Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This is how realignments happen…

Wetsuit optional.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

This blog goes to 11…

What fresh hell is this?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Consistently wrong since 2002

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Gastritis broke my calculator.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

We still have time to mess this up!

Shocking, but not surprising

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Lighten up, Francis.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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War

Speaker Pelosi and Senator McConnell Are Running Out of Time: The President Must Be Impeached Tonight!

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Things are now moving at their own pace. Events are out of the hands of the decision makers. There is a limited amount of time to get things back under control.

Today, at the instigation of President Trump and his enablers in the House and Senate Republican caucuses, Trump’s supporters engaged in an act of violent, extremist, armed insurrection to overthrow the Congress of the United States of America and the Constitution of the United States.

Early this evening Vice President Pence, after being consulted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff GEN Milley and the unqualified Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, authorized the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to respond to the attack on the US government instigated and fomented by President Trump and his enablers! This is an illegal order! Vice President Pence is not in the chain of command, he has no authority to issue any such order, and, as a result, the US military is now operating outside of constitutional and lawful civilian control.

As I type this time is running out for Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader McConnell to move to both occupy the high ground and to contact in response to the ongoing events. The revolutionary insurrection that President Trump and his Republican enablers in the House, the Senate, elected Republicans at the state level, and conservative news media has created against the United States is ongoing. As such, Trump needs to be immediately impeached in the House and then the Senate must move to convict and remove him. They need to do it before he decides to up the ante, invoke the Insurrection Act, and declare martial law. We can only imagine what he might try to do with the national security emergency powers he would be granted under such a declaration, but there is no longer the actual time, let alone the political space, to wait around and find out.

If Speaker Pelosi and Senator McConnell do not act now, they will not get the chance to act. It is now or never. Despite the wishes of some, there is no time to wish for Vice President Pence and Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. America as a self governing democratic-republic is in a moment of gravest danger. Speaker Pelosi and Senator McConnell have to lead now lest the danger consume us all. If they don’t, then, as Samuel Adams said:

This meeting can do nothing more to save this country!

Open thread!

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Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector

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The whole discussion around the recently disclosed Russian hacking – “is it traditional SVR espionage using the cyber domain or is it subversion or is it an act of war?”- is all fascinating and completely misses the two most important points.

The first is that from the Russian perspective this is war. As can be seen in the delineations in the table below:

Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector

Moreover, Russia considers the information domain to consist of two critical components: the technical side (which includes communications sabotage, electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and other C4ISR sabotage or degradation efforts), and the psychological side. That is demonstrated in the graphic below (from this publication at the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation):

Properly Framing the Recently Acknowledged Russian Hacking of the US Government and Private Sector 1

The Russians aren’t making these distinctions, but they’re sure glad that Richard Haass who runs CFR is all over the US news, nat-sec and foreign policy sites, and Twitter muddying the water for them.

From the Russian doctrinal perspective this is part of what they call New Type War, which is how they doctrinally understand hybrid and unconventional warfare these days.

The second, and equally important point, is that it will take months, if not years to figure out everywhere and everything the SVR’s cyber-operators got into, what they actually did inside those systems, and what the actual ramifications are. Since we don’t have months or years, the strategic assumption to drive strategy and operations in response has to be “they got into everything, they’ve compromised everything they could, and we can expect anything and everything that can be controlled by computer code can and will go down at the least optimal time for the US and our allies and the most optimal time for the Russians”. Imagine what happens when the power grid goes down at 12:01 PM on 20 JAN 2020 just to make a point that Biden may now be President of the US, but Putin has control of the US. Or when he takes it down someplace that has a major winter weather event so people freeze to death. Or he has his people tamper with the emergency broadcast systems to cause chaos, injury, and death during a major weather event or other natural disaster – he did a dry run on this back in 2015 in Louisiana.

It’s great that Haass has the luxury from his home office to ponder whether this is a fish or if it is a fowl, but that luxury is a mirage. And I have serious doubts that anyone but GEN Nakasone is taking this seriously right now. Maybe Christopher Wray, but if he is, he’s going to continue to keep his head down and his mouth shut. Ratcliffe isn’t because that man is almost as dumb as Louis Gohmert. O’Brien and the Acting SecDef aren’t because that’s now what they’re being paid to do. From all the reporting Haspell is packing her office up as she knows she’s either getting fired between now and 20 JAN or on 20 JAN. We know the tennis player who is illegally acting as the DHS secretary isn’t. To use a Star Trek analogy: they’ve taken the shields down from inside the ship and have spent a lot of effort to make it look like they’re still up.

