Center for a New American Security

Peter Bergen recently put out an interesting piece recommending the United States declare victory against al Qaeda. He starts off by making the comparison, as many do, with that ideal-type of American conventional warfare, World War II:

To end World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin demanded an unconditional surrender from the Nazis.  But there will be no such surrender from al Qaeda. The group is not a state that is capable of entering into such an agreement, even if it wanted to do so, which seems highly unlikely.

So we are left with a choice:  We can continue fighting al Qaeda indefinitely and remain in a permanent state of quasi-war, as has already been the case for more than a decade now.

This is somewhat true, but a misleading comparison. The Nazis did not technically surrender - the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) did, in order to avoid a repeat of the World War I dolchtosslegende. Of course, some German military units resisted (such as Army Group Center), before the Allies’ overwhelming military power promptly defeated them. The Nazi civilian government, though it permitted military capitulation, was not part of the surrender process. The Allies arrested and unilaterally dissolved Dönitz’s Flensburg government. World War II, like Iraq in 2003, in fact ended in debellatio - with the destruction of the legal authority which could have signed a political surrender document.

The historical minutiae aside, this highlights an important point: World War II was actually won the way wars against irreconcilable foes often are - through the destruction of the enemy’s will and ability to resist - the only way to impose one’s will against a foe that is truly beyond negotiation. However, policy determines the question of which enemies need to exit the battlefield, dead or alive - how much of our will must be imposed. It’s true, as Bergen says, that we didn’t need to “kill every Nazi,” but we did not leave any Nazi-led fighting capacity standing in the field, and conducted a systematic military, political, and legal dissolution of Nazi fighting power - and we did so long after destroying Germany’s ability to pose a threat to the United States. Had the Nazis been able to initiate “Werwolf,” our policy likely would have looked much more similar to “kill every Nazi” than it happened to at the time, despite the basic disappearance of the Nazi threat to American security.

Of course, al Qaeda is nothing like the Nazis in any useful sense, other than perhaps that the United States held both to be irreconcilable foes, as Bergen notes. But the differences don’t easily lend themselves to assertions that irregular groups can’t have their wills as thoroughly broken. Mary Habeck echoes some of my critiques of this analogy, and goes on to point out that insurgent groups are formally and decisively defeated:

For instance, from 1898-1954, the U.S. absolutely defeated three separate insurgencies in the Philippines, including a nationalist insurgency, an insurgency by local Muslims, and a communist insurgency. The British took on and repeatedly defeated insurgencies (the Boers, the Malay communists, and the Kenyan Mau-Mau, for instance), and it is actually difficult to find, beyond the Sandinistas and Castro's group, an insurgency that has succeeded in Latin America.

The stories here are all significantly more complex, but it is true that irregular groups are not immune to decisive, obvious defeats, even if one quibbles with the cases. However, she goes on to describe what victory against al Qaeda would look like:

The objective of irregular wars is rather different, however: to secure the population by clearing out the insurgents; then holding the territory through persistent presence; and finally creating the political conditions necessary to prevent any further appeal by the remaining insurgents. In this view, winning against al Qaeda does not depend on body counts, but rather would look very much like victories against other insurgents: the spreading of security for populations in Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and elsewhere; the prevention of a return of al-Qaeda to these cleared areas; and the empowerment of legitimate governments that can control and police their own territories.

Here, we come to the problem with the current conception of what victory in our conflict against al Qaeda means. If the definition of defeating an insurgent group is clearing, holding, and then politically precluding the appeal of insurgency, then it’s hard to say that, by Habeck’s standards, some of the other insurgencies Habeck mentions have truly been defeated. After all, the Philippines were not able to “spread security” and preclude the continuation of Moro insurgency in Mindanao until, today, where the counterinsurgency campaign against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front continues. While few Latin American insurgencies succeed, few Colombians would consider the conflict against FARC over.

As Colin S. Gray noted in his 2002 monograph on decisive victory, starkly delineating decisive victory - especially a politically permanent one - as a simple alternative to failure is grossly misleading. As Gray notes:

… decisive victory is probably best viewed as a range of possibilities, rather than as a stark alternative to the failure to achieve such a success. The enemy can be understood to have continuing powers of resistance on a sliding scale. Decisive victories come in many guises and sometimes mislead the winner. Cannae was the tactically decisive victory straight from the textbook, but its operational, strategic, and political consequences were trivial.

If one retains the normal political concept of victory - imposing our will on the enemy - then irregular warfare does not require anything so radical to produce meaningful political outcomes - but it should similarly make us wary of hasty attempts to derive political victories from tactical, operational, or even strategic ones.

Frustration with the inability of seemingly obvious tactical successes to translate into the total debellation of an irregular group has misleadingly brought some to believe that there is some fundamental break between regularity and irregularity as modes of war. This is mistaken. The objective of irregular wars isn’t different, we’ve simply naturalized a version of them which considers governing our enemies inseparable from the idea of defeating them - for a country waging a war against an insurgency in its own territory, this may be critical, but for one trying to defang a transnational threat, it may not be. Though Habeck tries to draw a dichotomy between World War II and irregular war, in terms of political goals, the total defeat and preclusion of an ideology’s appeal was at the heart of the American approach to Nazi Germany - moderated only when post-war planning glimpsed the potentially destabilizing effects of such an approach.

It was the embarrassment of Germany’s upturning of the post-WWI international order that made such a total defeat of Germany - including the preclusion of ideological resurgence and the “empowerment of legitimate government” - so critical. It’s an important reminder of the point of declaring victory - to advance policy goals. Bergen notes it is politically unfeasible to declare victory al Qaeda. This is true: unlike Nazi Germany, al Qaeda is not reliant on mass mobilization to launch politically damaging operations against the United States.

But then what purpose does declaring a political victory over al Qaeda achieve? If one has won a war tactically and operationally but lost politically, one has still lost the war.  It is undoubtable that at the very least, tactically and operationally (and many would argue strategically) that the U.S. has inflicted grievous blows on al Qaeda. But the persistent capability and possibility of al Qaeda’s thus-far unbroken will translating itself into coercive power make a political declaration a liability. Indeed, were an attack to occur after such a declaration, the response would likely severely undermine the wartime credibility of civilian leadership and inaugurate an even more costly and ambitious conception of retaliation and counterterrorism, which is particularly problematic since Bergen’s goal is to redirect resources away from the war on terror.

Despite the fact that al Qaeda’s operational capability to conduct attacks on the continental United States is undoubtedly weaker than during 9/11, it retains strategic options to imperil US interests. Al Qaeda retains the ability to expand the battlefield against the U.S. and threaten Western assets outside of American soil. Bergen argues that our extensive defense establishment is part of the logic behind declaring victory, but if the goal of declaring victory is to refocus assets from that establishment, and deploying overwhelmingly superior resources is our defense, the benefits of declaring victory remain slim and potentially counterproductive. Because the U.S. hasn’t decisively stemmed the growth of local affiliates - which can still kill U.S. citizens and personnel or target critical assets abroad - the potential remains for the al Qaeda threat, however operationally reduced, to exact politically significant costs. By the logic of Bergen’s argument, the massive defense establishment will again have to ensure that none of al Qaeda’s dispersed affiliates reconstitute some sort of transnational threat, which could make preserving our victory against al Qaeda costly, and a declaration of victory politically disastrous.

