Category Archives: Military

Can a “citizen of the world” be the President of the US?

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Barack Obama went abroad to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and trim John McCain’s advantage in that area, and at first it seemed to be working; now that he’s back, though, the trip pretty clearly looks like a political flop. For the first time since Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination, we have a poll (USA Today/Gallup) showing Sen. McCain in the lead, by four points; in the Rasmussen tracking poll, perhaps the most accurate one out there, Sen. Obama leads by three points, within the margin of error.What went wrong for the Chicago senator? One major thing seems to have been his Berlin speech, in which he greeted his German audience as “a fellow citizen of the world,” apologized for America, went out of his way to avoid crediting the US with saving West Berlin via the Berlin Airlift (for that matter, he also snubbed the Brits for their part in it), and referenced the fall of the Berlin Wall without ever mentioning that that came about because America led the West in standing up to Communism. As a result, his speech doesn’t seem to have impressed much of anyone. A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune noted dryly, “While America may not be perfect, there is no reason to apologize to the Germans, architects of the Holocaust.” In a commentary in Germany’s Stern magazine sardonically titled “Barack Kant Saves the World,” Florian Güssgen called Sen. Obama “almost too slick” and said, “Obama’s speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon’s feel good song ‘Imagine’ than of a foreign policy agenda.” As for the UK, a columnist for the Guardian snidely dismissed the whole thing with a classically British crack: “Barack Obama has found his people. But, unfortunately for his election prospects, they’re German, not American.”It probably didn’t help, further, that he kept the American flag offstage, both for his Berlin speech and during his press conference in Paris with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy; that could only underscore the impression that Sen. Obama cared more about the opinions of his European audiences than he did of the opinions of American voters, whom the trip was ostensibly intended to impress. The thing that might end up hurting Sen. Obama the most, though, was the incident at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he had been scheduled to meet with wounded soldiers. According to reports, the Pentagon informed him that he would not be allowed to bring the news media or his campaign staff, only his official Senate staff; in response, Sen. Obama canceled the visit. Sen. McCain’s response was predictable on every level, as political opportunity combined with a snub he no doubt felt keenly: he attacked.

If Sen. Obama wants to convince skeptics he can handle foreign policy, he’s going to have to do better than this.

The tipping point in the War on Terror?

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If not, it sounds like we’re at least to the tipping point in Iraq; the headline in The Times of London reads, “Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda,” and the article quotes the major general commanding the American forces in northern Iraq as saying, “I think we’re at the irreversible point.” Even Barack Obama is starting to admit he may not be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Personally, I’d call that progress.Also, those interested in the ongoing efforts to clean up Iraq after Saddam’s rule might appreciate this story: we just finished moving the last 550 metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq (about 12 miles south of Baghdad) to Canada, where it will be used to generate electricity. Apparently, there was a great sigh of relief once the stuff was finally out of the region. Now, the goal is the decontamination of Tuwaitha. The article dryly notes that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site—surrounded by huge sand berms—following a wave of looting after Saddam’s fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns,” which just makes me shudder; the sooner that place is safe, the better.HT: Bill

Have an honorable Memorial Day

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This might be from a beer company, but it’s still right on. I grew up around the Navy, so I know our military’s far from perfect, but still: we should be proud of those who served, and those who are serving now; we as a nation owe them far more than we could ever repay, and we should never forget that.

“Winning” doesn’t mean “easy”

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Unfortunately, our quick-fix minute-rice instant-oatmeal fast-food culture has largely lost touch with the fact that some struggles take a long time, and that even tough, long-term fights may well be not only worth fighting but necessary to fight. I think most of our churches have lost the stomach for that, which is why the long victory of discipleship, with the lifelong struggle to put sin to death in our lives and replace it with trust in Christ, is foreign to so many who consider themselves Christians; and I’m quite sure we’ve largely lost the stomach for it in our politics. We may talk the talk of long-term effort, but we don’t often walk the walk. That I’m sure is at least part of the reason (along with partisan opportunism) why the war in Iraq became so unpopular: it stopped being easy. Once it no longer looked like a cakewalk, a lot of folks stopped supporting it.