As for Trump downplaying it and trying to blame it on China, that also makes no sense. He and his people have spent so much time since 2017 trying to blame stuff on China that every Republican, every conservative, and everyone on conservative news from Fox to OANN to talk radio to Breitbart, and conservative social and digital media no longer call China China. Nor does Pompeo or any elected or appointed Republican official refer to it as either China or by its official name or acronym the People’s Republic of China/PRC. Now it is the Chinese Communist Party/CCP. Oogah Boogah!!! So if “the Chinese Communist Party” is so bad, then having the PRC responsible should be as bad, if not worse, than having Russia do it. And that is beside the point that if the PRC did it, given that they’re a lot more careful and subtle than the Russians, we still probably wouldn’t know about it.

I’ve been making the same point since early spring 2016: we are at war. With Russia. Not just cyberwar or information war, but war. And we’re at war not because we want to be at war with Russia or because it’s good that we’re at war with Russia, but because Russia has been stating for the better part of a decade that they are at war with the US and that the US is the aggressor and the cause of the war. When someone clearly and consistently tells you and demonstrates to you what it is they believe it is foolish to ignore it. My paper on this new, largely non-kinetic/non-lethal form of 21st century war and warfare that deemphasizes military power while leveraging and weaponizing all the other elements of national power was published this past July. It attempts to frame and contextualize the war and warfare that we’re seeing hostile state actors, peer competitors, and regional powers use as part of great power competition, Gray Zone conflict, and subversion. As well as how non-state actors such as violent extremists, ultra wealthy individuals, and corporations that have more financial resources than 90% of nation-state’s gross domestic product are leveraging their own non-state equivalents of national power to wage war for their own benefit and achieve their own objectives as well. The 21st century operating environment is as dangerous as the 20th century one, even as the character and characteristics of war seem to be becoming less kinetic.

Open thread!

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A Retired General Officer or Flag Officer Should Not Be the Next Secretary of Defense

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Yesterday, in response to a Newsweek article about whether or not President-elect Biden should pick a retired general officer, specifically GEN (ret) Austin, to be the next Secretary of Defense, Senior Chief Nance had a very strident response:

GEN (ret) McCaffrey then replied attesting to GEN (ret) Austin’s character and experience. Senior Chief Nance co-signed that by tweet.

What GEN (ret) McCaffrey did not do, however, was explicitly endorse GEN (ret) Austin for the position of Secretary of Defense, though this tweet from 28 November might be taken as an implicit endorsement.

While I appreciate Senior Chief Nance’s enthusiasm, as well as his concern about the think tank world inside the Beltway, I think he’s wrong regarding the appointment of another general officer/flag officer to the position of Secretary of Defense. While the Newsweek article’s focus, specifically the focus of the people that provided statements to the reporters on this possibility, all seem to focus on reestablishing the Civilian-Military relationship, I think there’s another reason for President-elect Biden to be cautious about appointing a retired general or admiral to be his Secretary of Defense: a 40 plus year career of acculturation, socialization, and indoctrination to deferring to the president as the commander in chief of the military.

While deference to those above one in the chain of command isn’t confined to generals in relation to the President, we have reporting that indicates this was a major problem for Secretary Mattis in his relationship with Trump. Specifically, when Trump threw a temper tantrum at Secretary Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (now retired) Gen. Dunford, and the Joint Chiefs in the Tank at the Pentagon in the summer of 2017 when they, along with Secretary of State Tillerson and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, tried to hold an explanatory briefing for Trump about the United States national security commitments and posture. This was the meeting where Trump lost his shit and screamed at Mattis, the Joint Chiefs, and the rest of the military personnel in the room that:

“You’re all losers,” Trump said. “You don’t know how to win anymore.”

“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass.

Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

What happened in response is not just telling, but it provides us with the central reason why a general officer/flag officer may not be the best choice to be the Secretary of Defense (emphasis mine):

Tillerson in particular was stunned by Trump’s diatribe and began visibly seething. For too many minutes, others in the room noticed, he had been staring straight, dumbfounded, at Mattis, who was speechless, his head bowed down toward the table. Tillerson thought to himself, “Gosh darn it, Jim, say something. Why aren’t you saying something?”

But, as he would later tell close aides, Tillerson realized in that moment that Mattis was genetically a Marine, unable to talk back to his commander in chief, no matter what nonsense came out of his mouth.

Others at the table noticed Trump’s stream of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn’t stand it another minute. His voice broke into Trump’s tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops.

“No, that’s just wrong,” the secretary of state said. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.”

Tillerson’s father and uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service.

“The men and women who put on a uniform don’t do it to become soldiers of fortune,” Tillerson said. “That’s not why they put on a uniform and go out and die . . . They do it to protect our freedom.”

There was silence in the Tank. Several military officers in the room were grateful to the secretary of state for defending them when no one else would. The meeting soon ended and Trump walked out, saying goodbye to a group of servicemen lining the corridor as he made his way to his motorcade waiting outside. Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn were deflated. Standing in the hall with a small cluster of people he trusted, Tillerson finally let down his guard.

“He’s a f—ing moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.

Secretary Mattis is considered to be the most highly regarded Marine of his generation. His Marines affectionately called him the Warrior Monk because of his scholarly, self contained, bachelor lifestyle. He calls himself CHAOS (Colonel Has An Outstanding Suggestion). Those who don’t know him, and don’t realize he hates it, call him Mad Dog. But my Marine teammates all speak of him in the highest regard. Those of my former teammates that know him and have served with and under him all have their own unique stories about him and why he is held in such high regard. Unfortunately, over a forty plus year career Secretary Mattis had been socialized, acculturated, and indoctrinated to defer to the President as the commander in chief. Just as he and every other officer in the Marines, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, had been socialized, acculturated, and indoctrinated to defer to those above them in the chain of command. This is a real problem. One of the now retired general officers that I was assigned to as cultural advisor/senior civilian advisor used to refer to the problem as the Legion of Frightened Men. Colonels and lieutenant colonels and even in some cases general officers who wouldn’t speak up when the most senior general officer in the room asked if anyone had anything to add, any suggestions, any concerns. Not because they didn’t have anything to add or any suggestions or any concerns, but because they had been taught and trained to defer to those who ranked above them in seniority.

I’ve got no dog in the fight over who does or does not become the next Secretary of Defense. Each of the people whose names have been floated – former Undersecretary of Defense Flournoy, former DHS Secretary Johnson, GEN (ret) Austin, and Senator Duckworth – would each be a vast, vast, vast improvement over Secretary Esper and the current acting SecDef. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Kath Hill, who is running the DOD transition team for President-elect Biden would also be a vast, vast, vast improvement. But the bulk of my career for the better part of the past 15 years has been serving as a senior civilian advisor to senior Army leaders, from colonels commanding brigade combat teams to lieutenant generals commanding Army Service Component Commands. And I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been either permanently or temporarily assigned to an excellent batch of senior leaders. It is important to realize, though, that they’re professionally raised differently than civilian senior leaders. I watched one general officer I was assigned to, who was senior in overall time of service, defer to a higher ranking general officer on an issue – a general officer who lied to his face about what was going to be done to deal with that issue – because of socialization to the chain of command. Because that’s what a more junior officer, even if that junior officer is a general or an admiral with more time in service, does when given an order or guidance by a more senior leader. And there is no more senior leader for the US military than the president.

As I wrote the other day:

I know GEN (ret) Austin, but not well. I met him in Iraq in 2008 when he was the Commanding General of 10th Mountain Division. The brigade combat team my team was assigned to had been split off from the rest of 1st Armored Division in Multi-National Division North and sent south and east of Baghdad to Multi-National Division Central. 10th Mountain Division fortunately took over Multi-National Division Central two months into our deployment. I met GEN Austin when he came to our FOB as part of his initial battlefield circulation. I was introduced to him, he spoke to me for about 90 seconds, and my part of his briefing lasted about two minutes tops. I also provided support to him when he was the Commanding General of CENTCOM via his Command Sergeant Major, who was my point of contact in the CENTCOM command group.