It’s a mistake to assert, as Habeck does, that governing away al Qaeda is a necessary victory condition of an irregular conflict against it. If a lesser exertion of state power with more modest political aims produces major gains in security at a much lower cost, then there’s little merit in perpetually maintaining or increasing the nation’s resources. It is not contradictory to say that a decisive - and politically satisfactory - victory against al Qaeda may not yet be won, without taking a maximalist operational approach to achieving that end. Bergen was correct to note, in his “kill every Nazi” comment, that utter tactical and operational annihilation is not a requirement for a decisive victory in terms of political aims and policy - but nor do seemingly overwhelming tactical  and operational victories, as Bergen seems to sense, translate into a decisive success.

Yesterday, I caught up with some friends at IFRI* over lunch and scored an invitation to come hear the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, speak later in the afternoon on the future of Turkish-French relations.

I don't think I've ever seen a foreign minister as confident as Davutoglu. With Europe in a financial crisis and the Arabic-speaking world in a political crisis, Davutoglu clearly sees his own country as flourishing when compared with its neighbors near and far. "The question for Europe," Davutoglu asked, "is: with or without Turkey?"

Davutoglu clearly feels Turkey has as much or more to offer the European Union than the European Union has to offer Turkey at the moment, which is a provocative thesis to introduce to a room full of western Europeans.

Accordingly, one of the distinguished guests in the room pushed back during the question and answer session. He proposed that Turkey was rather more like the American West -- nationalistic and religious -- than Western Europe, which is known for its culture of tolerance and inclusivity. He asked whether Turkey thus still needed Western Europe as much as Western Europe needed Turkey.

As I squirmed in my seat and bit my lip, Davutoglu proceeded to deliver one of the best smack-downs I have ever heard in a public forum. He began by remarking, "I don't know if there are any Americans in the room, but your question is a little Euro-centric."

He then bluntly stated that the American identity is more inclusive than French identity or German identity. He referenced the fact that the American president is the son of a Kenyan man and that the very name "United States of America" references a geographical location whereas the names of European states often reference a specific people or culture. He concluded by saying that when the Germans elect a man or woman of Turkish descent as its president then Europe could begin lecturing Turkey on matters of inclusivity.

I am not doing justice to how epic a smack-down this was. He must have spoken for five minutes, at least, about the virtues of American identity and inclusivity, and it warmed my heart. Although he teased America about how young a nation we are, he surely knew that the day prior was our birthday, and his words made for a wonderful belated birthday present.

Davutoglu had a lot more to say on Israel and Syria that would interest readers of this blog, but the above vignette was the one I most wanted to share.

*If you do not know the crew at l'institut français des relations internationales, you should. My friends Etienne de Durand, Marc Hecker, and Corentin Brustlein are doing some of the very best work in strategic studies in all of Europe. Ifri.org

First off, let me wish everyone out there a Happy Fourth of July. As a veteran of the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan, let me take this opportunity to clear up a misconception and remind you that the Fourth of July is not about today's veterans. We have both Veterans Day and Memorial Day for ourselves do not need another holiday. (Although we'll take Arbor Day if you're offering it.) Today is the day, rather, when we honor those who won the American Revolution. I am speaking, of course, of the French Navy.

My column in today's World Politics Review, meanwhile, aims to poke a few holes in the "crisis in civil-military relations" that everyone worries about and which reached something of a crescendo in 2009. I'm not saying that smart people like Richard Kohn and Andrew Bacevich don't raise some good points. I'm instead arguing that wartime civil-military relations are actually quite healthy by comparative and historical standards. This column is the first in a two-part series: next week I will tackle where I do see there being some problems.

(Preview: it's not in the fact that the president salutes.)

P.S. You probably all saw that odd article in the New York Times arguing that military officers have a tough time transitioning to being diplomats and civilian officials -- before then awkwardly listing a bunch of former military officers who have not, uh, actually had much difficulty making the transition. The article featured a quote from John Norris of the Center for American Progress:

Would you take a talented professional diplomat with no military experience and put him in charge of a major military unit? Absolutely not ... Yet we still think it’s a good idea to take senior military officers with virtually no diplomatic experience and put them in key diplomatic and political posts.

I'm sure I would actually agree with Norris more often than not if we sat down and talked about this over beers at Cafe Mozart, but his sentiment expressed in the article struck me as all kinds of wrong. First off, you don't become a four-star flag officer without gaining some diplomatic experience along the way. I am halfway through the newish Gaddis biography of George F. Kennan (more on that later), and one thing that strikes me is that George C. Marshall had decades more diplomatic experience when he became the Secretary of State than his successor -- the Washington lawyer Dean Acheson -- did. Along the same lines, did Hilary Clinton have more diplomatic experience than Colin Powell when each became the Secretary of State? And how was James Jones, who was the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe an era when he didn't have to worry about Soviet tank divisions, anything but a high-level diplomat? Did Kennan himself object when Walter Bedell Smith was named the ambassador to Russia? No -- probably because Smith had as much or more diplomatic experience than his predecessor, the businessman Averell Harriman, who Kennan very much admired. (Also, was Kennan, a career diplomat, a better ambassador to Russia than either Harriman or Smith?) Second, we put civilians in de facto command of military units all the time. Look at all of those civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. Some of them are former military officers, but many are not, and if they ever were, they stopped serving in the ranks many years prior to their service in the Department of Defense. Finally, take a look at the first few chapters of the classic Marine Corps Small Wars Manual: U.S. Marines are repeatedly referred to as "State Department Troops." Why? For the way in which they were (and are) often placed under the operational control of diplomats in overseas contingencies. I could go on.

In progressive foreign policy circles, there is at once a desire to gather former military officers close to policy makers to get, as the New York Times article describes, "validation." There is also, elsewhere in progressive foreign policy circles, a knee-jerk suspicion of military officers. Neither instinct, frankly, is very helpful in the formation or execution of foreign policy.

I am in Paris, working on my French, reading a lot, and using up all my vacation time before I take a leave of absence from CNAS at the end of the summer to spend a year working in the governmnent. You can expect my posting on the blog to be pretty light for the next month. For the past semester, though, we at CNAS have been really lucky to have had Hilary Polak as an external relations intern. Hilary's fluency in Hebrew and familiarity with Israeli politics and society really helped me, in particular, as I worked on our big Middle East report this past spring. Hilary starts at the Institute for the Study of War this month, but before she left, I asked her to help me make sense of the new service law that is causing such a ruckus in Israel.