I’m glad, though, to see President Bush (finally?) call that attitude out:

I have to wonder (not originally, I know) what that reporter, and our press corps as a whole, would have made of World War II, or the Civil War . . . (According to Wikipedia, the American death toll of the entire Iraq War through the end of this month stands at 4,058 deaths, 3,320 in combat. In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge alone claimed 19,000 American dead.)

HT: Ed Morissey

America’s Stone-Age Navy

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OK, so maybe that’s an exaggeration—but when it comes to computer technology, it’s frighteningly close to the truth.

Consider the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided-missile destroyer. It is one of the most sophisticated and capable fighting ships the world has ever seen. With its advanced SPY-1 radar, 96 vertical-launch tubes armed with a variety of long-range weapons, an advanced sonar system and antisubmarine warfare capabilities, it has everything a naval warrior could want. Consider, now, the Blackberry that has become ubiquitous in our culture. The two-way communication bandwidth of a single Blackberry is three times greater than the bandwidth of the entire Arleigh Burke destroyer. Looked at another way, the Navy’s most modern in-service multi-mission warship has only five percent of the bandwidth we have in our home Internet connection. And the bandwidth it does have must be shared among the crew and combat systems . . . The recruiting posters promise, “Accelerate your life!” but the best we can do is “decelerate” access to information. The Economist summarized the challenge: “If Napoleon’s armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth.” During the past ten years we have seen an explosive growth in commercial bandwidth, and each year the Navy’s connectivity falls further and further behind. By 2014, our homes will have 250 times more bandwidth than a [guided-missile destroyer], and 100 times more than the next-generation aircraft carrier. We have to reverse this trend. And if we want the Navy to become a more interactive, collaborative, and effective fighting force, we have to leverage the innate collaborative nature of our Millennium Sailors.

I imagine that we’ve survived this handicap (which isn’t just the Navy; this is a problem for each of the services) to this point because we haven’t been up against opponents with the ability to exploit it. With China rising, we will—and probably sooner than we think. This needs to be fixed.HT: Max Boot

Honor, reputation, and sacrifice

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I wrote a while back, with reference to John McCain, about the difference between honor and reputation, arguing that Sen. McCain knew the difference even if the New York Times didn’t (and presumably still doesn’t). Now Sen. McCain’s campaign has released a rather extraordinary Web ad which, inter alia, proves that he does indeed know that difference well. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this ad is that it’s all about how he learned that difference—and that it’s unsparing about just how much he had to learn, and how much growing up he had to do, before he went to war. He’s not pulling any punches about the kind of person he was before his stay in the “Hanoi Hilton,” and I respect him even more for that.

John McCain

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With Mitt Romney’s decision to suspend his campaign, the pundits would have you believe that John McCain is now guaranteed to be the Republican presidential nominee. He may well end up such, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near that certain; to this point, Sen. McCain has received less than half of the votes cast in Republican primaries, and if most of Gov. Romney’s supporters go to Mike Huckabee, I think the convention could well end up deciding this race. (On the Democratic side, I think that’s highly likely to happen. Heaven help Denver.) Still, the odds would seem to favor Sen. McCain at this point—which has a lot of the conservative talking heads completely apoplectic. “McCain’s not a true conservative,” etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, combined with dark suspicions about his stability and the like.Now, as a Navy brat, I know a lot of people who knew Sen. McCain back when he was still, say, LCDR McCain, and I trust them to have more of a perspective on the man than your typical pundit. Here’s what one of them, as true-blue a conservative as anyone I know, had to say about him a while back (this is posted with permission):