I barely know GEN (ret) Austin, but what I know of him indicates he’s an excellent general officer. However, given the dynamic we’ve seen with the retired senior military leaders – generals and admirals – appointed to senior positions over the past four years by Trump, many that required Senate confirmation, my professional opinion (for what it’s worth) is that if a highly qualified, exemplary civilian senior leader can be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense, then she or he should be nominated instead of a retired general officer/flag officer. This does not mean that retired senior military leaders are unfit for senior civilian appointments, it just means that they should be appointed to the right positions otherwise they are being set up for failure.

I was very glad when Secretary Mattis was nominated to become Secretary of Defense given the possibilities that Trump could have come up with for nominees. I think he did as good a job as he possibly could have under the circumstances. But it is very clear, as reported by multiple sources in long form news reporting and books, that he was unable to transcend what he always was – a Marine and a Marine general officer – during times when the Nation needed more from him and for him to be more. That isn’t his fault. Asking and expecting him or anyone else to be other than who they are is an unfair expectation. But his tenure as Secretary of Defense, as well as his relationship and interaction with Trump, should stand as a stark warning about making sure that the right person is designated for nomination as the next Secretary of Defense. And given the evidence we have from the last four years, the right person may not be a retired general or admiral no matter how exemplary they are as a national security professional and as a person.

Everyone is different. GEN (ret) Austin is not Secretary Mattis. He may be able to overcome his socialization and acculturation to deferring to the president as the commander in chief of the military and if he can, then he’d be an excellent pick. But if he can’t, then someone else – Flournoy, Johnson, Duckworth, Hill, someone who hasn’t been publicly speculated about yet – should be chosen to avoid recreating the situation that Secretary Mattis found himself in. Not doing so would be setting not just GEN (ret) Austin up for failure as the Secretary of Defense, but President-elect Biden up for failure in regards to building the Department of Defense back better. And if GEN (ret) Austin isn’t the best fit for Secretary of Defense, I would hope that President-elect Biden would find an appropriate senior appointment for him and, should he be willing to return to service, that GEN (ret) Austin would accept that appointment and excel at it.

Edited to Add (ETA):

I want to clarify a point or two as there seems to be some confusion in the comments. I am not arguing that GEN (ret) Austin would not be a good Secretary of Defense. Nor am I arguing that one of the other people whose names have been floated as a potential choice are better choices. What I am arguing is that if GEN (ret) Austin is selected by President-elect Biden, he will have to overcome the same career’s worth of conditioning to defer to the President as commander in chief of the military that Secretary Mattis could not overcome. While GEN (ret) Austin is not Secretary Mattis – they are very different senior military leaders – this will be a key challenge. Of course, as a number of you have pointed out in your comments, President-elect Biden is not Trump, so the dynamic between Secretary of Defense and President would be very, very, very different from the start.

Open thread!

 

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Schroedinger’s Secretary of Defense & the Reality of Building Back Better

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There’s been a lot of coverage, much of it somewhat angsty or gossipy, playing out over who President-elect Biden is going to select as his Secretary of Defense. Most of the coverage appears to be in Politico,  with Axios, whose founders were also Politico’s founders, getting one scoop in. The reporting largely focuses on former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michelle Flournoy. Flournoy founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), served as President Obama’s first Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and then, when she left government, founded a national security consulting firm with Secretary of State designee Antony Blinken. The news stories include reporting that the Congressional Black Caucus is pushing for the first African American to be appointed Secretary of Defense to GEN (ret) Loyd Austin* and former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson being the African Americans under consideration for the position to suggestions that she might not get the nomination because President-elect Biden doesn’t know her well to questions about Flournoy’s clients and work in the private consultancy she founded and ran with Blinken to Flournoy’s charitable work with CARE.

The reporting is somewhat interesting in an inside baseball sort of way if you like that sort of thing. It is also a clear indication that Politico and Axios are looking for anything even remotely controversial within the Biden-Harris transition, which itself would seem to indicate that no one at those publications, as well as others, have learned anything over the last five years.