***

More Israeli-Arabs, or Palestinian citizens of Israel, volunteered for civil service through the military than Haredi (also known as ultra-orthodox) Jews in 2011. Of the 2,400 Israeli-Arabs who volunteered, 90% were women, 40% Muslim, 36% Bedouin, 13% Christian and 11% Druze. For those citizens of Israel who are not obligated to serve in the military, the option of civil service in schools, hospitals, community centers, retirement homes and even ministries is available. The fact that more Palestinian citizens of Israel than ultra-orthodox Jews have opted to do national service is a symptom of a much larger, more grave and elusive challenge facing the State of Israel today. Benjamin Netanyahu, who formed and leads the new coalition government that holds a majority of 94 Knesset seats, has the chance to address this national issue and implement formative change, if he chooses to seize the opportunity.

You could say Israel is suffering from a serious “personality disorder.” The nation is undergoing an intense internal struggle to understand and define its current and future identity. The Jewish state that was built on the ideals of pluralism, democracy and liberalism, intended as a haven for all Jews and the majority of whose growth was initially shouldered by nationalist, non-religious kibbutzniks is realizing a greater threat than was ever anticipated is growing rapidly in their midst: the Haredim. What started in 1948 as a few hundred yeshiva students in the holy cities of Israel has evolved into the fastest-growing societal block in the country with an average of 7.6 children per woman, roughly triple the rate for the population as a whole, according to the Israeli government’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The Haredi population is exempt from military service due to their religious convictions, with 11% of 18-year-olds granted exemption in 2007 and a projected 23% in 2019, and they pose a severe strain the economy, challenge the progressive, egalitarian characteristics of the state and hold major sway in electoral politics.

This schism in Israeli society is an incredibly sensitive one, and it can be felt almost everywhere: from the apartment of a Russian Jewish family to an Arab village, from the urban metropolis of Tel Aviv to the agricultural kibbutzim. The atmosphere in Jerusalem is particularly difficult -- the air seems to be almost physically stifling. Popular culture, the news and the internet is swamped with material referencing the growing number of Haredim and the associated tensions. The lack of Haredi participation in the the military, an integral piece of Israeli society and a potential vehicle for upward social and economic mobility, places a huge burden on the backs of secular Israeli citizens. Secular Jews are forced to compensate for their absence in the military realm. In turn, Haredi Jews have their Torah studies financed by working Israelis. The ultra-orthodox who do volunteer typically belong to the Dati Leumi, or Religious Zionism, group, and most of them serve in combat units isolated from other sections of the IDF. There is a concern that these religious soldiers, operating in high-risk areas like Jenin, may choose to obey their religious obligations in place of official military orders.

In this tiny, dynamic country where domestic politics are almost inseparable from foreign and defense policy, how is Israel to address this problem? The new, centrist government coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud and Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz of Kadima, may hold the key to a solution. While the new government might not be able to ease the stress that exists between subsets of Israeli society, they can decide to capitalize on the opportunity to instate new laws and reforms to alleviate some of these issues. However, in order to do this, they must maintain the unity government at all costs.

The February 2012 Supreme Court ruling that the Tal law (the law granting exemption from military service to ultra-orthodox Jews) is unconstitutional has provided a window for action. Netanyahu has a powerful coalition where he does not need to comply with the demands of the religious parties like Shas and United Torah Judaism. It is doubtful that a Haredi draft will be established tomorrow, but the government can take serious steps toward improving the situation by crafting a new resolution that would coerce Haredi Jews to serve in the military. As a result, the Haredim could play a positive role in the economy and pay their dues to society. There has been a great deal of rhetoric surrounding this topic-- the majority of MKs and Israeli citizens are in agreement that Haredim should be subject to military service, and Netanyahu, Mofaz and Barak have all made statements in support for more inclusive conscription laws-- but so far, no one has made any concrete advancements on the matter.

There has been some movement on the settlement issue in the last few weeks. In Netanyahu’s first major move concerning settlements since Kadima joined his coalition government, he instructed his ministers to vote against a draft bill that would have retroactively legalized illegally built settler homes in the West Bank. The settlements are a contentious subject for the Israeli government, the Obama administration and other international powers. While this move might seem insignificant in the scheme of things, it may be the slightest intimation of where Netanyahu and his coalition are heading. How Netanyahu and Mofaz will address the religious, right-wing settlers with their newfound political clout in the long-run remains to be seen.

Netanyahu, with his keen political skills and significant Knesset majority, has the chance to go down in history as an Israeli leader who implemented important legislation at a crucial time. The new coalition has the opportunity to tackle real, serious issues-- like the swelling Haredi population and the burden they place on the whole of Israeli society, migrant workers, the settlements and even the peace process, among other things-- with more ease than many prior governments. Time will tell if he will indeed take on some of the most factious and emotionally charged topics that exist in Israel today, and how he will do so. Mofaz and Kadima must also prove they are players in the game and are crucial actors in the government assuming a more secular and middle position; if they fail, the 2013 elections may be their undoing. Israel desperately needs to look inward and deal with the complex side effects of her “personality disorder.” By focusing on improving Israel’s domestic policies, the unity government can ensure that the nation will be better equipped to face even greater security threats looming nearby and elsewhere in the international community.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's excellent if depressing new book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan comes out today. You may have already read excerpts in the Washington Post. Rajiv wrote much of the book while on leave from the Post and locked away in a cubby hole at the Center for a New American Security, so we are hosting a book event for him tonight to which you are all invited. 

I read the book in two sittings on Friday and Sunday afternoons. Rajiv's first book depressed me because I was close enough to the shenanigans up the road in the Green Zone to be angered by them. This book depresses me because I was even closer to many of the shenanigans in question and know some of the protagonists. I was also forced, in reading this book, to go back and think through my own assumptions in 2009, many of which I got wrong. Rajiv's third book, presumably, will be about how I myself incompetently managed the occupation of Syria and hosted wild parties at the embassy in Damascus while Marines fought mightily in Homs.

A friend of mine has never forgiven me for saying he was a "loser" in Tom's narrative of the Surge in Iraq. (He insists I called him a loser in life, which I didn't do -- I just wrote that he was a "loser" in the narrative Tom presented.) This book has very few winners and very many losers. The winners? A few intrepid U.S. military officers and diplomats. The losers? Pretty much everyone else -- and especially the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. I really hope those two organizations in particular take the lessons from this book and remember them going forward but suspect they will instead go into a defensive crouch.

Anyway ... on to the questions. 

1. You argue, in this book, that the United States essentially lost the first year of the Surge in Afghanistan because of the way in which it allocated its troops — sending thousands of Marines to Helmand Province instead of, say, Kandahar City. Who was responsible for that decision?

The responsibility rests with several senior U.S. and NATO officers. When commanders at the NATO regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan were asked by their superiors in 2008 to identify how they would use an additional combat brigade, they picked Helmand over Kandahar. Those officers — Dutch Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif and his deputies, among them U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson — identified four reasons to send the forces to Helmand instead of Kandahar.