Lt. John McCain was a flight instructor in VT-7 based at NAS Meridian, MS in the summer of 1964 while I was a student Naval Aviator there. Based on my observations and those of my best friend then and now, it is my opinion that the best thing that ever happened to him was doing hard time in the Hanoi “Hilton.” He had a violent, hair trigger temper and was arrogant, self-serving and vindictive. Following his experience as “ground zero” of the Forestal fire (a lesser man would likely not even have survived that) he needed to find a way to get his now-denied combat experience to stay competitive for promotion. I have no doubt that he used his considerable political influence to immediately get a set of orders to CAG-16 deploying on the Oriskany.During his tenure as a POW he demonstrated immense courage and resourcefulness. He was tough and I admire him greatly for the way he handled himself and I think that experience took the edge off of his most negative qualities. Just a side note here for those younger folks who may read this and for whom the Viet Nam war is little more than a few pages in a dusty history book, the gutty conduct of most of our POWs in that war was nothing short of incredible. And Senator McCain was right near the top.I had the privilege of quaffing a couple of beers with him and a few of his pilots in Yuma following his repatriation while he was CO of VA-174 (the East coast A-7 RAG). He was mellow and gracious and a pleasure to be with then.I was a big fan of his until he started his first run for president and I became aware of his inconsistent positions on several issues that I held dear. In short, he didn’t appear to have a coherent conservative worldview. I also think he blew his chance for the nomination in 2000 because he didn’t understand and embrace the evangelical grassroots. He had that block for the taking early on when they were still skeptical of W. Instead, he thumbed his nose at them (us) and lost the nomination. Most of the grassroots energy in the party comes from the so-called “Christian right” and McCain missed his chance (although he may never have been any more able to connect with them than, say, Hillary).The problem with the entire Republican field is that there is no “Reagan conservative” anywhere to be seen so we are back to asking, “which one will we settle for?”On the plus side: McCain is pro life, anti spending and spot-on on the WoT. Negatives are: Soft on immigration, voted against tax cuts and McCain-Feingold was a disaster that gave us Soros, Lewis et al. Also, have to give him credit—though I was unhappy with him at the time—for getting our Supreme Court nominees through.Senator McCain may end being my man though I think the governor from Arkansas is the best of the bunch in debate and thinking on his feet.

Now, this is far from pure adoration of the “he’s the ideal candidate” type. Clearly, he isn’t. However, while there are certainly reservations here about McCain (reservations which I share), I don’t think there’s reason for hysterical opposition, either. Yes, he’s a man of great pride and greater temper who can be a bit short in the fusebox; no, that doesn’t make him “unstable” (the kindest insinuation I’ve heard). And yes, he’s spent too much time poking conservatives in the eye, and yes, he needs to give up the adulation of the NY Times and come back to his conservative roots on some things; but I agree with John Weidner: once he’s no longer a thorn in Bush’s side, but instead the guy standing between the MSM’s favored candidate and the White House, the NYT’s gloves will come off, and that will solve the problem.The bottom line: if Sen. McCain is the nominee, I think folks like Rush who are suggesting conservatives are better off if he loses have gone clean ’round the bend. As Dan Lehr says, if he isn’t the nominee we wanted, we need to grow up and get over it. Two reasons: one, we will get far better judges out of Sen. McCain than out of Hillarack Oblinton (two peas, one pod). Even if you don’t trust him on nominations, anyone he’ll come up with will be much, much better than anyone either of those two would put forward. And two, he will prosecute the GWOT, and probably far more effectively than the current administration; the Democrats will concede our gains. We have turned the corner in Iraq; we can’t afford to be in thrall to those who want us to turn back around it. I’m still voting Huckabee in Indiana, but if it’s McCain in November, then my vote is McCain all the way.

Bumper-sticker geopolitics

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I saw a bumper sticker today that caught my attention: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” It made me wish I had the person who owned that car there to talk with, to ask them one question: Why? This isn’t a truism, after all, something that can simply be presented as inarguable; and while I suppose it might be presented as a dictum that impresses by the force of its truth, I don’t find it so. Rather, this is an assertion which needs to be supported with logic and evidence; if it is so, it needs to be proven.

To be honest, I don’t think it can be—I think the study of history is very much against this proposition. To be sure, there are times when efforts to prepare for war undermine or even negate efforts to prevent it (World War I would be the classic case in point); but given the reality throughout history of aggressive expansionistic powers which tend to treat countries unprepared for war as hors d’oeuvres—which does at least make for short wars, I’ll grant—there are clearly many cases in which failing to prepare for war makes war inevitable. (Just ask Neville Chamberlain.)

The bottom line here, I think, is that war (like most major human undertakings) is complex, and neither the factors that cause it nor the strategies for preventing it can be summarized and dismissed in a bumper sticker. That sort of simplistic thinking does no one any good.

