[R-G] US military ripe for a fight with Obama

Mon Nov 24 12:50:47 MST 2008

US military ripe for a fight with Obama
By Mark Perry
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JK25Ak01.html

The most intense debate in the aftermath of Barack Obama's
election as the next president of the Untied States has been over  
whether Robert Gates will agree to stay on as defense secretary.  
Speculation on Gates' status seems to change by the hour. "Bob wants  
to come back to Texas to finish his work as a university president," a  
Gates friend said in the aftermath of Obama's sweeping victory over  
Republican Senator John McCain. Another colleague proffers a different  
story: "Bob and his wife are intent to enjoy their retirement," he  
says. "They have a home in the northwest, and they would like to spend  
some time there. He wants out of Washington."

The speculation over Gates' tenure has been most intense inside the  
Obama transition team. The team received a request from Gates that,  
were he to stay, he would want to retain some of his top civilian  
assistants. The request led to concerns among the Obama transition  
staff: "Gates is not a neo-con or even a hardcore Republican," a  
person close to the process noted, "but the people around him sure as  
hell are." A former Bill Clinton administration official who has been  
deployed by Obama to conduct a series of "meet and greets" with top  
officials at the Pentagon scoffed at the notion of a continuation of  
Gates' tenure: "The [presidential] election was a clean sweep," he  
says, "and that includes Bob Gates. It's called a change in government."

But others inside Obama's close-knit group of advisors think that a  
continuation of Gates' tenure can provide Obama with a bridge to the  
nation's military leadership - essential, they say, because of US  
troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. These advisors point out  
that Richard Danzig, a former secretary of the navy and reputed front  
runner for the Pentagon post ("always the smartest man in the room",  
as retired four-star US Marine Corps General Joe Hoar describes him),  
supports a continuation in Gates' tenure. Then too, Gates is  
apparently admired by Obama himself, who has been in close touch with  
a number of Gates' former colleagues (dubbed "graybacks"), like Brent  
Scowcroft, from the first George W Bush administration. "The graybacks  
have weighed in, and they're all for Bob," a defense official says.

But regardless of whether Gates stays on as secretary of defense, the  
new president faces daunting challenges in dealing with the American  
military. Not the least of these is that while conservatives go to  
great lengths to point out that the military is an almost exact  
reflection of the nation's ethnic and gender diversity, the simple  
truth remains that the new president will be the commander-in-chief of  
a military that is primarily southern, rural and conservative - an  
exact description of the one group of Americans that voted  
overwhelmingly for McCain.

The opening shot
"Mark my words," a retired general says, "the test that Barack Obama  
will face in the first months of his presidency will have nothing to  
do with foreign policy. It's going to come from the military and the  
opening shot will be the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. The military  
is hard over on the issue of gays in the military and we'll go up  
against him just like we did with Clinton."

The general cited anger "among the senior officer corps" about Obama's  
June 1, 2007, statement calling for a repeal of the "don't ask, don't  
tell" policy: "It's time to turn the page on the bitterness and  
bigotry that fill so much of today's LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual,  
transgender] rights debate," Obama said. "The rights of all Americans  
should be protected - whether it's at work or anyplace else. 'Don't  
ask, don't tell' needs to be repealed because patriotism and a sense  
of duty should be the key tests for military service, not sexual  
orientation."

While Obama later retreated from this statement, saying that he would  
"work through a process", influential senior military officers were  
not impressed. "For some of us, Obama is viewed as Clinton two," a  
retired three-star officer says. "We're afraid he looks at the  
military the way that Clinton did, as a kind of social laboratory."  
This officer says the plan is to "tame" Obama the same way that  
Clinton was tamed. The "taming of Bill Clinton" came two weeks into  
his presidency, on January 25, 1993, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff  
(JCS) showed up in the Oval Office to question his promise to allow  
gays to serve openly in the military. Clinton was in a weak position:  
the military was arrayed against him. JCS chairman Colin Powell  
offered a compromise: stop asking and stop pursuing.