First, that the Canadian forces who had responsibility for Kandahar province didn’t want to cede more territory to the United States. Some Canadian officials were convinced security in Kandahar was improving; others didn’t want to risk the embarrassment. Either way, U.S. commanders didn’t want to push the Canadians to shrink their battlespace.

Second, Helmand was the epicenter of poppy production.

Third, there were more Taliban attacks in Helmand than any other province.

And fourth, foreign troops needed to stay out of Kandahar city, given its cultural and religious significance.

Our own Abu Muqawama (then a member of General McChrystal’s initial assessment team) was among those to question all four points. As I write in the book, “If the mission were to protect the people, Exum thought, the new troops should be closer to the largest population center in the south, not where violence was worst. The drug argument similarly made no sense to him, since Richard Holbrooke had just announced that to avoid antagonizing farmers the United States would no longer participate in the eradication of poppy fields; a CIA study also claimed that the Taliban got most of its money from illegal taxation and contributions from Pakistan and Persian Gulf nations, not from drugs. And even if the Afghans were right about the psychological impact of foreign forces inside the city—some on the assessment team questioned that logic—the surrounding districts seemed like the best home for the Marines. The Taliban’s surge in Helmand was ‘a feint,’ Exum wrote in his notebook. ‘It draws our attention and resources away from Kandahar.’”

The ultimate decision on where to place the first wave of new troops authorized by President Obama in February 2009 rested with the top U.S. and NATO commander in Kabul at the time, Gen. David McKiernan.

When McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009, he gave thought to moving the Marines. By then, however, it was too late. But even if it hadn’t been, his hands would have been tied, because of a conditions set forth by the Marine Commandant at the time, General James Conway. He insisted that the Marines operate in a contiguous area where they could be supported by their own aviation. That effectively ruled out Kandahar. Conway also insisted that a three-star Marine general at CENTCOM have overall operational control of the Marine brigade. That meant McChrystal couldn’t have moved the Marines to Kandahar without the approval of the Marine high command.

2. And people wonder why I love U.S. Marines but have very little patience for the U.S. Marine Corps. (I really need to burn those notebooks, by the way.) But is it really possible to hold the Obama Administration even partially responsible for a decision related to the order of battle on the ground? Sam Huntington argued that politicians should set the policy and agree on a set of strategic objectives and resources with their commanders but that it was up to the commanders themselves to figure out how to operationalize the strategy. Is it then reasonable to criticize the administration for errors made by field commanders?

I agree that it doesn’t make sense for the White House to manage operational or tactical decisions, but the president and his national security team should be fully aware of how the troops are being used. It’s just a brigade, you might say, so what’s the big deal? Perhaps in the context of World War II or Vietnam, it’s a rounding error, but in the context of Afghanistan, the rationale for the placement of 10,672 Marines out of an initial deployment of 17,000 troops should have been clearer to the White House. A new president, signing off on his first troop deployment, should at least have known — or been told — that a majority of those forces were being sent to a part of Afghanistan that is home to about one percent of the country’s population.

3. You displayed a lot of admiration for the U.S. Marine Corps in your reporting for the Washington Post and again in this book. But you also have some very sharp criticisms toward the way the U.S. Marine Corps protected its own parochial interests at the expense of what you see as the greater mission in Afghanistan. Describe for us why you admire the Marines who fought in Afghanistan but fault the Marine Corps as an institution.

I think the Marines — particularly the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (the first tranche, which was sent in 2009) under the command of then Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson — did an amazing job under very challenging circumstances. The work they did in Nawa and Garmser, in particular, was standout COIN (putting aside questions of whether we should have been engaged in a full-on COIN mission there). Did Nicholson push into some places that USG and NATO civilian advisers -- and his NATO bosses in Kandahar and Kabul -- thought were unnecessary? Yes. But the fault, as I write, did not rest with him. He was given the troops, and he was doing what any good field commander would. He wasn't going to let them cool their heels at Camp Leatherneck.

The problem was tribalism — among the Americans, not the Afghans. Marine leaders did not really want to be joint and interoperable. They wanted their own turf, even to the detriment of the overall war effort.

This is what I write in the book:

"[Political adviser Kael] Weston didn’t think Nicholson was being insubordinate in moving into Taghaz. Taking Kamchatka was a rational act if you had the troops. Weston believed the surge had put too many pieces on the Risk board. The problem had been compounded by the decision to send the Marine brigade to Helmand instead of Kandahar. The blame for those choices lay not with Nicholson but in Washington. To Weston, Nicholson was an aggressive commander who was using the resources at his disposal to secure his entire area of operations. Weston disagreed with some of Nicholson’s moves, but the political adviser understood that the general was playing the generous hand he had been dealt. He wasn’t going to keep his Marines sitting on bases.

"There was no doubt in Weston’s mind — or in mine — that Nicholson had used his forces to transform the central Helmand River Valley, evicting the Taliban from its sanctuaries and giving the Afghans another chance to make something of Little America. By the time they departed in mid-2010, Nawa had grown so quiet that Marines regularly walked around without their flak vests. Much of Garmser was safe enough for American civilians to commence reconstruction projects. Hundreds of families were returning to Now Zad. Even the bleeding ulcer of Marja was starting to heal. Nicholson’s year in Helmand felt like the most dynamic and entrepreneurial period of the Afghan War. After years of drift, momentum was finally starting to swing America’s way."

And this from the last chapter:

“Over drinks with a Marine general in a still gentrifying Washington neighborhood, I compared Afghanistan to a run-down urban street. It seemed, I said, as if the United States were devoting a large share of its community redevelopment funds to transform one tenement at the end of the block into a swanky mansion. What happens, I asked the general, if we win Helmand but lose Afghanistan? ‘That would be just fine for the Corps,”’ he said.”

The 2nd MEB has been awarded the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation. I'm no judge of awards, but their work sounds PUC worthy to me. But what if they had done all of that good work closer to the country's second-largest population center?

4. You're also unforgiving in your description of the civilian effort in Afghanistan (in a chapter bluntly titled "Deadwood"). You've now been witness to incompetent U.S. civilian efforts in two wars. Is there any hope for the U.S. government in this regard? What does observing the U.S. civilian efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan make you think as a taxpayer?

I believe that our nation has the talent to engage in war-zone nation building, if that’s something we decide to do again. (Any policymaker or military leader who thinks that’s a good idea needs to have his or her head examined.) The problem is that those doing the hiring for the civilian component don’t look in the right places. Instead of scouring the United States for top talent to fill the crucial, well-paying jobs that were a key element of President Obama’s national security agenda — they should have brought in top-level headhunters. Those responsible for hiring (often bureaucrats in D.C. with no great sense of urgency or creativity) first turned to State Department and USAID officers in other parts of the world. But the best of them had already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of those who signed up were too new to have done a tour in a war zone or too lackluster to have better career options. Then they turned to retirees and to contractors who had served in Iraq. The right people do exist. We just have to find them, and then convince them to serve their nation.