The reality for whomever will be the next Secretary of Defense, just as the reality for whomever will be appointed to the requiring Senate confirmation principal and deputy positions across the executive branch is going to be triage. What the Department of Defense is going to need, just as every other department, agency, bureau, and office within the executive branch, is someone who both knows how to run a large organization and recognizes that the job is going to be overseeing a rapid assessment of the damage done by Trump’s appointees, or, in some cases, lack of appointees, and that is still being done through the transition. This includes identifying which of Trump’s political appointees have been burrowed into senior civil service positions where they are intended to prevent President-elect Biden and his appointees from making repairs, changing policy, and revising strategy. It will then be necessary to strip these burrowed in political appointees of all responsibility, basically pay them to do nothing, until the long, slow process of removing them from the civil service is worked through so they can be fired. President-elect Biden’s senior appointees and their teams will then have to shore up what can be shored up and repair what can be repaired so that the different executive branch elements can begin to function properly again. They will then need to develop plans to build something better to replace those parts of the executive branch that have been broken beyond repair. And, in the case of the Secretary of Defense, all of this will have to be done will maintaining readiness, conducting all the ongoing missions, being ready and able to conduct missions to deal with events that haven’t even happened yet and that not even the people on the Futures teams can anticipate.

Frankly, whomever is Biden’s first Secretary of Defense is likely to be gone in two years. Not because they aren’t a quality appointment, nor because they aren’t committed to the President-elect’s vision, but because this is going to be an exhausting, thankless job. As I’ve written about here, as well as other places, despite the massive amounts of money we spend on the Department of Defense and the Services, we have a readiness problem. Some of that is personnel related. Too much tail and not enough tooth combined with recruitment issues. Some of it is material related. The Government Accountability Office just released a report that found that the vast majority of military aircraft have fallen short on readiness over the past decade. This lines up with what Lt Gen (ret) Deptula stated in January 2017:

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has been at war not just since 9/11, but since 1991.  After 25 years of continuous combat operations, coupled with budget instability and lower-than-planned top lines, have made the USAF the oldest, smallest, and least ready it has ever been in its history. The average USAF aircraft age is 27 years—the youngest B-52 is over 50 years old. Going into Operation Desert Storm, the USAF had over 530,000 active duty personnel, today that number is 320,000—40 percent less, and the USAF has almost 60 percent fewer combat fighter squadrons today (55) than it did during the first Gulf War in 1991 (134).  Today, over 50 percent of USAF forces are not sufficiently ready for a high-end fight against near-peer capabilities posed by China or Russia.

Despite spending over $700 billion a year on the Department of Defense and the Services, we are, to use the colloquialism, out of Schlitz. While the Budget Control Act, d/b/a The Sequester, was waived every year for the DOD and the Services, the reality is that it was used to justify all sorts of bizarre decisions not to spend money. I cannot tell you how many DOD and Service civil service positions were allowed to go unfilled when people retired, in fact when people were incentivized to take early retirement, in order to meet budgetary targets resulting from the sequester, even though the sequester was waived every year. I cannot tell you how much of this work was pushed to the contract side and then those contracts were never finalized – start work orders never issued – because of the time it takes to run through the contracting process either providing contracting officers with excuses to claw back money because it hadn’t been spent promptly or because the start work orders got pushed back until the contract awards conflicted with the 80/20 rule for when money has to be spent by or clawed back. And more contract awards than ever are now being contested, and in some cases litigated, by the companies that lose the bid, which further compounds the problem.

And if you think the Department of Defense has it bad, let me tell you about the Department of State and USAID. Secretary of State designee Blinken is inheriting a pair of agencies that have been gutted. Whomever is named to be the next Attorney General has a morale and professionalization issue that is going to be hard to address at the Department of Justice and the FBI. The DNI nominee and, eventually, the Director of Central Intelligence nominee have similar problems as whomever will be the next Attorney General. Secretary of the Treasury designee Yellen is going to have a huge task in cleaning up the mess made by Mnuchin, as will whomever is nominated to take over at Commerce, Interior, HHS, Agriculture, etc.

At the end of the day what is going to matter is who President-elect Biden is comfortable with and how they get along with their key counterparts. For instance, how the Secretary of Defense gets along with the Secretary of State** and the National Security Advisor. Or how the Secretary of the Treasury gets on with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. The first two years of the next four years is going to be a massive undertaking of assessing what condition the executive branch is in, what can be quickly fixed, what can be patched while longer term repairs are planned and undertaken, and what can’t be repaired and has to be replaced with something new.