Clinton agreed, but he had little choice. As Clinton's de facto press  
secretary George Stephanopoulos later noted: "Their [the JCS] message  
was clear. Keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight us  
and you'll lose - and it won't be pretty." The military's victory over  
Clinton in the early days of his presidency set the tone for the next  
eight years. On any sensitive military subject, he took the views of  
the JCS into account: as later confirmed, he couldn't "afford a break  
with the military".

It is unlikely that Obama will make the same mistake. He has shown  
particular sensitivity to military issues and, during the campaign,  
surrounded himself with a bevy of senior retired officers. "Obama set  
out early on to take veterans and military issues away from McCain," a  
campaign aide says, "and he succeeded. It's really amazing what he  
did: [former Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry served in the  
military, and the Republicans successfully questioned his courage and  
patriotism. But they couldn't lay a glove on Barack."

In the end, Obama actually won a larger percentage of both the veteran  
and military vote than Kerry - a stunning turnaround for a politician  
who knows even less about the military than Clinton.

While Obama is likely to "kick this can [the issue of gays in the  
military] down the field", in the words of one transition insider, the  
battle has been joined. Recently, a group of 104 retired admirals and  
generals signed an appeal urging Obama to repeal Clinton's "don't ask,  
don't tell" policy. The group is led by retired Admiral Charles  
Larson, a former superintendent of the US Naval Academy. "There are a  
lot of issues they'll [the Obama administration] have to work out, and  
I think they'll have to prioritize," Larson told reporters. "But I  
hope this would be one of the priority issues in the personnel area."  
Obama did not comment on the letter, a signal that he would deal with  
more important issues first. Iraq and Afghanistan are at the top of  
his agenda.

Leaving Iraq ...
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi cabinet on  
November 16 and to be voted on in parliament on Wednesday, did not  
surprise the Obama government-in-waiting, as officials in Gates'  
office had been briefing Obama's inner circle on the agreement for  
several weeks. But what was surprising, at least for some Obama  
partisans, was that Bush would push for the agreement - instead of  
dumping the Iraq war in Obama's lap. "The agreement is a gift for  
Obama," a currently serving Pentagon officials notes. "We always  
thought there were only three ways we were getting out - if we won, if  
we lost, or we were invited to leave. The second option was never in  
play, but for many of us the last option seemed just as remote."

For the US military, the Iraqi cabinet vote in favor of the agreement  
provided an ironic twist: only one cabinet member voted against the  
agreement - the minister representing the Sunni bloc in the Iraqi  
parliament. The vote was passed by 27 of the 37-member cabinet, with  
nine members absent. The lone Sunni dissent was registered in silence  
by the woman minister representing the bloc. While the Sunni bloc  
keeps its distance from the American-supported Sunni Awakening  
Councils, the lone "no" vote sent an unmistakable signal to senior  
American officers, particularly to those who have served in Iraq's  
Sunni-dominated Anbar province. "The irony is that the Shi'ites, whom  
we put in charge in Baghdad and supported for years, can't wait for us  
to leave," one retired marine colonel who served three tours in Iraq  
notes, "while the insurgents who fought us want us to stay. What does  
that tell you?"

For senior military officers in Baghdad monitoring the flow of weapons  
into the country, the protest of Shi'ite parties over the agreement is  
clear: "They can't wait to get their hands on the Sunnis," a defense  
official says. "The Anbar Awakening tops their list." That reality is  
obvious to the senior officers of CENTCOM - the Central Command  
headquarters that oversees the Iraq war. Even General David Petraeus,  
the new CENTCOM commander, credited with the victory of the "surge",  
is careful in his assessment of the future, according to a number of  
his colleagues and reporters who follow him. When one reporter  
commented to Petraeus that it seemed the "surge" had worked, Petraeus  
corrected him: "Yes, it's worked," he said, and added: "So far."

Engaging Afghanistan ...
But if the American military is under decreasing pressure in Iraq - at  
least "so far" - just the opposite is true in Afghanistan, where US  
and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops are straining to  
respond to a burgeoning insurgency. That point was emphasized most  
recently by JCS chairman Michael Mullen during a talk with a group of  
officers due for promotion to flag rank. Mullen reviewed American  
military challenges in the Middle East, vowing that he would continue  
to press "the current and incoming president" to seek a diplomatic  
solution to Iran's intransigence over the nuclear issue.