5. Despite the criticisms, there are some real heroes in this book. Kael Weston and Carter Malkasian stand out in particular. What makes guys like that special, and who are some other heroes?

Kael spent seven years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Carter spent two years in a hot and dusty forward operating base in Garmser. They built trust with the Marines they served with, and the Afghans. I really respect Kael and Carter, and I wish I could say they are two-of-a-kind, but the truth is that many civilians working for the government could be just like them. If they agreed to spend real time on the ground. If they took the time to build relationships, and, in Carter’s case, learn the language. If they were willing to flout stupid rules set down by the embassy’s security officer.

Most importantly, they were willing to define their jobs in ways to give them maximum influence. Kael called himself a political commissar, not a political adviser. He constantly reminded the Marines that they had been deployed in support of the Afghan people — and as an extension of civilian diplomatic policy, not the other way around. Carter also saw his role as more a proconsul than an adviser. He single-handedly cajoled influential tribal leaders and mullahs to return to Garmser district, correctly betting that their presence would lead others to follow. He won the trust of skeptical residents through countless meetings and roadside conversations, convincing them to reject the insurgency and support their government. He also shaped the Marine campaign in Garmser in a way no civilian had in other parts of the country. He served as a counselor to five successive battalion commanders, influencing decisions about when to use force and helping them calibrate it with a political engagement strategy. He built such credibility with the Marines that if he urged a different course of action than the one they were planning, they almost always complied. Larry Nicholson was among his biggest fans. He thought the Americans needed a Carter Malkasian in every district of Afghanistan.

They weren’t the only ones. State Department officer Marlin Hardinger spent three years working at the provincial reconstruction team office in Helmand. He’s just finished a year of Pashto study and will be heading back for another year or two. That’s dedication. There are/were others like them. But the problem is they are the exception, not the rule.

6. I always end with a question about food or drink. What are the top three most memorable meals you have enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan -- and why?

a. Eating chicken enrobed in an inch-deep layer of oil on the roof of the police station in Garmser with district governor Abdul Manaf. We spent a while joking about his deputy’s virility — the man had two wives and more than twenty children. But then the conversation moved onto the future of Afghanistan. It was then I wondered whether men like him — in whom the U.S. military and diplomatic corps had invested so much — would be able to survive once the Americans leave.

b. The First Strike MRE I cracked open after spending nine hours walking, kneeling, crawling and worming on my belly on the first day of the Marine operation to clear the Taliban from Marja. I was cold, wet, tired and miserable. Food never tasted better, even if it was processed junk with a ten-year-long shelf life.

c. The lunch that never was. I was on my way to have lunch with Ahmed Wali Karzai when I received word that he had been killed.

Ha. I sometimes test intelligence officers by asking them about local power brokers and who they had lunch with yesterday. It turns out a safe answer is "Rajiv Chandrasekaran." Buy his book here.

Military cyberpower is everywhere in the news. But is also still tremendously invisible. Take Misha Glenny's recent op-ed, "Stuxnet Will Come Back to Haunt Us"

THE decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet. Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon. If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory.

The phrase "militarization of the Internet," does not seem to mesh with the fact that military-funded research played a major role in developing the Internet. To go back even further, Alan Turing and Norbert Weiner, two monumental figures in the history of computing and robotics, were originally World War II-era military researchers in cryptography and command and control. We owe ubiquitous location-based mobile services, one of the drivers of today's emerging "post-PC" information ecosystem, to global positioning systems---also a military invention. It is good that most of what we associate as cyberspace can be exploited as public goods, but computing and information technologies have always been strongly associated with military command and control, targeting, and weaponry.

Glenny's focus on the Internet is part of a common fixation on the Internet as cyberspace, when in fact cyberspace is actually something far larger. As the National Defense University iCollege's Samuel Liles and Dan Kuehl have both argued, the invention of the "Victorian Internet" in the form of the telegraph and its order-of-magnitude improvement in military command and control marks the real beginning of military cyberpower. Cyberspace is, as Kuehl has written, a global domain within the information environment whose distinctive and unique character is framed by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to create, store, exchange, and exploit information via inderdependent and interconnected networks using information-communication technologies. The Internet is certainly part of cyberspace, but there was cyberspace long before anyone began to seriously discuss the idea of computer network operations. As Bob Gourley tweeted, superior American exploitation of cyberpower won the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II and exposed the Zimmerman Telegram in World War I.

Stuxnet itself is a curious candidate when one looks for a point at which a Rubicon has been crossed that would fundamentally change contemporary warfare. Stuxnet targeted centrifuges rather than human beings. Yet, the United States military uses cyberspace for instrumentally lethal military purposes every day. Drones? They operate on the network, which is part of cyberspace. The Tomahawks we lob at Yemen? And so on and so on. We based the Offset Strategy on the idea that we could exploit superior computing technologies to engineer conventional weapons with superior combat effectiveness against Soviet second echelons--weapons that would obviate the need for tactical nuclear weapons to compensate for raw Warsaw Pact armor. To focus on computer network attacks alone is to ignore the massive structure of military power and coercion built around cyberspace and how crucial it has been to warfare for decades. Cyberspace has been one of the many drivers behind US military hegemony, a fact that has not been lost on aspiring military competitors. Just like focusing on remotely piloted aircraft as uniquely dangerous weapons of war renders invisible the fact that manned aircraft are the actual "grunts" of the targted killing missions, regarding Stuxnet as uniquely horrible is only possible if other, more substantial, military uses of cyberpower are normalized.

There is a tremendous need to conceptualize cyberspace as a kind of pristine, Edenic realm corrupted by the Satan's Apple of Stuxnet. Just like space, cyberspace is seen as a zone that is beyond--or should be beyond--geopolitics.  But space began with explicitly military origins and military spacepower facilitates Earthbound military operations. Operational domains have always been zones of conflict and contestation. Glenny's use of the phrases "monster" and "come home to roost" in his op-ed also reveal a framing of Stuxnet as a Frankenstein narrative, a kind of cyber version of the karmic theories of foreign policy and strategy Dan has criticized. But military cyberpower is not a monster cooked up by a mad scientist in a dreary castle, and "coming home to root" is a phrase that implies a kind of divine retribution more appropriate for a Old Testament prophecy than a security assessment.

Glenny's implicit comparison between a stable world of nuclear weapons and an unpredictable world of "advanced cyberwar" is also interesting because those nuclear weapons were part of a global American military command and control network enabled by exploitation of cyberspace. And in comparison to nuclear weapons, Stuxnet only inficted kinetic damage on the target--the Iranian nuclear program. As Thomas Rid observes, the collateral infection of other computers commonly cited in analysis of Stuxnet were not actually damaging: 

Cyber-weapons with aggressive infection strategies built-in, a popular argument goes, are bound to create uncontrollable collateral damage.The underlying image is that of a virus escaping from the lab to cause an unwanted pandemic. But this comparison is misleading. Stuxnet infected more than 100,000 Windows hosts to increase the chances of reaching the targeted system – yet the worm did not create any damage on these computers. In the known cases of sophisticated cyber-weapons, collateral infections did not mean inadvertent collateral damage.