Build back better isn’t a campaign slogan, a motto, or a mission statement. It is a recognition of a very grim reality. A grim reality that will wear down even the best of people.

Open thread!

* Full disclosure: I know GEN (ret) Austin, but not well. I met him in Iraq in 2008 when he was the Commanding General of 10th Mountain Division. The brigade combat team my team was assigned to had been split off from the rest of 1st Armored Division in Multi-National Division North and sent south and east of Baghdad to Multi-National Division Central. 10th Mountain Division fortunately took over Multi-National Division Central two months into our deployment. I met GEN Austin when he came to our FOB as part of his initial battlefield circulation. I was introduced to him, he spoke to me for about 90 seconds, and my part of his briefing lasted about two minutes tops. I also provided support to him when he was the Commanding General of CENTCOM via his Command Sergeant Major, who was my point of contact in the CENTCOM command group.

** Given that Michelle Flournoy and Antony Blinken are friends and have been working together – inside and outside of government – and are co-owners of a national security consultancy in DC, I expect that this will have some bearing on the final decisions as to who will be chosen to become the next Secretary of Defense. I don’t know Flournoy, but in many ways she is an almost perfect example of the right make, model, and type you’d want to be the Secretary of Defense right now. I don’t know if that and her relationship with Blinken will be enough and I’m sure whomever President-elect Biden selects will be an exemplary candidate.

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A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran

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Last week Bibi Netanyahu made a secret trip to Saudi Arabia to meet secretly with Mike Pompeo and Mohammed bin Salman. It didn’t stay secret for long. As the meeting was getting underway the Houthis attacked a Saudi ARAMCO facility. Which means the Iranians, who the Houthis have turned to for support, have excellent SIGINT fidelity on Bibi’s movements. Bibi should, probably, keep that in mind.

In the wake of this morning’s news, which Cheryl brought to all of our attention, we can now speculate that this morning’s operation was a likely topic of discussion at the secret Netanyahu-Pompep-bin Salman meeting.

Regardless, we need to understand the strategic reality right now that the lame duck Trump administration, as well as Bibi Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman are involved in. And we can do it with pictures!

The Iranians are playing chess*:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran

Bibi is this guy:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 1

And this is Trump:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 2

As a bonus, the Chinese are playing go, which, I would argue, is even harder to master than chess!

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 3

The only good news is that the Iranians are smarter and better at this than Trump, Bibi, Pompeo, and bin Salman. They know Biden will be president soon. And while the Iranians may not have invented the game of chess, they’re willing to absorb the loss of a piece to win the game.

I expect we’ll eventually find out that this is the same in country team the Israelis used to kill al Masri back in July. As always, Bibi is willing to fight Iran to the last American. As I wrote back in August 2018, based on analytical work I’ve done on the issue for the Army beginning in January of 2012, going to war with Iran would be strategic malpractice and tactically stupid.

Open thread!

* Before someone starts, I am well aware that while the name for chess is derived from the Persian/Farsi word shah, meaning king, it is most likely that the game was introduced to Persia from what is now India.

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Veteran’s Day 2020: A Long Overdue Honor

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Yesterday the US Senate passed legislation providing a statutory exemption to the time limit for awarding the Medal of Honor. This exemption is for one very specific soldier: Sergeant 1st Class (SFC) Alwyn Cashe.

From The Washington Post:

The Senate passed legislation on Tuesday that clears the way for President Trump to award the nation’s highest award for valor in combat to Army Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, who repeatedly entered a burning vehicle in Iraq to save six fellow soldiers and an interpreter from harm and died a few weeks later.

The legislation, passed by unanimous consent, waives the legal requirement that the Medal of Honor be awarded within five years of a service member’s acts of valor. Cashe has long been considered one of the war’s great American heroes and would be the first African American to receive the award for actions in Iraq or Afghanistan. Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper supported the move in a letter to Congress in August after years of deliberations within the Army.

The Senate bill was introduced on a bipartisan basis following the approval of similar legislation in the House last week. In both cases, lawmakers said they wanted to move quickly.

The approval of the Cashe legislation in both chambers leaves Trump’s approval as the only hurdle to Cashe receiving the award. The president has not commented on the case, but Cashe is often cited within conservative circles as worthy of the award. A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the open case, said before the legislation’s passage in the Senate that Trump would be supportive.