Mullen recommended the same diplomatic strategy be adopted for  
Afghanistan: "We have killed hundreds of Taliban fighters along the  
border," he said, "and they just keep coming." Mullen's comments  
confirmed his September House Armed Services Committee testimony in  
which he said that "we [the military] can't kill our way to victory,  
and no armed forces anywhere ... can deliver these keys alone. It  
requires teamwork and cooperation."

Mullen's viewpoint is shared by America's commander on the ground,  
General David McKiernan, a non-West Pointer with years of experience  
in Bosnia and in Operation Iraqi Freedom. McKiernan recently came to  
Washington to brief civilian policymakers on the Afghan war. His  
message echoed Mullen's: "I always like to say that this campaign is  
not going to be decided militarily, and that's difficult sometimes for  
a guy in uniform to say," McKiernan told one policy gathering. "We're  
not going to run out of bad people in Afghanistan
that have bad intentions, and we're not going to kill and capture so  
many of these bad people that it's going to break the will of all the  
insurgent groups that operate in Afghanistan. Ultimately, it's going  
to be people that decide that they want a different outcome in  
Afghanistan. It's

going to be a political outcome."

McKiernan was not always so welcome in Washington. On the eve of the  
Iraq war, in March of 2003, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld  
went to Kuwait to meet with senior American commanders. A part of the  
event was televised, with cameras showing Rumsfeld standing behind a  
lectern during a briefing. As the camera panned the room it caught  
McKiernan rolling his eyes. CNN beamed the picture into the White  
House. "He was absolutely sunk," an army colleague says. The incident  
was just the beginning of McKiernan's troubles. During the Iraq  
invasion, McKiernan flew into Iraq to receive a briefing from General  
William Wallace on the surprising tenacity of Saddam Hussein's  
Fedayeen militias.

McKiernan wanted to suspend the attack on Baghdad until the Fedayeen  
were defeated. The invasion's commander, Tommy Franks, disagreed. In a  
meeting on overall strategy, Franks implied that McKiernan was being  
overly cautious. McKiernan was not intimidated: "Dave thought it was  
just stupid to ignore the Fedayeen," an army colleague notes and adds:  
"He made his views pretty well known up the chain [of command]. Tommy  
[Franks] didn't like it one bit."

McKiernan also questioned Rumsfeld's post-war decision canceling the  
deployment of the army's 1st Cavalry Division. The 1st Cav, McKiernan  
believed, was essential to solidifying American military gains and  
suppressing Baghdad's unruly mobs.
When it came time for Rumsfeld to appoint a commander to oversee post- 
war operations in Iraq, McKiernan was pushed aside "because he wasn't  
a team player" and the ill-prepared Ricardo Sanchez was given the job.  
Despite the snub, McKiernan remains dedicated, if opinionated. Asked  
recently about what form a future Afghan government should take,  
McKiernan's comment was pointed: "I don't care," he says, "so long as  
al-Qaeda is not a part of it." The implication is that the US  
commander is perfectly willing to allow Kabul to shape a government  
that would include the Taliban - a political solution that would  
isolate al-Qaeda and "other irreconcilables". McKiernan's words  
reflect the military's new shorthand that differentiates between  
"insurgents" and "terrorists" - a stark repudiation of Bush's  
definition of a terrorist as anyone who objects to American policies.

While McKiernan is quick to tell reporters that "Afghanistan is not  
Iraq", the program he outlines for the country looks a lot like the  
one adopted by military officers in Anbar province, where "insurgents"  
were broken off from al-Qaeda "terrorists" and brought into local  
governing coalitions. As McKiernan notes: "What I do think has great  
merit ... is a community outreach program that takes an area - say a  
district - in Afghanistan and brings together the leaders of that  
district, whether they are tribal elders, whether they are mullahs,  
whether they're religious scholars in a shura [council] and allows  
them to select a committee to represent that community and then have  
the government of Afghanistan, with support from the international  
community, provide that committee the wherewithal, the authority and  
some resources to help not only provide security but represent that  
community from a bottom-up approach and incentivize it." He adds: "So  
that's a little bit different approach than the Sunni awakening or  
tribal engagement in Iraq, but the common part of it is it's a bottom- 
up approach at the community basis."