Midway between luck and skill

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I’m not sure what this world is coming to (admittedly not an infrequent observation on my part), but the best book on military history I’ve read this year was written by a lawyer. Dallas Woodbury Isom is a retired law professor from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon who decided to explore the reasons for the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway because he found the existing explanations insufficient; the result was the book Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway. I haven’t finished it yet, but I can already say it’s an excellent piece of work, as his lawyerly standards for evidence and inquiry match the standards required to do good history—and he’s a good writer, to boot. The book’s critical contribution, and the reason it will almost certainly be a major landmark in WWII history, is the significant amount of primary research Dr. Isom conducted in Japan, both in official Japanese sources and through interviews with survivors of the battle. He notes that as a result of his research, “many of my findings will be surprising to devotees of the battle, and some are bound to be controversial in the military history community”—but though his argumentation is marred somewhat by faulty assumptions (he does not, after all, have any first-hand experience of carrier operations in specific, or military operations in general), his evidence is so solid and his conclusions so carefully marshaled that I expect his work will stand whatever scrutiny it receives.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dr. Isom’s work to me is the number of times he uses words and phrases like “fortuitous,” “miraculous,” “bizarre twist of fate,” “sheerest accident,” and “incredibly bad luck” in describing the events of the battle. At one point he notes that “the luckiest break of the entire day for the Americans came out of what could have been a disastrous blunder: an inaccurately plotted ‘interception point’ based on the erroneous PBY sighting report.” Luck plays a significant role in most battles, but at Midway, that was true to a remarkable degree. If you tried to write this in a novel, critics would complain that you were stretching the reader’s credulity beyond the breaking point; and yet, it happened in real life. The crowning irony here, though, comes in Dr. Isom’s conclusion, after he has constructed an alternate-history scenario based on a Japanese victory at Midway:

In a chronicle replete with ironies and paradoxes, the final irony is that Japan’s defeat would almost certainly have been much more horrible had it won the Battle of Midway than it was having lost it. All in all, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Japan was lucky to lose at Midway. Such are the vagaries of war.

The reason I find this all very interesting is that Dr. Isom has no stronger word to describe all this than “luck,” which is why he must repeatedly add adjectives like “incredible” and “bizarre”; though he does at one point use the epithet “miraculous,” he shows no sign of actually believing in miracles. From a Christian point of view, however, I’d call this something else: divine providence. If “coincidence is God acting incognito,” this many remarkable and improbable coincidences constitute a place where God is visible through the disguise, at least to those who have eyes to see. And as Dr. Isom carefully argues, this wasn’t merely to America’s benefit; as I would say, it wasn’t just God acting on behalf of America to ensure the US won the war because we were the good guys. Rather, in the long run, it was just as much to the good of the Japanese, given how things likely would have unfolded with a Japanese win at Midway; God was at work to bring about what was best for both sides. Such are the vagaries of war? Yes, from a human perspective; but more than that, more meaningfully than that, such is the providence of God—who is ever redemptively at work in human history, even when his hand is hard to see. So I believe, and so I affirm—and so Dr. Isom shows me in his account of the Battle of Midway, even if he doesn’t see it himself.

An insurgency divided against itself cannot stand

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From the “Things the US Media Won’t Tell You” Dept.:

Our Islamicist opponents in Iraq are turning on each other, and their “premier jihadist propaganda tool” has now launched an all-out attack on al-Qaeda. This shouldn’t surprise us–one of the best arguments for standing firm in Iraq is that the uneasy alliances among our enemies there can’t hold together if we keep the pressure on–but unfortunately, it also shouldn’t surprise us that no one in the West is interested in reporting this. Kudos to Nibras Kazimi, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute, for breaking this story on his blog Talisman Gate; this is the sort of thing we need to know if we’re going to have any chance at all to evaluate the situation in Iraq rationally and helpfully.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club picked up on this, via a thread on Small Wars Council in which it’s noted that al-Qaeda’s actions on the ground have outraged not only fellow jihadists but at least some of the tribes on whose cooperation they have depended. The key for us in Iraq, it seems to me, is to use a sort of large-scale judo on al-Qaeda and on other groups involved in the insurgency, to do everything possible to use their strength against them and assist them in defeating themselves; and if Wretchard’s right, that might be just what we’re doing. Now might not be a bad time at all to significantly reduce our troop presence, but it’s definitely not the time to pull out and abandon the field to our enemies. Stay the course, but sneakily.