11 carriers, the Navy will be fielding only 10 or even nine in the next five years. In fact, the Navy will be operating with just 10 carriers between the time the USS Enterprise is retired in November this year and the USS Gerald Ford joins the fleet in 2015. Congress authorized the Navy to waive the law for this 33-month hiatus. Continue reading →

Iran’s nuclear poker game: Teheran wants to play, and the U.S. wants to delay

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by Fred Edwards

Hormuz map

Strait of Hormuz

Jan. 13, 2012 – The goals of this nuclear poker game are straightforward: Iran wants nuclear capability, while the United States, Israel and other powers want to delay Iran without an all-out shooting war that could engulf the region.

Iran has two aces and a joker. Its first ace consists of threats to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments pass. The second ace is a strategy that would employ small naval attack craft. Using “swarm” tactics, even one boat could seriously damage or sink one or more U.S. warships. Think of commanding from the bridge of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) while transiting the 34-mile long Strait of Hormuz to join the USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74), and being in the Vinson’s moving blind spot of 300 meters ahead. The strait itself is only 21 miles wide and the width of the shipping lane is only two miles, separated by a two-mile buffer zone. Teheran plans to flesh out this strategy within a year.

The Iranian joker cannot be measured by logic. Teheran’s leaders seek to regain the grandeur of the Persian Empire it lost centuries ago. They look across the Persian Gulf, beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and see Saudi Arabia, an arch enemy. Directly across the land frontier they see Iraq, the country with which they fought a bloody war for more than eight years.

The United States and allied countries carry an ace and several jokers. The ace consists of sanctions against Iran which are beginning to work, now that other countries are coming on board. The Iranian currency has plummeted, commodity and import prices are spiking, and Iranian banks are suffering runs. Stopping Iran from selling oil to its traditional customers in Europe and Asia could create a global crisis worldwide by crippling already shaky economies and alienating key U.S. allies that depend on Iranian oil. The price of oil could jump from about $100 a barrel to $150 or even $200 a barrel if the West’s sanctions should even appear to create an interruption in gulf traffic. If Iran should close the Strait of Hormuz, financial chaos would erupt. Continue reading →

Business as usual with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

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by Fred Edwards

Photo

Kim Jong Un

My posting of Dec. 23, 2011, listed five possible scenarios for North Korea’s new 20-something dictator, Kim Jong Un:

  1. The elites circle the wagons to protect the wagon master and their gold from the peasantry.
  2. An older official takes Kim Jong Un under his wing.
  3. The military attempts a coup.
  4. The people attempt to impose a government of law.
  5. Massive numbers of North Korean refugees attempt to escape the totalitarian state.

The elite already have circled the wagons, anointing Kim Jong Un as “supreme leader” of the state’s 1.2 million armed forces, and head of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party.

And as expected by many, he appears to be under the tutelage of his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and his paternal aunt, Kim Kyong Hui. Jang Song Thaek heads party administration and overseas the intelligence arm and other military-related agencies, according to the Sejong Research Institute in South Korea.

A 5,000-word New Year’s message published by North Korea’s state media called on “the whole Party, the entire army and all the people” to “possess a firm conviction that they will become human bulwarks and human shields in defending (Kim Jong Un) unto death.” The message continued to deify the new dictator’s father by calling his death “the greatest loss our nation had suffered in its 5,000-year-long history and the bitterest grief our Party and people had experienced.”

A coup is not on the horizon at present; the elite are busy circling the wagons around the wagon master, the protector of their gold and guarantor of their way of life.

There appears to be little chance of a people’s revolution or even of a massive outflow of refugees. To the contrary, a Los Angeles Times article of Jan. 5 reports that border guards reportedly killed three people trying to flee across the Yalu River into China. The killings came in response to Kim Jong Un’s order of  “immediate executions when people are caught trying to cross the borders.” In addition, North Korea has continued its pledge to hunt down and imprison or kill three full generations of family members left behind by escaped refugees or attempted escapers, according to Seoul’s Joongang Daily newspaper. The starving populace is continuing to starve.

So what should American policymakers do? Continue reading →

Five scenarios for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

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by Fred Edwards

Dec. 23, 2011 — The anointment of 20-something Kim Jong Un as the “Great Successor” to North Korea’s deceased “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, has the U.S. intelligence community scrambling to answer “What if?” The following five scenarios could play out separately, or together, or not at all in that secretive, totalitarian country. Continue reading →

We must recognize the radical Islamists’ guerrilla war against the United States

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by Fred Edwards

Dec. 11, 2011 — Some 2,400 years ago a Chinese military theorist known as Sun Tzu wrote that if you know your enemy and know yourself, you will never be in peril. He added that if you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. But if you are ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you invite defeat in every battle. Too many Americans fall into the third category concerning radical Islamism.

As an ideology, radical Islamism is a blood brother of Fascism and Nazism. It is important to separate the ideology of radical Islamism from the religion of Islam, yet, some U.S. leaders still refuse to identify radical Islamism as one of America’s most dangerous enemies in the homeland. Note the following points. Continue reading →

CENTCOM/SOCOM con artist flunks final con

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by Fred Edwards

Dec. 4, 2011 — Prior to his court date this month, Scott Allan Bennett wrote a 120-page letter to U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington, stating that he was “just confused” by a bureaucracy that he had manipulated to suit himself.

Bennett was so confused that he passed himself off as an aide to Adm. Eric Olson, chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), who he identified as commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), both headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., in order to hitchhike on a military airplane to fly to the base.

He was so confused that Continue reading →

Feckless super committee endangers national security

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by Fred Edwards

Nov. 25, 2011 — The Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) has labeled the Congressional so-called super committee’s failure to act “an appalling and disgusting abdication of their collective responsibilities for rational governance.” A legislative update of November 22, titled “Super Committee Opts to Whack Military People,” explained that the super committee’s inaction will cause a sequester of $1.2 trillion in funding cuts, with half of that slashed from the defense budget. Coming on the heels of $450 billion in cuts already in the works, MOAA says the result will “devastate” both weapons and personnel programs.

Zeroing in on the effects upon service members and their families, the MOAA update concludes that the 12 super committee members essentially have targeted a military force that “already has endured 100 percent of the America’s Nation’s wartime sacrifice with a new round of unfair and disproportional sacrifices through force cuts, more family separations, pay and benefit cuts and more.” Continue reading →