McKiernan faces obstacles in making his plan work. A Washington Post  
article of November 19 detailed these obstacles, focusing on Taliban  
attacks on the supply route into Afghanistan from Pakistan. But that's  
only a part of the problem. The other was caused by the Bush  
administration. "We should have alternative supply routes through the  
north and not have to rely on the roads from Pakistan," a senior  
serving army officer says, "but we can't get a northern route because  
the Bush administration pissed off the Russians in Georgia."

Negotiations with the Russians over a northern resupply route that  
would be place the 67,000 US and NATO soldiers at the end of "a secure  
tether" have been stalled, according to this officer. "This is typical  
of the White House, they can't see beyond tomorrow. They have never  
been able to plan ahead, to think through the consequences of their  
actions. They're so proud of themselves, and we're the ones who  
suffer." He adds: "They can't be gone soon enough."

Phase IV
The difficulties faced by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan have sparked  
a revolution in thinking inside the American military. Some of thee  
leaders of this revolution are well known: Generals Petraeus, Odierno,  
McKiernan and Petraeus counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen.  
Petraeus, Odierno, McKiernan, Kilcullen have focused on what the  
military calls "Phase IV Operations" - the post-combat "nation- 
building" phase of providing stability, reconstruction and economic  
programs in post-war societies.

Recently, however, the loudest voices calling for more focus on Phase  
IV operations ("in which wars are really won") have come from the US  
Marine Corps, and particularly the group of serving and recently  
retired colonels around marine commandant James Conway and General  
James Mattis, the current Joint Forces Commander. These are the same  
colonels, primarily from the Marine Corps 3rd Civil Affairs Group  
(CAG) who first met with Anbar officials in Amman in 2004 and who, as  
a result, kick-started the Anbar Awakening. Quietly supported by  
senior civilian policymakers at the Pentagon, these colonels have been  
urging Obama transition officials to retain the myriad "Phase IV"  
operations in Iraq and to set aside increased resources for the inter- 
departmental structures that have grown up around the effort.
The colonels have a number of allies, including senior Department of  
Defense policymakers who have brought together Pentagon, State  
Department and US Agency for International Development officials in an  
effort to coordinate "nation building" operations.

A core of strong voices, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of  
Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Celeste  
Ward, and counter-insurgency wonk Janine Davidson, have emerged as  
important advocates for increased "interagency planning that fully  
integrates civilian and military activities vital for developing  
governance structures in a post-conflict environment", as Ward says.

The new effort has resulted in the creation of the Consortium for  
Complex Operations, a kind of internal "super think-tank" headed by  
Davidson that is attempting to draw together government thinking on  
managing post-conflict societies. Ward and Davidson's initiative was  
welcomed by the marines, which strengthened its "Phase IV" offerings  
when Mattis assigned a senior officer to the army's recently created  
Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute at the Army War  
College. The marines, the army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations  
Institute, and the Consortium - and well-placed defense thinkers at  
the Pentagon - have been working to shift government thinking and  
military planning on how best to address the challenges facing the US  
in the Middle East.

The target of senior Pentagon officials who support "Phase IV"  
operations has been Obama transition official Franklin Kramer, a  
former assistant secretary of defense for international security  
affairs. Key defense officials have been meeting with Kramer in an  
attempt to convince him to keep in place the Defense Department's core  
of "Phase IV" thinkers. The meetings have been going well because of  
what one military officer described as "Kramer's conviction that  
nation-building is a part of what we should be doing".

Kramer is reportedly intent to overcome the military's natural  
inclination to hand off stability operations to other government  
agencies, like the State Department, which the military believes lacks  
the training and staff to take over post-conflict societies. Kramer's  
allies in the Pentagon agree, pointing out that in the wake of World  
War II, Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower scoffed at notions that  
State Department officials could handle occupation duties in Germany.  
Instead, he put the country in the hands of senior commanders and gave  
them broad authority. The same thing happened in Iraq, albeit by  
accident. "We were packed and ready to go," a marine colonel  
remembers, "and when we turned around to pass the baton, we looked  
like the American relay team at the Olympics - there was no one there  
to grab it. So we did it. We had no choice. Hell, there were only two  
State Department officials in Anbar at the height of the insurgency,  
and they were very junior."

