U.S.-led ambush strikes a positive note in Afghanistan

Source: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/17/world/ 17afghan2_600.JPG

A New York Times reporter recounts the story of a one-sided ambush in Afghanistan — this time launched by U.S. forces:

Lieutenant Smith was new to the platoon. This was his fourth patrol. He was in a situation that every infantry lieutenant trains for, but almost no infantry lieutenant ever sees. “Fire,” he said, softly into the radio. “Fire. Fire. Fire.”

The platoon’s frontage exploded with noise and flashes of light as soldiers fired. Bullets struck all of the lead Taliban fighters, the soldiers said. The first Afghans fell where they were hit, not managing to fire a single shot.

This doesn’t say much about the overall strategic situation in Afghanistan, but it’s pretty uplifting to see certain things going well. It’s also a great story.

Tehran’s and Washington’s interests aren’t mutually exclusive

The Obama administration today announced that it would drop a key precondition for negotiations with Iran — a precondition that the Bush administration had insisted on maintaining, says the NYT.

The theory is that by allowing Tehran to continue enriching uranium for an as-yet unspecified length of time during talks, the country will have an incentive to negotiate. “We are going to start with some interim steps,” said an unnamed European official, “to build a little trust.”

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200804/r240208_972753.jpg

But Obama’s concession doesn’t fundamentally change the cost-benefit analysis for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Certainly, from his perspective, keeping the enrichment facilities up and running as long as possible is in Iran’s interest. But if the outcome is still going to be that Tehran gives up its nuclear programs, you can bet that Ahmedinejad will do everything he can to sabotage the process.

What we need is a solution that’s mutually agreeable. Iran’s goal is to keep its nuclear facilities. Westerners don’t want Tehran to build a bomb. These aren’t mutually exclusive objectives. Yes, it’s difficult to implement effective oversight, and it’s not that far a jump from civilian nuclear energy to something more dangerous. But the hardest part is coming to a satisfactory agreement in the first place. Everything after should be a piece of cake by comparison.

A middle-ground solution would be to do what the U.S. recently did with the United Arab Emirates: sign a cooperative nuclear treaty that would see American technology exported to the Middle East. Done this way, Ahmedinejad gets to keep his nuclear energy program, and the U.S. gets to keep track of every piece of equipment that goes over there. Periodic, perhaps random maintenance checks, would also give Obama an opportunity to oversee what’s happening.

The danger that Ahmedinejad might co-opt even this program into producing enriched uranium is not nonexistent. But risk management, while more difficult, is also more realistic than the inflexibility of risk avoidance.

We know the Future Combat System is overbudget. But does the U.S. even need it?

I’m all for new toys. The Future Combat System is an Army project that hopes to create a new fleet of military vehicles that can network with soldiers, robots and remotely-controlled drones. The Pentagon estimates the project will cost $159 billion. But in its latest confirmation of news we already knew, The Washington Post says the program’s critics are skeptical, raising the real cost to exceed DoD’s projections.

The problem with FCS isn’t its cost — because how do you put a price on saving soldiers’ lives? The same argument led Congress to approve some of the largest defense budgets in history. No, the real reason critics should oppose FCS is because it was a poorly executed idea. It’s a relic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld‘s notion of network-centric warfare. Rumsfeld’s vision of a lighter, mobile military that can move faster, shoot farther and hide better is an extension of the idea that “if we can see it, we can hit it — and if we can hit it, we can destroy it.”

For the military, being able to destroy anything more efficiently has become a goal in itself. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. What use is a fighting force if it can’t disarm opponents quickly? But killing the enemy has now become less productive than it once was. Today, building infrastructure and providing basic services like sanitation have become critical to winning small wars — arguably more so than simply shooting at things.

It’s still important to prepare for conventional war. FCS would prove most useful in an all-out fight with a state with lots of tanks, planes and men. But as John Nagl has said, the U.S. has given up only a fraction of its conventional warfighting capability in exchange for immeasurable amounts of experience infighting unconventional wars.

So while FCS would be useful, it’s not clear that it makes any significant contributions to the U.S.’s already rock-solid global military posture. It’s a project that’s effective conceptually, and would certainly provide soldiers a huge tactical advantage on the ground.  Still, I can’t help but think it was designed for the wrong war — or at least, the kind of war that the U.S. should be less interested in waging these days.

Nervy arguments, indeed

Thomas Ricks’ “The Best Defense” blog highlights new, “nervy” arguments made by Colin Gray. The article, which appeared in the latest issue of Parameters (the U.S. Army War College’s quarterly magazine) claims the following:

1. A war between the U.S. and China is “quite likely.”
2. People fret about terrorism the same way that Chicken Little worried about the sky falling. “Compared to interstate war, terrorism … is a minor menace.”
3. “NATO-Russian relations are an accident waiting to happen.”

Gutsy indeed. I think Gray is wrong on all counts. Maybe I’m overly idealistic, but I just can’t see it happening. Yes, China’s growing cyberwarfare capabilities are a threat to U.S. security, and the two countries differ over issues of development and human rights. But I’m not convinced those differences outweigh our similarities (read: both countries just want to get rich). China’s politics may differ from America’s, but that’s not to say they’re necessarily in direct competition.

John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, one of the nation’s foremost counterinsurgency thinkers and a senior fellow at CNAS, has argued that the U.S. military has given up only about three percent of its conventional warfighting capability — for a 300 percent increase in its capacity to fight unconventional wars. Even if interstate war is really more important than low-intensity conflict, the U.S. is still more than prepared for a conventional fight. And the payoff we’ve had from redirecting our resources to learn about unconventional warfare have been massive, enough to make them a valuable pursuit in themselves.

NATO’s recent olive branch extended to Russia suggests relations are improving, not worsening. Despite the historically tense ties between the alliance and Moscow, I don’t think a Russia-NATO partnership is out of the question. If NATO can get Russia to become a net security provider instead of a security liability (maybe even bring Russia on board as a member!) that will mean huge gains for European and Asian security. And that would be a bonus for NATO, who’s looking to justify its relevance in the post-Cold War age. A bonus, too, for Russia — they get to be part of the club that all the popular countries are in. Everybody wins.

The Mexican drug war finally becomes America’s problem

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00030/mexico_drug_war4_30955a.jpg

Mexico’s uncontrollable drug war is so problematic that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has plans to get involved. This is the kind of conflict that blurs state borders, making efforts to come to closure a transnational issue. It’s about time the U.S. took action. The Mexican cartels have allegedly killed as many as 6,300 people since last January amid the ongoing shooting war with government forces.

Mexican officials have said the only way to successfully limit the drug trade’s influence in the country is to add U.S. support. Much of the cartels’ money laundering and production of methamphetamine and marijuana takes place in the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service. Today, Mexican drug lords dominate the entire spectrum of drugs:

Mexican drug cartels already control about 90 percent of the cocaine trade across the United States and most of the market for marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin, with operations in 230 cities, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center. They have essentially supplanted the Colombian and Dominican criminal groups that terrorized major U.S. cities through the 1980s and ’90s, the agency said.

Add to that the tremendous volume of firearms (including high-power, select-fire assault rifles) that flow across the U.S.-Mexican border every day — and what you have is the ammunition (literally) for the continued violence. American weapons “account for 95 percent of Mexico’s drug-related killings,” says CBS News.

The U.S. finally realizes that it’s contributing to the problem, and it’s said it wants to respond to the war with counterinsurgency measures. The military plans to give Mexico $1.4 billion and assistance with intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance.