Yon's call on Afghanistan

This is disturbing. For those who don't remember, Michael Yon made the call that we had turned around the Anbar province and defeated the insurgency well before that notion became mainstream. For those who also don't remember, he's probably spent more time on the front lines of the War on Terror than most generals and many soldiers. If he thinks there's nothing left to be gained, then, well...

Death by a thousand cuts redux: only off by $490,000,009,000

Yeah I said I'd be on hiatus until deployment. My blog, my rules. Deal with it.

So, in a proud moment last week, with all the service chiefs and secretary of defense present, it was announced to the nation - and the world - that the American military would no longer be able to do what it's planned to do - and done - for the last ten years. Money's tight, wars are winding down, we need to get "leaner", etc. This is not the first time we've been down this road, and to a certain extent it's understandable. Yes, the economy sucks; yes, we've "ended" one major conflict and are trying to "wind down" another; yes, there's "fraud, waste, and abuse" we can always cut down on to save cash; yes, everyone needs to take a haircut (more on that in a second) and the military, with all its expensive toys, should not be exempt.

But, as I said in my last post on the topic, let's go down this road with both eyes open and cut the bullshit. Making us "leaner" does not make us better. We are admitting, to friend and foe, that our military is surrendering its capacity to do what it's done over the last ten years: namely, fight two major conflicts simultaneously, while retaining the capacity to handle any 'brushfire' problems that might arise. If you think we haven't been doing this over the last decade, you're wrong. We've had a large footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still done other things like fight pirates, keep an eye on things in Yemen, police the sea lanes with our Marine Expeditionary Units and carrier groups, and found time to kill bin Laden. No longer; now, it's win one major conflict while "spoiling" another. If you're North Korea and, say, Iran is already the big show, this is good news; otherwise, I don't see anything to celebrate. We are imposing our own limits on ourselves. This may be necessary, but let's not pretend it's great.

Let's also not forget that, contrary to nobly "turning the page on a decade of war", our enemies still get a say in world affairs, and this reduces our ability to deter and influence the extent of that say. We abolished war once, if you'll remember - the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928 - and unfortunately Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini didn't get that memo. War and conflict do not end because we say they do, and we can no more "turn the page" on armed aggression than we can on poverty or crime. It's a part of living in a world of imperfect men. All you can do is prepare, or react, to unforeseen events. With the "two-war" strategy, we prepared; with "win-spoil", more and more we'll be forced to react, and it won't be pretty.

Don't think so? Let's look back on other times we decided to 'turn the page' on war and cut back our military. We did it after World War I, and entered World War II with a small, technologically inferior, and poorly trained force that suffered some embarrassing setbacks (Kasserine Pass) before finally dominating the battlefield. Then we drew down after World War II, and when North Korea invaded the south in 1950, all we had to oppose them was a (wait for it) small, technologically inferior, and poorly trained force that was either slaughtered (Task Force Smith) or forced to retreat to a tiny perimeter until more men could be scraped together from across the ocean to counterattack. After Vietnam, we were tired of war and again dismantled and emaciated our military, and men died in the darkness and sand of Desert One. Then the Iron Curtain fell, and we spent another decade blissfully reducing our military, until 9/11 rolled around and we found ourselves scrambling to recruit and train more boots on the ground. We've seen how this movie ends over and over again, and the ultimate victory at the end makes us forget the bloodiness of the beginning and that, if we'd just kept the team together from the LAST war, we might not have gotten hurt so badly in the opening round.

To counter the drastic cuts - in the tens of thousands - of those boots on the ground from the Army and Marine Corps, we're told that an increasingly robust, unmanned, and advanced Navy and Air Force will continue to project our power around the world. Except . . . we've seen this movie too, and how it ends. Again, since World War I, there's always been the 'next big thing' that will supposedly reduce or eliminate entirely our dependence on the grunts. Between the world wars, it was air power. After World War II, it was nuclear power. After Korea, it was special forces. After Vietnam, it was precision weapons and stealth technology. After 9/11, it was unmanned aircraft, satellite imagery, and precision weapons that were even more precise. Yet every single time, the next big thing could not replace the need for a man and a rifle to defend that trench, hold that ridge, storm that beach, or take that hill. Nothing will ever replace him, nothing; and now, we'll have a hundred thousand fewer of those men to defend that trench or storm that beach. And in the next war, someone in Washington will throw up their hands and angrily demand why we didn't have enough men to accomplish our objective; and some family will wonder why their loved one didn't come home because he died trying to accomplish that objective against all odds.

These cuts may yet be reversed; but until then, we've still advertised to the assholes and shitheads of the world that whatever it is they're thinking right now, they might be able to get away with it, especially if our attention is diverted elsewhere. Get ready for a more dangerous and less stable world.

P.S. Having the entirety of military leadership on display when telling them that what they've accomplished over the last decade won't be repeatable in the near future was a nice touch. I await the day when the secretaries of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, the EPA, Commerce, and the rest are hauled in front of the cameras for a similar announcement. I have this nagging feeling I won't see it.

Hiatus: statistically my most common post

Um, yeah. Not much going on here. Facebook arguments notwithstanding, I actually have a billet that engages most of my time, leaving less for annoying people both on Facebook and here. So, probably until my next deployment comes up, don't expect much activity on this page. I know, I know, but stop crying, the hurt will go away. Until deployment, then; or something else interesting happens.

The day of fire, ten years later

There's much to say about the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The first thing to be said is that we do a disservice to the memories of those who died that day, and who died in the months and years following to avenge that day, by calling it anything else but an attack. I hear it called "the events of 9/11" and it sounds like someone's referring to nothing more deadly than the minutes of a staff meeting. 9/11 was not a series of "events"; it was a chain of murder, violence, terror, hatred, and brutality, interlinked with astounding acts of courage, love, and selflessness. 9/11 was an act of war; Americans immediately responded with acts of brotherhood, faith, and in the case of Flight United 93, steel, firm resolve, and righteous retribution.

There are many other things to say. Unfortunately today I don't have the time for much more than the above in terms of creative thought. I'm packing for a three-week 'vacation' to lovely Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, starting tomorrow, where I'll be 'auditing' the academic portion of the Weapons and Tactics Instructor class. Maybe that says something in itself; that for myself, and the hundreds of thousands of others who where the uniform, 9/11 is not a dim spark of a memory where we exchange a few platitudes with our friends and coworkers and return to our business. 9/11 - its villains, its organizers, its supporters, and its current spiritual brethren - has been our business for the last ten years, is our business today, and will be our business for the foreseeable future. Others will say it with prettier words; America's warriors say what they can with their day-to-day actions. We have not forgotten; don't you forget either.

Also, while I might not have time for creative thought, as I've said in the past, nothing still captures my own thoughts better than this post first written in 2005.

It's been four years since I woke up one Tuesday morning, looking forward to a relaxing start to an easy day with only one class late in the afternoon, to find my roommates glued to the television, newscasters almost unable to comprehend what they were reporting on, and, apparently, the whole world on fire. By the time I finally tuned in, both towers of the World Trade Center were burning and the Pentagon had a hole in it; reports were just beginning to come in about a plane crash of some kind in Pennsylvania; and rumors were flying wild, including one of a bomb set off on the Washington Mall. We sat there, watching reruns of the planes striking each building, watching smoke pour out of the gaping wounds in the Twin Towers, watching people hanging their heads out the windows for air and, in some cases, flinging themselves down into the streets below, choosing death by falling rather than death by incineration.

I remember the first person I called that morning was my Marine selection officer: I wanted to know if there was anything I had to do, if we might get called up to do something or other (a silly question, of course, since I had all of 12 weeks of extremely basic training and I'd be lucky if all I did was shoot one of my fingers off without hurting anyone else). The second person was my mother. I wanted to know what she made of all of this, whether they were even reporting it in Canada, if perhaps Canadian news had some outside tidbits of information we lacked. She was the original American in my life; I thought maybe she'd have some insight from all her years here about who, what, why this was happening. But few people knew anything that morning, other than the fact that we were under attack. So all we could do was watch.

The first Tower fell. Clouds of smoke, dust, and ash billowed through the streets of downtown New York as people tried to outrun it. At the Pentagon, flames roiled up out of the gash that had been cut to the very center of the building. Rumors of a fourth plane wreck were confirmed, and we got our first look at the gaping scar of earth where Flight 93 had come to grief. The second Tower fell. Manhattan was now obscured by sheets of haze and smoke as the debris spread and fires burned. I don't remember what we said to each other, if anything. It was all so unexpected, so unbelievable. It was supposed to be a Tuesday like any other. What was it now?

My one class for the day was cancelled, but I still had to go to cross-country practice. I was a co-captain of nine or ten guys who also thought that today was going to be just like any other day. I tried to think of something to say to them; I think what I came up with was something about our country getting hit hard, but that we still had to press forward and not let this interrupt our lives. Whatever I said, it wasn't memorable. Someone else on the team said something far better in far fewer words as we practiced. We were running laps around the track, and our workout was almost done when Chris Ambrose, crossing the start line, yelled out, "Let's do it for New York and DC!" The guys jumped across the line, and I thought I would break down completely right there.

The rest of the week was turned upside down. Classes were cancelled the next day, as I recall, and we had a memorial service instead. I remember Father Jonathan trying to hold back tears as he told us that he'd learned of an alumnus who'd died in the World Trade Center. I heard from my parents that the father of several kids who attended my old high school had also died there. That morning of rapid destruction was starting to ripple across the country and across borders.
At some point that week we learned that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were taking credit for the attacks. I think my first reaction was, "What the heck is al Qaeda?" I'd heard of bin Laden a few times, in connection with the USS Cole bombing and the attacks on American embassies in Africa; but he certainly wasn't a topic of daily conversation in the news. Now, his face was everywhere, and eventually a video tape emerged of him gloating as he learned how successful his plans had been.

By then I really didn't care who was behind it. All I knew was that these attacks had given my rather general decision to join the Marine Corps a focus that it previously lacked. Before 9/11, I'd wanted to join up out of a fascination with the American military tradition, a general desire to serve my country, and go with the Marines because they had a bad-ass reputation and the coolest uniforms. Now there was a specific purpose: I would make it my personal responsibility to make sure that no one I loved would ever have to see what we saw that morning ever again, or be threatened by the kind of men who perpetrated it.

9/11 gave focus to something else too. It made me realize that my fun little fling with this big ole sea-to-shining-sea country had, over the last couple of years, developed into a full-fledged love affair. I could no longer joke around that I had one foot North of the 49th parallel and one foot South: when the Towers fell, I knew that both feet would be forever here. Because what I saw that morning hurt me more than anything I could remember in the twenty-odd years of my life. This wonderful country where I'd found an incredible school, even more incredible friends (and ultimately, in the months to come, the love of my life), a way of life that was energetic, freewheeling, and boisterous, neighbors and acquaintances who challenged me and made me think about who I was and what I believed - this place that had given me so much was now reeling under a blow from petty, angry little men who couldn't even begin to understand what they were attacking. I hadn't felt so stung by any single event before or since. Hurricane Katrina has come pretty close, but Katrina was a natural event, one beyond our power to control. It was a force without guidance or malice. 9/11 was committed malice aforethought. It was the purposeful decision by a group of men to kill as many of their fellow human beings as possible.

The rage and pain that this barbaric act generated were indescribable, and though the years have dulled these feelings, they've never subsided. They come flooding back to me now as I write this, and I'm actually a little surprised that they're still this strong. That's a good thing, though: it means that I still haven't forgotten what it felt like that Tuesday morning, on what was supposed to be an easy, relaxing day. I hope I never forget, and that the rest of America never does either.

Death by a thousand cuts

As I admitted over on Facebook, when it comes to the topic of cuts to defense spending, I'm not an uninterested party. But I find it disturbing that, in the debate over how to keep this country from plummeting over a financial cliff and becoming another Greece, decisions on the big drivers of fiscal armageddon - entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare - have been punted and are only discussed in the vaguest terms, whereas defense has been examined with a microscope and hacked away at with knife. This is not to say that there aren't places where cuts could be made, or that, given the nation's dire debt situation, defense spending should be immune. It's fair to say that there are any number of places where cuts could be made - like reducing the bloated civilian contractor workforce - and I've heard some pretty innovative suggestions on issues that don't immediately pop to mind when thinking about defense spending (like turning over the exchange/commissary system, currently run by someone in uniform, to a commercial agency like Wal-mart, and allowing them to buy the rights to establish stores and sell their products on base, combining the price value and efficiency of an experienced private entity with the shocking notion of actually MAKING some money for the military in the process). But the very real, specific cuts being forced on the military stand in stark contrast to the vague promises of future efficiency and reform only hinted at for the entitlement programs that, all agree, will grind our national economy to a halt without a major course correction. Abolish the Defense Department in its entirety and the 'most predictable crisis in history' caused by entitlement spending will still be there. And with each cut in the defense budget, our military's warfighting ability will suffer.

Never mind that reducing defense spending while hostilities are ongoing is unprecedented; we're still lightly engaged in Iraq, heavily engaged in Afghanistan, and doing something or other over in Libya. The American military is currently tasked with a variety of missions that no other country can readily take over. The global commerce that requires open and secure sea lanes is only possible under the aegis of the United States Navy, whose surface fleet has dwindled to its lowest numbers in a century (fun fact: more ships were involved in the landings on Okinawa, only one of many theaters in which the Navy was engaged, than we have in the entire Navy today). No one superpower yet rivals the United States, but there are a multitude of regional powers like China, North Korea, and Iran who have strong localized military capabilities and do not have our best interests at heart. The threat from radical Islamist groups like al Qaeda is diminished but not gone. And, as has been embarrassingly demonstrated in Libya, our NATO allies cannot conduct anything resembling a sustained military campaign, even in their own back yard, without American support. Extensive reductions in the defense budget will necessarily mean that our capability to effectively conduct operations like those above will be reduced as well; and since nature abhors a vacuum, as we pull back less desirable and benign forces will flow in to take our place (already happening off the coast of Somalia). Any politician advocating a diminished Defense Department had better be honest about the consequences, and damn well better take responsibility when, predictably, something goes wrong and people start to die.

Summer reading/watching

Since I seem to keep blowing my opinion pieces on Facebook, which is probably the last thing most people want to hear about, I don't have any currents ones for this ol' blog. So let's try something lighter, like my summer read/watch/don't watch list:

Reading:

• The Saxon Tales (Bernard Cornwell) - fans of historical fiction know Cornwell mostly for his Richard Sharpe series (turned into great TV movies in Britain), but with Sharpe having fought his way from the plains of India to Waterloo, vanquishing Napoleon and showing up in some rather unlikely places - like Trafalgar - in the process, that ship had pretty much sailed and Cornwell turned elsewhere. He's written some other short series about the Civil War and Arthurian Britain, but his latest is set in a dark time period I knew little about. Thus, along with his typically bloody but riveting battle narratives, I've picked up some knowledge about the birth pangs of the nation the world came to know as the United Kingdom. Following the trials of Uthred, a pagan Briton who, in the aftermath of the Vikings invasions of the 9th century, finds himself in the service of the Christian king Alfred, we follow the Norsemen as they overrun most of the island, leaving only Alfred's Wessex as the last English kingdom in the realm. Book by book, Alfred manages to cling to power and slowly turn back the Viking tide with the help of Uthred's sword. Due to the paucity of written records from the time, some events are heavily fictionalized, but as always Cornwell paints a scene that makes one feel that if things didn't actually happen this way, they should have. Quite readable, though those without a strong hankering for historical fiction in general might find working through the various Old English place-names rather trying.


• History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Vol 1, The Birth of Britain (Winston Churchill) - Cornwell's Saxon Tales dovetailed into my picking up the first volume of this series, which I'd ordered a mere three years and three deployments ago. Churchill has a lot of ground to cover, however, so there wasn't quite as much detail on King Alfred the Great's reign as I'd hoped (he's a small blip in between the Romans and William the Conqueror). As such, my pace of reading the first volume has slowed in direct relationship to the farther away from King Alfred it got. At this rate, I'll probably finish volume one in time for my next deployment a year from now.


• Sharpe's (fill in the blank) (Bernard Cornwell again) - reading Cornwell's new stuff make me hanker for some of his old stuff, so I decided to pick up the Sharpe chronicles again and go through them in chronological order (I've read them all before, but Cornwell first inserted a book here and there in between those from his original pantheon, and then he rewound time twenty years and went all the way back to India for several books). The Sharpe series is one of only a few by modern authors that I followed expectantly for years, from start to finish. Sharpe's a one-trick pony throughout - gets in a scrape which quickly requires vengeance against an old or new enemy, finds a girl along the way, and has his vengeance requited during a large, bloody battle - but Cornwell is at least as good a historian as he is a writer, and has a detailed and generally quite accurate backdrop behind each tale. Sometimes Sharpe takes the place of an actual historical figure who played a critical role in various battles during the Napoleonic period, but otherwise the battle descriptions are true and vivid, and one can learn a great deal about the clashes, big and small, that made Arthur Wellesley the preeminent general of his time. There's also something delicious in watching Sharpe, born and bred in the gutters of London, continually prove himself a better officer and warrior than the aristocrats who paid for their commissions rather than earn them.


• Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban (Stephen Tanner) - on the relatively good chance that Afghanistan is my next deployment destination, I figured a little background knowledge would be useful. Tanner's history claims to be the only military history of a nation that's known little else but warfare for over 2,500 years. Some curious notes: generally Afghanistan has only garnered the interest of warlords as a prize to be kept from someone else, not as something intrinsically valuable on its own; this trend accelerated with the growth of ocean-going trade by European powers which bypassed the old Silk Road. Also, Genghis Khan's conquest of that area almost a thousand years ago may have done more to contribute to its poverty and backwardness than any other single event. He annihilated powerful urban centers and large populations so thoroughly that they never recovered. Tanner writes well up until the American intervention in 2001; the last two chapters covering 9/11 and the last several years of counterinsurgency are much choppier, with obnoxious editorializing and non-sequiters popping up frequently (like so many, Tanner seems taken in by the fallacious notion that the Israel-Palestine issue is the cause of unrest throughout southwestern Asia; it's mentioned on almost every page in the last two chapters with virtually no attempt to tie it in to the larger narrative, not to mention that most Afghanis have lived in such isolation from the wider world that the conflict is meaningless to them). Perhaps another revised edition later down the road will allow time to provide a better perspective on our actions there now; but overall, despite the weak ending, it was a decent one-volume overview of the history of the graveyard of empires.


• A Song of Ice and Fire - A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast of Crows (George R.R. Martin) - there's a funny story on how I started reading this series (not funny "ha ha", but it certainly illuminates the dark and twisted alleys of the mental labyrinth I call my thought process). I saw some promos for a new HBO series starring Sean Bean, of the British Sharpe TV special-Boromir in LOTR-Irish terrorist from Patriot Games-general baddass fame. I cared less about the series than the fact that he was in it. However, I did not, at the time, subscribe to HBO, so I started reading the books instead. After getting through the first two, I bought HBO and slowly started watching the series (which is based on the first book), already knowing what's going to happen throughout the entire season. So because of one promo poster, I now have four new books and ten new channels, and have spent more time watching How to Train Your Dragon on HBO than the series that was the inspiration for the whole thing. So don't get lost in my mind; it's scary up there. Anyway, I don't read modern fantasy since - in my opinion, founded on nothing specific - it's generally a poor derivation of Lord of the Rings or the computer game Warcraft; in the former case, I think once you've immersed yourself in LOTR you'll never be satisified with anything less, and the latter, computer games don't make for good books. But I've been pleasantly surprised; Martin's cycle cares less about magic and mystical creatures and more about the political and military machinations of the various noble houses in his fictional world. It reminded me greatly of Dune (the first three books, before Frank Herbert got really weird and his son spoiled the franchise for all time), with intrigue, betrayals, plots-within-plots, and outright war between different powers seeking the might of the crown for themselves. Unlike Dune, LOTR, and, I suspect, most other fantasy books, Martin also presents the reader with the gritty realities of medieval warfare, where princes, kings and knights fight according to aristocratic notions of virtue while making the lives of the baseborn utterly miserable. A knight can expect some quarter during a battle, and be ransomed later for the proper fee; the king's levies, however, simply die, their lands sacked and scorched as royal armies march back and forth across them. There IS fantastical mystery, however, and it's teased out at a pace sufficient to keep the reader engaged. Martin doesn't reveal the boundaries of his created world, as Tolkien did not; there are little-known lands over the horizon, holding mysterious powers and peoples, and wild places where unknown evils lurk. Readers looking for a gentle frolic through a peaceful fairyland should probably give this series a pass - the bloody violence and sexual escapades of the nobility are not for the faint of heart - but if you can handle that, it's a captivating journey.

Watching:

• Game of Thrones - no need to repeat everything I just said above. Given the constraints of television, many little details from the books have been omitted from the show, but overall it remains true to Martin's vision (helped, in no small part, by having Martin on board as a co-producer). Strong actors like Sean Bean tie it all together. I'd read the books first.


• The Pacific - watched it after coming back from my own tour of the Pacific. Many reviews I'd read about it were mixed, with a common criticism being that it was too depressing and less noble than events portrayed in its sister series about the Western front, Band of Brothers. Well, having visited many of the islands where Marines fought these battles, and studied the memoirs of those who fought them, The Pacific is not too far off the mark. The Marines in that theater fought brutal, unforgiving battles against a vicious enemy under the worst possible physical conditions. Comeraderie and the occasional light moment are shown, but the misery and violence of the island-hopping campaign simply can't be white-washed without diminishing what those Marines went through. Island by island, the Marines ground away at the Japanese, taking horrific casualties in the process. The weakest point in the series wasn't the constant darkness of the story but the attempt to tie several different war stories together into a cohesive narrative. Band of Brothers had the luxury of following one small group of people who were in the same unit the entire time; The Pacific follows three different Marines whose experiences barely overlap. The producers did about as well as they could, and I admire their attempt to ensure that as many stories as possible were heard. But it's choppy.


• Cars 2 - I had high hopes for this. By and large, everything Pixar touches turns to gold. But they went badly off the rails on this one. As I said on Facebook, we all know that Hollywood types cling to certain trendy beliefs. Sometimes, they put those beliefs aside and focus on making good movies; Pixar generally does this. Sometimes, those beliefs slip through a little bit, but the movie itself doesn't suffer; Pixar got in its shots about big-box stores and pollution in Wall-E, but then went on to tell a cute story about a robot with puppy-dog eyes and the triumph of humanity over machinery. With Cars 2, the mask came completely off. Apparently John Lasseter, Pixar's creative genius, thought really really hard about who would make a good 'bad guy' in a spy movie starring cars, and in a flash of inspiration came up with: Big Oil (you could literally hear the capital B and capital O as the bad guys plotted their dastardly deeds). Never mind that gas is the life-blood of all the characters; never mind that Dinoco, the Big Oil of the first Cars, was nobly portrayed by the venerable The King race car; never mind that there were a half-dozen storylines introduced and then abandoned during the course of the movie, all of which would have made for better antagonists (lemon cars taking over the world would have been amusing and more in line with the Cars world overall). Hollywood had to make its point, and as a result the movie fails. Pixar would have our children believe that oil companies will literally murder to prevent "alternative fuels" from getting their due (for those parents who haven't seen it already, this is by far the most violent movie Pixar has made; and while the Incredibles had its share of explosions and baddies getting thrown around, race cars are, no kidding, assassinated and tortured throughout the film). I think I'm going to pass on the merchandising for Pixar's latest offering (except for the Legos Aaron got before we saw the movie...) and see if they can do better next time. They could hardly do worse.

Happy 4th to all, and to all a good summer

In the absence of much else to say right now, I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend, wherever they are. My plans include a visit to the San Diego Fair, the roasting of an 80-pound pig (caught and cooked by someone else, not by me), and maybe an oil change. Exciting stuff, I know, but I'm an old man and my body can't handle the thrills of my younger years. There might be some Game of Thrones watching in there too, possibly some computer gaming, but most definitely some Lego-playing and puzzle-building with Aaron, and vomit-wiping and diaper-changing with Molly. These are a few of my favorite things.