Inside the matrix
In a much-read article on the rise of the military's counter- 
insurgency clique, reporter Spencer Ackerman noted that while the  
military has been deeply influenced by "the rise of the counter- 
insurgents", their ultimate victory is not assured. Strong forces,  
including senior officers, believe that the military's traditional  
role should not be expanded to include "non-kinetic operations" -  
shorthand for any task that does not include killing the enemy.  
"People keep saying, ‘well, the military destabilized Iraq'," a senior  
officer says, "and I keep saying, 'damn right' - because that's our  
job. We destabilize countries, that's what we do. And after we do it,  
it ought to be someone else's job to set it straight. It's not ours."

That viewpoint has strong advocates, including former army vice chief  
Richard Cody. "We don't want to become an army that can only fight a  
counter-insurgency," he told one reporter. Lieutenant Colonel Gian  
Gentile, a West Point history professor, echoes Cody, warning against  
"building a counter-insurgency-only army that puts our ability to  
address non-COIN contingencies at risk."

For Gentile, the success of the "surge" was not due to the adoption of  
a proper counter-insurgency program, but "the decision to ally with  
our former enemies (eg, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents), the pause  
in activities by Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi, and the separation  
of rival factions in Baghdad

stemming from sectarian cleansing in 2006-2007".

Gentile's critique represents those who fear a dilution of the  
military's mandate - to protect and defend the United States and find  
and defeat its enemies. As Gentile wrote in Armed Forces Journal: "The  
authors of the army's 1986 AirLand Battle doctrine premised their  
manual on fighting as the essence of war. Fighting gave the 1986  
manual a coherence that reflected the true nature of war. The army's  
new COIN manual's tragic flaw is that the essence of war fighting is  
missing from its pages."

Come January, the new Obama defense team will find itself in the midst  
of an escalating conflict between counter-insurgency advocates who  
feel besieged by the traditional proponents of the "AirLand Battle  
doctrine" and those who live in the world of counter-insurgency  
operations.

The debate has recently devolved into name-calling. The counter- 
insurgency clique, its opponents claim, live in a "matrix" of true  
believers, a term derived from the movie by the same name. To escape  
"the matrix" you have to "swallow the blue pill", and return to the  
real world, where the job of the military is to destabilize nations  
and kill they enemy. The most important voice to speak out against the  
new focus on COIN, Colonel Sean MacFarland, was once in the matrix,  
but has now swallowed the "blue pill". MacFarland, a hero to many in  
the military because of his courageous work with the insurgency in  
Ramadi in 2006, wrote an internal army study in May that warned that  
the focus on counter-insurgency doctrine is weakening the army's  
training regimen. A similar focus on counter-insurgency operations in  
the Israeli Defense Forces, MacFarland said, led to Israel's loss in  
their war against Hezbollah in 2006. The MacFarland heresy stunned the  
counter-insurgency community. "Counter-insurgency without MacFarland  
is like Christianity without St Paul," a senior defense official notes.

The middle ground
This contentious battle between red and blue "pill swallowers" has  
escalated to the point where it now involves the secretary of defense  
and JCS chairman. Both have attempted to adopt a delicate middle  
ground, arguing that it is possible for the nation to prepare for both  
a major war and train its soldiers in counter-insurgency doctrine.  
"Even the biggest of wars will require so-called 'smart war'  
capabilities," Gates said recently at the National Defense University.  
"In Iraq, we've seen how an army that was basically a smaller version  
of the Cold War force can over time become an effective instrument of  
counter-insurgency." Mullen, on the other hand, has emphasized the  
need for the creation of a balanced force, adding, "I do worry about  
us losing our focus too much in the counter-insurgency world. We need  
balance in the way we think, in the way we train and in the way we  
resource ourselves."