Glenny worries that Stuxnet and Flame will precipitate constant penetrations of networks in order to gain target intelligence for attacks during the initial period of war, but somehow has missed the fact that this has been a basic element of Chinese and Russian military doctrines for some time. The phrase "Advanced Persistent Threat" is commonly used as a euphemism for nation-state attackers seeking to conduct "long-range cyber recon" of United States military and defense networks to steal military secrets and develop a better understanding of their dynamics and vulnerabilities. And the United States has not been the only victim of long-range cyber recon, and the Chinese and the Russians are far from the only culprits. Glenny worries that Stuxnet will prompt nation-states to develop cyber weapons and use them, but neglects to provide strategic rationales or scenarios for such development and use. South Korea, for example, is developing cyber capabilities to deal with the North's development of computer network and electronic warfare capabilities. Cyberpower is an outgrowth of the South's existing national security policy rather than a special effort somehow prompted by the use of Stuxnet and Flame.

Military cyberpower, once invisible to all but a few defense specialists, is slowly becoming visible. In some ways the current wave of commentary on Stuxnet is simply a delayed reaction to what should have been apparent once the electromagnetic spectrum was utilized by Abraham Lincoln to command the American Civil War: a new operational domain has military as well as civilian purposes. The civilian use of cyberspace, like the civilian use of the ocean or space, provides commercial and cultural value, but there is also a power-political context that simply cannot be wished away.

Update: Mike Tanji wrote a far more concise (and hilarious) critique of the op-ed here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter has decisively demonstrated why she is one of America's most valuable public intellectuals with this thought-provoking cover story in the Atlantic. I recommend this article to any Washington professionals -- male or female -- looking to balance work and family over the course of a successful career. This article deserves to be read and debated collectively by couples over the weekend.

A few points:

1. I would love to read a companion piece to Anne-Marie's article by Andrew Moravcsik, who is not the only guy out there married to a woman whose intellectual gifts and professional promise often overshadow his own. How does he, as an accomplished and gifted professional, enable his wife? What went through his own mind as his wife took on positions of ever-increasing responsibility that placed more of the burden for parenting on him? For some of us, these questions are not hypothetical, and I suspect I am not the only one out there who would love to hear his perspective.

2. It might be because I know so many theologically orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but I know a lot of really well educated and professionally promising women out there for whom being a full-time mother is the acme of career success. These women, who do not necessarily think they have "lost" anything by choosing to raise children full time, are not represented in Anne-Marie's article. There is a starting assumption that positions of high authority in government and in corporations should eventually be split 50-50 between men and women because well educated women, if given the chance, want to be both mothers and high-profile executives. That is not necessarily the case, though. I know a lot of ridiculously talented women out there for whom their highest professional aspiration is to be a stay-at-home mother. I'm related to some of those women and go to church with others, but I suspect that there are women out there outside conservative faith communities for whom this is also true.

3. Don't forget the boys. Every conversation we have about women and their careers and families should be accompanied by a discussion of what we want for our boys who are growing up. What should it mean, for these young men, to be fathers and working professionals? Should their roles in families and at work precisely mirror those of women or should we have different expectations for their roles and responsibilities? When I was growing up, the only expectations for me that differed from those for my sister related to manners and the military: I was expected to hold doors open for women and stand up when they left the table, and I was also expected, by my mother and unlike my sister, to serve in the military. But that was about it. Only when I was in my twenties did I start having conversations with older men and women about what my role as a husband and (potentially) a father should be.

4 (counterpoints). Dan and Barbara's amazing kids criticize the article both directly and indirectly in Salon. I didn't think Rebecca's somewhat knee-jerk reaction to the piece really wrestled with much of its content, even though she is, in my mind, one of the brightest women writing on women's issues. Aaron's article, by contrast, wasn't about Anne-Marie's article at all. But Aaron starts to explore #3 on my list of points in a really interesting and oblique way that I appreciated. Read them both.

While re-reading John M. Collins' text on grand strategy (written in 1973), I'm struck to the degree to which US strategic thinking has not adapted to the systemic shift brought on by the end of the Cold War. Yes, this might seem to be a pretty banal insight--it's beyond cliche to claim that US strategy is oldthink. I've heard that magazine editors also (rightly) summarily reject article pitches beginning with "since the end of the Cold War." But hear me out for a few minutes.

One of the major points of Thomas Schelling's Arms and Influence is that strategic conventional and nuclear forces enabled punishment as a strategic tool. Granted, looting and pillaging of a foe's countryside was commonplace in ancient times but was not instrumental in the way, say, punitive bombing or a countervalue attack would be. Moreover, Soviet punitive strikes could also entirely bypass US fielded military forces. In the past, as Schelling noted, defeat of an enemy army was necessary before one could ravage its civilian infrastructure and population. But distance and conventional forces offered scant protection. Ravaging of German and Japanese infrastructure occured long before Axis armies completely eroded. Under such circumstances, the distinction between national and personal security significantly blurs.

Under such circumstances, national security policy entered radically new territory. Yes, as Colin S. Gray pointed out, Clausewitz still governed nuclear war and even wars of mass destructions could have theories of victory. But the existence of weapons of mass destruction, while not altering war's eternal nature, radically shifted American perceptions of security. It's common to claim that globalization and irregular warfare has completely eroded the stopping power of water, but only when we talk about strategic warfare does this supposed truism really make sense. Lazy claims about the death of distance in fact originate from thinking about the airpower and nuclear revolutions.

Pushing other powers out of striking distance has been a longtime American strategic preoccupation. Hegemony over the Americas ensured that European powers could never use the oceans to burn down the White House again, and the United States was one of the few powers that did not suffer numerous attacks on its territory during World War II. The Cold War was fought entirely in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. And aside from the September 11 attacks, the global war on terrorism has been primarily fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The idea is that American citizens should be spared financial and personal security costs of warfare, an objective that has had its own unintended civil-military consequences. "America is not at war," one Marine famously lamented. "The Marines are at war. America is at the mall."

The gap left by an existential Soviet strategic nuclear threat to US existence has fortunately not been filled. Not only is irregular warfare not an existential threat, but it also is affected by geographic considerations in ways nuclear operations are not. Terrorism may not respect national borders, but power projection has costs. In their backyard, the Iranians are fearsome irregular adversaries. But when the action gets farther out, they rely on used car salesmen and blow off their own legs in failed bombing attempts. This isn't to doubt the power of Iranian intelligence and paramilitary organizations, but it's important to note the degree to which projecting power is generally easier when you are operating closer to your own political and logistic sources of power. US offensive military and intelligence efforts abroad and domestic intelligence have also substantially raised the cost for al-Qaeda to execute successful strikes against US territory. Violent non-state actors do pose threats to the US, but instruments of national power can at least theoretically strengthen the state against them in ways that were not possible within the context of Cold War nuclear strategy.