Cashe, 35, of Oviedo, Fla., was deployed to Samarra, Iraq, with the 3rd Infantry Division when the armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle he was in rolled over an improvised explosive device on Oct. 17, 2005. He was slightly injured by the explosion and drenched fuel, and realized the vehicle’s fuel cell had erupted and the vehicle had burst into flames.

Cashe made numerous trips into the vehicle to recover fellow soldiers, suffering burns in the process. He died about three weeks later on Nov. 5 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, which is known for its unit treating burns suffered in combat.

Cashe was initially approved for the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest award for valor in combat. His commanding officer, then-Lt. Col. Gary Brito, later said that he did not initially have a full understanding for what Cashe did and has sought an upgrade for years. Brito is now a three-star general and the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel.

“Without regard for his personal safety, Sergeant First Class Cashe rushed to the back of the vehicle, reaching into the hot flames and started pulling out his soldiers,” the Silver Star citation said. “The flames gripped his fuel soaked uniform. Flames quickly spread all over his body.”

Cashe continued to assist others, even after he was on fire, the citation said. He suffered burns over 72 percent of his body.

Cashe’s sister, Kasinal Cashe White, said in phone conference with reporters recently that she did not believe discrimination had a role in the Army’s failure to award the Medal of Honor sooner. She cited a conversation that she had with Brito, who also is Black, in 2007.

Brito, she said, told her that no one in the 3rd Infantry Division had received anything higher than the Silver Star and that he knew from the information he had at the time that Cashe merited one.

“What I feel is that the information did not get back in time,” she said.

White added that she “won’t allow anybody to make it a race thing.”

“He did what he did not because he was Black, but because he was a soldier and because he loved his men,” she said. “And I believe they loved him in return.”

I expect that if the President, in a fit of pique over how the election went, refuses to sign it, it’ll be quickly resubmitted in the next Congress and President-elect Biden will sign it and then make the award.

I did not know SFC Cashe as I didn’t go to work for the Army until 2007. However, I do have a connection to him and know of his heroism. When I deployed to Iraq in 2008 with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division (2BCT/1AD), the Iron Brigade, our operating environment (OE) included one (command) forward operating base (FOB), four combat outposts (COP), and a number of patrol bases (PB). Our armor battalion, 1st Battalion/35th Armor Regiment (Task Force Iron Knights) was located just outside of Jisr Diyala on a combat outpost that was divided into a north and south base. This base’s name is COP Cashe; specifically COP Cashe North and COP Cashe South. I spent a lot of time during my deployment working with the 1/35 Armor Soldiers, as well as their Civil Affairs Team-Alpha (CAT-A), and their National Police Training Team (NPiTT) and, as a result, spent a good amount of time living and working off of COP Cashe South. There was a large portrait of SFC Cashe in the entryway to the tactical operations center (TOC) and a description of his heroism hung beside it.

This award is well deserved and too long overdue. And it is fitting that the Senate bestirred itself to actually act on this in advance of Veterans Day.

And, so that I don’t get yelled at in the comments, here’s some appropriate Veterans Day music.

Open thread!

Veteran’s Day 2020: A Long Overdue HonorPost + Comments (96)

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

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Saw this on Twitter today:

And there’s your microcosm of the brutal, wretched, murderous idiocy of that “Great” War whose end we remember today. One minute to go–as everyone on the line knows–and the guns of he Western Front are in full cry.

And then silence–and pity the soldiers dead in those last sixty seconds. And every minute of the previous four years.

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

For me,  World War I is a talisman, a constant reminder that one must always deeply mistrust, perhaps loathe, anyone from the 101st Chairborne slavering to send other people’s kids in harms way. I am not a pacifist in an absolute sense. But I believe that the use of military power in any circumstance, however urgent or inescapable it may seem (or be) in the moment, is the result of prior failures.

But leave such highfalutin thoughts behind for a moment, and listen into that silence. The birds can be heard again, metaphorically if not literally, for the first time in the four years before this recording could be made.

Before and together with Veteran’s Day, there was/is another name for November 11th:  Remembrance Day.

Image: George Grosz, Fit For Active Service, 1918

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh DayPost + Comments (198)