In a series of public addresses, Gates has also focused the military  
on a new mantra. Quoting a turn-of-the-century American general by the  
name of Fox Conner, Gates says that the US should "never fight unless  
it has to, never fight alone, and never fight for long". While Gates  
would never acknowledge it, the mantra is a direct repudiation of the  
Bush Doctrine of fighting "preventive wars" - which suggests that the  
best way to keep America's enemies from going to war is to bomb them  
first.

Nor does he add a fourth principle, the Lincoln Doctrine, that  
dictates that, in wartime, the US should deploy all the forces it has.  
The doctrine is derived from Abraham Lincoln's instructions to Ulysses  
S Grant, just prior to the last campaign of the Civil War. "This  
time," Lincoln told Grant, "put everyone in." The Gates mantra and the  
Lincoln Doctrine may provide the best way to resolve the blue pill-red  
pill debate, as both sides agree that whether or not the new counter- 
insurgency doctrine becomes the doctrine of the future, the US should  
not only stay out of unnecessary wars, but also deploy enough troops  
to ensure victory; it's a view that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,  
Rumsfeld - and Franks - pointedly ignored.

While it seems unlikely that Obama will decide the military's  
increasingly nasty doctrinal debate, leaving the question to senior  
military officers, it seems likely that those who emphasize training  
soldiers to master "Phase IV" operations will be heeded. The Obama  
military brains trust contains a large number of Pentagon officials-in- 
waiting whose primary expertise is in "Phase IV" operations. Included  
in this number are former marine
officer Nate Fick (a fellow at the Center for a New American Security  
- CNAS) , Roger Carstens (a retired army special forces lieutenant  
colonel and CNAS fellow), Shawn Brimley (also a fellow at CNAS),  
influential army colonel Peter Mansoor (a professor of military  
history at Ohio State University), and retired army Lieutenant Colonel  
John Nagl, who helped Petraeus and Mattis write the military's counter- 
insurgency field manual.

The Obama team
Despite the contentious disagreement over military doctrine, the  
transition from the Bush to the Obama presidency is expected to go  
more smoothly than the still-born military hand-off to the State  
Department in Anbar.

While it is not yet clear whether Gates will stay on as defense  
Ssecretary, the senior military's cooperation with Obama transition  
officials has been unprecedented, a sign of just how disenchanted the  
JCS and the military's regional commanders have been with the Bush  
presidency. An era that was inaugurated with talk of how respectful  
the Bush White House would be towards the military was destroyed by  
Rumsfeld's imperious handling of the war's senior commanders and  
Bush's nonchalant reaction to military advice. The result has been the  
shattering of trust between civilian policymakers and military  
officers, what retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard (with over 50  
years of observing the White House-Pentagon interaction) calls "the  
worst breakdown in civil-military relations that I have ever seen".

Obama himself is aware of the chasm of mistrust that exists between  
the Pentagon and the White House, which is why he is not only  
considering keeping Gates on, but why it is all but certain that he  
will appoint General James Jones as his administration's national  
security advisor. It is a job that Jones wants. The retired former  
Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Jones was asked to be Secretary of  
State
Condoleezza Rice's deputy, but turned down the job. "He was very  
careful to leave himself open for a spot in the Obama administration,"  
a colleague says. Jones has considerable stature among senior military  
officers who, in the words of a close marine colleague, "would welcome  
his appointment as reassurance that Obama will not only listen to what  
we have to say, but will respect our point of view. He's perfect for  
the job."

While it is not clear where Jones stands on the escalating debate over  
counter-insurgency doctrine, this same colleague believes Jones (like  
Obama) will stay clear of the military's doctrinal debate at the same  
time that he "serves as a bridge to the military's most important  
planners".

Among the challenges Obama faces is how to wrestle with an out-of- 
control defense budget, a costly war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a  
military that reflects a constituency that did not elect him.  
Wrestling with the cost of the Iraq War, funded through successive  
"supplemental appropriations" (what JCS chairman Mullen describes as  
"the military equivalent of a bad cocaine habit") looms as a top  
priority, second only to the new president's plan to draw down  
American forces in Iraq. That plan will undoubtedly be the subject of  
Obama's first discussion with the JCS - coming right after he  
reassures them that the last thing he wants to do is change the  
military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Mark Perry is a director of Conflicts Forum and author of Partners in  
Command (Penguin Press, New York, 2007).