Of all the policy problems the US currently faces, only the global financial crisis and the prospect of biological contagion negates the power of distance and effects Americans individually in the way Soviet nuclear weapons could. As John Robb noted in December 2011:

When the histories are written about his era, this word may prove to be central: contagion.  Why?  We're all connected -- on every level between the physical and logical -- for the first time in history.  We see contagion everywhere, from the financial markets that spread fear and panic over default globally to viral rumors/pictures that spread across the Internet in a flash.

The contagion Robb discusses is financial and virological. Both, in some way, feed off human-built devices--massively integrated financial markets and global commerce, transport, and travel networks. Both also break down the distance between national and personal concerns the way nuclear weapons did. Financial ruin can open a pandora's box of health and safety issues, and deadly viruses have far less indirect effects on personal welfare.  But neither are the deliberate design of a malicious state or non-state actor. Rather, they are emergent phenomena formed by aggregations of state decisions and individual behaviors by humans, nonhumans, and things. Adam Smith's metaphor of the "invisible hand" was one of the first serious looks at how complex adaptive systems function in human society. The markets are an aggregate of human decisions, organizational policy and behavior, and computational trading algorithims. Pandemics are a consequence of human interaction, but also can be spread by animals as well. 

Financial and virological contagion, while terrifying, do not rise to the level of global nuclear warfare and atomic annihilation as threats to our personal safety and interests. Remember that the next time someone tries to tell you that the current international security environment is more dangerous than the Cold War.

Of course, the tricky part is that such a state of (relative) safety is rooted in a set of geopolitical, financial, and military arrangements that do not sustain themselves in perpetuity. We should not make the mistake of believing that the US is on a teleological path to greater and greater levels of security. The policy choices we make matter too, as do those of allies, competitors, and other states.  Additionally, 90% of threats are not existential but still necessitate strong tools of national power. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and threatening of Saudi Arabia did not challenge American national survival. But the prospect of Hussein gaining strategic control of the Persian Gulf was enough to trigger the Carter Doctrine tripwire. And while terrorism does not pose an existential risk, it is still the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens from terrorists and imprison or destroy irregular enemies.

My discussion of finance and health is not an argument that US national security policy should be revamped around preventing market crashes or virological outbreaks---that's the proper place for economic and health instruments of national power rather than the Pentagon or the FBI. But we should be more aware, especially, when contemplating the idea that the world is more interconnected, that only in distinctly nonmilitary areas such as finance and health does interconnection pose a significant danger for the United States and individual American citizens. When it comes to everything else, we must acknowledge our good fortune to have two oceans, a strong military and intelligence apparatus, and diminished but nonetheless powerful allies. The Soviet nuclear threat was the only time that neither distance nor military and intelligence strength could grant us protection from existential risk, and the fact that this threat no longer exists should arguably be more explicitly recognized. 

... U.S. Army LTC and CNAS Military Fellow Tony DeMartino, who was awarded the French Order of Merit for his service in Afghanistan. I got through about eight lines of La Marseillaise in the staff meeting this morning before Ellen told me to be quiet.

Last week, the president of the University of Virginia was fired. Although the reasons for Teresa Sullivan's dismissal are still unclear, there is evidence to suggest that the Board of Visitors believed she should be behaving less like an academic professional and more like a chief executive officer of a major corporation. Sullivan lacked, one board member complained, the "strategic dynamism" necessary for a person in her position. 

I have spent all but a few months of my adult life in either the U.S. military or in institutions for higher learning. I was commissioned as an officer in the infantry two days before graduating from college, and I started graduate school three months after leaving active duty. I then began teaching about six months after earning my Ph.D. In my work for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, I spend a lot of time with corporations. I am sometimes asked to meet with corporations with interests in the Middle East, for example, to help them think through the business environment and to talk about trends in the region.*

So I think I know something about universities and the military and a little bit about the way in which corporations function. Which qualifies me to say this: Not-for-profit universities are not corporations, and neither is the U.S. military. Neither organization should be treated like a corporation.

Smarter people than me have patiently explained why it makes little to no sense to treat an established, esteemed university like the University of Virginia as one would treat a corporation. As one Virginia professor put it:

I agree with all of this but want to extend this professor's worry to another institution I hold dear: the U.S. military. Over the weekend, I began to wonder why so many professional military reading lists contain business books that you would be less surprised to find on sale in an airport bookstore's "Management Excellence" section. Some of these books -- no disrespect to the authors -- can be summarized in a five-slide PowerPoint presentation. They probably were once a five-slide PowerPoint presentation but now push other, worthier books -- like Paret's Makers of Modern Strategy -- off the list of books we're telling military officers to read. The result is an officer class raised to believe their role in life is to manage organizations rather than, as the late Sam Huntington would have said it, to manage violence. I guarantee you we have officers running around Fort Benning, for example, who cannot tell you anything about Huntington's model for soldier-state relations and do not know the difference between the Moltkes elder and younger but can sure as hell explain the difference between spiders and bleeping starfish.

One can argue that businesses have a lot to teach universities because the former are more accountable to the cruel realities of the bottom line. Fair enough. But the price of victory and the costs of failure are more keenly felt in military organizations than they are in businesses, which is why some business writers study military organizations rather than visa versa. And which is why it makes good business sense for businesses to recruit military professionals.

But the military is not a for-profit corporation. It is a public organization that is specially recruited, trained and equipped to achieve the political objectives of elected policy makers through force. Can it learn something from studying the performance of businesses? Absolutely. I wish, for example, the U.S. Army officer corps had half the appetite for risk as entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But at the end of the day, the U.S. military, as results oriented as it should be and is, is not about turning a profit or rewarding shareholders, and its leaders should rein in their love affair with business models and the mostly execrable "literature" we force on our students in business schools.

Besides, this craze to make our universities and military organizations mirror our businesses is ironic. While the American model of capitalism is generally strong and often admired, it is by no means seen by the world as the undisputed model for how other businesses and business environments should look. Other successful capitalist economies often look at U.S. business culture and find much to criticize. U.S. institutions of higher education, though, are the undisputed model for others to follow and are universally admired outside the United States. The same can be said for the U.S. military, which for at least two decades has been the world's strongest and most admired military organization. Even before the financial collapse, meanwhile, during which your average second lieutenant could have taught most U.S. banks something about risk management, most businesses in the United States failed. 

That's a luxury military organizations are rarely allowed.

P.S. One final bit of irony? The decision made by Virginia's business-minded Board of Visitors is seriously hurting the university's bottom line. The decision to remove Teresa Sullivan may in fact end up a Harvard Business School case study. But not in a good way.

*Any compensation I am eligible to receive for this work I either decline or turn over to the Center for a New American Security in order to preserve the intellectual integrity of my work. The list of corporate or institutional sponsors for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, can be found here. Unlike all but a few think tanks, we make no effort to hide our sponsors. I join my colleagues in thanking them for their support. 

Uncle Jimbo of Blackfive highlighted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago arguing that women should not be allowed to attend U.S. Army Ranger School. There might well be some very good reasons for not allowing women to attend Ranger School, but this op-ed neglected to make any of them. 

I graduated in Class 5-01 (that a 22-year old me, right below the N in RANGER, which stands for "Nowledge"). I then went on to serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment. 

It's only my opinion, and I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but I see no compelling reason why women should not be allowed to attend Ranger School. As far as I am concerned, if a woman really wants to run around a sawdust pit at two in the morning screaming "Ranger!" while periodically stopping to low-crawl for 50 meters, we have a constitutional -- nay God-given -- responsibility to allow her to do so.

The only thing about which I feel strongly -- quite strongly, in fact -- is that women and men be held to the same very strict physical standards. The U.S. Army always screws this up, and it's unfair -- to women. Unequal physical standards for men and for women encourage men -- and women themselves -- to think of women as lesser soldiers. It may be true that men, on average, have a significant advantage over women in terms of testosterone and muscle mass. My wife, for example, may be a far superior athlete to me, but, when we play sports together she, being the competitor that she is, is constantly frustrated by my natural advantages in terms of size, strength and speed. 

But here's the thing about people, on average: they don't, on average, tend to volunteer for or graduate from Ranger School. Only people who are mentally and physically tough to begin with volunteer for Ranger School, and only the most physically and mentally tough people among those people end up graduating.

I may be older and more injury-prone than I used to be, but I am a lot stronger today than I was when I attended Ranger School. And you better believe there are women who are stronger and physically tougher than me. I know there are women out there who, if given the chance, could attend and graduate from Ranger School. 

The U.S. Army will screw this up only if it relaxes the physical standards to lower the bar for admission. The last time I checked, for example, you had to be able to do six strict chin-ups to attend Ranger School. That's pretty easy for a reasonably fit man, but even very physically fit women have trouble doing strict chin-ups. The temptation will be to relax the standard, because only a very select group of women would be able to do six strict chin-ups.

But that, of course, is exactly the point. When I was selected for service in the Ranger Regiment, the Regimental psychologist told me, "Well, the bad news is, you are not normal. The good news is, we're not interested in normal people."

Only a very select group of mental and physical freaks volunteer for and graduate from the toughest military training programs, and that is how it should be. If a female freak of nature can meet the same physical standards that we male freaks of nature can meet, she should be afforded every opportunity to attend the toughest schools and courses. If the U.S. Army -- Happy Birthday, by the way -- relaxes the standards to allow more women to qualify to attend, though, which it has a habit of doing, the Ranger tab will mean a lot less in the future.

Now, "normal" women might prefer to stay home and do normal girly stuff like bake cookies in the kitchen and overhead squat their body weight 15 times consecutively. And hey, if they want to do that instead of attending Ranger School, fine. I don't judge. 

But just as surely as we need to be honest about the real physical differences between men and women and how those differences should inform defense policy, we should also be honest about the fact that there is a very small minority of women out there who can kick my ass and yours and ought to be allowed to sua sponte their way to Ranger School.

DARPA is looking to alter the military's reliance on global positioning systems (GPS) lest it be felled by enemy jamming and denial capabilities. The solution? The All Source Positioning and Navigation System (ASPN), an all-in-one system that will incorporate a host of GPS alternatives ranging from radio beacons to stellar navigation systems. W.J. Rue, howerver, tweeted an alternative solution: a map and compass. While this should be contextualized within the perspective of the writer (Rue served with the Marines, a service that places less stock in complex technology than the other services), the GPS to ASPN issue deserves wider comment.

Why is the idea of a map and compass such an radical idea, as opposed to another set of sensors? The answer lies in technological autonomy, a well-known concept in science and technology studies. No, I'm not talking about autonomous killer robots. Rather, the idea, as popularized by Langdon Winner, is that technology is not solely a neutral tool. As the good folks at Cyborgology noted, Winner argues that technology creates networks of dependency:

Technological autonomy is a shorthand way of expressing the idea that our technologies and technological systems have become so ubiquitous, so intertwined, and so powerful that they are no longer in our control. This autonomy is due to the accumulated force of the technologies themselves and also to our utter dependence on them.  …Advanced technologies require vast networks of supportive technologies in order to properly function. Our cars wouldn’t go far without roads, gasoline, traffic control systems, and the like. Electricity needs power lines, generators, distributors, light bulbs, and lamps, together with production, distribution, and administrative systems to put all those elements (profitably) into place. A “chain of reciprocal dependency” is established, Winner says, that requires “not only the means but also the entire set of means to the means.”

Each successive layer of technology creates another layer that locks an actor, organization, or nation to further dependence on mutually interlocking technological assemblages. Each new technological innovation (especially complex military platforms!) rest on a supportive network that is simply difficult to uproot. GPS and other similar systems for mapping, targeting, communication, and coordination are the root of present American military advantage. As previously noted, even new technologies that seem fairly simple when compared to capital-intensive platforms, such as drones and cyber, are underpinned by complex technological and organizational networks. From counter-IED efforts to high-end conventional warfare, we are wedded to network-enabled C4ISR.

But this isn't any different from the variety of ways we experience technological autonomy and implicit trust in complex systems in everyday life. Let's  take a more mundane point of reference--the car. Very few people understand all of the inner workings of their automobile, but find themselves placing a great deal of implicit trust in its operation when they take to the highway. We commit to trusting various complex systems in life, basing our activities around the assumption that they will work the way they are designed. When trouble occurs, we ask experts (the Apple "Genius Bar," for one) to fix them. Technological autonomy and the reality of dependence gradually crowd out alternatives. Netflix, for example, has along with Hulu so dominated the rental market that it displaced brick-and-mortar stores. The remaining physical rental services, like Redbox, have incredibly limited selections.

When facing less technologically advanced enemies, complex technological systems can limit freedom of maneuver. In the Millennium Challenge wargame, Red Team commander Lt. Gen Van Riper reacted to electronic warfare platforms frying his comms by relying on motorcycle messengers and coded messages broadcast from mosque minarets. Van Riper was not rejecting technology, but relying on technologies less vulnerable to adversary disruption. But complex technology also has its benefits against less advanced foes: both manned aircraft and drones entered into American service the same way: intelligence, surveillance, and reconaissance against violent non-state actors. The way Airland Battle-era technologies demolished Iraqi ground and and anti-air forces in 1991 may be exaggerated but still deserves some credit.

We can't undo the set of technological networks our precision-strike and network-centric operations are based on, nor would it be wholly advisable to forgo the advantages such systems bring us. However, one future factor to consider when investing in military technologies is whether increased complexity (and thus layers of dependence) is worth the qualitative edge provided. The suite of technologies we utilized to build the Offset Strategy yielded ample military benefits from 1991-2003. It is less clear, as Bernard Finel observes, whether we can gain similarly disruptive qualitative advantages with new platforms today. Moreover, increased complexity, particularly in tightly coupled systems, brings increased operational risk.